How I Wonder What You Are

by Jane Lovering

  You see, Molly? Suze was right about me. I cry too much. Sometimes everything hurts, even memories.

  ‘So, do you want to take first watch, or shall I?’ She’d moved back, whether to give him space or because she was disgusted with his exhibition of emotion, he didn’t know. ‘Actually, if you do it I’ll make us some food. I brought some of the camping packs that I had to try out for the magazine. They’re not bad as long as you don’t expect cuisine. Oh, and if you light the Primus.’

  ‘Sounds good. Thanks.’

  The sky is constant. Space is infinite. Focus on that, on the never-ending nature of nature itself and remember that nothing else matters. Love is a matter of fleeting hormonal shifts, but space endures, Baxter, the universe and all its mysteries are yours, so stop angsting about things you want but can’t have. Shut up and watch the skies.

  * * *

  The tent had a little vestibule area, so I hunched over the Primus out of the wind and let Phinn scan the skies whilst I stirred a bottle of water into a tinfoil container of something that looked like horsefeed. But at least it would be warm, and with the way the wind was cutting through the ripstop material of the tent like Wolverine through muslin, we were going to need that heat. It was distracting too, keeping me busy so I didn’t have to think about any of the things that Caro had said. We’d never argued before. I’d come to think of her as all-accepting, so it felt a little bit as though I’d been savaged by my duvet.

  ‘Molly.’ Phinn’s voice blew in sounding professional. ‘They’re coming.’

  I scrambled to my feet, switching the Primus gas bottle off and resigning myself to losing the meal. ‘Which way?’

  ‘From the south. Quickly, I need you to man the video.’

  The wind was manic outside, punching into me armed with pellets of ice. ‘Where?’ I had to shout over the noise of it. ‘I can’t see.’

  Phinn’s glasses were frosted over. ‘There.’ He took me by the shoulders and turned me bodily around, pointing with the camera. ‘Up. Higher.’ His hand left my shoulder and tilted my chin. ‘See now?’

  As though the wind flustering down below didn’t reach any higher than us, the lights hung unbothered. In fact they seemed to be making stately progress towards us, coming diagonally from the south, skirting the edges of the village and drifting towards the high moor as though on a leisurely outing.

  Phinn shoved a piece of machinery into my hand. ‘Point it up and press this.’ He cupped his hands around mine, indicating a glowing blue button. ‘Keep it steady.’

  I tried to comply but the wind was buffeting me from both sides, swirling and skirling around us, and my hands were shaking. Phinn was clicking away with his camera, periodically glancing down to make a quick pencilled note on pages which whipped and drummed as the wind flipped them. Flurries of sleet obscured my vision and I had to keep lowering the camera to wipe my face.

  ‘You okay?’ Phinn called, his words rising over the gale. ‘You’re doing all right, keep going.’

  I looked at him. The storm was dragging his hair away from his face, pushing his glasses sideways and threatening to tear his clothes from his body, but he looked as though he didn’t care about any of this. Head thrown back, eyes fixed on the lights, he looked almost elemental himself. ‘And here they are.’

  Directly above us the lights seemed to halt. ‘How are they doing this?’ I asked, my mouth filling with little gobbets of ice which cut my tongue. ‘It’s like they’re watching us.’

  ‘Earthlights!’ Phinn yelled at the sky. ‘Got to be earthlights! So why does it look intelligent?’ He lowered his camera but kept his face turned to the stars. ‘You bastards! What’s the point of all this?’

  His face was pulled out of shape by the wind and by the emotion inside him. I suddenly had the sense of a kettle that had simmered for so long but was now reaching a full boil, feelings erupting into the cold air like escaping steam. ‘Hey.’

  He ignored me. ‘Is it you, Suze? Are you doing this somehow? Is this you coming through from the other side to make sure I understand what kind of a loser I really am? Was it not enough that night – you have to make sure that I carry on knowing that I’m a waste of space?’ And in an act of sudden violence he raised his arm and flung the camera across the rapidly whitening heather in an overarm throw that sent it tens of metres into the darkness. ‘D’you know something, Suze? I really don’t give a flying fuck about what you think any more. See? That’s how much I give for your opinion of me now!’

