Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  – OK.

  There was no one on the bus but us. The fields were empty. I wondered where everyone was. No, I didn’t. I just wondered where Grandad was.

  18.

  Geese

  It wasn’t just Grandad who was missing. When we got back to Stramoddie, there was no car in the farmyard. The front door was open, but there was no one in the house. We ran up to the pasture. The cows were out, but there was no one there. The Coo Palace was deserted. I shouted everyone’s names but the only answer was the hens all running round being stressed. No one had collected their eggs. I carried them into the kitchen and put them in a bowl next to my shopping.

  – Aren’t you worried that everyone’s gone missing?

  ‘Not really. I think we could manage here fine on our own. Plenty of cows to eat.’

  I was scared that something terrible had happened. That something even more terrible might happen. I took Grandad’s chopping knife out of my backpack and put it in my pocket.

  As if they’d heard what Sputnik had said, the cows started mooing. I ran to the window. The Blythes’ car was rolling down the loaning. I opened the front door.

  They’d been at church. I’d forgotten it was Sunday.

  I took Grandad’s chopping knife out of my pocket and held it in my hand. The mum looked at it.

  Then she smiled and said, ‘Are you going to help me cook?’

  Then the dad spotted the Tesco bag. ‘He’s been shopping. Are you going to cook for us?’

  All I knew was I wanted to peel and chop things. I wanted to do something that my grandad could do. Something that would make me feel like he hadn’t vanished off the face of the Earth.

  In the kitchen, the mum showed me a chicken. ‘It’s the brown one. The one that hardly ever laid but made loads of noise.’

  ‘She didn’t kill her for lunch,’ said Ray. ‘She killed her for revenge.’

  ‘But we can still eat her for lunch.’

  The dad showed me how to do roast potatoes, because I’d never done them. Then I did the tomato and chilli sauce. It didn’t really go with the roast chicken, but the smell of the chilli, and the way the tomatoes went sticky if you grated them and cooked them really slowly, was exactly how Grandad did it.

  After we’d eaten I helped move the cows into the Coo Palace for milking. Sputnik went up the tower while we were fixing the pumps. He shouted, ‘Come and look at this!’

  ‘What’s he making such a racket about?’ said the dad, heading off up the stairs to investigate. ‘I sometimes get the impression Sputnik is trying to tell us something.’

  ‘I’m trying to tell you,’ said Sputnik, ‘that the sky is full of food!’

  Geese.

  At first they were just dark smudges on the sky out over the sea. Then you could see that the smudges were dots. Then V-shapes. Then all at once they were overhead, honking like ships’ foghorns, their big wings hauling their fat bellies through the air. Wave after wave of them came. It felt as if it would go on forever. They flew so low over our heads that sometimes we had to duck down. They landed on the Merse and on the fields around the caravan site. And when they landed they were noisier than ever, stretching their necks and blasting the sky with their honks.

  ‘They’ve been in Iceland all summer,’ said the dad. He had to shout over the noise of them. ‘They come back every year in autumn. Same fields. The honking is the wives and husbands trying to find each other. They’re moving into their winter homes. It’s amazing. They come all the way from Iceland to the same field every year. Eight hundred miles. They never get lost. But they also never warn the others that people shoot them and eat them. I suppose home is home, even if people are shooting at you.’

  ‘Can we shoot at them?’ said Sputnik.

  – No.

  That was the end of my stay.

  Next morning I went back to the Temporary.

  19.

  Be Nice

  I didn’t have to pack (because I kept everything in my backpack).

  I didn’t have to say goodbye. (‘We’ll not say goodbye,’ the mum said, ‘because you’re welcome here any time.’)

  I didn’t have to worry. (‘Don’t worry about Sputnik,’ said Jessie. ‘I’ll look after him’).

  (‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Sputnik. ‘I’ll be out of here and on my way home first thing in the morning.’)

  – But it can’t be over just like that.

  ‘Honestly. I’ll be fine. Stop worrying about me.’

  – I’m not worrying about you. I’m worrying about me. And my grandad. And the planet.

