Dan wonders, with subtle regret, why Teddy doesn’t seem to need a nap after lunch these days, even after toddler group this morning, their first time back in about three or four weeks, the pair of them, inevitably, much fussed over. But the move has changed so much, their old routines are gone. And there is not much point, he thinks, in trying to settle him into new ones, since they’ll have to be moving again soon. If he can find somewhere. Though Luke insists he doesn’t mind. Their evenings are enjoyable, the child curled up asleep in a duvet-nest in the corner and them talking over beers, swapping music, films, and Luke reading out good bits from books he likes, until Dan thinks that it might, one day, be possible to read for pleasure again. The slow Californian drawl reciting sections from that crazy man Fort, stars and planets and impossible conglomerations of objects, showers of frogs and little fish raining periodically from the sky. Spinning worlds up there in space and Fort’s own life by then so tightly circumscribed you can count the steps: home, library, home. To boxes and boxes of cuttings and clippings where all the anomalies are stashed. Poor man, he thinks, he would have loved databases as much as Luke does. Retrievable knowledge.
The coffee today is another pleasure. He is beginning to relax, the anxieties retracting their sharp little claws from his heart. Only the thought of Lina really nags at him now; they had gone straight to the Blaschkas this morning, even before Jane’s stars, and walked around them several times, as if performing a spell. She hadn’t materialised. Have you seen a woman in a headscarf, he had wanted to ask the attendant, as if women in headscarves were so very rare you would have to notice, but he had not had the courage. She is never on her bench, and the number he had for her rings meaninglessly: texts fly off into nowhere, bringing nothing back. If she has moved on, he thinks, we will never know. And if it is worse than that. Luke told him about the ginger-haired boy, and he is intermittently wounded by the thought of those blank eyes. I should have tried to talk to him, he thinks. But I was frightened.
He drinks the coffee slowly, and watches Teddy on the steps. He isn’t looking forward to having to move again, it’s all so cumbersome, but he is less angry now at the loss of the little terraced house with the blue door. They’ll find somewhere. And he’s nearly ready again to think about doing some work for Theo, the digging would be good for him, and the company, and they could do with some proper fresh air, and there’ll be new creatures in the pond for Teddy to examine. Theo might have seen her, he thinks, of course. They might be working on something together. He hunts back through his phone for the number and wonders what he should say.
Sorry been out of touch. Do you need a hand digging? Have you seen Lina?
He presses send, and reaches for his mug and looks around him. In the time it has taken him to write the text, Teddy has disappeared.
62.
A woman so careful of everything does not simply lose her phone. Careful of her speech, since the language, though familiar, is not her own; careful of her undemonstrative appearance, of her manners, of the little money she has. She has hunted all around the flat in case the anxiety and excitement of arrival had perhaps made her do something unusual. Her bag, her pockets, are turned out several times over, as if the thing might somehow have materialised from one search to the next. She picks up the useless charger from where it sits coiled neatly by the photo of Ali and the children, and knows that she has not plugged it in since moving. She tries it in Myra’s phone, but of course it does not fit. She has a vivid memory of seeing her phone in her handbag the day before she left the hostel. A cheap, worthless phone, no use to anyone else; only spite would make you steal such a phone. But it had a number, the number beneath her staring face on the Middle East Displaced Persons site, a number which made it at least possible to imagine that one day somebody might get in touch. She is daunted by the loss and the complications that will ensue. She needs to talk to someone, to Dan, to get advice in sorting this out.
The train she is on should be helping, she thinks, its rhythms relaxing her, releasing the anxious knot in her stomach. The scenes through the grey-streaked window should be at the very least a distraction, roads and factories, hillsides, horses, rivers, pylons. None of it looks at all familiar, she thinks, though last time, with Teddy in her lap, she had pointed things out. A yellow crane. Some sheep. But there is nothing she recognises here. Perhaps it is the change in the season that makes it look so different. Or perhaps she has misremembered the name of the place, and is heading in the wrong direction altogether, into a hinterland not Theo’s world of bogs and streams and moss and forests, but one of warehouses and roundabouts and junkyards and defunct petrol stations. Perhaps there are two different places with the same name. She looks in her bag again, in case the phone has reappeared; she finds a very old boiled sweet, gone sticky in its wrapper, and sucks it slowly.
