He Said/She Said(82)
I forget that the chain’s on the door. I pull it two inches wide to see Beth Taylor standing on my doorstep.
The cup falls from my slackened grip and the purple juice explodes across the floor tiles and up the walls, making the floor slippery beneath me, the tart berry smell at odds with the metallic fear on my tongue. Instinctively my hand goes over my belly and I stagger backwards, catching the banister to stop me falling as my foot skids on the mess beneath me. I find myself sitting on the bottom step, hands pathetically trying to cover my bump. Whatever Beth was going to say, the shock of my fall and, judging by the way she’s staring at my belly, of my pregnancy takes her breath away for a few seconds, then she says, ‘Shit, Laura. Are you ok?’
‘What do you want?’
She puts her hand through the gap between the door and the jamb, a stretching motion that could either be a pathetic offer to help me up or a hand curling around to undo the chain. It will only fit as far as the wrist.
‘Laura,’ she says.
‘No!’ I say, and she draws her hand quickly back.
I look at the console table but the landline handset isn’t in its cradle; too late, I remember leaving it upstairs when I spoke to Dad this afternoon. My mobile is somewhere in the sitting room, and in the time it would take me to go and get it, who knows what she’s capable of? Unhooking the chain? Kicking the door down? Has she got a weapon?
‘Please, Laura,’ she says, pressing her face up close to the gap between the door and the jamb, so all I can see is her nose, her mouth and the inside corners of her eyes. ‘I really need you to let me in.’
Third Contact
Chapter 44
KIT
20 March 2015
‘Svalbard,’ says Richard, waving his tablet under my nose. ‘We should’ve gone to bloody Svalbard.’ We’ve found a bar in the harbour, with free Wi-Fi, a view of the red house and Sólarbjór on tap; my last drink for a while, I think, and decide then and there not to touch any more booze until the babies are safely born. Richard has decided that our last few minutes on the Faroes should be spent bent over a screen, wallowing in what could have been. ‘Or even some of the other Faroe Islands – this was taken just twenty miles north of here.’ He zooms close on a beautiful image of a crescent sun in a clear sky. ‘And look! There was a cruise ship that couldn’t dock in Tórshavn and they all saw it from the middle of the sea! Why didn’t the Celeste do that?’
‘Why don’t you sue them for bad weather?’ I suggest. You do actually hear of that happening; tourists, not serious chasers, haranguing their tour operators for their money back if they’re clouded out. Richard takes my point.
‘Speaking of the Celeste, we should get a move on. Gangplank’s up in half an hour. Have you got your stuff?’
‘Indeed I do,’ I say, patting down the paper bag I’ve just acquired. My ‘stuff’ is two miniature T-shirts with a picture of the corona on them that I’m pretty sure came from the 2006 eclipse, I can tell by the distinctive horizontal flare of the hydrogen promontories. The T-shirts look tiny to me, too small for anything but a doll or a teddy bear, but the label inside says 12–18 months. I am struck again by how imminent fatherhood is, and how little I know about babies. I thought I was quite a hands-on uncle with Juno and Piper but Ling and Laura tell me that I used to let their heads wobble all over the place, and that I always handed them back when they started crying.
I stand up, feeling the camera strap cut into my neck and, draining the last of my Faroese beer, strike out after Richard for the ship. I’m two drinks down, and it’s partly the alcohol, but a kind of euphoria is moving in to replace the paranoia, the madness that infected me up on the mountain. All Laura’s fears have come to nothing and in twenty paces I’ll be on the boat and on the way home to her.
‘Kit!’
The woman’s voice is right behind me, so close that she didn’t need to shout. Richard rolls his eyes, bored now of my celebrity, but my heart hammers. The shock of hearing my real name, the one that Laura calls me, in this context, stops time then stretches it. A hand is on my arm before I register something important: although it’s a female voice, the accent is wrong. I turn to face a woman about my age with dark hair, a washed-out prettiness, smiling at me with delighted recognition. I don’t have a clue who she is, although this doesn’t seem to faze her.
‘It’s Krista!’ she says. ‘Krista Miller!’
My mind scrambles vainly for a foothold.
‘I’m so sorry, Krista,’ I say. I hope my smile is charming. ‘You’ll have to help me.’
‘Ah, it’s fine,’ she says, totally unfazed. ‘I’ve changed a lot – although you haven’t. Aruba? Aruba ’98? Baby Beach?’
A memory forms, slow as a Polaroid. The last eclipse I saw with my dad. Missing a week at university – it was the year before I met Laura – to fly out of the UK in February and lie on white sand that rippled like silk and burned like hot metal. A beautiful eclipse, Venus and Jupiter shining studs in the sky. All the Brits and Americans congregating at the same beachside bar every night of the trip and among their number an American student in – the image coalesces quicker now – gypsy top and Bermuda shorts, train-track braces. I remember posing for a group photograph that someone had taken with one of those disposable cameras that were all the rage back then. Memories flood back of promising to write, to get a copy of the photo sent, of street addresses rather than emails being exchanged. Lost in the past, I become aware that Krista’s staring expectantly at me.