The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

  Jamie found herself mentally ticking off the markers along the way.

  The bridge over the dried-up stream.

  The dirt track, where she’d parked with her first boyfriend. An inexperienced fumble that had ended in her kneeing him in the groin before getting out of the car and stomping off toward home. He’d driven past her, fast and close, screamed Bitch, and left her to walk the two miles back to Belsley.

  The stone lions at the old manor house.

  The row of vast and silent turbines ranged along the horizon, their great arms turning slowly.

  “Look at them.” Jamie hadn’t realized that Rena was so close behind her until the other woman spoke, her voice curling with distaste. “Ugly great things. That’s all we did. Spoil what God made for us.”

  “I never minded them,” Jamie said. She’d always thought they fitted with the vastness of the northern landscape.

  “We don’t need them,” Rena said. “The old world gobbled up power and spat out filth. There was never enough to keep everything running.”

  “They weren’t just for electricity.” Jamie didn’t know why she was engaging. “The newer ones had pods to disperse seeds or treatments for crop diseases. They used them for artificial pollination when the bee populations were low.”

  “They should be pulled down,” Rena said, her voice rising. “Like all the things we did wrong.”

  “Okay.” Jamie was tired of the conversation. She picked up her pace a little, moving on ahead. “I’ll leave that with you.”

  As they approached the turn for Belsley, Finn suddenly stopped walking, his head going up, as though he’d caught some scent on the wind.

  Jamie suddenly realized what it was. There was a low, resonant rush, almost on the edge of hearing. If you’d ever heard it you’d be in no doubt as to what it was—and if you’d never heard it you’d have no idea what it meant.

  She walked over and held out her hand to him. He was still clutching Emily’s lead rope.

  “Come on.”

  He hesitated, then reached out slowly to place his free hand in hers.

  Jamie tugged Finn into a shuffling run, the horse breaking into a reluctant trot to keep pace. As they jogged along the narrow lane, Jamie could smell the sharp tang of sand, and salt, and dune grass.

  At the little parking lot where Jamie and her sisters used to buy ice creams, Finn dropped to a walk. Sand had drifted across the tarmac and he lifted his feet up high, placing them carefully, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as the footing shifted beneath his weight.

  “It’s okay.” Jamie wanted to laugh, and then cry. It was more than okay. They were here. All those millions of miles, all that dust and loss and zero point zero zero zero one, and they were finally here.

  At the edge of the dunes, Emily dug his hooves in, refusing to follow. Jamie tied the lead rope to the gate across the trailer slipway. Then she took Finn’s hand again and pulled him up the dunes, slipping and sliding. They scrambled up one false summit, and another, and then they were over the top, with the great, golden curve of the beach sweeping off toward the headland. The old lime kilns squatted at the entrance to the little harbor, with a cluster of guesthouses pressed up against the crumbling stone walls.

  And there was the sea.

  It was a deeper green than she remembered it, with the sun a shifting glaze of silver across the waves. She could feel herself rising on her toes, ready to run down the dunes, across the beach, the ground growing damp and hard beneath her feet, until she was running through water, not on sand. There were wide shallows just offshore, and she’d wade and wade until that moment when there was nothing beneath her feet but the ocean, and it could be a few inches, or it could be full fathom five, and it would make no difference.

  Finn said something, but his voice was muffled by the thudding of blood in her ears. It might have been That’s it.

  That’s it.

  One of those moments when the world contracts around you, fitting like a second layer of skin. And you’re just the right shape for this piece of world, and if you spoke you’d say the right thing, and if you heard music, it would be the most perfect song, and if someone touched you, it would be true love.

  It will pass. The more cynical part of herself was muttering at the back of her mind.

  I don’t care. I’m here now.

  Overhead the scythe-winged gulls wheeled and shrilled at one another.

  People. People. Leftover sandwiches. Fish bones. Chip papers stiff with salt and vinegar. People. People. People.

  There were voices behind her. The scuff and scrabble of people climbing the dunes, and then Lowry was panting beside her. Rena was talking, her voice high and fast, but she was just static in the background. The sea filled Jamie. She was buzzing, manic, but she didn’t care.

  The sea.

  CHAPTER

  24

  Callan came up beside her and stood looking out across the beach.

  “Beautiful place.” The words should have been inadequate, but there was an odd note in Callan’s voice. When she turned to look at him, he gave her a tilted smile, sadder and less guarded than any she’d seen on his face before.

  “Never seen the sea before,” he said. “My mother was from the West Coast, and she always wanted to go back. But it was always next year, next year, and when next year came, there’d be something we needed more than a trip to the beach.” He glanced at Finn, who had started down the dunes toward the beach, cat-stepping and cautious. “Maybe it was just as well. Ed wouldn’t have cared about this. It would have been too hot, or too windy, or too bright. It would never have stopped until we were home again.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Jamie said, looking at Finn.

  “No,” Callan said. “Doesn’t mean I don’t regret some of the things we didn’t have.”

