One Thousand Stars and You Read online

  ‘Good enough,’ Maureen replied with a grin.

  ‘Ah, you are early,’ the man said, clapping his hands. ‘Come, my wife is here. She will make you some food. Are you hungry? Did you come from the train? How many days have you been in Sri Lanka?’

  Alice could only open and close her mouth uselessly as he led them through an incredibly tidy lounge area, chattering away without waiting for them to reply. The smooth white tiles felt wonderfully cool beneath her bare toes, and she pushed her feet down against them as she would have in a yoga class, encouraging the pleasant sensation to spread into her lower limbs. She had always considered herself a fan of the sunshine, but even Alice had to admit that it became overwhelming here – especially when carrying a dead weight on your back.

  ‘I am Chatura,’ the man told them, pausing by the bottom of a flight of wooden stairs and beckoning for his wife to come out from behind a beaded curtain that concealed the kitchen from view. She was tiny and softly rounded, with grey hair pulled back into a low bun and large, conker-brown eyes.

  ‘This is my Monisha,’ her husband proclaimed proudly, looking at the diminutive woman as if she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  Monisha smiled shyly and waved, before backing away again and disappearing behind the beads.

  ‘She likes to hide,’ Chatura said happily, giggling as he started up the stairs. ‘She is scaredy like a cat.’

  He seemed to find this hilarious, and bellowed with laughter as he padded barefoot along a narrow corridor. There were three doors, which he opened in turn – the first led into a bedroom containing two bunk beds, one small single, and a dressing table; the second was the bathroom, which was large, square and basic, and the third opened out on to a long balcony.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ Alice breathed, leaning over Steph’s shoulder so she could see the view.

  ‘The best view in all of Sri Lanka,’ Chatura told them solemnly, his hand clasping the metal railings that ran all the way along the balcony’s outer edge. Below Alice could see the sprawl of flowers that decorated their host’s back garden, and beyond that the landscape tapered away downhill in a heady mixture of greens, yellows and reds. In the far distance, on the other side of the city, vast hills loomed, while above them lay a scatter of dip-dyed clouds, half white, half grey, the sky around them a freshly laundered blue.

  ‘The sunset here is very good,’ Chatura informed them, clearly pleased by their matching expressions of awe. ‘Come back here at six. I bring tea, we watch the sun setting.’

  ‘That sounds lovely,’ Steph replied, looking at Alice and Maureen, who agreed. It was only just two p.m. now, so they would still have a few free hours to explore.

  Chatura left them alone to settle in, but not before explaining at length and in broken English how to work the shower, how important it was that they bolt the balcony door every night before going to bed, and where the bottles of complimentary water were stored. Alice took it all in with a smile, then clambered on to the bottom bunk while Maureen headed for a quick freshen up and Steph popped outside to take photos in the garden. With every passing minute that they spent in this house – well, really in this glorious country – Alice felt easier and more relaxed, but also invigorated.

  She knew she had allowed herself to settle into a rut of sorts back in England. Her job in the council office no longer challenged her, while her relationship with Richard ticked along pleasantly enough, but it had been a long time since Alice had needed to try. When she talked to Steph about it, confessing her concern that things between her and Rich had become all too predictable, her friend would roll her eyes and tell her not to be so silly.

  As far as Steph was concerned, Alice was lucky to be in such a comfortable relationship, and she should feel blessed not to have any drama in her life, but Alice was beginning to wonder if the too little, in their case, might eventually lead to a too late. The spark that she saw so clearly between Steph and Jamal, the same one that Maureen imagined lit the space around herself and Max, was not one Alice could recall feeling for a very long time.

  Well, she thought guiltily, extracting her phone from the top of her backpack – not with Richard, anyway.

  Alice had expected a barrage of messages to appear as soon as she logged on to Chatura and Monisha’s Wi-Fi, but the home screen remained stubbornly free of little grey text-message boxes. Nothing new from Richard, and she’d had no reply from Freddie.

