Cosmic

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  The man looked at Dad. Dad just shrugged. “He’s in Gifted and Talented. At school. They study this kind of thing. Last month it was global warming.”

  Mom said, “He is right though. I’m not sure about this color.”

  Not only was I not allowed to go to Tunisia, I wasn’t even allowed to walk home by myself anymore. Mom and Dad took to meeting me at school and escorting me home, like a prisoner. They would have banned me from Little Stars too except everyone else had done so much work on The BFG that it wouldn’t be fair if it had to be canceled.

  Lisa tried to be nice about it. “You’re the star,” she said, “so you get your own dressing room.” Then she shoved me into this cupboardy thing just behind the stage. There was one chair, no window, a packet of pickled-onion flavor Space Ranger crisps and a blue Panda Pop. Space Rangers are the cheapest crisps that money can buy. They are crisps, but only until you put them in your mouth. The moment they make contact with your tongue they stop being crisps and become soggies. The flavor is sort of optional in that it seems to fall off the crisps and make a powdery sludge at the bottom of the bag, which you can scroop up with your finger if you like. Blue Panda Pops are supposedly raspberry flavored, but the flavor is irrelevant as they are so fizzy that when you drink them all your senses close down and your brain just shouts, “FIZZY!” Later on you belch a lot, which is fine if you’re playing the BFG, as he’s quite a belchy character.

  I remember sitting in that cupboard, feeling like the rest of the world had completely vanished and that I was now orbiting the sun entirely on my own, on a chair. Planet Panda Pop. Sitting in a tiny enclosed space eating strange chemicals. It turns out that Little Stars was outstanding training for astronauts.

  During the interval, I just messed about on DraxWorld. At first I checked “location of phone one”—so I could see where Dad was. He was in the audience. Then I looked at all the Waterloos in the world, trying to decide on a favorite. I was just tossing up between Waterloo in Sierra Leone and Waterloo in Trinidad and Tobago when the phone rang. It was a woman with a very friendly voice saying, “Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Drax Communications. We’ve noticed you have a very interesting pattern of use and we’d like to ask you a few questions if you have some minutes.”

  I had about two and a half minutes to the beginning of Act Two.

  “Can I just ask you, have you actually been to any of the following places which appear in your recent searches—Waterloo, Sierra Leone?”

  “No.”

  “Waterloo, Siberia?”

  “No.”

  “Waterloo, Belgium?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any plans to visit these places in the near future?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “all of them. I don’t know how near the future is though.”

  “We also noticed that your recent searches include many theme parks and rides.”

  “Oh. Yes. Alton Towers. EuroDisney. Six Flags. Mountain—”

  “Pretty well all the theme parks in the world, in fact. What is it you like about theme parks?”

  “The Crispy New World feeling you get after you’ve been on a thrill ride. I love that.”

  “So you go on the rides with your children?”

  She thought I was a grown-up and she couldn’t even see me! I deepened my voice a bit and said, “That’s right. Yeah.”

  “How old is your child?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Lovely. Thank you. And one last thing—as a dad, how would you summarize your philosophy of child rearing?”

  “My what?”

  “What do you want most for your children?”

  “Well…” I don’t remember thinking about it. I just came out with this: “I want my children to think of the whole world as their thrill ride.”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “What a beautiful thought.”

  And I was thinking, Yes, it is a lovely thought. I wonder where it came from.

  “Thank you, Mr. Digby, for talking to me. We’ll be in touch very soon.”

  She hung up. In World of Warcraft, when you defeat an enemy you can take their stuff: their money, their armor, things like that. But sometimes it turns out they’ve got something you weren’t expecting—like a magic ability or a bottle of the Elixir of the Mages. And you can feel the extra power surge through you. That’s how I felt at the end of that call. I knew something cosmic was going to happen.

  A few minutes later, Lisa knocked on the door, shouting, “BFG onstage, please!”

  As we were walking up to the wings, I got a text. Lisa snarled, “Turn off your mobile, for goodness’ sake.”

  “In a second.”

  “In fact, give it to me.”

  “Okay, yeah, whatever,” I said with a giant smile. I was smiling because of the text:

  You have been selected to take part in a very special competition, with a prize that will make you into a hero in the eyes of your children. Infinity Park is a unique new theme park in China, packed with astonishing, innovative attractions, including the Biggest Thrill Ride in the History of the World—the Rocket. We are offering four fathers and their children the chance to travel to the park, experience the rides and visit local landmarks.

  Don’t miss your chance to become the Greatest Dad Ever. Call this secret number tomorrow before midday GMT to find out if you are one of the four lucky winners. Please do not disclose this number to anyone else.

  All you have to do is get put through.

  I was still smiling after the play was over and everyone had finished clapping. Lisa said I was the friendliest-looking Big Friendly Giant she’d ever seen. Mom said, “I loved it. You looked so happy up there!”

  I waited till we were getting into the car and then I showed Dad the text. “China…the Biggest Thrill Ride in the History of the World…your chance to become the Greatest Dad Ever.” I got that Crispy New World feeling just reading it.

