Gold

  “Of course,” said the Stormtrooper, and produced a carton from a blue isotherm bag.

  “We’ve got one of those bags at home,” said Sophie.

  “Wow,” said the second Stormtrooper. “Small universe.”

  The first Stormtrooper spun around to look at the second, then quickly turned back to Sophie.

  “Prisoner!” said the Stormtrooper. “Our master is expected at any moment. When he arrives, you must stand at attention. If you are invited to speak to him, you must address him as ‘Lord Vader.’ What must you address him as?”

  “Lord Vader,” said Sophie in a small voice.

  “What’s that? I can’t hear you,” said the Stormtrooper, cupping a gloved hand to the place on the helmet where an ear would be.

  “Lord Vader!” said Sophie, as loud as she could. She was tired from the long car journey. Her voice had a slow puncture and it was letting out air.

  “That’ll do,” said the Stormtrooper, and went off to whisper to the other.

  A hush fell on the bridge. The Stormtroopers stiffened to attention. Sophie’s legs trembled. The music of “The Imperial March” sounded from hidden speakers. An involuntary whimper came from Sophie’s throat. A blast door opened. Clouds of dry ice billowed. Darth Vader emerged from his vapors, stood mightily in silhouette, and stepped onto the bridge. His respirator hissed and clicked.

  He stared at Sophie and Dad, and nodded slowly.

  “So,” he said. “The captured Rebel fighters.”

  Sophie felt urine running down her legs, shockingly hot. It splashed on the brushed steel floor. The noise was undeniable.

  She looked at the pooled urine on the floor and felt tears coming. This was going to really freak Dad out.

  She looked up at him. “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  There was a moment of surprised silence on the bridge. Vader’s respirator wheezed.

  “Uh … are you alright?” he said.

  “I think she’s let a bit of wee go,” Dad whispered.

  “What?” said Vader.

  “Oh, where are my manners? I mean I think she’s let a bit of wee go, Lord Vader.”

  Vader held up his hands, black gloved palms outwards.

  “Hey,” he said. “Don’t make me the bad guy here.”

  The nice Stormtrooper came over, knelt beside Sophie, and put an arm around her.

  “It’s okay,” the Stormtrooper whispered. “It happens.”

  Sophie looked up at Dad’s face, which was lined with concern. She couldn’t bear that she’d done this to him. She began to cry.

  Darth Vader bent down and patted Sophie on the shoulder.

  “What’s that tube going into you?” he asked.

  “It’s … it’s a … Hi … Hi … Hickman line,” Sophie sobbed.

  Dad folded her into his arms. “It’s to get the chemo into her.”

  “Ha!” Vader said. “You call that a line? You should see me when I take this helmet off. I have so many wiggly lines going into me, I look like a plate of spaghetti.”

  Sophie giggled between her sobs. A perfect green bubble of snot swelled from her nose, stretched to molecular thinness, and shrank back again, like the membrane of a calling frog.

  “You’re a very brave young lady,” said Vader.

  After her tears, Sophie had a hammering headache and a rending in her guts and a pain in her side that made her want to curl up.

  “I’m fine,” she said, looking up at Dad. “I actually feel great.”

  He smiled. She smiled back. This was good.

  Afterwards, when they’d got Sophie cleaned up, Darth Vader lifted her to sit on his shoulders. They watched the huge monitor screens on the bridge, which showed the galaxy lying before them and shimmering.

  “Would you like to choose a world to destroy?” Vader said.

  “Why?” said Sophie.

  Vader shrugged. “It’s just something I offer my guests.”

  “Does it have to be a world? Could you blow up my bad blood cells?”

  Air sighed from the grille of Vader’s face plate. He waved a gloved hand at the starfield.

  “I can do you anything on that map,” he said.

  Sophie pointed at a bright star in Orion. “Let’s say those stars are my white blood cells and that one’s a bad one.”

  “Fine,” said Vader. “Commence death ray initiation sequence.”

  Sophie held up her hand. “Sorry, but it’s not actually a death ray if it’s saving my life.”

