A Godawful Small Affair

by J. B. Morrison

  Nathan had been underneath his bed now for half an hour and his dad hadn’t been to check on him. He’d heard people arrive and leave but his dad hadn’t called out his name. He wondered how long he could stay under the bed before his dad noticed he was missing too.

  Since the police had found the deleted photos, and especially the picture of Alex, Nathan’s dad was like a dog with a bone. He’d completely forgotten about Nathan going back to school. He didn’t seem so bothered about him becoming a doctor or a lawyer anymore. Nathan hadn’t left the house for two days. He wasn’t allowed to go to the shops or to play on the estate or to go to Arthur’s house, and he definitely wasn’t allowed anywhere near the park. He was starting to think the only way he’d ever leave the house again was if the aliens came and took him away from it. He might have believed his dad was worried about him and didn’t want to risk losing him, but Nathan thought that, really, what his dad didn’t want was for the Zoe Love Museum to be disturbed. Just by being Zoe’s brother, Nathan was another exhibit. He was no more or less important or significant than a half-drunk bottle of Oasis or the dust on Zoe’s dressing table. Nathan’s dad was so focused on finding his daughter he’d forgotten he had a son as well.

  Nathan’s quarantine lasted uninterrupted for nearly an hour. It ended when someone knocked on his bedroom door. At first, he thought the five knocks was Zoe, using their secret Close Encounters knock. Then the door opened and he saw Craig’s black Levi’s, the same kind of jeans he always wore. Different pairs, but always Levi’s and always black. He saw Craig’s espadrilles too. Black. No socks. Nathan didn’t think Craig ever wore socks. Even if it was raining or snowing.

  “Hiding from someone?” Craig said, bending down and lifting the edge of the quilt.

  “I’m in quarantine.”

  “What from?”

  “I’ve been to the Moon. I don’t want to give everyone flu.”

  “Makes sense. How long does it last?”

  “What? Moon flu?”

  “The quarantine.”

  “Three weeks.”

  “I better keep my distance till then then.”

  Craig stood up and sat on the bed. The bed springs creaked under his weight and the bed sagged. Nathan worried he might be squashed. Nathan’s dad and Craig used to be as twin-like as Nathan and Zoe. As alike as two FLOs. There was a photo of them on the mantelpiece in the living room, both wearing matching black bomber jackets. Nathan’s dad said they looked like nightclub bouncers. But Craig didn’t go to the gym anymore. He ate and drank too much, and with every second helping and ‘one for the road’ Craig looked less like his twin.

  “Left or right?” Craig said. He held both his closed hands down over the side of the bed. Nathan worked out which fist contained the best, or at least the largest, prize. He thought the swallow tattoo between Craig’s right thumb and forefinger was larger than usual and the ink thinner because the skin beneath it was stretched.

  “Right,” Nathan said.

  “Sure?”

  “Definitely.”

  Craig opened his hand, revealing a Kinder Surprise. He held it there until Nathan reached over and took it. Craig closed his hands and pulled them away out of sight. He sat back on the bed, making the springs creak again. Nathan could see the top of the South London Boys Forever 2013 tattoo on Craig’s ankle.

  “You can change your mind if you want,” Craig said.

  “It’s all right, thank you.”

  “No wonder greengrocers are going out of business,” Craig said. Nathan heard him biting deliberately noisily into some kind of fruit.

  “Is it a plum?” Nathan said.

  “Good guess.”

  “It wasn’t a guess.”

  “Well, you’re right anyway. It is a plum. And a particularly juicy one. It’s too late to change your mind now though you realise?”

  “That’s okay.” Nathan unwrapped the Kinder Surprise.

  His dad always used to come home from work with the smell of whatever were the freshest or most popular items on the stall that day. Sometimes he’d come home smelling of potatoes or bananas. Nathan didn’t like the banana peel smell because it reminded him of cheesy feet or going past a farm with the car window open. He preferred it when his dad came home smelling of strawberries or peaches. It usually meant he had some with him. Nathan thought Craig must have sold a lot of cherries today. He also smelled like he’d drunk a lot of alcohol.

