Seeing Stars (3 page)

C lay on the tiles on the kitchen floor for a few cold, quiet

minutes, considering the ever after. Then with her good

hand she punched a long, random number into the keypad,

eleven or twelve digits. After a lot of clicking and

crackling, it rang. “Who is this?” said a man. “My name’s

C and I’m dying from a spider bite,” she said, and described

the incident with the insect and the pre-packed salad

vegetables. The man said, “I’m dying too. I’ve been adrift

in an inflated inner tube in the Indian Ocean for six days

now, and the end is near. I think a shark took my leg but I

daren’t look.” “Why don’t you call for help?” she asked.

“Why don’t you?” he replied. His name was Dean. They

chatted for a while, not caring a hoot about the cost of

premium-rate international calls during peak periods. “Is it

dark there?” C wanted to know. “Yes. Are you married?”

asked Dean. C replied, “I’ve had no luck with men, even

though I’m a lovely person and I’ve taken good care of my

body.” “What’s your best feature?” “My laugh,” said C,

laughing. “And my lips, which have never received the

attention they deserve.” The poison had reached as far as

her windpipe and was tightening around her throat. Dean

said, “Do you think we could have made it together?” “I

think so,” she whispered. “I don’t like courgettes,” Dean

joked, and those were his last words. “I would have done

broccoli instead,” she breathed, “or even cauliflower.

Whatever you asked for I would have made.”

There was a horrible pause as we sat there wondering

whether or not to applaud, then the curtains closed.

I’ve been writing a lot of poems recently about my

difference but my tutor isn’t impressed. He hasn’t said as

much, yet it’s clear that as far as he’s concerned my

difference doesn’t
cut much ice.
He wants me to dress my

difference with tinsel and bells and flashing lights, or sit it

on a float and drive it through town at the head of the May

Day Parade. “Tell me one interesting fact about your

difference,” he says, so I tell him about the time I lost my

difference down the plughole in a Bournemouth guesthouse

and had to fish it back with a paperclip on a length of

dental floss. He says, “Er, that’s not really what I had in

mind, Henry.” Basically he needs my difference to die in a

crash, or be ritually amputated in a civil war. Then he

shows me a prize-winning poem (one of his own in fact)

about a set of twins whose differences were swapped at

birth by a childless midwife, and who grew up with the

wrong differences, one in the bosom of the Saudi Royal

Family and the other beneath the “jackboot of poverty,” and

who met in later life only to discover that their differences

were exactly the same. He wants me to lock my difference

in a coal cellar until it comes of age then take it outside and

reverse over with the ride-on mower, thus making my

difference
very different indeed,
or auction my difference in

the global marketplace, or film it getting a “happy slapping”

in a busy street, or scream the details of my difference into

the rabbit hole of the cosmos hoping to bend the ear of

creation itself. I tell him I once swallowed my difference

without water on an empty stomach, but he isn’t listening

any more. He’s quoting some chap who went at his

difference with a pair of pinking shears. He’s talking about

such and such a poet who threw his difference in front of

the royal train, or had it beaten from him by plain-clothed

officers and rendered down into potting compost or

wallpaper paste, or set fire to his difference on primetime

national TV. And when I plead with him that no matter

how small and pitiful my difference might seem to him, to

me it makes all the difference in the world, he looks at me

with an expression of complete and undisguised and

irreversible indifference.

Leo burnt his hand very badly on a jet of steam

which hissed from his toasted pitta bread as he

opened it up with a knife. The visiting nurse said,

“Are you sure you haven’t been beating up your

wife?” “Excuse me?” said Leo. “Are you sure you

didn’t sustain this injury during the course of

physically assaulting your wife?” questioned the

nurse. Leo was shocked. “It’s a burn,” he said.

“Of course it’s a burn, but who’s to say she

wasn’t defending herself with a steam iron or a

frying pan? Do you cook your own meals, sir, or

do you insist on your wife doing the housework?”

