Star Shot (23 page)

They don't take much persuading. Piled into the white van, driving away from the city and out towards the hills, they describe how Luke found Teddy cold and deeply asleep, like a creature hibernating, in a corner of the museum downstairs from the main hall, a place roped off for months, unused, full of lockers and tables. The silence had been pressing so long against the outside wall it had seeped through the pores of the stone, or got in through a crack, and pooled deeply enough to trap him like an insect in a puddle. How the paramedics had warmed him and woken him very slowly in the back of the ambulance, and how the hospital tests had found nothing wrong at all, and that this morning after a good sleep and a good breakfast they'd said it was OK to go.

So we went, says Luke happily.

Us too, says Myra, though they weren't quite so keen to let us out. The outside world comes at her too quickly, and she closes her eyes, feels Theo rejoicing beside her at the wheel.

Lina won't believe this, says Theo. We are going to celebrate for days and days.

I promised him pancakes, says Dan, stroking Teddy's head. He doesn't want to tell the others about the one thing that isn't quite right.

Mountains of pancakes, says Theo. Excellent idea. We'll need eggs.

71.

Lina had half woken to the sound of the van's tyres on the gravel under her window, and slept again. When she woke properly it was to sunlight and the chatter of small birds. Now she sits up in bed and feels the ache in her legs as something almost voluptuous. No need to move yet, the house is very quiet.

The room has a high ceiling and a large bay window and feels spacious in spite of the books and the pictures and the boxes piled everywhere. The furniture is eclectic and battered, but nicely shaped. She fingers the patchwork counterpane, intricate and faded, runs her finger along the neat little stitches and thinks of her mother.

The shoebox sits on the table. If you're sure, he had said after their long talk, and gone hunting up in the attic room for ages. This morning she doesn't know if she is sure.

After a while she slips out of bed and goes to the window, pulls open the curtains, and looks down over a garden of roses and fruit trees hung with small apples and ripe plums. Beyond it a track leads down to the open land, and to the sunlit pond. If Mrs Evans is strong enough, she thinks, they could go out and collect some plums to stew for when Myra comes. And she must see if there is anything in the kitchen cupboards to make a cake.

She decides she needs tea. Passing the room downstairs where Theo's mother sleeps she stops and listens to her breathing, deep and regular. In the kitchen she boils the kettle and hunts through cupboards. She finds yeast and olive oil and the right kind of flour, and mixes up some bread dough for later on. Cake looks like a possibility too, though she will need to find eggs. But not yet. She takes her tea back up to her room and sits down at the table with the box in front of her, tracing a wavy line through the dust on the lid with a fingertip. She lifts it off. Photos and letters are packed flat, in bundles; she picks one out and carefully unrolls the perished elastic band, which snaps. Then she spreads the dozen or so photos across the table without looking at them properly. She covers her face with her hands and closes her eyes in something like prayer. Eventually, she looks at them.

They are pictures from the past, from her past, from streets she could have known and might have recognised if they were not all so generically bombed and jagged, with figures in them she could have passed at any time, held in their moment in black and white. Children in doorways, with inscrutable expressions, looking straight at the camera. A woman carries a bag of groceries past a pile of rubble. A young father and a small boy sit side by side on a kerb. People you see every day on the news, her people; the dates on the back tell her how old this news is now. With a kind of detached curiosity she examines each picture, and whether or not they are looking back at her she acknowledges each person she sees, and passes on.

The next bundle is harder to look at. It documents the immediate aftermath of a bomb in a marketplace. This she does recognise, both the place and the event. A few streets away from them; she sometimes went there with the children for fruit and vegetables. Not that day, however. Ali had treated some of the wounded. The sister of a close friend of theirs had been among the dead. About a year before the end, she thinks, looking at the dates again; she would not have thought it so long.

Each photograph receives the same careful acknowledgment, an internal nod that is neither a prayer nor a blessing nor a farewell. There is no rage or pity in it either, and nothing that comes close to acceptance, but it is something she has learned to do, a way of looking that faces down horror. She wonders about the man behind the camera, whether he looked like Theo, whether he slept in this room when he was growing up. When she finishes this batch of pictures she gets up to open the window and finds that her hands are shaking.

Noises in the house, a toilet flushing, a door closing. Lina remembers her bread and goes down to the kitchen to knead the dough and put the kettle on. After a while Theo's mother appears in the doorway and smiles at her. Good morning, she says. I slept a long time.

Tea, Mrs Evans, says Lina. It's another lovely day, look. What shall we have for breakfast?

The morning goes quickly. They pick a bowlful of dark red plums and stew them with cinnamon. They can't find eggs, so make biscuits instead. The smell of bread fills the house. Lina retrieves her clothes from the washing machine and hangs them on the line. They drink coffee on a bench at the top of the garden, and Lina explains every so often where Theo has gone. Each time she tells her, the older woman looks pleased and surprised to hear he has gone to collect another friend. Then she wonders again where her other son has got to, and Lina says he is still away.

By late morning Mrs Evans is tired, and falls asleep in the green chair. Lina goes back upstairs to her room and works her way slowly through the last two bundles of photographs. In the last pile she finds a picture of a hospital in ruins; there are no people in this picture, and the place it so wrecked it could be anywhere; but the date on the back, she sees, is perfectly correct. That must be our hospital, she thinks, and he must be in there, deep in the rubble. It is, she knows now, the closest she will get.

