He Said/She Said
Erin Kelly
A total eclipse of the sun has five stages.
First contact: The moon’s shadow becomes visible over the sun’s disc. The sun looks as if a bite has been taken from it.
Second contact: Almost the entire sun is covered by the moon. The last of the sun’s light leaks into the gaps between the moon’s craters, making the overlying planets look like a diamond ring.
Totality: The moon completely covers the sun. This is the most dramatic and eerie stage of a total solar eclipse. The sky darkens, temperatures fall and birds and animals often go quiet.
Third contact: The moon’s shadow starts moving away and the sun reappears.
Fourth contact: The moon stops overlapping the sun. The eclipse is over.
We stand side by side in front of the speckled mirror. Our reflections avoid eye contact. Like me, she’s wearing black and like mine, her clothes have clearly been chosen with care and respect. Neither of us is on trial, or not officially, but we both know that in cases like this, it’s always the woman who is judged.
The cubicles behind us are empty, the doors ajar. This counts as privacy in court. The witness box is not the only place where you need to watch every word.
I clear my throat and the sound bounces off the tiled walls, which replicate the perfect acoustics of the lobby in miniature. Everything echoes here. The corridors ring with the institutional clatter of doors opening and closing, case files too heavy to carry wheeled around on squeaking trolleys. High ceilings catch your words and throw them back in different shapes.
Court, with its sweeping spaces and oversized rooms, plays tricks of scale. It’s deliberate, designed to remind you of your own insignificance in relation to the might of the criminal justice machine, to dampen down the dangerous, glowing power of the sworn spoken word.
Time and money are distorted, too. Justice swallows gold; to secure a man’s liberty costs of tens of thousands of pounds. In the public gallery, Sally Balcombe wears jewellery worth the price of a small London flat. Even the leather on the judge’s chair stinks of money. You can almost smell it from here.
But the toilets, as everywhere, are great levellers. Here in the ladies’ lavatory the flush is still broken and the dispenser has still run out of soap, and the locks on the doors still don’t work properly. Inefficient cisterns dribble noisily, making discreet speech impossible. If I wanted to say anything, I’d have to shout.
In the mirror, I look her up and down. Her shift dress hides her curves. I’ve got my hair, the bright long hair that was the first thing Kit loved about me, the hair that he said he could see in the dark, pulled into a schoolmarm’s bun at the nape of my neck. We both look . . . demure, I suppose is the word, although no one has ever described me that way before. We are unrecognisable as the girls from the festival: the girls who painted our bodies and faces gold to whirl and howl under the moon. Those girls are gone, both dead in their different ways.
A heavy door slams outside, making us both jump. She’s as nervous as I am, I realise. At last our reflections lock eyes, each silently asking the other the questions too big – too dangerous – to voice.
How did it come to this?
How did we get here?
How will it end?
First Contact
Chapter 1
LAURA
18 March 2015
London is the most light-polluted city in Britain, but even here in the northern suburbs, you can still see the stars at four o’clock in the morning. The lights are off in our attic study, and I don’t need Kit’s telescope to see Venus; a crescent moon wears the pale blue planet like an earring.
The city is at my back; the view from here is over suburban rooftops and dominated by Alexandra Palace. By day it’s a Victorian monstrosity of cast iron, brick and glass, but in the small hours it’s a spike in the sky, its radio mast tipped with a glowing red dot. A night bus of the same colour sweeps through the otherwise empty park road. This part of London has a truer 24-hour culture than the West End. No sooner does the last Turkish kebab shop shut than the Polish bakery takes its first delivery. I didn’t choose to live here, but I love it now. There is anonymity in bustle.
Two aeroplanes blink across each other’s paths. One floor below me, Kit is deep in sleep. He’s the one going away, yet I’m wide awake with pre-trip nerves. It is a long time since I slept through the night but my wakefulness now has nothing to do with the babies in my belly who tapdance on my bladder and kick me awake. Kit once described real life as the boring bit between eclipses but I think of it as the safe time. Beth has crossed the world to find us twice. We are only visible when we travel. A couple of years ago, I hired a private detective and challenged him to find us using only the paper trail of our previous lives. He couldn’t trace us. And if he couldn’t do it, then no one else can. Certainly not Beth, and not even a man of Jamie’s resources. It has been fourteen years since one of his letters found me.
This total eclipse will be the first Kit has seen without me since he was a teenager. Even the eclipses he had to miss, he missed with me, because of me. It’s not a good idea to travel in my condition, and I’m so grateful to be in this condition that I don’t begrudge missing the experience, although I am terrified for Kit. Beth knows me. She knows us. She knows that to hurt him is to destroy me.