Star Shot by Mary-Ann Constantine

Author:Mary-Ann Constantine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 111-1-11-111111-1
Publisher: Seren
Published: 2016-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

47.

When she is settled and dozing in the big green chair he walks down to the pond for ten minutes of fresh air, hoping she will not wake and be at a loss without him. He feels vaguely guilty for going out at all, but he has to get out, because his head hurts and because although it has only been a matter of weeks since she had the accident he is now not used to having another person at home, not this person; it is not like before. She is so fragile and so confused he cannot see how they can possibly avoid it happening all over again, and worse this time, the fall, the white hospital, the distances in her eyes increasing. She had looked out of the taxi window all the way home. He held her hand. Every few minutes she turned to him with questions she could not formulate and a nervous smile that struck his heart. He had told her the names of places as they passed through them.

Standing now by the pond’s edge staring down he could swear the horsetails have grown an inch since this morning. Weird things, their perpendicular spears pushing through the water into air; they are just beginning to branch out. Underwater, in that other world, a few of the stems are thick with feeding tadpoles, sticking like iron filings to a thin magnetic rod. Like living chimney-brushes, wriggling totem-poles; tad-poles. He wonders why only two or three stems get chosen for the feast. Crouching down to get a better look his eyes are drawn further in, to the sticklebacks hanging, waiting, flicking away. Little hunters, their skyblue and salmon colours just beginning to intensify. A pale worm thrashes suddenly into view in the mud at the bottom; it looks as if it is being harried, hunted down by a handful of small fish.

A swift dives across him into a cloud of tiny dancing flies. He straightens up, and the headache returns magnified. He looks across the marshy land towards the hills with a new kind of apprehension, at June buttercups too bright and shiny in the heavy air, at dark green rushes somehow loaded with obscure significance. Only without remembering, without noticing in the first place, could anyone ever assume that early summer must be infallibly lovely. We forget days like these. The air is yellowish, thick with the gathering dead.

The last time the three of them had sat down together for a meal must have been nearly ten years ago, her seventieth, she hadn’t wanted to go out. They’d all cooked, all at once, different dishes, chopping and frying across each other, drinking wine and beer, dancing round her, teasing, playing the fool. They’d dug out stories for her then, from when they were small, glimpses of games and worlds she was not party to, but whose contexts she remembered far better than they could. Nothing was said about work until after she had gone up to bed, and the two of them sat drinking and talking at the kitchen table.

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