Star Shot (21 page)

I did what was required.

Seven, maybe eight hours ago he had sent her the barest of messages. Three consecutive dates in mid-September. Enough for her to know she has just under a month. She will have started preparations already. Silk and scaffolding. A stage like a pool of light. She will know what train he is on, and be expecting to hear from him, a line of relief, of quiet triumph, of bitter humour. But his phone has been off since midnight, when he had sent the text, dressed himself for the journey and gone to sit and wait for morning and his train in the chair by the window, wrapped in a blanket, phoney tartan, under a pale scattering of stars. He closes her out of his mind to protect her, to protect himself. Keep running, he thinks, and this time it is along the nondescript length of a canal, past grand industrial derelictions of blackened brick, under road-bridges and railway lines. Dandelion and dock, the vegetation of neither here nor there. Another long straight line, this one, no complex labyrinthine route through streets and parks; he imagines his breathing, heavier and rougher in his chest with every half-mile, like breathing sandpaper. Keep running. Another hair's-breadth.

There is a boy on the towpath up ahead, perhaps ten years old, fishing, and he has caught something big enough to be visible from a way off. He slackens the pace, to see what happens next, though it doesn't take him long to realise that he knows what happens next: the twisting fish, open-mouthed, and the frightened child's botched attempt to kill it. A pen-knife. Then a rock. Neither wholly successful. He runs on past himself and does not look back.

65.

Luke arrives, precariously, on a bicycle borrowed from a student. Teddy has been missing for more than half an hour now, and the museum authorities have called the police. A picture from Dan's phone has been sent out to all staff, and in every gallery attendants are looking for a little boy in blue dungarees with silky blond hair. Dan has searched all the rooms, climbed all the stairs, public and not public, right up to the dizzy octagonal balcony where the directors' offices and the panelled meeting rooms are; he has looked dispassionately at the cinematic drop to the tiled floor below, pushed at the door of the Galatea Room, still closed, and hurried on, trying to outstrip the slow cold disbelief spreading through his nervous system like poison.

He is so terribly easy to imagine in so many different settings. Teddy trotting oblivious under a row of bright Impressionists; watched over by concerned Madonnas, crouched hide-and-seeking under a bench. Teddy talking to the stuffed foxes, the seabirds; Teddy listening to the mellifluous tones of the Turtle. Reaching up to touch shining minerals, stroking a mammoth leg-bone. Asleep in the buggy by the table where they had coffee. Teddy sitting on the floor waiting patiently by his mother's stars. Dan passes a toilet and goes in to retch up his fear. He can feel himself shutting down. He splashes water on his face, and finds his way mechanically down to the main hall, where a policewoman is waiting to talk to him, and where Luke finally finds him and holds him in a bear hug, hard.

They sit him down with a glass of water and the policewoman begins asking him questions, slowly, patiently, and purely, he thinks, to keep him there. He is too tired to fight or make a scene now, and so he sits and answers her as best he can, all the while watching from a distance, from up near the dome of the ceiling, watching himself and the policewoman doing everything properly. Very slowly. And then he sees Luke quietly head off to the desk to exchange a word with two or three tight-faced staff as they hold their phones and their walkie-talkies and wait for news.

Luke is asking about the outside of the building. The exits are blocked, they say, and the police are searching the area, though it does seem unlikely that such a small boy would have wandered out by himself. And would he have got through the silence? It's pretty thick still, especially at the front there; you'd think it might deter him. They look at the picture on their phones, and hope that it isn't going to become the iconic vanished child picture in tomorrow's news.

I'll go, ah, and see if I can help outside, he says. Just for ten minutes. He glances across at Dan. Tell him …Tell him I'll be right back. Can, ah, someone let me out here? They give him a neck tag, and open the door.

He's wearing a T-shirt, and is still hot and sweating from cycling, so the cold of the silence is a shock. He catches his breath and pushes through it to stand just the other side. Two policemen on the lower steps are turning people away from the main entrance. Then he sits down and pulls up the most recent map of the silence on his iPad, homing in on the thick loop around the building. He experiments with different ways of zooming in, magnifying the line of emptiness to try and capture its edges, which are slightly fuzzy, slightly ragged, perhaps because the stuff is in flux, he thinks. He steps back into it, and the screen goes blank. Then he steps out again and, holding the iPad like a map, starts to walk along the edge, a bit like following a river, he thinks, but with the river as high as a wall and invisible – higher than head height, nobody can quite work out how high. What am I looking for anyway, he thinks; why would Teddy be here?

It isn't easy to follow the silence exactly round the building, as various architectural features get in the way, especially at the front; but it gets easier walking up Museum Avenue along the low stone wall, easier to move in and out, to trace the line precisely. It seems, as at the front, to keep about a foot away from the building itself, but there are places where it brushes up against the stone, and others where the coldness collects and pools, swirling back on itself. The staff entrance, down the slope at the back, is like a small dark lake. He spends five minutes there, though plenty of other people are looking in the corners and behind the parked cars, and shivers as he climbs the steps up the side, following the silence as it snakes back up, cutting off the building from the visitors' car park, and coiling round towards the bulge of the lecture theatre on Park Place. He follows another low wall, and turns at last onto the front steps, where he waves his badge at the police, and is about to push through the doors when he sees, just ahead of him, shuffling slowly across the Gorsedd gardens, a familiar bundled figure clutching two grubby plastic bags bursting with papers. He hesitates for a second, wonders about going to talk to him; but he is coming from the wrong direction, he thinks. He can't possibly have seen Teddy.

