What they said about the original print version of this book
(Saving the World and Being Happy, The Computer Ager, ISBN 1-4137-1756-X)
‘Dangerous to the status quo. It offers people a glimpse of hope.’
-- Bruce K. Alexander, author of The Globalisation of Addiction, A Study in Poverty of the Spirit
‘A delicious mixture of messianic message, wicked satire, sweet romance and utter hilarity.’
-- Marian Van Eyk McCain in Resurgence magazine
‘Ingenious. Deserves a wide audience.’
-- Joe Middleton in the Scottish Left Review
‘A great read. Moves from rite of passage for the individual to rite of passage for the planet in a bold dramatic sweep. Funny, thought-provoking, intelligent.’
-- Tony Cook, Chief Executive, ABCtales; Co-Founder, Red Pepper
Saving the World
R. Eric Swanepoel
ISBN of the ePub version of this ebook: 978-0-9563258-1-5
ISBN of the mobi version of this ebook: 978-0-9563258-2-2
Published by Synchrony Books 2011
http://www.synchronybooks.co.uk/
Copyright R. Eric Swanepoel 2011
Cover design by Kit Foster
Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Acknowledgements and Dedication
CHAPTER ONE: The Source and Some Tributaries (Time, Rosemary, and BASIC)
CHAPTER TWO: A Confluence (BASIC meets Rosemary)
CHAPTER THREE: Combined Forces, Smoother Waters, and the Entry of Time
CHAPTER FOUR: Unexpected Turbulence
CHAPTER FIVE: Beatled, But Not Beaten
CHAPTER SEVEN: High Pressure, a Low, and an Ambivalent Alliance
CHAPTER TEN: Books and Biology
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Towards Researching Time’s Losses
CHAPTER TWELVE: Ph.D.: Pettiness, Hardship and Disillusion?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: The ‘Tartan Terrors’ and the Torment of Thyme
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Frustration and Fortune
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Crash, and Crisis in the Chrysalis
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Several Operations and a Wedding
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Honeymoon Hijacking
CHAPTER NINETEEN: Another High Tide
CHAPTER TWENTY: The River Mouth
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: The Ocean At Last
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: Cider with Rosemary
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: Making Mary an Insider
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: Transport of daylight robbery/Transports of delight
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: Good Hair Days, Dreadlock’n’Roll
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Hope-ism Shapes Up
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: Funny Business
CHAPTER THIRTY: Michelle: My Hell
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Yvonne Worse, and the Michelle Shock
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Sheep and Satin Slash
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Reflections
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: Whisky in Mud, and Clarity in Gin
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: Share Hell, and Security
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: Mudrock-ing the Boat
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: Suspense
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: Red-faced
CHAPTER FORTY: Forever Dirtying Windows?
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE: ‘We are living in a non-materialistic world.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO: A Cliffhanger Ending
Author's Note
This novel was largely researched and written in the late 1990s when I was based in Paris. It was first published in print version in 2004 under the title Saving the World and Being Happy, The Computer Ager.
Since 2008 the flaws in our media and in our economic and political systems have become all too apparent. In 2011 the rights of the novel reverted to me. It was also in that year that Rupert Murdoch’s empire suffered a significant setback (when The News of the World closed following the exposure of phone-hacking practices) and his influence was widely debated. Riots broke out across England and many believe that the gap between the rich and poor, rampant materialism and the greed of those at the top were contributory factors. A British tourist was kidnapped in Kenya (and her partner murdered) by a group from the desperately poor and dysfunctional country of Somalia. The euro was in crisis as Greece was forced to slash public spending and embark on extensive privatisations – exactly what the Hope-ists in Saving the World feared would result from European Monetary Union. The book seemed more relevant than ever, and I decided to make it widely available as an affordable ebook. I also took the opportunity to make a few minor corrections.
Enjoy the book – it’s not what it at first seems!
Comradely ‘Hope-ist’ regards
R. Eric Swanepoel
Edinburgh, September 2011
Acknowledgements and Dedication
Thanks to my friends and relatives for your support over the years!
This book is dedicated to the memory of three uncles, all remarkable men:
James ‘Jim’ Alfred Phillips
Wilhelmus Jacobus ‘William James’ Swanepoel
Frank Taylor Thomas
Part One: The River
CHAPTER ONE: The Source and Some Tributaries (Time, Rosemary, and BASIC)
If the truth be told, there was no single moment that led to it all, but it is human nature always to seek a unique starting point and a direct line of causation. For example, to find ‘the’ (i.e. one and only) source of the Nile was the obsession of supposedly intelligent men. (Women were wiser.) Was the reasoning of such ‘brave’ explorers impaired by heat and/or swamp fever such that they couldn’t sit down and think about their stupidity? A few moments of sober meditation, if this were possible under their sweltering solar topees, would have told them that rivers are the sums of their tributaries, that one source is as good as another, and that even raindrops might be counted as sources… to say nothing of the urine streams of natives micturating bilharzia into the water, through which the paler skinned ‘discoverers’ were later to wade heedless.
The truth is that the notion of ‘the’ source of a river is artificial. It is necessary for men (not women) to compete. To compete they need a goal, preferably arbitrary. Men are said to be superior to animals because of their capacity for abstract thought. That is debatable, but it is true that few concepts could be as abstract as that of ‘the’ source. Like cricket, football and war-gaming, there is plenty of room for so-called heroism (and a lot more for rivalry, jealousy, and assorted forms of malice) in the race to discover the source of a river. And it’s all nicely useless.
Why do something worthwhile, such as making a minimal effort to understand the culture of those who live beside ‘the’ source, when it is so much more satisfying and simpler to plant a flag, take the appropriate compass bearings, and sing the national anthem of one’s mother/fatherland, rejoicing in the knowledge that one has beaten some other poor, jaundiced, anaemic, dysenteric, schistosomiatic, febrile, die-hard imperialist to the spot? Competitive culture comprehension could not hold a candle to such a magnificently perverse delight.
The spread of ‘European civilization’ – or ‘syphilization’ – was a secondary justification. Ultimately one succeeded in getting the local, relatively melanotically undeprived peoples (‘the darkies’) to drape themselves in clothing dependent on intensive laundering and industrial chemicals for its mandatory whiteness, so that they would then be fit to accompany one in one’s subordinate obsession: the ligneous implement-assisted rapid relocation of pigskin-covered balls of string, also known as the English rain-making ritual, ‘cricket’.
