An Astronaut's Life

by Sonja Dechian

  ‘Get some sleep,’ he says.

  ‘Just this page?’

  ‘It’s late enough. You’ve got school.’

  She switches off her lamp, but he hears her flick it back on before he’s halfway along the hall. Eddie isn’t tired either. He opens the living room curtains and looks out at the rain pooling in his drive. The first and only driveway he’s ever made; it was perfectly level at the time, he’s sure of it. But that was six years ago, and anyone can see the ground has shifted since then.

  It’s rained eleven days in a row.

  Eddie doesn’t have time to set up the telescope so it sits in its box for almost a week until Alexis reminds him that it cost, as it turns out, a hell of a lot more than a child’s bikini.

  ‘All right, I get it,’ he says. But the weather’s still bad and he’s booked up with work for weeks ahead thanks to the shoddy wiring in some of these older houses.

  ‘I’ll do it tonight, I promise.’

  Meghan’s bikini proves to be a better investment. She wears it all day and then to the dinner table that night with her best friend Kathleen in tow. Kathleen has a matching bikini, and both girls have flowers in their hair.

  ‘No one told me we were having a luau,’ says Alexis.

  ‘Well, it is summer,’ says Meghan. ‘And at least we don’t have to worry about getting rained on.’ As if the rest of them are stupid for wearing clothes.

  Alexis reaches over to brush at the flaking skin on Meghan’s arm.

  ‘How can anyone get sunburnt in this rain?’

  ‘Don’t,’ says Meghan. She pulls away.

  ‘So, who’s going to help me get the telescope going?’ Eddie says.

  ‘Sun tans cause cancer anyway,’ says Catherine.

  ‘If it clears up we might see some planets.’

  ‘Can we go eat in my room?’ Meghan says.

  The telescope is more complicated than he thought, and by the time Eddie has it ready night has fallen and his shoulders are wet with a spray of rain. Inside, Maddy is already asleep.

  ‘She tried to wait,’ Catherine says.

  So the two of them head out to the verandah and Catherine stands on tiptoe to look into the telescope tube. It’s too high for her, so Eddie readjusts the legs, which knocks out his focus.

  ‘When I was your age or a bit older, I used to dream of a telescope like this,’ he says. ‘I thought I’d be able to see space aliens or something. I used to love all those old space movies.’

  ‘Like E.T.?’

  ‘All of them. Even the black-and-white ones. I used to lie awake imagining what an astronaut’s life would be like.’

  Catherine squats on the back doorstep as her father refocuses the telescope. She’s struck by the idea of him wanting something different to the life he has today.

  ‘So what did you do?’ she says.

  ‘I used to stay up at night staring out my window, counting shooting stars, waiting for something to happen. Then I finally saw something.’

  ‘Aliens?’

  ‘Probably not,’ he says. ‘Probably I just wanted to see aliens so bad I imagined them.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘It was yellow. I still remember this yellow glow, a circle way too big to be a star, and it seemed to hover, right there, in the sky.’ He points up over the horizon, and the rain catches on his fingers. ‘It sat there while I watched it. I felt like it saw me too. Next day I went to school and told my friends, but no one believed me. They made fun, so I stopped talking about it.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone believe you?’

  ‘Only your grandpa. I remember him coming up the hall in his work boots, and he said, “I hear you’ve been seeing spaceships. Now show me right where you saw it.” He stayed up late with me, but it never came.’

  ‘Why didn’t it come back?’

  ‘I don’t know. Most likely I dreamt it in the first place. But it was a good night with your grandpa. It was good enough that he believed me, it made me more determined.’

  He thinks Catherine will understand what he’s trying to say; that he knows about childhood obsessions and will believe in hers if she needs him to. But Catherine thinks the story is sad.

  ‘Do you wish you were an astronaut now?’

  ‘Not really. I like how things are.’

  It’s a good father-daughter moment for them, even if the meaning they’ve found is individual and not shared. When they finally spot Venus through the telescope they share a similar sense of looking at something larger than their lives. It’s a whole different planet, and when it fills the viewfinder Catherine stops thinking about the rain and feels what it might be like to inhabit a different life. The life of a small boy dreaming of astronauts—but ending up here, beside her.

  It’s around then that Alexis walks into Meghan’s room without knocking and finds Meghan and Kathleen, still in bikinis, kissing on the lips in front of the new laptop’s inbuilt camera. It’s for some sort of chat room, full of boys, possibly men, and Alexis walks straight out. She waits at the door for the girls to emerge, then drives Kathleen home in silence.

