The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds Extract

Read an extract from The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds by Gina Butson.

PROLOGUE

Ruapehu maunga, New Zealand, 2006

The slope stretches out in front of Thea, a pathway of moving lights. Jim and Penny are in front of her and Marcus is behind as they make their way through the snow up to the hut. There’s no moon, but above her the stars are a million glittering worlds: dreams and memories cast wide across the clear dark sky. This is life. This is what her father had wanted her to experience, had wanted to share with her.

She can imagine him lovingly shaking his head, smiling and saying, ‘I knew you’d love it, Thee.’ Less than a year on, there are still so many times a month she wants to pick up the phone and call him, just to tell him something, to pass the time, to say hello — and then she realises that she’ll never be able to do that again.

She thought she’d have more time. More time to tell him that she was ready to spend weekends on the mountain with him, learning to traverse icy slopes, to climb couloirs, abseil into snowy craters, to navigate cracks and seracs down a glacier and back to the hut. There were always reasons not to go on trips with him: tickets to gigs, plans with friends, too much study, her part-time job, then her full-time job and work events — but she always thought the time would come.

But time is like a wild goat: sometimes it stops and stares at you, an unblinking challenge; at others, it bounds off and no matter how fast you run, it’s gone. Thea found herself, six weeks after her father’s funeral, sitting in front of the bookcase at his house, running her finger along the spines of guidebooks and the thin folds of topo maps. She pulled a book from the shelf at random, flicked through the pages and saw her father’s comments and markings scribbled in the margins. She stopped on one page: there in a blue ballpoint circle was a capital T. She slowly turned through the pages. There was another, and there was another. And in most of the guidebooks, there it was, just once or twice: a T to mark the routes and climbs he’d hoped to do with her. One day. When she was ready.

Sitting there, she’d felt the loss of him tumble down around her, all those unlived adventures and unsnapped photographs sliding away. All those stories of his time in the mountains that she only half-listened to and was already forgetting, memories fading like white breath on a cold day. She couldn’t let that part of him, nor that part of who she thought she’d be, just disappear. Finally she joined the Mountain Sports Club and signed up for their Introduction to Mountaineering course.

At the time she enrolled, she hadn’t realised that Marcus was one of the instructors. Marcus who, although much younger than her father, had spent the better part of the past decade climbing with him. He’d been in and out of their house over the years, planning trips and borrowing gear, often staying for a cup of coffee or dinner. Thea could hear her father in the way Marcus explained the difference between a true, pre-dawn alpine start and what he jokingly referred to as a city-slicker, post-caffeine alpine start; in the way he described clouds as ‘the stuff of hopes and dreams — and sometimes disappointment and nightmares’; the way he told them to watch their feet, and the skies.

Being on the mountain always feels right to Thea, like she’s exactly where she’s meant to be. Yet all those course weekends felt like practice. This feels real. Tomorrow she’ll climb the mountain.

Or maybe it’s today. The trip from Auckland to the road end had taken much longer than it should have, with terrible traffic leaving the city, a last-minute grocery stop and dinner in Te Kūiti. By the time they reach the hut, today will have rolled over to tomorrow; tomorrow will be today.

Their boots crunch through the snow. A wind whispers down the mountain, rustling through their waterproof jackets and pants. She tries to catch hold of fragments of the stories her father told her about this mountain, spindrift memories breezing past. She remembers one about a plane that crashed on the Mangatoetoenui glacier. It took more than thirty years for the slow-moving ice to release the plane just six hundred metres from where it crashed. Some things take time. Those stories of his, his love of the mountains, have been churning underground across the years; they’re part of who she is.

She follows Jim and Penny. Behind her, Marcus nudges her when she stops to stare up into the night sky. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘we’ve got a big day ahead and it’s well past bedtime. Aren’t you tired?’

‘Exhausted,’ she says. And she is, or should be. She and Penny were out late on Wednesday night — always a big night out on K Road — and she hasn’t quite caught up on sleep. They were both yawning on the drive here. When they got out of the car, the bite of ice-tinged air woke her up, but she can feel the tiredness creeping back into her body as they make their way up the steepening mountain. It’s like there’s another body inside her, an internal shadow that with every step spreads farther into her limbs, tugging her downwards into sleep.

‘I’m stoked you’re joining us tomorrow.’ Penny throws the words towards Thea over her shoulder. Before Thea can say anything in response, Penny adds, ‘You haven’t changed your mind, have you?’

‘Ask me after breakfast. Or at least coffee,’ Thea replies. Originally she was going to join the group going up the Whangaehu Glacier and back: the easier option. During the car ride, Penny, Jim and Marcus had convinced her to join them going up to Te Heuheu summit: the longer and more technical option.

‘It’d be good to have an even number,’ Jim had said as they drove through the chopped-up back of the North Island.

