Acts of Mutiny (42 page)

That night, his thoughts far from any radar screen, he walked to a corner of the base compound where the lights from the main block hardly carried. There was to be a launch tomorrow; some squib would squirt its way up from the desert a hundred miles west. Further away still, a team of squaddies might be rigging a scaffold tower for the next ‘dust experiment’. Might – or maybe they had given up on all that now. He did not know. The outlines of the Flinders foothills were just visible, dark on dark. Beyond them the continental floor, once a seabed.

He must find her. He turned and stared up at the stars. They were peculiarly alive, yet remote. Crux hung under the Southern Pole. The Jewel Box. Reticulum, the Net. He pointed out to her Carina, Vela, Puppis. ‘There! Do you see?’

The tears prickled at his eyes. ‘I saw what I saw, know what I know’ But the ship was fracturing, the sections already losing themselves against a chaos of scintillation.

As for Erica and me, you know the details of our stay. We subsisted on the edge of the bush for about a year, until the draggles of commitment from Chaunteyman dried up, and a summons home was posted out.

And so we were reunited with my father. I was born in the town of Woolwich, near Greenwich itself, London’s prosperous and beautiful pearl, where the whole world takes its time from a metal marker hammered into the hill. My mother told me. My dad taught me to read. I held his hand. We took the train down to the marshes on Galleons Reach. I saw a barge with brown sails from the green foot-bridge over the railway line, looking out across the allotments. The river stank in the sun, was green, too, close up; yellowish green the river from the steam ferry crossing over to Silvertown. I saw a porpoise floating dead, belly up. Silver-tarnished, and everything smoky and soot-stained before us, steaming onward with the paddle-wheels driving, and black behind us upon the rise of the southern shore we had left, far behind, back past Woolwich, as far as Greenwich where the slopes rise up to Blackheath. Dark houses. That is England. Smoking against a hot, pale sky, with low sun. That is England, a hot country of perpetual fire.

Derek Beaven lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire. His first novel,
Newton’s Niece
(1994), was shortlisted for the Writers’ Guild Best Novel Prize and won a Commonwealth Prize.
Acts of Mutiny
is his second novel.

Newton’s Niece