by Meg McKinlay
Things That Fall From the Sky
Newt, once.
It was the middle of the night, pitch dark. He was halfway up a tree, trying to climb higher. I was standing at the bottom, trying to make him come down.
It was no one’s fault.
It wasn’t Mum’s fault. She was exhausted from work and slept with earplugs so nothing but her alarm could wake her.
It wasn’t Newt’s fault. He was only four and there was no way he could understand.
It wasn’t Kat’s mum’s fault. She was trying to be kind when she told Newt Dad was watching over him from above, that when he looked up at night, Dad would be the brightest star, shining down on him.
She couldn’t have known Newt would take it literally. That he’d start climbing hills and ladders and rooftops in the middle of the night, trying to get as close as he could to the sky.
If it was anyone’s fault, it was mine. I had hidden the ladder but I couldn’t hide the trees. Maybe I should have told Mum. I always meant to. I’d lead Newt back to the house, tuck him in and plan to tell her tomorrow.
But when morning came, I never did. Mum always seemed like she had enough to worry about already, with working all the time and those envelopes that kept arriving with red writing saying “Overdue” and “Final reminder”.
So I didn’t say anything – not to Mum and not to Newt. I didn’t tell him Dad wasn’t really a star. I didn’t want to be the one to take that away from him. Instead, I started sleeping with my door open, listening for his footsteps in the hall.
That night, I didn’t hear him until he was on the verandah. By then, it was too late to stop him climbing. All I could do was try to talk him back down.
When he fell, I caught him. Or at least, I broke his fall. He had the wind knocked out of him – and so did I – but he didn’t break anything. He was okay. We both were. And so we could go back to bed, wake up in the morning, and pretend it was all a dream.
Nine
On Sunday two things happen.
Two and a half things, really.
The half is that when I get up, there’s a note from Mum. It’s on the bench in the kitchen, right where I always stand staring into the cupboards wondering what I should make for dinner.
“HOME BY 4.30!” it says. “DO NOT COOK!”
The next thing is that she actually does it. At 4.27 she comes through the door with a paper shopping bag in her arms and a big grin on her face.
“We’re having steak and chips!” she says. “And apple crumble!”
Apple crumble! My mouth waters at the thought. The buttery, brown-sugary, coconutty thought.
Only … the supermarket’s closed on Sundays. The bag Mum’s holding is from the milk bar, but you can’t get steak there, or potatoes, or apples. When she unpacks it onto the bench the only things inside are a small tub of vanilla ice cream and a bottle of lemonade.
Not that I’m complaining, but …
Mum sees my confusion and laughs. She goes to the fridge and reaches into the very back, pulling out a plate with a thick piece of meat on it.
“Took it out of the freezer this morning,” she says. Then she reaches up to the top cupboard, the one I can’t open without standing on a chair, and gets down two bulging brown bags.
Granny Smiths and potatoes.
“Got them yesterday,” she says. “See how organised I am?” She puts the bags on the bench, then opens a drawer and scrabbles around inside. “Still managed to forget the ice cream, though. Lucky the milk bar’s open till five, hey?”
I nod, watching tiny bubbles fizz up through the lemonade.
“Now where’s that peeler? I’d better get started on the spuds.”
“Oh, here.” It’s in the dish drainer, where I left it last night, after the chicken failed the sniff test and I made sausages and vegies – peas and carrots and nothing else because we didn’t have any potatoes.
But that was last night. Tonight, everything is different.
I grab the peeler and reach for the bag of potatoes. Mum waves me away. “Nope. My turn tonight.” She takes the peeler from me, giving my hand a gentle squeeze. “I know how much you do around here, love. Don’t think I don’t see it. And I really am sorry about Friday.”
That definitely counts as one whole thing.
***
While she cooks, I sit and read Storm Boy. After a while Newt comes out with his coathangers and starts tinkering with the TV. He turns it on and off, switching between the two channels, taking a step back occasionally to frown and scratch his head.
