Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘Just going upstairs,’ he said, then went to his room, where he lay down on his bed. His sister Janet wasn’t an alien, he’d decided, but he couldn’t say anything to her in case she gave the game away. His pretend dad was probably behind it all. Robbie would just have to keep quiet and act casual until he could grow up and call in the army to demolish the entire house. His mum came in, and he sat up.

  ‘Everything all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine,’ said Robbie, feeling tense as he spoke.

  ‘Did you fall out with Scott?’

  Robbie told her about the frogspawn Scott had thrown, but not the rest. His mother sat beside him on the bed, put her arm round him, and immediately he wondered how he could ever have doubted she was human. Then as soon as she left, his fear returned.

  She was meant to be just like his real mother; that was the whole point. He could never know for sure that her warmth and kindness were genuine. He couldn’t be certain that he would never wake one night, in darkness except for an orange gleam across the ceiling from the streetlight outside, then leave his bed, go downstairs and enter the living room, there to see two hideous creatures with fangs and tentacles sitting on the settee calmly watching a secret alien channel on the telly. How could anyone ever prove otherwise? It was like God; either you believe or you don’t.

  He didn’t know if he truly believed it himself, but just thinking it amounted to a form of belief. And the alien theory explained so much: why he was sent up to bed at fixed hours; why his father couldn’t ride a bike (clearly an extraterrestrial foible); and why, when Robbie had got bored with the telly and wandered into his parents’ bedroom one Saturday afternoon some years ago and found them lying together partly clothed on their bed, there had been a swift awkward fumbling between the two of them as their human disguises were hastily restored.

  Surely there must be some way to verify his unique predicament. In every account of alien life forms, he recalled, some trait distinguishes the creatures from humanity, and becomes the weakness which ultimately proves their undoing. But Robbie’s parents weren’t unnaturally sensitive to light, or to diseases such as the common cold (once the downfall of an entire race of invaders). They didn’t retreat at night to a cupboard in their bedroom containing a sleek metallic pod (or did they?), nor devote mysterious evenings to the care and maintenance of an inscrutable electrical device. As far as he could tell, his parents were pretty much like anybody else’s; though it was this false normality that was most damning of all.

  Treading softly downstairs, Robbie wanted to go and think about it in his cupboard space simulator, but his mum was in the kitchen, standing at the sink and blocking the entrance to the musty capsule beneath. So Robbie went instead to the living room, where his flight-control panel was situated. Janet was at Guides and Dad wouldn’t be back from work for ages; Robbie had the precious equipment all to himself. Lifting the heavy lid of the radiogram, he saw the tuning knob and dial which were his link to the truth that lay beyond the stars. Twisting the control, watching the moving pointer on its journey past the planets, Robbie thought how powerful it was, the electrical illusion that could place a voice inside a living room, or an artificial mother inside a house. She must have heard him, because Mrs Coyle came through from the kitchen and saw him playing. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?’ she said, kneeling beside him, enfolding him in her arms. ‘What’ve you and Scott been up to?’

  He came straight out and asked her. ‘Are you an alien?’

  She laughed and kissed him as Robbie explained what had happened, then said, ‘I’ll have words with that wee devil, so I will, for putting daft ideas in your head.’ When she left him to carry on playing with the radiogram, Robbie knew his fears about his parents were groundless. Of course they weren’t from another planet: they were sensible grown-ups who knew the right way to do everything. But what about Robbie himself? He was a bewildered traveller in a strange world who couldn’t even stop peeing his bed. He was the alien: a space foundling dropped one night into the back garden by a smouldering comet, unable to relocate his cosmic home except by a process of random tuning which one day, if he was very lucky, might bring him to the comforting frequency he sought.

  6

  The time came for Mr and Mrs Coyle to go off jigging like idiots somewhere. It was a particularly unfortunate night on which to die by fire, Robbie thought, as he had a loose tooth and would miss out on the fairy-borne sixpence that was his due. His parents were already decked out for the evening when Moira arrived at the door and was shown into the living room, tall and blonde and with a fur-collared light-blue coat whose big buttons were more fascinating than her face.

