by Liz Williams
Stella
From the house, Stella watched her sisters bagging apples in the garden. Foreshortened, their figures looked oddly similar. Sam was elsewhere; he’d morphed, fairly seamlessly, into a kind of handyman figure: not, God forbid, a forelock tugging subservience, but a kind of extra brother. Like Dark, Stella thought. They could all do with extra brothers. In Stella’s head, Sam had become a sort of counterweight to Tam Stare, as though the universe was sending them pairs. Sam and Tam, like flowerpot men.
Wincing, Stella went down the stairs and out into the yard. She found Sam himself cleaning tools in a shed, whistling faintly.
“I was going to take that stuff to the recycling. The co-op takes metal, they told me. Do you want anything in town?”
“We’re nearly out of milk.”
“I’ll swing by the shop.”
Together, they loaded the detritus which had accumulated in the shed: old radios, PC cables, a defunct television. Things that you mark for disposal but which somehow never go away unless a determined effort is made. Stella was not sure what the co-operative did with them, but the important thing was that they were put to good use and did not come back again. She slammed the Landrover door shut and took off down the drive, grinding through mud and cow slurry. It felt rugged, driving the Landrover; Stella liked it. It was higher than a normal car, too. You could see over the bare hedges, down the long slopes of fields made vivid by sudden sunlight. A shaft of watery light caught the tower at the summit of the Tor and turned it to gold. A fairy-tale tower; what it needed now was a princess.
But Stella needed to concentrate on the winding lane ahead of her. There was a person in the road; as the Landrover barrelled towards them, they stepped back into the hedge. It was, Stella saw, Dana Stare. Shit! Pretend you haven’t seen her! She might want a lift! And indeed, it felt for a moment that smoky tentacles of intent were reaching out from Dana, whose white smiling face she glimpsed for a second as she sped by. Wanting me to pick her up. Well, I won’t. Feeling childishly relieved at having got away, Stella glanced into the rear view mirror and saw something long and dark slinking into the hawthorn. Either Dana had walked away very quickly indeed, or – Stella gave her head a little shake. She wouldn’t put it past Dana to keep polecats, or weasels. Something a bit sleek and vicious, anyway. The tower at the top of the Tor was no longer bright. Stella pulled into the normality of Tesco’s car park with some gratitude.
That evening, after a sharp shower of rain, Stella walked to the churchyard to see Abraham. The drain had overflowed, sending a rivulet of water down the lane and transforming it into a little stream. Her grandfather was sparkling about the point of his tomb.
“I thought we’d have too much cloud,” Stella said, by way of greeting.
“You’re in luck. It’s blown through. It’ll come in the east.”
Stella felt again that prickle of Christmas-night anticipation. “Too early yet, though?”
“A little. But Venus is up.” Stella looked over to the indigo ridge of the low western hills and saw a single bright star, hanging beneath the moon. She laughed. “They’ve all come out in their finery, to greet him.”
“They have.”
“Abraham, do you know a family called Stare?”
“There was a man of that name near Priddy. A cowman, if I remember rightly. Not a nice man. Not much to say, and violent. His wife always looked afraid.”
“Charming.”
“He must be long dead now, though – this was years ago when I was a boy. During the war. Why?”
“There’s a brother and sister called Stare hanging around the Amberleys. I don’t like them.”
“Caro has – resources. I wouldn’t worry too much.”
Stella leaned back against a gravestone. “You’re probably right.” The evening was deepening.
“Look over your shoulder,” Abraham said.
She did as he told her. “Oh!” There was again that smudge on the eastern sky, that cosmic thumbprint. It looked unreal.
I’ll come when the comet comes.
“It’ll be here for a while, as I told you the other day,” her grandfather said.
“For Apple Day.”
The wet chill was growing, too, creeping into Stella’s bones even through the borrowed Barbour. She said goodbye to her grandfather and went down the church path, between the gravestones, suddenly remembering that this was the lych path, the corpse path by which coffins were carried. And as she thought that, she saw a light in the church itself, through the porch.
