He Said/She Said(80)
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I said to Kit. ‘I just want to do it all again.’ I said this knowing full well that the next one was in the Antarctic circle.
‘I can’t see many of this lot making the South Pole.’ Kit surveyed the gurning casualties around us. Our bus’s engine was still idling even though all the seats were taken. ‘They couldn’t afford it. No humans have ever witnessed an eclipse from the pole before. It’s a massive expedition, it’ll cost thousands. I can’t see us making it.’
I don’t know what made me look back. Some avenging spirit of justice, punishing me for daring to drop my guard and be happy. But I did look back, craning over my shoulder at the other bus. She was framed by a grubby window, staring at me, into me.
‘Beth.’ It came out of me in a growl. There was a moment of absolute stillness and horror. Kit froze, then slowly followed my gaze. The three of us were locked like that for a heartbeat. Then, like a spider after a fly, she started to move.
‘Can you get going?’ said Kit to the driver. On the other bus, Beth clambered over her neighbour and began to move down the aisle, clearly obstructed by bags or bodies. The driver was the embodiment of the word ‘laconic’; he raised an eyebrow at Kit and sucked his huge yellow teeth.
‘Just fucking drive!’ said Kit. I’d never seen him look so frightened, not even in the fire.
‘Please,’ I begged the driver, somehow mustering a calm smile. ‘We really need to be somewhere.’ I fished in my pocket and found a handful of kwacha; Kit threw the notes into the driver’s lap. Finally the wheels spun, churning the thin soil, so that when Beth made it into the stony road, she stumbled into a cloud of exhaust and swirling bush dust. A motorbike roared past her, so close I thought it would skin her knees. Undeterred, she tried to run alongside the bus, but the flip-flops on her feet slowed her down. ‘Laura!’ she said, but there was no threat in her voice. She looked desperate rather than angry, aggrieved rather than frightening.
‘Don’t slow down, don’t stop!’ said Kit to the driver. ‘Put your fucking foot down!’ It was the first time he had shown his fear in front of me. Only in the stripping of his strength did I understand what it had cost him to carry me. The bus surged forward. I turned around, stood up in my seat, and saw Beth collapse to her knees in the street, her skirt puddling around her legs so she looked like a landed mermaid, suffocating in a swirling red cloud. We rounded a bend and she was gone from my sight.
Everyone on the bus was staring at us. Kit sank low in his seat, glowing with embarrassment. The silence ensued until the driver began to play with his radio. ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ was playing and the driver sang tunelessly along.
‘She came halfway across the planet to find us,’ Kit said in a voice so low even I could barely hear it. ‘All this effort we’ve gone to in changing our names, making a new life, it’s all been for nothing. And we told her where we were going to be.’
The bus rolled past patchy fields of skinny cattle. I took hold of Kit’s bad hand and ran my fingers over the scar. He pulled it away. ‘She saw my map, she knows where to find us for ever.’
He didn’t say it but the implication was clear; because you invited her into our house. I reached for his hand again, but it was clenched in a fist.
Chapter 42
LAURA
15 November 2003
Jamie Balcombe was released after serving half his sentence. He had been a model prisoner for two and a half years. In the prison library, he taught fellow inmates to read and write. After the fire he wrote me one more letter, saying he had heard about the incident – I shuddered at the knowledge that he was keeping tabs on us – and hoped that my own experience of trauma had increased my empathy, and the likelihood of my retracting my statement. I re-sealed the envelope and sent it back to the prison, saying that there was no forwarding address, and no more letters came. I don’t know if the authorities opened it; if they did, it didn’t count against him when it came to probation.
Jamie’s freedom brought to me both fear and release.
Fear that he would somehow get through to Kit. I was confident Kit would believe my lie over a convicted rapist’s truth, but still it remained a lie, and not one I could bear to repeat to the person whose opinion mattered most. And release, because I had felt every day of his imprisonment like a score in my skin. At least now he wasn’t in prison; it was only – only! – his good name that remained tarnished.
We didn’t see another total eclipse for five years after Zambia. We were – well, I was – too scared of Beth to go to South Africa in 2002. Antarctica in November 2003 might as well have been a flight to the moon as far as we were financially concerned, coming the year after we’d bought the house on Wilbraham Road, lying on the then-ubiquitous self-certification mortgage application to make it happen.
We still chased the shadow, but gone was the excitement of the big alternative parties; instead, we slid under the radar. In 2006, when the path of totality was thickest across Libya, and the third ‘festival of a lifetime’ was held in Turkey, we saw the eclipse at the opposite end, in Brazil.
The night before our flight, Kit caught me sneaking hydrocortisone cream and a whole blister pack of Diazepam into a side pocket of our bag.
‘We don’t have to do it,’ he said, searching my face.