  Vader pointed at the big red button labeled DEATH RAY. He said, “It’s the only ray we’ve got.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Vader crouched down to let Sophie press the button. A low drone built slowly to a crescendo. The lights flickered. They all watched the monitor screens as the eight green beams of the death ray converged into one, shot out across space, and heated the core of Sophie’s bad blood cell until it exploded in a shower of bright sparks across the blackness of space.

  They watched the sparks crackle and fade back into perpetual darkness.

  Car park, Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire

  Jack carried Sophie out to the car while Kate and Zoe were still changing out of the Stormtrooper costumes. She was shattered. She clung on around his neck and buried her face in his chest.

  Jack shifted her weight onto one arm. Her head lolled. He extracted the car key from the back pocket of his jeans, popped open the car door, and eased Sophie into her child safety seat. He handled her like a patient cop with a drunken perp, laying one hand on the crown of her head to prevent her banging it on the door frame. One of the last remaining clumps of her hair came detached. Lifted on the wind, it rose briefly into the ragged sky, then floated down into the mud. Jack followed its progress with his eyes, then turned back to his daughter. He didn’t say anything.

  Sophie sat with her eyes half-closed, uncooperative while Jack worked to install her. She was sluggish, like a reptile waiting for the sun to warm her. On the other side of the car park, mammalian children in red Wellington boots and striped bobble hats giggled and splashed each other with the tawny water from the puddles.

  Sophie’s Hickman line was in exactly the wrong place for the seat belt where it rode across her collarbone, so they always needed to tuck a folded tea towel under the belt. He checked that it protected the Hickman line, and that the seat belt still ran smoothly.

  He squeezed Sophie’s knee.

  “How about that Vader?” he said.

  Her eyes came open. “He was so cool,” she said. “You remember how he’s actually Luke Skywalker’s father?”

  Jack grinned. “He is?”

  Sophie nodded. “He actually tells him? In Empire Strikes Back? Right at the end?”

  Jack made a face as if he were weighing up the information. “You don’t want to believe everything a guy in black leather knee boots tells you.”

  The animation left Sophie’s face and a worried, provisional expression took its place.

  “What?”

  Jack’s stomach fell. He was an idiot for breaking the bubble.

  “Sorry, big girl. Forget it.”

  He went to stroke her cheek, but she turned her head away and folded her arms. Now Jack felt terrible for teasing her. This was what she dreamed about—what she believed in—while the other girls on their street rode their bikes and had Hannah Montana sleepovers.

  The guy who played Darth Vader had handled the Sophie situation pretty well. Better than Jack would have done, probably. People were actually okay. The man probably made—what?—ten quid an hour, eighty a day? In that stifling black costume, patiently helping under-tens select worlds to destroy.

  Jack wondered if he should have tipped Vader.

  He got into the driver’s seat and made sure that the Hickman line emergency kit was still in the glove box of the car beside the sterilizing gel, in case Sophie began hemorrhaging through the line and it needed to be clamped.

  “Can you stop kicking
the back of my seat, please?”

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  He plugged his phone into the cigarette lighter to charge, in case something happened en route and they needed to call in an emergency. He pulled the road atlas from beneath the passenger seat and memorized the route home to Manchester. Then he checked which hospitals were close to the route and tried to recall which ones had accident and emergency departments. This was in case Sophie began fitting, or lost consciousness, or was stung by a wasp or bee and needed a precautionary injection of adrenaline to stop her small body from going into shock.

  “Can you stop kicking my seat?”

  “Sorry.”

  He winked at her in the rearview mirror. He didn’t mind, really. If anything he liked it—found it reassuring that she wound him up in the ways a normal kid might.

  A movement in the mirror caught his eye, and Jack turned in his seat to see Kate and Zoe starting out across the car park. Zoe’s head was down. Kate was walking slowly, making it easy for Zoe to come alongside her if she wanted to, but Zoe walked a few paces behind. He wondered if she regretted having come along.

