The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

THE WOODPECKER AND THE WOLF

Every time she wakes she is convinced for a couple of seconds that when she opens her eyes she will be looking up at the mobile of wooden animals which hung over her bed in the house in Gloucester where she spent the first seven years of her life — hippo, lion, monkey, snake, eagle. Then she opens her eyes and she sees the air vent with its halo of beige stain and the four cables running across the ceiling which Mikal has duct-taped to the panels. The air smells faintly of sweat and hot plastic and human waste. In the wall space she can hear the water pumps ticking over.

Day 219. She sits up and rubs her eyes. Her back is sore. She lowers herself to the floor and sits against the bed with outstretched legs. She holds her right foot with her left hand for ten seconds then holds her left foot with her right hand for ten seconds. She sits back and feels the knotted muscles loosen. She listens until she is certain that it’s unoccupied then she steps into the corridor and goes to the toilet. She comes back to the room, takes off her pants and vest and rubs herself down with the damp orange cloth. She gets back into her pants and vest, massages Epaderm into her heels and elbows, takes her testosterone and brushes her teeth. Then she zips herself into her green worksuit and heads over to North 2 to get breakfast.

Suki and Arvind are sitting at the table eating granola, drinking coffee and staring at tablets. Arvind looks up. “Good morning, Clare.”

She has never found Arvind attractive but he has skin so smooth and flawless it looks like suede and sometimes she wants to reach out and stroke the back of his neck. She asks what the news is from home.

“Baby girl.” Arvind rotates the screen to show a picture of his sister holding a tiny, damp person in a crocheted yellow blanket. “Leyla.”

“Uncle Arvind. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, though it required very little effort on my part.” He looks at his niece. “Nine pounds six ounces.”

“Is that big?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“That’s pretty much a Thanksgiving turkey,” says Suki without looking up. They are all small but Suki is the smallest by some margin, and moves so lightly on her feet that Clare sometimes catches her out of the corner of her eye and thinks there is a teenage girl here with them, which spooks her every time. Suki has black belts in judo and karate. Clare guesses that she is still in the middle of Angels & Demons.

“Also, there’s been a coup in Guatemala,” says Arvind, “and Brad Pitt is dead.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m serious.”

“Overdose?”

“Cancer.”

“Were we expecting this?”

“The world was, I think, unprepared,” says Arvind. “Though I am not always on top of celebrity gossip.”

“We should have a memorial night,” says Suki, again without looking up. “Ocean’s Eleven, Fight Club, Twelve Monkeys.”

“Happy Feet Two,” says Arvind. “He voiced Will the Krill according to a very comprehensive obituary I have been reading.” He is looking at the little girl he will never be able to hold in his arms. He puts his hand across his mouth, riding out a lump in his throat perhaps. He turns the screen off and Leyla vanishes.

Suki finally looks up. “Have you seen Jon, by the way?”

“I’ve only just got up,” says Clare. “Is there a problem?”

“He must be having a lie-in.” Suki returns to her Dan Brown. “I’ll prod him later.”

Clare pours water onto some powdered apple and spreads cream cheese onto a rye cracker. She sits and stares through the scratched porthole at five thousand acres of pink rock under a washed-out, gull-grey sky. There are five or six dust devils in the distance, twenty, thirty metres tall. The Endurance impact crater, Margaritifer Sinus quadrangle. She thinks, every time, how ironic it is that they chose to name the place after Shackleton’s ship, abandoned and crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea.

In truth she misses being en route, sealed inside a tiny metal bead on the longest string in the world, slipping through the great tide of radiation at two hundred degrees below zero. It was her reason for coming, those childhood fantasies of being at sea with Magellan or Frobisher, hunting the Northwest Passage, anchored off the Celebes, hunkering below decks while the hull rolled, a hundred cold fathoms below and nothing from the crow’s nest, the way it made her feel, the belonging of not belonging, so that she was not afraid when Suki’s epilepsy started, or the port-forward adjuster blew and set them spinning for two weeks, because that was the cost of stepping over the edge of the known world, and if you didn’t embrace it then why were you here?

In truth, if she were writing the script they would have died during the landing, entering the atmosphere nose first, shredding the parachute, hitting the ground at a hundred, a hundred and fifty, no flames, no suffocation. Bang. Over and done with. Because what do you do when the most extraordinary thing has happened and you are still alive? You hunker down and don’t complain. After all, it was one of the reasons they’d been chosen, wasn’t it, their ability to accept, to be patient, to endure.

She remembers the garden in Painscastle the year before her mother went into care, those two hours of stillness and silence she needed between hoisting that tiny body into bed and returning to sleep in her own bed. Late spring, Orion setting, Cassiopeia almost gone, Jupiter with its pinprick moons, Mars rising on the great Ferris wheel of the ecliptic, the red of the iron oxide visible even at that distance. Information pouring like rain down through the dark. The desire to be somewhere else, which is never satisfied by being somewhere else, however far you go, though you have to go a very long way indeed to figure that one out.

She scoops up the morning’s data. She takes it all down twice then meets up with Per in South 2 for the handover.

“Greetings, co-worker.” He looks directly into her eyes for three or four seconds. “You’re still sleeping badly.”

“I need to ski for longer.”

“Then ski for longer.” Per has a birthmark on his neck precisely where the bolt would be if he were Frankenstein’s Monster. His blond buzz cut has grown into a blond ponytail. In one of the early training runs there was a fire. Everyone assumed it was real, that something had gone terribly wrong. Per sealed Shona and Kurt inside a module to stop it spreading. Shona wept openly assuming she was about to die. They were gone by the end of the week. If the shit really hits the fan Clare wants Per nearby, on her side of the airlock.

“Water throughput?” says Per.

“Two hundred and five litres.”

“Backups?”

“A good. B good.”

“UV sterilisation?”

“We’re up and running again.”

“Thank God for that,” Per says, “the chlorine is disgusting.”

“Oxygen 21.85 percent, nitrogen 77.87, CO₂ 0.045.”

“Internal radiation?”

“Top 10.5 milirads, bottom 9.5.”

“Humidity?”

“Twenty-three percent,” says Clare. “I dropped the night temperature a couple of degrees.”

“Don’t want people getting too comfortable. And how is the weather out there?”

“Minus 12.2 °C and rising. Winds 4 to 8 kph. Visibility between 18 and 20 km.”

“So, people, it is shaping up to be a fine summer’s day.” Per leans back. “Enjoy your drive-time commute. Stay safe. And here is some classic Bruce Springsteen to kick off the programme, the appropriately titled ‘Radio Nowhere’ from 2007’s Magic album.”

