Sam’s relationship to girls over the past few years was all but non-existent. Small, short and though not ugly certainly not a knockout, he drew little attention from the opposite sex. Moreover, in circles where girls were present – i.e. work – he was well liked by them but because of his size and his tremendous niceness he posed none of the sexual threat that seemed, to Sam, a prerequisite for the kind of kinetic firestorm type of love he so dearly longed to inspire. Girls came to Sam as a friend, to unload their problems, not create new ones. Dreaded phrases like ‘just a friend’ and ‘nice guy’ and ‘just don’t think of you like that’ had become common to his ear at university when he still pursued girls. There were hits – he’d had sex with two students – but the ratio to misses was dismal. Not that simply bedding a girl was the end goal for Sam, far from it; it was just that the act of sex as achievement was so all-pervasive in university culture, it was hard to escape. But that was before. These days he didn’t bother trying. It was safer to leave it for now and pretend he’d pick up that thread later in life.
And yet here she was, the girl with red hair and glasses, sitting next to him.
The wide road became a lane just big enough to get a car through when they reached the mountains and the lack of street lights gave Sam an opportunity to use his full beams, something he always enjoyed; how the night reveals itself in white light.
‘What’s your job?’ she said.
‘I work for a Japanese electronic components wholesaler.’
‘Oh.’
‘We sell screws and nuts and bolts – things that go in TVs and cars and things.’
‘You work in a Japanese screw factory.’
Sam thought. ‘I guess I do.’
Not strictly true. Electronica Diablique (they’d changed their name from their traditional Japanese one to sound more ‘European’) didn’t manufacture anything, so really it was more of a warehouse.
‘Is it fun?’
‘I like it. It’s hard work sometimes but the pay’s pretty good. It’s definitely not fun, though. I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t getting paid.’
‘Have you ever been to Japan?’
‘They did want me to go, and go to China too, but it didn’t work out.’
He didn’t tell her how much he disliked flying.
‘Oh man, you should have gone. Have you seen those mega-factories they’ve got in China that are like cities?’
He slowed around a bend. Reps from such factories had visited his offices. The one to which he’d been invited had its own hospital, library, school and ping-pong outhouse.
‘Have you heard about this superhero guy in the city who’s going around in a mask and cape?’
This not from Sarah but from Tango in the back seat. The boys had been talking among themselves the whole way, in the kind of voice people use when they want to be overheard, but Sam had zoned them out, until this sudden sentence rose from nowhere to everywhere. Superhero.
‘I saw it on the news. Some guy going around dressed as a superhero.’
He eyed Tango in the rear-view mirror and felt the moisture in his throat evaporate.
‘I’ve heard of those in America.’ Blotchy adjusted himself in his seat. ‘They go around trying to help people out. Carrying shopping bags and things.’
Out the corner of his eye, Sam saw Sarah moving a strand of hair from her face.
‘I read an article in The New Yorker,’ she said.
He could only catch snippets of what Tango was saying. Was the report on the BBC? Could he catch it on iPlayer before it went into the void?
‘About this factory in Shenzhen – is that right? – where ten thousand people live.’
He tuned back into the boys but as quickly as it had come so the conversation had gone, moving on to a discussion of some documentary about a Nazi occultist called Otto Rahn.
‘So do you think we’ll see many shooting stars tonight?’ Sarah said.
He tried to clear his mind. ‘Who knows? If the sky stays clear we should definitely see a few.’
‘What sort of wish will you make?’
When she said this he was thumped by a sad thought. He knew exactly what wish he would make, and who that wish would involve, just as surely as he knew that it would never come true, no matter how many meteors he saw.
It was a long trek up the mountain to the lake – according to Graham, the darkest point in the region. There were probably fifteen people in their party, each shining a torchlight before them.
Sam’s light played over Graham’s back. Graham lived a rustic life; he enjoyed fine ales, was a keen angler, foraged herbs and mushrooms in the dawn wilds. He had a wide breadth of knowledge on many things in which Sam was interested: UFOs, ancient secret societies, conspiracy theories, computer hacking. Sam imagined Graham on February mornings hunting the meadows for hares.
‘You OK there, youngster?’ came his voice, without turning back.
‘I’m good.’ His breath was heavy.
‘You believe in magic, Sam?’ Graham’s words were gently slurred under the persuasion of Bishop’s Assault, the strong local ale. ‘There are forgotten parts of this world. There’s still magic around. Just depends if you’re willing to see it.’
