A Godawful Small Affair Read online

  In the days and weeks that followed, Zoe’s dad found earthly explanations for everything. Her sensitivity to light he blamed on headaches caused by her reading in bed too late at night, and when the headaches worsened, he Googled ‘migraine cures’ and took her to the doctors. They gave her stronger pills. Zoe couldn’t seem to remember what day or year it was anymore, or if it was summer or winter. Her dad said he could be forgetful himself. He called it an early onset senior moment. It was supposed to be a joke, but Zoe didn’t laugh, and Nathan didn’t get it.

  When Zoe had been back for nearly a month and she forgot how to tell the time, her dad blamed her iPhone. The tapping, humming and scraping noises that no one else could hear were the fault of the loud music Zoe listened to and because of the earphones she constantly wore, even when there was no music playing. When Zoe started sleepwalking, her dad fixed a gate to the top of the stairs as though she was a toddler or a dog.

  Zoe’s dad refused to believe that toast popped up when it was still bread if Zoe was in the kitchen, or that the television switched itself off or changed channel when she walked into the living room. He said it was just a coincidence that light bulbs didn’t seem to last as long anymore, and mobile phones lost their signal if Zoe was nearby. He said she was making everything up, and probably for her brother’s entertainment. Nathan thought his sister was a superhero.

  He watched her take another puff from her inhaler.

  “Do you want to play a game?” Zoe said.

  “What game?”

  “A question and answer game.”

  She took a thick block of Post-it notes from the top of their dad’s desk. The block was made up of three different coloured layers. The top and bottom layers were each an inch thick and both pink. The layer of notes in the middle was white and half as thick. Zoe peeled off the top pink layer and half of the white Post-it notes. She replaced the top pink layer and returned the now much thinner block back to the desk. It reminded Nathan of the time he’d caught her topping up a bottle of their dad’s best wine with tap water when she was thirteen.

  Zoe took the red Sharpie she’d used to write a message for David Bowie out of her jacket pocket and came over to the sofa.

  “Budge up,” she said.

  Nathan shuffled along the sofa on his knees. Zoe wrote something on the top Post-it note and peeled it off. She reached her hand out and lifted Nathan’s fringe. He pulled his head away.

  “What are you doing?” Nathan said.

  “Trust me.”

  Nathan sat round the right way on the sofa and let Zoe stick the Post-it note to his forehead. Her hand on his head reminded him of when their mum used to check his temperature when he was trying to get out of going to school. He went to remove the Post-it note to see what it said.

  “Leave it,” Zoe said.

  She gave him the pad of Post-it notes and the red pen and told him to write a name down.

  “What name?”

  “Someone famous. And don’t let me see.”

  Nathan looked at the small square blank page like it was homework.

  “Anyone?” he said.

  Zoe nodded. “Not one of your mates from school though. Somebody I would have seen on telly or at the cinema. And no footballers. Unless it’s David Beckham or Wayne Rooney.” Nathan went to write something down. Zoe arched her eyebrows. “Not David Beckham or Wayne Rooney.”

  Nathan sat back on the sofa. All he could think about was his sister in a spaceship and what the aliens looked like. Since Zoe had been back on Earth, that had been Nathan’s most frequently asked question – what did they look like? He’d even made an Alien Guess Who? game to try and find out. Nathan had cut pictures of aliens out of comics, TV listings magazines and from the toy section of the Argos catalogue. He’d spread them out on his bedroom floor and asked Zoe if the aliens – her aliens – were green, and did they have eyes or beards, tentacles, antennae and so on, turning pictures over every time Zoe said no. When every single picture was turned over, Zoe had shrugged and said, “I suppose aliens don’t look anything like aliens.”

  Zoe gestured at the still blank Post-it note in front of her brother. “Take your time,” she said sarcastically.

  “I’m thinking,” Nathan said. “Can he be from a film?”

  “So, it’s a he, is it?”

  “Might not be.”

  “Yes, then,” Zoe said. “He, or she, can be from a film, and stop chewing my pen.”

