Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  If the kid could live his life again he’d make sure he did everything differently. Same as he does with socks. First you do the life where your parents don’t get on and you get sick to death of both of them and you run away. Then you do the life where everything’s cool – but maybe you run away for the hell of it. Then something else. And so on, never repeating, because only losers do the same thing twice.

  A programme he saw on TV: one hundred things to do before you die. Only a hundred? Like, not a zillion? And anyway, most people manage maybe ten. They never get to be millionaires, never form a rock band, never write a novel, never appear on television. Instead they go through the jungle swinging their spiny tails and they don’t see the meteorite above their head.

  A man loitering at the edge of the park, old man in a long dark coat, forty something, same kind of age as the Stegosaurus. Is he with the woman and the little girls? No, more likely a flasher or a paedo, either it’s the woman he wants or it’s the girls or it’s the kid himself. One hundred things to do before you die: run away from home and get sexually assaulted in a swing park, no that was never on the list. But then, why not? I mean, thinks the kid, if you’re going to do everything, like absolutely everything in every menu and submenu that life can throw at you. Well, it makes you think.

  Here’s what the kid thinks. The universe is infinite, right? He knows it’s infinite because he saw a Horizon programme that said the Hubble Space Telescope took a photograph of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Was it Hubble or was it WMAP? Never mind – and now the woman’s telling her daughters it’s time to leave, like maybe she saw the old man and her pervert alarm went off.

  Let’s say it was WMAP, purely for the sake of argument. Took a photograph of the cosmic microwave background, which is so to speak the afterglow of the Big Bang that happened 13.8 billion years ago – the kid knows this stuff by heart. And they took the photograph to this big room where a whole load of scientists looked at it with a magnifying glass, because the thing about the picture is that it’s got lots of spots, it’s kind of grainy like when you look at a screen too closely. And the size of the graininess tells them the shape of the universe, because if space is curved then the pattern gets distorted. This is what the kid knows, and he sees the old man coming into the park at the same time as the lady and the little girls go out. As in, I’ve only just run away and here comes a pervert to get me, exactly like they say always happens.

  All of this started with a particle or a singularity or something that exploded 13.8 billion years ago and nobody, absolutely nobody on this planet we call Earth, knows why it happened. Thing to do before we all die: figure that one out. But it happened, and it made this spotty picture of microwaves that the scientists looked at under a magnifying glass, and they said: this proves space is flat. And that means space is infinite. So by looking at this little photograph through a magnifying glass they proved that space goes on for ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever …

  ‘Hello, kid.’

  The guy has walked right across the empty swing park from the gate at the far end to the bench where the kid sits, all in the time it takes to think about a little photograph of an infinite universe.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Mind if I sit down?’

  ‘No.’

  And suddenly it’s like the kid is a kid. His magnets can’t deal with this one.

  ‘You’re all alone here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Don’t you have any friends?’

  ‘Sure I’ve got friends. Lots of them.’

  ‘You’re very lucky. Friends are important. You know, there’ll come a time in your life when you realize that friends are the only important thing, nothing else matters. And the only way to have friends is to be a good person. Are you a good person?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘No, not always.’

  The man smiles and nods. ‘I like that. I can tell you’re an honest person, and being honest is good. Have you any idea who I am?’

  The kid’s throat is so dry. ‘No.’

  ‘I come from very far away. You might not think it from my accent but it’s true. I’m on a mission.’

  ‘What sort of mission?’

  ‘Never mind. But I saw what you did, stealing the computer game. It’s in your pocket, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, and if you’re a store detective you’ve got no right to search me …’ The kid gets up but the stranger stays calm, waving his hand as if none of it matters.

  ‘I saw you stealing, so I know you’re not always honest.’

  ‘But I had to do it. I can’t explain why, I needed to, that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ says the stranger. ‘You’re a kid and it’s what kids do sometimes. There are worse mistakes a person can make, and I should know. Are you going to go home now?’

  The kid hesitates. ‘Maybe.’ He sits down again. ‘What did you mean about being on a mission?’

  The man takes a deep breath, more of a sigh really, like this is something difficult for him to talk about. He’s got like a lined old face but sort of distinguished. ‘I’ve been travelling for a long time and now I’d like to find my way home.’ In other words the complete opposite of what the kid plans on doing. The kid wants to travel. He wants to see the world.

  ‘Have you seen the world?’ the kid asks.

  ‘I’ve seen many worlds.’

  Kind of thing the Doctor might say. Guy’s nothing like David Tennant or Christopher Ecclestone, or even Tom Baker or Peter Davison in the old Doctor Who episodes the kid’s seen on DVD, lousy stories with cheap special effects that Steg likes because he grew up with them and can’t appreciate how generations move on, can’t understand that being ‘classic’, i.e. old, isn’t necessarily the same as being good. This guy’s sort of classic-looking, though. Dark hair with only a little grey at the temples, big long coat; he could be a regenerated Doctor in a new series. He’d need an assistant. Kid asks, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Can’t tell.’

