Charades (2015)
“Charade asks. She wonders: is it a centagram …?
Centagram? Katherine wonders. Centagraph? Centagon? Would that be the word? She is deep in the stacks of the university library, her carrel in a mauvely lit cave around which book spines rise like a forest. She is doodling on foolscap sheets: circles, tangents, deflected tangents; contingencies, contiguities; hundredsided figures. If one took a turning at every fork on the way, at predictable intervals and always in the same direction, then wo...uldn’t one eventually complete a faceted circle, more or less, clockwise or anti, depending on the consistent direction of the turns? But then suppose one turned left or right randomly, and altered the distance travelled along each tangent …?
The page is beginning to look like a nerve-map in Gray’s Anatomy.
If we hadn’t moved to Brisbane? she wonders.
If she hadn’t been sent to the library on Mondays, if Bea’s father hadn’t died, if Nicholas had never lain down beneath a mango tree in Finsbury Park and played his recorder, (if Bea hadn’t invented his recorder?), if she hadn’t heard that word, that exotic word university, first spoken to her, oh irony, by Bea …?MoreLess
Centagram? Katherine wonders. Centagraph? Centagon? Would that be the word? She is deep in the stacks of the university library, her carrel in a mauvely lit cave around which book spines rise like a forest. She is doodling on foolscap sheets: circles, tangents, deflected tangents; contingencies, contiguities; hundredsided figures. If one took a turning at every fork on the way, at predictable intervals and always in the same direction, then wo...uldn’t one eventually complete a faceted circle, more or less, clockwise or anti, depending on the consistent direction of the turns? But then suppose one turned left or right randomly, and altered the distance travelled along each tangent …?
The page is beginning to look like a nerve-map in Gray’s Anatomy.
If we hadn’t moved to Brisbane? she wonders.
If she hadn’t been sent to the library on Mondays, if Bea’s father hadn’t died, if Nicholas had never lain down beneath a mango tree in Finsbury Park and played his recorder, (if Bea hadn’t invented his recorder?), if she hadn’t heard that word, that exotic word university, first spoken to her, oh irony, by Bea …?MoreLess
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