  He strode suddenly past me, head still up despite the now driving sleet, and ducked into the tent which was humming and flapping like a restrained bird.

  I followed him. What else could I do?

  At first I thought my eyes had deceived me and he’d gone past the tent and headed off into the night, but as my vision adjusted to the eerie new dark inside I saw him. He was huddled up against the back wall.

  ‘Phinn?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I blew it.’ His voice was tight as though he had rocks in his throat. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Why are you apologising?’ I advanced cautiously. ‘It wasn’t exactly a procedure we could practice, was it?’

  A high laugh. ‘Oh, I just apologise first and explain later. It saves time. It’s always my fault, when it comes down to it, after all.’

  I didn’t know what to say, how to play it. I’d never really had anyone break down and lose control like this. I was used to people being very stiff-upper-lip about disasters and tragedies. ‘That can’t be true,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Oh, can’t it.’ He sounded tired. ‘Okay. If you say so.’

  ‘Phinn—’

  ‘We should go. Get out of here, get down into the village. They won’t be able to see us down there, we can hide indoors.’ He stood up, unfolding himself until his head brushed the roof of the tent. ‘Come on.’

  But as soon as he opened the tent flap wide I could see we weren’t going anywhere.

  ‘It’s a bloody blizzard! We can’t go down in this. We’ll freeze and get lost and die.’

  ‘I thought you knew these moors?’ He was lit by the weird blue light of the falling snow, it made his skin look dead. ‘You can find your way down, surely?’

  I sat back. ‘Not in a full-on white-out I can’t. There’s no real path to follow and everything looks different in the snow. We’ll have to sit it out. You can’t cross untracked moorland in snow without a compass and a map.’

  Phinn stepped outside into the tugging wind. ‘I’m prepared to give it a shot.’

  ‘No!’ I crouched in the vestibule and pulled my jacket close around me. ‘You don’t understand, it’s brutal up here. Feel how cold it is? In ten minutes you’ll have lost all sense of direction and even a bloody genius brain like yours won’t be able to cope. You’ll just lie down exhausted and freeze to death.’

  Snow splattered him, settling on his shoulders, his arms. He threw his head back and I could see the feathery flakes touching his eyelids, his lips, like dead kisses. ‘Okay, and why is that such a bad idea?’

  ‘Oh stop being so bloody overdramatic! It’s a bad idea, all right? Come back in here and we’ll wait until it stops.’

  He turned his head to look at me and the expression in his eyes was hot and hard. ‘I think control over whether I live or die is mine, don’t you, Molly?’

  There was a curious moment of stillness as though we stood at the fulcrum of something huge waiting to see which way the lever would move. Even the storm dropped and the snowflakes started falling straight down, dizzyingly white.

  ‘Phinn.’ It was all I could say. I hoped that my voice sounded neutral and cool but I rather suspected that there was an undertone of longing slipping through. ‘Don’t.’

  He moved, a minor snowdrift outlined where he’d stood for a moment, and then he was gone, walking into the falling flakes. His dark shape stayed visible for only a second and then was swallowed up by the renewed wind chasing white flurries across where he’d been and blanking him out
to my view.

  I scrambled to my feet and rushed outside the flap. ‘Phinn!’ Even his footprints were filling in as though nature was trying to expunge him from the world. ‘PHINN!’

  The snow cut across my vision with dancing lines, blinding me, driving into my face with a force that made the softness just a story; this snow cut and lanced and drove itself home like an armed troop. I took a stumbling step forward. ‘Phinn, please. Where are you? Don’t do this. You can’t do this, not to me … please.’

  My voice sobbed into silence. There was no answer but the wind’s echoing cries as it dragged at the tent and hurled fistfuls of snow to earth. I was alone in the whiteness, the man I was now pretty sure I’d fallen in love with had walked away to almost certain death.

  ‘I wasn’t aware I was doing anything to you.’ Phinn’s voice came from behind me. I turned so fast that my feet slipped from underneath me and I landed on my backside, legs akimbo, gazing up at the dark shape approaching rapidly from out of the storm. ‘Certainly not from back here, anyway.’

  And there he was again, snow melting against his skin and lying half an inch deep across his jacket. He raised an arm. ‘Had to fetch this.’ He waved the camera by the strap. ‘Losing my temper is all very well, but I don’t want to lose all the evidence too.’

