‘Oh…’ Juno let out a long breath, leant against the wall to steady herself.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes…’ she gasped. ‘Just… relieved.’
Maggie put a hand on Juno’s shoulder and her eyes softened. ‘It’s been a long day, JJ.’ Juno nodded. ‘Why don’t you go up there and get some sleep?’ She nodded again.
Maggie leant forward and kissed her on the forehead. For a moment Juno’s nose was filled with the sweet lavender scent of her perfume and she exhaled another shaky breath.
‘If I don’t see you in the morning…’
‘You’re supposed to wake us up.’ Maggie nodded as if she had forgotten that fact. Juno had grown used to seeing her silhouette in the doorway in the morning, just after the bell rang. She always smelt sweet as fresh bread and woke them all up by leaning down and stroking their cheeks. Like a mother, almost. Whenever Juno pictured waking up in space she imagined Maggie standing in the doorway and saying, wakie wakie, girls, her own eyes bright and ready to face the day.
‘Sure thing,’ she said with a smile that wilted a little into a grimace. ‘I’m proud of you.’ Maggie added it as an afterthought, when Juno had already taken a couple of steps down the corridor. She stopped and turned back.
‘For what?’
Chapter 5
JESSE
11.0 5.12
T-MINUS 36 HOURS
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE THE launch, Jesse was lying on his bedroom floor listening to news reports from mission control. His sister was speaking to him about attachment, but Jesse was only half listening. He was thinking about the rocket. She kept repeating herself: ‘The thing about attachment,’ she was saying, crossing her legs in front of her, ‘it’s not about not caring, it’s about not clinging.’ The word rang in her throat as if it was a little dirty. ‘You know, the way you hold your breath for just a second when you are given something little and beautiful, in the immediate anticipation of losing it. Which – of course – you will.’ She said this with a flippant wave of her hand. ‘You can’t cling on to anything in this life; money, possessions, other people, even the cherry blossoms dry up and drop away. Loving anything is bound to the pain of losing it. Which is why clinging causes suffering.’
‘You should write that on a bumper sticker.’
‘Are you listening?’
‘Mostly,’ Jesse said. ‘I just don’t see what this has to do with me.’ His sister rolled her eyes.
That was the last night he ever spent with her. The last conversation they had in person. He would realize this later – with a wrench of pain. She had returned from university the previous week and whipped off a patterned scarf to reveal her stunningly bald head. She’d shaved off her thick waist-length locks, and with them the clutching spectres of unhealthy attachments, her own vanity and the hopes of her weary parents.
‘You know what this has to do with you,’ she said, and then her voice softened a little, ‘it hurts to see you in pain like this.’
She had left the week after he discovered that he was not going to Terra-Two, and returned months later to find that he was still hunched over with the ache of disappointment. For Jesse, not a day went by where he didn’t glare at his sleep-swollen face in the mirror and curse his own inadequacy. Not an evening went by without pushing his food away at the dinner table, silently wondering what hateful thing had caused him to fail at the final hurdle. He would never know.
He’d trained with the Beta until January and after he’d been released the six of them had become his new obsession. He bought an issue of every magazine that featured their smiling faces, choked down the breakfast cereals that promised tiny figurines of the shuttle and kept the models themselves in his pockets, which were already heavy with the commemorative coins he collected – the ones with the two earths emblazoned on one side and THE OFF-WORLD COLONIZATION PROGRAMME stamped on the other – and would roll them across his knuckles until his fingers were numb.
‘How do I do that?’ he asked his sister. ‘Since you have all the answers. You talk about worry as if it’s a jacket that I could shrug off. Don’t you think I want to? Don’t you think I want to crawl right out of this anxious body and forget about the space programme and about dying. I can almost imagine how good it would feel. I can almost imagine the vanish of weight. Go on then, Morrigan. Tell me how to do it and I will.’
She was silent for just a moment, her green eyes filled with pity. The radio hissed in the background. ‘Oh Jess—’ his sister reached out to rub his shoulder. ‘Destinies don’t change.’
JESSE WAS TOO NERVOUS to sleep that night. He stood up every half hour to limp over to the mirror and check his body for visible signs of disease, not including the shadows under his eyes or the hollows his new restrictive diet had worn into his cheeks. Whenever he closed his eyes, he dreamt of malignance, of cells multiplying in the soft tissues of his body, of spores floating into his open windows and settling in the membranes of his lungs. Sleep was an abandoned hope.
Instead, he thought about off-world colonization. Of the exquisite design of the spacecraft and the people who would be climbing on to it in a little over twenty-four hours.
Over a million spectators were camped out at the launch site, filling the roads and the surrounding fields with their nocturnal celebrations. It’s like a music festival, one of Jesse’s friends had texted, and he could imagine it now. Most of the people would be the amateur astronomers who had developed a sort of offbeat cool over the past few years. They would be parading their homemade telescopes, the astrolabe apps downloaded onto smartphones. Some of them would be schoolchildren with the Union Jack painted on their eager faces, eyes lifted towards the skies waiting for history to be made.
Jesse didn’t know, even as he began shuffling through another day, that Ara had already taken her final steps towards the bile-black river.
What he did know was that the shuttle that would carry the Beta into orbit – the Congreve – was lit up on its platform behind guards and barricades, and that when it disappeared into the sky the following day, so would the last of his hope.
He was going to die. He was no astronaut. He was no pilgrim, he was no humble dreamer fated for the stars.
Chapter 6
JESSE
12.05.12
T-MINUS 12 HOURS
HE HEARD IT ON the radio first. The headline, that the body of an astronaut had been recovered from the Thames in what appeared to be an accident. His nerves quivered as if they’d been struck by a tuning fork.
He rushed down the stairs to the kitchen, where his mother was half-watching Strictly Come Dancing on the small television above the fridge. Jesse grabbed the remote from the table and switched to the news. The saucepan hissed as his father set it on the stove. Jesse’s heart was racing as he watched the headlines rolling. Saw the words ‘ARA SHAH’, and ‘ACCIDENT’ and ‘MISSION IN CRISIS’. He didn’t even notice that he’d dropped the remote until he heard the sound of plastic crashing against the kitchen tiles and saw the batteries roll under the table. Then he turned around, and began to run.
He stopped outside his front door, standing alone in the cloying late spring air, his eyes stinging. In his sleep-addled mind, he was certain that, tonight, his life was about to change, but he didn’t know how. A blood vessel bulging in his brain, about to burst? A car lurching around the kerb, its headlights bright as jack-o-lanterns in the split second before it crushed him into the concrete? Or a call from the space agency at the last minute?