Radius Limpfast wanted to throw his arms round Fiona and tell her she was a genius and that he was head over heels in love with her and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her for a very long time or even longer and would she marry him tomorrow – well, not so much tomorrow, but as soon as they had a prenuptial agreement agreed upon and signed.8 But he didn’t. It wasn’t that Radius didn’t want to act anything less than super-cool in front of the other board members because it might slightly undermine his authority, which was true, but the real reason was that deep down inside he was shy and his feelings were confusing him. He hardly knew that the word ‘shy’ even existed, never mind ever having felt that way before. So he just acted like Mr Cool.
‘Interesting,’ Radius said. ‘It was, of course, on top of my list of titles and hearing someone else say it just confirms it.’
Suddenly Radius spotted the perfect face in the crowd below.
‘Camera six,’ he called into a microphone, ‘quick, pan right and follow the guy in the green jacket.’
‘Look at him,’ he said to Fiona and the other board members. ‘He looks perfect and so do his wife and two kids. Can’t see a granny, but we’ll worry about that later. Go down and get them.’
Apart from the green jacket, which was more of a sort of grey colour, the guy did look perfect – not too self-confident, not too good-looking, nice, clean and tidy – and although years of reality TV had given Radius a keen eye for people, experience also told him that someone who looked perfect could sometimes be the worst choice ever.
Still, we have to start somewhere, Radius said to himself. There’s no way we’ve got time to audition every applicant. And his wife looks good too.
So it was that Stark Contrast, his wife, Laura, and their two children were pulled out of the obscurity of the crowd and brought into the world of legends and fame.
As Stark himself said later in one of his rare jokes, ‘It was one small step for the Contrasts and one giant step for um, er, us’ – which, as jokes went, was rubbish.
Radius Limpfast has been creating his life story ever since he was five years old, when he discovered that a bit of creative lying could make life much, much better in so many different ways.
Such a discovery means that he has never let things like the truth or the facts get in the way of a life that millions envy and admire. Reality has been mangled up and buried so deeply that people can’t even agree how tall Radius actually is. If anyone asks the question, ‘What is Radius like? – meaning, ‘How tall is he?’ or ‘Is he good-looking?’ or ‘How old is he?’ – the answer is usually, ‘Well, you know, sort of, er, you know.’
Because Radius is famous, there are a lot of photos of him – except they aren’t actually of him because he employs several doubles who look nothing like him. Radius is a confused mixture of someone who loves being rich and famous and someone who wants to be anonymous, which, of course, is almost impossible.
His parents have been many, many people, from mysterious European royals to gypsies, circus performers, famous politicians, actors, inventors and dark mysterious beings who could even have come from a galaxy far, far away. So varied and so convincing are his stories that there are times when even his own mother has wondered if she is actually related to him.
All evidence – including the actual body – of his father was lost in a Very Suspicious Fire, which started in Radius’s own nursery when he was seven, spread rapidly to all the family photo albums, passports and birth certificates, but magically avoided destroying any of the money and cheques that were stored in the very same safe.
The family retainer was accused of arson, but nothing was proved. And no-one suspected the angelic little seven-year-old when boxes of matches and lighter fuel were found buried under his toy soldiers, together with a copy of The Boys’ Book of Arson.
Fiona and three security guards went down to the street to fetch the Contrasts. Radius told them to make it look like the family were in some sort of trouble so as not to make the crowds suspicious.
‘Excuse me,’ Fiona said, ‘could you come with me, please? There seems to be a problem with your application forms.’
‘What?’ said the man as he and his wife, son and daughter followed Fiona through a small, inconspicuous door in the side of the building.
No-one else in the queue suspected anything was happening. The people behind the Contrasts were delighted because they’d moved up one space in the queue, and the people in front of the Contrasts didn’t care because they were already in front of them.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Fiona, once the Contrasts were safely inside the elevator. ‘We didn’t want to upset the crowd by letting them think you’d been chosen.’
‘But we haven’t,’ said Laura Contrast, the mother.
