Neptune's Tears (16 page)

‘Don’t be silly, dear.’ Mrs Hart had leaned forward and put her hand over Zee’s. ‘I know you’re afraid I’ll shuffle off while you’re gone, but you
needn’t be. Why, I wouldn’t think of dying before I know how things turn out between you and your young man. And they
do
have a way of turning out, you know, no matter how bleak
things may look. My life is proof of that. So you go ahead and follow your heart. I’ll be around when you get back.’

As she’d spoken, she’d unclasped the necklace she was wearing and poured the thin golden chain with its trio of diamonds into Zee’s hand. ‘Take this for luck, Zee. It
hasn’t looked good on me for twenty-five years anyway. It needs a young throat. And young dreams.’

‘Oh no, I couldn’t —’

‘Come now, dear. Of course you can. They’re only fakes, as you know, but my good wishes for you are real, and I’ll feel better if I know it’s with you.’

So Zee had taken the necklace, and now was glad Mrs Hart had insisted. Each time she touched it, she remembered Mrs Hart wishing her well.

Still, she was glad she wasn’t going directly from London to Java. When she’d told her parents she was planning to visit Jasmine in Indonesia, it had taken no time at all to detect
the disappointment in their voices. Realising that they’d hoped she was calling to announce a trip home, Zee felt a pang of guilt mixed with true homesickness. ‘So I was wondering if I
could stop and see you on my way,’ she added quickly. ‘It’s been a long time since I was home.’

It
had
been a long time. Almost four years, in fact, since she’d made the trip, as her family usually visited her in London. And when she arrived, it was a bit of a shock to find
that the place she’d thought of all this time as home no longer felt like home to her. The house seemed large, after London spaces, and less cosy. Opening the door to her room, which
she’d felt so sad to leave, was like stumbling into the room of a child she might once have known. It took her a minute to remember the music groups whose posters were on the walls.

‘Why didn’t you take this room when I moved out?’ she asked her little sister. ‘It’s bigger than yours.’

‘I know but Mom said we had to keep it for you.’

‘Well, you don’t have to keep it any more. Why don’t we fix it up for you while I’m here?’

Bex’s eyes lit up. ‘Can we paint?’

‘Sure. We can get paint tomorrow.’

‘But Mom and Dad —’

‘Don’t worry about Mom and Dad. I’ll talk to them, it’ll be okay.’ Zee grinned. ‘Start thinking of colours.’ Over the past year, Bex had lost her
formless, bean-shaped look. Her legs were longer and her bright red hair was growing darker and glossier, just as Zee’s had at about that age.

She waited until Bex went to bed to take up the subject with her parents. ‘It’s just not fair to Bex,’ she began. ‘It’s like you’re telling her I deserve the
room more even though I’m not here.’

‘But it’s your room,’ her mother said. ‘What if you come back here to live? It would be like we’d gotten rid of you.’

Zee didn’t have the heart to tell her parents she was pretty sure her future, wherever it took her, didn’t lie there. ‘If I come back,’ she said, ‘we’ll do
what we did when we were kids – we’ll draw for it.’

She saw that her parents weren’t convinced. When had this started? They both acted like any change was a threat. Earlier, her father had told her that the neo-hippie group they’d
been part of for so many years had fallen apart. And, as Zee could see without being told, his faith in the aliens had turned to disappointment over the years. No wonder he seemed at a loose end!
Zee hadn’t had many – any, really – boyfriends when she lived at home, and she’d wanted to tell them more about David. She’d even thought that hearing how David had
helped during the anarchists’ attacks might restore some of her father’s faith in the aliens, but he hadn’t seemed to care one way or another.

‘Why don’t we make a family project of it, the way we used to?’ she said. ‘I’m here for three days and if we all pitch in, we can switch the rooms and give Bex
something really special.’

And that’s just what they did for the next few days. Her father seemed to shake off all his disappointments and throw himself into creating a screen wall for Bex, who had turned into a
techno geek and had now established a worldwide student news network. Zee and her mother moved furniture while Bex tested various shades of illuminating blue paint on the walls.

