Prune sighed. “Don’t let’s start on ancient history!”
“Shut up, Prune!” Andie kicked her under the table; Prune gave a yelp, and glared back. “What’s the use of whining?”
Mum sighed. “I did think we could have a sensible discussion.”
“What’s the point?” snapped Prune. “You’ve made your minds up, haven’t you?”
Dad shook his head. “It’s more a question of having our minds made up for us.”
So, Andie thought, everything will be back as it was. She’d be back in the navy uniform of Hillsden High, waiting at the bus stop for Barbara each morning. It would be nice to talk and giggle with Barb again, and sit at the back in Maths where they could pass notes to each other, and take their packed lunches out to the bench by the netball court when it was sunny – but what about Kris and Ravi? They were her new friends. She wanted to see Barbara, but she wanted Ravi and Kris as well, that was the problem.
“You’re quiet, Andie,” said Dad. “What are you thinking?”
“I – I was thinking about school. I quite liked the idea of going to the same school as Kris.”
“But, Andie,” Mum said gently. “Mary Burnet is a fee-paying school. We could never afford for you to go there. It would have been St. Dunstan’s for you and Prue.”
Andie hadn’t even thought of that. Everything around her had flumped into dullness – but still, she couldn’t see the point of going into a Prune-like sulk. It wasn’t Mum and Dad’s fault. If they couldn’t afford to live in London, they couldn’t afford it, and that was that. She glanced around the dining room – at the table that was polished by Maria once a week, at the glass-fronted cabinet full of crystal glasses, at the elegant chairs they were sitting on. We just don’t belong in a place like this, she thought. We’ve only been kidding ourselves, pretending.
“Tell you what,” Mum said brightly, “why don’t we plan a nice day out for tomorrow? The four of us?”
“Good idea.” Dad was trying to sound bracing. “There are lots of tourist things we’ve not done yet. How about Madame Tussaud’s?”
“I don’t want a nice day out.” Prune sat hunched and defiant. “And I’m definitely not trudging round staring at a lot of stupid waxworks. What’s the point?”
Only two days ago, Prune had told Andie that she wanted to go to Madame Tussaud’s. In this mood, she wasn’t likely to be pleased with anything.
“Come on, Prue,” Mum tried. “You’re not being fair. It’s not just a whim, you know, this change of plan – Dad and I are disappointed too. We really thought we could live in London. But it’s just not possible.”
“It’s not my choice, commuting,” said Dad. “Setting my alarm for the crack of dawn – waiting for trains – getting home late and tired. But let’s be positive. I’ve still got the job.”
“It’s not good enough, though,” Prune huffed. “It’s always money, isn’t it? Why’s there never enough?”
“Prue! Let’s keep a sense of perspective, shall we?” said Dad. “We won’t be begging on the streets! We’re lucky, when you think about it – more than lucky. I’m bringing in a reasonable salary with this new job, your mum’s got the skills to find work anywhere, we’ve got a roof over our heads and a home of our own, and we’ve got each other. Let’s be grateful for all we have got, instead of pining for what we can’t have.”
“Have you finished the lecture?” Prune was getting to her feet. “I’m going to see Sushila.”
How was it, Andie wondered, that the moon was a short rocket-hop away, but the move from Slough to London was too far to be managed? She went down to find Kris, and tell her the news.
“Oh, that’s too bad,” Kris sympathized. “But surely there’s some way round it?”
Andie couldn’t think of one. She didn’t understand money – how, for people like Patrick and Marilyn and the Kapoors, it didn’t seem to be an issue. They just had plenty of it – enough not to be always talking about it, anyway.
“I’ve never not lived in a city,” Kris said. “London or New York. Can’t imagine anything else.”
Patrick was downstairs in the cellar, working; classical guitar music floated up the steps. I’ve been living in the same house as an artist, Andie thought, and I’ve hardly spoken to him. What was he working on? In a brighter mood, she might have asked if they could go down and see – then, maybe, she might mention, or Kris might mention, her own ambitions… “I want to be an artist – I really, really want it, more than anything in the world,” she could say, “but my parents don’t think I can. What should I do about it?” Whenever she’d imagined this, she’d decided that it could wait till later – till she felt more confident, or had more pictures to show. But now there wouldn’t be much later; it was all coming to an end, and soon.