The church wasn’t even supposed to be open. Normally, due to its age and famous decoration, it was kept locked. A warden, maybe, someone seeing to the flowers? Or the vicar? Stella stepped cautiously forwards. The light was bobbing about, like a will o’ the wisp. She didn’t like the prospect of going into the church, but her curiosity was impelling her forwards. She should have brought a golf club. Or a fucking shotgun. Surely that ancient horned thing couldn’t manifest on consecrated ground? You never bloody knew, Stella thought.
Once inside the porch, she hesitated. The light was still there, moving about, but she couldn’t hear anything. The door creaked as she pushed it. The light, a pale yellow ball, was dancing above the altar and as Stella stepped into the church, it changed. The ice plain rolled out before her, the black sky seeded with stars. Her foot slipped on a patch of snow.
“Stella!”
She turned. Alys crouched in a leafless tangle of alder, which stood in a bank of ice. A frozen river ran beside it, its spiralling coils silent and still.
“Mum?” Stella quavered. But it wasn’t, not quite. Alys’ red locks were bound with wool and silver, hung with bone. Woad-blue bands decorated her wrists. She wore layer of skins. Her face, peering out of the bare branches, was a white curve like a skull.
“Mum? What are you doing there? Where are we?”
Alys grimaced. “I got stuck, Stella!”
“For fuck’s sake!”
“You’ll have to get me out. I can’t – I had to change to get here, you see.”
“How?” Stella had been speaking of rescue, not the mechanics of the trap, but she could feel the land pulling at her, trying to suck her in – “Stella, go! Now!” She could see the alarm in Alys’ half-familiar face. “It’ll take you, too!”
Stella tried to step back, but the land tugged at her, she could feel cold webs about her. Alys did not seem able to move from the tree. Then Stella was surrounded by a cascade of blue sparks. The little lights pulled her away, out of the silent freeze of the land, and into the peace of Hornmoon church. Ornamental texts flowed about the walls and a single night light flickered on the stand for prayer candles as her grandfather faded, over and out.
I’ll come when the comet comes.
And so, it seemed, she had.
Serena
Serena went to bed early. She dreaded waking in the small hours, re-running thoughts of her life with Ben like an old black and white movie, jerky and flickering. But she did not like the idea of taking sleeping pills: they sent her too far under, drowning deep, so that she swam to wakefulness through the consistency of an old London fog. She set the pill box firmly aside and relied on hot milk instead, like an invalid child.
Far into the night, however, she did wake up, startled to find that she’d slept. Something had woken her. The nightlight, beside her bed, flickered, casting long shadows across the familiar comfort of the room. Serena, muzzy, investigated it section by section: nothing was different. She got out of bed, picked up a wrap and went onto the landing. Bella’s door stood ajar. Serena, fearing horrors, peeped inside and saw her daughter’s still, huddled form. Serena held her breath for a second and Bella sighed and stirred. Nothing to see there. Relieved, Serena padded down the stairs into the hall, feeling as though she was out of place. The front door was covered at night by a heavy satin curtain, partly for effect and partly to keep out draughts, but the shell-shaped fanlight above it suddenly blazed with light as the motion sens
or came on. Someone was out there. Probably a prowling cat, Serena told herself firmly. Get a grip. She pulled the curtain aside and looked through the spyhole.
Ben was standing on the step. He stood facing away from her, head bowed, but she would have known his figure anywhere. Hands trembling, she unbolted the door and dragged it open, expecting to find him gone, but he was still there.
“Ben?” she whispered. “Oh God…”
He turned. His face was white in the harsh illumination of the motion sensor and in it his mouth formed a black ‘o.’ He was speaking, but she could not hear what he said. His eyes looked like river water. She faltered his name, but he did not move, did not reach out a hand or take a step forward. It occurred to her that he did not even know she was there, that he had appeared as a fetch, a shadow on the face of the city, and could not see her at all. Then he was going, moving fast and sailing up like a blown leaf above the knobbly branches of the plane trees, gone against the night. The motion sensor light clicked off, decisively, and Serena sank down into a cold huddle on the step, alone.
