He Said/She Said(3)

‘Get back into bed,’ I say. ‘It’s not good for you to be leaping around.’

‘Ah, I’m awake now. I’ll go back to bed when you’ve gone.’

In the shower I run through today’s itinerary one last time, the finer details in my grand plan. I’ll catch the 05.26 from Turnpike Lane Tube, then the 06.30 from King’s Cross to Newcastle, where I will meet Richard at 09.42. From there a chartered minibus will take us to Newcastle docks and at a pleasingly round 11.00 we will board the Princess Celeste, a 600-berth cruise ship that will take us across the North Sea, past Scotland and halfway to Iceland, where the Faroe Islands lie. Most of Friday’s eclipse will be over water, but even a calm sea is never still and the best photography is done on land. I had to choose between the Faroes or Svalbard, north of the Arctic Circle. (It was Laura who wanted me to go to the Faroes. The biggest crowds will be in Tórshavn, on Stremoy, the largest island, and she believes in safety in numbers.) In two days’ time, at 8.29 a.m., the moon will start to creep across the surface of the sun and slowly build to two and a half minutes of total eclipse.

I towel-dry the beard Laura insisted I grow for the trip, then dress carefully in the clothes I laid out the night before. My work clothes – not a uniform, but they might as well be – hang neatly in the wardrobe, tugging at my conscience. Delighted as I am at the prospect of five days away from the optical lab, I can’t help but feel guilty at taking annual leave to travel when I could have tacked it on to my paternity leave. Then I think about the chemicals I’ve been breathing in for so long that they line my lungs, and the stiff neck that’s been craned over lenses all year finally hinging upwards to look at the sky, and I think sod it. I’ve got the rest of my life to play the provident father. What’s five days, in the wider scheme of things?

I put on a long-sleeved thermal vest, and then over that my lucky T-shirt, a souvenir from my first eclipse. It says Chile ’91 on it – countries always claim the eclipse as their own, even when the shadow falls over three continents – and is in the colours of the Chilean flag. A crude black circle in its centre represents the covered sun, surrounded by the flares of a corona. When my dad bought it from a roadside hawker it was virtually a dress on me. Mac refused to wear his but I wouldn’t take mine off even to wash it. It fits me now but it won’t in a few years unless I follow Mac’s lead to the gym. There’s a burn on the collar where Mac flicked a lit joint at me during an argument in Aruba, in 1998. On top of these layers goes the magnificent finishing touch, a work of art in chunky black and white wool. Richard and I bought matching Faroese jumpers online months ago. We’re stamping down hard into our carbon footprints by taking them home to the country where the sheep grazed and where the wool was spun and knitted.

I check my phone again, in case weather conditions have changed in the last ten minutes, but the forecasts remain gloomy. There’s a thick blanket of cloud across the whole archipelago. ‘Eclipse chasing’ sounds like a misnomer, and I’ve learned to defend the term over the years. How can you chase a phenomenon when you’re the one moving, and the phenomenon is standing still? First of all, there’s nothing still about an eclipse; the darkness comes at more than a thousand miles an hour. Well, it’s true that there’s no changing the co-ordinates. The shadow will fall where the shadow will fall, in a pattern that was established when we were still primordial soup. But clouds are not nearly so predictable. An unanticipated cumulus can disappoint a crowd of thousands who only moments before were standing confidently in sunshine. The thrill is in outwitting the weather. My fondest memory of my father is from Brazil ’94, Mac and me riding loose in the back of Dad’s VW, speeding along a pot-holed highway until we found a patch of blue sky. (He was, in retrospect, drunk behind the wheel; I try not to dwell on that.)

These days, naturally, there are apps. Breaks in the cloud can be pinpointed with much greater precision, and it’s not unusual for entire coach parties not to know their viewing destination until five minutes before first contact. I turn my phone face down. I will go mad if I think too hard about the weather. Fortunately I’ve always been good at shutting out thoughts that would distract or upset me. In the moments when I allow myself to think about the past, which is not often – it only gets shoved to the forefront of my consciousness when there’s an eclipse on the horizon, and Laura’s triggers go off – in those rare moments, it seems that life since the Lizard has been lived as though under a malfunctioning neon light. A subtle but constant vibrating strobe that you learn to live with, even though you know that one day it will trigger some kind of seizure or aneurysm.

The smell of fresh coffee wafts up the stairs. Laura’s in the kitchen, five steps down and at the rear of the house. Our scrubby little back garden is in darkness. She has filled a mug for me and she’s wrapping a sandwich in foil. I kiss her behind her right ear and inhale the buttery scent of her. ‘Finally, the subservient housewife I’ve always wanted. I should leave you on your own more often.’ I feel the skin on her neck tighten as she smiles.

‘It’s the hormones,’ she says. ‘Don’t get used to it.’

‘Promise me you’ll go back to bed once I’ve gone,’ I say.

‘Promise,’ she says, but I know Laura. I had hoped that pregnancy might slow her down but if anything the steroids have sped her up, so she’ll power through the day until collapsing in a heap somewhere around 9 p.m. She sweeps the worktop clean with a sponge and puts the empty coffee pods in the bin. With her back to me, she performs a tiny act, meaningless to anyone but me, that twists at my guts. She swipes at her bare forearms, twice, as if brushing imaginary cobwebs from her skin. It is months, if not years, since I have seen her do this and it always means she’s thinking about Beth. I wish for the millionth time that she had my discipline when it comes to the past, or rather the way the past might impact our future. Why waste energy anticipating something that could never happen? She gets like this with every eclipse, even though it’s been nine years since Beth’s last known movements. She turns around with a too-wide smile, literally putting on her brave face for me. She doesn’t know I saw her brush at her arms. She might not even know she did it.