  He leaned across to make sure that the small cylinder of emergency oxygen for Sophie was accessible in the side pocket of the passenger door. He checked its air line for kinks or obstructions. He gave the spigot on the head of the cylinder a quarter turn and put the oxygen mask to his ear to check it was delivering. Then he closed the oxygen tap and replaced the cylinder in the door pocket.

  He looked up again and adjusted the rearview mirror to watch Zoe and Kate approach the car. They paused while something was said, then they briefly hugged. He knew he wasn’t the most sensitive observer but the signs were hard to miss this morning: these rushes the two women made to the brink of disintegration, followed by the check, and the careful backing down. They’d been like this all the way down here in the car. It was always an intricate friendship to navigate, this bittersweet affection of rivals, and yet it seemed more urgent today.

  Kate got in the back seat next to Sophie, took her cheeks in her hands, and went to kiss her on the forehead. Sophie squirmed and took evasive action, the way any healthy eight-year-old tomboy would. Jack smiled. You collected these signs of normality. You took them to the bank, knowing that if you saved up enough of them, then the compound interest would eventually grow your deposit into a child in remission.

  Zoe got into the passenger seat next to Jack.

  He glanced across at her. “Everything okay?”

  She tilted her head. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  Jack said nothing.

  “What?” she said.

  “Let’s go, for God’s sake,” said Kate from the back.

  He shrugged, released the hand brake, and reversed five yards. Sophie announced that she needed a wee. Jack smiled. It was all the Ribena: the Stormtroopers had been very free with it. He eased the car five yards forward again, reapplied the hand brake, and sat looking straight ahead.

  Kate undid Sophie’s seat belt and helped her to go at the edge of the car park, tucked away behind a van. Jack and Zoe watched the pair of them.

  “You’re more dad than human now,” she said.

  He ignored the jibe. “You’re frazzled today.”

  Zoe snorted. “You know how to make a girl feel special.”

  “Overtraining?”

  “Overthinking, maybe.”

  “It was good of you to come. It means a lot to Kate.”

  He let himself look across at her.

  She said, “Sometimes it all gets a bit heavy, you know?”

  Jack gripped the wheel a little tighter. “Are you okay with it?”

  Zoe thumped her chest lightly above her heart. “It just gets me more than it used to. I mean, Sophie’s so ill …”

  “But you’re fine?”

  Zoe hesitated. “Fine …” she said, seeming to test the feel of the word in her mouth as if it hadn’t been used for some time, like housewife, or Rhodesia. “Fine,” she said. “Yeah. I mean … fuck, how could I not be?”

  Jack turned to look back through the windscreen, and they sat in silence as Kate pulled Sophie’s jeans back up and brought her back to the car.

  “What are you two talking about?” Kate said as she swung open the car door.

  “The Tour de France,” said Zoe.

  “Oh, I’ve heard of that,” said Kate.

  She reseated Sophie and reattached her seat belt. Jack watched in the mirror and knew what his wife was thinking: how skinny their child was becoming. In three months of relapse she’d lost half the weight she’d put on in three years of remission. He reached out a hand behind the headrest of his seat, and Kate took it, and they squeezed. The pressure created a fixed point in time, to which so many accelerating events could be anchored.

  With Sophie safely strapped in, Jack drove away.

  “Sophie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Next time you kick the back of my seat, I’m taking you back to the Death Star to be brought up by the Sith.”

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  He slowed almost to nothing on the speed bumps of the film studio’s exit road, and he checked in the rearview mirror to make sure that Sophie wasn’t jolted too much. When he pulled out onto the main road, he drove defensively. He’d been on a course to learn how, since it was unlikely that any kind of road traffic accident would improve Sophie’s prognosis. Jack planned in which direction it would be safe to swerve in case the green Mercedes waiting at the upcoming junction pulled out early. When it didn’t, his eyes moved on to the next car ahead, and then to the mini-roundabout after that. “Sophie …”

  “Yeah?”

  “Kicking.”

  “Sorry, Dad.”

