Amur

Warm light bled through the window as the sun wended its way west from its halfnoon azimuth. Mike peered up through the blinds. Birds took off from the eaves as a tile skittered from the roof and shattered below. Diane sat on the sofa drinking from a cup of tea. A long crack ran down the side of the porcelain, right through the second l of Longleat. They were the Hunters, married four years to the day.
In the room the clock was ticking. Outside stars were dying, dense enough to burn helium to carbon, no longer able to heat their own cores against gravity. Mike sat on the spiral arms of the sofa. Diane lifted her knees up under her. They heard the rotary whir of a helicopter somewhere above them. The aerial shot it recorded fed through to their television and showed the chaos at the Sandown Zoo. Pillboxes, enclosures, habitats, aviaries, and mock temples were all cordoned off, men in overalls strafing amongst the buildings with catchpoles and snares. A rolling ticker scrolled along the bottom of the screen under the heading: Zoo escape.
Their fingers nearly touched when Mike handed over a coaster. A sound outside brought him to the window again. The street was quiet; no children, no prowling cats, no gardeners or carwashers. A vapour trail spoored in the sky and a cumulus cloud in the shape of a horsehead. Beyond that, unilluminated, Ursas Major and Minor rode the pole along the line at infinity.
A marked car crawled past, visored policemen leaning out of the windows with their tranquiliser guns. The family opposite tentatively stepped out onto their front lawn and watched it go by, standing like refugees in their nightwear. Next door a child peered from an upstairs window holding a toy gun.
In the kitchen Mike put his hand to the side of the kettle. The water wasn’t hot enough anymore and he put it on to boil again. A commemorative plate from their wedding day hung to one side of the smoke alarm, just above the door. It showed two tigers circling one another, their striped tails entwined in the shape of a heart.
In the garden Diane put her hand to the side of the woodcrete nestbox. There were no birds inside. Three bags of unopened fertiliser stood up against the shed. When she lifted one the grass beneath was straw-coloured and crawling with woodlice.
Mike called her in urgently from the patio door, scanning along the back wall of the house.
‘I just wanted to check the nestbox,’ she shouted back.

We went over to Bath one weekend. I had to give a lecture at the university and you had family in Southdown. The hotel was awful; breakfast came in a bag they attached to the handle of the door. You sat on the bed in a dressing gown, eating cereal with a plastic spoon. You were writing a book on arachnology. I told you about the Tarantula Nebula, how its luminosity was so great that if it had a similar proximity to Earth as the Orion Nebula, it would cast shadows. You stopped chewing, one hand resting fashionably in the air. I took it and we said goodbye.
All the lights were off in the lecture theatre and the projector played images of forming nebulae, neutron stars, white dwarves, red dwarves, degenerative matter, things falling apart, collapsing in on themselves. I thought of you – the way you’d been that morning on the bed, doe-eyed and tiny inside your bathrobe – and how you collected all the light of the room, drew it in, all that mass and radiance, burning up.
On the Sunday we went over to Longleat and drove through the Safari Park. You liked the flamingos. You wondered what was stopping them from flying away and I said that their wings were probably clipped. We got to the monkey jungle and you screamed and laughed when the macaques hopped on our bonnet and stole the aerial. We saw lions lying in Lion Country, timber-wolves in Wolf Wood, hippos and sea-lions basking at Half-Mile Lake, but there was no sign of the Amur tigers when, late in the day, we rolled slowly through their territory. We sat there in the afterglow, the light dying. You said they were probably asleep so we just drove back to the hotel.

