Blue and white ribbons swept around the cockpit. Aster squinted, trying to decipher what she saw. The greens squares below must be fields, she reminded herself. The cows she’d seen at ground level now resembled clots of chalk and charcoal against green and brown scribbles that were almost definitely hedgerows.
Her breathing was an ocean rushing in; rushing out. With effort, Aster managed to slow its tide. She examined the pale clumps sitting to the south and west, reminding herself that however solid they seemed they were only clouds – wisps of suspended water droplets, not obstacles to worry about.
“All good?” asked the pilot seated behind.
“All good,” she agreed.
*
The email was addressed to Clary as well as Aster. In it, their mother announced she’d entered a church raffle and won the star prize. It’s for a glider trip!! LAUGHING FACE. If either of you fancies it, let me know.
Aster read the email twice before replying. “I’d love it, thanks! If that’s ok with you, Clary?”
A message appeared from her younger sister. “Impossible to get a day without the kids anyway. So, go ahead, A. Assuming you can get to the airfield!?”
Aster stared at her screen, trying to read any antagonism between the lines, and typed back: “Will find a way, C. Ta.”
In the pub with her colleagues, she shared the story of her mum’s win. “Poor Mum – her own height gives her vertigo!” Aster was proud of the parachute and bungee jumps she’d done for St Mungos and other charities. “At least it’s more exciting than a bake sale,” she said.
“Only for you.” Vina raised her pint in mock salute. “You enjoy the ego boost of risking your life, but we don’t even get a sugar rush.”
Aster grinned. “Just doing my bit for your arteries. You’re welcome.” She clinked her glass to Vina’s. Vina’s nails glinted with blue and silver-speckled polish, reminding Aster fleetingly of a pendant her mum used to wear. “Might have to forfeit this one, mind you. It goes from an airfield in deepest, greenest Gloucestershire, and you know I don’t drive.”
“Why not?” asked Milly, a newbie data analyst who seemed too young to have a driving license herself. Aster tried to take in the girl’s sleek brunette bob and peachy skin. Nope, too generic, it wasn’t going to stick.
“I have a condition called visual agnosia. It means my brain doesn’t always understand what I see,” Aster said, reeling out the explanation she always used.
When she pictured the words ‘visual agnosia’, they glowed a vivid blue like Mum’s pendant on the hallway carpet, a drop of sky that had cratered through the middle of her life, creating a before and after.
“What does that mean?” Milly frowned.
“You never seen a coat hanging from a peg and thought for a sec someone stood there?” Vina asked.
“Oh, sure. But that’s normal, isn’t it?”
“Totally,” Aster agreed. “For me it happens more often and more intensely. I sometimes have trouble recognising people. Cars look like big blobs and it’s hard to know if they’re parked or moving. So…”
“Of course you can’t drive.” Milly patted her arm sympathetically. “That would be nuts.”
Aster resisted the instinct to slap her hand away.
“You should have seen her the day she got the diagnosis.” Vina chuckled. “We were a couple back then, and she came out of that doc’s appointment like a kid with a new toy.”
“I was relieved,” Aster excused herself, grinning at Vina. “You can’t imagine what it’s like to constantly second-guess what you see and not know why.”
“Sure, but I know how it is to be dancing in a club with your woman and watch her grab a stranger’s hand,” Vina said. “That girl thought she’d got lucky!”
“It was dark. You were both wearing glasses.” Aster laughed. She didn’t mention the detail that convinced her – broad shoulders held high like Vina’s, as though poised to fight or embrace anyone within range.
Aster herself tended towards flight – always prepared to run from the bewildering world.
When she was a kid, her father described her as seeing with her heart instead of her head. “Tell me what you see, sweetheart,” he’d say, and she’d list the colours and shapes in front of her. He’d tap her sternum. “That’s what you see in here. Now, concentrate, how about here?” And he’d knock his knuckle against her temple.
She did her best to find the answer that would ease his impatient frown.
After he headed off to the pub, presumably to drown his disappointment in her, Aster’s sister Clary squeezed her hand and whispered: “You see with your heart, but he sees with his gut and I reckon he’s got chronic irritable bowel syndrome.”
Yet Clary was the one who met their dad for occasional coffees now and said he seemed better than he had in years.
Aster recalled arguments seeping up through the floor after she and her sister were packed off to bed: rumbles from Dad; shrill murmurs from Mum. Sometimes there’d be a clatter or a yelp, and then a silence Aster strained to hear past like someone struggling to see through smoke.
Clary’s taps on the thin wall between their rooms were a comfort. Tap tap tap, tap tap tap. Three taps, four times – one for each fingernail, Aster guessed. Tap tap tap, tap tap tap. She returned the code that meant, in her head at least: I’m ok, you’re ok, Mum’s ok, Dad’s stupid…
Even twenty-five years on, Aster sometimes woke at night thinking she heard her sister’s tapping.
Clary devised her own version of their dad’s challenges to entertain the local kids.
“My sister’s got heart-sight, instead of head-sight, like you and me,” Clary told the shuffling audience. “Watch this.” And she’d line up objects on the grass. “Aster, pick up the apple.” They’d gape as Aster tried to interpret which was which, searching for clues. Not one of the curved forms matched the apple in her picture book, with a stalk and perfect leaf. As shame burned her insides, she learned to turn it into a performance, reaching a wavering hand towards one option, then another. Slowly, aware of breath held all around her, she folded herself until her nose nearly touched the smooth round rubber ball, the shiny glass apple ornament from the hall table, and the real apple, with its lightly textured skin and subtle sweet smell, which she lifted at last with a gesture of such triumph their audience couldn’t help but cheer.