Nathaniel E. Papulous could not be accused of these absurdities. He didn’t play cricket, hated football, and hadn’t been further afield than London or Manchester when the whole thing started. He only came up with ‘the’ source of his revolutionary and planet-saving ideas when he got tired of the disappointment on female journalists’ faces in response to his standard ‘I don’t really know…’ mumble. His journalist-pleasing concoction wasn’t entirely untrue, as the grandfather clock and the oil paintings had had some influence. Probably.
The story was that as a four-year-old he’d been taken by his aunt to see the former home of a great man, then converted into a museum. He’d been awed by the size of the rooms, the height of the ceilings, the gilt-framed oil paintings of the uniformly fair women and uniformed fairly ugly men, the musty smell of the grim-looking volumes on the bookshelves (fairly informed men!) and, more than anything, the grandfather clock in the hall – formidable! When one is used to the rapid and trivial tick-tick-tick mouse heartbeat of little clocks and, especially, from a more recent perspective, when semi-habituated to the hideous silent plastic slickness of electronic timepieces broken irritatingly by their evil little beeps insidiously pressurising one’s already hectic existence, the measured, deep, stately tock… tock… tock of a grandfather clock is impressive, more so when the noble quality of its ancient mechanism’s vital signs and casement are set off by a mahogany parquet floor and an ornate vaulted ceiling.
Of course, Nathaniel didn’t quite use these words in his interviews (and electronic watches weren’t around when he was four), but he did convey something of the impact the enormous clock had made on his four-year-old self. If he had had full recall he would have mentioned the pendulum. No little boy viewing a grandfather clock for the first time could fail to be mesmerized by that measured swing. Be that as it may, the gist of his hack-fodder story was that this childhood museum visit made him aware of the passage of time, and thereby of change.
Come the height of Nathaniel’s fame, the museum visit story had become more elaborate still. He had extended his analysis of the effect of the tocking on his infant consciousness, and would say that the grandfather clock’s genteel beats had spoken to him of the importance of the correct use of time. That is, that while they hinted at mortality, their leisureliness intimated that what time remained to mortals was perhaps not best employed by precipitate action but rather by weighty and deliberate deeds, considered at length and seriously undertaken. Concordantly, the steady persistence both of the ancient clock’s mechanism and of its housing had suggested to him that a measured approach to life might extend it; that a hasty bull-at-a-gate lifestyle might abbreviate it. His treatment of the effect of the oil paintings on his young self also found itself embroidered. The portraits of successive generations, he stated, had made a considerable impact – the features being visibly passed on (or not, when aristocratic inbreeding necessitated a little judicious covert outbreeding) from parents to hapless or happy offspring – leading him to pose himself at the time a juvenile version of the nature-or-nurture question. His own physiognomical inheritance had been, to put it charitably, mediocre: a weak chin, poor skin, premature alopecia – the essential attributes of the computer expert. No surprise, then, that computers would be his life, or at least a major part of it.
Apart from the question of genes, he’d been particularly fascinated, so he said, by multiple portraits of the same sitter, showing the effects of age. That he had been conscious of all he claimed to have been conscious of at the rude and raucous age of four is surely not true. Rather than call him outright a liar, though, we might imagine that his accompanying aunt (who died a few months later) had said something along the lines of, ‘Look, Nathaniel, there’s the same man at 20, 35, 51 and 80 years old! Can you see? Look, see his hair is greyer here, and you can see how this wrinkle grew! He probably did a lot of frowning! But I’m sure he looked even worse than that. The painters tried to make them look as young and as handsome as possible or they wouldn’t get paid!’
The full truth of the source of Nathaniel’s ideas will never be known, for while the superficial physical appearance and location of things may, within limits, be described, the chimerical electrochemical workings of the human brain can only be approximated, especially those of a child many years since matured. However, the approximate source of the Nathaniel saga, as outlined here, should be good enough for most purposes. It is certainly more accurate than ‘the source of the Nile’ (de Nyl zijn Oog), as ‘discovered’ by the voortrekkers, not vastly north of Pretoria in South Africa, half a continent south of ‘the genuine’ source. At least the wretched voortrekkers, like Nathaniel, never inflicted cricket on anyone.
Nathaniel was born in the Sixties, but the most important years of his childhood were the Seventies. Never has a decade unfairly suffered so much opprobrium as the poor Seventies. Granted, the clothes were not ‘practical’ or ‘restrained’, but who needs practical and restrained? Neither were the sideburns particularly aesthetic, but muttonchop whiskers had been around before, and would come back again, and the ties came in damn handy if something had to be mopped up.
The Seventies had none of that ghastly Sixties half-hearted pseudo-rebellion of rich kids, which was blamed for every evil in society for the next few decades and thereby killed sympathy for genuine reform, being used to justify repression and promote reactionary attitudes by numerous right-wing bigots and, worse, launched the career of that most appalling ‘singer’, the adenoidally hinge-voiced Bob Dylan. (OK, granted, his lyrics had some merit, and someone had to be ‘the voice’ of that generation.) The glorious Seventies were also untainted by the crass materialism of the Eighties. Indeed, this and ‘yuppie’ power had yet to rear their conjoined, hideous, short back-and-sided Thatcherite heads.
The Seventies yielded the shamelessly hedonistic but touchingly innocent Bay City Rollers in flamboyant tartan. Bowie was at his camp best. Abba were the slickest popsters ever. The sufferings of poor old Elvis mercifully came to an end. Motown was motoring, and Nixon got his fixin’. The residues of the best aspects of flower power were still there at the start and AIDS was nowhere. A veil should perhaps be drawn tactfully over the Mods and the Rockers in the UK, and the Partridge Family in the USA, but, overall, the picture is clear: the Seventies were fab! Even if the Beatles had ceded to Wings.
The Seventies weren’t quite like that for Nathaniel. At least not at first, though he benefited in some ways. Being the only child of professional parents (that is, his parents had professions, they were only too conscious of the fact that they received no money for raising Nathaniel!) he didn’t want for material comfort and, provided what he requested had some perceived educational benefit, it was his.
