Forever Magazine

by Wyrm Publishing

  “Rachel isn’t here, Gran,” said Anita. “Her leave is finished. She’ll be flying back to America next week. I told you this last night on the phone.”

  She felt full of a cold and desperate pity. She wondered if this was how her grandmother had felt when she had to explain to Anita that her mother was dead. In a small corner of her mind she envied Meredith for being able to exist in a world where Rachel was still retrievable, where the possibility existed of her imminent return. She felt tears start at the back of her eyes. She bowed her head, hoping that her grandmother was now beyond noticing such things. She had heard that a large part of the illness was self-absorption, an inability to process events in the outside world. But Meredith wrested a hand free and grabbed at her, tilting her face towards her as she had used to do when Anita was a child.

  “You look sad,” she said. “Has something bad happened to Rachel?”

  Anita gazed up at her, thinking as she had often thought how strange it was they looked so little alike. Anita’s mother had been blonde and robust, taking after the Dutch sea captain, Claes Sheener, who had been her father, and from what she could tell from the photographs Anita was exactly like her. Meredith Sheener was a small, Celtic-looking woman with fine bones and heavy-lidded deep-set eyes. Her hair, once black, had begun to go grey shortly after Melanie died.

  Anita felt her heart crushed by tenderness for her. She had always shown such fortitude. Even now in her helplessness she was busy thinking of others.

  “No, Gran. Rachel’s fine. If there’s anything you want to say to her just you tell me. I can pass your message along next time she phones.”

  Meredith’s grip relaxed and the fierceness went out of her eyes.

  “Not to worry, my darling. I wanted to tell her she’s just like Melanie, but it doesn’t matter now that she’s gone.” She caressed Anita’s hair, looking suddenly tired. Anita stared at her blankly. She thought of Rachel’s gangling limbs, her flat chest and copper hair and freckled face. Before the Kushnev drain was started Rachel had used to joke she was more than half-cockroach already. There was no way she could be compared with Melanie, who was as like Anita with her fair skin and apple cheeks as two panes of glass in a window frame. And yet she supposed after all that it was true. Rachel and Melanie were both courageous women of action, both prepared to die for what they believed in. Whereas Anita had always been content just to stand and watch.

  Her mother hadn’t loved her enough to stay on Earth for her and neither had Rachel. Anita began to weep.

  “It’s all my fault, Gran,” she said. “I should have found a way to stop her but I didn’t know how. I love her so much. It’s almost worse than if she were dead.”

  If Rachel were dead she would in some sense be safe, safe to be remembered and loved. As it was she lived on as a monster, dedicated to a life where personal feeling was nothing when set against her vocation, the mysterious inner voice that told her that her place was not here, but elsewhere. Somewhere so far away that it was impossible for the normal mind to conceive it.

  And yet in a hundred years from now, when Anita was dead and buried, would Rachel sometimes think of her, and remember the afternoon they had spent together on Shooter’s Hill, the foxgloves bright as bunting in the overgrown grass?

  She hugged her grandmother’s knees and cried. She thought how furious the peroxide nurse would be if she came in and found her in such a state. She struggled to control her tears.

  “I’m sorry, Gran,” she said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m just tired.”

  Her grandmother was silent, her eyes fixed on some invisible horizon, her hands now lying still at her sides. Anita’s heart lurched. For one impossible moment she wondered if her grandmother was dead, had died because of her crying, and for this too she would be to blame. Then at last her hands moved, rustling the stiff mauve silk of the skirt she was wearing. Anita got to her feet and stood over her anxiously. The dodo pendant swung free of her blouse. It hung in midair, twisting slowly at the end of its chain.

  “Can I get you anything?” said Anita. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Meredith Sheener looked up at her and smiled, creasing the delicate skin at the corners of her eyes. Then she reached out for the pendant, grabbing at it like a small child trying to catch a butterfly. She batted it with her fingers, making it dance and shudder, the closest it would ever get to natural flight.