  Nathan rolled the Kinder Surprise foil into a ball and flicked it out from under the bed. He asked Craig where his dad was.

  “He’s gone outside to think for a while.”

  Nathan broke the Kinder egg into two halves and put the plastic pod containing the surprise on the cover of the library book by his side.

  “What was the book you were reading?” Craig said as though he could see through the thick mattress he was sitting on.

  Nathan moved the Kinder surprise so that it obscured the (and Women) sticker. He didn’t want to have to explain what it meant and, more importantly, who’d stuck it to the front of the book. Every conversation couldn’t be about Zoe.

  “It’s about astronauts and the men who went to the Moon,” Nathan said.

  “What’s that rocket on the cover called?”

  “Saturn Five.”

  “Is that a good one?”

  “It’s the tallest rocket ever built. Higher than the Statue of Liberty and Big Ben.” Nathan bit into the chocolate.

  “Where’s it off to on the cover?”

  “It’s taking Apollo Eleven into orbit.”

  “Houston, we have a problem.” Craig’s American accent was bad. It made Nathan laugh.

  “That’s Apollo Thirteen,” Nathan said.

  “My mistake.”

  Nathan really hoped he had a friend like Craig when he was older. Someone to go to the football with and share identical tattoos. Craig was always there for Nathan’s dad – twenty-four seven – but he didn’t ask him how he was all the time. Craig didn’t say ‘any news?’ or ask how Nathan’s dad was coping or if he was holding up. He did say a lot of inappropriate things, and he could make Nathan’s dad lose his temper with his poor taste jokes sometimes. Like last night when Craig came to the house on his way home. He was in the kitchen, eating the huge bunch of grapes he’d brought from work for Nathan’s dad as though he was recovering from an operation. Craig looked at the picture of Zoe on the leaflet stuck to the fridge and asked Nathan’s dad when he thought the police would use age-progression software to show how Zoe might have changed. Nathan’s dad threw his World’s Best Dad mug at the wall. He just couldn’t bear thinking of Zoe being gone for long enough to look any different. Nathan wanted to tell his dad that time moved slower in outer space and Zoe probably wouldn’t have changed at all.

  Craig shifted his weight on Nathan’s bed. The springs creaked like a pirate ship.

  “Perhaps the rocket people should have skipped straight to Apollo Fourteen,” Craig said.

  “Why?”

  “Thirteen is unlucky, isn’t it? They should have jumped from Apollo Twelve to Apollo Fourteen. Was there even an Apollo Fourteen?”

  “Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, Edgar Mitchell,” Nathan said proudly.

  “Who are they?”

  “The Apollo Fourteen astronauts.”

  “You should go on Mastermind. I suppose you know all the names.”

  “Yes,” Nathan said. He hoped Craig didn’t test him almost as much as he hoped that he did.

  “Do you want half of the Kinder egg?” Nathan said. He was relieved that Craig knew enough about ten-year-old boys to say no. Nathan stuffed the last piece of chocolate in his mouth.

  “I used to think they were called kinda eggs,” Craig said, pronouncing the ‘i’ with a ‘y’ sound.

  “How can eggs be kinder?” Nathan said with a mouthful of chocolate.

  “Not kinder. I don’t mean like nicer eggs. No. I mean, I thought they were kind of eggs. You know, like eggs but only kind of?”r />
  Nathan laughed. He popped open the lid of the Kinder surprise pod with his teeth. He took out two halves of a plastic Hot Rod car and clicked them together. He opened the library book on the floor next to him and put the car on the surface of the Moon.

  “Okay,” Craig said. “Your two minutes begin now. How many men went to the Moon altogether?”

  “Twelve,” Nathan said. He picked up the hot rod and closed the library book, so Craig didn’t think he was cheating. “There were six lunar landings altogether.”

  “Who’s the geezer who played golf on the Moon?”

  “Alan Shephard and two golf balls are still there.”

  “On the Moon?”

  “Yes.”

