Star Shot (5 page)

Ah, says Luke, disappointed. It's just … I'm, ah, looking for someone. But maybe you come here quite often?

Not terribly often, says Theo. I don't live in town.

We do, says Dan. Who are you after?

A woman, says Luke. A woman with red hair who sits on that bench down there.

I know who you mean, says Dan. I've seen her.

Theo, who has already started back up the steps, turns sharply and looks down at them.

She's in hospital, he says. At least, about a week ago, I saw her go in.

17.

No cat no goldfish, she said, and closed her eyes. The nurse smiled and left. No lynx no bears no lions no monkeys. Not even an aardvark snuffling behind the sofa. The plants will die, though. She must remember to text Elin and ask her to take the little orange tree and anything else she likes. But how will she get the key to her?

Perhaps having a long break from the bench, from the truculent building, will do her good, she thinks. When she comes back in a week, maybe two, the velvet black tulips will be out and the building will be so glad to see her it will give her its complete attention, and she will know she was missed, and who can ask for more than that? But she must wait until she is quite well again, to get some life and strength back. She has no intention of being an object of pity.

When she wakes again she is uncomfortable and needs the loo. It is a short walk down the corridor, a million miles away. This is what old is like, she thinks. People everyday their hearts sinking at the million miles. Come on, Myra. She cannot wait for unpredictable nurses. She hates to ring for help. Slowly, slowly, she shifts her legs sideways off the bed, and at the same time pulls herself up into a sitting position. A peculiar movement, she thinks, in different directions, like being the arm of some complicated swing bridge. The sitting is painful, tugs at the wound in her abdomen. Then she slips gently down onto her bare feet and takes a deep breath. It is not so bad. Not so bad.

On the way back, however, she has to sit on a chair in the corridor for a minute to get her strength back. She composes her face into an expression of impregnable cheer, so that no one will dare to ask if she is all right. No one comes past to ask. She closes her eyes and breathes in and out. Then stands up far too quickly, and before she can do a thing about it there is a rush of darkness closing around her vision and she is keeling forward into white space. The hands that catch her and guide her firmly back to her chair are not those of a nurse.

Thank you, says Myra, too dazed to be properly surprised.

Not at all, says Theo, gently. This time he sits down beside her. She waits for him to ask if she is all right, but he doesn't.

I got up too fast, she says.

Yes.

I'll be ok now, I think.

Give it a minute, he says. And then adds, you know you look quite odd without your raincoat.

I'll try to remember it next time I need the loo.

You do that, he says.

Why, she says, are you wandering the corridors of the women's ward?

My mother fell and broke her leg a few days ago. She's further down in the next section. I'm going to visit her now.

Oh. Is she doing ok?

I don't know, he says. They say she is, but she's not herself. I don't much like it.

Oh. Myra looks concerned. Look, I'm fine now. Thank you for catching me.

Again, he says.

She pulls a wry face. Yes. Sorry. I'll try to keep my balance a bit better next time.

Come on, he says, getting up. Come on, let me see you back. Is it this way?

And he gives her his arm with such eighteenth-century politeness that she laughs, and forgets to bristle, and is glad of the support. He hands her carefully back to her bed and gives a little nod.

Don't go gallivanting around too much, will you?

I will try to restrain myself, she says.

18.

There are seven screens in his office, and a different map on every one. The colours are lovely. The professor walks round and round, stopping for a few seconds in front of each, until he finally sits down at the largest console. He clicks a few times, pulling the maps in one on top of the next so that they form a palimpsest, like layers of tracing paper, he hasn't seen tracing paper in years, he wonders if it still exists, if people still use it; it was never, he thinks, quite translucent enough. He selects seven more maps, then seven more, thickening the layers on the big screen.

In any case, here is confirmation. The blankness eating through the fine lines of every map is itself a pattern, a new map – one which does not correspond to any of his. The invisible lines, though not quite a perfect match in every layer, form a tracery of nothingness. Strands of it, reaching out like veins and arteries across the city, with tendrils twisting and curling off the main stems. All of them flowing out of what appears to be a pool of emptiness in the middle of the castle.

It is, he now knows this for certain, nothing to do with him or any of his team. He has thought of it till now as a virus, a poisonous piece of software with a life of its own; a slow malicious joke, perhaps, against the new regime by one of those ousted when the changes came a few years back. But words have been coming back to him from the streets, his project-workers dropping by in ones and twos, quietly baffled, all unsettled, handing over their worm-eaten data and talking uncomfortably of gaps and walls and sudden silences. And he has been out and found them for himself; has listened attentively to the quality of the nothingness. And, though it is in many respects a setback for the project as a whole, he must admit that he has been secretly pleased to find his maps, his data-tools, his programmes sensitive enough to pick up something so unplanned-for, so utterly impossible to predict.

He will have to get into the castle, it appears. This has not been particularly easy since ButeCo kindly took it back off the City during the last economic crisis. He remembers going as a child, with his brother, the two of them running in mad circles on the grass and urging their mother to take them up the keep, though she said it made her dizzy, horribly dizzy, they were pitiless and made her climb up after them. Scampering feet spiralling up ahead of her; he thinks of her now holding on to the curve of the rail and forcing her own feet to follow, one step after the other, her desperate anxiety for them chasing on ahead of her, like a hawk after sparrows, oblivious little sparrows, who never felt the rush of her panic, and never, ever stopped. The keep is gone now though, of course. It must look empty in there.

