Star Shot

by Mary-Ann Constantine

  And yes, Elin will admit she is worried, because she and Tony want to start a family, please don’t tell anyone, and she knows that maternity leave, like illness, is a wedge in the door, that you may never get your hours back to what they were, that sometimes you don’t get your old job back, you get landed with stuff way down the payscale, or indeed you don’t get any kind of job back at all. Bonny Elin, funny Elin, tired and anxious. Don’t worry, said Myra, reassuring, they know they can’t cope without you, you’ll be fine, you go ahead and have that baby, that’s what matters, don’t let them stop you. And Elin had looked at her then with a kind of dawning despair, and taken her hand and cried a bit and said she was sorry for being so thoughtless, so selfish. No, said Myra, come on now, I’m fine; don’t you be so daft.

  Now she looks sleepily at the last half-lemon in the bowl near her bed, and thinks with satisfaction that she has something appropriate to give the woman in return. Biscuits are better than bluebells, as presents, especially when the bluebells are drooping a little, as hers are by now. She had come again this morning, after missing a couple of days, and had been pleased to find Myra sitting up drinking tea. That’s better, she said. Those lemons are working.

  They are, said Myra. I can feel a difference.

  I’ll bring you more, then, said the woman, if that’s the last one.

  Oh you mustn’t, said Myra. I mean, I love them, they’re beautiful, but you mustn’t put yourself out. Here – let me give you some money for them, at least…

  But of course when she had looked in her handbag and found her purse she had no real money, just coppers and useless cards. She hasn’t needed money for so long that the whole idea of payment felt elaborate and awkward. She was perplexed, but the woman just smiled at her, pulled off one of her rubber gloves, and raised a worn index finger with a blue stone ring.

  I’ll bring one, she said. Just one. Fine?

  Fine, said Myra. Thank you, very much.

  You get well, said the woman, and trundled her cleaning trolley off down the corridor.

  She had read for while then, one of Theo’s odd books, and learned that Genesistrine is a region in the Super Sargasso Sea, and that parts of the Super Sargasso Sea have rhythms of susceptibility to this earth’s attraction. She likes that. Rhythms of susceptibility. She thinks she probably has them herself. And then the new consultant had arrived, a fierce, likeable Scottish woman, to discuss the options for dealing with the symptoms of post-operative early-onset menopause, the possible ways of holding it at bay, so that she wouldn’t be thrown from girlhood, or young womanhood, straight into a fragile and osteoporous old age, her bones as light and brittle as a bird, her hair dry and thinning. It’s thinning anyway, she’d pointed out, from the chemo. I know, the consultant said, but it should come back. And then the nurse had taken her blood-pressure and decided that it might be edging a little closer to Normal. It’s the lemons, Myra had explained, drowsily. They seem to be working. And they had agreed with her about the lemons, and left her to sleep.

  The sleep was interrupted by Elin, who stayed for half an hour or so. It reclaimed her afterwards, not a deep sleep, this time, and its dreams were not dramatic, but fragments of them clung to her as she drifted in and out. Sitting on the lower steps of the building in a summer frock, in the sun, she was holding a creature in her lap, short brownish-grey fur, trembling, not a cat, not a dog, she’d never been keen on dogs. Possibly an aardvark, but she suspected not, she’d have remembered the snout. Holding it safe until the building was ready for it, and could send someone out to collect it.

  She is woken at last by Theo, out of breath and in a state. Two minutes, he gasps. No, one, bugger. Appointment downstairs. No time. Just wanted to tell you I saved your bench from a terrible fate, thought you’d be pleased. Explain later.

  He hurries over and kisses her on the top of her head. She hands him a biscuit.

  I must have known, she says. Look, I saved you this, as a reward.

  47.

  When she is settled and dozing in the big green chair he walks down to the pond for ten minutes of fresh air, hoping she will not wake and be at a loss without him. He feels vaguely guilty for going out at all, but he has to get out, because his head hurts and because although it has only been a matter of weeks since she had the accident he is now not used to having another person at home, not this person; it is not like before. She is so fragile and so confused he cannot see how they can possibly avoid it happening all over again, and worse this time, the fall, the white hospital, the distances in her eyes increasing. She had looked out of the taxi window all the way home. He held her hand. Every few minutes she turned to him with questions she could not formulate and a nervous smile that struck his heart. He had told her the names of places as they passed through them.

