She squeezed my hand gently, in a way that made it feel like her fingers were closed around my heart. ‘I know I’m probably the last person you’d ask for help, given our history, but if there’s anything I can do to help your sister… well, I’ve got a soft spot for sisters.’
‘Thank you.’
She squeezed my fingers again. I was terrified, suddenly, that she might let go.
‘I don’t want to fight anymore, Sadie,’ I said. ‘I know academia pits us against each other all the time – that we pit ourselves against each other all the time – but I don’t want to do that anymore.’
For a long time, she was silent.
‘I’ve been fighting for so long I’m not sure I know how to stop,’ she said, ‘but I’ll try if you will.’
And so our sixth ceasefire was forged, the one I thought would be our last. The final binding agreement between Dr Sadie Shaw and Dr Jonah Fisher. The contract we would never break, a mature end to our immature rivalry, the tentative beginnings of something that might one day become a friendship. White flags waving. Weapons down.
The job was listed the next day.
NOVEMBER
Chapter OneSadie
I wrote my PhD thesis on a concept called eucatastrophe.
People always think I spent a bunch of years wallowing in something really depressing when they hear this, but nothing could be further from the truth. Eucatastrophes aregoodcatastrophes.
The term was coined by J.R.R. Tolkien in a lecture called ‘On Fairy-Stories’, which he gave in Scotland in 1939. The first time I read it, it struck a chord deep inside me that never really stopped thrumming.
Eucatastrophe, in Tolkien’s words, is ‘the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn”?’. In mine, it’s the moment in a story where, when it seems like all is lost, that things are going to be awful forever, that the only possible endings are full of misery and despair,something good happens.
My favourite example of eucatastrophe comes from one of my most beloved childhood books. An enterprising school librarian had seen me, a disadvantaged little redheaded girl who loved books and learning, and pressedAnne of Green Gablesinto my hands. I loved it so much I cried when I had to return it, so Chess, then in her early teens, had begged, borrowed and eventually stolen to get me a boxset of all theAnnebooks from the school book fair.
I loved and treasured them all, but the third book was my favourite:Anne of the Island,the one where Anne goes away to university. Near the end of the book (spoilers, sorry, but this book came out in 1915) it’s revealed that Gilbert Blythe, Anne’s one-time-rival/ eventual-friend/sort-of-ex-because-she-rejected-him-earlier, is dying of typhoid.
And Anne has a horrible, awful realisation. She is in love with this man – and now she’s going to lose him.
The next morning, steeling herself for the worst possible news, Anne tremulously asks how Gilbert is.
Gilbert is better. His fever broke. He’s not going to die after all.
Eucatastrophe.
I can remember the first time I read this so clearly. I was nine years old, sitting on my bed in the late afternoon in the tiny bedroom I shared with then-fourteen-year-old Chess. I started tearing up when Anne found out Gilbert was dying, but I tried to keep quiet – Chess was sitting on her own bed, studying, and I didn’t want to disturb her.
But then Anne found out Gilbert wasn’t going to die and I couldn’t help it – I burst into tears.
‘What’s wrong?’ Chess was beside me in an instant, her textbooks hitting the floor.
‘Nothing,’ I sobbed. ‘It’s just—it’s just so—’
‘It’s just so what?’
‘It’s just sonice!’
It took half a second for Chess to put her arms around me, a full second for her to start laughing. ‘You scared me to death,’ she said. ‘Next time you start crying, can you send me some sort of signal that it’s just because of a book?’
There were lots of very solid, serious, scholarly explanations as to why I wrote about eucatastrophe in my PhD thesis, but the realreason was that I’d been chasing the feeling I’d had that day ever since: that euphoric moment of joyous relief; that sense that for once, finally, things were goingright; that sunbeam penetrating the darkness.
I had grown up in that darkness. I had grown up trapped. There were only two things standing between me and the grim realities of a terminally ill mother, an absent-at-best father and crushing poverty: my sister and my books.
Outside the pages of those books, there had been no eucatastrophe for Chess and me, no sudden joyous turn. There had only been a series of long, slow battles. Our mother’s against her illness, until she died. Ours, against our father, until he finally stopped coming back. Chess’s, to succeed in corporate law, to ensure that we never, ever experienced that kind of poverty again.
