All nightmare long, p.36
All Nightmare Long, page 36
“Mark!”
I extricated myself and stretched my arms to the sky, fingers locked above my head. Rosie was running across the field, lifting her legs high to avoid the sharp spiky hay stumps. I watched her approach, disappointed that she wasn’t carrying a bottle of water. Our car was parked on the dusty lane between fields, and I noticed its door hanging open. That’s when I realised something was wrong.
“Mark, the Sunbeam . . .”she gasped. She grabbed my hands and held on so tight that I winced.
“What about it?”
“It’s gone. No sign. No daily message.”
I frowned and glanced up. I always looked to the skies when Sunbeam was mentioned, day or night. I could never help myself. It was ridiculous, and Rosie usually laughed when I did it, because the chance of me looking up in the direction of the ship was one in billions.
“So what does that mean?” I asked.
“They’re saying it doesn’t mean anything. Power outage, some sort of disturbance, a storm, one of a hundred things. But...”
“But we’ve never not heard from it,” I said.
“Never,” she said. Rosie had been following the whole Sunbeam project much closer than me. Of course she had. Her brother Jimmy was on that ship, and though we both knew he was lost to her forever, while the daily communications continued he wasn’t really lost. Just gone.
“Come on,” I said. “You should have—”
“You left your phone back at the farm.”
“Yeah. Sorry.” I liked being out of touch, and Rosie was always having a go at me about it. What if you cut your fucking arm off? she’d ask, and get angry if I laughed. It was very irresponsible of me, but I was in no rush to change my ways.
We hurried back across the field together, dodging the huge round hay bales. By the time we arrived at the car we’d both cut and scraped our legs, and blood bubbles speckled our skin like rouge jewellery.
The sun was bright, hot and high in the sky. I’ll get back to work after a bit of lunch, I thought, get the baler fixed and finish the field. But the baler was destined to remain where it was, door open and engine compartment exposed, until morning.
Rosie drove quickly along the lanes, and it only took five minutes to reach the house. We were silent all the way, and it was only when we both jumped from the car and rushed across the dusty yard that I said what neither of us could possibly know.
“I’m sure he’s fine.”
Rosie offered me a weak smile and I followed her inside. The shadowy interior of the old farmhouse was a welcome relief for my sunburned, sweaty skin, and I could already hear the muttering of the TV.
“I’ll just get a drink.” I grabbed a couple of bottles from the fridge and followed her into the living room.
A news presenter was talking over a collage of images that virtually everyone on Earth knew so well. The Sunbeam, built in orbit and surrounded by various construction craft and structures, so hemmed in that it resembled a spider’s victim twirled in a web. Sunbeam’s captain, Michelle Gomez, in a still from one of her many transmissions back to the home she would never see again. Schematics, images, the celebrations across the globe when the ship left orbit, all of it was stuff we’d seen countless times before.
Then something we had not seen. Pete Williams of Mission Control, looking so grave-faced that I stopped with a bottle halfway to my lips.
“Every indication is that Sunbeam has suffered some sort of cataclysm,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s destroyed, or disabled. But it’s been two days since the datastream was disrupted, and the ship has failsafes, including four backup cores, and I . . .”He shook his head, and I was sure I could see tears in his eyes.
“Rosie,” I said. She hugged me, and I hugged her back, and we both took comfort in each other while something we had always dreaded played out on the TV screen. This time I offered no useless platitudes. Rosie wouldn’t appreciate it. Her brother might be dead. Light years away, distances beyond imagining, they had both always known that they were lost to each other forever, and yet dead was more final. Distant, apart, there was still the link of love between them, and she’d often smile when we were talking about him and say, So far away, always here.
I heard a voice. It was Danzer. I stiffened a little, then relaxed, because I knew she would wait. She always had before.
After another hug Rosie let go and sat down, and said, “I’d love a coffee, Mark. Really strong. I’m going to carry on watching.” I nodded and went out into the kitchen, and Danzer was sitting in the old wooden chair by the fireplace. The fire was rarely lit, the chair never occupied, but it didn’t surprise me at all to see her there.
I paused for a moment, as I always did, turning my head this way and that. She wasn’t fully present. I could not see through her, and she looked complete, but there was no solidity to her. She was like a memory cast onto a scene, as if I’d walked into this room another day, another time.
She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I’d never tried to approach or touch her, because I was always afraid that would make her go away. She was a calming presence, yet I’d always sensed that her being here was a fleeting ability. I didn’t want to do anything to upset whatever delicate balance had brought Danzer to me.
“You’ll need to replace the oil filter,” she said.
“I did that last month.” I kept my voice down. Rosie had heard me talking to Danzer a couple of times before—talking to myself, she said, and deep down I knew she was right, even though her saying that made me unreasonably annoyed—but I did my best to keep our brief, strange discussions private. Danzer spoke aloud, but Rosie never heard.
She shrugged, scratching at her chin. “Got to maintain things,” she said. “Things need attention. Need to know you’re looking after them.”
“Oil filter,” I said, turning to the sink and filling the kettle.
