Star Shot

by Mary-Ann Constantine

  Myra agrees to go back to bed and rest for a couple of hours, while Theo goes into organisational overdrive, vanquishing doctors, cajoling nurses, and battling for the necessary paperwork to get her released. Nobody, apart from Myra, thinks he’s doing remotely the right thing, and it is only when she tells the Scottish consultant that she will simply stop eating if she cannot leave that people start to relent. A nurse shows them how to administer the current medication; a doctor makes them promise to return for further tests in a week. They agree unreservedly, and are finally left in peace to pack Myra’s few possessions into her bag.

  She takes an unemotional leave of the big gull on the roof outside her window. It has watched them intently throughout. Though if it wasn’t for him, she says, I wouldn’t have been up and walking so early this morning. He was beating against the pane when I woke up, it was horrible, I thought, I can’t stay here, I have to get out…

  A nurse arrives with Theo’s letter. Myra opens it and looks hugely pleased.

  My mother did the dragonflies, he says.

  Come on then, she says. If you really are going to show me this pond.

  Her legs are still rather shaky and she has to lean on his arm, but they make it to reception where she sits down for five minutes to get her strength. The space is done out in an unnecessarily bracing combination of purple and orange; the sheer number of people moving around overwhelms her. She closes her eyes, and finds Theo’s hand.

  But the hand pulls away and he is suddenly on his feet, pushing through a knot of queuing people, calling out Dan! Luke!

  And then he sees that Teddy is walking between them, holding a hand each. The child spots Theo before they do, and opens his mouth in pure delight, reaching out his arms. Theo scoops him up and swings him high. You’re not lost, little man! he says.

  They don’t take much persuading. Piled into the white van, driving away from the city and out towards the hills, they describe how Luke found Teddy cold and deeply asleep, like a creature hibernating, in a corner of the museum downstairs from the main hall, a place roped off for months, unused, full of lockers and tables. The silence had been pressing so long against the outside wall it had seeped through the pores of the stone, or got in through a crack, and pooled deeply enough to trap him like an insect in a puddle. How the paramedics had warmed him and woken him very slowly in the back of the ambulance, and how the hospital tests had found nothing wrong at all, and that this morning after a good sleep and a good breakfast they’d said it was OK to go.

  So we went, says Luke happily.

  Us too, says Myra, though they weren’t quite so keen to let us out. The outside world comes at her too quickly, and she closes her eyes, feels Theo rejoicing beside her at the wheel.

  Lina won’t believe this, says Theo. We are going to celebrate for days and days.

  I promised him pancakes, says Dan, stroking Teddy’s head. He doesn’t want to tell the others about the one thing that isn’t quite right.

  Mountains of pancakes, says Theo. Excellent idea. We’ll need eggs.

  71.

  Lina had half woken to the sound of the van’s tyres on the gravel under her window, and slept again. When she woke properly it was to sunlight and the chatter of small birds. Now she sits up in bed and feels the ache in her legs as something almost voluptuous. No need to move yet, the house is very quiet.

  The room has a high ceiling and a large bay window and feels spacious in spite of the books and the pictures and the boxes piled everywhere. The furniture is eclectic and battered, but nicely shaped. She fingers the patchwork counterpane, intricate and faded, runs her finger along the neat little stitches and thinks of her mother.

  The shoebox sits on the table. If you’re sure, he had said after their long talk, and gone hunting up in the attic room for ages. This morning she doesn’t know if she is sure.

  After a while she slips out of bed and goes to the window, pulls open the curtains, and looks down over a garden of roses and fruit trees hung with small apples and ripe plums. Beyond it a track leads down to the open land, and to the sunlit pond. If Mrs Evans is strong enough, she thinks, they could go out and collect some plums to stew for when Myra comes. And she must see if there is anything in the kitchen cupboards to make a cake.