This morning, though it feels much longer ago than that, she had walked from Myra’s flat into town, and then found her way out to the street with the house with the blue door. It was covered in scaffolding. Tenants been gone at least three weeks, love, said the man carrying paint. The lady’s doing it up to sell now, see.
She had gone to the museum, forcing herself through the wall of silence, more brutal than ever now she carried her own cold fear twisted inside her. Strange and beautiful plants and animals had distracted her for a while, but she had not found Dan and Teddy. She had sat, then, on her old bench until the cold had beaten her away. And finally she had decided on Theo, catching the train as one might say a prayer: an act of faith, from a platform she recognised, with a ticket to a name that sounded familiar. And when she gets there, she thinks, if there is where she ought to be, she will have to walk and ask people for directions. The house was a long way from the station, she remembers, he had come to get them in his van. She must not close her eyes, now, in case she misses her stop.
And when it comes it is miraculously familiar, recognisable, a place she has definitely been before. She stands in front of the little station in the full heat of the day and looks down the street and up at the hills and wonders what to do next. She should eat something, obviously, but her anxiety is pushing her on, she must keep walking, though she has done too much today already, and the thin flat shoes, not made for walking, have begun to rub her heels. This is where he picked us up, she thinks. I can remember which way he turned out of the station. I will recognise the road, I was in the front, I think I will know which way to turn.
She has the sense to buy a bottle of water and some biscuits from the station cafe, and then she sets off and soon leaves the small town straggling behind. She walks along the edge of the road, pulling in when cars pass, always too quickly. Nobody stops. There are green clustered berries in the hedges, and a feathery, sweet-scented creamy flower growing along the verge; crisp packets and polystyrene cartons are scattered in the long grass. Gates into fields with cows. Patches of woodland, oak trees thick with leaves. Her heels are rubbed raw, but she is too ashamed to take off her shoes and walk barefoot on a public road. After a while there is a junction, with a sign pointing to several named places, which she scans critically for a moment or two, and then ignores, carrying on along the main road. A second junction holds her attention for longer, and after a long minute’s thought she takes it, off to the left, a smaller road dipping down into a valley. The road is narrower here, and the cars fewer, and by now her heels are wet with blood and she has no choice but to take off her shoes. She hunkers under a tree and sips some water, eats a biscuit, and hopes she has taken the right turning. The place looks utterly unfamiliar again, a narrow lane between trees which could be going anywhere, and too low down in this wooded valley for the open slopes and views around Theo’s pond, but she cannot face trekking back to the main road now. The soles of her feet feel scratched and bruised as well, but when she tries the shoes again the pain of the gouged-out heels is still worse.
Eventually there is a stone bridge over a small river, and a path leading down to the riverbank, where
she washes her face and then sits with her feet in cool running water, grateful beyond words. If she is right, she thinks, though she feels less and less sure now that this is the case, then the water round her feet could have come down from his pond. She is comforted by the thought of a million micro-organisms brushing her skin. But all these valleys have rivers, she thinks, even in this heat, even in the driest summer; it is not like it is at home. And when she is rested, she starts a slow, winding climb, and her thoughts are all of her own country, of walking as a child with her mother up a dry rocky path, cutting through terraces of olive groves to visit her grandmother, who was blind and angry and who frightened her; she remembers how they walked to visit her with gifts of fruit through the thick noise of the cicadas, the heavily-scented herbs. So when the road finally shakes off the last of the trees, and suddenly splits to accommodate a huge grey and white chapel surrounded by gravestones, she stands for a brief moment in two simultaneous worlds, rocked by the force of a double recognition. This is not a place you forget, after all. The name carved in stone and picked out in white letters above her is Hebron.
