Life

In what was formerly the drawing room of a grand Victorian tenement in the fashionable west end of Glasgow, utilitarian bookcases of the sort you’d find in a library with midcentury aspirations lined the walls. The shelves were packed with curious and cryptic tomes filled with mathematics that has largely been forgotten by most people since it was discovered in the late 17th century, and accompanying these were Cordelia Graham’s self-penned treatises on cosmology. The collection had long outgrown the shelves which Cordelia had bought forty years ago, and much of the floor was now underneath a Himalayan topography of books and papers.

A narrow path of threadbare scarlet carpet led to an oak desk in the south-facing bay window. On the rare and treasured sunny days in summer, light would cast itself onto the desk from 7am until the early afternoon, and afterward, a pleasant shadow from a grand old sycamore tree would keep the room cool. In front of the desk was a peculiar ergonomic chair with no apparent way to sit on it without some contortion. Cordelia had reached the great age of 96, and had now retired from the special chair which was supposedly good for you to an armchair facing the electric fireplace.

Several slender coffee tables orbited her within arm’s reach, populated with pens and notepads for her scribblings. She never used these for a cup of coffee, as that was, in her view, a vulgar drink, similar to cocaine. She had a speech prepared for whenever someone suggested coffee, and this was something Hughie, her great nephew, knew and found both entertaining and fascinating. There did seem to be a glimmer of truth to what she said, and he respected her intuitions and insights into the greatest cosmological questions, so perhaps she was right about the nature of coffee. On the other hand, they did sound like the ravings of someone who held modern life and consumerism in contempt, and perhaps Cordelia’s disdain had nothing to do with coffee at all. The one luxury she allowed herself was regular and opulent cups of the most exquisite Ya Shi Xiang tea.

Apart from the tea, Cordelia had led a spartan life. Her tastes in clothes, holidays, and food were akin to those of a wandering hermit. She possessed no interest in gathering material wealth, and she’d often quote Deuteronomy, “man does not live on bread alone,” or Tom Weir, Scotland’s eminent ornithologist, “Some view a home as a place to return, some see it as a place to leave,” for this gave her a wise and profound stance, even if she was responding to questions like “what shall I get you for your birthday?”

“Are you sure I can’t get you anything, even a nice cup for your tea or a good pen?” Hughie asked.

“No, darling, I’m quite okay. When you’re 97, you are just happy to be awake every morning. I may not outlive the fruit bowl, dear,” replied Cordelia.

Hughie felt his youthful optimism diminish as she spoke this ultimate truth. Did she have to be so morbid?

“Birthdays are supposed to be a special day, and we should do something. We could go to that nice cafe down the road,” said Hughie.

“I suppose we could do that. Perhaps I could try one of those avocados I’ve heard so many dreadful things about,” said Cordelia.

Cordelia had always been a great independent thinker who was hard to put in a box. She was the daughter of the wealthy engine magnate Sir Earnest Graham. Born in 1921, she was destined for a life of reclining on the teak decks of sailing yachts in the Mediterranean, buying exclusive designer clothes from Harrods, being invited to parties attended by people who appeared on the silver screen and Broadway, and eventually marrying a man whose third cousin was in the Royal Family. But she gave up the pampered life of an Edwardian lady in a gilded cage to join the war against the Fascists. Unbeknownst to old Earnest, she joined the army and was shipped off to Egypt in 1940 to kill Nazis. Earnest would often threaten to withdraw her allowance if she did not return and behave, but despite his cruel industrialist sensibilities, he could never follow through with his threats. Upon her return from the war, she again defied old Earnest and insisted on reading physics at Oxford, specialising in theoretical cosmology. Earnest thought this was frivolous, futile, and disrespectful, but he saw it as an act of philanthropy to give her freedom, similar to the donations he made to the Glasgow Academy of Fine Art. For the next fifteen years, she worked alongside greying men who seemed to have all invented the radio, but to her dismay, her ideas were never regarded as serious and were given no more than a condescending first glance. Upon the death of old Earnest, she took her inheritance and resigned from her position at Oxford. She returned to Glasgow and bought a well-apportioned flat in the west end, where she was able to spend the next five decades developing her cosmological ideas in peace.