  ‘I thought …’ I scrabbled my way to my feet. ‘I thought you’d …’

  Phinn pulled a face. ‘I’m not that noble.’ He reached out a hand and grabbed mine to help me to stand up. ‘But I am interested in why you’d take it so personally.’

  ‘You’re my friend. Of course I care about what happens to you.’ I used the excuse of brushing the snow away from my face to cover my rapidly heating cheeks with both hands. ‘And for God’s sake, let’s get back inside the tent before we end up soaked and frozen.’

  ‘Okay.’ Phinn held open the flap to let me in first. ‘And thank you for not mentioning my outburst back there. I’m not sure what happened.’

  ‘It’s those lights.’ I unzipped my jacket in the new warmth. ‘They’re doing something to us.’ At least, that was my reasoning. It had to be some external force that was making me feel like this, as though my stomach had turned to marshmallow and my heart was a weak, frail thing barely managing to beat.

  ‘Some kind of psychic thing?’ Phinn removed his jacket now, sending a spray of melted snow splashing across me. We were both tinged pink from the small amount of light from outside filtered through the red nylon of the tent. It made his hair look orange and his skin healthily blushed. ‘Could be, I suppose.’

  He sat down and pulled the camera onto his lap, switching it on and flicking through the photographs on the screen. ‘None of these are much good. They’re always too far away to show up as anything other than blobs which could be anything.’

  ‘So you don’t think it was the lights that made you lose it.’ To occupy myself I began stirring at the rank, turnip-smelling mass still sitting lukewarm on the Primus, hoping that the light wasn’t making me look heart attack purple. My trousers were sticking to my wet buttocks and chafing unpleasantly. ‘What was it then?’

  Phinn stopped moving. Sat very still, looking down at his knees. ‘Would you tell me something, Molly?’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  Now he looked up. Beads of water hung in his hair like diamonds. ‘Would you tell me the truth? Whatever I ask, will you tell me, honestly, what you think?’

  ‘I …’ How could I promise when I didn’t know what he was going to say? What if he asked if I really thought of him as a friend? My woolly jumper was suddenly a size too small. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Okay.’ Back to looking at his legs again. ‘Do you think I’m a wimp?’

  ‘A … No. No, of course I don’t.’

  ‘No “of course” about it. Do you think I’m a pathetic excuse for a man, then?’

  ‘Phinn …’ Without knowing why I was doing it I reached out and touched his hand where it held the camera. ‘Why would you even say these things? Have I ever … do I make you feel like that?’

  Slowly his eyes came up to mine. He looked tired, beaten, and his eyes had a bruised kind of look to them. ‘No. But life does.’

  ‘Your wife—’ I started, then realised I had no idea where I was going with the sentence. ‘You’re a lovely guy, Phinn.’

  ‘My wife told me I’m a wimp, just as she was leaving for the second time. In other words, just before she crashed and drowned, she told me I was a pathetic example of manhood. Introverted, a waste of what little testosterone I had, as she put it, a weak, ineffectual geek whose only saving grace was that he knew how to put the toilet seat down after he’d used it – and she even said that as if it was a bad thing.’

  ‘She was wrong,’ I said definitely.

  A shrug. ‘Maybe.’ Now his gaze moved across my face. ‘I’ve never done anything particularly manly, never known how to.’

  ‘This is all crap. Why should you have to be all butch and masculine. There’s plenty of women who like their men a bit less macho. I mean, look at Johnny Depp, he’s not exactly going to be playing rugby any day soon, is he? And he’s not short of the odd female admirer.’

  ‘Wow.’ Phinn smiled and the smile drove the haunted look from his eyes. ‘Me and Johnny Depp. At least I’m in good company.’

  ‘And you’re kind and sweet. You took my shoes home so that they wouldn’t get wet and ruined, that’s not something that a typical man would even think about doing. Sometimes thoughtfulness trumps being able to bench press a hundred pounds where women are concerned.’

  ‘I had to resort to medication, Molly. Real men, apparently, don’t get depressed either.’

  ‘It happens. It’s not your fault, Phinn.’

