Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  ‘Hadrian’s what?’ said Sputnik.

  ‘Hadrian’s Wall,’ said the dad. Again it was almost like he could understand every word Sputnik was saying. Maybe because he was a cow farmer he was used to talking to other species. ‘The Romans built it. Hadrian was a Roman emperor. Well, he was emperor of Rome. He actually came from Spain. So did most of the soldiers on the wall.’

  Grandad was born in Spain. He went all over the world with the navy, then he met my gran and ended up in Scotland. Just like a Viking. Or a soldier in the Roman army.

  ‘Hadrian built the wall to keep the Scots out of England. As if we’d ever want to leave a place as bonnie as this.’

  ‘A wall?’ said Sputnik. ‘How big was this wall?’

  – It’s eighty-four miles long. It goes from Bowness to Newcastle. One side of the country to the other.

  I was surprised by how much I remembered from Mrs Oddly’s ‘This Is Our Country’ project in Primary 5.

  ‘A wall,’ said Sputnik, ‘eighty miles long.’ He made the wall sound tastier than a cow full of ice cream.

  Once the first fifteen cows were milked we let them out of the back door, which led straight to the pasture, then let the next fifteen through the big sliding door from the courtyard.

  The moment we opened the door, Sputnik set off across the field towards the farmhouse.

  ‘Sputnik! Come back!’ yelled Jessie.

  I went after him. Jessie tried to come too but the dad called her back to help him.

  ‘That’s so unfair,’ she said. ‘I milk cows and Prez goes off gallivanting with Sputnik.’

  ‘The dog probably just wants to do his business somewhere,’ said the dad.

  ‘Exactly right,’ said Sputnik. ‘That man really understands me. I need a wee.’

  – Go in the bushes.

  ‘Oh no. No, no, no. I have big plans for this wee. Very big plans.’

  9.

  Chicken-and-Mushroom Pie

  ‘An eighty-mile wall,’ said Sputnik, as we walked into the farmyard. ‘It makes you think.’

  In Primary 5 Mrs Oddly had asked us to think about the wall. ‘Consider,’ she had said, ‘how brilliant the Roman engineers must have been to build something so big and strong without machinery all those centuries ago.

  ‘Think,’ she said, ‘about the moonlight flashing on the swords and spears of the Roman legion. Think of the blue paint on the bodies of the furious Picts.’

  I knew Sputnik was not thinking about any of this. I knew exactly what Sputnik was thinking about.

  ‘An eighty-mile wall!’ he sighed. ‘You could pee a good long message on a wall like that. You could pee a chuffing novel on a wall like that.’

  – It’s a long way off. Can you hold on till we get there?

  ‘We’ve got transport – look.’

  The little digger that the dad had been using to clear the farmyard was still out. The keys were even still in the ignition.

  – No, no. We’re not going joyriding. Besides, this thing only goes about two miles an hour.

  ‘Have you read the instructions?’

  – No. I haven’t read the instructions.

  ‘So how do you know how fast it can go? Let’s take a look.’ Sputnik walked once around the digger, then reached into his backpack and pulled out a massive hammer. Clang! He whacked the undercarriage of the digger.

  – No. Sputnik. Please. They need this for the farm. You can’t . . .

  Clang! He whacked the other side. The digger rocked on its suspension.

  ‘Get in!’ said Sputnik.

  – No.

  ‘I’m not used to driving in this kind of gravity,’ he said, ducking underneath the scoop. ‘I think I should be under supervision. That means you.’

  I jumped at the sound of a drill whistling somewhere under the scoop.

  – Please stop messing about, Sputnik.

  ‘Who’s messing? I’m totally re-engineering this vehicle for the benefit of mankind.’ He bounced into the cabin, pulled a few levers and brought the scoop down straight in front of us. It looked less like an elephant’s trunk now and more like a rocket. From somewhere in his backpack he pulled out a circular saw and carved the front of the digger into a point.

  ‘Nice job, Sputnik,’ said Sputnik. ‘OK. Let’s start her up.’ He turned the key in the ignition.

  Sputnik has often tried to explain what happened next. It’s all to do with physics. As you approach the speed of light, your body begins to lose mass. Or gain mass. Something like that. Anyway, you sort of stop being exactly solid, which means you can slice through traffic without bumping into it.