  Nathan thought again. Zoe picked at her blue nail varnish. He tried to block out the horrible sound.

  “I’ve got one,” he said. He turned his whole body away from Zoe while he was writing it down.

  Zoe gathered her hair in her hand and tied it in a ponytail with a black scrunchy and Nathan stuck the Post-it note to her forehead.

  “Don’t look,” he said.

  “I can’t see through my skin,” Zoe said, and Nathan wondered if she really could. He put the lid back on the pen and gave it to her. She wiped his drool off on the arm of the sofa.

  “What do we do now?” Nathan said.

  “We ask each other questions about the name of the person written on our heads. But the answers can only be yes, or no. Shall I start?”

  “It’s like Alien Guess Who?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You remember.”

  Zoe shook her head.

  “Shall I go and find it?” he started getting up.

  “Can’t you concentrate on one thing for five minutes? Sit,” Zoe said. “And stay,” like he was that puppy again. “Right. Am I male?”

  Nathan had forgotten what he’d written. He leaned closer to look at the piece of paper he’d stuck to his sister’s forehead. “Yes.”

  “Your turn,” Zoe said.

  “Am I male?”

  “It doesn’t have to be the same question.”

  “Am I female?”

  Zoe rolled her eyes. “You’ve already had your question. My answer to your first question is, yes, you are male. My turn now. Am I alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I in acting?” Nathan asked.

  “Hmm,” Zoe said. “Sort of.”

  “You said we could only say yes or no.”

  “Okay. No. You aren’t in acting. Am I American?”

  “No,” Nathan said. “Am I black?”

  “No. Am I a singer?”

  “No. Am I a man or a boy?”

  “Is that one or two questions?”

  “Am I a boy then?”

  “Yes. Do I play a sport?”

  “No. Am I Elliott?”

  “Whoa,” Zoe said. “Yes, you are.”

  Nathan peeled off the Post-it note. From the way he smiled, Zoe immediately knew what was written on the piece of paper stuck to her forehead.

  “Am I E.T.?” she said.

  Zoe folded the two Post-it notes in half and poked them through the slot of a fat pink piggy bank on the mantelpiece. In its time the piggy bank had been everything from a swear box to a phone money honesty box and their dad’s ‘tattoo fund’. Most recently the piggy bank had been raided to buy ice creams from the ice cream man. Now it was a bin for used Post-it notes. They both wrote more names and stuck them to each other’s heads. Nathan asked the first question.

  “Am I a famous singer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I David Bowie?”

  The speed in which they guessed each other’s identities was like a magic trick. Some names were easier to guess than others. David Bowie was easy, of course, and Zoe got George Best because Nathan kept looking over at the picture of the footballer hanging on the wall. Zoe had allowed it, even though she’d said no footballers. After six or seven games the magic started to lose its power and more and more questions were required, clues had to be given to make the games end and twice Zoe gave up. The final game was as slow as Monopoly and ended with both of them giving up, even though Nathan suspected he was Taylor Swift but didn’t want to have to ask, “Am I Taylor Swift?” An
d also because Zoe was never going to get Hugh Jackman as long as Nathan thought his name was Hugh Jackson.

  Zoe put all the used Post-it notes in the piggy bank and Nathan went upstairs to the toilet. He left the bathroom door open and aimed his wee at the sides of the toilet bowl and he didn’t flush, in case the aliens used the noise of the rushing water to mask the sound of their spacecraft landing. Ten months after Zoe’s abduction and Nathan still couldn’t leave his sister on her own without thinking she wouldn’t be there when he got back.

  4

  Nathan looked at his lightning bolt make-up in the bathroom mirror. There was a square patch of red missing, where the Post-it note had been, but it still looked cool. Nathan came out of the bathroom and walked along the landing to his bedroom. He pulled a large drawer out from under his bed. His dad had fixed the heavy drawer to castors so that Nathan could easily get to it and keep his room tidy. Once the drawer was full and pushed under his bed though, it rarely came out again.

