And All the Stars (4 page)

"Don't worry
about us: we're all tucked up. Even got
the animals in. Listen, you're going to
have to sit tight there, at least till it rains. Don't go out while that stuff's still all
over the ground. And drink bottled
water."

"Lucky there's
a coffee shop here." Madeleine muted
the television, hoping her father hadn't picked up on the noise, then poked at
laptop keys, trying to bring the screen to life. "How long till they know what the dust
does?"

"That's
anyone's guess. I doubt a visual
examination will tell us anything – unless it's bacterial and already
known. Smaller animals would react to it
first, but of course not necessarily in the same way as humans." Her father, a devoted vet, sighed. "I have a great view of the Nguyen's
retriever. Racing up and down, showing
no signs of anything yet. It's nothing
like so bad out here though – you can only see the dust on dark surfaces."

"But it blew
all the way to Leumeah." Her family
currently lived in an outlying Sydney suburb, more than fifty kilometres from
the city centre. "Dad...I'm
sorry. I–"

"All that
matters is that you're safe inside." Her father's voice had thickened. "Though once this is all over, you're grounded till you're
twenty."

Madeleine kept him
on the phone, asking questions he didn't have answers to, then talked to her
mother, making up more lies about the Art Gallery, and conversations she hadn't
had with Gallery staff. She'd been lying
to her mother too often lately, and usually felt quietly guilty about needing
to, but was glad for the moment to concoct a reassuring fiction about a highly
militant curator holding back any threat of dust with ingenuity and sheer force
of will. She was privately sure the Art
Gallery of New South Wales would be full of dusty people – it was too close to
Hyde Park, and every jogger and lunchtime soccer player in The Domain would
have run for it as soon as the dust started drifting down.

As Madeleine
finally ended the call, the television switched from something about the
Olympics which weren't likely to happen, to a diagram of Sydney, of the cloud
spreading south and west, leaving much of the far northern and north-western
suburbs untouched. But by then she'd
opened her email, and was flipping through a dozen photographs sent by someone
called Michael. Tyler Vaughn in a Hunter
green shirtdress and black jeans, his long auburn hair gleaming, makeup
subdued, lips berry-dark and perfect, giving the photographer a Mona Lisa
smile.

Even against a
backdrop of airplane seats he looked both inviting and untouchable, rich with
mystery. It was Tyler's public face, and
nothing like the image Madeleine had wanted to create. But there was a last picture, one obviously
captured earlier, of Tyler seated by an airplane window, lipstick chewed to
traces, strands of hair caught by the weave of the seat's cover. He must have been staring out the window at
the dust, toying with a long topaz necklace, and just turned his head toward
the person seated next to him. The green
eyes which came from Madeleine's father's family were tired, lids drooping, and
his mouth was stern.

And Madeleine was
lost to anything but the fragile skin beneath his eyes, the tangled hair, the
chips in the polish on his nails. This
was just what she'd wanted, and she began sketching furiously, small
compositions at first, and then a more detailed piece, before transferring the
lines to one of the pre-prepared canvas stretchers.

The Archibald
Prize, the focus of all Madeleine's recent ambition, required that portraits be
painted from life. Even if that wasn't a
rule, Madeleine would normally never consider painting from a flattened image
on a computer screen, and she would have aimed for four or more sittings. But this wasn't about proving a point any
more, was not about prize money, schools or careers.

It was just the
rest of her life.

ooOoo

Tyler had a few
thousand litres of hair product. What he
lacked was anything resembling food. The
refrigerator was empty, unplugged. Every
shelf of the tall pantry cupboard was packed solid with boxes of the same brand
of shampoo, along with neatly-labelled boxes of junk Tyler had collected over
the years: clippings, ticket stubs, even a box dutifully inscribed "Dirty
Pictures".