‘Well, I think you probably have,’ said Fiona.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said the daughter, Primrose Contrast. ‘We’ve haven’t done anything, like an audition or stuff.’
‘Plenty of time for all that,’ said Radius as the family walked into the boardroom.
He explained that the response to the invitation had been so massively overwhelming that if they went through all the procedures they’d planned for every applicant, by the time they’d finish, Radius himself would be over ninety-nine years old, instead of the thirty-seven he was now.
‘So we had to slim down the selection procedure,’ he said.
‘What, you mean, by picking us out of the crowd at random?’ said Primrose, who was obviously the sharpest one in the family.
‘Yes, but why us?’ said Stark Contrast, who was obviously the unsharpest one in the family.
‘Yeah, wow,’ said Jack Contrast, who was a bit sharper than his father, but a lot duller than his sister.
Laura Contrast said nothing, nor did the expression on her face give anything away that told Radius and Fiona exactly where she fitted into the family sharpness-wise.
Both Radius Limpfast and Fiona Hardly made mental notes and came to similar conclusions. The daughter would be the only one who might be a problem, but then problems always make reality TV shows more interesting. And a few extra problems could easily be created.
‘Yeah, right,’ said Primrose.
‘It’s true,’ said Radius, ‘except the selection process wasn’t exactly random.’
‘Mmm, thought so,’ said Primrose.
‘You, dear people,’ Radius said, ‘were chosen because you stood out from the crowd like stars. And stars are what you are going to be – superstars, even.’
Stark and Jack were gobsmacked, over the moon, excited and speechless, apart from a few wows and yeahs. Laura was pretty excited too, but said nothing.
But Primrose was suspicious. A voice inside her head kept telling her that it would all end in tears, but another voice said, Oh, what the hell, it sure beats school.
‘OK,’ said Radius, ‘let’s get out of here.’
‘What?’ said Stark. ‘We’re leaving already?’
‘Well, no,’ Fiona explained, ‘not for the moon. They haven’t finished building the ship yet. No, we’re going to the country so we can get to know you better and organise all the training and that sort of stuff.’
‘Moon?’ said Primrose. ‘What do you mean – moon?’
‘Oh, didn’t we tell you?’ said Radius. ‘You’re going to live on the moon.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Primrose. ‘You can’t live on the moon.’
‘We’re building a luxury home up there,’ Fiona said. ‘It’ll be amazing.’
‘Yeah,’ Radius continued, ‘and we’re building a state-of-the-art spaceship to take you there.’
‘No way,’ said Primrose.
‘No way,’ said Jack and his dad.
‘Um,’ Laura said because she was so overwhelmed she couldn’t think of anything else.
‘Wow!’ said Jack and his dad. ‘Wow.’
‘Exactly,’ said Radius. ‘So now we’re going to whisk you away to a luxury secr
et location and get you ready to meet the world’s press.’
‘What about Crumley?’ said Jack.
‘Crumbly?’ said Fiona. ‘What on Earth is crumbly?’
‘Our dog,’ Primrose said. ‘And he’s called Crumley, not crumbly. We can’t just go off and leave with no-one to look after him. Not that I’m going anyway.’
‘I think you’ll find you are,’ said Radius.
‘I think you’ll find I’m not,’ Primrose snapped back.
‘You signed the application form, didn’t you?’ said Fiona.
‘No, my parents did,’ said Primrose. ‘I wouldn’t sign it.’
‘Irrelevant,’ Radius said and smiled. ‘At your age, your parents decide what you’re going to do, not you. So we’ll send someone to get your dog.’
Before Primrose could protest, Fiona made a phone call, took the Contrasts’ house keys and someone went off to collect Crumley.
‘Can he come with us?’ said Jack.
‘Absolutely,’ said Radius. ‘We’re going to my house in the country. He’ll love it there. There’s woods and fields and rabbits, loads of them. He’ll have a brilliant time.’
‘I meant to the moon,’ said Jack.
