One Thousand Stars and You Read online

  ‘Room for a Mister and his Mister?’ he asked, noticing how Alice’s face lit up when she saw him.

  ‘Of course.’ She patted the wall next to her and Max sat down, using his hands to steady himself and being extra careful not to bang into her with his prosthetic leg.

  ‘The view up here is quite something, isn’t it?’ he ventured, following her gaze out towards the horizon. Mountains were visible in the far distance, as well as hundreds of acres of lush vegetation, forests and a vast, light-dappled lake. A swell of low clouds sat like cappuccino foam just above it.

  ‘You can see why King Kassapa chose it,’ Alice said, gesturing to her open guidebook. ‘Apparently he murdered his own father to take the crown, then built a palace all the way up here so he could hide from those seeking retribution.’

  ‘You would definitely see them coming – it’s a great vantage point,’ said Max, rubbing the top of his right thigh with both his hands. The final climb up here had been quite tough going, and the scorching heat of the day was causing moisture to collect around his stump. What he should really do was take off his prosthesis and wash his residual limb with what was left in his bottle of water, but he didn’t want to make Alice feel uncomfortable. She was undoubtedly a cool girl, he was convinced about that, but he had also witnessed even his closest friends and some members of his own family avert their eyes whenever Mister Tee came off. The staring didn’t bother Max so much as the trying not to stare. ‘Have a good old gawp,’ he often told people. ‘Get it out of your system.’

  ‘Don’t you want to know?’ he asked Alice then, his thoughts tumbling from his mind and out through his mouth before he was fully aware of what he was thinking. She turned to him, not immediately understanding the question. The sun had brought out a scatter of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and her top lip was dappled with droplets of sweat. At least it wasn’t just him suffering in this heat.

  ‘Know what?’ she asked, banging her heels against the wall. There was something of the naughty child about Alice, Max decided. Perhaps that was another reason why he had taken to her – it was the rebel in him recognising a fellow comrade.

  ‘What happened to this,’ he replied, pointing down at where the bottom half of his right leg had once been. It had been almost eight years now since Max had lost it, but he was still occasionally surprised to look down and see it gone, even now. That was normal, though, he’d been assured. His central nervous system would still be playing catch-up for some time yet.

  ‘I didn’t want to … I mean, I don’t need to …’ Alice stopped, her features contorting.

  ‘It’s OK.’ Max touched her arm briefly. ‘I’m happy to tell you. Only if you want to know, that is?’

  ‘I do if you want to tell me,’ she replied. ‘But don’t feel you have to. It’s really none of my business. I mean. Oh, you know what I mean.’

  Max smiled, trying to reassure her with his eyes. A bright-blue bird with vibrant red plumage on its front landed on the ground a few feet away from them and cocked its head, as if waiting for him to continue.

  ‘Well, this fella definitely wants to know,’ Max said lightly, and Alice made a small noise of amusement. Max knew he was doing exactly what he hadn’t wanted to do and making her feel uneasy, but he was here now. And anyway, he wanted her to know the truth. He wanted to share something with her, and it had been a long time since he’d had such a compulsion.

  ‘It happened back in May 2009,’ he began. ‘I’d not long celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday. Well, as much as you celebrate anything when you’re stuck out in a conflict zone.’

  ‘You were in the army?’ Alice asked, looking almost fearful, her blue eyes wide despite the glare of the sun. Max guessed that she must already have gone over all the possible reasons for his lack of a lower limb, and that the one he was about to tell her would have been the most horrific she’d come up with. People tended to opt for a car crash first, as if that was somehow an easier idea to grasp than the far more violent reality.

  ‘I was, yes,’ he told her. ‘For a long time. Since I was eighteen, in fact. When all my mates went off to uni, I followed my big brother into the Welsh Gunners.’

  ‘But you’re not Welsh,’ Alice pointed out, flushing when he laughed at her.

