by Luiza Sauma
Nearby, some kids were sitting on a bench, passing around a spliff. When I was their age, thought Iris, it felt like London belonged to me.
Everywhere around the country, other people were enjoying this natural spectacle, the appearance and disappearance of our star, the birth and death of each day. Somehow, after thousands of years of human advancement, this everyday occurrence was still the loveliest thing on the planet. There would be no sunsets on Nyx. Iris took a photo of it, uploaded it to Instagram and waited for someone to like it.
14.
Say Something, Anything
The night before Iris flew to Los Angeles, she said goodbye to her family. Eleanor insisted on going to a fancy restaurant in town, to make it special. Iris suspected that this was a way of containing their emotions. Saying goodbye in public ensured that no one could become too hysterical, though Iris thought she could see tears glistening in her mother’s eyes, over dinner. Eleanor looked like she wanted to say something. Several times, she opened her mouth, took a breath, changed her mind and closed it again. Say it, thought Iris. Just say it. Iris would rather have eaten at their house in Tufnell Park, watched an old film and slept on the floor of Mona’s room, listening to her breathing in the night. Perhaps they could have driven her to the airport the next day. But no, they didn’t offer to do this. Iris would spend her last night in Clapton, in her empty bedroom. She had given away most of her clothes and belongings. Kiran’s new flatmate would arrive a few days later.
After dinner, Iris hugged all of her family in the street. She made the first move. Jack was surprisingly warm and bear-like. Mona squeezed her in a life-or-death clench, her arms tugging painfully at Iris’s long, loose hair. When she pulled away, Mona was crying. Iris wasn’t, because the situation was too bizarre to feel real. And then Eleanor stepped forward. She held Iris, but didn’t speak and wouldn’t let go. Iris eventually had to take a step back. She could still change her mind, but how awkward would that be? It would be even more awkward than her failed suicide attempt, because everyone would know. What would she do if she changed her mind – go back to Freedom & Co? To Eddie? To her parents’ house? What would she do with her time on Earth? She didn’t have any ideas.
Finally, her mother said something, her voice barely audible: ‘Jack, please.’
Jack stepped forward and took Iris by the shoulders, gently. ‘Iris, we think you should stay.’
‘Wh– what are you doing?’
‘You don’t have to go through with this.’
Iris looked at her mother. She still didn’t speak, but her face trembled, as if on the verge of collapse. Say something, thought Iris. Anything.
‘What is this?’ said Iris. ‘An intervention?’
‘You can move back in with us,’ said Jack, ‘and we can work through this together. You can get another job or you can just … rest for a while, and think about what you want to do next.’
‘This is what I want to do next.’
‘Iris,’ said Eleanor, and everything seemed to go silent – the people around them, the honking cars. She put a hand on Iris’s arm. ‘Iris.’
Mona pushed Eleanor out of the way and grabbed both of Iris’s hands. She was crying freely with snot running from her nose into her mouth.
‘Iris, what are you doing?’ she sobbed. ‘Don’t leave me, Iris. Don’t go.’
The silence had dissipated. Passers-by were looking at them. Cars were speeding by. Eleanor was looking at the ground. Say it! Iris waited another minute with Mona in her arms, so close she could feel her battering heart, but Eleanor didn’t speak. Iris decided that she had to walk away, to make it easier for everyone.
‘I have to go.’
‘Iris!’ screeched her sister.
‘Iris,’ said Jack, holding her arm, ‘please consider it.’
‘I’ll call you from LA. We can talk every day until I start training.’
‘Fuck you,’ said Mona. ‘Fuck you, Iris!’
Iris had wanted to watch her family walk away, turn the corner and disappear, but instead she herself walked away, with their eyes on her back, hearing Mona’s voice become smaller and smaller, until it was swallowed by the night.
