Star Shot (13 page)

A large picture at the end of the room pulls her over. In the foreground is another Madonna, this one without Child, standing in front of a busy orchard full of workers piling fruit into wooden carts. She is tall, slender and stern. One hand holds a book close to her body; in the other is a glass of water, lifted to the light, a yellow September light which makes the orchard behind her glow. Lina is curious enough to read the label.
Our Lady of the Apple-Carts
, it says,
Italian, Tuscan School, possibly C15th
. Which leaves her none the wiser, really, but then her knowledge of Christian tradition, beyond the basics, is pretty weak. The woman looks almost unhappy, she thinks, in spite of the piles of beautiful apples, the assiduous peasants.

She moves on through other galleries. Castles, a whole wall of them, from all over Wales. Cardiff's looks lovely, she thinks, all trees and water where the road should be, and a man sitting in the dust with his dog; and a woman hanging out her washing to flap against the walls. Another room. Rodin's naked lovers unsettle her, and few of the Impressionists make her want to stop. She climbs a small flight of stairs to see where it goes, and finds a big wooden door with a sign on it:
Oriel Galatea Gallery : Closed / Ar Gau
. She comes back down a different way into a room full of modernist portraits, all of them apparently staring at her, and suddenly feeling she has had enough of Western tradition and its obsession with human form, hurries through two more rooms and down a short corridor to emerge, with relief, into a world of plants and creatures.

Five minutes later she has found the Blaschkas. The pictures she remembers seeing many years ago in a book do not come close. Inside the glass case, glass creatures, her creatures, a million times magnified, exquisite, strange and so familiar she cannot help the tears in her eyes. She blinks them away and circles the case in complete wonder. Reads blurrily how they were created by the Blaschkas,
Leopold and Rudolf, father and son, in late nineteenth-century Bohemia,
how their techniques have never since been reproduced. And there, centre-stage, is the
Actinota Heliosphaera
, the fretted glass sphere with irregular rays like slender spears of ice. Crystalline. Uncanny. More than ever, she thinks, more even than under the microscope, they look like entities from the farthest depths of space, from the stars; oh I wish you could see them Ali, can you see them? I wish you were here now, my husband, I wish you could see this.

And because she doesn't want to frighten the beautiful young man sitting discreetly against the wall in the attendant's chair, and because she is on the verge of something worse than tears, she hurries down the stairs, through the galleries, past groups of primary-school children in the busy main hall and out down the steps through the shiver of silence to find a bench where she can put her head in her hands and weep.

40.

Even if it didn't do any good, says someone, it didn't do any harm either; no harm at all.

Everyone, says Phoebe, had a wonderful time.

And it was good publicity, excellent really, with the professor's stunning media profile applications have simply rocketed up.

Luke, who has been told by someone very senior, in no uncertain terms, and in the strictest confidentiality, that he will be strongly recommended for fast-track promotion, is keeping modestly quiet.

Are there any biscuits? says someone.

Biscuits would be nice, says Phoebe. I'll go and ask. And has everyone got coffee who needs it?

Can you do me a fennel and liquorice tea? asks Aslan, who is chairing this meeting in the professor's absence. There's a box by the kettle.
Wrth ymyl y degell. Diolch
.

They listen to three reports. The Museum Steps project now has a hundred and seventeen recorded negative reactions (NRs), and fifty-two follow-up interviews, mostly carried out by Phoebe who is very good at such things, and whose respondents offer a range of explanations for turning back. Roughly sixty-five percent say they felt an overwhelming sense of grief or despair, twenty-two per cent felt ill and dizzy, and the rest said they'd just thought of something else they needed to do instead, and had changed their minds.

The relevant graphs are projected and explored at some length. Luke presents a brief round-up of the benches project, though he explains that, because of involvement in the Parade, he has had to delegate most of the data-collection to other people. Everybody nods vigorously. The figures here speak for themselves, revealing a gradual, inexorable thinning of sitters, attributable mainly to the lower temperatures around the benches where the cold silence swirls and pools.

The third report, a PowerPoint prepared by the professor and presented by Aslan, shows the current reach and spread of the silence across the city. A month's worth of day-by-day mapping, with brief analysis of the directions of flow and the principal channels. A note at the end adds that they are currently in talks with Physics to explore ways of measuring the intensity, or it may be that the better word is viscosity, of the silence in different designated areas. This initiative meets with considerable approval.

The final item on the agenda is titled
Ar ôl yr Orymdaith/Post-Parade
. It asks for a brief assessment of the effect of the Parade on a) the silence and b) the profile of the university, and suggests, by way of concluding the meeting, a half-hour brainstorming session to come up with new ideas. The assessment part is quickly done, since the general feeling is that although the effect on a) was negligible, the effect on b) was entirely positive. The discussion that follows is predictably chaotic, with suggestions involving everything from electricity to hot-air balloons, and tempers are properly starting to fray when Aslan manages to remind them that the task in hand is not so much to solve the problem of the Interference – they have, after all, got most of the university science section on the case, quite apart from the work being done by the Government people and the scientists at the museum – as to be seen to be engaging with it in persuasively exciting ways.