  ‘You don’t have to be Welsh to join,’ he said. ‘That’s just a nickname the regiment had; we were part of the Royal Artillery.’

  Alice nodded. ‘Guns,’ she said simply.

  ‘There were lots of guns,’ he agreed. ‘Not that they made a difference in my case. The only thing that can arm you against an enemy buried under the ground is luck, and unfortunately for me and a few of my crew, luck wasn’t in great supply the day we happened to drive down that stretch of road in Afghanistan.’

  Alice had gone pale, and Max could see the hair standing up on her bare arms despite the heat. She didn’t say anything, just waited for him to continue telling his story. He was trying to keep his tone as light as possible, but it was hard when he got to this part of the tale, it always was. For so many months, Max had been unable to even think about what happened, let alone articulate it, but as time passed, and he got the help he needed to accept it and move forwards, the words became less frightening. It wasn’t talking about it that could hurt him, he had learned that, but he was still afraid of the unexpected triggers that could send him right back there. He knew it was only ever a matter of time before one caught up with him.

  ‘It was an IED,’ he said matter-of-factly, his voice calm in spite of the ugly tableau he could now see in his mind. ‘That’s an improvised explosive device, just in case you didn’t know.’

  Alice nodded again; her shoulders looked tense. There was a light breeze up here on the summit, and strands of her hair were being blown gently across her forehead. Max resisted a strong urge to reach across and tuck them behind her ear.

  ‘We were in a convoy, me and three other guys in the Wolfhound – that’s a big truck – transporting some ammo and kit, and we drove right over the bloody thing.’

  He was close enough to Alice to feel her shudder.

  ‘Made a right old noise and a right bloody mess, as you can imagine,’ he went on, coughing to clear his throat. It was always the same when he told this story – his mouth would feel as if it was somehow full of the strange, thin dust that coated everything in that dismal place, and made its way into every crevice, nook and hole, filling up empty boots and destroying cameras, phones and portable radios. Max would often wake from one of his nightmares with the taste of it in his mouth – it was the flavour of death.

  ‘It was a fairly sizeable bomb,’ he went on, watching the clouds shift and billow above the lake. ‘Parts of the Wolfhound came apart in the blast and there were bits of it embedded in my right foot and ankle. A flesh wound, the medic called it, but that basically translated into an injured leg that was too damaged to save. The docs did their best, but they had nothing viable left to work with.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Alice looked as if she might cry, and Max was compelled to pull her against him in a comforting half-hug.

  ‘Oh, don’t be,’ he said into her hair. ‘I got off lightly. The two lads in the front cab didn’t make it – and the other one still can’t hear right. Like I said, a bloody mess.’

  They sat there in silence for a few moments, Max soothed by the rhythmic pattern of Alice’s beating heart, which he could feel through the arm that he’d wrapped around her. After the bomb had gone off in Afghanistan and the terrible, high-pitched screaming of his fallen comrades had ceased, Max had tried to focus on the beating of his own heart. Lying there amongst the mangled remains of the armoured truck, he’d known from his training that he must try to apply a tourniquet to his leg – or what was left of it – and he could remember reaching up towards his chest and the pocket where it would be, only to find that his hand was red and dripping. His fingers wouldn’t do what he told them and the pain was too much. It was too difficult to be in the present, to manage that
moment and pull a coherent thought out of pure feeling, and so he retreated inside himself to where his heart beat on like a clock – one-two, one-two, one-two – and stayed there, hidden, until everything went black.

  He must have drifted off momentarily into his memories, because the next thing Max was aware of was Alice moving gently out of his embrace.

  ‘I can’t imagine how frightening that must have been,’ she said, her eyes searching his. It was strange, Max thought, how unguarded he felt with this girl. He sensed that she was letting her guard down with him a bit now, too. She no longer looked uncomfortable, as she had when he’d started telling his morbid story. Her shoulders had dropped, and her expression was open. She was sorry for him, yes, but there was more there than mere pity or even misguided admiration – there was understanding.