  “I blamed myself for years over Melanie,” she said. “We had such a terrible row the day before she left. You were so tiny still, and I told her she was a fool and selfish, that she was neglecting you for the sake of her career. She said I was jealous, that I wanted to turn her into a housewife just like I was. None of that was true, but I was using you as an excuse, just the same. She did this strange thing, you see. She asked me to look after that pendant. She had never done anything like that before, and she never took off that chain. Her best friend in college gave it to her and she always wore it, even in the shower. I got it into my head that something terrible was going to happen. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her, you see.” She took Anita’s hand, squeezing her fingers with surprising strength. “I used to take photographs, too, a long time ago. There was a time when I thought I might make something of it, but what with Melanie being born and Claes leaving like that it was all so difficult, so complicated. I suppose I just let things slide. I was just beginning to think I might take it up again, pick up where I left off. But then Melanie died and it was as if the tide had gone out and left me stranded. Like walking along the beach at dusk, you know how it is here, when the tide is out and the sand is wet and shiny as a mirror. It’s beautiful, the dusk, but it’s the loneliest time of the day. I felt so lost, as if I’d never be able to find my way home again. I even felt some sympathy with them, you know, with the people who did it, the God people. The idea of space travel seemed so terrfiying, so dangerous, like straying into a house where bad things are. It felt all wrong to me, even though I was so proud of her I could hardly breathe.”

  She reached for the pendant again, holding it between finger and thumb. “Your friend Rachel was so beautiful. I think she is very brave to give all that up.”

  “She still is beautiful, Gran,” said Anita. “At least she is to me.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. Her eyes felt swollen from crying. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go and see who’s in the dining room.” She stood up and put out her hand. Her grandmother stared at it in bewilderment, as if at some miraculous apparition. Anita wondered how much of their conversation she would remember. The new drugs showed amazing results, but the doctor had warned her not to be over-optimistic about the long-term prognosis.

  “It’s like blowing on dying embers,” he said. “There’s a glow, and a little warmth, but it doesn’t last.”

  It struck her how unusual it was, his mode of expression, so rich in metaphor, almost like the speech of a poet. She thought of his tired eyes, his twisted fingers, of how kind he was really, especially when delivering bad news. How he seemed to take each failure to heart, as if he were personally responsible for medicine being so powerless against death.

  I wonder if I could film him , she thought. I wonder if he would let me, if I asked .

  The boxes were in the cupboard under the stairs, pushed right to the back behind the vacuum cleaner and her grandmother’s old ironing board. There were three of them, two large ones stamped with the logo of a well-known food company and another, half the size, which was unmarked. She opened the small box first. She had only sketchy memories of packing the crates, of what had gone into each of them, but she saw almost at once that what the third box contained was mostly her mother’s official papers—birth certificate, passport, medical—and nothing of immediate importance. The other two were more interesting. These contained photographs and postcards, letters from old boyfriends, a fudge tin full of pin badges and a pencil sharpener in the shape of the Apollo 13. At the bottom of the second crate there were three cloth-bound notebo
oks that contained Melanie’s diary for her final year at Oxford and for the months leading up to her enrolment in the space program. Anita was surprised to learn she had gone in as a ground engineer. She supposed this was how she had met Malcolm Schleif, although there was no mention of him in these pages.

  Tucked into the inside cover of one of the notebooks was a postcard, a colour reproduction of Roland Savery’s Dodo in a Landscape . A single sentence, “don’t forget your wings,” was scrawled across the back in spiky black capitals. The card had been posted from Oxford, and was addressed to Melanie at the Shooter’s Hill flat. It was signed “with all love from Susanne.” Anita could see from the postmark that it had been sent less than a month before her mother’s death.

