Gold (5 page)

Leukemia didn’t feel real either. They put tubes into you and pumped you full of chemicals that made your ears ring and your skin go so transparent that you could see right inside yourself. You could touch the tubes with your fingers and look at your tendons with your own
eyes. It was possible that you weren’t dreaming, it just didn’t seem very likely.

After a while you stopped worrying about what was real. The rare school days lasted six and a half hours, and then they were gone. Life lasted till you were very old—with odds of ninety percent—or for another few months, with odds of ten percent. Being here on the Death Star would last as long as it lasted. That was how you had to look at it.

Her dad knelt and put an arm around her. “You’re not scared are you, big girl?”

Sophie shook her head. “No.”

She made her voice sound as though the question had been stupid, but Vader was coming and the truth was that she was more scared than she had ever been in her life—more scared than she’d been in January when Dr. Hewitt had told her the leukemia was back. It was important not to worry Dad, though. It was harder for him.

“You prisoners, stop talking!” said one of the Stormtroopers. Then, in a softer voice: “Are you guys alright for drinks and so on? Can I get you a juice or a biscuit?”

Sophie asked, “Is there Ribena?”

“Magic word?” said the Stormtrooper.

“Is there Ribena, please?”

“Of course,” said the Stormtrooper, and produced a carton from a blue isotherm bag.

“We’ve got one of those bags at home,” said Sophie.

“Wow,” said the second Stormtrooper. “Small universe.”

The first Stormtrooper spun around to look at the second, then quickly turned back to Sophie.

“Prisoner!” said the Stormtrooper. “Our master is expected at any moment. When he arrives, you must stand at attention. If you are invited to speak to him, you must address him as ‘Lord Vader.’ What must you address him as?”

“Lord Vader,” said Sophie in a small voice.

“What’s that? I can’t hear you,” said the Stormtrooper, cupping a gloved hand to the place on the helmet where an ear would be.

“Lord Vader!” said Sophie, as loud as she could. She was tired from the long car journey. Her voice had a slow puncture and it was letting out air.

“That’ll do,” said the Stormtrooper, and went off to whisper to the other.

A hush fell on the bridge. The Stormtroopers stiffened to attention. Sophie’s legs trembled. The music of “The Imperial March” sounded from hidden speakers. An involuntary whimper came from Sophie’s throat. A blast door opened. Clouds of dry ice billowed. Darth Vader emerged from his vapors, stood mightily in silhouette, and stepped onto the bridge. His respirator hissed and clicked.

He stared at Sophie and Dad, and nodded slowly.

“So,” he said. “The captured Rebel fighters.”

Sophie felt urine running down her legs, shockingly hot. It splashed on the brushed steel floor. The noise was undeniable.

She looked at the pooled urine on the floor and felt tears coming. This was going to really freak Dad out.

She looked up at him. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”

There was a moment of surprised silence on the bridge. Vader’s respirator wheezed.

“Uh… are you alright?” he said.

“I think she’s let a bit of wee go,” Dad whispered.

“What?” said Vader.

“Oh, where are my manners? I mean I think she’s let a bit of wee go,
Lord Vader
.”

Vader held up his hands, black gloved palms outwards.

“Hey,” he said. “Don’t make me the bad guy here.”

The nice Stormtrooper came over, knelt beside Sophie, and put an arm around her.

“It’s okay,” the Stormtrooper whispered. “It happens.”

Sophie looked up at Dad’s face, which was lined with concern. She couldn’t bear that she’d done this to him. She began to cry.

Darth Vader bent down and patted Sophie on the shoulder.

“What’s that tube going into you?” he asked.

“It’s… it’s a… Hi… Hi… Hickman line,” Sophie sobbed.

Dad folded her into his arms. “It’s to get the chemo into her.”

“Ha!” Vader said. “You call that a line? You should see me when I take this helmet off. I have so many wiggly lines going into me, I look like a plate of spaghetti.”

Sophie giggled between her sobs. A perfect green bubble of snot swelled from her nose, stretched to molecular thinness, and shrank back again, like the membrane of a calling frog.

“You’re a very brave young lady,” said Vader.

After her tears, Sophie had a hammering headache and a rending in her guts and a pain in her side that made her want to curl up.

“I’m fine,” she said, looking up at Dad. “I actually feel great.”

He smiled. She smiled back. This was good.

Afterwards, when they’d got Sophie cleaned up, Darth Vader lifted her to sit on his shoulders. They watched the huge monitor screens on the bridge, which showed the galaxy lying before them and shimmering.

“Would you like to choose a world to destroy?” Vader said.

“Why?” said Sophie.

Vader shrugged. “It’s just something I offer my guests.”

“Does it have to be a world? Could you blow up my bad blood cells?”

Air sighed from the grille of Vader’s face plate. He waved a gloved hand at the starfield.

“I can do you anything on that map,” he said.

Sophie pointed at a bright star in Orion. “Let’s say those stars are my white blood cells and that one’s a bad one.”

“Fine,” said Vader. “Commence death ray initiation sequence.”

Sophie held up her hand. “Sorry, but it’s not actually a death ray if it’s saving my life.”

Vader pointed at the big red button labeled
DEATH RAY.
He said, “It’s the only ray we’ve got.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Vader crouched down to let Sophie press the button. A low drone built slowly to a crescendo. The lights flickered. They all watched the monitor screens as the eight green beams of the death ray converged into one, shot out across space, and heated the core of Sophie’s bad blood cell until it exploded in a shower of bright sparks across the blackness of space.

They watched the sparks crackle and fade back into perpetual darkness.

