He Said/She Said(2)

I watch the moon set in its slow arc. Following its course is a deliberate act of mindfulness, the living-in-the-moment therapy that is supposed to stop my panic attacks before they can take hold. The telltale early symptom is there; a subtle standing-to-attention of all the tiny hairs on my skin, a feeling that someone’s trailing a gossamer scarf over my forearms. They call it somatising, a physical manifestation of psychological damage. Mindfulness is supposed to help me separate the soma from the psyche. I play join-the-dots with the constellations. There is Orion, one of the few constellations everyone can identify, and, flung a little to the north, the Seven Sisters that give the nearby neighbourhood its name.

I rock back and forth from the heels to the balls of my feet, concentrating on the carpet fibres under my bare toes. I can’t let Kit see me anxious. In the short term, it would ruin his trip, and after that, he would suggest more psychotherapy, and I’ve taken that as far as I can. There’s only so far you can get when you’re holding on to a secret like mine. The psychotherapists always say that the sessions are confidential, like their Ikea couch is a sacred confessional. But my confession is a broken law, and I can’t trust anyone with it. There is no statute of limitations for what I did in this country, and none in my heart.

When my breathing evens out, I turn away from the window. There is just enough light to see Kit’s map. Not the original of course, that was destroyed, but a painstaking recreation of it. It’s a huge relief map of the world, crisscrossed with curves of red and golden thread, measured to the nearest millimetre, glued down with characteristic precision. The gold arcs mark the eclipses he has already seen; the red those we can expect to see in our lifetimes. Part of the ritual is coming home after a trip to replace red threads with gold. (Being Kit, he has calculated his life expectancy using family history, lifestyle and longevity trends, and allowed for infirmity curtailing travel when he’s ninety. So we should see our last eclipse in 2066.)

Years ago, Beth trailed her fingers over the first map and that’s when I told her about our plans.

I wonder where on the planet she is now. Sometimes I wonder if she’s even still alive. I have never wished her dead – for all that she put us through, she was a victim too – but I have often wished that she could be . . . deleted, I suppose, is the right word. There’s no way of finding out. Try to look up ‘Elizabeth Taylor’ and see how far you get without the actor or the novelist making a nonsense of your search. Using the diminutive ‘Beth’ does little to narrow it down. She seems to have vanished as effectively as we have.

I haven’t looked Jamie up for years. It’s too uncomfortable, after my part in it all. His public relations crusade paid off and these days when you search his name the crime comes up but only in his preferred context. The first few hits are about his campaigning work, the support he gives to wrongly accused men and rightly accused men too, calling for anonymity up to the point of conviction. I can never get beyond the first few lines before I start to feel sick. I still need to keep myself informed, so I got around the problem by setting up a Google alert that links his name to the only word that matters. There’s no point combining his name with Beth’s in a search; her lifelong anonymity is guaranteed. That’s the law whatever the outcome of this kind of trial. I suppose she was lucky – we all were, in a way – that the case pre-dated social media and the keyboard vigilantes whose blood sport is identification.

Light on the landing tells me Kit’s awake. I take a deep breath in and a longer breath out and I am calm. I have beaten this attack. I roll up the sleeves of the sweater I’m wearing. It’s Kit’s, and it doesn’t do me any favours, but it fits and I seem to have been at the stage where I dress for comfort for years now. Even before I conceived, the steroids gave me hips and breasts for the first time in my life, and I still haven’t worked out how to dress around curves.

I pad down the stairs, edging past the flat-packed cots on the landing. When Kit comes home we’ll have to convert Juno and Piper’s room at the back of the house into a nursery. Superstition, a reluctance to do anything until he has survived this trip, has held me back.

I find him sitting up in bed, already checking his phone for the weather report, his pale copper hair at mad angles. The words don’t go try to punch their way out of my mouth. Knowing he would stay if I asked him to is all the reason I need to let him leave.





Chapter 2





KIT

18 March 2015

I lie awake for a few seconds, listening to Laura’s footsteps overhead, and savouring the Christmas-morning feeling. The thrill never lessens when the abstract numbers on the calendar finally take shape into days. I have known for years that on 20th March 2015, the moon will block the sun from view, making a black disc in the sky. Total eclipses of the sun have been dots on the timeline of my life since I first stood beneath the moon’s shadow. Chile 1991 was the eclipse of the last century; seven minutes and twenty-one seconds of pure totality. I was twelve years old and I knew that I would devote the rest of my life to recapturing the experience. Nothing compares to witnessing a total solar eclipse under a cloudless sky. Until I met Laura, it was the closest I came to understanding religion.

The sheets on her side of the bed are cold. When she comes in, her belly entering the room a beat before she does, her cheeks are sunken from tiredness. Her hair is tied up, the roots showing, a millimetre of brown that looks black against the platinum lengths. She’s wearing one of my old sweaters, pushed up to the elbows. She has never looked lovelier. I had worried, when we first started trying for a baby, whether I’d miss that ectomorph gawkiness I always loved, but there’s a new pride at seeing Laura’s body change because there’s something of me in there.