A Godawful Small Affair

by J. B. Morrison

  “I don’t remember saying I wanted to go back,” Zoe said. “Okay. Shut up now. Put your fingers here, opposite mine.” Zoe put two fingers on the base of the glass.

  “Is the glass made from stars?” Nathan said.

  “Yep. And from sand.”

  “Shut up, is it? Are my fingers made out of stars then?”

  “All of you is. All of us.”

  “Is Dad made from stars?”

  Zoe nodded.

  “Is Hitler?”

  “From Dad to Hitler?” Zoe said. “How does your brain work, Nathan? Now stop asking stupid questions and put your fingers on the glass.”

  Nathan put his index and middle fingers on the base of the upturned glass opposite Zoe’s. He asked her if she thought their mum had gone back to the stars.

  “She was cremated,” Zoe took her fingers off the glass to mime smoke rising. “So, yes.”

  “Do you remember when we sprinkled her ashes in the sea?” Nathan said.

  Zoe smiled. “She wouldn’t go, would she?”

  “Dad said, ‘She doesn’t want to go to France?’”

  “She did not want to go to France,” Zoe said. “Right. Stop changing the subject. Are you ready?”

  “What do we do?”

  “We ask questions.”

  “Yes and no questions?”

  “They don’t have to be. If anyone’s listening, the glass will move and spell out their answer.”

  “Other lifes?”

  Zoe nodded.

  “Aliens?”

  Zoe said sshh. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath and then in a strange voice said, “Is there anyone out there?”

  Nathan laughed at her weird voice. Zoe opened one eye and told him to take it seriously. “Move the glass to yes if you can hear me.”

  Nathan watched the glass.

  “Nothing’s happening,” he said.

  “Give it a chance.”

  Zoe asked three more times if anyone was there and the glass moved slightly, and then it snagged on the paper and toppled over. Zoe opened her eyes.

  “Did you move it?” she said. Nathan shook his head.

  Zoe picked up the glass and lifted the Luigi board and brushed toast and crisp crumbs from the carpet underneath with her hand.

  “We need a smoother surface,” she said. “Pass me some of Mum’s records.”

  Nathan went over to the shelf beside the sofa.

  “Which ones?” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Nathan pulled out an album and gave it to Zoe. She looked at the cover.

  “Good choice.”

  “I didn’t choose it.”

  “I was talking to Mum.”

  Zoe put the T. Rex album on the carpet and asked Nathan for three more records. He picked them at random and brought them over. Zoe examined the covers, as though she was considering buying them from him. She looked at the front of Kings of the Wild Frontier and said she would have to paint an Adam Ant white stripe across Nathan’s face later. Nathan said cool. Zoe said he was lucky their parents had good taste in music, or he’d be made up to look like Victoria Beckham or Robbie Williams instead of David Bowie. She put the Adam and the Ants record next to one by Kate Bush and completed the square with the same copy of Aladdin Sane she’d used to copy Nathan’s lightning bolt make-up from.

  Zoe put the Luigi board on top of the square of records and replaced the upturned glass. She moved it around to test the new surface and seemed satisfied. She put her fingertips back on the base of the glass and Nathan did the same. Zoe closed her eyes.

  “If you can hear me,” Zoe said. “Move the glass to YES.”

  Nothing.

  “Is there anybody there?”

  Still nothing.

  “There’s probably too much interference,” Zoe said. “All the crap in the house made from stars. The walls and the ceiling, the roof, the furniture, that picture of George Best. The piggy bank. You and me. The signal can’t make it through.”

  “Let’s try again,” Nathan said. He put his fingers on the glass. Zoe didn’t move and Nathan picked her hand up. She made it go deliberately limp. He straightened her fingers out for her and placed them on the glass. “Ask it,” he said.

  Zoe sighed. “Is there anyone out there?”

  “Do the proper voice,” Nathan said.

  Zoe rolled her eyes. “If you can hear me, move the glass.”

  The glass moved.

  Zoe stared at Nathan. “Are you doing that?”