Jack carried Sophie out to the car while Kate and Zoe were still changing out of the Stormtrooper costumes. She was shattered. She clung on around his neck and buried her face in his chest.

Jack shifted her weight onto one arm. Her head lolled. He extracted the car key from the back pocket of his jeans, popped open the car door, and eased Sophie into her child safety seat. He handled her like a patient cop with a drunken perp, laying one hand on the crown of her head to prevent her banging it on the door frame. One of the last remaining clumps of her hair came detached. Lifted on the wind, it rose briefly into the ragged sky, then floated down into the mud. Jack followed its progress with his eyes, then turned back to his daughter. He didn’t say anything.

Sophie sat with her eyes half-closed, uncooperative while Jack worked to install her. She was sluggish, like a reptile waiting for the sun to warm her. On the other side of the car park, mammalian children in
red Wellington boots and striped bobble hats giggled and splashed each other with the tawny water from the puddles.

Sophie’s Hickman line was in exactly the wrong place for the seat belt where it rode across her collarbone, so they always needed to tuck a folded tea towel under the belt. He checked that it protected the Hickman line, and that the seat belt still ran smoothly.

He squeezed Sophie’s knee.

“How about that Vader?” he said.

Her eyes came open. “He was
so
cool,” she said. “You remember how he’s actually Luke Skywalker’s father?”

Jack grinned. “He is?”

Sophie nodded. “He actually
tells
him? In
Empire Strikes Back
? Right at the end?”

Jack made a face as if he were weighing up the information. “You don’t want to believe everything a guy in black leather knee boots tells you.”

The animation left Sophie’s face and a worried, provisional expression took its place.

“What?”

Jack’s stomach fell. He was an idiot for breaking the bubble.

“Sorry, big girl. Forget it.”

He went to stroke her cheek, but she turned her head away and folded her arms. Now Jack felt terrible for teasing her. This was what she dreamed about—what she believed in—while the other girls on their street rode their bikes and had Hannah Montana sleepovers.

The guy who played Darth Vader had handled the Sophie situation pretty well. Better than Jack would have done, probably. People were actually okay. The man probably made—what?—ten quid an hour, eighty a day? In that stifling black costume, patiently helping under-tens select worlds to destroy.

Jack wondered if he should have tipped Vader.

He got into the driver’s seat and made sure that the Hickman line
emergency kit was still in the glove box of the car beside the sterilizing gel, in case Sophie began hemorrhaging through the line and it needed to be clamped.

“Can you stop kicking the back of my seat, please?”

“Sorry, Dad.”

He plugged his phone into the cigarette lighter to charge, in case something happened en route and they needed to call in an emergency. He pulled the road atlas from beneath the passenger seat and memorized the route home to Manchester. Then he checked which hospitals were close to the route and tried to recall which ones had accident and emergency departments. This was in case Sophie began fitting, or lost consciousness, or was stung by a wasp or bee and needed a precautionary injection of adrenaline to stop her small body from going into shock.

“Can you
stop
kicking my seat?”

“Sorry.”

He winked at her in the rearview mirror. He didn’t mind, really. If anything he liked it—found it reassuring that she wound him up in the ways a normal kid might.

A movement in the mirror caught his eye, and Jack turned in his seat to see Kate and Zoe starting out across the car park. Zoe’s head was down. Kate was walking slowly, making it easy for Zoe to come alongside her if she wanted to, but Zoe walked a few paces behind. He wondered if she regretted having come along.

He leaned across to make sure that the small cylinder of emergency oxygen for Sophie was accessible in the side pocket of the passenger door. He checked its air line for kinks or obstructions. He gave the spigot on the head of the cylinder a quarter turn and put the oxygen mask to his ear to check it was delivering. Then he closed the oxygen tap and replaced the cylinder in the door pocket.

He looked up again and adjusted the rearview mirror to watch Zoe and Kate approach the car. They paused while something was said, then they briefly hugged. He knew he wasn’t the most sensitive observer but
the signs were hard to miss this morning: these rushes the two women made to the brink of disintegration, followed by the check, and the careful backing down. They’d been like this all the way down here in the car. It was always an intricate friendship to navigate, this bittersweet affection of rivals, and yet it seemed more urgent today.

Kate got in the back seat next to Sophie, took her cheeks in her hands, and went to kiss her on the forehead. Sophie squirmed and took evasive action, the way any healthy eight-year-old tomboy would. Jack smiled. You collected these signs of normality. You took them to the bank, knowing that if you saved up enough of them, then the compound interest would eventually grow your deposit into a child in remission.

Zoe got into the passenger seat next to Jack.

He glanced across at her. “Everything okay?”

She tilted her head. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

Jack said nothing.

“What?” she said.

“Let’s go, for God’s sake,” said Kate from the back.

He shrugged, released the hand brake, and reversed five yards. Sophie announced that she needed a wee. Jack smiled. It was all the Ribena: the Stormtroopers had been very free with it. He eased the car five yards forward again, reapplied the hand brake, and sat looking straight ahead.

Kate undid Sophie’s seat belt and helped her to go at the edge of the car park, tucked away behind a van. Jack and Zoe watched the pair of them.

“You’re more dad than human now,” she said.

He ignored the jibe. “You’re frazzled today.”

Zoe snorted. “You know how to make a girl feel special.”

“Overtraining?”

“Overthinking, maybe.”

“It was good of you to come. It means a lot to Kate.”

He let himself look across at her.

She said, “Sometimes it all gets a bit heavy, you know?”

Jack gripped the wheel a little tighter. “Are you okay with it?”