by Temi Oh
And these people, the teenagers on children’s bikes who cat-called and whistled when she past, these were her people. For five years, she had believed that when Dalton ended – when she was no longer allowed to lounge in the ivied quad reading books – it was to these streets she would return. To hate this place would be to hate herself, her mother would remind her during every visit home. Her mother vetted Poppy’s speech for a new word or turn of phrase, and teased her mercilessly about it. ‘Ohhh, Mrs Dalton,’ she’d say with a curtsey. ‘Too good for us these days,’ and Poppy would blush and bite her tongue.
On Monday she had discovered that she had been chosen to go to space. In the quiet week after she found out, Poppy walked around in numbed surprise, certain a mistake had been made. It had been a dream to get into Dalton in the first place, to live and study amongst the neat, brilliant students who were unlike her in every way.
At almost fourteen, Poppy had been four months shy of the upper age limit for candidates, but she had filled out an application – an online test, logic problems, personality quizzes, reasoning and lateral thinking – in a secret moment of longing. Half a million other children also applied. She had been shocked when she was invited for the selection interviews, but knew that her mother would not be able to afford the train fare into London. That might have been the end of it, right then, had it not been for a school teacher who handed her an envelope of cash with a note saying, ‘make us proud’. It was the first time she’d ever left her city. An escort had taken her and a coach full of other applicants to Dalton for three more rounds of testing in a purpose-built training facility alongside thousands of other terrified candidates, wearing numbered badges and coded wristbands. They had been the hardest tests that Poppy had ever taken, four hours in a humid silent hall, several writing and coding tasks and one tortuous language exercise that required her to pen a persuasive argument in a language that the examiners had invented, following stringent rules in their devised syntax and morphology. Then came a week of invasive physical exams, blood tests and a comparatively low-tech beep test, which involved running back and forth across a gymnasium at ever-decreasing intervals. Two prospects had vomited on the linoleum.
That had been six years ago. Getting accepted into Dalton had been the greatest achievement of her life, and yet every test she had taken since then was harder than the last. Every week, when their scores were projected up in the school hall, Poppy had been comforted to find that she had achieved high enough to remain on the programme, but never high enough to pose a strong enough threat to the other students, who were bright and driven and strange and already disliked her because of her accent and her age.
When she’d opened the letter to discover that she was one of the six who had been selected for the Beta, she’d been certain that some mistake had been made. And so, for the rest of the week, she carried the news around with her like rubbish she was keen to toss.
The day the names were released publicly, Poppy returned to her street to find a mob. At first, seeing the road blocked by cars and news vans, she’d thought there had been an accident. Reporters thronged the pavement speaking simultaneously into microphones, and the shuttering lights of cameras burst like firecrackers at the edges of her vision. Initially, Poppy was drawn towards the mob with a shiver of intrigue, but it turned into dread in the next moment when she realized that the crowd were lining up outside her flat, trampling the lawn and banging on the door.
‘Hey—’ she approached a young man who had been slouched on the wall. ‘Do you know what’s going on?’
‘Oh, it’s uh—’ He looked up at her and took in her white uniform and her vivid red hair, which was already slipping out of the loose braid she had twisted it into. ‘Oh,’ he said again, and then produced a small notebook from his back pocket. ‘Poppy Lane, how are you feeling about the upcoming mission?’ The sound of her name on this stranger’s tongue was unnerving, and Poppy stepped back. ‘Can you just give me a sentence or two? What are you excited about? What will you miss the most – since you will never return?’
‘I – uh?’
A couple of people standing nearby caught sight of her. Wait, is that her? Is that Poppy lane?
‘Poppy,’ shouted a reporter, ‘over here!’
‘Can we get a picture?’
‘Over here!’ Camera lights blinded her. When she opened her eyes it seemed as if people had materialized out of nowhere; there was already a small crowd closing in on her, and more racing towards her, jostling for a better view.
‘How does your family feel?’
‘Is it true that you speak thirty-two languages?’
‘Why do you think this mission has been so controversial?’