They came, at last, to where the land flattened out. The air was freezing and, so far away from civilisation, completely devoid of ambient white noise. There were no car engines, no humming of heating systems, no trace of anything human. The torches shone out now over an expanse of water, illuminating a thin spider’s web of mist on its surface. The water was black as pitch, impenetrable to the eye. Sarah came up beside him and he was acutely aware of her breath crystallising on the air. The stars here were so much brighter, the white smudge of the Milky Way making the galaxy seem backlit.
‘It’s lovely up here,’ she said.
‘It’s one of Britain’s dark areas, where you can see the stars properly.’
Sam set down his backpack and pulled out a collapsible chair.
Her head was facing directly upwards. ‘They’re so bright.’
Sam wrestled the chair into formation and set it into the wet grass.
‘There,’ he said, offering it to Sarah.
‘Where are you going to sit?’
It was easy to see in the starlight and he found a round, flat boulder and put the chair next to it. Pulling a thick blanket from his pack, he draped it over Sarah.
‘I’m not an invalid.’
‘Sorry.’ Though he wasn’t sorry; he liked chivalry, even if it was unfashionable.
‘I’ve got a friend who lives on a farm,’ she said. ‘The stars are like this there.’
Sam started unpacking his amateur telescope. It was an average telescope that didn’t cost much but had been recommended to him by Graham because it was lightweight, came with a tripod, had a good altazimuth (which Sam later learned was a tripod mount that was smoother than most, meaning he could move it around easily) and had three eyepieces of varying strengths. What Sam liked most about it though was the neat back pack that came with it, with little pouches for all the different parts.
‘Do you do this often?’
He clipped the telescope on to the tripod. ‘Not really. This is the third time I’ve used my telescope. I tried it in my back garden but there’s too much light pollution to get a decent view. There’s a lamp post in the alleyway behind my back fence.’ Sam peered into the eyepiece. ‘We probably won’t need the telescopes to see the meteors. If you want to make sure you definitely see one, you’re better off just looking up.’
‘So why bring them?’
‘Well, it’s quite nice looking at the stars.’
Sarah was silent for a moment. Sam pointed the telescope and brought an object into focus.
‘Do you want to see something cool?’ he said.
When he turned she was already standing right next to him. He jolted, her face inches from his. His heart made a solid thump, like a jump-start.
‘Wow,’ she said, peering into the eyepiece.
‘That’s Jupiter,’ he said, trying to recover.
‘Really?’
‘Uh-huh. You’d be able to see it much better later on, but up here it’s so dark you can see it now.’
‘It’s incredible,’ she said.
Through the eyepiece Sarah was seeing the planet as a small circle.
‘The light bits and dark bands you can just about see are the atmosphere,’ said Sam. ‘Caused by rising and falling air.’
Sarah didn’t say anything for a second.
‘How far away is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It feels weird looking at it. Up there in space. It’s so beautiful.’
Neither of them said anything. As the moonbeams sketched the landscape he watched the others set up their kit. Graham had the biggest telescope, capable of seeing distant nebulae. Many of the other guys had clips for their phones and iPads so they could take pictures and videos of the cosmos. Blotchy and Tango were already set up and had started pitching stones into the lake. They were trying to skim them but their limited athleticism ensured the stones sank beneath the surface at first impact.
‘Do you believe in God?’ she said, all of a sudden.
‘Jeez. I don’t know.’
‘Sorry, weird question.’
‘No, it’s not.’ A breeze came across the lake. ‘It’s hard not to think of things like that when you see the planets.’
Sarah brought her eye away from the scope and turned to him.
‘It’s hard to believe in things, these days. I mean, there’s a lot of bad feeling out there.’
‘I think people are still basically good,’ he said, thinking suddenly of his costume at home. ‘You look around here,’ he nodded to his friends, a group of people who’d come all the way out here with little tubes of mirrors to look up at the stars, ‘and you can see that maybe.’
He looked over to the lake. A middle-aged woman in a velvet cloak had hurried over to Blotchy and Tango. ‘Stop that. You’re disturbing the energies.’
‘That’s Donna Mae,’ Sam told Sarah. ‘She’s a witch.’
Donna Mae’s round face glowed chalky in the moonbeams. He was getting cold without his blanket and his recent injuries were starting to hurt.
‘This is a very interesting group of people,’ Sarah said.
‘Sorry,’ said Sam.
Sarah’s mouth fell open. ‘Don’t say sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s awesome. I’m sorry, I’m not a nice person sometimes.’