He asked for a computer. In those days computers didn’t come with games consoles and a vast assortment of glitzy noisy wham-bang games. If you wanted to play a game you typed in the programme yourself, or you might possibly have been able to procure a taped version of paddle tennis – yawn! In short, if you had a computer you learned to programme it. Sitting in front of the poor quality screen of the black-and-white portable TV in his upstairs bedroom, this is precisely what Nathaniel did.
There was only one other kid in Nathaniel’s class at school who had access to a computer. They were, therefore, special – an elite club of two. Jason and Nathaniel shared the subscription to a computer magazine, and one of Nathaniel’s annually renewed Christmas presents (provided he passed all his exams, which he always did) was a subscription to Scientific American (which had Computer Recreations and Metamagical Themas columns, the latter being an anagram of ‘mathematical games’). Together the two boys would translate the programmes given in these magazines into the appropriate versions of BASIC for their humble machines. For the really long programmes this would take a couple of evenings of painful hunt-and-peck, and then there’d be the even more painful and frustrating process of debugging. There was nothing to beat the adrenalin-endorphin rush, however, when a new programme ran for the first time! Nothing, that is, until Rosemary appeared.
Rosemary and her family arrived in Thrackston with a bang one wintry afternoon. They moved in next door to the Papulouses, empty since the Martins had gone taking their obnoxious yapping pug with them. The Taylors had a cat, but no dog. There was a boy, several years older than Nathaniel (a supermacho sports freak of a guy, it later emerged), a little girl about five years old (who plays no part in the story at all, but is listed here for completeness), and Rosemary, fourteen like Nathaniel.
Nathaniel had been waiting for the Mandelbrot pattern to appear on his screen (which took ages when generated by a BASIC programme running on a Seventies computer) when, from the vantage point of his bedroom window, he had seen them disembark from the once white Peugeot estate. It was as if he had been shot. For fundamental and ancient things like human emotions, the old metaphors are often the best, and the Cupid’s arrow one still has some mileage left in it, unlike the Taylors’ vehicle which was backfiring and belching smoke and, indeed, didn’t see the following spring, at least not as a possession of the Taylors.
Perhaps the backfiring had something to do with Cupid’s arrow. It is said that heightened emotion, whatever the cause, increases a person’s vulnerability to pulchritude and, certainly, the fantastic racket of the old banger had Nathaniel’s heart racing even before he had seen his soon-to-be-beloved. The back of her complaining chariot was stuffed with bedding and suitcases, and was low on its axle. The front was riding high and proud, as well it might for the princess who emerged from it, a Seventies princess in the full glory of the appropriate regalia: bell-bottom jeans, massive orange platform-soled shoes, a satin-sheened orange boob-tube under a fake fur-trimmed wasp-wasted suede jacket. Her fair hair, as he later described it, using the words from what became the most important song in the universe (‘Passion Proliferates Where My Rosemary Permabulates’) was ‘somewhat flamboyant and unrestrained’. Perfection.
Nathaniel watched intensely for the next few hours, as the estate car and a removals van were unloaded, and as that wonderful incarnation of all the important virtues (those of importance, that is, to a young man in early testosterone flush) appeared and disappeared: visible as she collected small items from the vehicles, gone as she entered the house, and intermittently visible again through the uncurtained windows of the rooms facing him. And then the significance of the patterns of movement in the house, which he had been observing without any attempt at analysis, became clear. The room directly opposite his was to be hers! It was the second bolt from the beneficent blue! The hanging of curtains all too soon eclipsed his view, but not before he’d seen her putting posters on her walls: David Cassidy, Abba, Mungo Jerry and Gilbert O’Sullivan.
She seemed to notice him for the first time as she was about to pull the curtain closed, and peered for a few seconds at the shadowy face lit from the side by the glow of a television screen. First eye contact – pity it was so dark! Nathaniel turned reluctantly back into his pop poster-free room and was surprised to see an elaborate and elegant pattern on his screen. He had forgotten all about it! Yes, the Mandelbrot pattern was beautiful, but not as beautiful as…
As is often the way in ‘real’ life, and as novelists are often fearful of admitting lest they destroy their tales by pushing the sceptical reader’s credulity too far, there was a ‘genuine’ coincidence that day. ‘Passion Proliferates Where My Rosemary Perambulates’ had actually been playing on the radio as the Taylors unpacked their possessions, though at the time Nathaniel hadn’t known that to be her name. Until the Rosemary era, Nathaniel had listened rather indifferently to music, Jason’s enthusiasm having not entirely rubbed off on him.
That changed the following day, when the new girl in his class was introduced. He immediately identified himself as her neighbour, though blushing furiously. She was polite, but not obviously over-delighted. Still, they had spoken. That evening Nathaniel re-ran the brief conversation in his head, disappointed that she’d been picked up from school by her mother and apparently hadn’t come home until it was dark. Still, there was always tomorrow. In the future, he thought, there would be so many opportunities! His radio was on, and as he lay on his back on his bed he let ‘Passion Proliferates Where My Rosemary Perambulates’ rack him with pain-joy. He must buy a record player! His computer had its first night’s rest since its purchase.
The computer was idle for a long time. It found itself languishing in a cupboard, cruelly displaced by the upstart record player. If it had not been relegated to the sheltering darkness it would have witnessed a shocking change in its environment, as newspaper cuttings about Clive Sinclair were displaced by huge images of David Cassidy, Abba, Mungo Jerry, Gilbert O’Sullivan, and – to show his independence and shameless machismo – Gary Glitter (then not revealed as a paedophile). Nathaniel’s bank account converted itself into vinyl.
His parents were not entirely gruntled, but were wise enough to voice only mild displeasure, thus enabling their adolescent progeny to experience the essential developmental phase of rebellion without its extreme manifestation in the form of repeated all-out screaming matches. Under such circumstances Nathaniel had, therefore, sufficient reason to closet himself with his friends and mutter darkly about lack of parental understanding, but could not legitimately slam his door more than five times a day. And he did have more ‘friends’, now that he was up on pop music and had one of the best collections in the class. To some extent, it achieved its primary aim, in that the gorgeous Rosemary became a ‘friend’, and would drop by from time to time, accompanied or alone.