Hughie was Cordelia’s great nephew. He’d heard apocryphal tales of a mad aunt from his relatives. He would see her at the odd gathering of the clan. Whenever one of the Grahams got married, they hosted it at their ancestral home, Struan House, in Perthshire. By a peculiar line of succession involving a helicopter crash and a horse, Cordelia had inherited the baronetcy and Struan House and was legally unable to relinquish them to one of her more tasteless and ostentatious relatives. At one of Struan House’s weddings, various awful cousins were gossiping:

“I hear Cordelia will be coming to this. I haven’t seen her since Rabb and Carol’s wedding. You wouldn’t know she was a millionaire. She looked like all her clothes were second-hand from twenty-five years ago.”

“It’s sad, really. You can tell she’s not really with it. She told me she was visiting her friend in Stockholm once, said something about attending a gala while she was there because he’d won a medal.”

“She kept talking about the hole in the centre of the universe as well. Like, I’m into horoscopes, but she’s mad into it, you know?”

“I know what you mean. I dropped her back off in Glasgow on my way down to London. In the car, she wouldn’t stop talking about conspiracy theories. Proves Oxford is full of quacks. She never seems to finish a thought before she moves on to the next one.”

“She wasted her opportunity. Her life was basically handed to her for free when she inherited this place. Granted, she lives in a perfectly nice flat, but when you go in, it’s wall to ceiling junk. Some of that stuff hasn’t been touched for decades. I bet under that heap of crap in her flat, we’d find some of granddad’s diamond collection.”

Hughie was fourteen when he first met Cordelia. All the superstition surrounding her eccentric life had piqued his curiosity, and he’d ended up in a chair next to her at tea. He felt star-struck, and words could not come out of his mouth. What was an appropriate question? He couldn’t ask if she was mad, could he?

“Hello, dear,” Cordelia said, breaking the several minutes of silence that had formed between them since he’d sat down, despite the silence not fazing her.

“Please, would you go and find me a cup of tea? And when you’ve found it, would you bring it to me?”

“Uh, okay, Auntie.”

Upon returning, Cordelia said,

“Thank you, Hughie. How old are you now?”

“Fourteen. Fifteen soon.”

“You must be thinking about the end of school. Do you like to read?”

Hughie was taken aback. He had no idea how to have such a mature conversation. Moments ago, his cousin Jake had challenged him to see who could drink the most water the fastest. What did he like to read? Whatever people made him read, but he didn’t want to sound two-dimensional, so he named the book he was reading for English.

“Dracula is pretty good.”

“Oh, you like fiction? And which subject do you like at school?”

“I’m quite good at maths and science. I’m doing each science as three separate subjects. Most people only do one. We’ve just finished the solar system.”

“And what about the solar system did you learn, dear?”

Cordelia and Hughie spoke about the solar system for the rest of the evening. He was amazed that she seemed to know everything, and he’d hoped he’d impressed her by quoting the sun’s mass in kilograms. She thought the mass of the sun was a trivial thing to worry about, but she wanted to kindle the spark she’d seen in Hughie, and encouraged him to keep talking throughout the evening. Amongst her dreadful, vacuous relatives, Hughie stood out as a careful listener who had a love for the beauty of the natural world. From then on, Hughie looked forward to the various gatherings of the Graham clan. She was rarely there, however.

Hughie had decided to study physics at the University of Glasgow. The summer before his first term, he went to stay with Cordelia. His parents weren’t skint, but they weren’t well off either. They’d spent their share of the industrial cash pile on huge parties in their thirties and neglected to get proper jobs until they were in their forties. His grandparents had blown a sizable portion of old Earnest’s wealth on living an idle life by maintaining a private swimming pool, keeping horses, gambling in Vegas. All that led to Hughie looking for the cheapest way to go to university, and he thought it was a great opportunity to stay walking distance from the physics building for free. He conceded he’d miss out on meeting people his own age, but he’d get to know Cordelia better.

His parents dropped him off with a suitcase of clothes, and he buzzed the number labelled in spidery handwriting: “1/1, Dr Graham.” He made his way through the close to the faded, peeling red door and found Cordelia Graham smiling to see him.

“Hello, dear, come on in.”