  Regret. That word sounded an off-key note inside her. The elation was fading, and she could feel old memories stirring, as though she were starting to resonate at the same frequency as the space around her.

  Finn was crossing the sand, still lifting his feet up high, like it might bite him.

  “I’d better go with him.” Jamie set off down the dunes, the sand slipping and sinking around her. She caught up with Finn just as the damp sand was giving way to the first thin sheen of water.

  “Careful.” She pointed down. There was a dark line of damp just above the rubber soles of his boots.

  Finn lifted his foot and examined the wet sole.

  “You could take them off,” Jamie suggested.

  He gave her a suspicious look. Clearly this went against his understanding of how the world worked.

  “It’s okay. It’s what people do . . .” She caught herself. “. . . what people did on the beach.”

  Finn contemplated this, then nodded and started to sit down. Jamie laughed and caught at his arm. He didn’t flinch, she noticed. “Not here. Come back onto the dry sand.”

  As they moved back up the beach, the others walked down to join them. Only Rena hung back, shading her eyes to peer along the coast.

  “What are you doing?” Lowry asked.

  “Paddling,” Jamie said with a grin.

  She helped Finn unlace his boots and roll his trousers up to his knees. He plucked briefly at the uneven twist of the hem, trying to straighten it, and then stood up, curling his toes into the sand.

  “You ready?” Jamie said.

  He nodded and took her outstretched hand. When she started to run toward the sea, he ran beside her, his eyes fixed on the waves.

  They were in up to their knees, and there were dark splatters on their trousers, but Finn didn’t seem to have noticed. He was looking out toward the horizon.

  “Farther in?” he said.

  Jamie laughed and shook her head. “Not today. We’re not exactly dressed for it. But sometime. You’ll have to learn t
o swim first.”

  A splashing behind them heralded the arrival of Lowry. He had his own trousers rolled up and his hands pushed into his pockets.

  “We made it,” he said.

  “Yes.” She glanced up the coast to where the uneven silhouette of Lindisfarne was just visible. “Well, almost.”

  Lowry followed the line of her gaze. “We need to wait for low tide. Unless we can find a boat.”

  “Can you sail?”

  He gave her a quick grin. “How hard can it be?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Maybe you better start with a rowing boat.”

  He laughed. “Or maybe I’d better wait for the causeway.”

  They stood for a moment, watching Finn wading about in the shallows, occasionally bending down to examine something beneath the surface.

  “What about you?” Lowry said. “Are you coming to Lindisfarne?”

  Jamie looked across the waves. Whenever she’d thought of getting here, it had been this she’d pictured. The sea, the sand, the great sweep of the sky beyond it all. Nothing else. But if she walked just a little way along the shore she’d see the white-painted fence and gate of her old house, just behind the kilns. The gate used to creak, and her stepmother would come to the door if she heard it. If you’d been up to something you didn’t want her to know about, you were better off coming up the path from the headland and sneaking under the kitchen window.

  “Can you watch Finn?” she said. “I just want to see something.”

  Lowry nodded. “Of course.”

  She waded back to the shore and headed toward the kilns and the slope that led up to the lane. The gritty surface of the road nipped at her bare feet as she passed the holiday cottages, their windows off-season empty. Past the guesthouse, past the old Dixon place, and around the curve of the lane to where her old house stood.

  The windows weren’t as sparkling clean as her stepmother had kept them, and the upstairs curtains were closed, but otherwise it looked just the same. The familiarity jarred somehow, as though she’d been expecting some Sleeping Beauty’s castle of gnarled thorns and crumbling stonework. The only signs of neglect were a little posse of stinging nettles swaggering at the front of the flower bed, and the wilted rose petals on the path.

  The front door was closed but not locked. Jamie turned the handle and used the very tips of her fingers to push it open. The hallway was tidy, with rows of boots lined up neatly and coats hanging from the driftwood hooks.

  She stepped inside. The flagstone floor was gritty underfoot, as though someone had trodden sand in and hadn’t been sent to clean it up with a dustpan and brush. The door at the far end of the hallway was open.

  The living room was bright and high-ceilinged, with white-framed windows looking out to the sea beyond the headland. Books crammed the alcoves on either side of the fireplace, and the mantelpiece was covered in framed family photos. Jamie walked over and ran her fingers across the glass covering her own face. Her eyes were screwed up against the sun, her lips twitched into a reluctant smile. Her half sisters were beside her, their faces open and untroubled.

  There was no dust here, no sign that anyone had spent their last days in this room. Her stepmother’s desk was still in the corner, tidy and clear, with pens crammed into a pot decorated with pieces of sea glass.

  She’d made that, hadn’t she? She went over and picked it up. A couple of pieces had come loose, showing the cheap white china underneath. She remembered gluing the glass onto the surface, but she couldn’t remember what had been behind the gesture. All her memories of her stepmother were from a distance, with no sense that there had ever been a connection between the two of them. And yet the pen pot was still here on the desk, holding the old-fashioned fountain pen that her stepmother had always insisted on using, preferring pen and paper to whatever technology came along.