“Uh-huh.”
I plugged the kettle in and switched it on, and when I turned around Danzer was gone. I felt the familiar sense of loss tinged with relief. I knew that she was never really there, and had always known, and after each appearance I stood for a moment looking around the room and wondering who or what I had just seen and heard.
“Oil filter,” I muttered. “Right.” I made coffee and took our cups in, and sat beside Rosie, and we watched into the evening as coverage of the potential loss of the Sunbeam continued. Rosie cried for Jimmy. I’d always thought that he was so far away that alive and dead no longer really mattered, but it never crossed my mind to say that. I could never be so insensitive.
My first memory of Danzer was when my family dog pulled me over and I skinned my knees, and a shard of gravel became stuck in one of the cuts. I must have been five years old. I returned home crying, leading the dog by the lead. Sheena knew she’d done something wrong and she came with her head hanging low, but I loved her too much to be angry with her.
While my mother cleaned my cuts and grazes and gave me a bag of sweets to chew on, and dampened a cotton bud ready to try and tease out the bit of trapped grit, a figure walked in through the open back door. She was short, adult, with long brown hair and a friendly face. She wore a bright blue one-piece suit, and I thought maybe she was a mechanic from the garage in the village square. But I’d never seen her before, and her hands were clean.
“She needs to use tweezers,” the stranger said. I stopped chewing for a minute, looking down at my mother where she was bent over, concentrating on working the stone from my knee. The pain wasn’t too bad, and even though tears still flowed down my cheeks I was crying silently.
“Is it out?” I asked.
“Not yet, son. Just let me . . .”She leaned in closer and I saw her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth, something she always did when she was concentrating.
I looked up and the stranger was doing the same. She giggled when she saw me watching. “Tweezers!” she said again.
I glanced down at my mother.
“She can’t hear me.”
“Why?” I asked. Mum looked up at me, frowned, back to my bloodied knee. It was starting to hurt more now.
“Because I’m Danzer.”
“Okay,” I said, and Mum looked up at me again.
“You feeling alright, son? You look pale.”
“ Tweezers,” I said.
Mum nodded, stood, then disappeared into the downstairs bathroom. “Just a minute!”
Alone in the kitchen with Danzer, the moment seemed frozen. She stood half-in, half-out of the back door, sun casting her shadow fully into the kitchen. That shadow convinced me I wasn’t imagining her, even though everything else suggested to me that she wasn’t actually there.
“It wasn’t Sheena’s fault,” Danzer said.
“I know that. She’s a good dog.”
“Aren’t they all?” Danzer leaned down and scratched Sheena behind the ear. The dog seemed not to notice.
“She is a good dog,” my mother said as she came back in. She had tweezers in her hand, and she went to work on my knee, and I closed my eyes and actually heard the soft pap as the stone left my flesh, and when I opened them again morning sunlight was streaming in through the open door and Danzer was gone.
Mum held up the stone shard for me to examine. “Tweezers!” she said. I couldn’t believe how something so small could have hurt so much.
Next morning I checked the baler and found the oil filter clogged with dirt. I took it out and cleaned it as best I could, and once it was replaced the baler started up again. I stood back and listened to the motor whirring. Another problem solved.
It was cooler, and the sun hiding behind a haze of clouds cast a more restrained light and muted colours across the landscape. Rosie and I had stayed up into the night watching the news on TV until it started repeating itself, which even the most profound, earth-shattering news does when there are so many minutes to fill. They’d brought on various talking heads and so-called experts to discuss Sunbeam and what might have happened, and when they started dragging up minor celebrities to offer their take on things we’d flicked the TV off.
Rosie was still back at the farmhouse, but she was getting ready to feed the chickens and collect the day’s eggs. Life went on. At various times through the sleepless night she’d pronounced herself certain that Jimmy was dead, or confident that he was alive, and she attributed her confusion to shock and grief. I knew her well enough to know when she wanted to be left alone.
I carried on baling, and the simple comfort of honest physical exertion distracted me from the news. It was always there though, nestled at the back of my mind waiting to seethe into my thoughts. It might have been the biggest news item of my life, and its effects stretched far.
Around mid-morning Rosie walked across the field carrying a flask of coffee and some pastries. She seemed more level, calmer, and we sat with our backs against a roll of hay and poured, drank, ate. The sun had burned through the morning haze and it was hot against my skin. I always used sunscreen, because the denuded atmosphere made continued working outside virtual suicide if you didn’t.
I leaned back and thought of infinity. The Sunbeam had been gone for over four years, and on the news they said it was over a hundred thousand times more distant from us than the sun. Way beyond the Solar System, somewhere in interstellar space on its way to a distant star, the vast craft carried a hundred million souls and the dreams and hopes of a planet. Those soft dreams, those desperate hopes, were now under threat.
“I just don’t know,” Rosie said.
“You might never know.”
We’d discussed the possibility that the true fate of the Sunbeam might be lost to us forever. Broken communications did not necessarily mean a dead ship, and that was something mission control was eager to preach.
“We had two dozen eggs this morning.”
