A Godawful Small Affair Read online

  A GODAWFUL SMALL AFFAIR

  By J.B. Morrison

  In Loving Memory

  David Jones 8.1.47 – 10.1.16

  Jenny Morrison 12.8.29 – 10.1.16

  ‘Tonight, Big Brother is watching you

  And I am watching too

  I will watch over you’

  And God Created Brixton –

  Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  ONE GIANT LEAP FOR BOYKIND

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR:

  OTHER TITLES AVAILABLE FROM

  COPYRIGHT

  ONE GIANT LEAP FOR BOYKIND

  Nathan checked the equipment and supplies in his backpack. He’d already eaten the cheese sandwich and the Kit Kat, but he still had half a bottle of Coke Zero left, and he hadn’t touched the Satsuma. There was a small Christmas cracker compass in the backpack and a notepad and pencil — he had originally packed a pen but remembered Zoe telling him that writing in zero gravity was like writing upside down. He’d packed a half-used disposable underwater camera and an old MP3 player. He’d found them both in Zoe’s room. There were thirteen photos left on the camera and sixty-four songs on the MP3 player. The songs were mostly by groups of girls shouting and swearing, but Zoe’s favourite David Bowie playlist was on there too.

  Nathan looked up at the night sky. The stars didn’t seem as bright as when his dad had first stuck them onto the ceiling. Zoe said that most stars were either dead or dying, maybe that was true with the plastic ones as well. On the morning after his sister went missing, Nathan woke up with Jupiter stuck to his forehead. Zoe would have told him that as it was falling from his bedroom ceiling it was a meteor and when it landed on his head, Jupiter became a meteorite.

  Nathan unzipped the front pouch of the backpack and took out his Space Torch. He switched it on and shone the light onto the photo of his sister. Every police officer in London knew what she looked like because of the same picture. It was on the posters and leaflets and it was the profile picture on the Where is Zoe Love? Facebook page. The photo was the screensaver on Nathan’s dad’s laptop and there were plans to have it printed on the front of T-shirts. In the television appeal there was an enlarged copy of the photo on an easel. Nathan’s dad’s friend Craig said it looked like the police were auctioning a painting.

  Nathan changed the setting on his Space Torch. He projected an image of a galaxy from eight million light years away, taken by the Hubble telescope, onto his bedroom wall. Nathan’s own telescope was in the backpack, but it wasn’t powerful enough to see into the flat opposite. He switched off the torch and put it in his backpack. He probably wouldn’t need it where he was going. The bright light was the first thing that Zoe had talked about. For a while it was the only thing she would talk about. The light had been so bright that, for a week afterwards, she had to wear sunglasses indoors. Craig had called her Bono. To protect Nathan’s eyes from the bright light, he was wearing his dad’s tinted swimming goggles. And to stop him coming back from space with the same cuts and bruises as Zoe, he had skateboard pads on his elbows and his knees.

  Nathan put the red Swiss Army knife into the backpack. The knife’s two sharp blades probably contradicted the We come in peace slogan on the badge pinned to his bright orange Mission to Mars all-in-one astronaut costume. He didn’t know if they even spoke English where he was going – there was a small dictionary in his backpack just in case. He’d written his name and address on the back of his hand: Nathan James Love, Brixton, London, England, the World, Earth, the Solar System, the Universe.

  Nathan took one last look around his room before pulling the swimming goggles down over his eyes. He looked at the model rocket and the Lego Space Shuttle and the three Buzz Lightyear figures and the books on astronomy and his Dalek money bank and the Star Wars figures guarding it. He looked at the NASA patches on the sleeves of his Mission to Mars spacesuit and at his Guardians of the Galaxy backpack and at the planetarium on his ceiling and he wondered if the aliens had gone to his sister’s bedroom by mistake.

  1

  Zoe Patricia Love was fifteen when she went into town with her little brother to pay respects to their favourite singer on the first anniversary of his death. Before they left the house, Zoe painted a red and blue lightning bolt onto Nathan’s face.

  “Don’t get it in my eyes,” Nathan said.

  “I won’t, if you’d just keep still.”

  When Zoe was finished, she gave Nathan a mirror and the album cover she’d been copying from. Nathan compared the record sleeve to his reflection.

  “I could shave your eyebrows off too, if you like?” Zoe said.

  Nathan put his hand and the record in front of his face, until Zoe swore on their dad’s life and their mum’s grave that she wasn’t really holding a razor.

  In spite of Nathan thinking his make-up looked cool, he moaned so much to his sister about not wanting anyone else to see it, that when the security light came on over his head the second he stepped out of the front door, like a spotlight pointing him out to the world, Zoe laughed and didn’t stop laughing until the bus came.

  Nathan zipped his parka right up to his chin and kept the hood pulled over his head, even when they were on the bus. The snorkel hood was so long that he couldn’t see where he was going without turning his whole head. Zoe said he looked like a meerkat. When they got to the mural and Nathan saw he wasn’t the only one with a lightning bolt on his face, he removed the hood. And when he saw the painting of David Bowie with the same bolt of red and blue, Nathan wanted everyone to see.