The second crew are en route aboard the Halcyon, 408 days into their journey — Joe Deller, Annie Chen, Anne-Marie Harpen, Thanh Thuy, Kees Van Es. They don’t seem real yet. Perhaps it’s self-preservation, perhaps it’s the two-way light-time of thirty minutes, perhaps it’s those two weeks of radio silence when the earth was behind the sun. None of them use the word “home” anymore. It has become a fictional place, despite the daily ebb and flow of information. So here they come, these five new people, like characters walking out of a fairy-tale forest, no one knowing if they are good or evil.

She goes to West 1 and strips down to pants and vest. She wipes the headphones clean, puts them in and scrolls through her playlist till she finds Kylie’s Impossible Princess. She presses play, steps onto the machine and turns the resistance up to 64.

Gravity here is 0.4 G. But after two weightless years on the Argo it felt like being poured onto the Wall of Death in a fairground. It seems normal now. She no longer notices the bounce in everyone’s step, the thin legs, the puffy faces. But on the increasingly rare occasions when she watches a DVD she is surprised by the speed at which everyone moves, like Charlie Chaplin or the Keystone Cops. A couple of months back Suki broke her ankle tripping over a chair. They still don’t know if the bone loss plateaus. They’re the guinea pigs on this one. Fifteen minutes, twenty. She cheats and drops the resistance a little. The trick is not to ask why you are doing anything, the trick is simply to persist. Twenty-five, thirty. I should be so lucky. She is sweating heavily.

Arvind says he misses baths, the sensation of lowering yourself into ridiculously hot water. It’s showers for her. One in particular keeps coming back. They were on holiday in Portugal. The name of the resort escapes her, as does the year, her poor memory being one of those disabilities which become skills in the right context. But the beach is clear in her mind, the wooden diving platform, the jellyfish like Victorian lampshades, Peter in his green Speedo. They’re in the hotel room afterwards, wind moving the balcony curtains, those cool terra-cotta tiles underfoot, the tightness on her salty, almost-burnt skin. Standing naked in the falling water. What is it about that moment which calls her?

After lunch she goes to find Mikal. They’re doing an EVA later in the day to work on the Long Array, not much more than a slow walk for a kilometre and a half carrying two titanium poles and a rock drill, but a hundred ways to die en route. On her first outing her oxygen supply failed after forty metres. She lost consciousness halfway back and Per saved her life by dragging her to the airlock.

They now have a 73-point checklist to work through before they call in Per and Jon to get suited and booted. They take their helmets out of the lockers and lay them on the table. They take our their thermal underwear and lay it on the table.

“Suki tells me Jon is not feeling well,” says Mikal. “So if you’re thinking of having a heart attack it might be wise to postpone it till tomorrow.”

“A heart attack would be a good way to go, don’t you think?” says Clare.

“Not in the immediate future, I hope.”

Per and Suki are, in the best possible way, psychopaths. They have retained pretty much every piece of information they’ve been given and they have never been visibly tired or frightened, but Clare has absolutely no idea what is going on in their minds. She suspects, sometimes, that for long periods there is nothing going on in their minds, that they sleep like sharks, on autopilot, shutting down half their brain at a time. Arvind pays for his buoyancy with periods of darkness which he tries hard to keep from the rest of them, so that Clare holds him at a distance for fear of becoming infected, as they all do. Jon, the crew’s doctor, is constantly positive, a whipper-up of good cheer, and while she enjoys playing backgammon with him or helping him swab down one of the units she is uncomfortable with his relentless need for activity, for noise, for distraction. But she can sit in a room with Mikal for hours and his silent presence puts her at ease in the way that dogs and horses once put her at ease. He has a piratical beard, bends every rule a little and treats his previous life as a deep well of entertaining stories. They have sex sometimes. She never used to like it much, one of the reasons her relationship with Peter faltered. She doesn’t like it much now, but the testosterone which stops her bones turning to powder gives her discomfiting dreams unless she relieves her raised libido every now and then. Of all times this is the one she finds hardest, when they are lying together afterwards, the way he runs his hand through her hair, the way three years and three hundred thousand kilometres seem like a curtain she could step through.

They take out their boots. “There was a beech wood just below the sawmill,” says Mikal. “It was the most astonishing place in spring. Yellow rapeseed to one side, bluebells coming up through the dead leaves.” They visually check the airtight joints at the ankles, knees and pelvis, rotating each one through 360 degrees. “I was chased by a forester once. A huge man. He had a gun. It was tremendously exciting.”

Suki appears in the doorway, noiselessly as always. There is a look on her face that Clare has never seen before. “You need to come.”

“I have pain moving from my stomach down to my right iliac fossa.” Jon is finding it hard to speak. “I have no appetite. I’ve been vomiting. I have a temperature of forty-one and I have rebound tenderness. I think it’s fairly obvious without doing a white blood cell count.”

“Antibiotics?” asks Per.

“I’m taking them.”

“When do we have to make a decision?”

“Now would be good,” says Jon.

Everyone looks at Clare. She’s never done an appendectomy.

Per turns back to Jon. “Tell her everything she needs to do. Suki, get into a blue suit, sterilise West 2, put new air filters in. Arvind, set up the equipment. Mikal, we need references, photos, notes, diagrams. Jon, morphine or ketamine?”

Everyone else leaves the room and Jon and Clare are alone. He says, “Well, this is an adventure.”

She did military medical in Florida, four years of college compacted into six months. No time for surgery. In 403 days they would be joined by Dr. Annie Chen. In the end all you could do was to rank the conceivable emergencies in order of likelihood, draw a red line where time and money and the capacity of the human brain came to an end and hope you encountered nothing on the far side.

“Sofanauts” was the word they coined, people willing to be fired into space on top of a 700-tonne firework then spend the rest of their lives playing Scrabble and cleaning toilets. You had to get pretty close to the Venn diagram to see where those two circles overlapped.

She had very little to tie her down. Her parents were dead. Three years with Peter convinced her that she did not possess a talent for intimacy. He wanted children but the rough end of her father’s anger had warned her against the dangers of that particular relationship.

She had two degrees in physics and a job as a lab technician. People told her that she should be more ambitious but it didn’t seem like something one could change. Less sympathetic people said that she was detached and uninterested. Then she found her niche. Vasco da Gama, Shackleton, Gagarin. Was it stupid to hope that your name might be remembered in four hundred years’ time?

Jon lies on his back with his right arm tucked up out of the way. He is intubated and Mikal is hand-ventilating him. She stands on his right, Suki on his left, both of them masked and blue-suited. Laid out on a second table are scalpels, six retractors, a couple of clamps, an electrocauter, suture, needles, saline and antiseptic gel. Behind the instruments are two tablets, one showing images of the skin and muscles in the abdomen, the other showing the notes she made from Jon’s instructions. Before he was anaesthetised Jon drew a 4 cm diagonal line on his own abdomen with a Sharpie to show her where to begin cutting. She washes the area and swabs it with green gel.

