A Godawful Small Affair

by J. B. Morrison

  He shook the blue inhaler. He breathed out and then in and put the puffer in his mouth and pressed. He was instantly lightheaded and thought he was going to be sick, like when Arthur made him smoke half a cigarette. Astronauts had to try hard to not puke in Space, because the sick would float around and might end up in another astronaut’s mouth. Nathan lay down on Zoe’s bed and waited for everything to stop spinning.

  Before he went back to his own room Nathan took a Kwell tablet from the packet in the bathroom cabinet. There were pictures of a car, a plane and a ship on the front of the box. He didn’t know whether the pills would work for space travel, but he put the tiny pill on his tongue and swallowed it anyway. He placed three cotton buds in the shape of an arrow outside his bedroom door and went through the contents of his backpack. Every night he was adding something new. If Zoe didn’t come home soon, he’d have to get a bigger bag. Tonight, he would take the snow globe and the blue nail varnish. He sat on the edge of his bed and painted both his thumbnails blue, shaking and blowing on them like Zoe did. If he made himself more like her, the aliens would be more likely to take him too.

  17

  Brixton, London, England, the World, Earth, the Solar System, the Universe. Nathan’s dad had gone out early on his own and Auntie Maureen was on guard duty. Nathan tried his luck and asked her if he could go to the park and she said categorically no, which she told him meant no times a thousand. The chain was on the front door and both bolts were pulled across the back. As his dad was the only one who knew where the window keys were hidden, Nathan told Officer Dibble, if there was a fire, they would both burn to death.

  Maureen made Nathan a full English breakfast, with Linda McCartney sausages and two eggs, sunny side up, because that’s how Zoe had hers. Nathan sat with Maureen at the table in front of the living room window. Up until a week ago no one in the house ate their meals at the table. They always sat on the sofa or the armchair with their plates on their laps, usually watching television or looking at their phones. With Maureen in charge of mealtimes the living room had quickly turned into a restaurant. Knives on the right, forks on the left. Placemats in the middle and a tablecloth underneath. Maureen held up two sauce bottles, a brown one and a red.

  “Daddies?” she said. “Or Aunties?” Nathan couldn’t decide. “I’ll leave them both and let you choose.” Maureen said.

  Nathan poured tomato ketchup onto his plate and shook the bottle of brown sauce. He slapped it on the base like his dad did, firing a huge dollop onto the plate. He mixed the two sauces together with his knife. He’d expected the tomato ketchup to disappear into the darker brown sauce, but the opposite happened.

  He asked his aunt if she was going to get sacked from Greggs because of all the time she was having off work. She said no because they owed her a lot of holidays. Nathan said she was having a really rubbish holiday and Maureen laughed. She said at least no one in Brixton would get scurvy because she wasn’t selling them cakes, and Nathan knew his aunt and his dad had been talking about him. After breakfast he asked Maureen if she had any glitter.

  “Not on me,” she said, patting her pockets.

  Nathan wondered if saying ‘not on me’ and patting your pockets when someone asked you for something that you didn’t have was a family joke handed down to his aunt and his dad from their aunts and dads. It occurred to Nathan that his dad and his aunt had the same dads and aunts as each other. It hadn’t been long since he’d realised Maureen was his dad’s sister. He always knew she was his aunt, but he hadn’t made the connection.

  After breakfast Maureen went to look for more things to wash. Nathan could hear her in the kitchen, humming along with the radio or the washing machine. His dad told him a joke once: Why do bees hum? Because they don’t know the words. Nathan didn’t think Maureen even knew she was humming all the time. And unlike a bee, she sang as well. If a song she knew came on the radio or was played in the middle of a television programme, Maureen couldn’t help joining in. It could be quite annoying at the end of a film. Nathan didn’t think he’d heard his aunt singing since Zoe had been missing though. Or at least not when his dad was in the house. It was funny how, because Nathan’s sister wasn’t there, his dad’s sister never seemed to leave.

  Nathan watched cartoons and read Moonmen (and Women). There were new facts to share with Zoe when she came back. Moon dust was soft as flour but sharp as broken glass. It smelled and tasted of burned gunpowder and gave the astronauts lunar hay fever.

