by Ailsa Wild
‘Ugh,’ I say. ‘You’re gross, Baby!’
Then I snuffle my nose in the soft skin under his ear. He giggles. Our Baby has the cutest giggle in the universe. I take him out into the kitchen and make us both breakfast.
I’m so hungry that I eat a bowl of yoghurt with banana wheels and honey, five pieces of vegemite toast and a choc-chip biscuit I find on the couch. Baby eats my vegemite crusts and smears most of a banana on his legs. I’m still in my pyjamas and so is Vee. I feel like last night’s excitement is still hanging in the air.
‘Mum?’ Vee asks. ‘Do any astronauts live in Melbourne?’
Alice is eating toast, packing her bag and checking her phone at the same time. ‘Um, probably.’
‘Is the space station really four hundred kilometres away?’ I ask.
Alice nods, with a mouthful of toast.
Jessie sits down at the table in her uniform. Her neat ponytail swings shinily. She does her I-told-you-so face.
Vee still isn’t convinced. ‘But Mum, that means the space station is closer than Sydney!’ she says.
Even Dad turns around from where he’s making school lunches. ‘Are you for real, Al?’
Alice laughs, swinging her bag onto her shoulder. ‘Yep. If there were a road, you could cycle there in a weekend.’
Dad smiles, kind of blushing. His other cycling friends are faster than him. ‘Maybe a long weekend.’
Alice is a lecturer of astrophysics. Mostly, that means she does maths. But it also means she brought home our telescope, when the university got better ones. And she knows things about astronauts.
‘But why would there be spacewoman on the roof?’ I ask.
‘What roof?’ Alice asks.
‘The one across the …’ I start to point and then Alice notices something.
‘Squishy Taylor, are you still in your pyjamas?’
I look around. ‘Vee is too,’ I say. Because being the bad one by yourself sucks.
‘It’s ten minutes till blast-off to school, kiddo!’ Alice says, ignoring Vee. ‘Get a wriggle on.’
She kisses Dad, grinning up at him. ‘Good luck getting them out of the house,’ she adds. ‘Have a good day, everyone.’ But she doesn’t smile at me.
Baby bounces on Dad’s hip, as we run to the tram stop. We just miss the tram and stand there, watching it go up the hill. It’s six minutes until the next one. We’ll miss the bell, but we won’t be very late.
Our tram stop is two buildings up from where we live. Across the road from us is where we saw the spacewoman. I lean against the tram-stop wall, looking up at the spacewoman’s building. It’s just apartments, with a car park in the basement. It looks a lot like where we live.
‘You know what?’ I whisper to Vee. ‘I reckon we could get up to that roof.’
In class, I try to do the maths because astronauts have to be good at maths, but the numbers don’t make sense. At recess, I do a flip off the monkey bars and land funny on my leg. It doesn’t even hurt that bad, but it reminds me about not being able to hug my mum. After lunch I fall asleep on my writing book and wake up in a puddle of dribble. I feel yucky and I’m mad at my friends for not waking me even though they’re nice about the drool.
On the tram, Jessie and Vee and I all sit together on one seat.
‘So,’ Vee says, ‘how would we get to the spacewoman’s roof?’
Jessie swishes her ponytail. ‘There is no spacewoman,’ she says.
‘What were those sparks, then?’ I ask.
Jessie shrugs. ‘Dunno, some kind of machinery, I guess.’
‘Yeah, like a rocket,’ I say.
Jessie snorts and gets out her book.
‘So we need to sneak in,’ I say.
‘We need to follow someone who has a swipe card for the front door,’ Vee says.
I nod. ‘Yeah, then race up the fire-escape stairs.’
We plan how to spy on the astronaut all the way home and Jessie ignores us.
As we arrive in our kitchen, Jessie says. ‘You’re being idiots. There is no spacewoman. It’s like Squishy thinking the moon can come in between the earth and a space station. It’s ridiculous.’
Usually I don’t really care that Jessie’s so annoying. But right now, all the crankiness of my day is hurting my chest.
