by Temi Oh
‘Commander-in-training.’
‘Have a sense of humour,’ Harry said finally. ‘It was only a game.’ He ruffled her hair, then made to walk off.
‘You’re not fit to be commander,’ Juno shouted after him. ‘You’re not fit to be behind the wheel of a car, let alone a spaceship, if this is all just a game to you.’
Harry didn’t even turn, just spoke over his shoulder as he strode down the corridor. ‘That’s all there is up here, though. Games. And everyone chooses to play because we’re all bored out of our fucking minds.’
JESSE
29.08.12
WHEN JESSE OPENED HIS eyes in the infirmary, Juno was standing over him. ‘You’re okay,’ she said softly.
‘I guess so . . .’ he began, but as soon as he said it, the memories flooded back. The cardiac plunge he’d experienced when he’d looked in Harry’s eyes and realized that he really was about to die at his hands. The violence of his final moments, thrashing at the sealed door, the bruises around his elbows where pinpricks of blood had burst out of his capillaries. Juno had been the one to save him. He recalled, with a visceral shame, his own begging howls, the tears that had come to his eyes, the way she had looked when the airlock opened, a floodlit nimbus about her face, the fleeting moment of wonder at her touch. All of a sudden, Jesse wished she would leave.
‘I’m fine. I’m really fine,’ he said, trying with some effort to sit up. ‘You can go. You probably have something to be doing.’
She shrugged. ‘I have an excuse to miss dinner, which, today, I’m glad about. I think if I see Harry again today there’s a real danger I might stab him with my fork. Eliot and I are going to tell Sheppard tonight.’
For a moment Jesse was sick with fear and embarrassment. He imagined trying to explain what had happened. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Please. It’ll only make things worse.’
Juno shook her head doubtfully. ‘Sheppard should know. Fae already knows you had a panic attack—’ Jesse grimaced at the word. ‘But she doesn’t know what Harry did to you. The senior crew should know that Harry’s dangerous. Possibly insane.’
‘Don’t be dramatic. It just got out of hand, that’s all.’ Jesse tried to swallow, though his throat was tight. A flash of Harry’s grinning face came to him and he turned cold with rage. ‘I don’t want to talk about it again. To anyone.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ Jesse said darkly.
‘That was a terrible thing he did. I can’t actually believe . . .’ Juno trailed off, shaking her head in puzzlement.
‘Can’t you?’ Jesse asked. ‘Everyone acts like it’s a surprise whenever Harry does a bad thing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just because he’s been chosen to be here and is a good pilot doesn’t mean that he’s a good person. He’s going to be our commander when Sheppard is gone but he’s nothing like Solomon Sheppard. He’s not quiet and humble, or wise and good. He’s cruel. Just because he’s a talented pilot, just because he’s good at sports and handsome and shagged half the girls in our year, doesn’t make him a leader.’
‘I guess you’re right.’ Juno looked down. ‘There were always those things he did, like pranks and mean jokes that I thought he just did because, I don’t know, he’s a teenage boy. But now I wonder if that’s just the person he is. The person he’s become.’
They sat in silence for a moment. Then Jesse revealed something he hadn’t admitted before. ‘You know . . .’ He searched Juno’s face for a sign she would understand. ‘I’ve been thinking . . . I think I, kind of, hate Harry.’
‘Don’t say that.’ Juno frowned. ‘You’re just angry, that’s all. I am too. But we’re a team. And we’re supposed to be a family.’
‘A family.’ Jesse snorted. ‘Some dysfunctional family that I’m sure as hell not part of.’
‘Don’t say that.’ Juno was getting upset. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘you don’t actually have to do everything that Harry says.’
‘Of course I know that,’ Jesse snapped.
‘Then why do you always go along with his games? You follow him around like—’ she paused. ‘Like you admire him. Almost like you want to be him. You watch him at dinner, you laugh at his jokes, you sit in the games room and just watch him while he plays on the simulator. For hours.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Jesse said.
‘No, I don’t.’
