In Too Deep (5 page)

Melinda was leaving me.

‘I doubt that either of us will ever forget today,' she said, over breakfast. The arrangements were already set, her new man, Jonathan, was coming by to pick her up at noon, and now that we'd reached the actual brink, a sort of calmness had settled over us.

She was referring to this business of the eclipse, of course, using the significance of one event to heighten that of the other. I wanted to say that we hardly needed anything as dramatic as a shifting of the heavens to help mark down today as a permanent memory, but one glance at her strangled the words in my throat and I busied myself instead with reaching for and buttering another slice of toast.

Everything worth saying had already been said, we'd laid out the apologies and the accusations, tossed and turned them until they were burnt through on both sides, and we both knew that there was no way on from here other than the way we were taking. Still, I suppose that there had to have been some good moments during our time together, and it was for the sake of those that we had wordlessly agreed to keep up this charade of acting like civilized human beings. Later, there would be all the time in the world for tears.

I could feel her watching me, watching the amount of butter I was using, but she let it go because I was no longer her fight. She sat across the table, her spoon troubling a bowl of sodden bran flakes, doing more poking than actual digging. She was wearing a blue-and-white tartan-patterned blouse, sleeveless, which made a nice boast out of her narrow body, and her hair was tied up in the way she knew I liked. She looked good. Better than good, great. I ate my toast and tried to forget that this morning's effort at alluring appearance was not for my benefit but for his.

‘It's funny, don't you think, when you consider all those enormous planets and moons spinning about in all that space.'

Not ha-ha funny, but yeah, I suppose there is a bit of the Groucho about it.

‘Space is empty and yet it's full of stars. How can that be? And this business of the eclipse, this one moment when our rock and another rock defy all that emptiness to line up exactly with a great flaming ball of gas, well, it puts in perspective how small our lives are, and how insignificant. Think about it; the next time this happens could be hundreds of years from now, maybe thousands. We'll be gone and forgotten, and all the arguments and the laughter will be gone, too. Christ, it's enough to make you go cold.'

I poured myself another half cup of coffee, then out of spite helped myself to the last slice of toast. This time she watched me openly while I smeared on the butter.

‘You should use the spread, you know,' she said, going delicate with her disapproval for the sake of the truce. I could feel the edge in her voice, though.

‘Should I?' As serene as you like. I can be a bastard and a half when I set my mind to it.

But this morning she was beyond stepping into my traps. She dropped her spoon into her mess of bran and raised both hands in that gesture of surrender that made me want to bounce her off every wall in the room and at the same time to sweep her up into my arms and never let her go. ‘Forget it,' she said. ‘Your heart, your choice.'

I took a bite of toast, chewed it without enjoyment, then dropped the slice in favour of the coffee. She watched me until I met her stare and then she did something with her mouth, a little crimping of the lips that might have been a smile or might not, and she looked away. The tablecloth was bunched a little at the corner to her right, the material dragged out of shape by the weight of the coffee pot, and she fumbled to undo the ruffles and then ran a hand across the surface, as if to assure herself of the smoothness. The tablecloth was hers – she had chosen the style and design, white cotton with silver embroidered geese, quaint but pretty – but when it came to the matter of dividing the possessions she insisted that it remain here. She had no need for it, she said, and then, almost as if she'd been caught in a lie or some particularly sordid act, she mentioned that Jonathan's kitchen table was round rather than square. That seemed to imply something, though even now I can't quite figure out exactly what.

We sat there, passing the time with empty words and stolen glances. Then, finally, we heard the rumble of the car outside, and we both knew that it would be Jonathan, her new main man, a lumbering oaf who had somehow become the answer to all her problems.

‘Look after yourself,' she said, in a small voice.

I almost made a witty riposte, but held back. She didn't deserve much, not after all that had happened, but she de-served that. I nodded. ‘You can send that one to the bank,' I said, squeezing into a smile. ‘From now on, it's number one all the way.'