  She decides she needs tea. Passing the room downstairs where Theo’s mother sleeps she stops and listens to her breathing, deep and regular. In the kitchen she boils the kettle and hunts through cupboards. She finds yeast and olive oil and the right kind of flour, and mixes up some bread dough for later on. Cake looks like a possibility too, though she will need to find eggs. But not yet. She takes her tea back up to her room and sits down at the table with the box in front of her, tracing a wavy line through the dust on the lid with a fingertip. She lifts it off. Photos and letters are packed flat, in bundles; she picks one out and carefully unrolls the perished elastic band, which snaps. Then she spreads the dozen or so photos across the table without looking at them properly. She covers her face with her hands and closes her eyes in something like prayer. Eventually, she looks at them.

  They are pictures from the past, from her past, from streets she could have known and might have recognised if they were not all so generically bombed and jagged, with figures in them she could have passed at any time, held in their moment in black and white. Children in doorways, with inscrutable expressions, looking straight at the camera. A woman carries a bag of groceries past a pile of rubble. A young father and a small boy sit side by side on a kerb. People you see every day on the news, her people; the dates on the back tell her how old this news is now. With a kind of detached curiosity she examines each picture, and whether or not they are looking back at her she acknowledges each person she sees, and passes on.

  The next bundle is harder to look at. It documents the immediate aftermath of a bomb in a marketplace. This she does recognise, both the place and the event. A few streets away from them; she sometimes went there with the children for fruit and vegetables. Not that day, however. Ali had treated some of the wounded. The sister of a close friend of theirs had been among the dead. About a year before the end, she thinks, looking at the dates again; she would not have thought it so long.

  Each photograph receives the same careful acknowledgment, an internal nod that is neither a prayer nor a blessing nor a farewell. There is no rage or pity in it either, and nothing that comes close to acceptance, but it is something she has learned to do, a way of looking that faces down horror. She wonders about the man behind the camera, whether he looked like Theo, whether he slept in this room when he was growing up. When she finishes this batch of pictures she gets up to open the window and finds that her hands are shaking.

  Noises in the house, a toilet flushing, a door closing. Lina remembers her bread and goes down to the kitchen to knead the dough and put the kettle on. After a while Theo’s mother appears in the doorway and smiles at her. Good morning, she says. I slept a long time.

  Tea, Mrs Evans, says Lina. It’s another lovely day, look. What shall we have for breakfast?

  The morning goes quickly. They pick a bowlful of dark red plums and stew them with cinnamon. They can’t find eggs, so make biscuits instead. The smell of bread fills the house. Lina retrieves her clothes from the washing machine and hangs them on the line. They drink coffee on a bench at the top of the garden, and Lina explains every so often where Theo has gone. Each time she tells her, the older woman looks pleased and surprised to hear he has gone to collect another friend. Then she wonders again where her other son has got to, and Lina says he is still away.

  By late morning Mrs Evans is tired, and falls asleep in the green chair. Lina goes back upstairs to her room and works her way slowly through the last two bundles of photographs. In the last pile she finds a picture of a hospital in ruins; there are no people in this picture, and the place it so wrecked it could be anywhere; but the date on the back, she sees, is perfectly correct. That must be our hospital, she thinks, and he must be in there, deep in the ru
bble. It is, she knows now, the closest she will get.

  72.

  He swirls the pale mixture to cover the pan, and waits attentively for the rash of tiny dark air-pockets to appear. Then he slides the spatula underneath the pancake and feels it lift away nicely. Good pan, he thinks. Better than the flimsy thing at Luke’s place. He flips it over and studies the surface of the moon. It is different every single time, the channels and veins, the rough patches where water might once have been, the craters and mounds; golden-brown skeins mapped onto a rich pale yellow, those lovely eggs from the farm shop just outside the village.

  Lina comes in with a plate, laughing. He’s finished it already, she says. You have to give him that one too.

  This is Luke’s, says Dan, firmly. Strict rotation. He was up all night too, you know…

  He slides the pancake on to her waiting plate.

  Teddy’s, she says. He’s starving. Or they’ll have to share.

  Whatever you do, says Dan, don’t cut it in half or there’ll be hell to pay. He goes berserk if you try and cut them in half.

  Though quite how, he thinks, even Teddy might pull off a major tantrum in his current condition he isn’t sure. He is briefly amused by the thought of his son silently jumping up and down like an angry cartoon character with the sound turned off. Then he thinks he would give anything to hear him scream.