  I expected Dad to jump up and down with excitement and say, “Get the suncream, Liam.” Inexplicably he didn’t. He shook his head and said, “No one really wins those things.”

  “Well, someone must win them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be allowed to advertise them. Of course someone wins them. Come on, it’s just a phone call.”

  “Yes, a long, long phone call. This is just a trick to get you to spend loads of money calling a premium-rate phone number. And when you do, there’s nothing at the other end except a voice saying ‘Please hold’ and playing some nice classical music. And they collect the money for the call.”

  “But you’ve been specially selected.”

  “Yeah. Me and ten million others.”

  He deleted the message.

  We walked home past the shopping center. I looked up but you couldn’t see any stars. I remember thinking, I’ll probably never get out of Bootle as long as I live. It’s funny to think I am now at this moment farther away from Bootle than any other living human.

  That night Dad wanted us all to play Monopoly in the new kitchen. Monopoly! Has anyone ever played Monopoly to the end? Don’t most people just sort of slip into a kind of boredom coma after a few goes and wake up six months later with a handful of warm hotels? If it had been Risk or Cluedo, that would have been something, but Monopoly!

  “Sit down,” he said. “It’ll be nice. All of us together. We haven’t played a game for ages.”

  I said, “Monopoly is not a game.”

  “Well, here’s the dice and here’s the board—how is that not a game?”

  “It’s not a game because NOTHING IS HAPPENING. In Monopoly you can ask someone else to take your go for you while you go to the toilet and it won’t make any difference. Can you imagine asking someone else to take your go in chess, or Risk, or soccer? I’ll tell you what Monopoly is. Monopoly is my life—going round and round the same streets over and over again with not enough money.”

  “So,” said Dad, “you don’t want to play then?”

  “No, I don’t.” I got up. I was going to go
and play a few hours of Warcraft.

  “It’s always an anticlimax,” said Mom, “when you’re in a play or something and then it ends.”

  “You don’t want to play a little game of Monopoly with your real live mom and dad?” said Dad. “But you’ll play all night with your invisible Warcraft friends.”

  “I haven’t got any real live friends left, have I?”

  “Maybe you would have if you weren’t always coaxing them into illegal situations involving high-powered sports cars.”

  “Oh now,” said Mom, “he isn’t always doing that. He only did it once.”

  “And isn’t once enough?!”

  They were still discussing this when I logged into Azeroth and summoned my guild—the Wanderlust Warriors.

  We were crossing the Blasted Lands with a caravan of traders when the door opened and Dad looked in. “Listen,” he said, “I’m sorry about earlier. If you don’t want to play Monopoly, that’s fine. I’ll play Warcraft.”

  “Oh. Thanks. But it doesn’t really work like that.”

  “How does it work then?”

  So I tried to explain Warcraft to Dad, but honestly—where do you begin? He didn’t even know what an avatar was.

  I said, “Like when we play Monopoly and you are always the top hat? Well, it’s like that, only more complicated. That’s me on the screen, look, that elf.”

  He squinted at the screen. There were hundreds of avatars across the vast desert of the Blasted Lands. I showed him which one was mine and I introduced him to all my other guild members. We’re mostly very heavily armed Night Elves. I think he was impressed.

  “You see,” I said, “in Monopoly, you get as much money as you can, right? And that’s it. In here you have to get money. And health. And experience. And skills. And then…you use them. For a quest.”

  “What kind of quest?”

  “Well, there’s all kinds. Some of them are dangerous and complicated and some are simple. And you meet hazards and monsters. Sometimes serious monsters—so you run away or get help. And sometimes trivial monsters—so you fight them. And if you complete the quest, you gain experience and new skills and maybe some strength and wealth. So then you can level up…”

  “What?”

  “See, I’m a Level Forty elf, but what I want to be is a Level Seventy elf. Then I can Engage with really serious monsters. When you Engage, that’s called an Instance. We’re having a bit of an instance right now with this dragon.”

  The dragon had ambushed us, but the Wanderlust Warriors stood their ground and fought like a well-oiled machine. Soon the dragon was dead. So were two of my Warriors, but that was okay because I’ve got healing powers. I brought them back to life and we looted the dragon’s hoard.

  That’s what was happening in my head. Of course, to Dad it just looked like I was sitting there clicking the mouse so fast it sounded like castanets.

  “Cosmic!” I yelled. “Look what we found: Elixir of the Mages. If you use that just before an instance, it doubles your brain power.”

  “This,” said Dad, “is not a game. This is a career.”

  “But it’s good on here because people just accept you for what you are.”

  “Namely an elf with magical healing powers. Is that what you really are, Liam?”

  “No, but in-game, if I have experience and strength and stuff, I can go out on quests and do things. In-life, you can look like a grown-up and shave like a grown-up and be Gifted and Talented and everything, and you’ve still got to sit in a class full of kids who call you ‘freak’ and ‘Wolverine’ and stuff.”

  Dad nodded his head like it all made sense to him. Then he got my profile up so he could have a proper look at my avatar.

  “It says here he’s shorter than average.”

