by Temi Oh
‘It’s true, though,’ Ara said.
‘Well I wish you’d stop saying it.’
‘I wish you’d stop doing that,’ Noah hissed. Eliot was crouched on the floor, where he had found a lighter someone had tossed near a dustbin. He was sparking and re-sparking it, his thumb sliding over the sputtering flame as he stared, mesmerized.
‘It doesn’t hurt,’ he said, without looking up.
‘Still—’ Noah twisted uncomfortably. ‘. . . it’s something about the way you look when you do it.’
‘How?’ Eliot tore his gaze away from the flame and glanced up at Noah.
‘It’s just strange, that’s all.’
‘There’s nothing strange about a fascination with flames,’ he said. ‘Fire is pure energy. Light and heat. Some places in the world, people worship it.’ He stuffed the lighter into the pocket of his jacket. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘you can’t be an astronaut if you’re afraid of fire. Or if you’re afraid of what happens when gasoline meets liquid oxygen. Tomorrow we will be sitting on top of a bomb.’
Noah’s lips were white. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m not an astronaut,’ he said quietly.
‘She’s not going to let us go.’ Ara was looking anxious now, chewing on a thumbnail, and beginning to pace.
‘Where do you even want to go?’ Poppy asked, leaning back in a reading chair to flip through the rest of Vanity Fair.
‘Where the fun is,’ Ara said. This was Ara’s catchphrase. On the few nights out they had been allowed over the years, Ara would refrain from making plans and jump on random buses until she reached somewhere exciting – and she always did. She attracted fun things, like an impromptu street party, a marching band. Ara seemed to trip through life wide-eyed, expectant and spoiled on delight.
‘I’ve spoken to the flight surgeon.’ The door flew open as the public affairs officer re-entered. ‘She said that you can look around the library and this wing of the space museum, for an hour. You must be back here and changed into your flight suits before your commander and the other veteran astronauts return.’ She looked at her watch. ‘One o’clock.’
They all agreed.
Back in the main hall, Juno’s crewmates looked as if they would burst with delight. Ara was laughing, Poppy’s face was red. ‘One whole hour,’ she said as if it was something too large to eat.
‘Where should we go?’ Juno asked, but Noah slipped his fingers into hers.
‘Come with me?’ he asked.
‘But, the others . . .’ When Juno turned back, Ara, her sister and Eliot were already skipping in the opposite direction.
‘Please?’ he asked, his knuckles dovetailed into hers. Every time she looked back on that afternoon, Juno would urge herself to do something different.
‘Let them go,’ Noah said.
And she did.
THEIR FEET FELL INTO a familiar rhythm as Noah led her down the dim corridors and towards the lift that led to the Garden of Flight. The silence was uncomfortable, so Juno scrambled for things to say to him. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘Everyone’s getting really emotional this morning. About the launch. I feel as if I’m the only one who’s excited. They’re only focusing on the things they’re leaving behind but there are so many things I’ll be glad I’ll never see again.’
‘Like what?’ Noah asked, pressing his thumb against the scanner to hail the lift.
‘I don’t know. Traffic jams and hailstones.’ They stepped inside. ‘I’ll probably never have to pay taxes, or stand in line at the post office.’
‘You’ll probably never see all that stuff that supermarkets throw out in those big skips at the end of the day and the people who rummage through them for something to eat,’ Noah added. ‘That makes me sad as hell.’ The floor numbers began at zero and descended into negatives, Noah pressed -7 and the door closed.
‘Greenhouse gases,’ Juno said. Her stomach dropped as they headed to the basement. ‘Civil war. Famine.’
‘All those things might happen on Terra-Two, you know,’ Noah said. ‘Eventually. I mean, war kind of happens everywhere.’
‘No, it won’t,’ Juno said. ‘We’re leaving behind a world where slavery happened. Two world wars. Genocide. A world where people have used atomic bombs. Terra-Two will be different. Better. We will make it better.’
The lift pinged and they stepped out. The Garden of Flight was a dark orchard, densely packed with trees of all different kinds. Lots of silver birches, with bark that peeled like tissue paper. ‘Sheppard had a birch tree,’ she said.