‘I want something that won’t interfere with my glasses,’ she explained.

‘Glasses?’ Zee asked in surprise. No one had worn glasses for their eyesight for over a hundred and fifty years. ‘Is that a new fad?’

‘No, these,’ Bex said, handing Zee what looked like a gamer’s headset with an extra large eye shield. ‘Try them on.’

Zee did and her field of vision was instantly filled with about a hundred screens. ‘Eek! I feel like a fly! Help – how can I just look at one screen?’

Bex tapped the left rim of the visor a few times and the field reduced, showing only the upper right quadrant. ‘If you want to get to one screen, just focus on the one you want, or put on
the gloves and you can touch your way to it.’

‘No thanks,’ said Zee, pulling the headset off. ‘I think I’ll leave all of this sort of thing to you. What was I looking at, anyway?’

‘Oh, those are just news stories I’m watching.’

‘I’m impressed,’ Zee said, and watched Bex glow.

They finished the room the night before Zee had to leave and celebrated with homemade pizza, creating crazy mosaics with the toppings just like they had when Zee was Bex’s age.

Bex couldn’t come to the vactrain station with them in the morning because she had an online editorial meeting and Zee’s father, who’d planned to drive, came down with a
blinding migraine. In the end, it was just Zee and her mother waiting for the train.

‘I hope Dad’s okay,’ Zee fretted.

‘He will be. He just can’t stand to see you go is all. He really loved having you here. And you were great with him, Zee. Lately he’s been so . . .’

‘I know. Mom, did you see what a great job he did on the work in Bex’s room? Those built-ins he did? That kind of workmanship is pretty hard to find. Maybe now that the neo-hippies
have disbanded . . . well, I bet lots of people around here would hire him to do custom work like that.’

‘What a great idea, Zee.’ Her mother paused. ‘I wish we saw more of you. You’ve grown up so much in the last year, and now you’re off to see that boy.’

Zee’s eyes opened wide. ‘You know?’

‘Well, not for sure. Not until just now. But I had a hunch. Indonesia is a long way to go just to see Jasmine. And so suddenly. It’s that boy who took you out for your birthday,
isn’t it? And helped during the bomb attacks? Don’t look so surprised. Every mother started out as a girl in love, you know, even me.’

‘I wish you could meet him, but everything’s so uncertain. He transferred to Indonesia because he doesn’t think we should see each other any more, since his time here is almost
up and he has to go back to his home planet.’

‘And you’re going to talk him out of it?’

‘I . . . I don’t know. I only know I have to see him one more time. I have to make sure it’s what
he
wants to do, not something he’s doing to try to protect
me.’ She stopped abruptly and studied her mother’s face. ‘Do you think I’m stupid for doing this? I mean, I know I’ve never had a boyfriend before, so it must seem
like I’ve gone totally off the deep end and —’

Her mother gave her a quick, hard hug. The rumbling vibrations under their feet signalled the imminent arrival of the vactrain. ‘I don’t think you’ve gone off the deep end,
Zee. You could have had tons of boyfriends by now, but you always had other things on your mind. So if this boy has your heart, he must be special. And I’d hate to see you go through life
without having that. You’d better go now, or you’ll miss that train. And don’t worry about your father. We’ll be fine.’

‘Bye, Mom. I’ll email when I get there. Love you.’ Hugging her mother goodbye, Zee noticed for the first time that she was now the taller of the two of them.

The closer Zee got, the more her doubts grew. It had been one thing to stand on the familiar vactrain platform at home and set off for parts unknown. It was another thing to
actually
be
in parts unknown, on a mission that seemed increasingly uncertain. If David had truly cared about her, wouldn’t he have stayed? There were many moments, high over the
Pacific, when her palm would close around the Neptune’s Tears necklace and she would hear Mrs Hart’s voice telling her to follow her heart.

