Star Shot (6 page)

You look a bit, well – translucent, he said critically. As if you might be gradually vanishing. Are you eating properly?

I eat what they give me, mostly, she said; though that's hardly properly.

So he had offered, of course.

Well, she said, if you are passing M&S. Where do you live, anyway?

Out, he said. An hour away. Tell me what you'd like.

The really posh fruit salad, she said, the one with pomegranate seeds and blueberries and mango and, well, everything. And Greek yoghurt – the thickest, the really creamy kind –

Anything else? His eyebrows were quizzical.

And some… She caught his tone just too late and shut her mouth and shook her head. Then looked at him sideways, and added, very quickly … and freshly squeezed lemonade and the seed mix, the stuff that looks like superdeluxe birdfood.

He laughed. Mam wants a packet of Rich Tea biscuits.

It's a generation thing, said Myra crisply, and gave all her attention to her mercurial knitting.

As he headed out to the corridor she had called out softly: thank you. He grinned, pretended not to hear.

Now he is absorbed, skimming off bunches of duckweed and crowsfoot; fishing out beetles and larvae for the starter tanks, adding scoops of frogspawn, the tiny black commas just beginning to flick with life. He has six or seven tanks ready to go, but will have to wait for the others to come back with the van. And since three of the drop-offs are in the city he will do this run with them, and call in to the hospital again, and get an evening train back. The nurses like him, don't mind him coming at odd hours; and she needs a clean nightdress, and she will be pleased with the Rich Teas.

21.

The professor meets her at the station. She took some persuading. Seven days. The song goes round in his head, the Dylan song, seven days. I'll be waiting at the station.
And she'll be comin' on forth…
My beautiful comrade from the North
.

And she does. And she is, with her honeybrown hair all streaked with grey, and the crinkles round her laughing eyes, and though he does not catch her by the waist and swing her round, he hugs her hard, and then they stand back and look at each other for a full five seconds, and burst out laughing. He wins the tussle over her bag and they leave the station, still laughing. As he leads her up into town he reaches into his pocket for his phone and, one-handed, begins to text.

Hotel. Drop bag. Coffee?

She glances at her phone and smiles and texts him back.

Nice suit.

I know.

With the lightest touch to her arm he manoeuvres her across roads, threads them both through the busy arcades, glancing down and up, and at her bright face, as the words fly between their phones.

You read what I sent?

On the train.

Journey?

Bliss. Five hours to myself.

Kids OK?

Most of them, most of the time. Yours?

Long gone: doing her own thing. Not an academic, thank god.

Mine will become accountants.

And wear Nice Suits.

Somehow they make the hotel without serious collisions. He orders coffee and while she checks in and finds her room he collects his briefcase from behind the desk and sets up the screen with the map of the twisting blank tendrils, and picks over the sheaf of papers prepared for him by Luke. Because, he thinks, if anyone can grasp the quality and intent of this stuff it will be Meg Vaughan, Director of
Distaw Rhwydd/ Théâtre
du Silence
, dancer, tight-rope walker, fierce theoretician of the performing arts, erstwhile bloody impossible colleague and so profoundly deaf and dumb since birth that she is acknowledged across the world as the servant, ambassador, and queen of silence.

She slips into the seat beside him, and places an iPad across the solid arm of the chair, and their hands play a quick duet of questions and answers and more questions, and her eyes meeting his are as sharp as they ever were. Come to bed, he thinks; but he knows they have very little time. The castle has agreed to open the gates at five, but only for half-an-hour, and he wants her to see some of the main channels through the city, the wall at the museum, and the swirls around Luke's benches. He shows her their itinerary, and though she mocks him for his flashy technology and his over-careful preparation he can see that she is as curious and excited as he is, every bit.

22.

