We Used to Be Kings

by Stewart Foster

  As the days passed the Russians were on TV less and less, until for the last three days of the week they weren’t on at all. The only picture of them we saw was one that flashed on the screen for five seconds at the end of the news. But me and Jack couldn’t even watch that in peace, because every afternoon before tea Auntie Jean walked along the path and came into our house. Ever since Dad had gone to the moon it was like she had moved in. On the first day of the summer holidays she was round our house all day. Me and Jack were in the sitting room. He was building a rocket out of Lego, I was gluing stickers to the wings of my planes. Auntie Jean was talking to Mum in the kitchen.

  ‘How long has it been now?’

  ‘Nearly two weeks.’

  ‘And they haven’t been out since he’s been gone?’

  ‘No . . . Only to school . . . All they do is watch TV . . .’

  I put my stickers down and listened more closely.

  ‘Their teachers are worried,’ she said. ‘Mr Taylor says Tom’s not paying attention.’

  ‘It’s only to be expected.’

  ‘I know, but they’ve even stopped talking to their friends . . . I wish—’

  I heard a crash and looked over at Jack.

  ‘I pressed too hard.’ He pointed at his rocket that was now scattered into a hundred pieces on the floor. ‘I’ll make—’

  I told him to shush. I listened for Mum and Auntie Jean, but it had gone quiet in the kitchen.

  ‘What was that noise?’ asked Mum.

  I looked up. She was stood with Auntie Jean in the doorway. Jack pointed at the bricks.

  ‘My rocket crashed.’

  Mum and Auntie Jean smiled. I shuffled along the settee and they sat down beside me. Mum’s face was red and blotchy. Her hair was tied back behind her head and her eyes were sparkling like she had been crying. Mum had been looking more and more tired each day. It was like she hadn’t slept since Dad had gone.

  ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘are you OK?’

  She nodded quickly.

  ‘It’s only hay fever,’ she said. She put her hand on my shoulder and nodded at my stickers and planes. ‘You should finish those before the glue dries up.’

  I dabbed the glue on a sticker and tried to stick it on a Spitfire but the glue stuck to my fingers and the wings tilted over. I tried again but there was more glue on the table than there was on my planes. I couldn’t stop thinking about Mum and what she’d said in the kitchen and I wondered if she was wishing for the same thing as me, because after T plus fourteen days, twenty-two hours, fifteen minutes, twenty-three seconds and counting, I was wishing that Dad would come home.

  We sat on the settee all afternoon with the TV flickering silently in the corner until Mum turned it up when the news came on. I looked at the screen. People wearing scarves and balaclavas ran through the streets in the rain. They stuffed rags in the tops of bottles, lit them with matches and threw them at the soldiers. The soldiers ran for cover, hid behind barricades as the bottles hit the road and burst into flames.

  Out the corner of my eye I saw Auntie Jean slide her hand along the settee and put it on top of Mum’s.

  ‘It’s OK, Miriam,’ she whispered. ‘At least he’s safe now.’

  I wondered what Auntie Jean meant, I wondered what she knew, but I didn’t have time to ask as Jack was nudging me in my side because the Russians were back on.

  I slid off the settee and knelt closer to the TV but all I saw was Georgi and Victor frozen in mid-air and Dad dead-still with his finger poised over a button. The newsreader said that no one had been in space for as long as the cosmonauts but he didn’t know when they would be coming back down. I waited for him to say more. I waited for more pictures, but after less than ten seconds the Russians had gone. It was like they didn’t matter any more. Everyone had been excited when they took off but now they were floating around in space nobody seemed to care. I looked at Mum.

  ‘I want to see Dad,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He’s been up there for days and all I’ve seen is the back of his head.’

  She held my hand.

  ‘Maybe he’ll be back on tomorrow,’ she said.

  But I was fed up with waiting, I was fed up with watching pictures of where Dad used to be, I wanted to see where he was now.

  I stood up in the middle of the room. Auntie Jean leant round me. I turned and saw the weatherman on the TV.

  ‘It’s just the weather,’ I shouted. ‘It’s not important, it’s just hot and getting hotter. Go and buy your own telly. We want to watch the Russians. The Russians are important. Our dad is important.’

  Auntie Jean put her hand over her mouth. Mum stared like she couldn’t believe the words were coming out of me.

  ‘T plus fourteen days, twenty-three hours, twenty-three minutes, forty-five seconds and counting . . . That’s how long he’s been gone, that’s how long we’ve been here watching.’ My chest beat up and down, I tried to breathe deeper but the more I tried to speak, the more my words wouldn’t come out. My throat started to throb, my eyes started to ache.

  Mum stood up.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘Everything will be OK.’ She held out her arm, pulled me towards her and hugged me tight. I closed my eyes and started to cry. I felt her hand smooth my head. I thought about what I’d just said and felt bad inside. It wasn’t her fault the Russians weren’t on TV. It wasn’t her fault everyone had forgotten them.

  I heard a sniff. Auntie Jean wiped her nose with a tissue.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all right, Tom,’ she said. She stood up and went out the door. I waited for Mum to tell me off but she just held me tighter. Auntie Jean shuffled along the path with her head pointed at the ground. I wished I hadn’t shouted at her; she looked so old and lonely now she was walking on her own.

