He Said/She Said(41)

Beth is not on the ship.

There’s still a chance she’s on land. If I were going to look for her, find her before she can find me, my greatest chance would be in that bar. During the shadow, there will be thousands of tourists scattered across dozens of hills. We won’t even know our own vantage point until the morning of the eclipse, when the scouts go out to assess the cloud cover on the island. But for the next twenty hours, until we dock in Tórshavn Harbour, there will be no confrontation with my past.

I think I deserve another drink.



I catch Jeff Drake at the bar. He remembers me at once; ‘Christopher!’ he says (thanks to my name tag, my full name is already beginning to prick my ears the way Kit does at home). His voice kicks me back through the corridors of time and into his rooms overlooking the Isis. I half expect to look down and see the battered Adidas Gazelles I used to wear.

‘I often wonder what became of you,’ he says, when we have finished telling each other what a small world it is. ‘Academe’s loss must have been industry’s gain.’ It is a long time since I felt shame when I told anyone what I do for a living now, but when I do, he is gracious and interested; if anything, he is disappointingly undisappointed in my failure to complete my doctorate. But Jeff is as famous for his diplomacy as he is for his intellect. When our conversation is interrupted by an elderly Canadian lady earnestly asking the difference between a star and a planet, he speaks to her with the same respect he showed me when I was his student. My wasted potential is a stone in my throat, and I wash it down with red wine.

Richard has fallen into conversation with a party of astronomers from Wales and it’s soon established that there are some serious eclipse chasers here. Tansy, a vast, ruddy woman about my mum’s age, threatens to show us her lucky underwear. ‘Never been clouded out with my lucky knickers on!’ she says, topping up my glass.

‘Still got it,’ I tell Richard under my breath. As notes of eclipses passim are compared, a pecking order naturally establishes itself. Richard takes a register of names and eclipses viewed on the back of a tour itinerary. Our undisputed master is a nonogenarian Californian man who has seen nineteen eclipses, but if you divide the number of eclipses by our ages (and I can’t resist the calculation) then I have seen by far the most eclipses relative to my years.

Wine just keeps appearing. The temperature in the bar rises and I peel off my Faroese sweater to reveal my Chile ’91 T-shirt underneath. The effect on Tansy is like Clark Kent ripping off his suit to reveal the Superman outfit beneath. ‘1991! You must have been a babe in arms.’

More wine, and I realise I have stopped noticing the ship’s keel, which means either we are motionless on a millpond sea, or the lurching feeling in my brain is in perfect synch with the vessel’s slow rocking. Richard challenges everyone within earshot to break the world record for the most eclipse chasers ever in one photograph. As an eclipse virgin he is not eligible to take part, but he herds us into his viewfinder. There’s a Princess Celeste souvenir baseball cap lying on a table and, without asking whose it is, I pull it down over my eyes and stand at the back. I’m a black peak and a ginger beard. When he’s got his shot, Richard runs the end of a straw up and down his list, his lips moving as he does the mental arithmetic. ‘This picture,’ he says brandishing the image on his phone, ‘represents a total of 103 discrete total-eclipse-viewing experiences.’

‘If that’s not a practical use of mathematics I don’t know what is,’ I say, to laughter all round. Mac’s been telling me I’m not funny my whole life, and even Laura doesn’t get all my jokes, but tonight I realise I’ve been looking for appreciation in all the wrong places. Here, they love me. Everyone wants to hear my eclipse stories. I can talk freely about them for the first time since before Cornwall, because these people are so fluent in the technicalities of the experience that I can leave out everything else – the interruptions and aftermaths that would have soured even perfect conditions – and they will still be interested. My new friends hang on my every word. Tansy inches closer. I look at the wine glass in my hand only to find I’ve moved on to rum. Someone produces a selfie stick and there are more pictures, and I keep the cap on. I’m introduced to another man in a Chile ’91 T-shirt; naturally we embrace like long-lost brothers. I note with satisfaction that while his strains over a proud beer belly, mine still hangs more or less straight from my shoulders to my belt. No wonder Tansy finds me so irresistible. Conversations with my new friends repeat, circle and blur. I believe there is some singing and at one point I tell an amazing story, I think.

‘Maybe you should calm down a bit,’ says Richard, gently taking my glass from my hand and setting it down.

I am indignant. ‘Me and Tansy are just friends.’

‘What are you on about? Your bunk’s two feet away from mine. I don’t want to be woken up by a face full of your puke.’

I’m too drunk to stop drinking but still sober enough to know that fresh air is my friend. On the top deck, I thud on to a recliner and then I have a quick power nap. When I wake up, someone has covered me with a blanket. Below and around me, waves shatter against the sides of the boat. The wind has blown the clouds to one side and the moon is a thick waning crescent. There are more stars than blackness above us; multi-armed galaxies swirl before my naked eye and meteors are as frequent as London buses. I haven’t seen a firmament like this since Zambia. Laura’s absence is the only flaw in a perfect evening. I cannot remember the last time I felt so at home.