Big lights flashed inside Radius Limpfast’s head. A perfect-looking family AND a dog – brilliant, he thought.
Fiona made a note to organise a dog spacesuit. There’s a documentary in that, she thought.
Radius Limpfast was right. Watch This Space was going to be the greatest TV series in history for years and years to come.
‘Dog in space, oh yeah, man, no problem,’ said Radius to Jack.
‘Um, yeah, but what about my job?’ said Stark. ‘I’ve only got this week off to do the audition. I’m supposed to be at work next Monday.’
Fiona wrote down the details of where Stark worked.
‘I mean, it’s a good job,’ said Stark. ‘Good pension fund and everything. I wouldn’t want to lose it.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Fiona reassured him. ‘I’ll sort it all out.’
‘Excellent,’ said Radius. ‘Let’s go.’
He led the family through a door at the end of the room and up some stairs on to the roof of the building where a helicopter was waiting.
‘And we need to talk to your grandparents too,’ Radius added, just before the helicopter engine started and no-one could hear what anyone was saying.
Everything had happened so quickly. Stark Contrast – thirty-nine years old, production director for the country’s biggest nut and bolt company with branches in every major city and a few in cities that were not major but seemed to use a lot of nuts and bolts – didn’t like ‘quickly’. He was the sort of person who liked to think about things before making a decision. Sometimes it drove his family mad.
‘Oh, come on, Dad,’ Primrose would say as her dad dithered at the counter of the ice-cream shop. ‘Strawberry or vanilla?’
‘Well, yes, but the raspberry looks nice,’ Stark might reply.
‘You hate raspberry,’ Laura would say. ‘You know you do.’
‘Oh yes, so I do, I forgot,’ Stark would say. ‘All right then, vanilla … no, hang on, strawberry … though, if I had vanilla, I could have sprinkles …’
Stark had a problem with full stops. He wasn’t sure they actually existed, even though he knew they really did. He just didn’t know where to put them.
‘Because sprinkles don’t really work with strawberry, do they? And, as I always say, sprinkles add excitement to ice-cream,’ he added.
This was something Stark Contrast had never said before, apart from the ‘as I always say’ bit, which he did all the time, even though it was never true. It was a phrase he’d inherited from his father, who had been the production director for the country’s largest screw and washer company. One thing Stark’s father did always say was, ‘You’d be amazed at just how interesting screws and washers actually are.’ Stark said the same thing about nuts and bolts and had actually invented a very special chrome molybdenum seven-and-a-half-sided nut that had been used in Patagonia’s first space shuttle.9
In the end, Laura usually got him one scoop each of strawberry and vanilla. Before her husband could point out that they might not go very well together, she would pay and they would all walk out of the shop. And because Stark had taken so long to make up his mind, everyone else’s ice-creams would’ve already melted and Laura would say to her husband, ‘OK, darling, wait out here with Crumley, I’ll go and get us all another ice-cream each.’
When it came to something big and important, it could take Stark months or even longer to make up his mind. It wasn’t that he was stupid.10 He just liked to weigh things up and consider all the options. The last time he’d bought a new family car, by the time he’d decided on one, it had become last year’s model, and had been replaced by a newer and better model. Laura said that if he changed his mind again, she would go crazy, so Stark bought the one he’d been looking at. Because it was last year’s model there was only one colour left, which made the decision a lot easier. And because it was last year’s model, Stark got a fantastic discount – and bought a huge new TV with the leftover money.
‘Bit of luck, that,’ he said.
Except it then took him months to decide the best TV to get, by which time their old TV only worked in black and white, and, as far as Primrose was concerned, this was so embarrassing she couldn’t invite any of her friends over.
So being whisked out of the queue to the top floor of a skyscraper and away to the country filled Stark’s head with all sorts of questions, queries and what-ifs. He hadn’t even been given time to go into work and quit his job or go down to the pub to say goodbye to all his mates.
‘But …’ he would begin – but whatever he would finish with, Fiona Hardly would say it had all been taken care of.
