A Godawful Small Affair

by J. B. Morrison

  “There are police here every day because of you, Zo,” Nathan said. “Everyone is looking for you. Me and Dad put up loads of posters with your face on. So, you’re famous now. And you’ve sort of been on telly as well. Auntie Maureen is here every day. She says me and Dad would starve to death otherwise and we’d be wearing dirty clothes. I’d have to go commando all the time. Auntie Maureen didn’t say that. That was me. Every time she offers to make Dad something to eat though, he says, oh, just something simple please, Mo. Move the cup to yes if you can hear me, Zoe, and if you want me to come and find you. Because I know where you are.” Nathan stared at the cup, willing it to move. “If you don’t move it, it doesn’t matter because I’ve decided anyway. I’m coming to get you. Seriously though, Zoe. I’ve got hundreds of things to tell you. Since you’ve been gone it’s been one thing after another.”

  12

  Nathan adjusted the crotch of his orange spacesuit. It felt tighter than when he’d worn it to the park just a few nights ago. Zoe had already been gone long enough for Nathan to have grown. He double-checked the contents of his backpack. The compass and the telescope, the underwater camera and the MP3 player and the Swiss Army knife he’d taken out of the kitchen drawer when he was looking for batteries for his Space Torch. He ate the last Kit Kat finger and threw the silver foil wrapper at the bin in the corner of his room and missed. He pulled the swimming goggles on, adjusted the strap again and looked up at the stars. Even though all he had to do was go to sleep, he doubted he’d be able to.

  He tried naming the fifty-three moons of Saturn. Like counting sheep. Aegaeon, Aegir, Albiorix, Anthe, Atlas, Bebhionn, Bergelmir, Bestla, Calypso Daphnis. What came next? Nathan knew three people with the same names as Saturn moons now. A girl in his class was called Pandora and the policeman who’d tricked him by pretending to be a good cop was called PC Kari. The other person was Arthur’s Staffy cross, Titan, the name of Saturn’s biggest moon and Brixton’s ugliest dog.

  Nathan chased an itch around his body. It ran across his belly and up and down his arms and into his hair like when someone talked about ants. He loosened the skateboard pad on his left knee and itched underneath. He felt so wide-awake. How had Neil Armstrong ever managed to sleep before he left for the Moon? It must have been like a billion Christmas Eves. Maybe it was dangerous for an astronaut to fall asleep in Space. If Neil Armstrong had a dream about aliens and the aliens woke him up, Apollo 11 could have ended up stuck in orbit forever. Nathan tried to empty his mind, like Miss Casablanca said he should do during yoga. Arthur always said, ‘That won’t take long.’ Every single time.

  Nathan yawned. An encouraging sign. He adjusted his spacesuit again. He wondered whether the aliens would be tall like Chewbacca or short like E.T. Ever since Nathan had been able to stand upright, people had remarked on how short he was for his age. His parents had said it and so had doctors and teachers, even complete strangers in supermarkets. And they always made being short for his age sound so negative. Like having something wrong with his speech or being slow at reading. Whereas the boys in his class who were tall for their age were hailed as legends and heroes. They got picked for the basketball team even if they couldn’t catch or throw to save their lives.

  When the astronauts returned from the International Space Station, they were two inches taller. Nathan hoped that would happen to him. Perhaps on whatever planet or galaxy he was taken to, he’d already be the tallest one there. Apart from Zoe, of course. The sooner he fell asleep, the sooner the aliens would wake him up and he’d find out. He gave up trying to empty his mind or remember Saturn’s moons and went through the police alphabet instead. Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Hotel…missed one, Golf, Hotel, India, Julia, Lima, Mike, November…

  13

  Nathan woke up. Still in Brixton, London, England, the World, Earth, the Solar System, the Universe. He went to the toilet, checking in the bathroom mirror for bruises or strange marks on his body, finding nothing except the rings under his eyes from the swimming goggles. He liked the way the rings made him look more like his dad.