66.

The long walk down the corridor left her worn out; she has spent the last two days more or less in bed. Small flurries of doctors and nurses, more than has been usual lately, have been taking blood and measuring things. And there was a trip to some other part of the hospital to be scanned again. All of which, they seemed to agree, counts as progress. No Lina, which she regrets though half expected. She knows her hours have been cut. But the Polish girl with the wide smile is back, and on the second day, watching her empty the tangled red hair from the bin, Myra asks her what her name is, and how long she has been in Cardiff.

Two years, says Dorota. Yes. Nearly two years.

Have you been cleaning all this time?

She shakes her head and smiles. No, I work in a hairdressers, up near the castle. Closed down now. I am training there. Back home, near Gdansk, I will open a
salon
. She says it the French way, and gives a little wave of her long fingers, and it all sounds utterly plausible.

Myra nods approval. That sounds good, she says. I'm sorry your old place closed down. You looking for another salon to work in?

Looking, she says with a shrug. But a lot is closing down out there. Maybe I'll go home sooner.

Myra touches her own hair. This is no good, she says. You see how it's coming out. Do you think…?

Dorota comes over and gently feels a strand of Myra's hair.

Beautiful hair, she says. But yes. If we cut it short short it will come back one day stronger.

Myra nods, says nothing.

I come back this evening after work, says Dorota. With my scissors.

The trolley trundles off down the corridor towards the lift, and Myra curls back under the sheets, suddenly sad for her poor hair. She feels her mother insistently brushing out the tangles before school, yelling at her to just be still.

Sleep this time takes her directly to her bench, where she sits swinging her legs and feeling hot and thirsty, watching her mother and a man walk round and round the big stones, talking. There are bright flowers in the beds and people coming and going. After a while she gets up and stands in front of the little bronze girl, who is crouched on her plinth with her arms wrapped round her legs, and her chin resting on her knees, thinking hard. She stands there for a long time, a minute, maybe two. Then she touches the girl's hand very lightly, and gets back on her bench, sitting sideways this time, so she can pull her own knees up and put her chin down, and wait for her mother to finish talking.

But she doesn't finish talking, she goes on and on, round and round the stones, deep in discussion, not looking up or over at the bench, where the little girl finally lets go of her grazed knees and lies down to sleep.

67.

The letter slips into the box in time. He wishes it luck and speed. Then he goes back to queue up in the village shop, holding milk and biscuits and a packet of frozen peas, feeling disproportionately large, and listening to the chatter around him, dipping and drifting between English and Welsh. He moves forward a few paces, and the phone in his jacket pocket collects a sudden burst of messages as it finds a little pool of connectivity. He balances groceries in one huge hand, and scans through as best he can with the other. Dan's text from earlier that afternoon is among them. It would be a blessing, he thinks, to see them both. Back at the van he quickly answers those who need it, and then writes to Dan to tell him they can come out any time; and no, he hasn't seen Lina.

He is calm enough now to drive home leisurely, with a detour down the valley to collect two more gas canisters and some fuel for the strimmer. The path around the pond needs clearing again, especially if Teddy is imminent. He follows a pair of jays back up the tiny lane to the house. More blue flashes. As he loops around the big mulberry tree to park on the dandelion and gravel drive he sees in surprise, then in fear, that the front door is standing wide open, like a dark astonished mouth. She has escaped, he thinks. Wandered out to find me. But surely not far, and not down the road… The garden. Probably the garden. She can't have made it to the pond. If she has fallen. Her leg. I should have bloody locked her in.

He slams the van door shut and looks around for guidance. In the time it takes him to begin to think, two figures appear in the doorway. They smile at him. Lina looks smaller than he remembers, and oddly ragged, and tear-stained; his mother, taller by a head, rests a protective arm around her shoulders. He leaps up the steps towards them and hugs them both together. What happened? he said. Where did you come from? Are you OK? Lina, what happened?

I'll make some tea, says his mother unexpectedly. Then turns and points:

Her feet.

Theo sees the blood on Lina's heels and the ruined little shoes by the door. He guides her gently inside towards the sofa, and sits her down.

No rush now, he says. Let's have a look at this.

He goes out to the kitchen to fetch a bowl of warm water and finds his mother stood looking at the tea-pot and the kettle. He spoons some loose tea into the pot and fills it, and points at the cupboard. Can you get us three cups, Mam? He holds up three fingers. That would be great. Then he finds a clean towel, lint and bandages from upstairs, and begins to tend Lina's wounded feet. The sight of such a large, awkward man kneeling in front of her makes her sob.

It's OK, he says, come on now, you'll be fine. We'll have some tea and you can tell me what's going on. You must have walked miles.

I didn't know she was your mother, says Lina through her tears.

Well she's not as ugly as me, says Theo cheerfully, not looking up. But yes, we're related.

Now she laughs and cries all at once. No, she says, I mean when she was in hospital. I didn't know she was your mother. Mrs Evans.

He leaves off bandaging her foot and looks up at her in puzzlement.

What do you mean?

In the hospital. Where I clean. Mrs Evans was on my round.

She smiles.

We had good conversations. I was sorry when she went, but I'm glad her leg is better.