The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories

by Nina Allan

Genres: Fantasy; Horror; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

A beautifully inventive collection from multi award-winning author Nina Allan. These stories will enthral fans of China Mieville, Aliya Whiteley and Carmen Maria Machado.



A stunningly inventive collection from multi award-winning author, Nina Allan. Unsettling, dark and brilliantly astute, these weird and wonderful tales take us on journeys through time and space to explore enduring questions of memory and loss. Her worlds are recognisably our own but always closer to the edge, on the slant – and sharply unexpected. These stories are an unmissable insight into a writer at the top of her game.

Release date: September 7, 2021

Publisher: Titan Books

Print pages: 480

Sample

THE ART OF SPACE TRAVEL: A WRITER’S JOURNEY

The stories in this book were written over a period of some fifteen years, and have been arranged in roughly chronological order. I made my choices more or less on instinct, selecting works I feel best express themes that remain important to me, stories that are still present in my heart and mind years after they were written.

I have a horror of revisiting my own work, and so had not laid eyes on the three earliest stories since editing them for my debut collection A Thread of Truth. Rereading and revising them now has been akin to a careful unearthing of archaeological artefacts: brushing off the dirt, assessing the damage, evaluating their relationship to a world that has changed since they were created.

My relationship with short fiction has never been easy. From the beginning, and now increasingly, my stories feel discontented with their restricted word counts. They push and stretch at their bounds, splitting off on tangents, demanding more space. The stories I admire most – the short fiction of John Cheever and Julio Cortazar and Katherine Mansfield – resist such temptations. They seem like jewels to me, offering glimpses of a world rather than the world itself; by working within their confinement rather than against it, they appear limitless in imaginative scope and technical achievement.

I have often wondered whether I would have attempted short stories at all, had I not been working with the materials of speculative fiction. By the time I began to write seriously for publication in the early 2000s, the idea of beginning a literary career writing short fiction was all but dead, except within the science fiction, fantasy and horror communities, where it was not only live and kicking, but appeared to be the norm. I did not know any other writers personally at this time, but from reading author interviews online, in magazines and in ‘how to’ books I quickly became aware of the magazine tradition in SFF publishing, of how even the most well-known writers had begun as nobodies just like me, sending off stories to magazines and hoping that sooner or later their efforts would be rewarded.

This tradition still exists, is still, as it was then, one of the most democratic, radical and progressive aspects of the science fiction community, one of the features that most distinguishes it from the kingdom of mimetic fiction, where short fiction magazines rarely prosper and are little read.

The weight of industry expectation placed upon the shoulders of debut novelists has become colossal, with writers feeling increasingly that they have just one chance to launch a career, one chance to get it right. If the writer is young, such pressure is all the more destructive, when what the new writer needs most of all is not only space to grow but time to get things wrong. Writing and publishing short fiction offers the new writer the chance to experiment, to become accustomed to the initially terrifying idea that other people – strangers they have never met – might be reading and discussing their work, possibly liking it, possibly not, but knowing it is there.

Such experience is invaluable, most of all because it gives the writer time to thrash about a bit, to understand their craft better, to find out what kind of writer they want to be.

When I see debut novelists shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I cannot help but feel uneasy on their behalf: if this is the pinnacle of their career, the best they can offer, where else is there to go?

* * *

I have spoken before about how each of my short stories seems to me like an outtake from the novel it might have become, and what strikes me most about these stories now is how cohesive they feel as a collection, almost as if they were someday destined to become a part of this same book. Some are linked through recurring characters: though written years apart, they come as pairs, and I will leave you to discover these internal connections for yourself. As for the others, the links are more thematic than literal, though the overlap, the sense of circling a central hub of meaning, feels equally strong. This is what it means, to create a body of work. The reason I first began writing was to cement my memories, to make them real and tangible to myself and to others through the medium of the written word. That is still my driving force as a writer today, a force that seems to grow more urgent the more time passes.