  Whatever, just after he turned the ignition, the digger approached the speed of light. Less than a second later we were veering off a long straight road on to a car park fifty miles from Stramoddie Farm. My stomach, though, was still back in the farmyard.

  A pair of buzzards circled overhead.

  There was a smell of wet sheep, peat, coffee and cake.

  See? I was even starting to notice the things that Sputnik noticed.

  There was a sign pointing to a building with ‘Visitor Information and Toilets’ written on it. Behind the building a grassy bank ran across the top of the field. It had bits of wall sticking out of it. There were huge chunks of stone scattered all over the field. I’d never been here before, but I knew where we were. This grassy bank was Hadrian’s earthwork. The chunks of stone were the remains of Hadrian’s Wall.

  A low, furious mutter came from Sputnik. ‘That’s the wall? That?! Is the famous wall?! Are you calling that a wall? That is not a wall. That is rubble. What’s wrong with you people? You had a lovely long wall with nice big stones and you let it fall down?! Where’s it all gone?’

  I knew where it had all gone. We did Hadrian’s Wall with Mrs Oddly in Primary 5.

  – Over the centuries, farmers used stone from the wall to build barns and cottages and sheep pens.

  ‘Oh, did they?’ growled Sputnik, ‘Oh, very did they? Well they can just chuffing well put them back.’

  I should have worried when he said that.

  I should have worried even more when he lowered the digger arm and drove over the car park, through the little wooden fence and up the hill towards the wall itself.

  A lady in Roman clothes came out of the visitor centre, waving her hands in the air. At first I thought we’d time-travelled or that she was a ghost but she turned out to be just a guide in fancy dress. ‘No, no, you can’t bring that vehicle on to the site. The site is very fragile. This is an ancient monument. No diggers are . . . NO!’

  The digger’s spiky teeth and wide black mouth were bearing down on the lady, as though it was going to eat her. Sputnik was at the controls.

  ‘NO!!’ She jumped out of the way. Sputnik scooped up a load of boulders from the field, then headed towards the ruins of the wall. ‘What do you think you’re playing at?!’ screamed the Roman lady. She was looking at me. ‘WHAT,’ she yelled, ‘is going on?’

  That was a tough question for me. Because the truth is I had no idea what was going on. I had no idea how we’d even got there.

  ‘Turn that engine off now! This wall is two thousand years old. It must be treated with respect.’

  ‘We’re going to treat it with respect all right,’ said Sputnik. ‘We’re going to mend it.’

  She was still looking at me. She couldn’t hear Sputnik, though he kept on talking.

  ‘I’m Sputnik Mellows. The Sputnik Mellows. This is a school project. My friend here was asked to imagine what Hadrian’s Wall might look like to Hadrian. I can tell you,’ said Sputnik, ‘he most certainly did not imagine it looking like this . . . mess. So we’re fixing it.’

  A man in a yellow hard hat and big boots and a high-vis jacket came striding out of the visitors’ toilets.

  ‘Excuse me!’ the Roman lady shouted at him. ‘Do you know anything about this? Why is there a digger on the site?’

  ‘No idea,’ said the man in the hard hat. ‘I’m
Maintenance, so if anyone knew anything, it would be me. Responsibility for upkeep rests with the Department of Ancient Monuments. Not with a schoolboy in a digger.’

  ‘Upkeep?!’ howled Sputnik, ‘Well, you haven’t upkept it very well so far.’

  ‘As far as we’re concerned,’ continued the man in the hard hat, ‘you’re a vandal. Get off the site right now, or legal proceedings will proceed.’

  ‘Prez,’ snarled Sputnik, ‘is Hadrian’s Wall important?’

  – Of course it’s important.

  ‘Then why are these people leaving it lying around in bits on the ground? Either the wall is important, so they should fix it, or it’s not important, so they should get rid of all these stones and have a nice field instead.’

  The Roman lady screamed as the digger scooped up a load of stones, trundled up to the top of the bank and dumped them next to the wall. She screamed even more when it happened again. And again, until every stone in the field was piled up at the top of the earthwork.

