A ring of white light surrounded the sun, one pure diamond flare teetering at the tip, and then the switch of totality was thrown. Oh my God, dio mio, mein Gott, wow, screamed the crowd. The moon was a black disc covering the sun and streamers of plasma flared out, like a gas ring being ignited. ‘Is it safe?’ I asked Kit. I meant can I take my glasses off but the question felt bigger, too. Is it safe to be alive, on this spinning rock? Is it safe to be this small? Are we going to be all right?
He removed my glasses in answer and I looked with naked eyes at the coal-black ball in the sky. I knew all the theory, I knew I was looking at vast promontories of hydrogen gas, but as I stood there I could think only in terms of gods and magic. The corona danced, a living golden flare twice as big as the sun itself. A star is not an angel but a monster. It was so huge that it made everything that had happened to us, everything we had done, seem tiny. Regret, guilt and fear melted away.
‘I’m healed,’ I said, and it didn’t feel trite in this context. You can say anything under the shadow. Kit’s cheek was wet on my shoulder and I matched him tear for tear. We weren’t the only ones crying; there was soft sobbing nearby, and in the distance, someone howled like a wolf. We stayed like that for four and a half minutes. As if programmed by some internal clock, Kit slid my goggles back down like a visor; seconds later, there was a blaze of yellow light and the shadows melted away to the east. It was over. The tears I wiped away now were happy.
‘When’s the next one?’ I said.
The following day, buses that had brought us here arrived to take us back, only now there were seven thousand people all trying to leave one destination at one time and chaos ensued; some were bound for Lusaka Airport, others going further south to Livingstone. Some poor sods from Japan faced two days on the bus to Johannesburg. Kit and I queued on one side of the road for the Livingstone bus, while the opposite queue for the Lusaka shuttle snaked for half a mile. After a two-hour wait it was finally our turn to lug our backpacks on to the roof-rack and take our places on the sticky plastic seats. I wiped the window down but the dust was on the outside.
‘I don’t want to go home,’ I said to Kit. ‘I just want to do it all again.’ I said this knowing full well that the next one was in the Antarctic circle.
‘I can’t see many of this lot making the South Pole.’ Kit surveyed the gurning casualties around us. Our bus’s engine was still idling even though all the seats were taken. ‘They couldn’t afford it. No humans have ever witnessed an eclipse from the pole before. It’s a massive expedition, it’ll cost thousands. I can’t see us making it.’
I don’t know what made me look back. Some avenging spirit of justice, punishing me for daring to drop my guard and be happy. But I did look back, craning over my shoulder at the other bus. She was framed by a grubby window, staring at me, into me.
‘Beth.’ It came out of me in a growl. There was a moment of absolute stillness and horror. Kit froze, then slowly followed my gaze. The three of us were locked like that for a heartbeat. Then, like a spider after a fly, she started to move.
‘Can you get going?’ said Kit to the driver. On the other bus, Beth clambered over her neighbour and began to move down the aisle, clearly obstructed by bags or bodies. The driver was the embodiment of the word ‘laconic’; he raised an eyebrow at Kit and sucked his huge yellow teeth.
‘Just fucking drive!’ said Kit. I’d never seen him look so frightened, not even in the fire.
‘Please,’ I begged the driver, somehow mustering a calm smile. ‘We really need to be somewhere.’ I fished in my pocket and found a handful of kwacha; Kit threw the notes into the driver’s lap. Finally the wheels spun, churning the thin soil, so that when Beth made it into the stony road, she stumbled into a cloud of exhaust and swirling bush dust. A motorbike roared past her, so close I thought it would skin her knees. Undeterred, she tried to run alongside the bus, but the flip-flops on her feet slowed her down. ‘Laura!’ she said, but there was no threat in her voice. She looked desperate rather than angry, aggrieved rather than frightening.
‘Don’t slow down, don’t stop!’ said Kit to the driver. ‘Put your fucking foot down!’ It was the first time he had shown his fear in front of me. Only in the stripping of his strength did I understand what it had cost him to carry me. The bus surged forward. I turned around, stood up in my seat, and saw Beth collapse to her knees in the street, her skirt puddling around her legs so she looked like a landed mermaid, suffocating in a swirling red cloud. We rounded a bend and she was gone from my sight.
Everyone on the bus was staring at us. Kit sank low in his seat, glowing with embarrassment. The silence ensued until the driver began to play with his radio. ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ was playing and the driver sang tunelessly along.
‘She came halfway across the planet to find us,’ Kit said in a voice so low even I could barely hear it. ‘All this effort we’ve gone to in changing our names, making a new life, it’s all been for nothing. And we told her where we were going to be.’
The bus rolled past patchy fields of skinny cattle. I took hold of Kit’s bad hand and ran my fingers over the scar. He pulled it away. ‘She saw my map, she knows where to find us for ever.’
He didn’t say it but the implication was clear; because you invited her into our house. I reached for his hand again, but it was clenched in a fist.
Chapter 42
LAURA
15 November 2003
Jamie Balcombe was released after serving half his sentence. He had been a model prisoner for two and a half years. In the prison library, he taught fellow inmates to read and write. After the fire he wrote me one more letter, saying he had heard about the incident – I shuddered at the knowledge that he was keeping tabs on us – and hoped that my own experience of trauma had increased my empathy, and the likelihood of my retracting my statement. I re-sealed the envelope and sent it back to the prison, saying that there was no forwarding address, and no more letters came. I don’t know if the authorities opened it; if they did, it didn’t count against him when it came to probation.