  He rested his hand on his dad’s laptop on the sofa next to him. He felt for warmth, like a detective feeling the bonnet of a car. He remembered how PC Kari had done the same thing to the grass in the park. The laptop was cold. Nathan listened for the sound of his aunt, still humming in the kitchen. He lifted the laptop lid and touched the Z key. Before the screen was fully awake, seventeen emails arrived with a loud ping and the Twitter bird was jumping up and down in the dock at the bottom, trying to catch his attention. Nathan quickly closed the lid.

  He listened again for his aunt in the kitchen and then opened the laptop again. He turned the sound down and looked at Twitter. There were thirteen new Tweets mentioning Zoe. Nathan opened the Where is Zoe Love? Facebook page. Ignoring the twenty-nine Facebook notifications, he scrolled down his dad’s timeline. Every two or three posts there was an advert or a sponsored link that somehow related to missing, kidnapped or murdered teenagers. There were YouTube recommendations for videos of suspicious men in white vans idling outside schools that the internet thought his dad might also like. There were sponsored links to private detective agencies, solicitors and second hand vans, and an Amazon promotion for DVDs of Gone Girl and Gone Baby Gone.

  Nathan was careful not to open any of the unread Facebook notifications or messages, even though he wanted to. If there was good news, Nathan would love to be the one to break it to his dad. He imagined telling him that Zoe had been found alive and well, knowing how that would make his dad feel. Nathan would even have preferred that to bringing her back from space. He looked at a few of the Facebook comments his dad had already read.

  ‘Is this her?’ one asked, above a picture of a girl who was about Zoe’s age. She did actually look like Zoe, but from the clothes the girl was wearing and the old-fashioned cars and shops in the background, it was obvious the photo had been taken at least twenty years ago. Nathan followed a long thread of Facebook replies back to the comment that started the thread: ‘Spoiler alert. Face it. This girl is dead!’

  Nathan leaned over to the arm of the sofa and picked up the house phone. He pressed the button and listened to the dialling tone. He put the phone back in its cradle, repositioning it to make sure it was definitely recharging and then he checked the dialling tone again, pretending to be the father of a missing teenager.

  The house phone had rung more times since Zoe had been away than it had in the entire ten years they’d had it. The loud ring made Nathan and his dad jump every single time and his dad would practically throw himself across the room to answer it, as though the phone might explode or – far worse – stop ringing if he didn’t reach it in time. Almost every call was someone asking if there was any news. Nathan’s dad told them all the same thing. As soon as he heard anything, they would be the first to know.

  The sound of his dad’s mobile was more familiar and so it was less of a shock when it rang. But the ringtone was too chirpy and upbeat. Nathan knew his dad could have changed it easily enough or Nathan could have shown him how. But as Zoe had chosen the ringtone, ‘Shrill Frog Song’ was now part of the Zoe Love Museum.

  Nathan looked at the photos of Zoe on his dad’s laptop. Relatives had shared some of their pictures, taken when Zoe was younger than Nathan was now, and some from before he was even born. Nathan looked at those and at the two hundred or so pictures of the sky and street furniture that his dad had insisted on copying onto the laptop before allowing the police to take Zoe’s phone away. Nathan zoomed in on the incidental tower blocks and office buildings in the dis
tance or on the edges of the photos. The bigger he made the images, the more impossible it was to see any detail.

  He took the laptop over to the window and held it up to the glass and compared the thread pattern on the curtains in one of the photos to the real-life living room curtains. Zoe had obviously taken the photo from there. Apart from the curtains, everything else in the picture had changed. The sky was long gone.

  Nathan worked out which other skies had been photographed from the living room window and which pictures Zoe had taken from the kitchen and from the bedrooms and the bathroom upstairs. He zoomed in on the edges of rooftops and aptly named Sky dishes. The majority of Zoe’s indoor sky photos had been taken from her bedroom. Nathan wondered what she was looking at when she sat for hours at her window. Was it really just clouds and stars or was she feeling homesick? Did Zoe wish she was an alien again? They wouldn’t take you if you didn’t want to go. She’d told him. It’s not a kidnapping.