“Hi, Auntie, thanks for having me.”

“Oh, it’s no problem at all. I’ve got a room for you, but you’ll need to help me shift the boxes of papers out of it. There’s a bed in there which the Ikea people left for you to put together. How are you managing with Glasgow so far?”

Hughie entered the threshold, and fascination gripped him. Behind stacks of yellowing and bluing books, Greek letters peeked out on a now-grey blackboard. His eyes picked out a black book with gold letters: “The Hamiltonian for Particles Orbiting Singularities Within the Locus of Increasing Entropy.” On a coffee table, atop a pile of papers built through the delicate, decades-long task of stacking for later, there was an arrow pointing to an inflexion on a graph with the corresponding note “confirmed.” This was like a cave of wonders, the entire flat filled with artefacts of this sort. Hughie’s eyes struggled to settle on any one piece before being drawn to its neighbour. His parents had warned him that Cordelia was an eccentric hoarder, but it became clear to him that Cordelia was a genius. They made small talk, since they didn’t really know one another, and then Hughie went to set up his room.

After his first term, Hughie found amongst Cordelia’s yellowing bookcases an envelope with “Earnest” scrawled on it.

“Cordelia, is this from your dad?”

“Oh, no, dear. That’s another Earnest. You can read it if you like.”

Hughie took the envelope and read its contents.

“Wait, this is Rutherford? You knew him?”

Hughie was astounded to find out that Cordelia had maintained a decades-long correspondence with Ernest Rutherford. Hughie spent a significant amount of time in his first term of studying physics finding out this guy was something of a Big Deal.

“How did you meet him?”

“Through work, but it wasn’t really through collaboration. He was sort of there with the other Cambridge lot. There were fewer physicists in those days, so it was easier to know most of them. You’d go to some college dinner and there’d probably be one of them there. I’ve got some letters from Dirac too, if you’d like to read them.”

For the following seven years, Hughie became Cordelia’s apprentice, and he began to navigate Cordelia’s library and locate information with efficiency. She’d worked for decades on her grand cosmological schemes in relative isolation, so having an assistant who could carry out some of the more modern tasks was invaluable to her. He’d spent a year documenting and publishing her FORTRAN code to the internet, and running exploratory projects under her tutelage. He’d taken her nascent idea about dark matter and written a 126-page thesis entitled “The Distribution of Dark Matter Within a 6-Manifold.” Much of their work relied on openly available data, but a significant amount of the paywalled research was paid for by engines made for steamships 100 years ago.

Hughie had asked Cordelia early on in his stay with her why she wasn’t working at the university.

“Because then I’d have to work with a bunch of crusty old men, and I’ve done enough of that in my life. I’m 92, dear. Those boys speak to me like I’m a child. They assume they know what I’m thinking.”

“But times have changed since 1970, haven’t they?”

“Maybe they’ve changed, but should I work at the whim of men? Societal mood improved in my favour decades after all the men my age retired, but it’s not hard for it to go back to the good old days.”

Death

Cordelia and Hughie returned from the cafe. Her 97th birthday felt special to Hughie, even though they’d done the same thing they did most days: talked about a nuance of the interior of dense cosmological objects over tea and shakshuka. She was sharp, but she looked small and often seemed tired. They returned to the flat, and 1/1 was becoming harder and harder for her to reach. Hughie was looking at bungalows, but Cordelia had lived in 1/1 so long she was carved into the masonry of the building.

In the gloaming, under a purple hue, a white BMW crept down the quiet, leafy street. It stopped, and a figure materialised. It advanced up to the tenement’s portal and scanned the buzzers with its spectral eyes. The sky darkened and the wind in the trees stopped. The soft chatter of the city drowned in silence, and the figure raised its hand to its temple, and buzzed for 1/1.

Hughie was mid bungalow search when he heard the buzzer go. It was unusual for someone to be at the flat at this time of day, so he assumed one of his neighbours had a lost friend. He answered the buzzer.

“Hullo?”

“Hello! Is Cordelia in? I’m her nephew, Gare. I’ve got her a birthday card and thought I’d pop by to see how the old crow is doing.”

“Oh, right, yes, I’ll let you up.”

