by Temi Oh
Jesse’s brow was furrowed in concentration as he rifled through his things, and Juno thought about how keen he had seemed to give Poppy a gift, how often he asked after her, the way he stared at her across the kitchen table. Then it occurred to her that he must like her. How obvious, she thought, and how uninspired. Everyone liked Poppy, with her delicate limbs and thick russet locks. Even now, unwashed as she was, Juno knew she would emerge from her bedroom, after much coaxing, and everyone would still look at her like she’d just walked off the pages of Vanity Fair. Juno stood up, caught off-guard by her own disappointment.
‘Aha!’ Jesse held something up in his hands like a trophy, then handed it to her. It was a conch, the most beautiful one Juno had ever seen, pearly orange with a hard spiralled shell and a flared slit along its length. Inside it was smooth and cool to the touch, pink as the wet skin inside lips.
‘Don’t you want to hear the sea?’ Jesse asked. Juno was puzzled for a moment before she remembered and held the conch to her ear to listen to the sigh of the waves inside its body. Such things didn’t excite her anymore. When she was younger she really had believed that sea shells remembered the sea as old women remembered their youth. The swansong of a domestic object that had once known the majesty of an ocean. ‘Seashell resonance,’ she said. Any curious child knew that the same sound was audible in mugs and empty jam jars or a pair of cupped hands held up against an ear. ‘Where did you get this from?’
‘I think . . . that was Mombasa. My sister saw it under the water and she dove right down and gave it to me.’
‘Oh, Kenya?’ She looked up.
‘Yeah, my mum’s Kenyan.’
‘Really? And your dad too?’
‘No, he’s from Dublin. But we lived in Nairobi for a while when I was little.’ He pointed to a picture pinned to his noticeboard of a smiling family. Jesse, younger, with springy shoulder-length black locks. Their faces blurred by candle light. ‘That’s my tenth birthday. That morning we went to Nakumatt supermarket and tried to buy a cake, but they were like “a ready-made cake?’ ” He mimicked their surprise. ‘So my mum bought a tart instead and then, just as I was blowing out the candles, the lights went out.’
‘Power cut?’ Juno asked, remembering her own childhood home.
‘Yeah.’ Jesse smiled. Juno examined some of the other photographs. Jesse’s sister smiling at a market stall. ‘Where’s that?’ she asked.
‘Istanbul,’ Jesse said casually.
‘Is that New York?’ Juno pointed at a picture of a white man and a dark woman standing in front of a yellow taxi.
‘Vancouver,’ Jesse corrected. ‘My family travel around a lot.’
‘I gathered that much. Why?’
‘Well – my dad’s a journalist, sort of. He does this documentary series called Undiscovered Earth, maybe you’ve heard of it?’ Juno nodded. She had come across a few episodes on the BBC. The kind of Sunday-night viewing that was comfortable to fall asleep in front of, as surprising vistas of far-flung places lit up the screen. It was difficult to imagine that the gaunt presenter was related to the handsome golden-skinned boy standing before her.
‘And he travels around a lot to research disparate communities and the effects of climate change, and my mum’s an author so she can work anywhere. Wanderlust, my parents are sick with it. They took me and my sister out of school for eighteen months to travel across east Africa. My dad taught my sister most of GCSe chemistry. For Christmas, we took a cruise down the Nile.’
His braided hair reminded Juno of the overly tanned white boys she’d seen at Kenyatta airport, sunburnt and peeling, blond locks in cornrows. ‘That sounds . . . amazing,’ she said. ‘My dad is a missionary, he travels a lot too. But we didn’t really get to go with him so often.’ She paused. ‘I feel bad, actually. I don’t think I’ve asked you anything about yourself. You sound like you’ve had an interesting life.’
‘So have you,’ Jesse said. ‘You’re an astronaut.’
Juno rolled her eyes. ‘We’re all astronauts,’ she said, mimicking his tone. ‘But you’ve been to all these places. Places I’ll never get to go.’
Jesse shrugged. ‘It had up- and downsides – travelling so much. When I was younger it seemed like a lot more downsides, if I’m honest. But I got to pick some things up along the way; a suntan, some passing phrases in Arabic, this shell . . .’
