A Godawful Small Affair

by J. B. Morrison

  He put the photo of ‘Alex’ in the folder and all the PDF guides about how to search for missing children and how to best use the media to your advantage and how to raise campaign funds and so on. Nathan put a desktop folder that his dad had named ‘red herrings and timewasters’ into the ‘DAD’ folder and finally the folder titled ‘Space Cadet’, with the scanned pages of Nathan’s red notebook inside. Nathan dragged the full ‘DAD’ folder into the trash so that the only thing left on the desktop was the wallpaper picture of Zoe. He angled the laptop so she could see the stars. He imagined her eyes in the photo, not half-closed but half-open, waxing not waning, as she gazed in wonder at Orion’s Belt and its two brightest stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel. Zoe’s mouth was open in awe. Her braces shone like Ziggy Stardust.

  Nathan took the dishevelled but still beta Luigi board out of his coat pocket and unfolded it in front of him on a different upturned log. He had to pull the paper apart where it had stuck together. The B, the L and the P were completely torn off. He wiped away tears and snot on the back of his hand and put the snow globe on the Luigi board to stop it from blowing away. He thought about Zoe telling him that the Luigi board was normally a device for speaking to the dead. All the time when he’d been trying to make contact with alien Zoe, he’d been speaking to ghost Zoe.

  He took everything out of his backpack. The glitter tube, the lid from Zoe’s Sharpie, her asthma inhaler, the doll’s head and the Christmas cracker compass. Nathan looked at it all, laid out in front of him like E.T.’s Speak & Spell, coat hanger, record player, fork, umbrella and buzz saw blade. He felt if only there was some way to connect it all together, he would be able to make contact. Zoe would still be okay.

  He heard a voice. At first he was sure it had to be Craig, escaped from the police and coming for him too. There was another voice though and then a third. And they were much younger voices than Craig’s. Boys. In the darkness they could have been as far away as Herne Hill, but they felt very close by. Nathan tried to work out if the voices were getting louder or quieter, moving closer towards him or further away. They were definitely growing louder. The boys were swearing, threatening each other but laughing too. Nathan thought of the boys on the big estate. If it was them, this time they’d definitely kill him. He wondered if the boy who had his phone was there. The boys didn’t seem to care about being heard. They either had no fear or were too scared to admit to it in front of each other.

  Nathan thought about running. He looked at everything he’d taken out of his backpack and didn’t want to leave it. If he put it back in his bag, the heavy backpack would slow him down. Even if he was willing to lose the Luigi board and the other components of his E.T. Communicator, he thought about how badly his dad had reacted to Zoe’s words being painted over on the mural wall. He could never leave the laptop in the park with all of her photos on it.

  Nathan still wasn’t sure exactly whereabouts in the park the boys were. They might be between him and home, and if he ran, he might run right into them. He thought about the boy getting stabbed. The gap in the railing wasn’t an escape route at all, it was a trap. Nathan shut the laptop and tried to put it in his backpack but it wouldn’t fit. He did his best to remain calm. Less haste more speed, Nathan. He needed to be more like his mum, not like his dad chasing the sleeve of his sheepskin jacket like a dog trying to catch its tail. He was still crying. As long as he didn’t sob. He wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coat to stop himself from sniffing.

  Nathan forced as much of the laptop into the backpack as he could and wrapped everything else up inside the Luigi board and stuffed it all into the bag. He put the backpack down on the ground behind the longer section of tree trunk. He pushed it up against the tree and the backpack disappeared into the hollow. Nathan wondered if the hole was big enough for a small boy. He pushed his bag as far in as he could and rolled his body in after it. He hoped he didn’t roll straight out of another hole on the other side of the tree.

  It stunk inside the tree. He thought there might be something dead in there. Instinctively, he started counting to take his mind off it. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. Was the beat of his heart as loud to others as it sounded to him? He held his breath. Three Mississippi, four Mississippi. He’d trained for this, in the bath and in bed, underwater and under the covers. The voices of the boys were really loud now, and there were more of them. He thought he could smell weed. Arthur said skunk got its name because it smelled the same as a skunk. He thought there might be a skunk inside the tree with him, dead or alive.