The sun was falling across a midden of houses and out to the Solent. Satellite uplink trucks and microwave vans passed through the street on their way to Sandown, their dishes and antennae tagged with three-word acronyms. Diane watched the television, a cushion on her lap. Mike moved to the wood-display cabinet. Diane’s books were arranged along the shelves, monographs she’d written on dipterology, myrmecology, coleopterology, vespology.
Mike selected one of the books and read the back of it. When he replaced it the joists sprang from their brackets and the shelf collapsed, books clattering to the floor.
Diane turned from the television. She was about to open her mouth when the screen zipped to a single line of static and the lights went out. The hydronic boiler gave out, waterpipes knelling and radiators losing heat, until the whole house could be heard coming to a gradual stop in the faucets, flanges, and copper pipes. Digital clocks died and the kitchen wound down to a semi-perceptible hum, appliances rattling back into a state of lifelessness.

I met you at the Beach Bar in Freshwater. We were introduced by mutual friends. I told you I was an entomologist, and that meant I studied insects, but you stopped me halfway through and told me you knew what an entomologist was. I thought you were rude. You had recently moved to the island and you told me later on that you were bad meeting new people, you always had your guard up. But as you drank you opened up and you smiled with your eyes not your mouth, which was thin and colourless. You told me that you were born with a full set of teeth and that when you were a teenager you had to have some of them taken out because there were too many in your mouth. It took you time to free yourself to me, that was all.
We went outside. The sea was black, the moon lambent on it like a great ball. We could see the chairlift suspended between the park and the beach, the little seats rocking slightly in the breeze. Waves crashed against the Needles and the lighthouse beyond, the light from the electric lamp stroboscopic on the sea. You took my hand in yours and drew out the constellations in the sky, naming them for me. But I wasn’t listening, and the waves kept coming, and all I could think about was how small your hand was.

They kept their candles in an old Quality Street tin that had once contained leftovers from their wedding cake. Some crumbs had remained in the circular groove. Mike pulled out six red sticks and a cheap wooden candle-holder in the shape of a menorah. It was still the afternoon but the lounge backed out on to the garden where large fir trees crowded over the windows and kept out the light. He lit the candles with matches and moved the menorah over to the coffee-table. On the way one went out and he had to light it again.
Diane hugged the cushion. In the dimness she looked uniformed in one solid mass, no separation of space visible between fingers or limbs. A spider stalked out from beneath the sofa, body suspended on spindled legs, and tested the hardwood floor with a measured octave tread. Melted wax dripped down the candles and solidified. She looked at Mike where he stood by the window.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing. Just looking.’
‘Can you see anything?’
‘The stars are coming out. Cygnus, the swan, and Sagitta.’
‘I meant can you see anything from the zoo?’
A car pulled up in the drive opposite. Nothing happened for a moment. Then the tail-lights went out. Mike saw a figure emerge suddenly from the driver’s seat, slam his car door shut, and bolt for the house.
Diane started humming a tune; Saint-Saens, The Carnival of the Animals. The spider scuttled from the room. Mike took a deep breath then followed it. In the corners of the ceiling there were deposits of scum where damp was coming through.

We got married late in September. The church was so small the pews were on top of us. You wore a fascinator studded with miniature insects. I watched you walk down the aisle with your father. I wanted to wear my father’s wedding ring but it was too big so we had it cut. When you put it on my finger I noticed a black line where the metal had been soldered.
We honeymooned in Bali and then Guam. You said that we were always on an island. We signed our names in the sand with cane switches. You spent the afternoons on your own, khaki-clad and in cleated boots, tramping through fields of mangosteen and jackfruit and through the cashcrop groves where you could observe the rhinoceros bettle and the unicorn mantis.
In the evenings we sat out on the balcony and listened to the cicadas and the grasshoppers. I was writing an article on the Crab Nebula. I told you about it; how, although it was only ten miles across, the pulsar at its core released bursts of energy that shone 75,000 times more brightly than the sun. I told you how we were made from the same particles, how every atom in our bodies was billions of years old, forged in exploding stars, blasted across space. I told you we were stardust.
We were in Guam during the dry season; the air was close and moistureless. We stood in silence at the rails of our balcony and watched the wildfire running like dorsals across the grassland and barrens. The night was completely black except for the fire and we watched it every night, not talking, just following it across the horizon where it blazed without sound.