  When they get back, she parks the car on the street again; the ditch that has formed in the driveway is now so deep with water she isn’t certain they’ll make it over. Meghan sprints across the wet lawn in her bikini, which is at last practical attire, and Alexis follows behind in the rain.

  Inside, Alexis uses the laptop to discover that teenage girls do this and other things—worse things—all the time. The laptop is for school, she finds herself repeating, as if the misuse of the computer is the problem. What is happening to girls? What is happening to children? She heads to Meghan’s room.

  ‘Have you done this before?’

  No reply.

  ‘Answer me, Meghan. Who was watching you on the camera? Who was telling you to do that?’

  ‘It was just some kids.’

  ‘But how do you know that? What if it’s old men? Do you want them looking at you in your little bathers? Bikinis are for swimming, Meghan.’ As if it’s her misuse of the bikini that is also the problem.

  Meghan starts to cry.

  ‘They what?’ Eddie says after they climb into bed and Alexis explains what she’s seen. She tells him Meghan could already be one of those girls on the internet, flashing breasts and dancing for cameras, who knew?

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he says.

  ‘They’re twelve. Do you know it’s illegal?’

  ‘I don’t think two kids messing around is illegal. It’s normal. I was younger than her when the girls next door used to ask to see my penis. That was harmless.’

  ‘But these kids don’t live in the same world we did. People can record it, make videos. Can’t you see the consequences?’

  ‘We’ll keep the laptop in the kitchen from now on. I’ll go talk to her.’

  Eddie starts to get up.

  ‘Not now, it’s late. Make her stew on it—she needs a proper punishment, to see we’re serious this time.’

  ‘I’ll just see if she’s okay.’


  ‘You’re too soft on her. It’s time she learnt a lesson.’

  He climbs out of bed and heads down the hall, but when he stands outside Meghan’s room, he wonders if Alexis isn’t right; maybe it is discipline she needs and not understanding. He listens at the door, and even though it’s late, he knocks softly then enters. Meghan looks at him with disgust.

  ‘Oh great, she told you.’ She rolls over to face the wall.

  Catherine dreams of a hammerhead shark washed up dead on their driveway. Its dull grey head is tipped to one side, and as she leans in to inspect it, the shark winks.

  She scurries out of bed, clicks the door gently open and stands in the hallway, listening to her breath and calculating the trip up to her parents’ room.

  ‘Dad?’ She doesn’t say it loud enough to wake anyone.

  ‘What’s wrong, honey?’

  His voice comes from the living room.

  Catherine finds him in the recliner and crawls into his lap. They open the curtains to check there’s nothing outside, no hammerhead shark in the driveway. No fish gasping for air. There’s nothing like that. Just dark rain overflowing gutters and puddles growing across their lawn.

  The following day, Maddy returns from school with a note—the students have taken their health assessment and the nurse has some concerns about her development. She’s recommended a specialist to ensure Maddy’s organs and hormones are in order. They probably are, the GP tells them, but they need blood tests, X-rays and maybe a test for her pituitary gland before they can get a referral.

  Eddie and Alexis hold hands in the waiting room. Maddy measures herself on the chart. She is ninety-two centimetres, only three more than she was a year ago. She bursts into tears and Alexis holds her. It’s frustration more than anything. She’s too small, it’s obvious. Everyone knows it.

  Alexis pats her hair. ‘We all grow at our own pace. You’ll catch up; I bet you’ll be taller than me. You wait and see,’ she says.

  At home they sit down with Meghan and set new rules for the use of both laptops and bikinis. It’s dark by the time Eddie heads to Catherine’s room. She’s asleep.

  He sits in the chair by her bed and listens to her soft, round breaths. There’s a pile of library books on the floor, Our Changing Planet and Under the Weather. He’s been meaning to talk to her teacher, he’s been meaning to spend more time with her, but the attention he intends to give Catherine is so often sidelined by the more urgent problems of his youngest daughter, who can not grow up, and his eldest, who can’t stop.

  Catherine had come to him before a drop of rain had fallen. He’d been watering the lawn, it was early in summer, they were barefoot.

  He flicked the hose so water sprayed her legs.

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘What’s up? You want to do the lawn?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  He dropped the hose into the garden and squatted to face her.

  ‘Something wrong?’ he said.

  ‘No. It’s just I keep having this dream. About the ice.’

  ‘What ice?’

  ‘The ice. Like on the North Pole. The ice that is melting.’

  ‘In your dream?’

  ‘No, it’s melting in real life. But I can hear it in my dream. Cracking.’