63.
He reaches across the water and carefully pulls the reed stem out with the larval case intact and empty, still gripping for dear life. He slides it gently from the stalk and cradles it in the palm of his big hand, noting the species, another Southern Hawker, perhaps one of the two he’d caught in a flashing blue-and-yellow dogfight at the far end of the pond yesterday morning. He regrets not having been there to see the creature split its skin, but in years of patient watching he has only caught a few such moments of emergence.
He takes the fragile exuvia back over to the hut, labels and dates it and puts it in the appropriate box. Then he continues his slow inspection of the pond edge, noting tiny white moths, the various signs of water vole, spider-webs, tortoiseshell butterflies on the pink flowers of watermint, slugs. A couple of wrens fuss in the thicket of brambles, where the blackberries are just beginning to redden. He tries not to think of Myra, and thinks instead of his mother’s drawings; two more recurring images intrigue him, a woman’s face made up entirely of spheres, a face you can only see if you stand far enough away; a naked girl with a curious expression trapped by or emerging from a rough block of stone. She is still doing birds, the long-legged birds, but he has long been familiar with them.
A flash of blue scrapes the corner of his eye. He spins round to catch it, misses it, but stands and waits a moment. Patience. They often come back. And this one does, confirming his subconscious thrill, because it is an Emperor, as blue as lapis lazuli, absurdly huge, flying with dipped abdomen, scouring the pond. Oh you perfect beauty, he thinks, as it circles and dances and scoots off to the sedges at the far end, are you just visiting, or do you belong here, are you one of mine?
And it seems to Theo impossible, and quite ridiculous, that there should be no way of telling Myra about this. He has phoned the hospital every single day, and no one will tell him, in a way that convinces him, exactly where or how she is. He turns abruptly and walks back to the wooden house. He takes a sheet from a pile of rough paper and sits down to it, determined. Myra, he writes, there was an Emperor dragonfly over the pond. You never saw anything so utterly blue in your life. When you’re well again I’ll show you, and I’ll come and find you as soon as I can but it’s difficult with my mother. Please ring, I have left messages. Please ring. Theo. And his number.
He closes and latches the summerhouse and heads quickly up the path. He is pleased to find her still drawing. Mam, he says, turning his piece of paper over to the blank side. Here. Do me a dragonfly. She looks puzzled. He fetches a book down from the corner shelf. Dragonfly, he says. Emperor. Anax imperator. Do me one, can you? I’m going to find an envelope.
And when he comes back downstairs she has drawn two, in mid-air, over the barest outline of a pond. He kisses her, delighted, and addresses the envelope. I’m going to the village to get milk and supper and post this, Mam, he says. Fifteen minutes. I won’t be long. You sit tight and I’ll bring you some Rich Teas and we’ll have a cup of something when I get back.
And he is gone in the van before he has even had time to think. She normally comes with him to the village, sitting in the van while he shops, but today he is barely stopping, and he knows she will be happy drawing for another half an hour at least. He can’t remember when the post goes, prays god he is not too late. Slowing down to cross the junction at the foot of the hill he half sees a distant figure, off to his left, like a shadow, walking along the edge of the road. But with the letter on his dashboard and a flash of blue in his head he pushes down on the accelerator and thinks nothing of it.
64.
I did what was required.
The west coast slips away from him and he lets it go. He has no business with such beauty, with birds and horizons and rocks of almost shocking three-dimensionality in slanting sea-reflected light. He makes no attempt to hold any of it, refuses to let it imprint. On the way up he had imagined stopping for a few hours at one of these places to explore; a half-formed plan that had sustained him for the first part of the long weekend. By now all he wants is the entire length of the British Isles between himself and the people in the big house. Cardiff may not be far enough. Hills and farmhouses and motorways and dry-stone walls and power stations, fried chicken shops, shopping malls, builders’ merchants, wind-turbines – anything, everything will do.