  He should get up now and run. It might be dark enough to disappear into the park and hide until the boys were gone. He could go home and his dad would never know he’d been away. He would find him in bed, cold and crying and presume he’d had a bad dream. Nathan knew his dad was probably right. There was no such thing as aliens. Zoe had made it all up. For attention. Or because she was grieving. Because of their mum. And because she was a teenager. She was going through a phase. Because it made her feel better.

  The boys’ voices were right next to him. He tried counting them. As many as seven or eight, maybe nine, and all talking at once. No one listening. He reached inside his backpack. His fingers traced the white cross on the side of the Swiss Army Knife. He took the knife out of the backpack and pulled out the tools until he felt the long sharp blade. He turned his body around. He wasn’t completely inside the tree and could still see the sky. He held the penknife against his chest, with the point under his chin, like a knight buried with his sword. And then the sky exploded with light. His scream of surprise was drowned out by the most deafening of bangs. There were four more loud bangs and the fireworks turned the sky Aurora Borealis green and red. Every firework lit Nathan up too. Rockets whizzed and whooshed, in quick succession across the sky. When the third firework went off, Nathan thought he saw Zoe.

  Smoke wafted above him. Moon dust smelled like gunpowder. Eugene Cernan had said that; Eugene Cernan from Apollo 17, the last man to walk on the Moon.

  There was another almighty explosion and for a second or two there were no stars in the sky, just one enormous bright manmade light. And Nathan saw Zoe again. He reached his hand across and pulled the poster towards him. He lay still, waiting for the next explosion, or for the boys to drag him out and cut him up. He held the picture of Zoe close to his chest, with the penknife over it, singing the names of Saturn’s moons in his head. Aegaeon, Aegir, Albiorix, Anthe, Atlas, Bebhionn, Bergelmir, Bestla. When he got stuck, he thought about the cameras and lunar vehicles, the golf balls and flags. The Moon was a tomato, the Earth was the orange and the grapefruit was the Sun. Zoe explaining the Universe with fruit. Meteors becoming meteorites. Asteroids and comets, stars that twinkled, planets that moved. Novas and supernovas, dwarf planets and supermassive black holes. Poison clouds that tasted of raspberries. Cirrus, cumulus, cumulonimbus, stratocumulus, lenticularis, mamma. No, Nathan. Columbus is not a cloud.

  Hundreds of Mississippis must have passed since the last firework. It was dark again and so cold. Nathan pulled the hood of his parka all the way over his head and tucked his body further inside the tree. He was shivering too much and he was far too cold to fall asleep, but he was dreaming anyway. He dreamed he was weightless. He could feel his body floating and the Earth spinning and turning as he rose above it.

  He opened his eyes and looked up at the stars, expecting to be in amongst them. He watched them move across the sky like planets and yet they were twinkling too. Like hundreds of India99s, looking for all the missing girls and stabbed boys. The mispers and the murdered. The stars seemed to bounce.

  Nathan followed the zigzags and the curls, and the lines on the snake’s body where it disappeared up the sleeve of his dad’s T-shirt. The snake was covered in goose bumps because of the cold, and because his dad was only wearing a T-shirt – his sheepskin jacket wrapped around his bitterly cold son. Nathan rested his head against his dad’s chest. He was still holding the poster with the picture of Zoe tightly in his hand.
He must have dropped the knife. He hoped the boys didn’t find it. He didn’t want someone getting stabbed because of him.

  Nathan’s shivering had slowed. It was almost in time with his dad’s heart, beating like a drum beneath the tattoo that said ‘KAT’. He could already see the estate and an oblong of light filling the open door where Maureen was standing, crossing herself, thanking God. Nathan looked at the railings between the park and his house and at the narrow gap that him and his dad and the heavy backpack that appeared weightless when his dad was carrying it, were going to have to somehow squeeze through. But Nathan wasn’t worried. He knew his dad would find a way.