Suki’s and Mikal’s eyes are unreadable above their masks. Through the one porthole she can see the layered shale slopes of Mount Sharp and the featureless carbon dioxide sky. She ratchets her focus down. Be calm. Pause before every new action. Detail, detail, detail.

Mikal says, “You can do this.”

She picks up a 12-blade scalpel and cuts into the abdominal wall. The blood starts to flow. Suki hooks the tube into the lower end of the wound to pump it out. Clare can see the three layers of which the flesh is composed: the outer skin, the fatty layer of Camper’s fascia and below that the membranous Scarpa’s fascia. She cauterises the bleeding from the bigger blood vessels. It smells like bacon frying. The heart monitor chirps. 78 bpm. Mikal squeezes and releases the clear plastic ball. She makes a second incision and refers back to the diagram. She has reached the upper layer of stomach muscle. The parallel fibres run north-west to southeast. This is where the hard part begins. She makes an incision along the fibres, pushes two clamps into the slit and uses a retractor to crank it open. She is surprised by the force she has to exert and the fact that the muscle doesn’t rip. The resulting hexagonal hole is shockingly small.

Under the muscle she can see the peritoneum. She takes hold of it carefully with the Metzenbaum scissors and cuts into it making an even smaller hole. Mikal asks if she needs any help. She tells him she doesn’t. She hears the snappiness in her voice. She stops and takes three long, slow breaths. Twenty-four minutes, but doing it right is more important than doing it fast.

She checks her notes. She has to find the ascending colon and the longitudinal muscles around it. She scrolls through the pictures. Nothing seems to correlate. She is going to have to move the colon around using clamps. She is unsure of how much pressure she can apply before the glossy membrane tears. Gently pinching, she moves it to the left, shifting the clamps one over the other in turn as if she is hauling on a wet rope. Then she moves to the right in the same way. She can see them now, the taenia coli. She follows them downwards and there it is. The inflammation is all too visible.

Arvind comes in, masked and blue-suited and takes over from Mikal who leaves the room.

Clare uses the rounded metal end of a clamp to guide the appendix gently up and out through the hole. She puts a clamp on the junction between the appendix and the colon, squeezing it shut until it catches on the first notch and holds, then a second clamp beside it. There is an artery in that little isthmus of flesh around which she is going to tie the sutures. She stretches her hands and fingers to loosen them. Suki gives her the first length of suture. She threads it round the neck of flesh between the clamps and ties it tight with a reef knot. She cuts the loose ends away. She ties a second suture next to it. To make absolutely sure she ties a third. Slowly she releases the clamp on the appendix side of the suture.

She hadn’t thought to ask Jon what the appendix contained. Pus, presumably, but how liquid, and under what pressure? She asks Suki to soak several swabs in antiseptic gel and pack the opening to protect the peritoneal cavity. She uses a new scalpel to cut through the pinched flesh between the sutures and the clamp. It is tougher than she expects and when it finally gives she slips and slices through one of the swabs right into the muscle.

“Fuck.”

She waits and breathes. She examines the fresh wound. She hasn’t punctured the peritoneum. Luckier still, the swollen appendix has come away with no leakage. She drops it into a tray then cauterises the bunched flesh where it was attached.

She releases the second clamp. The sutures hold. She is going to wait for five minutes. She wants to be absolutely certain. There is no noise except the hush and crumple of the air bag. Four minutes, four minutes thirty seconds, five minutes. She rinses the wound with saline. She pulls the two sides of the cut peritoneum together and clamps them. Suki threads a curved needle and hands it to her. She stitches, moves the clamp, stitches again and moves the clamp. When she has finished she prods the peritoneum on either side of the wound. The stitches are not tidy but they hold. She washes them with saline.

She clamps and stitches the muscle. She clamps and stitches the fasciae. She clamps and stitches the skin. She washes the wound with saline.

It has been three and a half hours.

Suki says she’ll clean up and keep an eye on Jon.

Arvind says, “That was an extraordinary piece of work.”

Clare steps outside, removes her gloves and lowers her mask. Mikal comes up to her and puts his arms around her. Per is standing beside them. It is the first time Mikal has shown her physical affection in front of another person. “You were heroic.”

Jon dies the following morning. Suki has brought him some warm oatmeal and a weak coffee. He hoists himself up the bed so that he can eat and drink more easily and this must be the moment when the sutures break. He asks for Clare. Suki doesn’t understand what is happening.

He tells Clare that it is his fault. He should have told them earlier that he was feeling ill. The sheet under him is red. He asks for morphine. Everyone is in the room now. Arvind, Mikal, Per. Between the pain and the growing fog there are five minutes of clarity.

Per stands up straight and sticks out his chest. “I would like to say on behalf of all of us—”

Jon says, “Oh, do fuck off.”

Arvind laughs and catches himself.

Jon lies back and closes his eyes. “I want to listen to some music.”

“What music?” asks Mikal.

“Bluegrass,” says Jon.

He is unconscious by the time Mikal returns. Mikal puts the music on anyway. No one knows what else to do. There is nothing in the Protocol which deals with this situation. Leaving the room seems wrong, talking seems wrong, but standing quietly doing nothing makes it seem prematurely like a funeral. Suki holds Jon’s hand for a while but he does not respond so she drops it again. Arvind stares out of the window so that no one can see his face. Jon dies listening to “My Lord Keeps a Record” by Carl Story and his Rambling Mountaineers.

Per says, “Let’s concentrate on the small things.”

They strip Jon’s body, plug it and wrap it in the bloody sheet. Recycling is so axiomatic that Clare cannot help thinking how wasteful it is to discard an object containing so much fluid and so many calories. They lay him in the airlock ready for the morning. They don’t want to be outside with night falling.

Mikal and Clare tidy Jon’s room. They fold the clothes, put them away and make the bed. Clare opens Jon’s Ark and takes out a crucifix of palm fronds, a fossil trilobite and a green toy Ferrari with one tyre missing. She arranges them beside Jon’s little zoo of origami animals. In the bottom of the Ark she finds a dog-eared and faded photo of a young woman aged eighteen or nineteen lying naked on a bed. She is dark-skinned with shaggy coal-black hair, big breasts, utterly at ease. There is an open bottle of red wine on the carpet and the bottom of a film poster Clare cannot identify above the headboard. She puts it back in the box and they seal the room to save energy.

They bury Jon the following morning. They have no vehicle so Mikal and Arvind have to carry him slung between them. The EVA suits make it hard to get up after a fall so they move slowly and rest often. It takes them twenty-five minutes to reach the site a couple of hundred metres south of the base which has already been quietly earmarked as a graveyard. They return for spades. The soil is not as deep as they had hoped. They lay Jon in a shallow trough. They have been outside for more than two hours by this time. Per tells them to return to the base but they insist on completing the job, gathering stones and building a long, low cairn so that Jon’s body is not uncovered by the wind. When they return they have been outside for more than five hours. They are exhausted.

