Star Shot (16 page)

When they reach the animal wall Dan gets Teddy out of the buggy and lifts him up onto his shoulders. Small hands grab his hair and pull. Stop it, you menace, he says; don't tug like that. He holds both of the child's feet together with one hand, and steers the empty buggy expertly along the pavement with other; they count the blackened animals along from right to left, making, where possible, the appropriate noises until a tiger-roar cuts out like engine stalling, and Dan hurries them through a slice of silence, and in through the gate. He lifts the boy down from his shoulders and sets him loose to run in zigzags across the grass. He guesses they are probably heading for the climbing tree, with its thick low branches grazing the lawn. But a flash of yellow up behind the castle distracts them both. There are diggers. They go and investigate,
digger
being one of Teddy's few but powerful words, and diggers in action counting as high entertainment for them both.

The job is just beginning, and seems to involve, as far as he can make out from a complicated information panel, shoring up the eroded banks of the leat behind the castle and hooking the water away back down to the river somewhere near the bridge.
Shoring up these fragments
, he thinks, automatically.
Shoring up these fragments against
. One of the guys in orange grins and waves at them. Teddy looks up at Dan, delighted, and for the first time, completely, he sees Jane smile.

It gets cold, watching the diggers, and after a while he chases Teddy back down towards the bright flowerbeds and the friendly curving tree. He sits on the horizontal trunk and watches the child climb like an inexperienced koala. The smile flickers in his head like the fragment of a song.

So many ways  that we don't die.

49.

Stinks in here, says the thin girl in the vest. I only came in for a cup of tea, not a fuckin curry, not for breakfast, Jesus, who has curry for breakfast?

Lina keeps on frying; onion, garlic, cardamom, spices.
It is best not to apologise. It is best not to say anything at all.

I'm sorry, she says, quietly, without looking up. I'm cooking supper now because it will be late when I get in. I won't be long.

The girl pushes past her, fills the kettle, puts it on. Fuckin stinks it does, she says to herself as much as anyone, I only came in for a cup of tea.

Lina pulls the rings on a can of tomatoes, a can of chickpeas, and adds them to the pan. She says nothing more. The girl makes her tea and sits up on the bar stool by the counter. She gets her phone out of her jeans, swears at it, puts it back. She heaps sugar into her tea and stirs it, then waves the spoon at Lina's back; the scars run like tiger claw-marks, like glacial striation, up the inside of her thin white arms to the crook of the elbow.

You need to get out, she says, not threatening, not vicious, just matter of fact. Jen and some of the others been saying it, and now there's two more coming in this weekend. Not because you're a paki, it's just there's no room, see. These new girls need more help; you got a job. And no one's beating the shit out of you. You need to get out you do. Make us all some room.

Lina stirs the contents of the pan to stop it sticking. The idea of a sprig of fresh coriander flits through her head. The idea of her sister stirring something similar, but for a larger number of people, somewhere in Palestine, flits through her head. It would have been better, she thinks, if it could simmer for ten more minutes, much better, to have it quietly simmering there while she did a few jobs round the tiny kitchen. But she turns off the ring, and tips everything, much too hot, into a plastic bowl. She washes and dries the pan, puts a lid on the plastic bowl, and opens the fridge.

Don't put it near my stuff, says the girl. Stinks, it does.

Lina rearranges the food on the crowded top shelf but her bowl still won't fit. She pulls out some items from the back, a half-eaten meat pie rimed with white mould; a chocolate dessert two months out of date, a bag of rancid salad, and puts them carefully on the counter.

These are old, she says. Do you think it's OK to throw them out?

The girl shrugs, suddenly not interested. She is looking at her phone again and seems better pleased this time. Lina puts the food in the bin, and her bowl in the fridge, and leaves her to her tea and her texts.

50.

He has moved things around to make it easier for her during the day, when he is out. Almost everything she needs is in the big kitchen where they eat; the green chair for sleeping and reading, books and magazines and the radio beside it on a shelf. And he has moved the cherrywood table and the curved oak chair from the sitting room, now her bedroom, and placed them under the bay window, looking down through the fruit trees in the garden and over the fields towards the pond, a glimmer in the distance. He can't tell if her eyes can translate the glimmer into water any more, but it makes him feel better to think of her occasionally looking up from her strange drawings towards his place of work.

He doesn't think the rearrangement has been too confusing, and he likes the room this way. He has removed some chairs and a good deal of clutter, it feels more spacious, brighter. Important familiar objects are still in place: pictures and photographs and plates, a worked blanket, a grey stoneware jug. Her clay figures. But the dining table is cleared of its toppling piles of books and papers; he has moved most of them upstairs into one of the bedrooms. Every time he leaves the house he turns the switch on the electric oven off, and gags it with thick black tape; he turns the gas hob off at the canisters outside. He has hidden the iron. Not that he ever uses it, himself, but she might take it into her head to start ironing teatowels or something. His mind is full of possibilities, as if he were the parent of a small child, constantly playing through dreadful scenarios.

