Star Shot (17 page)

52.

Dan stares with a kind of inert fascination over the railings. The huge rectangle of filthy water stretches down towards the Bay, dark even under a bright blue sky. Teddy is crouched at his feet, an arm wrapped round one of his legs, peering through the railings at the extraordinary mess of green slime and thick brown water, and a constellation of crisp packets, cans, a plastic shoe, a messageless bottle. A viscous, milky turquoise stain has spread across the surface like the map of an impossible country; the air is hot and still, and no breeze alters its coastline or shifts its borders. Unbelievably, there are four or five birds; coots with white-stripe heads, clucking and squealing, and two exotic-looking grebe things, paddling around in the slime and occasionally meeting, courteously enough, head to head. Teddy is watching them, and calls out to them softly,
dak-dak
, but Dan is fixated by the poisonous-looking blue stuff, which doesn't, quite, look enough like paint; he finds himself perversely hoping that it isn't some kind of algae, that it would be too horrible to think of it blooming naturally, brought into being in heavy heat and powerful light from that thick evil soup of ingredients. Theo would know, he thinks, but christ could even Theo redeem this place? How do the birds manage, he wonders. Perhaps there are poisonous-coloured slugs in there for them to feed on; or deadly bright-blue frogs like in South America.

Last month, before this thick heat took hold, they had been out at Theo's place, working, with Lina; and Teddy, being that much closer to the ground, had spotted them first: dozens and dozens of tiny, perfect frogs, clambering through the grass at the edge of the pond as if it were a jungle. Once you started looking the whole path was alive with them, heading with equal determination in different directions. Lina had caught one to show Teddy, close up; the size of a fingernail, absolutely perfect.
Broga
, said Dan; and Teddy had echoed him:
Brog
. Theo was as pleased as a child.
Not one instance have we, he declaimed, of tadpoles that have fallen to this earth. Never has a fall of adult frogs been reported… Always frogs a few months old…
Then he had gone into the summerhouse and come out with a brown leather book, and read to them, like a preacher, the lesson of the day:

As soon as the frogs are released from their tadpole state, they immediately take to land; and if the weather has been hot, and there fall any refreshing showers, you may see the ground for a considerable space perfectly blackened by myriads of these animalcules, seeking for some secure lurking places.

Dan can feel the empty buildings behind him, gaping, and he reaches down to touch Teddy's silky blond head. No brogs here, he says; come on. Even if the tip-off had been right, he thinks, and this had been a secure lurking place, he couldn't have faced this every morning. And imagine the bleakness in winter. The JCB man, the one who had waved up by the castle, and had recognised them when they came past again afterwards, and had lifted Teddy up into the cab, Rick, or Rhod, he said his name was, had told him about some deal down at the wharf, in what was possibly the last office left, he thought, where they were renting out empty space sort of under the radar, not quite illegal, but not quite legitimate, and god knows there's enough empty space down there. But the office, when he'd found it just now, was as dead as the rest of them. He could see through the windows that nothing had happened there for months. Ghost offices full of the languishing souls of defunct estate agents, solicitors, data-information-solutions-providers, clustering round their dried up water-coolers, desperate for some news.

Dan unclasps Teddy from his leg and takes his hand; they leave the buggy and walk down the long edge of the rectangle. He notices more turquoise blotches in the water; to their right, where the offices stop, is a rampant tangle of buddleia and yellow ragwort, of yarrow and cow parsley and thistle. The buddleia is thick with butterflies, heady, sickly sweet, and he remembers, as he always does, that scene from the French book they did at school, at A-level, a scene where the butterflies feast on the corpses under a pitiless proven
ç
al sun. He is about to turn back when he sees a figure heading towards them from the direction of the bay. A man in a pale-grey suit and white shirt, slight, trim, walking quickly, with a briefcase slung over his shoulder and a phone in one hand. There is something familiar about him, thinks Dan, as he gets closer; he must be a politician, a newsreader, a face from the papers. When the man is very close he sees who it is, the professor, Luke's professor, indeed, briefly, his own head of department, in the first months of that failed post-doc project. He does not expect recognition, and doesn't get it, but the two men do look at each other as they pass, and exchange a civil hello. Dan waits a moment by the railings before turning round;
he doesn't want to seem to be following, but nor can he bear this place very much longer. The professor has disappeared. He lifts the child up onto his shoulders and quickens his own steps back.

53.

He has to walk. The conference room down at the Bay was comfortable, and nicely air-conditioned; the iced water had sprigs of fresh mint in it, there was room for everyone at the meeting to breathe, the coffee was drinkable and the Powerpoint worked beautifully, but as he picks his way through the car parks and the slip roads he knows that the heat of the sun and the thick warm air in his face are infinitely less suffocating than all that. He badly wants to phone her, to talk at once, immediately, voice to voice, and that, of course, is the one thing he cannot do. His slim fingers cannot text quickly enough.

Where are you?
Angen siarad
. This week?

The answer, when it comes, is laconic:

Cneifio
.

Damn, he thinks, bloody mountain sheep. Everyone else is long done by now, christ, it's practically autumn, they'll be freezing by next week, poor buggers, cold and shivering up on the crags.

Angen siarad
! he replies, put out.

Du calme, du calme
, she says; write to me later, send me the gist.