‘Yes,’ she reassured him, ‘we’ve even organised for someone to go to your house and take care of the goldfish in the garden pond.’11
There were no ‘buts’ that Stark could think of that Fiona didn’t have an answer for, but he was still worried.
‘Listen, Fiona, my dad worries about everything,’ Primrose said. ‘He was even worried when a really happy bluebird landed on his shoulder and gave him a priceless diamond ring.’
Which had actually happened several months earlier on a Tuesday.
And of course, Stark had worried big time about it and taken the ring to the police station and handed it in to an embarrassingly honest policeman who gave it back to him after the specified legal time had passed.
‘Then the ring obviously belongs to someone who doesn’t live round here,’ Stark had said.
‘No, sir,’ the embarrassingly honest policeman had told him. ‘I have checked everywhere that isn’t around here, even as far away as far and wide, and no-one has reported it missing. So the ring is one hundred per cent completely, legally and officially yours.’
When Stark still insisted it belonged to someone else, the embarrassingly honest policeman said, ‘Sir, it belongs to you.’
Stark had then sold the ring and given the money to a charity that cared for really happy bluebirds that were not happy anymore and had turned grey and had lost the will to handle jewellery.12
Being suddenly rushed away from every single one of his comfort zones had made Stark very stressed, or rather, it would’ve done if he hadn’t spent so long trying to decide if he was stressed or excited, so that by the time he came to a conclusion he had almost nearly sort of come to terms with the whole going-into-space thing and was beginning to think about becoming quite keen on the idea. Or not.
What Jack had been saying as the helicopter had taken off was, ‘We haven’t got any grandparents.’
‘They haven’t got any grandparents,’ Laura had been saying too, but they were both drowned out by the helicopter.
As they flew away across the city, the massive size of the crowd surrounding the TV station became apparent. Looking at the satellite photos later, it was calcula
ted that there were over half a million people queueing for auditions, with more still arriving and that was just at the main studios. This was repeated at the seven other LIMP-TV studios around the world.
‘Did you say something?’ Radius said when they’d finally landed and were walking up the lawn towards the mansion.
‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘I said we haven’t got any grandparents.’
‘It’s true,’ Laura said. ‘Stark and I are both orphans. Saint Prunella’s Home for Unwanted Orphans – that’s where we met.’
‘How touching,’ Radius’s mouth said while his brain thought, DAMN, DAMN, DAMN!!
But then, he said to himself, I haven’t got where I am today without turning every setback into an opportunity.
‘We’ll find you one,’ he said.
‘Find us one? One what?’ said Laura.
‘A parent,’ said Radius. ‘One will do.’
‘We’ve tried,’ said Laura. ‘We’ve searched through every record we could lay our hands on, but neither of us could find the slightest trace of any of our ancestors.’
‘Don’t worry, dear lady,’ said Radius. ‘We’ll get you one.’
‘But, they won’t be our real grandparent,’ said Primrose.
‘Yes, they will,’ Fiona Hardly said. ‘Sure, they won’t be your own personal one, but they’ll probably be someone else’s grandparent. I mean, most old people are.’
‘But we might not like them and they might not like us.’
‘Yes, they will,’ said Radius. ‘The granny will love you.’
What he meant was, he would pay some old actress a lot of money to pretend to love them even if she didn’t, and because she would be quite a good actress and everyone wants to believe it when someone tells them that they love them, the Contrasts would believe it.
It was all beginning to take shape.
Once again, Radius had turned the potential disaster of no grandparents into an added benefit. Instead of some old lady who could possibly leak all over the spaceship, talk to imaginary people in the wallpaper and, perish the thought, even have a mind of her own, he would have an insider who would do whatever he told her to and the family wouldn’t even suspect it. He decided one old person would be enough. There was no point in wasting money and besides, two old people together could cause all sorts of problems, and there was only one type of problem Radius Limpfast liked and that was a problem he was totally in control of.
Out to Launch Page 2