He brings flowers back indoors from the field and the woods and the garden. Frothing meadowsweet and sharp dark irises; buttercups and sorrel. She has everything, he hopes, to keep her content in that downstairs space, to stop her wandering up and down, where she could fall, to stop her going into the garden without him and forgetting how to get back in, heading off down the lane perhaps, towards the big road. He thinks of stair-gates, as for a toddler; of an electronic tagging system, a sort of invisible tripwire, as for a low-security prisoner. He thinks of an impenetrable circle of thorns and roses, as for a sleeping princess. And then he thinks that if the silence had got into the valley, and noosed itself around their house, as it had around the museum, around the benches, around the park, it might have kept her in, stopped her drifting – she has always hated to be cold. But the silence is nowhere near them, and never likely to come seeping up their way; the hills, he thinks, will keep us safe.

The first few days were difficult. He felt he could not leave her for more than half an hour at a time. He cancelled or delegated all his jobs for the week, and carried the image of Myra's white room around in his head like an awful shrine. He gave his mother music, classical, soothing; and the stuff she'd always liked, Dylan, Joni, the old blues guys, both of them singing along. He left magazines and newspapers for her to flip through. He cooked as he had always done in the evenings, and represented his brother and his father in increasingly surreal, often lively conversations across the crumpled folds of space and time. When she was deep in one of these discussions she could do things without thinking – dry dishes, sweep up, sort clothes.

Then he found paper in a cupboard upstairs. Big sheets, thick paper, and bundles of pencils, all the Hs, all the Bs, and charcoals, their perfect points untouched. He carried it all downstairs and laid it out for her under the bay window.

Draw something, Mam, he said. I'm going to work now. Draw something for when I get back.

51.

After seven days of waiting, and with doctors and nurses seeming to come round less and less often, Myra decides she must learn to walk. She has managed for quite a while now to get over to the ensuite toilet in the corner of her room by first sliding into the chair, resting, and then working her way slowly, head-down, along the windowsill, refusing to make eye-contact with the huge gull looking in sideways at her. But that is all compromise, she thinks. Almost as bad, though not quite, as slithering across the floor on your belly. She must get vertical, and on her own, since no one appears inclined to help.

She wonders, now, if she had had a phone that worked, and if she had given him her number, whether they might have talked, or texted. But the dead thing in her handbag has long since lost the power to connect with the very few numbers stored inside it: Elin, her mother, no longer answering, a cousin and two old schoolfriends, the secretary at work and the doctor. Since she came back from London
she has had no email account outside work, has never been on any kind of social network, and never shopped online; she has made herself as light and as invisible as humanly possible, at least without being some kind of spy or criminal. All she had wanted then was to not be found; now she is not so sure. It all depends, she supposes, who finds you first.

They had left the zimmer-frame. She wakes one afternoon and stares it down coolly for a while; then she slides into her chair and sets off round the windowsill as usual. But on her return she lets go of the edge and grasps the light metal instead. Keeping her head down to cheat gravity, and taking one step at a time, she gets about half-way back before the dark tide comes rushing in; she summons just enough strength to stumble forward and pitch onto the bed. It's a start.

So one morning when Lina comes in pushing her cleaning trolley she finds herself face to face with Myra, pale as porcelain, pushing her metal frame. They look at each other for a long moment, and then Myra says, very slowly, if you make me laugh, or cry, I will probably fall over. Also, I think I'm stuck. Lina nods, carefully expressionless, and comes over with a hand outstretched. Let go of the frame, she says, you can walk to the bed with me, look.
Myra is breathing quickly, like a cat, and her eyes are narrowed in concentration.

Come.

There is more strength in hands, even small hands, thinks Myra, than in metal frames. Holding Lina's, she makes it to the bed, and lies flat for a minute or so to keep the darkness at bay, before raising herself on her pillows and gesturing for Lina to sit on the bed beside her.

Thank you, she says, I really was stuck.

Lina smiles and strokes the white hand, then sighs and shakes her head and gets to her feet. I have to get on with this, she says, I'm running late. They'll be round to check up on me soon, it's a quality audit morning. They'll be round this way.

Just empty the bin, says Myra, the room's perfectly fine. I'm really sorry to have made you late.

Lina stands with one hand on the trolley and tries to smile. But after last night, the kindness is too much, it breaches her.

When I got back to the hostel, where I stay, last night, she says. When I got back, the food I had prepared in the morning, the food in the fridge, it was all over the kitchen, thrown around, in the sink, on the walls, on the sides, on the floor, it was everywhere, it took a long time to clean up, an hour, maybe more. They want me to leave. I am taking up space. Because nobody is beating the shit out of me, the girl said; I have to make room.

Myra has wrapped her arms tight round her knees, and her face is full of pain. What will you do? she asks. What will happen tonight?

Lina shrugs, shakes her head, and reaches for the binliner in her trolley. It will be fine, she says. You get well. You get well now.

But Myra is sliding off the bed again trying to get at the bag in her locker. She fumbles the zip and roots around inside. Pulls out keys.

My flat, she says, waving them. My flat. Come back after your shift and I'll tell you how to get there. The fridge might be horrible. But it's nice enough, the place. There used to be a little orange tree, I can't remember if I asked Elin … no, ah no, I'm afraid it's probably dead.