We Are All Made of Stars

by Rowan Coleman

  I remember that my husband can’t stand to look at me any more.

  It’s just before six when I turn the key in the lock and open the front door very slowly so that it does not creak. I hold my breath. The house is quiet. I can hear the needle on the vinyl that Vincent has always preferred over CDs or downloads click, clicking away. I breathe out as I see he is sleeping on the sofa, still wearing his gym uniform, his Beats headphones, which he bought to stop the neighbours reporting us for the loudness of his music all night long, still covering his ears. He must have taken his prosthetic off at some time last night; it is propped up against the coffee table, where several cans of pre-mixed Jack Daniel’s and diet cola lay discarded and crumpled.

  Reassured that he is sleeping deeply, I tiptoe into the room and look at him, my heart in my mouth and full of longing and love. Oh God, how I miss being able to just look at him, never mind touch him, or feel his touch. His head is tipped backwards at an awkward angle that will surely cost him a stiff neck when he wakes up, and I see the long tanned stretch of throat, laced with scarring on the right side which extends up the side of his face and into his hairline, where the hair grows unevenly now. Edging closer, I sit in the armchair opposite, taking in the sweep of his thick, dark lashes, his wonderful, slightly crooked nose, his arms – muscular and toned, crossed over his chest, tightly hugging one of our sofa cushions.

  The yearning to feel the warmth of his skin is almost unbearable. I wonder what would happen if I let myself carefully unclasp his arms, took away his protective cushion and slid my hand ever so gently under his T-shirt, feeling the firm abs that he works so hard to maintain, rising over the ridge of his pectoral muscles, tracing my fingers over the web of silver scars that track down his back and side. For a moment, unbidden and of its own volition, my hand floats upwards and out, stretching towards him. But I stop. I can’t risk it. I can’t risk him turning away from me again. Somehow I need to find out what happened the day he was injured that changed everything between us, because when I know what it was, then I will know why he can’t stand to be near me, why he can’t sleep unless there is rock music drowning out his thoughts, and if … I almost can’t bear to think it, but I must … if we have a chance to stay together.

  So I don’t touch him. I sit back in the armchair and watch him for a few moments more, until just minutes before I know the alarm on his phone will go off to get him up for work. Then I leave him and trudge silently upstairs to our bedroom, hoping to dream of him instead.

  Dear Keith,

  No, wait, darling Keith.

  Darling Keith, you are the one I have always loved; I hope you know that. I think you do, but I should have told you, shouldn’t I? What a fool I am for not telling you more, louder, longer, ever. But I always thought you knew.

  There’d be a look between us, a touch, a moment when the air just hummed with it, with our love for each other. We never needed to shout about it, did we, Keith? Shouting was never for us. Well, except at the footy, every Saturday afternoon – just our poor misfortune that we have to support the worst team to never grace the Premier League.

  Every Saturday afternoon, we laughed, didn’t we? Laughed and sang and had a drink on the way home. When all the others had peeled off, and we were the last two with the furthest to walk, our fingers would find each other’s, and we’d hold hands for those last few yards.

  Well, Keith, I have always loved you. I’ve never shouted about it, but now the words are here, on the paper. Put them in frame if you like, copy them a thousand times, and stick them to trees. Take out an ad at the ground; tell the world that I love you, Keith, and that the greatest joy of my life has always been knowing that you love me back.

  I’ll be yours always,

  Michael

  THE SECOND NIGHT

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HUGH

  ‘Hello?’ I let myself in and listen. And to my relief I discover there is no one else here, except for the cat – the only gift I have ever been given that I cannot return. The girl that stayed the night, a nice-enough girl called Joy, has let herself out and gone. I’d been worrying all day that she might have decided to stay and cook me something in a wok, because a lot of single women seem to like to cook things in woks, but she’s gone.

  The cat sits on the bottom step and regards me with a take-it-or-leave-it indifference. So deeply black that he almost has no edges, no features apart from his luminous green eyes, he regards me with what seems to be a habitually deep dissatisfaction.

