All That Glitters (24 page)

“Wrong. It means this is the bit that will make me famous.
More
famous. So I need you to really dig deep and bring out your best stuff. You know. Do your thing.”

I stare at Kevin for a few seconds in bewilderment.

“Sorry, my thing?”

Does he want me to do complex algebra for the cameras? Analyse a bit of metaphysical poetry? Experiment with the migration of manganite ions?

Kevin bends down and pulls two little yellow boxes out of his bag.

Then he wedges them in the sand.

“I’m thinking
nomadic.
I’m thinking
free spirit.
I’m thinking
my classic timepiece by Jacques Levaire is so glorious I can’t control my happiness.
Pretend there’s a campfire and sparklers if you need them. We can always CGI that in later. ACTION.”

Then he waves his hand at the cameras and clicks a button on his iPod.

Oh my God. What is happening?

Except as huge white lights switch on with a bang and the cameras start whirring, I think I already know. Sure enough: a loud, tinny beat begins to thump across the sand.
Thud. Thud. Thud thud thud thud.
Then a little voice starts screeching
ooooooooh babyyyyyy hiiiighhhh iin theeee skkyyyyyyy yeahhh baby
. An electronic keyboard joins in, followed by what appears to be a random fake owl sound.

The kangaroo rat has wide toes that turn its feet into sand shoes, allowing it to run across sand really fast in the opposite direction to danger without sinking in.

I may need to quickly grow some too.

“Now,” my director confirms as he leans back on the camel again and throws his hands out widely. “
Dance.
”

So I dance.

Or – more specifically – Hannah does.

With the skills she learnt during a short stint with the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, she swirls and spins, pirouettes and squats, jumps and curtsies. She rolls around a bit on the floor, getting sand in her eyes and mouth and hair and trying to surreptitiously spit it back out again in the most glamorous way possible.

She fake-drowns and jives, shuffles and wiggles.

She even attempts a little break-dancing. And you know what? Harriet Manners can’t do any of this. But Hannah Manners?

Apparently she’s not that bad at it.

I must have harnessed her powers more accurately than I ever dared dream could be possible, because for the first time Kevin hasn’t got a single word of criticism.

“
Superb!
” he yells as I attempt to moonwalk across the sand. “
Marvellous!
” he shouts as I huff and puff through three extremely low star jumps. “
Genius!
” he exclaims as – in a panic – I steal a few of Dad’s key moves and start doing ‘wobbly-knees’ and making big boxes with little boxes inside them with my hands. “This is
precisely
what I wanted! It’s fresh, it’s unorthodox! It’s visionary! Could you, perchance, try a little
krumping
?”

Which I assume is dancing like a crumpet.

So I obediently roll myself on to the sand and try to look as bread-like as possible.

Finally, the music stops and I crash in exhaustion to the ground and end with tired jazz hands. I’m sweating all over and breathing so hard I sound like a tree being cut down.

“AND THAT …” Kevin yells, clacking his little board for the final time, “… IS. A. WRAP! Could you take a photo of me jumping?” He hands his phone to Helena. “I need one for my Facebook profile.”

I sit for a few seconds in the sand, trying to get my breath back.

Then I look upwards at the sky.

The light is fading, pink has deepened to a purple-blue and stars are popping out and multiplying by the second like freckles in the sun. I give a little sigh and try to quickly take as many mental photos as I can. I’m only sixteen, after all. I can always come back and enjoy my first ever night in the desert without somebody yelling I CAN JUMP HIGHER! DO IT AGAIN! another time, right?

Right?

“You know,” Joe the cameraman says, helping me up. “After careful consideration, I think I might need a couple of extra shots of the dunes. A long, long way over there.”

He points far away in the distance.

“I’ll come with you,” Kevin says, reappearing as if by magic. “I know
exactly
the shot you’re thinking of and you can’t do it without me because I’m the
director.
” He holds his fingers up in a square. “Oh yes, I
see
it already. I see it
all.
”

Joe winks at me as Kevin begins sliding through the sand in the direction Joe indicated and – as if by some strange, wonderful enchantment – the air gets quieter and quieter until it’s completely silent.

I can almost hear the desert heaving a sigh of relief.

Then I quickly whip my shoes off while mouthing a grateful
thank you.

“You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Joe says with a small grin as I start heading towards the biggest dune I can find. “Get as far away as you possibly can.”

And it looks like the desert is finally mine.

cientists estimate that there are 70,000 million million million stars in the known universe and at least 170 billion galaxies stretching 13.8 billion light years away from us in all directions.

Our galaxy alone contains 400 billion stars.

With all the energy I have left, I scramble on all fours up the dune. It takes a surprisingly long time: for every two scrabbles forward I slide back one, as if I’m trying to climb a mound of warm, soft sugar.

Finally, I reach the top and lie down. I spread my arms out wide with my fingers buried in the sand.

And I look upwards, at a sky now coated in glitter.

Hertfordshire/Sydney – February (9 months ago)

“I know you miss me but try and be cool, Manners. There’s no need to lick the computer.”

I laughed and pulled Hugo off the webcam.

He got a bit overexcited every time he saw my boyfriend, but I couldn’t exactly blame him.