For a moment he hated them all. All the members of the Beta. They were grossly entitled and self-absorbed. He hated the way they had swanned through the school in the final days, crowds parting in awed enchanted waves before them. The way they had emerged before the entire world, that day before the launch, as if they were crowned in laurel, the whole country chanting their names when only a week later they’d been absorbed again in their little problems.
Most of all he hated them for hating him, for the way they had all closed ranks against him as if he had pushed Ara into the river and then slung her ghost like an albatross around his neck. He needed to be alone.
‘Get lost,’ he said to Juno.
She looked stung for just a moment but then stood up. ‘Whatever.’ She pushed her chair back under the desk. ‘You think you have it so much harder than everyone else, don’t you?’
‘You don’t have to apologize for being here,’ he shouted.
‘Neither do you.’ She headed for the door and before she slammed it behind her she said, ‘And – when you’re not feeling so damned sorry for yourself – I’m glad you are here.’
AS SOON AS JESSE was feeling better, he headed down to the games room and spent the rest of the evening using the flight simulator. Harry was already at the ninth level, and his high score glittered on the screen every time Jesse loaded the programme.
Jesse started well, making it easily through the first and second levels, then, with less ease, to the fifth. By the time he reached level six his ship had sustained too much damage to hold up against the high temperatures, and when he tried to land in the thick Venusian atmosphere, sulphuric acid clouds flayed the already battered hull. He never made it down to the troposphere, and every member of his crew died.
After a while, the sound of feet and the low rumble of voices on the floors above faded. He checked the numbers on his watch and guessed that most of the crew would be asleep. He headed back to the boys’ cabin but found that Harry was still awake, lamplit at the desk, watching something on his laptop. It was a boat race. Jesse was unsurprised to see the interlocking Olympic rings in the corner of the screen. Jesse guessed it was the coxless fours, as there were four men in lime-yellow boats, oars cutting the water in unison as they lanced down the wide lake.
The voice of the commentator was barely audible over the crackly cheering of the crowd coming through the laptop speaker . . . ‘Can the British team retain this rhythm and concentration? Their training up in the Alps, is it going to pay off for them? They’ve had so much disruption this year, when they were beaten in Munich by the Australians . . . and here come the Australians now . . .’
Harry’s eyes were unblinking and filled with light. He had been watching the television recordings every night since the games began, on longer and longer delays.
‘They’re upping it now . . .’
He was actually holding his breath.
Jesse already knew that the UK had won. His father had sent him the results a week ago, but Harry had wanted to watch all the games and tally them up himself.
Jesse had always enjoyed watching the Olympics at home, everything from fencing to synchronized swimming. But he’d never understood rowing the way that Harry did. He’d been told that when you got it right it felt like flying. It never did for Jesse, who had been drafted into the rowing class at Dalton for all of one term. Every Wednesday afternoon he’d have to take the train down to the boathouse with the laughing boys who never spoke to him. It wasn’t for him, hoisting the jauntily named boats out onto the brown water. The miserable weather. The cold. When he’d
complained about the sub-zero temperatures, the others had whispered that of course ‘black men don’t row’ – a sentiment that had made him all the more determined to stick it out for the term. He stayed behind in the tank just to practise again and again on the stagnant water, in the rotting boat that was nailed to the floor. It wasn’t until he’d burned calluses into the palms of his hand – and scraped the sculls over his knuckles so often that he’d ripped the delicate skin clean off – that he got the rhythm right. And, even then, he never flew. One day it was so cold that he lost sensation in his fingers for hours, and he realized that he hated every boy in his boat. He’d been in too much pain to help haul it back out of the water and the coach had rolled his eyes. It had rained, foul-smelling Thames water had flooded over the gunwales and Jesse discovered a hole in his boot. He never came back after that. He switched to running, the only one in his class, around and around their school’s grassy track. Somehow that had still been less lonely.
‘. . . towards the finishing line. It looks as though they’re gonna do it! It is gold for Great Britain!’ Harry let out a breath he’d been holding in . . . Silver, Australia, and bronze United States of America . . ..
It was a sunlit day on the screen and a blond rower in the Team GB boat was blowing kisses at the crowd.