It stands to reason that the central themes of my work – memory, loss, time, sense of place – have retained their hold on my imagination, surfacing again and again, like a series of snapshots, as the stories reveal themselves. What feels fascinating to me in this context is how my way of exploring these dilemmas has become subtly altered over the years, shifting from an impressionistic, sensation-based writing in the earlier stories towards a more analytical, forensic approach in more recent work. The final two stories in this collection go still further, utilising elements of autofiction and investigative journalism.

At the time of writing, it is the newest story, ‘A Princess of Mars’, written for an anthology that never happened, that most clearly articulates my current interests as a writer. This is the work that in terms of its form and approach I am still most excited by, most eager to take further. Only time will tell how that pans out. I hope the work that follows it will expand on and extend this story’s potential.

* * *

In editing this collection, I have been careful not to interfere with the overall intention and trajectory of individual stories. The more recent works, in any case, required little intervention, and even those that have undergone a more substantial revision process – the first three especially – still tell the same story. There have been some interesting decisions to make along the way, mainly concerned with the business of anachronism.

Readers will note the almost total absence of computers and mobile phones in the early stories especially. As someone who did not own or even use a personal computer until the early 2000s, digital technology has always been a tool for me, a part of my evolving hinterland rather than an intrinsic element of my imaginative process. Aside from the odd tweak here and there, I have left the technological landscape of these stories alone, suspended precariously between the analogue and the digital, as indeed we all are.

People still write letters in my stories, still travel in trains with compartments and doors that open independently of a central control. These things too I have left as they are; stories should reflect the writer, and the time of writing.

Where I have spotted factual inaccuracies I have corrected them, along with any unintended inconsistencies. Intended inconsistencies I have left in place. Close readers will become aware of a switched surname here, a reversed age difference there. I could have sanded away such discrepancies, but I chose not to. In some instances, to erase these marks of process feels like a lessening of involvement, a levelling down; to include them invites discussion, revealing the subjective, unreliable nature of memory itself.

Nina Allan, Rothesay, September 2020

AMETHYST

In the High Street they were selling sardines. When you see them laid out like that, head to tail on a marble slab in the fishmonger’s window, you can almost convince yourself they were never alive. They gleam like designer jewellery, an expensive work of art. One of Angela’s aunts gave her a box of chocolate sardines for Christmas once. The box was painted to look like tin. The chocolates inside were wrapped in foil, with a pattern of scales. I once tried to source the same brand – I thought they would make a nice present for someone – but I couldn’t remember the name of the company that produced them. The idea is peculiar, when you think about it: chocolates shaped like fish.

Angela used to buy things because she felt sorry for them. She had a talent for investing rubbish with a life of its own. She once bought three beaten-up My Little Ponies from the junk shop in the arcade, because she was afraid of what might happen to them if she didn’t. The ponies looked bloated, as if they had been inflated with a bicycle pump. Their previous owner had twisted their manes into dreadlocks. She paid £5 for the three.

“There’s nothing wrong with them,” she said. “Once I clean them up they’ll look almost new.” A week later, I saw the ponies displayed on the bookshelf in Angela’s bedroom. Angela had somehow managed to disentangle their manes. It must have taken her hours.

The junk shop was called Garston’s. Angela’s mother used to help out in Garston’s because she was friends with the owner. I used to wonder if Angela inherited her passion for junk from her mother, or whether it was just a coincidence. Scientists say it’s difficult to establish how much of our behaviour is acquired, and how much is pre-programmed. I might have discovered more on the subject if I had decided to study biology instead of switching to statistics, but perhaps that decision was pre-programmed, too.

The name of our town came up in a television music quiz once. Amethyst’s single ‘Moon Landing on Silas Street’ was in the charts for six weeks the summer it was released. People knew the song was about our town because Lorna Samways had said so in a TV interview. Amethyst were a folk-rock group, and their lead vocalist was born just down the road from us. The song made the town famous, at least for a while. Hardly anyone remembers them now.