  ‘I’m sure we’ll have a lovely time together,’ she was saying to Robbie’s parents. ‘You just go out and enjoy yourselves.’ Janet was hovering, awestruck, beside the newcomer, and Mr Coyle was hovering too, but Robbie remained silent. Moira took off her coat, handed it to Robbie’s father who went out to the hall to hang it up, and sat herself down beside her quiet young charge. ‘You don’t look very pleased to see me. Maybe this’ll cheer you up.’ A Milky Way emerged from Moira’s small handbag.

  ‘He might not be able to eat it,’ said Mrs Coyle, barely recognizable to Robbie in her make-up and jewellery. ‘He’s got a wobbly tooth.’

  ‘Have you got a Milky Way for me too?’ Janet asked.

  ‘Don’t be rude,’ her mother intervened, glancing at herself once more in the mirror and pouting in a mysterious way that must have had something to do with all that lipstick, Robbie reckoned.

  ‘Of course I’ve got some chocolate for you,’ said Moira, opening her handbag again. As she reached for the second bar, Robbie glimpsed other items that lay beside it – keys, a purse, a cigarette packet – all of which made him even more certain of imminent death at the hands of a woman who didn’t belong in the Coyle family home. ‘Is it all right for them to have these now, Anne?’

  ‘They’ve had their tea,’ Mrs Coyle nodded, then addressed the children. ‘I want you both to be very good. No fighting, and don’t be too late going to bed.’

  Mr Coyle had come back from the hall. ‘We’ll expect to hear a good report from Moira.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure it’ll be glowing,’ Moira insisted. ‘And I’ll bet these two children have got lots of things they want to tell me about.’

  Mrs Coyle had got to know Moira through a keep-fit class they both went to. Moira was younger, probably fitter too, and the fags in her handbag were a very bad omen. Robbie watched carefully for signs of female incompetence when Moira closed the front door on the departing parents then looked at the fashion designs Janet was keen to show her. ‘You drew all these yourself?’ Moira said with exaggerated incredulity. ‘I think you’ll be an artist when you grow up.’

  ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ Janet asked her, as Moira positioned herself between the two children on the settee.

  ‘Sky blue,’ said Moira. ‘It’s a healing colour.’

  Janet was nestling beside her like a pussy cat, but Robbie kept his distance. Things so far were certainly looking bleak.

  ‘What do you mean, healing?’ Janet asked.

  Moira went into an explanation of how every colour, fragrance or mineral was part of a cosmic scheme. ‘Opal is my birth stone – look at my ring.’

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Janet, Moira’s hand resting in hers.

  Robbie was having no more of this. He got up and announced he was getting something from his room. The two females barely acknowledged his departure, so wrapped up were they in their conversation about clothes and other nonsense, and when Robbie arrived at his room he wondered if he might be able to improvise some kind of fire extinguisher, perhaps using the shower hose. Robbie liked making things; he often created space capsules from bits of card, then with a carrier bag or handkerchief tied on as parachute he would throw them from the landing window, watching their descent onto the back garden. Americans always came down on the sea, but the Russians di
d it on land, because their spaceships were stronger. Robbie had found that toilet rolls were a superior material in spacecraft design, and Russian scientists had evidently made a similar breakthrough.

  There was a fire in a spaceship once. All the astronauts were locked inside, waiting on the launch pad, when a tiny spark erupted into a ball of flame. It was an American spaceship, filled with pure oxygen instead of ordinary air like the Russian ones, so the wee spark instantly exploded and the astronauts were fried. One of them was Ed White, who had made the first space walk – Robbie read all about it in a space magazine his mum bought him, and when he told her about it she took the magazine straight back off him. Weeing the bed was nothing, though, compared with getting burned alive. It made Robbie all the more certain that the only kind of spaceship he’d ever go up in would be a Soviet one, preferably with a fire extinguisher on board just in case.

