As we park at a tilt on a stony verge, I wonder what it’s like in London. It would be ironic if Laura gets a clear view of the partial while I’m stuck clouded out of totality.
We settle on the hillside, the toytown harbour spread below. It is relative wilderness here. There is enough space for all the parties to spread out. Rather than the huge crowd I’d feared, we are in clusters. Of the few lone figures yomping out across the uneven ground, none of them is her. I’m sure that even after all this time I’d be able to recognise her, even if only by the roll in her walk, the curve of her, so different to Laura.
I set up my camera tripod and fiddle with the settings, squatting to squint through the viewfinder.
‘I’m surprised you can see anything out of that hood,’ says Richard.
He’s right, it is obscuring my vision. But I’m not taking any chances.
Ten minutes before first contact, the sun peeps out from behind a lacework of clouds and then, as if startled by our cheering, retreats. 8.29, first contact, and it still hides. I keep my Mylar glasses on, but it’s only a gesture to potential. As the moon chews its way through the sun, only occasional glimpses of the shapes in the sky are available, and as totality approaches, the clouds thicken until the sun’s position above is hardly discernible.
My eyes keep travelling to a loose rock at my feet, sized halfway between a fist and a human head, and I think: this will do. If she looms from nowhere, this will do me just fine. I’m horrified at my own thought process. This is not me, I tell myself, this is not me; and then, she’s not here. She’s not here.
‘Who’s not here?’ says Richard. I didn’t realise I’d spoken out loud.
‘Is that a break in the cloud?’ I deflect, looking up at the impenetrable sky.
Disappointment momentarily crowds out thoughts of Beth, and it’s almost a pleasure to feel a different negative emotion. I decide instead to try to observe the other phenomena that come with the eclipse, the things you miss when you’re transfixed by the sun itself. I’ve always been so busy looking up that I’ve never observed the flowers closing, for example. But there’s nothing underfoot but rocks, scrubby vegetation and sheep shit.
Then the darkness comes. Without the countdown in the sky, it’s pure and instant. All the street lights in the town below come on, so quickly it’s like sparks igniting. Now, in the darkness, disappointment is replaced by the familiar thrill of totality. But this time it’s different. Suddenly, unexpectedly, fear pours down through the hole in the sky and I am overwhelmed with a little child’s terror of the night, only my monster is what Beth represents; she embodies all that I stand to lose. The air all around seems thick and sound muffled; at one point, I sense something behind me, and whip around from the camera, but there’s nothing there.
I keep the lens trained on the sky in the increasingly vain hope that something might happen, but I can’t focus on the clouds, only on the darkness around me and behind me. The mountainside holds its breath.
Maybe ten seconds after third contact, we see a crescent sun, but I can only release the shutter a handful of times before the clouds return. Then the black water in the bay is silver again, and it’s over. The post-eclipse world is flat and ordinary. There is no Beth, and even if there were, I’m not powerless against her. I see that now. The fears of a few seconds ago seem unfounded, as nightmares always do when the light comes back on.
Chapter 38
LAURA
4 September 2000
‘I’ve got half a mind to report her for assault,’ said Kit, gingerly easing his foot into a shoe for the first time since his injury. It had been meant for me, and I was in no doubt why. I had never said that it was probably time to put it all behind her now, or asked her what did she expect if she went to a festival on her own, or said that she must have done something to make Jamie think she wanted it, or suggested that on some level she must have enjoyed it. Other people said those things to Beth and worse. They said these things to her in court, then in the press, then on the internet, on the streets of her home town. People said terrible things to win the case or in spite or even out of love, but until that one night, I never had. From Beth’s point of view, it was Tess all over again. I’d drawn her in, only to throw her out.
‘Don’t do that!’ I begged Kit. ‘She’s disturbed. She’s a victim. We can’t turn on her.’ He made the old-man’s harrumphing noise he reserved for the times when he knew I was right but he didn’t want to take me on. I forced myself to speak more gently. ‘I’m not ruling it out. But I’d rather talk it through with her.’
‘And have you?’
He knew perfectly well I hadn’t picked up the phone. I was still going over it in my head. The situation with Beth, once so clear, had been muddied, and I wanted to let the brackish waters of my mind settle before I talked to her.
‘You can’t throw people on the scrap heap just because they fuck up once,’ I countered.
‘It’s hardly a one-off, is it? Turning up at all hours, bringing us over-the-top presents like a bloody cat bringing in mice? You heard what she did to her friend’s car. And that’s before we even get on to the naked photographs. She’s bad news, Laura.’
Despite everything, I still felt protective towards her. ‘Anyone would think you’d forgotten how we met her.’
His nostrils flared. ‘There’s hardly any danger of that.’