At one point when I look up, the picture is worse than I’ve ever seen it. “Don’t worry,” Newt says. “It’s science. Knowing what doesn’t work helps you figure out what does.”
I go back to reading. There’s only a few pages left and I know what’s coming. Part of me doesn’t want to read it, but a bigger part of me knows it’s really why I love the book.
“Can you hold this for me?” Newt calls. “It’s hard doing everything at once.”
I shake my head, keeping my eyes on the page. In the kitchen, hot oil sizzles as Mum drops fat wedges of potato into the wire basket. She’s about to start on the apples when she clicks her fingers. “Hang on – it’s Sunday! That means Disneyland, right?”
I nod.
“Perfect!” She looks over at Newt. “It’d be good to have the picture looking a bit less … rudimentary by then if you can manage it.”
Newt shoots me a meaningful look. I sigh and close the book. For the next half an hour I’m his personal antenna-holding slave, bending the coathangers – and myself – all over the place like a game of Twister while he frowns and takes notes.
By the time dinner’s ready, the picture’s almost as good as it was before he started.
That’s when the second thing happens.
Even though it’s time for Disneyland, there’s no sign of Tinkerbell. Instead, when we bring our plates into the lounge room, there are three men in suits sitting at a desk. They have papers and pointers and very serious faces. There’s a TV screen behind them that says “SPECIAL REPORT” and a kind of easel between them with a photo of Skylab.
As we watch, one of the men unclips the photo and sets it on the desk. In its place on the easel is a large map of the world with a series of lines curving across it. The man closest to it taps the map with his pointer and starts talking about orbit paths.
“Did you know,” Newt says, “that Skylab orbits the Earth 15.4 times per day?”
Mum frowns. “I thought Disneyland was–”
“Shhh!” Newt scoots closer until he’s almost directly in front of the screen.
“At this stage it is expected to arrive sometime between 20th June and 4th July.”
Mum frowns. “That’s not what they said last time.”
“That’s because this is an update,” Newt whispers.
Expected, I think. Arrive. Those words are for buses and trains, maybe babies. They’re for things that have some sort of schedule, a timetable. Things that are cheerfully tumbling like cartoon characters, instead of plummeting towards us out of control.
Plummeting and plunging and crashing and …
Pointer-Man makes a spiralling motion, drawing Skylab down through the atmosphere, down through the sky towards the vast blue of ocean.
All at once it’s a plane in my mind’s eye. Dad and Skylab. Skylab and Dad. The whole tangled mess of it and I don’t know how Mum can sit here and not see it.
I wish I could do that. I wish I could.
“It is estimated that the rogue satellite will strike the Earth in a path 160 kilometres wide and 6400 kilometres long.”
Mum frowns. “How much is that in miles?”
“1.609 kilometres per mile,” Newt mutters, his gaze fixed on the screen.
I wish I could sit here and focus on numbers and distances and grumble about why we had to change to the metric system anyway, like Mum’s doing now, like she always does when someone says kilometres or centimetre
s when we have perfectly good miles and inches.
“I just don’t see why they have to–”
“Shh!” Newt puts a finger to his lips and points at the screen.
“While most of Skylab will burn up on re-entry,” says Other Pointer-Man, “it is likely several huge chunks will fall to Earth. Most will weigh less than four kilograms but several will be more than a tonne.”
“A tonne!” Mum raises her eyebrows. “Good grief!”
“At this stage, NASA’s Skylab Project Director says they are unable to offer advice as to what people should do when Skylab’s re-entry is imminent.”
“Right,” Mum says. “Well, that’s helpful of him.”
“Don’t worry,” Newt says. “The odds of it hitting a populated area are very low. The Earth is over seventy per cent water, you know. Statistically speaking–”
Mum clicks her tongue. “Statistically speaking it’s 6.37 and that means Disneyland should already have started.”
