‘Don’t go all monosyllabic on me.’
‘Stop over-analysing things,’ he snaps back. ‘You know me, I always get a bit of the old black dog when I’ve been clouded out.’
‘Swear on our babies that nothing’s happened.’
The connection cuts out for a second, so I can’t tell if the pause before ‘I swear’ is his hesitation, my imagination or some kind of satellite delay, and then he’s gone.
The magnitude of what I’ve done hits me. I’ve made him swear on our unborn children. Kit isn’t superstitious and would say anything to talk me down from a panic attack. I have tempted fate. I put my hand on my belly and wait for the babies to kick, but nothing happens.
Chapter 41
LAURA
20 June 2001
‘Seven thousand totality freaks, all gathered together,’ said a girl with a ring in each nostril and purple dreads twisted into upside-down cones on her head. ‘It’s gonna be fucking filthy.’ She had a point; the location, deep in the Zambian bush, seemed to have filtered out both the casual ravers and the serious astronomers, many of whom disliked sound pollution almost as much as light pollution. Kit and I were five hours into a six-hour journey from Livingstone Airport to the festival site, in an unventilated bus with poor suspension and fifty hippies who used only natural deodorant. Scrubbing-brush trees sprang green against apricot soil. Cattle walked between speeding, laden trucks without flinching. Roadside greengrocers displayed rainbow wares. Old painted advertisement hoardings and towns made of corrugated iron came and went in the turn of a wheel. When we stopped for lunch in a Fanta-branded café, dozens of children emerged as if from nowhere, and all of them wanted to touch my hair, shrieking with delight as tiny fingers tugged and twirled it into knots.
Civilisation seemed a long way away by the time we crested the hill to see the makeshift township. The festival site had better infrastructure than some of the villages we’d passed en route, with a little bush supermarket, a row of showers and African-style squat-down toilets that were cleaner than any you’d find in a British shopping centre. Cafés sold drugs as openly and cheaply as beer.
‘It feels right,’ I said to Kit. He simply tilted his face to the sky and grinned. There would be no checking the forecast for him here, no worrying about weather conditions. An African winter is predictable. That day, the sky was the kind of warm bright blue that makes you doubt the colour could ever be associated with coldness, and its clarity made us doubt the very existence of clouds. On a fully rigged stage, a reggae band chugged their way through a series of Bob Marley covers. We walked past a tent where a marbled graphic was being projected on to one wall. Kit picked up a little coconut mask of a screaming African face and held it over his own eyes. ‘This looks exactly like Mac did when he was sectioned.’ It was the first time he’d ever been able to joke about Mac’s recovery.
There was no dusk; one minute the sun turned the colour of orange squash and the next it sank without warning behind the horizon. We ran through the new night to pile on the layers and lie at the mouth of our tent, backs on the ground. At 4,000 feet above sea level, with minimal light pollution and only a pink moon glowing, the African sky was not so much speckled with stars as streaked with them; the effect was meteorological rather than celestial, the Milky Way a stormcloud that threatened to rain glitter. There was an atavistic satisfaction in gazing at the heavens.
‘We’re meant to look up,’ I said. He nodded into my shoulder, then rolled into me. The shallow convex of his belly tucked into the small of my back, matching the rise and fall of my diaphragm. Even our breathing was in synchronicity that night.
Perhaps it was the effort involved in getting here or my need for atonement but Zambia felt more pilgrimage than holiday. We eschewed the stages and bars for the shade of trees. That must be why it took her so long to see us.
When it was time for the eclipse, the organisers pulled the plug on the sound systems. ‘First contact,’ whispered Kit, as the moon took its first baby bite out of the sun, to soaring cheers. Here at last was the reverence I had so hoped for in Cornwall. Not a silence, there were too many of us for that, but every whoop and whisper was respectful of and somehow devoted to the phenomenon. The crowd tilted their faces towards the shrinking crescent sun in heliotrope unison. An hour followed in which it seemed to me I barely blinked.
‘Don’t you want to get a picture?’ I asked, gesturing to the camera dangling by his side. He waved it away.
‘Nah,’ he said, to my astonishment. ‘Not this time. Let me just live it for once.’
Then the winds came, that eerie nowhere breeze I’d experienced in Cornwall, only here it was warm and gritty with dust. As if at the wind’s signal, time, crawling for the last hour, sped up and dusk pushed in from the east.
‘This is what two thousand miles an hour looks like,’ said Kit, as the darkness charged us. The landscape changed as dramatically as the sky, our shadows suddenly shrinking as though we were melting into the ground. I started to shake, and reached for Kit’s hand. He lifted his arm and twirled me around, ballerina-style, so that I could see the twilight on every horizon.