Andrea Höst: And All the Stars

She would not waste it.

On non-dusty days Tyler’s three-bedroom corner apartment commanded a spectacular view of water, park and city skyline, though the headland blocked any glimpse of the Opera House or Harbour Bridge. The previous weekend, when Madeleine’s father had driven her in to drop off her supplies, she hadn’t dared do more than tuck easel, canvas stretchers and paints against the near wall of the sunny main room. She’d only met Tyler a handful of times since he’d returned to Australia and found massive success playing a witch on a new TV series about vampire detectives. She’d had no intention of jeopardising their sittings by prying.

Now, hair wrapped in a towel, she took his cordless phone and dialled and redialled while glancing around the open lounge and dining area, then checking out the two spare bedrooms, one utilitarian and the other converted into a shelf-lined office. The master bedroom was spare and tidy and looked like something out of a designer’s catalogue. It was only in the massive walk-in wardrobe that she found any sign of personality, and there it overflowed.

One of her earliest memories was of Tyler in a sunhat, face hidden by the broad brim. He obviously still favoured them, had a dozen variations on hooks high around the room. Below were a profusion of jewel-tone scarves, glimmering gowns, and plenty of the skinny jeans and shirtdresses he was commonly photographed in. Gaps here and there – he’d been filming overseas for the past two months – but still a bountiful range of possibilities.

Her own clothes drip-drying in the shower, Madeleine fingered a flower-spattered shirtdress. She was shorter and narrower of shoulder than Tyler, but had the same curveless figure, so likely some of his clothes would fit. A pattern in black and gold caught her eye and she lifted out a silken dressing-gown. Koi carp in an irezumi style: brilliant golds and iridescent green against black. She slipped it on, and hit redial once again.

"Give it up, Michael," sighed a warm, throaty voice. "There’s nothing you can do about it."

"Tyler."

"Leina?" Tyler laughed, that infamous burble capped with a soft intake of breath, a tiny, shiver-worthy ah! "I think I’m going to be a little late, kiddo. Are you at my place?"

Only Tyler had taken seriously her five year-old self’s insistence not to be called Maddie. She’d long ago given up that fight, but enjoyed the fact that he remembered.

"Yes. Are you–?"

"Still on the plane. We were just coming in to land. And now, well, there’s been an informative lecture on something called bleed air, which apparently requires running engines. And much debate on whether all this floating muck rules out a dash to New Zealand or the bright lights of Tasmania." The amused voice grew serious. "Please tell me you were safely flipping through my dirty picture collection when this happened."

"You have a dirty picture collection?"

"A most graphic one: best you don’t look. Now tell me."

"I – almost." There was a wobble threatening her voice, and she knew if she tried to explain St James she’d fall to pieces, so she hurried on. "My parents think I’m at the Art Gallery. I didn’t want them to try calling here till I arrived. I…well, I guess I’ll know sooner than most what the dust does."

"Any symptoms?"

She hadn’t heard her cousin so grave since her broken arm. And what could she tell him? That she was tired, and her back hurt, though the shower had helped her headache. That the dust surely had to be some kind of attack?

"Tyler, I wanted you to do something."

She could almost hear the smile. "If it involves annoying stewardesses I’m all over it. Otherwise–"

"Get someone to take a photograph of you, just as you are now, and email it to me."

"Leina…"

"I came here to paint you Tyler. I want to–" Her voice had risen, and she swallowed the rest of the sentence, staring out of the window at an only faintly hazy sky, and a talcum-dusted world. Sydney’s familiar skyline was made unreal not just because of its powder coating, but by a black lance dwarfing skyscrapers and Sydney Tower. At least double the height of its nearest rival, it thinned to a needle point.

"I want to be painting right now."

"…I’ll see what I can do." Tyler paused to murmur to someone off the phone, then added: "I’ll call you back if there’s any developments here. Take care of yourself, Leina."

There’d been a large laptop in the office, which Madeleine fetched out and was glad to find required no passwords to access the net. She put down her drop-cloth and set up the easel, then went and dug through Tyler’s wardrobe until she unearthed an old tracksuit, since it would be a crime to get paint on that dressing-gown. No new email had arrived so she tried to ring her parents and, finally, with a certain level of reluctance, figured out how to make a large screen rise out of a cabinet, and settled down to watch the apocalypse.

" …too early to call this any kind of catastrophe . We are facing something new and unknown, but one thing that leaps out is the placement of these towers: Hyde Park in London and Sydney, Melbourne Park, Central Park, New York, Shinjuku Gyoen, Tokyo. In every city, no matter how densely crowded, the Spire has been placed so as to minimise damage–"

"Still at the expense of dozens, if not hundreds of lives around the world. If this isn’t an attack, then it’s negligence of–"

The terse, combative words reawakened Madeleine’s headache, and she flipped channels until she found a picture of one of the black needles piercing a grassy park. No sign of windows, doors, openings of any kind: just a round, black column narrowing to a point. From a distance you couldn’t even see the stars.

The picture changed, showing the park without the tower, with a couple of joggers pounding across it. And then a blink-and-you-miss it moment, an almost instantaneous arrival which was then played again, slowed down to demonstrate that the Spire had risen , not landed, and with far less damage than anyone would expect from such an event.

Aliens from underground?

"…clear from viewing the Tokyo, Manila, and Sydney Spires that they are not identical. A comparison to nearby buildings shows the Sydney Spire to be some six hundred metres in height. The Manila spire is more than three times this size, rising over a kilometre and a half above Villamor Golf Course. The narrow base of the Spires compared to their height – in some cases not more than a hundred metres across – suggests that they extend deep underground. At least one hundred – closer to one hundred and fifty cities…"

The Spire currently on-screen – Madeleine had no idea what city it belonged to – began to vanish behind a haze, a vagueness which thickened, extended, became a plume, a cloud, an immensity which grew so quickly that Madeleine wondered how the entire underground of St James Station had not been packed solid. It was clear, though, that the majority of the dust was coming through at the top.

The camera recording the scene had to be kilometres away, but it soon showed nothing but purple-tinted white, and then there was a time-jump in the playback and the Spire began to appear again, looming out of the thinning cloud. Madeleine wondered how many people had been coated as completely as her, and how many were still crammed into the nearest shelter, waiting for the dust to settle. Searching themselves for the any sign of what would happen next.

Singing, slow and sultry. Madeleine shifted, then realised she’d dozed off, and reached for her mobile, murmuring a response.

"Maddie? Sweetheart, are you okay?"

"Dad." Madeleine sat up, rubbing her eyes. "Fine – I was just resting. Did you and Mum get home in time?"