Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

by Temi Oh

  THE SHAME OF SURRENDER was as familiar to Juno as the cool pride of self-control. That night, she went back to the kitchen when everyone was asleep and half the lights in the ship were off. In the darkness, the smell of dust and preserved sugar set her heart racing.

  Then, afterwards, she tortured herself by counting and recounting how much she had consumed. The chocolate melting over her tongue, the jelly babies that stuck to the sides of her teeth and left her mouth sour and furry, the juvenile delight of glacé cherries, which she loved because, when she was much younger, she would steal them from her mother’s baking cupboard. Seduced by the sight of them, Juno had grabbed one when her mother’s back had been turned. Then, again, that same night she crept down the stairs and ate another, then another, tortured by the sight of them, gleaming like marbles in the box, within her reach. Soon, she was stealing six or seven at a time, her fingers sticky and syrupy sweet, a delight to lick clean. She would lie restlessly in bed, waiting for her parents’ door to close, just so she could slip like a shadow into the kitchen and spoon icing sugar into her mouth, chocolates and ladyfingers, Swiss rolls and digestive biscuits. Then she would lie awake in the darkness, tasting the insides of her mouth and the low ebb of guilt.

  The first time her mother caught her had also been the first time she’d ever given her a smack with a wooden spoon, on the palm of her left hand. It took Juno too long to realize that the slap had not been for the sweetness she could still taste behind her lips, but for the lies.

  That night on the ship, it was no surprise when the sickness came. She felt it rise up from the base of her stomach and heard herself cry out before it filled her mouth. She bolted out the door and made it to the bathroom just in time to heave over the edge of the toilet bowl. Every time she thought it was over, a muscle under her solar plexus contracted, with the brutal force of an elastic band pinging back, and a hot flood of half-eaten junk food surged back up between her teeth.

  She’d forgotten to lock the door in her rush to the bathroom, and though she knew that the sounds of her gagging would be audible outside, she did not have the energy to stand and close it. Juno pressed her cheek against the ground. She felt as if all the bones in her body had dissolved.

  She didn’t know how long it was until she became aware of the sound of movement outside. The soft slap of bare feet.

  ‘Go away,’ she moaned, her voice an ugly rasp. Then another hot flood of bitter food erupted from her throat.

  ‘Juno?’ Jesse’s voice was edged with fear. Juno became more aware of her surroundings; the bathroom was filled with the acrid smell of vomit and her cheek was wet with it.

  ‘Just leave me alone,’ she said more forcefully, trying to get up. She couldn’t think of anyone she was more ashamed to be found by. ‘Please—’ she gasped, and to her horror her mouth filled up again. She found the energy to sit up and lean over the edge of the toilet bowl. ‘Please stay outside,’ she said when she’d finished. ‘I don’t want you to see this.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ Jesse said. ‘I’ve been out on a Friday night too, you know.’

  ‘Please?’

  ‘Okay, fine. I’ll stand outside.’ His shadow disappeared but she could still hear his voice. ‘Hey, are you spacesick?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she muttered, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘Sick of space.’ He chuckled. ‘I don’t think so,’ she admitted.

  ‘Then maybe it’s something you ate?’

  Juno’s face burned. ‘Maybe,’ she managed to say.

  ‘Should I go and get Fae?’

  ‘No, I don’t want you to wake her. I’ll be fine in a few minutes.’

  They were silent for a while. Juno’s head clouded over with sleep, pinpricks of imaginary light stippling the darkness. The room was illuminated only by the glow from the crew module through the open door. She tried to imagine Jesse on the other side of the wall, in nothing but a T-shirt and boxers. Imagined the straight line his thigh made all the way down to his ankle, and his feet that were stained green with fertilizer from walking barefoot in the greenhouse.

  Her eyes dropped closed as she began to drift into sleep, but she bit awake abruptly when her head flopped down on her neck. In panic and semi-conscious confusion she called out, ‘Jessseee . . . ,’ her voice a plaintive whimper. He was by her side in the next moment.

  There were tears in her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ he said softly, pushing them away with a thumb. ‘You’ll feel better soon. You’re okay.’