  37

  In the days, weeks and months that followed, if Nathan’s dad had a Mobile Quarantine Facility, he would have locked Nathan inside. He’d failed to protect his daughter from the worst horrors of the world, but he could at least try and protect his son from the details of those horrors. His dad turned newspapers over in shops, changed television channels and the password on his laptop. Nathan wasn’t allowed to answer the phone and his dad wouldn’t speak with the FLOs when Nathan was in the room.

  But even if his dad bought all the newspapers and burned them, if all the paper shops really did blow away, if he disconnected the phones and cancelled the Wi-Fi, the news would have made it through. Like the line of ants that Buzz Aldrin had seen walking through the Mobile Quarantine Facility. Nathan would have found out what had happened to Zoe one way or another. From his friends at school or overhearing a woman in a green tabard on the estate. Their stories would be unreliable and full of hearsay and rumour. Facts would be exaggerated or made up and no doubt even more horrific and unbearable than the truth already was.

  And so, Nathan’s dad had to tell him himself. He tried to make it sound as much like a riddle as he could, as though he was talking about another girl and not his daughter. He told Nathan that Craig had walked into the police station and told the desk sergeant, that after watching his best friend and his best friend’s son on breakfast television, he could no longer live with himself and the terrible thing he’d done. It was actually Nathan, talking about Elliott and E.T., that really got to Craig – just as it had moved the witness who’d seen Zoe collecting firewood to break the criminal code and go to the police. And as the stars and fireworks fought it out for dominance of the skies over Brixton, Craig was down below in a windowless interview room, completing the second of his police interviews.

  Craig told the police how on the night Zoe went missing, he’d left the pub with her dad and they’d walked together back to his house. After talking and drinking in the living room for a while, Nathan’s dad had gone to bed, leaving Craig alone in the living room. He was going to sleep on the sofa until it was time for him to walk into town and take his turn opening the stall. Up until Craig had told the police any different, they – and Nathan’s dad – believed that was exactly what had happened. They’d all watched Craig leaving the estate at five a.m. on the blurry CCTV images, filmed by the same cameras that captured Craig and Nathan’s dad staggering into the estate a few hours earlier.

  But Craig couldn’t get to sleep on the sofa. He was too tall. And the sofa was uncomfortable. The metal studs were digging into his side and when he removed the cushions, the broken spring in the base of the sofa was even worse. As Nathan’s dad told Nathan the story, he frequently paused to blame himself – If only he’d fixed the spring in the sofa like he kept saying he would. If only it had been his turn to open the stall. If only he’d had one less drink.

  Craig told the police that at three in the morning, he heard someone moving around in the hall. He heard the front door open and had the sensation of cold air entering the house. He got up from the sofa and went out to the hall just as the front door was closing. He put his shoes on and went outside and saw Zoe walking in the direction of the park. He went back to the living room to get his jacket and he followed her.

  When the police asked Craig why he didn’t just ask Zoe where she was going, he told them she used to sleepwalk. Everyone knew it was dangerous to wake sleepwalkers, didn’t they? He said he would have told her dad he’d seen her, but he didn’t want to wake him either. Craig told the police he didn’t think it was a ‘big enough deal’ at the time. He decided to follow Zoe until she woke up of her own accord and then he would bring her safely back home.

  Craig followed Zoe and watched her climb over the railings. In her sleep? Nathan thought. Craig said he was very drunk. It was something he would say a lot in his interviews, telling the police he knew it was no excuse, while repeatedly blaming everything that happened on alcohol. Craig climbed over the railings and followed Zoe into the park, where she immediately started picking up sticks. He watched her carry them over to a tree lying on its side, where she added them to a pile. Craig watched her from a distance, but he said he wasn’t hiding exactly. Not for sinister reasons anyway. He confessed he was curious. He wanted to know what she was doing. Craig told the police he then realised how cold it was and decided he would have to wake Zoe. He approached slowly and quietly. He wasn’t sneaking up on her, he said. He was still wary of startling her. He’d heard about people having heart attacks and going into comas because they’d been woken up when they were sleepwalking.