  She searched quickly through the bundles of letters, hoping to discover some clue to Susanne’s identity. After five minutes or so she found what she was looking for, a brown jiffy bag containing several dozen handwritten letters and about the same number of email printouts, all from a Susanne Behrens, who wrote sometimes from Hamburg and sometimes from Oxford but always in tones of affection and intimacy.

  For some reason Susanne’s letters, with their bawdy in-jokes and cosy diminutives, made her mother more real to Anita than all her grandmother’s reminiscences put together.

  Her hands were filthy with dust. She wiped them against her jeans and went to put the kettle on. Just as the water boiled the phone rang. When she picked up the receiver she found herself speaking to Serge.

  “I was just seeing if you were back yet,” he said. “I couldn’t get through on your mobile. I was starting to get a bit worried.”

  “My phone battery went flat,” she said. “I forgot to take my charger. I only got back this morning.” All three statements were lies. She had been back in London three days, and after the fourth successive call from Serge she had simply switched off her phone. For some reason she could not define Rachel’s departure had changed everything. Also she could not forget the way he had sounded when she had last spoken to him, the sense that he had something to hide. She would have liked to put off their conversation indefinitely but she knew this was impossible. Sooner or later she would have to face up to what had happened.

  She asked him how he was and he said he was fine. He asked after her grandmother and she mumbled back some stilted reply. There was a short, uncomfortable silence, and then he told her what she knew he had called about in the first place.

  “Listen, Anita,” he said. “I thought I should tell you I’ve started seeing someone. I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else.”

  Her name was Bella Altman and she was a composer of electronic music. “You’ve probably heard some of her stuff, actually,” he said. “She’s done hundreds of commercials. Her work is all over the place.” He laughed, a small, tight sound that she had never heard before. She realised he had been waiting to tell her ever since their last phone call, that perhaps he had wanted to tell her even then.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said. “Don’t you think you should be telling Rachel instead?”

  There was another uncomfortable silence. “Do you think she has to know?” he said finally. “She’s hardly going to find out on her own.”

  He was asking her permission to treat Rachel as if she were dead. No, she thought suddenly. He’s trying to find out if you mean to tell her yourself .

  She felt an anger so deep and so cold she knew there was no way back from it, that if she and Serge ever met again it would be as strangers.

  “I’m not going to rat on you, if that’s what you’re afraid of,” she said. “What you do is none of my business. It’s Rachel that I care about, not you.”

  She waited for a moment to see if he would say anything else and then she put down the phone. She topped up her coffee mug with boiling water and then went back to sorting Melanie’s letters. She wondered what might be the best way of trying to trace Susanne Behrens.

  Civilian flights to the States had become almost prohibitively expensive, but Clement Anderson had supported Anita’s visa application, which had enabled her to claim back some of the cost in the form of a research grant.

  A junior officer had met her at the airport and escorted her to a motel a short bus ride from the base. Then there were the inevitable protocols, two days of debriefing and form-filling. She had asked if she could film these processes but her request had been politely denied.

  The flight crew of the Aurora 6 were now being kept in more or less permanent isolation. Each member was allowed one last visit prior to launch day, a final thirty minutes with a friend or family member from outside. Anita had been able to speak to Rachel several times on the telephone but she had always assumed the visit would go to Serge. The invitation came out of the blue.

  Finally she was taken to a room that was bare of everything except a table and two chairs and in the corner a low sofa covered in a brown leatherette. There was a pane of smoked glass set into one wall that she guessed was a two-way mirror. At the end of some ten minutes’ waiting the door opened and Rachel appeared. She was dressed in grey overalls, silk or some synthetic substitute. What remained of her hair was mostly hidden under a close-fitting cap that reminded Anita of the caps worn by surgeons in the operating theatre. The few strands of hair that were showing looked dry and brittle, almost like tufts of grass.

  Her lips were the colour of beetroot. They looked stuck to her face more than part of it, fissured and clotted as scabs.

