by Ray Cluley
First he went to the bathroom, turning on the stereo as he went. No need to put the CD in, he’d been listening to it this morning. He pissed to the gradual sound of track one, flushed as Ziggy Stardust told him about ground control and Major Tom, and by the time he was assembling sections of spacecraft he was singing.
It had been a good day.
The woman with kids had come into the cinema after the trailers and adverts, just as James was beginning to despair that anyone else would come in at all. Judging from how soaked they were, the rain had worsened. The woman was hushing the kids forward having won a temporary quiet with sweets and soft drink.
“Not there, Sam, look at all the popcorn. Your dress. What will your mother say? Come on. No, Kevin, here. Come on you two, sit down.”
James had waited with held breath as the three of them moved sideways past the aisle seats to those further in. As the woman helped the boy out of his coat the girl sat down, only to stand again with a shriek.
The woman hissed a sharp “Ssh!” and, best of all, grabbed the girl’s arm and pulled her back down into her seat. “Sit. Down.”
The girl screamed a second time and leapt up, spilling her drink over the woman James assumed to be a babysitter. Kevin, at the same time, sat down only to be catapulted up with a cry. Launched like a rocket.
James grinned and popped the tab of his Coke. It spat and foamed but he sucked it up quick and burped quietly. He put the can down away from his work.
REM sang of a man on the moon. It wasn’t one of his favourites. If he wasn’t busy he’d usually skip it, and “To The Moon and Back” by Savage Garden. They didn’t feel right. Dad probably put them on for a joke but after five years the novelty wore off. “Loving the Alien” was okay, even with no aliens in it. David Bowie was good, or Ziggy Stardust as he was really called.
The plasma cannon had to be held firmly to dry and James blew on it so the hole for the laser turret didn’t seal over with excess glue. He looked at the map on the living room wall while he waited, wondering where his father was now. He’d stuck flags in where he thought seemed likely, enjoying the way the pins slid easily into the corkboard behind. The corkboard had been the only good idea his mother ever had, apart from running away.
“Look at all those holes,” she’d said, having pulled his poster down to redecorate. He’d looked and seen his own constellations in the paintwork. This one was Father’s Journey, and this one over here could be Father’s Smile. There, Father Waiting. Dad didn’t sound right.
“Well? What do you have to say about that?” his mother demanded.
“Cool,” said James, and she smacked him around the head.
“You’re lucky they’re small enough the paint will fill them.”
He didn’t feel lucky. He rubbed his head and sulked.
“Aren’t you too old for all this space stuff now?” she asked. If she knew why he had the star charts she pretended to have forgotten. “You’ll get picked on at big school, you know.”
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t care.” She looked at the poster in her hands, the swirls of stars and the coloured gases of the universe, and for a moment James must have inherited the mind-reading power only mothers had because he suddenly knew she meant to screw it up and throw it away.
“No!”
“Alright,” she said, “okay, you don’t care. Fine.” She’d dropped the map onto his bed, paper slightly crumpled but at least away from the bin. “You better take all of those down, too,” she said, pointing to where his models dangled from the ceiling. “Heaven forbid I get paint on the captain’s solar ship, or whatever.”
It pissed James off when she did that. He’d sulk until tea time now. She knew it wasn’t a solar ship.
“You’re just like your father,” she muttered as she left and suddenly there was no need to sulk anymore.
James had taken down his rockets and spaceships grinning.
S
At work, James tapped at a keyboard at a small desk nestled between two other men tapping at keyboards at a small desk. Occasionally the phone would ring and one of them would answer it with the practised, “Good morning, IT department,” and then one of them would go and fix an easy problem one of the muggles elsewhere in the company was experiencing.
“Computers are the future,” James’ father had told him, and James believed it, he really did. He just wished the future would hurry up and get here so he could play an important part in it.
In the meantime, he coloured a drawing pin with permanent marker. The ink would wipe off the metal with each back and forth of the pen if you weren’t careful but James knew to use single strokes and to let them dry before applying another on top, darkening the brass to black. At the end of his shift he pocketed the pin and took it with him when he left, sure to put it in the right pocket—the other had a hole in it and pins could end up in the coat lining.
There was a multi-storey car park near the building where he worked. He went to the lift and rode it up a few floors, applying glue to the back of the pin just before the doors opened and admitted people heading down. He stepped out as they came in and, once the lift had begun its descent, pressed the base of the pin to the call button, holding it there till it was secure. Then he hid himself between a couple of cars and waited, fumbling as if for keys whenever anyone passed.
The quiet growl of cars climbing in slow spirals rumbled somewhere below him. Engines thickened the air with the smell of petrol, exhaust, and warm rubber as tires turned tight circles, squealing at each ramp. The lift came and went but that was okay.
Eventually, a sleek vehicle parked on the same floor as James and a man in a rush hurried past. At the lift he jabbed the button. It jabbed him back. The man swore his pain so loud it echoed back and forth amongst the concrete columns. James emerged from where he’d watched and approached as the man peered closely at the lift controls.
