Читать книгу Entanglement - Katy Mahood, Katy Mahood - Страница 9

4 August 1977

At first she thinks it is a cloud, or smoke. But its undulations are too regular, too melodic. As the train closes the distance, the movements become more granular, a lace-like pattern of dark and sky, curving rhythmically in waves and turns above the countryside, and Stella sees it is a group of fast-flying birds. Wingtips almost touching, they move in perfect motion, against the evening sky.

Murmuration. There is magic to it, this seamless dance of small birds weaving a form that exists only in their togetherness. The tree on the horizon, the church, the hill: these things stand still as time moves around them. But this is something more; a new dimension forged in time and motion.

The train arrives. From above, the arches of the roof of Paddington Station curve and roll, ripple marks made by the tide of progress. The concourse teems with life, eddying across the mica-flecked floor. A fresh flood flows from a newly halted train and somewhere within the throng is Stella, returned early from her summer break. She struggles with a heavy bag, nervous for the tiny life pulsing within her, a secret that at this moment is hers alone. In the summer heat the station air is hazy. Specks of smut rise and glisten, and she looks for the face of the man who will meet her, but for now sees only the fuzz of people and particles pushed by the waves of warm air and urgency.

And then, there he is. He moves stop-start through the throb of the crowd, long limbs that don’t quite know where to be, long hair falling in his face. John is thinking, she can see, not at that moment of her, but a thought scored through with formulae that could unlock this tangle of bodies, noise and motion. He lifts his head, eyes narrow in the glare of the dipping sun, and sees her silhouette with its halo of gold-lit hair, her shoulders stooped beneath the heavy bag. And though he knows the physical impossibility of it, time for him is suddenly slowed, revealing gaps he’d not discerned before, through which he moves to claim this fresh-skinned girl. They press together and the world around them speeds up once more, gusting fumes and breath and microscopic fragments of life, up, up and into the spiralling dance overhead.