by Temi Oh
She slipped into the cool pantry. The motion-sensitive lights flickered and the clinking sound of it made her breath catch in her throat for just a moment. She looked around. It was nothing like their busy pantry at home, where some shelves were stacked precariously with pots of wildly growing basil and thyme, others with the lurid cardboard boxes of their childhood cereals.
This pantry was more like a laboratory, the food arranged carefully in cupboards marked with all of their names – their portions were tightly controlled by a consultant dietitian – sticky labels loaded with cryptic etchings referring to specific nutritional and caloric values.
Astrid peeled open a fridge, and her eyes fell on the shelf marked Juno. There was her sister’s breakfast, glistening with condensation. Cooked salmon and pickled eggs, a salad, soft pearls of mozzarella and sun-blessed tomatoes swimming in oil.
Was it stealing?
Astrid reminded herself that she was running out of time. Thought again about all the foods she would never try. Quails’ eggs – spotted ivory treasures the size of olives that she lusted after every time her mother took her to the farmers’ market. She wanted to eat a blood orange, with its eerie crimson flesh, which she imagined tasted like rust. For a whole year now, whenever she’d gone off-campus, she’d lingered by restaurant windows, green with envy, as she watched people devour little langoustines, guinea fowl, golden pears. Last Christmas their mother had won an ornate jar of quince jelly at a raffle but dropped it in the car park on the way home. Astrid had stared down at the shattered glass and the carmine splatter on the tarmac as if the jelly might as well be a million miles away. Her stomach ached for it now. For any and everything.
So she ate it all. The egg first, in one briny mouthful, then she peeled the salmon off the platter and dropped slices into her mouth before stabbing her finger into a lump of butter and licking it clean.
Astrid ate magnificently, bits of everybody’s breakfast, and then the fruit salad. It would be over a year before the hydroponic garden on the Damocles yielded any fruit, so she devoured a whole box of cherries and spat the stones out like tiny bones sucked clean of marrow. Grapes, a generous helping, and then mango that was soft as butter inside, golden as a slice of the sun.
Time slipped by. As she ate, the sky outside grew lighter and the rain began. The racing in her heart only made the stolen feast even richer, sweet with abandon.
There was a noise outside, and Astrid froze midway through tearing apart a crackling loaf of bread. The wind, she wondered, or a security guard making his rounds outside?
Another sound. The door to the refectory slid open, lights flickered on and flooded through to the pantry, where Astrid crouched like a thief.
She was holding her breath, fighting to keep as still as possible though her chest shuddered against the hollow thumping of her heart.
With black terror, she looked around at the remains of her meal. The floor was littered with shreds of tin foil and cling film and a cairn of cherry stones, and a little blizzard of breadcrumbs drifted around her. In the glacial light of the fridge she saw herself, in a nightdress, her fingers stained black by cherries, hair unbrushed, on her knees amongst the mess. The food in her stomach turned, curdled into a sudden shameful awareness of her animal self.
What would she say?
She pictured her sister’s nose wrinkling with disgust. And then the fear, again. Would she be punished for stealing? She wasn’t supposed to be out of bed before the morning bell. Her mind flitted naturally to the worst thing imaginable: being kicked off the programme, convicted, publicly shamed.
She dropped the bread and darted behind an open door into a shadowed corner of the pantry, holding her breath and praying not to be found.
Her ears pricked up a minute later as the sound of footsteps echoed off the walls. She tried to imagine who might be downstairs so early. One of the cooks with their white hairnets? A security guard who’d heard a sound in the kitchen and come to investigate? The surly dietician? Astrid spotted her sometimes, roaming about the refectory with a clip-board.
Her stomach snarled.
‘Hello?’ came a voice.
Astrid said nothing, tried to keep still.
But the sound of steps grew louder, marched towards her, slammed the cupboard door back.
‘Astrid!’
She yelped and leapt back. Then looked up to find a familiar face under a storm of red hair.
‘Poppy?’ she gasped, almost with relief.
‘What are you doing?’
Astrid glanced around at the pantry, the cupboards she had thrown open, the detritus on the floor. Her cheeks burned.