In fairness, so did I.

“Saliva is antibacterial,” I told Nick airily. “We just like keeping things clean.” Then I poked my face round my dog’s little white fluffy head. Hugo immediately started licking my ear instead. “Is it nice being home?”

Nick was making the most of shooting a huge campaign in Australia by spending the weekend with his parents.

“It’s great, but I keep getting this niggling feeling I’ve left something behind.”

“You did,” I said, holding up a blue sock. “I found this under my bed yesterday. It doesn’t smell great. In fact, I have considerable doubts about your laundry skills.”

Nick threw his head back and laughed, and every one of my two billion heart-muscle cells stood up silently and did a little invisible dance of triumph. “I gave that to you when you jumped in the snow puddle, plonker. So technically you were the last one to wear it.”

“Oh.” I flushed with happiness. “Of course. In that case, it smells of sunshine and roses and I’ve never inhaled anything so delightful in my life and shall sleep with it forever under my pillow.”

We both laughed, and then the screen flickered.

“Hello?” I clicked a few buttons. “Are you still there? Nick?”

It flickered a few more times: his face appearing and disappearing again. “Harri—”

“Nick?”

“
Shoot
,” a disembodied voice said. “Why is this connection so bad?”

“It’s OK, we’ll just …”

Then the sound cut out too.

Over the two and a half months we’d been dating, I had grown to hate video calls with a passion. They gave me a pixelated picture of Nick – like he had been drawn or painted – but I couldn’t curl up with my head on his shoulder or smell his lime-green smell or kiss him.

And there were these little unexpected awkward bits: the moments where we talked over each other, or the sound lagged, or the screen froze and we were suddenly disjointed and pulled apart.

The screen went bright again and I could see his beautiful face: fuzzy and frozen in the middle of expressing a
U
shape.

“Are you …” we both said at the same time.

“… Here.”

“… There. What?”

“Huh?”

There was an awkward silence again while I flushed. My face was now frozen in the corner of the screen, like a constipated goblin. I felt strangely shy, as if we were back at the beginning.

My boyfriend was 10,552 miles away, and I could suddenly feel every single one of them.

“What were you—”

“I was just—”

“You go—”

“No, I was just saying—”

Another long silence while we both fiddled with our laptops and I tried my hardest not to throw it on the floor and stamp on it.

“Take me to the window,” Nick said finally.

“Oh God, it’s not
that
bad, is it? I mean, you’re not going to virtually jump, are you?”

“Maybe,” he laughed. “Let’s see how I feel when I get there.”

I clambered off my bed and took my laptop to the windowsill. Our neighbour was trimming his lawn with a dark blue fleece on. Not even vaguely romantically: I could hear him swearing and kicking the machine through the glass.

“Now turn me round so I can see the sky.”

“But you can’t see anything, Nick. It’s just grey.”

“Obviously. You’re in England so that goes without saying. Now I’ll do it.” Nick held his computer up and I peered forward. “What can you see?”

“Black.”

“Because I’m currently in the southern hemisphere, and you’re in the northern hemisphere. We have two almost totally different skies, so it’s dark here while it’s light there.”

I turned the camera round so I could blink at him incredulously. Maybe this was what happened when you became a model: people tried to explain the notion of a spinning earth to you.

“Thanks for that, Nick. That is fascinating geological knowledge that I didn’t learn when I was six years old at all. Please, tell me more about the basic concept of night and day.”

“I wasn’t finished,” he laughed. “May I continue?”

“Yes. Unless you’re about to tell me that rain comes out of clouds and gravity makes things, like, fall down. In which case, no.”

He growled at me so I stuck my tongue out.

“I said we have
almost
two totally different skies, smarty-pants. But there’s still a crossover point and it’s always there. Three—”

Nick’s face suddenly went very quiet and stationary.

Oh my God
, I thought,
you have to be kidding me
.

“Nick?” I shook my laptop desperately. “Three what? Three squirrels? Three blind mice?”

But there was nothing: just emptiness and silence.

“Nick?” I said in a smaller voice, shaking it again. “Come back.”

And the screen went black.

Thanks to almost no light pollution, I can now see more stars than I’ve ever been able to before: thousands and thousands of lights slowly scattering themselves across the sky like the blue sparkle Nat used to throw all over everything when she was seven.

But I’m only looking at three of them.

After five minutes of cursing my laptop, I’d finally worked it out: Orion’s Belt, also known as The Three Kings.

Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka.

Three of the brightest stars in the sky, and – because of their position near the equator – visible in both the northern and southern hemisphere: Morocco and Australia.

Last week I read that the heart has its own electrical pulse, which means it can function even when it has been separated from its body.

Which I thought was pretty handy.

Given that mine has been on the other side of the world now for quite some time.

But as I dig myself into the warm sand and look upwards, it suddenly feels a tiny bit closer again: beating and hopeful, as if I’m not quite as empty any more. And as I think about my letter, I feel a little closer to being whole again: more than I have in a long time. Since I walked off Brooklyn Bridge and left the boy I love still standing there without me.

Because tonight, these stars are mine.

But in a few hours, they’ll belong to Nick again.