  But when Zoe saw Craig, she must have thought he was someone else. It was dark, Craig said. And she panicked. Craig said he only put his hands on her to calm her down. He wanted to reassure her that it was only him. It was just Uncle Craig. But she wouldn’t stop struggling, and then she slapped his face and he had no choice but to tighten his grip on her. He just wanted her to stop struggling. That was all. He told the police she was like a caught fish. He asked them if they’d ever held an eel before. A policeman later told Nathan’s dad that Craig had smiled at that point. It was one of the details Nathan’s dad tried to keep secret from Nathan. There were things about that night his dad wished he didn’t know himself. Everything would make its way down the grapevine to Nathan eventually.

  At some point when Zoe was struggling to free herself from Craig’s arms she blacked out. Craig said that was when he was the one who was panicking. He told the police he wasn’t thinking straight. He sat on the grass with Zoe for a long time, waiting for her to wake up so he could take her home, but she didn’t wake up. He lost all track of time. He picked Zoe up, intending to carry her home but for some reason he walked in the opposite direction. He was confused. He thought he might be in shock. One excuse after another.

  Craig carried Zoe away from the estate, further down into the park. He told the police he was looking for a safe place and somewhere warm to leave her. He laid her down inside a thicket of small trees and bushes close to the clock tower. He covered her with his jacket and a thick sheet of plastic he found on top of a pile of bricks that must have been there for the work being done to the café and stable block.

  Craig then went back to the estate. He planned on waking Zoe’s dad, but he panicked again. He walked past his friend’s house and kept going until he was filmed by the CCTV camera on the wall of the flats opposite, leaving the estate and walking out onto the main road. The images were of such poor quality that none of the police who watched the film seemed to notice that Craig wasn’t wearing the green Harrington jacket he’d arrived in earlier. If Nathan’s dad had looked in Craig’s wardrobe, he might have seen the space left between the brown and navy jackets. Like the space between the Converse shoes in Zoe’s wardrobe.

  Craig walked back to the pub where he’d left his van. He sat in the van for a while, trying to clear his head. When the park was open, he drove through one of the largest of the twelve gates. His was just another white van entering the park, presumably as part of the building work. When he drove out again with Zoe in the back, Craig told the police he actually found himself in the middle of a short convoy of white vans.

  Nathan’s dad couldn’t bring himself to tell Nathan anything that happened after that. He had to wait until he read it online or heard it at school. The thi
ng that would upset Nathan the most when he found it out, something that would haunt him in his dreams for a long time, was that when they were driving around Brixton in Craig’s van looking for Zoe, and when Craig pulled the van onto the kerb outside the Body Shop and put his hazards on so Nathan could show his dad where Zoe had written on the wall, and then on the journey back to the estate, taking diversions up and down side streets looking for Zoe, until they were back at the estate where Craig parked illegally with the hazards flashing and ‘EMERGENCY BUILDING WORK’ under the windscreen, and while they waited for the police to arrive, and when the police came and exchanged friendly banter with Craig about keeping out of mischief. For that entire time, Zoe had been in the back of the van, hidden amongst the potatoes and the carrots, underneath a carpet of green astro turf used for displaying tomatoes and oranges on the stall.

  Later, Craig took the police to the forest where Zoe’s body was hidden. Arthur showed Nathan a picture in the newspaper. Craig and the police were so tiny in the picture. It looked like it had been taken from space. But they’d probably just used a drone. Arthur said the forest looked like Center Parcs.

  Craig pleaded guilty. He said he didn’t want to put Zoe’s family through any more suffering, as though he was some kind of hero for that. He was sentenced to Life, which only really meant twenty-three years, and everyone thought it wasn’t long enough. Arthur said he could get his brother to stab Craig up in his cell, but Nathan told him they weren’t in the same prison.

  There was a drawing in the newspaper of Craig when he was in court. Because he’d kept his head bowed the whole time, the court artist had drawn him like that. It looked like he was going bald. Nathan was glad.

  He would never understand how Craig had managed to appear so concerned or how he’d helped search for Zoe when he knew where she was. When he thought about Craig watching the appeal, drinking beer and making jokes, especially when Nathan thought about Craig giving him Kinder eggs and pretending to be interested in the Moon landings and being President Nixon, when all the time he’d murdered his sister. Nathan just couldn’t understand it.