by Elske Rahill
*
The first half of the day is made up of a series of lectures that Caitriona struggles to follow. There is quite a lot of science, but the lecturers repeat that candidates mustn’t worry; they don’t have to understand it all yet. A big projection shows the houses they will live in – a row of silver domes on a crimson terrain. There is one lecture called ‘Our Galaxy; Our Neighbourhood’, where they are given brief summaries of the other planets in the solar system.
Someone puts their hand up. Caitriona can’t hear the question but the lecturer repeats it through his microphone. ‘This lady is asking about Pluto, about why it is no longer a planet...’ He explains that it never really was, but it is a good question because soon they – the men who do these things – will send a probe to take measurements and photos and find out more about Pluto. So there might be some hope for Pluto after all, thinks Caitriona, to have a place in the galaxy; to be remembered again. A colour picture of Pluto is projected onto the wall. The lady murmurs again, and the speaker repeats her question for the audience:
‘Would it be possible for them to find something that would make Pluto a planet again?’ He laughs. ‘No, sorry, that’s not how it works, I’m afraid. Right, any more questions before we wrap up for lunch?... No? Okay, chosen candidates go with Pearse. Make sure you have your ID. All other stakeholders please come with me.’
Pearse is a tall man with a whey complexion and long, blueish fingers. He stands at the front of the hall while the candidates form a flock. He counts the heads: twenty-five. Then he leads them out into the main auditorium and off down a corridor to a smaller, cooler room with a whiteboard and collapsible chairs pushed back against the walls.
There are three cardboard boxes on a desk, and a water dispenser sitting awkwardly in the middle of the room. Pearse stands by the boxes and congratulates them all on being chosen. He warns that this is only the beginning of a long and harrowing quest for a new world.
The boxes contain their lunch – a selection of protein bars. These are samples of what they will be living on for the seven-month voyage. Pearse says there are three flavours – strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla. All three are the same muddy colour and wrapped in the same red greaseproof paper. They smell like rotting wood, but the taste is inoffensive. ‘Some people find they taste like pineapple,’ says Pearse. While the candidates eat, a nutritionist called Camilla explains that the bars are made from tiny green sea vegetables and contain a full spectrum of vitamins, proteins, and trace minerals. They will need to take fat supplements on board too, and lots of water.
After lunch the water cooler is wheeled into the adjoining room, and they are asked to help fold the chairs properly and stack them in a corner. Then they are told to form a circle. One by one they must announce their names and tell the group something about themselves.
‘I am Caitriona Dawson,’ she announces, ‘and I work in hospitality.’ She can feel the heat in her face and she can’t figure out what to do with her hands, so she fiddles with the Mars pin, taking the back off and pinching the little wings to open the hole and put it back on. She has an urge to push the point into her palm. Her response isn’t the worst, though. One woman tugs fiercely at her cuticles with her teeth and when it comes her turn she says, ‘I am Delia, and I have three cats and six goldfish.’
Somebody sniggers and Pearse says, ‘No laughing at other candidates please. Anything at all about yourself. Thank you, Delia.’
Next they are organized into groups of four. Caitriona is asked to choose a group name and she says ‘Pluto,’ before she has time to think. They are each given a big round blue sticker and they write their name on it, and the name of their team: Caitriona Dawson – Pluto. There is one man in the group, a skinny fellow from London who says he works in a hospital but doesn’t disclose his role there. She noticed him earlier because he has been wearing the black version of the Mission Mars cap all through the day. The more merchandise you buy, the more Mars points you get. You get points, too, for blogging, more if you give interviews to journalists, and there will be a documentary with the chosen candidates. They explained all this in the interview. They need publicity for funding, they said; the mission depends on it.
Also in her group are the oval-faced girl from last night, and an older lady from Scotland with big jewellery, very small hands, and an enormous bosom. The lady touches Caitriona’s elbow and winks warmly. ‘Good name,’ she says. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for Pluto.’