  Along the landing his dad’s bedroom door was open and his bed was empty. Nathan imagined the aliens had taken his dad as well and that he was the last boy on Earth. For the three steps along the landing to Zoe’s room Nathan was excited by all the adventures he was going to have on his own. By the time he knocked on her door, he was imagining the film Home Alone with the two robbers successfully breaking in and killing him.

  Recalling a game that he used to play with Zoe, Nathan knocked on her bedroom door. In the game one of them would think of a tune and tap out the notes on a table or the wall with their knuckles. The other person would have to guess what tune it was. They both became so good at guessing correctly, that like the Post-it note game, to anyone else it would have seemed like it was a rehearsed trick. Zoe said that even though they were born nearly five years apart, they were more connected than identical twins.

  Nathan knocked on the door five times. If Zoe had returned during the night — they always came at night, she’d told him — she would recognise the up-and-down notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  A few seconds passed without response and Nathan opened the door. He checked the tripwires and alarms he’d set up the night before. The cotton bud still seesawed on the edge of the dressing table and the plastic beads were unmoved on the narrow windowsill, still forming the shape of a ‘Z’.

  He picked the snow globe up from Zoe’s dressing table and shook it, watching the snow falling on Neil Armstrong. The plastic astronaut was almost as big as the Moon he was standing on. He was holding an American flag like a golf caddy. Nathan hadn’t read anything yet in Moonmen (and Women) about whether or not it snowed on the Moon. Zoe would know. When she came home, he would ask her. He’d also ask her to explain how astronauts weren’t floating but falling. He’d read it over and over in the library book, but he couldn’t seem to understand it. Zoe would make it all make sense to him. On the base of the snow globe it said: ‘ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN’, which, everyone who knew anything at all about space knew, Neil Armstrong hadn’t meant to say.

  The snow globe was from the same National Space Centre gift shop as Nathan’s torch and the stars and planets on his bedroom ceiling. His dad had painted the ceiling black and then he’d stood on a chair, sticking the stars to the night sky. Zoe said he looked like God on his fourth day.

  When Zoe came back, or when Nathan brought her back, he would ask their dad if they could all go to the National Space Centre again. They could stay in the same hotel as before and Nathan would share a room with Zoe again. He would help her reacclimatise to life on Earth back among the humans. Her bones and muscles would slowly start to recover from lack of gravity, she’d find her voice again and they’d stay up all night talking. They’d make cups of tea with the hotel kettle that took forever to boil. Nathan would squirt milk onto the carpet again when he tried to open the tiny cartons and Zoe would have to creep out into the corridor to steal more milk from a trolley. She’d take two packets of biscuits from the trolley as well and they would lay awake for hours on their hotel beds, Zoe on the double and Nathan on a small bed on wheels, that the scary-tired-bored man from reception would pull out from under the bigger bed like a DVD tray.

  With nothing but the light from the television to see her by, Nathan would watch his superhero sister picking at a new scab on her leg. He’d record it in a notebook he’d bought from the National Space Centre gift shop. He would ask her how she got the scab and Zoe would tell him, “I think there’s an implant under my skin. So they can track my movements.”

  “The aliens?”

  “Yep.”

  “Like an Oyster card?”

  Zoe would look at him like he was the strange one in the family.

  “Dad says the government can tell where you are because of your Oyster card,” Nathan would tell her.

  Zoe would roll her eyes again, because her dad was even stranger than her
brother.

  “Do you want to go out?” Zoe would say.

  “Where?”

  “Just outside. See if there are any stars.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “He won’t want to come.”

  “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “Come on.”

  Zoe would open the heavy hotel room door and hold it until it closed behind them and they’d walk along the corridor and go downstairs. They’d go through another heavy door and sneak past the scary-tired-bored man in reception who would see them anyway but wouldn’t seem to care. Outside, most of the shops and services would be closed. There wouldn’t be any people around, just lots of parked cars and vans. Zoe would say it looked like a film about the end of the world.