Juno ran her fingers along its blunt spines. ‘You must like Poppy a lot, since you’re giving this to her.’
‘I dunno. I’ve been wanting to give it away ever since Morrigan gave it to me. I mean, it’s pretty and all, and it made me feel like Ralph from lord of the Flies but – you’re going to think this is so dumb – when it was on my shelf I kept thinking about how big it was, and how big the thing that used to live inside it must have been. I felt a little guilty because it was once something’s home, and I also got a bit grossed out.’ He seemed to shudder at the thought of the soft slimy animal that made its home in the shell.
‘Maybe it’s evolution,’ Juno said, trying to hide a smile.
‘People frightened of invertebrates live longer?’ Jesse teased.
‘I’m sure I heard that somewhere,’ she replied, and they both laughed.
‘I don’t even know how this ended up in my box,’ Jesse said. ‘It’s kind of spooky actually. I feel as if I’m being followed.’
‘Imagine if we got to Terra and there were hundreds of them all over the beach.’
‘Exactly. So I’m glad I’m giving it to Poppy. Does that make it bad? Like, not really a gift?’
Juno thought. ‘Sometimes, for Lent, I’d give up tomatoes. But I’ve always hated tomatoes.’ He looked puzzled for a moment, so she continued. ‘It’s supposed to be a sacrifice.’
Someone coughed behind them and they turned to find Astrid standing at the door. ‘I found something,’ she said, and opened her hand to show Juno the bejewelled hair slide that looked worth more than the six pounds she’d paid for it in Camden. Now, it probably was.
‘Jesse’s got something too.’ She showed her sister the conch.
‘Wow.’ Astrid grinned, taking it from her sister and holding it up to her ear. Her eyes glazed over as if she could already see the crashing waves.
POPPY
15.07.12
SHE HAD NOT BEEN ready for the darkness of space. Other astronauts had warned her that it came as a real shock, the complete unilluminated blackness. But, at the time, Poppy had been looking backwards and not ahead. She had been looking back down at Earth at everything she was glad to leave behind, not ahead into the vacuum.
Sometimes she felt as if the blackness was actually inside her. As if space itself yawned inside her, and the cold of it had leeched into her bones.
Two weeks after they’d arrived on the Damocles, Poppy had come down with a cold – a mild fever, airways stuffed with cotton wool, a head that felt like a fish tank – and Fae allowed her to take a day off work on the condition that she catch up with her chores over the weekend. Poppy had spent the next three days in bed, and sleep came so easily, submerged her again and again like warm water. Even when Poppy tried to get up, a few days later, her bones were heavy. Suddenly everything seemed like an awful lot of work and she no longer had it in her to do it. She couldn’t see the point. As the days passed more and more things fell away. She realized that she had spent her entire life blindly beating back against a tide of futility, performing tasks she would only have to do again and again: changing filters, cleaning rooms, updating software, scraping away the black dirt that aggregated under her fingernails. The others could not see with her keen eyes; they were still fighting, they were still working as if they had forgotten that one day their eyes would shut and maggots would wriggle into their stomachs and the marrow in their bones would turn to dust.
That was happening to Poppy already, only slowly.
The day of her birthday, Poppy opened her eyes and saw Harry’s face. He had twisted a sheet of coloured paper into a cone and tied
it on top of his head like a party hat. ‘It’s your birthday,’ he said with a smile.
‘Is it?’ Her mouth was sour, her teeth furry and unbrushed.
‘You’re twenty.’
‘I’m twenty.’ The words came as a hollow surprise and made Poppy’s stomach twist.
‘Hey, don’t cry,’ he said, although she hadn’t realized that she was. Harry leant down, wiped a tear away with his thumb and then licked it.
Twenty, she had heard, was young in the scheme of things. And yet it was the oldest she had ever been.
‘We have a surprise for you,’ Harry said.
‘You do?’
He nodded. ‘Outside.’
