Read Online The Pause by John Larkin - Free Book Online

Overall, having come this far, the chances of your existing is one in forty million.
    Now let’s duck down to the biological level (your father’s happysack if you will) because it’s here that things start to blow out, so to speak. Your mother makes about one hundred thousand eggs in her lifetime. Mercifully she isn’t a chicken or she wouldn’t get a moment’s peace. Your father is even busier, producing around four trillion sperm during the years you could conceivably be conceived. So the chances of the one egg and the one sperm that made you actually bumping into each other in the darkened confines of your mother’s fallopian tubes are – wait for it – one in 400,000,000,000,000,000. That’s one in four hundred quadrillion, which is rather a lot. Butthat’s just your parents. You now need to track your unbroken lineage back four hundred million years, starting with your grandparents and ending up with some single-celled organisms floating around the primordial sludge. The chances of all that happening (your two parents, your four grand parents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents – keep going back four hundred million years …) come in at one in 10 45,000 . That’s a ten with forty-five thousand zeros after it, which is somewhere beyond mind-blowing. But then you have to remember at each step along the way, from grandparents down to the single-celled organisms – which are really not a lot of fun to be around though significantly more interesting than the studio audience of an infomercial – the same rule of the single egg and the single sperm meeting applies, which comes in at a jaw-dropping one in 10 2,640,000 . That’s a ten with two million, six hundred and forty thousand zeros after it. So now we have to consider all that together. 10 2,640,000 × 10 45,000 × 2000 × 20,000 puts your chances of existence at one in 10 2,685,000 .
    All of which points to two patently obvious facts. Firstly, Ali Binazir has way too much time on his hands. Secondly, your existence is a miracle.
    And I abandoned the miracle of my own existence because I didn’t know how to ask for help.

Time stopped the moment I entered the psych ward and so now I live in a sort of bubble. Disconnected from the outside world. From reality. It’s as if none of this is real. It could be the drugs but I feel like I’m living a dream. Someone else’s dream.
    On my nurse’s advice, I’m sitting in the common courtyard outside my room giving my eyelids a suntan. I’ve never done this before and it feels okay. The warmth flowing through my eyes, through my body. This is what we depressives need, apparently: vitamin D. Vitamin D and not killing ourselves. It’s amazing how when you almost die it’s the simple things that matter.I don’t want to hoon through Surfers Paradise in a Bugatti Veyron, climb Mount Everest, or go to my year-twelve formal with a supermodel. I’ll take the sun on my face, a hazelnut latte (don’t tell Chris or Maaaate), a good book, a walk along the beach at sunset with Lisa’s fingers interlocked in mine. I had all of that and yet I still gave it up. Almost. Maybe because at that moment on the train platform, at my crossroads, I felt for sure that none of these would give me any pleasure ever again, and no amount of Bugatti Veyrons, Everest expeditions, or trysts with supermodels could come close to compensating for what I’d lost. Hope.
    I stare at Lisa’s message again:
    Hey D. Hope you’re surviving.
    Mum took my phone.
    Email when I can. Love L XXX
    She must have used her aunt’s phone. I can’t risk texting her back in case her aunt is anything like The Kraken.
    Lisa’s message positively drips with subtext. She hopes I’m surviving? Clearly she realised just how much her leaving was going to mess me up. Obviously more than I did. And of course The Kraken