“You feeling okay?” James asked.
“Some bastard’s stuck a pin there,” the man said, pointing. A small bead of blood marked the pad of his finger.
“You feel alright?”
“Yeah, it was just a pin. Fuckers.” He wiped his finger on a handkerchief. He knocked the pin away with his briefcase but James didn’t mind, it had done its job. He stood on it when the man wasn’t looking and enjoyed the reminder of its tap tap tap as he walked home.
S
When James was five his father left to be a rocket man. James couldn’t go with him because of his medication, but when he was better he’d be able to go into space.
“Live long and fuck yourself,” his mother had shouted at the door, making a hand gesture that didn’t belong with the proper saying but seemed to suit hers. She said it as if she was angry, though daddy must have been saving the world or exploring the universe for the benefit of mankind or something. She’d even used the f-word, aiming it at the front door, but if she was angry with dad why not aim it at the sky? Adults were confusing. But his daddy was a rocket man and James couldn’t wait to tell his friends at school.
Sitting on the bus, James remembered those days with a mix of pride and perplexity. Even as he’d grown up his mother had remained a mystery. Occasionally she would pass news of his father on to him. He was always away at strange sounding places. Slough. The Witterings. Newport. The last he imagined as a space station rather than a planet, huge and bright and busy with vessels from various systems and federations. It pleased him to learn, eventually, that these places were named after real places on Earth not far away from where they lived.
One day his father sent him a CD.
“Something useless from your father,” his mother had said, throwing it to him like a toy. He hadn’t been able to play it—they didn’t have a CD player yet—but he had admired the way it caught the light in rainbow lines across its shiny surface a
s he turned the curve of it this way and that. He liked the words that came with it, written on a folded piece of paper. His mother passed this to him only after checking its contents herself first. “Spaceman,” Babylon Zoo. “Space Dog,” Tori Amos. “Space Oddity,” David Bowie (Ziggy Stardust). Strange names, alien names. He wondered what a Babylon Zoo looked like, what animals you’d find there—a space dog, maybe. Best of all, he liked the last track listing. It was another David one, “Hallo Spaceboy,” which he liked to imagine was his dad’s way of saying hi. Later, “Rocket Man Elton” by someone simply named John would become his favourite, but not until he could play the album. Even now, knowing the correct title and artist, James liked to think of it that way. Rocket Man Elton, burning out his fuse up there.
He skipped the tracks on his iPod until he heard the piano of the intro and settled back into the seat to watch the streets flash by beyond the window. The rain had stopped but drops still streaked the glass, speeding down in diagonal lines that were nearly horizontal as the bus accelerated the last stretch of main road.
It was almost empty, the bus. James’ stop was one of the last and they were nearly there. Even though he wouldn’t be around to see it, he pushed one of his needles base down into the fabric of the cushioned seat beside him. No need for Blu-Tack because the foam was firm and would hold it upright until someone sat and was speared.
They stopped and a woman got on. The bus started before she could sit down and she took a few quick steps forward, catching the rail.
James pressed the button for his stop.
“Is anyone sitting here,” the woman asked, indicating the seat beside James. Clearly nobody was sitting there, but he understood the question.
“Go ahead,” he said. He held his breath.
She was pretty. A little large to be beautiful, maybe, but lovely eyes that sparkled and an easy smile. She was wearing the uniform of a dental nurse. Well, a nurse of some sort. It was the sticker saying “I’m a brave girl” with a grinning tooth beneath it that suggested the dentist part. Maybe she was a normal nurse who’d just been to the dentist for a—
“Fuck! Ow!”
She stood up quick, hand clasped to her buttocks. The bus shuddered to a stop and she staggered forward with the motion, catching at a pole to steady herself.
“You alright, love?” the driver called.
She held the needle in her hand. She must have pulled it from the seat when she stood, its point buried in her flesh.
“There was a needle on my seat,” she said, dropping it in the bin for used tickets. And then, amazingly, she laughed.
“You feeling okay?” James asked.
She laughed again. “Well, that woke me up,” she said. “How embarrassing.”
The driver suggested a tetanus shot and asked if she wanted him to record it for health and safety reasons, pulling a clipboard out from somewhere near his seat. “Wasn’t a syringe or nothin’ was it?”
“Didn’t look like it,” she said, rubbing where it had stuck her. “Just a sewing needle. Nothing on it but my arse.”
“What’s your name, Miss?”
“Angela,” she said. He began writing it down. “Oh, don’t bother, I’m alright.”
A car beeped behind them and the bus driver made a gesture out the window for it to pass. They re-joined the traffic behind it.
“If you don’t mind, I’ll sit here,” Angela said, sitting down across the aisle from James.
James realized he was staring and wondered if he’d been doing it the whole time, if she suspected it was him, or if she thought he was just another gormless weirdo that rode public transport.