  ‘Finished my list. Mission accomplished. Thank you and goodbye.’ Sputnik tugged on the straps of his backpack.

  – What? You’ve got ten things?! You never told me.

  He waved his red notebook. ‘It’s all in here,’ he said.

  – Show me.

  ‘OK, I’ve got nine things right now, but I’ll find the last one easily. There’s loads of things worth seeing on this planet. I don’t need your help.’

  But I needed his help. I needed him to help me find Grandad. I knew he wouldn’t help me unless I tricked him into it. So I had to think without him hearing me. It wasn’t easy. I had to put one big loud thought at the front of my brain and have a quiet little shifty think in the back of my mind. It was a bit like that thing where you swing your left arm forwards and your right arm backwards. At the front of my brain I thought:

  – BUT YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED YOUR LIST.

  ‘Yes, I have. Well, nearly.’ He started to reel off his list: ‘Earth’s atmosphere, eggs, the television remote . . .’

  – The TV remote is rubbish.

  ‘What?! It was brilliant. I foiled a robbery with it. I could have done a jailbreak with it if we could have found it in time . . .’

  – Exactly. That’s the thing about TV remotes. Whenever you want them, you can’t find them. It’s a design flaw. TV remotes are just very, very losable.

  ‘I’ll fix that. I bet if you read the manual . . .’

  – I’ve got something better.

  ‘What?’

  – Something really amazing.

  ‘What?’ I could feel him poking around in my mind to see if I really did have something wonderful to show him.

  – That’s cheating.

  It felt like lemonade spilling inside my head. I was trying to put something exciting in there, but I couldn’t think of one thing I wanted to see on the whole planet. Apart from my grandad. And he had disappeared.

  ‘I can’t see anything exciting inside your head,’ said Sputnik. ‘Plus I’m suspicious of your motives.’

  He was right to be suspicious of my motives. I needed to trick him into finding Grandad.

  How do you lie to someone who can read your mind?

  In my imagination I pictured Grandad’s sea chest. I added a few fancy bolts and locks and nice bits of metalwork to it. I knew Sputnik could see it somehow. Then I thought . . .

  – Remember this? Grandad’s sea chest back at the flat? No one knows what’s inside. Only my grandad has the keys.

  ‘I don’t need keys. I can shoot the lock off.’

  – But maybe what’s inside is something delicate and fragile. Maybe it’s got a curse on it. No, you definitely need to find my grandad if you’re ever going to solve the secret of the sea chest.

  ‘It’s probably just jewels or something. Doesn’t interest me. There’s an entire moon made of diamond a few doors up from the Crab Nebula. There’s an asteroid made of ruby that I sometimes hitch a ride on. Honestly, treasure is dull.’

  – I think it might be something to do with Shangri-La.

  ‘Shangri-La is a mythical kingdom in the Himalayas where no one ever gets old or ill.’

  – I know. I’ve been there. Look. It’s on my map.

  ‘You’ve been to a mythical kingdom?’

  – I don’t remember much about it.

  ‘You’ve been to a mythical magical kingdom where no one ever gets old o
r ill, but you don’t remember much about it?’

  – It’s on my map, look. I could take you back there. Come on – it’s got to be better than a TV remote.

  ‘I’ll think it over.’

  Mrs Rowland’s car came down the loaning. She thanked everyone. I climbed in and that was that.

  ‘Let me get a sniff of you,’ said Sputnik. ‘That way if I do need you, I can come and find you.’

  ‘Sputnik’s crying!’ said the mum, misinterpreting his sniffing. ‘He’s sad to see you go.’

  ‘Don’t be sad, Sputnik,’ said Ray.

  ‘He wants to go with Prez,’ said Jessie.

  ‘You don’t want to live in the town, Sputnik,’ said the dad. ‘You want to stay here where there’s grass and space. And work to do.’

  ‘We’re going to have a great time here. Aren’t we?’ said Ray, ruffling Sputnik’s hair.