  ‘Thank you,’ and he sounded genuinely grateful. ‘I’d been … dwelling, I guess, on what Suze said, and the business with the tent and everything … it just rattled me. Being up here, all so wild and empty and miles and miles of nothing, it felt like she was right behind me with her sarcasm and her cheap shots.’

  ‘Why did you stay married to her?’

  I stood up and found the two spoons I’d brought in the pocket of my jacket. Hauled the rapidly congealing food from the stove using my sleeve to insulate my fingers from the hot packet and held it up. ‘Dinner, by the way.’ I used my jacket to insulate my lap and rested the foil on top.

  ‘She seduced me, you know.’ Phinn took a spoonful of glop. ‘I’ve never been particularly … a PhD doesn’t make me an expert on … I don’t really know what women want. It’s like … having a penis doesn’t suddenly qualify you to know how to unhook a bra and when to do the tongue thing. It just complicates matters when all I really wanted to do was take it slowly, talk, find out … but Suze really took it up to new levels, and then … it was just easier to hang in there than to try and get off and face her. I know that makes me an even bigger coward, the fact that I’d stay with a woman rather than put up with the unpleasantness of divorcing her, but … it wasn’t all bad. Suze wasn’t all bad. And I had a home, you know? Someone to go back to, a place that was fixed and permanent and mine. It might be stupid and it might be wimpy but … all I really wanted, all I’ve ever really wanted was a home.’

  I felt my skin prickle. I knew how it felt to long for a proper home, lights on in the windows and food cooking; a cuddle before bedtime … I wanted to go outside and pound my fists against the earth until the feeling went away.

  ‘But you must have had other girlfriends, ones that didn’t treat you like that. Women that made you feel good about yourself?’

  His spoon hovered near his mouth. ‘There were a few. But my previous girlfriends were all colleagues, workmates. If we had nothing else to talk about there was always the research. Those relationships just kind of petered out, or they’d move on to another programme.’

  ‘So what did Suze do for a living?’

  ‘She was a model.’

  I swallowed a mouthful of the greyish food without tasting it, although t
he gritty grains stuck to my tongue. ‘That figures,’ I muttered.

  ‘But I’m good at what I do, Molly. And I love it. Trying to prise the lid off the universe, find out what makes it tick, what fills all those spaces … I can’t explain it, it’s like … did you ever do jigsaws? You know when you find that piece that fits so perfectly that you can’t believe you didn’t see it before, the piece that makes sense of everything you’re looking at? That is how my job makes me feel.’

  He looked up at the roof of the tent, a taut nylon screen above our heads onto which he seemed to see an image of the sky projected. ‘It’s full of all the possibilities that there ever could be, Molly,’ he said, his voice only just above a whisper. ‘There could be anything out there, from Star Trek spaceships to Dune-style sandworms. Life could all be connected through invisible holes we can’t even sense. We might even be able to reach out and touch it.’ He raised a hand and brushed my cheek with his fingers. ‘If we knew how.’

  I closed my eyes. Everything inside me had risen into my throat, and I couldn’t entirely blame the awful food. What should I do? He didn’t know how this went, he’d said so himself. But what if I did something and it turned out to be a misunderstanding?

  ‘Phinn, I …’ I opened my eyes again and he was looking at me now with those eyes that looked like a black hole.

  ‘Molly.’

  ‘You wanted me to be your friend. You said, you needed a friend.’

  His hand dropped away and he went back to scoop another spoonful of mixture from the foil container. ‘Friends. Yes, you’re right. We’re friends.’

  ‘Is that still what you want?’ I could feel my heart beating so hard that it felt as though it was trying to drill its way out through my shoulder blades.

  ‘I want … shit, Molly, that’s not a fair question right now.’

  Very carefully he placed the food brick at the side of the tent and then turned back, kneeling in front of me so that our faces were level. ‘I’ve never known what I wanted. My parents had me as some kind of thought-experiment, brought me up as a prodigy then sent me off to school. There was university and the doctorate and the research programmes and then Suze – and all that time, no one asked me what I wanted. I was just this super-thinking-brain, y’know? I was meant to have all the answers, not the questions. And now … now life is all questions. What do I want, where am I going, what the hell is happening to me? I …’ He raised both hands and let them fall onto his thighs. ‘I’ve got nothing.’