He wonders, then, as he reaches the big rectangular water, how one might ever convey the gist of such a meeting, with so many interested parties, himself included, trying to control not merely the narrative, but the sub-plots, the subtexts, and a whole greyish spectrum of barely acknowledged meanings, a tangle of intentions and agendas, most of them as invisible as they were unpleasant. He had been asked to give a presentation on the current state of the silence to a dozen or so representatives of the power of the city: to the man from the Council, ill-prepared and out of his depth, the rival VCs, the two enigmatic women from the Corporation, the personable bloke from the BBC and at least three – four? – people working for ButeCo, though all were ostensibly independent and representing something else: the Parks and Gardens Charitable Foundation, the Dock Development Group, and the more nebulous Supermarkets Consortium. The gist, he supposes, if there was a gist, was that several of the more powerful members of his audience had not much liked his maps, or had not, rather, liked the obvious conclusion to be drawn from them, and that the entire four-hour meeting had managed, astonishingly, to avoid mentioning the castle. They had made encouraging noises about supporting future research; ButeCo, indeed, would be delighted to provide immediate funds to help resolve the wifi issues. But the bottom line, apparently, was that the silence was nobody's responsibility, and not enough of a problem for any of them to need to act. Even his own VC, thoroughly briefed and entirely, he thought, committed to pushing for some kind of action, had simply sipped her water quietly, looking anxious and saying nothing. He wonders now, in anger and frustration, what the deal was, in the meeting that must have happened before the meeting, between the very select few.

Cneifio
, in the name of heaven! Bloody mountain sheep.

He passes a young man with dark hair holding a little boy up to look over the railings at the rancid water. He nods and says hello. Then he turns abruptly off and crosses an empty road, picking a zig-zag path through intersecting water-channels connecting an incongruous suburban residential area to the groups of surviving businesses clustered around their car-parks. It feels like a different route every time, he thinks; the bridges move,
new channels open up. The walking has helped, and he pays more attention, now, to his surroundings. From one of the little bridges he looks down at the water stifled by the spread of a huge flat-leaved yellow lily; it looks almost mutant, he thinks, with fat bright flowers held up on stems as thick as his arm. A young gull flounders unnaturally in the water, as if wounded, but the moorhens and the coots seem to power through the vegetation unconcerned.

Coming down off the bridge he notices the drop in temperature, and wonders if the silence is using the channels as well; probably flowing quicker than choked-up water, he thinks. And the thrashing gull with its open beak looks as if it might well be screaming in pain.

54.

She got off the bus at the wrong stop, and now as she reaches the place she is hot and her canvas bag is much heavier than it had been an hour earlier, and it is getting dark. It takes almost all her courage to get through the front door with the silver key; now she stands in the stairwell, unsure. There are several switches on the wall but she doesn't want to make a mistake, doesn't want to draw attention to herself, and so she climbs the dark stairs very slowly, stopping to breathe and to feel her heart beating too fast, much too fast. Up on the landing she prays no one will come out of the flat opposite and challenge her. I am a friend, she says, over and over in her head, I am a friend of Myra, of Miss Jones; she asked me to keep an eye on the flat for a few days. But she has long since lost any sense of her own right to anything at all, and knows she would not sound convincing. She is so anxious that she has to try the bronze key several times before the lock clicks cleanly and the door opens. She closes it behind her, slips off her shoes with their cracked soles, puts down her bag and finds the light. She likes the place at once.

The little tree is dead, of course, but she waters it anyway and puts it back on the windowsill. Looking down into the darkening street she sees plenty of people, all sorts of people, passing up and down and feels glad; the lights are on in a chip-shop and a foodstore and a pub. She boils the kettle and rummages in her bag for mint tea. Then she pulls off her headscarf and sits on the sofa brushing her grey-black hair, and wondering if she should try and work out how to turn the television on, to get some news of the war. Decides against it, and wanders round the room instead looking at Myra's pictures and books. She likes the photo of her as a little girl, with her mother, probably, sitting on the white steps of a big building, both smiling.

In Myra's bedroom Lina changes into pyjamas and hunts in her bag for the photo of Ali and the kids. Puts it by the bed, and prays, and then curls up to cry, and sleeps, and is surprised to be woken, many hours later, by sunlight on the white sheets.

Today she is not working. Today she will spend her time entirely as she likes. She will wash her clothes, explore the shops in the street below, buy food, fresh fruit and vegetables, and spend hours preparing a meal. She will try out the oven, make an almond cake, with lots of lemon, to take to Myra tomorrow morning. She opens windows all over the flat to let the sunshine in, and hunts around for the cleaning things. It will be so bright in here when Myra comes home, she thinks. It will be so bright. She washes up her cup and watches people down in the street, a young Asian mother and her beautiful son, a builder, two old people not talking to each other. Then a black guy in a dirty anorak ambles past, head to one side, big smile, singing or talking, she can't tell from here; he has two heavy plastic bags, bursting with papers, one in each hand.

55.

An unexpected side effect of the heat wave has been a spike in bench-usage, right across the board. With the Parade behind them, and further action, or so he understands, temporarily suspended, Luke has returned to his former project with considerable enthusiasm. He has just devised a complex system of routes taking in about twenty-five benches, routes which ensure he walks at least 7km a day. He has one of those clever watches which makes sure he covers the distance, and he enters his times in a spreadsheet afterwards – the times vary depending on the people he sees, of course, but it gives you an idea. And, even after three days, he tells Dan, he does feel much fitter, much more focused, and Dan, who spends most of his days pounding the streets with the buggy or traipsing after Teddy in the park, congratulates him.