  There were hundreds of messages for David Bowie, written on the mural and on the walls surrounding it. People had tucked postcards and scraps of paper underneath the square of see-through Perspex that protected the mural. Messages were written on train tickets and till receipts, with different coloured pens, and with lipstick and eyeliner pencil. The messages were in English and French, Italian and German, and what Nathan thought was Japanese. One message was written on a Brixton ten-pound note – the one with David Bowie’s face on.

  The pavement in front of the mural was covered with candles. Decorative church candles in posh candlesticks, plain white power-cut candles planted in their own melted wax, and tea-lights in flimsy tin cups. There were a lot of flowers in front of the mural. Bunches of garage flowers still in their wrapping and single red roses poking out of wine bottles and beer cans. A star-shaped balloon anchored to the buckle of a gold high-heeled shoe swayed in the breeze. When the wind picked up, the balloon bashed against David Bowie’s face.

  After Zoe explained why somebody had left a Mars bar on the pavement, Nathan quickly worked out the reason for the box of Heroes chocolates next to it. Neither of them knew the significance of the three plastic bottles of milk.

  A man played ‘Five Years’ on an acoustic guitar. Anoth
er man joined in on a school recorder and a group of girls sang, following the words on their phones. Zoe squeezed Nathan’s hand, pumping it in time with the music. There were so many people with the same lightning bolts on their faces now that Nathan couldn’t believe he’d ever tried to hide his. Zoe borrowed a lighter from a Japanese girl. She took a tea-light out of her pocket and lit it. Shielding the flame with her hand, Zoe placed the stubby candle on the ground. She took another candle out of her pocket.

  “One from Mum,” she said. Or it might have been one for Mum. She lit the candle and put it on the ground. When she stood up Zoe closed her eyes and Nathan thought she was praying or making a wish. She took a red felt pen out of the pocket of her green army jacket and she wrote on the wall next to the mural:

  WE MISS YOU SO MUCH DAVID

  NATHAN AND ZOE (THE GIRL WITH THE MOUSY HAIR) X

  They stayed at the mural for almost an hour. When Nathan admitted he was shivering because he was cold, they walked home, letting buses pass them by. They sang David Bowie songs – ‘Starman’, ‘Let’s Dance’ and Nathan’s favourite, ‘Kooks’ – remembering the family sing-alongs on long journeys in their bright red car, with the noisy engine in the boot and their luggage under the bonnet at the front. People overtaking in their boring square and rectangle, round-the-right-way cars, looked at them as though they were a family from outer space. ‘Kooks’ was Nathan’s favourite David Bowie song to sing in the car. Whenever it got to the bit about David Bowie throwing his son’s homework on the fire, Nathan and Zoe would sing the line really loud. Zoe once asked their dad, if her homework ever got her down would he throw it on the fire and take the car down town. He said they didn’t have a fire, but he promised to leave her homework by the radiator and turn up the central heating and see what happened.

  They walked home from the mural, their journey captured on CCTV cameras outside chicken shops and banks. The camera on the wall of the library filmed them when they stopped to look at a huge picture of David Bowie, projected onto a bare brick wall that had the word BOVRIL painted on it. It was the first time Nathan had even noticed the wall was there, as though it had been built especially to project David Bowie’s face onto. Zoe told him the wall had been there forever and that Bovril was a bit like Marmite.

  They carried on walking, filmed by the security cameras outside Halfords, PC World and Sainsbury’s. They passed the big pub on the corner and the wooden fence surrounding it, where soon their dad would stick a long row of posters, making it look like HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? was one of the bands playing at the pub. The remainder of their journey was filmed by CCTV cameras mounted to the walls of council estate blocks and the gated private community new-builds and by the cameras inside the Tesco garage, where they stopped to buy crisps and Cokes. The girl who served them complimented Nathan on his face paint. The police said the quality of the images from the garage’s security cameras were of a high enough quality to say that when Zoe paid for the drinks and crisps, she looked happy.

  2

  When they got home, Zoe changed into her favourite black onesie – with the white star pattern on the hood and body. Nathan put on his Mission to Mars astronaut costume.

  “It’s Guantanamo Boy,” Zoe said when he came into the living room in the bright orange boiler suit. Nathan asked who that was, and Zoe opened a Wikipedia page on her phone and gave it to him. She found a music video channel on the television and they listened to back-to-back David Bowie songs while they ate the crisps and drank their Cokes. Nathan said he was still hungry, and Zoe made toast, with Marmite because of the Bovril wall.

  They took the toast into the living room and sat next to each other on the carpet with their backs against the sofa. Nathan pulled his knees up to his chest, copying his sister, and they watched E.T. on a movie channel. They’d missed the beginning, but Nathan knew the story off by heart. It was one of the films that came with an old home movie projector their dad had won in a card game when Nathan was seven and Zoe was eleven. Their dad would show the films in the living room, projecting the washed-out images onto the wall. He removed pictures, pulled out nails and filled in holes but he could never get the wall smooth enough or the room dark enough. In the years since, if Nathan ever saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T. on television, he always expected there to be a break halfway through, when he’d help his dad change the reels of tape while Zoe and their mum made popcorn in a wok. He could see the ghost of the living room wallpaper pattern and the holes his dad had filled in when he watched the films on television, even though they weren’t there.