‘All of the Mars Expeditions did. I don’t know why. Look here.’ He led her to a row of them, like pale sentinels, the names of astronauts carved into a marble stone at the foot of each tree. Juno found the names of the veteran astronauts following them on the mission. Igor Bovarin had the most trees; some delicate saplings, others sturdy and flush with leaves, thick roots swelling from the black soil.
Noah led her to the centre of the garden, skipping over an artificial spring, into a luxurious clearing, lit blue with holographic galaxies projected on the ceiling. The air was heavy with pollen, and Juno trod carefully, so as to avoid crushing the flowers. ‘This place is different from the way I imagined,’ she told him, looking around at a patch of bluebells, their stems heavy with flowers. ‘I don’t think I’ve seen a plant, or anything other than titanium and steel and plastic, for over a week.’ Juno laughed. The air smelt deliciously of apple blossom, and juniper, mint and wild sorrel. ‘It’s still spring here,’ Juno said, reaching to break a bunch of cherry blossoms off a branch.
‘It’s something to do with the climate controls I think. They use these LEDs – like the ones they use on space stations, to keep them growing down here. But, for some reason, the seasons start and finish about a month later.’ Flower petals dropped like confetti and gusted across the ground. It looked like the type of wood that she and Astrid used to search for faeries in. Like the wood near Noah’s childhood house where he had first asked Juno to be his girlfriend, his cheeks burning, his eyes defiantly hopeful. Or where she’d met him after a dentist appointment, the first person he smiled for after they fitted him with braces – still ashamed of the cages they’d locked his twisted teeth into.
Dalton was a hostile place for friendships. Few romances lasted longer than a summer, but because Juno and Noah had endured, their union had taken on a kind of mystique. The young, star-bound lovers. But, after Noah had chosen to leave the programme, some of the excitement died. Juno sometimes wondered what kept them together now. The tepid comfort of habit, she supposed.
‘So—’ Noah stopped walking and let her hand drop. ‘I got you a gift.’ He dipped his hand into his pocket and opened his palm. ‘It’s a moon rock,’ he said, ‘in a necklace, so you can’t lose it.’
Juno’s heart fluttered. ‘But that’s yours,’ she said. She had lost count of how many times she’d seen him turning the little stone over in his hands, or slipping it into his pocket before exams. It was small and grey, shot through with silvery flecks. An actual piece of the moon that Noah’s father had left behind when he walked out of his son’s life.
Juno was unable to meet Noah’s gaze.
‘Yes, but I wanted to give it to you. I mean, I know you’re probably going to see so many other things on your way. Nothing so pedestrian as the moon, but—’
‘Thank you,’ Juno said, and kissed him quickly on the cheek. He smelt of sweetened milk and non-bio washing powder. Motes of dust flitted between them, and she memorized his face. His watery eyes, hair like spun sugar.
‘Shall I put it on?’ he asked.
She turned around and lowered her gaze as he tightened the clasp. The silver chain was cool on her skin and Noah let his fingers linger on the nape of her neck. Juno became aware of the airless intimacy of the garden, of the hair prickling up along her spine.
When she glanced up, though, she noticed something in the corner of the clearing. Nine holes, dug like graves in a row, and the potted saplings, ready to be tra
nsplanted into the ground. ‘Those are ours,’ she said, rushing towards them. Her name was engraved on a marble stone. JUNO JUMA. She knelt down and touched it with trembling hands.
‘Do you ever think about what we would be doing if you weren’t in the Beta?’ Noah asked, his shadow stretching before her.
‘Not really.’
‘Like, what do you think we would be doing tonight?’
‘Noah . . .’
‘We might be going to the same university. You’d be studying physiology or medicine and I would be a physicist. Maybe we’d go to Blackwell’s and buy all the books on our reading list second-hand, then sit upstairs in Costa blowing bubbles out of straws and making them all burst because we’re laughing so hard. When we kissed goodbye in the night we would still have tomorrow . . .’
Her stomach squirmed with the usual guilt. He couldn’t know that she had already left him. She wanted to say, Space, Noah, I’m going to space. How could I choose you? How could she choose those insipid dreams of his over the splendour of the sky?