Hughie was perturbed. Gare Graham was a relatively distant cousin he’d seen a couple of times but never properly spoken to. He didn’t have clear memories of Gare Graham, and the more he tried to picture him, the blurrier Gare became in his mind’s eye. His voice echoed through Hughie’s thoughts, and it became harder to hear. Gare had also never dropped by before, and people don’t say things like “old crow.” But Hughie let him up anyway. Despite Gare Graham being a made-up-sounding relative he could barely remember, and despite instincts which didn’t make sense to him, Hughie buzzed Gare in.

In the close stood Gare. He was tall, with dark hair and pallid skin, dressed in a designer tracksuit with a gold bracelet. His vacant stare and wicked smile were obscured under a Von Dutch cap. Hughie looked into the study to alert Cordelia to Gare’s arrival, but in her usual place sat a grand Maine Coon with eyes like stars and whiskers longer than wisdom. The cat’s coat was an exquisite silver, and it had eyebrows to match an ancient lore master’s. Bewildered and troubled, Hughie went to look for Cordelia in the kitchen but was interrupted by Gare knocking at the door. He put the huge cat and the missing Cordelia to one side so he could deal with the Gare-shaped problem.

“Hullo again, come in, Gare. It’s been a while since we saw you. Cordelia’s just in another room, but you can go sit in the lounge. Would you like a tea or anything else to drink?”

Hughie furtively scanned the kitchen as he asked this, but Cordelia wasn’t there either.

“Wee Hughie! What’s going on in this flat? There’s shite from wall to ceiling. Have you been managing to cope with Cordelia? I can see you’ve let this place go to ruin. Cordelia! It’s Gare, I’ve come to drop off your card. Hughie, can you go and tidy up a bit, maybe chuck out some of the stuff on the coffee table so we can all sit down.”

Hughie was taken aback.

“I’ll just move the papers to the other room. Cordelia and I are working on a project.”

“Where’s the old crow? Wow, what a hideous cat. You shouldn’t keep them. They make the flat stink of piss.”

The Maine Coon had come out of the study and begun hissing at Gare.

“Sorry. Yes, the cat’s staying here temporarily. Cordelia will be out in a moment. Please, go and sit down, make yourself comfortable.”

“I can see you’ve made yourself comfy, haven’t you, Hughie? Yes, you’ve got quite a nice arrangement here. You know, nobody’s spoken to Cordelia for quite a while, and we’d begun to worry about her, so I came down to check in on you two, and well, it’s worse than we thought. You’re not looking after her properly. You’ve let her flat become a crack den.”

The Maine Coon leapt at Gare, but he seemed ephemeral, and the cat crashed into a pile of books behind him.

“Jesus, Hughie, your cat is totally feral. What sort of way to live is this?”

Hughie was now mute, and he felt as though his feet were trapped in cement. Gare went on,

“I am going to check that Cordelia’s okay. You stay put, and we’ll talk about how to look after her properly once we’re all sat down.”

Gare ceremoniously checked the rooms.

“Not in here, either.” “Oh, not here too?” “Cordelia, wherever are you?”

Hughie’s arms felt weak, and a migraine began pounding behind his forehead. The Maine Coon followed Gare into each room, protesting his presence, trying to trip him up, but he treated the cat with irreverence.

“Oh, what’s this, Hughie? You’re looking at buying a house? And where’s Cordelia? You said she was in, but I see an urn.”

Gare’s voice turned sepulchral as he intoned,

“In this urn are the remains of Cordelia Graham. She is no longer with us. She is dead, Hughie. You know she is dead. And you know that you are guilty. Your crime is called fraud on Earth, but to hell your soul is destined, for you are guilty of deathly lies, lies which use departed dear old Cordelia as a means to get rich. And for this, you must pay.”

Hughie stammered,

“What’s, um, she is just in the other, well, we just need, ah, I haven’t done anything.”

“Then why, Hughie, are you looking at buying a bungalow? Why have you let this flat fester with decades’ worth of trash while you buy yourself pedigree cats? Tell me, Hughie, if you can. But of course, you won’t. Because none of that makes sense. Your lies are plain to see. Of course, if the police were to find out, you’d be thrown straight in jail.”