Stella did not say: you imagined it. Or, you really ought to move on. Or any of those things. Instead, her voice a little echoing on the other end of the phone in the hall in Mooncote, she said, “I think there’s a train at quarter to ten. Sam can run me to the station. I can be in London by noon.”
Stella
Resting her head against the glass, Stella watched the green world whip by with mixed feelings. Back in the Smoke. She might as well be a milkmaid with straw in her hair for all the awkwardness she was feeling – not for the situation, or Serena, but for her relationship with London. It occurred to her that this had been the One. Mr Big. Not a man, at all, or a girl, but a city, ever since she’d started going up to town in her early teens, hanging out in Camden and the clubs, much too young. Didn’t seem to have done her a lot of harm, though, and Alys had sanctioned it, in a vague sort of way. The memory of her mother, deerskin dressed, in the alder tree was still with her, like a haunt. She didn’t know quite what she was going to tell Serena, but would face that once the Ben thing was out of the way.
She had shared the vision with Bee and Luna and Sam.
“We should go to the church,” Bee said. “You go up to town and sort out Serena. Bring her back here if you have to.”
“Divide and conquer,” Sam said. “As long as someone stays here, your mum said.” Luna had, uncharacteristically, reached out and touched her sister’s hand.
“Don’t worry. We’ll find Mum, if she’s there to be found. I’ve seen her once already. We’ll find her.”
Didcot Parkway, Reading. The Dickensian backs of houses, the distant column of a mosque. Then the train was grinding into Paddington. Stella felt her heart lift. It had been a good thing to go back home and she would return there soon, but it was great to be back in the wicked city. Young woman, sadder but wiser, returns to the purity of the rural world and is healed by the power of nature was not going to be Stella’s story. Not quite. Clubs and pubs and the swarming streets could not be abandoned for long.
She caught a bus, not the Tube; she did not feel ready to venture into the maw of the underground just yet. She wanted to see. The bus, up top, allowed her to reconnect, first with the babel of streets around the station and then the pale quietness of west London’s Georgian facades. Serena lived in one of these lighthouse houses. It was starting to rain when Stella got off the bus; she slipped through the monochrome streets quickly, until she reached her sister’s front door.
Serena looked a bit wan and freaked out, but not quite a wreck. Her hair was still damp, curling a little at the ends.
“Showering!” said Stella. “That’s good.”
Serena pulled a face. “At least I no longer stink. Do you want some tea?”
“Tea is always good.”
She waited until they were seated at the scrubbed oak table, in Serena’s blue and white kitchen with its view up into the garden, before she began to broach obvious subjects.
“How do you actually know he’s dead?”
“I just – really felt it.”
“But no one’s actually rung you up and told you he’s dropped off his perch? I googled him on the train. There’s nothing in the news. Okay, he’s not exactly a household name but he’s not no one, either. If he’d been found dead, it would have hit the papers. Look at poor what’shername Geldof. That was all over the tabloids for days.”
“If he’d been found.”
“And he’s not – then what, being eaten by cats?”
Serena actually laughed, though it sounded more like choking. “I don’t think Bast and Bertie would have started on him just yet.” Those being Ben’s cats, Stella recalled.
“A mate of mine had a friend in the police in Bristol – he said cats always eat you. Dogs never do.”
“Nice.”
“You have rung him up, I suppose? Ben, I mean.”
“Yes. Twice. But if he’s not dead, I don’t want to come across as a bunny boiler.”
Stella had to admit that she had a point.
“At the moment, and please understand that in no way am I blaming you, because there is so much weird shit going on at the moment that I would not be surprised if Ben suddenly had the ability to project himself out of his body and astrally visit you… at the moment, we don’t actually know if he’s dead or not. And there’s no evidence that he is. So I think we, or probably better I, should go and find out.”
Serena, fingers wrapped around her mug, was silent for a minute. Then she said, “Okay. Yes. But I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to go.”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to go, either. I’ll go.” Stella took a final bite of her cracker and stood up. “In fact, I’ll go now.”