He begins to run, in his head, the longest and most complex route he knows from his office to the flat through the park, but even the park, he thinks, is only there by their grace, by their favour; so he swerves off onto an imaginary road to nowhere, long and straight and heading into some vast American landscape, and keeps on running. North by Northwest, he thinks, they’ll be sending the plane over any minute now.
The Scottish coast is so insistent he closes his eyes to avoid it, and finds, when they open again, that he has bought himself an hour’s oblivion, and is grateful. Every hour, and every mile, he thinks, pushes it all a hair’s breadth further away.
I did what was required.
Seven, maybe eight hours ago he had sent her the barest of messages. Three consecutive dates in mid-September. Enough for her to know she has just under a month. She will have started preparations already. Silk and scaffolding. A stage like a pool of light. She will know what train he is on, and be expecting to hear from him, a line of relief, of quiet triumph, of bitter humour. But his phone has been off since midnight, when he had sent the text, dressed himself for the journey and gone to sit and wait for morning and his train in the chair by the window, wrapped in a blanket, phoney tartan, under a pale scattering of stars. He closes her out of his mind to protect her, to protect himself. Keep running, he thinks, and this time it is along the nondescript length of a canal, past grand industrial derelictions of blackened brick, under road-bridges and railway lines. Dandelion and dock, the vegetation of neither here nor there. Another long straight line, this one, no complex labyrinthine route through streets and parks; he imagines his breathing, heavier and rougher in his chest with every half-mile, like breathing sandpaper. Keep running. Another hair’s-breadth.
There is a boy on the towpath up ahead, perhaps ten years old, fishing, and he has caught something big enough to be visible from a way off. He slackens the pace, to see what happens next, though it doesn’t take him long to realise that he knows what happens next: the twisting fish, open-mouthed, and the frightened child’s botched attempt to kill it. A pen-knife. Then a rock. Neither wholly successful. He runs on past himself and does not look back.
65.
Luke arrives, precariously, on a bicycle borrowed from a student. Teddy has been missing for more than half an hour now, and the museum authorities have called the police. A picture from Dan’s phone has been sent out to all staff, and in every gallery attendants are looking for a little boy in blue dungarees with silky blond hair. Dan has searched all the rooms, climbed all the stairs, public and not public, right up to the diz
zy octagonal balcony where the directors’ offices and the panelled meeting rooms are; he has looked dispassionately at the cinematic drop to the tiled floor below, pushed at the door of the Galatea Room, still closed, and hurried on, trying to outstrip the slow cold disbelief spreading through his nervous system like poison.
He is so terribly easy to imagine in so many different settings. Teddy trotting oblivious under a row of bright Impressionists; watched over by concerned Madonnas, crouched hide-and-seeking under a bench. Teddy talking to the stuffed foxes, the seabirds; Teddy listening to the mellifluous tones of the Turtle. Reaching up to touch shining minerals, stroking a mammoth leg-bone. Asleep in the buggy by the table where they had coffee. Teddy sitting on the floor waiting patiently by his mother’s stars. Dan passes a toilet and goes in to retch up his fear. He can feel himself shutting down. He splashes water on his face, and finds his way mechanically down to the main hall, where a policewoman is waiting to talk to him, and where Luke finally finds him and holds him in a bear hug, hard.
They sit him down with a glass of water and the policewoman begins asking him questions, slowly, patiently, and purely, he thinks, to keep him there. He is too tired to fight or make a scene now, and so he sits and answers her as best he can, all the while watching from a distance, from up near the dome of the ceiling, watching himself and the policewoman doing everything properly. Very slowly. And then he sees Luke quietly head off to the desk to exchange a word with two or three tight-faced staff as they hold their phones and their walkie-talkies and wait for news.
Star Shot Page 13