  Rearranging the pillow so that she could lean against the wall comfortably, Alice opened Instagram and clicked through to Maureen’s account. The last photo her friend had uploaded was of the three of them on the bus to Kandy, all shiny faced and happy, and Alice double-tapped it and watched the little red heart appear below the image. Further down, she found a photo of some chunks of papaya on a plate, which Maureen had captioned with a green, about-to-be-sick emoji. Giggling, Alice liked that one, too, then scrolled down and felt the blood rush into her cheeks at the sight of Max. He was standing on the summit of Sigiriya, his arm casually thrown around Maureen’s shoulder and his face upturned for the selfie. Alice could see the reflection of the sun and the trees in the lenses of his sunglasses, and his smile was wide below them. She used her fingers to zoom into the image, looking closely at his white teeth, at the stubble on his jaw, at the neat curve of his ears. Tapping her finger below, Alice saw that Maureen had done as she hoped and tagged Max in the photo. ‘BoyBrooke,’ she read, frowning slightly. She was sure Max had told them that his surname was Davis.

  Abandoning Instagram and opening her Facebook app, Alice hurried through to Maureen’s profile on there and checked her recent new friends. Yes, there he was, Max Davis, grinning as if he’d just been laughing in his profile picture. So, she wondered, what was the ‘BoyBrooke’ all about? Perhaps an army nickname?

  She returned to Instagram and searched for Max’s account this time, ignoring the creep of guilty sweat that was beginning to dapple her chest. She was only looking. There was nothing wrong with that. She wasn’t even liking anything – and she hadn’t started to follow him, either. And anyway, she reasoned, Max was her friend, so it was totally fine to scroll through some of his pictures.

  Alice quickly discovered that a large number of his photos featured a cute, determined-looking little girl, who she worked out from reading the captions to be his niece, Poppy. There was a man in some of those photos who could only be Max’s older brother. He looked a lot like him, but taller and broader with less symmetrical features. They had the same light-brown hair, the same intense gaze, and both seemed to spend a lot of their time pratting around, from what Alice could see.

  Way further down, past family snaps, pictures of food, a Christmas tree and group shots of Max with a whole pile of muscular-looking mates, Alice discovered a photo of Max crossing the line of the London Marathon a few years ago, tears streaming down his face. There was another one of him sitting up in what looked to be a hospital bed, a wheelchair beside him and a drip trailing out from under the covers. He was giving the camera a thumbs up, but Alice winced at how sunken his cheeks were, and how pronounced the shoulder blades beneath his T-shirt. Max had added a caption to this one that read, ‘#TBT to when I woke up in Selly Oak. Putting on a brave face but shitting it (not literally, Mum!). Thanks again to the incredible team of doctors and nurses that I will never forget – and sorry for hiding that pilchard salad you tried to make me eat in the cupboard and forgetting about it. That’ll teach you to dish out the pain meds like sweets!’

  The post had over 200 likes, and so many comments that Alice had to scroll down to read them. Many were jokey ones from his mates, messages written in a military jargon that Alice didn’t understand, but there were also expressions of love, and of pride from the medical professionals who had been part of the team that looked after him. An Instagram user called ‘JayIsDaMan’ had written, ‘Milking it much?’ and Alice grinned as she clicked through on a hunch and discovered that it was indeed Jamal.

  It felt strange to
see Max like this, when he was still unknown to her. He had occupied her mind so much over the past twenty-four hours that the idea of not knowing him at all seemed absurd. Even if she never saw him again after these two weeks – and, with a leaden heart, she accepted that this was the most likely scenario – Alice knew that it would comfort her just to know that he existed in the world. Him being in it made it better. She didn’t know why she felt this way, or why she was so sure of it, but she was.

  ‘Alice?’ The bedroom door banged open to reveal Maureen, her wet hair dripping on to the tiles and her cheeks pink from what must have been a hot shower.

