Star Shot (2 page)

But Fort, of course, wants the stuff for his catalogue of the damned:
I shall have to accept, myself, that gelatinous substance has often fallen from the sky – or that, far up, or far away, the whole sky is gelatinous?
That meteors tear through and detach fragments? That fragments are brought down by stars?

You should be in the geology section, then, she said, they've got a lovely collection of meteors there. We'll try the birds first, I think, he said; I'm really not that inclined to the cosmic.

Now abstracted, in no hurry, he roams up and down past cases of stuffed animals all stageily doing their thing: fox-cubs tumbling, otters on their hind legs looking surprised, rodents with perfect untrembling whiskers, and the huge suspended sea-turtle in its own special booth, telling its life story on a loop to all comers in a voice that sounds suspiciously like that of Richard Burton. At last, a heron. He stands looking at it for a long while, unconsciously mimicking its stance, the pair of them equally thoughtful. It is you, isn't it? Has to be. Who else? Not the blessed coddymoddies, for sure, because they don't eat frogs and then regurgitate frog-associated by-products in a gelatinous mess. A mess which emphatically does not, Mr Fort, fall to earth in the wake of meteors from vast floating beds in the sky. Any more than frogs themselves do, in the normal course of things. Not that you're interested in the normal course of things, I know.

Two peculiarities of the fall of frogs:

That never has a fall of tadpoles been reported

That never has a fall of full-grown frogs been reported

Always frogs a few months old.

He can see it might be hard for some people to resist a man who writes nonsense with the authority of liturgy. He stands on the white steps now and blinks at the sun. Then he crosses the little park and waits for four lanes of traffic to stop and part and let him through. For a few long seconds as he crosses the road he has the sensation of walking in a riverbed filled to the brim with complete silence.

5.

In the rain it is often the stuffed animals, the wondrous talking turtle, Mam's stars. But today is bright and almost warm and so it is a walk in the park, a walk in the park, an absolute walk, he thinks, in the park. More metaphorical than real of course. Oh, he remembers walking, properly walking, hard and fast and with long strides across this same park to get to her room, and then back to his bedsit, drunk, in the dark, even when the park was chained and bolted against him, he knew the ways in and out.

This is not walking. There is no word to describe this amazing lack of forward progress across the face of the earth. It is hardly aimless, because nothing could be more intent, more determined. It is something like the way beetles move about, desperately busy but profoundly inexplicable, unless you know about beetles, or are one, when it must all make more sense. It is all directions and no direction. It gets us precisely nowhere. It puts that coffee, which would be ten or fifteen minutes away in real time, into the league of impossible tasks, up there with golden apples, the scissors-and-comb thing, and the sodding grail. Oh child, oh beetle, I should not have thought of the coffee. Now I am not an amused and nonchalant god. I am a strategic one, a cunning one; a god with ulterior motives. Come on little beetle, run this way! Catch me, if you can.

Teddy starts after Dan with a radiant grin, following the path like a charm, pulled in the wake of the rolling buggy. And yet when Dan turns round for the second time to shout encouragement the child appears to be miles back, sitting on the warm tarmac, tugging patiently at his shoe. Dan turns back on his tracks, bracing himself for the unequivocal refusal to be strapped back in. I am a bear, he says, by way of explanation, and he scoops the boy up with a growl and stuffs him into the buggy. It almost works. He fumbles the bloody straps, giving Teddy just enough time to realise that he is being cheated of his liberty, and summon his rage. It is not, Dan decides, even worth opening negotiations, and so he makes diagonally for the gate, head down, pushing hard, ignoring the sideways eyes of two elderly walkers. The pitch rises, the cries are louder and louder. Dan slows near the gate to let a woman through and then pushes the pram up onto the pavement where the child's sustained yell cuts out so suddenly his heart cramps in terror. He jams down the brake and bends over to see Teddy's raging face still furious, screaming in utter silence.

In seconds he has yanked off the harness, pulled the child into his arms and dragged the buggy back against the park railings onto the grass verge. The yell returns, full-blooded, uninterrupted. And then, as Teddy realises he is free again, subsides. They look at each other baffled. Shaking, Dan tucks his son tightly into him and negotiates the empty buggy with the other hand through the traffic and towards town.

6.

She calculates the time left against the tasks still to do. She will not finish them today, in half an hour; not in three hours; not in three days. She saves a file of work to do after supper, and then chooses three emails, and answers them carefully, conscientiously, ignoring the rising push of the rest like a reservoir filling, the authors full of excuses renegotiating deadlines in bad faith, the useless man from publicity, the requests that should have gone to a different department, and the upbeat, poisonous flow of criticism disguised as praise from the senior colleague. Smiley emoticons; tiny, barely perceptible barbs.

At twenty-five past she presses send for the third time, shuts down, straightens the piles on her desk and picks up her bag, her jacket, and goes into the toilets to do her hair and gloss her lips. Nods goodbye to the others, chats briefly on the stairs to the new girl and joins the scattering of people like her, spilling out of their offices. Many head for their cars, but she will walk home, looping in a daily twenty-minute detour to pass the building after it has closed, to have it emptied of its public, calm and stern. It should be more daunting this way, more focused on her, but oddly enough when there is no chance of going in she can often get closer, walking past it slowly. Twice she has found herself courageous enough to sit on the steps and listen to it breathing. On a bright spring afternoon that might, perhaps, feel possible.

