A Godawful Small Affair

by J. B. Morrison

“David’s coming too, is he?” she said.

  She tucked the album under her arm, switched off the security sensor light and opened the front door. They both pulled their hoods up and walked through the estate. The hood of Nathan’s parka was so far over his head that his coat looked empty. They walked quickly, keeping to the centre of the path between houses, so they didn’t set off any of their sensor lights. There were no CCTV cameras on the estate. There’d be none in the park.

  A metal railing fence separated the estate from the park. Two of the railings looked like they’d been forced apart by a circus strongman in a leopard skin leotard. Nathan crouched down in front of the gap, one that had more likely been created with a car jack as an escape route for drug dealers. He put his head through the gap.

  “What are you doing?” Zoe whispered. “Do you really want to be known on YouTube as Boy with Head Stuck in Railings?”

  She dragged a tall green wheelie bin over. In the darkness it sounded like thunder. Everything was so much louder in the dark. Zoe held the bin steady and told Nathan to climb up. When he was on top of the bin Zoe said, “Are you going commando?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Are you not wearing any underpants?”

  Nathan lifted the back of his parka. There was a hole in his astronaut suit, exposing the flesh of his left buttock.

  “I took them off earlier.”

  “Why did you… Actually, don’t tell me. Jump over.”

  Nathan looked down into the darkness on the other side of the railings. He wished he’d put batteries in his Space Torch and brought it with him.

  “What if there’s dog shit?” he said.

  “It’ll break your fall.”

  “What do you mean break my fall?”

  “Just jump,” Zoe said.

  Nathan hesitated. He heard a siren. He thought it was because of them.

  Zoe took a puff on her asthma inhaler and exhaled, “Jump.”

  Nathan pretended he was a parachutist in the war. He rolled when he landed and stood up in one expert movement. That was how to go commando. He smelled his hands, spitting on them and rubbing his palms together.

  “It’s only mud,” Zoe said, landing in the park next to him, not even bothering to parachute roll.

  She immediately started walking along the path between the estate and the park as though she knew where she was going. Nathan followed her. The only light was behind them on the estate and from a nearly full, but dim, Moon. The sky looked dark brown, the colour of Marmite or Bovril. They walked as far as the ponds. Nathan heard animals or birds that he didn’t recognise enough to be sure they were actually animals or birds. The park could be frightening enough in the daytime because of the gangs and the loose dogs and all the paedos who hid in the bushes. But it was twice as scary at night. It sounded like a Tarzan film. Nathan followed Zoe as she doubled-back on herself. She was acting like they were being followed and she was trying to throw who or whatever was following them off their trail. She circled the sand and water play area and walked through some longer grass. It was wet and Nathan wished he’d worn his older trainers but at least it was quieter now they were away from the ponds. Until he realised the silence made the darkness even scarier.

  Nathan followed Zoe to the open ground at the centre of the park. It was where the air ambulance had landed last month after a jogger had a heart attack, or when a man was shot, depending on whose story Nathan believed – the newspaper’s or his friend Arthur’s. There was a large tree lying on its side. It looked completely out of place so far from all the other trees and bushes. It looked like it had fallen from the sky.

  “What’s she doing all the way up here?” Zoe said. She went over to the tree and stroked the bare, rough bark.

  “And where are her arms?”

  “Trees don’t have arms,” Nathan said. “And trees aren’t shes.”

  He knew ships were female and their mum used to call her VW Beetle ‘she’ and ‘her’, and eventually, not long before the council picked the red car up and took it away to be crushed, their mum named the car Sarah after the girl in Labyrinth. Their mum had cried when the car was crushed. But trees weren’t female. They didn’t have girls’ names. Nathan knew some French words were male and others were female, and he wondered if the tree was French. Trees definitely didn’t have arms though. He was sure of that.

  “This is my favourite tree,” Zoe said. “She belongs down there.”

  Zoe pointed down the hill to a clump of trees in front of the building where the café was. The café was being renovated. A row of white vans was parked outside and scaffolding was up. If Zoe asked Nathan to climb the scaffolding to be closer to the Moon, he was going to say no.