Iris had just over £2,000 in savings. Money she had dutifully scrabbled to the side, for the future. In the morning, before she said a final goodbye to Kiran and caught a cab to Heathrow, she transferred the money to Mona’s bank account and followed up with a text message. Mona didn’t respond. Once Iris was in LA, she tried to contact her again, but she still didn’t reply. Instead, Iris spoke to her mother every day before she went to the desert for training. They didn’t have much to say to each other and Mona was seemingly never around. Despite that, Iris never wanted to end their conversations. There was still time for Eleanor to tell her whatever it was she had wanted to tell her. After saying goodbye, Iris would wait for her mother to hang up first. The last time they spoke, she listened to the crackling silence for five minutes, with tears running down her face.
On her last morning in LA, before she left the hotel, she received two messages from her sister.
I hope it’s everything you ever wanted.
Please don’t reply. It doesn’t help. I love you & always will xx
Iris typed, ‘I love you too,’ but deleted it. Then she changed her mind.
I’m sorry – I had to reply. And I’m sorry for everything. I never wanted to hurt you. I love you more than anyone I’ve ever met. I hope you will grow and thrive and be happy. I love you, I love you, I love you, my dear Mona xxxx
She waited a few minutes for a response, but nothing came. Mona must be in school, or asleep, or doing her homework, or eating dinner. Iris couldn’t remember what time it was in London. She was shaking all over. She removed the phone’s SIM card, threw it in the bin, and left the handset on a table with a handwritten note for the chambermaid: ‘Free phone – please take.’
15.
Departure
They posed for the world’s media – smiling, thumbs up, giving peace signs like 1960s pop stars. Photographers were screaming, ‘Look over here – no, over here, give us a smile!’ The hubbub smothered all of Iris’s doubts. She wondered who was watching her on TV – her mother, her sister, her friends, her exes? What a wonderful feeling, to be seen.
That day, five ships were launched into the Pacific Ocean, each carrying twenty people. Iris was on the second ship. She shared her quarters, Block G, with a woman called Abby and two men, Rav and Vitor. The women were separated from the men by a sliding door, which on Nyx would be fused shut. They would travel for seven days, mostly sedated, strapped to their bunk beds and fed through tubes.
It was a shame that Nyx could only be reached through the wormhole. Iris would have loved to see Earth from above, just so she could think: Wow, there it is. Earth would get smaller and smaller and smaller and, after a while, it would look like a blue plastic ball, something you could bounce against a wall. All the suffering. Bounce. All the wars. Bounce. All the suicides. Bounce. Someone being fired. Bounce. Someone being born. And then it would disappear. Abracadabra.
But it wasn’t like that. She didn’t get to see Earth. She didn’t even see the wormhole. Six days passed in a haze of dreams. Another one about Edie, in which they found each other again, and were very much in love. Stress dreams about school exams, about Mona becoming a drug addict. In one dream, Iris was on the Tube in London when her train passed another going the same way, side by side. Her father was on the other one, dressed in black, reading the Evening Standard.
He looked up and said, ‘Wake up!’
But she didn’t wake up, because the drugs were too powerful.
SOMEWHERE
* * *
Seven Years Ago
16.
Floating
On the seventh day, Iris opened her eyes. The tubes had been taken away. For a minute she enjoyed feeling cosy and warm in her bunk, hovering between wakefulness and sleep. Then she remembered where she was and thought: Fucking hell, I a
ctually did it. She unstrapped herself and floated towards the ceiling, then held on to the bunk and pulled herself towards the floor, stretching her limbs, one by one. Her hair and skin felt greasy. Abby still had her eyes closed. Iris somersaulted in the air, giggling.
‘Oh my God,’ said Abby, opening one eye. ‘I can’t move.’
They were called to the front of the ship, where the technical team worked. Everyone gathered together, rubbing their eyes, looking like shit, holding on to the walls and each other, so they wouldn’t float away.
‘We’re nearly there,’ said Johnny, an Australian technician, strapped into his seat. ‘We didn’t want you guys to miss this.’