Diane walked through the house barefoot, a candle in her hand. The streetlights had not come on yet and the darkness outside was total. The stairs creaked as she climbed them. Mike was in the bed, his back to the door. His Celestron telescope steered up into the skylight.
‘Mike, listen to me,’ she said. ‘This is important. Are you awake?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think we should keep this reservation. It’s our anniversary and I think we ought to keep it.’
Mike put another pillow behind his head. ‘The restaurant will be closed.’
‘It isn’t. I rang.’
‘You rang?’
‘Yes.’
‘You rang the restaurant?’
‘Yes.’
Mike sat up on the edge of the bed and rubbed his eyes, letting air out through his nose. ‘They said on the radio no one should leave their house.’
Diane shrugged and went over to the skylight. The sickle of the moon touched a star at both points like something on the front of a nation’s flag. ‘It’s damp here,’ she said.
‘Water gets in somehow. I think there’s a crack in the glass.’

We pollarded one of the trees in the garden and I made a nestbox for the birds. You stood by the patio door and watched me treat the softwood with Sadolin. You showed me how to attach the lid with a strip of inner tubing from a bicycle tyre. In the evenings we sat outside and waited for the birds but they didn’t come. I went inside when it gold cold but you always stayed out on your own, waiting for the stars.
Towards the end of summer, after we’d still seen no birds, I went and opened up the nestbox to have a look. Inside, roughly about the size of a grapefruit, was a wasp-nest. One side of the box was violently alive with colour and wings, a kind of collected movement that looked like the body of one single organism. They were swarming over the body of a large garden spider, its swollen abdomen carried along the colony, legs pressed as if in prayer.
I didn’t make the next one; we bought it from the RSPB. It was different, better. It looked like a real house. No splits or rimes. It was symmetrical, uniform, durable. You said it looked like it would last and I agreed with you.

Mike pulled the car slowly out of the drive. Faces appeared at windows as they drove to the end of the road. The roads were quiet; the odd police car or RSPCA van crept past in the opposite direction, windows wound down, torch-beams sifting through roadside bracken and thickets. They passed one van mounted on the kerb, two men in overalls swinging nets like trawlermen through the treelimbs.
‘Take a left here,’ Diane said.
Forty degrees above the horizon Sirius blazed away and to the east, in almost-perfect solar opposition, sat Jupiter. Diane changed to another station, her head resting against the window. Mould and fungi ran up the gearstick in green and white down where rain had leaked through the sunroof.
They took another left and came out on a rutted country road.
‘Are you sure you know where this place is?’
‘Just slow down, okay?’
The road stretched before them, fields laid out either side. Trees loomed over the car, willow branches and osiers shattering under the tyres, and the stars disappeared. Leaves drifted slowly to the ground.
‘Mike, slow down.’
Mike switched to his full-beams. Little hawkmoths rose in the refraction of the bulbs and dashed themselves against the windshield. He manoeuvred round a cairn of stones lying in the path, one hand on the gearstick. Diane was about to grab it when something huge and catlike exploded from the side of the road, bounding over the embankment, burning bright. They caught it mid-pose, contre-jour in the headlamps. Black painted stripes and immortal eyes. Sad stony pupils in whose inlay Mike and Diane saw themselves briefly, arms raised and mouths open, like figures caught in an act of infidelity. One side of the body had reared up in anticipation of the impact, the spangled tail bighting in the shape of half a heart. There was a shared understanding of the inevitability of the situation, a recognition, as though all three had previously met, and then it disappeared under the bonnet of the car.

We had just moved house. I watched you from the bedroom window. You stood on the pavement watching children playing with plastic guns in the street. I heard the low rumble of the removal truck ebbing away down the road. I went downstairs, moved past the white goods in the hallway, and joined you. You weren’t wearing shoes and your toes curled over the kerb. Very lightly I put the palm of my hand on your shoulder.