She felt weighed down with gloom. Her dream seemed as unreachable as the most distant stars. In just a few weeks’ time, she’d be back in Miss Temple’s dreary lessons, in that dull room where even the air seemed grey and tired. Back to the scrubby brushes, the spongy paper and the colours drained of life.
Chapter Fourteen
One Giant Leap
Andie had never stayed up so late – it was past three o’clock in the morning! – and was now watching the TV screen through a haze of tiredness. They were all in the Kapoors’ flat, clustered round the television in chairs and on floor cushions. Everyone was there – Marilyn and Patrick, Kris, all the Millers and all the Kapoors.
The lunar module had landed, and now everyone was waiting – “the world waits”, as the TV commentary kept saying – for the astronauts to emerge, and the first pictures.
“Do you realize,” said Mr. Kapoor – he’d asked them to call him Amit, though Andie couldn’t quite bring herself to; he was such a quiet, dignified person and seemed to know so much – “that never before have so many people watched the same event at the same time, all around the world?”
“But only those with access to television and electricity,” said his wife. “Hundreds of thousands of people haven’t got these things, and to those people – if they hear of it at all – this must seem completely irrelevant. But I have to admit, it’s very exciting.”
“We’ll remember this, for the rest of our lives,” Dad said solemnly. “It’s history in the making.”
Ravi, of course, had gone into the shyest of silences, hiding inside himself, the way he did. No one would guess that he had more than a passing interest in what was happening. Why did he have to be so secretive? Andie wondered. But, when she considered it, lots of people had secrets – she did. Perhaps everyone needed a secret self, one that was more real and true than the outside everyday self, that other people saw.
“I bet this’ll be commonplace by the time you kids are as old as I am,” Patrick remarked. “This is the Space Age. There’ll be regular sightseeing trips to the moon. Space cruises.”
“Holidays on Mars,” said Kris. “Vacations on Venus. Count me in!”
“The Russians won’t want to be outdone,” Dad said. “I bet they’ll have men on the moon before long.”
“Or women,” Sushila added. “One of the first Russian cosmonauts was a woman – Valentina someone.”
“Tereshkova,” Ravi put in.
“Valentina Tereshkova. That’s right.”
Kris said, “Who’s going to be the first woman on the moon? Why should men have all the fun?”
“I don’t agree with all this women’s lib stuff,” said Mum. “Women wanting to be just the same as the men. Where’s it all going to lead?”
Did she have to come out with such squirm-making remarks? “Mu-um!” Andie reprimanded, out of the corner of her mouth.
“You’d better not say that too loudly in the upstairs flat,” Patrick said, smiling at Mum. “The ghost of Edwina Rutherford might come back to haunt you.”
“Edwina Rutherford?”
