A Godawful Small Affair

by J. B. Morrison

  Nathan went to the kitchen with the policeman. One of the FLOs shut the living room door behind them. She forgot to lift it over the carpet. The noise it made was horrible. In the kitchen, Nathan asked PC Kari if he could have a drink of water, as though it was the policeman’s house they were in.

  “Where do you keep your cups?” PC Kari said. He started opening and closing the same cupboards he’d opened and closed two weeks ago when Zoe first went missing. He took a glass tumbler out of the cupboard above the sink. Nathan wondered if it was the original Luigi board glass.

  The policeman filled the glass from the tap and gave it to Nathan. He sat down and sipped the water. PC Kari asked him about the planetarium and what he enjoyed most at the National Space Centre. What was his favourite thing there? All Nathan could think of was the Rocket Tower, but he’d forgotten the name of one of the rockets. He drank the water slowly, to avoid having to speak. He couldn’t hear anyone talking in the other room. Thor Able, he remembered. And the Rocket Tower wasn’t really his favourite thing. It wasn’t the planetarium either or saving the ice moon Europa. It was staying up all night in the hotel room with Zoe afterwards. Getting ice creams from the vending machine and making cups of tea with the tiny milks that Zoe stole from the trolley. It was going outside to look at the stars with his sister.

  Nathan looked at the kitchen clock. The hands were moving so slowly he thought it was broken. PC Kari asked him what his favourite planet was, which was such a stupid question and he almost told him so. It was definitely Saturn though. The second largest planet in the Solar System. It had at least sixty-two moons. Fifty-three of them had names but he could only remember one of them right now and that was only because it was the same as the name of the policeman in his kitchen. Nathan thought he heard his dad shout. It was more of a stifled scream. Titan was the name of Saturn’s biggest moon, Nathan remembered. The same name as Arthur’s dog. He wondered how Arthur’s ankle was.

  Janet knocked on the kitchen door. Two knocks. Not enough for a song. She opened the door and nodded a secret police signal to PC Kari. Nathan was certain that because he’d failed to bring Zoe back, his dad was going to prison. He followed the police back to the living room. His dad was sitting on his own at the table, looking down at his clasped hands, massaging the head and tail of the snake as though he was trying to rub the tattoos off. He didn’t say anything when Nathan came in. He looked like he was about to say something, or he tried his best to say something, but he couldn’t find his voice or the words that he really needed to say. He turned his face back to his hands instead.

  They all sat together in silence apart from the occasional crackle of the police radios until Auntie Maureen arrived. Nathan would have to live with her forever now. He’d have to eat spicy food at the table with a knife and fork while his aunt hummed like a fridge. The FLOs spoke quietly to Maureen in the hall and then the three police officers left. Without Nathan’s dad. Maureen asked Nathan and his dad if they wanted a hot drink. Nathan’s dad shook his head and Maureen said she would make him one anyway. She said he didn’t have to drink it if he didn’t want to.

  “Nathan,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to help me make it.”

  Nathan looked at his dad. He was staring at nothing now. Not his hands, not out of the window. Nathan realised that Maureen had been asked to come to the house because the police didn’t want to leave his dad on his own. Nathan thought he knew what Craig had meant when he said he was worried about his dad doing anything daft.

  “Will my dad be all right?” Nathan asked Maureen.

  Maureen looked at her brother. “Steve?”

  Nathan’s dad looked up and managed a single nod.

  In the kitchen, Maureen filled the kettle and switched it on. When it started to boil, with her back to Nathan and leaning heavily on the sink, she told him, “They’ve arrested Craig.”

  35

  Nathan tested his Space Torch. The light flickered. He shook the torch, then unscrewed the end, removed the batteries and rolled them between his palms and replaced them. He tested the torch again. It was better but the beam was weak. He switched the torch off and put it in his backpack. He rested the Christmas cracker compass on his open palm and moved his hand around until the needle pointed north. He put the compass in his backpack. He packed the notepad and pencil, the underwater camera, the MP3 player, the pocket dictionary and the photo of his sister. He put the empty glitter tube in his backpack and also the Sharpie lid, Zoe’s blue asthma inhaler and the doll’s head.