When Poppy stepped outside, everyone shouted ‘Happy Birthday!’ They had cut strips of paper into ribbons and hung them from the beams in the crew module, made a banner with a red Sharpie and printer paper so the Ps in ‘HAPPY’ and ‘Poppy’ looked like candy-canes. They’d made her a cake, substituted apple sauce for the eggs they didn’t have and covered it with icing and hundreds and thousands. Commander Sheppard sang as Eliot thrashed out lively chords on his guitar. Fae, Igor and Cai clapped, while Juno, Astrid and Jesse gesticulated wildly, with all the glad energy of a circus troupe.
Poppy looked at all their smiling faces and felt the love. She smiled back, because these people didn’t know that it hurt inside her, and why should they have to? Their singing, peppy and discordant as it was, came to her as if from behind a pane of glass. She smiled numbly the whole way through and when they were finished she ate the cake with her fingers. It was good, the way the sugar entered her veins, and she closed her eyes and said, ‘This is good.’ It was the first thing she had eaten all day and she could feel it sizzling in the emptiness inside her. ‘I could eat the whole thing. I could eat several, every day for the rest of my life.’
‘Well, just a little for me,’ said Juno, leaning over Astrid’s shoulder as she held the cake knife. ‘No . . . No, less than that. Half – I said half – of that . . .’
‘Shame we don’t have any candles,’ Astrid said. ‘Fire hazard.’
‘Twenty’s a lot of candles,’ Harry teased.
‘It’ll be you in a few months,’ Juno reminded him.
‘Yeah . . .’ He was thoughtful for a moment. ‘You’re right.’
‘Twenty’s okay,’ said Astrid. ‘It’s eighteen or nineteen that’s the problem. When you have to buy two packs of candles and they come in these weird sets of, like, seven or eleven or prime numbers and you always have loads spare.’
‘Oh yeah . . .’ Poppy laughed at a memory. ‘Remember when we had to buy something like four packs of five for—’ She cut off suddenly and her eyes darted to Eliot in alarm.
He looked up from the ground. ‘You can say her name, you know.’ Everyone ducked their heads. ‘That was Ara’s birthday. I remember.’
‘Well,’ Fae said, nibbling at a spoonful of her cake, ‘just wait until you get to fifty-six, that’s all I can say.’
‘Or seventy-eight.’ Igor laughed.
After they finished eating, the adults politely absented themselves, leaving the Betas to continue the party without them.
Poppy stuffed the rest of the cake in her mouth then ran a finger around her plate, licking off the remainder of the icing. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘it was always Ara who had the best birthdays.’
‘No,’ Harry said quickly, ‘there was Sebastian Branwell’s eighteenth.’
For a moment the name drew a blank, but then Poppy remembered the thin boy with the living room the size of her mother’s flat. She remembered being happily drunk and looking up at all her faces reflected back in the crystal teardrops on the chandelier. ‘There must have been about three hundred people,’ she said. The rooms were packed, and students she knew distantly from the local schools were smoking weed in the garden, daring each other to leap topless into the marble fountain.
‘More than that, for sure.’
‘And that cake . . . it was like a wedding cake.’
Harry started laughing. ‘Yeah, Oliver Tammon and I played that game to see how far we could hit the ball out and I got it all the way across that field. Like four hundred feet.’
Poppy was still smiling when she looked at him quizzically and asked, ‘You did?’
‘Course I did. You were there,’ Harry said. ‘You were. And Oli bet you and Kate fifty pounds that you wouldn’t be able to get it back.’ Poppy shook her head with a shrug. ‘How could you forget that? It was so fucking awesome. Everyone was talking about it the whole night.’
‘Maybe I wasn’t there for that bit?’
‘You were!’ Harry shouted loud enough to make everyone start.
‘Okay,’ said Jesse, cutting another piece of cake from the plate in the middle. ‘Cool it. It’s not like it matters anymore.’
‘Right,’ said Harry, turning on him, ‘that’s your philosophy, isn’t it, nothing matters. I bet it makes you feel so cool. But something’s got to matter.’