As he spoke, she imagined – as she often did – that she was already up there. His hold on her decreasing, like gravity. Soon this residual remorse would be nothing at all.
‘Juno?’ When she turned to him his eyes were wide with anticipation.
‘What?’
‘Were you even listening?’
‘Sorry. I’m sorry. Please say it again.’
‘I said – I said . . .’ He took a breath, his cheeks flushing, ‘Will you have sex with me?’
She leapt to her feet. ‘What? Now?’
‘We’ve been going out for three years—’
‘Yeah, and I thought—’
‘I know we both agreed to wait but since you’re leaving tomorrow, I thought . . .’
‘What?’ she said, a little more aggressively than she intended. She was prickling all over with panic.
‘Well, don’t you think that changes things? It’s not really “waiting” anymore, is it? We’re never going to see each other again.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Tomorrow you’re going away on that shuttle, and if we see each other, ever, like if I make the Gamma and launch in two years’ time, I still won’t see you for almost three decades—’
‘Two . . . and a half . . .’
He was blinking fiercely, fighting back tears. ‘We love each other.’
‘Yes but . . .’ She could feel her pulse in her clenched fists.
He squeezed his eyes shut. ‘Please . . . ?’
This was it. This was the reason Noah was here, the thing he’d been steeling himself to ask. What difference did it make, it occurred to her, if she said yes or no? She’d regret it either way. And when she glanced at him, then, in the shade of the old trees, her heart swelled with pity. Juno imagined the day after the launch. Imagined what it would be like to be the one who was left behind on the planet she’d renounced. On a clear night, Noah would be able to see the Damocles flicker like another star amongst the constellations. But as it disappeared, he would feel as if it was really him getting smaller and smaller, spinning out in a lonely orbit, sentenced to navigate streets that used to be theirs.
Other astronauts had snatched pieces of the moon to keep themselves from forgetting. To make the goodbye a little easier. Would it be so bad if she gave him this?
‘Okay,’ she said, taking a deep breath as if bracing herself to dive into cold water. ‘We’ll do it.’
‘Really?’ His eyes widened with gratitude.
‘It’s what you want, right?’
‘And you, right?’
Juno glanced at her watch. ‘We haven’t got long.’
When they kissed that time, it reminded Juno of their first time. There was a photo of them on his mother’s mantelpiece, at a Christmas formal, Juno in an ill-fitting satin dress, distracted by the rainbow shards on a disco ball. Noah was photographed gazing at her in an unguarded moment of naked adoration. It had made her cringe even then. He looked the same way that day, in the Garden of Flight. He even thanked her when she twisted an index finger into one of his belt-loops, and then he stepped back to snap open the buckle and tug it loose. The light glanced off it and, for a moment, it was the blade of a knife. ‘You don’t know how long I’ve wanted this,’ he said, unbuttoning his shirt.
Juno sat down on the grass and watched his fingers, fleet and trembling. He let his shirt flutter to the ground and it occurred to Juno that she had only seen his body a couple of times before: at swimming practice or at the beach. Noah’s chest was hairless except for a thin jet of blond beneath his navel. His ribs and collarbones shone through blue-veined skin. Juno was struck by how terribly alien it was. The sight of all that flesh.
The holographic stars cast a spotlight on the clearing. It was an empty stage now, before the curtain, and Juno’s nerves felt like ice. Noah lunged clumsily forward, and rolled on top of her, and then his clammy hands were everywhere, in her hair, between her thighs, pushing under the wired cradle of her bra. Juno willed herself to feel the same desire, for just a second. But as Noah continued kissing her face, her neck, urgent and dumb, the blood drained from her. He was made repulsive by his need, his heavy breathing, the sourness of his breath and the fullness in his jeans.
Pins and needles prickled up her fingers. ‘Noah . . .’ She twisted away from his sloppy mouth. Nettles in the bumpy undergrowth were sharp against Juno’s spine. As her muscles went slack she became more aware of the weight of Noah’s chest bearing down on hers so hard she could only take in shallow gasps. ‘Get off me.’