  There hadn’t been time to get any food from the kitchen. All he had to eat was the ice cream and strawberries he’d stolen from Astronaut Buzz’s display table and the remainder of his Subway sandwich. He’d taken Zoe’s half bottle of Oasis out of her bedroom. The space ice cream had been in his backpack for almost a week and it still hadn’t melted. It was no more real ice cream than the apples and oranges in Auntie Maureen’s fruit bowl were real fruit. The Subway sandwich was stale and falling apart and he wished he’d asked for the works because that was Zoe’s favourite. He pulled the longest blade out of the Swiss Army knife and trimmed the crustiest bit from the end of the bread. He dropped the crumbs on the carpet next to the fifty-six alien pictures and the wreckage of the Kinder Hot Rod.

  There was a high-pitched scream outside. Nathan held the Swiss Army knife like a weapon. He opened the curtains just enough to see two foxes, playing with a chicken wing on the outdoor Ping-Pong table. No matter how many times Nathan heard foxes on the estate, he always wondered what creature could be responsible for such a noise – Velociraptor? Dragon? – before realising it was just a fox. They never seemed to make the same sound more than once. Something startled the foxes and they jumped down from the Ping-Pong table. Nathan watched them trot away into the darkness.

  He sat back on his bed, opening and closing the tools of the Swiss Army knife. He stroked the sharp edge of the longest knife blade against his skin. He wanted to cut himself. If he was more like Zoe, the aliens might take him too. He touched the tip of the blade with his thumb, imagining what it would feel like to stick it into Craig.

  Nathan pushed the blade back into the knife and put the knife in the front pouch of his backpack. He zipped the pouch closed. He lay on his back, hugging his backpack close to his chest, watching the night sky through the gap between his curtains. There seemed to be a lot of stars. He took the snow globe out of his backpack, shook it and waited for the snow to settle.

  Holding his hand up to the estate light spilling in through his window, Nathan admired how well he’d painted his fingernails this time. He’d even managed to do the nails on his right hand. He’d drawn a snake’s head on his left hand and coloured it in, using all of Zoe’s eleven remaining Sharpies, listening to the lids click back in place a total of thirty-three times to be sure none of the pens would dry up. There was no room left on his hand to write his address, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to come back home again, and his name was on the ID badge from the television studio anyway. He’d pinned it next to the We come in peace badge on his Where is Zoe Love? T-shirt. He was wearing the T-shirt over his orange spacesuit. He didn’t bother with the swimming goggles or the skateboard pads.

  When it stopped snowing on the Moon, Nathan put the snow globe in his backpack, placing it carefully at the bottom of the bag so it didn’t break, like Maureen did when she was packing eggs at the supermarket. He checked his new phone was on silent, or as silent as anything such a bright yellow could be. He closed the curtains and stood up, slung the backpack over one shoulder, eased his bedroom door open and crept out onto the landing.

  It was quiet enough to hear the house breathe, the central heating complaining and water rushing through the pipes at such great speed, he thought somebody must have got up to use the toilet. Nathan walked along the landing, checking rooms. Maureen was in his dad’s bedroom. Even when she was asleep Maureen was humming, like she wasn’t really asleep but on stand-by.

  Nathan’s dad was asleep
in Zoe’s room. He was lying on top of the covers, still dressed. Nathan presumed his dad had fallen asleep by accident, unable to physically stay awake any longer. He was snoring and Nathan wanted to turn him over or pinch his nose. He stood in the doorway and watched him sleeping, thinking of all the times his dad had stood in his bedroom doorway watching him sleep, or pretending to. Nathan was great at pretending to sleep. He didn’t make it look too obviously fake by snoring loudly or yawning and his dad would stand there for ages, thinking he was fast asleep. Nathan liked it. He felt safe. Protected and loved. Lots of his friends didn’t have dads, or they never saw them. Nathan watched his dad sleeping and wondered if he was dreaming. He hoped he wasn’t. Why didn’t I check her room?