‘Ugh,’ I growl. ‘Jessie, do you have to be so sensible? It’s like you want to miss out on all the good stuff. You want the world to be as boring as you are. Well, it’s not. There’s weird stuff happening, Jessie. We saw it. You’re just being horrible to make yourself look better.’
I drop my bag in the middle of the floor with a bang.
‘Who didn’t get enough sleep last night?’ Dad asks, with his most patronising smile. I hate it when I’m furious and grown-ups tell me it’s because I’m tired.
Dad makes us smoothies, which is good. But he decides to walk to the playground with us, which is bad. It means we can’t scope out the building across the road.
I try to get Dad to do astronaut training on the space station with us. But he can’t do that and hold Baby at the same time. He ends up with Jessie, turning the solar system around instead. They both talk seriously, as if there wasn’t meant to be fun in the universe ever. When there’s a mystery somewhere else, the playground is just stupid.
After dinner I skype Mum. I tell her all the stupid-cranky-bad things that happened in my day.
She says, ‘Oh Squishy-sweet, I wish I could give you a big cuddle.’
I remember what it used to be like, with my head under her chin and her arms all tight around me. We used to cuddle every single day of my life (except Dad weekends). But now she’s so far away.
I think of something. ‘Did you know that Geneva is further away from Melbourne than the space station?’
Mum grins. ‘You trying to make me feel guilty, Squisho?’ she asks.
‘No!’ I say. ‘It’s just cool.’
I glance out our bedroom window and gasp. The sparks are showering on the roof again.
I say, ‘Love you, Mum. Gotta go.’
Mum smiles. ‘Well, that was sudden. Love you too!’
I turn off Skype and sit up.
‘Vee! Jessie! Come in here!’ I call. ‘Jessie, bring the telescope.’
‘Bed in three minutes,’ Dad shouts.
Jessie and Vee run in and push their faces against the glass.
‘Again,’ Vee says.
Jessie pulls the telescope and tripod out. She’s good with putting things together. When Alice built our bunk-beds, Vee helped me carry everything up from the car. Then we got bored and played with Baby. But Jessie measured wood and marked screw-holes and did bolting with Alice for two entire days.
Jessie sets up the telescope super fast. But there’s not really anything to see. Our floor is too low. The sparks are clearer but that’s about it.
‘It’s just some kind of machinery,’ Jessie says.
‘Yeah, but if it’s not a rocket, what is it?’ Vee asks.
Jessie bites her lip and shakes her head, still watching the sparks. I can tell she’s interested.
‘We need to get out on the roof again,’ I say.
‘Well, Tom forgot to give the roof key back,’ Jessie says. ‘It’s still on the counter by the door.’
Nice work, Dad, I think.
After Dad says goodnight I fall straight to sleep, but Jessie’s alarm wakes us up.
‘It’s ten o’clock,’ Jessie says. ‘They’ve gone to bed. Let’s go.’
We tiptoe through the kitchen. Jessie has the telescope, Vee has the tripod and I take the keys from the counter. We’re like ninja-shadows in the hallway and up the stairs.
When we reach the roof, I prop the door open with a handy brick, so we don’t get locked out up here.
There are no sparks, and for a second I’m disappointed. But the rocket shape is still there.
‘Look,’ Vee says. ‘What’s that?’
I see a dark shadow moving around the rocket.
Jessi
e is setting up the telescope in record time and focusing on the shadow. ‘What’s she doing?’ she says, almost to herself.
I hop from foot to foot beside her, wanting a turn of the telescope. Vee keeps glancing from Jessie to the rocket and back again.
‘What is it Jessie, is it a rocket?’ I ask. ‘Why is she building a rocket?’
‘It’s hard to tell what it is,’ Jessie says. ‘She’s covering it up with something, a big sheet of plastic, I think.’
‘Because she doesn’t want people to see it when daytime comes,’ I say. ‘She’s hiding something, something big!’
Vee is nodding. ‘Exactly. That’s why she has to work secretly, at night.’
We take it in turns to watch the red-haired lady as she ties the plastic over her rocket and tidies up her tools.