Pearse sits on a high swivel chair at the top of the room; one foot tucked in his crotch and one dangling. He rotates slowly from side to side, making the hinge yelp. Their first task is to explain to each other why they are volunteering. ‘Be completely honest,’ Pearse says. ‘This is only amongst ourselves.’
Caitriona huddles into her group. The hospital worker says his name is Eric and that he will speak first. He removes his cap to reveal a slick of thinning hair. Then he flips open a sleek black wallet to show a photo of his son, a round-eyed child with a frightened mouth.
‘This is Howard,’ he says, ‘my son.’
He slides the picture out and passes it around his three teammates. There is a pause while they each take a moment to look at Eric’s son. ‘How sweet,’ says the Scottish lady, and Eric nods sadly. He takes a deep breath and returns the cap to his head. Then he begins to speak very fast, eyes pecking at the faces of his audience. His ex is a psycho, he says. She is always cutting access, always trying to make him do all the running around. Now the courts have ordered him to pay her maintenance. ‘I’m going to show them all I am a dad to be proud of. He’ll be able to say “My dad is a spaceman,” and then she’ll be sorry. Boys love rockets.’
When he is finished speaking Eric looks exhausted. There is a silence into which the Scottish lady sighs, ‘Well I might as well go next...’ Then she gives a deep, sad chuckle. While she speaks Eric lowers his head, but his eyes still dart about as though he wasn’t quite finished. The woman rocks on her heels, hands clasped at her belly. She punctuates each utterance with a little laugh, like relief after pain. ‘I just want to be remembered. That’s all. That’s all really. To make a mark.’
The white-haired girl quickly takes over. She makes Caitriona nervous. She says she is an astrophysics student and she lives in Stockholm. She began her studies in marine biology, she says, but she soon decided that the answers were not on this earth. She is either mad or extremely clever, with lots of words that Caitriona has never heard before, spoken with strange authority in that alien accent. ‘The next war will be the end of life on Earth,’ she says. ‘Someone has to find a new planet or human life is finished.’
Caitriona doesn’t know what she will say but then the words come very quickly. ‘My dad died last year. He wanted me to do something extraordinary but I never knew what it should be. So... yep. That’s why I’m here.’
The groups are assigned tasks; a number of computer-simulated crises which they will have to manage together. At first Eric has a lot of opinions – ‘Look girls, what we need here is to think outside the box. Who’s to say plants can’t pull the water from the atmosphere?’ – but he soon lets the astrophysics student lead.
*
On the e-vite it said the conference would finish at six, but when six comes, Pearse asks them to follow him. They arrive in a dimly lit room where there is a scattering of fine black dust under a long glass case. The case is in the centre of the room and they are allowed to walk around the exhibit and peer in through the viewing panels on the side. This, he says, gesturing with both hands to the stretch of glass, is a new metal that copies itself over and over, and when it copies itself it creates a gas. One of the purposes of the mission is to take this substance up to Mars. Once it begins, the stuff will keep copying itself until, after millions of years, it has created an ozone layer around the planet. Then they will start filling the atmosphere with air. This is called ‘terraforming’. ‘Imagine all the lives that pass in those millions of years,’ her father o
nce told her – but did he? Or are these the things she is inventing now, to make him real, to remember a person about whom there is very little to say?
After they have looked for a while at the metal, Caitriona expects that they will finish up, but instead Pearse says that each group has half an hour to come up with a presentation on the best way to multiply the metal on Mars.
She waits until seven before slipping out of her workshop group. ‘Sorry Pearse,’ she says, ‘I’ll have to excuse myself...’
For a moment Pearse’s face loses all expression. He keeps his eyes on her while his voice goes up like a siren. ‘Excuse me everyone. I need your attention for a moment!’
The room falls silent. They are all looking at her now, with pity or disdain, perhaps. She doesn’t know. She keeps her gaze focused on Pearse. She will not lower her head.
‘A candidate...’ he peers at her badge, ‘...Catreeownna... has just told me that she needs to leave to catch a flight. That leaves her team down one member. For this mission you need to be dedicated. You need to be able to deal with the unexpected... Well. Let’s all say goodbye and get on with our work.’