  Nathan went downstairs, avoiding the steps that always creaked when his dad stood on them, in case the backpack was heavy enough to make the stairs creak for him too. From the living room Officer Dibble watched Nathan. The cat could have no idea of the tragic events that had led to him finally getting his night-time spot back on the sofa. Nathan went into the living room and sat next to Officer Dibble. He stroked him until he was purring and struggling to keep his eyes open. Nathan almost sent himself to sleep too.

  He reached over the cat for the television remote control. He took the back off, removed the batteries and swapped them with the ones in his Space Torch. He held the end of the torch against his hand and tested it. The beam was brand new. Nathan’s dad claimed Zoe used to make the remote controls stop working by putting dud batteries in them. Nathan still preferred to believe she had superpowers.

  He picked up his dad’s laptop. There was a crack on the lid through the centre of the apple, where the police had dropped something on it. Nathan opened the laptop. There were eighty-nine unread emails. He daren’t look at Facebook or Twitter. He opened his backpack and squeezed the laptop in as far as it would go, pulling the drawstring as tight as possible. He stood up and tested the bag for weight. The fact it was now almost too heavy to carry made it seem more important. The backpack felt like an actual portable life support system rather than a children’s toy.

  Nathan went out to the hall. He lifted his dad’s sheepskin jacket off the hook by the front door and pulled his parka out from underneath. He returned his dad’s jacket to the hook and put his parka on. He zipped it up and put his phone in the pocket. And then he paused. He took the phone out again and put in the pocket of his dad’s jacket. He carefully lifted the chain off the front door. He disabled the security light and hauled his bag onto his back. It was almost heavy enough to topple him over. In space, the backpack would be so light that if it wasn’t strapped to his back it would float away like a balloon at a country show. He opened the front door and looked back into the house. One last idiot check. Officer Dibble had come out into the hall. Probably hearing the door and expecting to be fed. Nathan looked at the cat and mouthed the words, “Don’t tell Dad.”

  36

  Outside it was as cold as the Moon. It could be as low as minus 173 degrees at night on the Moon and as hot as 100 degrees during the day. The material of Nathan’s spacesuit was thin, and the T-shirt didn’t provide much added warmth. It was too late to go back upstairs for a jumper. He gently closed the front door and looked out on the deserted estate and the jet-black sky. He’d never seen so many stars. Like Oscars night, Zoe had said to him when describing one of her secret nights out under the sky. There were too many stars to count. An astronomer in America once counted more than nine thousand stars without using a telescope. Nathan had asked Zoe how anyone could tell the astronomer was telling the truth. Zoe shook her head. She said she was disappointed with his scepticism, “and at such a young age too.”

  When Nathan saw the star-filled sky, his gut instinct was to go back inside and tell Zoe. Look, Zoe. Look what you’re missing. The knowledge that he would never again be able to do that, almost paralysed Nathan and he thought he might collapse on the spot.

  The backpack was pulling at his neck. He turned around and rested the bag’s weight against the side of a dustbin while he adjusted the straps until it felt slightly more comfortable. The dustbin had been outside their house since Friday. The binmen had been but they hadn’t emptied it. Nathan wondered if it was because his dad had been so rude on the phone to everyone at the council. He stood on his tiptoes and looked inside the dustbin. The stink knocked him back on his heels and combined with the weight of his backpack, he almost went ‘arse over tit’, as his dad liked to say. Nathan had seen a terrapin at the zoo once. It had managed to flip itself upside down and couldn’t right itself. Zoe had ignored the warning signs to not tap on the glass until the terrapin turned himself upright again. “We probably saved that stupid terrapin’s life,” Zoe had said.

  Nathan recovered his balance and took a deep breath and looked again in the dustbin. He reached his hand inside and tugged at the paper until it broke free from the rest of the rubbish piled on top of it. The paper was stained with curry and with egg yolk and tomato sauce. It looked like a T-shirt in an advert for washing powder. There was a big piece torn away from the corner and only three stars remained intact. Nathan stuffed the manky Luigi board into his coat pocket, wiped his hands on his sleeves and headed towards the park. His legs were already tingling and itching from the cold.

