He Said/She Said(14)
‘I promise,’ he says. ‘I won’t leave the Ladder till you come home. Don’t worry, I’ll look after her.’
‘Stay driving sober,’ I say. It’s a joke, of course. He’s been dry for fourteen years now. It wasn’t sobriety or even fatherhood that mellowed him but success. Laura and I concluded that it was keeping his inner capitalist suffocated under a duvet of hippy liberalism that was making him so bitter. He calls himself a barefoot entrepreneur, which makes him sound like a dick, and the difference in me is that these days I actually tell him that.
The cityscape changes as we approach the docks. Shipping crates are piled high as tower blocks and cranes like rocket launch pads pierce the low cloud. I recognise the Princess Celeste from the brochure and feel the squeeze of claustrophobia when I see how tiny the windows are.
At the harbourside, our luggage is whisked away, with reassurances that it will be waiting for us in our cabins. We stand, Richard and I, in matching knitwear, at the foot of the gangplank. There are hundreds of people around us. Despite my reassurances to Laura, I find myself on the lookout for dark hair that curls like smoke, and my ears are braced for the sound of my old name.
Chapter 7
LAURA
11 August 1999
The day of the eclipse dawned dull and chilly. We woke up at eight, even though we’d been working till midnight and after that we’d gone dancing. A girl with a pot of golden body paint gave me and Ling a two-for-one deal: we had had flaming suns painted on our bare arms even though it was so cold that our bodies gave off steam. We’d found a little tent playing trance and gone wild. Now most of the body paint was on my hands and the sleeping bag; still, that smudged golden sun was the only one we were likely to see.
When Kit poked his head out of the tent I thought he was going to cry. ‘I’ve never been clouded out before,’ he said. ‘I know it happens, there’s a one in six chance, but I just can’t see how it’ll be the same.’
An hour before first contact, I packed a little bag and Kit checked his camera for the millionth time. We wandered past the Waltzer and the Ferris wheel, through the trees to the stall. In the absence of customers, Mac and Ling were in the chill-out area, giggling hysterically. ‘Yo!’ said Mac in greeting. I studied them like a vice-squad cop; their eyes were pin-sharp, so not dope: their jaws were still, so not E; so acid, which meant they were good for nothing for the rest of the day.
‘You’re taking the piss,’ said Kit. I knew it wasn’t prudishness, or even frustration at the loss of money, so much as anger at Mac’s lack of respect for the phenomenon. ‘Let’s leave them to it,’ he said to me. ‘I couldn’t care less about making a profit now.’
They didn’t even notice us go.
The main stage was as busy as we’d seen it, the field packed full of people nodding in time to thin trance music and squinting hopefully at the white sky. Many of them were wearing their protective goggles, Mylar-coated lenses in cardboard frames, even though there would be nothing to see for some time. Occasional shafts of light broke through, to sparse whoops and whistles that died away as the clouds closed over. Kit looked nervously around the crowd.
‘There’s no horizon here,’ he said. ‘If we’re going to be clouded out, then we want to be able to see as much sky as possible.’
We turned slowly in a circle.
‘What’s on the other side of those trees?’ I asked. ‘There might be a better view there.’
The other side of those trees turned out to be full of parked vans and the HGVs that had brought the funfair equipment. There was an abandoned dodgem whose seats had been slashed so that the stuffing was foaming out; a vital-looking piece of equipment, something that looked like the whole arm from one of those spider rides. I resolved not to go on a single ride. Behind all these was the perimeter fence, cutting off the sky at twenty feet.
‘It’s worse here than at the stage,’ grumbled Kit.
‘Hang on,’ I said. There was a lorry parked right next to the fence, its roof level with the top of it. I looked at Kit, then up at the top.
‘We can’t,’ he said, but he did a recce of the vehicle, looking first in the driver’s cab and then in through the windows before giving me the thumbs-up. He was up in one graceful bound; I clambered like a monkey, my fingers clinging to the wing mirrors, and my feet finding purchase on the bottom of the windscreen, until Kit pulled me up the last few feet.
Even on an overcast day, the view was a picture painted just for us. Green hills rolled down to the sea in the distance. Where yesterday we had had the clifftops to ourselves, today the grass and heather were stubbled with tourists. Through some trick of the air, the music sounded better up here than it did by the stage, the doof-doof bass less fuzzy, the electric treble cleaner. I took the eclipse goggles from my jeans pocket and wiped the plasticky lenses on the hem of my jumper. One of our customers last night had told us there was a shortage of the glasses on site; apparently pairs were changing hands for up to fifty pounds. I took mine off; they were just a strip of paper and plastic in my hand. I wondered how often an object is priceless one minute and valueless the next.
Kit’s melancholy had given way to agitation now. He held my hand so tight that I had to pull it away.
‘Sorry,’ he said, rubbing my crushed knuckles back to life.