  Nathan looked through some of the toys and games in the drawer. Things he’d broken, grown out of or lost interest in, and yet he would never allow his mum or dad to give anything to the charity shop or sell them on eBay. He took the dried-up slime and hard Play-Doh out of the drawer and put them on the floor. He pulled out plastic dinosaurs, trading cards and Panini stickers, the Power Rangers ninja star blaster that was snapped in half, Spider-Man with one arm missing and three Action Man dolls.

  Both the WWE figures in the drawer would never wrestle again. Stone Cold Steve Austin was headless and Dolph Ziggler’s leg had been melted with a lighter by Nathan’s friend Arthur. There were four board games at the bottom of the drawer – Battleships and Bingo, Snakes and Ladders, and a maths game he’d really hated – but he couldn’t find Alien Guess Who? He did find his Space Torch though, and the notebook his dad had bought him from the National Space Centre. The cover of the notebook was red and made of plastic. Nathan had crossed out the words ‘National’ and ‘Centre’ with a black marker pen and added Zoe’s name, so it said:

  ZOE LOVE. Space Cadet.

  Nathan squeezed the notebook into the one pocket of his Mission to Mars spacesuit that was real and tested the Space Torch. The batteries were flat. He threw everything except the torch and the notebook back into the drawer and pushed it underneath the bed. He went back downstairs, taking the steps two at a time. Halfway down, he could see into the living room. When Zoe wasn’t there he panicked. He took the last three stairs in one big jump.

  Zoe was on the other side of the living room. She’d switched the television off and was trying to close the door of their dad’s overstuffed desk. She had a large roll of Sellotape hooked over her wrist and a thin wad of copier paper held between her teeth.

  “What are you doing?” Nathan said.

  Zoe said something that with the paper in her mouth Nathan couldn’t understand. She pushed the sofa back, exposing a crime scene on the carpet beneath. Nathan picked up a tiny plastic ray gun, Spider-Man’s missing arm and the head of a Bratz doll. He stuffed the ray gun and Spider-Man’s arm in the same pocket as the red notebook. He pretended to bowl a cricket ball with the doll’s head. It was hard to imagine Zoe had ever played with dolls. It was easier, in fact, to picture her decapitating the doll than it was to picture her playing with it.

  “What are you doing?” Nathan asked again.

  Zoe took the paper out of her mouth. “Making contact.”

  She laid four sheets of copier paper on the carpet to form one larger rectangle, and with the roll of tape still around her wrist she peeled off long strips and taped the paper together. She tipped her arm up and let the roll of tape slide down into her open hand. She put it on the sofa behind her. With the red Sharpie Zoe wrote the letter ‘A’ and continued writing the alphabet in an arched line across the centre of the paper. When she ran out of space, she started a second curved row of letters underneath.

  “What is it?” Nathan said.

  “The alphabet.”

  “Duh, I know that. What’s it for?”

  “I’m making a Ouija board.”

  “What’s a Luigi board?”

  Zoe laughed. “It’s a device for speaking to the dead.”

  She was now writing numbers in a straight line under the letters, from zero to nine. Nathan sat on the carpet next to Zoe.

  “Do you mean Mum?” he said. The only other dead person he could think of was their gran, their mum’s mum, who he hadn’t liked talking to when she was alive. She was always in a bad mood and he always felt like he was in trouble with her for no reason, until she forgot who everyone was, which was worse because she didn’t even give him money from her purse anymore.

  “This Luigi board isn’t for speaking to the dead,” Zoe said. “It’s for speaking to life.”

  “What life?”

  “Other life. On other planets.”

  “Mars?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Cool.”

  Zoe wrote a large YES at the top of the paper and a NO at the bottom.

  “Is it like the Post-it game?” Nathan said. “How does it work?”

  “I don’t know if it does yet,” Zoe said. “It’s a beta Luigi board.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It hasn’t been tested yet.”

