Twilight in the Land of Nowhen

by Nury Vittachi

  He gave me a big grin. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll take you to school in the X31 tomorrow and we can park it in the playground. Let’s arrive just before the bell rings, so that every kid is there to watch us. How about that?’

  ‘Really, Dad?’

  It was against the rules for parents to land their flying cars in the playground, but Dad didn’t care about rules like that. Dad was cool.

  ‘Thanks, Dad.’

  He nodded. ‘I promise.’ He messed up my hair with his gloved hand, promised to be back before eleven, and then closed the door behind him.

  I started towards the computer room to play Everworld Combat Plus Special Edition. Then I turned into my room instead and got my mum’s hand-mirror out of my bag.

  I told myself that I just wanted to check that my face was still there. But when I had the mirror in my hand, I realised that I wanted to do something else. I wanted to look at my mother’s face.

  I stared into the oval for ages, trying to see an adult woman with my features. But I couldn’t. I just saw a scowling boy with a few zits and baggy eyes and dirty hair. I wanted to see past that face, into the world of the mirror. No matter how much I tried, no matter how much I wanted it, I couldn’t.

  What had my mother looked like? She would have had prettier features, a rounder face and longer hair than me. And all that female stuff—lipstick and eye-shadow and stuff.

  An idea struck me.

  I locked the front door and bolted it. Then I went into the bathroom. I knew Melly had left some girly things in the cabinet.

  I hunted around until I found what looked like a pencil case. It was full of old cosmetics.

  There was a thin, fuzzy stick with black goo on it. I’d seen Melly using it on her eyes. I swiped it over my eyelashes. There was also a lipstick in there. Frosty Morning Pink Gloss. I carefully applied it to my lips. It was sticky but tasted nice, like fake strawberry.

  I found a tiny pallet where the only colours were blues and greens. I used a small plastic matchstick with a sponge on the end to rub some green paint on my eyelids.

  I needed to do something about my hair if I really wanted to discover what Mum might have looked like. There were no wigs in the house. Melly had left a sort of woolly hat thing with dangly bits in my dad’s bedroom cupboard, so I pulled it over my head.

  To complete the transformation, I put on a blouse with a white fluffy collar that I found on the floor near Dad’s bed.

  I lifted up Mum’s hand-mirror and looked in it.

  All I saw was my own angry face looking even more horrible than before, with smears of colour over it.

  I half closed my eyes and stared until my vision went blurry. But the grotesque sight in the mirror didn’t change into the face of a beautiful woman. Mum was not in the mirror. So where was she? I put down the mirror and went to the window, looking up at the sky. Was there a heaven up there? Could people in heaven see people on Earth?

  ‘Mum?’ I whispered. ‘Mum, are you there? Are you looking down at me? Do you watch me from somewhere up in the sky?’

  There was no answer, of course. I tried again anyway.

  ‘Mum. Do you know how things will turn out for me? Am I going to be okay?’

  The silence seemed to get louder, if that makes sense, which it probably doesn’t.

  ‘Mum, if you are with me in some way, can you give me a sign?’

  I looked around for something that could be a signal. Evening was falling and the sky was darkening fast. ‘Mum, if you are watching me from heaven, could you make the moon shine through my window tonight? Blow the clouds away so I can see a big, clear, bright moon? That would be a good sign.’

  I picked up her little white Bible. It seemed the right thing to do when asking for a message from heaven. Resting my elbows on the sill, I gazed at the sky. The clouds formed a thick, solid cover over the world. There was no moon, or even a single star visible through it. Would Mum clear the clouds that filled the sky as a sign to me?

  I opened the Bible. The first chapter explained how God made the evening and the morning and that was the first day. Then he made the land, people and animals over the next few days. It was all familiar stuff. I read it again anyway.

  There are two reasons why I like the Bible. One is that it’s the only thing I have that contains a message from my mum. Second, it’s supposed to have the answers to the big difficult questions of life. There seem to be so many big, difficult questions in my life, and I need answers. Meeting Ms Blit earlier in the week had made me feel that there might be answers elsewhere as well.