‘Do you think she’s some kind of renegade astronaut?’ I ask.
Vee looks away from the telescope. ‘Why else would someone build a rocket?’ she asks.
‘Maybe she’s an alien just trying to find her way home,’ I suggest, and I’m only half-joking. Maybe she is an alien.
Jessie snorts. ‘It’s not a rocket. Real rockets are way bigger than that.’
‘Yeah, but even you don’t know how big an alien rocket is,’ I say. Which is totally true, but Jessie doesn’t think I won the argument. She snorts again.
Vee pulls her eye away from the telescope again. ‘Whatever she is, she’s gone,’ she says.
We pack up slowly and head downstairs.
When we get to our door, I’m actually pushing the key into the lock when Jessie’s eyes widen and she grabs my hand to stop me. She pushes her ear to the door and waves us to do the same. On the other side I hear the muffled sound of Baby crying and Alice walking backwards and forwards in the kitchen.
That was close! And now we’re stuck out here until Baby goes back to sleep.
‘Phew,’ Jessie says. ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t check our room.’
We slide down against the door.
‘I want to go to bed,’ Vee whispers.
I nod. I’m suddenly really tired. I’m desperate to be in my bed. I almost think we should just open the door and face getting in trouble. But I can’t even be bothered standing up, so I close my eyes.
I wake up with Vee shaking me. My neck feels stiff and my back is sore where it’s been leaning against the door.
‘Get up,’ Vee says. ‘Get up. We fell asleep. It’s morning.’
The hallway has grey early light from the window at the fire-escape end.
Jessie pushes her ear against the door and then shakes her head. ‘They’re not up yet. Lucky. OK, we just have to get ourselves into the bedroom before they open their door.’
I ease the key into the lock. ‘Quietly,’ Jessie says. ‘Quietly.’
I place the keys as gently as I can on the counter and tiptoe across the kitchen after the others. We close our bedroom door, scramble into our bunks and burst into a fit of muffled giggles.
‘We slept in the hallway half the night!’ I whisper.
‘I can’t believe we just did that,’ Jessie says.
‘How long till breakfast?’ Vee asks.
‘Who cares about breakfast?’ I say, remembering what we saw last night. ‘We have to find out more about the rocket.’
Somehow I fall back asleep.
When I wake up, Jessie is rummaging with something right next to my head.
‘Whaaa …’ I ask sleepily, rolling over to see what she’s doing.
Jessie has stuck the iPad to the telescope with black gaffa tape. She’s just opened the iPad camera app. The telescope is tilted down, to the street below.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, more awake now.
‘Porridge is ready!’ Dad calls from the kitchen. Then Baby starts crying.
But I’m staring at Jessie’s new device. She’s filming through the telescope. And the telescope is focused on the front door of Spacewoman’s building.
‘Genius,’ I whisper.
‘It’s our own spy camera. Now we can see every time she comes and goes from the building.’
‘That’s so cool, Jess,’ Vee says, from her bunk.
Jessie nods, a bit smugly. ‘Yep. I’ve even plugged the iPad into the power so it doesn’t run out of battery while we’re at school.’
‘Jessie, you are the Best Bonus Sister Ever,’ I say.
‘I’m calling it a tele-pad,’ Jessie says and I grin.
Dad calls from the kitchen again. ‘If you’re not up in fifteen seconds, this bucket of ice-water is going over your heads!’
He’d never do that. But it makes us laugh and we climb, jump, flip and scramble out of bed.
‘We want to learn her habits,’ Jessie says, as the tram rumbles us to school. ‘When does she usually leave the building? When does she come home? What does she carry? Stuff like that.’
I jiggle in the seat. I can’t wait to get home and find out what our new spy camera has filmed.
‘I bet she carries wiring and computers and satellites,’ Vee says.
‘Yeah, and special alien food, and letters for the president of the galaxy,’ I add.
The others laugh. The president of the galaxy is from Lightspeed Kids and we all know he’s not real.
‘I wish we didn’t have to go to school,’ Vee says.
I almost agree. But there’s one reason I do want to go to school. ‘If we want to be astronauts, we need to get good at maths,’ I say.
