Solstice

He coughed and said, 'Did I come into the wrong room or something?'

'No,' she said, turning round, half-smiling at him. 'The door was open, so I used it.'

'So I see.'

'I've been drinking your vodka.'

'Permission granted. Don't be offended if I don't join the party.'

He went over to the balcony. She'd changed. She was wearing a thin red shirt, old and weathered, and cheap jeans cut off at the knee. Her hair was wet from the shower. She could have been sixteen, he thought, if you didn't look too close. Her face was naked, shorn of expression.

'I couldn't sleep,' she said. 'Not right away. And there's nothing for either of us to do until the Shuttle finds something.'

'And Annie?'

'Like a log. Do any children suffer from insomnia?'

'You're asking me?'

'Yes.'

'I don't think so. They tend to accept things for what they are. You need to grow up a little in order to fool yourself you make a difference.'

She looked at him, and she wasn't a kid just then, he thought. She had all that knowledge and intuition inside her that women seemed to possess just when you hoped they were looking the other way. 'All that easy cynicism, Michael. Is that really you?'

He gulped at the water, and wondered about the vodka before pushing away the thought. 'Sometimes.'

'You should have had kids, Michael. You're good with them. You can talk to them like a grown-up and on their own level too. That's a gift. I can feel Annie coming out of her shell a little more every time we meet'

'Why's she in that shell, Mo?'

'Jesus.' She gulped at the drink. 'We don't take the long way round to questions these days, any of us.'

'Blame it on the weather. It shines right through everything.'

'Not quite. Annie's like that because of me. Is that what you want to hear?'

'No. Because I don't really believe it. We all get sidetracked in our lives sometimes. Me more than most. There are times when you should blame yourself. And times when you have to accept that some days it just rains. None of us controls as much as we like to think.'

'No,' she said. 'Maybe not. But I'm grateful for the way you talk to Annie. Like she's real. Not some ornament around here. Can't we leave it at that?'

He pulled up a chair, planted it next to hers on the balcony, looked at the sky, and felt like a jerk. She was scared and he should have known that, would have known too if all the right parts inside him had been working as they should.

What scared her were the Northern Lights that stood above them, rolling and dancing, ageless, formless. There were reasons for this exhibition. They stood at the back of his imagination, hard and cold and factual, reasons that talked of all those extra protons and electrons that the sun had emitted colliding with the upper atmosphere of the earth, racing toward the magnetic poles and giving off their mutual energy in this psychedelic panorama that took your breath away, made you feel small and powerless beneath its vastness. But reasons belonged in the plain, all-seeing light of day. Sometimes they never followed you into the dark, unfamiliar rooms where you needed them.

This was the biggest Aurora he had ever seen, at any latitude. It flowed like a continuous greenish blue curtain to the north of them, its lower hem a fringe of violent ruby red.

Inside, the fabric seemed to be alive, seemed to move and pulse and breathe.

They stared at the lights, so bright they made the stars in the south invisible in the radiant night sky. She was shivering, he could see that, and it wasn't that she was cold.

'Take it easy, Mo. It's no big deal.'

The usual night noises were oddly absent, with few bird calls, only a gentle rustle of hot air across the dry grass. And beneath it all, like some distant, mystical orchestra, the sound of the lights. A gentle fizzing and crackling that was like static, the rustling of electricity.

She reached up, covered her ears, trying to stifle this sound from the sky. 'I don't want to listen, Michael. I can't stand the thought of being underneath all this. Not being able to hide.'

'You don't need to hide. This isn't Charley. This is natural. Being afraid of this is like lying awake at night worrying someone is going to turn off the gravity and send us all cartwheeling off into space. Even if that were a possibility, fretting over it would be pointless.'

She watched the green electric curtain pulsing, alive, above them, and said, 'You know these things. They make sense to you. All I see is… insanity.'

'No. You see change. The world changes. We get used to thinking that we control those changes but that's an illusion. It's always been changing. It's not what we have to be frightened of. It's what's inside ourselves when we realize how tiny we are against all this.'

Did this reassure her? He thought there was no way to tell. She kept something tight and close and private inside her, something that rarely saw the light of day.

'You're scared for Annie,' he said. 'You needn't be. It's people in the cities that need to be scared. When things break down, people damage each other. Charley knows that. She's not going to bother with us any more. We're too small.'

'I'm scared for all of us. The world scares me. Michael…'

Gently, gingerly, she put her arms around his neck, cradled her face against his skin. She was warm. There was moisture there. A dim memory, he thought: It was a long time since a woman had cried against him. A dim memory.

'What happened today-'

'Shhhh…' He put a finger against her lips, felt the warm, dry skin. 'What happened today is in the past. We got out of there. We survived. We will survive.'

She moved her face closer against him; he felt the hard, damp sharpness of her teeth on his neck, her fingers running through the back of his hair. Mo Sinclair kissed his cheek, pulled back, and he found himself staring into her strained, expressionless face.

'Michael,' she said, 'I can't be alone just now. I can't be.'

Something like electricity ran between them, mirroring the fire in the sky.

'This isn't a good idea,' he said, and she was rising already, back into the room, taking off her shirt, walking over to the bed. She was wearing nothing beneath the old red fabric. Her breasts stood small and taut against her thin, straight chest.

'We don't have time for ideas. Don't think, Michael. Feel.'

He took one more gulp of the water, tried to force some sense into his head, looked at the sky, and decided this was futile. 'You sound like me,' he said, out over the balcony to no one but the dancing, raging sky. 'You sound just like the old part of me, not my favourite part.'

Something clicked inside his head. Something that gave no way back. He rose from the chair and started to remove his shirt, his jeans. She was in the bed now, beneath the single sheet, her body just visible through its flimsiness, her face stained by the green light coming in through the open windows. She held out her hand. Pleading, Lieberman thought, and something now slumbering inside him asked: Why?

He sat on the side of the bed and pulled back the sheet, down to her breasts, staring at the dark, small nipples, soft as he touched them, not stiffening. He pulled the fabric down farther, revealing the long slender body, the colour of fading copper, too tanned, a triangle of dark hair.

'Don't think,' she said, and reached for him, felt the developing stiffness at his groin. 'Please.'

He let his head break free of this baggage of adulthood, shrugged off the last of his clothes, and climbed on the bed, touched the gentle rise of her stomach, bent down, licked her navel, felt the taut, tight lines of her stomach, her thatch, the damp, inviting sweetness it concealed, kissed her hard, hand raising now, into her long, dry hair, eyes closed (not in the green light, not in the green light), felt her legs submit, moved, was above her, inside her, gently shifting, rocking, probing, feeling.