  ‘Off in Wonderland again?’ she joked, peering through the gloom. Alice had closed the wooden shutters, thinking that she would get changed, then been distracted by her phone.

  ‘Chatura’s brought up some banana cake,’ Maureen went on. ‘And then he says he’ll drive us down to the Temple of the Tooth.’

  ‘Give me two minutes,’ Alice said, thinking that she would fire off a quick message to Richard, telling him they had made it to Kandy safely. When she looked back down at her phone, however, she realised in horror that she’d accidentally liked the photo of Max in his hospital bed. A photo that he’d posted over two years ago.

  It was only the knowledge that sweet little Chatura was just outside the door that prevented Alice from cursing very loudly.

  17

  Max

  If I should die,

  Don’t bury what remains,

  Turn my body to ashes,

  And scatter me like rain …

  There was a dull, insistent pain in Max’s stump. He had been aware of it for a few days now, and hoped that the long flight was to blame, but it was not showing any signs of abating. In fact, Max accepted with a grimace, it was getting worse. As a doctor at Selly Oak Hospital had explained to him right at the start of his long period of recovery, pain was a continuum with his sort of injury. The loss of a limb was never a simple snip, tie, stitch and then off you go; it was the beginning of a healing process that went on for the rest of your life.

  Frustrated by the limitations that his predicament had forced upon him, Max was initially eager to crack on with his rehabilitation and get around without having to use a wheelchair. This determination, as well as sheer force of bloody-minded will, had him up on the comfy sticks within a fortnight, and from there it was only a matter of time before a cast was made for his first prosthesis.

  Alas, as Max had learned early on, the smallest of changes or fluctuations in his still-healing stump could mean a hold-up of days or even weeks. It didn’t matter how many times he was patiently told by the medical professionals around him that he must allow for new rules when it came to his residual limb, that blood flow would be limited and so recovery would take five or six times longer, that his shattered bones could further deteriorate, that ulcerations could occur and damage the tissue inside his leg, that even the slightest change in his weight might cause his socket not to fit properly, and make getting around unaided impossible yet again. Despite all this, Max still battled.

  There had been dark days and brighter ones – an infection had slowed the healing of skin grafts taken from Max’s inner thighs, forcing him back into bed, but then, two weeks later, he felt like he’d conquered a mountain when he managed to climb a set of steps without using crutches. Every hurdle overcome, Jamal had told him, his serious dark-brown eyes on a level with Max’s, no matter how small, was a triumph. But, and this was vital, if Max ever felt any sort of pain or even mild discomfort, then he must not keep it to himself.

  Max knew this rule. He would go so far as to say it was a mantra, even – something that was so absolute in its importance that he should no more question his duty to obey it than he should to breathe in and out. But today, and with this pain, Max did not adhere to it. He was not an inherently stubborn man – far from it – but Max was tired of his body no longer feeling like his own. There had been so many doctors and nurses and physios, and for a long time, there had been his mother, helping him to wash, to pee, to shave, to do all the things she should not have to do. The only way Max could make peace with it was to disassociate himself from his physical form, close off that part of his mind that made him feel humiliated and small. Logic reasoned with him that this was his mother, the woman who had given birth to him, raised him, knew and loved him more than any other – but it was still close to being unbearable. The burden he had caused her haunted Max to this day, and there was no question in his mind that the blame was his and his alone. No mother should have to endure what Max’s had. No father, brother, sister, child or friend either, for that matter. It was all so barbaric – the lifestyle he’d chosen, the injury that followed, and the trauma it left behind.

  As the years had passed and the searing red-hot memory of that time had diminished somewhat, Max had learned to let go of a lot of the things that in the beginning felt so intolerable. He understood he had lost the ability to be as spontaneous as he once was, he recognised the need to keep his weight in check because of the effect any fluctuation would have on his stump, he accepted the mental trauma he’d been left with and coped with it as best he could, and he had persevered in the practice of self-examination, staring at himself in the mirror until his scars felt familiar.