  ‘’mnotokay,’ she slurred as tears fell freely from her eyes. ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ he said and pulled her close to him, though her face was sticky. ‘You’re okay.’ He stroked her hair. She realized that this was the closest she’d been to a human body since Noah had held her in the Garden of Flight back on Earth. Such a long time ago. Nestled against Jesse’s large chest, she felt slight and safe. She would drift into sleep a couple of times, only to jerk awake in a body filled with pain and retch over the toilet bowl. Each time Jesse would wake too and tug the hair out of her face, and wipe her forehead and smile lazily and promise her that she would soon be fine.

  She supposed he carried her out of the bathroom a while later, and onto the sofa where she woke to find herself in his arms. By then, the worst of the sickness had passed. She felt light and tired and wonderfully clean, as if she’d been baptized in flames. She opened her eyes to discover a body without stomach cramps or tremors. Jesse was still asleep beside her, his lips slightly parted, head rolled back on the sofa, breathing softly.

  JUNO

  11.12.12

  BY THE TIME DECEMBER came, everything was different. Jesse and Juno slid into an intimacy born of constant proximity. Cosy habits emerged: watching recordings of University Challenge and shouting out the answers or marathons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Juno discovered that they shared the same cynical sense of humour. Every new thing she learned about him was a delight. They stayed up late talking most nights, sometimes until the hallway sky simulation turned lemon-yellow with ‘dawn’.

  Everyone had closed ranks by the end of that year: Harry and Eliot stayed up late playing insomniac chess marathons on the control deck; Poppy and Astrid paired rations of sugar and evaporated milk to make wild saccharine confections and curled up together in Poppy’s bed, discussing star signs.

  A couple of weeks after they began their approach to Jupiter, an email from Noah arrived. The subject line was ‘Juno?’, nothing in the body of the message but a photograph of her house, and a video attachment. The photograph had clearly been taken a couple of months ago, because the leaves on the apple tree in the front garden were the colour of fire and rust. Juno touched the screen. He had given her the end of the summer. The shortening days, Cox apples growing fat. For a moment, she was there too. Beyond the reinforced walls of their vessel. Home.

  Juno clicked on the video attachment, which loaded slowly, and as it did, she shuddered with excitement and dread. Finally, Noah’s face appeared on her screen. His curly blond hair had grown out so that he looked like a young Robert Plant, his chin shadowed with patches of stubble. Noah fiddled with the camera, setting it on the desk in front of him, before staring straight into the lens. ‘Hey, Juno.’ He waved. ‘So I was thinking about a gift to give you and your mum suggested I make a video so you get to feel like you’re here with me. It’s September right now but I probably won’t get up the courage to send this to you until after Christmas so . . . happy Christmas?’ He was in a bedroom she didn’t recognize, sparsely decorated with a fire-safety notice stuck to the back of the door. ‘I could see you for a while, you know. In the sky and on the news. I wish you could have been here. I don’t know if they told you how crazy it got down here for a while. The Beta was on the news every day . . . but I don’t watch it so much anymore.’ He paused, and swallowed. ‘So anyway, here is my room in uni!’ He twisted the camera around to show a rather bare room. Juno recognized some of the posters from his old bedroom. The periodic
table, an old Coldplay poster, a little postcard that said ‘if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the precipitate’, which never really stopped being funny even after GCSE chemistry.

  ‘My bookshelf . . .’ He pointed the camera towards three fitted shelves, with a couple of fat textbooks. ‘We had to buy all of these books. Most of mine are second-hand. We started lectures a week ago and it’s not so hard . . . Mostly A-level stuff. I’ve probably covered half of the content at Dalton already but I kinda can’t wait for it to start getting harder. Oh also, this is the view from my window –’ he pointed the camera towards a courtyard that reminded Juno a little of the space centre, only there was a group of people slouching under a smoking shelter – ‘and all my photos . . .’ Stuck to the pin-board, mainly photos of the two of them, a school trip to Devon, their Leavers’ Ball, Juno giving a dorky thumbs-up in the first spacesuit she ever wore.