‘Well, you know,’ Jesse stretched his legs out in front of him, ‘nothing really matters. I mean, Earth stuff. Think about how famous you guys were when we launched – all those people and all those magazines – for a while you were the most famous people on the planet. And what use is it to any of us up here? It’s not like it makes a difference anymore, not like we can take it with us. Even other things, like school, being popular or being rich . . .’ He trailed off with a shrug.
‘Some of it’s got to matter,’ Harry said, quietly, more to himself.
‘I suppose we can decide,’ Juno said. ‘Hey, when you think about it, we’re sort of like a community or a society, right here, the six of us. We get to choose what’s important to us.’
‘That’s weird.’ Poppy shuddered.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, like we’re . . . on our own . . .’
Astrid looked up. ‘Is it though? Look around.’ And Poppy did for a moment, glancing at the others, who were seated cross-legged in a circle around the half-eaten cake. ‘Can you imagine what it will be like the day we look out the window of the Atlas module and we see Terra-Two the way we used to be able to see Earth? Can you picture us all swooping down into the atmosphere on the lander and standing there, feeling like we’ve come to an end but also a sunlit beginning. Picture it, for a moment,’ Astrid continued, her voice strong. ‘I do, every day. When you think about it, we’re like pioneers. We’re the first, and after us, if we’re lucky, there will be a whole country. Countries.’
‘It’s kind of a big responsibility,’ Jesse said.
Poppy leant forward in the silence and took another fat slice of cake. Dessert was such a luxury in this world where they survived on macronutrient broth.
‘It’s a little childish,’ Astrid said, ‘but I thought of a few games we could play.’
Harry smiled. ‘It’s not a party without a game.’
JUNO
15.07.12
THEY HAD USED THREE rations of sugar and cocoa powder to make the cake, so it was sickly sweet and black as sin. Juno had been so distracted by the hot feeling of it in her stomach that she missed the count and was out of it until everyone was running to find a hiding place.
Harry closed his eyes and Poppy spun around, her heels flashing pink as she shimmied between a gap in the bookcases, a finger pressed against her lips as she disappeared. In half a second Eliot and Jesse were gone, racing down the corridor, thrilled by the competition. Astrid dashed through the hatch, down to the lower deck, flicking off the lights as she went, the sound of her stifled giggle audible in the sudden darkness. Everyone was trying not to trip over things as they ran, their blood thick with sugar, the air chiming with laughter or bated breath.
Juno didn’t want to get in the way of the fun, but she had no real appetite for another game. Over the past few weeks, she had watched both Eliot and Jesse grit their teeth as Harry’s high score on the simulator tripled and their progress stalled. She’d witnessed the competit
ion spill out from the games room into the crew module, where Jesse beat Harry and Eliot in a four-hour chess tournament, to the kitchen – the setting for red-eyed staring contests – and Igor’s lessons, where Harry and Eliot argued over formulae and scribbled convoluted equations on the whiteboard. Card games and arm-wrestling matches almost resulted in blows. The air between the three boys prickled with the static of imminent combustion.
‘Juno, quick,’ came a voice from the shadows. Juno strained her eyes in the gloom, searching for the source, but, as Eliot slammed the door to the boys’ cabin, she remembered that time was running out. If she didn’t find a place to hide, she’d risk the embarrassment of being caught first, standing gormlessly in the middle of the crew module.
‘Ten seconds,’ Harry said. Juno’s heart quickened and she looked around for a place to hide. She could crouch in one of the darkened alcoves, but as soon as Harry flicked the light on he was sure to find her. The girls’ cabin struck her as an obvious choice, but she had no time now to run across the crew module. So she lunged in the opposite direction, to the bathroom, tore open the door and dived in. As it closed behind her, she heard Harry count down, ‘. . . six, five . . .’
The room smelt of damp and detergent. Juno’s eyes were not accustomed to the darkness so she groped around for a few seconds to get her bearings. It was a decent place to hide, she supposed, surely the last place Harry might look. Fumbling for the latch, Juno pulled the shower door open and stepped in.
‘What the—’
Her hands flew to her mouth too late to catch a startled whimper.
‘Shh,’ Jesse hissed savagely. He was standing in the shower too, only a shadow in the gloom.