  Zoe walked the whole length of the fallen tree. Her favourite tree apparently, although it was the first Nathan had heard about that. Where it was once thirty feet high, the tree was now thirty feet long. Zoe put her arm around the thick trunk as though she was hugging it.

  “There’s a hole here,” she said. “A hollow. I’ve never been able to reach it before.”

  Nathan walked over and Zoe showed him the large hole in the side of the tree. When the tree was upright it might have been home to a family of squirrels or a woodpecker. It was probably full of drugs. She told him to put his hand inside, but he said no.

  Zoe stood up.

  “How did she get up here?” She could make the most obvious and simple things sound like magic definitely had to be involved. “And why chop her down? Humans are terrible, Nathan.” Not men with chainsaws. Not terrorists or murderers. Not even people. ‘Humans’. As though Zoe was talking about a completely different species to her. Nathan wondered if perhaps she was. He even hoped she was.

  “It might have a disease,” Nathan said. “Our school tree got chopped down because it had a disease.”

  Zoe turned to look at him. “You have a school tree?”

  Nathan nodded, unsure what was so unusual about a school tree.

  “I’ve found her arms,” Zoe said. She picked a small branch up from a large pile next to the tree. Nathan thought she might try and reattach it, but she returned the branch to the pile and sat down on the grass.

  She put the David Bowie record on the ground next to her and lay down. Nathan looked at his sister and at David Bowie. Even the tree was lying down. Nathan felt exposed being the only one standing up. He sat on the grass first, and then he lay down. As long as he didn’t think too hard about insects and worms, the park was actually less scary down low. He copied Zoe and made a pillow out of his clasped hands. He watched a blinking light in the sky.

  “If it’s the air ambulance, it might land on top of us,” he said, trying to work out if the helicopter was moving closer or further away.

  “At least we’ll get to the hospital quicker,” Zoe said.

  Nathan laughed, stopping himself because it was so loud in the darkness. He watched the helicopter until it was far enough away that he couldn’t even be sure it was moving, let alone in which direction. He could hear music coming from the estate or from a car stopped at the lights on the main road. Then the lights must have changed because the music went away.

  “That’s Venus over there,” Zoe said, pointing to a vague white dot in the brown sky. “And that one is Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest in the Solar System.”

  “There aren’t a lot of stars,” Nathan said.

  “I told you there wouldn’t be. It’s because of light pollution.”

  Nathan sniffed the air. Zoe gently punched him on the arm.

  Nathan made a telescope shape with his loose fist and scanned the sky for more stars but all he could see were the lights at the top of cranes and on the tower blocks and skyscrapers in the distance. The tallest building was the Shard. The tip was lit up like a cigarette.

  When their mum was in hospital, Nathan had been up high enough and close enough to almost reach out and touch the Shard. It was when their mum had been moved to a private room. Their d
ad had hated the busy ward she was on and was always asking the doctors if she could be moved to a room on her own. But when it finally happened, Nathan couldn’t understand why his dad was so upset. The same thing happened when the doctors removed some of the tubes going in and out of his mum. Nathan’s dad really hated the tubes being there, until the doctors started removing them.

  Nathan and Zoe had left their parents alone and they’d gone to get some chocolate from the hospital vending machine. Zoe said she wanted to quickly look at something. Nathan followed her along corridors, turning left and right, getting further away from their mum and dad. He wanted to turn back, but he was so lost by then he had no choice but to follow his sister. They went through the revolving doors that led outside and crossed a road where the ambulances were parked and went into a different hospital building. Nathan followed Zoe to another lift. They were the only people in the lift who weren’t doctors or nurses and Nathan was sure they’d get into trouble. A man in a white coat asked what floor they wanted, and Zoe said, “Top please,” and smiled, as though she was on her way to conduct an important operation.

  By the time they got to the top floor they were the only ones in the lift. Nathan followed Zoe to a large window with a view of London she called ‘panoramic’. He could see Tower Bridge and the Tower of London and the funnels of a big ship and other smaller boats going up and down the Thames. There were trains below them that looked like models or toys and all around there were people in office blocks and high-rise flats. Rows of houses were laid out along streets, like in a game of Monopoly. And the Shard was right outside the window next to them. But Zoe didn’t seem interested in anything the panoramic view had to offer. It didn’t matter how high she went, she was always looking up.

