telling him to mind his own fucking business, but I knew he was just the sort to complain about things and get me into trouble so I kept quiet. I finished off his basket and waited for him to pay.
‘Here you are, Stacey,’ he said. ‘Sorry to interfere – I was only trying to help, you know.’
I took a quick look up at him as he give me the money and I have to say I felt a bit mean then for not answering and all that. He was watching me with ever such a worried expression, and it didn’t seem so creepy after all – more like my mum looks when she knows I’m hurting and stuff. Maybe he really was just a friendly old guy who was a bit lonely.
‘S’all right,’ I said, and I smiled at him. Not so’s I was encouraging him or nothing – I wasn’t gonna thank him ’cos I never asked for his help, did I? – but the least he deserved was to be let off the hook. In any case, I thought I’d better keep on the right side of him – I didn’t want him going home and plotting something nasty. You never know with customers – they can be a dodgy lot if you ain’t careful.
Sometimes I can see life in the simplest possible terms, and I feel as if I’ve discovered the answer to everything, and then at other times I’m completely at sea and out of control. It’s scary, and I’m not sure which is true. It started with all the stuff we had at school about the uncertainty principle – at first I didn’t bother to take it in much, just wrote it all down so I could learn it for the exams, but when I really started thinking about it I could see that it made life impossible. If nothing really exists – or at least not in a decided form, kind of thing – until you observe it, then surely nothing exists at all? Or at least it’s as good as if it didn’t. And if things change just through you looking at them, then nothing I see, hear or feel has any reality, because it’s reacting to me observing it. So what I see is unreal, and what I don’t see doesn’t exist. It makes me feel quite frightened at times, and it’s not easy for me to talk to anyone about it, because when I’m in the really bad moods then I have to be by myself so that I don’t change anything by communicating with it.
Even on a mundane level it affects the way I look at things. It’s like Mum and Dad getting so brittle with each other: I’m never sure how much of that is due to my watching them. Were they easier with each other when Sally and I were little, or was it just that I wasn’t consciously judging them then? A while ago I’d have talked to Mum about feeling so strange, but she always seems so busy with her work now, and when she isn’t she’s either lying down in her bedroom or rushing about the house being tense. Or she gets into those weird moods when she’s really hyper. Does things like hovering about downstairs for the post in the mornings as if she’s waiting for something. She always says it’s just a magazine or a catalogue she’s expecting, but she goes all girly and happy for a bit and buys us things and gives us treats. Sally and I used to wonder if she was having an affair, but it doesn’t seem like that, somehow. Anyway, I can’t see it.
Trouble is, thinking about what objectively exists makes me want to stop working, because in a way everything I’m doing is a waste of time. When I’m sitting there at school it all feels really pointless because I’m observing it and changing it. And all the books and theories and mathematical formulae and religions and portents are worthless. I’m not sure if it makes me want to commit suicide or live for ever. Who was it said there was only one real philosophical question – whether to kill yourself or not?
It’s not that I’m always gloomy – more confused. Sometimes it’s like I’ve discovered the key to everything and it feels really good, because if nothing has any true reality then nothing matters, so there’s no need to get upset about anything or to hurt about the way things are. But I still don’t know what I’m going to do about these thoughts. I feel rather like I’ve been given a very important message to deliver but they’ve forgotten to address the envelope.
I started to talk to Holly about it today in the dining hall, but I didn’t get very far. I thought it might help if I could explain it to someone else and get it out of my head for a bit, but I could see she didn’t understand how important all this was. She was looking really cute, with her hair up in one of those grippy things – and she kept smiling back at me as I tried to explain.
‘When you measure something,’ I said, having decided I should start from basics – Holly’s doing languages for her A-levels, and science has never been one of her strong points – ‘you’re never sure if your answer is right. Never. That’s why it’s called the uncertainty principle.’
‘Well, obviously you can never predict things,’ she said, dipping her head to look down at her hot chocolate. She tipped a sachet of sugar into the plastic cup and stirred it. ‘It doesn’t take a scientist to tell me that.’
‘No, it’s not exactly that,’ I went on. ‘It’s more that – oh, Holly, for God’s sake, that stuffs already sweetened: it’ll be disgusting – no, it’s not so much that we don’t know how atoms and particles and things are going to behave when we look at them, it’s more that we don’t even know the rules. I mean, even if we could measure things without affecting them, we’re probably judging them by all the wrong rules. Common sense doesn’t really work any more, at least not once you try to look at both quantum and macroscopic physics at once. They just don’t gel, you see. And it makes my life – all of our lives – pointless.’
She had that sweet, patient smile on her face again, and the weird thing was that it made her look as if she understood far more about all this stuff than I did, while at the same time I knew perfectly well that she hadn’t got a clue what I was on about. Holly always does that to me – whatever I’m trying to tell her she always seems to be one jump ahead, even though she doesn’t really know a thing about quantum mechanics.
She put one elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. ‘I don’t see that at all,’ she said, still smiling and pretending to be interested. ‘Of course your life isn’t pointless, Ben. Try and explain.’
‘I’m trying to tell you something really important here, and you’ve got that “let’s humour Ben” look on your face. Forget it, Hol.’
‘No, go on. Don’t be so touchy. I will try to understand, I promise.’
‘It’s really simple – but it frightens me. I just feel sometimes that everything round me is unreal because I can’t look at it without changing it. I suppose that’s what I’m trying to say.’
‘How’s your dad, by the way?’
‘My dad?’
‘Yes. You haven’t talked about him much, lately. You used to all the time. I just wondered if he was OK?’
It really made me think, when she said that. It was true – I did used to tell her about Dad’s cases and things. They were always pretty interesting when he was dealing with divorces and stuff: he was cool about telling me some of the really strange things people get up to and how he had to question them about all the intimate bedroom things that went on. But he hadn’t been telling me much recently, and I hadn’t realised until Holly asked.
‘I think he’s OK,’ I said, ‘but he is a bit quiet, now you mention it. Just working hard, I suppose.’
Charlie’s been a bit strange lately. All this volunteering to do the shopping is most out of character: I know he says he’s interested in the fat checkout girl and seeing if he can cheer her up, but I find it very hard to believe that’s really what he’s up to. It must be six or seven times he’s gone back there now, over the last couple of weeks. Maybe he feels guilty about me: I know I’ve been working too hard and it worries him. Rather sweet really, the way he’s trying to take the pressure off me. But I do wish he’d go back to