He hit a button. A panel opened to reveal three large windows to the outside. Everyone breathed in sharply. It looked just like space did on TV – supernal and black – except they were there, surrounded by it. Johnny pointed out the debris floating around from the Pacific Ocean, things that had fallen through the wormhole: clumps of seaweed, a few fish, a shark, a huge whale covered in white splotches, floating in space for ever. Everyone cooed in amazement.
‘That’s our new sun,’ said Johnny, pointing at an increasingly bright, orange star, ‘but please don’t look directly at it. And that over there is our new home, the planet Nyx.’
People whooped, applauded and hugged each other.
Nyx was a pink blob, the colour of poached salmon, still small and far away, in the future. Even further away were the millions of stars, everywhere, all around them.
NYX
* * *
Seven Years Ago
17.
Year 1
Every Friday at the farm, Iris’s hands and nails became caked in dirt. After her shift, she would scrub and scrub in the shower, to no avail, until finally she decided that she liked it: this faint grubbiness, permeating her skin like a tattoo. Sometimes she would catch herself sniffing her fingers – deliciously bitter, organic, unclean.
She read for hours every day. She learned how to make soap, using fat from the kitchen and corrosive lye. Her cleaning shifts with Yuko and Stella were surprisingly satisfying. On Earth, she rarely cleaned – only when her flat was disgusting or when Kiran complained. She took photos of the Hub and the landscape outside, wrote pithy captions and clicked ‘send’. She did more exercise than she had ever done on Earth, so that her body thinned and hardened, the way she had always wanted it to.
Iris’s first year on Nyx passed slowly, delectably, like summer used to.
What was happening on Earth? Bad things, probably. Global crises, terrible new leaders, untold suffering, maybe World War III. Nothing of that scale ever happened on Nyx.
Iris didn’t hear about any of these bad things, so it felt as if they weren’t happening at all. It was relaxing, this state of ignorance. It helped to silence the hum of anxiety she had lived with for so long. This must be how it had felt in the past – each tribe only concerned with the goings-on of their own people.
But sometimes it was boring. Sometimes she missed hearing about the bad things.
A few months in, Hans had a huge row in the living room with Maya, a Canadian woman. It was a spectacle. He was a foot taller than her; quiet and passive, while she screamed. He was trying to shrug her off, after they’d had a brief fling. Several other people were sitting on the sofas, trying not to look.
‘You can’t treat people like that!’
‘Like what, Maya?’
‘Like shit! I’m not your goddamn whore.’
Someone let out a supportive murmur.
Hans looked pained. He hated confrontation. ‘Come on, let’s talk about this somewhere else.’
‘I don’t want to talk somewhere else.’
‘Should we leave?’ whispered Iris.
‘Are you kidding?’ said Abby. ‘This is better than TV.’
After Maya had stormed out, Hans sat down with them and quietly admitted that, on Earth, he would’ve just blocked her on his phone and never seen her again.
The drama carried on for several weeks until, finally, he apologized to Maya.
There was no escape on Nyx. No ghosting. You can’t ghost people when they’re always there, sitting at the next table, eating lunch. You could blank them for a few days, but eventually you would have to let them back in. This was a good thing, thought Iris. Everyone would learn how to discuss their problems; to manage their relationships, rather than throwing them out and seeking new ones. On Nyx, nobody was entirely new.
There is good in everyone, she once muttered to herself, as she walked away from the farm. Sean had spent the whole shift tutting at her, telling her off – she couldn’t do anything right. There is good in everyone, she repeated. There is good in everyone. There is good in everyone. There is good in everyone.
But as the months passed, she began to wish she could see someone new. Not even meet them – just see them. Glance at their face, notice their hair, the way they walked and talked.
More than that, she wished she could be alone, just once in a while. Like she used to be, on Earth. On a Sunday, when Kiran was with Ben, she would wake up, pull on a dressing gown, make tea and toast, watch Netflix in bed, scour the internet and maybe argue with a few strangers online, without having to smile or utter a single word.