In the hallway, I put a hand on the small of her back, leaned in and kissed her cheek almost at the lobe of her left ear. Jonathan was there all right, his too-big carcass squeezed into the coupé that looked both expensive and ridiculous. He sat there, tapping one bear's paw of a hand on the rim of the steering wheel, and my hand on Mel's back was to manoeuvre her out of his line of vision because the door was open. I didn't give a damn what he saw of me, but to my mind the very least that she deserved was the dignified privacy of a last farewell. After all, we'd just put paid to a whole life together, an entire convoluted history. We had reached the point now where our connection no longer counted for very much, but at this moment, with my lips pressed against the silken flesh of her cheek and with the tinge of her true scent scraping through the cloying breath of Christian Dior number whatever perfume, it felt, at least to me, as if we'd never known a greater intimacy. When she stooped to reach for her suitcase, the little nubs of her spine rose against my touch and a memory stormed my mind of our first time in bed together, back when everything was fresh and new, and exploring every inch of her body was a step further into the unknown.

‘Take care of yourself,' she whispered, clearly not trusting the strength of her voice. A tear blistered the lashes of one eye and burst against the heel of her hand. I held my breath for the deluge, but it seems that I was only worth the one tear.

And then, without another word, she turned away and was gone.

I stood in the doorway for a long time. There was heat in the late August day, but nothing unbearable. A breeze stirred the alders that leaned over the wall of the nearby schoolyard, and traffic out on the main road was light for the hour. I studied the sky, expecting some kind of revelation, I think, but there was little to see, only a blanket of washed-out grey and away on the horizon the stately crawl of a high-altitude jet. Apart from the imminent eclipse, this was just another ordinary Tuesday. Time still puttered along at its usual rate, always chasing, always in debt. Billions of hearts across the map still leapt, ached and, in dozens of tragic ways, broke. The world hadn't stopped turning, hadn't even slowed.

Just after two o'clock, the dogs began to howl.

Earlier, when I'd gone out into the yard to feed them, I found them subdued, drained of their usual boundless energy. Their barks were sharp and catching, the unsettling screech of the youngest one starting off a rounded chorus amongst the others, and they all stood with backs arched, their heads hung low and their haunches all aquiver. Such behaviour was most unlike them. But when I set out their food and assured them with a few soft words and a quick pat, they bunched together and attacked their feeding bowls with something like their usual gusto, and it seemed that everything was all right again. Dogs have a lovely way of simplifying a situation.

I'd made myself a sandwich and was just sitting down to eat when the howling began. Such an eerie sound. I went outside and found them huddled together in one corner of the yard, all four of them. They raised their heads to howl and I'm not sure that I have ever experienced anything more unnerving. The sound seemed alien to them, an earthy long-ago sound, as forlorn as whale-song and as strange. They howled, and then shivered violently as, in answer, somewhere off in the distance, another dog started up with another series of long bleating whoops.

The sky looked unchanged, still the same blanket grey of earlier, though away to the west the cloud had begun to split apart and lay in flumes across a thin swath of blue. The little breeze of earlier had sighed itself out or fallen away and a peculiar stillness had overtaken the afternoon. I thought about going back inside, but didn't. Couldn't.

On last night's news, they had come up with the technical or scientific term ‘Syzygy'; I had no idea what such a word actually meant, but standing in my yard, feeling the mystery of the day unfold around me, I found myself speaking it aloud over and over and delighted in its buzzing cadence and jagged lack of vowels. ‘Eclipse' explained what was happening but ‘Syzygy' went closer to truly defining this imminent celestial alchemy. I savoured the word and sang it in between long whistling breaths, until a little after half past two, at which point the thin darkness of a false night had more fully fallen.