  Jack was thirty-two years old, he was an Olympic gold medalist, and he was one of the top five quickest male cyclists in the world.

  He said, “Sophie? If I’m going too fast you just tell me, okay?”

  On the motorway they drove in the slow lane, wedged between lorries. Sophie knew it was to keep her safe. This was the effect she had on people: they drove twenty percent slower, they gripped the handles of boiling saucepans twenty percent harder, they chose their words one fifth more carefully. No one was going to blow a tire and crash her, or spill a pan and scald her, or say the word worry or die.

  She wanted to tell them that it all just made you twenty percent more scared, but she couldn’t do that. They did it to cope with how they felt. She felt bad for making them feel that way.

  Out the side window, she saw normal families cruising past. They were mostly families who weren’t on the good side like the Argalls or on the dark side like the Vaders. They were families who weren’t anything except on their way to the zoo or the shops. Quite often you could see them squabbling as they drove past. Their mouths moved crossly behind the glass. It was like a museum of human families, where the display cases moved past you without labels. Sophie wrote the labels in her head: Mum Bought the Wrong Crisps, or Dad Won’t Let Me and Chloe Listen to the Chart Show.

  When Sophie got bored of watching the other families, she watched Star Wars in her head. She’d seen the films so many times now, she didn’t need the DVDs. She watched the AT-AT Walkers attacking the Rebel base on the ice planet Hoth, to take her mind off how sick she was feeling. She felt so bad today, it was scaring her. Everything hurt. Her head pounded, her vision was blurry, and her bones ached the way they did when it was freezing and you were out on a long walk and the rain just kept getting harder. Waves of nausea rolled over her and gave her the icy chills.

  It was incredible how Skywalker flew his fighter ship. It was because he was a Jedi. There were special cells in your blood, called midichlorians, that made you a Jedi. Sophie knew the changes in her blood that Dr. Hewitt thought were leukemia were actually just the start of midichlorians forming. You couldn’t expect Earth doctors to diagnose it right: they would be lucky to see a single case in a lifetime of medical practice.

  Even so, when she felt as sic
k as she did today, there were times when she thought she would never become a Jedi. Even at sixty miles per hour, she was uncomfortable. The rumble of the road surface was shaking her up and making her insides hurt. How would she ever be able to fly a ship at hundreds of miles per hour between the feet of an attacking Imperial Walker?

  She swallowed. “It’s okay if you want to go faster,” she said.

  Dad shook his head. “We’re good like this.”

  Sophie looked at Dad’s wiry forearms on the steering wheel, and then she looked at her own. She squeezed her fists to make her muscles bulge.

  “You okay?” said Mum. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  The veins in her arms were dark blue and thin and led nowhere, as if someone had taken a biro and drawn the wiring diagram of a useless droid on her body before stretching human skin over it. Her dad’s veins bulged like cables under the skin and made purposeful lines, powering the blood back to his heart. Dad was the strongest man in the world, probably. She didn’t understand how Dad could look at her—at the fragile, sickly sight of her—and not be scared. She had to try to seem strong and brave.

  “It’s okay if you swerve a bit,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  Dad looked at her in the rearview mirror. “And why would I do that?”

  “There’s actually a TIE fighter chasing us.”

  In the front passenger seat, Zoe looked serious. “Right. Divert maximum power to the aft deflector shields please, Sophie.”

  Sophie grinned and pressed the button on the side of the child seat that executed Zoe’s order.

  “Fire the turbolasers!” said Zoe, and Sophie did.

  “Make sure you lock on to their coordinates!”

  Sophie was amazed that Zoe was so good at this. When the TIE fighter was destroyed, and they were all safe again, she relaxed in her seat. “Thanks, Han!”

  Zoe turned and there were tears in her eyes, which was something that Sophie didn’t get. She hadn’t complained and she’d tried really hard not to look ill, and it made her a bit angry and sad if people felt sorry for her.

  She made sure to keep smiling.

  “It’s okay,” she told Zoe. “I actually feel great!”