by Glass, Lisa
‘Oh my flipping God,’ my mum said. ‘She’s been attacked.’
Han ran over to her. I was hot on his heels.
‘Jesus Christ, Gran! What happened?’
‘The cut on my face is not deep but I will be needing a tourniquet for my thumb, dear. Not at Christmas. Not in five minutes time. Right now, please.’
She had opened her hand and a big gash ran around her thumb, purplish blood spilling out in fat drops. It looked pretty gross.
Without saying another word, Han unpicked his Doc Martens and made a little tourniquet out of the lace. His hands shook really badly.
The Producer of the show saw the commotion and nodded for the models and cameramen to move away. Maybe they was planning on leaving on anyway, or maybe the Producer just didn’t want the show to be caught up in any local drama that might involve policemen and delays.
The catwalk queens grumbled a bit and got back into the pink coach and it turned in the direction of the old army barracks.
‘Is she alright?’ I said, wondering if Han’s granny might drop dead of a heart attack. I hoped she wouldn’t because if she did, Han would have to go back to his folks in Loughborough. I felt guilty for that thought.
‘Someone should call an ambulance,’ Han said.
‘What happened?’ I asked her, as casually as I could.
‘Looks like she’s been mugged,’ my dad butted in. My mum was clucking around Han’s granny, patting her back and shushing her, as if she was three rather than a-hundred-and-three.
The old lady piped up.
‘I do not require an ambulance. My injury is not in the least life threatening. I have sustained far worse than this, I can assure you. I will be fine now that Han has stemmed the blood loss.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ I said.
‘There is such a thing as shock, you know,’ my mum said, making manic telephone gestures to me and mouthing the words ‘phone them.’
‘Shock can be fatal,’ my dad agreed. ‘Shock kills more people than sharks.’
‘Who did it?’ I said, wondering who would want to hurt an old lady like Han’s granny. Silently betting it was Rick Sylvester.
‘None of you will believe this, of course, but I am almost certain that I have seen a meteorite.’
I sniggered. I couldn’t help it. My mum frowned at me.
‘What? She thinks she’s been hit by a meteor!’ I said, raising my eyebrows.
‘Han,’ the old dear said, glowering. ‘Kindly explain the difference between a meteor and a meteorite.’
Han didn’t say anything.
‘And I did not say I had been hit by a meteorite, only that I had seen one.’
‘Well I never. Dead birds falling from the sky and now meteorites!’ my mum said.
‘I was attempting to locate the extra-terrestrial object, you see. The stone came in on a low trajectory and appeared to come to rest somewhere in the vicinity of the old fox’s den. I was leaning into the den when this happened.’
‘Gran, you can’t be doing stuff like that,’ Han asked.
‘I wished to find the meteorite.’
‘Why?’
‘I have my reasons.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Anyhow, I was kneeling on the ground with my hand in the hole when I felt . . . whiskers. Then some beastly creature bit my thumb. From the glimpse I caught, I believe it was a rat. I was so startled that I fell and cut my cheek.’
‘I wouldn’t have bothered,’ I said.
‘No, you would not have,’ she said.
Han’s granny was German. She’d been in Cornwall for fifty years but she still had a bit of an accent, which was why everything she said sounded like a telling off.
My dad said: ‘If it was a meteorite and had hit you it could have taken your head off. Bet you’re counting your lucky stars? You must think you’ve got a guardian angel.’
Mum was circling and she interrupted before Mrs Schwab could answer to remind us all that Mrs Schwab should really get to Casualty ASAP and not stand around chatting. Nobody paid her much attention.
‘It is merely chance. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is no need to resort to angels as an explanation.’
‘Gran, you shouldn’t even have been walking in the dunes on your own. What if something worse had happened? You might not have been found for days.’
‘Don’t be so dramatic, Han.’
‘Mrs Schwab really must be getting to the hospital now,’ my mum said, pointing at her own chest and doing panicky eyes.
‘I’ll take her,’ my dad said.
‘Thank you, Darren.’
‘I’ll go as well,’ Han said.
Oh god, I thought, my dad and Han trapped in a hospital together for hours.
‘Han, you don’t have to go. Does he?’
Han’s granny gave me a look. It was the kind of look that teachers liked to give me too, and shop assistants when they thought I’d been thieving, and also grave diggers that time I hung around the cemetery because there was nothing else to do.
‘Alright, alright,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Perhaps, young Jenny, you can oblige me by continuing to search for the meteorite?’
I was going to say that I thought she was off her rocker and had probably seen a bit of bird poo land or something, but I stopped myself. I might not have looked like Cleopatra, but I could do something nice for Han and his granny. So instead I said: ‘I’ll go and have a look.’
‘Very well,’ the old biddy said, shaking her head and staring at her hand. ‘It’ll be small, maybe only the size of a pea. And it’ll be blackened, more on one side than the other, from the atmosphere. Don’t expect a large crater. There won’t be one. Look near the big fox den on the largest of the southern dunes. It could be anywhere around there, I suppose. You want a small dark stone that stands out from the native rocks. Do your best.’