He didn’t.
She looked around wildly, flailing for words to describe her distress.
‘Noah . . . please. Get off me!’ It was too much. She didn’t want the weight of him, she didn’t want his hands or his lips or any part of his strange body on hers. She shoved him, leapt to her feet in one fluid movement and stood shaking at the edge of the clearing.
There was an awful quiet between them while Juno choked back the acrid tide of nausea in her throat.
‘Juno . . . ?’ Noah’s voice trembled. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘No.’ She looked away, blinking back tears. ‘No. I’m sorry. It’s me. I can’t – I don’t know why. It doesn’t feel good. It never feels good.’
‘You can. It does. You’re just . . . not letting yourself, that’s all.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is. I mean, we love each other. And you know, we’re basically adults and stuff . . .’
‘But—’
He grabbed her arm and looked at her seriously,
‘You know, Juno, there are worse things in the world than . . . doing this. People do worse things all the time.’
‘When did you decide that?’ she said, then regretted it.
Noah clenched his fists. Juno watched his knuckles turning white.
‘I don’t know what you want from me. I can’t help it. Loving you . . . wanting you. It’s all the same thing for me. And sometimes I really feel like you want to as well, but you’re stopping yourself. I think that you’re scared of not having control all the time.’
‘That’s not true,’ Juno hissed. ‘I’m not scared. I just don’t want to.’
‘Really? You don’t feel anything at all? Because sometimes you—’
‘I don’t. Feel anything. That’s the truth, Noah. When you’re on top of me, I don’t feel anything at all. Not one bit of affection, not one soupçon of desire. Not for you. Not for anyone. It’s not that I’m scared. It’s just that . . . sex is repulsive.
‘I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal. I don’t understand why you think about it all the time. It’s just your body. It doesn’t have to control you.’
As Noah got up off the ground she caught a flash of green boxers through his jeans. He zipped them up, fingers still unsteady. ‘I can’t take this,’ he said quietly, as he turned to go. ‘Maybe everybody’s right and there really is something wrong with you.’
Juno felt the blood rise up in her face – hot with shame and fury and regret.
She called out, ‘I don’t know what it would change. It won’t change anything at all. You’ll feel okay for an hour and then you’ll feel rotten and I’ll still be leaving.’
‘Maybe that’s what it comes down to,’ he said, with a quiet rage. ‘I love you too much to ever leave you.’
‘I wish you loved me too much to ask me to stay.’
Before he disappeared into the darkness between the silver birch trees he said, ‘Don’t you realize? I always have.’
T-MINUS 22 HOURS
SHE WAS ALONE FOR a long time before someone came to find her. It was the public affairs officer, and when she did the phone in her hand was lit up. Juno thought she could hear the sound of sirens hiss through the speakers. Poppy emerged from behind her, her face streaked with tears. ‘Juno!’ she shouted, ‘Something terrible’s happened!’
ASTRID
T-MINUS 22 HOURS
SHE HAD DONE IT once before.
Once, in the gilded foodhall of Harrods department store, Astrid stole a handful of sugared almonds. She had wandered the aisles, her heart clenched with longing, and gazed at the silver fish gutted on shelves of ice, scales resplendent under the chandeliers. Towers of sherbet-coloured macarons. Strawberry truffles. White-chocolate bonbons. Glittering bowls overflowing with crystalized fruit. Astrid had glanced around – uniformed shop assistant temporarily distracted by a demanding customer – and then grabbed a handful of sugared almonds, the size and blue of robin’s eggs, and then run, past the guards at the front door, past the throngs of tourists and all the way out into the glare of the midday sun. It had been an easy thing, a little thing, a swift combination of muscle contractions that comprised the theft, all, in themselves, innocuous. Astrid and Ara stole that delicious hour of freedom just as easily.
After the public affairs officer dismissed them, Astrid followed Ara down the corridors and into the Space Museum one floor down, with Eliot racing after them. They headed through the exhibitions, barely seeing them. A tour guide was leading a group of pensioners past an exhibit that featured Edwardian spacesuits. The three of them rushed past into the neighbouring hall, the one with the machine that simulated flight for small children.