  Luke is next in.

  This one’s yours for definite, says Dan, flipping another moon.

  Good, says Luke. Thought I’d come and make sure no one else intercepts it.

  He walks up and down the kitchen holding his phone at peculiar angles, as if dousing for water.

  I can’t, ah, get a signal anywhere, he says.

  You won’t, calls Theo. Not in the house.

  I need to tell work where I am; there’s a meeting I’m going to miss.

  Theo comes through. Land-line, he says, or email upstairs, it’s usually pretty reliable. I can get you set up if you like.

  You eat this first, says Dan.

  After a while Lina persuades Dan that she can be trusted with the pan, and he joins Theo and his mother at the table. Teddy scrambles down off his chair and up into his lap. Myra, still dizzy from her tight-rope act, is propped up on the sofa eating her third pancake, and Luke has disappeared. They pour him tea and let him eat, and when Lina comes in with the last of the pancakes he tells them what they all know by now, which is that Teddy has no voice.

  Otherwise he’s fine. And he doesn’t seem to know it himself; it’s not as though he’s stopped talking…

  Theo has found a book about birds, and Teddy is reading it very earnestly on the rug. Aloud, by the look of him. Invisible words.

  Dak-dak, says Dan, automatically, encouragingly.

  Is it just the shock of being lost? says Myra. A sort of reaction? It might wear off, it’s still very soon.

  Dan nods. That’s what I think, he says. Like losing your voice. It’ll come back, I’m sure.

  Theo watches the silent talking child and says nothing.

  Luke comes downstairs looking concerned. I, ah, have to go, he says. At least, that is, if it’s convenient for me to go… There’s something badly wrong at work, the professor, I need to see him, he’s been ill. He’s never ill. But I can, ah, ring for a taxi?

  I can give you a lift to the station, says Theo. I’ll need to buy supplies if this lot are staying. Dan looks at Luke, and then at Lina who is down on the mat cross-legged with Teddy tucked into her lap, pointing out the birds.

  Stay here, says Luke. It’s the best place for him. For both of you. How about I, ah, come back tomorrow around suppertime, if everything is sorted by then?

  He turns to Theo. You sure that’s OK?

  Perfect. Let’s go. There’s a train at half-past you’ll get, no problem.

  Luke says goodbye, and rubs Teddy’s head. Then he remembers.

  The, ah, city map upstairs on your wall? he says to Theo. With the pools and the dates all marked on it?

  Mmm, says Theo, hunting for keys.

  Could I just take a quick picture of it? I have an idea…

  Of course. Go ahead. I’ll be in the van.

  Theo crouches down beside Myra and cups her face in his big hands. Go upstairs and rest, he says. Lina will show you where. Go and lie down, have a sleep. I won’t be long.

  She closes her eyes and he kisses her lightly on the forehead, and when she opens them again he is gone.

  73.

  He is standing looking into the fridge when the doorbell rings. There is nothing there he could possibly eat. He tries the food cupboard, but it appears even less promising; everything in it is too dry or too complicated. The bell rings again. He crouches down and goes through a small stockpile of tins of tomatoes, lentils, and some water-chestnuts. He knows he must eat but has no hunger for anything he sees. He tries to imagine what he would choose, given the choice, but nothing occurs to him. In the end he dissolves a spoonful of honey into boiling water and sits at the kitchen table stirring it round and round and breathing in the steam.

  The noise of the doorbell has been getting more insistent, but he has not, until now, been able to give it much attention. He wonders how the person outside knows he is inside, knows to keep ringing like that, and not give up and go away. It wouldn’t make much sense, that level of persistence, he thinks, unless you knew for sure that someone might eventually answer.

  He has a sip of honeyed water and begins to find the ringing profoundly annoying. Another couple of sips, and he realises that the only way to make it stop is to go all the way to the front door and ask the person doing it to go away. He heads unsteadily down the corridor and leans up against the door, shouting, please go away. I can’t answer the door. I’m ill.

  Sir, says a muffled voice. Sir. Please.