‘Be careful of snakes, Jen. There’s adders everywhere in those dunes this time of year,’ Han said.
Han put his arm around his gran’s shoulders and they followed my dad back to Sunny Daze where our old Cortina was parked.
I watched their backs disappear as they followed the road around to the site.
I turned to my mum.
‘Looks like Han’s not coming around for tea tonight after all.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Looks like he won’t be. Ask him around tomorrow instead.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Dad’s going to be with him for hours today at the hospital.’
‘Jenny.’
‘What?’
‘Why don’t you want us to get to know him? Are you ashamed of us or something?’
‘No.’
‘Well then, are you ashamed of Han?’
‘Shut up. Why would I be ashamed of him?’
‘Then why are you acting so strangely?’
I shrugged. Truth is I had a lot of reasons for that. One reason was because of what we’d said and done in the dunes, and another was because of what we did all those years ago.
Chapter 5I went home, had some lunch, watched a bit of telly, had some tea, and then dragged myself off to the dunes. After all, I had promised Han’s granny that I’d look for her space rock. I thought it was a pretty pointless task, but a promise is a promise.
So there I was on my hands and knees amongst the rabbit poo and empty snail shells. There were adders about, more that year than usual. They did their hunting at dusk; people didn’t realise that and thought they’d be safe once the sun went down but it wasn’t true. Adders were around for at least an hour after dark. A couple of dogs had already been bit and a young spaniel bitten on the nose died because there wasn’t any anti-venom at any vets in the whole of Cornwall. I put it out of my mind.
There were crows pecking at things to my right, and sea
gulls strutting about and screeching to my left, and all around me I could see the jittery movements of rabbits.
Suddenly I could sense someone watching me. I looked up. Walking towards me was a tall thin figure, the same one I had seen earlier. This time I saw his face.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked me.
‘None of your business.’
I knew him. Luke Gilbert.
There was a man in a book we studied at school and he never left the house, not even on Sundays to go to church. Boo Radley was his name and he was strange as the Moon, quiet as a mouse, and said to be a cat-killer. Luke was a bit like how I pictured Boo. Tall, skinny and ill-looking. Except, admittedly our Luke had a tan on account of all his roaming.
The teenagers hated him. They thought he was a junkie. They thought he had diseases. AIDS maybe. Someone egged his windows and wrote Kiddy Fiddler on his front door. They said Luke looked at them funny. They said that he stoned birds in their nests and ate their eggs with soldiers. They said that at home, Luke, a grown man, was a quilter. Sitting in an armchair by the window of his house like an old lady and sewing square after square out of his mum’s blouses and his dead dad’s underpants. They said he was a deviant who’d gone off the straight and narrow because he was born wrong in the head and no one was looking out for him.
When his uncle died, Luke came into some money and he bought a smart black jacket. You can’t polish a turd, they said about him then. Doesn’t matter how much time you spend, or how much money, you just can’t polish a turd.
I mostly avoided him because he looked like he could suck out your guts just by talking to you.
‘What’s in the bag?’ I asked, nodding at the hemp sack that he was carrying.
‘Nothing.’
There was definitely something in there. What’s more, I thought I saw the sack move. Was probably some poor wild rabbit that he was taking home to murder. I didn’t want to think about it.
‘Was that you spying on the models earlier?’ I said.
‘Not spying on them. I was photographing them.’
‘That’s even worse. What are you gonna do with the pictures? Actually, don’t answer that.’
‘I have a project.’
‘Really. I don’t want to know.’
‘It’s on representations of beauty.’
‘Sounds fascinating,’ I said, in my most sarcastic voice.
‘I’m going to publish it as a book.’
‘I’ll reserve it at the library,’ I said.
‘You know you shouldn’t be out here alone. Anyone could be about.’
‘I can handle myself.’
‘Anyone could sneak up on you. You wouldn’t even see it coming.’
‘I saw you coming.’
‘Because I approached from the front. I might easily have approached from behind.’
I didn’t like the look on his face.
‘I’ll be fine. If you don’t mind, I’ve got something to do, so I better get on.’
At that moment, the earth moved. Very faintly and just for a few seconds. My fingers tightened in the sand.
‘What was that?’ I said. ‘Not like an earthquake?’
‘Didn’t feel anything,’ he said, making a face.
‘Yeah, you did,’ I said. ‘You must have.’
‘Who cares?’ he said, and sloped off, shoulders hunched like an old man.
I was a bit freaked by the earth tremor thing but I stayed there for almost half an hour without anything else happening. I looked down all the dens and badger setts, and I went on searching this bit of grass, searching that patch of sand, but I couldn’t see that stupid space rock anywhere and the light was failing with every minute.
Even if the thing had landed, it could have been anywhere. A sea gull might’ve taken off with it. They’d eat anything. Ducklings, fag packets, Coke cans. I reckoned I’d done my bit. No point spending all night looking for something that was never going to be found.
I thought again of the girl called Vega. Even with all the excitement, she hadn’t gone out of my mind. I wondered how much weight I would have to lose in order to be as thin as her, and how long it would take me to lose it. I’d have to cut and dye my hair too, and buy straighteners and use products. But even if I looked identical to her, I could never compete with a girl called Vega. Vega! It was ridiculous. Nobody had a name like that. Still, maybe Han liked me just as I was, I thought, dubiously.