  Nathan told Craig there were twenty-eight different objects that astronauts had left on the Moon. He’d been awake last night trying to memorise them all, like the names of the seven dwarfs or the French hens and turtledoves in ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. He thought it might help him fall asleep where counting sheep and the moons of Saturn had failed. Twelve cameras, six flags, three lunar roving vehicles, two pairs of flight suit trousers, one pair of gloves, two golf balls and twelve pairs of space boots. When Nathan told Craig about the hundred bags of poo, wee and sick, Craig made a Mastermind beeping noise and told Nathan his time was up.

  “What was the surprise?” Craig said.

  “A hot rod car.”

  “Mine just had a stone in it,” Craig said. “That’s not even a kind of surprise.”

  Nathan laughed. He opened the library book again and wheeled the Kinder car across the Moon. He thought about the three lunar rovers the astronauts had left there. Even when they went to a different planet, humans had to leave their rubbish behind. Golf balls and cars, movie cameras and towels, the empty packaging from the space food they’d eaten or the flags they stuck in the ground to claim the Moon as their own.

  Craig had gone so quiet that Nathan thought he might have fallen asleep. He pretended Craig was Richard Nixon, visiting him in his Mobile Quarantine Facility. There was a picture of the American President talking to the Apollo 11 astronauts in Moonmen (and Women). They watched from a window while the President spoke to them through a microphone on a stand. He looked like he was singing them a song.

  “Craig,” Nathan said.

  “Yes, Nathan.”

  “Do you believe in aliens?”

  “I think I’ve met a few in my time.”

  “My sister has.”

  Craig didn’t answer.

  “I mean for real,” Nathan said. “She really met them.”

  “I remember that,” Craig said. He sounded tired, or sad.

  “Do you think they could have come back? To take her away again?” Nathan said.

  Craig didn’t answer. Nathan wondered if he was one of the adults that believed. Perhaps he could ask Craig to go with him on his mission. Craig could get his own Mission to Mars spacesuit and Guardians of the Galaxy backpack and they could go and find Zoe together.

  Nathan rolled out from under the bed until he could see Craig. He was lying on his back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  “The stars don’t come out until the lights are off,” Nathan said.

  Craig looked down at him and forced a smile.

  “I better get back down to your dad. Make sure he doesn’t do anything daft,” Craig sat up on the edge of the bed and then stood above Nathan, like one of the rockets in the tower at the National Space Centre. He put his hands behind his back. “Left or right?”

  Nathan chose left this time and Craig bent down and placed a sticky, wet plum stone in Nathan’s hand.

  “Eeurrgrh,” Nathan said, throwing the stone on the floor and rolling back under the bed.

  “Enjoy the rest of your quarantine,” Craig said. He zipped his Harrington up over his beer gut, causing a bulge that made it look like he was shoplifting a frozen chicken.

  Nathan listened to him walking down the stairs. Halfway down he heard Craig call out, “Get the kettle on, Stevie boy. If you haven’t broken all the crockery, chucking it at the wall.”

  21

  When Zoe had been missing for ten days Nathan and his dad were invited onto a breakfast television show. A car was coming early in the morning to take them to the TV studio and the FLOs would follow behind in their own car. Nathan asked why they couldn’t all travel together, imagining a fast ride in a police vehicle with flashing blue lights.

  “I’m sure the car the telly people are sending will be preferable to us all squashing into our old jalopy,” Janet said.

  “What’s a jalopy?”

  “I think it’s a Peugeot,” Janet said and both FLOs laughed. They were in good spirits. They seemed to be looking forward to the television show. Certainly more than Nathan’s dad was. The two women looked like they’d been to the hairdressers and were wearing more make-up than usual. Nathan’s dad, meanwhile, although he’d washed and shaved for the first time in ages, was dreading it. He was pacing the living room and going to the toilet a lot. Nathan heard him being sick.

  A text message pinged on both FLO phones to say the car was waiting for them. Nathan’s dad put the front door on the latch in case Zoe came home without her keys while they were out, and they walked through the estate to the main road.