They would talk about the inevitable subjects – parents, pop music and school – but Nathaniel never quite mustered his courage sufficiently to tell her directly that she was more than a friend to him. He would play ‘Passion Proliferates Where My Rosemary Perambulates’ whenever she visited, but then almost all Rosemary’s friends did this – it was a standing joke which, like the record, was wearing rather thin.
He would wave to her from his bedroom, when she was ensconced in hers. He would hear what record she was playing, and try to synchronise his record player. They walked to school together. Nathaniel started to believe that his feelings were reciprocated, that they had an understanding that obviated verbal description… and yet he did want to tell her, and he wanted to hold her hand, to kiss her. He wanted to know for certain that the feelings were shared and that they would be together forever. Seeing her so often, talking to her without taking it any further was making life hell. He decided, then, that he had to act, some time, somehow, although part of him knew that he might lose everything.
Rosemary was a balanced, healthy, outgoing girl. She had many friends (of which Nathaniel was painfully aware). She was also leagues ahead of her would-be suitor in terms of psycho-sexual development, indeed in her understanding of human beings, and of Nathaniel himself, even. She was a girl, after all. She was not unaware of what the classroom stares, the perpetual solicitude, of her neighbour signified. She liked Nathaniel, but was beginning to find him irritating and, physically, sexually, he was a non-entity to her. She had debated the ins-and-outs of the whole thing ad nauseam with her coterie of female friends – she even had them visit her bedroom with the express purpose of showing them Nathaniel’s constant vigilant presence – how to drop him gently? Though she had sworn them to secrecy, these things have a way of coming out, and it wasn’t long before Nathaniel became an object of pity amongst the more kind-hearted girls in the class, and an object of fun amongst the rest – most of them, in fact. Rosemary’s emotions were increasingly perturbed: pity, pride in her power over someone else’s existence, frustration, anger at being subjected to all of this, and even hatred. They churned inside her but no butter of salvation formed. She couldn’t bring herself to tell him directly to get lost, she couldn’t be cruel to be kind. The next few months were difficult.
Rosemary’s curtains were closed more often than not, even in daylight. Rosemary was always involved in intense discussions with others at school, and would sit as far from Nathaniel as possible. Rosemary was out a lot. Nathaniel was losing his appetite. From being in the top five in most of his subjects at school, he fell to average, and was even doing poorly in history and French. He would try to concentrate on the texts of his school books, up there in his Rosemary-pop shrine, but seconds of concentration were the limit, then the love-obsessed lyrics of some pop song would redirect him to reflect again on his misery, his gaze would revert to the house next door. At times he would doze, and hallucinate that Rosemary was there, coming home, or opening her curtains, but it was seldom true.
The day came when she swapped her bedroom with that of her brother, and Manchester United and Status Quo posters replaced Rosemary’s. If big brother Neil caught Nathaniel looking out of his window towards the Taylors’ house, hoping to see Rosemary entering or leaving, he would glower and shake his fist, and once, humiliatingly, called him aside in the school playground, and stood over the puny Nathaniel: ‘Leave my sister alone! She’s sick to death of you. She wants nothing to do with you!’
But that couldn’t be true! The problem was that he hadn’t declared the true depth of his feelings! If she really knew him, knew how deeply he cared, she would change her mind. They had all poisoned her against him. It was her brother, and her brother’s friends, and her friends. The pain increased daily. And then she was picked up one evening by a rugby first team mate of her brother’s, and carried away on the back of a motorbike. Nathaniel was too young for even a learner’s licence. To be a shining knight in Rosemary’s eyes he must have a charger, or do valiant deeds? Something heroic.
One Saturday morning the Taylors had all gone somewhere, and Nathaniel was able to stare at his beloved’s territory unthreatened: the hated curtains of her hated brother’s room radiated all that was malign, but not powerfully enough to swamp Rosemary’s magic influence on the dwelling as a whole; the lucky sparrows, nesting under the eaves of a house that contained the glory that was Rosemary; the washing line, sanctified through its contact with her glad-rags; the fishpond, which reminded him of a failed conversational gambit about goldfish; the garden shed, where, in his wildest late-night imaginings, he and Rosemary might…; the decaying poplar tree, where… their cat was stuck!
The pathetic miaows transmuted themselves almost instantly in Nathaniel’s lovesick mind into the breathless voice of Rosemary: ‘Oh, Nathaniel, how can I ever thank you enough? Nathaniel, I have been so wrong about you. Please forgive me! Nathaniel, I love you!’ He almost lost himself in reverie. Who’d have thought that that hated cat, which had for years (probably) undeservingly and unappreciatively experienced the caresses of Rosemary’s sensual, slim, beautifully manicured fingers, the warm pressure of her breasts as she hugged it… that that very same despised bird-murdering felid would now be the agent of his experiencing similar sensory stimulation? He would simply rescue it, and become a hero!
Theory and practice are rarely identical, there’s many a slip twixt cup and lip, and other apposite old saws… The truth is that that decaying old poplar could have done with an apposite old saw a few years before Nathaniel’s attempted epic chivalric feat. He was halfway up the thing when a branch gave way beneath his feet. He slipped a bit, and grazed a knee, but his handgrip was secure and he did not fall. The significance of the break would only register later. At the time the powerful libido-driven limbic system of his brain had enslaved the higher faculties of reason. Rescuing the cat to gain the fair maiden was all what mattered. Ever onward, ever upward.
A yard higher: what if no one believed he had rescued the cat? Rosemary would probably – no, definitely – imagine that the whole story had been contrived to impress her, nothing but a cowardly braggart’s empty and desperate boast! Ah ha! He would wait in the tree until his loved one returned, and then effectuate the swashbuckling rescue in front of her pale brow and tremulous lip, her fair hands writhing in an agony of suspense, her warm heart expanding with repentance and admiration like the Mandelbrot pattern gradually emblazoning itself in all its wonderful intricacy on the screen of his black-and-white portable television set.