  Her psychology books were lined up on the shelf above the desk, and a couple of cardboard folders sat next to them. Her case files. Had she still been working when the virus struck? She’d have been, what, sixty-two?

  Jamie ran her hand down the spines, with their names and case references. She remembered some of her stepmother’s clients coming to see her in her office at the back of the house: younger ones in school uniforms, shepherded in by parents who smiled too much and talked too fast; and monosyllabic teenagers, slouching in with headphones wedged in.

  Those children would be adults now, perhaps with children of their own. Had they managed to leave their troubles behind? Or had they been passed down to another generation, like something in the blood?

  Then Jamie remembered. They were gone. The children, and their children. Whatever their troubles, they’d blown away as dust on the wind.

  About halfway down the pile was an unnamed folder, marked only with a set of dates from the year that Jamie had turned fifteen.

  She picked up the folder and opened it, conscious of a prickling unease, as though someone might come in and find her leafing through confidential information. The papers inside looked as though they’d been torn from a notebook. They were covered in her stepmother’s slanted handwriting. There were no bullet points, no medical abbreviations, just a solid block of text, like a stream of consciousness.

  . . . sleeping fine, school work good, no obvious troubled behavior other than complete lack of engagement in any discussion of personal matters, complete silence, some regular distraction techniques . . . selective mutism? No. Don’t overcomplicate.

  It sounded like they just wanted to be left alone, whoever they were.

  . . . no obvious progress, no overt signs of grieving, hasn’t cried, or has hidden it well . . .

  Jamie turned the page and found a more coherent passage. The pen strokes were thicker and pressed harder into the paper, as though her usually measured stepmother had been agitated when she wrote it.

  I’m getting this wrong. When it matters the most, I can’t get through. I know the theory, but it’s not working. Maybe we’re making it worse. There’s something I’m not getting and it feels like I’m running out of time.

  There was something sharp lodged at the base of Jamie’s throat.

  When it matters the most.

  Below that passage was a list, with some of the entries scratched out with what looked like another vicious pen stroke.

  Dinner at Bamburgh.

  Trip to the spa.

  A memory took shape. She’d been about fifteen, and her stepmother had suggested that they do something, just the two of them. She’d come up with a little clutch of ideas for what they could do. We could go to a spa. Just you and me. I’ll book. Jamie had fiddled with her bracelet and smiled the vague, distant smile she’d perfected for moments like that. And then she’d made another arrangement with someone from school and pretended she’d forgotten her stepmother had ever made plans.

  Something twisted painfully behind her ribs.

  I’m getting this wrong.

  But what if there hadn’t been a right?

  “Were you right?” A voice spoke from behind her, echoing her thoughts, and she turned to see Lowry standing in the door.

  “What?”

  He took a couple of steps into the room. “I said are you all right?”

  “Oh.” She put her hand up to push her hair back from her face. “Yes. Sorry. Where’s Finn?”

  “With Callan.” He walked over and put his hand on her arm. “I don’t think you are. All right.” He searched her face. “Are you?”

  She shook her head, slowly. “No.”

  “What happened?”

  She glanced down at the page again, then put both hands up and rubbed at her face. “God, it was years ago. I should be over it by now.”

  “I don’t think it works like that,” Lowry said gently. “When things happen, they’ll always have happened, no matter how many years go by. There isn’t a switch
that turns it all off.”

  She tried to smile, but it slid away, half formed. “Really? A switch would be good.”

  “What happened?” Lowry asked again.

  She turned and walked over to the window.

  Oh God, the view. That was always the first thing guests said. But when she lived here, she’d stopped noticing it. It was just part of the background to their lives.

  “My mother died when I was fourteen,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.” Lowry didn’t say, You already told me that.

  “No.” Jamie could hear the impatience shading her voice. “That’s not it.” Her breath was condensing on the window, turning a little patch almost opaque. Maybe she could write her story in the steam, so that it would stay there, invisible, until she came back and breathed on it again. “I mean that’s not all. My parents divorced when I was nearly five. And then he married again, and my mother went to pieces.”

  “Must have been hard for you,” Lowry said. “Did you still see your father?”

  Jamie nodded. “This was his house. I used to come and stay most weekends.” She took a deep breath. “And then I’d go home and my mother would have been drinking the whole time I was away—and she’d tell me how sad she’d been while I wasn’t there, and how she couldn’t stand the thought of my stepmother looking after me, and that I didn’t understand how hard it was for her.”

  “Those were some big emotions for a young child to unravel.”

  “I didn’t even try,” Jamie said. “I hated it when she was like that, so I wouldn’t talk to her. It felt safer. Because when I did tell her anything about my father and stepmother, she’d cry, or get angry. But she hated it when I wouldn’t talk to her too. I couldn’t win.”

  “No,” Lowry said. “There aren’t usually any winners in situations like that. Certainly not the children.”

  “But I should have tried harder,” Jamie said. “When I was older, anyway. I could have tried to talk to her. But I think . . .” She stopped. The admission that was taking shape wasn’t something she’d realized she knew.