And All the Stars

Chapter Three

On non-dusty days Tyler’s three-bedroom corner apartment commanded a spectacular view of water, park and city skyline, though the headland blocked any glimpse of the Opera House or Harbour Bridge. The previous weekend, when Madeleine’s father had driven her in to drop off her supplies, she hadn’t dared do more than tuck easel, canvas stretchers and paints against the near wall of the sunny main room. She’d only met Tyler a handful of times since he’d returned to Australia and found massive success playing a witch on a new TV series about vampire detectives. She’d had no intention of jeopardising their sittings by prying.

Now, hair wrapped in a towel, she took his cordless phone and dialled and redialled while glancing around the open lounge and dining area, then checking out the two spare bedrooms, one utilitarian and the other converted into a shelf-lined office. The master bedroom was spare and tidy and looked like something out of a designer’s catalogue. It was only in the massive walk-in wardrobe that she found any sign of personality, and there it overflowed.

One of her earliest memories was of Tyler in a sunhat, face hidden by the broad brim. He obviously still favoured them, had a dozen variations on hooks high around the room. Below were a profusion of jewel-tone scarves, glimmering gowns, and plenty of the skinny jeans and shirtdresses he was commonly photographed in. Gaps here and there – he’d been filming overseas for the past two months – but still a bountiful range of possibilities.

Her own clothes drip-drying in the shower, Madeleine fingered a flower-spattered shirtdress. She was shorter and narrower of shoulder than Tyler, but had the same curveless figure, so likely some of his clothes would fit. A pattern in black and gold caught her eye and she lifted out a silken dressing-gown. Koi carp in an irezumi style: brilliant golds and iridescent green against black. She slipped it on, and hit redial once again.

"Give it up, Michael," sighed a warm, throaty voice. "There’s nothing you can do about it."

"Tyler."

"Leina?" Tyler laughed, that infamous burble capped with a soft intake of breath, a tiny, shiver-worthy ah! "I think I’m going to be a little late, kiddo. Are you at my place?"

Only Tyler had taken seriously her five year-old self’s insistence not to be called Maddie. She’d long ago given up that fight, but enjoyed the fact that he remembered.

"Yes. Are you–?"

"Still on the plane. We were just coming in to land. And now, well, there’s been an informative lecture on something called bleed air, which apparently requires running engines. And much debate on whether all this floating muck rules out a dash to New Zealand or the bright lights of Tasmania." The amused voice grew serious. "Please tell me you were safely flipping through my dirty picture collection when this happened."

"You have a dirty picture collection?"

"A most graphic one: best you don’t look. Now tell me."

"I – almost." There was a wobble threatening her voice, and she knew if she tried to explain St James she’d fall to pieces, so she hurried on. "My parents think I’m at the Art Gallery. I didn’t want them to try calling here till I arrived. I…well, I guess I’ll know sooner than most what the dust does."

"Any symptoms?"

She hadn’t heard her cousin so grave since her broken arm. And what could she tell him? That she was tired, and her back hurt, though the shower had helped her headache. That the dust surely had to be some kind of attack?

"Tyler, I wanted you to do something."

She could almost hear the smile. "If it involves annoying stewardesses I’m all over it. Otherwise–"

"Get someone to take a photograph of you, just as you are now, and email it to me."

"Leina…"

"I came here to paint you Tyler. I want to–" Her voice had risen, and she swallowed the rest of the sentence, staring out of the window at an only faintly hazy sky, and a talcum-dusted world. Sydney’s familiar skyline was made unreal not just because of its powder coating, but by a black lance dwarfing skyscrapers and Sydney Tower. At least double the height of its nearest rival, it thinned to a needle point.

"I want to be painting right now."

"…I’ll see what I can do." Tyler paused to murmur to someone off the phone, then added: "I’ll call you back if there’s any developments here. Take care of yourself, Leina."

There’d been a large laptop in the office, which Madeleine fetched out and was glad to find required no passwords to access the net. She put down her drop-cloth and set up the easel, then went and dug through Tyler’s wardrobe until she unearthed an old tracksuit, since it would be a crime to get paint on that dressing-gown. No new email had arrived so she tried to ring her parents and, finally, with a certain level of reluctance, figured out how to make a large screen rise out of a cabinet, and settled down to watch the apocalypse.

"…too early to call this any kind of catastrophe. We are facing something new and unknown, but one thing that leaps out is the placement of these towers: Hyde Park in London and Sydney, Melbourne Park, Central Park, New York, Shinjuku Gyoen, Tokyo. In every city, no matter how densely crowded, the Spire has been placed so as to minimise damage–"

"Still at the expense of dozens, if not hundreds of lives around the world. If this isn’t an attack, then it’s negligence of–"

The terse, combative words reawakened Madeleine’s headache, and she flipped channels until she found a picture of one of the black needles piercing a grassy park. No sign of windows, doors, openings of any kind: just a round, black column narrowing to a point. From a distance you couldn’t even see the stars.