Jasmine and her boyfriend Rajasa met Zee at the airport, though how they found her in the shoulder-to-shoulder sea of people, Zee would never know. Rajasa was as attractive as the hologram
Jasmine had sent and charming to boot, chatting easily with her, carrying her luggage – he even managed to get them a seat on an airbus so crowded that several passengers had to get off
before it could even lift off the ground.

‘Is it rush hour already?’ Zee asked, and Raj and Jasmine laughed.

‘It’s always like this,’ Jasmine explained. ‘Except on holidays —’

‘— when it’s much worse,’ Raj finished.

They looked at each other and smiled over the joke they’d shared many times.

Jasmine’s apartment was tiny, barely as big as Zee’s two rooms in the residence hall, but, Jasmine told her, larger than anything most couples could afford.

‘Couples?’ Zee’s eyebrows lifted.

‘You’re the first to know,’ said Raj with a huge grin. ‘I’ve asked Princess Jasmine to marry me and she’s said yes.’

Jasmine blushed and smiled. ‘I’m not a princess,’ she said.

Raj looked at her with adoring eyes. ‘You’re my princess.’ He turned back to Zee. ‘Anyway, I proposed and she said yes. I have no idea why.’

‘Because you are so rich,’ Jasmine teased, ‘and I promised Mama I would marry a rich businessman.’

Raj had just started his residency at the hospital where Jasmine worked as an empath. They would be poor for years, and both would earn less than they would have elsewhere, but neither seemed to
mind. In this lush, crowded country of a thousand tiny islands, they had found each other and that was what mattered. Jasmine, who’d been plump and worn layers of clothes against the cold
even in the middle of England’s summer, had blossomed like an exotic flower since Zee had last seen her. She’d grown thinner – ‘No chips! No more doughnuts!’ –
and lost the shadow of something Zee had seen in herself, in David, and even in confident Mia – homesickness. She and Raj would live their lives where they were born. Their children would
grow up with grandparents and cousins. Their work and their lives would make their country stronger, and their contentment with all of this shed light like a small sun. Zee thought of her time with
David and how almost every minute seemed to have been danced on a tightrope. It was hard not to envy Jasmine and Raj, or what it would be like to be them.

After Raj left, Zee told Jasmine about David, leaving out, as she had for her parents, Omura’s nasty habit of destroying one partner and bringing the other back home if the relationship
was discovered.

‘And you came all this way to find him!’ Jasmine sighed. ‘He must be very special. I can’t wait to meet him!’

‘One thing at a time,’ Zee said. ‘I mean, what if he doesn’t want to see me?’

‘Why wouldn’t he want to see you? Of
course
he’ll want to see you.’

It had been nice to hear this, even though Zee herself was having doubts. And now, the day after, she’d been at Prambanan almost three hours and still hadn’t made her way to the
building where David was working. Part of it was procrastination, she knew, but part of it was Prambanan itself. She’d been so caught up in the idea of finding David, she hadn’t given a
thought to what a Hindu temple might look like.

She’d arrived early in the morning, when the mists were still clearing. As the fog lifted, the central temples came into view, each one shaped like a torch with spiky points reaching into
the sky. Getting off the airbus and starting down the broad avenue that led to the central plaza, she saw other temples, not just one or two or even a few dozen – but hundreds of them, some
as tall as a house, some barely as tall as she was, some empty and some housing statues of Hindu gods and goddesses, some perfectly intact and some mysteriously toppled into ruins. But what amazed
her, when she got to the large buildings, were the relief sculptures carved into the stone walls. On almost every building, panel after panel of men and women danced out stories of love, faith and
passion. Each figure was so carefully carved, with an expression so different from all the others, that Zee could have recognised each of them in a crowd. They were portraits of people who had
lived over fourteen hundred years ago, yet their expressions so perfectly echoed her own hope and despair that she felt bound to them, another dancer in the endless chain.

He had tried every way he knew to forget her. When the opportunity to transfer to the Prambanan research team came up, he volunteered immediately, and spent the rest of the
afternoon feeling like he’d cut off his own arm. To board the plane, he’d told himself a fantasy about returning to London in a few weeks and watching her from afar, without letting her
know.