  Nathan didn’t know if he was running away from home or if he was looking for Zoe or for aliens. And he didn’t know why he’d felt the need to bring so much useless stuff with him. Maybe he would leave it all in the park, like the cigarette packets and baby’s socks that were already there. Or the 180,000 kilograms of litter left on the Moon by twelve highly-trained but still terrible humans. He walked along the centre of the path between the houses and flats, careful not to set off any security lights. He saw somebody had sprinkled table salt on the threshold of one of the houses. It was probably to stop the ground turning to ice, but it could also have been to keep evil spirits away. Auntie Maureen used to do that in every doorway of her house when she was upset after Uncle Sean left her.

  Nathan pushed his backpack through the drug dealers’ gap in the railings and climbed in after it. He didn’t stop to think about getting himself or his bag stuck or to wonder if the boy who’d been chased through the estate was stuck in the same gap when he was stabbed. If Nathan had considered any of that he might not have had the courage to go any further.

  When he was safely through the gap, he started walking towards Zoe’s favourite tree. In the park it was a lot darker, so he stopped and took off his backpack. He found his Space Torch and Zoe’s MP3 player. He switched the torch on and put the earphones in and pressed play. ‘Life on Mars?’ started. The torchlight and David Bowie’s voice made him a little less frightened. He hooked the backpack over his shoulder again and carried on into the park. When he found his first arrow, he picked up the three short branches and threw them as hard as he could into the park. His second arrow he kicked apart and the third arrow he couldn’t find. When he got to Zoe’s tree, he found the first arrow that he’d left. The folded poster was gone from inside the hollow of the tree.

  He picked up the three sticks and threw them in three different directions into the park. He put his backpack down on the grass next to the tree and stretched his arms out, pushing his shoulder blades together and turning his head from side to side, like his dad warming up or cooling down at the gym.

  One half of the thick tree trunk had been cut into about ten smaller pieces. They were laid out in a row like stepping-stones across a stream. He sat down on one of the upturned logs and stared up at the night sky. He would have to go to Antarctica or Scotland or travel back in time a billion years to see so many stars. He didn’t expect to ever see a sky like it over Brixton. It was like being at the planetarium or staring at his bedroom ceiling. If he changed the setting on his torch and shone the distant galaxy at the sky, maybe Zoe was right and something calamitous would happen.

  ‘Life on Mars?’ finished. He turned the volume up as far as it would go so that he could
hear the end of the piano and the phone ringing and the swearing. Zoe had played the end of the song over and over, trying to work out what was being said after it was finished. Once she found out what it was, she couldn’t wait to tell Nathan. No doubt hoping that he would repeat the swear words in front of their parents.

  Nathan stopped the MP3 player and removed the earphones. He took his dad’s laptop out of the backpack and put it on another of the upturned logs. Opening the laptop in the darkness of the park was like lighting a fire in a cinema. The screen was bright enough to be seen from Space. He half-closed the lid and pressed the key to dim the screen. He opened the photo library and went through Zoe’s pictures to see if she’d captured a sky as spectacular as the one above him now. Even Venus was twinkling like it was a star. Unless it was his tears. Nathan hadn’t realised he was crying.

  An email arrived on the laptop. The pinging sound was so unexpected and so loud it made him jump and he knocked the computer off the log. He picked it up and read the subject of the email.

  This is the money button!! Try it you self. Click here and win win win big $$$$!

  If Nathan was an adult, he would definitely have clicked on the link and every other link like it. He hadn’t thought it was possible to pick up Wi-Fi in the park and he wondered if the email had been sent by some other means, one as yet undiscovered by earthlings, spam from deep space.

  He muted the laptop’s sound and quit the email and the web browser. He created a new folder on the desktop and named it ‘DAD’ and started dragging all the desktop documents and folders into it. Every single archived webpage with reports of sightings and all the blurry iPhone jpegs of vans parked outside schools. Some of the pictures had been enlarged and cropped so his dad could read the number plates. They were so blurry they didn’t even look like vans anymore. Nathan dragged them all into the ‘DAD’ folder.