Three hours is a long time to cling to the trunk of a tree, particularly if it is raining, which it was towards lunchtime. Still, ‘Faint heart ne’er won fair maid!’ Nathaniel repeated to himself. Disregarding the trivial irritation of the wetness, there were two immediate problems with this tree-clinging business. Firstly, he was terrified of heights and, secondly, he was suffering terrible cramps. The first problem he tried to overcome by telling himself that height was nothing but vertical distance, and that it was silly to be afraid of distance, distance being the necessary means by which objects avoid being superimposed (not that he’d have minded being superimposed on Rosemary!) Without distance nothing would exist, because everything would be one, back to before the Big Bang. In general, it would be more logical to fear extreme proximity! Verticality, too, was not that bad, because it was only 45 degrees away from being a slope of 45 degrees, and who woke up at night having experienced the nasty sensation of sliding down a slope of 45 degrees? No one. Forty-five degrees was nothing, not far off horizontal in fact, and you couldn’t be anything but laid-back about horizontality! So there was nothing at all to fear about vertical distance, QED!
Nathaniel was almost light-headed about the whole thing now. Hey, once he got down he could sell this idea of how to combat fear of heights! Heights? Oh, my god, look how high! God, the leg pain! Was it better to concentrate on the arm cramp or the leg cramp? Perhaps if he just imagined he was hugging the grateful Rosemary on solid ground rather than a rotting old tree eight yards skyward of terra firma. It would probably be a good thing if he moved, he thought. He should keep the circulation going. The cat was still a couple of yards away, anyway. A bit more climbing…
Zebedee watched the appalling anorak monster approaching him. He had tolerated its relatively static presence a few yards away, and had almost got to the point of finding its intermittent sighs and hums (‘Passion proliferates where my Rosemary perambulates…’) soothing rather than disturbing, but the intense and apparently malevolent stare that was fixed to the front of this ghastly apparition as it approached to within a yard was just too much. Zebedee decided to get down from the tree. A cheeky bound on the monster’s shoulders, a light scrabble down the trunk, and Zebedee was through the cat flap and curled up next to the radiator.
The Taylors’ new (second-hand) blue Citroën pulled up. By twisting his head Nathaniel could see the whole family disembark. ‘Nathaniel, what the blazes are you playing at? That tree’s far too dangerous to climb, and it’s on our property! Get down at once!’ called Mr Taylor.
Humiliation. Nathaniel, cramped and terrified and wretched as he was, descended to the point where the branch had broken, following the shouted instructions of a gleeful Neil and a wrathful Mr Taylor. Then he could go no further. It was Neil who fetched the ladder and carried him down to safety, to ignominy, to humiliation in its extreme abject depths. Naturally, he told them what he’d been trying to do. He didn’t know whether they believed him or not, and hardly cared now anyway. Everything was hopeless.
No, it was never entirely hopeless. Nathaniel bought and borrowed self-help manuals, and pop psychology texts and, unfortunately, Richard Bach’s books about the power of love, and from all his reading he only took in what he wanted to have confirmed: that true love (which, of course, was his variety) would ultimately win through. How and when? Rosemary was now so remote that he couldn’t even speak to her. He wrote letters, and posted them through her letterbox, and stuffed them in her bag at school when she left it unguarded. After the first three she wrote a reply: ‘Nathaniel, please leave me alone. I don’t know how you can love me. You don’t really know me. I can never love you. You are only hurting yourself by going on like this.’
His next letter professed that he would die for her, if necessary. Shortly thereafter her parents called to have a serious discussion with his. The depths of hell, that was, to have his parents poking around in his soul! They took him to a psychiatrist, but he remained uncommunicative, staring at the table. From where he sat, he could read the graffiti inscribed by previous beneficiaries of the good man’s services: ‘F***ing p*** tried to f*** me!’ and ‘Suicide would be better than this!’
Returning from the shrink in the back of his parents’ Austin Maestro, he suffered their reprimands: ‘You might, at the very least, have greeted the man, Nathaniel!’ It was then that he resolved to send the world to Coventry. When they arrived home he also put himself on indefinite hunger strike in his bedroom, for good measure.
At dinnertime (7.30 p.m.) his parents sat over their healthy portions of balanced high-fibre low-fat food. Mr Papulous swallowed the second of his daily allocation of two glasses of red wine, an expression of distaste distorting his thin lips. Both the older Papulouses hated wine, but had thought it prudent for their son to witness moderate and responsible drinking at home, and never deviated from the two-glasses-a-day rule. According to Nathaniel’s recollections of his parents, the conversation might have run something like this:
‘Mathilda, I think we may possibly have strayed a little too far towards Rousseau in our approach to the rearing of the boy.’
‘You mean, I presume, Everard, that we have not been involved enough, that we have failed to interact sufficiently? A bit too laissez-faire.’
‘Precisely. Heaven knows we studied everything we could find on child-rearing, but perhaps our moderate approach was… miscalculated?’
‘But we didn’t just try a moderate approach, did we? I mean… the years we spent trying different methods – the Spock approach in ’67 and ’68, for example? No one could have done more!’
‘Mmmn, yes. There is one more thing we could try, Mathilda…’
‘Spit it out, man!’
‘Well, I’ve read… there’s this idea that one should hug one’s child, and inform it that one… that one loves it!’ Mr Papulous mouthed the word ‘love’ with as little relish as he had the wine.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Papulous with a sigh, ‘We’ve definitely tried everything else!? I suppose it couldn’t do any harm to try that too, although it does… ahh… it does seem a little far-fetched! If that doesn’t work we really will have to have the child committed though! We could always try again with another one, you know. It’s not too late yet!’
Mr Papulous muttered under his breath, looking at his severe and unadorned spouse, ‘So much touching involved – whichever way!’
Meanwhile, in his room above their heads, their son, barely conscious of what he was doing, was extracting his long-forsaken computer from its place of internment. He plugged it in to the mains, connected it to the television and the tape recorder, and switched it on. Mechanically, he rewound the tape and loaded the old Mandelbrot programme again, typed ‘RUN’ and pressed ‘ENTER’. He was staring at it as it developed, remembering again the day Rosemary had arrived, when the world had been full of promise and joy (this was one of his favourite memories), when his parents knocked and entered directly.