“ I guess I know what’s for lunch, then!”
“ Fixed the baler, then.”
I nodded, slurped more coffee.
“Oh,” Rosie said. She could read me like an open book. Sometimes it frightened me how well she knew me. “Her?” I’d never told Rosie Danzer’s name. I wasn’t quite sure how I knew it myself. It was such an odd name, I thought I’d probably dreamt it up.
“She was in the kitchen last night.”
“Wait, you saw her?”
I blinked, wiped sweat from my forehead. Giving myself time. I’d always been vague about how Danzer communicated with me; the haze of a dream, a flash of inspiration. It was a very private thing. I’d never suggested to anyone that I could see her.
“Seemed to work,” I said, nodding at the baler. “Oil filter.”
“But you saw her?”
“Just a...sort of a glimpse.”
Rosie chewed thoughtfully. I always liked it when she got her teeth into a problem, worked it through. “Must’ve been the Sunbeam,” she said.
“How’d you mean?”
“Yesterday. Traumatic event. News like that kicks reality out from under you, makes you question what you know. It’s so huge. Such a shock, when we’ve been here day in, day out, growing and harvesting, and suddenly something like that happens and it’s . . .”She raised her hands, scattering pastry crumbs across her legs. “And I was so affected by it all that you were dealing with that, too. So your childhood friend came along and presented herself to you to help.”
“She’s not my childhood friend.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did, and didn’t. I’d long since ceased trying to rationalize Danzer, because nothing I thought about her seemed to change or settle anything.
“I didn’t mean to lessen her,” Rosie said, and she leaned her head on my shoulder.
“So what are they saying this morning?”
“Pretty much the same as last night. Same interviews, same clips of Sunbeam being built, launching. It’s disaster on a loop.”
“If it even is disaster,” I said.
I felt Rosie shrug.
“Come on,” I said. “Give me a hand. Let’s stay away from the news for a while.” I thought she’d object, but maybe the touch of the sun and being out in the fresh air had cleared her head a little. We spent the next few hours working the land, while above us speckled clouds faded from the vast blue sky like dreams dissipating in the dawn.
Danzer came to me a dozen times between when I left school and met Rosie, and several times since. There was no real pattern to her manifestations, except that she always seemed to appear when I needed help with something. It wasn’t only tough life-lesson things, either. Once, in my early twenties, I fell off my bike and broke my collarbone. I lay beside the road for a while, then managed to crawl up against the hedge and drag my bike with me. My phone had been smashed in the fall and was useless. It was a quiet country road and early on a Sunday morning, and I had to wait forty minutes until a car came along and I flagged it down for help. Danzer didn’t appear to me then. I’d watched and waited for her, hoping she would step from a gateway or wander along the road and suggest how I could help myself. I wonder if that’s because I was already doing all the right things.
The time that sticks in my mind happened a few years later, and it took me a while to realise how important it was. It was a moment that changed my life, and an instant that Danzer herself made happen. There’s something comforting in that. Maybe a little chilling, too.
I was driving along the main road leading from my family’s farm to the local town. Music blaring, windows down, I was singing along to AC/DC at the top of my lungs, loving life even though I knew I was going to be late for a job interview. Tardiness has always been a fault of mine, and I’m not sure where it comes from. I was keen on the position with a local supermarket, but for some reason the fact that I was going to be at least ten minutes late didn’t bother me too much. A little more gas, singing a little louder, wouldn’t get me there on time, but it made the journey fun.
As I neared the turning for the supermarket, I saw a car parked beside the road. It was up on a jack and a woman stood beside it, looking in despair at not only a flat rear tyre, but a flat front tyre as well. That was tough luck. I saw the look of frustration on her face, then I passed her by, and with a glance in the rearview I indicated for my junction.
Guilt niggled at me. I didn’t want to be a knight in shining armour—I was far from that—but I knew she needed help. She’d probably already called for a tow, but the main road was busy and dangerous, and the least I could do was drive her to the local garage.
But I’d passed her by then, and the junction was close, and there were a dozen other people who might stop to help.
As doubt and guilt toyed with me, I became aware of a figure sitting in the passenger seat.
“You could easily turn around,” Danzer said. She was there, solid, in her bright blue one-piece suit. Yet the sun shone through her, and if I blinked there was a void where she sat, just for a moment. She was the space between blinks.
“I’m late for my interview.”
“You won’t be working in that supermarket.” She said it with such confidence that I turned to ask her why, and as I lifted my left hand from the wheel—I don’t know what I was planning on doing, reaching for her own hand perhaps—she smiled and disappeared from view. One blink to the next, here and gone.
I took the junction, reversed into a gateway, turned around and drove back to the main road.
The woman glared at me when I parked in front of her car. I opened the door and got out.
“Need some help?”
“Do you have two spare wheels for an old Audi?”
“It just so happens . . .”I said, turning to walk around to my car boot. I heard her utter a short sharp laugh.
“Is there a decent local garage?” she asked.
“Morgans,” I said. I pulled out my phone. “I can give you their number, or I could drop you around. Only a mile or so into town.”
