He Said/She Said(5)
I only ever keep things from her that I know will upset her.
Turnpike Lane Tube Station is still closed when I get there, its art deco splendour undermined by crappy shop hoardings and peeling billboards. At precisely 5.20 a.m. the iron lattice gates are pulled wide by a TfL worker in a royal blue fleece. The only other passenger is a tired-looking black woman in a tabard, probably off to clean some office in the city.
I glide down the escalator, lost in thought. It seems unlikely that Beth will be on my ship, but not impossible that she will be somewhere on the Faroes. I’m glad to be travelling alone, and that I don’t have to think about Laura’s safety. I have been protecting my wife against the fall-out of what happened on Lizard Point for so long. I will do anything to keep it that way.
Chapter 3
LAURA
10 August 1999
The National Express coach was stationary on the A303 outside Stonehenge. It seemed like half the world was travelling into the West Country for the eclipse. The sky was the same grey as the standing stones, the ancient clock on the soft green hill. If I had to be stuck in traffic, this seemed like an appropriate place; people don’t realise that Stonehenge was once used to predict eclipses as well as mark midsummer. But after over an hour staring at the sacred site, even I was struggling to remain awestruck.
Every time the weather report came on to the coach driver’s radio, a rake-thin man with a straggly druidic beard sitting near the front would stand up, clap his hands and give us the update. The chances were we would be clouded out. My fellow travellers to the festival in Cornwall mostly whooped and cheered anyway, in a younger, cooler version of the famous British stoicism that had seen our grandparents through the Blitz and our parents through caravanning holidays. For them, it seemed, the eclipse was just an excuse for a festival; a bonus if they witnessed it, but if they didn’t there would still be the music. Kit cared deeply about the eclipse, and I knew there would be a corresponding gloom in his mood.
He, along with Mac and Ling, had already been on the festival site for two days, setting up the tea stall that would hopefully turn a small profit. I hadn’t eaten since my breakfast meeting with the man from the recruitment agency, and I’d changed in the toilets at Victoria Coach Station. The clothes I’d worn for my job interview were stashed in my rucksack. I kicked my army boots, pressing them down as though on to an accelerator, and wondered if I’d get to Lizard Point before nightfall.
Eventually the coach squeezed through the bottleneck, which was caused not by roadworks but drivers rubbernecking at the debris of a pile-up. Soon Wiltshire gave way to the chalk horses of Dorset. By lunchtime we were in Somerset. The chemical toilet got blocked somewhere in Devon. When we entered Cornwall, a genuine cheer went up. The chimneys of disused tin mines seemed to sprout from the hills almost as soon as we crossed the border, and here and there the county standard, the distinctive black flag with its white cross, fluttered proudly. I felt the press of the sea on either side as England petered into a peninsula and the familiar weight building inside me to know that on the southernmost point of the county, Kit was waiting for me.
We had been together six months at that stage. That time was less a honeymoon period and more a fugue state. It should have derailed our university finals, but Kit reaped the rewards of a lifetime of study and a photographic memory, and I fluked it with a question about the one text I’d studied and a ready supply of amphetamine sulphate. Kit insists it was love at first sight; I think it took about twelve hours. We agree to differ.
Ling and I were in our third year at King’s College London when she started going out with a media studies student called Mac McCall (even his mum didn’t call him by his real name, Jonathan). I liked Mac, up to a point – he was good looking in a russety sort of way, funny and exciting and generous with his drugs, but he had a way of taking over whatever space he was in, and I resented him slightly for crashing into my friendship with Ling. I was in no hurry to meet his twin brother, who was studying theoretical astrophysics at Oxford. Chalk and cheese, I thought, and I was right. Mac is your classic extrovert – he draws his energy from people, from crowds – while Kit is a textbook introvert. Conversation drains him; ideas recharge him.
Eclipses brought us together, in a way. As a very young woman I chased any experience that purported to be authentic or alternative to the mainstream culture I used to sneer at. I only liked grimy clubs and right-on bands no one had heard of, and I went out with a lot of boys who looked like Jesus. I thought that standing in a field watching a star disappear would be the ultimate climax to the ultimate rave, a special effect beyond the imagination and budget of any club promoter. When Ling said that she and Mac had found a way to see the upcoming total eclipse in Cornwall and get paid for it, I was in.
Mac lived in Kennington, in an ex-council flat with low ceilings and walls covered in swirling fluorescent fractal posters. I walked in across a forest floor of torn-up Rizla packets. The bulb in the living room had blown, and the place was lit by candles in jam jars. Kit, down from Oxford for the weekend, was a coiled figure in a shadowy corner, his face hidden behind a floppy strawberry-blond fringe, a woolly black jumper pulled down over his wrists. He seemed paler than Mac, in all ways.
‘Dearly beloved,’ began Mac, his hands busy with a lump of hash and a lighter (he could talk and roll a joint the way most of us can talk and blink). ‘We are gathered here today to find a way we can go to a festival without actually having to pay for it. The best mark-up I can find is on hot drinks, teas and coffees, and if we work in shifts, we should turn a tidy profit.’ Mac was surprisingly entrepreneurial for a self-professed anarchist. He wore Amnesty T-shirts and preached peace and love but only to those who mirrored his own values. He made a peace sign by way of a greeting, but thought nothing of keeping his neighbours awake all night with deafening techno.