The picture changed, showing the park without the tower, with a couple of joggers pounding across it. And then a blink-and-you-miss it moment, an almost instantaneous arrival which was then played again, slowed down to demonstrate that the Spire had risen, not landed, and with far less damage than anyone would expect from such an event.

Aliens from underground?

"…clear from viewing the Tokyo, Manila, and Sydney Spires that they are not identical. A comparison to nearby buildings shows the Sydney Spire to be some six hundred metres in height. The Manila spire is more than three times this size, rising over a kilometre and a half above Villamor Golf Course. The narrow base of the Spires compared to their height – in some cases not more than a hundred metres across – suggests that they extend deep underground. At least one hundred – closer to one hundred and fifty cities…"

The Spire currently on-screen – Madeleine had no idea what city it belonged to – began to vanish behind a haze, a vagueness which thickened, extended, became a plume, a cloud, an immensity which grew so quickly that Madeleine wondered how the entire underground of St James Station had not been packed solid. It was clear, though, that the majority of the dust was coming through at the top.

The camera recording the scene had to be kilometres away, but it soon showed nothing but purple-tinted white, and then there was a time-jump in the playback and the Spire began to appear again, looming out of the thinning cloud. Madeleine wondered how many people had been coated as completely as her, and how many were still crammed into the nearest shelter, waiting for the dust to settle. Searching themselves for the any sign of what would happen next.

Singing, slow and sultry. Madeleine shifted, then realised she’d dozed off, and reached for her mobile, murmuring a response.

"Maddie? Sweetheart, are you okay?"

"Dad." Madeleine sat up, rubbing her eyes. "Fine – I was just resting. Did you and Mum get home in time?"

"Don’t worry about us: we’re all tucked up. Even got the animals in. Listen, you’re going to have to sit tight there, at least till it rains. Don’t go out while that stuff’s still all over the ground. And drink bottled water."

"Lucky there’s a coffee shop here." Madeleine muted the television, hoping her father hadn’t picked up on the noise, then poked at laptop keys, trying to bring the screen to life. "How long till they know what the dust does?"

"That’s anyone’s guess. I doubt a visual examination will tell us anything – unless it’s bacterial and already known. Smaller animals would react to it first, but of course not necessarily in the same way as humans." Her father, a devoted vet, sighed. "I have a great view of the Nguyen’s retriever. Racing up and down, showing no signs of anything yet. It’s nothing like so bad out here though – you can only see the dust on dark surfaces."

"But it blew all the way to Leumeah." Her family currently lived in an outlying Sydney suburb, more than fifty kilometres from the city centre. "Dad…I’m sorry. I–"

"All that matters is that you’re safe inside." Her father’s voice had thickened. "Though once this is all over, you’re grounded till you’re twenty."

Madeleine kept him on the phone, asking questions he didn’t have answers to, then talked to her mother, making up more lies about the Art Gallery, and conversations she hadn’t had with Gallery staff. She’d been lying to her mother too often lately, and usually felt quietly guilty about needing to, but was glad for the moment to concoct a reassuring fiction about a highly militant curator holding back any threat of dust with ingenuity and sheer force of will. She was privately sure the Art Gallery of New South Wales would be full of dusty people – it was too close to Hyde Park, and every jogger and lunchtime soccer player in The Domain would have run for it as soon as the dust started drifting down.

As Madeleine finally ended the call, the television switched from something about the Olympics which weren’t likely to happen, to a diagram of Sydney, of the cloud spreading south and west, leaving much of the far northern and north-western suburbs untouched. But by then she’d opened her email, and was flipping through a dozen photographs sent by someone called Michael. Tyler Vaughn in a Hunter green shirtdress and black jeans, his long auburn hair gleaming, makeup subdued, lips berry-dark and perfect, giving the photographer a Mona Lisa smile.

Even against a backdrop of airplane seats he looked both inviting and untouchable, rich with mystery. It was Tyler’s public face, and nothing like the image Madeleine had wanted to create. But there was a last picture, one obviously captured earlier, of Tyler seated by an airplane window, lipstick chewed to traces, strands of hair caught by the weave of the seat’s cover. He must have been staring out the window at the dust, toying with a long topaz necklace, and just turned his head toward the person seated next to him. The green eyes which came from Madeleine’s father’s family were tired, lids drooping, and his mouth was stern.

And Madeleine was lost to anything but the fragile skin beneath his eyes, the tangled hair, the chips in the polish on his nails. This was just what she’d wanted, and she began sketching furiously, small compositions at first, and then a more detailed piece, before transferring the lines to one of the pre-prepared canvas stretchers.