*
Dark, despite pipes of light running cool as drains overhead. The air is thickened by the earth that must be muffling against the concrete, dulling the faraway chirrup of the trains. Cram of bodies teeming down and up the stairs and keeping to one side for the sake of order. Which side is it she should be on? She keeps veering to the wrong side. She needs to find a bin to stuff the conference pack in. Her badge, too. Remember to take off the badge.
If she misses the flight it means using the credit card. It means inventing some excuse. Already she will have to explain the conference fee. As a chosen candidate, she was given a special rate, but it was enough to make a dent. Barry will notice it and ask and she still doesn’t know what she’ll say. When she squeezes between the sliding doors she is still holding the red folder.
‘Mind the gap.’
So many people. Blank faces but she can tell their types by the way they dress and the things they have; a tall woman in an awkward blouse knitting with purple acrylic amongst the crush of passengers; a bearded young man with a checked scarf, hugging a rolled canvas.
Wobbling at his mother’s knees, hand squelched tight in hers, is a little boy in a camouflage jacket with a crest saying Army Man. He looks like the child in the hospital worker’s photo. Huge eyes and mouth shut small until it opens wide and lets out a shriek. ‘Look Mummy!’
He is pointing at the floor. Some of the conference pack contents have slid out, Caitriona sees; they are sprawled down amongst the feet.
‘Look! SPACE, Mummy! SPACE!’
The mother’s face is flattened with a thick layer of dust-dull make-up. She rubs her son’s head, pulls it to her hip. ‘Shhhh...’
There is no use trying to squat and pick them up. She will only drop other things if she tries. Panic starts in her lungs. What is it that they are breathing in and out down here? What is keeping them all standing, making the blood move through, and how long will it sustain them? She clutches at a loop overhead to steady herself, jiggles to the pulse of the carriage. Only one Tube stop and a bus. Then the plane and then her little boy’s face slotting into her neck, ears like the singing tunnels of seashells, fragrant scalp, the rippling cable of his spine.
She tries to tidy the papers a little with her feet: the pictures of the galaxy and of the machine that will make the oxygen, and the strings of words she could not understand. She should have thrown them out right there in the conference centre. She has probably failed anyway. Of course she has.
The child is on the floor now, trying to pick up one of the pictures he has seen – the solar system, which is not a sequence of eight as she once believed, but a blur of stars and planets too vast for her mind to map. Fat sticky hands like her boy; her boy who exploded from a tiny nook; a surge of blood thrusting her body into a new space and then his birth that threw open her sky. But she will close it up neatly again, as she suspects all mothers do. She will grow away from him over the ten years it will take to train for Mars, and that is right of course. A curling beat inside her and then a cord. A breast and then a head in her neck; a hand in hers and then no hand because that’s how it is with time and space. Wider and wider the distance; the journey that began in her, and who will he be out there with no touch left between them?
The door slides open.
‘Mind the gap.’
She pours with the shoal of passengers out onto the platform and the crowd is gone, moving blind as maggots on the steps. At the top there is only a dull light; it is evening now. She has almost reached the open.
‘Hello lady.’ The child has grabbed the end of Caitriona’s dress. A little shut mouth again, a little chin. Big bug eyes.
‘Shhh,’ the mother says, ‘sorry about that.’
‘Oh no,’ says Caitriona. ‘No, I have a little one myself...’
‘So you know how it is?’
And the woman’s smile is like the swell of a dying star, the disappointed climax and the heavy joy, and the relief because Caitriona knows it too – the awesome detail of accidental being.
The child is thrusting a bundle of papers towards her: three sheets stapled together and on the front the picture of the home on Mars – a row of huts like silver polyps on the rust sand.
‘You keep that,’ she says, but the child shakes his head. The pin then. She pinches the back and pulls it from her chest.
‘Look,’ she says, ‘do you know what that is?’
‘Space,’ the boy says.
‘You keep that, okay?’