  They’d walk to the same grassy area that reminded Nathan of the middle bit of their estate. The only light would come from the kind of short streetlights they have on the roads near airports to stop low flying planes crashing into them. They’d sit on the same concrete bench and tip their heads back, just as they’d done earlier on in the planetarium at the National Space Centre. Nathan would turn on his Space Torch and he’d project the galaxy from eight million light years away at the sky.

  Zoe would say, “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “You don’t know what might happen. It might be like meeting yourself when you time travel. Or typing Google into Google. Something calamitous will happen. The sky will explode, or we’ll all die in a huge ball of fire.”

  Nathan wouldn’t believe her, but he’d switch the torch off anyway. Just in case. They’d stare at the sky without talking for a while. Nathan would steal glances at his sister, wondering what she could see up there that he couldn’t, and Zoe would make the same joke as the last time they were there, “You’d think they would have built a National Space Centre somewhere with a few more stars.”

  On the way back to their room they’d get ice creams from the vending machine in the hotel’s reception. Nathan loved that vending machine. It had a robot arm that moved over and sucked the ice creams out of the freezer. It was better than a lot of the interactive exhibits at the National Space Centre. He wanted to have a second go, but Zoe said no. She would steal more milk cartons and two more packets of biscuits from the trolley outside their room. Nathan would pocket a sachet of sugar and feel like Professor Moriarty.

  The snow settled inside the snow globe and Nathan returned it to the exact same spot on Zoe’s dressing table where he’d picked it up from. He tightened the lid on the half-drunk bottle of Oasis and felt the boobs on a glass perfume bottle in the shape of a woman with no head. He sprayed some of the perfume into the air and sniffed it. It was the only thing in the room that didn’t remind him of Zoe.

  Her bedroom was like the living museum Nathan had been to with the school. It was like a world stopped in time. At the living museum people in old-fashioned clothes with no make-up or hair products weaved baskets out of straw and made wooden furniture and pots without using power tools. Arthur had stolen a small stoneware pot from the museum and smashed it on the coach back to school. Humans were terrible, even if they were your friends.

  Nathan sorted through a basket full of Zoe’s pencils and pens and badges, looking for glitter. At the bottom of the basket there was a see-through wallet with eleven different coloured Sharpies inside. He stared at the space between the blue and the green pens and pretended he was the father of a missing teenager, trying to see what it felt like to be his dad. At least Nathan knew where Zoe was. And how he was going to get her back.

  He took one last look around, what his dad called ‘an idiot check’. He put a bottle of blue nail varnish in his pocket, promising Zoe he’d return it, and closed the bedroom door. He replaced the strip of Sellotape across the door and the door frame and went downstairs.

  14

  Nathan’s dad was in the living room. He must have fallen asleep sitting on the sofa and had gradually slid down onto the floor in front of it like a silk scarf. His laptop had travelled with him and somehow remained balanced on his knees. Both dad and computer were asleep and Nathan didn’t want to wake either of them.

  He went into the kitchen and climbed on a chair to pull the top bolt across the back door to let Officer Dibble in. If he was quick enough, he could have probably gone out through the garden to the park and retrieved the Luigi board. He could have looked again for the arrows and the Post-it notes. But the thought of what his dad would do to him, and the knowledge of what thinking he’d lost ‘another one’ would do to his dad, was enough to stop him. He closed the back door and scooped some stinky meat onto a saucer for Officer Dibble and poured himself a bowl of Rice Krispies, keeping his hand over the bowl, in case the snaps, crackles and pops woke his dad. He sat on the floor next to the cat and opened Moonmen (and Women). He found the chapter titled: ‘Animals in Space’.

  “Fruit flies were the first animals in space,” Nathan said, reading to the cat. “They were launched in a V-2 rocket from the desert in New Mexico and travelled sixty-eight miles in three minutes and ten seconds.”