Once it started, the eclipse quickly engulfed the sun. As such, there was nothing to see, not with the bank of cloud obliterating the magic, but then there was no real need to see. Over the next few minutes, the light was gradually sucked out of the day, and the air tingled. Whatever was happening kicked awake some sort of primal instinct, in me just as much as in the animals, and I made a conscious effort to focus on the details, on the reaction of the dogs, now whimpering and circling one another in a frenzy of confusion, on the bleached and then slowly dusky hue that overtook the colours of the world, on the rise in my own pulse rate and the stirring of something in my stomach that wasn't fear exactly, but wasn't so far off that either. The dying day, plunging from its apex, carried a genuine sense of event, marking this out as an occurrence of significant magnitude and, really, one quite beyond comprehension.

The ancients would have been mesmerised. They'd have been on their knees, worshipping and wailing, howling as the animals howled now, and those who had dared to look, the hooded druids or those of the warrior class, would have witnessed their godly sun devoured by a creeping blackness, eaten down to one final flash of desperation before all was lost. It was easy enough, at least for me, to picture the scene, to bear witness in mind if not in body to the wails climbing headlong to crescendo until there was no more hope of salvation except through prayer, or prayer and promise, the divulgence of a blood sacrifice, perhaps. Nowadays the mathematicians, astronomers and astrophysicists have a way of using a slew of formulaic babble to explain away every wonder known to mankind, their numbers over numbers multiplied by letters that allow their own gibberish brand of logic to prevail. But back when time was measured at different speeds, wasn't it possible that the survival of the whole world rested on some phrase uttered either by accident or with intent, or with a single pleading word dropped in amongst the veritable throng of assurances and incantations, even a word as spine-twisted and apocryphal as ‘Syzygy', one hyped to the very brim with witchery and import? If we are asked to believe in such-and-such a chemical or the atomic balance of water, sand or salt, why can't we allow ourselves to believe that somewhere out in all that empty space there was and maybe still is something sufficiently godly and almighty just waiting for one word, one precious word or any word at all, to awaken its slumbering mercy? The ancients believed it, and by design or happenstance prayed the word that slowly, ever so painfully slowly, brought their sun bulging out through the darkness once again, their golden god renewed and reborn.

Today turned out to be a day of two dawns and after a few breath-held moments of weighty darkness, the eclipse began to wane. Any affinity that we might have shared with our aeons-gone ancestors was lost as Syzygy proved to be no more than a fleeting wonder, there and then gone, a life lived and lost in the span of a heartbeat. Maybe it served its purpose, though; maybe the almighty of the universe had heard me utter the magic word and had deigned, yet again, to comply, to let the sun have another chance at life. Or maybe, as the scientists said, this was merely a natural phenomenon, a temporary confluence of the planets and stars. Whatever the reason, out beyond the obliterating smear of cloud, space continued on its merry way, worlds turned, and the sun broke free of its shadow-trap, one crack at a time.

White light sifted into the day and the darkness was broken down to twilight. Within a few minutes, unseen birds began to sing, tricked into concert by the sudden, unexpected return of day, and then the dogs settled and my backyard seemed to breathe with renewed vigour. After the darkness, everything seemed more vital and alive, colours appeared far more brilliant than before, even on an overcast late August afternoon.

I thought about Melinda and wondered if she was settling comfortably into her new life; if, with her new man at her side, she had stood at some window or in the middle of a garden space over on the other side of town to watch the unfurling of this astronomical sleight of hand. The idea of an eclipse would have appealed enormously to the old Melinda, the Melinda who had once upon a time loved nothing more than walking on storm-lashed beaches or watching the first arrival of the swallows, the Melinda who, a lifetime ago, had fallen headlong into love with me. But she had changed in a hundred years worth of ways over the past six months, ever since Jonathan had appeared on the scene to turn her head with his leery charm and to turn her mind on to all manner of small excitements. I estimated the odds lay probably better than evens that the newly matched lovers had foregone the wonders of Syzygy in favour of working through a bottle of celebratory champagne or enjoying a stint of bedtime acrobatics.