*
On the plane she allows herself a sigh of relief. The smells she carries are of packed bodies and recycled air, a sweet, fruity broth of panic – but she has made it, and the evidence has been disposed of. The only thing she has kept is the big blue sticker: an innocuous thing, the kind of thing they might give out in playgroups for children’s names. But that too should go. She folds it into a half moon, sticky sides together, and then into smaller and smaller wedges, before tucking it into the pocket in front of her with the onboard shopping magazine. No one will ever open it to see what is written there: Caitriona Dawson – Pluto.
‘Oh yes, Pluto. That used to be a planet, didn’t it?’ Barry touched the hand-painted mobile, making it wobble clumsily above their sleeping child. The mobile was a gift from her sister. It has a sun and an Earth and seven other planets, but no Pluto. She didn’t notice until the day she returned from maternity hospital.
Pluto was the precious livid piece in her solar system jigsaw, and she always slotted it in last. Today she saw the planet projected huge against the white parchment. It was exactly like the jigsaw; an unfathomable full stop spinning out in space, its surface blotched brightly like the skin of an unburied corpse.
Right to Reply
HIS LATTE WAS tepid when it arrived, grease marbling on its surface; but Louis wasn’t going to make a fuss.
When the phone trilled he was standing by the penthouse window looking down on Galway Bay, rolling the wiry tassels of his moustache between thumb and forefinger. His face felt tight and sore, as though exposed too long to the elements. Lola wanted to walk on the beach today, and his skin had already registered the drudgery of it – the heavy sand; the salt-sharpened wind; the scribbles of crusty bladderwrack before the tide. And she would want to drink in a typical Irish pub. It was all such a waste of time, barely worth the pleasure of her unzippable pencil skirts and long, callow throat.
‘Your phone,’ said Lola.
She laid her fruit salad in a nest of bedsheets and unfolded her legs, curling her tongue over a bloated grape as she reached towards the bedside table. She brought the phone to him and rubbed his back too softly, pressed her lips to his shoulder. The girl was as clingy after sex as he was squeamish.
Louis held the phone to his ear and took a quiet mouthful of the latte. He always let the caller speak first. It was a technique h
e had learned at a seminar once. It was called ‘Keeping the Reins’.
‘Louis,’ said his sister. He pinched the milk scum from his moustache and stepped away from Lola, lowering his head. Mammy, he thought, and in an instant he could see his mother’s cheeks fall and flush with shame for him, the disappointment in her voice, Are you not ashamed?
‘Bertha.’
‘How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘You haven’t seen the paper then.’
*
It was a Sunday. Dine woke late to find eight missed calls on her phone. Sitting up in bed, her head knocking for caffeine, she rang back.
‘Bomama did you call me?’
‘Dine,’ said her grandmother. ‘Darling. When can you come?’
Her grandmother was never good on the phone. Her calls were generally just a summons, or a transfer of information, and she shouted down the receiver as though to cross the great distance between them. Before her husband’s final stroke, she often made calls like this, with no greeting, just ‘When can you come?’ For there were days when he was ‘very down’, and ‘it would do him good to see you.’ But by now Dine’s grandfather was two years dead.
‘Are you alright Bomama?’
‘Just come darling will you please? When can you come?’
‘I’m getting dressed now. I’ll get the next bus.’
‘Take a taxi.’ Her accent was agitated, clipping her English into a succession of hard, quick taps; tickataxi.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘They are saying things about Bompa. Disgusting things.’
*
They should have known him. If they could have known him they would be ashamed to say these disgusting things about her husband.
Where did they get that photo? Well he was handsome there: his lovely mouth with the lower lip that brimmed to a cliff before the swoop of his chin; his fine neck; his freshly razored jaw. She knew what his skin must have smelled like when that photo was taken – sandalwood shaving soap spiced with morning perspiration, scent of his blood running close beneath. Where did they get that photo of her beautiful husband, and what did they think they were proving, the newspaper men, by overlaying the picture with a grey swastika? ‘Shadow from the past,’ said the headline, and the swastika was cast clumsily over her husband’s face. They would fool no one with a trick like that.