Bony heaved her guts out over the lavatory bowl and spat and spat, ‘Tche, tche’ – dry biscuit and bile slime, shuddering, clutching her shrunken stomach. ‘Oh God!’ She leant sideways to rest her shoulder against the wall, and wiped dribbles of spit from her clammy mouth with a hand that was not part of her and which flopped to the floor while she explored her mouth with her tongue and found it disgusting.

   She looked up, her eyes rolling round the pale green walls to the wrought iron frame of the wash basin. Water! She crawled up on rubbery limbs and aimed a floppy hand in the direction of the tap and, pushing at it, released a noisy jet of water. Balancing her lower half carefully, she bent over and sucked in the cold, clean liquid, rolled it around her teeth and spat, ‘Tche, tche’. She looked up, wiping her forehead with a damp hand. ‘Better now, Bony?’ she asked the face in the mirror.

   The face in the mirror was far from bony. Chubby from childhood, the teasers in the playground had made ‘Bonny’ into ‘Bony’, which had stuck to her for the rest of her life. It was a nickname after all, made her feel she had friends. She had slimmed down a bit in her teens and twenties, but had spread steadily since – now not actually obese, but definitely very plump. Her mousy hair was turning an even duller grey. She cut it herself, really short, and cultivated a bit of an image with big dangly earrings and ethnic smock over a long black skirt.

   When Trish had been there she’d made a real effort to be healthy, done the wholefood and lentils thing, made bread, the lot. But Trish had gone off to college. So Bony cycled to the supermarket, almost every day, stuffed herself in the Coffee Shop, picked up a trolley full of packet food, wobbled back with the carrier bags over the handlebars, then ate it all – and drank – red wine by the big, cheery glassful, slurping the blues away, slumped in front of the telly.

   Not all the time; there was her work, and sometimes she really got into it. Since being made ‘redundant’ two years ago – actually displaced by a younger teacher with a smart suit and personal organiser – she’d been doing some research. But it was damned hard keeping to it and putting in the hours when there was no one else involved. No one had asked her to do it, no one was paying her, probably no one would be impressed by it when it was done, if it ever was. And she was so lonely!

   She was feeling better, a bit. ‘Cup of tea and a nice hot bath?’ she offered herself. ‘Sorry, no bath, can’t afford it, blasted water meter – I hate showers.’ She shivered, looked around and snatched up the shawl she’d dropped earlier, wrapped it round her shoulders, pushed her feet into her old mules and shuffled to the kitchen.

   Putting the kettle on, she glanced at the clock. ‘Twenty past one, past bed time. Who cares when’s bedtime? Going to do some work, haven’t done a thing all day, too sorry for myself.’ She nibbled at a dry biscuit in case she was going to be sick again, even worse on an empty stomach. She grimaced at the remains of the ‘Cod Provençal’, and scraped it into the over-full waste bin, on top of the packet with its tempting picture. ‘No more fish, all diseased I expect, all that shit in the sea, planet’ll sick us up next, probably already is.’ The kettle clicked itself off.

   ‘Peppermint, I think, refreshing.’ She fished out a bag on a string, into a mug from the drainer, sploshed on the boiling water, then shuffled around the partition into the dining area, also her study. Putting the mug down, she rolled out the swivel chair, eased into it, switched on the PC, put down the dry biscuit, ‘Crumbs not good for the keyboard,’ she said aloud as the thing hummed into action.

   There was always this difficult transition from her lonely, lazy world – full of self pity, little treats and distractions, into her Important Work, that she loved, and could, on a good day, really get into. The freedom of it was wonderful. None of the interference and frustration of her years as a maths teacher. She had wanted to bring out the ‘natural mathematician’ in each of her pupils. The system said ‘No. You teach this syllabus, to this timetable, from these books, and assess your pupils this way, so they get good grades in the public exams, and enhance the School’s Reputation.’

   She opened a document containing an early chapter of what she thought of as her ‘book’, although she had only daydreams of getting it published. ‘Polish, polish,’ she said gleefully, jabbing on the ‘insert’ key to make sure she did not over-write any of her wonderful words. Taking a slurp of the peppermint tea, she read the familiar yellow-on-blue type.

‘Mathematics is the study of patterns. Human survival, indeed most animal survival, depends on recognising patterns: distinguishing food from foe, mate from rival, self from surroundings. Human animals were late evolutionary arrivals, with no central role in the ecosystems they emerged in, so they made a living as opportunistic scavengers. Our major evolutionary strength was being capable of recognising a wide range of interesting patterns, in an environment full of uninteresting ones.’

Bony changed ‘ones’ to ‘patterns’ and back again, as she had done many times before. ‘Not quite happy with that bit,’ she muttered. And yawned. Her tummy rumbled. ‘That’s good, settling down. Think I’ll go to bed. No, must do a little bit.’ She tapped the ‘PgDn’ key a few times. ‘Ah, yes.’

‘The conventional scientific paradigm focuses on a few relatively simple patterns, such as atoms and genes, virtually ignoring the vast majority of complex patterns in nature, at the same time making the huge assumption that the rest are all accumulations of the special few. The patterns studied are seen as geometrical forms in the spatial dimension, but are believed to change over time as a result of mechanical and electrical forces acting upon them, in obedience to a set of laws, which are expressed in mathematical language. This, of course, is a human mental conception. However, over the past two hundred years especially, the mental conception has been externalised in the construction of machines, and in uniform plantation agriculture, which between them are rapidly displacing the diversity of complex patterns on this living planet.

   ‘There have been a number of scientists in recent years who have begun to question the mechanistic model, and its effects. Only one has come anywhere near recognising the peculiarity, and sheer unlikeliness, of the conventional model of how change occurs: the biologist Rupert Sheldrake. Sheldrake’s alternative hypothesis conceives the agents of change as being memories of past forms, whereby new forms occur in the present time by tending to follow the forms closest to them in the library of memories. Everything from subatomic particles, atoms and molecules to cells, organisms, ecosystems and human cultures behaves, develops and persists by resonance with similar forms in the past.’

‘Need to give some examples here, I suppose,’ Bony said to herself, ‘Always a bore that. What was that bit I thought of in the Coffee Shop – about rabbits and acorns? I wrote it down on the cover of my cheque book.’

   With a grunt of irritation she got out of the chair and went into the kitchen area to where she usually dumped her shoulder bag. Rummaging in its depths she extracted the cheque book and peered at the scribble in blunt pencil which was barely legible over the pale grey cover. Reading it as she made her way back to the computer she bumped her head on the edge of the partition. ‘Bugger! That hurt.’ She amplified the jottings as she inserted the new passage.

‘The patterns of oak trees and rabbits in the past determine the germination or embryonic formation of new oak trees and rabbits, and their growth and behaviour. The same kind of influence holds human attitudes and conduct in their path. A human child becomes a social creature primarily through the presence of the cultural patterns which have accumulated, and are still present, in his past, and only secondarily by deliberate upbringing and education. Understanding the power and persistence of past influences is vital at a time in human history when radical changes are needed. It is almost as difficult for human society to undergo profound change as it is for an acorn to give birth to a rabbit. A cultural reincarnation is required, and the circumstances for that fresh gestation can only emerge out of the breakdown of the existing forms.’

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