  I flipped back to the inside cover and looked at the words written by my mother. Remember me.

  ‘Mum. I’ll always remember you. But will you remember me? Will you blow those clouds away?’

  I watched the sky darken for a long time. The clouds were thicker than ever. No moon or stars appeared. And then it began to rain.

  What a waste of time. I put down the Bible, tried to wipe the make-up off my face, and went to play Ever-world Combat Plus Special Edition.

  18

  The next morning I woke to light streaming through the open window. My eyes hurt so badly I had to close them again. I felt awful.

  It wasn’t difficult to discover why. I’d been sleeping on a hard lump of something. Where was I? This wasn’t my bed.

  Blinking, I rolled over and gradually got my bearings. I had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the computer. The game controller was digging into my back.

  Oh no. I had fallen asleep with Everworld switched on. This was seriously bad news. If you are logged on, other people can kill your characters. If you are logged on and fast asleep, you cannot fight back.

  I did a quick inventory. Of my twenty-eight characters, twenty-three had been killed. I only had five left. All that work ruined.

  This wasn’t the first time I had fallen asleep in front of a computer game. When I did, Dad usually found me and

  tucked me into bed, before logging off the computer. Why hadn’t he done it this time?

  I dragged my tired bones to his room. His bed was in its usual unmade state, so I had to look carefully to see if he was in it or not. He wasn’t in it. I guessed that he hadn’t come home last night.

  I checked the telephone. No messages. He must have stayed at Melly’s house.

  Still, I was sure he would be on his way back. After all, he’d promised to take me to school in the X31 today, and make them change my teacher.

  I looked at my watch. It was 8.25 a.m. I’d missed the school bus already. If I was going to get to school on time he’d better hurry up.

  I phoned Melly’s number.

  Dad answered the phone with a groan. ‘Unh? Yeah?’

  ‘Dad. Dad. It’s me. You said you’d take me to school today. In the Breaker? You’re going to talk to the school office about changing me to another class. You have to come and take me to school because I’ve missed the school bus.’

  He groaned again. ‘I’m in no state to do anything this morning, kid,’ he said. ‘Melly and I went out on the town. Can’t you—’

  ‘No.’

  ‘—get a taxi or something?’

  ‘Dad, I don’t have any money. You promised you’d come to school with me this morning.’

  He gave one of his long, tired sighs. ‘Simon, you always want me to solve your problems for you. Sometimes you have to sort things out for yourself. I am really, really tired, and I really don’t want to deal with this just now. Get yourself to school and we’ll talk about it tonight.’

  He put down the phone.

  I said to the handset: ‘I wish you were dead, Dad, instead of Mum.’

  I decided not to go to school that day. For a start I had no way of getting there. In fact, I made a big decision.

  I wasn’t going to school ever again. Once I had made that decision, everything was fine. I felt much better.

  Who cared if Eliza Marshmallow named me Void of the Year? I wasn’t going to be part of that community an
y more, so it wouldn’t make any difference.

  If I refused to go to school, then they would eventually have to expel me. I could start again somewhere else. We’d have to move to a new district probably, but we’d done that often enough.

  I might even use some of the things I learned from Ms Blit to help me make friends at the next school.

  Thinking of Ms Blit reminded me of something. She said I had a Secret Sharer in Easterpark. Maybe at this school. If we moved, I might not find him or her.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about anything serious.

  So I went to play in Dad’s car. I do that sometimes when he’s out. I sit in the X31 and pretend to drive. Of course, I don’t do it like a little kid—I don’t put my hands on the steering wheel and say brmmm-brmm, like a baby. I know how to drive . . . Well, I know a bit. I’ve got a Scala-Poynter X31 flying car simulator program on my computer, and have been driving that for years.