  He turned the engine off.

  I could hear the Roman lady talking to the police on the phone. ‘Not just any wall. The wall. Hadrian’s Wall. The Roman wall. The Vallum Aelium. Our greatest national monument.’

  Sputnik bounced out of the cabin, skimmed across the field and sat looking up at her. I assumed she was going to do some kind of citizen’s arrest on him there and then. Instead she smiled and said, ‘Now where did you come from? Aren’t you lovely?’ and ruffled his hair. She saw me walking towards her and snapped, ‘Be warned, young man. The police have been informed. You are in deep, deep water.’

  Sputnik handed her something that looked like a small pineapple. ‘Ohhh!’ she cooed. ‘Is this for me?’

  How could she be cooing at him – the actual culprit – while threatening me with arrest? There is no justice.

  She felt the weight of the pineapple thing in her hand. Sputnik was still giving her that big-wet-eyes look. It looked weird on a wee alien with goggles but I suppose it looked cute if you thought he was a dog.

  ‘I know,’ she cooed, ‘what you want.’ She hurled the pineapple high into the air. It arced towards the pile of stones.

  ‘Good shot,’ shouted Sputnik.

  ‘Fetch! Go on, boy. Fetch!’

  ‘FETCH?!’ said Sputnik. ‘Are you NUTS? That’s a live hand grenade.’

  – When you say live hand grenade . . .

  ‘When I say live hand grenade . . .’

  – What did you give her a hand grenade for?!

  ‘We can discuss this later. For now, get your goggles on . . .’

  – I haven’t got any goggles. I’m going to be killed. We’re all going to be killed! You said you were here to look after me! Now you’re chucking live grenades around in my vicinity.

  ‘Cover your ears. Get your head down. Five . . . four . . . three . . . DUCK!’

  I threw myself on the ground and covered my ears. I did it so quickly that the Roman lady and yellow-hat man did the same.

  Even with our ears covered, the noise was deafening. First came a thunderous sucking – as though a vast invisible cleaner was vacuuming the grass.

  Then a terrible patter of pops like a massive hedgehog rolling around on bubble wrap.

  Then a whoosh as something flew past my shoulder. So close. So fast. I had to look up.

  The grass was boiling like soup. Lumps and humps appeared in it. They sprang up and then they burst open. Rocks and stones erupted from under the soil as if pulled out by some giant hoover.

  In computer games, when there’s an explosion, all the pieces fly away from each other. This was an explosion, but a backwards explosion. Instead of flying away from each other, all the rocks were flying towards each other.

  ‘Reverse dynamite,’ said Sputnik. ‘That stuff is literally the bomb. Just watch.’

  With my hands over my face, peeping through the gaps in my fingers, I watched rocks, stones, bricks and lintels flock together, and swerve through the air. One by one they settled on the ruins of the Roman wall. They piled up on top of each other, shuffled along the wall, made space for one another, twisted into place. Dust billowed. The stones and rocks ground against each other. They clicked.

  Then everything was still.

  We could hear the buzzards calling again.

  Sputnik shoved his goggles back on top of his head and put his hands on his hips. ‘Lady,’ he said, ‘Hadrian’s Wall. As Hadrian meant it to be.’

  A perfect, brand-new Roman wall stretched across the top of the field and away over the hill.

  For a moment none of us said a word. Then the man in the high-vis jacket took his hard hat off and held it to his chest. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is a fine piece of work.’

  ‘Beautiful,’ sighed the Roman lady. She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a bit of toga. ‘The Vallum Hadriani.’

  Then of course Sputnik went and peed on it. ‘Got to sign my masterpiece,’ he grinned. When he’d finished we all strolled along in the shadow of the ramparts for a while.

  The man in the hard hat kept touching the stones, saying, ‘Tidy bit of limestone. Looks good as new. Great piece of work. My name’s Pavel, by the way.’

  ‘Actually no,’ said the Roman lady. ‘When it was new, the milecastles at this end were originally made of turf and wood whereas that milecastle over there is . . . oh my!’ She stopped. ‘A milecastle! Come on! Let’s go inside!’ A little way ahead there was a stone tower sticking up out of the wall, with a pointy wooden roof and a kind of balcony. The Roman lady ran ahead and pulled at the door. ‘It’s open!’ she whooped. ‘Come on. I’m Emilia, by the way.’

