by Nina Allan
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Magic spells are chains of words, nothing more. Words that help you imagine a different future and create a shape for it, that help you see what it might be like, and so make it happen. Sometimes when I read about our struggle to land people on Mars, that’s how the words seem to me—like an ancient incantation, and as deeply unfathomable, a set of mystical words, placed carefully in order and then repeated as a magical chant to bring about a future we have yet to imagine.
The Edison Star Heathrow has sixteen floors, 382 bedrooms, twenty private penthouse apartments, and one presidential suite. It is situated on the northern stretch of the airport perimeter road, and operates its own private shuttle bus to ferry patrons to and from the five terminals. We have a press lounge and a flight lounge and conference facilities. As head of housekeeping, it’s my job to make sure things run smoothly behind the scenes. My job is hard work but I enjoy it, by and large. Some days are more demanding than others.
It was all just rumours at first, but last week it became official: Zhanna Sorokina and Vinnie Cameron will be spending a night here at the hotel before flying out to join the rest of the Mars crew in China. Suddenly the Edison Star is the place to be. The public bar and the flight lounge have been jammed ever since the announcement. There’s still a fortnight to go before the astronauts arrive, but that doesn’t seem to be putting the punters off one little bit. It’s cool to be seen here, apparently. Which is ironic, given that we weren’t even the mission sponsors’ first choice of hotel. That was the Marriott International, only it turned out that Vinnie Cameron had his eighteenth here, or his graduation party or something. He wanted to stay at the Edison Star and so that’s what’s happening.
I guess they thought it would be churlish to deny him, considering.
The first result of the change of plan is that the Marriott hates us. The second is that Benny’s on meltdown twenty-four hours a day now instead of the usual sixteen. I can’t imagine how he’s going to cope when the big guns arrive.
“Perhaps he’ll just explode,” says Ludmilla Khan—she’s the third-floor super. A dreamy expression comes into her eyes, as if she’s picturing the scene in her mind and kind of liking it. “Spontaneous combustion, like you see in the movies. The rest of us running around him flapping like headless chickens.”
She makes me laugh, Ludmilla, which is a good thing. I think there’s every chance that Benny would drive me over the edge if I didn’t see the funny side. Benny’s a great boss, don’t get me wrong—we get on fine most of the time. I just wish he wasn’t getting so uptight about the bloody astronauts. I mean, Jesus, it’s only the one night and then they’ll be gone. Fourteen hours of media frenzy and then we’re last week’s news.
Probably I’m being mean, though. This is Benny’s big moment, after all, when he gets to show off the Edison Star to the world at large and himself as the big guvnor man at the heart of it all. There’s something a bit sad about Benny underneath all his bullshit. I don’t mean sad in the sense of pathetic, I mean genuinely sad, sorrowful and bemused at the same time, as if he’d been kidnapped out of one life and set to work in another. And it’s not as if he doesn’t work hard. He’s beginning to show his age now, just a little. He’s balding on top, and his suits are getting too tight for him. He wears beautiful suits, Benny does, well cut and modern and just that teeny bit more expensive than he can really afford. Benny might be manager of the Edison Star, but you can tell by his suits that he still wishes he owned it. You can see it every time he steps out of the lift and into the lobby. That swagger, and then the small hesitation.
It’s as if he’s remembering where he came from, how far there is to fall, and feeling scared.
My mother, Moolie, claims to know Benny Conway from way back, from the time he first came to this country as a student, jetting in from Freetown or Yaoundé, one of those African cities to the west that still make it reasonably easy for ordinary civilians to fly in and out.
“He had a cardboard suitcase and an army surplus rucksack. He was wearing fake Levis and a gold watch. He sold the watch for rent money the first day he was here. He still called himself Benyamin then, Benyamin Kwame.”
When I ask Moolie how she can know this, she clams up, or changes her story, or claims she doesn’t know who I’m talking about. I don’t think it’s even Benny she’s remembering, it can’t be, or not the Benny Conway who’s my boss, anyway. She’s confusing the names, probably, getting one memory mixed up with another the way she so often does now.
Either that, or she just made it up.
Benny slips me extra money sometimes. I know I shouldn’t accept it but I do, mainly because he insists the money is for Moolie, to help me look after her. “It must be tough, having to care for her all by yourself,” Benny says, just before he forces the folded-over banknotes on me, scrunching them into my hands like so many dead leaves. How he came to know about Moolie in the first place, I have no idea. There’s a chance Ludmilla Khan told him, I suppose, or Antony Ghosh, the guy who oversees our linen contract. Both of them are friends of mine, but you can imagine the temptation to gossip in a fish tank like this. I take the money because I tell myself I’ve earned it and I can’t afford not to, also because maybe Benny really is just sorry for Moolie and this is his way of saying so, even though I’ve told him enough times that it’s not so much a question of looking after Moolie as looking out for her. Making sure she remembers to eat, stuff like that. It’s the ordinary stuff she forgets, you see. During her bad patches her short-term memory becomes so unreliable that every day for her is like the beginning of a whole new lifetime.