  He flattened his nose against the window and followed the slow movement of a wispy puff of cloud across the sky. He followed it for so long he didn’t want to look away or even blink, in case that was the moment the cloud morphed into the Starship Enterprise. He couldn’t remember if clouds actually moved or if it was the sky behind or both, and he’d forgotten all the names Zoe had taught him. All he could remember was Columbus wasn’t a cloud.

  Nathan knew the Earth was moving. Maybe the aliens had brought Zoe back and her house wasn’t where they’d expected it to be. There were no arrows to lead them to it. Zoe could be on the other side of the world now. Nathan watched the wispy cloud until it was almost over the house. Before it disappeared, he waved. Just in case.

  He went back over to the sofa and looked at the photos Zoe had taken that weren’t of the sky. His dad had stared at each one a hundred times, hoping to find some significance in his daughter’s random, uninhabited photos. Who was it that had last made a call from the empty phone box before Zoe took the picture, and who caught a bus from the deserted bus stop? Nathan’s dad had stared at the drain covers and at the traffic island and the swimming pool, wondering who had just crossed the road or last swam in the empty blue water of the lido. Whose body was about to break the surface of the water? What was the deeper meaning in the photo of the rubbish skip? Who did the mattress sticking out of the skip belong to? Who had slept on it?

  Nathan mimicked his dad, enlarging the picture of the empty park bench, trying to read the name on the brass plaque on the back of the bench, but just making it blurrier. It was like Zoe was playing a cruel joke on her dad. Leaving clues behind for him. All of them just out of his focus. What did the stencilled number on the grey dustbin mean? What was so special about the number twenty-one? Nathan thought Zoe just liked how the stencil looked pretty on the side of such a plain and ugly bin, and so she took a photo of it. But he couldn’t tell his dad that. His dad needed it all to be a solvable puzzle, or else how would he be able to go on?

  Nathan closed the laptop and returned to his library book – the edge of the known Universe is forty-six billion light years away from the Sun. Astronauts scratch their noses on Velcro inside their helmets. He read aloud to Officer Dibble, purring on the sofa next to him.

  “On the first American human spaceflight, electrodes were stuck onto the astronauts’ bodies, Dibs. To measure their heart rates and calculate the amount of air in their lungs. And look,” he held the book up to show Officer Dibble the picture. “They’ve got tattoos like my mum had. So that the NASA doctors knew where to stick the electrodes on the astronauts.”

  Nathan put the book down and lifted up his shirt. He searched his skin for the dots Zoe had drawn on him when their mum was alive. He wished Zoe had used permanent ink like the time she’d helped him draw his own snake tattoo. Nathan had managed to draw the end of the tail on his left hand and he’d drawn the snake’s body up his arm as far as his shoulder, but he couldn’t reach any further. Zoe offered to help. Nathan gave her the pen, and starting with the head, she drew on his hand and up his arm, right across his shoulders until the two halves of the snake met on his back.

  When Nathan went downstairs to show his parents his tattoo, his dad laughed and his mum said, “Oh for Christ sake, Zoe.” Nathan’s mum was bad cop that day. She took him up to the bathroom and told him to stand in front of the mirror. His mum went into her bedroom and came back with another mirror, which she held behind him like a hairdresser and he saw: ‘GULLIBLE BROTHER’ written on his back. It took three weeks of baths to completely wash it off.

  Nathan thought about times like that when he really thought he hated his sister. He thought about her flossing her teeth and dropping the disgusting dental floss on his shoulder for him to discover later. Or when they played hide and seek and it was Nathan’s turn to hide and he’d be in their parents’ wardrobe behind the coats, or outside in the tiny shed, while Zoe sat in the living room, watching television, or in the kitchen making herself a sandwich, not counting to a hundred and with no intention of doing any seeking.