Nathaniel didn’t move a muscle (apart from those of his diaphragm and his heart, of course, which were not under his conscious control at that moment, so it is debatable whether he, or rather his will, moved them anyway, but this is not the place to launch into a metaphysical discussion…)
The senior Papulouses stood awkwardly just inside the doorway. ‘Nathaniel, your mother – that is, we – have something to tell you…’
Mr Papulous was nudged sharply by his wife, who muttered, ‘No, no, Everard!’ and gestured towards Nathaniel. Mr Papulous looked uncertainly at her. She gestured more vigorously. He advanced, haltingly, towards Nathaniel (still resolutely refusing to look at them) and stood for a moment behind his son’s chair. Further eyes-to-the-skies-accompanied gesticulations from his spouse caused Mr Papulous to raise his arms, and shakily deposit his hands on Nathaniel’s shoulders.
In the Seventies they would have likened Nathaniel’s expression to that of a startled rabbit. The language has since been enriched by the activities of a certain artist of zoo-sectional tendencies, and today Nathaniel’s expression would be described as being akin to that of a farmyard animal which has just been informed that it is about to meet Damien Hirst. In short, Nathaniel was terrified. His father scarcely less so. Mr Papulous’s trembling transmitted itself to Nathaniel, who perceived that the Mandelbrot pattern was now jiggling.
Mr Papulous tried to speak. ‘Na, Na, Nath, Nathan…’
Mrs Papulous had had enough and, very rapidly, she blurted, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Everard! Nathaniel, we’ve come to tell you that we love you!’ Then, more quietly but with the same celerity, she said to her husband, ‘Right, that’s it. We’ve done it. Let’s go!’
Mr Papulous whipped his hands off his son’s shoulders and left in a hurry. For the first time in his life he heard himself say, ‘God, I need a drink!’ No objection emerged from the ashen face of his wife, and that day the two of them increased their alcohol intake by a whopping 50 % – a whole glass extra! They lay awake that night, worried that they were well along the road to becoming hopeless alcoholics.
As it turned out, their visit had afforded some comfort to Nathaniel. His parents meant nothing to him, and their absurd performance did not, as it was meant to, immediately fill him with even the tepid inkling of a feeling that he might be wanted. It did, however, relieve his gloom slightly to know that no matter how crazy he was at times, there were people crazier than himself. He would eat, after all, if not speak. The Mandelbrot pattern was steady again. How he wished it could be Rosemary’s face, rather than the representation of a mathematical formula.
CHAPTER TWO: A Confluence (BASIC meets Rosemary)
When a tributary joins a river (or, to be unbiased, when two streams merge) the mixed water retains characteristics of each contributing body, yet gains in power and possibility. Salmon, entering a river mouth together, may part company at upstream junctions, depending on which tributaries furnished their individual nurseries. They taste home equally in the conjoined flow of the lower reaches, but some will taste it in one branch at each potential parting of the ways, and some in another. The taste of home is all-encompassing when they reach the little gravel-bedded becks of their infancy, and of their later rapidly succeeding concupiscence, senescence and death.
For mankind, a river generally becomes more useful, certainly more navigable, as it nears its debouchment in the briny. We have tasted the distinct flavours of the three major headwaters of the Nathaniel E. Papulous saga: an awareness of time, an interest in computing, and the love of Rosemary. This chapter details the first confluence. The next relates the usefulness of the augmented water body.
Nathaniel’s wish to have Rosemary stare back at him from the screen would have been increased, had that been possible, by his parents’ chosen therapy for his condition: the Papulous family moved, lock, stock and ‘VacuVin’-stoppered wine bottle (why waste a glass-and-a-half of perfectly drinkable red wine?)
Rosemary was now, on average, 67.23 miles away, Nathaniel estimated. By this stage even he realised that he had nothing to gain by seeing her in the flesh, at least not in the short term, and he made no effort to travel back to Thrackston by the two bus rides and the one train journey that would have been required (although he could have afforded the £3.93 he calculated was necessary).
His apparent improvement in the new environment of Utter Glopwort was spectacular. Little did his parents know, that far from this being due to the abandonment of his obsession, Nathaniel’s ‘recovery’ was due merely to a channelling of his ever-present pain into activity; in short, a plan.
The idea dated from Thrackston days, when Nathaniel had been wishing Rosemary’s features onto his screen. It was not a stroke of genius. A sub-eureka experience would be a fair description, as it was simply the thought ‘Well then, why not put them there?’ Newly unpacked in Utter Glopwort, and before even the pop posters had been erected, he spent an hour trying to draw a fair likeness of Miss Taylor’s face on grid paper, in order to transfer the X and Y coordinates of the comely features to his computer. Nathaniel discovered that he wasn’t an artist. No matter how clear the image of this reluctant Juliet was in this too-willing Romeo’s brain, it did not compensate for a lack of drafting skills. The clean new sheet of graph paper rapidly became a grey, eczematous cellulosification of failure: so many rubbings out, so many millimetres of pencil lead – all wasted.
Adopting the classic pose of the despair-wracked (elbows on the table, eyes closed, head in hands), Nathaniel sobbed. All the treasured images of Rosemary cascaded through what remained of his mind: Rosemary arriving in Thrackston, Rosemary putting up posters in her bedroom, Rosemary laughing next to him as they listened to music together, Rosemary walking with him to school, Rosemary playing netball… BINGO! That was it! Rosemary was the star of the junior netball team so there’d almost certainly be a photograph of her in the school magazine, due out next week!
Nathaniel was on the phone to Jason in seconds, ‘Hi, Jason! It’s Nathaniel. Yes, we’ve arrived in Utter Glopwort. Look, I’m really sorry about the way I’ve been behaving, but I’m getting over it.’ Nathaniel was not good at lying, but Jason let it pass.
‘Jason, um, I don’t really want to go back to Thrackston, but it would be good to see you some time, you know. I promise I won’t talk about Rosemary. You know you could come over for the weekend. I’m sure my parents won’t mind.’ (They associated Jason primarily with Nathaniel’s computing activities, and so approved of him.) ‘Umm… It’d be good to hear how you’re all doing! Umm… the school magazine comes out next week, right? Why don’t you come over next weekend and bring a copy with you? OK, speak to your parents.’
As the next weekend was almost certain to bring him a picture of Rosemary, whatever his new school had been like Nathaniel would have tolerated it. It turned out to be small and quiet and, although his mind was largely elsewhere, Nathaniel managed to pass himself off as an innocuous lad of mediocre ability, with a good knowledge of pop music.