  That still left the problem of daft Moira downstairs, who was probably already dropping matches on the carpet while getting all excited about Janet’s stupid drawings. What was so great about clothes – couldn’t Janet design a spacesuit? At least that’d be useful. Fancy outfits were only good for jigging about in like an idiot, the way Moira probably did every week. But how was he meant to make a fire extinguisher? He’d just have to be sure there was a full bucket of water handy for when the emergency arrived. Better sleep with one beside him. Or even drink it, then his bed would end up too wet to burn.

  His dad was brilliant at making things – it was part of his job. Mr Coyle often explained to Robbie the workings of machines, frequently with the aid of sketch drawings, and in this way Robbie had seen pumps, motors and circuits, all of which made about as much sense to him as the Russian alphabet. From time to time, though, his father would show him some piece of machinery – ‘junk’ as his mother called it – which would come home in Mr Coyle’s canvas tool bag and end up at the bottom of a cupboard, saved for a possible future use that never seemed to come.

  Those oily gear assemblies and grubby switch units had the smell of work about them, the odour of the real world of factories, men in overalls, sweat, progress. Every item looked to Robbie like part of a spacecraft, and his favourite was one he had been allowed to keep on a shelf in his room – a technological treasure. Made of iron, it had come off an old steam engine; a single component only six inches long, called a governor. Two metal balls were fixed on moveable struts, able to spin freely around the central shaft like horses in a merry-go-round. Twirl them, and the balls would rise outwards and upwards. If the steam engine ran too fast, these rising balls would close a valve, reducing the steam. If too slow, the balls would sink, opening the valve to let more steam through. The result was a happy medium: the little governor could keep an entire locomotive in check.

  Robbie took it from the shelf and lay on his bed, twirling it in his hand and watching the metal balls rise and fall. He could hear laughter downstairs, then quiet. Laughter again, and the baffled murmur of Janet’s excited voice, her actual words unintelligible. They were probably talking about Robbie. More laughter, followed by further silence. There was a mechanism spinning the females into hysterics, shutting off the pressure, then letting it build again; though when the quiet continued for a longer time, Robbie wondered if the two of them had run out of steam altogether. He put the precious governor back where it belonged and went downstairs. Opening the living-room door, he saw Moira and Janet squatting cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, in some kind of trance.

  Moira’s eyes blinked open. ‘Come in and I’ll teach you the lotus position.’

  This sounded like the most absolute invitation to death by idiocy that he’d ever heard. ‘What’s the locust position?’

  ‘Lotus,’ said Janet, staring at him with the superiority of a hostile extraterrestrial intelligence. ‘It’s a kind of flower that grows in Egypt.’

  ‘It’s what we’re doing now,’ said Moira, whose platform-soled shoes had been removed and placed neatly beside the settee. Moira was wearing a black miniskirt, and through the thick but taut material of her matching tights, the lotus position offered an unequivocal view of sky-blue knickers whose healing properties Robbie preferred to do without. He sat himself at right angles to both Moira and Janet so that he wouldn’t have to stare either of them in the face or anywhere else.

  ‘That’s right, just sit cross-legged in the normal way,’ Moira instructed. ‘We’ll start with the half lotus. Here, like this.’ She was bending her leg like it was made of Plasticine; Robbie tried and fell over. Now he knew what had been causing all the laughter, a renewed portion of which Janet directed at him with evident satisfaction.

  ‘It’s not hard,’ said Moira, ‘but it takes a wee bit getting used to. Look, I can do a full lotus.’ The children watched in silence as Moira adopted the posture, placing her upturned hands on her knees and curling her fingers in a gesture of transcendental peace.

  ‘Fab!’ Janet exclaimed with an admiring sigh. Moira’s closed eyes allowed Robbie to examine the babysitter’s face in detail, making him even more convinced he and Janet were in the incapable hands of a maniac.

  ‘I can do other positions,’ Moira said brightly, her eyes popping open again.

  ‘Does my mum know them?’ Janet asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Moira. ‘I could teach her. I’m sure I could show your dad a few as well.’

  Janet shook her head. ‘I don’t think he’d like it. Please don’t tell him about any of this.’

