Star Shot (22 page)

Various things dawn on him simultaneously, and he gets to his feet in agitation.

At the hospital? Where my mother…? Cleaner? Lina, I didn't know. Of course of course … she let you in. Oh, Lina…

He crouches back down again and grabs both of her hands in his; his incoherence deepens.

I … do you know a girl with red hair, very pale? She's on the cancer ward … is that part of your … I mean, have you seen her, is she…?

Lina pulls her hands free so she can put them firmly on his big shoulders. I know Myra, she says. Of course I know Myra.

The shock of her name.

I…

She's getting better, I'm sure she is. She's making herself walk. To get out. It won't be long.

By now he is next to her on the sofa with his head in his hands. Two weeks, he says. Two weeks, I ring every bloody day but no one answers. And I can't go into town because I can't leave… He gestures helplessly. Why doesn't she phone me here?

Tea, says his mother brightly across the room. Theo helps Lina to her feet, and she limps over to the table.

Thank you, Mrs Evans.

The older women smiles at her, and then at her son. Do you take milk? she asks him.

He closes his eyes. No, Mam. Not now, not ever.

No phone, says Lina, answering Theo's question. She can't phone, it's run out, dead. And the nurses, they hardly ever come now. It's hard even to get her a cup of tea.

I need to see her.

I know. I can stay here. We'll be fine.

He is looking at the clock and calculating time and distance.

It's late. It will be late.

He looks at Lina, still dishevelled and tear-stained. Her clothes are covered in dust. At his mother, smiling intently at something or somebody just beyond them both. He takes a deep breath.

Tomorrow, he says. Come on, you need to eat and rest; and I'll show you the house and get you settled in. I'll go first thing tomorrow. Mam will be happy with you here.

Relief lifts him like a wave. And while Lina is washing and changing into some of his mother's old clothes he puts fish in the oven and peels potatoes. Remembers Dan. Fetches his jacket and slips out the back door, climbing the hill behind the house as fast as he can to the spot where the phone usually works.

Lina is here, he writes. She's fine. Come and join us.

The sky west behind the rowan-tree hill the other side of the valley is streaked with red. Fort's rivers of blood, he thinks,
that vein albuminous seas
. The arteries of Genesistrine:
sunsets are consciousness of them… super-embryonic reservoirs from which life-forms emanate…

At this moment, anything is possible. I'll show you soon, he tells Myra in his head. Soon.

As he sets off down the hill another late message comes through. From Dan. Inscrutably brief, and frightening:
Teddy is lost
, it says.

68.

The building emptied out its public an hour early, and most of the staff, those not part of the volunteer search group, have gone by now as well. The police and the volunteers have been methodically working their way through room after room. Dan is still at a table in the main hall. He has stopped talking or reacting altogether, but when Luke suggests they walk once round the Gorsedd gardens he lets himself be pulled gently through the main door and down the steps. In the park they find the black guy on Myra's bench, being interrogated by two frustrated policemen. Luke intervenes.

Ah, excuse me? We know this man, he's part of a university project; can we, ah, help you?

He's not co-operating, says the first policeman. He won't tell us how long he's been here, so we can't rule him out.

And, says the second policeman, he won't stop singing.

Luke checks his watch. Ah, about two hours and twenty minutes, he says. I saw him arrive earlier. About an hour after the kid went missing. I don't think he will know anything.

Who is he? says the second policeman. He won't tell us his name.

This is Mr Jones, says Luke. Nehemiah Jones.

Dan adds, quietly, but you can call him Skip. He nods at the figure on the bench, who grins and winks at him, and gestures that he should come and sit down.
Hallelujah
, he says. Dan shakes his head. The policemen look slightly uncomfortable, make professional-sounding noises, and withdraw. Dan sits down in his misery beside Skip, who shifts one of his dirty bags along to make room. Luke shows him a picture of Teddy. We've lost him, Mr Jones, he says. He's gone.

