The Money Star

by Jon Lymon

  With trepidation he rung the doorbell.

  Remnant’s worst case scenario was realised. Carl answered.

  “Ah, Mr Remnant.”

  “Hello, mate.”

  Carl blocked his path into the house, which smelt expensive even from the doorstep. That certainly wasn’t two-for-one air freshener he was inhaling.

  “Is she in?” Remnant asked.

  “She is.”

  “Can I see her?”

  “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “She texted me.”

  “Carl, who is it?” The call came from deep inside the cavernous three story house (four if you included the basement, which Remnant didn’t like to ).

  “It’s your Dad.”

  There was a silence, filled, Remnant presumed, by muttered curses, or even the gathering of domestic weaponry to be used against him.

  “What does he want?” said Chloe, her tone of voice betraying her central London council roots as it always did when she was angry.

  “I just want to see you darlin’. Have a chance to explain meself,” Remnant called out.

  Another pause.

  “Let him in, Carl.”

  Remnant smiled toothily at his soon-to-be son-in-law. Getting past ‘security’ felt like a small victory. But Remnant’s progress towards the lounge was halted as he nearly lost his right shoe in the depth of the pile of the carpet that received his first step.

  “Shoes off, please,” said Carl.

  Remnant didn’t say one was already half-off, but he thought about it.

  Carl ushered him into the lounge which looked like it had been wrapped in polythene since some rich girl magazine shoot. Chloe had her legs folded under her on the white leather sofa, looking self-consciously relaxed and comfortable while reading a spurious fashion monthly.

  “Darlin’, what can I say?” Remnant stretched his arms out wide.

  “If it’s the usual bollocks, Dad, don’t bother saying nothing.”

  “I brought you these.” Remnant handed over a small bunch of roses that he’d borrowed from a florist’s window display, leaving an IOU card in their place. Chloe sniffed them and was a little surprised to discover they were fresh and real.

  “Where did you nick these from?”

  “Now, come on. Don’t be like that.”

  “Like what? Like the daughter whose Dad has let her down again? Like the bride-to-be who’s had to ask a man she hardly knows to lead her down the aisle on the biggest day of her life?”

  “I want to lead you down the aisle, darlin’. There’s nothing I want more in this world.”

  “Then where were you for the rehearsal? You said you wrote the date down.”

  “I did. On me old phone. But it got cut off. Money’s a bit tight at the moment. I ain’t paid me bill for a few months. But exciting things are happening. Money’s coming in.”

  “Like that reward from the jeweller?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s one thing I’m still waiting on. Amongst others.”

  “Mum said she found you drunk down the pub, chatting up someone.”

  “I wasn’t chatting her up. I was working. Trying to drum up business.” He leaned closer to his daughter. “I’ve got this ship, well, me and couple of mates have. We’re planning to launch it a week after the wedding. I’m gonna try and get some of that diamond.”

  Chloe looked incredulous. “You can’t go into space.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, you’re not… Dad, there’s people falling out of the sky trying to get up there. It’s impossible.”

  “Nothing’s impossible, darlin’. But let’s talk about your wedding.”

  “I’m still shocked you think you can go into space.”

  “I’ll show you the ship if you like. Mate of mine’s an engineer. It’s got nuclear engines and…” Remnant cut off as Carl, who had been busying himself elsewhere in his castle, poked his head around the door.

  “Everything all right?” he enquired.

  Chloe smiled. “Do you mind getting me Dad a cup of tea, please?”

  “Certainly. How do you have it?”

  “Builder’s.” Remnant was glad to see that the description confused Carl as much as he hoped it might. “Strong. Milky. Two sugars,” Remnant added.

  Carl turned his nose up. “Another latte for you, dear?”

  She shook her head.

  “So what do you say darlin’?”

  “About what?”

  “About me giving you away?”

  Chloe sighed and looked out of the window at her extensive garden, the greenery abruptly ending in a six foot high beige and maroon brick wall. “Mum said she’d kill you if you showed your face at the wedding.”