Poppy turned away from them and began to run, back down the street in the direction she had come. Just over her head the streetlights were flickering on and when she reached the end of the road she cast a quick glance over her shoulder. But the mob were descending upon her.
The blood beat in her ears. She felt exposed and frightened and far away from herself. The world had uncovered her secret before she had had a chance to fully understand it herself.
‘Just a few questions!’ A man pulled at the collar of her shirt and Poppy heard the tearing of cotton.
‘Leave me alone!’ she yelled, pushing him away. But more people were bounding towards her.
‘Can I get a picture with you?’ asked a woman, grabbing at her sleeve.
Everywhere she looked there were people, their voices slipping into a white-noise of urgent clamour. Sweaty fingers tugged at her blazer and the strap of her messenger bag. She pictured her own face, petrified in black and white on the cover of a newspaper. In a moment of panic, she kicked over a large plastic bin, which crashed to the ground with a heavy thud, the contents flying out. The crowd dilated, giving Poppy enough time to scramble over the fence into the darkness of someone’s garden.
She raced around the unlit house and into a narrow alleyway between the buildings. Hid in the shadow of the high walls. As she unhitched her bag and dropped it on the ground, Poppy noticed a ladder ripped into her tights. Nettles bit her ankles and she waited for the blood to stop crashing through her ears before she considered her next move. Through the bushes she saw the lights of the news vans, reflected off the black windows of the house. The thought of facing that crowd again, of trudging back through them to get to her flat, filled her with dread. She was trapped, and the realization made her heart sink. But the idea of squatting in the gloom of the alleyway until the drifters left the street and the vans drove away made her skin crawl. The cracks in the fence were fluffy with cobwebs, cigarette butts yellowing amongst the leaves and the silvered edges of condom packets.
Poppy spotted another escape. She could run through the alleys and into her own back garden, as she had done with her friends in the past, during humid summers. Just the sight of the overgrown passages reminded her of following the neighbourhood girls as they clambered over fences and marched through bramble, sweeping away cobwebs like the intrepid explorers they thought they were before finally scrambling back over the picket fence and into their shared back yard, rolling into the house filled with laughter.
Poppy lifted her bag and took a route behind the houses that she remembered, creeping through the thorns until her foot struck pavement on the other side of the alley. The street behind her house was quiet, so she climbed over rubbish bins and slipped into the pool of yellow light that illuminated their back yard. Dashing to the door, she stabbed the key into the lock and, finally, she was home.
The only light in their little kitchen was the flickering of the television screen. Poppy’s head spun as she recognized her own face smiling back at her over the ticker-tape headlines – Names of the Beta, the students chosen for controversial interstellar mission, released today. Like her own, the names of the other students selected had been kept top secret. Poppy’s gaze was drawn to the screen as their faces appeared: Juno Juma, the scholar, the prefect, and her t
win sister. Ara, who never seemed like she had to cram for exams, as if she was born understanding mathematical constructs like quaternions. Her stomach flipped with joy and relief when she saw Harry’s handsome face on the screen. ‘He’s going too . . .’ she said out loud.
When she turned to her mother she noticed the tears in her eyes, then the faded lipstick on a mouth that had begun to sag. A halo of silver hair had appeared at her temples and Poppy wondered when her mother had become an old woman. Maybe it had happened suddenly, between trips to and from Dalton, or maybe an old woman had consumed her mother slowly in the solitude of their flat. Her mother’s first words when Poppy entered were, ‘Don’t go. Please. Don’t go.’
Poppy winced at the request.
Their family friend, Claire, sat on the other side of the table nursing a chipped mug of tea.
‘How can you do this?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t even tell your poor mam.’ Poppy didn’t have the energy for an argument, and so she turned on her heel and headed quickly out of the room, but Claire’s voice trailed down the corridor after her: ‘How can you leave her alone like this, when you’re all she has? The ungratefulness of the child who . . .’
Poppy was out of breath when she reached her room and flung the door shut behind her. She slid down it. There were footsteps coming down the hall. Poppy turned the lock.