‘You’ll love it, Thea,’ Marcus said. ‘It can get a bit gnarly if it’s icy, but it’s great climbing.’

Thea had stared out the car window into the moving darkness of the King Country, wisps of mist settling into the crook of the land. As the black roads curved and rose towards the Central Plateau, she hadn’t been sure that she was ready for a summit trip. Her ghostly face in the glass warned her that it would be challenging. But, caught up in the others’ confidence in her, she decided it was worth a go. She had turned away from her dark reflection and back into the car. ‘I do like a challenge,’ she said brightly.

Now, walking up the night mountain, she remembers the photos on top of the bookcase in her father’s house, gleaming white peaks against infinite blue skies. She wants that.

‘Your choice,’ Penny says, ‘but if you don’t come with us, you’ll have to get a ride back with the others. The group that drives together climbs together. Or the other way round. No pressure though.’

Thea stoops to scoop up a handful of snow. She shapes it into a snowball and lobs it at Penny.

‘That’s enough, you two,’ Jim says. ‘We didn’t come here to have fun.’ Without looking at each other or saying a word, Thea and Penny both bend down, pick up a handful of snow and throw it at Jim. ‘Hey!’ He turns towards them, grinning. ‘Watch it, I’ve got years more snowball experience than the two of you put together. You don’t want to take me on.’

They continue up the mountain, laughing and talking until they see the shadow of Tāne Whakapiripiri, the club hut, crouched against the snow. The orangey outside light is a warm halo in the dark-white world. It makes Thea think of the lamppost in Narnia, a single light in the snow, a boundary marker between worlds. The group from the Wellington branch of the club arrived a couple of hours ago and they’ll already be in bed, fast asleep. The four climbers approaching fall silent as they near the hut.

When Thea first stayed at Tāne Whakapiripiri, on the first weekend of the course, she wanted to text her father. I thought you were hardcore. What happened to rustic huts and tents and snow caves? Instead she’d said to no one in particular, ‘This place is a palace.’

Marcus had responded. ‘Palace might be stretching it,’ he said, ‘but it’s pretty nice, right?’

For a mountain hut, it’s luxury: on the main floor, there’s an open area with a large wooden table and a couple of sofas, plus a kitchen equipped with pots and pans and other basics; two bunk rooms are wedged in the lower part of the building. Everything’s a bit chipped and threadbare now, having provided shelter to hundreds of people over the years, popular for family-oriented club weekends where just being in the hut is the adventure, and a base for more extreme days out. The years of wear and tear only add to the sense of safety and comfort. Thea’s already looking forward to sitting on the couch after the climb, looking through the big window back towards the summit and rewinding through the day, reliving the adventure and swapping stories.

‘The Wellington crew are in the south room,’ Marcus says, his voice low, ‘so let’s take the north room.’

Before following the others inside, Thea runs her eyes back along the trail of boot prints crisping into the snow until they disappear into the darkness, beyond the reach of her head torch. She could follow those prints back down the mountain. The snow would thin as she descended, rocks cropping out and scree dirtying the white as she reached the carpark where Marcus’s car waits and her work clothes are folded neatly on the back seat.

She switches her head torch off and looks up once more, past the heavy darkness of the mountain to where the thickness of stars makes the sky milky-white. Time is slow and wide and deep; she feels like she can sail through it, light as a boat made of driftwood and dried leaves. In that moment, all her nervousness, all her uncertainty about tomorrow’s climb, melts away. She breathes deeply, a smile on her lips, then joins the others inside.

In the darkness of the hut, the turning and shaking of sleeping bags is slowly replaced with the soft rasp and sigh of sleep. Listening to Jim’s snores, Thea doesn’t think she’s slept until she realises she’s woken. The final group to arrive are quiet, unpacking their sleeping bags before they enter the bunk room, making as little noise and movement as possible, but it’s enough to wake a light sleeper, or someone still trying to dampen doubts about the day ahead. Like slow dominoes, Penny rolls over with a muffled groan; Marcus shifts to face the wall; then Thea rolls onto her stomach, pressing her face into the folded fleece she’s using as a pillow. Only Jim keeps sleeping, with a rhythmic in and out of breath. The room settles once more and, before too long, they’re all asleep, dropping into exhausted rest, absorbing what they can from the shallows of the night.

Outside, the darkness slowly ebbs, swallowing stars as the sky changes imperceptibly from black to grey. Snow falls. Glaciers continue their crawling churn down the mountain. As the sky lightens, the broad top of Ruapehu cuts a dark seismic line between earth and sky, a line between now and then, between today and all the days that follow after.

Extracted from The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds by Gina Butson,

available from 15 July.

---

The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds

by Gina Butson

A hypnotic novel about love, guilt and forgiveness. If you loved Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts by Josie Shapiro, you will adore The Stars Are a Million Glittering Worlds.

FIND OUT MORE