  ‘Jake.’ I nod at him politely as I go into the kitchen. It was never me that wanted a cat, it was Melanie, an ex-girlfriend who assured her permanent place in my life by leaving me this pet behind when she left. She bought Jake for me for Christmas as a surprise, a tiny black mass of fluff in a cardboard box. She cried when I said that I really didn’t want a cat, and that actually I was a bit allergic. She cried and wept – big snotty, raspy sobs – so I gave in, thinking that after a couple of weeks I could take him to a shelter and pretend he’d been run over. But, as it turned out, Jake lasted longer than Melanie. I was just getting used to him when one night she said she couldn’t bear my cold-hearted indifference for a moment longer, and stormed off to find the happiness she claimed to deserve. And I thought, am I really that much of a git? Because I don’t feel that way inside; I feel like I have a regular warm-blooded beating heart. Although I wasn’t that sorry to see her go; in actual fact, I was kind of relieved. But anyway, I thought I’d keep the cat, just to show the world that I do have a heart, should they care to look.

  Jake follows me into the kitchen at a slight delay and looks pointedly at his food bowl, prepared for disappointment. Melanie, during her short tenure, bought him all sorts of food, different-coloured gourmet tins, special treats. We had an entire kitchen cupboard devoted to his dietary requirements, which were complex and many. He ate better than I did – mostly because Melanie was one of those very women that love to stir-fry vegetables. I grew up on oven chips. Now, though, since she’s no longer cluttering up the fridge, I feed him the tuna every day that I bulk-buy at the supermarket. Take it or leave it. He takes it, and supplements his diet with small birds or mice, which he finds during the night and often brings home to murder in the kitchen. Carole, one of the other curators at work, told me that this means he loves me. I just assume that every mangled animal I sweep into the bin is some kind of death threat. It’s safer that way.

  I put a frozen pizza in the oven and crack open a beer, take my research notes from work and put them on the kitchen table. I switch on the radio to LBC and turn it down low, because I just like the sound of the voices in the background – not what the people say, because most of what the people say makes me want to dig a bunker in the middle of a remote forest, hoard tinned food and wait for the apocalypse.

  Tonight I am researching the Victorian spiritualist movement, and the wave of table tipping and séances that swept across the nation, the Empire and the world, for a special exhibition at work entitled ‘Afterlife: How science tried to solve the mysteries of death’. It’s a working title; something more catchy will come – that’s what I keep promising my bosses. It’s all got to be immediately catchy, these days; it’s got to be a Daily Mail headline, even history. Which is fine, because that’s what I’m good at: making the subject I am passionate about seem interesting to people who normally are mostly passionate about TV talent shows. It also comes in handy when meeting girls.

  When I was a kid, and I mainly pretended to be Spider-Man or Eighties Flash Gordon, I never would have foreseen anything as prosaic as a career as a historian, specialising in nineteenth-century social culture, in my future. It was one of those things that I felt like I alone had discovered. A subject that I caught the corner of, and kept pulling at, peeling back layer upon layer until it transformed from an interest into a specialism and finally, I, in my little two-bedroom London terraced house, was listed almost everywhere as a world expert.

  The Victorians loved to congr
egate around tables and talk to ghosts.

  It’s not lost on me, as I sit at the table that’s been in this kitchen since I was a baby – this very table where my mum used to feed me mashed-up carrot and my dad would sit after work, and roll his shoulders, and wince if he got up too quickly – that I am surrounded by ghosts, if only metaphorical ones. This is the table where Mum would let me draw on the tablecloth, where Dad would explain to me the finer points of making a fly, for the purposes of fishing. This was the table where I first asked out a girl, and was spectacularly turned down. And it was here where Mum left her wedding rings.

  This is a table surrounded by ghosts, covered in the fingerprints of the two people I have loved most. The people that exited, stage left and stage right, before their time, before my time, all gone now, leaving me here alone with a table full of long-dead people’s exploited hopes. And a slightly resentful cat.