72.

He swirls the pale mixture to cover the pan, and waits attentively for the rash of tiny dark air-pockets to appear. Then he slides the spatula underneath the pancake and feels it lift away nicely. Good pan, he thinks. Better than the flimsy thing at Luke's place. He flips it over and studies the surface of the moon. It is different every single time, the channels and veins, the rough patches where water might once have been, the craters and mounds; golden-brown skeins mapped onto a rich pale yellow, those lovely eggs from the farm shop just outside the village.

Lina comes in with a plate, laughing. He's finished it already, she says. You have to give him that one too.

This is Luke's, says Dan, firmly. Strict rotation. He was up all night too, you know…

He slides the pancake on to her waiting plate.

Teddy's, she says. He's starving. Or they'll have to share.

Whatever you do, says Dan, don't cut it in half or there'll be hell to pay. He goes berserk if you try and cut them in half.

Though quite how, he thinks, even Teddy might pull off a major tantrum in his current condition he isn't sure. He is briefly amused by the thought of his son silently jumping up and down like an angry cartoon character with the sound turned off. Then he thinks he would give anything to hear him scream.

Luke is next in.

This one's yours for definite, says Dan, flipping another moon.

Good, says Luke. Thought I'd come and make sure no one else intercepts it.

He walks up and down the kitchen holding his phone at peculiar angles, as if dousing for water.

I can't, ah, get a signal anywhere, he says.

You won't, calls Theo. Not in the house.

I need to tell work where I am; there's a meeting I'm going to miss.

Theo comes through. Land-line, he says, or email upstairs, it's usually pretty reliable. I can get you set up if you like.

You eat this first, says Dan.

After a while Lina persuades Dan that she can be trusted with the pan, and he joins Theo and his mother at the table. Teddy scrambles down off his chair and up into his lap. Myra, still dizzy from her tight-rope act, is propped up on the sofa eating her third pancake, and Luke has disappeared. They pour him tea and let him eat, and when Lina comes in with the last of the pancakes he tells them what they all know by now, which is that Teddy has no voice.

Otherwise he's fine. And he doesn't seem to know it himself; it's not as though he's stopped talking…

Theo has found a book about birds, and Teddy is reading it very earnestly on the rug. Aloud, by the look of him. Invisible words.

Dak-dak
, says Dan, automatically, encouragingly.

Is it just the shock of being lost? says Myra. A sort of reaction? It might wear off, it's still very soon.

Dan nods. That's what I think, he says. Like losing your voice. It'll come back, I'm sure.

Theo watches the silent talking child and says nothing.

Luke comes downstairs looking concerned. I, ah, have to go, he says. At least, that is, if it's convenient for me to go… There's something badly wrong at work, the professor, I need to see him, he's been ill. He's never ill. But I can, ah, ring for a taxi?

I can give you a lift to the station, says Theo. I'll need to buy supplies if this lot are staying. Dan looks at Luke, and then at Lina who is down on the mat cross-legged with Teddy tucked into her lap, pointing out the birds.

Stay here, says Luke. It's the best place for him. For both of you. How about I, ah, come back tomorrow around suppertime, if everything is sorted by then?

He turns to Theo. You sure that's OK?

Perfect. Let's go. There's a train at half-past you'll get, no problem.

Luke says goodbye, and rubs Teddy's head. Then he remembers.

The, ah, city map upstairs on your wall? he says to Theo. With the pools and the dates all marked on it?

Mmm, says Theo, hunting for keys.

Could I just take a quick picture of it? I have an idea…

Of course. Go ahead. I'll be in the van.

Theo crouches down beside Myra and cups her face in his big hands. Go upstairs and rest, he says. Lina will show you where. Go and lie down, have a sleep. I won't be long.

She closes her eyes and he kisses her lightly on the forehead, and when she opens them again he is gone.

73.

He is standing looking into the fridge when the doorbell rings. There is nothing there he could possibly eat. He tries the food cupboard, but it appears even less promising; everything in it is too dry or too complicated. The bell rings again. He crouches down and goes through a small stockpile of tins of tomatoes, lentils, and some water-chestnuts. He knows he must eat but has no hunger for anything he sees. He tries to imagine what he would choose, given the choice, but nothing occurs to him. In the end he dissolves a spoonful of honey into boiling water and sits at the kitchen table stirring it round and round and breathing in the steam.

The noise of the doorbell has been getting more insistent, but he has not, until now, been able to give it much attention. He wonders how the person outside knows he is inside, knows to keep ringing like that, and not give up and go away. It wouldn't make much sense, that level of persistence, he thinks, unless you knew for sure that someone might eventually answer.

He has a sip of honeyed water and begins to find the ringing profoundly annoying. Another couple of sips, and he realises that the only way to make it stop is to go all the way to the front door and ask the person doing it to go away. He heads unsteadily down the corridor and leans up against the door, shouting, please go away. I can't answer the door. I'm ill.

Sir, says a muffled voice. Sir. Please.

No sirs no pleases, he says. Just go away. I'm going back to bed.

The letterbox rattles and opens. The voice is clearer now, and familiar.