She sets off briskly, clacking the heels of her new shoes. You really like those shoes, don't you? the senior colleague had said, and she had not known what to reply. Through the leafy car park, across the wide main road and through a scrap of building-site to the railway bridge. Where she lingers, because it is a busy time for trains and she knows one will be along soon. It turns the corner, endearingly short, a single carriage, like a determined grub. The squeal of the brakes and gears is pleasing; she waits for the rattle and rush of it on the long straight. But as she moves to the centre of the graffitied metal bridge to watch it approach the noise cuts out with the abruptness of a mute button, and the train passes under her in total, baffling silence.

7.

People Who Sit On Benches would, he thinks, make a great project. He must bring it up at their next strategy meeting. So great, in fact, he would like to keep it for himself; work it into his ongoing Famous Footsteps project, there must be all kinds of exciting intersections there. Though getting much, indeed, any, historical depth on People Who Sit On Benches could be tricky, unless his Authors made something of them in their texts. How long have municipal benches been around in this country, he wonders. I mean, there's your starting point at least. No, maybe not. But an interesting joint project nevertheless, something performative, that could work pretty nicely. He will bring it up with the professor over a coffee first: test the water, stake a claim. He must make it clear whose brainchild this one is.

He walks on past the black guy as he has done fifty times before, but now feeling seriously self-conscious. It is a notebook day, he observes without quite looking. In spite of the drizzle. Not a cutting-up-university-prospectuses day. They must be stashed in the plastic bags. He almost has qualms: would a project like this mean talking to them? His normal subjects are literary and historical, that is to say, dead; he is not trained up for folklore, not folklore, what do they call it here, ethnography, talking to people. Perhaps they could get one of the postgrads to do that bit? The man doesn't look up as he goes past, but he is mumbling something. Luke quickens his pace and heads on up towards the campus. Remembers suddenly the curious new data problem with his maps. Something else to show the professor.

8.

The hospital appointment is awkwardly timed for late morning, so Myra has had to take a half-day. Tight and anxious, having slept very badly, she had left the flat far earlier than she needed to and walked into the centre, where she stood in a daze in various just-opening clothes shops, hoping for distraction. Bought nothing. Had an expensive coffee and a biscuit which she left untouched and read the letter again, Dear Ms Jones, your appointment with the consultant has been arranged for /
Annwyl Ms Jones, trefnwyd eich apwyntiad gyda'r ymgynghorydd
. Felt unenlightened in either language; knew that she missed her mum. Now she sits with her handbag tucked instinctively into her abdomen, pushing it gently against the pain. She has always associated this pain – mostly, during the day, a dull and perfectly manageable pain – with her fear of the colleague at work. Her GP has started to think otherwise.

She finds she has crossed the main road and the pocket of park in the light cold drizzle, past the beds of green shoots she hopes will become chocolate-black tulips again. There is a man on her bench. He is buttressed by old plastic bags full of magazines and papers. He is intently writing, sheltering his notebook with one hand; his lips move. She recognises him from somewhere. Another bench, she thinks, another part of town. It doesn't matter anyway because today she has no time to sit down and is in no mood to play games with the building; she does not feel proud or coy. She just needs it to look at her, give her a bit of its strength. So she carries on past the guy on her bench, past the little girl in bronze, and stands facing it, brave and vulnerable, her hands in the pockets of her raincoat.

Nothing happens.

She waits, looking directly at the main entrance, the pillars, the white steps, all the way up to the roof with its stately, allegorical figures and their absurd tufts of buddleia. The space where there ought to be a dragon. Two or three people come in and out, it is early, mid-week, not busy.

Still nothing.

There is not much time; soon she will have to catch her bus. She crosses the slip road and stands on the bottom steps, something she hasn't been able to do in a long time. And there, on the lower white steps, in the drizzle, as close as she dares, she feels a kind of panic rising; and nothing happens.

He takes the steps in his long stride two at a time and even he, deep in cogitation and looking forward to his meeting, feels her distress glance off him as he passes on his way up. Her image imprints on his mind between the bottom and the top step in a photographic flash. A white face, scared eyes, a mass of dark-red hair; a small figure in a tightly belted black mac, hands in her pockets. Unexpectedly, by instinct, he turns at the entrance to the building and calls down to her: Are you alright? Do you need any help? But she is facing the town now and it seems she cannot hear him: he has the profoundly dislocating sensation of having spoken and made no noise. He calls again, uselessly, into the wall of silence. He is on the verge of going back down to her when she gives a kind of shudder and stumbles down off the lower step and hurries across the park. He watches her go, then turns in through the big entrance where the sounds of voices seem suddenly magnified and restored, and heads for the woman at the desk, who recognises him, and smiles.

9.

Theo wasn't sure what he'd expected, but ‘inconclusive' was not it. How, he wondered, in this precise and forensic day and age, could they not analyse and properly explain something so obviously biological? A rush of irritation came over him like a hot breath. He understood then that he was annoyed not so much with the people downstairs, although he had been mildly disappointed not to find the woman with the grey ponytail again, but with Charles Fort, no doubt thrilled to the tips of his spectral being in whatever astral plane he currently inhabits, crowing at this tri
umph of the Inexplicable over Science, a whole enlightened century on. They've sent it for further tests, is all, Mr Fort: we'll have rescued my star-rot from your host of the damned in another fortnight. Patience. Heron vomit, not the trailing mess of meteors, you'll see.