‘This is a truly magnificent moment . . .’
Jesse wondered if Harry was imagining how it felt. He had always wondered why Harry had chosen space over some sunlit river in early summer, slicing through the water on a boat while his round-bellied relatives raised glasses of Dom Pérignon. Perhaps Harry wanted something different from his older brothers, twins who had won silver for rowing in the Beijing Olympics and were competing again that year in London. Perhaps Harry had lurked in their shadow his entire life, in silent wait for the day the entire world would cheer for him as he ascended the sky on a jet of flames.
JUNO
19.09.12
THE SUMMER JUNO AND her sister turned fifteen, their uncle had died. Juno remembered waking up to her mother’s wailing, the unnatural quiet of the funeral home, poking her finger at the coffin lining. It was softer than her own bed. Her mother’s mascara left gritty charcoal tracks down her cheeks.
She hadn’t grasped the reality of their uncle’s absence until the next week, when she noticed that no one had taken out the rubbish bags. He usually did the job, hauling them out into the front garden on Wednesday nights, but the black sacks were still out in the garden, baking in the sun. She’d tiptoed out in her socks and picked up two of the heavier ones, carrying them through the kitchen and then out the front. She was halfway across the tiled floor when she’d noticed a grain of rice on her hand, on the boneless stretch of skin between her finger and thumb. But, just before she could flick it off, it had moved, shrunk and then engorged, slithered on her wrist. She’d gasped and dropped the bags to flick the maggot off her hand. As she did so one of the slimy rubbish bags had burst open, spilling thousands of maggots everywhere. They’d surged across the tiles in a seething wave. It was something about the way they’d moved their fat white bodies, the horrific stench, the surprise of suddenly being surrounded by living wriggling things, that had made her scream.
Astrid had heard her and run downstairs. ‘What is it?’ she’d asked, but Juno had looked down at the tiles just in time to watch the maggots writhe into the shadows under the dining table. They’d slipped into the dusty slits of darkness under the fridge and the dishwasher, they’d slid into the unreachable warmth behind the radiator. Before she could squish even one of them, they had all vanished. Juno kept rubbing the skin on her arms to check that nothing was nibbling at them. She’d asked her mother to check her hair for bugs. No matter how much she scrubbed that evening, she could not feel clean. She’d never walked barefoot in the kitchen again.
That was the first day that she really missed him, her uncle. The man who performed a thankless task with faithful regularity. She had relied on him and she didn’t know it. Without her uncle this might have happened earlier – the bags rotting in the sun – but every week he’d kept her safe from it. And it was strange, his absence came only then as a sickening surprise to her, like finding maggots twitching on the tiles, like sunlight pouring on the unmade bed that still smelt of him.
The memory of that summer flashed across Juno’s mind when she opened the disposal unit to find that someone had stacked plates in it and they had gathered a fluffy green layer of mould. The macronutrient broth had separated in the unwashed bowls into an acrid brown liquid, with soft green clumps floating like curds across the top. The smell was overpowering, and even when Juno slammed the door shut she still had to fight the urge to vomit in the sink.
‘Whose turn was it to do the washing up last week?’
Jesse shrugged. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his mouth full.
‘It wasn’t me,’ Astrid said, looking up from her book.
Juno swallowed back nausea and headed for the fridge, where the cleaning rota – written in her own hand, and colour-coded with her own fine-liners – was displayed. Under ‘Washing up’ and ‘Disposal’, Poppy’s name was printed in red.
‘Poppy,’ Juno said, stabbing a finger at the name and gritting her teeth. Of course it was. Poppy had not only neglected the washing up, but she had stowed the dishes away in the darkness to fester. A cup of milk had spilled down the side of one of the walls in the disposal unit and a green scum clung to it. Juno shuddered at the recollection. Seven days. Poppy had shirked her duties for seven days, hiding the plates away like a thief. It was not only lazy, it was dishonest.
This could not go on.
Juno stormed down to the bedroom, her gut hungry for justice.