  “If I had a pound for the number of times your mother has said she wanted to kill me, I’d have been able to pay for your wedding twice over. And I wouldn’t need to worry about that asteroid. Listen darlin’, I’m sorting out a new suit. I’ve started work on the speech.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper so folded and thumbed it resembled ancient parchment.

  “Don’t, Dad.” She stopped him from unfolding it. Remnant slipped off his chair onto one knee on the thick carpeted floor at his daughter’s feet. “Please darlin’. I’ve been looking forward to this for so long. It’d kill me to think you’d let someone else give you away. I know I’ve been a bad father.”

  “You’ve been really shit, Dad.”

  Remnant nodded in agreement. “I know I haven’t done all the things a Dad should, but I have tried. I’ve been a mess and I’ve let you down. Let everyone down. I’ve even let meself down. But I’m trying to do something about it before it’s too late. I’m trying to make things right, the only way I know how.”

  “Get up, Dad.” Chloe tried to pull her kneeling father from the floor.

  “Not until you say I can come to the wedding and give you away.”

  Carl returned carrying a tray which featured a lone tea in an impossibly delicate cup, replete with rattling bone china saucer. He looked shocked to see his future father-in-law adopting a pose that was similar to the one he’d used when proposing to Chloe. “One builder’s tea,” he said.

  Remnant ignored him, refusing to look anywhere else other than straight into his daughter’s eyes.

  Chloe was fighting back the tears, remembering all the times her Dad had let her down. But there had been good times too. She thought about the time he bought, well, got her a bike with stabilisers that was the envy of all the other children on the street until it was nicked and never seen in the neighbourhood again. He’d given her a hundred pounds in cash on her eighteenth too, and even though she blew it in a night, she knew it was money he couldn’t spare. He’d have gone without food and a few Gates in order to save that sort of money. There must have been other occasions when he’d done nice things. She’d have been too young to remember, or she’d have blotted them out, remembering only the bad stuff, the bad times, the arguments with mum, the shouting, the flying crockery, the drunken tempers, the lack of help with the homework. The man who was meant to be the most important man in her early life was here, kneeling before her, needing her more than she needed him.

  She nodded, and Remnant bowed his head. His thumb and forefinger gripped either side of the top of his nose and, tearfully, he slowly rose to his feet and planted a gentle kiss on her forehead.

  He mouthed ‘thank you’ and turned to leave, nodding at Carl in the doorway who was holding what looked like someone else’s tea. “You wanna put a bit more milk in that next time, my son,” Remnant said, patting Carl twice on the upper arm.

  Remnant slowly walked toward the door and put on his shoes. He turned and smiled at Chloe who was looking out into the garden.

  “See you next week, darlin’, he whispered.

  Carl closed the door to the lounge, throwing the hallway into darkness and Remnant saw himself out.

  20

  John Stock arrived at Cape Canaveral looking sever
al months younger than when Haygue had last seen him. If his reverse ageing continued at this pace, Stock would have teenage acne by the time they returned to Earth, a prospect that pleased the veteran astronaut.

  Haygue beamed as he took Stock on a brief tour of the site. Prospector III was a magnificent craft, twenty-foot high by eighty foot long. Gleaming white with a huge stars and stripes under the pilot’s window on the port side. Its wings were smaller than Stock had imagined, but the eight nuclear blasters at its rear far bigger.

  “This will get us to Mars quicker than any other ship on the planet.”

  “So that’s where we’re going then?” said Stock, pleased to have gleaned some information.

  “I figured you’d guessed that already.”

  “So there is a diamond asteroid out there?”

  “I never said that.”

  Stock gazed at the magnificent vessel. “Can I take a picture of it and post it on my blog?”

  “Sure, but not here. Security staff around here don’t like cameras.”

  Stock felt fear surge through him. Had he been brought here for a reason other than to go on the trip?