He watches the man's face slowly cloud over; he rustles through one of the plastic bags and after a while pulls out a picture of the professor from about five years ago, newly appointed as Director of the School of Cultural Cartography, looking shiny and determined.

Jesus, he says, is a mighty good saviour.

That's not Jesus, says Luke.

And anyway, says Dan, bitter and already shivering, he isn't; he's patently useless. Don't give us the Jesus stuff now, for christ's sake.

Skip's eyes are filling up with tears, and after putting his picture away he starts to sing again, hoarse and low, a jumble of desolate bits and pieces about hard times and the killing floor and the people who are drifting from door to door. He rocks back and forth.

When the policewoman comes out to check up on Dan she finds him sitting with his eyes closed, pale and completely still, with the man on the bench beside him rocking and keening.
In the pines
, he sings,
in the pines
. Luke is on another bench a few yards away, comparing maps on his iPad. He looks up at her and smiles.

Hi, he says. He's OK here; best if you leave him be. And I've just thought of something. I need to go back inside. Would you, ah, just keep an eye? Don't sit too long, though, or you'll get cold.

She sits down neatly on the bench and folds her hands over her walkie-talkie as if it were a prayer book.

Where the sun never shines.

And shiver the whole night through.

She shivers.

Ten minutes later her walkie-talkie crackles. She can hear nothing through the interference, so she moves away from the bench, turning towards the building. At that moment Luke appears on the top step, with Teddy limp in his arms, asleep or unconscious. He is yelling for Dan, though no sound reaches them at all through the silence. She cries out and drops the walkie-talkie and runs over to the bench, pulling Dan roughly out of his cold trance.

Come on, she says. Quick now. They've found him.

69.

He lies under a sheet, too cold and then too hot, letting the poison of the weekend work its way through him as illness. He cannot read. Music is unbearable, and the voices on the radio cannot be endured for more than two minutes. He shrinks like a coward from the news. When he phoned the office he had warned them that it might take three days. This is already the third; at least he thinks it is the third. He sleeps as much as possible, and eats almost nothing, and wonders how long it will all go on. He can feel her restlessness, trapped inside his phone, his iPad, his laptop, volleys of questions and comments swirling around like starlings, light and teasing at first, then increasingly disturbed. But he has built a glass wall around her, to keep her safe, to keep her out.
I did what was required
.

The creature lurches into the black pine forest again and again. Blood on its flank. Over fine bone china, the old lady laughs.

70.

In two weeks the place has become utterly strange again. He takes at least three wrong turns, and finds himself at the end of a corridor, a lift the only way out, and no stairs in sight. He doesn't usually take lifts. He stares hard at himself in the mirror, trying to see what his big face might hold beyond the familiar ugliness. A glimpse of his brother around the eyes, but that is about all. He feels presumptuous and insignificant.

The door opens for the top floor and he steps out into a white corridor he knows. He had left at first light, his mother and Lina still sleeping, and it is barely seven now. Everything feels unnaturally quiet. He turns to make for the room at the end of the corridor, and stops short.

She is walking precariously towards him, as if on a tightrope stretched across an abyss, one step at a time, wholly focused on the next few inches ahead. Her red hair is cropped tight around her face; her cheekbones are sharp, there are dark pools around her eyes. The drop on either side of her is terrifying, but all he can do is hold his breath and watch.

She sees him, or seems to, but she barely reacts, concentrating harder than ever, foot after careful foot, on the taut line. He can only wait, willing her on, readying himself to run forward if she should start to fall. She doesn't fall, though he can see that she is tiring. The effort of balance. The effort of moving forward. He is as patient as a mountain. He must not, he will not move.

Closer now, and the strain on her thin face is breaking him. Almost close enough, but not quite, she wobbles, breathes fast as a cat, but finds her balance, and keeps on.

At last she lifts her head and looks right at him, gives a
small shout of triumph and holds out both her hands. He grasps them and pulls her in to him, away from the edge of the cliff.

Myra agrees to go back to bed and rest for a couple of hours, while Theo goes into organisational overdrive, van
quishing 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.