It’s not always like that, though. She can look after herself perfectly well most of the time, she just gets a bit vague. She can’t do her work anymore, but she’s still interested in the world, still fascinated by what makes things tick, by aeroplanes and rivers and metals, the rudiments of creation. Those are her words, not mine—the rudiments of creation. Moolie used to be a physicist. Now she sounds more like one of those telly evangelists you see on the late-night news channels, all mystery and prophecy and lights in the sky. But when it comes down to it, she’s interested in the same things she’s always been interested in—who we are and how we came here and where the bloody hell we think we’re going.
If you didn’t know her how she was before, you wouldn’t necessarily spot that there’s anything wrong with her.
It’s all still inside, I know it—everything she was, everything she knows, still packed tight inside her head like old newspapers packed into the eaves of an old house. Yellowing and crumpled, yes, but still telling their stories.
For me, Moolie is a wonder and a nightmare, a sadness deep down in my gut like a splinter of bone. Always there, and always worrying away at
the living flesh of me.
The doctors say there’s nothing to stop her living out a normal lifespan but I think that’s bollocks and I think the doctors know it’s bollocks, too. Moolie was fifty-two last birthday, but sometimes she’s bent double with back pain, as bad as a woman of eighty or even worse. Other times she burbles away to herself in a made-up language like a child of four. Her whole system is riddled with wrongness of every kind. The doctors won’t admit it, though, because they’re being paid not to. No one wants to be liable for the compensation. That’s why you won’t find any mention of the Galaxy air crash in Moolie’s medical file, or the sixteen lethal substances that were eventually identified at the crash site, substances that Moolie was hired to isolate and analyse.
There were theories about a dirty bomb, and it’s pretty much common knowledge now that some of the shit that came out of that plane was radioactive. But ten years on and the report Moolie helped to compile still hasn’t been made public. The authorities say the material is too sensitive, and they’re not kidding.
The medics have given Moolie a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. If you believe that then I guess, well, you know how it goes.
When Moolie dies I’ll be free. Free to move away from the airport, free to look for another job, free to buy a one-way ticket to Australia and make a new life there. I lie awake at night sometimes, scheming and dreaming about these things, but in the morning I wonder how I’ll manage. Moolie is like a part of me, and I can’t imagine how the world will feel without her in it.
When she goes, all her stories will go with her, the ones she makes up as well as the ones that happen to be true.
Once she’s gone, I’ll never discover which were which.
* * *
I think about the astronauts a lot. Not the way Benny would like me to be thinking of them, I bet—with Benny it’s all about scanning the rooms for bugging devices, checking the kitchens for deadly pathogens, making sure the PA system in the press lounge hasn’t blown a gasket.
I know these things are important. If we cock up it won’t just be Benny who looks an idiot, and the last thing I want to see is some kid in the catering department getting fired because someone forgot to tell them to stock up on mixers. I check and recheck, not for Benny’s sake but because it’s my job, and my job is something I care about and want to do well. But every now and then I catch myself thinking how crazy it is really, all this preparation, all this fussing over things that don’t actually matter a damn. When you think about what Zhanna Sorokina and Vinnie Cameron and the rest of them are actually doing, everything else seems juvenile and pointless by comparison.
They’re going to Mars, and they won’t be coming back.
I wonder if they know they’re going to die. I mean, I know they know, but I wonder if they think about it, that every one of them is bound to cop it much sooner than they would have done otherwise, and probably in a horrible way. It’s inevitable, isn’t it, when you consider the facts? There’s no natural air on Mars, no water, no nothing. There’s a good chance the whole crew will wind up dead before they can even set up a base there, or a sealed habitat, or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing when they arrive.
How do they cope with knowing that? How does anyone begin to come to terms with something that frightening? I can’t imagine it myself, and I have to admit I don’t try all that hard, because even the thought of it scares me, let alone the reality.
In interviews and articles I’ve read online, they say that learning to cope with high-risk situations is all part of the training, that anyone with insufficient mental stamina is weeded out of the selection process more or less straightaway. I’m still not sure I understand, though. Why would anyone volunteer for something like that in the first place?
Ludmilla Khan is especially upset because one of the women astronauts is a mother. We all know her name—Jocelyn Tooker. Her kids are five and three. They’ve gone to live in Atlanta, with their grandmother.
“How can she bear it? Knowing she’ll never see them grow up, that she’ll never hear their voices again, even?”
“I don’t know,” I say to Ludmilla. “Perhaps she thinks they’ll be proud of her.” The way Ludmilla talks, you’d think Jocelyn Tooker had murdered both her kids and chucked their bodies down a well. One of the male crew, Ken Toh, has an eight-year-old son, but people don’t go on about that nearly as much as they do about Jocelyn Tooker.