  She closed the door behind her and stepped into the room. Her wrists, poking out from the loose sleeves of the overall, were skeletal, her fingernails thickened and black. Her eyes were hard and glazed, barely human. It was only in the delicate line of her jaw, the fine, high arch of her brow, that any traces of her beauty now remained.

  Anita got up from the table and went towards her. She felt a dull ache beneath her breastbone, as if she were trying to hold her breath underwater.

  “Is it all right to touch you?” she said.

  “Of course it is,” said Rachel. “Come here.”

  They embraced. Rachel’s body felt like a bundle of glass tubes held together by strips of paper and pieces of string. She smelled like farm silage, or like the heaps of grass clippings on the compost heap at Southwater House. They sat down either side of the formica table. Anita touched Rachel’s hand, thinking how from the other side of the two-way mirror they must look like two actors in some prison drama.

  She’s really going up, thought Anita. For the first time the sight of her friend brought not sorrow or anger, but awe.

  They talked together in quiet voices. Rachel asked about Meredith, and Anita told her about her search for Susanne Behrens.

  “I want to interview her for the film,” said Anita. “From her letters it looks as if she knew my mother better than anyone.”

  “The film will be wonderful,” said Rachel. “Your mother would have been so proud.” Anita stroked the backs of her hands. As their half hour drew toward its close she unhooked the dodo pendant from around her neck and handed it to Rachel. The chain still carried the warmth of her own body.

  “Take her with you, wherever you’re going,” she said. “It’s what she wanted most in the world.”

  Rachel’s diamond eyes seemed to shimmer. She closed her fingers around the silver, slowly, as if to touch anything that solid was now painful for her.

  “I’ll be taking you both,” she said. Her voice was a dry whisper, like long grass moving gently in the wind. “I couldn’t have done this without you.”

  It took Anita some time to track down a copy of Voyage to the Sun . So far as she could tell it had never been released on DVD, and when she finally located a video copy on some obscure fan site she was surprised at how much it cost to have it transferred to disc.

  The print was by no means perfect, but for a VHS transfer it was more than acceptable. For Anita, Voyage to the Sun seemed to epitomise the epic style of film making that had reached its zenith towards the end of the
twentieth century. It was a long film, almost three hours, replete with significant imagery and spectacular if rather dated special effects.

  The film’s main actors were Rowan Amherst as the ship’s captain, Hilary Benson as the first mate, and Aurelie Pelling as Lilian Furness, the captain’s fiancée, nominated for an Oscar in her role. Anita found all three of them impressive, although for her the star was undoubtedly the young Joshua Samuelson in the part of Linden Brooks the cabin boy. It was his first major role, and he played it brilliantly. The character of Brooks was ambiguous. He was intelligent but devious, brave but duplicitous, and Samuelson brought out these contradictions with insight and flair. Anita thought it significant and appropriate that the main focus of the film’s closing sequence was not the half-starved captain or the mutinous first mate but the Machiavellian cabin boy.

  Alone of everyone on board he seemed to thrive on the harsh conditions. His skin was scorched almost black and there was not a spare ounce of body fat on him, and yet his pale eyes burned with a pure light that was almost ecstatic in its intensity.

  He flew hand over hand up the rigging to the crow’s nest, skinny and agile as a monkey.

  “ Land ,” he screamed out. “ Land ho! ” His salt-clogged hair flamed red against an azure sky.

  The images were pure Hollywood, but in the way of all great cinema they were inspiring and in their own way beautiful. Anita found she had no trouble in understanding how the child-Rachel, her young soul already on fire with romantic ideals, would have identified with these fictional pioneers. Linden Brooks the cabin boy, with his blaze of red hair and frenzied excitement at the sight of a new continent, might easily have been her twin brother.

  She ejected the disc from the machine and replaced it carefully in its clear plastic case, knowing the film was a part of Rachel she could keep close to her forever. She thought of her friend, suspended in space, her inner processes as mysterious and miraculous now as those of a chrysalis, and distinctly felt a message pass between them.