‘I – I . . .’ Astrid fumbled for an excuse as Poppy looked about in amazement, and horror. ‘Please don’t tell anyone.’
It was then she noticed that her friend’s eyes were bloodshot and shadowed.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked. Poppy shook her head, choking back a tear. ‘What is it? What are you doing down here?’
‘I came to look for you,’ she gasped, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. Sniffing. ‘You said you were just going to the bathroom and I thought . . . I need to talk to someone.’
‘Then talk.’ Astrid closed the fridge and they stepped out of the pantry and into the refectory, sat on one of the plastic benches on the nearest table.
Poppy pulled her retainer out of her mouth and placed it in front of her, silver strings of saliva sliding off her gums.
‘You won’t tell anyone?’ she asked. Astrid shook her head. ‘I was up all night. And I’ve been thinking. I can’t go.’
‘What?’ The words knocked the breath from Astrid’s throat. Poppy nodded.
‘I’m . . . I know the rest of you don’t understand this . . . but . . . I’m afraid. And maybe I’m not ready.’
‘For what?’
‘For all of it.’ Poppy’s pale fingers were trembling. ‘This whole thing has happened so quickly. It feels like yesterday that we were selected and now here we are. Leaving tomorrow. I’m not ready for it, or to spend twenty-three years travelling to a planet that no one has ever been to. And the other stuff too . . . never having children of my own, and—’
‘Look,’ Astrid interrupted, ‘you just have cold feet. That’s all.’
‘Twenty-three years, Astrid.’ Poppy’s eyes widened as if she could see every hour they would surrender to the darkness. ‘And—’ she lowered her voice. ‘Do you always believe them, about Terra-Two?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That it will be a paradise. That it’s as beautiful as they say it is. Like the pictures.’
‘Of course, I do. W-why wouldn’t I?’
‘I don’t know.’ Poppy shrugged, ‘I imagine reaching it sometimes and finding that it’s as scarred and desolate as the face of the moon. I think I’d die of disappointment.’
‘You just have cold feet,’ Astrid said again, gripping Poppy’s arm, willing her to stop.
‘Do I?’ she asked.
‘I believe everything,’ Astrid said. ‘This is an amazing adventure, and we’re the first. Like Armstrong and the moon or Igor and Mars. And it will go by quickly. All the years. Like this –’ She snapped her fingers.
They both looked up. They’d only just noticed the sound of the rain, the heavy way it was pounding the copper roof of the refectory. Behind Poppy was a glass wall, and a door leading to the courtyard. The sky was twice as bright as it had been just five minutes ago, and the dawn made the clouds light up in peach and bruise-purple. Astrid had never seen rain like it before, the kind that reflected the sun and filled the air with a flaxen light. She might even have called it beautiful if the word hadn’t curdled in her stomach.
‘That’s why you deserve to go,’ Poppy said, turning back. ‘You and your sister and Ara. The boys. They made a mistake with me.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘No . . .’ She lowered her eyes, ‘It’s true. I came because I was running away. And . . . you want to know someth
ing?’
‘What?’ asked Astrid.
‘Moy sekret,’ she said. Astrid recognized the Russian from her GCSE classes. Poppy had an irritating habit of flaunting her language skills at inappropriate times. ‘I lied in the personality tests.’
Astrid gazed at her in confusion.
‘It’s quite simple, actually,’ Poppy continued, ‘they have specific select-out and select-in criteria. You have to be sociable enough to thrive as a member of a multi-disciplinary team, but introverted enough to do well in the isolated environment of outer space, so you—’
‘It’s not possible to cheat those tests,’ Astrid said. ‘They control for lying. Don’t you think everyone lies? Or tries to? No one’s going to say they’re frightened of the dark or enclosed spaces. Everyone ticks “strongly agree” when they read “I function well in a team.” But they chose you for a reason. You’re so good at—’ Astrid fumbled for a moment. ‘. . . communication. And . . . public relations. The crowds love you. You wouldn’t have made it through if they didn’t know you were right for this mission, Poppy.’