  The camera wobbled again and Noah held it close to his face, so that his eyes filled her screen. Juno had forgotten the details so quickly – forgotten how striking his eyes were. The frosty lines in his iris sparkled like cut glass. ‘I still love you Juno. I know you’re not coming back, but sometimes I wish you were here with me. Also . . . I’m sorry about what I said. You know . . . Please forgive me?’ The screen went blank too soon.

  Juno re-watched it, and each time the video seemed shorter. Only two minutes. Juno felt as if it was only the window of her computer screen separating them. She could be in university too, reading fat expensive textbooks and wondering what to do with the abundant free time she was trusted to organize herself. University would be filled with new, exciting people, and Juno took a moment to imagine what they would be like. What she would be like. As she did, she saw, all too clearly, a different avenue her life could have taken. Why did it hurt? She had chosen this path and yet she was distracted by the distant ache of injustice. The notion that she’d been robbed of something too soon.

  She flopped back on the bed, clutching her stomach. When the others asked what was wrong she’d tell them she was spacesick.

  POPPY

  25.12.12

  SOMEHOW, BY DECEMBER, HER mind had changed. Poppy would never know if it was the antidepressants Fae had given her or finally getting used to the new rhythm of her life on the Damocles or Juno’s determination to pursue order, but by Christmas Poppy found it easier to keep from being mired in hopelessness. On Christmas morning, she awoke with a hard knot of excitement unspooling in her stomach. She looked around in the darkness at the sleeping heaps of Astrid and Juno in their bunks and smiled. For years, at Christmas, Poppy had woken alone in her bedroom and longed for sisters.

  The crew module was festooned with the decorations she and Astrid had made the night before, delicate snowflakes cut out of silver and grey crepe paper and sellotaped to the windows. Paper chains, and a sign Jesse had drawn that said ‘Happy Christmas’, so that the ‘I’ of Christmas looked like mistletoe.

  ‘Hey.’ When Poppy turned, Harry was leaning against the door of the boys’ cabin, his eyes still half-lidded from sleep, his hair tousled and flopping into his eyes. Cute and dewy-skinned.

  ‘I have a present for you,’ she blurted out.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah, I made it.’

  ‘I have a present for you too,’ he said, flicking his hair out of his eyes. Poppy’s stomach flipped with excitement. This was the day. She replayed a familiar fantasy in her head: Harry, handing her a powder-blue box crowned in a white ribbon, she pulling out a silver charm bracelet or a rose gold pendant, his eyes twinkling with adoration.

  ‘Don’t you find it a little weird?’ Poppy asked. ‘Christmas without family?’

  ‘Only a little.’ Harry shrugged. ‘Meet me in the engine room and I’ll give it to you.’

  ‘Okay!’ Poppy chirped, and she headed back into her room to fetch his gift.

  For Poppy, Christmas had never been a joyful time. Over the years they had fallen into a tradition of watching reruns of ER on satellite, bingeing on ready meals and chocolate in the fizzy light of the television. Sometimes, Poppy would take the old tree out of the cleaning cupboard, set it up by the window with fairy-lights. Every year the decorations were fewer and fewer, dusted baubles from Pound-Stretcher that dropped off and cracked like eggs underfoot. When she was young Poppy would push her face right into the plastic pine needles of their tree and breathe in the smell of dust and PVC. She would stare at the lights nestled in it and imagine a happy world bathed in the golden glow of Christmas-tree-light.

  That was how she imagined Harry’s whole life. She’d heard that his family owned a few properties across the UK, although she’d only been to his North London house once. It had been an imposing Edwardian house at the end of a leafy lane in Hampstead. She remembered being dazzled by the chandeliers, the sweeping marble staircase. She’d said, foolishly, ‘I thought only people on TV lived in places like this.’ He’d shrugged, and tossed an apple core at the dustbin, missed.

  His Christmases were probably around a huge oak dining table, all his blond siblings laughing in the candlelight, a honey-glazed pig in the middle of the table, a seven-foot tree his burly older brothers hauled in from the garden. Poppy liked to imagine snapshots of his old life and was filled with shivers of pleasure when she remembered that, now, she was a little part of it too.

  She’d knitted him a scarf, his initials messily embroidered into the corner. A labour of quiet love, and when she handed it to him later in the engine room he said, ‘Wow . . . good effort.’ Twisted it around his neck and grinned.

  ‘Mine’s not so fancy,’ he said, and then handed her a bottle of mouthwash.

  ‘Um . . .’ Poppy held it up quizzically. ‘Thanks . . . ?’

  ‘Taste it, silly,’ he said.

  ‘Listerine?’ She couldn’t help that her heart sank.

  Harry grabbed it back off her, unscrewed the top and took a swig, wiped his mouth noisily and smiled, his teeth bright like a wolf’s in the half-light of the engine room. Poppy copied him, and she noticed the burn, the oaky aftertaste, the rush of blood to her head and neck. ‘Whiskey?’

  He nodded. She held the blue liquid up to the light and eyed it suspiciously.

  ‘Food colouring,’ Harry said. ‘An old trick from the Dalton days.’ Poppy laughed and took another sip. It burned going down, and she smiled.

  JUNO

  25.12.12

  JUNO WAS GLAD TO see Poppy so gleeful again, giggling and pulling Santa hats over everyone’s ears, smiling for the camera as if her teeth were bright pearls she’d been hiding. They wore the hats to record a video for the BBC, stood in two rows in front of the camera as if they were posing for a school photo. Eliot had forced them to practise saying ‘Merry Christmas’ in unison a couple of times, so by the time they were on-air their voices chimed ‘Merry Christmas’ after his signal with the mechanical hollowness of a music box. By that point, it took radio signals from the Damocles almost forty minutes to reach Earth, so they had been instructed to downlink their video early enough for it to be replayed on national television half an hour after the Queen’s Christmas Message.

  Igor said ‘S Rozhdestvom’ to his family in Russia, most of whom, he explained, actually celebrated Christmas in January, according to the Orthodox calendar. He looked different, somehow, in the light of the control room. His voice was hoarse, and when he thought the rest of the crew weren’t looking Juno caught him wincing in pain, his face pale.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. Igor waved a dismissive hand at her and walked carefully over to the door.

  Lunch was spectacular. Poppy had done a beautiful job with the decorating. She had plastered silver paper-cuts snowflakes all along the windows, written ‘Merry Christmas’ on a large roll of paper. On the table, Juno’s name was on a place card, next to Jesse’s. It had a fat little drawing of Santa making a peace sign.

  The table was a cornucopia of food. It was Cai and Jesse’s first harvest in the greenhouse; there were
beets, Brussels sprouts, cabbages and carrots as well as fresh rocket, rosemary and sage. Poppy had laid out their rations in sweetly decorated bowls and plates. Sticky slices of canned peaches and pineapples floated on a lake of syrup, Jesse’s lentil and cashew nut loaf was sprinkled with the watercress that had been growing in the greenhouse and some of them had donated the last of their tuck, so gold and purple packets of fudge and chocolate eclairs glittered amongst the dishes.

  Sipping at her glass of water, Juno nudged at the peas, then dropped her fork with a small sigh. Jesse rested his hand on the table next to hers, rolling it over slightly so that his palm was facing up and the little brown hairs along his forearm brushed against hers. She could see the green veins in his wrists, the steel rings on his fingers, the little black infinity symbol tattooed along the wrinkled edge of his thumb where his light-brown skin turned white. When she looked up, he was smiling at her, his lips stained black with wine.

  ‘What about presents?’ Poppy said. She’d built a little cardboard Christmas tree in the middle of the counter, to lay the presents under.

  ‘Actually,’ said Jesse. ‘Cai and I have a present for all of you.’

  ‘Is it under the tree?’

  ‘No, it’s a surprise. We’ll show it to you after dinner.’

  ‘Awww . . .’ Astrid said. ‘I’m excited already.’ She nudged Cai, who had touched little of his food. ‘You’re getting into the Christmas spirit too.’

  ‘It was Jesse’s idea,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t spoil it.’ Jesse pressed a finger to his lips.

  Juno spooned a couple of ice cubes into her cup and listened to them clatter against the glass. She wasn’t sure what was wrong with her. Jesse’s proximity, next to her at the table, made her stomach twist with excitement. It was as if she’d never seen him before.