“That was lovely, wasn’t it?” says Mum.
“Delicioso!”
“And the walk? And the visit to Dad?”
“Fantastico!”
“You are OK, aren’t you?”
“Yes, mostly.”
“Mostly’s pretty good.”
She puts her arm around me. We watch the stars intensify. We stand up and slowly walk on. We follow the footpath.
“When you grow up,” I said, “do you ever stop feeling little and weak?”
“No,” she says. “There’s always a little frail and tiny thing inside, no matter how grown-up you are.”
“Like a baby?” I say.
“Yes. Or like a tiny bird, right at the heart of you,” she says. “It’s not really weak at all. If we forget it’s there, we’re in deep trouble.”
We walk on, heading for the gates, but she takes my hand and turns me away from the path.
We walk to the darkest part of the park, beyond the swings and the bowling green. A few lights mark the pathways behind us. Lights from Crow Road and Falconer Road and from the city twinkle through the trees. The night’s dead still. I think again of the Underworld, and I shudder, then I turn my thoughts away. I feel the solid earth under my feet. I feel the air on my skin. I lift my eyes to the sky, to the millions of stars.
Mum shows me Saturn and Venus. She points out the constellations: Virgo, Cancer, Leo. She shows me the cluster of the Pleiades. We try to look further, further, through the stars that are scattered like dust across eternity. We try to make out the beasts and weird winged beings that the Greeks described up there: bears and dogs and horses and crabs and Pegasus and Daedalus and Icarus. We imagine a sky filled with beasts and beings.
“We’re looking across billions and billions and billions of miles,” she says. “The light from some of the stars has taken millions of years to reach us.”
“We’re time travelers!” I say.
“Yes.”
“And we’re made of the same stuff. The stars and us.”
“Yes. No matter how far away we are from each other.”
We stand dead still and we listen to the night. The city drones. An owl hoots and a cat howls and a dog barks and a siren wails.
We let the stars shine into us.
I stare. Is there anyone else out there? There has to be. Are they like us? Is there another Mina and another Mum looking toward us through the darkness that goes on for billions and billions and billions of miles and billions and billions and billions of years? Are their joys and their pains the same as ours? Will we ever know the answers to things like that? And how did everything get here, anyway? And why? And will it go on forever? And what’s right out there at the very edge of the stars and the darkness? And what’s at the very heart of things?
Mum cups her hands around my head.
“Look,” she murmurs. “I can nearly hold your whole head in my hands, Mina. Your head holds all those stars, all that darkness, all these noises. It holds the universe.” She holds me against her. She rests her head against mine. “Two heads, two universes, interlinked.”
After a while, we make our way back towards home. She holds my hand as we walk and she’s happy at my side.
We hold each oth-er’s hand and walk back home
We walk back home and hold each oth-er’s hand
We …
We come to a lamp beside the pathway, and suddenly we stop our walking, and we start to dance, and we glitter in the shafts of light, like stars, like flies, like flakes of dust.
EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY
Take a line for a walk.
Find out what you’re drawing when you’ve drawn it.
Take some words for a walk.
Find out what you’re writing when you’ve written it.
Take yourself for a walk.
Find out where you’re going when you get there.
EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY
Stare at the stars. Travel through space and time.
Hold your head and know that you are extraordinary.
Remind yourself that you are dust.
Remind yourself that you are a star.
Stand beneath a streetlamp.
Dance and glitter in a shaft of light.
EXTRAORDINARY ACTIVITY
Listen for the frail and powerful thing at your heart.
A Dream of Horses
Later, just before I go to bed, I look out of the window. There are lights on in the house I still call Mr. Myers’s house. Shadowy figures move behind the windows. I think of the baby and hope that she’s sleeping peacefully. I keep the curtains open. The moon rises and its maddening light falls on me. I tremble. Does everybody feel this excitement, this astonishment, as they grow? I close my eyes and stare into the universe inside myself. I feel as if I’m poised on the threshold of something marvelous. I drift to sleep at last.
I dream. Such a weird dream! I see the night sky filled with beasts and extraordinary beings, all the beasts and beings imagined throughout history. As I stare up to watch them, they start to fall towards me.