  ‘I thought that coming here to Sri Lanka was a scary thing to do,’ she admitted, looking away from him as the blue-and-red bird in front of them shook out its feathers and took flight once again. ‘To tell you the truth, I get scared all the time these days. It’s ridiculous, really – you should have seen me as a child. I was a right nightmare.’

  ‘Oh?’ Max prompted quietly, pleased that his assumption about her had been correct.

  ‘I used to get myself into all sorts of scrapes,’ she told him. ‘Even before I could walk, I would crawl so fast that my mum would lose sight of me in moments. I almost drowned when I was two, because I ran into the sea and didn’t stop.’

  Max laughed at that. ‘You nutter!’

  ‘I was,’ Alice agreed, but Max noted that she didn’t seem amused. ‘I guess I thought I was invincible. I managed not to damage myself too often, so I had little incentive to stop.’

  ‘Why did you?’ he asked, his eyes flickering over the old injury on her face. It was neatly healed, but certainly noticeable, and he could tell that it must have been quite severe when it first happened.

  Alice fingered her scar and stared straight ahead.

  ‘I got injured,’ she said simply, her tone sheepish. ‘My parents’ house has a flat ledge on the roof, and I used to climb out of my bedroom window to reach it. It drove my mum mad – the few times she caught me in the act, she would scream and yell at me to come down, threaten to ground me until my sixteenth birthday, that sort of thing. But I still didn’t stop. I refused to listen to her. And I must have done it a hundred times, but this time it had been raining and I lost my footing.’

  ‘Shit,’ Max said, drawing air through his teeth in a wince.

  Alice turned to him. ‘The greenhouse broke my fall,’ she told him, gesturing once again towards her face. ‘Thirty-odd stitches and two skin grafts.’

  ‘How old were you?’ Max wanted to know.

  ‘Ten,’ she said. ‘Right at that age when you start to care about your appearance, so not the best timing.’

  ‘I bet you were straight back up on that ledge, though, right?’ Max joked, and was surprised when Alice shook her head.

  ‘God, no. My mum would have locked me up. After it happened, she barely let me and my older brother out of her sight. Poor Freddie – he went from having complete freedom to a strict curfew overnight, and he hadn’t done anything wrong. My mum was so traumatised by what had happened to me, she made me swear on her life that I would never do anything stupid and reckless again, and I haven’t – well …’ She stopped, glancing over her shoulder as if to check that nobody else would hear her. ‘What I mean is, I am far more cautious these days.’

  ‘Well, you made it up here OK,’ Max told her. ‘You weren’t scared on the rickety stairs, were you? Because I was.’

  ‘No.’ She smiled briefly. ‘I don’t feel at all scared here, but I do feel … different.’

  She wrinkled up her nose as if confused by her own words. ‘I don’t mean that in a bad way. Sorry, I’m not making much sense, am I?’

  ‘Not much,’ Max replied, a smile playing around his lips. ‘But it doesn’t matter. You’ve got two more weeks to figure it out.’

  She nodded, taking in a deep breath through her nose and looking down at their feet, side by side, the metal joint where Max’s ankle used to be glinting in the mid-morning sun. He realised for the first time that she was wearing the same walking shoes as him, albeit far smaller and much cleaner. He liked sitting here with her; he liked the way she made him feel like himself. Not the Max who joined the army and got himself blown up, not the Max who was a burden to his family, but the real him, the one that barely anyone knew.

  ‘We should find the others,’ Alice said. ‘Do you think they’ll be wondering where we are?’

  Just as she said it, Jamal appeared behind them, and Max noticed the look of relief cross his friend’s face. It didn’t matter how many years had passed since they first met that day at Headley Court, Jamal still felt the need to look out for him. And, as much as Max hated the fact that he was more vulnerable since his injury, he liked the security of having Jamal with him on this trip. He was one of the few people in Max’s life who truly understood what he was going through, and he knew how best to deal with him. Friends and family tried, but they didn’t really understand – how could they?