“This is me,” he said, getting up.
She smiled her goodbye. He smiled back. Earlier, after her scream of pain, she had laughed. Laughed!
“Thank you,” James said, stepping down from the bus.
He watched as Angela put earphones in and wondered what music she liked to listen to. As the bus moved away, James wondered if she liked David Bowie.
S
There was a starman waiting in the sky, James knew. Track five. Ziggy Stardust had a lot of good songs. To think, this magnificent collection of music had simply hung on a thread from his ceiling when he was a kid. Like a flying saucer, suspended with the small fleet of spaceships that flew there.
Now, years later, the CD was down and all of his ceilings were an armada of spacecraft. In a matter of an hour or two there’d be another one to join the ranks.
He carefully applied another coat of paint to the tail section. He started with the tail section because the tail section needed to dry first so he could put the transfers on.
“Shit.”
He dipped a tissue into the water jar and wiped the mistake he’d made on the ship’s escape pod. The escape pod had to be gunmetal silver, not sunburst.
He couldn’t stop thinking of Angela. Every time he managed to get into the Zen of painting, there she was, leaping from her seat as if into orbit. He saw again the way her hand clapped the right cheek of her behind, the way she turned to try and look as she withdrew the slender sliver from herself. Sometimes, even though he was sitting behind her when this happened, he saw the way her breasts must have bounced under her dental tabard. Beautiful large soft planets of flesh.
“Shit!”
He’d done it again. This time the line of paint swept right across the escape pod and down to the droid bay. He wiped it clean again and washed the brushes, setting them upon a dishcloth to dry. There was no point trying to finish it tonight.
He grabbed a bottle of beer, a box of pins, and a roll of sticky tape and took them into the living room. He’d watch an episode of series 4 and make what he called pinstripes, pushing drawing pins through strips of sticky tape so he could fix them under banisters and door handles at a later date. Mindless work. If he imagined Angela in first officer uniform or fighting off the amorous advances of the charismatic captain, it wouldn’t be a bother.
He’d made his first pinstripe at school, when he was nine. After the day of the fight.
“Those boys are so much bigger than you, James. Boys, plural. You don’t fight, James, look at you.”
“They said—”
“They said what?”
They said his dad was not an astronaut. They said there was no such thing as spaceships, even though they’d watched one take off on TV in science class. No Martians, even though there was a face on Mars that someone must have made.
“Nothing.”
“This isn’t nothing.” She’d shown him the tear in his school trousers. “This isn’t nothing.” She showed him the note from his teacher immediately afterwards. “When you do things like this, it hurts me, James. Alright? It hurts me. And then I have to hurt you, so you’ll learn.”
He’d hurt Bobby and Tom and Justin the next day even more. He’d stuck a strip of pins to a ruler and slapped each of them with it until their hands and faces bled.
He had to move schools after that.
“I should send you to your father,” his mother had said, as if it were a threat.
“Yes!”
“Oh, you think you’d like that, do you? Think he’d like that? Then why hasn’t he come for you already? Why doesn’t he visit us more often, hmm?”
“He thinks he’ll blow our minds!” James yelled.
His mum had laughed, recognizing the lyric. Not a nice laugh, like Angela’s.
“The only blown mind is his. Go to your room.”
His mum didn’t understand punishments. His room was the best place she could send him.
She didn’t let him eat any dinner that night but he had three packets of Space Raider crisps hidden under his bed and plenty of books. “Food for thought,” the librarian had said, and winked as if he knew the same secrets Ray Bradbury and Robert Hei
nlein did.
James set about reading so he’d be ready when his dad came, stopping only when his mum came in to give him his medicine shot.
“All better,” she said, part of the routine, rubbing at where she’d injected him. Then she remembered she was angry with him, remembered he was like his father, remembered she didn’t like him at all, and with the knowing power of all mothers she reached under his pillow for the book hidden there and confiscated it for the rest of the night.
S
Angela got on the bus at the same stop as before. She was wearing the uniform again but not the sticker. She said hello.
“Any pins?”
At first James was so startled by the question he almost said yes, reaching to his pocket as if to offer her one like a piece of gum or cigarette. He caught himself and made a show of sweeping the seat instead, pushing down on the cushion. “Nope.”
He’d thought about it. All of last night he’d thought about it, Angela jumping up with a cry in all sorts of different uniforms and then nothing at all until finally he’d had to masturbate just to be able to go to sleep. He’d been thinking about it on the journey home, too, but finally decided he’d rather sit next to her this time. Besides, it would be too suspicious if he did it again so soon.
She sat beside him. Her perfume was something sharp and citrusy.
“I think you fixed my computer once,” she said.
He looked at her but couldn’t remember ever doing any such thing.
“Council office,” she added.
“Yeah, I worked there for a bit.”
“Me too. You came down to show me why I couldn’t enter data like everybody else.”