Leo was flabbergasted. “I’m not even married,”

he said. “Yeah, right, and I’m the Angel of the

North,” she said, throwing him a roll of lint as she

barged out of the house and slammed the door

behind her.

Leo really wasn’t married. His friends were

married. Both of them. One was even divorced.

But Leo was a bachelor and not at all happy with

the situation. Bachelor—the word tasted like

diesel in his mouth. However, that night in the

pub he met Jacqueline, a young blind woman

from York, and they talked for a while on the

subject of Easter Island, about which neither of

them knew anything, and after an hour they were

still talking, and a few moments later their knees

touched under the wooden table. For him it was

like a parachute opening. For her it was like

something involving an artichoke. He lifted his

hopelessly bandaged hand to within a millimetre

of her cheek and said, “Jacqueline, I’ll never hurt

you. I wouldn’t do that. Everything’s going to be

all right from now on and you’re safe. Jackie, I

love you. Do you understand?”

They’d overbooked the plane. “At this moment in time,”

announced the agent at the counter, “Rainbow Airlines

is offering one hundred pounds or a free return flight to

any passenger willing to stand down.” A small man in a

cheap suit and Bart Simpson socks scratched his ankle.

“One hundred and fifty pounds,” she announced, fifteen

minutes later. Nobody moved. “Two hundred?” From

nowhere, this neat-looking chap in a blue flannel jacket

and shiny shoes loomed over the desk and said, “I’ll take

the money.” “But you’re the pilot,” she said, then added,

“Sir,” as if she’d walked into a Japanese house and

forgotten to take off her shoes. The pilot whispered,

“Listen, I need that money. I’m behind on my mortgage

payments because my wife’s a gambler. I’ve got two

sons at naval college—the hats alone cost a small fortune

—and I’m being blackmailed by a pimp in Stockport. Let

me take the two hundred, you’d be saving my life.”

I’d been sitting within earshot, next to the stand-up

ashtray. “Give him the money,” I said. “Who are you?”

asked Dorothy (she was wearing a plastic name-badge

with gold letters). “Dorothy, I’m George,” I said, “and

clearly this man’s in pain. I don’t want him going all

gooey midway over the English Channel. I once heard

sobbing coming from the cabin of a Jumbo Jet at thirty-

three thousand feet, and it sounded like the laughter of

Beelzebub.” “But who’ll fly the plane?” she wanted to

know. “Why me, of course.” I opened my mouth so she

could see how good my teeth were—like pilot’s teeth.

“Do you have a licence?” she asked. I said, “Details,

always details. Dorothy, it’s time to let go a little, to trust

in the unexplained. Time to open your mind to the

infinite.” By now my hand was resting on hers, and

a small crowd of passengers had gathered around,

nodding and patting me on the back. “Good for you,

George,” said a backpacker with a leather shoelace

knotted around his wrist. It was biblical, or like the end

of a family film during the time of innocence. I said,

“Dorothy, give me the keys to the cockpit, and let’s get

this baby in the air.”

“Let’s get married at the zoo!” exclaimed Scott. “Perfect,”

said Charlene. They found the name of a humanist minister

in the Yellow Pages and he arranged to meet them at 15:30

by the elephant house. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer

the glass wall of the penguin tank as a backdrop?” asked the

minister. “They’re so vivacious and life-affirming.” “No,

here’s fine,” said Scott. “Perfect,” agreed Charlene. “Then

let’s begin. Do you, Scott, believe that friendship and

decency underpin the essence of humanity?” “I do,” said

Scott, removing a stray hair clinging to Charlene’s lip.

“And do you, Charlene, agree to hand over the universe to

future generations in an improved and morally enhanced

condition?” “I do,” said Charlene, “I most truthfully do.”