Poppy was bundled up in her yellowing bedsheets, face down, her back rising slowly. ‘Poppy,’ Juno said, reaching out to touch the other girl’s back. When Juno touched her, her skin was damp with sweat. ‘Poppy, wake up.’
When Poppy finally rolled over, her eyes were sticky with sleep. She squinted up at Juno and moaned something incoherent.
‘Poppy, it was your turn to do the washing up last week.’
‘Juno,’ Astrid said, standing in the doorway behind her sister, ‘just leave it alone will you.’
‘No – this affects all of us,’ Juno said. She turned again to Poppy. ‘You are impossible to live with.’
They had been tiptoeing around her for weeks. Her misery seemed to suck all the air out of every room. She lay in bed, if not sleeping then quietly crying. When had she last taken a shower? Looking at her greasy hair, the black dirt under her fingernails, the sour smell of Poppy’s doughy body, Juno felt something of the disgust she’d experienced when she’d opened the disposal.
‘When did you last get out of bed?’ Juno demanded. Poppy rolled on to her back like a creature washed onto the shore, her face tear-stained and swollen. She shrugged.
‘Can’t you see she’s—’ Astrid began.
‘—sick.’ Juno finished Astrid’s sentence for her. ‘I know. Everyone knows. You’re missing Earth. We’re all missing Earth. Ara died but you don’t see Eliot skipping chores, and she was basically his soulmate.’
‘Juno,’ Poppy said softly, her voice a rasp from weeping, ‘don’t you ever just wake up and want a different life?’
‘Of course I do. I could have been a contemporary dancer or some person who drives along windswept roads and takes pictures of rare cloud formations. Or I could have stayed in London with my parents, who love me, and gone to Imperial with Noah, who loves me, and become a scientist and discovered a cure for myasthenia gravis. Before the age of thirteen we decided to be astronauts, and here we are. You made a choice when you applied to Dalton, and when you agreed to be a Beta, and now is too late to quit. Think about it practically, Poppy. You don’t have a lot of options. Either you can lie in bed until your muscles waste, leaving our food to rot and waiting out the next two decades, or you can put your head down and work as hard as you can and do your best to make everyone�
�s life a little bit easier.’
‘I’m glad you think it’s so simple,’ Poppy said. ‘I wish we could all just will ourselves out of sadness.’
‘I only need you to will yourself out of bed. I’ll write a list of all the chores you’ve skipped. And you need to catch up this afternoon and for the rest of this week.’
‘Juno,’ Poppy hissed, a tight edge in her voice, ‘you’re not my mum. You’re not the commander. Stop thinking you can boss everyone around.’
‘I don’t want to have to get Commander Sheppard involved again,’ Juno said, already sensing she had played the wrong card and too early. Now she sounded like a whiny toddler, threatening to snitch.
‘Go away,’ Poppy said, rolling back into her duvet. ‘You can’t make me do anything.’ The words stung with unavoidable truth. Poppy was an adult, Juno’s crewmate, over whom she wielded no authority. Astrid turned to her sister with a sympathetic shrug of surrender as she stalked out.
LATER, JUNO SAT STIFFLY on one of the chairs in the crew module, grinding her teeth. She would not go to the kitchen and clear up Poppy’s mess, and yet the thought of leaving the food there to gather more mould – the thought of living with the smell for another hour – made her stomach turn.
Two months had passed since Poppy’s birthday. Sheppard and Fae had confronted Poppy about her behaviour. Each time, she would make an effort to work for a week or two, film her educational videos, but then her enthusiasm would lapse again. She’d complain of symptomless illness, retire to bed early, do the bare minimum so the rest of the crew would have to work hard to finish her chores or do the communications work that she had neglected.
The damage had already been done. Poppy’s behaviour was beginning to affect the other members of the crew. They were reluctant to come to meals, they complained far more about chores and grew sullen and argumentative at the slightest provocation.
Juno imagined the next year, and then the next twenty after that. Years of her crew members abandoning their duties, sunk low in the self-absorbed pit of their own despair and unwilling to help each other. What a hateful place their home could become if they thought only of themselves, of avoiding work, of ignoring justice.