  ‘If he doesn’t stop ruffling my hair, I’m going to shoot him,’ said Sputnik.

  – It’s horrible when you talk about people in front of them like that. Just because you know they can’t understand you. He really likes you.

  ‘He thinks I’m a dog.’

  – He likes dogs.

  ‘It’s not about how I look. It’s about how they see. You see different.’

  – Be nice to them.

  The car drove off. I looked back at them all waving.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve had a very nice summer,’ said Mrs Rowland, ‘and made a very good impression. Well done, Prez.’

  On the drive back I thought that if I started talking she might think I’d done so well that I should go back and stay there. I thought of a few things to say, but before I could put a sentence together we were there. Mrs Rowland’s car is a lot quicker than the number 63 bus.

  20.

  Spaghetti

  It was strange being back at the Temporary, strange to wake up to the sound of buses and milkmen instead of chickens and cows. There were some new kids, and a few of the old kids had left but – apart from the faces – everything was just the same. Murder Bell was still there. Dinner was still spaghetti Bolognese with a sauce that came out of a jar. I mean, why do that? It must be cheaper to chop up a few tomatoes and onions. A new kid with spiky hair cut his spaghetti into little pieces before eating it. Where’s the fun in that? Murder laughed when he heard I’d spent the whole summer in Stramoddie. He said his family had taken him to Florida. This turned out not to be true.

  21.

  Fire Drill

  I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d heard a doorbell. Really loud. Up close. Why would there be a doorbell in my bedroom?

  Sputnik.

  When I flicked the lamp on, there he was, sitting on the end of my bed, his portable doorbell in his hand.

  – How did you get in here?

  ‘Easy. I disabled the extremely primitive alarm system.’

  As soon as he said that . . .

  WHAAAAAA WHAAAAA

  . . . the alarm went off.

  I had to clatter down the fire escape and stand in the car park in my pyjamas while the Night Care Team counted us and made sure there was no actual fire. It was freezing cold. The fat full moon looked down on us like a camera. Sputnik had refused to leave my room.

  – What if there really is a fire?

  ‘If there was a fire, I’d be able to smell it.’

  By the time I got back to my room, Sputnik had grabbed the bed. He was lying there blowing randomly into Grandad’s harmonica.

  – Shh. You’ll wake everyone.

  ‘I’m playing a lullaby. I’ll probably put everyone to sleep.’

  – Only if they’re deaf.

  ‘So where’s this sea chest then?’

  – It’s back at the old flat. But it’s useless without the key. Grandad’s got the key. If we want to open it, we have to find Grandad.

  ‘I’ve thought about this,’ said Sputnik. ‘If he’s not in jail, he’s probably in Australia.’

  – Australia?

  ‘I’ve looked into it, and apparently when you’ve been really bad in this country, they send you to Australia. Let’s go!’

  – Australia is the other side of the world.

  ‘There’s an airport in Glasgow. I’m absolutely one hundred per cent confident that they’ll lend us a plane. After all, it’s their planet we’re trying to save.’

  – And when we get to Australia?

  ‘We ask around till we find someone who knows your grandad. Someone’s bound to. If he’s a criminal, there will be criminal records.’

  – You haven’t found my grandad at all. You’re just taking a wild guess.

  ‘I have it on very good authority that if you do something too bad for jail they send you to Australia . . .’

  – That was hundreds of years ago. They don’t do that any more.

  ‘So where’s this map then?’

  – What do you want the map for?

  ‘To help me find your grandad.’

  – It’s not a map of where he is. It’s a map of where he’s been. And by the way, he’s never been to Australia.

  ‘The only way I know to find out where someone is, is to start where they used to be and move forward.’

  I handed him the map.

  Sputnik held it the right way up, with Murmansk at the top. Then he held it upside down, with the Amazon at the top. Then he held it flat and looked straight across as if he thought there might be tiny Himalayas hidden in its folds. (There weren’t.) He pressed it against the window.

  ‘Turn out the light. I’m going to show you something.’