  Haygue led him inside a single-storey glass building where he handed Stock an orangey brown space suit that was a size too small, and a white oxygen mask that was a size too big. Stock tried on both without complaint, oblivious to the tightness of the space suit around his thighs and the looseness of the mask around his ears.

  “Where’s Onamoto?” Haygue asked, looking beyond Stock to the black leather chairs in the waiting area.

  “He’s already here,” Stock replied, examining the oxygen mask and marvelling at how they worked. “Haven’t you seen him?”

  “No one’s here but me, you and the pilot.”

  “I saw his Facebook status before I arrived. It says he arrived an hour ago.”

  “No he didn’t. Or if he did, I haven’t seen him. Can you call him?”

  “I don’t have his number.”

  “What?”

  “We’re Facebook friends is all.”

  “What kind of friendship is that?”

  “Every friend counts, Haygue. I’ve been hovering around the one thousand mark for a while now. Do you want to be friends?”

  Haygue scoffed. “I’m not even on Facebook.”

  “That’s funny, I found you.” Stock flipped his iPad and showed Haygue his own profile page. There was no photo, only that silhouette, three friends (his wife and two dogs) and maxed-up privacy settings.”

  Facebook was Haygue’s worst nightmare. He couldn’t bring himself to tell people about himself. They didn’t need to know and he didn’t want them to know. His business was none of their business. Status updates? What the… no way. A running commentary on the life of a powerful man? Sure, people would love to know the status of someone of his status.

  “OK, OK. I’m on it. I just don’t go on there much,” Haygue told Stock. In reality, he’d been trawling it for the last month, trying to get a heads-up on this Onamoto guy. But most of Onamoto’s page was only accessible to his friends, and there was no picture, save for that silhouette, and Onamoto had not accepted Haygue’s friend request. Haygue had even taken to unscrambling the name to see if it was an anagram of something. It wasn’t, but Haygue congratulated himself for being clever enough to have thought about trying in the first place.

  “It’s OK. I was only asking to be friends out of politeness,” said Stock.

  “That’s the first question you ever asked me out of politeness, Stock. Most of the questions you ask me are just plain out of order. And to be honest, I forgot I had an account.” Haygue led Stock out of the building, back towards the ship.

  “What’s with the two dogs as friends?”

  “I think you should board. I’m going to wait here for Onamoto. Your cabin is right then second on the left.”

  Stock took his suit and ascended the steps. Haygue checked his watch. He knew this Onamoto guy would be a no-show. It was all too easy posting comments and pictures on the internet from the safety of a bedroom. But when it came to turning up in the flesh, to front people face-to-face, that took a real man.

  The pilot, M Krugler, tapped the cockpit window and looked down to give Haygue the thumbs up. That was the pre-flight checks completed. It was time. The window that would give them the fastest, smoothest trip to Mars was small, and M Krugler didn’t want to miss it.

  M Krugler was an experienced space pilot who despised the commercialisation of space long before the commercialisation of space. But he saw it coming. He knew the Virgin Galactic service to the moon was the precursor, the first step to the spoiling of the solar system. He had journeyed to Mars in the early days when going there was headline news. Kids getting excited, parents tapping up the volume on the television. ‘Hush, hush, here’s some good news that’s interesting and doesn’t involve cute animals.’ But good news couldn’t remain interesting for long, and soon Martian stories were demoted from news bulletins altogether, replaced with scaremongering features about nervous stockmarkets, factory shutdowns, job losses and profit warnings.

  M Krugler had only just returned to Earth from the red planet when news of the diamond asteroid broke. Cursing his luck that he’d been thirty-six million miles closer to the loot a few months previously, he was eager to get back out there and get himself some diamond before all the bigwigs and fat cats turned the asteroid belt into a stop-off tourist destination on the Costa del Solar. ‘Coming up on your left, the universally famous diamond asteroid.’ ‘Where, where?’ ‘There, look’.