Poppy Lane. They had chosen her.
In the silence of her bedroom, her heart was pounding. Some part of her had not believed it was really true until the reporter said her name on the news. Some part of her was certain that a mistake had been made, that she would be passed over in favour of some more deserving girl. She had always believed that she would live and die in this council flat.
Poppy Lane. She let herself believe it now. Mirabile visu, she thought, wonderful to see. Her entire body buzzed with fear and excitement. Muscles tensed around her mouth, lips dawned into a smile she could not hold back, spilled over with laughter that came out thick and fast as quicksilver.
‘Poppy.’ There was a bang on the door but she wasn’t yet ready to open it. ‘Poppy, love.’
There was something on the bed, a solid parcel with her name written on it. Poppy stood up and held it in her hand for a moment, noticing the telltale signs, the hard ridge of it, the indented edges – it was a book. When she tore it open she wrinkled her nose in puzzlement. A Guide to the Zodiac: Decoding Your Destiny in the Stars. She traced the golden patterns along its thick spine, and then opened the front page, and found the inscription:
I always knew you’d do it, Freckles. You were born to shine. Dad.
She traced her thumb over the word; D. A. D. – her favourite.
‘Poppy.’ Poppy heard the familiar scrape of metal in the lock, which meant her mother was twisting it open with a butter knife. She appeared a moment later on the threshold in her faded dressing gown.
‘Mum, was Dad here?’
‘Is that from your father?’ Her eyes darted to the book in Poppy’s hand.
‘Yeah. I mean, it’s his writing on it. Did he come here to see me? When I was in school maybe?’
Her mother shook her head. ‘That arrived in the mail this morning.’ She sat heavily on the bed, taking the book from her daughter’s hands.
‘Funny thing to get you, eh?’ she said. ‘But then, he never bothered to learn a thing about you. Probably thinks you’re interested in star signs, just like me.’
‘Maybe I am.’ Poppy had always rolled her eyes at her mother’s devotion to astrology. Through the gap in her curtain she could still see a constellation of headlights, bonnets of cars parked in front of their house, idling engines, the rising chatter of onlookers. It was the first inkling she had of quite how different her life would soon be.
‘Don’t go.’ Her mother’s voice was thick and Poppy felt her stomach sink.
‘You knew this might happen.’
‘Did I?’ her mother said. ‘I mean, what were the chances, like one in a million. I know you’re supposed to be clever and you know all those languages but . . .’
‘Why me?’ Poppy finished for her.
‘Right. And I didn’t think I’d find out from the Channel Four news.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I don’t know.’ Poppy cast her mind back to the strange disbelief that had clouded her thoughts over the past week. ‘I guess I didn’t properly believe it either. Like, maybe they’d made a mistake or something. It was too good to be true.’
‘Too good to be true,’ her mother repeated and then her expression broke and she was sobbing fat ugly tears, her face twisted in misery, nose dripping. When Poppy leant over to hug her she felt guilty as a thief. She had nothing good to say to her mother, whose future life she could see suddenly and horribly. She imagined her mother growing old in her dressing gown in their dirty flat, her cholesterol soaring, hair turning coarse and white. If her heart didn’t kill her, the loneliness would. When she slipped away in the light of the television the reporters and talk-show hosts on-screen would shout at her corpse for two weeks before the smell became so bad that someone came to find her.
Was it possible to save your parents? Poppy wasn’t sure. The only thing worse than watching her mother was becoming her, becoming a woman in that house where despair lurked, waiting to swallow her whole.
‘Hey,’ Poppy leant back as a thought occurred to her. ‘Now I’m in the Beta they’ll take care of you for life. You know that. They’ll pay you. You could move maybe – to a nicer place.’
Her mother choked on her sob. ‘Is that why you’re doing this?’ she asked.
Poppy shrugged. ‘I’m just saying, that’s one thing. At least there’s that.’