  It was the middle of the night. The Temporary is up on top of a hill. When Sputnik held the map against the window, the light of the moon shone through like a pale headlamp.

  ‘I don’t think this,’ said Sputnik, ‘is a map of the world.’ He moved it over the glass, as if he was hoping the moonlight would find something. ‘I think this,’ he said, ‘is a map of your town. Look.’

  He tugged the corners of the map. The map got bigger. Its paper got thinner. Soon the pattern of street lights shone through it. He tugged it a little bigger and thinner. Now I could see the separate points of the street lights. He shuffled the map around. The pattern of the street lights fitted perfectly over the lines of the streets on the map.

  ‘This is not a map of the world,’ said Sputnik. ‘This is a map of Dumfries. Look . . . See where it says the Amazon? That’s the River Nith running through the town. Where it says the Taj Mahal . . .’

  – That’s the Robbie Burns Memorial.

  ‘The Leaning Tower of Pisa . . .’

  – Which isn’t leaning.

  ‘Because it’s actually Dumfries’s famous Camera Obscura. And Murmansk with the drawing of the polar bear on the ice floes . . .’

  – Is the ice rink. But . . . does that mean . . . ? It does mean . . . I haven’t travelled to all those places. I haven’t seen the world. I’ve never been anywhere but Dumfries.

  ‘Dumfries is good. They don’t call her Queen of the South for nothing.’

  – But everything was lies. Why? Why would he do that?

  ‘I don’t know. We need to read between the lines.’ He folded the map in half, then in half again. ‘How many times do you think you could do this?’

  I took it from him and folded it again and then one more time, but the paper was too small to fold any more, and the folds were too thick to bend. It took me all my strength to find out that I couldn’t do it more than six times.

  Sputnik took it back. He folded it a seventh time. Pressed it neatly into layers, and then folded it again. It was tiny now. Not much bigger than a stamp, but thick as a sandwich.

  ‘One more time?’

  He folded it again. And then again. And again. Twelve times. Fifteen times. Eighteen times. Twenty-one. It got narrower and narrower but taller and taller. Until the map was a line strung out into the sky . . .

  – Are you sure you’ll be able to unfold this again?

&n
bsp; ‘Just a few more folds.’

  The map-string was so thin now I had to keep staring at it to stop it disappearing. If I scrunched up my eyes I could just catch sight of it when it moved, like a spider’s web when there’s mist and sunlight. It snaked through the glass of the window and somehow I could see that it was squeezing itself between the molecules of glass.

  ‘Are you counting?’

  – If you fold it again, it’ll be twenty-seven.

  He folded it again.

  There was a whoosh.

  The glowing string rocketed up and up. I tried to see where it was going but it seemed to be going to forever. It flew away but it also stayed where it was, changing but the same, like a tiny, bright upwards waterfall of fireflies.

  – What is it?

  ‘People say that no matter how big a piece of paper is, you can’t fold it more than seven times. But if you make the effort and keep folding, then when you get to twenty-seven times, you go atomic. This is still your grandad’s map, but now you’re looking at it one atom at a time. It stretches to the very edge of the solar system.’

  I thought of Grandad’s map stretching out to the edge of the solar system like the finest fishing line. I thought, if I could just tweak it, I might feel him tugging at the other end, and be able to reel him in. But my finger couldn’t find it, even though I could still see it.

  ‘If I kept on going to 103 folds,’ said Sputnik, ‘the other end of this map would be outside the known universe.’

  – That is a long way.

  ‘I do this whenever I get homesick,’ said Sputnik. ‘Get down to the atoms. Wherever you go in the universe, atoms are atoms. A hydrogen atom is a hydrogen atom and an oxygen atom is an oxygen atom. Whether it’s here or a thousand galaxies away.’

  – You get homesick? But you said you didn’t have a home.

  ‘You don’t have to have a home to get homesick. You just have to want one. The whole history of your wee planet is nothing but people looking for a home. Look at those Vikings, charging off across the sea, waving their battleaxes, just looking for somewhere to call their own . . .’