Per says, “I know that this is a difficult situation but we mustn’t allow emotion to undermine discipline.”

Mikal and Arvind remove their suits and everyone eats lunch together.

Arvind says, “I would like to recite a poem.”

Per says, “That would be acceptable. If no one has any objections.”

Arvind stands up. “Maranare tuhu mamo shyamo saman meghabaran tujha, megha jotajuta, raktakamalkara, rakta adharaputa…”

Suki asks what the poem is.

“It is Tagore,” says Arvind. He does not offer a translation or a title. Clare suspects that he is trying to show more grief than the rest of them.

Mikal tells stories about Jon, how he played noughts and crosses on the Argo with floating grids of rye crackers, the monitor he made to predict Suki’s fits, his God-awful singing voice.

Per says, “I think it would be a good idea if we were to carry on with this afternoon’s timetable as usual.”

Suki says, “We have years ahead of us. Perhaps we should each of us decide how best to spend the rest of the day.”

They write reports for Geneva and give video testimonies. They are not allowed to discuss these with one another in advance. They are given pre-prepared scripts to learn and perform for a media package. They are encouraged to edit these to make them seem more personal. They take psychological tests which have been devised for them in the event of the death of a crew member.

Previously when she tired of company she retired to her room. Conversely when she felt lonely she sought the others out. Now she hungers for some indefinable third option. She has become the crew doctor. She tells Mikal that she does not want to have sex. He asks if he can simply hold her. As he is doing so she wonders if she was frightened of loving Peter too much, if that was why the relationship failed. Loving someone too much, not loving someone enough. Was it possible to mistake one of those for the other?

One evening Per is absentmindedly humming “My Lord Keeps a Record” to himself as he prepares his supper. Arvind says, “What the fuck are you doing?” She has never heard Arvind be anything less than courteous. Per has no memory of where the tune comes from. Arvind calls him a robot. Per puts his hand high on Arvind’s chest but not quite around his neck. He says, “This mission is more important than you or your feelings.”

Clare says, “We are all upset. We just express it in different ways.”

After a pause Per takes his hands off Arvind and says, “You are right, of course.”

She gives Arvind diazepam, 6 mg a day with a slow taper. She makes him increase his exercise regime by 50 percent. She sees him every evening to assess his mood. He is allowed to record and receive more videos to and from his extended family in New Haven and Chennai.

Per asks to talk to her in private and says that now might be a good moment to share with her the contents of the Kent Protocol. She says that Arvind will get better. It was a temporary aberration. She will read the Protocol if and when it becomes necessary.

Life refinds its equilibrium. Per, Mikal, Suki and Arvind take turns doing EVAs to the Long Array. Clare is no longer allowed to take part in potentially dangerous activities. Instead she measures heart rates and blood pressure and lung capacity and muscle tone and bone mass and visual acuity. She gives reaction tests and scans for tumours. She reads Neil Gaiman. She reads George R. R. Martin. Christmas comes and goes and the fact that none of them are practising Christians prevents the party atmosphere thickening to something more sombre. Arvind finishes his course of Valium and seems stable.

It is early February when the Halcyon is lost. There is a brief audio message from Anne-Marie Harpen to Geneva saying that they have detected heightened oxygen levels and will be performing a 95 percent electrical shutdown while they find the leak. Contact is never resumed. They wake the black box from Geneva. An hour after Anne-Marie’s message the internal temperature rose rapidly to unsurvivable levels and remained there for seventeen minutes. There is no subsequent electrical activity anywhere on the main vessel. If anyone has managed to survive in a sealed section they will be taking their Moxin to avoid a longer, less comfortable death. There is no change of trajectory, so the ship is still heading in their direction. Nine months later, on 4 or 5 September, if it strikes the atmosphere at the right time of day they will see it burn up overhead like a shooting star.

They watch a video of the non-denominational services of remembrance in Geneva and Florida then perform their own more modest version. Arvind does not quote Tagore. Once more they are given pre-prepared scripts to learn for media circulation.

There is a third crew waiting to travel and another ship, the Sparrowhawk, ready to take them but the launch will only be authorised after a report has identified the reason for the loss of the Halcyon and the fault has been rectified.

The Halcyon was carrying more solar panels, new air filters, a range of medical supplies, a 3D printer and half a ton of ABS blocks. The five of them must now catalogue everything they possess and work out the rates at which they are allowed to consume these things. Per and Suki collate the figures. There will be no more EVAs. Daily food intake is reduced by 10 percent and the ambient temperature is lowered by three degrees. East 2 is sealed off and the dining area in North 2 is narrowed to make space for the gym equipment. She and Suki move into a single room as do Per and Mikal.

They have more time on their hands. Per exercises for three hours a day. Squats, press-ups, pull-ups. He skis sometimes while they are trying to eat a meal only a couple of metres away.

Suki learns German. Arvind, who worked in Stuttgart for seven years, carries on conversations with her as if they are both residents of a German town of his own invention called Stiller am Simssee. “Tut mir Leid, ich bin zu spät da mein Fahrrad einen Platten hatte.”

“Komm in mein Haus. Mein Vater wird es reparieren können.”

Mikal watches old thrillers, North by Northwest, The French Connection, Serpico. He sits in quiet corners practising mindfulness. He says, “Are you OK, Clare? I worry about you.”

Floods in Bangladesh kill over 10,000 people, though the real number will never be known. Fukushima is finally enclosed in a vast box of concrete, half above ground, half below. Over Arvind’s shoulder Clare reads a headline saying “Fate of Halcyon Still a Mystery.” She thinks of Frank Wild and his men hiding under their boats on Elephant Island eating seal and penguin while Shackleton travelled in search of help.

An alarm goes off. The internal pressure is dropping unexpectedly. They gather in North 1, seal off all the other units and reopen them in turn until they track down the leak to South 2. Per suits up with Mikal and the two of them go inside. It takes three days and five visits to locate and mend a broken valve inside a wall panel.

Arvind says, “It is not a real emergency.”

She fears that he is losing his balance again. “Arvind…”

“It is a piece of theatre,” he says, “designed to keep us on our toes.”

This possibility has never occurred to her before. She would like to tell Arvind that he is being ridiculous but how can she prove it?

A commission sits in The Hague to discuss the fate of the Halcyon and hears expert testimony from a long string of physicists, engineers and systems analysts.

She asks Mikal for sex. She would dearly love to get drunk. She wants to take a hammer and smash things. These feelings are tangled in a knot which she can neither understand nor undo. She makes noises when Mikal is inside her. He puts a hand over her mouth so that no one hears and she bites him hard, drawing blood. She has orgasms for the first time, and in the minutes afterwards, when she floats untethered in the dark, she sees brief visions of her past life. Pear-tree blossom in the Painscastle garden, Tokyo from the air, the neat line of hair which ran down from Peter’s belly button.

One of the transmitters fails. There is no spare capacity for personal audio and visual. Until it is mended they can communicate with their families by text only.

Mikal watches Marathon Man, The Night of the Hunter, The Long Weekend.

“Es sind Sommerferien und ich bin sehr gelangweilt,” says Arvind.

“Morgen werde ich dich zum segeln auf dem See mitnehmen,” says Suki.

He says, “The messages from my sister, they are not real.”

“Arvind,” says Clare, “what are you talking about?”

“They are being written by the same group of people who write our video scripts. They are amusing. Humour has never been my sister’s strong suit. The news, too. I find it increasingly unconvincing. For example, we ourselves do not feature.”

She urges Arvind not to say these things to Per. He touches her arm as if it is she who is having problems. “Do not worry, Clare. All is well and all manner of things shall be well.”

Per does the Paris Marathon on the running machine in North 1 at precisely the same time as it is being run 300 million kilometres away. He completes the course in three hours forty-two minutes.

She is ill. She cannot identify specific symptoms but she knows that something has changed inside her body. She runs all the tests she can think of but finds nothing. She does one final check to be certain. She is pregnant. She did not think that this was possible on her drug regime. She does not tell Mikal. She falsifies her weekly obs to Geneva. She cannot have a child here but the thought of killing it is unthinkable.

Per asks to talk to her in private. He sits on the end of her bed. He appears calm but many minutes pass before he is able to speak. He says, “I don’t know why I am doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“This.” He leans over and touches the wall of her unit in a way that is surprisingly tender. “Honour, pride, duty, a love of one’s country, one’s family, the desire to be remembered well. I no longer know what any of these things mean.”

She says, “The emails from our families, Per. Are they fake?”

He does not answer for a long time.

“And the news?”

“The commission has been dissolved,” he says. “They have no idea why the Halcyon was lost. There will be no third flight. It’s too risky.” He puts his hands over his nose as if he is breathing through a mask. “We are coping with the situation remarkably well according to the newspapers. We understand that money is not unlimited, that technology is not perfect, that our safety was never guaranteed. We are going nobly to our deaths.”

She says, “Perhaps you should show me the Kent Protocol.”

“Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary.”

They find him next morning in South 2, on all fours, his head pressed to the floor as if he is not dead, just listening to something underground.

“Moxin.” Mikal hands Suki the empty blister pack.

Arvind appears behind them. “Now that I was not predicting.”

Clare leads everyone to South 1 where Per has written his log-in code on the control desk with a permanent marker.

The CAPCOM’s video is four weeks old. “These things are out of my hands, Per. We’ll keep pressing but this may need a change of government. I’m not meant to voice an opinion but they have fucked you over. And you won’t find many people in the building who think differently.”

The ban on EVAs seems pointless now and no one wants the body inside so Mikal and Arvind suit up. They decide not to take it to the burial site. They do not feel about Per as they felt about Jon. Suki protests but she is unable to wield the power she inherited on Per’s death. They lay him beside the hopper, into which they put the hair and nail clippings, where he cannot be seen from any of the windows.

Suki sends a report. She says that Per is dead. They know about the commission. They know they have been abandoned. CAPCOM’s reply comes back in light time plus four hours.

CAPCOM releases them from all protocols and says that they will try to provide whatever assistance is needed. There is a pause. “I’m afraid we can’t tell your families.”

“Fuck,” says Mikal.

Clare stops the video.

“Our families will have guessed already,” says Arvind.

“I don’t understand,” says Suki.

“Are you reassured by your frankly unconvincing emails from home?” asks Arvind. “I doubt that our families are reassured by the frankly unconvincing emails they will be getting from us.”

Clare says, “I’m pregnant.”

There is a long silence.

“How did that happen?” says Suki.

Mikal says, “I’m so sorry.”

They watch Double Indemnity, The Wages of Sin, Paan Singh Tomar.

Mikal draws a timeline. “Let’s assume there are no accidents. Let’s assume consumption and depreciation continue at the present rate. This is the approximate date beyond which we will not survive. And this is the last date for a second crew to set out if it is to have a chance of reaching us in time.”

Suki has a rotten tooth. Clare extracts it under local anaesthetic.

CAPCOM sends them real news again. Wildfires burn out of control in California. The Cardinals win the World Series. Everest is closed to foreign climbers.

She assumed that the desire for sex would vanish with her pregnancy but the opposite seems to be true. She is becoming a stranger to herself. When Mikal says he is not in the mood she slaps him.

Arvind says, “Do you want to keep learning German?”

Suki says, “When we get home I am going to move to Stiller am Simssee. I am going to buy a little apartment. I am going to eat stollen and walk in the mountains and read the detective novels of Friedrich Dürrenmatt.”

Arvind says, “Stiller am Simssee does not exist.”

“Oh,” says Suki. “I misunderstood.”

Mikal says, “You cannot have a child. We cannot have a child. This is insane.”

Clare’s nausea recedes. She plays Skyrim on her own and backgammon with anyone who’s willing. There is a sandstorm. It is the fiercest they have experienced. It howls outside, the hard carcinogenic grains rasping against the walls. Contact with Geneva is degraded and intermittent. Then it fails completely. They cannot find a fault. It may be outside, but they cannot go outside until the dust dies down.

Mikal says, “The Mignonette sank en route to Sydney in 1883. The four crew members managed to escape in a lifeboat with two tins of turnips. They were seven hundred miles from land. They ate a turtle and drank their own urine but couldn’t catch any rainwater. After three weeks the cabin boy Richard Parker passed into a coma. Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens stabbed him in the neck with a penknife and ate him and drank his blood.”

“Why are you telling us this?” asks Arvind.

She is woken from sleep by Jon hammering on the walls asking to be let in. He is cold and lonely. She does not tell anyone about this.

During her weekly scan Clare spots what she thinks is the beginning of a tumour in Suki’s left breast.

Mikal says, “I love you.”

She says, “I think you are just frightened.”

“I’m frightened and I love you.”

“I need you not to be frightened.” Her belly is visibly swollen now.

After six weeks the sandstorm dies with freakish speed over a single morning. The silence for which they have been longing is unsettling, the sound of nothing and no one and nowhere. They cannot re-establish contact with Geneva. Mikal and Arvind do an EVA but can find nothing wrong with the transmitters. EVAs are energy-hungry. Each one shortens their remaining lives by eight days. They vote against a second. Unless a ship falls from the sky there will be no more contact. Mikal says, “Los Angeles may burn and we will never know.”

Suki suggests that they reduce their daily calorie intake, down to a thousand for Arvind and Mikal, down to eight hundred for Clare and Suki herself.

Mikal says, “Clare is pregnant.”