The Archibald Prize, the focus of all Madeleine’s recent ambition, required that portraits be painted from life. Even if that wasn’t a rule, Madeleine would normally never consider painting from a flattened image on a computer screen, and she would have aimed for four or more sittings. But this wasn’t about proving a point any more, was not about prize money, schools or careers.

It was just the rest of her life.

Tyler had a few thousand litres of hair product. What he lacked was anything resembling food. The refrigerator was empty, unplugged. Every shelf of the tall pantry cupboard was packed solid with boxes of the same brand of shampoo, along with neatly-labelled boxes of junk Tyler had collected over the years: clippings, ticket stubs, even a box dutifully inscribed "Dirty Pictures".

At other times Madeleine would have stopped to look, or at least smiled, but she only bit back a growl of frustration and turned to fling open the doors beneath the kitchen cabinets. The hunger had hit her as an absolute imperative. Not you-haven’t-eaten-since-breakfast pangs, but shooting pain, a frightening urgency which left room for nothing but the need to fill her stomach. The cabinets offered only a token collection of saucepans and more boxes of hair product, all of it the brand Tyler had done a commercial for last year.

The upper cabinets. Plates, mugs, glasses, half a jar of instant coffee. And sugar. A kaleidoscope of paper tube packets advertising different cafes, scattered any-which-way across the shelf. Madeleine grabbed a handful, roughly aligned, and tore them open, pouring the contents into her mouth. Again. Again. Struggling to swallow the grainy bounty as discarded packets dropped to the floor, and then there were no more, and she was scratching among the fallen paper, hunting out fragments she’d dropped before fully emptying.

The kitchen floor was a black slate tile, and specked across it were granules of white and brown, lost to her haste. Madeleine, on her hands and knees, contemplated the tiny crystals, then levered herself shakily to her feet and ran a glass of water, then another, drinking until her breathing had slowed.

A few dozen packets of sugar weren’t nearly enough, but now that the keenest edge of her hunger had been dulled it occurred to Madeleine to pull out several of the boxes of shampoo, revealing a small supply of packets and tins at the back of the pantry cupboard. It seemed Tyler didn’t live completely on take-out.

"Thank you for not making me lick the floor," Madeleine muttered, and wondered how many planeloads of people were arguing over their last packet of peanuts.

She ate a tin of pineapple chunks while heating pumpkin soup, and drank the soup lukewarm while heating a second can. It had stopped hurting by then, so she poured the second serving into her mug to sip at a less frantic pace.

The still-muted television was showing a smothered road, cars creeping along, and one racing as if it could outpace the air itself. Slow or fast, they lifted a trail of dust. Madeleine had deliberately angled her canvas away from the screen, not willing to either watch it or turn it off. Finding that feeling had not changed she unlocked the sliding door to the balcony and stepped out into cool autumn sunset, the city skyline outlined against crimson. The air itself occasionally caught alight, motes of glitter blazing fiery warning of their presence. She drank her soup and watched them drift.

Shutting the hushed world back outside, Madeleine scrupulously cleaned up the mess she’d made in the kitchen, then hesitated between canvas and TV. She would have chosen canvas, but the presenter was holding up his wrist, his face stiff with suppressed emotion as he unbuttoned his cuff and pulled it back, displaying what looked like an old bruise, a flush of green beneath the skin. Then there were other people, men and women who usually stayed behind the camera, leaning forward to show more wrists, green and blue, and their faces were the same as the presenter’s – tight with distress and determination.

"…in our Sydney studio at the time of the Spire’s arrival. We could not have been quicker sealing the doors, and the Building Manager shut down the air-conditioning plant as a matter of priority, and closed every vent possible. It made no difference. Every single person in the building has begun exhibiting the symptoms observed in the heavy-exposure group broadcasting from Seoul. We can only repeat the medical advisory. Do not travel. If you are infected, do not attempt to reach a hospital. Even if you are indoors, cover both mouth and nose with multiple layers of damp…"

Madeleine was in the bathroom, pulling the oversized tracksuit top over her head, shucking the pants, staring at herself in the mirrored wall. Blue wrists. Not a flush of colour beneath the skin, but bold streaks extending to the inside of her elbows. More at armpit and groin, midnight blue. She turned, considering the true bruises on her back, dim by comparison, and spotted more midnight blue at the back of her knees.

Pressing the skin of her right wrist produced none of the pain response of a bruise. The skin was warm, soft, normal. She didn’t feel sick, beyond having eaten far too much too quickly.

