LAURA 18 March 2015
Mac’s bright green ectoplasm drink tastes nicer than it smells. I sip it through a straw in the kitchen, listening to the woman on BBC London hosting a phone-in about the great eclipse goggle famine of 2015. Yesterday, the newsagent on Green Lanes had a sign in the window saying no eclipse glasses here. sky at night magazine sold out. If the weather was better, I could make some money by selling some of ours. We’ve got dozens of them, from flimsy souvenir freebies to professional-grade polymer in strong plastic frames. According to the radio, over-protective parents are panicking London’s children will all go blind, like in Day of the Triffids. One teacher is even keeping the poor kids indoors with the windows closed. Callers are frothing at the mouth about the health and safety culture. I don’t know why the presenter is feeding the frenzy. She must know it’s going to be clouded out. But I don’t suppose that makes great radio. I hover over my iPad, which I keep online, much in the same way that Mac keeps a bottle of whisky in the house as a test of his sobriety. Sometimes he even opens it and smells it. The difference is, you can live without whisky, but you can’t survive in London in 2015 without the internet. I check the weather quickly; it’s still touch and go. Kit could yet get his eclipse. There are more detailed reports available but that means opening up the internet properly, so instead I put the iPad face down before I’m tempted to look at anything else. One click leads to another. Images slide in unbidden online and as soon as you start searching anything to do with eclipses there’s an outside chance the video might find its way onto my screen.
The video is an adult version of a child’s worst nightmare.
When I was about seven, I became frightened, properly phobic, of a picture in a book. There’s a chapter in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl in which one of the grandparents ages by hundreds of years in a matter of moments. The accompanying pen-and-ink drawing of the lined and sunken face scared me so much that the first time I saw it I wet myself. I couldn’t read the book again until Dad went and bought me a different edition with new illustrations. I called it the picture – ‘I’ve had a nightmare about the picture,’ was all I needed to say when my screams called him into my bedroom in the middle of the night – and even now, when photographs have played such a significant part in my life, it remains the picture.
It’s the same with the video. I know it frame-by-frame. (I’ve thought a lot about memory over the years; how some events imprint themselves clearly and never fade, while others are smudges even as they happen. Take the letters Jamie sent me, for example. Even though I didn’t keep them, I expect I could recite every single one.) I could probably direct a reconstruction of it, from the fire-juggler who opens the film to the sweeping shots of the lush Turkish valley. I could describe perfectly the music, a classic trance beat overdubbed with wild wailing in that weird Eastern atonal key that was somehow unlocked to Western ears by the beat and the chords. And I could tell you that at ten minutes and fifty-one seconds into the video, a dark-haired girl with a photograph clutched in her hand – the one Ling took at our graduation ball? Or the one Beth took herself, the warning I chose to ignore? – interrupts twelve different people, drawing their eyes from the sky to the picture, surely asking if they have seen these people, do you know them, can you tell me where I might find them. Her whole part is only maybe twenty seconds long and it’s all in the background, then the camera pans up to the sky as totality hits. But it’s enough.
I know all this; it’s a perfect sequence that plays itself out in my dreams. Why, then, am I so scared to watch it again?
I think I know the answer. While it’s all in my head, I can pretend that’s the only place it exists. I can file it away with the anxiety attacks and the rest of the paranoia; a product of my over-sensitive, over-working imagination. But when I watch the video, it is all too real. It happened.
Why didn’t I see it? Looking at her now, her problems are etched on her face; you can tell by the way that strangers are looking at her. People who’ve never met her recoil from her intensity so why, when I spent so much time with her, didn’t I see it until it was too late?
Chapter 15
LAURA
9 May 2000
The witness room had a stale, sugary smell of stewed tea and biscuits that had been in their tin for more than one trial. I was due into the witness box first; Kit, who had seen only the aftermath, would follow me. Even though we had spent every night since last August together, we were forbidden from discussing the case. Carol Kent had told us not to speak at all in the break between my evidence and his, so we held hands in silence while the witness care officer, a sprightly blue-rinser called Zinnia, filled us in on the importance of wigs as predictors in English criminal justice.