“So we should give up food for someone who will never be born?” says Suki.

Mikal says, “We should kill a child so that you can live a month longer?”

Arvind stands and leaves the room. Clare thinks, he is playing the long game, he is preserving his energy, he will last the longest.

They can smell ammonia on one another’s breath.

An alarm goes off. There is a structural problem of some kind in North 2. The stresses of the storm perhaps. They do not have the strength to suit up and run ultrasound checks so they simply seal it off.

No one is exercising anymore. Suki falls again and breaks her ankle. Clare offers her as much pain relief as she wants.

She can feel the baby moving. She scans herself. It is a boy. She dares not give it a name.

They watch Ocean’s Eleven, The Princess Bride, The Bridges of Madison County. Clare stays in another room, reading or playing games. She cannot bear to see pictures of earth.

Arvind says, “I miss the sensation of wet grass under my feet.”

Clare says, “For Christ’s sake, Arvind.”

Suki takes Moxin. They reopen North 2, put her inside and reseal it.

There was a group of five skinny brown boys who spent every afternoon on the wooden diving platform. She and Peter ate chickpeas with cow’s feet and vegetables in the café at the top of the beach.

“Eu gostaria Orangina, por favor?”

She was stung by a jellyfish on the second day and had to keep her foot in a bucket of ice for the rest of the evening. Peter told her about Atlit Yam, the oldest stone circle in the world, built circa 7000 BC, underwater near Haifa. He told her about the Hurlers on Bodmin Moor, the Merry Maidens, the Nine Ladies, the Twelve Apostles. They lay on the bed naked in the afternoon. Beams of dusty sunlight, the sound of splashing outside and tinny Brazilian pop from Jordão’s cheap speakers. Then she got the phone call from the hospital saying that her mother had suffered a stroke.

Mikal has diarrhoea. She gives him Imodium and Dioralyte but he remains badly dehydrated. He has a headache that will not go away.

Neither of them has the strength to move Mikal’s body.

Arvind says, “Death, you are no different to me than my lover with your cloud-coloured skin, and your hair a mass of dark cloud, your hands like blood-red lotus, and your lips the colour of blood.” She says, “What is that?” “Tagore,” he says. “Maranare tuhu mamo. Do you not remember?” She puts her hand on the smooth skin on the back of his neck and waits till it goes cold.

She has no sense of how long her labour lasts. Every time she thinks that death would be easier than this she remembers the baby and she manages to find the strength from somewhere. Jon sits on the far side of the room. His face is grey. She thinks he might be a doctor and this reassures her. She drags herself to the medicine cupboard and finds a plastic bottle of liquid morphine. She takes a sip. Not too much or the baby will die inside her and rot. Is that how it works? She knew these things once.

A contraction, then a contraction, then a contraction. It is like putting her hand into a flame, taking it out then putting it in again. She prays. She remembers that there is no one to pray to, that there is no one for hundreds of millions of kilometres, no life of any kind. The thought is a gale sweeping through the empty rooms of her head, slamming doors and smashing windows. Another contraction. If only she could let this happen to her. If only she didn’t have to push.

Lights flash behind her closed eyelids, like the flashes they see at night, the remnant particles of supernovae giving up their energy to the retina. Then there is an animal on the floor and it is moving. She lifts her vest and lays it against her breast. The world vanishes and there is darkness for a period. Then she opens her eyes and expects to see the hippo and the lion and the monkey and the snake and the eagle but sees instead that she is lying in a pool of blood in the corner of a room with aluminium and plastic walls and there is a baby in her arms.

It is easier to think about someone else’s welfare instead of her own. She wraps the baby in towels. He cries. She comforts him. She eats two portions of everything for the first five days, reducing her intake only when she can feel her strength returning. She cannot bear to eat the placenta, not yet at any rate, so she freezes it. There are more supplies now that everyone is dead.

The bodies of Mikal and Arvind are decomposing. She drags them into the corridor and seals it. She is living in a single room now.

She watches nature films. If there are no human beings it no longer causes her pain. It is just a beautiful planet far away. Gelada monkeys eating grass in the Ethiopian highlands. Marine iguanas. A pride of lions bringing down a female elephant. When the baby will not be comforted she holds him and walks in circles until he sleeps. He looks into her eyes and holds her finger and something like a smile passes over his face. She remembers that Mikal is his father. She remembers how they ran through the beech wood below the sawmill, the bluebells coming up through the dead leaves. It seems like such a long time ago. She knows that this will not last forever. If the power fails, if the oxygen fails there is nothing she can do. There is a blister pack of Moxin on the shelf.

Two grad students in Seattle solve the mystery. It was a freak surge of solar wind which knocked out the oxygen sensors on the Halcyon. They run a simulation and run it again and run it again. Fitting a shield takes two weeks. The Sparrowhawk is launched a month later. Serendipitously it has to spend only thirty-six hours in orbit waiting for the best slingshot opportunity of the past two years. The journey is estimated to take fourteen months.

The launch happens only two months after the sandstorm takes out the station’s transmitters.

There are six astronauts on board — Mina Lawler, Vijay Singh, Giulia Ferretti, “Bear” Jonson, Mary D. Eversley and Taylor Paul. Two months into their journey there is still no communication from Endurance. It is assumed that everyone is dead. The best-case scenario is that the station lost power and they will have to bury the bodies, clean up and fix whatever is broken. The worst-case scenario is that those bodies have been sitting inside a warm, functioning station for fifteen months.

They monitor the surges in the solar wind with some trepidation but there is no recurrence of the previous problem. Only during descent does the mission skirt the edge of disaster when one of the parachutes fails. The landing is uncomfortable but the lander remains intact.

They overshoot the station by twelve hundred metres. It is not important. They are in no rush to perform six funerals. When everything else is up and running, when they’ve carried out a few shorter EVAs, they will head over and take a look.

She is woken by a tremor passing through the rock below the station. She wonders if it is a seismic shift, or simply a hallucination. It is getting progressively harder to tell whether events are happening inside or outside her head.

In the morning there is no doubt. Through the sand-scratched window, in spite of her failing eyesight she recognises the shape instantly. She looks into the baby’s face and says, “We’re going to be saved.” She is unable to stop herself weeping.

But no one comes, not on the first day, not on the second, not on the third. She wonders if something terrible has happened, if there is no one alive in the lander. She can think of no way of signalling to them, either physically or electronically. Ten days go by. She and the baby are weak and getting weaker. Previously he cried when she couldn’t feed him enough. Now he is silent. She is looking through a milky fog that will not clear. Her joints hurt.

It is the last thing she does. She gathers the remaining solid state light sticks. She waits for darkness to fall and tapes them to the window. She can do no more. She lies down with Michael on the mattress and pulls the blanket over the two of them.