"…just in," the presenter was saying as Madeleine returned. "The Seoul group has reported intense, urgent hunger, an almost crippling–"

Madeleine hit Mute and turned away. If anything worse happened, she’d know it as soon as anyone, and she didn’t like the way the presenter kept having to stop and swallow, didn’t like what his voice rather than his words were telling her. It pulled her into thinking of a whole world looking at their wrists, clogging the phone lines, melting down Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook, comparing symptoms, reaching out in their overwhelming need to know what it all meant, how far it would spread, what would come next, after the hunger. If she spent her time thinking about how she would die, she wouldn’t finish.

Thankfully she was working with quick-drying acrylics, had already laid down the base colours, and could now build detail. The clothes, necklace, hair, polish, and blue seat made a vivid mix, and she would have to work to stop Tyler’s skin from receding, or losing the magnetic quality of pale green eyes.

Racing symptom three.

Drumming rain, lukewarm and persistent.

Sitting tilted in a corner, Madeleine puzzled over why she felt the rain should be hotter, and turned her head away from slick tiles. She’d been leaning against them so long it felt like her skin was peeling out of a mould. Lifting a hand she could trace the indentation of grouting below her eye. Velvet.

She blinked, saw tinted glass, and recognised the outer wall of Tyler’s enormous shower, and then looked at her foot, her leg, all the way up to the sodden hem of the tracksuit top. Midnight blue. With stars.

What surprise she felt was for the lack of pain. Pain had been the constant, the dominating force which had overtaken every other consideration. It had started in her lower back, tiny twinges, and she’d thought it just another consequence of her marathon at the canvas, a companion to the stretched ache between her shoulder-blades. The pangs had spread to her legs, her arms. Not too bad at first, an intermittent ache that made her want to shift and move. But then sharp, deep pains along her bones, making her gasp and jerk and stamp about.

For a while she’d been able to work through, but one jolt had taken her at a bad moment and she’d slashed a fine line of white across half the canvas. After quickly repairing what she could, she’d had to step away. Better to leave the piece unfinished than destroy what she’d achieved. Particularly Tyler’s hand, toying with the long topaz necklace. That was some of the best work she’d ever done.

Her memories were hazy after the last of the painting. Another patch of extreme hunger, and a long time on the couch, shifting and twisting. Random images from the television: black towers and people in Hazmat suits. Roadblocks. Blue and green animals, everything warm-blooded showing stain. Crackling feedback on her phone when she tried to answer a call.

It had been daylight when the tremors and cramps started, knots beneath her skin which made her cry out and whimper. That was why she’d ended up in the shower, needle-hard water stitching her skin because the heat and the pulsing force had been the only thing which had helped at all.

She pulled off the sopping tracksuit and by slow degrees drew her feet up, levered herself on to them, and shut the water off. Then she shuffled with geriatric gait to lean against the mirrored wall. This time she didn’t need to look for patches of blue skin, but catalogued instead what was familiar. Her head, barring a patch below her right eye, remained its usual untanned self. Her neck, except for a line up the back. Some of her right hand and the thumb and two fingers of her left. That was all Madeleine.

The rest, from just below her collarbone down, was an unbroken dark blue, studded with motes of light. Galaxies, nebulae and fiery novae. They weren’t on the surface of her skin, but seemed to float below it, as if she had become a window on a night sky at the centre of the universe.

And the way it felt! The mirror she leaned against, the tiles beneath her feet. Everything she touched was a confusing mix of the texture she expected, but also velvet. And when she ran blue palm along blue arm, it was velvet on velvet.

There were still fine hairs along her forearm. Peering close she could make out the faint lines and ridges at her wrist, and her fingers showed the prune effect of long exposure to water. If it wasn’t for the shimmering light beneath, and the feeling of velvet, she could tell herself that she’d simply been stained blue. But her skin was not her skin.

Was she turning into the tower?

Memory of warm stone, wondrous and strange, flooded through her. Touching it had sent a tingle all through her, but then it had thrown her away, blasted her–

The mirror shattered, and Madeleine was tossed forward, bouncing off the basin and falling to her hands and knees. Fragments of glass and tile rained down around her as she cowered, hands over her head, but none of it touched her, and she was aware of strength flowing out of her in a way which felt as uncontrolled as a throat wound. She was doing this, destroying everything around her even as she shielded herself.

Madeleine pulled it back, an effort which left her limp, barely able to lift her head to survey her handiwork in a room suddenly dim, lit only through the open door. Shards of glass and ceramic lay everywhere. The mirrored wall, ceiling light, the basin, shower screen, even the tiles – all looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to them. But she wasn’t injured at all. Not even the smallest fragment had reached her, though she would now have to find some way to move without cutting herself to shreds.

The television was still on. Madeleine could hear a voice with a British accent, talking about death tolls. About blues and greens, a mandatory no travel order, and the possibility of person-to-person transmission.

She was hungry again.