But before the minister could pronounce them husband and

wife, a hulking brute of a man in dirty waders and a peaked

cap came galumphing towards them, bellowing, “What the

bloody hell fire is going on here?” The minister had sidled

away very smartly and was pretending to admire the

aardvark. “We’re getting married,” said Scott. “Not in my

zoo you’re not,” said the man. “Have you no respect for

these creatures, flaunting your humanness in front of them?

Can’t you see how defeated and ashamed they are? Have

you looked the orang-utan in the face?” Scott said, “But

we’re nature lovers.” The zookeeper guffawed. “You’re a

pair of hypocrites. Now fuck off.” Charlene’s heart sank to

the sea bed of her stomach. She hadn’t wanted to hear a

word like that on her wedding day. “Go on, leave this

place. The capybara needs its toenails cutting, and when I

come back I want to find you supremacists gone.”

It rained and there were no taxis. The silk dress Charlene

had ordered from a tailor in Wushi began to perish in front

of her eyes, and the scar on his back where Scott had once

been treated for shingles began to throb and burn. Back in

the house they argued like flamethrowers. But later, after

two bottles of chilled Veuve Clicquot and a tray of Dublin

Bay oysters in bison grass vodka, they pushed the coffee

table to one side and in front of a glowing fire dispensed

with restraint for the first time in their lives. For the heart

shall never relinquish its claim on the crown, and from

love’s furnace shall the golden infant be born. And I

should know, because my name is Sean Wain, Australian

test cricketer, peerless spinner of a red leather ball and their

beautiful bastard son.

Stealing from his mother’s house, Edward came

across a handwritten note tucked away in a scallop-

shell purse.

“As a child, Edward liked to climb trees in the

plantation and make dams in the stream at the foot

of the garden, and once carved a toy rifle out of a

table leg. But right from the very beginning there

was a craving emptiness in Edward’s life. Board

games and soft toys, space-hoppers and bikes—the

more it was given the deeper and wider it grew. All

sweetness was rancid on Edward’s tongue and all

teachers and doctors were assassins and spies. All

handshakes were tentacles, all compliments were

veiled threats, all statements and assessments were

worthless confessions obtained under torture, all

care plans were Byzantine conspiracies of evil

intent. Awake and asleep Edward stalked the

battlements alone, meeting the emissaries of peace

with the point of a bayonet, beading friendship in

the crosshairs of suspicion, scanning the open plane

from the watchtower so as to ride out and beat until

dead the first flames of tenderness or the sparks of

love. He is survived by his mother, Eleanor, from

whom he took everything, but who would give it all

again just to let him scream his agonies into her face

or pound his fury into her breast one final time. He

left no note.”

Edward opened the wardrobe, which was empty

except for the greatcoat, which slumped towards

him then engulfed him as he hauled it from the rail.

The huge, overburdening coat with its stiff, turf-like

cloth, and its triceratops collar, and its mineshaft

pockets, and the drunken punches of its flailing

sleeves. Through the neat bullet hole in the back,

daylight looked distant and pinched, like the world

through a dusty telescope held back-to-front to the

eye. And there Edward wept, crouched in the

foxhole, huddled in a ball under the greatcoat,

draped in the flag.

The elf said to Kevin, “You’re probably wondering why

I’m sitting here at your breakfast table this morning,

helping myself to your condiments. Kevin, I’m here to

make you a very special offer—let’s call it a once-in-a-

lifetime opportunity. Today you’re forty-four years and

thirty-six days old, and that’s exactly how long you’ve got

left! Let me save you the mental arithmetic: you’re going

to live till you’re eighty-eight years and seventy-two days,

and you’ve just crossed the halfway line. It’s what we

elves like to call ‘the tipping point.’ So, Kevin, as of now,

you can either carry on regardless and pretend we never

met. Or say the word, and I can flip the hourglass on its

head. Do you see what I’m saying? So instead of getting

older you’ll be heading back in the other direction. I’ve got

all the forms—you just sign here, here and here and it’s

goodbye incontinence, hello Ibiza! What do you say,

Kevin?”