‘Yes—’ her mother sniffed. ‘At least there’s that. And will they be writing a cheque for nineteen years of my life as well? Giving me all those hours back. For your red hairs in the bathroom sink? For a child I’ll only watch grow up behind a television screen? Will they pay me for that too?’
ASTRID
12.05.12
T-MINUS 30 HOURS TO LAUNCH
THE MORNING BEFORE THE launch, Astrid woke up starving.
She’d had a nightmare about the rocket exploding on the launch pad, and all their bodies roasting in their seats. In the dream, the air smelt of rocket fuel and roasting flesh. Astrid opened her eyes at 5 a.m. longing for meat.
The sun was only just rising behind the space centre, and clouds rolled up the horizon, bringing a storm that was scheduled to pass by lunchtime. Her sister and the other girls were asleep, bundled up in their duvets in quiet heaps at the four corners of the dormitory. Astrid tried to climb out of bed without waking any of them, but as her bare feet hit the floor, Poppy rolled over and her eyes flew open.
‘Sleeping?’ Poppy asked in a whisper. She was wearing her retainer, and her voice was full of metal.
‘No,’ Astrid said, ‘I’m awake.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To the bathroom,’ Astrid lied. Poppy closed her eyes again and turned away.
They hadn’t left the space centre for almost nine days. Nine days of intense training, the twice-daily medical checks and briefings. Astrid felt as if she had not seen the sky for months.
She stepped out into the corridor, looking up and down for any security guards or medical inspectors, but it was empty. The fastest way to the kitchen was via the emergency staircase, so she headed in that direction and rushed down steps, cold as stone under her bare feet, two at a time.
As the launch approached Astrid had developed the strange sense that her stomach was yawning open like a dark well. She woke up every morning weak with hunger, longing for the roasted potatoes soaked in butter her grandmother made at Christmas, blistering hot on the tongue. She wanted to leave the space centre’s clinical refectory behind and return to the humid, joyful cave of her grandmother’s kitchen, the tiled floor on which she’d played from birth, watching the old woman’s wrinkled
hands as she set cauldrons of stew bubbling over the fire. Astrid remembered a cornucopia of food on the table, the air so thick with spices that she could taste it. Everyone candlelit and laughing.
The afternoon they’d reported to the space centre had been thrilling, the approaching days rich with possibilities. Yet Astrid had realized, as she waved her father goodbye, that she had traded his earthy espressos for the rancid instant coffee that dripped from machines in the space centre’s refectory. She’d chosen macronutrient power bars over the raspberry and white chocolate cookies her mother baked in obscenely large batches. Astrid’s mouth watered at the memory of the silky sweetness of the chocolate, shot through with the tart skin of the raspberries.
She remembered the midsummer’s day their family made a trip to the Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens. Astrid and her sister had been nine or ten, then, and they ate mint ice creams in front of a wooden pirate ship. Their father took a photo, which Astrid still had, the image sun-bleached and overexposed, two brown girls, their tongues green, toes caked with sand. Astrid wanted to eat it all, the sweetness of turning ten. The first time she tasted a lemon and squealed at the acid bite of it, the time Juno – out of spite – had stirred a spoonful of washing-up liquid into her squash and Astrid’s mouth tasted so strongly of soap that she cried, in the car, all the way home. She used to think that you could taste the spring, even. That when she grew tall enough to pluck cherry blossoms they would melt in her mouth like liquorice. But spring was almost over now.
Astrid was empty inside and she was running out of time. On the spaceship, their meals would be bowls of macronutrient broth, cereals and rehydrated meats, or vitamin-fortified spag bol, until the hydroponic greenhouse began producing crops. Astrid had seen a spreadsheet of everything she would eat for the next twenty-three years and it turned her stomach.
Astronauts who had gone up before her said that in the darkness something changed in their mouths and foods they loved came to taste like rubber, sapped of every delight. They were known to add liberal amounts of salt and spices to everything in hope of reinvigorating miserable meals. Astrid thought with dread that she had around twenty-four hours left on this rich planet and there were so many things she had never eaten.