Midnight at noon and the silent bells

St Andrew on the run to the sea

Life’s on fire and there’s no way home

Moon landing

Moon landing down on Silas Street

St Andrew’s is at the top of the town. Silas Street runs from just opposite the churchyard all the way down to the Nubia Pavilion on the seafront. The Nubia had been boarded up since before I could remember. Every other year squatters or yobs broke in and ended up having to be forcibly evicted. There was always some committee or other trying to raise the money to have it reopened but their plans never came to anything. There were all kinds of legends about the Nubia; that it was haunted, mainly, but people will say that about anywhere that’s dark and filthy and old. No one ever noticed anything special about Silas Street. Until the song came out, Silas Street was just an ordinary road.

* * *

“What do you think the words mean?” Angela said. “How can you have a moon landing when you’re not on the moon?”

Pop! magazine was featuring Lorna Samways as Diva of the Month. Angela was unpicking the staples that held the magazine together so she could remove the centre spread without it tearing.

“Lots of pop songs have nonsense lyrics,” I said. “They don’t have to mean anything.”

“Maybe they’re trying to say that Silas Street is like the moon somehow – empty and alien. Or that it seemed that way to Lorna.”

Lorna Samways had a plump moon face and a dimple in one cheek. Her voice was incredible. I went online recently and looked up some of the coverage. One reviewer compared her to the young Janis Joplin.

“She probably didn’t write the song herself,” I said. “Mostly they pay people.”

“Lorna writes all her own songs. She’s a poet as well as a singer.”

I used to like painting birds. I began by copying pictures from books, and progressed from there. I painted in watercolour, in a sketchbook I bought from the art supplies shop in the arcade. I found the paints in the living-room sideboard. I don’t know who they belonged to originally but no one seemed to mind when I took them over. I liked the way the watercolours seemed to blend with the paper but it was the birds themselves that interested me most. I know a lot of artists insist that painting isn’t about what you see but about the paint itself, the quality of line and brushstroke, the effects of colour and light. All I wanted to do was to make a record of the birds I saw. That the record turned out to be in paint was a matter of chance.

Angela would sometimes lie on the floor of my bedroom, turning the pages of the sketchbook as if it were a photo album.

“You could go abroad and paint more birds,” she said once. “Foreign ones. Like the artists who went on the Endeavour with Captain Cook.”

I laughed because what else would I do? There was no way I was going to admit that was exactly the kind of life I sometimes imagined for myself. In the end I was able to paint well enough to consider exhibiting, but by then I had given up on becoming an artist because there was no money in it. There was plenty of money in accountancy, and I had always been able to make sense of numbers without having to think.

Numbers seemed like the best chance I had of getting away.

I don’t remember if Angela’s obsession with aliens began with Amethyst or whether it started before that. What I do remember is that soon after Lorna Samways’s TV interview, Angela insisted we walk up Silas Street and have a proper look at it.

“She wrote about that road for a reason,” she said. “She wouldn’t have picked it at random.”

“She picked it because of how it sounds,” said Angela’s father. “It’s Silas, and Street – the two ‘s’s. That’s called alliteration.” Angela’s father was a taxi driver but he had trained as a teacher. He spoke with a northern accent. When I once asked Angela where her father was born she said she didn’t know. I thought that was odd but then so was Angela.

“How come you don’t know where your own father was born?” I said. “Aren’t you interested?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” said Angela. “He’s my dad, that’s all.”

The first time I met Angela’s father I was convinced I’d seen him before somewhere. Not that there was anything special about him. He was a small, wiry man with thinning hair and bad skin. Yet still there was that feeling of familiarity. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and had strange, almost colourless eyes. His eyes made me nervous, for some reason. Every time he looked at me I wanted to look away.

The idea of us going to have what Angela called a proper look at Silas Street was ridiculous of course, like going to have a proper look at your own living room. At the same time, I could see what she meant. It’s easy to stop noticing the things you see every day. The fact that someone had chosen to put Silas Street into a pop song had made it seem special and not only for Angela. Some people in the town hated ‘Moon Landing’ on principle because it brought in too many tourists but others said that Amethyst had made our home immortal. Comparisons were made with Penny Lane and Bourbon Street and Scarborough Fair and I realised then that these places would be as familiar and ordinary to the people that lived near them as Silas Street was to us.