  Nathan shook his head. “Ask it something else.”

  “Where are you speaking to us from?” Zoe said, both eyes open and fixed on Nathan.

  The glass moved again. Zoe called out the letters as it went to them. “A. S. P. A. C. E. C. R. A. R. F. T. I know it’s you, Nathan,” she said, “because your spelling is so atrocious.”

  Zoe took her fingers off the glass. She got up from the floor and sat cross-legged on the sofa. She switched the television on. Casualty or Holby City was on. After her abduction Zoe couldn’t bear to watch anything set in a hospital or with any kind of medical procedure in. She said it was because of something that happened to her on the spaceship. Her dad insisted it was just a delayed reaction to the death of her mother. Zoe changed the channel. She didn’t mind the surgery so much now. She just couldn’t stand soaps. Zoe got up from the sofa and picked the glass up from the Luigi board. Nathan followed her out to the kitchen.

  “Let’s try it once more,” he said. “I’ll do it properly this time.”

  “Nope. It was just a stupid game anyway.”

  “It’s probably just manmade interference stopping it.”

  “More like boy made interference.”

  She filled the Luigi glass with tap water and swallowed it in three gulps. She went back to the living room and folded up the Luigi board. She put it inside the sleeve of Aladdin Sane, as though that’s where it was always kept. She sat on the floor in front of the sofa. Nathan took the National Space Centre notebook out of his trouser pocket and stood between Zoe and the television. He flipped open the red plastic cover of the notebook like a communicator in episodes of the old Star Trek his dad forced him to watch.

  “Are you calling for back up?” Zoe said.

  He looked at the first page. “Zoe Love. Where were you going on the twenty-third of April two thousand and sixteen?”

  Zoe looked at Nathan. “What the hell are you on about?”

  “At one thirty-one a.m.,” Nathan said. “You left the house and turned left. You returned at two forty a.m..”

  “What is that?” Zoe reached out to take the notebook. Nathan held it behind his back.

  “You’ll tear it up,” he said.

  “I’m not five. Show me.”

  Nathan gave her the notebook and she read the cover: ZOE LOVE. Space Cadet.

  “You do know what that means, right?”

  “A person training to go into Space,” Nathan said. “It’s what Dad said you and Mum were.”

  Zoe shook her head and tutted. “Hmm,” she said, reading the first page of the notebook. “Congratulations on observed,” she said. “But you’ve spelled subject wrong.” She held the notebook up to him.

  23rd April. 1:31. The subjict was observed leaving the house. She turned left.

  “I think that was the best night of the Lyrid meteor shower,” Zoe said. “I was going to the park to watch it. Get my phone, Nath. It’s in my jacket.”

  “I’m not your servant,” Nathan said but he went and got it anyway. He sat on the floor next to Zoe. She turned the notebook pages, nodding to herself. She seemed to be comparing whatever she was looking at on the phone with what Nathan had written in the notebook. Last year, he’d recorded all the times he’d seen his sister sneaking out of the house late at night. He’d never shown the notebook to Zoe. He thought he’d lost it and then he forgot all about it.

  “Why didn’t you just ask me where I was going?” Zoe said.

  Nathan said he d
idn’t know. He did know that watching his sister sneaking out late at night had quickly turned into a game for him. If he’d told her about it, the game would have ended. He’d pretended he was a scientist, observing a human who’d met beings from another planet.

  “I thought you were going to meet the aliens,” Nathan said.

  Zoe laughed and then she looked more serious. “Has Dad seen your little red book?”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “Best keep it that way, okay?”

  Nathan nodded.

  “I promised him I wouldn’t do it anymore,” Zoe said.

  “Dad knows?”

  Nathan hated that a secret he thought he’d shared with his sister for almost a year was actually common family knowledge. He’d always been jealous of Zoe. Because she’d been to outer space and he hadn’t. Observing her was his consolation. If Zoe was the astronaut, he could at least be her Mission Control. He started looking forward to being woken up by her leaving the house and imagining where she was going. Even though he could never get back to sleep again, until he heard the chink of the chain being put back across the front door when she returned. He thought it had been their secret. A secret Zoe didn’t even know they shared. And now it turned out their dad knew as well. Nathan was annoyed. He wished he’d never shown the notebook to Zoe.

  She turned the pages, biting her nails and nodding to herself. She asked Nathan to get her red Sharpie and on the first page, underneath where Nathan had written:

  23rd April. 1:31. The subjict was observed leaving the house. She turned left, Zoe added, “To the park. To watch the Lyrid meteor shower”.

  Zoe went through the rest of the book, adding where she was going and for what reason when Nathan had recorded her leaving the house. Sometimes it would be for a meteor shower or something called the transit of Mercury. Other times Zoe had gone out because of a clear sky or a full Moon.

  “Is my sister a werewolf?” Zoe said, holding up the notebook page with Nathan’s entry for May 22nd. “This one’s the Perseid meteor shower,” Zoe read aloud, “On 13 August at one fifteen a.m. the subjict…Do you want me to correct these spellings for you as well? The subjict was observed walking away from the house…That was when I spent the night on the roof of the Rotunda.”

  “The Rotunda?” Nathan said. “Our Rotunda?”

  Zoe nodded. “Do you remember last year when the council put the scaffolding up?”

  She told Nathan that when she saw the scaffolding and the two ladders leading up to the roof of the circular community building at the centre of the estate, she couldn’t resist. She’d spent most of the night of August 13, inside a sleeping bag staring up at the sky, watching ‘the most amazing celestial display’. It was the best Perseid meteor shower for years, Zoe said. “Two hundred meteors an hour smashing into the Earth at thirty-seven miles a second. I couldn’t miss that could I, Nath? There hadn’t been that many Perseids since Space Camp.”

  “What’s Space Camp?” Nathan said.

  “I suppose you might have been too young to remember it. I was eleven, I think. I was just about to start secondary school. Or I’d just started. So, you must have been, what… six?”

  Zoe turned her attention back to the notebook. Nathan tried to remember going to something called Space Camp.

  “You know the flats where Gran used to live?” Zoe said.

  Nathan nodded.

  Zoe held the book up to show him. “That’s when I went there.”

  “What for?”

  “I wanted to see the supermoon. I used to see that rusty old door when we went to visit Gran. With the sign on it saying, Roof. Authorised Access Only. I always wondered what was on the other side of the door. The roof, obviously, but I wanted to see for myself.”

  “You never went up there,” Nathan said.

  Zoe nodded. “I know an extra eight floors wouldn’t really have made any noticeable difference. And I was still as far away from the Moon as I was when I was on the ground floor, but once I got the idea in my head—”

  “What’s Space Camp, though?”

  Not looking up from the notebook, Zoe said, “You know when we went to Cornwall—”

  “Who did?”

  “We did. You and me, Mum and Dad.”

  “When?”

  “When I was eleven and you must have been six. We stayed in that big tent Dad bought. It had separate rooms—”

  “I remember that,” Nathan said.

  “There you go, then. That was Space Camp.”

  “I didn’t know it was Space Camp,” Nathan said. “I thought it was just camp.”

  Zoe smiled.

  “You did spend most of the time playing football with Dad. So, you might not have noticed. Or climbing trees. Doing your boy’s stuff. I seem to recall Dad sneaking off to the nearby pub a lot, while me and Mum were up all night with the other nerds. Staring at the stars through Mum’s massive telescope—”

  “Our mum had a telescope?” Nathan said. He couldn’t believe he’d been to something called Space Camp and not known about it or remembered it. And their mum had a telescope! A massive telescope.

  “Where is it now?” Nathan said.

  “The telescope? I think Dad sold it. We didn’t use it anymore anyway.”

  “I would have used it,” Nathan said.

  Zoe told him more about Space Camp. They’d stayed for two nights, near a forest but away from trees. They weren’t allowed to use any white light, and everyone had red torches. Their mum had made theirs by covering normal torches with red sweet wrappers. On the last night of Space Camp, Zoe and their mum sat in a circle with everyone – except Nathan apparently! – watching the Perseid meteor shower. Their car broke down on the way home and they had to finish the journey on the back of an RAC truck.

  “I remember that!” Nathan said. “We have to go to Space Camp again. I’m going to ask Dad tomorrow.”

  While Nathan tried to remember Space Camp, Zoe filled in the details for the rest of the night-time destinations her brother had recorded in the notebook. She managed to match most of the times and dates to interesting or important events in the sky. There were seventeen in total. Nathan had first seen Zoe leave the house on April 23rd, a month after she’d returned to Earth, when he now knew she’d been in the park watching the Lyrid meteor shower. The notebook entries stopped on September 16th, when Zoe had gone to the flats over the road to be closer to the penumbral lunar eclipse. After that there was a three-month gap, when Zoe either didn’t leave the house or Nathan had slept through it. And then on December 14th at 11:30, he observed her leaving the house and turning right. Even though it was the most recent entry in the notebook, Zoe couldn’t remember where she was going or why.

  “Must have just been a good sky,” she said, closing the notebook.

  “Can I have my book back?” Nathan said.

  “Only if you promise not to show Dad.”

  “You said he already knows.”

  “Not in your Stasi-like detail,” Zoe said. “Dad thinks I went out two or three times at the most. And he was so not happy about that. He thought I’d be snatched or something.”

  “You were snatched.”

  Zoe gave him a look. “A different snatched.”

  “We could go and look at the stars now,” Nathan said.

  Zoe shook her head. “Uh uh, no way. Dad would literally kill me.”

  “I won’t say anything,” Nathan said. “Not about any of the other times you went out either.”

  Zoe raised her eyebrows. “Are you trying to blackmail me, Nathan Love?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Please.”

  “No,” Zoe said. “There won’t be any stars tonight anyway.”

  “How can there not be any stars?”

  “Because of all the streetlights and the illuminated tall buildings. That’s why I used to go to the park—”

  “We could go to the park now,” Nathan said.

  “Absolutely no wa
y. Apart from anything else, it’s closed. The gates will be locked.” The more detailed Zoe’s protests were, the more Nathan thought she was considering his request.

  “How did you get in the park then?”

  Zoe didn’t answer. She looked at her fingernails. She used the edge of the notebook to scrape at the blue varnish. She stood up.

  “Right,” she said. “Ten minutes in the park. We’ll look for stars and then come home. Okay?”

  Nathan tried not to appear too pleased in case Zoe changed her mind just to annoy him.

  “And it’s not going in your little book either,” Zoe said. “Space cadet indeed.”

  She tapped Nathan on the head with the notebook. He reached up to grab it and Zoe gently pushed him. He lost his balance and toppled over, with his legs bent and his knees on his chest and his hands hugging his ankles. It was the same position he’d found Zoe in almost a year ago, lying in her bed, covered in cuts and bruises, after being abducted by aliens.

  5

  When Nathan had been pleading with Zoe to go to the park, it had seemed like such a good idea. Now that it was actually happening and they were in the hall putting their coats on, he was having second thoughts.

  “What about the gangs and paedos?”

  “It’s too cold for gangs of paedos,” Zoe said.

  “Not gangs of paedos. Gangs and paedos.”

  “It’s still too cold. Now stop whining. What would have happened to E.T. if Elliott had such a defeatist attitude?”

  “What’s a defeatist attitude?”

  “I’ll tell you in the park.”

  “What if Dad comes home, though?”

  Zoe looked at her wrist. She wasn’t wearing a watch.

  “Dad’s out with Craig, and Craig doesn’t like to leave a pub until somebody rings a bell and asks him to. We’ll be back home ages before Dad. And how come I’m talking you into what was originally your idea? Do you want to go to the park or not?”

  Nathan thought about it. “We should take the Luigi board,” he said. “To try it outside.”

  Zoe sighed. “Go on then. And hurry up.”

  Nathan ran into the living room. He grabbed the David Bowie album with the Luigi board inside and gave the record to Zoe.