We Used to Be Kings Read online

  Everything will be quiet . . . and we can write the last chapter.

  —

  Can we write it now . . . on the typewriter?

  No.

  —

  It’s not quiet yet.

  ?

  —

  We yawn.

  We’re tired.

  Are we?

  Yes.

  We rub our hands over our face. Our eyelids are so heavy that we cannot keep them up with our thumbs. We rest our head against the wall and put our feet up on the desk and look down at the shadows of the lorries parked side by side in the dark. Tomorrow we will be on number 9.

  Tomorrow we’re going to the beach.

  Yes. Because it’s where Dad used to take us, it’s where he was happy. Sometimes people go back to the places that made them happy.

  Like elephants?

  ?

  Like elephants?

  No.

  But I thought . . .

  No, they go back to places to die.

  —

  —

  Our blood throbs in our hand. We are tired and cold.

  But we’re safe?

  Yes.

  And no one will come and take me?

  No.

  How do you know?

  Because no one else could put up with your questions.

  —

  —

  So we can read?

  . . . We have to.

  . . . Can we read about the last time we went to the beach with Mum and Dad?

  OK.

  And then I’ll go to sleep.

  And I’ll keep guard.

  Like a dog.

  Like a wolf.

  Hooooooowlllllll!

  Ha!

  Ha!

  We wrap ourself tight, let our head drop and rest on our shoulder. We breathe and go to sleep with one eye closed and the other watching the moon. It shines through the window, casts our shadow on the table, makes the shards of glass glisten, lights our fingerprints around the pane. We’ll have to wipe them off in the morning, along with our blood. We don’t want to leave a mess, we don’t want to leave any traces of our DNA.

  We look back up at the moon, see its oceans and craters, its eyes and its nose. We feel small and wonder why someone we want to see so much went so far away. Tomorrow we will be on the beach, one step further away from the house, one step closer to him. The wind blows across the glass, the red brake lights of a car wind through the hills. Our book falls down onto our lap.

  We close our eye and hope that in the morning, when it opens, we will wake up with the sun.

  Summer 1971

  I was on the sand dune.

  Mum was on the beach.

  Jack was in the water.

  Dad was in the rock pools with his space helmet on, stepping from one pool to another. Every once in a while he bent down, dipped his hand in the water and dropped something into a yellow plastic bag.

  He stepped out from the shadow of the cliffs and turned towards me. The sun sparkled on his visor. I waved to him. He put his hand in the air and signalled for me to come over.

  I slid down the dune, ran along the beach between the windbreaks and children building sandcastles.

  He had moved on to another pool by the time I reached him.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘what are you doing?’

  He didn’t answer. He just turned and I saw myself reflected in his visor as he checked up at the cliff top, then back along the beach. Everything was quiet, like I was watching TV without sound.

  ‘Nobody’s watching, Dad,’ I said. ‘Nobody’s listening.’

  ‘There,’ he said.

  I followed the line of his finger as he pointed out to sea, beyond the wooden wave breaks, past a man rowing in a dinghy. I looked as far as I could see, to where there seemed to be a trail of black smoke behind the silhouette of a ship on the horizon. Dad tapped the side of his helmet.

  ‘They might be watching,’ he said. ‘They might be spies.’

  I stood watching the ship, wondering if there might be spies on board, but even if there were, I was sure they couldn’t see us if I couldn’t see them. I turned around to tell Dad, but he had moved on.

  I climbed into the next pool where Dad was standing with one of his hands closed tight. He told me to hold the yellow bag. It rattled when I took it and was really heavy. Dad slowly unfurled his hand and, as I leant forward to get a better look, my head bumped against his helmet.

  ‘Sporry,’ he said.

  I rubbed my head and watched as he brushed grains of sand off his palm with his finger until all that was left were three black dots in the middle.

  ‘What are they?’ I asked.

  ‘Samples,’ he whispered. ‘Meteorite and moon dust, and there’s more in there.’