The sun was bobbing on the sea in a haze of pink and I was just about to call it a day and go home for supper when a light caught my eye. A fireball was streaking in over the sea from the west. Another meteorite?
Then I realised that I was wrong. Bits of the fireball was dropping off it and into the water and it was coming slower than I reckoned a meteorite would.
The sound of it. Like a million robots being tortured. I sat on my heels and put my hands over my ears. All of us that heard the noise said afterwards that we would never forget it.
Me and my shadow ran after the fireball. Lots of people was out in their gardens wondering what the racket was. My parents, as usual, was nowhere to be seen. Nathan’s little brother Sammy was out in his red pyjamas, hanging on the picket fence and staring at the white smoke in the dark sky.
‘What’s happening, Jenny?’
‘Something bad.’
‘I wanna see.’
‘Go back to bed,’ I said. ‘Your folks know you’re out?’
‘No, they ain’t home. I’m coming with you.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘Yes I am.’
‘Where’s Nathan?’
Nathan was my sort of ex-boyfriend who lived in a chalet next door. We kissed once beneath the bus-stop when it was raining, but I couldn’t take him seriously afterwards because his glasses had steamed up. The next time I saw him, he tried to put his hand up my shirt and I called it off. We were still friends though.
‘At a disco down the town. He likes some new girl.’
‘Get your shoes on.’
Sammy wanted to hold my hand, which he never normally did, but I let him because it was dark and he was only little. Walking up the road was a group of people, and more joined them as they went, like the Pied Piper. We followed them too. Hardly anyone was talking.
The smoke smelt stronger as we walked onwards and it got everywhere. We rounded the corner of the lane. I felt the heat of the flames before my eyes could make out what they were seeing. It made our November bonfires look like the little flame of one match. The blossom trees, the kissing gate, even the flowers on the graves was burning.
Sammy squeezed my hand so hard that it hurt.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘You’re okay.’
He buried his face in my jumper but didn’t say a thing. I held him tight and wished I knew what to say to make it better.
My dad was sitting in the gutter with his head in his hands. The landlady of the pub had eyes on stalks. My mum was crying so hard that her sobs were shaking her whole body. But worse than all of this was the pathetic catwalk queens who spilled out of the pub, screeching loud enough to burst your eardrums. Vega wasn’t there.
I sent a text to Han. Where R U? R U safe?
I turned back to the church and couldn’t hardly blink, my eyes were so shocked. People say that churches can take anything – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, whatever. Even when everything else is flattened, the churches survive. That’s what they say. And people think that churches survive because God is on their side.
Our church, which been there five hundred years, had a small aircraft skewered like a broken toy on its bell tower.
Chapter 6The next day everything was different. It was like the government had announced there was only a week left before the nuclear apocalypse. Everyone was talking in quiet voices and some of the neighbours had come to ou
r door with tears in their eyes and bottles of booze in their hands. Others arrived with bunches of flowers that they said they wanted to leave at the church. The flowers got left in the sink and wilted as the day wore on.
My dad welcomed the booze-bearers into the lounge and sat with them in front of the TV News loops. My mum, not yapped out even after hours of talk, cut up cake and took it with her on her rounds of the site.
‘I got to check on my oldies,’ she said. ‘This will bring back all sorts of memories for the ones that lived through the War. They don’t have the strength to cope with something like this. Not anymore. Not at their age. Old Timothy is said to be very cut up.’
‘Are you going to Mr Hitchcock’s place?’
‘I wasn’t intending to leave him out. We’re a community. All of us. Even him.’
‘Say hi from me,’ I said.
‘You know your father doesn’t like you knocking about with that man.’
‘He helps me with my crazy golf.’
‘A man his age should have better things to do than hang out with a girl your age. Some people would call it inappropriate.’
‘He’s just being nice. There’s nothing dodgy about it.’
What with all of the chaos from the plane, I’d forgotten to ask my mum about the earth tremor.
‘By the way, did you feel that little earthquake we had?’ I said.
‘That wasn’t an earthquake. Tremors happen sometimes on account of all that tin mining they did in the olden days round these parts. There’s a tin mine not four hundred yards from here.’
‘How come we haven’t had them before?’
‘I felt them before.’
‘Like when?’
‘When I was a girl, if you must know. There was a bad one then that knocked tiles off the shop roof. It’s nothing to worry about. If you want to worry, you can spare a thought for that poor family on the plane what was incinerated.’
‘Lovely,’ I said, but it wasn’t lovely at all. Something was really wrong in Hayle. Hundreds of our birds had died, now a family on a plane had been killed right in the middle of our church. My nanna always told me that bad things come in threes. Always threes. If two bad things had happened, she was so superstitious about it that she thought it was safer to make a third bad thing happen yourself and then the three bits of bad luck would be over and done with. So she’d take her favourite bit of china outside and smash it up with a meat hammer. If the two things were really horrible, she’d break the worst thing a person could ever break: a mirror.
