One Thousand Stars and You Read online

  ‘It does,’ Alice confirmed. ‘Depending on which religion you follow, it is either the footprint of Buddha, Shiva or Adam.’

  Max appraised her with new respect. ‘You clearly know your stuff. Are you a historian?’

  She shook her head, and was about to tell him what she actually did for a living, when Maureen interrupted.

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ she told Max. ‘Alice’s boyfriend is a history teacher. I bet we have him to thank for all her knowledge.’

  ‘Oi!’ Alice admonished. ‘I found this out for myself, I’ll have you know.’

  She was struck with a mixture of guilt at not being the one who had brought Richard into the conversation, and annoyance towards Maureen for doing so. It shouldn’t matter that Max and Jamal knew about her boyfriend, but for some reason Alice wished that they didn’t. Not yet, anyway. At home, she was so accustomed to being one half of Ali and Rich, and part of her had been looking forward to simply being Alice for a while.

  She glanced sideways at Max, scanning his face for a reaction, and when he felt her eyes on him and turned, Alice dropped her chin so that her hair fell over the scarred side of her face. Old habits die hard, she thought.

  She distracted herself by picking up her beer, sipping it, putting it back down. She stretched out her legs, laughed at something Maureen was saying, fiddled with the cutlery on the scraped-clean plate. But, when she eventually sneaked another look back at Max, she found that he was smiling at her. He could tell that she was uncomfortable, and was doing his best to make her feel more at ease. And, to Alice’s surprise, she found that Max had succeeded.

  8

  Max

  If I should die,

  Know it was in vain,

  I would have suffered,

  There would have been pain …

  The dream always started the same way, with light and with laughter, reeling him in with its uncomplicated promise of happiness. Max’s limbs would settle, his heart would still, and he’d let himself go and float away into the moment, into the warmth of his untarnished memories of that time.

  For a long while, Max hadn’t been sure if he had any to venture into. It was as if what came later had eradicated all the goodness, like a fist brought down hard on a burning candle, all the brightness snuffed out. In time, however, he learned how to look back and find them, how to peer through the dark brambles of horror and find patches of clear, open joy. Because it hadn’t all been terrible; it hadn’t all been for nothing.

  But as soon as he gave in, let go of the fear and waded out into the shallow water of the dream, Max’s world would shift and spiral off in all directions. A red-hot flash, shouting, pain, so much pain, tearing through his body as if his very soul was on fire, throwing him up in the air before tossing him down in the dirt. More pain. Dust. A ringing sound loud enough to rattle his brain inside his head. Screaming, his screaming. Pain, pain, pain, pain.

  ‘Come on, Max. Mate, wake up. It’s OK, you’re here. You’re OK. I’ve got you, I’ve got you. Come on.’

  Max moved to thrash his arms, his compulsion to escape far stronger than his vague realisation that Jamal was kneeling beside him, his big, solid hands on Max’s shoulders.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ Jamal said again, his voice low and steady. ‘It was just a dream.’

  Max blinked and waited for his heart to stop racing. He took a deep breath, focused on Jamal, on his kind brown eyes and his smile.

  ‘Shit,’ he said at last. ‘Sorry, mate.’

  ‘Less of that,’ Jamal released Max’s arms. ‘You know I don’t like apologies.’

  ‘I thought I’d …’ Max trailed off, embarrassed by the sweat on his knotted sheets and the tears on his cheeks.

  ‘I get it.’ Jamal nodded in sympathy. ‘You thought the dream was gone, right?’

  ‘It’s been months.’ Max wrung his hands. ‘I didn’t even bring my tablets, because I was so sure that I—’ He stopped again, angry with himself but knowing he shouldn’t be. This was the life he had chosen for himself, and the consequences of that choice were his to bear. There was no point in piling extra pressure on himself. The pills he swallowed to help him sleep were for the very worst times only, and there had been fewer of those with every passing month. Max had thought being away from home would help, that his mind would have so much to focus on, so many new sights, smells and sounds, that he would be looking only forwards, rather than back. But that was the morbid beauty of the mind: it didn’t ever completely forget.