  I opened the bag wide and he dug his hand right to the bottom. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Right there . . . anorthosite and breccias . . . and volcanic glass . . .!’

  I looked closer but all I could see were shells, rocks, and a piece of seaweed wrapped around the tip of his finger.

  ‘It’s just beach things,’ I said.

  He nodded at the boat on the horizon.

  ‘That’s what they want you to believe,’ he whispered, ‘but that’s not what the Russians have taught me.’ He blinked and made a noise like a tape playing backwards. I bent down and scooped more sand from the water.

  By the time we reached the ninth pool the bag was cutting into my fingers. Dad took it from me, tied the handles and then placed it on the sand. He said we could collect it later. The sun was burning my head, my skin was stiff with salt. I told him I was hot and thirsty. He nodded over my shoulder, said I needed to keep up because we were being followed. I looked back and saw a line of children; they were picking up things Dad had discarded and putting them in their buckets. I heard a girl say she was collecting meteorites. I heard a boy tell her she was collecting rubbish. I tried to keep up with Dad but the pools were getting rockier and deeper. I stopped for a rest. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and saw a boy wearing a yellow T-shirt. He was taller than Jack but not as tall as me.

  ‘Is your dad a scientist?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  I went to walk away. He tapped me on the shoulder again.

  ‘What is he then?’

  I looked at Dad, then back at the boy. ‘He’s a cosmonaut,’ I whispered. ‘He’s going to the moon, but don’t tell anyone else.’

  The boy screwed his eyebrows together.

  ‘What’s a cosmonaut?’

  I checked back at Dad; he was bent over with his hand deep in the water.

  ‘They’re the same as an astronaut except they come from Russia, not America.’

  Dad stood up and took off his helmet. His hair was stuck down flat against the sides of his head and his face looked long and tired. He waded through the water towards me and the boy.

  ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘I said not to tell anyone. They’re out there listening.’ His eyes seemed to pop out of his head as he pointed to the boat on the horizon.

  I turned around to tell the boy but he was gone and the rock pool was empty. I looked up and saw the blur of his yellow T-shirt as he ran across the sand with all the girls trailing behind. I looked back at Dad.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I told them.’

  He smiled.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s OK.’ He walked towards me and sat down on a rock.

  I looked out at the water but I wasn’t really looking at anything, I was just wishing I hadn’t let out the secret, thinking that I should have kept my mouth shut. I felt an elbow in my ribs, looked up and saw Dad smiling with his helmet in his hands.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Try it on.’ He held it over my head, pushed it down and clipped the strap under my chin. My head fell forward and the visor shut over my face. The sand turned orange, the sea turned black. I smelt sweat and leather. I tried
to stand up but my head started to wobble. Dad started to laugh. I took a step, he held out his arms and stopped me falling over. He held me tight and the visor steamed up as my laughter echoed inside.

  ‘My head’s too big for my body,’ I said.

  ‘Or your body’s too small for your head.’ Dad smiled and helped me take the helmet off. I sat beside him. He laughed again, then went quiet as we watched Jack playing in the water as the sun moved across the sky.

  I started to think of the clocks on the wall, ticking the time away at home. I thought how exciting it was that Dad was going to the moon, but the more I thought, the longer we sat together on the rock, the more I realised that I didn’t want him to go.

  His arm suddenly jumped on my shoulder. I looked up at him, his face twitched and a blue vein bulged in his neck. I asked him if he was OK. He said he felt a little dizzy, that maybe the sun was too hot or he hadn’t drunk enough water. He bent over and held onto a rock. His skin pulled tight across his back and I counted the bumps where his ribs met his spine. I hadn’t seen his ribs before. I hadn’t noticed he was getting skinny. I also hadn’t noticed the two red marks at the top of his neck.

  He started to shiver. I asked him if he was cold. He shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘. . . It’s a trick the Russians taught me to lower my body temperature if I get too hot in space.’ He blew out his cheeks. ‘It’s working,’ he said. ‘I feel cooler already.’