“Jeremy Rutherford’s aunt. It used to be her flat – she left it to him when she died. She was a suffragette
– went to prison for it, more than once – very formidable lady, she must have been—”
“Shh! Something’s happening –”
Everyone watched the screen, listening, waiting. Andie thought of all the attention focused on these men – Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the two who were in the Eagle, and actually on the moon’s surface, while Michael Collins stayed in the command module. Poor him! To go all that way, and not make the final descent to the moon! It must be like not being picked for the netball team, only thousands of times worse. But what if it all went wrong, and he had to return to Earth alone? What if the other two, down on the Moon’s surface, couldn’t take off again, couldn’t get back to the command module? What if the first men on the moon were also the first to die there? They must be so brave, accepting the huge risks. Like the crew of Apollo 1, who had all died when their rocket exploded on the launch pad…
Snatches of fuzzy conversation could be heard, or sometimes not quite heard, between the module and mission control at Cape Kennedy. Crackly voices – sounding far away, though certainly not a quarter of a million miles away – exchanged remarks and sometimes even jokes. It was Neil Armstrong whose voice had said calmly, “The Eagle has landed”, from what was now called Tranquillity Base, and who came slowly, blurrily into focus, as FIRST LIVE PICTURES FROM MOON came up on the screen. On leaving the capsule, he had lowered a TV camera, which was now – amazingly – sending back images! At first, Andie couldn’t tell what she was seeing; it looked like a snowy landscape with some sort of building in the foreground. Then she realized that it was a ladder, and a part of the spidery module, and that the large pale shape moving slowly down was Neil Armstrong himself, stepping carefully just like Dad had done when he wallpapered the lounge. “I’m at the foot of the ladder,” he said, speaking to them live from the moon – from the moon itself! “The surface appears to be very, very fine grained as you get close to it – it’s almost a powder.” He hesitated on the lowest step. “I’m going to step off the ladder.” A bigger drop, some fuzzing and blurring, and his voice again: “That’s one small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.”
Everyone was talking at once. “That’s it! Man on the moon!”
“Wow! Unbelievable!”
“They’ve done it! They’re there!”
“The moon’s a real place! He’s standing on it –”
“How must that feel? To stand where no human being has stood before, ever?”
“Amazing! Incredible!”
“A man, he must have meant to say,” said Sushila. “One small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind. Doesn’t make sense, otherwise.”
They all watched while Neil Armstrong collected samples of moon dust and rock. A few minutes later, Buzz Aldrin came carefully down the ladder, guided by Armstrong – bobbing like an inflated toy in the moon’s reduced gravity. And now the two were talking to each other: “Isn’t that something? Isn’t it fine?” It sounded so ordinary; they might have been on Brighton beach. Andie had expected them to say something more startling, something wise and wonderful. But what? Perhaps “Wow!” and “Unbelievable!” and “Isn’t that something?” were the best that could be done with words, when you saw something utterly astonishing. Perhaps a person standing on the moon wouldn’t quite be able to believe what they’d seen and done, till much later. Perhaps not ever.
Neil Armstrong aimed his camera at what he called “the panorama”, the view from where he stood – the surface of the moon, pale, flat, pockmarked. But it wasn’t Andie’s moon. She had the odd feeling that her moon was somehow more real. Part of her longed to go back there, by herself.
The two astronauts put up an American flag and posed beside it.
“That doesn’t seem right,” Sushila said. “It’s like they’re claiming the moon for America.”
“The plaque says for all mankind,” Kris pointed out.
“I know, so it ought to be an Earth flag. Or no flag at all.”
“An Earth flag! Now, that would be something,” agreed Sushila’s mother. “I can’t help thinking that all those billions of dollars this has cost would’ve been better spent on reducing poverty in Africa and India. It seems dreadful that people starve in Biafra while these colossal sums are spent on landing two men on the moon.”
“Shh, shh, here’s Richard Nixon.”
Now the President of the United States was speaking to the astronauts by telephone from the White House. “This certainly has to be the most historic phone call ever made,” he said. “For every American, this has to be the proudest thing of our lives, and for people all over the world.” It sounded like he was reading a speech. “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world.”
“But they always have been,” said Ravi. “People have always looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of them.”
He immediately looked embarrassed at having said so much. A few moments later, when his mother went into the kitchen to bring in cakes and sweet pastries and coffee, he followed her out of the room, and didn’t come back. Andie guessed that he’d escaped to the attic. She was torn between carrying on watching the television, and following him outside to look at the real moon.
It was Kris who noticed next. “Where’s Ravi? I can’t believe he’s missing this!”
“Gone to bed?” Patrick said, yawning. “It’ll be hardly worth it if we stay up much longer.”
“If I know Ravi,” said Mr. Kapoor, “he’ll have gone up to the roof. He’s got a telescope now – his uncle gave it to him.”
“On the roof?” Mum looked puzzled. “How does he get up to the roof?”
Andie tried not to turn red.
