owl | Numb3rs fic: England (Reply)

Title: England.
Rating: G
Word Count: 1000. In other words, it's a (drabble)^3/2
Summary: Charlie at Cambridge, in 1000 words. First impressions, climate statistics, first love and family.
Notes: Another one from the 2008 Summer Alphabet Challenge. This is a fic about an English city, from the viewpoint of an American, written by an Irishwoman. I was strongly tempted to subtitle it A Californian Mathematician at the University of Cambridge, but I resisted. This is also something of an experiment for me, stylistically, but I think it worked.
Disclaimer: Not my characters.

The first thing Charlie notices about England, driving from the airport, is how small everything is. Almost all the land is enclosed, and the road margins press close up to the pavement (tarmac, they call it), with fences or hedges on the road's edge. And there are houses everywhere, scattered all through the agricultural land in clusters, nothing like the contrast between L.A. and the Mojave.

The countryside around Cambridge is more open, and flatter, with big skies that remind Charlie of a soggier, greener version of the Midwest. Cambridge itself is full of cramped little houses, and colleges jammed together in the centre of the city, and crooked streets that don't fit into neat blocks. It's old. The colleges remind Charlie of Princeton, a little, or perhaps of what Princeton might have been if the architects hadn't been on drugs when they designed it. The traffic is nowhere near the sheer volume of a California freeway, but makes up for it in crazy dives through narrow gaps and general insanity. And the cars are all stick shifts, and as small and toy-like as the roads. Charlie buys a bicycle.

The second thing he notices is, of course, the rain. According to the stats, it rains approximately one day in three; he tracks it for a month and makes it forty-three percent, and that's not counting when he's asleep. On his second morning, rainwater is flowing off Trinity's roof in solid lumps, and straight down Charlie's collar, and, oh, he's homesick. By the end of the winter he finds he owns three raincoats. He's not sure what he'll do with them when he leaves, unless he moves to Oregon.

The time difference between England and California is eight hours. When it's evening for Charlie it's lunchtime for his parents. He and Mom talk a couple of times a week, Dad less often, and Don not at all, even though he's closer to Charlie by two time zones.

Charlie's a Californian, so he finds it utterly bizarre to hear something two hundred years old described as 'new'. This university has six centuries of encrusted traditions, ranging from innocuous to bizarre to just plain stupid. The physical fabric of the university varies as well, from the solid cathedral-like masses of the oldest colleges, pinning down the landscape, to the modern Newton Institute with its stepped roof, which Charlie likes because it wouldn't look out of place in Pasadena.

Then there are the minor annoyances: no decent coffee or bagels and about three varieties of takeout. It takes Charlie a month to get used to the bread, but the chocolate is better than home. He misses proper cookies; British biscuits just don't compare, with the exception of chocolate digestives. And even apart from the confusion of scones and railways and tellies and crisps, he can't understand half of what anyone's saying at first, their voices are all too fast and blurred. But then, no-one can understand him either, and it's not just the math. His accent goes more East Coast with the effort to communicate.

The sports (matches not games, played on pitches not fields) are all different. Football means soccer and hockey means field hockey, and the closest thing to baseball is rounders, which is mostly played by ten-year-olds. Cricket is another sport full of statistics, but it's just similar enough to baseball to make him homesick. On his first hot day in England, he lies in the grass by the edge of Trinity's cricket ground, listening to the sound of wood hitting leather. It's simultaneously familiar and slightly off because of the different bat and ball, and he absently quantifies the acoustics, thinking about Don. Except that Don's a Fed now, and Charlie can't even imagine anymore what he does all day long, and Don isn't talking.

He meets Susan Berry during his second week in the city, and latches onto her like a newly hatched bird. Mom was right, there are some girls who don't think he's unbearably weird, and the surprising thing is that she isn't even a mathematician. In fact, when he's in the middle of talking basic set theory one day, she leans in, grabs his demonstrating hand and kisses him. Contrary to popular opinion, Charlie sometimes does know when to shut up.

He sends a snapshot of the two of them to Mom and Dad, and another to Don. His parents reply with an invitation for Susan to come with him the next time he flies home. Don's reply reads, in its entirety, Way to go, Chuck. Welcome to the brave new world of grandchildren hints, which works out at 4.6 cents a word for postage. There are times when he wants to hit Don, really he does.

It always surprises him when he's living somewhere new and he starts to like it, because he's tied so strongly to that Craftsman house in Pasadena. It seems as though he shouldn't be able to love any other place, because he's already used up his capacity for it, but somehow he does. So he walks the same streets as Newton and Babbage, Hardy, Venn, and Turing, while the grey city and the damp green land and the changeable sky work their way under his skin, so that it's all tangled up forever in his memory with Don joining the FBI and Susan and Hermitian random matrices.

At a guest lecture, he meets a Ukrainian physicist named Ivan, whose last name is unpronounceable (and definitely unspellable). He knows Larry, and one wintry evening he and Charlie sit on a table in the Cavendish Laboratory, talking grand unifying theory and eating tikka masala with beer, which Charlie's legally allowed to drink over here. He walks along the Madingley Road afterwards, flakes of snow catching in his hair, feeling as though he could know everything, anything he likes, so close he can almost taste it. He's Dr Charles Eppes, twenty years old, in Cambridge, England, and he can't imagine being happier.