Clary’s show trained Aster to notice subtle differences such as texture and sheen that made it less likely she’d choose the ball by mistake. Her skills served her well at school as well, heightening her ability to ace tests and, later, a BSc Mathematics degree.
The day Dad was subtracted from their family, a smell of toast snagged her attention when she and Clary came home from school. She stood sniffing the air and trying to make sense of the laundry upended at the bottom of the stairs. A spot of sky or water glimmered beside the heap, so out of place the hairs rose on her arms. As she stared, the drop reshaped itself into their mother’s pendant.
“Mum!” Clary jostled past and knelt to check for a pulse as they’d been taught at Brownies, yelping to Aster to phone an ambulance. But Aster was stuck in the doorway while her brain shrieked in protest at what she could now see. She yearned to leap back from head-sight to heart-sight, to the innocent tangle of clothes, and stop seeing Mum’s bleeding face.
“OK, love?” Vina asked, returning her to the present.
Aster nodded. “Gotta go. Getting morose.”
Vina walked her to the bus stop. “I should call you an Uber.”
“No need. The bus stops right outside my house.”
Vina leaned close, exhaling the freshness of menthol chewing gum. “I’ll drive you to the airfield on the big day, no worries.”
Aster repressed the urge to bark that she didn’t need Vina’s help. The bus arrived, doors hissing open. “That would be great, Vina,” she muttered as she boarded.
She showed her pass to the driver and sat down, waving at a figure she hoped was Vina, although through the smeared window she could no longer be sure.
Vina had lived in England’s West Country for five years, but the climbing lilt of her New Zealand accent still melted Aster’s heart.
When they were girlfriends, Vina often insisted they head out to the nearby Cotswolds. She strode up hills with a gusto that left Aster breathless, before halting with a loud sigh as though the view quenched a deep thirst.
“What can you see?” Aster tentatively asked.
“Trees,” Vina said, and smiled, acknowledging Aster’s need for specifics. “Beech trees with oval, tapering leaves, and wych elm – that’s similar but has two little devil horns. Fields of wheat shining silver and green as the wind goes through it. Roads wriggling in the distance like shoelaces. And a sky more grey than blue, like yesterday and tomorrow.” She squeezed Aster’s hand. “And you? What d’you see?”
Aster shrugged, trying her hardest “A green rectangle, with shimmers of blue in it.”
“That’s a wheat field,” Vina said.
“And clumps of brown and green all the way round. Hedges?”
“That’s right!”
Vina’s approval made Aster’s chest constrict. The unearned praise was too close to the pitying awe of Clary’s audience all those years ago.
Following Aster’s diagnosis Vina was a touch too considerate. Aster didn’t want to be a girlfriend Vina needed to be careful around, and it was enough to break them apart.
Six months on, Aster wondered if she’d been too hasty.
Vina suggested Aster stay at her place the night before the glider flight. “I’m not far from the airfield,” she said. “And we’ve got to be there early. Makes sense, yeah?”
Aster agreed and packed a small bag that wouldn’t prompt gossip in the office.
“Tomorrow’s your flight, isn’t it?” Milly asked at the coffee machine, tucking sleek brown hair behind a pink ear. Aster glanced at the girl’s wrist, checking for the pattern of freckles she’d memorised.
“Yeah, bright and early!” Aster echoed Milly’s upbeat tone, ignoring the tension twisting her stomach. It reminded her of how she felt the day of the burnt toast and the sky-blue pendant, and whenever she thought of her dad. She wondered if that was why she pursued so many risky activities – to lessen the twist by adding a burst of thrill.
At Vina’s place, Aster bounced the idea of reconnecting with her dad around her mind. She asked her heart and then her head, searching for the answer to the question: Reconcile with Dad?
Her heart clenched and she felt her skin tighten. No. Never.
Her head shook on her neck, adamant. No. Maybe one day, but not yet.
“You ok?” Vina asked, sitting beside her on a hand-me-down couch. It sagged in the middle, toppling them gently together. Vina’s thigh was warm against Aster’s. “I’ve never known you so quiet.”
“Guess I’m nervous about tomorrow.” Aster put her head on Vina’s shoulder, wondering how to make it clear she’d welcome a kiss.
A text arrived from Clary as Vina drove Aster towards the airfield. Come over 2nite + tell me what I missed? I’ll cook.
A groan escaped Aster’s throat.
“Not going to chunder, are you?” Vina asked.
“Na. Just… My sister wants me to go to hers tonight.”
“My sister’s eighteen thousand kilometers away.” Vina rolled her beautiful shoulders, tilting her head from side to side as she drove. “I’d kill to be able to pop over for an evening.”
Aster’s heart thudded in her chest. “I know, I…” She made herself say it. “I wanted to spend tonight with you.”
“We’ve got tomorrow. And the day after.” Vina hesitated, an uncharacteristically shy smile curling the corners of her lips. “And the day after too, if you like.”
Grinning at Vina, Aster responded to Clary’s text: I’ll bring wine. Could do with some for courage now.
Clary replied SMILEY FACE xx You’ll be fine, my brave bold sis. See you later.
The airfield was a wide greenish space ahead.
A long, tapered object bisected the field like a giant ballpoint pen. The glider, Aster decided. Beside it, a stack of boxes extended an arm and waved, reconfiguring as the pilot.
Brave and bold, she reminded herself, it’s all about perception. Her pulse swooped as adrenalin danced with her nerves and set them alight.
The sky above shone blue: all sheen, no texture, waiting for her to arrive.
Judy Darley is a writer, editor and communications manager. She is the author of three short fiction collections, ‘The Stairs Are a Snowcapped Mountain’, ‘Sky Light Rain’, and ‘Remember Me to the Bees.’