Events, he says. Smaller-scale than the Parade, obviously, but public events, workshops, short films – things that will get reported in the media, to show we're doing our bit, you know they'll be bored with this story soon, we need to find ways of keeping it alive. Creative responses are always good, too. Can we find some artists?

41.

When he was about ten, on holiday, someone let him drive a tractor. Grey, a Massey Ferguson, and already very old, a thing of utter beauty. Later on, as a student, he would associate it at some odd subconscious level with that picture of Samuel Beckett, it was that important. Iconic. His hands on the wheel. And he feels like that now, sitting in the front of the van. Not driving, Theo is driving, but the effect is the same. His excitement is multiple and manifold: beautiful May evening; out without the baby; doing something new; something bordering on a misdemeanour. Theo understands, is pleased for him, amused.

And as they discuss the practicalities of the job in hand both men have glimpses of Lina sitting at the kitchen table in Dan's terraced house with half-a-dozen borrowed copies of the
NMBJ
, delighted to be catching up on work in her field again, but probably more delighted at the thought that she might be disturbed, he is teething again after all, and have to comfort him in her lap with warm milk and songs.

Dan has already done two ponds this last week, both commissioned, the first in a private garden, the second a home for the elderly, each time with Theo and a different member of the group. He finds them congenial company, these people, and he is full of admiration for their work. And they like him, clearly, enough to let him join a non-commissioned drop, which this evening will be on a roundabout somewhere on the edge of town. As they wait at some lights Theo points to one they did earlier, tucked between a disused factory and a bankrupt Bathroom Supply Stores. A little hawthorn tree, full of creamy blossom, guarding a small pond which throws back the pale grey of the empty warehouse as a circle of light.

How do you get away with it? When you're doing the digging, I mean.

You act as if you're supposed to be there; it's easy enough.

But don't people get suspicious? You lot lurking about on roundabouts?

We don't lurk. It's all very open. Hi-viz jackets, and a couple of flashy sponsorship boards, and a kind of weary expression as if you'd much rather be doing something else, and no one ever looks twice.

He glances sideways at Dan, then back at the road, straight-faced. You might need to work on your expression.

And when it's all done?

We leave a discreet sponsorship board up nearby; especially with roundabouts, everyone sponsors roundabouts. This Nature Initiative is Brought to You By…

And who sponsors you?

Theo snorts. No one. We make up acronyms, fancy logos. Occasionally for fun use a big name, Macdonalds, John Lewis, the Lottery. Or say it's something like a Council Partnership Initiative. In six, seven years of this no one has ever thought to think it might be otherwise.

They pull up at a bus stop to pick up a woman called Petra. She shoves a big plastic carry-all into the footwell and squeezes in beside Dan.

In fact, continues Theo, I've seen some of them quite pleased to take the credit; a couple of supportive letters to the local paper and they're convinced it was their idea all along. It's good all round.

Nice to meet you, says Petra.

My first non-commisioned, says Dan. I'm Dan.

Petra is a genius at designing fake logos, says Theo. She could be out there making millions in the real world, but no…

Wasting my talents on a bunch of guerrilla environmentalists, says Petra. How about you?

Me? says Dan. Oh, I'm here for the digging.

42.

Even before she wakes she can sense the change. The scent of them hangs in the air around her bed. There is no hurry to wake, the ebbing dream is not a difficult one, and coming out of it does not involve a struggle. When at last her eyes open the scent translates into an intensity of blue, a deep, impossible blue, hanging over her, and then very gradually into stems and bells, curved and nodding from the side-table, she thinks of seahorses, lying there looking up at them as if from the bottom of the ocean floor; she knows perfectly well by now not to try and come up too fast.

When at last she gets herself sat up in bed, and the seahorses have resolved themselves into bluebells in a glass vase, she finds another gift: three bright lemons in a white bowl. The sun pouring into her white room makes the colours hyper-real, and they keep her entranced for several minutes. At last she reaches over and takes one of the lemons, holds it close to her face, smelling it, scoring it with her nails to get at the tang of the zest.

Theo walks in, makes an inarticulate noise and puts his hands over his face for protection. He peers through the cracks in his big fingers at a blur of red hair, bluebells and lemons in the sunlight and says she might have to put the fruit down, it's too much for him. She throws him the lemon; he catches it one-handed and sits on the end of the bed.

They're beautiful, she says, nodding at the flowers. Thank you. Are they from your place? From the pond?

Near enough, he says, just up and along a bit, and he describes the sloping hill across the marshy field, and the plantation with its rows and rows of whitebeam, service and rowan. We've got a kind of genetic spectrum going, he says, it's a museum project, they connect up, the trees, one species into the other. I'm the nursery for the different types; and I collect too. I helped find the Avon Gorge specimen, you know, the missing link…

She has no idea what he's talking about. How's the jelly stuff, the star-shot? she asks. Have you had any results?

He shakes his head. The bloke who was supposed to be doing the tests has been off work with depression for weeks. It's just sitting in the freezer, I imagine. Poor guy. I liked him; he was fun.

The thing, she says, the wall of silence – it's still there, isn't it? I mean, the Parade didn't make any difference did it?

It's still there, he says. He throws the lemon gently from palm to palm. Who brought you these? he asks. I know I didn't. Not that rather daunting colleague?