  We followed her up the wide, clean steps to the top of the tower and looked out.

  That’s when we saw it properly for the first time. The Wall. It snaked away from us, over the hilltops, in and out of valleys and into the blue distance. A tower rose up from the top of the next hill, as though the wall was sitting up and taking a look around.

  ‘Oh. Now that’s going to create a bit of awkwardness,’ said Pavel, who was looking behind us to where the new wall went straight across the main road. The next milecastle stood just exactly where the central reservation had been. ‘Looks is if you’ve closed the A7.’

  ‘But it was worth it,’ sighed Emilia.

  A line of stopped cars stretched back along the road. Some of the drivers were turning around to go back the other way. Others were getting out of their cars to take a look at the wall. They patted the stones and walked up and down, as if they couldn’t believe it was really there.

  ‘Have to say,’ said Pavel, ‘in that toga, with the wall and the sunset and everything, you look every inch the Roman . . .’

  ‘Roman what? Ruin?’ she giggled.

  ‘Goddess,’ he muttered, then looked away, so they could each do their own private blush. He said, ‘I suppose we’ll be in endless trouble for disrupting the traffic?’

  – Trouble? Of course we’ll be in trouble.

  ‘Trouble?!’ Sputnik laughed. ‘For fixing Hadrian’s Wall? The nation will be insanely grateful. And anyway, if a huge fortification appeared out of nowhere, reaching from one side of the country to the other, who would think of blaming it on one boy and his dog?’

  He was right. Ha!

  People from the stuck cars strolled past us, gazing out over the fields and up at the battlements like dreamers. More of them came. They left their cars in the road and climbed up on the inexplicable wall. As the traffic jam got longer, people started to stroll across the fields towards the wall. Men from the roadworks in their yellow hard hats, families heading back from school with their kids in bright summer clothes, men and women on their way back from work, filming it all on their tablets and phones, the passengers from a big coach, a group of girls in tracksuits – looking down at them all, we felt like Roman legionaries surveying the attacking hordes.

  – Sputnik, you’ve caused a massive obstruction. You’ve built a wall across the main road.

  ‘I didn’t build
it. It’s been there for thousands of years.’

  – But it’s not been there for the last few hundred years.

  ‘It was interrupted. Now it’s gone back to normal, that’s all.’

  Pavel and Emilia were worried about the same thing as me. ‘A lot of people,’ said Pavel, ‘are going to be very put out about this obstruction.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting that we knock it down?’

  ‘Lovely bit of work like this? I couldn’t bring myself to scratch it, never mind knock it down.’

  ‘Sometimes an obstruction can be a nice thing,’ said Emilia. ‘You’re going along in life, then something happens to make you stop and think and . . . everything looks lovely. Although it is getting chilly.’ She was only wearing a toga. Pavel took his jacket off and draped it around her shoulders. Next thing I knew they were holding hands.

  – We should be getting back to Stramoddie. The dad will be wondering where his digger is.

  ‘If you like,’ said Sputnik.

  But somehow we couldn’t leave. We carried on walking. Everyone carried on walking. The wall seemed to want us to walk on it, the way music wants you to listen to it.

  We walked until the light began to fade and then a star appeared. Just one. Quite low in the sky, but very bright. If you looked closer, you could see that it was shimmering different colours. Everyone stopped to look at it, as though it was a light coming on in a window far away, calling them all home. I knew what it was. Sirius. The dog star. Sailors use it because it’s nearly always the first star to come out.

  ‘I’m not looking at Sirius,’ said Sputnik. ‘I’m looking at the tiny white star just next to it.’

  I looked hard, but I couldn’t see a tiny white star.

  ‘One good thing about being a dog is their eyesight. It’s a lot sharper than humans’. At night-time anyway. There’s a little white star there. It’s called the Pup. Look it up some time. It had a lovely little solar system.

  All the time I kept looking where Sputnik was pointing. After a while I could just make out a tiny white star. After a while longer I think I could nearly see its planets swinging around it like sparks.