Jamie’s freedom brought to me both fear and release.
Fear that he would somehow get through to Kit. I was confident Kit would believe my lie over a convicted rapist’s truth, but still it remained a lie, and not one I could bear to repeat to the person whose opinion mattered most. And release, because I had felt every day of his imprisonment like a score in my skin. At least now he wasn’t in prison; it was only – only! – his good name that remained tarnished.
We didn’t see another total eclipse for five years after Zambia. We were – well, I was – too scared of Beth to go to South Africa in 2002. Antarctica in November 2003 might as well have been a flight to the moon as far as we were financially concerned, coming the year after we’d bought the house on Wilbraham Road, lying on the then-ubiquitous self-certification mortgage application to make it happen.
We still chased the shadow, but gone was the excitement of the big alternative parties; instead, we slid under the radar. In 2006, when the path of totality was thickest across Libya, and the third ‘festival of a lifetime’ was held in Turkey, we saw the eclipse at the opposite end, in Brazil.
The night before our flight, Kit caught me sneaking hydrocortisone cream and a whole blister pack of Diazepam into a side pocket of our bag.
‘We don’t have to do it,’ he said, searching my face.
‘It’s all booked. It’s all paid for!’
It wasn’t actually paid for, which made it worse; the whole trip had been booked on already strained credit cards. Kit smiled at me with such obvious effort I thought his cheeks might creak.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘If it’s going to make you ill again, it’s not worth it.’ I was touched by how hard Kit tried to make me believe him, but also I knew him better than that. Foreign travel and mind-blowing primal experiences would have appealed to any man more than a nervous wife with scabs on her arms, let alone Kit, whose compulsion to chase eclipses had been in him long before he met me. In my lowest moods, I worried it ran deeper. These dates were in his DNA; they were his last connection to his father. He would hold it against me for ever if I was the reason he had to stop. It was my fault, my lie, my bad judgement that had let Beth in. It was my responsibility to deal with it.
‘Of course we’re going,’ I said. ‘We can’t let her win.’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I know what it took you to say that.’
He knew part of it, I suppose.
We stayed in a budget hotel and watched a clean, perfect eclipse together, sitting on the bonnet of our hired car, halfway up a hillside where we were the only English-speakers for miles around. Four minutes, seven seconds of totality: the moon covered the sun, ripping a huge bullet-hole in a gigantic canvas. After that, we could believe that Beth had given up on us. Of course we would eventually find out that she had been in Turkey. In 2006 YouTube was in its relative infancy and it was another couple of years before a German clubber posted the video online.
Our subsequent trips were poisoned by my anxiety to various degrees.
Kit tried to make it easy for me when we went to China in July 2009. We booked into an anonymous hotel next to a motorway, the last place she would look. Even so, I barely slept the week before we travelled. Knowing I had to tolerate the discomfort didn’t stop me panicking in the airport and I took so much Valium on the outbound flight that Kit had to carry me off the plane. It was the uneventful eclipse – if such a thing is possible – that he had promised. Most of the trip was spent watching Kit fiddle with photographic equipment next to a motorway.
I would have loved to go to the huge festival they held on Easter Island for the 2010 total eclipse, but Kit said it wasn’t worth my paranoia, and so we saw it halfway up the Andes in Patagonia. On the mountainside the snow was so dry it felt more like sand than water. Kit got some beautiful shots of the shadow cone spreading out across the snow. I could have sworn I didn’t take my eyes off the sky throughout totality, but our guide took a picture of me, looking over my shoulder, when all around me were gazing up in rapture.
I ought to have relaxed in Cairns in 2012; tens of thousands of people watched from the miles of palm beaches on Australia’s Gold Coast, but by then smartphones were everywhere and, terrified that someone would broadcast us as they had Beth, I wore a hat so huge I could barely see the sun. Now, when I look at the globe and envision the path of totality for that eclipse, it seems to me half of Australia was covered by the shadows, that the chances of her finding us on such a huge land mass were tiny. Not like now, when the shadow falls mostly over water, and everyone is squeezed on to those dark northern islands, so tiny that there is nowhere truly to hide.
Chapter 43
LAURA
20 March 2015
Now the sun decides to show itself. It is early evening and it shoots through streaky pink and purple rashers, the kind of clouds that see cameraphones all over London pointed at the sky.