more and left them out on the strip with the aeroplanes. ‘I can’t allow myself to keep things. I was the kid who had to take all her Christmas presents apart on Boxing Day because I’d got bored with them doing just what they were meant to do and then couldn’t put them back together again.’
‘You are a bird who flies in straight lines,’ Oksana said. ‘You pick your destination, you spot your landmarks, you fly straight toward them. Me, I go in circles, because that is how the world goes. Things come close, things move apart again. This way nothing is ever lost. You will come back to this country. No one who comes here ever leaves it, in here.’ She touched the place where her breast had been tattooed with the totemic mask of the wolf. ‘And you will find Shepard again, because you have never really left him, in here.’
Aircraft lights moved in the big dark over the city. Gaby thought about the time on the coast, with the kids. The circles had been closest them, and therefore all they could do after that was move apart. But some journeys end, she thought.
She saw Fraser taking the ball off her in a sliding tackle and turning to blast it over the goal line. She tried to imagine his journey ended. She tried to imagine him dead. Something tore within. She saw Aaron coming out of the sea in his mask and snorkel, flapping over the sand in his yellow flippers. He would be in a wheelchair forever. If he lived. The thing inside tore a little more. When it tore all the way, all the things that had fallen apart inside would spill out and she would be a long, long time picking them up and trying to put them back in their places. If she was careful, it would hold until she was out of this place, away from these people she did not want to shame with the nakedness of her despair.
At T.P.’s valedictory lunch Gaby discovered more prominent friends and ardent admirers of the type who wait until the afternoon your plane leaves to tell you so. Regret was expressed about her hair, a beacon in the news community.
‘It’s growing right back,’ Gaby said. But she saw how Abigail Santini smiled at her.
Dr Dan had been invited but sent his regrets that he would not be able to attend through his lawyer Johnson Ambani. He had been subpoenaed to appear before a Ministerial Committee to answer accusations that he had exceeded the remit of his enquiry.
‘I thought I was in the shit,’ Gaby said. ‘Shouldn’t you be helping him with your magic briefcase?’
‘This battle he insists on fighting himself,’ Johnson Ambani.
The Norfolk’s Indian food was outstanding, the beer wonderful. Faraway propositioned Gaby behind a mound of samosas and the sewn-up thing inside tore a little more because she understood for the first time that all Faraway’s jokes and innuendos and double-and-single entendres had been constructed to conceal the truth that he was crazy about her.
He and Tembo came with T.P. to the airport.
‘Why do the bookstalls sell so many novels about terrorist hijackings and air crashes?’ Tembo asked. Then he said, ‘Go with God, Gaby McAslan. I will pray to Jesus that you return safely, and come back to us. I know this will happen. Jesus’s blood never failed me yet.’
Faraway said nothing but hugged her and turned away so she would not have to see anything as uncool as emotion on his face.
‘Be clever, my girl, and let who will be good,’ T.P. said. ‘What’ll you do?’
She did not answer, because just them the ground-side stewardess called for the final passengers for the flight to London Heathrow to proceed immediately through passport control.
The booking computer had been kind. It had given her a row of three seats all to herself. She looked out of the window as the plane climbed. The 747-400 banked and she glimpsed the Nyandarua Chaga through rents in the rain clouds. From ascent altitude it was a huge many-coloured carpet laid over the hills and valleys of the White Highlands. Gaby watched it until the veils of high alto cirrus closed over it and she could see the places with the oldest names in the world no more. She drank and slept the rest of the eight hours to Heathrow.
She came through London immigration in the dawn hours and booked a shuttle ticket to Belfast. There was nothing in London for her to go home to. There was everything in Ireland. She bought people alcoholic presents and waited in the cafeteria for her flight to be called, drinking grapefruit juice. She watched the aircraft come in to land and thought about the shaman called Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina and her plane called Dignity.
The commuter flight was a third full. She gave herself a window seat and watched for landmarks as the feeder jet followed the line of the coast in to the city at the head of the lough. It crossed the narrow finger of the Ards peninsula, turned above Donaghadee – she recognized the Copeland islands, and the lighthouse on its stone pier. She saw the Watchhouse on its little headland by the harbour, and the autumn brown of the Point.
Her father met her at the airport. He had bought a new car: a Landrover 4x4. Paddy the black dog was in the back. Sonya was in the front. More than cars had changed. Gaby pleaded tiredness as her reason for having little to say on the drive home.
Reb and Hannah and a slightly sheepish Marky were at the house to greet the returning heroine. Hannah’s oldest, in her very best junior Laura Ashley frock, stared aghast at her Auntie Gaby. The new baby cried because Paddy started to bark.
After the lunch, Gaby begged time alone, and pulled on her Africa boots and a weather-proof coat and went out on to the Point. She walked the way she had walked the night she thought the stars had called her name. They too moved in circles, but their orbits were slower and grander and more subtle than human lifetimes could sense. She stood at the edge of the land looking out to sea. The wind stirred the fields of winter barley behind her. She had forgotten how cold this land was. It penetrated all her layered tropical-weight clothing. The sea was choppy, breaking in frantic little white folds of foam, constantly re-absorbing itself. She picked a flat stone from the shore and skimmed it out to sea. Two, three, four bounces. She skimmed another one. Three, four, five. Six was her personal record. She did not beat it, or even equal it, today.
Hannah and Marky had gone home by the time Gaby returned from the Point, but Hannah came back to the Watch-house that evening: sisters together. Hannah was wearing a little black dress. Gaby knew the significance. The alcoholic presents were drunk. The sisters reminisced and embarrassed their father in front of Sonya about his inevitable shortcomings as a parent. Then Hannah got the tape out, and the microphones, and Reb whisked Gaby upstairs into the spare black body and mini that fitted and no more. Dad and Sonya shouted impatience as Gaby dashed on makeup. There was a round of applause as the soul sisters took their mikes and their positions.
‘Wait for it,’ Reb said and Gaby smiled as the introduction played, because it was the one to the song that said when you feel that you can’t go on, all you had to was reach out and someone would be there. She pushed out a hip, lifted one arm, two, three four, and
53
On the south side of the sky it is February 9, high summer as the
The highest point of the probe’s course, over the middle section of the elongated cup-shaped object, is fifty kilometres. Closest approach, over the open end, is two-and-a-half kilometres. In astronomical terms, that is a French kiss.
The thing devours comparatives, shrivels superlatives.