This time, because of speed, she did take the Tube, heading across town from Notting Hill Gate, up on the Northern Line to Camden. Coming out of Camden tube station was a blast from the past: it hadn’t changed much, but then, Stella reminded herself, it wasn’t all that long since she’d been there. It just felt like a long time. She was tempted to nip into the World’s End for a quick restorative white wine, but that could wait. She was on a mission. She avoided a puddle of dried vomit and hurried on.
Ben lived some distance south of the market, above a shop that was now, inevitably, selling cheap leather goods and trying hard to differentiate itself from its competitors by a sequence of peculiar, attenuated mannequins in the window, all with shocks of neon hair and gaping open mouths. They looked like cartoons, Stella thought. She pressed the bell on the door which led to Ben’s flat, not really expecting any significant response, but there was an immediate clatter of feet on the stairs. Then the door was flung open and Ben appeared in the gap, in a designer sweatshirt and a pair of jeans that Stella immediately recognised as expensive. He smelled expensive, as well, and he’d had a haircut, which suited him. Not dead, then. In fact, large as life and twice as natural.
He was also apparently delighted to see her.
“You’re here! Great!”
Then his face fell.
“Sorry,” Stella said, cheerfully, not sorry at all. “I’m not who you were expecting, am I?”
“It’s not that I’m not – er, well, not really. You’re not wearing a brown and orange uniform, for a start.”
“Aha,” said Stella. “That well known pastime of ‘waiting in for the courier’?”
“They’re supposed to be delivering some flyers. The tracking said ‘morning’.”
Stella was genuinely sympathetic. It was now close to three. “What bollocks!”
“It’s like bloody dominoes. I’ve got to go down to Chalk Farm and see someone before he has to go out – look, I mean…” He stopped.
“What you mean is, would I stay in while you pop out? Yes, sure. I was only passing. I’m not in a rush.”
She was caught halfway between amusement and outrage, and trying to keep it from her face. So, you dump a girl’s siste
r, then when the latter turns up at your house you immediately enlist her to house-sit for your courier? Fuck off! Thought Stella, but – mission, sister, would be a cunning ruse to get her into the place where she could snoop about… “Not a problem,” Stella breezed.
Ben shot her a grateful smile as she made her way past him up the narrow, creaking stairs.
“Thanks, Stel. It’s good we can – you know.” Stella, not entirely willing to let him off the hook even for strategy reasons, gave him a bright enquiring smile. “Thing is, Serena and I – we’d run out of road and we both knew it. We both had other people. Sometimes it just stops working. But it doesn’t mean that we have to let all connection drop.” His brow was furrowed with sincerity, the bastard.
“Sure, I know how it is,” Stella said, thinking: does Serena know this? Stella was willing to bet that she didn’t. “She told you about this other bloke, then?”
For the first time, Ben looked a little bemused. Stella had the unnerving impression that a mask had closed over his face. “Yes, she – she must have done, mustn’t she?” Then his face smoothed over. “Of course.” He gestured towards the sofa. “Make yourself at home. I won’t be long. But they’re bound to come when I’m out – I really appreciate this. There’s tea in the kitchen. I think there’s some wine in the fridge. Help yourself. I’ve fed the cats.”
“Thanks!” Stella said. “Might see you a bit later, then.”
She waited until the door shut behind him, then ran to the window. There went Ben, perfectly alive and as normal as he’d ever seemed. But he wasn’t. The not-quite-remembering dumping Serena episode had rattled her: he hadn’t even looked like himself for a moment. She watched him out of sight and turned back to the flat. No changes here – it was lined with books and vinyl, retro rock posters, carefully and professionally framed. Bohemian, but too tidy really to be a musician’s flat. And it was big, too. Either family money or the band was doing well enough to pay actual money; she supposed it was possible. They weren’t Coldplay or Mumford and Sons, but they did have a name. Maybe Richard Amberley had coughed up for his son and heir. Lucky Ben, if so. Stella herself had never been able to afford a London flat. The occasional room in a house share, yes: out on the fringes. Hounslow had been particularly grim, Catford not so bad. Now, when she came to town, she stayed with Serena and took care to give her something for it, which Serena tried to refuse. But Stella wouldn’t budge: it wasn’t anywhere near the cost of real rent, but at least she could hold her head up.