  One of only a hundred or so pilots to have a mission to Mars and back on his CV, M Krugler expected interest in his skills and he wasn’t disappointed. He fielded about three calls a day, all from the secretaries of millionaires with ‘a great ship under construction’ and promises of an expert crew to mine the diamond and bring it all home, blah, blah, blah.

  The call from the secretary of a Mr Z Haalange had been the most interesting because it had been the most lucrative. He’d been impressed by the size of Mr Haalange’s estate too when he was invited on an all-expenses paid trip there, and an eighth of his heart was touched by the fact that Haalange was South African like him. M Krugler immediately signed on the dotted line, only to be told a week later that there’d been a change of plan. The money was still on the table, but Mr. Haalange no longer required M Krugler to fly all the way to the belt. Instead, he wanted him to patrol the flyways between Earth and Mars and intercept and destroy any vessels he believed to be carrying alien diamond.

  M Krugler wasn’t really about shooting other people down. He was into racking up flying hours. He wanted the danger inherent in the challenge of returning to Mars and hunting down an asteroid in the belt.

  It left him susceptible to better offers, and one soon came. “We need a top pilot, Mo. Someone with Mars on their CV. You fit the bill.” It was Haygue.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” M Krugler said with trademark arrogance. “But why me? What about your pilots?”

  “The ones that haven’t retired or been made redundant are all tied up. We’re just interested in you joining us. We’re willing to cut you a decent deal. Half a million dollars up front, another million when we make it back, plus a five per cent cut of the value of all we bring home.”

  It was the second most generous offer that had been laid on M Krugler’s hypothetical table. M Krugler considered the offer with a sigh, a stroke of the chin and the smoke of a Lucky Strike, then immediately agreed to the deal. No negotiation, no bartering.

  “Meet me at the Cape on the twelfth,” Haygue said and hung up.

  M Krugler sat back in his green leather chair. South Africa had been hot this year. But the escort girl he’d celebrate with tonight would be hotter. His thoughts then briefly flicked to how he’d break the news to this Haalange guy. ‘Sorry, but your offer to wander space shooting people down is being refused. I’m going all the way, baby, and I’m coming home richer than you.’


  No, he wouldn’t tell him. Just not turn up. What could he do? Yeah, he wanted the South African economy to prosper, and he’d be quite happy if South Africa remained the only place to get diamond from, but not if it stopped him returning to Mars. He was going into space with NASA, baby. OK. SEC, whatever.

  Haygue clutched Onamoto’s ill-fitting suit and climbed the steps of the Prospector III, pushing the button that automatically pulled the steps up and in after him. He breathed deeply to calm the nerves that were flooding his bloodstream. He was going back into space for the first time since the Nineties. He thought of his wife and how she always wondered why a man with his space expertise never went into space. ‘How can you be an expert on somewhere you haven’t been for twenty years?’ she’d ask him. Then that mischievious look crossed her face. ‘If that kind of absence makes you an expert, then Errol, you’re an expert on cooking, nightclubbing, raising children and sex.’

  Haygue smiled to himself and sat down next to M Krugler in the cockpit. The South African was a big presence wherever he sat. Broad shouldered, thick lipped, generous thighed and always sporting a pock-marked brown leather jacket with his name labelled on it. He seemed even bigger amid the cramp, metal and controls of the Prospector III, but in his element among the new technology at his Cuban cigar diametered fingertips. Gadgets were everywhere, some of which hadn’t been officially invented yet.

  M Krugler couldn’t help but compare this to the ship Zeut Haalange had shown him around. Sure, money had been spent on the South African’s, but not in the right places. Expensive upholstery was one thing, kit was another, and M Krugler was a kit man. A leather seat was a leather seat, but a nuclear booster with a force equivalent to seventeen thousand Hiroshimas? That was what he was talking about.

  Haygue strapped himself in.

  “That’s everyone then,” said M Krugler, checking the inventory reading on the dash, another new feature he admired.

  “Not quite. We’re a man down.”

  “All present and correct according to my readings.”