  ‘Knock once for yes, twice for no,’ I say out loud to Jake, who has climbed onto the table to sit on my papers. It’s a peculiar habit he has developed of liking to sit on whatever I am trying to read. As far as I can tell, it’s designed purely to be annoying. There is nothing – no reply but the soft chatter on the radio, and the distant sound of trains somewhere. No secret smoke or mirrors. No other realm, full to the brim of the dead who have something very pressing to say to a Celia, Cecil or possibly Cedric.

  ‘Is there anybody out there?’ I say to Jake, who blinks in slow motion, and then, hopping down off the table, taking a ream of my research with him, disappears through the cat flap, as if he’s going to check.

  It’s not until I go into the living room a couple of hours later, my head full of stories of long-ago mediums that once held court every night at every fashionable address in London, that I see there is a message blinking on the answerphone, and the sight stops me in my tracks.

  The device is a relic, seriously outmoded technology, at least fifteen years old, perhaps even older. So old it has one tiny analogue tape that has been rewound and recorded over a thousand times – but not recently: no one calls my landline any more. I keep it really because it was Dad’s. It even still has his greeting message recorded on it. Not that I’ve played it for a very long time. I just like to know it’s there, that I can still hear the sound of his voice whenever I want. Fishing my mobile phone out of my pocket, I look at it. Nothing. No missed calls or texts. The landline wasn’t a last resort, a final attempt to try and reach me. Perhaps it was a random cold caller.

  I don’t know why I feel so nervous as I press it, and wait for it to go through its various machinations, whirring and clicking. Finally the long beep that precedes the recorded message sounds, and I wait, but it’s just – silence. No, not silence. I rewind it and play it again, kneeling on the carpet so that my ear is level with the speaker. This time I hear crackling, a distant sound of cars, perhaps the sound of an intake of breath. Someone is – was – there on the other end of the line. But there are no words.

  I am gripped by a need to know who it was who called. Yes, probably some scam selling me something, I tell myself as I dial 1471. A cold call from New Delhi, or something about a car crash that I may be eligible for compensation for, but I have to know. The phone rings and rings on the other end of the line, and I let it, unable to break this tenuous link between me and someone who wanted to talk to me. It seems like a lifetime until it is picked up.

  ‘Er, yeah?’ A male voice, young and unmistakably London, on the other end.

  ‘Oh, yeah, I had a call, from this number?’ I say, trying to sound nonchalant, concealing the strange, sickening irrational urgency that seems to have gripped hold of my gut. ‘I had a missed call from this number, today?’

  ‘It’s a phone box, mate,’ the voice says. He sounds young.

  ‘Would you mind telling me where it is?’ I ask him. ‘If you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘End of Shapland Road, opposite the burger place,’ he says and hangs up. I listen to the dial tone for a few moments more and put the phone down. I turn around and start to find that Jake has returned and is watching me, curiously, from the banister on which he is somehow poised, apparently able to defy the pull of gravity.

  ‘Who would call me from the phone box at the end of this street?’ I ask him.

  He hasn’t got a clue, either.

  CHAPTER SIX

  HOPE

  ‘I’m going in,’ Ben says, rubbing his hands together like a Bond villain.

  ‘You bloody are not.’ I drag him back, but he shakes me off and heads out into the hallway, clutching my guitar by the neck, knowing that eventually, like a Shaggy to his Scooby, I will inevitably follow. Today is the day when a selection of volunteers come to serenade the inmates, I mean patients. Last week we had this guy who played acoustic guitar and wore very tight jeans, which meant that when he was sitting on the stool he’d borrowed from the coffee bar, you could see exactly the outline of his penis. No such luck this week, though. This week we have the man with the accordion, who is singing ‘Here Comes the Sun’. Singing might not be exactly the term – it’s like Terry Wogan has been resurrected from the grave and he’s gone a bit folksy. Oh, wait, I don’t think Terry Wogan is dead. Well, you get what I mean. I thought about hiding in my room, waiting for the utter horror of having to watch someone else be dreadful to blow over.