Poppy looked up again at her friend with desperate eyes. ‘You think?’ she almost pleaded.
‘Of course.’
Poppy’s talent with languages had long made her the envy of the other students at Dalton. As part of their training, all astronaut candidates were required to display some proficiency in Russian, as the UKSA had strong links with the Russian Space Agency, Roscocosmos. As her classmates took their first clumsy halting steps into the language, Poppy was reading and conducting happy conversations with their engineering teacher. Although she scored below average in almost every other subject, Poppy had excelled in computer science and robotics because she picked up programming languages with the ease of a stamp collector.
Nevertheless, everyone suspected, uncharitably, that the real reason Poppy had been selected for the Beta over so many other competent candidates was because of her good looks. Poppy’s role, as Head of Communications, was the most public-facing of the crew. And her face was a delight. Unnaturally symmetrical. Titian hair drawn down her porcelain forehead into a delicate widow’s peak. Cartilage of her nose curved exquisitely upwards. Every week for twenty-three years, her role was to appear on the TV and computer screens of children all over the world, explaining thermodynamics and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion in twenty different languages.
‘And you have doubts too, sometimes?’ Poppy asked.
‘Sure,’ Astrid lied, ‘sometimes.’
A tremolo voice rose up from the rain, and Astrid looked up to see a girl outside the window in the courtyard, dancing by herself, dressed in mufti, a crop top and combat boots, a glittering line of bindis dotting her left brow. It was Ara. Singing a song that Astrid had heard her perform before, at their Leavers’ Ball the previous year. She had been the first on the dance floor, singing alone, wearing, then, a sequinned dress with a skater skirt that flared up around her thighs when she twirled. She had been like a human disco ball with her bold voice, an inspiration to them all – every girl who had scrabbled the previous fortnight for a date – alone and unashamed.
‘She can’t go a day without dancing,’ Poppy said with a weak smile as she stood up. Prising open the door, she followed just like the other girls had that night at the dance. Ara’s siren song, irresistible.
Although Astrid recoiled at the freezing rush of air into the refectory, she watched Poppy skip into the courtyard to join in. Ara took her hand and led her in a dizzy waltz up and down the cobblestones, both blinking fiercely against the rain. Then she let go and sent Poppy reeling, their laughter scattering up the four walls and into every window.
From where she sat, Astrid saw her sister Juno pop a sleepy head from the first-floor window, and was sure she was going to tell them off about the noise, but instead she ducked back inside then appeared in the courtyard a moment later to join them in the dance. Her sister had never been able to dance. She moved awkwardly, with none of the rhythm of her companions. Never able to shuffle off the weight of other people’s eyes, and even in short moments of celebration, too nervous to move the way her body quietly urged. But that morning, she could.
Astrid ventured from the table and stood on the threshold between the kitchen and the garden, watching them all in surprise. ‘Astrid, come and join us,’ Ara urged, spinning around, her arms thrown above her head. ‘The air smells so good out here. Like, cool and clean. The day’s just begun.’
Astrid hesitated – the storm that had been threatening when she woke up had arrived, and it was violent. Thunder roared overhead, raindrops exploded on the cobblestones and sluiced over the gutters. ‘What would you do with this day, Astrid,’ Ara called to her, ‘if you could do anything at all?’ But Astrid remembered that this morning was not a beginning at all. They had been five years in training for this mission and all of a sudden here they were, almost at the end.
It occurred to Astrid, in a disembodied instant, that already this moment was accelerating away from her. In a second, being young and full of laughter and standing with all her friends on Earth would be only a memory. Nothing more than a memory ever again.
When she finally stepped out into the storm everything hurt; the icy needles of the rain, the sharp cold cobbles underfoot, the gnawing hunger in her stomach and a sudden longing to swallow the whole sky, the sound of her sister’s celebration and the light shining off their forearms before it all slipped away.
A flash of lightning lanced across the clouds and Astrid spotted faces illuminated under one of the darkened archways on the opposite side of the courtyard. The boys. Eliot and Harry, their faces pale. Harry had his hands open, palms up, as if the rain was made of platinum coins.