Vee groans. Jessie laughs. Jessie’s already good at maths.
When we get home we rush to the tele-pad. At first I lean in close, watching every second. But there’s nothing for a while. It turns out watching the whole day back is really boring, even in fast forward. I take it in turns with Vee to practise bunk-bed tricks and to look over Jessie’s shoulder.
Nothing happens in real life or in the video, except for people going in and out. None of them are Spacewoman. I’m starting to feel pretty disappointed. Then I realise something.
‘That’s weird,’ I say. ‘Spacewoman never leaves the building.’
Jessie shakes her head. ‘She could have left for work before I set it up and not be home yet. We just have to wait a bit longer.’
I don’t want to wait.
Jessie sets up the tele-pad again. ‘The cool thing about the tele-pad is that it does the waiting for us, and we can do other things.’
‘Why don’t we just sneak up to her roof?’ I ask.
Vee does a Rolling-Spin-Drop from her bunk. ‘That would be more fun than waiting to see what’s on a camera.’
Jessie doesn’t look convinced, but she steps away from the telescope.
We stride out our front door and cross at the lights near Spacewoman’s building. It has a foyer just like ours, with glass doors that need a swipe card to get in.
We watch a few people swipe and open the doors.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Next person who comes, we follow them in.’
The next person to step up to the door is a tired-looking man wearing funny blue pyjamas and sneakers.
‘Why is he wearing pyjamas?’ Vee whispers.
‘Shhh,’ I say, and squeeze her arm.
As the tired man steps through the door, I jump forward to catch it and keep it open.
We’re in.
We wait by the lift with the man in blue pyjamas. I hope he doesn’t notice that we don’t have our own swipe card. Luckily he’s scanning wearily through his phone and barely even glances at us.
We follow him into the lift and Vee nudges my arm, nodding at his pyjamas. I try not to laugh. Jessie frowns at us. At the ninth floor, the lift stops and we follow Pyjama Man out. He goes straight to the door by the lift and digs for his keys. Where now?
Jessie spots the fire-escape door at the end of the corridor and leads the way to it. As soon as we reach the stairs and the door closes behind us, our giggles burst out.
‘We made it!’ I say. We high-five each other.
‘
That man was wearing pyjamas,’ Jessie says, in the same tone she uses when she discovers a new fact on the internet.
‘On the street,’ Vee says. ‘Why was he wearing pyjamas on the street?’
I start running up the stairs. ‘No idea,’ I say. ‘Let’s go find a rocket.’
The others chase me up the stairs. My astronaut training has paid off. I can run even faster than I used to and Vee is right behind. Jessie is slower, but we’re all at the top pretty soon. The door to the roof is different from in our building. There’s no gate and the stairs go all the way up. The door looks as though people open it all the time.
There is a sign. ‘Residents and guests only,’ Jessie reads aloud.
‘I laugh in the face of residents,’ I say, pushing open the door. It’s like our favourite line from Lightspeed Kids, but funny because I changed it from ‘enemies’ to ‘residents’.
Vee snorts and laughs. ‘Especially when the residents wear pyjamas,’ she says.
I step out onto the roof and into a garden. Someone’s growing vegetables and flowers up here. It’s like our balcony times a million. So many pots and tubs and wooden boxes full of plants.
‘Dad would love this,’ I say. Dad’s job is making other people’s gardens good. He has all these books about gardens that people grow in strange places.
‘Hey look,’ Vee says. ‘Strawberries!’ They’re still green but so cute, tucked in under their leaves.
Then I remember to look for the rocket. It’s on the other side of the roof. In between it and us is a tall wire fence.
The rocket is covered with a huge piece of blue plastic.
‘It does look rocket-shaped,’ Jessie admits from where we’re standing with our faces pushed up against the wire. ‘But you can’t actually see what’s underneath.’
I pull back, looking for a way in. The fence has a gate with a padlock.
I can do the bobby-pin trick on most padlocks.
‘Anyone got a bobby pin?’ I ask. Jessie and Vee shake their heads.