  “If you’re short you get extra agility. Plus you can sneak up on people.”

  Dad said, “A shorter-than-average magical being with lots of friends. Well…that’s a very nice avatar. Good night.”

  I did offer to tell him something about the history of Azeroth and who the Horde were and about the Alliance, but he said, “That’s enough for one night, thanks all the same. You get back to your quest. Don’t stay up too late—you’ve got school.”

  It was only when he’d gone that I noticed he’d left his phone on my desk. And only when I picked it up that I remembered that my phone was a clone of his. So the number he’d deleted from my in-box should still be there in his. It was. I copied it back into my phone.

  I Am on Hold

  I made the call on the bus to school next day. I remember looking out of the window at all the people: queuing outside the post office, standing at the pedestrian crossing, going in and out of 24-hour Tesco. None of them looked to me like they’d been specially selected. I was going to win. I dialed.

  The woman with the friendly voice answered right away. “Drax Communications. D’you want the opportunity to be the Greatest Dad Ever?”

  “Yeah, I do. I really do. I was thinking about it all night….” I talked for about a minute before I realized she was a recording.

  “…if you accept the terms and conditions of this competition, please press the star key now.”

  I did.

  “We’ll take your call as soon as we can. In the meantime, please hold. Remember: all you have to do is get put through.”

  They started playing classical music. They were still playing when the bus pulled up at the school gates half an hour later. Every now and then the music would stop and the friendly-voiced woman would say, “Your call means a lot to us. Please hold.” There must be a lot of people in the queue. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe I wasn’t that special.

  I was walking in through the school gates when I got a text alert: “Yes! We have our 1st winner!”

  Yes!? What’s “Yes!” about that exactly?

  Our first winner is Klaus from Hamburg in Germany, and his daughter Anna. Anna’s two great passions are thrill rides and helping others, says her father. “She once spent twelve hours on the Space Mountain roller coaster at EuroDisney in order to raise money for a local hospital. She hopes to get people to sponsor her to ride the Rocket and so raise money for children who were injured in wars around the world. When her school friends heard about this, they wanted to help her. We knew there might be a problem getting through to the number so they all came to school early and all called the number simultaneously. A boy got through and gave the phone to Anna immediately. She is a worthy winner.”

  In other words, she cheated.

  I was still on hold during registration. Registration’s a noisy business so no one noticed the music. But first lesson was math with Ms. Jewell, and math with Ms. Jewell is always full of long silences, for instance:

  Ms. Jewell: Square root of sixty-four?

  Class: Long silence.

  Ms. Jewell: Anybody? Anybody at all.

  Class: More long silence.

  So this morning I tried to answer all her questions, just to keep up the noise level and stop her noticing the phone. When she asked something about calculating the volume of a cylinder. I shouted, “Miss, miss…”

  “Liam, there is no need to shout, ‘Miss, miss,’ if no one else is offering to answer the question. There is no need to try to attract my attention if you have no competition.”

  “Yes, miss. Anyway, miss, it’s pi times the—”

  “Thank you, Liam. I already know the answer. I already know you know the answer. I’m hoping to find out if anyone else knows the answer.”

  “Wayne probably knows, miss. He’s good at math, miss, but he doesn’t always have the confidence to put his—”

  “Liam, I’m only too happy to hear your thoughts on geometry. I don’t want your thoughts on your fellow pupils.”

  “Just going back to the volume of the cylinder then, miss, isn’t it—”

  “Don’t go back to it, Liam. Let someone else have a go.”

  “Yes, miss.”

  “So…volume of a cylinder. Anyone? A
nyone at all?”

  Long pause. But not silence. A tinny little orchestra fiddling away.

  She frowned. She prowled up and down. You could see that she thought it might be in the next room. Or in her head. Finally she said, “Can anyone else hear music? Or are the angels finally coming to carry me away?”

  I laughed at this—probably too loud and definitely too long. No one else joined in but everyone did stare at me—including Ms. Jewell, who stared at me and then at my pocket. “It’s Holst, isn’t it?” she said.

  I said, “No, miss, it’s me,” thinking, Who’s Holst?

  “This music was written by Gustav Holst. It’s called The Planets. It’s not the usual rubbish. Why’re you playing it?”

  “Well, miss, I saw a thing on TV about how if you play classical music in the background your brain really likes it and it makes extra pathways through your synapses. You can get brainier just by listening to classical music. It definitely works, miss—look how many questions I’ve answered this morning….”

  She was sort of humming along to the music now. I took the phone out so she could hear better and asked, “Why’s it called The Planets, miss?” I know this was cynical. But she’s a teacher. She loves questions.

  Ms. Jewell talked nonstop for the whole lesson about music, about Greek mythology and about the solar system. At one point she tried to explain just how far away Neptune was, and everyone gasped. And then she said, “And it’s a near neighbor compared to the stars…,” and she did a massive calculation on the board to show how far away the nearest star was in both kilometers and light-years. It was the best lesson she ever gave us.

  But I was still on hold at the end of it.

  I did get another text alert though: