Space Hopper

by Helen Fisher

  People talk about what heaven is like. Some think it’s clouds and angels playing harps, some think it’s a golden city bathed in afternoon sunlight. I’ve heard some people say it would be the place they loved most on earth: a beach; a field; throwing a Frisbee to their dog and playing til they’re muddy and running back to a warm kitchen where their mother and father are calling them in for dinner: hot, buttered bread rolls and chicken soup.

  When my mother died, heaven was a blur to me, soft focus, but I believed she was there and if I’d had to describe it as a child I would have said it was most like the clouds-and-angels version. When I got older I stopped believing in God and heaven, but when people died, it still brought me comfort to imagine them somewhere else. So I visualised them sitting at a long bar, drink in hand, and then when another person I knew died, I pictured them joining the others at the bar, laughing, smiling, welcoming each other with a pat on the back. I even imagined a small TV on the wall of that bar with images of what was happening back on earth. I guess if there is a heaven, we don’t get to choose what it is. But surely I was dead? In which case my heaven was my old living room.

  I hadn’t imagined that dying would be so difficult. I had imagined maybe a flash of discomfort, then a bright light, walk towards it, etc. then… nothing. But my passage into heaven, if that’s what it was, had been a lot more difficult than that.

  As I rotated in the living room of my childhood, I had to be honest with myself. I was quickly beginning to think that I might not be dead, but rather, I’d gone back in time. I knew it wasn’t possible and when people normally travel back in time (I’m talking books, films), they don’t usually get so hurt. Don’t they just walk into a cupboard and step out the other side? But the big difference was that this was real. Of course it wasn’t going to be the same as storybooks and films; after all they’re not autobiographical. The point is that at the time, in the living room, I was starting to think I wasn’t dead. I didn’t feel dead. Maybe you would expect me to wonder if I was dreaming, but I’ve had hundreds of dreams, and this was no dream. I tested it in all the clichéd ways, I even pinched myself.

  It had always been hard for me to believe in things I couldn’t see with my own eyes, I had always been sceptical about everything I read in a book. Non-fiction could be as fanciful as fiction to me when I considered that those books were written by people who were simply telling me something they’d read or heard somewhere else. I suppose it’s why I’ve found it hard to believe in God, and share Eddie’s faith. If I can’t see it, I’ve got a problem with its existence. I mean, I believe in germs, even though I can’t see them with my naked eye, because they are at least there to be seen under a microscope.

  If only, if only, God could be seen under the microscope.

  There were more abstract things I believed in, even though I couldn’t see them, or understand them, like electricity and how it makes bulbs light up, or aerodynamics and how those forces get an aeroplane off the ground; the physical results of those things were evidence enough for me.

  All this in an effort to explain that I had always, always, trusted my senses. I pressed my toes into the carpet and touched the needles on the Christmas tree. I jiggled one of the ornaments and heard the tiny bell ring inside it. I licked my lips and tasted salt, and a tiny bit of blood, I closed my eyes and breathed in hard, I could smell my childhood home. A thing that can’t be described but is as distinct as the pattern on the wallpaper.

  Never before had I mistrusted my senses in the face of such overwhelming evidence. If I could see it, smell it, hear it, feel it and taste it, then it had to be real. But now, my sense of reality was reversed, the confirmation of my physical surroundings was giving me proof of something that I knew simply couldn’t be true. I had never had such unequivocal solid proof of something being real, and yet – at the same time – not believe it. I wasn’t sure I had enough faith to believe in what every single sense was screaming at me: that the only possible truth, impossible as it might be to accept, was that I had travelled back in time. That was the most reasonable explanation I could come up with. And for a girl who thinks God is far-fetched, that was really something.

  * * *

  I considered the strangeness of my immediate situation: it was night-time and I was in someone else’s house, they were probably asleep and if they found me, it was going to be difficult. And when I say ‘they’, I am of course talking about my mother. My mother. My heart stopped for a moment, skipped a beat, and when it started, it pounded hard. Would I see my mother again? Was she upstairs?

  The issue of getting home again, by which I mean back to Eddie and the girls, hadn’t hit me until I reasoned with myself that I must be in the past. I don’t feel comfortable when my children are out of arm’s reach, or shouting distance. I’m only truly at ease when I’m in the same building as them. The only exception is when I know they’re with Eddie, because he’s the only other person in the world who loves them like I do. And there, I suppose, is the most faith I have in the world: when I can’t see my children, but know they’re with Eddie, for me, that’s faith. A version of fear – that I have nothing to compare with – rose up and filled every cell of my body, a fear like no other that I might never see my children again. The times I had lost sight of them as they turned the corner at the end of a supermarket aisle, the time Evie wandered off in a shopping centre and security locked all the doors, and I wailed, What if she’s already outside those doors? All the imaginings I’d had, daily, of every possible thing that could go wrong, that might mean they were lost from me for ever, those imaginings were nothing compared to this.

  This time everything was different because it was me who was lost. They couldn’t find me, and I couldn’t reach out to them. If I became a prisoner in time, then my daughters – like my mother – would be relegated to memory only, and I would be relegated to theirs. I was suffocating with fear, and then I was forced to engage a level of faith I had never required before. The girls were with Eddie, but I was not in a different building or a different country, I was in a different year. The fact that I was thirty years removed from my daughters made everything go grey, and the air buzzed in my ears, and my arm swam about looking for something to hold onto.

  I crouched down and pressed my hands to the floor. It struck me like a hammer that if I couldn’t get home to my children, then I was like a mother who had died suddenly, leaving her most beloved to the care of others. And so I prayed that Eddie would be safe and well and strong, because my girls needed him. I tried to remember the last moments I spent with them: in the study; it was good. It would be a good memory for them, of me. I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured Esther and Evie in my mind’s eye. ‘I’m going to get back to you,’ I whispered.

  I stood slowly, my hands on my hips. I swayed, but I was okay. ‘I got here,’ I said out loud, in a shaky voice, ‘I can get home again.’ I was being my own air hostess, the only woman on board who could reassure me that I would, at some point, make it back to the place I started. And I didn’t quite trust her unsteady voice, but what choice did I have?

  I felt the need to safeguard the box: it was my ride home, my ticket to see my children again – or so I hoped – so no wonder I had the presence of mind to protect it.

  * * *

  Although it was dark, I knew my way around the house, took a right and went to the kitchen, unlocked the back door. The rush of freezing air added fuel to my conviction that I was neither dead, in a coma or dreaming in any way whatsoever. I was in my bra and jeans and bare feet, having lost Eddie’s jumper on the fall here, and I hobbled down a little path to the garden shed knowing the washing line was running parallel to my right. The bolt on the shed door had always been a bit stiff and I knew just how to wiggle it loose. I threw the Space Hopper box inside and bolted the door again before returning to the house. I didn’t lock the kitchen door in case I needed to get out quickly. I braced myself by the sink for a moment before doing the thing my heart was longing to do: I went
up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom.

  In her doorway, I hesitated. The room was dark, but pre-dawn light bathed the room, making it grey, rather than black. I was half in fear that she might be awake, and half in fear that it wouldn’t be my mother in the bed; so that was one hundred per cent fear of one kind or another. I could tell from her breathing that she was asleep. I’d been holding my own breath and it came out as a shudder, my mouth was dry, palms damp. Could I be about to see my mother for the first time in thirty years, a mother I had only known in all that time as being dead? Hope rushed through my veins, while the rest of me was paralysed. I hoped, I prayed, for the impossible.

  I found movement and padded round to her side of the bed, crouching down.

  My mother’s sleeping face; I took a sharp inward gasp. Her lips were slightly parted and her breath touched me, soft and warm, the very essence of alive. This is my mother’s breath, remember this, I thought. Her light brown hair swept across her forehead. She had a longish fringe and looked as if she’d dreamed about standing at the front of a ship at sea, letting the breeze do what it wanted with her. I looked at the miracle of her eyelashes, and her fingers that were curled under her cheek. I leaned closer, to smell her skin, and my eyes filled with tears: her face cream, a hint of roses. I had smelled the exact same scent on a lady in the supermarket once, and had followed her for a bit.

  My face was an inch from my mother’s. I tilted my head forward a fraction; my nose nearly touching her skin. Tears leaked from the outside corners of my eyes and I felt them meet under my chin. I wanted to wake her. A silent sob escaped me, and I wanted to shake her and say: ‘Mum, I’m here.’ I whispered the words, needing to say them out loud. But I was older than her, by more than ten years, and I knew, despite my emotional unravelling as I knelt at her bedside, that I would scare her if she woke now.

  I lifted the covers a fraction and felt the warmth of her sleeping body. The urge to crawl in beside her, as I had done many times as a young child, was overwhelming. But I was no child. And yet. And yet I was her child. And I had missed many years of falling asleep with her hand draped over my waist, with her falling asleep mid-sentence as she told me a story to chase away a bad dream with a good one.

  She sighed, and I quietly stood, just watching her for a moment. Now was not the time for a reunion. I would have to think of some way to make that happen. I was still just wearing my jeans and a bra, so I got a jumper and some socks from her drawers and pulled them on, and walked backwards out of her room, reluctant to lose sight of her.

  I went to my bedroom, to look at me. And there I was, a beautiful child. I was more confident with my younger self than I had been with my mother, and sat on the edge of the bed making it dip so that my sleeping self turned away from the wall and towards me. The action unwedged her little thumb from her mouth, and I could just make out tiny bite marks in the skin. I brushed her hair away from her face, my face; a curl disobediently bounced back. I stroked my thumb over her perfect cheek and whispered into her ear, ‘You are good, you are kind, you are clever, you are funny,’ which is what I whisper into my children’s ears every night while they’re sleeping. I don’t know why I started doing that, although you may have already wondered if it’s because I did it to myself when I was six years old.

  It was getting lighter outside and the child’s eyes flickered. She said, ‘Mummy,’ in a voice stuffed with sleep, and I kissed her – kissed me. I paused briefly on the way out and touched the spines of the books in my old bookcase, The Magic Faraway Tree, I had loved that, then I went noiselessly downstairs.

  I leaned against the kitchen counter, my heart thumping. My mother was alive and upstairs. Alive. I was the child asleep upstairs. What now? I bounced on my toes a little, took a few paces forward, shook my head, took a few paces backwards – I literally didn’t know what direction to take. I exhaled sharply, a long thin steadying breath. I stopped and held my palms in the air, as if quieting an excitable audience. I needed to get a grip. Despite everything, I had to be sensible and I said, ‘Get a grip,’ out loud. I needed to engage my brain, before my heart catapulted me back up those stairs and into my mother’s arms.

  Although it was cold outside, I couldn’t stay in the house. So I quietly opened a drawer that I knew would be bursting with wrinkled plastic carrier bags, and pulled one out. I cut a couple of slices of bread; a whole missing loaf would be noticed. I did everything slowly and as silently as I could; I took a knife and a jar of jam. There was always lots of jam in the cupboard, and I remembered it was because Henry had an allotment and made loads of his own. There were no plastic bottles to fill with water, although my mouth was dusty dry, so I drank straight from the tap. I wanted to take some water with me, but didn’t know what to put it in. Then I remembered my mother cleaned and kept the empty jars to give back to Henry, so I filled a couple up, screwed on the lids, shook them to make sure they weren’t going to leak and put them in the bag with the bread.

  I needed shoes, and there were two pairs of wellies by the back door: a small yellow pair (mine) and my mother’s black ones. Clearly the absence of boots would be spotted, but right now my need was greater, and my mother would have other shoes. So I put them on, and went to the shed, to eat, wait, and decide what to do next.

  4

  I shivered in the shed and sought reassurance in the rough wood beneath my fingers, touched the cardboard of the damaged box and thought fleetingly how wood and cardboard never get really cold, like glass and metal do. Sheds are not the most comfortable of places, and I found a cushion to sit on; it had that oddly comforting smell, like the attic. Some of my aches were getting worse but I only hurt from the waist up.

  I messily broke off a piece of bread and dipped it in the jam. It tasted of the old days except back then I didn’t like the bits in it, and now I did. I leaned against the wall of the shed. My head was a mess: one thought chased another like a dim-witted cartoon cat trying to pounce on a gang of clever and very quick mice. I tried to make sense of where I was; how and why. Desperate to organise my mind, I mentally gathered what I could of my situation and ordered it like a layered cake; like some version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But my train of thought kept crashing before it left the station, so I felt like I could grasp only the very basics of my predicament. I could breathe and I could chew. I was safe, I had shelter and wasn’t in any immediate danger; at least not that I knew of. Beyond that, I wasn’t sure: I was in the past, but what if I was stuck here? I wanted to see my mother, just wanted to reveal myself to her, and have her understand who I was. But what about Eddie and the girls? I should get back in the box straight away and get home, but I was here now and maybe this was the only chance I’d ever have to be with my mother: the only thing that could fill the mother-shaped hole in my heart. I held my hands in front of me, watched them shake, strangely keen to see physical proof of my inner turmoil. I pinched myself, and laughed; more of a cruel snort at my own predictability. Such a cliché. If I’d had a bottle of alcohol, I would have looked at it accusingly.

  I slapped myself round the face so hard that tears sprang to my eyes, and slapped myself again, about as hard as I possibly could, stinging my skin. Nothing changed, I was still in the shed. My mother within reach, but inaccessible. No friend, no Eddie. No one. I was completely alone, even though my darling mother was in that house. I imagined myself running inside, shouting, It’s me, it’s me.

  Gradually, a cold, white light seeped through the cracks in the shed walls, and with it came the tinny sounds of distant voices. I looked at the house through a gap in the shed door. I couldn’t see much, but after rummaging in a bucket of tools I found a scraper, which I used to widen the gap. The scraper was one of those flat metal things; I remembered my mother using it to get the old paint off the kitchen table. Now I could see her through the kitchen window in her blue dressing gown, her hair loose round her shoulders, the radio was on; that was what I could hear.

  I pulled the jumper around me, it was lo
ng, black and baggy, and helped against the freezing morning. But the real warmth came all the way from the kitchen window and the view of my mother. She was just so lovely. She had the power to make everything sweet, even this very moment. She leaned on her elbows and gazed out at the birds in the garden and then turned away briefly, getting bread, then came to the back door and threw a handful of crumbs out.

  Suddenly she turned fully and ducked out of sight, reappearing just as swiftly with little me in her arms. I was laughing, throwing my head back in that slightly worrying way that looks as though it might have gone too far. My eyes were squeezed shut and then I opened them, using both my hands to hold my mother’s face and press her cheeks together, kissing her lips. Then we both laughed – my mother and myself as a child – and I watched from the shed, wishing I was my younger self; feeling left out.

  About an hour passed in which I saw nothing more of me and my mother, except the imprinted image of me as a child in her arms, which I played over and over again in my mind like footage from a film.

  I heard more old-fashioned morning sounds, distinctive mainly because of the lack of traffic. We had lived on a road, quite a main one I’d thought, but it had been quiet enough to play on as a kid, picking up a ball or riding our bikes to the kerb now and then to wait whenever a car came by. And there was birdsong, lots of it, and some distant coughing and a dog barking. I wondered how I could approach my mother, speak to her. There was no easy way to introduce myself and spend real time with her. I thought about pretending to sell insurance, or maybe telling her she’d won a prize, but these ideas were so flawed. I only had one chance because I couldn’t knock, get it wrong and then knock again later.