‘You two want a cup of tea?’ A man in full army survival gear approached them, a scarf covering the lower half of his face. Fingerless gloves held out two polystyrene cups of tea. ‘We forgot the sugar.’
‘That’s OK,’ said Sarah, reaching out to take one of the cups.
‘We also forgot the milk.’
‘Oh well, at least it’ll keep us warm.’
Donna Mae was arranging some crystals on a small trestle table and lighting candles inside glass jars.
‘We’ll get a fire going and make some hot dogs later,’ said the man, who Sam had recognised as Gary, the council’s local handyman, as he wandered back over to the main group.
A contented silence fell in. Sam looked over at Sarah and felt warm in his belly. He thought about what Graham had said to him on the way up the mountain, about magic. There was something in his psyche, a little grain that triggered a pleasant feeling when he thought of something not quite in the realm of the everyday, something other, something at play behind the workaday world.
‘Can I ask you something?’ he said.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Weren’t you scared? Coming up here with a bunch of strangers.’
She shrugged. ‘What’s the worst that could have happened? You don’t hear of astronomy club members murdering people that often.’
‘You’re a spontaneous person.’
‘Not really, actually. Not any more. I’m trying to say yes to things more often.’
There was a pause. ‘Do you live with these guys?’ she said, nodding towards Blotchy and Tango.
‘Nope. I live on my own.’
‘How old are you?’ she said.
‘Twenty-six. How about you?’
‘Twenty-three.’
‘Ah, OK.’
‘It’s a weird age, this, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Too old to be young and too young to be old. Do you know what I mean?’
‘I guess.’ He didn’t.
‘What I mean is, where are we supposed to be along the line at our age? The expectations of the world – you should be doing this by this age, be at this point in your career, visited this many countries, slept with this many people, earning this much money – I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I should be further along the line.’
Something behind her words, a sad weight, told of a lot more life experience than he had, a tapestry of complex personal history – something he did not possess, and which he found quietly intimidating. To think of how much life was being lived out there while he was in his safe home watching the special features on his deluxe, extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was vertigo-inducing.
‘So you were looking to move further along the line by moving here?’
‘New job, new life. More money. I’m trying to be a grown-up. Shitty ex-boyfriend.’
He turned his head too quickly towards her when she said the last part.
‘I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, ultimately, it was for the job. I’ve been in Lincoln for a year, working in a public library, but it wasn’t what I wanted. They’re more like nurseries than libraries. The job at the university came up and I went for it. I think you have to take the leap sometimes, you know?’
The smell of hot dogs wafted, steam rose from the polystyrene cups. Gary was over by the trestle table now, an upturned bottle of Daddies tomato ketchup in his hand, Donna Mae holding her hot dog up to the mouth of it, him battering the sauce bottle, her readjusting the altitude of the hotdog with each whack so it didn’t go over her flowing robes.
‘Hey,’ Sarah said suddenly. ‘I think I saw one! Over there.’ Excitedly, she pointed to a third of the way up the western sky. ‘That was amazing!’ She hopped into the air. ‘Unless it was just a trick of the mind. I think I saw it though. Wah!’
‘Whoa,’ came a voice from over by the lake. Tango had seen a second one.
‘I saw it too. That was a biggie,’ said Blotchy.
Sam smiled at Sarah. Her eyes darted across the sky, searching for another meteor. The sky was completely different up in these dark regions, the stars so rich and bright. To be here, in this moment, with this sudden new person, was making him feel more alive than he had in a very long time. He could feel it running along his veins.
And then he saw it. A bright white streak across the pitch black. A tiny object that had been cruising through the emptiness of space for aeons colliding with the planet and lighting up the sky to put a bolt of joy in his soul. It was there and gone in a second, a blazing fireball. Everyone gasped at its brightness. His heart jolted as he felt her hand close around his wrist. She turned towards him and looked up. Oh my God, he thought. I feel so happy.
‘Quick,’ she said. He could see the crescent moon reflected in the lenses of her glasses as she beamed at him. ‘Make a wish.’
On the drive home the car fell into an insulated silence. Moonlight on the fields, over the low hedgerows, made the world feel uncanny, altered. Sarah had fallen asleep, her face turned away from him, thin neck exposed. Blotchy and Tango were both snoring.