  ‘All right,’ Moira said with a laugh. ‘If you want, it can be our secret.’

  Robbie felt his stomach tighten. What had seemed merely pointless now became sinister – why should any of this be kept hidden? And was he going to be part of the conspiracy? ‘I don’t want to learn any more positions,’ he said, standing up. ‘The load-us’ll do me.’

  ‘Teach me more!’ Janet implored, and so the yoga lesson continued while Robbie turned up the volume on the television and went through the three channels to see if anything was on. The choice was between Cilia Black, cowboys, and an announcer. The first two were hardly better than Moira’s meditating, so he picked the BBC2 announcer, hoping something good would come of it. ‘And now Horizon, investigating a strange new type of star.’

  ‘Great!’ said Robbie, turning up the volume knob until the opening music set the television rattling.

  ‘Not so loud!’ Janet shouted.

  ‘Quiet!’ Robbie snapped back at her.

  ‘Right, you two,’ Moira interrupted firmly. ‘Robbie, turn it down to where it was. And Janet, come over here away from the telly so we can do this quietly.’

  Robbie stared at the screen while the other two took up new locations. Moira was still visible in the corner of his eye, but Janet was thankfully out of sight. The television showed the white dome of a mountaintop observatory.

  ‘For decades, astronomers thought they knew all about how stars work. But new discoveries have cast this into doubt. The universe could be much stranger than we think.’

  The shot changed to show a man with thick-rimmed glasses and enormous sideburns. ‘Stars go through life, just like people do, and what we’re really interested in is what happens when stars die. Some fade away slowly, but others go with a bang. And they blow inwards as well as outwards. That huge implosion could give rise to something called a black hole, and we think we know exactly where we can find one in the sky.’

  Janet and Moira were doing a new position now. Reluctantly but unavoidably, Robbie felt his gaze swing away from the television towards Moira, who was on all fours and had bent herself into an unnatural angle with her miniskirted rump held high. He watched her for a few moments, wondering what satisfaction or benefit there could possibly be in such absurd contortions, the like of which he’d only previously seen done by a Chinese girl in a sparkly leotard in Billy Smart’s circus on telly at Christmas. Moira’s backside was trembling with concentration, and Robbie looked at the screen again so as not to miss what the side-burned
scientist was saying.

  ‘A black hole is a state of matter that is infinitely dense and infinitely small – a singularity – lying hidden from view inside a spherical region termed the event horizon. You could fly right through the event horizon without noticing anything at all, but once you’re inside there’s no turning back – you get sucked straight into the central singularity.’

  Another position now, just as daft as the last. Janet was taking it all in, following Moira’s every move as though the stupid woman were a teacher in school. Robbie listened to the voice-over commentary on the television while his puzzled gaze lingered again on Moira’s shifting form.

  ‘To unsuspecting astronauts, a black hole could prove a deadly trap. According to the predictions of Einstein’s theory of relativity, space travellers would be unable to detect what they were approaching, but colleagues back on Earth would get some inkling. Messages from the spacecraft would appear to be in slow motion – an effect called gravitational red-shift. The closer the spaceship gets to the event horizon, the slower everything inside will appear to observers on Earth. But before mission control can send any warning to the crew, the slow motion comes to a total halt. On their screens, the controllers see the crew frozen in time, completely immobile. This marks the moment when they’ve crossed the event horizon. Already, by the time the signals reach Earth, the spaceship and crew have been destroyed, every last drop of space and time squeezed out of them.’

  Now Moira was lying on her back, her conical breasts jutting into the air like a pair of command modules orbiting in tandem above a mysterious world. Her legs were bending and stretching in an alternating rhythm; she was a machine performing a pointless ritual. Maybe she’d left something switched on in the kitchen, or perhaps the cigarettes in her handbag were on fire and the whole house was about to explode; she didn’t care. She was in slow motion, and there was nothing Robbie would be able to do to save them all from tumbling into the lethal singularity, other than make sure he kept plenty of water handy when he went to bed. Maybe a wet towel too, to douse the flames.