On Friday he was jittery, and the mathematics teacher, Mr Barker, a huge man with a mane of black hair and a crushingly dominant personality, reprimanded him for tapping his heel on the floor, his right knee bouncing up and down. (Nathaniel had long been aware of the time-killing joys of the tendon-stretch reflex, though, at the time, did not understand the physiological principles behind it. Particularly pleasant was to find a piece of music to which the rapid and rhythmic contraction and relaxation of the gastrocnemius muscle could be synchronised. He never did spot the connection between this harmless habit of his and the more staid but equally regular swings of the pendulum of the grandfather clock of his youth, a pity as the source story could have been more satisfactorily embroidered.)
Nathaniel knew for a fact that Jason would be bringing the magazine. Jason had confirmed this when he’d phoned to say that his mother would drop him at Nathaniel’s place at seven that evening. Nathaniel drew a clock in the margin of his maths exercise book and marked off the minutes. How he hated trigonometry!
Until the Utter Glopwort days, Jason was not a major player in Nathaniel’s story. Though frequently in Nathaniel’s company and sharing his less passionate interests, he had not been crucial to any of the developmental stages. Nathaniel’s displacement changed all that.
Jason was a scrawny lad, slightly taller than Nathaniel, with a dirty poodle’s crop of tangled hair above his high forehead and bottle glasses. If Nathaniel had not been a classmate of his he probably would have found himself isolated and bullied, but Nathaniel had, in the early days, taken most of the flak.
More recently, Jason’s known connection with Nathaniel had boosted his cachet as Nathaniel’s ridiculous obsession and its various manifestations had become big news, and everyone had wanted to hear the details. On one occasion Rosemary had even asked Jason to intercede on her behalf, to persuade Nathaniel to leave her alone. Jason rather liked the standing all this had given him, but, at the same time, felt loyal to Nathaniel, his computer buddy of old, and fellow filler of the obligatory role of classroom nerd.
When Nathaniel had left Thrackston, Jason had allowed himself to talk a bit more freely about Nathaniel’s – and his parents’ – eccentricities, and so he was feeling rather guilty as he sat next to his mother in their old Ford as they approached Utter Glopwort. He must try to make up for his semi-betrayal by being as considerate and supportive as possible.
Nathaniel’s smile of welcome was genuine, even if it was for what Jason represented rather than for Jason himself. Nathaniel took him up to his bedroom immediately, ‘…so you can get rid of your things!’ A camp bed had been laid out for Jason, and the latter deposited his holdall on the end of it, fossicking in a pocket for Nathaniel’s promised magazine. He handed it over, and received a falsely casual ‘Oh, thanks’.
Nathaniel forced himself to point out the view from the window first, then to look at the cover of the tightly gripped magazine with apparent interest, and scan page one, and then to make a remark or two about the introduction and the photograph of the headmaster, and ‘read’ an article on page two, and page three, and four, and…
‘Jason, there’s a page missing here!’ Nathaniel looked at Jason, and knew the truth at once.
‘Well, Nathaniel, there was a picture of Rosemary there. I thought it might not be good for you.’ A needless explanation.
That was a difficult moment. On the one hand, the whole purpose of living for the last week had been as a necessary preliminary to possessing a photograph of the lovely Rosemary at the end of it. On the other hand, his only reliable link with this future Cleopatra to his Anthony was Jason, and Jason believed that Nathaniel was getting over Rosemary, and that any reminder of her would be bad for him. Nathaniel could not afford to alienate Jason, and yet how was he to use him for Rosemarious purposes without letting him know that she was still the centre of his existence? Nathaniel just managed to maintain his self-control and presence of mind, and said, ‘Oh, yes. You probably did the right thing. That was thoughtful of you.’ In his mind he was screaming, ‘Shit, shit, shit!’
The solution didn’t take long to come: bribery, combined with just enough of the truth to make his plea convincing without totally offending Jason’s conscience. ‘Sit down, Jason,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be honest with you. I still love Rosemary. I want her more than anything, but I sort of do realise now that I can’t have her. But if I can’t see her I feel I haven’t the strength to go on. This last week of cold turkey has been terrible, terrible…’ Nathaniel felt that the desperate circumstances had improved his ability to dissimulate, and was almost starting to enjoy his semi-deception, ‘…so I have been wondering how I can wean myself off her… I think a gradual approach might work. So, OK, I didn’t tell you why I wanted the magazine. Yes, I knew there’d be a picture of Rosemary there, and that’s why I wanted it. But it’s only to stop me…’ Nathaniel faked a tragic sob at this point, ‘…it’s only to stop me… ummm… it’s only to stop me doing something foolish. I must take things gradually. Now I know it’ll cost you to get another magazine, but I’ll pay for it. Better than that, you can help yourself to a record – a couple of records from this box!’
Nathaniel pulled over a cardboard box, split under the pressure of The Singles stuffed into it. ‘I’ve hardly played these. Go ahead and choose a couple!’ For the last few months it had been his practice to buy two copies of all the new singles as soon as they came out, in the hope that if Rosemary ever asked if he had a record he could reply in the affirmative and give it to her, and then (joy of joys!) he could play his copy, knowing she was playing hers.
The records in the split box were those she had effected to despise (in fact all those he’d bought in the last 14 weeks, which, strangely, included some new songs by groups she’d previously liked!), and which were consequently of no interest to himself. Indeed, until this moment they had been worse than useless as they all exuded the miasmatic gas of Rosemary’s disdain. Now they represented a vast treasure trove of future Rosemarious activities enacted by Jason on his behalf. Little did Jason know!
The magazine arrived in the post on Tuesday, as promised, and was waiting for Nathaniel when he got home, fresh from a bawl-out from Barker for his ignorance of tangents. His apparent complete sang-froid in the face of monumental ire considerably enhanced his status amongst his classmates, but this too left him unmoved. What did anything matter when he was going to see Rosemary again? Curled up around the magazine on his bed, he gloried over her heavenly image for nearly an hour, occasionally allowing himself the supplementary pleasures of kissing her lips and reading her name on the caption, ‘Rosemary Taylor’. Beautiful it was. Almost as beautiful as ‘Rosemary Papulous’!
Sighing, he got off his bed, and propped the photograph up on his table, where he could see it as he set up his computer and searched for a ruler and pencil. The tracing paper had been purchased days previously, but he needed to increase the resolution of the grid he’d drawn on it as he’d imagined a larger picture.
