I wonder if the weather has cleared in the Faroes. In an hour Kit will be at sea. There can be no passengers on the Princess Celeste’s return leg who weren’t on the outbound journey. It’s a chartered package tour, not a scheduled ferry. Perhaps she was there, or perhaps she was somewhere – on Svalbard, maybe, or on another island. Or perhaps she was in Tórshavn itself; maybe she watched the non-event on the other side to Kit of some crag or rock, eyes not on the sky but with an old picture of us in one hand and a screen-grab from that vlog in another. But if she was, she didn’t find him.
Tomorrow lunchtime, he will be home, with a load more souvenir tat. He’ll have his camera plugged into the laptop, uploading his photos, before he’s even got his coat off. With every passing minute, my fears seem unfounded and my outburst the last time we spoke to each other looks more and more like paranoia, me reading darkness in what was probably just a bad mood. Even the babies inside me seem calmer.
It can’t be more than an hour since I last ate but I’m ravenous all over again. I chew the last hunk of Mac’s sourdough and wash it down with the only drink that’s left, some kind of livid berry concoction; a film of green powder floats on its surface like algae. It probably is algae, organically sourced, local, Fairtrade algae. God knows what he charges paying customers for one of these. My children had better come out bursting with health after all the vitamins I’m taking.
The BBC are doing a special programme about tonight’s eclipse and even though I’m recording it for Kit, I watch it anyway, keen to picture, now that it’s not live, the place he’s been for the last few days. I’ve just about lowered myself on to the sofa when the doorbell goes. I heave my bulk out of the cushions and pick up Ronni’s Mothercare parcel, ready to hand it over. I feel it, like a kid would a Christmas present. Ling was right. It is wellies. Maybe I’ll invite Ronni in for a coffee, if she isn’t busy putting the kids to bed.
I forget that the chain’s on the door. I pull it two inches wide to see Beth Taylor standing on my doorstep.
The cup falls from my slackened grip and the purple juice explodes across the floor tiles and up the walls, making the floor slippery beneath me, the tart berry smell at odds with the metallic fear on my tongue. Instinctively my hand goes over my belly and I stagger backwards, catching the banister to stop me falling as my foot skids on the mess beneath me. I find myself sitting on the bottom step, hands pathetically trying to cover my bump. Whatever Beth was going to say, the shock of my fall and, judging by the way she’s staring at my belly, of my pregnancy takes her breath away for a few seconds, then she says, ‘Shit, Laura. Are you ok?’
‘What do you want?’
She puts her hand through the gap between the door and the jamb, a stretching motion that could either be a pathetic offer to help me up or a hand curling around to undo the chain. It will only fit as far as the wrist.
‘Laura,’ she says.
‘No!’ I say, and she draws her hand quickly back.
I look at the console table but the landline handset isn’t in its cradle; too late, I remember leaving it upstairs when I spoke to Dad this afternoon. My mobile is somewhere in the sitting room, and in the time it would take me to go and get it, who knows what she’s capable of? Unhooking the chain? Kicking the door down? Has she got a weapon?
‘Please, Laura,’ she says, pressing her face up close to the gap between the door and the jamb, so all I can see is her nose, her mouth and the inside corners of her eyes. ‘I really need you to let me in.’
Third Contact
Chapter 44
KIT
20 March 2015
‘Svalbard,’ says Richard, waving his tablet under my nose. ‘We should’ve gone to bloody Svalbard.’ We’ve found a bar in the harbour, with free Wi-Fi, a view of the red house and Sólarbjór on tap; my last drink for a while, I think, and decide then and there not to touch any more booze until the babies are safely born. Richard has decided that our last few minutes on the Faroes should be spent bent over a screen, wallowing in what could have been. ‘Or even some of the other Faroe Islands – this was taken just twenty miles north of here.’ He zooms close on a beautiful image of a crescent sun in a clear sky. ‘And look! There was a cruise ship that couldn’t dock in Tórshavn and they all saw it from the middle of the sea! Why didn’t the Celeste do that?’
‘Why don’t you sue them for bad weather?’ I suggest. You do actually hear of that happening; tourists, not serious chasers, haranguing their tour operators for their money back if they’re clouded out. Richard takes my point.
‘Speaking of the Celeste, we should get a move on. Gangplank’s up in half an hour. Have you got your stuff?’
‘Indeed I do,’ I say, patting down the paper bag I’ve just acquired. My ‘stuff’ is two miniature T-shirts with a picture of the corona on them that I’m pretty sure came from the 2006 eclipse, I can tell by the distinctive horizontal flare of the hydrogen promontories. The T-shirts look tiny to me, too small for anything but a doll or a teddy bear, but the label inside says 12–18 months. I am struck again by how imminent fatherhood is, and how little I know about babies. I thought I was quite a hands-on uncle with Juno and Piper but Ling and Laura tell me that I used to let their heads wobble all over the place, and that I always handed them back when they started crying.
I stand up, feeling the camera strap cut into my neck and, draining the last of my Faroese beer, strike out after Richard for the ship. I’m two drinks down, and it’s partly the alcohol, but a kind of euphoria is moving in to replace the paranoia, the madness that infected me up on the mountain. All Laura’s fears have come to nothing and in twenty paces I’ll be on the boat and on the way home to her.
‘Kit!’
The woman’s voice is right behind me, so close that she didn’t need to shout. Richard rolls his eyes, bored now of my celebrity, but my heart hammers. The shock of hearing my real name, the one that Laura calls me, in this context, stops time then stretches it. A hand is on my arm before I register something important: although it’s a female voice, the accent is wrong. I turn to face a woman about my age with dark hair, a washed-out prettiness, smiling at me with delighted recognition. I don’t have a clue who she is, although this doesn’t seem to faze her.