  Standing now by the pond’s edge staring down he could swear the horsetails have grown an inch since this morning. Weird things, their perpendicular spears pushing through the water into air; they are just beginning to branch out. Underwater, in that other world, a few of the stems are thick with feeding tadpoles, sticking like iron filings to a thin magnetic rod. Like living chimney-brushes, wriggling totem-poles; tad-poles. He wonders why only two or three stems get chosen for the feast. Crouching down to get a better look his eyes are drawn further in, to the sticklebacks hanging, waiting, flicking away. Little hunters, their skyblue and salmon colours just beginning to intensify. A pale worm thrashes suddenly into view in the mud at the bottom; it looks as if it is being harried, hunted down by a handful of small fish.

  A swift dives across him into a cloud of tiny dancing flies. He straightens up, and the headache returns magnified. He looks across the marshy land towards the hills with a new kind of apprehension, at June buttercups too bright and shiny in the heavy air, at dark green rushes somehow loaded with obscure significance. Only without remembering, without noticing in the first place, could anyone ever assume that early summer must be infallibly lovely. We forget days like these. The air is yellowish, thick with the gathering dead.

  The last time the three of them had sat down together for a meal must have been nearly ten years ago, her seventieth, she hadn’t wanted to go out. They’d all cooked, all at once, different dishes, chopping and frying across each other, drinking wine and beer, dancing round her, teasing, playing the fool. They’d dug out stories for her then, from when they were small, glimpses of games and worlds she was not party to, but whose contexts she remembered far better than they could. Nothing was said about work until after she had gone up to bed, and the two of them sat drinking and talking at the kitchen table. A discussion that got heated. A sheaf of photos thrown down like a gauntlet: figures and faces and buildings. Drunk and frightened and filled with righteous anger, his brother had made him look, and look properly, at every single one. You don’t have to go back, said Theo. You’ve done enough. And his brother had put his weary drunken head down on the table and said nothing more.

  The pictures survived, he thinks, though the photographer had not. They must be in the attic up at the big house somewhere, tucked in a file with all the boxes of stuff. He wonders how Lina got on with the Blaschkas. And then, suddenly stronger and more determined, he turns to walk back up to the cottage, concerned she might have woken, and ready to face the new world indoors. But while his back was turned the evening light has taken sudden hold of swathes of red sorrel lining the path up to the house, and now it flings the colour at him; it is the colour of Myra’s hair, and it hurts.

  48.

  One by one, in a street curving down from near the castle, like lights going out, like teeth falling out, over two or three months, shops have been closing down. They haven’t gone like falling dominos, one neatly after the next; just more and more gaps appearing until there are more gaps than teeth. His landlady’s shop, the hairdressers, is among them. People just stopped coming, she said. Even the old ladies. Like they’d all died or something. And the students, they used to come; we were reasonably priced, see.
I don’t know what’s happened. It’s a mess, it is.

  So the rent has gone up, sharply, and Dan is looking everywhere he can think of for a new home. Two adverts in the launderette came to nothing. The property rental people make no attempt to hide their opinion that a toddler is a liability. I can’t get rid of him, though, can I? says Dan, trying to be reasonable, and the girl just shrugs and says it doesn’t help. Pushing the buggy out into the bright sun he eyes up the distance from the agency to the gaping row. It won’t be long, he thinks. It’s heading your way. You should have been more sympathetic.

  He wavers between the park and the library. He needs the internet to trawl for accommodation, and he needs his fix of stars. But it is a beautiful summery day and Teddy shows no signs of needing a nap, and while he still has his swipe card and free access he feels he should make the most of it. They pass Lina’s bench, and he wonders how she is; wonders where she is. Up at the hospital, no doubt. He could always ask her about getting a cleaning job there, when his money runs out, since having a PhD doesn’t seem to be a handicap. Or maybe she just didn’t tell them. He hopes that she will want to fix up another session of babysitting soon, so that she can look after Teddy and he can go out again on a drop with Theo. But he cannot remember how to get hold of her, there was, she said, some problem with her phone.

  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.