“That’s not statistics,” Newt says. “That’s time.”
Luckily, before he has a chance to tell us all about the atomic clock and Greenwich Mean Time and who knows what else he’s busy looking up in the filing cabinet inside his head, the serious-faced men sign off. Tinkerbell appears, scattering her fairy dust around the magical kingdom and Mum settles back against the couch. She looks from me to Newt and back again with a sigh.
“You kids,” she says. “I’m just so lucky.”
She leans over and ruffles my hair like she used to when I was little, and I let her, even though she’s got greasy chip-fingers and is making tangles I’ll have to tease out later with a comb.
“Next time I’ll do a roast.” She draws me in close, gives my shoulder a squeeze. “Still, this is pretty good, isn’t it?”
And even though tonight’s movie is The Shaggy D.A., which I saw at the drive-in with Kat last year and was already too old for then, and even though there’s a 77-tonne space giant getting ready to fall out of the sky who-knows-where-who-knows-when and who knows what you should do if it’s anywhere in your general vicinity, I nod and snuggle deep into the cushions.
Because it is pretty good. It actually is.
Ten
The next day Skylab is everywhere.
By which I mean that it’s still up in space, quietly orbiting.
But it’s also on the bus and in the playground and even in the toilets.
It turns out lots of people were on their couches at 6.37 wondering where Tinkerbell was, because at school, everyone’s talking about Skylab.
They’re saying 6400 kilometres! and How much is that in miles? and Huge chunks! and What does “imminent” mean?
Some kids are looking nervously at the sky, like something could come plummeting down at any second.
Other kids are acting like it’s no big deal, saying NASA assures us there’s no cause for alarm. Saying the odds of being hit are less than being struck by lightning. Only when someone asks them what NASA stands for, or what the actual odds of being struck by lightning are, they have no idea.
Jeremy spends the morning banging his desk lid at random moments, trying to make us jump. “BOOM! SKYLAB!” he whisper-shouts, sniggering.
At recess the boys tell everyone about what happened at the drive-in.
“You should have seen them,” Dale says. “They nearly hit the roof.”
Jeremy laughs so hard chunks of chewed-up apple come flying out of his mouth.
For the rest of the week every time he sees us, he leaps into a Superman pose. “Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird … it’s a plane … no, it’s SKYLAB!”
It is one hundred per cent hilarious. And one thousand per cent annoying.
Not just because it’s stupid, and because getting chunks of someone else’s chewed-up apple on your face is completely disgusting, but because it reminds me about the drive-in. It reminds Kat about the drive-in and I don’t want her to think about that. About Mum and Newt and how wrong everything went. Kat said it was fine, but I could tell she was annoyed. When it’s your best friend, you notice things without even meaning to.
We’re okay, though. Kat and I don’t ever really fight. On Friday she brings in a couple of library books. There’s one on wetlands and one about meteorology. “I’ve finished with these,” she says. “You can have them.”
“Thanks.” I raise my eyebrows. “Um … meteorology?”
She shrugs. “I thought there might be something about storms.”
“But Storm Boy isn’t really–”
“There’s a storm in the book.” She slides them across the desk. “You never know what’s going to be useful.”
I’m pretty sure these aren’t going to be useful, but I take them anyway.
“I’ll bring the rest next week,” she says. “I should be finished on the weekend. I’ve got it all planned – look.” She opens her desk lid and pulls out a sheet of paper. She’s done a draft, a double-sided page with different sections and headings. “I’m going to do bubble writing for the main heading,” she says, “with actual bubbles coming off it – because of the Coorong, you know? And then for this one I’m going to do the letters so they look like feathers.” She grins. “I’m going to make Mrs Easton give me an A+. She’ll be powerless.”
“It looks great,” I say.
“How’s yours going? Have you worked out your relevant aspect yet?”
“Not quite. I’m still thinking about it.”