Astrid cleared her throat, all of a sudden ashamed and aware of herself. ‘Did we wake you?’ she called to them.
‘We’ve been up all night,’ Harry admitted. ‘Both of us. What are you doing?’
‘Dancing.’ Ara’s voice still chimed with laughter.
‘Evidently,’ said Eliot. ‘You’ll catch pneumonia or something, in this weather.’
‘You don’t catch pneumonia – or something – from the rain,’ Juno snorted.
They all stood in silence for a minute; the sun was breaking through the clouds and its muted light spread across them.
‘I want to go into town,’ Ara suggested with an excitement that sounded out of place. The exuberance of their last dancing moments had already dissolved on the rain-slicked stones. Harry chuckled, then stopped, spotting no sign of jest.
‘Are you serious?’ he asked, wiping the wet blond hair from his eyes. ‘How would we do that?’
‘We used to sneak out sometimes at Dalton. In the early days, when we were thirteen or fourteen.’
‘Yeah, but it’s pretty much impossible to leave here.’
‘I know what you mean though,’ Poppy sighed heavily. ‘I feel as if we’ve been indoors for years or something. It’s been so much work every day.’
‘We don’t have much scheduled today,’ Eliot said. ‘Just the tree-planting ceremony.’
‘Is it lame that I’m excited?’ Juno said, with a shy smile. They had grown up with pictures of famous and long-dead astronauts planting trees at the British Interplanetary Society, in the Garden of Flight. Pumpkin-orange in their flight suits, sprinkling dirt over the roots as they might over a lover’s grave. It was a ritual the Brits borrowed from the Russians, who planted saplings in Cosmonauts’ Grove near their launch site in Baikonur. Space enthusiasts still made the pilgrimage to see the 100-year-old oak tree planted by the first man in space. Astrid was excited too. She wondered if, in another century, people might touch the dirt at the roots of her own tree, mouth silent prayers for the other distant Earth that the Beta would be the first to stand on.
‘It feels like graduation, almost,’ Poppy said. ‘Like we’re finally real astronauts.’
‘We are,’ Harry said.
‘We will be tomorrow,’ Juno said, ‘technical
ly.’
‘And,’ Eliot said, ‘the garden will be in town. The BIS is near the Houses of Parliament. We’ll see all of London through the window. So you don’t have to feel like you’re missing anything.’
They all avoided each other’s gaze.
‘I thought I heard singing out here.’ Their flight surgeon, Dr Maggie Millburrow, entered the courtyard, wearing a transparent rain poncho over her lab coat. In the corner of her eye, Astrid thought she saw her crewmates straighten their backs, grow serious. They weren’t sure if they would be in trouble for getting out of their beds so early. But the doctor smiled at them, and ruffled Juno’s hair.
‘We were just talking about the tree-planting ceremony,’ Astrid said.
‘I see.’ Dr Millburrow smiled a little. ‘I’m excited too. The birch I planted died while I was on Luna-Nine. They say it’s bad luck, though the mission was a success. Fingers crossed this time.’
She glanced at her watch. ‘The kitchen staff have told me that there’s been a problem with breakfast.’ A pang of guilty nerves made Astrid’s heart flutter, and the blood burned in her face. She lowered her eyes, hoping that no one would notice. ‘It’s delayed by ninety minutes, so your medical checks have been brought forward to fill the time instead. Good to get them over with before the morning briefing. Commander Sheppard and Igor Bovarin have an engagement and so won’t be there but we’ll see them at 12.30 at the tree-planting ceremony. I have to tell you now though, I’ve been informed that anyone who does not pass the medical check this morning can’t be cleared to travel. Safety precaution. We don’t want to take any risks this close to launch.’
AFTER HER MEDICAL EXAMINATION, Astrid found Ara throwing up in the toilet.
‘Did they clear you?’ she asked, fingering the green ‘cleared’ tag they had just snapped onto her wrist. Peering around the open door of the cubicle, Astrid recoiled at the pungent tang of vomit, clutching her own stomach. ‘Are you sick?’