  Zoe named the clouds for Nathan: cumulus and cirrus, cumulonimbus, stratocumulus, lenticularis, noctilucent, altocumulus, and a cloud called mamma that only occurred when the sun was low. That was the day Zoe told Nathan there was a cloud in outer space called Sagittarius B2 that tasted like raspberries but was also poisonous. She also told him contrails were caused when planes flushed their toilets. Nathan looked at his sister to see if she was smiling, but she seemed quite serious.

  “How come they’re white then?”

  “When you go up high enough your poo and wee change colour.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “It’s basic physics, Nathan. Ask your science teacher.”

  “I haven’t got a science teacher.”

  “Well then.”

  “Well then what?”

  Zoe turned away from the window and Nathan followed her back to the lift. They passed a toilet on the way and Zoe suggested Nathan should go in to see if they were up high enough for his wee to turn white. He said he didn’t need to go to the toilet, which wasn’t true, he was bursting, but he didn’t want to find out that Zoe was just teasing him. Even before she’d been abducted by aliens, Nathan wanted to believe everything Zoe said.

  As they walked through the revolving hospital doors and along corridors back to their mum and dad, Zoe tested Nathan on cloud names.

  “No, Nathan,” she said. “Columbus is not a cloud.”

  Their dad was waiting for them outside their mum’s room. His expression was so new to Nathan that it might not even have been his dad at all. His face seemed broken. He frowned and smiled and sighed all at the same time.

  “She’s gone,” he said, and Zoe started crying, while Nathan couldn’t help himself asking, “Where?”

  Nathan turned his hand telescope into a Spock salute and then a Vulcan death grip. He chopped off the tip of the Shard with his fingers. He looked around the park for other landmarks. He thought he could see the darkened shape of the church spire next to the estate, and in the distance the Crystal Palace Tower that Zoe once made him believe was the Eiffel Tower.

  “Did you know, if either of us ever have children,” Zoe said, “they might live their whole lives without ever seeing a single star?”

  “I’m not having children,” Nathan said with certainty.

  “You might one day.”

  “No, I won’t,” Nathan closed his hand telescope. “Miss Casablanca says that most children have never seen a cow in real life.”

  “Who the hell is Miss Casablanca?”

  “My yoga teacher.”

  “Your Yoga teacher?”

  “Yoga helps our posture and stops stress.”

  “Posture and stress? You’re ten. And yoga? Seriously, Nathan? And you have a school tree? Where is this school? Hogwarts?”

  “No,” Nathan said. “Brixton. Which star did you go to?” He didn’t want to talk about yoga or Miss Casablanca or even think about school right now.

  “You mean which planet,” Zoe said.

  “What’s the difference?”

  Zoe told him it was too difficult to explain but basically planets appeared to move and stars didn’t.

  “And stars twinkle,” she said.

  Nathan looked at Venus, waiting for it to move or twinkle.

  “Which planet did you go to?” he said.

  “You can’t see it.”

  “Because of light pollution?”

  “And unimaginable distance.”

  Nathan tried to imagine distance.

  He heard a siren coming from somewhere on the other side of their estate, probably out on the main road. It changed from a woo-woo to a nee-naw and then dropped to a low honk, like someone was trying out the ringtones on a new phone. Nathan recognised it as the siren of a fire engine. He listened until it was loud and nearby, and then quieter, and far enough away, for him to know it wasn’t their house that was on fire.

  “Was it scary?” Nathan said. “When the aliens took you?”

  “Of course it was scary.”

  “Scary horrible or scary fun? Like a fun fair ride?”

  “I don’t like fun fair rides.”

  “Yes, you do. I remember we were on that big wheel when it stopped, and we were right up the top. I was scared but you said you loved it.”

  “I like being up high,” Zoe said. “It’s the coming back down to Earth that makes me want to throw up.”

  Nathan made a pretend vomiting sound.

  “Do you remember when we were going to be the first brother and sister on the Moon?” Zoe said.