They run the tape again. Is it lens glare? Reflected sunlight? They wait an hour. It is still there, visible through both windows. Vijay thinks he can see a shape but it is fading in the growing daylight. They take a photograph, increase the contrast and blow it up. Mina says, “Dear God in heaven.” The words HELP ME are spelled out in broken light sticks in the triangular window. Light sticks shine for two days max. Someone is alive in there.

Taylor asks Geneva to override protocol. This will be their first EVA. Bear Jonson and Mina Lawler volunteer. It takes nine hours to prepare. Before the EVA begins Bear and Mina sleep for two hours. Vijay prepares his own suit in case there is an emergency. They have three hours of daylight left.

The terrain is smooth. It takes them only thirty minutes to reach the old base. To the right they can see the rocky barrow under which Dr. Jon Forrester is buried, to the left the raking sun glinting off the titanium poles of the uncompleted Long Array. They circle the chunky double spider of units. In a recess at the rear lies a body so fiercely abraded by the sandstorm that it is now a skeleton. Taylor, Giulia, Vijay and Mary watch all of this on the headcam feeds.

Most of the windows in the base are dark and a temperature reading indicates that these units have been sealed off and depressurised. Only one unit seems to be in use. There is a low light in the window to which the now-dead glow-sticks remain attached but the sand which scoured the corpse has scoured the glass, too, and they can see very little through it. There is something which might be a body on the infrared. Afterwards both Bear and Mina will confess to an irrational conviction that whoever — or whatever — is inside is not one of the six original crew, perhaps not even human.

They return to an adjacent unit. As on all the doors there is a central crank for last-resort use. They try to turn it with the steel rod they have brought for the purpose, first Bear then Mina, but they are wary of slipping and falling or, worse, ripping one of the EVA suits. After twenty fruitless minutes Taylor says, “Just hit the thing with a damn rock.” Bear does this and they hear the dull chime of the whole structure ringing. He bangs it again. The crank gives a little. He bangs it a third time, puts the rock down and they are now able to turn it with their gloved hands alone. Finally the door swings open and they step inside.

There is a body on the floor, gaunt, leathery, mummified. It is tiny with thick black hair and must therefore be Suki Camino. They close the door behind them and seal it. They power up and the overhead lights come on, so the generators are working. They check the internal pressure. They start to pump the CO₂ out and let the air in from the rest of the station. There has been no response whatsoever to their grandstand entrance. If there is anyone still alive on the far side of the second door they must be either unconscious or remaining deliberately silent. Might this be a trap of some kind?

A soft pop and the door opens.

Clare Hogg and the baby are lying on a soiled mattress. The baby is not moving, Clare is barely conscious. There was no simulation which included this scenario.

Over the intercom Taylor says, “Oh, Jesus.”

Giulia says, “People, do something, OK?”

Mina ignores Taylor’s instructions and removes her helmet. The air smells of urine and sweat and something dense and sugary she doesn’t recognise. She takes her gloves off and picks the baby up. It is limp but warm. It is covered in its own shit and has sores and rashes all over its body. It is a boy. Bear keeps his helmet and gloves on. He rolls the woman into the recovery position. Her hair is knotty and rat-tailed. She appears unable to see clearly or understand what is being said to her. She cannot talk. She claws the air vaguely in search of her baby. There is an unopened blister pack of two Moxin on the floor, a couple of arm’s lengths away from the mattress. Mina wraps the baby in a clean blanket and holds it close.

Bear finds some powdered banana. They decant their own water supplies to create a paste. The woman eats it but Mina has to remove the needle from a syringe and squirt the paste into the baby’s mouth. It chokes then swallows then coughs it all up. She repeats the process.

It is too complex and dangerous to bring Clare and the baby back to the lander. Bear runs checks. The base is functioning normally despite the lack of external communications. Vijay walks twelve hundred metres carrying a bag of medical supplies. Night is falling. For the last ten minutes of the journey he is not visible from the lander. Bear finds two more corpses in one of the adjacent units. Mikal Galkin and Arvind Sangha. Judging by its appearance Mikal must be the baby’s father. Vijay puts the woman and the baby on glucose and saline drips.

She calls them “Mikal” and “Suki” and “Per.” She says that someone has taken her baby away. They say, “Here is your baby.” They ask her what the baby’s name is. She doesn’t know. Vijay washes the baby and covers it in Epaderm. She says she wants to go and stand in the garden. They explain that there is no garden.

They say, “You are very lucky to be alive.” They say, “Clare, can you tell us what happened?”

She says, “We were walking by the sawmill. There were bluebells.”

She breastfeeds her baby. She refuses to let go of him. They give her beef noodles and rye bread and apple juice. She says, “I want to talk to Mikal.” They say that they will explain everything once she is feeling better. Her baby cries. They say, “This is a good sign.”

She walks to the lander. It is the hardest exercise she has ever done. The baby is strapped to her torso inside an EVA suit five sizes too large. Jon and Bear walk on either side of her, holding her upright.

She remembers that Mikal is dead. She remembers that she watched Arvind die lying on the floor in front of her. She remembers that Per and Jon and Suki are dead. She remembers the fire on the Halcyon. She listens to bluegrass. She listens to Kylie. She listens to Mozart. She has her photograph taken with the baby. Taylor says, “You’re famous.”

After three months they are well enough to travel home. The craft is tiny and fully automated. There is nothing she will have to do. She and the baby will be alone for nineteen months. It does not matter. Other people do not seem real to her.

The ascent to orbit is terrifying but short. The baby screams. They circle for a week until the heavens are aligned then three short bursts of flame set them off on their great sleigh ride through the dark.

She must exercise. She puts on her belt, straps herself down and walks on the track. Two hundred metres, five hundred, a kilometre, two. She and the baby sleep in the bulkhead where the shields are thickest to minimise the effect of radiation on the baby’s tiny body. He floats in the air. He laughs. She wonders if his legs will ever develop the strength to walk. There are voices on the radio. She worries about her mind. She ate so little for so long. Has she suffered some kind of irreparable brain damage? He stares at her face, smiles in response to her smile, laughs in response to her laugh. He follows objects as they float past. She does not count time. They have the universe to themselves. The constellations are their toys. She tells him their names. Eridanus, Cepheus, Draco. He sleeps less now, eats solid food, explores constantly. She must watch him all the time to prevent him breaking or stealing things. He says, “Mamma, Mamma…” They eat dried pear and stollen and fish fingers. Nineteen months. It seems too short. She wishes the two of them could stay here forever on this endless silent sea.

They land twenty-four kilometres northwest of Baikonur. The re-entry capsule is not made for a tiny child. In the last twenty minutes of descent she sits him on her lap and straps the two of them together with loop after loop of electrical tape. He screams and struggles. They will experience 4G when they hit the ground. They’ve been living in microgravity for a year and a half. Already she can feel her body becoming heavy. She uses the last of the tape to fix the baby’s head to her chest so that his neck doesn’t snap. She can do nothing about the effect of the impact on his brain.