  “Zo-ee,” Nathan said. “Were your aliens like E.T.?”

  Zoe gave him a sideways look. “My aliens?”

  “The ones who took you.”

  Zoe looked at the television. E.T. was building a communication device out of old toys.

  “You do know this isn’t a documentary, right?” she said. “And they didn’t ride BMX bikes or celebrate Halloween, if that’s what you mean. And I’m sure I’ve told you this before, they weren’t the aliens.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Zoe sighed. She’d been answering Nathan’s questions for ten months now. On and off, but predominantly on. At first she’d refused to answer them at all, and then she was reluctant, begrudging, but eventually her brother’s persistence and enthusiasm wore Zoe down and she seemed happy telling Nathan what the spaceship looked like and how fast it went and where she thought it was going to and what it was like there when it arrived. Now though, after ten months of the same old questions, Zoe actually sounded bored by the whole thing. Nathan couldn’t understand that. If aliens abducted him, he’d never tire of telling people about it. Sometimes he thought his sister didn’t realise how lucky she was.

  “You know like if you go to a foreign country,” Zoe said. “It’s you who’s the foreigner? Well up there, I was the alien.”

  She pointed at the ceiling.

  “So, are you still an alien then?” Nathan looked at her pointing finger, expecting it to glow.

  Zoe shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m home now.”

  Nathan tried to hide his disappointment.

  “Have they contacted you since you’ve been back?”

  “Only in my dreams.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s when they make contact. When you dream about them.”

  “I dream about aliens all the time.”

  “I don’t mean dreaming about a film you’ve just watched. And you need to believe, of course.”

  “In what?”

  “Their existence, for a start.”

  “The aliens?”

  Zoe nodded.

  “I do believe in their existence,” Nathan said.

  “I mean truly, properly believe.”

  “I do truly, properly believe.”

  “And you have to want them to contact you.”

  “I do want them to contact me.”

  “In that case,” Zoe said. “They probably already have. You just haven’t realised it. When they come for you, they’ll wake you up.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  Zoe nodded.

  “Did you want them to take you?”

  “I suppose I must have done. Otherwise they wouldn’t have woken me up. People call it an abduction, but it’s more of a two-way street.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They wouldn’t take you if you didn’t want to go. It’s not a kidnapping.”

  “I want to go,” Nathan said, looking at Zoe as though she might be able to fix that for him somehow.

  “Hmmm,” Zoe said, like she was considering it. She picked the blue varnish off her fingernails. Nathan hated the sound it made.

  “Do you want them to take you again?” Nathan asked.

  Zoe shrugged, as though it didn’t make any difference to her one way or the other.

  “What if they didn’t brin
g you back this time though?”

  Zoe shrugged again.

  “What about school? You’d miss school.”

  “I hate school.”

  Nathan nodded. “So do I.”

  “No you don’t. You love it.”

  “Well, what about your friends at school then?”

  “What about them?”

  “Wouldn’t you miss them?”

  “I doubt they’d miss me. Most of them are dicks anyway.”

  “Girls can’t be dicks.”

  Zoe assured him they could.

  “What about me and Dad then?” Nathan said. “We’d miss you.”

  “And I’d miss you too,” Zoe said, messing his hair up like he was a puppy. He pushed her hand away.

  Zoe got up and went over to the window. Nathan tipped his head back to look at her. She opened a gap between the curtains and looked out. Sometimes Zoe would sit at the window with her eyes fixed on the same spot in the sky for such a long time that Nathan thought she was asleep or in a trance. Now he wondered if she was homesick.

  “If you go again,” he said. “Me and dad could go with you.”

  “Maybe you could but definitely not Dad.”

  “Why not?”

  Zoe closed the curtains and turned to face him.

  “You really have to believe first, remember.”

  “I do believe.”

  “I know you do. But Dad doesn’t.”

  Nathan muted the television. He got up from the carpet and knelt on the sofa. He put his arms on the back and rested his chin on his hands. He watched Zoe take a blue inhaler out of the pocket of her jacket. She shook the inhaler and took two long puffs. Nathan wondered if she wasn’t fully human again after all and still needed some sort of artificial breathing apparatus to keep her alive. He waited for her to breathe out and then asked if he could have a go on the inhaler. She said no. He decided that’s exactly what an alien would have said.

  3

  When Zoe was abducted by aliens, she was back in bed before anyone had the chance to notice she was gone. It was easy for her dad to believe she hadn’t been anywhere at all and had woken up screaming in the middle of the night because she’d had a bad dream. When he noticed his fourteen-year old daughter had wet the bed and there were scratches and bruises on her arms and legs, he upgraded her bad dream to a nightmare.