  The vein on his neck started to disappear but the two marks were still there.

  ‘Dad,’ I asked, ‘what are those marks?’

  ‘What marks?’

  ‘Those.’ I pointed.

  He jumped away from me and covered the marks with his hand.

  ‘Oh, these? . . . They’re from the electrodes . . . It’s what they use to monitor my DOS.’

  He looked along the beach, said Mum was waving for us to go and get some tea. I looked for Mum, but she wasn’t waving, she was just sitting on a blanket on the sand. I looked back at Dad. I told him I could see two more marks on his chest.

  He waved his hand like he was trying to brush off a wasp.

  ‘Bloody electrodes,’ he said. ‘They get everywhere.’

  I smiled but I didn’t know why, maybe it was just because he did. He held out his hand and we walked down to the water to get Jack. On the way he told me how the Russians connected him up to a machine when he was running so they could see his heartbeat on a screen. I asked him what it looked like. He said it was like valleys and mountains; when his heart didn’t beat he was at the bottom, when it did he was at the top, and the faster he ran, the bigger the mountains got until the valleys disappeared in between.

  ‘So it’s not a picture of your heart?’ I asked.

  He laughed. ‘No, Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s just a jagged line.’ He rubbed my head and I felt like Jack must have done most of the time.

  ‘Sporry wurry sputnik’ he said.

  ‘Sporry wurry sputnik,’ I said back.

  I laughed, but I still didn’t know what it meant.

  The water splashed against our legs as we walked out into the sea and we reached Jack bobbing up and down between the waves. Dad put his helmet on his head and his hands down by his sides. I took one hand and Jack took the other. Dad started to walk parallel to the beach, dragged us faster and faster. I looked across at Jack, he was laughing and smiling. We kicked our legs out behind us and cut like sharks through the water.

  When Dad got tired we turned towards the land and walked along the sand, past the lifeguard, until we stopped near the end where the yellow and red flags hung from poles. Dad put his hand on my shoulder and pointed at the sky.

  ‘Tell me what you see,’ he said.

  I looked across at Jack. He shrugged. Dad pressed his hand down on my shoulder.

  ‘Come on, Tom,’ he said. ‘I know you see it too.’

  I told him I could see people standing on the cliff tops, that I could see seagulls swooping above them.

  He shook his head like I was wrong.

  ‘I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know what I’m supposed to see.’

  He knelt down between me and Jack and held out his hand like it was a bird of prey hovering in the air.

  ‘Imagine you’re floating . . . across the sand, under the sun, over the dunes . . .’

  ‘Like we’re in a spaceship,’ said Jack.

  ‘Yes, Jack. Like we’re in a spaceship.’

  Jack smiled and looked at me. I wished I’d said that.

  Dad pulled us closer to him. ‘Imagine we have rockets,’ he whispered. ‘Imagine that we have rockets that are so powerful they can blast you off the Earth, but are as gentle as the breeze so you can land without a bump.’

  I imagined myself hovering. I imagined the engines underneath. I looked across at Jack, he was hovering with me, with his eyes screwed up against the sun.

  Dad pointed to the blue sky above the cliff top.

  ‘Can you see the dust cloud?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Start the engine, Jack. Press the button.’

  Dad flipped his visor down. I saw my reflection with Jack standing beside me; our bodies were small like babies, our heads were big like Martians.

  Jack held up his finger and asked me which button.

  ‘The middle one,’ I said.

  ‘This one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The engines started and we rose into the sky. Jack held the wheel, Dad controlled the engines and I plotted our position out of the window. We travelled over the ridges and craters, the mounds and the hollows that were as wide as our sky and as deep as our oceans.

  Jack turned left as Dad gave more boost to our engines. We flew over the Sea of Tranquillity, over catenae, dorsa, rimae and dustbowls and valleys that Dad didn’t tell us the names of.