Sometimes Sam considered the various levels of thought in the human mind. First there is the simple pursuit of food and shelter; the base, outer layer into which everything else feeds. The second layer is where you live most of your life; working, thinking about work, your plans for the evening, choosing your dinner; the everyday functions. Further in is where thought gets a little deeper and you consider things such as your own personal future, what you hope for on a superficial level; a nice car, house, holidays, pensions, savings. The fourth layer formulates moral codes; what you believe to be right and wrong in the world, how you think a society should operate; at what point personal responsibility should kick in for a person’s actions. Then there are two more levels; a dense outer layer around a core. In the fifth you might consider your place in the universe as you stand drunkenly under winter stars just before Christmas, or maybe wonder if magic still exists, or aliens, or secret government organisations. It is a whimsical level of belief, something separate from the true belief that resides in the core of your being, in the sixth layer of thought, right in the centre of the brain onion where everything you are becomes distilled and you must decide where you stand on the meaning of life.
He dropped Tango and Blotchy off first, bringing the car quietly into the sleeping housing estates where their parents lived, estates built within the last two decades, red-brick houses decorated with small features – yellow quoins, little porticos over the front doors, or the occasional white wood finial – and neat gardens, narrow roads with fresh tarmac that didn’t bump the car. There was a neat sheen to the little estates where in the summer grew daisies and manufactured hedgerows, and each garden was well kept by people who were proud of their small patch of the planet they’d worked so hard for. Blotchy mumbled something under his breath as he collected his bag and telescope from the boot. But when they reached Tango’s house, his friend nodded across to the sleeping Sarah and raised his eyebrows.
Tango smiled to Sam. ‘Great stuff,’ he whispered, and put his hand on Sam’s shoulder.
It made Sam feel foolish but he also appreciated it.
That central core, the sixth layer of thought, usually stirs on nights when sleep is far off but you’re lying in bed anyway, worrying about work the next day, how many hours of sleep you can get, deep thoughts crawling out of dark caves. We are all animals and alone, the universe is infinite, there is no such thing as a future because everything will crumble to dust in the end. Or so it went for Sam, who stayed well clear of the sixth layer as often as he could, listening to the radio before sleeping, always planning evenings well in advance so that boredom couldn’t creep in; he didn’t want his mind wandering down pathways he’d rather avoid, didn’t want to face the existential crisis in the middle of him.
Sarah’s place was in a not-so-great part of town, her flat above a boarded-up shop. The little sash windows looked dark and depressing. He woke her up and offered to see her to the door.
‘I’m sorry I fell asleep,’ she said. A red imprint of the seat belt was on her cheek. ‘Too much talking.’ She rubbed her eyes with the crook of her wrist, pushing her glasses up her forehead.
‘Did you have a nice time?’
She nodded. ‘I really did.’
A fluttering in his chest again.
It was freezing, frost crystallising on the pavement, the air sharp as needles.
‘Thanks again,’ she said. The lights had come on in the car from where she’d opened the door. ‘Seriously, I’ve had a really, really nice time.’
In his mind the shooting star flashed and he wondered if he should try and kiss her.
‘Me too,’ he said.
She closed the car door behind her and he watched her let herself into her flat before taking a deep breath.
At home the house was cold. He changed into his pyjamas, pulled the duvet over him and checked Facebook on his tablet. He was so tired but he lay in bed, in the dark, scrolling down the ever so bright screen. Most of his friends were people he went to school or university with, though he no longer had real-world contact with any of them.
Facebook late at night put in him a catastrophic form of loneliness, staring at the lives being lived out there, those dutifully filed online for people like Sam to marvel over – days out with babies in country parks, the selection of wedding venues, ice cream sundaes in nice-looking restaurants, arm in arm with a lover before the Eiffel Tower. His friends lambasted social media, citing invasion of privacy, tax evasion, the addicting properties of the Internet, the unmitigated disaster of the echo chamber, but they all used it. Sam knew it wasn’t good, that something deeply sinister and depressing was at play beneath the pixels, but its pull was enormously strong, way too strong for him to resist.
It had been so long since he’d taken a genuine interest in a girl, he found it hard to know how he felt. The happiness he’d felt on the mountain was already beginning to warp as all the memories of his life came pouring back in. The bubble in which he’d spent the evening had burst, so he scrolled and scrolled and tried to fight off the darkness. Why couldn’t he just be normal?
At last he sensed he could fall asleep, so he quickly listened to his voicemails before setting the sleep timer alarm on his radio, listening to a debate on the coming apocalypse when antibiotics will no longer work, hearing how people will die from a common infection, how governments are burying their head in the sand and we’re all doomed. But it was OK because even listening to this was better than facing the total horror of his sixth layer of thought.