  When Zoe came back from space, she was allergic to cats. Nathan remembered her breaking the bad news to Officer Dibble. Zoe told the cat she wouldn’t be able to stroke him or brush his stinky teeth with her old Disney toothbrush anymore. Officer Dibble, who’d been an indoors-cat since kittenhood, was going to have to be put outside at night like the bins. Perhaps Nathan was remembering it wrongly, but when he pictured Officer Dibble’s face as Zoe told him he wasn’t going to be able to sleep on the end of her bed and would have to take his chances with the rougher estate cats and weapon dogs from now on, Nathan was convinced the cat could understand. As if switching the television on and off with her mind and popping toast up just by looking at it wasn’t enough, Zoe was also a Doctor Dolittle.

  With one eye on the cat, Nathan continued reading to him, hoping for a similar reaction.

  “In 1957, Laika was the first animal to go into orbit. The Russian…” Nathan whispered the word, “dog, left Earth on board the Sputnik 2 spacecraft. Laika was the first animal to go into orbit, although he didn’t make it back as the technology hadn’t been developed yet.” Nathan turned the page and angled the book to show the cat a photograph. “That’s Félicette Dibs. It’s a French black and white cat that was sent into space in a special capsule on top of a rocket that launched from the Sahara Desert. The cat travelled one hundred miles in fifteen minutes and then the capsule separated from the rocket and came back to Earth by parachute. The capsule and the cat were both recovered safely. In Britain – that’s where we live, Dibble – the newspapers called Félicette the Astrocat.”

  Officer Dibble carried on eating and ignoring Nathan, even when he told him that after Félicette returned to Earth, scientists had killed her so they could carry out tests on her body. Nathan closed the book and got up from the kitchen floor. He poured the last of the Rice Krispies into his bowl and topped the bowl up with milk. He boiled the kettle and rinsed out a mug. There were no clean teaspoons and he didn’t want to put his arm into the sink full of cold murky water so he poured coffee into the mug from the jar. He hadn’t left enough milk for the coffee and had to tip some out of his cereal bowl.

  Nathan walked slowly along the hall to the living room, careful not to spill milk or coffee but managing to do both. He trod the spilled liquid into the carpet, until his sock was so wet he had to limp to the living room. His dad woke the moment Nathan walked into the room, catching the laptop just before it hit the floor. His dad yawned and hauled himself back up onto the sofa. After he’d stretched his back and his neck and pulled a few early morning faces, Nathan gave him the mug of coffee.

  “Have we run out of little marshmallows?” his dad said. He smiled, picking a Rice Krispie from the surface of his coffee. And then he must have remembered Zoe was missing and his smile was sucked into the black hole she’d left behind. Everything good about the day would follow it.

 
Nathan sat next to his dad. He balanced the cereal bowl on the arm of the sofa, and in the time it took him to take his wet sock off and drop it on the floor, his dad had woken the laptop up and was collecting emails. He refreshed the Facebook page and counted the notifications before Nathan had taken the spoon out of his bowl. His dad read the new Facebook messages and comments and accepted friend requests. This was his morning routine. Nathan already hated it.

  One of the FLOs had helped his dad set up the Where is Zoe Love? Facebook page and he was on the internet all the time now. He had a Twitter account too and every morning he searched #WhereisZoeLove. Zoe’s dad had been on social media more often in one week than his daughter had in her entire lifetime. Zoe’s lack of what PC Torres had called, ‘her digital footprint’, made it harder for the police to track her movements.

  Nathan’s dad had found some other photos of Zoe and he’d scanned them onto his laptop and added them to Facebook. At the top of the page there was a picture of the whole family together, all with identical skinhead haircuts. It had been Zoe’s idea to support her mum when she was ill. She’d shaved Nathan’s head and her own before telling their dad. Luckily, he was too moved to be angry and so Zoe shaved her dad’s head too. In the photo, their dad said they looked like a cult.