  I felt water around my feet. Jack’s arms started to shake. I waited for Dad to take over the controls and fly us home. But he was quiet, now he was just a passenger sitting in the seat behind us. He leant forward, put his head between ours and whispered so quietly it could have been the waves.

  ‘I’ll be going soon.’

  I turned around and felt sad and excited at the same time. It was T minus one day, six hours and counting, but from the darkness I saw in his eyes it was like he hadn’t just shown us the moon, he was already on it.

  We looked up at the sky, at a flock of birds flying across the sea towards the red strips of cloud on the horizon. Dad mumbled, something about shepherds, something about mackerel. I told him I couldn’t hear him. He mumbled again, and I caught the words ‘tomorrow’, ‘wind speed’ and ‘nitrogen’.

  I told him I didn’t want him to go. Jack said he didn’t want him to go, either. Dad’s eyes went dark and sparkled. He told me to be good and to look after Jack. I told him I always was and I would. Then he went quiet. I felt water rushing around my feet. I tugged his arm.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘the tide’s coming in.’

  He didn’t move, his helmet didn’t move, it was like he had gone to sleep inside.

  I looked at Jack, his face was white, his lips a thin line of blue.

  The world went cold.

  We stood together and shivered as we watched the sun go down in Dad’s visor.

  There were shadows outside my bedroom door when I woke up the next morning. I heard Dad cough, smelt smoke, soap and aftershave. When he bumped his head going down the stairs I heard Mum telling him to shush and not to wake the boys.

  I knelt up in my bed and pulled back the curtain – everything looked cold and grey outside. Mum walked up the path carrying Dad’s bag. Dad dragged his suitcase behind her. He was wearing a coat that I’d only seen in the winter. I reached behind me and wrapped myself warm in my blanket. Mum and Dad stopped under an orange street light at the end of the path.

  A mattress spring pinged and made me jump. The curtain moved and I looked along the windowsill and saw Jack grinning at me from the other end
.

  ‘Is it Christmas?’ he whispered.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But it feels like it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  My breath misted the window. I wiped it away. A car’s headlights lit up Mum and Dad as it turned into the road. A yellow taxi stopped beside them under the light. Dad picked up his suitcase, put it in the boot, put his helmet on and got inside. I watched the red lights shine bright as the taxi went to the top of the hill, turned around and came back down again. Mum waved, me and Jack waved too, but it was too dark to see if Dad was waving back.

  I lay down on my bed, reached for my torch and shone it up at my clock. I waited for the second hand to sweep round, but it didn’t move. I shone my torch at Jack’s wall: his hour hand was on the 6, the minute hand was on the 12 and the second hand was stopped halfway between the 8 and the 9, just like mine. Jack sat up in his bed. I turned my torch towards him and he put his hands over his eyes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he whispered.

  ‘Something’s wrong,’ I said.

  I stood up on my bed, reached out and tried to push the second hand. ‘They’ve stopped. The Russians have stopped the clocks.’

  Jack’s face shone white in the dark except for the hole where his mouth hung open. He reached under his bed for his torch and fumbled for the switch. The beam lit our clocks and our posters, the undercarriage of our planes and turned them into huge shadows on the ceiling.

  ‘He can’t be gone,’ he said. ‘Dad can’t be gone . . . It’s still T minus—’

  His torchlight stopped on my easel in the corner. The last number I’d written was 1, but now it was crossed through and underneath was a circle with a line scratched through it. I walked over and put my hand on the board. It wasn’t my zero, I didn’t do my zeros like that.

  Jack stood beside me. His breaths were quick and heavy. I put my arm around him and looked at the white on my finger.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  I showed him the chalk. He shook his head and pointed to an envelope jammed between the hinges of the easel:

  I reached up and pulled the envelope out. My heart was thudding, my hands were shaking. Dad’s writing wobbled in front of me and started to turn blurry. I didn’t want to open it, I didn’t want him to have gone, because if I’d known it was T minus zero I wouldn’t have waved from the window, I would have run across the path and said goodbye properly.