  It was a long time before Max felt comfortable enough to be intimate with anyone, but when that time did arrive – with a riding instructor called Eve at a uni mate’s wedding – it went surprisingly well. Eve didn’t seem repulsed or even curious about his stump; she’d simply had a quick look and said, ‘Oh, it’s lovely and neat,’ before continuing to remove her bra. For Max, who had been building up to the moment for years, the encounter was a breath of relieved air.

  He glanced across the bus now to where Jamal was sitting, his head resting against the dusty window, fast asleep despite the thumping music and the cacophony of traffic noise, and wondered why the hell he was being so stupid and not just talking to his friend about this pain. He would, Max decided, once Adam’s Peak was out of the way. As soon as he had proved to himself and to everyone else that he could still scale mountains – and Max knew this was as important to him figuratively as it was literally – then he would give in and let Jamal take a proper look. It was only a few days away now anyway – how bad could it really get in that tiny snippet of time?

  Max turned to his notebook, frowning as he read back over the beginning of another poem. He’d started his collection of work inspired by Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ while he was serving in Afghanistan all those years ago, and the tone was decidedly bleak. He had borrowed the late poet’s infamous opener, ‘If I should die’, to start each of his efforts, but he could never seem to continue past four lines. Being in the army had given Max a complicated viewpoint on death, insomuch as he’d had to make peace with the idea of it, but at the same time have a huge amount of disdain for it, too. Dying was losing, simple as that, and Max knew all too well that a wretched loss always accompanied death, that it would sit right beside death in its chariot as souls were snatched away. Max had no respect for either – life was what mattered.

  What he wanted was to write poetry about beauty, and love, and joy – but the words fell apart on the page when he attempted it. The truth was, and Max acknowledged it with a sad sort of reluctance, that when he reached down inside himself to pull out, explore and share what was in his heart, he could only ever find pain, hurt and bitterness. If there once had been love in there that was pure, he sometimes feared that it might be hidden too deep to recall. Perhaps his marriage to Faye coming to a messy end had chased it away, or maybe death carried it away along with his loss and fear. Max wasn’t sure, but what he did know was that the idea of opening up to someone again, of laying his heart out on the line in pursuit of love, scared him. It wasn’t that he had given up on love, more that he felt nowhere near ready to seek it out.

  As he stared down with unseeing eyes at a blank page, Max thought about Alice, and the way he’d felt co
nnected to her as they shared stories up on Sigiriya. They had not had any time alone since, and Alice merely said a brief farewell when the girls left for Kandy yesterday morning. Max had clocked the shifty way she glanced at the ground, up into the trees, down at her nervous fingers – at anything, it seemed, to avoid looking at him.

  He was used to this reaction, because new people often acted strangely towards him to begin with, and Max would not have thought too much about it if he believed Alice was uncomfortable around him. But he didn’t think it was because of that – there was something else going on that was making her feel uneasy. Perhaps he should just ask her straight. After all, he would be seeing her in just a few hours’ time. The five of them had arranged to meet at the main entrance of the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens in Kandy just after lunch, with a plan to go for a stroll around, before heading towards the lake in the centre of the city. There was a bar not far from there called Slightly Chilled, which all the guidebooks recommended.

  Max realised he was smiling when a small Sri Lankan boy beamed back at him from across the aisle of the bus, before pointing at Mister Tee and saying something to his father in Sinhalese. The older man glanced up and shook his head apologetically at Max, before whispering in the child’s ear. It was only natural for children to be inquisitive, and actually, Max didn’t mind it at all. His niece Poppy had even taken him into her primary school one day for show and tell, which Max had enjoyed enormously. Adults would always tiptoe around the difficult questions, misguided politeness and fear of being inadvertently offensive preventing them saying what they were really thinking – but the younger generation had no such qualms.

  ‘Do you beep at the airport?’

  ‘Would that melt if you sunbathed with it on?’

  ‘Did it hurt when your leg was blown off?’

  ‘Did you cry?’