  I went to the garage and spent an hour in the car, checking out the controls, and pretending I was skimming the top of the stratosphere.

  This is something I have learnt over the years. If there’s stuff going on that makes you feel bad, don’t think about it. Distract yourself with fun things instead.

  There was a sliding noise—the garage door opened.

  I froze.

  The door trundled noisily upwards and the room was bathed in light.

  Dad was back! He would be furious. I wasn’t even allowed to open the garage when he was out, let alone play in the car.

  ‘Sorry, Dad,’ I blurted to the silhouette at the garage door. ‘I was just having a look. I haven’t switched anything on or changed anything. Honest.’

  The shadow moved closer. I couldn’t see who it was, but I realised it wasn’t my father.

  19

  I heard a tinkling laugh.

  ‘I hope I don’t look too much like your dad,’ said Ms Blit. She moved away from the light shining through the door and I could see her clearly.

  ‘I’m not going again. Not ever,’ I replied.

  ‘Didn’t feel like going to school today?’ she asked.

  She came to the front of the car and peered at the dashboard.

  ‘Yeah, it is. It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘This looks like a rather high-powered vehicle,’ she said.

  I was very surprised when she got into the car on the driver’s side and nudged me over into the passenger seat. I guessed Dad’s car was so cool that even an adult like Ms Blit wanted to sit behind the wheel and get the feel of it.

  ‘Not much,’ I said.

  Still looking at the controls, she said, ‘Have you thought about the things I told you?’

  ‘I understand. At least, I’m beginning to understand,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a problem with time, haven’t I? I am ahead of everyone else. Almost like being able to see the future.’

  Ms Blit nodded.

  ‘I’ve sort of become loose from the space-time continuum that everybody else is on,’ I went on. ‘I’m an anomaly, aren’t I?’

  She continued to nod.

  ‘I need to get re-attached again, don’t I?’

  She slowly shook her head and turned to me. I could see from the movement of her lips that she was silently counting to three before she answered. ‘You can’t,’ she said, so quietly I barely heard her.

  ‘What happens if I get worse? I keep asking you that, and you never answer.’

  Ms Blit looked at the dashboard for a while. Then she turned to face me with a grim expression on her face. ‘Time for me to tell you some things I hoped you would never need to know,’ she said, in a sniffly sort of voice. I noticed that her eyes were damp.

  ‘Whoa, stop!’ I yelled.

  She started to press buttons on the X31. Her hand went to the ignition key.

  ‘Stop! Stop. You can’t drive this thing. Dad would go mad. It’s strictly not allowed. Only he knows how to drive it. This is like no other car. Dad built it. You will not believe how angry he is going to be.’

  She wasn’t listening, and neatly reversed the car out of the garage.

  Ms Blit really seemed to know how to drive the thing, because she pressed the buttons and pulled the levers and did all that stuff without hesitation.

  Before I realised what was happening—whuuuuum-mmppp—we were rising into the air. I felt excited and horrified at the same time. Seconds later, she switched from the hover motor to the jets and we zoomed away over the rooftops of the estate.

  I shrieked at her over the sound of the roaring engines, ‘My dad is absolutely going to kill you. He is going to kill you stone dead. And me. He will kill both of us. Nobody, absolutely nobody, is even allowed to touch this car, or even enter the garage and look at it. We are dead meat. Dead meat. ’

  Even as I said the words, I was surprised to find that I was not as scared as I should have been. I guess so much had happened that week that I was numb. I didn’t really have any energy left to feel anything.

  She pressed the button to close the roof over our heads. It became quiet enough to talk in a normal tone of voice. ‘I guess you’re taking me to school,’ I said, as we headed in that direction.

  Ms Blit flew with surprising style, although she didn’t seem to like straight lines. She swooped down between the trees, and then tilted off to the right to skim the treetops over Southerly Wood, before heading back in the direction of school.

  ‘Nope,’ she said. ‘I’m taking you to a place where you are going to get a real education.’