  No sirs no pleases, he says. Just go away. I’m going back to bed.

  The letterbox rattles and opens. The voice is clearer now, and familiar.

  Sir, it’s me, Luke. We, ah, need your help.

  I can’t help. I’m ill, for god’s sake.

  You have to; it’s important.

  I’m ill. I can’t help. He sounds petulant, even to himself. At least the ringing has stopped.

  Look, I can’t help now, he says, being placatory. My legs won’t hold up much longer. Come back another time.

  I have a new map, says Luke. Your department is imploding. The silence, the interference is getting worse. A child nearly died. Sir, we have to do something. Please, just let me in, I need to explain what’s going on. I think I’ve had an idea but I need to talk to you.

  I’ve done everything I can, he says bitterly, and more.

  Let me in, sir, says Luke, or I’ll, ah, just keep ringing.

  The professor thinks about this for a moment, then unlatches the door and lets him in.

  Luke is shocked. The man who opens the door in his t-shirt and boxers is thin and unshaven, hollow-eyed. He looks at Luke standing on the doorstep with complete indifference.

  The ringing, he says, was horrible. You’d better come in.

  Luke says nothing, and follows him back to the kitchen, where the professor sits down to his mug of hot water and carries on stirring it, and sipping. He feels nervous.

  How, ah, long have you been like this?

  The professor brushes the words away with a delicate impatient hand.

  Days, he says. I don’t know. Tell me what you have to tell me. Then go away, I need to go back to bed.

  Luke gets his iPad out and lays it on the table in front of him. He starts to explain, a little awkwardly at first, but warming, about the incident with Teddy, and what Phoebe had told him about the meeting in the department he had missed this afternoon, omitting the rumours of the professor’s possible suspension, and then he starts to tell him about Theo’s map with the ponds; but when he glances up he sees that the man at the other end of the table is trembling, shivering like an animal. Luke swallows the last of his residual fear and, still talki
ng softly about the maps, moves round the table and puts a hand on the older man’s shoulder, gently persuading him up onto his feet and out through to the bedroom at the back of the flat. He gets him to lie down, and quietly picks up the pile of keys from the bedside table.

  I’m coming back, sir, he says. No ringing this time; if you could maybe just sleep a little now, I’ll be back as soon as I can, OK?

  The indifferent eyes look into him, through him, and then the man in the bed turns over to face the wall.

  Luke pads around the flat, mildly surprised that it isn’t bigger, and investigates the medicine cabinet, the fridge, the food cupboard. He makes a mental list, then slips out into the warm dark evening to hunt for supplies.

  All is quiet on his return. He goes into the kitchen and starts to slice and fry onion and potatoes; he cuts and squeezes oranges, opens a bottle of red wine and finds himself a glass; emails Dan, just in case he’s connected, and turns over maps in his head, nudging his way towards an idea which still refuses to come clear. Fresh juice; paracetamol; watercress soup.

  A figure appears in the doorway. There is a little more life in his eyes.

  That smells good, he says. I could eat some of that.

  74.

  He has pulled an armchair over to be closer to the bed, and now he sits with his eyes shut, thinking and not thinking. Late afternoon sun, August sun with the feel of September in it already, fills the room and falls on the table and the dusty shoebox, on the medicine bottles, the needles, the strips of pills. Myra lies deep asleep on Lina’s bed. He is still concerned by what happens to her in sleep, and insists to Lina that they both watch her, taking turns. The watching is a rest from the work on the top floor and down the corridor, a great activity, all of them helping, clearing and cleaning rooms so that everyone will have a bed tonight.

  There is no shortage of rooms in this house, but the accumulation of boxes of papers, books, odd items of furniture and a lifetime of his mother’s paintings and sculptures has covered beds and sofas, and made spare mattresses inaccessible. Dan and Teddy have taken over the spacious attic room, hoovering and scrubbing and brushing away cobwebs, at least until distracted by the discovery of a box full of wooden blocks and animals. Lina is sorting out another bed in the smaller middle room, shifting piles of books into Theo’s study and going through the linen cupboard for bedding.