The top end of Silas Street was broad and well-kept with neat grey kerbstones. Beside the churchyard was a small uneven area of stubbly grass that was sometimes called Silas Green and sometimes Church Green. There were bushes around the green and several trees, beech trees I think they were, lopsided and a bit stunted because of the harsh salt winds that blew up from the sea in winter. A narrow cobbled path ran between the green and the churchyard. In the black-and-white postcards of the town sold in the kiosks along the promenade you could see that at one time Silas Street had been cobbled from top to bottom. When the cobbles at the bottom end were replaced by tarmac I don’t know.

A short way downhill from the church the road became narrower with houses to either side. On the left were half a dozen or so terraced cottages. On the right was a row of slightly larger houses, several of which had been turned into shops – a chemist’s that also sold photo equipment and two antique shops. Of course Angela loved the antique shops. She would stand with her nose pressed against the window gazing in at some old teapot covered in roses or a silver cigarette case engraved in curly letters with the name Maria. She thought things like that were beautiful. I stood and looked with her sometimes but I couldn’t really see the attraction. I’ve never liked old things much. I can never seem to forget they belonged to people who are now dead.

Below the antique shops was a narrow passage called Whitsun Lane, which led off from Silas Street at a right angle, connecting it with Johns Road, where the doctor’s surgery was and the old town hall. Whitsun Lane was too narrow for cars – bollards had been installed at either end to stop them trying to use it. Downhill from Whitsun Lane, Silas Street became shabbier, almost run-down. There was a fish-and-chip shop called the Jolly Roger. One of the small panes of glass in the door to the Jolly Roger had been broken literally since before I was born. There was a square of mouldering hardboard in its place. The Jolly Roger’s yard always stank – something to do with the drains – although their food was excellent.

At the bottom end of Silas Street, where it came out on to Westwind Road by the Nubia Pavilion, there were a couple of larger houses that had been made into flats. These houses were white and well-kept, with hanging flower baskets and large plastic wheelie bins instead of dustbins, but between them and the Jolly Roger, Silas Street was a jumble of tatty three-storey Victorian terraces and breeze-block garages. One of the terraces had a sign outside that said Margaret’s B&B, but the downstairs windows had been boarded up and the gate was padlocked shut. Behind the garages was a dirty alleyway where boys sometimes kicked a football or threw stones at empty beer bottles they hauled out of the dustbins.

“It’s an ancient place,” said Angela. “You can see that.”

“Those garages aren’t old,” I said. “They’re just ugly.”

“But the ground under them is old. There was another road here before, look. I bet if we could get hold of an old map we could find out more.”

She pointed to the concrete at the side of the road and I saw she was right. Where parts of the tarmac had broken away, you could see the remains of a much older road surface, red bricks laid side by side in zigzags, like a parquet floor. I had been behind the garages a million times without ever noticing. Looking at the dirty old bricks gave me the same feeling I had from the stuff in the antique shops, the feeling that I was looking at something dead. It was strange, because I used to walk past St Andrew’s four or five times a week, often using the graveyard as a shortcut to Angela’s without thinking twice about it. Cemeteries and gravestones are at least open about what they’re there for. These other things – the old teapots and the herringbone brick – were like the things you might expect to find inside a haunted house.

* * *

Lorna Samways’s song wasn’t really about aliens or even the moon, at least not that I could see. If ‘Moon Landing’ was about anything at all it was probably a break-up song. Most pop songs are break-up songs but when I suggested that to Angela she said I was wrong.

“It’s not a pop song, for a start,” she said. “It’s a folk song. Folk songs are based on ancient myths and legends.”

“There’s hardly going to be an ancient myth or legend about aliens though, is there?”

“Aliens have been here for centuries. Some people believe humans evolved from aliens, not apes.”

“Something could definitely evolve from whatever’s in those dustbins,” I said. I was trying to lighten the mood but she refused to laugh. Amethyst had brought out their first album by then, Holy Grail. Angela knew all the lyrics by heart. She told me she was going to start writing songs of her own. I went with her to look for a notebook. We must have been into every shop in the arcade. We looked at dozens of notebooks but she refused to buy any of them.

“It’s important to get it right,” she said. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

It was around the time of the notebooks that Angela starting bringing home all those odd magazines, with stories of sightings of UFOs and alien abduction. Angela’s mother hated them.

“You’ll give yourself nightmares, reading rubbish like that,” she said. “At least take them upstairs to your room where I don’t have to look at them.” She lifted one of the magazines from the floor in the breakfast room, holding it by the corner like a soiled handkerchief. As she moved her hands, her rings caught the sunlight, throwing dancing rainbow patterns against the walls. Angela’s mother had beautiful rings, you couldn’t help looking at them. One had a large pink stone that Angela said was amethyst. I thought it was too pale to be amethyst, that it was probably just rose quartz, but I didn’t say anything to Angela. I noticed that Angela’s mother bit her nails.

“You don’t really believe in all that alien stuff, do you?” I asked her, later. I half read, half flicked through an article about a woman in Cromer on the North Norfolk coast. She claimed the manager of the guest house where she worked had been replaced by an alien impostor.

He looks the same and he sounds the same but there’s a smell about him, the woman insisted. Everyone who works here thinks the same but nobody will say. There was a grainy black-and-white photograph of the hotel manager coming out of a supermarket. He was balding and running to fat. He reminded me of the man who ran the pharmacy in the High Street.

“Not all of it,” said Angela. “But there are lots of things that can’t be explained, you have to admit that.”

“That doesn’t mean the explanation has to be aliens.”

“No,” Angela said. “But they might be.”

Then Angela had the idea that we should go to Silas Street after dark. Her mother wanted to put a stop to it but her father said there was nothing to worry about, that we were old enough to make our own decisions.

“I’m in and out of that area all the time, even on a weeknight,” he said. “I can make a detour and bring them home if there’s a problem.” Angela’s father sometimes brought in a casual driver to help cover the evenings during the summer months but mostly he preferred to work alone. When he was off duty he wore old cord trousers and baggy T-shirts but when he was driving he usually wore a shirt and jacket and sometimes a tie. I did wonder why he had given up teaching to become a taxi driver but I didn’t like to ask Angela about it and the truth never occurred to me. There are some things you don’t think about unless they happen to you.

* * *

It was a cold night. I pulled my sleeves down over my hands. We came to the end of Kennmore Terrace, then took the shortcut through the graveyard. The tower of St Andrew’s was bathed in moonlight, and I remember thinking I’d never seen the old stones look that way before, mysterious and powerful. Things always seem different at night.

“It’s beautiful,” said Angela. “Isn’t it?”

“I suppose,” I said. “I’m freezing.”

We turned into Silas Street and began walking down the hill. The air was sharp in my lungs, heavy with ice crystals. There was no one about. From further down the hill I could hear the sound of cars on Westwind Road, a chorus of wolf whistles from the youths who sometimes gathered around the bus shelter by the Nubia Pavilion. Lights had come on in some of the cottages, the lights of people sat in their living rooms, watching TV.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” I said.

“We’re not looking for anything,” said Angela. “We’re experiencing the atmosphere.”

I laughed, hoping she would laugh back, but then I saw she had been distracted by something in one of the antique shops. The shop was called Chalmers. They had a display of antique linen in the window: embroidered pillowcases and handkerchiefs, a Victorian nightdress edged with broderie anglaise.

“My mother had some like that,” Angela said. I assumed at first she was talking about the lace nightgown and I thought how unbearably creepy that would be, wearing clothing that had belonged to a dead person, especially a nightgown. Then I realised it wasn’t the linen she was looking at, but a bone china coffee cup that had been placed among the items of linen like a stage prop. The cup was cylindrical, decorated with a design of exotic birds and a narrow band of gold below the rim. The saucer had the same gold line running around the place where you put the cup. As I hunkered down to look at it more closely I saw the saucer was cracked.

“Does your mum collect old china, then?” I asked. I wasn’t that interested – in Angela’s mother or the china – but Angela appeared so fixated on the display window it seemed wrong to ignore her.

“Not really,” said Angela. “The cups are broken now anyway. She smashed them against the wall.” Angela placed her hand against the window, blocking out the cup. Her hand looked tiny, bluish-white, like a starfish that had been washed up on the beach. When she removed her hand from the glass you could still see the misted outlines of her fingers. I wondered if it was true, what she said. Angela’s mother wore long floating dresses made of Indian cotton. She always sounded slightly breathless when she answered the phone. I couldn’t imagine her as the kind of person who went in for smashing things.

“All mothers are mad,” she said then. “Have you noticed?”

Her eyes had a distant look, as if she was thinking about something else.

“Can we go back now?” I said. Her words had stunned me.

“Not yet,” she said. She seemed to come back to herself. “Not until we’ve been all the way down to the promenade.”

The Jolly Roger was closed. In summer it was open every day but during the off-season they seemed to shut up shop whenever they felt like it. The dingy concrete yard stank whatever time of year it was.

“There’s no one here,” Angela said.

“What did you expect?” I said. I couldn’t get her words about mad mothers out of my head. I had never spoken to her or to anyone about my mother’s dementia and all I could think was that she had found out somehow, that her words were some kind of taunt, though that wouldn’t have been like Angela at all.

She was trotting down the hill ahead of me and I remember thinking that her red woollen coat was the exact colour of Heinz tomato soup. She had worn the same coat for as long as I could remember and it was too small for her. I watched as she disappeared into the narrow passageway that cut through to behind the garages. By the time I reached the garage block, Angela had disappeared.

Most of the garages were made from breeze blocks, with up-and-over steel doors. Two were of the older kind, built from reddish brick and with wooden doors. One of them was padlocked shut but the other you could break into easily because one of the doors was hanging off its hinges. When I peered inside I could see what looked like piles of cardboard boxes and, propped against one wall, an old bike. I stood still and listened, rubbing my hands together to warm them and trying to work out where Angela had got to. There were security lights on everywhere but I was beginning to feel freaked out. The garage block was invisible from the main road, a great place for getting mugged or even worse. I wanted to call out for Angela but I was worried about who else might be creeping around there in the dark.

I went into the garage because there was nowhere else to look. There was a strong smell of creosote, and loads of other stuff besides the boxes: folding garden furniture, tea chests full of newspaper, rusty pitchforks and broken spades, the usual rubbish people store in garages. There was a moped beneath a tarpaulin but no Angela. At least that was what I thought. Then I heard the sound of someone breathing.

I flipped round immediately and saw the outline of a figure, standing over by the cardboard boxes. There was no time to be afraid, and it took me only a couple of seconds in any case to realise the figure was Angela. I could see her coat in the light from outside, her wavy hair, but the way she was standing – so still – made her seem unlike herself, not quite real.

I said her name and started towards her but still she didn’t move. I blew air into her face. I didn’t dare touch her. I thought she might shatter like glass. Suddenly she moaned, and then began to speak. Her voice was high and piping, the voice of a child.

“I know they’re here,” she said. “They won’t let me leave.”

I felt freezing right through to my skin. I stepped away from her and rested my hands on the shrouded moped. I felt icy water spreading across my palm.

“That’s nonsense,” I said. “There’s nothing here apart from all this junk.”

I turned back towards her, trying to face her down. Then I realised there was something else inside the garage after all, something that scuttled away from me out of the light. Hard air punched into my lungs and I almost ran for it but then I saw that the monster was only a cat, a scrawny-looking, long-limbed tabby. Its eyes were golden and it looked furious. When it saw me staring it arched and hissed. I managed a laugh. The animal darted away.