There is a whiteness to the light, like being abroad. She cannot think why she has never walked this way before, it is lovely, a cycle-track and footpath with trees and primroses along a little river, coming out quite unexpectedly at the side of the Gorsedd gardens, where the road should be; she doesn't think to wonder what they've done with it. She has a new dress, soft, charcoal, with a simple neckline. Her white arms are scented lightly with suncream, a citrus tang; there are sunglasses pushed up high on her head, and her lips are dark-copper to match her hair. She goes click-clack on the path in her heels and then stops at the slip-road in sudden admiration at the building in the beautiful light, its pillars whiter, taller, more elegant than she has ever seen them. And for once the regard seems mutual, as if the building too has just caught its breath. She click-clacks up the shallow steps like a film star, one hand running up the smooth metal railings, and stands for a moment in front of the entrance, as it breathes its visitors in and out. And then she walks very deliberately to the alcove in the wall at the back, and first with one hand, and then the other, lays her palms flat against the smooth stone, and smiles. Then she puts her face to it, sideways, listening. And now she is pressed up against the wall with her whole body, listening, listening, because at long last after all that cruel silence the building has said to her come quickly, come now, there is something only you can hear, come and listen, it will happen very soon now. And so she is listening deep into the stone for that rare geological event, a heartbeat. Once in a million years, or thereabouts, depending on the type of stone of course, she can't remember the figures now, but even for Portland Stone dressed up as Parthenon Marble it is several hundred thousand and some, and decimal points, there are always decimal points, between one deep heartbeat and the next. With her eyes closed and the sun on the back of her neck and her milk-white self pressed flat against the building she waits, and listens, beyond the noise of the people on the steps and the patient rumble of school buses and the traffic beyond, and she has never been so beautiful in her whole life, so that the cold which follows is worse than unpleasant, worse than disappointment, worse than anything. It is a cold room, empty; darkened perhaps by blinds, and she is sitting on a plastic chair while someone walks around her, and around her. She is holding, in both hands, an incredible object made of glass, a spherical object with long, impossibly delicate spines, like a frozen star or a sea-urchin, or like skeins of pulled sugar, so crystalline and utterly fragile that she can only focus on holding it, on not breaking it, and cannot look up to see the face of the man, it is always a man, mocking her over and over as he walks around her and around, saying please do not touch, please do not touch, please… And it is cold because she is in her underwear and the circling is closer and closer, and the voice is slower and slower, please … do … not … touch … please … do … not … and she knows that when the fingers finally brush across her shoulders and neck it will be like chalk scraping the blackboard, and she will clamp her teeth and clench her hands and there will be such a shattering of delicate glass and the voice is getting closer and slower and she cries out
please
, holding her glass object,
please do not touch, do not touch, please…

And it is a hellish long time for everybody before another voice, gentle, urgent, finally breaks through to her from the other side, saying Myra, come back, no one will touch you, no one will hurt you Myra, wake up, come on, come back, it's me, I'm here, and look – I've got your fruit-salad.

23.

The benches are emptying. Dan and Teddy have started doing an unofficial round for Luke, now busy with the crisis team and enjoying every minute. The project has not been shelved, exactly, but the Interference, as they call it in the department, has had a significant effect on what they can do. A lot of time now goes on briefing the media and the ministers, and trying to squash the wilder speculations in the press. The benches database is on hold, at any rate, and it has become a question of managing things, of keeping an eye.

Luke buys them lunch or coffee every couple of days and they keep him informed. And Dan is grateful: for the food, because money is tight, and for the company, because his world is full of the mothers of young children, and he sees few men his own age. For the project itself, and the motivation it provides to get going, to plan routes, to fit the walking around playgroup and shopping; and of course, the sitters on the benches are drawing him in.

He talks more naturally to strangers than Luke ever could, and besides, Teddy is superb at breaking the ice. With every new round, as they move from a nod and a smile to a few words, they feel they are making friends. Teddy learns how to drop a scattering of coins in the hat of the vigorous guy singing Irish rebel songs; he learns not to try and scoop the contents of the hat out again. Dan tells Luke about the peculiar effect of leaning forward to drop the money and having the song cut out abruptly and then cut in again as you straighten up. Like a radio in a power cut. A blip. The black guy with the notebooks and the plastic bags chuckles with pleasure when he sees the child, and cuts him a tree, or a smiling face, or a bright logo, out of his university prospectuses. The Syrian lady saves them unsuitable boiled sweets. And apart from one lad with shocking pale blue eyes and (he guesses) a drug problem, who has never spoken and radiates a misery so intense that Dan cannot bring himself to stop, not with Teddy, they all, in their exchanges, seem glad to give him scraps of their lives.

I have a son, too,
she says
, but he is grown-up, and far away.

I'm from Leicester,
says the busker
. When I was a kid I always wanted to be Irish.

He doesn't pass much of this on, unless it's particularly funny, but just notes who, and where, and when; there's no room on the frozen database for all these back-stories. But he comes to see soon enough that he is not the only one lugging an ugly great loss around, that dull misshapen metallic lump. These meteor crashes, he thinks, what do they do to us, how do we manage. Extinction.