It’s sort of true, if you count thinking about thinking about it and planning to do it very soon without delay and definitely without going back and reading my favourite parts of the book over and over again.
She frowns. “You’d better get moving. Remember, you’ll be in high school next year! You have to show her what you can do.” She does her Mrs Easton voice again, grinning. It’s the same as before but for some reason this time it sounds annoying.
Also, I think, we’re supposed to really give it some thought.
That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?
“I know,” I say. “I will. Thanks for the books.” And then I put them inside my desk where I will absolutely not forget to get them later.
***
Last thing in the afternoon Mrs Easton starts looking around, and I sit perfectly still.
I try not to blink. Then I wonder whether it’s weird not to blink, whether that’ll actually attract her attention, so I blink over and over really fast to make up for it.
I could be a journalist, I think. I could be Lois Lane at the Daily Planet.
Because I like writing stories. Because I like playing with words.
Only then I’d have to twist them, wouldn’t I? I’d have to bend them into strange and unnatural shapes.
Expected. Arrive. Tumble.
I don’t think I want to do that. I don’t think I know how to.
Luckily, I don’t have to. Because it’s Sharon, today, and Dale.
Sharon is going to be a teacher, because I want to be just like you, Mrs Easton, only even more than Jenny and also because … I forgot.
Dale borrows Jeremy’s puffy jacket and Kat groans. “Not another astronaut!”
“Can’t be,” I say. “No salad bowl.”
Turns out I’m right.
Dale isn’t going to be an astronaut. He’s going to work for the CIA.
“Only not really for them,” he says. “More like a double agent.”
Because someone has to get to the bottom of what the government’s up to.
Because my uncle says the conspiracies go to the highest level.
Mrs Easton sighs. “And the jacket?”
“Because you have to meet your contacts in cold places. You always have to talk outside, away from bugs. Sometimes in Siberia.”
“I see. And what exactly do you mean by conspiracies?”
“Like the so-called ‘space race’.” Dale makes air quotes with his fingers. “It isn’t even real! My uncle said it’s all a massive scam. Did you know they’
ve never even been to the moon? They filmed the whole thing in a TV studio.”
“Did they really?” Mrs Easton looks like she can’t decide whether to laugh or cry. “Why would they do that?”
“To distract us!” Dale lowers his voice, as if he’s worried the government might be listening, as if he suddenly wants to go outside, maybe even to Siberia. “From the real stuff, like the arms race and how we’re all going to be fried and blown up and–”
“This uncle of yours,” Mrs Easton cuts in, fixing Dale with a look. “He’s a scientist, I suppose? An expert of some sort?”
Dale looks confused. “Nah, he’s a farmer.”
“Then I think we’ve heard quite enough.”
“But–”
“No ‘buts’.” Mrs Easton does the air quotes now. “Come up with something else, please. I’ll be calling on you again soon.”
***
When we get home the house is cold. Cold enough for a fire, I think.
There’s plenty of wood and heaps of paper in the potbelly box. Newt’s been going through everything looking for Skylab stuff but I made him return the bits he didn’t want. Even if Mum doesn’t bring any more home for a while, we’ll have enough to keep us going.
I set up the kindling, then grab a sheet off the top. I scrunch it up and stuff it inside, then light a match.
The flame takes hold, curling the edges of the paper and then eating its way through the tightly spaced lines. All that doom and gloom flakes into ash before my eyes, along with the weather, the footy scores, an ad for Superman at the drive-in, and …
I yank at the paper, pulling it back out. I let it fall to the floor, then stamp on it. A headline stares up at me, only slightly blackened.
Global Effort to Keep Skylab in Orbit.
It’s weird that Newt missed this. At least that’s what I think until I peer closer, and see why.
He wouldn’t have bothered looking here, because this isn’t the normal news section. This is what Dad used to call the weird and wonderful section.
It’s where you find articles like Confused Duck Thinks it’s a Dog and Hapless Burglars Lock Themselves Inside Store.