  The television car was as long and shiny as the FLOs’ jalopy was short and covered in a layer of dust with clean me written on the bonnet. Their car looked like it had been dumped. The driver of the TV studio car got out and opened the door for Nathan and his dad like they were the Queen. When the engine started Bhangra music played, and the driver apologised. He turned it down and changed the station to a phone-in show about the news. Nathan hoped they didn’t start talking about Zoe. The car was so quiet he thought it was electric or at least a hybrid. The engine’s silence reminded him of the noise his mum’s Beetle used to make. Nathan’s dad used to say he could hear it coming when it was still in Streatham or Camberwell.

  The TV car got stuck in traffic before they’d even left Brixton and Nathan’s dad saw the opportunity to show Zoe’s picture to the driver. He also showed him the photo of Alex, who people on Facebook were referring to as ‘Zoe’s boyfriend’. The driver said he didn’t recognise the boy and he only knew Zoe from reading about her in the paper.

  “I feel your pain, boss,” he said. “I had a teenage daughter myself.”

  The traffic cleared, the car moved silently forward, and Nathan’s dad sat back in his seat. Nathan guessed he was wondering what the driver meant when he said he had a teenage daughter. Was it because she was missing as well or because she dead? Nathan thought the driver’s daughter was probably just twenty now and so not a teenager anymore.

  Nathan checked behind to see if the FLOs were still following. The shiny leather car seat made a fart noise when he turned around on it, and so he checked for the FLOs at regular intervals. There was a box on the parcel shelf almost blocking his view. It was gold and shiny and decorated with a swirly pattern and looked like it contained something more valuable than tissues. Nathan thought they’d lost the FLOs and then he saw them two cars back. He was pleased with himself for guessing that because Anne Marie always sat on the right, she would be the driver.

  When they got to the television studios Nathan’s dad and the FLOs signed their names in a large book and they were all given ID badges, including Nathan. He pinned his to the waist of his school trousers. It was the first time he’d worn his school uniform since before Zoe had gone missing – or at least half of the uniform. He had his trousers and blazer on but wasn’t wearing his school shirt and tie because his dad wanted them both to wear their Where is Zoe Love? T-shirts. His dad had a long-sleeved sweatshirt under his T-shirt to hide some of his tattoos. When he’d finally watched himself on a recording of the television appeal, the first thing Nathan’s dad had said was that he wished he’d kept his hands off the table. He thought he looked like ‘a thug’. Nathan had worried his dad might have made him wear his school cap
, so he’d hidden it in Zoe’s room. There was no way he was wearing a school cap on television. He didn’t even really properly hide it. He just placed it on Zoe’s dressing table as though it belonged there. His dad would never disturb a Zoe Love Museum exhibit.

  A man called Oliver came out to the television studio reception. He shook everyone’s hands, commenting on Nathan’s ‘pincer grip’, and took them all through a pair of glass saloon gates to the ‘green room’, which wasn’t green.

  “Can I get you anything?” Oliver said. “Coffee? Tea? Water?” The FLOs said yes to coffee, Nathan’s dad said no to everything. “How about you, Nathan? Gin and tonic?”

  Nathan laughed. “No, thank you.”

  “I can get you a Coke out of the machine, if you like?” Oliver said.

  “Coke Zero, please.”

  Oliver rolled his eyes. “I’ll see what I can do, Mariah Carey,” he winked at Nathan’s dad. “I’ll be back in a tick to take you through to make-up.”

  Nathan’s dad looked horrified. “We won’t need make-up, will we?”

  Oliver studied his face for a second. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  Nathan’s dad had shaved for the first time in over a week and he’d washed his hair. He’d had a shallow bath, but only after Maureen had insisted, as though he was seven years old. He was only in the bath for about five minutes and he kept his mobile phone on the window ledge with the shampoos and shower gels, as though the phone could never leave his side, like a gunfighter’s six-shooter. Nathan was disappointed when Oliver didn’t inspect his face. If he’d been allowed make-up, he was going to ask for an Adam Ant stripe.