The Courier. Ava McCarthy

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       8

      ‘Diamonds, they come from stardust, did you know that, Mani?’

      Mani grunted, his arm throbbing as he helped Takata to his feet. The sun grilled his face as he followed the queue along the barbed-wire corridor.

      ‘Asha, she explained it to me.’ Takata sounded surprised that his daughter knew such things. ‘Diamonds are older than the sun.’

      Mani shook his head at the old man’s poetry. Behind him, the last of the hydraulic excavators clanked to a halt. The pit was now a graveyard of dust-covered machinery, abandoned for the day.

      Mani’s face twisted in pain as a hard lump in his chest ground further into his gut. Takata’s voice dropped to a whisper.

      ‘The diamonds, they come from outer space.’

      Mani managed a shrug, the lump a jagged fireball inside him. ‘It’s only a theory.’

      He’d explained it to Asha himself the day before he left. He’d sat with her on the ground outside the shack, watching her weave brooms from the grasses she collected. As always, there was a contented stillness about her. He’d wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. Instead, he’d snatched up a stick and drawn a circle in the dirt.

      ‘Do you know where diamonds come from?’ he’d said.

      She smiled. ‘From the ground.’

      A pack of shrieking children swooped in front of them, their faces gritty with dust. Asha laughed and waved them away. Mani jabbed at the centre of his circle.

      ‘They come from grains of carbon deep inside the Earth,’ he said. ‘In the mantle. A hundred miles below the surface.’

      He avoided her gaze. He was showing off, and he knew it. Educated student returns to his home village. But he couldn’t help it. Keeping his eyes low, he scored a line from the centre of his circle to the edge.

      ‘Volcanoes carried the diamonds upwards, punching lava through the crust.’ He pointed, teacher-like, at the line he’d drawn. ‘These volcanic pipes, they hardened into kimberlite.’

      He glanced at Asha’s face. She was watching him with her serene, almond-shaped eyes.

      ‘I know,’ she said.

      He tightened his grip on the stick. How could she know? How could she know anything, living in this shantytown of metal huts, with its goat-kraals and chicken coops and rusty hubcaps salvaged from wrecked cars? He glared at her. He could tell her things, things she couldn’t learn in this godforsaken place. He stabbed at the centre of his circle.

      ‘Yes, but where did the grains of carbon come from?’ he said. ‘How did they find their way into the Earth’s mantle?’

      Her shoulders lifted in a gentle shrug. ‘They grew there.’

      He shook his head, smiling. She didn’t know. ‘That’s what we used to think. That they came from plants or animals. A bit of plankton, maybe, or an insect, dragged around by the continental plates.’ He sneaked a glance at her. ‘But now we scientists know better.’

      Her eyes were on the swatch of grasses in her hand. She made no comment on his claims to be a scientist. He turned away, his cheeks burning in the sun.

      ‘Go on,’ Asha said.

      He shook his head, tossing the stick aside. ‘I’m talking too much.’

      She retrieved the stick, and held it out to him. ‘But I want to know.’

      Her gaze was steady, the smile gone. He cleared his throat, took the stick, then carved a second circle into the dirt.

      ‘They found a meteor in Antarctica. It broke up a sawblade when they tried to cut through it.’ He filled his circle with dots. ‘That’s because it was seeded with diamonds.’

      Asha plucked at her grasses. Mani roughed out a five-pointed star above his circles.

      ‘Then astronomers discovered diamonds in a super-nova,’ he said.

      ‘A super-nova?’ She stumbled on the English word. He looked at his feet. Suddenly, his urge to impress her seemed unkind.

      ‘It’s an explosion of dying stars,’ he said gently. ‘They viewed it through a powerful telescope and saw diamonds. Now they say the grains of carbon were planted in the Earth by meteorites and stardust.’

      Her hands went still, and her eyes drifted away from him. Mani kicked at his crude drawing, obliterating it in the dust.

      ‘It’s only a theory,’ he said.

      Asha was silent. He followed her gaze to the settlement clearing where the children always played, even in the dust storms. Beyond it, the metal huts looked like water tanks with roofs. Van Wycks provided them. In winter they were ice-cold; in summer, sizzling hot. Mostly, families gathered outdoors, unprotected from the kimberlite dust that blew in from the Van Wycks mines.

      His eyes came to rest on the grassland beyond the shantytown, where his mother had died the year before. Ezra had got word to him that migrating Congolese rebels, high on cocaine, had stumbled across her and slit her throat open.

      He swallowed and looked back at Asha. She had wrapped her arms around her waist, one hand stroking her side. Mani knew she had scars there, and more on her back, from where they’d operated to remove part of her lungs.