  I didn’t think I’d upset Auntie Jean very much though because she was around our house again the next day talking to Mum in the kitchen. Me and Jack were in the sitting room, but we didn’t have to wait all day for the Russians to come on the news, because in the middle of the afternoon they were back on our TV. Viktor and Georgi were still floating, Dad was still flicking switches, but then the picture changed to a man with a beard wearing a baggy jumper.

  He was a tramp.

  He was a scientist.

  He pointed at two circles on a blackboard and said one was the moon and one was the Earth. Then he drew an X in between them. He said the cosmonauts were in trouble, that he didn’t really know what was happening because the Russians had stopped communication.

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Jack.

  ‘It means they’re not talking.’

  ‘To each other?’

  ‘To us.’

  We slid off the sofa and knelt in front of the TV.

  The scientist pointed at the X, then drew a dotted line around the moon. He said the Russians would have to burn their engines to get out of the moon’s orbit. He drew another dotted line from the rocket to the Earth. He said the next seventy-two hours were crucial, that he didn’t know where or when the Russians would come back.

  The picture switched back to the cosmonauts: Georgi opened his mouth and chased after food. Then the same picture played again. The scientist said it was a library picture, that even though the Russians still had communication with the cosmonauts they wouldn’t let us see.

  I went hot. Sweat trickled down my neck. I turned away from the TV and walked over to the window. Jack followed me.

  The sun had gone down and our hill was a shadow. I looked up and wished I could see the Russians in the red sky. I wished Dad had taken a radio, I wished he’d turned around, I wished he’d written more in his letters. The first few days of him being in space had been exciting: watching him take off, watching Georgi eat, watching Viktor float. But now everything seemed to be going wrong.

  I turned away from the window and went out into the kitchen. Mum was sat at the table with her head in her hands.

&n
bsp; ‘Dad’s in trouble,’ I said.

  Mum jumped.

  ‘Have you . . .’ She looked at Auntie Jean, then back at me. ‘Have you been listening to us?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The scientist told us on the TV.’

  I pulled the calendar off the fridge and gave it to Jack.

  Mum stood up.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to work out when and where Dad is going to land.’

  Me and Jack ran upstairs. I got my globe out of the cupboard and put it on the floor between our beds.

  Jack slid his finger back to 6 June.

  He walked his fingers along the days of the week. On every day Dad had drawn a question mark and at the bottom he’d scribbled,

  Jack looked up and asked what the question marks meant. I told him it was all the days Dad thought he might be coming home but he wasn’t absolutely sure.

  I turned the globe and followed the equator with my finger as it went over the Pacific, through Colombia and Brazil. Jack pointed.

  ‘There!’ he said. ‘Dad could land there.’

  I stopped the globe.

  ‘The Democratic Republic of Congo?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘No . . . I don’t think Dad would land there.’

  ‘Because it’s too far away?’

  ‘Because it’s in the middle of the jungle.’

  He shrugged, moved his finger further up the globe and landed on America. I shook my head and told him the Russians wouldn’t land there either because they weren’t friends with the Americans.

  But the Russians were our friends.

  The ones in space were.

  I turned the globe and we went from America, through Canada, jumped over the Atlantic Ocean, bounced on England, then on to France, Germany and Russia. There were so many oceans, there were so many countries, so many wide-open spaces where Dad could land. I held my hand in the air and imagined I was in Dad’s rocket coming back to Earth.

  Eeeeeeeeeeeoonnnnnnnnnggggggg!

  It didn’t have propellers!

  Oh.

  I brought my hand closer, waited for the world to slow down and tried to find England again. But as I zoomed in, I thought that even if Dad had said he was going to land on our hill, if he was just one second late he’d end up in France.

  The world stopped. I looked at Jack. I looked at Dad’s writing and his question mark. If he couldn’t work out when and where he was going to land, what chance did we have?

  Mum was gone when we woke up the next morning. She’d left a note on the table for me and Jack to go to the shop and get some milk. We both wanted to stay in just in case the Russians came on TV, but Auntie Jean said that we should go out and that Mum had said we could spend the change.

  We got our bikes out of the shed and cycled down the hill to the shop. Jack guarded our bikes while I went inside. Mr Marsh was standing behind the counter whistling while he stacked cigarette packets on a shelf. I put a bottle of Coke and a bottle of milk on the counter. He turned around and smiled when I gave him the money.

  ‘How’s your dad?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The Russians have stopped talking.’

  ‘The Russians?’ he said.

  I bit on my lip to stop any more words from getting out.

  Mr Marsh shook his head, reached over the counter and gave me the change. I picked up the bottle and walked towards the door. I looked back, saw Mr Marsh still watching me and wondered how he knew that Dad had gone away.

  When I got outside Jack was sitting down on the step behind the newspaper stand. I unscrewed the top of the Coke and we took turns swigging from the bottle. I laughed when the fizz spurted out of his mouth and went on his T-shirt; he laughed when I tipped too far and the drink went up my nose.