  When Nathan was five or six, Zoe taught him to say swearwords, hoping he would one day repeat them in front of their mum and dad. When he eventually said fuck, their mum didn’t tell Nathan off but instead explained calmly that it was a ‘bad word’. A few days later when their dad stubbed his toe and swore, Nathan had put his hand over his open mouth and said, “Fuck’s a bad word, Dad.” Everyone couldn’t stop laughing, especially Zoe. Nathan was the last to laugh, because he didn’t really get the joke. Realising he might never be pranked or annoyed by his sister ever again made Nathan feel so anxious he thought he was going to throw up.

  He listened to Officer Dibble purring next to him and his aunt humming to herself in the kitchen. He imagined they were both robots. He stroked the cat, combining the stroke with a search of his fur, to see if there was an implant under the cat’s skin. Officer Dibble had been a missing person once. A misca. No one had called the police or made posters or filmed a television appeal. There were no India99s or Deltas. Nathan supposed the Deltas might have eaten Officer Dibble. Nathan’s mum and dad had just waited for the cat to return, which he eventually did. Strolling through the back door into the kitchen, looking for his saucer, as though he hadn’t been anywhere at all.

  The cat stopped purring. His ears twitched like radar. He was staring at the empty doorway out into the hall. Nathan heard the front door. It would only open as far as the chain would allow and the door slammed against the chain. Maureen came out of the kitchen. Nathan got up and went out to the hall. His aunt spoke to somebody through the gap. She unhooked the chain and opened the front door.

  It was Nathan’s dad. He was out of breath, as though he’d been running. He put his hands on his knees for a moment until he got his breath back. Nathan thought about getting him a paper bag to blow into, like Zoe did once when she lost her inhaler. She told Nathan afterwards that it wasn’t her asthma. She was having a panic attack. Nathan wondered if his dad was having a panic attack. When his dad stood up straight, he was almost too excited to speak.

  “The police have found some more photos on Zoe’s phone.”

  18

  The geeks – that was what Anne Marie called the Hi-Tech Crime and the Digital Capability units – had recovered nineteen deleted photos from Zoe’s phone and from the Cloud. Anne said the geeks were incredibly pleased with themselves for being able to say they’d found photos of clouds hidden in the Cloud. Zoe had probably deleted them from her phone because they were so badly out of focus. The geeks also found two blurred images that looked like accidental pocket photos. They discovered another empty phone box picture and a photo of Zoe’s favourite tree, still standing and down at the bottom of the park where it belonged. When the FLOs brought the deleted photos to the house to show Nathan’s dad however, it was the last picture they were especially keen to share. Nathan thought either the FLOs or the geeks had rearranged the order of the pictures, so they could save the most dramatic until last. It was a photo of a boy. A
human boy.

  The police didn’t know who the boy was. They’d hoped Nathan’s dad could help. He couldn’t, and now he was searching for two teenagers instead of one. He asked the FLOs if he could post the picture on the Where is Zoe Love? Facebook page. The FLOs talked about correct procedure and data protection, but after failing to get through to a senior officer on the phone for advice, they said something about resources and needing all the help they could get, and they told Nathan’s dad to go ahead. He posted the photo on Facebook with two questions: ‘Do you know who this is?’ and ‘Is this you?’ It didn’t take long for the usual theories, jokes, accusations and arguments to mount up. The comments under the photo were soon so far off topic that Nathan’s dad had to repost the picture and start again.

  In the afternoon he went to Zoe’s school and stood outside the gates showing the picture of the mystery boy to any girls coming in and out of the school, until a parent complained and a teacher asked Nathan’s dad to leave. He gave a copy of the photo to the teacher and she promised to show it to the whole school at the next assembly.

  The photo of the boy fitted all the requirements for a passport or a missing poster. He was looking directly at the camera and the background was simple, too simple to work out where the picture had been taken beyond it being somewhere outdoors. Nathan’s dad wondered if the boy was somehow connected to the all the other objects and places photographed by Zoe. He could be the missing piece of the jigsaw she’d left behind. Maybe the mystery boy caught a bus that left the bus stop before Zoe took a picture of it. Was he making a call from the phone box? Was he calling Zoe? Had the boy crossed any of the roads in Zoe’s photos or swam in the empty pool and sat on the park bench, maybe even next to Zoe?