  But of course Ben is going in; he never can resist the urge to grab the limelight. He sucks up adoration like a bone-dry sponge, so it’s lucky that almost everyone who meets him likes him at once. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a talent he developed while trying and failing for his entire childhood to get his mother to notice him.

  Ben strides into the patients’ lounge, and I loiter in the doorway, waiting to see what he does before I actually commit to entering, not just because of the awful mind-bending embarrassment of witnessing his utter lack of embarrassment in action, but also because I need that moment to wait for my heart rate to slow, as the short walk seems to have made my body think it’s running a marathon. The pain that holds me at all times intensifies for a while, and I concentrate on breathing, waiting until it becomes its usual background grind again, one that with enough concentration I can fade almost out of existence.

  The room is full of families and children, sitting on sofas, curled up on beanbags, toys spread across the floor, flooded with a kind of warmth that doesn’t come from the underfloor heating. My own small family of Mum and Dad aren’t here tonight. They left as Ben arrived, handing over the baton of keeping an eye on me in one seamless, almost invisible, move – Mum turning pink as Ben shamelessly flirted with her. Suddenly, I miss them, with a pang that isn’t like me at all. I look at the families brought together this evening, courtesy of Death and the accordion, and you feel it: all the hours of care and teetering anxiety, but mostly a sort of optimism. That life can’t be too bad, if it can be exactly like this, even just for a few rare perfect moments at a time.

  Ben isn’t exactly the world’s best singer, but what he lacks in tuning he makes up for in charm. Accordion Man looks more than a little put out as Ben joins in with his performance, but seeing the welcoming smiles of the faces of his captive audience, he grins and nods, and bobs up and down on his knees. I stand in the doorway and watch a little girl climb off her mother’s lap and dance in circles at Ben’s feet. And I see how it makes her mother, who’s wrapped in a bright purple dressing gown, smile, which in turn makes the girl’s father smile, and his expression of intense worry lifts a little for a while. That might be Ben’s greatest gift: the knack he has for making almost every person he encounters stop thinking about themselves and start thinking about him instead. He really should be doing something else apart from persuading unsuspecting people to upgrade to phone contracts they don’t need. He should be shining somewhere; he should always be the star. I think – I don’t really like to admit it, because it’s pretty shitty – but I think there’s a little part of me that wants him to stay small and disappointed, because if he suddenly knew, if he
suddenly saw what a talent he has for living, then of course he’d leave me far behind in my tiny four-walled world.

  Silently I sing along with Ben, and Accordion Man. I feel each note vibrating internally, knocking against my bruised and battered insides like a pinball in a machine of flesh and blood, and I know that even as weakened as I am, I could still sing better than both of them. But I don’t. I just watch and smile as Ben, one of the ballsiest buskers ever to be unleashed on unsuspecting Saturday-morning shoppers, flirts with the women, winks at the men and plays the fool with the kids, making the room come alive with smiles.

  ‘How about this one? Know this one?’ he says as the song ends, to laughter and clapping. He starts to play ‘One Love’ by U2, and, out of his depth, Accordion Man shrugs and takes a seat. But even he’s not that offended by Ben, because that’s his gift – the whole world loves him in an instant, and he loves them right back. There’s never a moment with Ben, not even a second, when he isn’t certain that everything is good.

  ‘Why don’t you go and sit down; join in?’ Stella comes in and stands behind me. ‘Your friend is joining in. He’s … very flamboyant.’

  I turn to look at her. Her dark eyes in a slim narrow face give her a particularly intense edge – like she feels everything a little more keenly than other people, even than me. I wonder what secrets there are that keep showing shadows in the hollows of her cheeks and eye sockets.

  ‘Ben doesn’t join in,’ I tell her. ‘The world joins in with Ben.’

  ‘Well, don’t be the only one left out, then,’ she says, watching Ben throw back his head and holler. ‘It’s really sweet that he comes every night to see you.’