He knows enough of the right people, he thinks. He will find a way in. But the chance must not be wasted. This stuff, this silence, must be properly analysed. And as he stands there in the centre of his office an idea grows inside him as quickly and irresistibly as a smile, and sets his pulse beating, and has his slim fingers reaching for his phone, and scrolling through the names to find an old, old number.

19.

Teddy is asleep in the pushchair, with his rabbit wedged under a cheek to keep his head more or less propped up. He is as flushed as a real live cherub, and is drooling onto the rabbit's matted fur. One small hand grasps a wooden tractor in a grip of steel.

So, after you, ah, finished the PhD…

We were in the States for year, a bit more. Jane was in the second year of her research post at NASSR, and then we were expecting him, and then they found the tumour, so we came back here to be near her parents and she had the baby and died three months later.

Luke looks into the swirls of his coffee, and then at the sleeping child.

He's very beautiful.

Yes. Yes, he is.

They drink their coffee in silence for a while, then Luke asks, Have you tried to do anything with your thesis?

You mean publish?

Mmm.

No, no time to think. I'm too tired. And I'm not sure I could now. I don't even read much any more. Except to him.

Luke thinks about this. I'm not sure I actually read that much any more either, he says. I mean I work with literary texts from dawn to dusk, but it's mostly, ah, sort of ingesting them through various programmes and doing stuff with the data.

The maps, you mean? Like the one you showed me, with the benches.

Yes, though the first ones were more, ah, literary, based on texts. I actually started off just helping out with data-input on the
Ulysses
project; that was ten years ago and as far as I know it's still going.

I remember that one, says Dan happily. Epic.

Quite. Then it got to be more about where writers were when they did their writing, and I co-managed a project on the BL in the 1920s, lots of famous footfalls there as you can imagine, it was very pretty to map, all radiating outwards.

Woolf, says Dan.

Yep. Lovely following her. And Fort, he was very neat to plot, very predictable, in and out at regular times and never really straying outside his square mile even after work.

Fort?

Charles, you know: the anomalies man, collector of the weird and wonderful.
Book of the Damned
. Though he'd actually published that by the time he came over. Did the same sort of stuff in London, though.

Don't think I've read him.

You should, he's very big on stars.

Then what?

Then it was another London one called
‘
And Did Those Feet?' says Luke.

And Did They?

Mostly, yes.

Whose?

Weird religious sects of the 1790s. Swedenborgians; Southcottians, followers of Richard Brothers, those types.

You get around a bit, then, if it's Cardiff park benches now.

Sort of a sideline, this one, says Luke. And then, thoughtfully scraping the froth out of the bottom of his cup, I hope that woman, that Miss Jones with the red hair, I hope she's going to be OK.

Theo will tell us, says Dan. Teddy begins to stir.

20.

The word knitting, he thinks, does not even begin to capture it. Knitting is thick and warm and heavy, the tank-tops and sweaters they used to wear on the farm. Tea-cosies, bobblehats; the two largely indistinguishable. But what tumbled from her needles over the hospital sheets was like mist, like breath itself, all silver and light, a pale grey silk that curled and twisted inwards. From a distance she could have been knitting a waterfall. Who is it for, he had said, in quiet amazement, and she had shrugged and smiled.

Now he walks from room to room in his mother's house, collecting fresh clothes, a book, an old photo of his dad. She – they – have been in for ten days or more, and all of time seems to have altered as a result. He wonders, now, thinking about it, if knitting was something his mother ever did, or might do. He has no recollection of seeing her with a pair of needles. Perhaps a bit late to start now. But he comes across her drawing things, the charcoals, a sketchbook, and the little pocket watercolours. Everything goes into a big hessian bag, where it looks hopelessly eclectic. If he had been a girl, he thinks pointlessly; then, if there had at least been a daughter-in-law, she would have known what was appropriate. The various nearly-daughters-in-law flit briefly before him, but they all look decidedly unhelpful.

In her bedroom he stoops over the dressing table and peers at his curious face reflected in triplicate, and then continually inwards, or possibly outwards, and an odd-looking face it is from any angle. He wonders if there is a necklace or a ring that might please her, and dips his huge hands, burglar's hands, into the carved wooden box. Pearls: Scottish river pearls, he bought her those; a string of tiny jet beads with bevelled edges. He chooses an amethyst brooch that belonged to his gran, and a small silver pendant he clearly remembers her wearing when they were children. Then his fingers find something he doesn't recognise, a bracelet, very simple; three strands of silver intertwined. He will ask her about it, see if she can remember a story.

He works hard down at the pond in mild drizzle all afternoon. A spiderweb hanging off the rushes recalls Myra's silver thread. The second time he had passed her part of the ward the curtains had been drawn. But two days later she had been there, propped up, knitting, and looked not unpleased to see him. She should have been allowed out by now, she said, at any rate for a few days after the biopsy, but the problem was that she fainted every time she stood up. Absurdly low blood pressure, she said; my heartbeats are too far apart, or something.