The noise and the vibration are now indescribable. Is something wrong? She finds it hard to believe that this is how it is meant to be. There is a double crunch, audible even above the roaring, and the craft bucks violently as the two red-hot heat shields are jettisoned and appear briefly in the tiny window before ripping away to burn up above them. There is a bang. It is like jumping from a roof and hitting concrete. She thinks they have hit the ground but it is only the parachute opening. In the final second the touchdown rockets go off under the capsule to soften the landing. Again she thinks she has hit the ground. Then they hit the ground. She blacks out.

When she comes round she has no idea where she is. She can hear a child crying. She doesn’t understand why her arms are so heavy. The child is strapped to her chest. She wants to release him but she needs to cut the tape so as not to rip his hair out. She remembers that there is a knife in one of her trouser pockets. She twists her head to reach it but knows immediately that she has broken her neck. She gently rotates her head back to its original position.

She must lie perfectly still. The child is screaming. She says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Someone will come and help us.”

But someone does not come. Out of the corner of her eye she can see a triangle of colourless sky through sooty glass. They are on land and it is daytime. That is all she knows. She can’t even be sure what country she is in. After all that she has survived, after so many deaths, after the hundreds of millions of kilometres it seems possible that she may die after taking the very last step of the journey.

The child is weakening, his cries getting quieter and quieter. Perhaps he is the one who will survive. If she could give her own life in order for that to happen she would do it willingly.

And then they come. First the thundering purr of helicopters, then the rumble of the big amphibious trucks. Doors banging, footsteps and dull voices outside in Russian and English. They call her name. She is meant to have opened the hatch from the inside so they will have to cut the seals. She sees the sparkfall of oxyacetylene torches beyond the glass.

The door falls away and the smells roll in. Dust and grass and exhaust fumes — and it is this which makes her weep. There are faces above her. She holds up her hand. “Stop. My neck is broken.” A plastic collar moulded for precisely this eventuality is slipped around her neck and locked into place. Someone is cutting the child free. A scoop is slid down the back of her seat and she is lifted gently out of the capsule.

The light and the noise and the sheer scale of the world are shocking. Cameras flash and radios crackle. There are so many people. The child is being carried alongside her. He is completely limp. Then she sees him scrunching his eyes against the light. He is alive. It is the gravity which is holding him down.

There are too many things around her changing too quickly. Everything inside her body feels wrong. Her head aches and spins. She vomits. Someone wipes her with a wet cloth. The paramedics carry her up the ramp into the nearest amphibious vehicle. The scoop is locked down and the engine starts up. She reaches out and holds the child’s hand.

It is strange to be travelling so slowly over this bumpy ground after the silent glide of space. People are talking to her but she doesn’t have the energy to respond. They find an unmetalled road and the bumping softens. Later there is tarmac under the wheels and the low singing of the big rubber tyres. Her head is fixed in one position. She can’t see a window. She can feel the weight of her tongue, her feet, her hands, her intestines. A doctor slides a needle into her arm and attaches a cannula.

The truck slows and turns into the Cosmodrome.

She assumes at first that she is dreaming.

“Clare…?”

Even when she opens her eyes it takes some time before she trusts what she is seeing. He has a beard now, trim, black. He has put on a little weight but it gives him an authority he didn’t have before.

“Peter?” He squeezes her hand. “You waited for me.”

She lies in bed for two days. She eats chicken soup and scrambled egg. The nausea recedes and she is able to sit up. The child sits in a car seat with sheepskin under him to prevent him getting pressure sores. As often as she can she lifts him out and holds him under his arms and puts his feet on the floor and bounces him up and down. He seems unsure what to do with his legs.

Peter stays in Hotel Tsentralnaya in Baikonur. The shower doesn’t work and the restaurant is closed.

She lifts little weights. She walks to the other side of the room and back. She eats lamb and bread. She drinks a glass of wine. She sits outside in the sun for ten minutes, for twenty minutes. The sky makes her agoraphobic. She loves wind. She loves rain. She meets journalists. They are allowed to ask only certain questions and cannot stay for longer than fifteen minutes. She has her photograph taken holding the child. He is not walking. He seems to be in pain. But he is alive and they are together and there was a time when she dared not hope for these things.

Peter comes in every day for an hour. He holds Michael in his arms. He seems unconcerned that this is another man’s child. His generosity overwhelms her. She does not deserve this.

They fly to Moscow on a military Antonov. There are more interviews at the airport. She says, “There are some things I cannot talk about.” She says, “More than anything I would like to be left alone.” She says, “Death, you are no different to me than my lover with your cloud-coloured skin, and your hair a mass of dark cloud.” They say, “You must understand that Miss Hogg is still very tired. I’m afraid that we must end the interview now.”

She cuts her hair and dyes it blonde. She buys a summer dress. She has not worn one since she was a girl.

They fly to Munich. The child is still not walking. It will take time. They hire a silver BMW and drive south on the E52 towards Salzburg, the Bavarian Alps rising in front of them. They turn north after crossing the Inn. Cresting the hill, the lake catches her by surprise, ten kilometres of cold blue light and a flock of sails all tilted at the same angle.

A sign beside the road says STILLER AM SIMSSEE.

They drive through the centre of the town. There are cobbles and awnings. There is the Hotel Möwe am See and the Westernacher Gästehaus. A whole skinned pig hangs outside a butcher’s shop. They take Rasthausstraße down to the water’s edge and follow the curve of the shore. Peter pulls up outside a small block of apartments facing the water. White walls, balconies in chocolate-coloured wood and a roof like a black hat four sizes too large.

She lifts the sleeping child from his car seat and puts him over her shoulder. Peter retrieves a key from his pocket and lets them into a hallway empty except for six wooden pigeonholes of post, a vase of paper tulips and a framed sepia photograph of the lakefront at the beginning of the last century. The stairs echo under their feet. Peter takes the child. Three flights. She has to wait and get her breath back after each one.

They step into the apartment. He doesn’t turn the lights on. He closes the door behind them. The darkness is almost complete. The cool air smells of beeswax and vanilla. “Stand there.” She hears a triple squeak of rusty handles and hinges being turned and the shutters are swung open. It does not matter what is in the room. It is merely a frame for this extraordinary view. She walks out onto the balcony. The flotilla is spread out now, white sails tacking one by one around a yellow buoy. It flows over her, this greenery, this life, this light. Peter stands beside her holding the sleeping child. She runs her fingers over the grain of the wooden rail, every line a summer long gone. She looks beyond the lake to the mountainside forests where it was cut down fifty, a hundred, two hundred years ago.

There is something wrong with all of this but she cannot put her finger on what it might be.

Peter says, “Tomorrow afternoon we will go sailing on the lake.”