“There’s a way out through the attic storeroom. It’s quite safe,” Mr. Kapoor told her. “You’ve been up there, I expect, Kris?”
“Sure,” Kris answered, then, to Andie, “How about now? I don’t think I’m going to bed at all. Coming?”
Andie followed her very quickly, before anyone could think of a reason why not.
It was already far too light for star-watching. Towards the east, along the river, the sky was pale mauvey-pink, streaked with faint cloud. The low moon was faint, silvery, two-thirds of it in shadow; present even when it appeared to dissolve into daylight. Although it was ridiculous to imagine she’d see the American flag staking its claim across a quarter of a million miles of sky, she felt reassured that the moon looked as pale and untroubled as it always had.
“Did you see them, Rav?” Kris called, as she and Andie emerged onto the walkway.
“Course! I waved at them, and they waved back.” But Ravi was removing the telescope from its mount, putting it back in its leather case.
“Hello, day.” Kris held out her arms. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it? I like the feel of the day starting up.”
“And not just any day,” said Ravi. “It’s Monday. Moon-day.”
“Happy Moonday! Hey, is this the first real Moonday? It might look just the same as any other Monday, but it’s not.”
Kris looked over the parapet. Andie and Ravi looked too, the three of them in a row, gazing down at Chelsea Walk, and beyond it to the Thames. Andie heard the hooter of a barge, the cooing of pigeons, traffic on the bridge, and a siren somewhere; she saw the leafy canopy of trees, the grass below; a dog out walking by himself, and strings of lights along the Embankment; she smelled the faintest tang of salt. It all felt fresh and brand new in the cool air of dawn.
She wanted to catch and keep this moment.
But I’ll always remember, she thought, even when I’m ancient and a grandmother. The day I stood on the roof with Kris and Ravi, and watched London wake up, and there were men on the moon.
Chapter Fifteen
The Slough of Despond
“MAN ON THE MOON” dominated the news. Andie saw the same photographs again and again: the boot-print, heavily shadowed; the Earth from the moon; the two astronauts by the American flag; and Neil Armstrong reflected in Buzz Aldrin’s helmet
visor. The lunar module had successfully taken off from the surface and – amazingly – docked with the command module exactly as planned, and the first men on the moon were on their way back to Earth.
Andie went back to her own imagined landscapes, where the moon was silent and alone, not the focus of the world’s obsessive gaze. She painted the Sea of Tranquillity empty once more, with a blur of footmarks, and the prints left by the spidery lunar module; beyond, the powdery surface was unmarked by humans.
On Tuesday she went with Kris to the King’s Road, to deliver a batch of Marilyn’s jewellery to East of the Sun, West of the Moon. She hoped Zak wouldn’t be there – hadn’t he said he was only helping out a friend? But he was outside, hanging T-shirts on a rail. He said, “Hi, you guys,” mainly to Kris, then looked at Andie as if he recognized her from the shoplifting incident. All her family members, wherever they went, seemed to devote themselves to creating maximum embarrassment for her, Andie thought.
Kris handed over the box of jewellery to the sharp-faced blonde woman and spent a few minutes discussing which of Marilyn’s pieces were selling best. As they left the arcade, Zak, who was now at the till, said to Andie, “Tell Prue I got her message, would you? Tomorrow’s cool. Quarter to nine, tell her.”
“What’s that about?” Kris asked, out on the pavement.
“No idea.” Andie was baffled. “We went in there last week, and Prune, er, talked to Zak. I don’t know what else.”
“What, is she going out with him or something? That’s neat.”
Andie thought this most unlikely, but was reluctant to explain why. She’d cross-examine Prune about it later.
Much of the world might have been gazing at the moon, but the King’s Road was still the centre of its own universe: self-absorbed, inhabited by beautiful people with swishy hair and arty clothes. Where did they come from? Andie wondered. Where did they go to? Had they been bred specially from shop mannequins, or designed by the editors of Honey? Somehow, in the King’s Road, even the plainest people, simply by being there, managed to make themselves look like the last word in cool.
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