  “Is it like E.T.’s communicator?”

  “If you like. It is a sort of intergalactic communication device.”

  Nathan said, “Cool. You can ask them to abduct you again and I can come with you this time. Can I come with you this time?”

  Zoe didn’t answer, which as far as Nathan was concerned was the same as a yes. She asked him if he had any glue. He thought there was some in the kitchen. He bowled another pretend cricket ball with the Bratz doll’s head and went to get it. Zoe called out for him to bring a glass in too. When he came back, she was drawing the last of five stars around the edges of the Luigi board. Nathan gave her the Pritt stick and the glass tumbler. She breathed on the glass and polished it on her sleeve, then put it on the carpet next to the Luigi board. She popped the lid off the Pritt stick with her teeth and dabbed glue onto each of the five stars. She replaced the lid and gave the glue to Nathan.

  “Pass me my jacket,” she said.

  Nathan went and got her jacket. She took two tubes of glitter out of the pocket. She gave Nathan the gold one and removed the lid from the silver tube.

  “It was supposed to be for David,” Zoe said. She sprinkled silver glitter onto each of the five Luigi board stars and replaced the lid. “I meant to make him a birthday card to leave at the mural.” She put the lid back on the tube of silver glitter and gave it to Nathan. He handed her the gold tube. He pretended he was the nurse and Zoe was the surgeon. She sprinkled gold glitter on top of the silver.

  “Stardust,” she said.

  “Ziggy Stardust,” Nathan said, and Zoe congratulated him on his ‘very clever joke’.

  When there was a messy pile of mixed silver and gold glitter covering all the stars Zoe asked Nathan to hold one of the now empty tubes steady. She picked up the Luigi board, folded the corner into a spout and carefully poured glitter back into the tube. She put the Luigi board back down on the carpet. Nathan looked at it.

  “Sick,” he said, as though his sister had just invented the PlayStation.

  Zoe put the two tubes of leftover glitter and the red Sharpie back in her pocket and threw the jacket onto the sofa behind her.

  “Your hands are covered in stardust,” Nathan said.

  Zoe held her fingers up to the light. The glitter twinkled.

  “Yours are too,” she said.

  Nathan moved his hands around, twisting and turning them.

  “There’s nothing,” he said.

  “Have some of mine,” Zoe brushed her fingers across the back of his hand until it twinkled too. “Did you know our whole bodies are made of stars? Or nearly all of them.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Or how?”

  “Both.”
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br />   “Because we’re made up of molecules and atoms. The atoms come from distant galaxies billions of years ago.”

  “How many billions?”

  “I don’t know. More than four.”

  “Five?”

  “I don’t have the exact figures to hand right now. You’ll have to get back to me on that,” she put her fingers to her ear. “Next caller please.”

  “You’re weird,” Nathan said.

  “So I’ve been told. We’re made of stars because all organic matter that contains carbon is made from stars.”

  “How?”

  “The Universe was originally just hydrogen and helium. Carbon was made afterwards. That took billions – I don’t know how many billions before you ask – of years. When the stars run out of hydrogen they die.”

  “How?”

  “They explode. The explosion’s called a nova. Massive stars exploding are supernovas. They’re brighter than the sun. Billions of times brighter. It’s always billions with space. The nova or supernova burns bright, and then it eventually fades. It’s more complicated than that obviously. But basically, we are all made of stars.”

  “Am I made of stars?”

  “Everyone is. We all come from stars and we’ll all go back there eventually too. At least half the things in this room are made of stars as well.”

  “The telly?”

  “Parts of it, definitely.”

  “The carpet?”

  Zoe rubbed her hand on the carpet. “I expect so.”

  “Is the Luigi board made from stars?”

  “The paper is.”

  “Are the stars on it made from stars?”

  “I don’t know,” Zoe said. She picked up the glass and placed it upside down at the centre of the Luigi board, underneath the letters and numbers.

  “Is that why you want to go back there?” Nathan said. “Because it’s where you came from? From the stars?”