  I sat down beside him. We kicked the tyres on our bikes, talked about what we would buy with the rest of the money, what we would buy if we had a pound, what we would buy if we had a hundred. I said I’d buy a Scalextric with so much track that it would go around our house twice. Jack said he’d get another Spitfire. I said he would have enough for ten.

  ‘I mean a real one,’ he said.

  ‘You can’t afford that.’

  ‘Too late,’ he said. ‘I’ve already got one.’

  He put the bottle on the ground, stood up and put his arms out wide. I started to laugh as he flew across the squares on the pavement. I stood up and he buzzed around in front of me, humming the drone of the engine and cracking the sound of machine-gun fire.

  D-d-d-d-d-d-la. D-d-d-d-d-d-la.

  !

  D-d-d-d-d-d-la. D-d-d-d-d-d-la.

  OK. OK.

  I held out my arms and we flew around together in circles outside the shop, then crossed the road into the chip shop, buzzed all the people in the queue and came back out again.

  We soared towards the sun.

  We dived towards the ground.

  Jack got tired.

  I got thirsty.

  We shut down our propellers and glided back to the shop. We stopped and looked at each other and suddenly felt bad, because for ten minutes, while we were talking and flying, we had forgotten all about the Russians in the sky.

  We finished our drinks in silence, then Jack said he wanted some gobstoppers. I gave him the change and told him he could get me some chewing gum at the same time.

  I sat in the sun and watched as the newspaper delivery van arrived. A bald man got out, threw a bundle of papers onto the pavement in front of me. Mr Marsh came out of the shop with a knife. He bent down and cut the string around the bundle. I watched as he unfolded a piece of paper and trapped it underneath the wire on the newspaper stand. He whistled as he picked up the papers and went back inside.

  Jack came back out with his cheeks stuffed fat like a hamster. He handed me a packet with three gobstoppers in it.

  ‘I wanted gum,’ I said.

  He juggled his sweets with his tongue.

  ‘Ih was all ey ad.’ He laughed.

  A purple gobstopper popped out of his mouth and pinged on the pavement. He chased after it as it rolled over the squares on the pavement until he stopped it with his foot.

  ‘You can’t eat it,’ I said.

  He didn’t reply. He just stood staring at the newspaper stand.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  He spat his gobstoppers out, lifted up his T-shirt and wiped his dribble from his chin.

  ‘Jack, what does it say?’

  He shook his head slowly.

  ‘The Russians are suff . . . The Russians are . . .’

  I got up, stood by his side and read the words in my head. But no matter how many times I read them they wouldn’t sink in.

  ‘What’s it say?’ Jack tugged my arm. ‘What’s it say? Beep.’

  ‘The Russians are suffocating, Jack. That’s what it says.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘It means they can’t breathe.’

  ‘Like my asthma?’

  ‘No. It means their oxygen is running out.’

  ‘And that’s not the same?’

  ‘No.’

  Jack knelt down in front of the board, as if seeing the words up close would help him understand.

  ‘Jack,’ I said, ‘I think we need to get back.’

  He stood up and looked at the sky.

  ‘Why can’t they breathe?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They might have a hole in their rocket.’

  ‘Can’t they glue it back together?’

  ‘I think they’re trying.’ I looked at the sky with him.

  ‘Can you see them?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The sun’s too bright.’

  I bent down, helped him lift his bike, then lifted mine and together we pushed them home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE ROAD STRETCHES out in front of us, runs between hedges, falls down hills, winds through valleys and climbs up the other side. We hang our
head out the window and the wind rushes by like trains. We look ahead to the horizon, wait for the sky to turn blue and wish that after two hours in Harriet’s van we could finally smell the sea. We look across at her. She smiles then jigs up and down in her seat.

  ‘You must know this one,’ she says.

  ?

  ?

  The sound of a piano comes out of the radio.

  ‘You’ll get it in a minute.’ Harriet turns the music up.

  We listen to a man sing a song about killing another man with a gun. We tap our fingers on our bag.

  Harriet looks across at us.

  ‘Have you got it?’

  We push out our bottom lip.

  And we shake our head.

  Harriet laughs.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she says. ‘Where have you been? It’s been number one all summer.’

  Well . . .

  Don’t!

  She taps the steering wheel, starts to sway from side to side. Then she starts to sing—

  Like a cat.

  !

  We rest our head against the window. This is the tenth song we have listened to. This is the tenth song she has tried to sing. We wish we knew the words, we wish we knew the tunes, but the only music we have listened to since Dad left has been drowned out by screams and drums.

  We look across at Harriet; she smiles like she thinks she is good. The music gets louder, she opens her mouth wider and, just when we think the song has finished, it starts up again.

  She’s giving us a headache.

  —

  We put our hands over our ears.

  ‘Oi! It’s not that bad.’ Harriet punches us on the arm and laughs.

  We fall against the door.

  It hurts.

  I know.

  We rub our arm and hope she will do it again.

  ?

  It means she likes us.

  Does it? . . . Does that mean Frost liked us too?

  No.

  We look out the window while Harriet keeps singing the longest song we have ever heard. In the distance a yellow train filled with coal runs along a track through the middle of a valley. The track looks like a zip.