  Alice was already on her feet and Max clambered up awkwardly after her, flinching slightly as his stump moved inside the socket. Jamal and Alice reached for him instinctively as he stumbled, their hands grasping him as he righted himself.

  ‘Cheers, guys.’

  Was it his imagination, or did Alice look almost sad to be letting go of his hand? As he watched her walk ahead to join her friends, he realised that a very big part of him hoped that she was.

  13

  The phone call came through not long after the minibus had dropped Jamal and Max back at the homestay. The cheerful driver had waited while Alice, Steph and Maureen quickly got changed, and they were now on their way to the cave temples in nearby Dambulla, leaving their new friends behind to locate some lunch. Food, on this occasion, had won the argument against further sightseeing.

  ‘Hey,’ Alice said as she answered, before adding, ‘It’s Rich,’ to the other two.

  Steph settled for waving, but Maureen leaned across until her mouth was next to the handset and trilled, ‘Hi, Dickie!’

  Alice heard her boyfriend sigh. ‘Can you tell Maureen that Dickie is not my nickname? Never has been, never will be.’

  ‘I think she already knows,’ chuckled Alice, turning her back on her laughing friend. Maureen had never been able to help herself when it came to winding Richard up. She found his serious side endlessly entertaining, and liked to see how far she could push his boundaries. Not far at all, as it turned out.

  ‘Tell her she owes me a pint to make up for it,’ Richard added. Alice could hear a blender whirring in the background and guessed that he had called her while making one of his famous breakfast smoothies – one banana, three strawberries, a handful of spinach, one large spoonful of natural yoghurt and half a cup of oats. Then, if he was feeling extra adventurous, a dollop of honey, too.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ she asked, then listened politely as Richard relayed a story about a school trip he’d taken his students on the previous day.

  ‘Caught a load of the kids smoking behind the museum,’ he grumbled. ‘Anyone would think they want to rot their lungs and end up prematurely impotent.’

  ‘They’re probably just doing it to look cool,’ Alice said, and Richard grunted in disgust.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said finally, switching off the blender. ‘What’s it like over there? Have you been riding elephants? Oh, you haven’t drunk any of the tap water, have you?’

  Alice laughed. ‘Of course not – who do you think I am?’

  ‘I just worry,’ he replied. ‘It’s my job to worry.’

  Alice was about to reply, when it occurred to her that she never worried about Richard. Not ever. He just wasn’t the type of person to get himself into trouble, so she had never had cause to feel concerned. Was she a terrible girlfriend? Rich was always saying that he
worried about her – it must be exhausting.

  ‘You don’t need to worry about us,’ she assured him, and saw Steph and Maureen exchange a glance. The minibus had come to a stop on the dusty road and was indicating to turn into a ramshackle car park.

  ‘I think we’re here,’ Maureen said loudly, and Alice cringed into the phone.

  ‘You girls sound busy,’ Richard stated, doing his best to appear nonchalant but failing hopelessly. Alice’s heart went out to him – he always had been a terrible actor.

  ‘Listen, Rich,’ she said. ‘Let me call you back later when we’re not on the move, and I’ll tell you all about the monkey we saw today.’

  ‘Were you looking in a mirror at the time?’ he joked.

  ‘Ha ha.’ Alice couldn’t quite bring herself to really laugh. ‘Very clever. Now get to work – catch some more kids smoking. Put them all in detention. I’ll talk to you later. Yes, you too. Bye.’

  Maureen was still laughing at her ‘Dickie’ comment five minutes later, as they made their way up the steps towards the cave temples. Because it was a religious site, bare skin (other than faces, hands and feet) was prohibited inside the most sacred areas, and Alice was glad she’d packed a pair of lightweight trousers. Maureen and Steph, however, had been forced to wrap their beach sarongs around their middles, and both were now waddling through the open courtyard in front of the Buddhist Museum like awkward geishas.