  ‘It’s just a dream,’ he said. ‘The ice is fine.’

  ‘They told us in school.’

  ‘It’s normal for ice to melt. That’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘I’m worried Dad.’

  ‘You’re safe as long as you’re with me. Got that?’

  By morning the driveway is completely submerged, and when Eddie opens the front door water washes up to his feet.

  Alexis stands behind him with her hands on his waist.

  ‘Still raining,’ she says.

  ‘Right. Hadn’t noticed.’

  It’s impossible to drive anywhere so they take the day off. They cook fish fingers, play snakes and ladders and tire quickly of the novelty of confinement.

  That afternoon Eddie is out on the verandah with a glass of whisky while Alexis reads a mystery book on the sofa. Catherine curls in the crook of her mother’s arm, Meghan’s off with the teenagers next door and Maddy’s upstairs, casting her homemade fishing rod from the window and waiting, with uncharacteristic patience, for something to bite.

  Eddie raises his feet on to an upturned pot plant and watches the water climb along their street. It’s slowly closing in, cutting them off from the world and all the libraries and doctors and laptops and bikinis in it. It doesn’t feel all bad.

  The following morning the carpet is wet. It squelches when the girls walk over it, dragging mud into the house. There’s no point telling them not to.

  ‘Let’s pack a bag,’ Eddie says.

  ‘We’re going somewhere?’ says Maddy.

  ‘Upstairs,’ he says. ‘Everything’s going upstairs.’

  It takes all day. Alexis takes all the photos and bedding and Eddie carries what he can of their furniture—mattresses, sofa, TV. They stand and look from the upstairs window. The rain has engulfed all the streets and lawns they can see. It is rising to cover the windowsills.

  ‘What about the letterbox?’ Maddy says.

  ‘How do you think the postman’s coming? In a row boat?’ says Meghan. She’s still in her bikini, but she’s shivering.

  It’s supposed to be like a slumber party with all three girls in the upstairs living room, but there are no late-night ghost stories, no pillow fights. By dark, even Catherine is sleeping. In her dreams fish smack their heads against the windows trying to get in. She wakes and stares at the ceiling. All she can hear is rain.

  ‘Cath?’

  It’s her father.

  ‘Catherine?’ He’s whispering.

  She leans up on one arm.

  ‘I thought your eyes were open,’ he says from the doorway. ‘Come on, I want to show you something.’

  Eddie leads her to the bathroom, where, instead of the neat row of toiletries that usually lines the sink, there are piles of dirty towels and a ladder. It reaches up and out the skylight.

  ‘Go on,’ Eddie says. ‘I’ll be behind you.’

  She’s barefoot and the ladder is cold. She forgets about the dream until a mist of rain starts to make its way onto her face and then she pauses, uncertain.

  ‘Go on,’ Eddie says.

  It’s calmer outside than she expected. She pokes her head through and Eddie steadies her waist as she pulls herself up, hands then knees, onto the roof tiles.

  The town’s green spaces are gone. There are no lawns or parks. She stands up and her father joins her, resting his hands on her shoulders. They’re surrounded by a lake, its surface divided by treetops and powerlines. Entire houses are under water.

  ‘Dad?’ she says.

  She finds her footing on rough tiles and turns.

  Eddie has set up the telescope while she was sleeping. And an esky of food, some flashlights, blankets and chairs.

 
He tells her to look through the eyepiece.

  She does, but all she can make out is a blurry yellow ball.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘That’s Saturn. Can you see it?’

  She puts her eye back over the viewfinder and presses down to focus.

  ‘Not so hard. Just relax.’

  ‘I see it,’ she says. ‘I can see the rings.’

  Eddie wraps a big plastic jacket around her and zips it while she’s still looking in the telescope.

  ‘What are they made from? Are they just dust and rock?’

  ‘No, that’s ice. Millions of pieces of ice,’ he says.

  ‘Wow.’

  Eddie curls an arm over her shoulders.

  ‘We’re okay up here,’ he says. ‘We’re safe now.’

  Catherine keeps her eye on the soft shape of Saturn as he lifts the hood of her jacket and covers her from the rain.

  MANY THANKS TO :

  Rebecca Starford and Mandy Brett;

  The Varuna Publisher Fellowship program;

  Marc Lieberman, for permission to reproduce his photograph of Francis Crick;

  Michael J Gratton, for advice on nanobots;

  Andrew Smith, for insights into sleep labs, and for perspective;

  Bel Schenk, my trusted first reader;

  and Stephen Griffiths, for constant and invaluable support.