Ludmilla has two little ones of her own, Leila and Mehmet, so I can see how Jocelyn Tooker’s decision might weigh on her mind. I’ve thought about it over and over, and the only thing I can come up with that makes sense of it is that the crew of the Second Wind look upon going to Mars not as a one-way ticket to an early exit but as a way of cheating death altogether. I mean, everyone aboard that spacecraft is going to live forever—in our hearts and minds, in our books and stories and films, and in thousands of hours of news clips and documentaries. Even if they crash and burn like the crew of the New Dawn, we’ll never stop talking about them, and speculating, and remembering.
If you look at it that way it’s a straight trade: fifty years or so of real life now against immortality. I can see why some people might think that’s not such a bad deal.
In a way, the men and women who go into space are our superheroes. Ten years from now, some journalist will be asking Jocelyn Tooker’s children what it feels like to have a superhero for a mum.
Who is Ludmilla Khan, or me or anyone else for that matter, to try and guess at how those kids will judge her, or what they’ll say?
* * *
My name is Emily Clarah Starr. The Starr is just a coincidence. Clarah is for my grandmother, whom I can’t remember because she died when I was three There’s a photo of us, Moolie and Clarah and me, out by the King George VI Reservoir before it was officially declared to be toxic and cordoned off. Moolie has me in one of those front-loading carry-pouch things—all you can see is the top of my head, a bunch of black curls. Grandma Clarah is wearing a hideous knitted blue bobble hat and a silver puffer jacket, even though it’s May in the photo and the sun is shining, reflecting itself off the oily water like electric light.
“Your grandma never got used to the climate,” Moolie told me once. “She always felt cold here, even though she came over with her aunts from Abuja when she was six.”
Moolie in the photograph is tall and thin, elegant and rather aloof, unrecognisable. She seems full of an inner purpose I cannot divine. She says it was my father who chose the name Emily for me. I don’t know if I should believe that story or not.
I have no idea who my father is, and Moolie’s account varies. I went through a phase of pestering her about him when I was younger, but she refused to tell me anything, or at least not anything I could rely on.
“Why should it matter who your dad is? What did fathers ever do for the world in any case, except saddle unsuspecting women with unwanted children?”
“Unwanted?” I gaped at her. The idea that Moolie might not have wanted me had never occurred to me. I simply was, an established fact, quod erat demonstrandum. But that’s the ego for you—an internalized life support system, and pretty much indestructible.
“Oh, Emily, of course I wanted you. You were a bit of a shock to the system, though, that’s all I’m saying.”
“What did Dad say, when he found out?”
“Don’t call him Dad, he doesn’t deserve it.”
“My father, then. And if the guy was such an arsehole why did you shag him?”
I was about fourteen then, and going through a stroppy phase. When rudeness didn’t get me anywhere I started hitting Moolie with psychological claptrap instead—all this stuff about how I had a right to know, that it would damage my self-esteem if she kept it from me. You know, the kind of rubbish you read in magazines. The situation stood at stalemate for a while, then finally we had this massive row, a real window-shaker. It went on for hours. When we’d been round in circles one time too many, Moolie burst int
o tears and said the reason she wouldn’t tell me anything was that she didn’t know. She’d had several boyfriends back then. Any one of them could be my father.
“We can do a ring-round, if you want,” she said, still sniffing. “Drop a few bombshells? Destroy a few households? What do you reckon?”
What I reckoned was that it was time I shut up. For the first time in my life I was feeling another person’s pain like it was my own. For the first time ever I was seeing Moolie as a person in her own right, someone whose life could have taken a whole different path if little Emily hadn’t come along to mess things up.
It was a shock, to put it mildly. But it was good, too, in the long run, because it brought Moolie and me together and made us real friends. I stopped caring about who my dad was, for a long time. Then when Moolie started getting ill I didn’t want to make things worse by dragging it all up again.
Then Moolie said what she said about the book, and everything changed.
* * *
The book is called The Art of Space Travel by Victoria Segal. I remember the book from when I was a little kid because of the star maps. The maps fold out from between the normal pages in long, concertina-like strips. They’re printed in colour—dark blue and yellow—on smooth, glossy paper that squeaks slightly when you run your finger across it. I always thought the star maps were beautiful. Moolie would let me look at the book if I asked but she would never leave me alone with it—I suppose she thought I might accidentally damage it.
As I grew older I had a go at reading it every once in a while, but I always gave up after a chapter or two because it was way over my head, all the stuff about quasars and dark matter and the true speed of light. I would soldier on for a couple of pages, then realise I hadn’t actually understood a word of it.
As well as the star maps, the book is filled with beautiful and intricate diagrams, complicated line drawings of planetary orbits, and the trajectories of imaginary spacecraft, rockets that never existed but one day might. I always loved the thought of that, that they one day might.