At other times
Madeleine would have stopped to look, or at least smiled, but she only bit back
a growl of frustration and turned to fling open the doors beneath the kitchen
cabinets. The hunger had hit her as an
absolute imperative. Not
you-haven't-eaten-since-breakfast pangs, but shooting pain, a frightening
urgency which left room for nothing but the need to fill her stomach. The cabinets offered only a token collection
of saucepans and more boxes of hair product, all of it the brand Tyler had done
a commercial for last year.

The upper
cabinets. Plates, mugs, glasses, half a
jar of instant coffee. And sugar. A kaleidoscope of paper tube packets
advertising different cafes, scattered any-which-way across the shelf. Madeleine grabbed a handful, roughly aligned,
and tore them open, pouring the contents into her mouth. Again. Again. Struggling to swallow the
grainy bounty as discarded packets dropped to the floor, and then there were no
more, and she was scratching among the fallen paper, hunting out fragments
she'd dropped before fully emptying.

The kitchen floor
was a black slate tile, and specked across it were granules of white and brown,
lost to her haste. Madeleine, on her
hands and knees, contemplated the tiny crystals, then levered herself shakily
to her feet and ran a glass of water, then another, drinking until her
breathing had slowed.

A few dozen packets
of sugar weren't nearly enough, but now that the keenest edge of her hunger had
been dulled it occurred to Madeleine to pull out several of the boxes of
shampoo, revealing a small supply of packets and tins at the back of the pantry
cupboard. It seemed Tyler didn't live
completely on take-out.

"Thank you for
not making me lick the floor," Madeleine muttered, and wondered how many
planeloads of people were arguing over their last packet of peanuts.

She ate a tin of
pineapple chunks while heating pumpkin soup, and drank the soup lukewarm while
heating a second can. It had stopped
hurting by then, so she poured the second serving into her mug to sip at a less
frantic pace.

The still-muted
television was showing a smothered road, cars creeping along, and one racing as
if it could outpace the air itself. Slow
or fast, they lifted a trail of dust. Madeleine had deliberately angled her canvas away from the screen, not
willing to either watch it or turn it off. Finding that feeling had not changed she unlocked the sliding door to
the balcony and stepped out into cool autumn sunset, the city skyline outlined
against crimson. The air itself
occasionally caught alight, motes of glitter blazing fiery warning of their
presence. She drank her soup and watched
them drift.

Shutting the hushed
world back outside, Madeleine scrupulously cleaned up the mess she'd made in
the kitchen, then hesitated between canvas and TV. She would have chosen canvas, but the
presenter was holding up his wrist, his face stiff with suppressed emotion as
he unbuttoned his cuff and pulled it back, displaying what looked like an old
bruise, a flush of green beneath the skin. Then there were other people, men and women who usually stayed behind
the camera, leaning forward to show more wrists, green and blue, and their
faces were the same as the presenter's – tight with distress and determination.

"
...in our
Sydney studio at the time of the Spire's arrival. We could not have been quicker sealing the
doors, and the Building Manager shut down the air-conditioning plant as a
matter of priority, and closed every vent possible. It made no difference. Every single person in the building has begun
exhibiting the symptoms observed in the heavy-exposure group broadcasting from
Seoul. We can only repeat the medical
advisory. Do not travel. If you are infected, do not attempt to reach
a hospital. Even if you are indoors,
cover both mouth and nose with multiple layers of damp...
"

Madeleine was in
the bathroom, pulling the oversized tracksuit top over her head, shucking the
pants, staring at herself in the mirrored wall. Blue wrists. Not a flush of
colour beneath the skin, but bold streaks extending to the inside of her
elbows. More at armpit and groin,
midnight blue. She turned, considering
the true bruises on her back, dim by comparison, and spotted more midnight blue
at the back of her knees.

Pressing the skin
of her right wrist produced none of the pain response of a bruise. The skin was warm, soft, normal. She didn't feel sick, beyond having eaten far
too much too quickly.