Hours of labour later, Nathaniel was staring at a crude likeness of his love on the flickering screen. It was slightly too wide and squat. The addition of two lines to the programme, and he could squash and stretch the image as he wished. Rosemary was his! At his mercy! He saved her on tape, and tried to sleep, the magazine in bed with him.
More than once that night he found himself switching on his bedside light and drooling anew over the photograph, and at 3.24 a.m. he just had to switch his computer on again and look at the digitalised version. His performance at school the next day was even worse than usual. He was exhausted, true, but it was more than that. He was unsatisfied with the oblique view of his beloved’s features offered by the magazine photograph. He wanted her face full-on, so that kissing her would be more realistic, and he wanted better resolution.
‘Jason. Hi, it’s Nathaniel. How’re things? Good. Listen, Jason, thanks a lot for the magazine. Yup, it’s great. Did you like the records? Boney M isn’t bad, huh? Listen, Jason, I was wondering if you could do me another favour. Could you take a couple of photographs for me? The sideways view in the magazine is lovely, but it isn’t quite… ummm… quite strong enough for me. Do you think you could try and take a photograph for me, a straight-on view? You can use my camera and, of course, I’ll pay for the film and development, and you can have another couple of records if you want. Please, Jason! Look, I’m not bothering her, am I? I’m not really bothering anyone except you, and if you don’t help me… Great! Thanks a lot! I’ll post the camera and film to you right away!’
The photographs, when they arrived at last, were unsatisfactory. Not one was a clear frontal view. Everything but. In the last three she looked really angry, and in the very last one her hands were reaching towards the camera, half-obscuring her enraged features. There was a curt note from Jason in the envelope: ‘You owe me £1.67 for development, postage and packing. Rosemary has your camera and the second film and I’m not going to get it back. Be happy that you have the first film anyway – it was lucky that I’d finished it and loaded the second before she got the camera! Forget the records. That’s the last time I help you.’
When Nathaniel phoned, Jason’s mother, in an embarrassed voice, described him as out, after a muffled conversation with someone. Nathaniel knew what the truth was. Hell, at least he had the photographs, and at least it was Rosemary who had his camera! She was touching what he had held! He might even be able to think of a way of using the camera to get to see her in the flesh, but in the meantime the new photographs: how she had looked only last week! Better than nothing!
Nathaniel selected the three best pictures and translated the familiar curves into digits. Now he could, at the touch of a few buttons, flick between four images of the hallowed features. Two showed her facing to the left, two to the right. He could magnify them or reduce them, squash them or extend them. If only there were a full-on view! As he stared at the screen, his hill of satisfaction gradually eroding into a talus of frustration, a real, full-blown, as genuine as Abba’s intra-group marital problems, eureka experience exploded upon him. Of course, what an idiot he’d been! To determine the position of an object in two dimensions one needed two fixes, to determine the position of an object in three dimensions one needed three. There must be a way of using the information in the four slightly different views he possessed to construct a three-dimensional description of Rosemary’s lovely-beyond-imagining face! But how?
Mr Barker was astounded. The transformation was amazing. Not only had Nathaniel metamorphosed overnight into his most attentive pupil, but he had also come up to him after the lesson to ask for more information! It must have been that row he’d given the boy. Yes, he’d always believed in putting the fear of God (or, at least, of himself) into them, and here was the proof of it working! Or was it just that the poor lad had needed time to settle in to the new school? Whatever – his teaching methods were clearly succeeding.
Within two weeks Nathaniel was the star pupil in the mathematics class, and Mr Barker was singing his praises in the staff room. It is perhaps worth taking some time to consider all the psychology that was at work here. If there is one concept in human psychology beyond all others of which the understanding enhances one’s ability to get on with people, then it is that of self-esteem. Boost someone’s ego and one makes a friend. Damage an ego and one destroys that person, or one makes an enemy. Those with self-esteem are outgoing, sociable, and willing to try new things. Those who lack it are reactionary, negative stay-at-homes. Had Nathaniel arrived at Utter Glopwort Comprehensive as a fully fledged mathematical prodigy, it is likely that Mr Barker would have felt insecure and, therefore, consciously or subconsciously, would have set about making Nathaniel’s life harder, in effect have taken him down a peg or two. As it was, Mr Barker believed that Nathaniel’s dramatic progress was largely due to himself. Identifying thus with Nathaniel’s apparently logarithmically growing capacities, Mr Barker took Nathaniel under his wing in a big way.
Mr Barker had been the most outspoken frequenter of the staff room almost since his arrival from college seven years previously. Utter Glopwort Comprehensive was a small school and there were not that many teachers, which prevented the usual cliques forming. Within the staff room everyone was on first-name terms. Even the usual school staff room division of stuffy old stick-in-the-muds and timorous-but-enthusiastic new bloods allied to the odd older rebel did not exist. Mr Barker (John) was well known to all, and liked (or at worst tolerated) as an outspoken, honest and competent man. Though given to occasional outbursts, these were usually justified. His position, then, was one of influence. This was particularly the case with the more junior female members of staff (none more so than Miss Grimshaw, a recently graduated English teacher), who were all conscious of his eligible bachelor status. While Mr Barker’s classes generally did well (for he was gentle, encouraging and laudatory towards his female pupils and he only ever aggressively perorated for the benefit of deserving, inattentive males) and he derived some satisfaction from this success, he was starting to feel that he needed more of a challenge.
Mr Barker could not have met Nathaniel at a more appropriate time. Nathaniel could not have met Mr Barker at a more appropriate time. A mutual ego-boost of gigantic dimensions was about to occur.
CHAPTER THREE: Combined Forces, Smoother Waters, and the Entry of Time
Never has someone’s opinion on a subject changed as quickly as Nathaniel’s did on mathematics. Trigonometry, geometry and algebra were no longer associated with miserable hours on hard school seats enduring high-volume abuse and dodging chalk dusters. No longer with fear-inspiring dog-eared textbooks seemingly designed to lock the abstruse knowledge on their yellowing pages rather than disseminate it. Now these subjects meant the delectable three-dimensional curves of Rosemary’s nose, her lips, her eyes (and why not her whole body?) at Nathaniel’s command – literally at his fingertips.