“That’s all you saw,” I said. “A stupid cat.” I took her arm.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “You’re cold.”

She put both arms around me, gripping me tightly as if she were drowning. All I could think was that if we’d really been in the sea we would both have gone down.

“I didn’t know what it would be like,” she said. “I never realised I would be so frightened.”

Her voice at least had gone back to normal. She was still hugging me but I could feel her body begin to relax. When I finally got her outside she looked up at the moon.

“It’s all still here,” she said. She let me go so suddenly I almost fell down.

“Aren’t you cold?” she added, and it was only then that I realised I had come out without my coat. I tugged the sleeves of my sweatshirt back down over my hands, huffed dragon’s breath through parted lips and watched the clouds of moisture escape into the dark. On Westwind Road a group of teenagers sat in a row on the steps of the Nubia Pavilion, smoking roll-ups. They ignored us totally. We started climbing back up the hill. We went the long way round this time, avoiding the cemetery. Eventually we reached the turning into Kennmore Terrace.

“Here we are, then,” I said. “I told you we wouldn’t find anything.”

“Could I stay round at yours tonight?” Angela said. She glanced at me quickly and then looked away. The unexpectedness of her question caught me off guard. Of course I wanted to say yes of course you can you muppet, to grab her by the hand, to drag her to safety, to sit up all night gabbling about aliens if that was what she wanted. But the gulf between the possible and the permitted seemed too wide to cross.

“Best not, really,” I said finally. I looked down at the ground. “My mother hasn’t been well, you see.” I felt ashamed, as if I’d betrayed her. It never occurred to me that I could confide in her, that I could explain. How different things might have been for both of us, if I had.

“Will you be OK?” I said instead. I could not stop thinking about the way her voice had changed, back there in the garage, her terror at nothing. Angela smiled and looked away down the road.

“Course,” she said. “I’m sorry about your mum.”

I walked with her as far as her house. There was a light on in the porch, and as we stood there saying goodbye, Angela’s father came out on to the step. He waved at me, but said nothing. Angela ran off up the garden path and then the two of them disappeared inside.

I remember thinking how nice it was, that her father was looking out for her, making sure she was safe.

My dad didn’t look out for me because he didn’t have time.

* * *

Angela was off school the next day. Her mother rang in and said she had a cold. After the weirdness in the garage I wasn’t surprised. She started being off a lot more after that though, until it reached the point where she was away from school more often than she was there. She began to get behind in her lessons. Angela changed towards me too. I should have been worried but instead I was angry. I felt she had abandoned me for some reason. It never occurred to me to wonder what was really going on.

In the end her absences grew so frequent that one of the teachers kept her behind after class and asked her how things were at home. No one talked about child abuse back then. These days they give teachers checklists of things to look out for: altered patterns of behaviour, increased absence, a drop in grades. Angela displayed all the classic signs – she was a walking textbook of signs – but even so it was more than a year before anything was said.

Angela’s father moved out of Kennmore Terrace for a while but he never faced charges. Angela was sent away to what was known as a residential educational facility for vulnerable teenagers. Special school was what they would have called it in the old days. The teachers said it was for her own protection, but it seemed more like a cover-up, even at the time. I had no idea what was about to happen until after everything had been decided because by then there was hardly a day when she wasn’t off school.

I remember I saw Angela’s mother once, coming out of the headmistress’s office carrying a pile of textbooks and a stack of coloured folders. Her head was lowered over the books and a strand of hair hung into her eyes. Her hair was blond, wavy like Angela’s but lighter in colour. I don’t know if she saw me. I turned away before she could catch my eye.

A couple of months after she started at Raymont, Angela sent me a postcard, sealed in an envelope. The envelope had been franked, not stamped, as if somebody had posted it for her. The postcard was of Lorna Samways, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans with her guitar resting in her lap. The guitar was black, a twelve-string acoustic flatback, her trademark instrument. I remember Angela had got the postcards by sending off a coupon from one of her music magazines. The back of the postcard was covered in Angela’s writing, so familiar and yet at the same time completely strange. She went on and on about her new school, happenings and people and sayings I had never heard of. I felt I was reading a letter from an alien planet.

