‘I want to keep a clear head for the eclipse,’ said Kit haughtily.
‘But it’s not until tomorrow,’ said Ling.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Mac, who always took refusal of hospitality in any form personally. ‘If he comes as late to drugs as he did to sex and rock ’n’ roll, he’ll probably have his first E on his fortieth birthday.’
I expected Kit to laugh it off – we’d had our wild nights – but he scowled instead. Only Mac could rile him like this. At some point in their relationship, probably in the ten minutes between Mac’s birth and Kit’s, probably in their shared womb, it seemed to have been decided that Mac had the balance of power. He had even appropriated their shared surname as his nickname, something no one but me seemed to think was weird. It wasn’t that he always had to be right, although more than once I saw Kit dumb down an argument to hasten its end. It was simply that his opinion carried more weight than Kit’s.
‘I’m going to go and unpack,’ I said, and walked across the field, knowing Kit would follow me. We didn’t unpack, we went to bed, or rather to sleeping bag. Sex back then was ballast that had to be chucked over the side before we could get on with anything else. Afterwards, we lay in the greeny light of the tent, my knickers in a figure eight round one ankle.
‘How far are we from the sea?’ I asked.
‘About twenty minutes. But if you’re in the mood for more of a hike, we could go to Goonhilly Downs. It’s where the first ever satellite signal was broadcast. They’ve got these huge satellite receivers, tall as skyscrapers.’
‘It’s not quite the romantic walk I was hoping for.’
‘It is, in its own way,’ he said. ‘Right in the middle of all this technology, there’s a load of standing stones. Megaliths just scattered around. And they built a fucking satellite station there! It’s decommissioned now.’
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘But I draw the line at going to see a satellite dish when the Cornish coast is over there.’
We flashed our wristbands to escape the festival and took the sea road towards Lizard Point. The tiny town, evidently resting on the laurels of its southernmost location, didn’t have much to offer. It was gridlocked with motorhomes and estate cars; tourists queued for cream teas at the tatty café. A country lane thinned to a craggy footpath. From a distance, the sea was molten lead, then suddenly we were at the cliff edge looking down on aquamarine rockpools.
‘You can see why all the smugglers’ ships used to get wrecked,’ I said as a large wave dragged backwards to reveal jutting black rocks, a dinosaur’s jaw.
‘I’d make a good smuggler, stolen bounty on the high seas,’ Kit said, and we both laughed because it was hard to imagine a less piratical man. ‘I could come at you in salty breeches with a cutlass between my teeth.’
‘And I could hide my rubies in my petticoats.’
‘Oo-ar,’ he said, and I had him back. He coiled his hands through my hair and pulled me in close.
‘I just want tomorrow to be perfect,’ he said.
‘There’s no such thing as perfect.’
‘There’s us.’
‘Don’t be a twat.’
He smiled and let my hair go.
Kit still believes that things went downhill that weekend because of what happened. That if I had turned left instead of right in the moments after the eclipse, we would have continued to sail that perfect golden stream. He is wrong. We were young and we were lucky but we weren’t immune to the same shit that happens to everyone else. Even – especially – good sex is unsustainable. Time and the mundanities of living would have stripped the gloss eventually. If anything, we are so strong now because of the trauma that forged us. But Kit won’t be persuaded. Despite that theory of parallel lives he’s always on about, where there are infinite universes where all possible actions take place, you cannot live the same life twice, going back and redoing things differently. We’ll never know what our relationship might have been like, untested. We only have the one we have.
Chapter 6
KIT
18 March 2015
England blends grey to green as my train rattles north out of London, and I get calmer with every mile. It’s actually a physiological process; I’m aware of my vertebrae unknotting themselves one by one. At first I put it down to the relief of hitting every mark on my schedule, unimpeded by failed signals or passenger action, but as I unwrap the sandwich that Laura made for me, and the thought of her brings some of the tightness back to my chest, I realise it goes deeper than that. It is, I understand with a horrible jolt, relief at being away from my wife. Four days away from the mood swings and the paranoia and the endless grisly speculation. Four days when I only have to look out for myself.
Thinking about Laura in these terms takes away my appetite. She can’t help her anxiety. I know that it’s torture for her. It kills me to see her clawing and crying, watching worry eat her up. I’ve asked her if she can’t talk to a counsellor again – we’d find the money; see if there’s a way she can learn to file the past away, like you might an old document that you may never use, but you need to keep just in case. Laura won’t countenance it. She doesn’t have that kind of brain, as she keeps telling me. And when I see her, scratching away at her arms, or breathing carefully in time to some internal mantra, I’m grateful I don’t have her kind of imagination. I should be grateful that one of us is able to keep it together. Guilt crashes in on the wake of these feelings, a futile emotion, and I force my mind elsewhere.