  Jamal passed him a half-empty bottle of water.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit warm, but it’s better than nothing.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Max took a slug and grimaced. It really was warm, like the bath water he used to swallow as a child, his head immersed beneath the surface as he listened to the strange sound of his heart thumping away in his ears.

  Jamal sat back down on the edge of his own bed, his dark eyes searching Max’s, enquiring but not fussing, happy to do whatever Max needed. It never failed to amaze Max just how generous his friend could be, and how patient. Jamal didn’t so much wear his heart on his sleeve as carry it around in his open palm. He envied his friend for having found a job he was so passionate about. While Max had enjoyed elements of being a soldier, the army was never his passion, and now he worked in the office of his dad’s construction company, chasing orders and organising staff rotas. It was about as uninspiring as Max could imagine a job to be, but he had found it impossible to refuse when his father offered. How could he turn his nose up at such kindness, after everything his parents had done for him?

  ‘I’m OK,’ Max assured Jamal. ‘Really. Tip-top.’ He tapped his chest as he said it, stirring up another memory in the process, one that was buried as far down as he could force it. There was more than one type of memory, Max knew, and this one straddled both mind and muscle. He wondered if he would ever leave it behind.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ he told Jamal, a glance at his phone telling him it wasn’t even six a.m. yet.

  Jamal cocked his head to one side, a gesture that Max read to be gently mocking.

  ‘I’m all right,’ came the predictable reply. ‘Slept like a log on the flight, didn’t I?’

  He had, it was true. Max had been unable to settle, his familiar aches intensified by the lack of movement and the pressure inside the cabin.

  ‘So, what do you think of our new lady friends?’

  Max looked up at Jamal, who was trying but failing to look nonchalant.

  ‘I think that you would only ask me that question if you’d taken a shine to one of them,’ Max replied, reaching for the small wooden box on the table beside the bed and sliding open the lid.

  ‘Damn, you can read me like a Sunday tabloid,’ groaned Jamal, folding his long legs back under his sheet with a grin. ‘Am I really that obvious?’

  ‘You like Steph, right?’ Max prompted, deftly flicking the domino pieces he’d extracted from the box between his fingers. One was a two, and the other a five. Twenty-five – the same age he had been when it happened.

  ‘She’s definitely my type,’ agreed Jamal, gazing up at the ceiling fan, before glancing back at Max. ‘You know I can’t resist a blonde.’

  The same could have been said of Max, once upon a time, but nowadays all blonde hair did was remind him of his ex-wife. Not that Steph seemed to be anything like her, which could only be a positive. Faye was a lot of things, but it had turned out that right for Max wasn’t one of them.

  ‘I think she likes you, too, you know,’ he told Jamal. ‘She laughed at your rubbish jokes, for a start.’

  ‘Now, now,’ Jamal tossed a pillow in Max’s direction. ‘We both know full well that I am the funniest person that either of us knows.’

  ‘Which makes me, what, the funniest looking?’ quipped Max, his laughter petering out almost immediately. ‘Oh, come on,’ he insisted, grinning at his friend’s blank expression. ‘Laughing at myself is a positive thing. Isn’t that what they always said at
Headley?’

  Jamal tutted. ‘They say all kinds of shit at Headley. But what’s at stake here is who the funnier person is, me or you. And I’m saying it’s definitely me.’

  ‘Have it your way,’ Max grinned. ‘But you know I have the edge when it comes to the slapstick stuff.’

  Jamal chuckled despite himself, leaning back on the pillow he hadn’t thrown at Max and closing his eyes.

  ‘You’re a dickhead,’ he sighed.

  ‘Takes one to know one,’ Max pointed out cheerily.

  ‘So, come on then,’ prompted Jamal.

  ‘Come on what?’ Max selected three more pieces from his box of dominoes and started constructing a miniature Stonehenge on the table top. He liked to build things; the methodical action involved helped to calm his mind.

  ‘Which girl did you take a shine to?’

  Max paused for just a second, but not so long that Jamal picked up on his hesitation.

  ‘No, don’t tell me,’ Jamal went on. ‘Let me guess. It’s the little brown-haired one, isn’t it?’

  Max felt colour flood into his cheeks as he pictured her.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ he asked blithely, concentrating on his little black-and-white building blocks instead of his friend.

  ‘Because she jumped about a foot in the air every time you spoke to her, mate,’ Jamal exclaimed. ‘And because I know you, and it would be too easy for you to go for Maur, who was making it pretty obvious how much she wanted to get to know you better.’

  Max allowed himself to picture Maureen. With her shiny dark hair, alluring, cat-like eyes and easy confidence, she perhaps was the obvious choice, but there was something about Alice that had drawn him in. There was no space in his life for game players or attention seekers – he needed someone he could trust on a higher level than most people, and Alice, to him, had felt like she could be one of those people. He had spent less than two hours in her company, but he somehow knew he could trust her not to judge him. He felt comfortable, he realised, acknowledging as he did so just how rare a feeling it was. He didn’t even feel that way with some members of his own family any more.

  He didn’t realise he was smiling until Jamal pointed it out, laughing as he did so and teasing Max that he must have it bad.

  Whatever it was about this girl, Max mused, perhaps it was a blessing that she had a boyfriend, and that anything romantic could be ruled out from the off. He had not experienced much luck when it came to finding a compatible partner, but he was always keen to make a new friend, and this girl, Alice, already felt like one.

  9

  Alice waited until Lurch had crept silently back to the kitchen before holding her nose and tipping down her papaya juice in one. Even when you couldn’t smell it, the taste and texture were still disgusting, and she pulled such an expression of revulsion that Maureen started cackling and promptly spat out a mouthful of her own juice across the table.

  ‘Bollocks!’ she cried, grabbing a napkin. ‘And I was so looking forward to drinking that, too.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ Alice deadpanned.

  She had been sitting in the seating area for an hour now, scribbling down her first impressions of Sri Lanka in her journal and reading up on Sigiriya Rock again, just in case she’d missed anything vital. With every minute that passed, the temperature seemed to rise, and despite the early hour, Alice could feel sweat prickling the backs of her bare legs. A thin veil of cloud was just visible through the treeline to the east, the sky around it a pale, arctic blue.

  Before going to bed last night, the five of them had arranged for Lurch to order a driver for the day, and they were all due to be collected in half an hour. If Max and Jamal didn’t get a move on, they would miss breakfast – and so would Steph, for that matter.

  ‘What is she doing in there?’ Alice asked Maureen now, who looked over her shoulder at the empty pathway leading from their room and shook her head.

  ‘God knows. Her hair, probably. It was so frizzy this morning, I had to ask her if she’d plugged herself into the mains overnight instead of her phone charger.’

  Alice snuffled with laughter.

  ‘Harsh,’ she said, ‘but funny.’

  She was just about to get up and go in search of her errant friend when a door banged shut and Jamal appeared from around the corner, a small rucksack in his hand and a wide grin on his face.

  ‘Ladies,’ he said in greeting, nodding at each of them in turn, before adding, ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘We could say the same to you,’ replied Maureen, reaching down to flick an insect off her ankle. She’d tied her hair up today in the sort of effortless chignon that Alice could only dream of creating herself, and her fake-tanned legs poured out of black denim hot pants. The red polka-dot scarf she was wearing as a hairband clashed merrily with her purple vest top, and diamond studs glittered at her ears. Maureen always looked so chic, and seemingly without putting much thought into it at all, whereas Alice looked the same as she had as a child, in clothes that didn’t quite fit in colours that didn’t quite suit her. It didn’t help that she had been blessed with a disproportionately large bottom which made feminine little dresses the enemy, or that she had the stumpy, muscular legs of a Shetland pony. Today she was wearing a pair of khaki shorts from Gap and a grey T-shirt with a Ghostbusters motif on the front. Sexy was as far removed from Alice today as Land’s End was from John o’ Groats.

  ‘Max is just booting up,’ Jamal told them, giving Lurch a thumbs up as the willowy Sri Lankan deposited a plate of breakfast on the table in front of him. There were scrambled eggs decorated with tiny flecks of fresh chilli, bread rolls still warm from the oven, a small dish of fiery red sambal and a plate of sliced banana and pineapple. Alice, who had been tempted to lick the plate clean after finishing her own helping, gazed at the food with envy.

  ‘Walking shoes really aren’t attractive, are they?’ mused Maureen, frowning down at her own pair. ‘I feel like one of those elderly ramblers that invade Suffolk every summer.’

  Alice, who loved her new walking shoes and was partial to the odd ramble, said nothing. She supposed she should get up and fetch her bag from the room, but she was anchored to her chair by the heat of the morning, the singing insects and the warm fullness in her stomach.

  ‘Morning!’

  Steph had finally joined them, looking typically adorable in red shorts and a pink shirt dotted with blue flowers. Her hair, as predicted by Maureen, had clearly been causing her some grief, because she’d uncharacteristically slicked it back into a tight bun. A few frazzled strands were still escaping around her face, though, and Alice wondered if her pink cheeks were the result of her battling with them for the past half-hour. Steph’s flustered appearance didn’t seem to register with Jamal, however, who grinned broadly at her and shuffled along the bench seat so she could sit beside him. Maureen took this in at the same time as Alice, and the two of them exchanged a knowing look.

  When they’d returned to the room last night, Steph had coyly confessed to finding Jamal attractive, and it looked as if the feeling was mutual. Maur, meanwhile, had openly admitted that she much preferred Max, a revelation that had come as no surprise to Alice. Her flirtatious friend did not believe in playing it coy, and Alice doubted if anyone who was seated at their table last night could have been left in the dark about where Maur had chosen to focus her attentions.

  Steph was now tucking into her eggs and ignoring the sambal, and both she and Jamal were pretending the papaya juice did not exist. Alice took out her phone. Ten minutes until the driver arrived, and a message from Richard which had just come through on the temperamental Wi-Fi, asking if she knew where he’d left his tackle bag. She sighed through a tolerant smile as she tapped out a reply – it would be where it always was, on the ledge outside the back door, with its wormy, maggoty contents as far away from Alice as she could get it. Richard had tried to get her into fishing many times over the years, but Alice had no patience for it. If she was outside, she wante
d to be moving. She couldn’t bear to be immobile, just waiting for something to happen. Richard and his dad could sit there for hours, passing the time with idle chat and eating the doorstep-sized cheese-and-pickle sandwiches she’d made for them. In the winter, they would take a thermos of tea each and spread a blanket out, their feet inside their wellies wrapped up in several layers of socks and their fingertips pink with cold. It was Richard’s place, and his time, too – Alice would not have wanted to encroach on it even if she did have a burning desire to wield a rod and net.

  ‘Here’s the man,’ Jamal suddenly announced through a mouthful of eggs, and Alice jumped so violently in her seat that she dropped her phone under the table. Bending to retrieve it, she saw Max’s feet come into view, and realised that his walking shoes were the same brand as her own. Running her eyes up, she took in one hairy shin leading up to a thick, muscular knee and strong thigh, which disappeared into the bottom of dark-grey cargo shorts. On the other side, where his ankle should be, there was instead a thick silver bolt, and from there a metal rod went up into a hard-looking black plastic shell the same shape as a shin pad. The knee area was obscured by a shiny white socket, which was half-covered by the hem of his shorts, and as she stared, realisation trickling through her, it dawned on Alice that what Max had told her when she accidentally kicked him last night – that he couldn’t feel a thing – was true. He really hadn’t felt a thing, because the leg she had bashed against was prosthetic.

  Alice sat up rapidly, her face aflame, putting her phone on the table as Max made his way towards them. He looked happy, and handsome and full of energy, and he smiled as their eyes met.

  ‘You better have saved some papaya juice for me,’ was all he said.

  10

  ‘I had no idea. Did you know? You must have, you were sitting right next to him all evening.’