  She shifted her hips and tilted the vehicle to the right. It yawed steeply and swung over a small estate of houses towards the outskirts of Easterpark.

  We turned left over a freeway, topped a small hill, and then turned right into an avenue of cypress trees.

  ‘Frosty Morning Pink Gloss,’ I replied.

  ‘What’s that stuff on your lips?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah, better not.’

  ‘I guess I shouldn’t ask.’

  I noticed we were heading into a rural area. Squares of farmland flashed beneath us, a patchwork quilt of different shades of green, brown and yellow. Then I saw a church steeple ahead. The engine’s whine dropped half a tone and we slowed down.

  ‘Here we are,’ Ms Blit said. We floated down and came to an elegant stop in a graveyard. She was a fantastic driver. I thought no one could land as smoothly as my father, but Ms Blit landed the X31 as if it had no weight at all. As if it were a butterfly landing on a flower.

  We stepped out.

  ‘Of course. They miss them,’ I said. ‘Like I miss my mum.’

  ‘People think the saddest thing that can happen is for a person they love to die.’

  Ms Blit and I sat on a crumbly old tomb. It was covered with moss, but she didn’t seem to worry about her clothes.

  ‘Some people believe in heaven, reincarnation, or some other kind of afterlife,’ she said. ‘Others believe that there is nothing after death. But almost everyone agrees on one thing. There’s one place where everyone who dies definitely lives on. That’s in the hearts and memories of the people who loved them. It’s important to people of every religion, and to people with no religion at all. A person’s ideals, the memory of what they looked like, things they said, what they achieved—all these things live on in the souls of the people who knew them.’

  She ran her hand gently over the soft, green moss on the stone. ‘In many countries, the most important holidays are those on which people visit their ancestors’ graves. In China, families go to the graves of their ancestors twice a year, to keep their memories alive. In Hong Kong, photographs are engraved on some gravestones to help loved ones live on in people’s hearts. In America, some people build statues and mausoleums to those who have died, or play videos of them. Sometimes they even freeze bodies in the hope that the person might be brought back to life one day.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Do you feel we are in a crowded place?’

  S
he gestured at the cracked statues and stones around us. Some of them were standing at odd angles, like ancient teeth from a massive jawbone.

  ‘You’re right. There’s nothing here but bones and stones. Where are the people? Whether we believe in heaven or not, we have to admit they are nowhere that we can reach. That’s what’s so sad about people dying. As far as the living are concerned, the dead are nowhere, except in our hearts.’

  She put her arm around me. ‘You know, Simon, people in the space-time maintenance business—well, we reckon there’s something worse than being nowhere. And that’s being in a place called Nowhen.’

  She picked up a stone and threw it as far as she could, right out of the graveyard.

  ‘People who fall out of the fabric of time are nowhere that can be reached, just like dead people. But when they fall out of time, they don’t just stop existing after a certain day. They fall out of time completely. They fall out of all time. Time future, time present, and time past. That means that every reference to them disappears, physical, spiritual and emotional; forwards and backwards in time. Like anyone who dies, they stop existing in the present and are erased from the future. The difference is that people who fall into Nowhen enter a state in which they have never been conceived. They have never been born, they have never been children, they have never grown up. Every interaction they have ever had with anyone, or anything, disappears. No one remembers them because no one knows that they existed to begin with. Being in Nowhen is far, far worse than being nowhere.’

  This conversation was beginning to spook me. When I spoke, my voice came out high-pitched and feeble. ‘How come I’ve never heard about this place?’

  ‘Because no one who has ever been there has ever returned, Simon. No one who has ever been there . . . has ever been.’

  I was silent for a while. Then, in a small voice, I said: ‘Are you saying this is going to happen to me?’

  She nodded.

  ‘No one will remember me?’

  She nodded again.

  20

  According to Ms Blit, there were rules that prevent Stitchers from telling people things about the universe. Temporal beings are not supposed to know about lots of things; Nowhen is one of them.