  Nathan said he did and when he asked her if she still wanted to go, Zoe said, “Yes. But let’s go to a different planet. An undiscovered one. A planet without a flag stuck in it. We can be the first brother and sister on a planet that hasn’t been named yet.”

  “We could name it,” Nathan said. “Like we did with the star when Mum died.”

  “What would you call our planet?” Zoe said.

  Nathan only needed a second. “David Bowie.”

  Zoe laughed and Nathan said sshh, which made her laugh even louder. He looked at her, shaking next to him, trying to contain her laughter. She had her eyes closed like David Bowie on the record cover on the grass next to her. Nathan said their names in his head like the start of a nursery rhyme: Nathan, Zoe and David Bowie. If they fell asleep now and dreamed, he was sure the aliens would take all three of them.

  “We should go home,” Zoe said. She stood up.

  Nathan opened his eyes and looked up at her. “What about the Luigi board? We need to make contact.”

  “I forgot the glass,” Zoe said.

  Nathan stood. His bum felt wet. He wished he was wearing underpants.

  “If the aliens do come tonight though,” Nathan said. “How will they know where to find us?”

  Zoe looked around her. “We could leave them a sign I suppose.”

  She took the leftover wad of white Post-it notes out of her jacket pocket and with her red Sharpie she wrote NATHAN on one note and ZOE on another. She stuck them to the side of her favourite tree.

  “Give me a hand,” she said. She put the Bowie album down and started picking small branches up from the pile next to the tree.

  Nathan looked at
her and she did her best just trust me face. He tried to make his face say I do trust you. He put his arms out and Zoe loaded him up with branches. When he couldn’t hold any more Zoe took three branches back and placed them on the ground next to where she’d stuck the Post-it notes. She picked up the Bowie record and they started walking back to the estate. They took a more direct route, not walking around the ponds, Zoe stopping every few yards to lay more branches on the ground.

  “How will they see them in the dark?” Nathan said.

  “We could set them on fire I suppose?”

  Zoe put her hand in the pocket of her jacket and Nathan tried to remember if she’d kept the lighter she’d borrowed at the mural. He was relieved when she took out the tube of mixed silver and gold glitter. She removed the lid, ran back towards the tree and sprinkled glitter on all the branches she’d left behind on the ground.

  “Remember,” Zoe said when they were almost back at the railings. “Don’t tell Dad we were here.”

  She lifted the lid of a small metal bin attached to a pole near the railings and dropped the empty glitter tube inside. When she threw the Luigi board in the bin, Nathan scream-whispered, “That’s the dog shit bin.”

  Zoe closed the lid. She said they could make another Luigi board.

  With nothing to climb onto on the park side of the railings they had to risk getting stuck in the drug dealer gap and becoming YouTube stars. Nathan went first. Just in case he did get stuck and Zoe left him behind as a joke, or to film him and put it on YouTube herself. They both made it through the gap easily though. They stood for a moment on the estate side of the railings, looking back into the darkness they’d left behind. Even though Zoe had covered the branches in glitter Nathan couldn’t see the nine arrows pointing from Zoe’s favourite tree to their house. She reassured him that from space they would ‘look like the Aurora Borealis.’

  Zoe took her phone out and Nathan thought she was going to look up Aurora Borealis on Wikipedia for him. But instead she held the phone up to the sky and took a picture of Venus.

  “It won’t come out,” she said.

  In the morning when Nathan woke up, Jupiter had fallen from his bedroom ceiling and was stuck to his forehead. There was red and blue make-up on his pillow. He went along the landing to the bathroom. His dad was snoring in his bedroom like he always did after a night of heavy drinking. Nathan weed for ages and looked in the mirror at the lightning bolt smeared across his face. There was gold and silver glitter in his hair. He went to show Zoe, but she wasn’t in her room. He picked the David Bowie record up from her bed, stood on a chair and put it back inside the open plastic frame on the wall where he’d taken it from the night before. He clicked the frame shut and went downstairs to the kitchen. His red National Space Centre notebook was on the table. He picked it up and put it in the pocket of his pyjama bottoms.