“No, the cafe down the road will tell you she’s alive and well, we were there just this afternoon.”

“The cafe down the road? Hughie, the cafe down the road doesn’t know you’ve been hiring vulnerable old people as actors as part of your puppet show. On the other hand, a death certificate signed five years ago, an urn full of human remains labelled Cordelia, and stacks of receipts proving you tricked old ladies into thinking they were making a documentary called Our Unheard Story tell another tale entirely. Hughie, you can’t lie your way out of this.”

The Maine Coon hissed “lies” and “scum,” but Gare remained unfazed. The cat bared its teeth and went for his ankles, but Gare seemed to have no graspable body. The cat catapulted itself into a spindly table, toppling it, and a will fell at Gare’s feet. Gare stooped to retrieve it, rose to meet Hughie’s eyes with a catenary smile and piercing stare, and resumed his proclaiming.

“This will says that I am Cordelia’s only heir. Hughie, of course, I want to help you out of this mess you’ve made. You were always such a nice boy who got carried away with a joke, a lie that got out of hand. I do want what’s best for you. I think I won’t mention any of this to the authorities. You can stay here for one final night. But tomorrow you’ll need to leave, and if you don’t, I may change my mind.”

Gare faded out of view, and when Hughie heard the door to the flat close, his migraine vanished and his wits restored themselves. He searched the house for Cordelia while the cat pawed at him, but it was hopeless. She was gone. He went to lie on his bed, and as he drifted between waking and sleep, he dreamt of teeth falling out and choking him, of people putting guns to his head, of Gare standing in the close telling him to die.

Revelation

The morning sun crept into the flat. Hughie felt relief to see the pale morning light, and the cat had curled up on his bed where the sunlight pooled warm and generous. Hughie began replaying the previous evening in his mind. Nothing seemed real, but when he returned to the scene of the crime, he found the will, the urn, the stacks of receipts. The cat crept into the room and meowed at him.

“Yes, I’ll get you some water and food.”

“Meowww.”

“You’re a chatty one, aren’t you.”

“Meowww.”

The cat flicked its tail up and brushed against his legs. He felt a familiar bond between him and the cat. He decided to get some cat supplies. As he left the tenement, he saw a skip had been placed directly in front of the building. When he returned with a bag of cat food and litter, he felt all hope evaporate. The vanilla’d pages of a life’s work had been dumped into the skip, and he heard the gleeful cry of Gare.

“Ah, glad to run into you, Hughie. Your clothes are over by the bins. I didn’t know if you wanted them, since they all looked horrible. You can hand me the keys now.”

The weather turned dreich. Hughie’s clothes were in a bin bag, which he emptied and started refilling with pages from the skip, desperately picking them out at random. The rain grew heavier, and soon the pages were becoming nothing more than pulp. Entropy was destroying all that Cordelia had worked on. Distraught and soaked, Hughie hurried off with the precious remnants of Cordelia’s insights to a bus shelter, and the cat followed him. He went to stay with his parents, and the cat came too.

The cat turned out to be a girl, so he called her Astrid. When Astrid stared at Hughie and meowed, it seemed to coincide with him recalling a detail of Cordelia’s theories. For the next five years, during the day he filled notepads with equations and pieced together an extraordinary theory of how the universe worked, and at night he made ends meet through zero-hour contracts.

On the night of Cordelia’s 103rd birthday, Hughie drank a cup of ceremonial tea in her memory with Astrid curled up on his lap.

Astrid looked back at him, her eyes deep as space, and a vision stared into Hughie’s self. He took the notepad at his side, scribbled an unintelligible shape onto the page, and felt transcendental euphoria. Astrid jumped off his lap, and as he stood up, before him he saw the universe, unfettered by its usual three dimensions. Brilliant white starlight surrounded a pupil, and he reached out to touch it. Astrid leapt into the eye, and he felt the eye’s powerful gaze compelling him to follow. As his fingertip reached the centre of the blackness, he saw all of time and all of space simultaneously. Struan House, the flat in Glasgow, the wealth of old Earnest, his money-grabbing relatives. All were but mere specks in the cosmological tapestry, without and within him. The bliss of understanding took hold of Hughie, and he stepped into the eye.