Star Shot (24 page)

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 talking 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.

Every so often Theo opens his eyes to watch Myra sleep. Then he drifts back down to the problem, the complex knot of thoughts and feelings lodged inside him, a tightness that even the quiet breathing of the woman on the bed cannot dissolve. We are not safe yet. He can see, now, that he had been wrong to think the silence could not reach them in the hills. He pictures the tendrils of nothingness spreading through his mother's mind, cutting off the old pathways, leaving her sentences with nowhere to go. And he feels again the comfortable weight of Teddy on his shoulders, the smooth, sturdy little legs held tight in his grasp. Heading down to the pond for a run around, while Lina and Dan went through the shopping and devised dishes for the evening; he could feel the child's delight through his body, but only guess at his silent commentary on the things he saw. Now and again he had thrown words into the conversation, hoping he was making sense.

Myra stirs and he sees fear flicker briefly across her face. The knot tightens, because he knows, at some level, that none of this will get better of its own accord, and that for Teddy to speak and for Myra to get properly well they will have to tackle the silence at its source. With his eyes closed he circles the knot in his mind, tugs at it, tries to loosen it, to get at its constituent threads.

Lina comes in holding a book bound in dark green leather. She smiles and beckons him over to the window. Look, she whispers, look what I found in the middle room.

It is a copy of the published Transactions of some lengthily titled scientific society, volume seventeen, it says in Roman numerals picked out in gold: 1863-4. He runs a finger down the spine and then sniffs the binding. Mmm, he says, childhood smell. What did you find?

She opens the volume on the table and flicks through the pages. Here, she says, long review of Haeckel, with some of the prints reproduced, look, aren't they beautiful? They were what got me started, all those years ago.

He turns the pages and looks at the line drawings of the Radiolaria, their delicate alien forms. I bet there's a copy of Haeckel here somewhere, he says. In my grandfather's library, nothing would surprise me.

She puts a finger to her mouth and glances at Myra. I'll come and sit now, and read this, she says, but can you help me first with the sheets? I have no idea which ones to use.

He makes a wry face and shrugs. Me neither, he says, but I'll try. Where's Mam now?

Drawing, says Lina. Downstairs drawing. Come on.

They leave quietly. A white butterfly with orange-tipped wings gets in through the open sash window and lands on the cardboard box in an infinitely subtle disturbance of dust. Myra stirs again, her eyelids flickering, trying to pull herself free of another dream where she is walking among rows and rows of war memorials, all bone-white and as monumental as her building, inscribed with names she cannot read, looking for something, avoiding someone, the old fear keeping her walking briskly, not looking back. The eyelids flicker again and open; the room is full of yellow light. She lies still for a while until the rows of pale stone fade, and then she pulls herself to a sitting position and takes stock of her probable strength, her probable balance. She decides it is worth a go.

The butterfly is hurling itself against the glass of the lower window. An inch or two higher, she sees, and it would be away. Very carefully, she makes her way over to help, and cups it in her hands, feeling it flutter then go still. She throws it to its freedom and it dances off.

Turning for the door, she sees Lina's
Transactions
open on the table beside her; the line-drawings catch her eye. She turns a page in curiosity and freezes at what she sees; fragile and hanging, a fretted and many-pointed star. She finds a chair and sits down, flooded with disbelief.

75.

The house absorbs them, one by one. After the long meal, and the long conversations into the night, they find their way to the various new-made beds. Dan scoops Teddy off the rug and climbs up to the big mattress on the attic room floor. He leaves the window open for any stars that might be passing overhead. Lina kisses Myra, who has been quiet and distant all evening, and goes upstairs to her article. She falls asleep reading.

Myra is struggling to stay awake.

You're done in, says Theo, sitting down beside her on the sofa and taking her hand. You going up?

She shakes her head.

You should sleep, he says. Come on, I'll help you upstairs.

I'm not tired.

This is so patently untrue he laughs.

I'm not, she says, defiantly.

OK. You're not. What shall we do?

I need to stay awake, she says. Can we go outside?

He doesn't ask why she needs to stay awake, but hunts around underneath her till he finds one of her tucked-in feet. He measures it against his hand.

Wait here, he says. I'll see what I can do.

He disappears out the back somewhere and returns with a pair of his mother's boots and two pairs of thick socks.

City girl, he says. You can't go down to the pond in the dark in heels. You'll fall in.

She grins, and pulls the boots on, and then takes his arm.

There's a moon, he says. We might not even need the torch. Come on.

Down by the water there are all kinds of noises. Chirps and whistling and rustles, and the sound of something dropping into the water.

Are your frogs going to sing? she asks.

I doubt it, he says. Not the right time for it. Then he laughs.

Paddock moon
, he says.

Mmm?

Pennant. The one that isn't mad; I mean not mad like Fort. He's mad in a good way, eighteenth-century mad. He's got a nice bit on frogs going quiet;
there is a time of year when they become mute, neither croaking nor opening their mouths for a whole month
. It's called the Paddock Moon, apparently.

Why?

Paddock means big frog.

I might have guessed.

Quite.
I am informed that for that period, their mouths are so closed, that no force (without killing the animal) will be capable of opening them…

Is it true?

Of course not.

She thinks of hundreds of stubbornly mute frogs, their wide mouths clamped tight shut, watching them from the reeds and the muddy edges of the pond as they walk like giants slowly through the peculiar washed-out landscape; it is light enough to see the shapes of the hills across the marsh. The moon, the paddock moon, is huge and reflected. A late bat skims across them and dips down towards the pale water.

They stop to listen to the stream at the bottom of the pond, trickling out and down away towards the river. Not much there now, he says, it's been so hot. Wait till October, it's a proper cataract then.

All this, she says. It feels quite unreal. But then I wasn't brought up to it, I suppose.

How long were you in London? he asks.

Years, she says, brusquely. I came back when Mum got ill.

What did you do?

Model, she says, even brusquer. It is clear he will learn no more.

He gives her a hand over the stream.

You're right, though, he says. Doesn't matter how well you know somewhere, this light would make it unreal. It's like being inside a dream.

She shakes her head. Not one of mine she says, bitterly. My dreams are rarely like this.

I know, he says, hugging her gently. I've seen you at it. Is that why you need to stay awake?

She shivers, folds herself into his arms.

Tell me, he says. Try and tell me, go on.

I think, she says, muffled, her face buried in his shirt, I think I'm going mad.