There was no return address, but I wrote a letter anyway and addressed it to Angela at simply ‘Raymont’, and the name of the town. I put a card in with the letter, a postcard I bought in the arcade, with seagulls on it. I wasn’t sure what to put in the letter so I told Angela I’d decided to drop my biology and art A levels and do computer science and maths instead. I waited and hoped for a reply but it was more than two years before I heard from her again.

* * *

I happened to see a TV interview with Lorna Samways a couple of years ago. Amethyst had broken up more than a decade before but Lorna Samways was still performing, still writing songs. She’s known mostly as a folk musician now, which is what she always was, I suppose. The interviewer asked her how her old band got its name and was it true that she had violet-coloured eyes. Lorna Samways laughed. She sounded carefree and natural, and seemed barely to have aged since her Pop! years.

“People always ask me that,” she said. “But my eyes are actually blue. Amethyst is my birthstone. My birthday’s in February. I’m a Pisces.”

She added that amethyst was said to be a protection against drunkenness, and that the stone was named after a woman in one of the Greek myths, who was changed into a pillar of quartz by the goddess Diana, to save her from being eaten by tigers. The god Bacchus had poured wine over the quartz and stained it purple, for some reason. “My song ‘Cup of Roses’ is based on that story,” she said. Samways was going to sing ‘Cup of Roses’ live in the studio but I switched off while she was tuning up. She still had her trademark twelve-stringed guitar. I realised I couldn’t bear to hear her play.

When the interviewer asked her what it had been like to have a Top Ten single at the age of nineteen, Lorna Samways laughed again.

“I never thought about it like that,” she said. “I just wanted to write songs. What happened afterwards was lucky because it meant I could write more songs without having to worry about where the money was going to come from. But the important thing for me has always been the songs.”

I wondered if the interviewer would ask her about the town she grew up in but he didn’t. He probably thought Silas Street was an invention, a place name Lorna Samways had made up. After switching off the television I looked up ‘amethyst’ on the internet. There were hundreds of links, for both the semi-precious stone and the band. I discovered that as well as being a charm against drunkenness, amethyst could also temper evil spirits, help to overcome addiction and stabilise mental illness. Amethyst was the touchstone for sincerity, a protection against poisoners and thieves.

* * *

I couldn’t find my coat anywhere. I thought I’d maybe left it at school but it wasn’t there either. I had to wear my mother’s old coat instead, a button-up woollen thing with a herringbone pattern, a garment I hated because it was ancient and because it was hers.

When I went back to the garage block a couple of months later I told myself I had gone to look for my parka, but I think I knew already that it wouldn’t be there. God knows what happened to it. I don’t know why I went back to the garages, other than that I missed Angela. I suppose I thought it would be something to tell her about, later, once we were together again. No one had thought to tell me she wouldn’t be coming back, that she would be staying on at Raymont until she finished school.

It was a foul evening, windy and wet. I hadn’t thought to bring an umbrella. The ghastly herringbone coat flapped damply against the backs of my knees. The broken tarmac was slicked with oil, making rainbows beneath the security lights. Rain dripped from the guttering. As I stepped between the puddles I noticed the door with the broken hinge was wide open, held in place with half a breeze block. The garage itself had been cleared out – the boxes and tea chests, the moped, all of it gone. My parka was gone too, if it had ever been there, which it hadn’t. No sign of the cat.

I folded my arms across my chest. It was cold in the garage, much colder than I remembered. There was a deep crack in the concrete floor, running the length of the garage and down between my feet. I didn’t remember it being there before. A large black beetle emerged from a gap in the wall and began its painstaking journey across the concrete desert. When it reached the crack it seemed to hesitate for a second before toppling in. I stepped forward, trying to see where the insect had gone, but it had disappeared.

I shivered. I had no idea what Angela had sensed when she was in the garage, what she thought she had seen, ...