Even Abby started to irritate her, at times, with her ironic tone of voice, the way she rolled her eyes. Even Rav, who smiled too much, and Vitor, who smiled too little, and thought he knew everything.
But this feeling never lasted long, not in Year 1. Iris would wake the next day in a better mood, go to breakfast, chat with her friends and love them again, and she would look out of the window, at the luminous pink sand, and think: Yes.
NYX
* * *
Present Day
18.
These Are the Things She Misses the Most
The sea. Any sea. Standing on beaches and waiting for cool water to lap against her feet. Rivers, streams, ponds and lakes. Bodies of water in general. The cold silk of the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath. The glistening blue off the coast of West Sussex. The way cold water made her skin pucker and redden. From her bedroom window on Nyx, Iris can see New Lake Michigan, but she has never been there. Iris has never left the Hub. She’s been here for seven years.
The sun on her skin. The real sun, not the Nyxian one. On Earth there was no better feeling than when the first ray of spring warmed her winter-white face. It made her feel new, like a polished diamond. There are no seasons here. One side of the planet always faces the sun; the other looks out to the abyss. The Hub is located a few kilometres from the Twilight, where it’s neither day nor night. Everything is constant.
Mona. She was fourteen when Iris left Earth. Now she’s a young woman. It’s unimaginable.
Eleanor, despite the fact that she didn’t fall down on her knees crying when Iris announced she was leaving the planet, like a normal mother might do. Iris misses her pale face. She misses the electrifying anger she felt towards her mother, which she held close to her heart. It has dissipated, leaving nothing in its place.
At least they have books.
In Year 2, Johnny started a weekly book club. Book choices were anonymously submitted through a specially devised app. At its peak, over thirty people took part and it could go on for hours. Watching people read and talk about books wasn’t great for ratings, so in Year 3 the control room imposed a limit: one book per month, per person. In protest the Nyxians started reading super-long classics, such as Middlemarch, War and Peace and, currently, John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. The latter was chosen by Iris, purely for its title. Now that she’s reading it, the name of the club in London seems incongruous. East of Eden is an epic story with biblical undertones about warring brothers and crazy prostitutes in California – nothing to do with cocktails or rooftop swimming pools. The book makes her glad to be far away from Earth, from all those wild expectations people have of life. Up here, wild expectations can’t be met. This is a comfort to her.
I
ris’s favourite thing about the book club is staring at her crush, Elias, across the circle of chairs in the living room. She never sits near him because her feelings are too strong. She fears that one look from him will cause her to faint, puke or shit her pants. She loves this feeling. Elias has long black hair and dark, doleful eyes. He’s American, with Lebanese parents. Iris should have grown out of this by now – being attracted to unhappy, handsome men – but his beauty gives her hope.
After the cutback in books, people started having more sex. Some of them even moved to the family quarters, where they could fuck whenever they wanted. The first Nyxian baby, Norma, was born to Yuko and Carlos in Year 4. She was named in honour of Norman. When her name was announced in the cafeteria, Abby turned to Iris and rolled her eyes. Yuko and Carlos were on the podium, cheeks flushed and smiling, holding their little messiah, bundled in a white blanket. It was no surprise that Yuko was the first to procreate. In Tokyo, she had been a nanny. She missed the company of babies.
She was so damn cute, Norma, this human baby who would never see Earth, but would instead learn her parents’ customs through a haze of distance, like a second-generation immigrant. Norma had her mother’s eyes and her father’s golden skin and wavy dark hair. Everyone in the Hub went crazy for her. She was the first baby they had seen in years. When Yuko or Carlos entered a room, all eyes turned to check if they were carrying Norma. She was always trailed by fans – people wanting to hold her, squeeze her chubby cheeks, touch her dimpled hands, sniff her sweet-sour head or just gaze in wonder at her face. She was a drug, a miracle. Overwhelmed by the attention, Yuko would hide in her room to breastfeed in peace, often weeping with regret that she wasn’t on Earth, with her mother. She finally understood what she had done.