"
...just in
,"
the presenter was saying as Madeleine returned. "
The Seoul group has reported intense, urgent hunger, an almost
crippling–
"

Madeleine hit Mute
and turned away. If anything worse
happened, she'd know it as soon as anyone, and she didn't like the way the
presenter kept having to stop and swallow, didn't like what his voice rather
than his words were telling her. It
pulled her into thinking of a whole world looking at their wrists, clogging the
phone lines, melting down Twitter and
Tumblr
and
Facebook, comparing symptoms, reaching out in their overwhelming need to know
what it all meant, how far it would spread, what would come next, after the
hunger. If she spent her time thinking
about how she would die, she wouldn't finish.

Thankfully she was
working with quick-drying acrylics, had already laid down the base colours, and
could now build detail. The clothes,
necklace, hair, polish, and blue seat made a vivid mix, and she would have to work
to stop Tyler's skin from receding, or losing the magnetic quality of pale
green eyes.

Racing symptom
three.

ooOoo

Drumming rain,
lukewarm and persistent.

Sitting tilted in a
corner, Madeleine puzzled over why she felt the rain should be hotter, and
turned her head away from slick tiles. She'd been leaning against them so long it felt like her skin was
peeling out of a mould. Lifting a hand
she could trace the indentation of grouting below her eye. Velvet.

She blinked, saw
tinted glass, and recognised the outer wall of Tyler's enormous shower, and
then looked at her foot, her leg, all the way up to the sodden hem of the
tracksuit top. Midnight blue. With stars.

What surprise she
felt was for the lack of pain. Pain had
been the constant, the dominating force which had overtaken every other
consideration. It had started in her
lower back, tiny twinges, and she'd thought it just another consequence of her
marathon at the canvas, a companion to the stretched ache between her
shoulder-blades. The pangs had spread to
her legs, her arms. Not too bad at
first, an intermittent ache that made her want to shift and move. But then sharp, deep pains along her bones,
making her gasp and jerk and stamp about.

For a while she'd
been able to work through, but one jolt had taken her at a bad moment and she'd
slashed a fine line of white across half the canvas. After quickly repairing what she could, she'd
had to step away. Better to leave the
piece unfinished than destroy what she'd achieved. Particularly Tyler's hand, toying with the
long topaz necklace. That was some of
the best work she'd ever done.

Her memories were
hazy after the last of the painting. Another patch of extreme hunger, and a long time on the couch, shifting
and twisting. Random images from the
television: black towers and people in Hazmat suits. Roadblocks. Blue and green animals, everything warm-blooded showing stain. Crackling feedback on her phone when she
tried to answer a call.

It had been
daylight when the tremors and cramps started, knots beneath her skin which made
her cry out and whimper. That was why
she'd ended up in the shower, needle-hard water stitching her skin because the
heat and the pulsing force had been the only thing which had helped at all.

She pulled off the
sopping tracksuit and by slow degrees drew her feet up, levered herself on to
them, and shut the water off. Then she
shuffled with geriatric gait to lean against the mirrored wall. This time she didn't need to look for patches
of blue skin, but catalogued instead what was familiar. Her head, barring a patch below her right
eye, remained its usual untanned self. Her neck, except for a line up the back. Some of her right hand and the thumb and two fingers of her left. That was all Madeleine.

The rest, from just
below her collarbone down, was an unbroken dark blue, studded with motes of
light. G
alaxies, nebulae and
fiery novae. They weren't on the surface of her skin, but seemed to float below
it, as if she had become a window on a night sky at the centre of the universe.

And the way it
felt! The mirror she leaned against, the
tiles beneath her feet. Everything she
touched was a confusing mix of the texture she expected, but also velvet. And when she ran blue palm along blue arm, it
was velvet on velvet.

There were still
fine hairs along her forearm. Peering
close she could make out the faint lines and ridges at her wrist, and her
fingers showed the prune effect of long exposure to water. If it wasn't for the shimmering light
beneath, and the feeling of velvet, she could tell herself that she'd simply
been stained blue. But her skin was not
her skin.