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’

  ‘Both,’ says the stranger. ‘Can’t implies won’t.’

  An adult who understands logic: kid likes that. Definitely an extraterrestrial feature. ‘How many hearts have you got?’

  ‘None – I left it in San Francisco.’

  ‘Not two?’

  Guy looks at him, puzzled. ‘Why should I have two?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says the kid. ‘I was thinking of Doctor Who, that’s all.’

  ‘You think I’m an alien in human form? A spaceman?’

  Kid laughs. ‘Of course not, duh. I’m not an infant or a retard.’

  ‘Because in a sense you’re right.’

  Kid stops laughing. ‘What do you mean?’ he asks quietly.

  The stranger is perfectly matter-of-fact about it. ‘You could say I’m a spaceman.’

  ‘What, you’ve been up in the International Space Station or something?’ Loads of people have done it, even like schoolteachers and tourists; it’s cool but not impossible. Probably on that list of one hundred things.

  ‘It’s not all about going up, you know. Sometimes spacemen have to fall.’

  ‘And you fell in Kenzie?’

  Guy nods. ‘Yup.’

  The kid’s fuck-around detector is on full power but it’s like the guy’s got some magnetic bypass because the kid’s almost believing him. ‘You mean you’re not a paedophile?’

  The stranger smiles and shakes his head. ‘Not a paedophile, not a store detective. A spaceman.’

  Here’s how it works. Some scientists get a photograph of the microwave background radiation and use it to prove the universe is infinite. Which means there’s more than enough room for all the infinite atoms to be in every possible arrangement, just like the kid’s socks, and it doesn’t matter how much time you’ve got, like whether it’s a year
or a billion years, because all of that space makes up for it. In an infinite universe anything is possible and everything is certain. You go far enough, there’s a bunch of atoms arranged to make a world just like this one, with a WH Smith in it and a kid who decided to steal a game, or maybe a different game, and you go farther still, there are worlds where the kid stole every possible game, one world beyond another for ever. A googolplex things to do before you die, all happening at once right now in an infinite universe. That’s the Way It Is.

  ‘I don’t think you’re really a spaceman.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because …’ Kid can’t think of a good reason except that if the stranger were a spaceman then it would be an Interesting Thing and the human species, as in his father, has evolved to repel Interesting Things with thick bony plates. Kid says, ‘Prove it.’

  ‘I don’t have to.’

  ‘Tell me what space is like.’

  ‘You can see it over your head every night. It’s no secret.’

  ‘Where’s your spaceship?’

  ‘I don’t need one.’

  ‘You mean you teleport, flap your arms, what?’ He sees the stranger get to his feet. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘I didn’t mean to insult you or anything.’ Only he thinks the guy is ninety-nine point nine recurring per cent certain to be a lunatic.

  ‘You need to go,’ says the stranger, looking down at him.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  It’s a cusp kind of a moment. Like the kid knows, suddenly he knows in that blinding all-illuminating way, that this is for real, if he wants it to be. He’s got the Special Features page up and there’s a link saying Normal Life (Like Dinosaurs Lead) and there’s another underneath it says Crazy Life (Like You Want) and the remote’s in his hand and it’s his call. He says, ‘Can I go with you? On the mission?’

  ‘It’s not a good idea.’

  ‘Only for a little while. Maybe I can help you go home. You know, like ET.’

  He mulls it over then says, ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take the game out of the store without setting off the alarm?’

  The kid smiles. ‘I have access to superior technology. I can walk into any shop and take whatever I want. Cool, huh?’

  ‘Does it work on cash machines?’ the guy asks immediately, making the kid give a start.

  ‘No … I don’t do cash machines. Not yet.’

  The stranger looks disappointed. ‘Still,’ he says to himself, ‘it could be useful.’ Then he says to the kid, ‘I need a place to stay tonight. I’m going to reconnoitre the area, see what I can find.’

  ‘I need a place too.’

  ‘You do? Then why not search as well? Let’s meet here at seven o’clock and we’ll see how we’re both getting on. Now go and do your duty.’

  The kid gets up, pauses, waits for something else, another word of explanation, or thanks, or anything, but the stranger isn’t going to give it. There has to be something, though, a sign, a sonic screwdriver, a Tardis in the bushes. Kid says, ‘Why won’t you tell me your name?’

  ‘I can’t, it might compromise the mission.’

  ‘Not even like your initials?’

  Now the guy sits down, kid’s still standing. Role reversal. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘RC.’

  ‘RC?’

  ‘That’s my initials.’

  Richard Carter, Robin Cuthbertson, Rohinder Chowdury … a thousand million trillion possible combinations in an infinite universe, and the remote’s still in the kid’s hand and he doesn’t know which special feature is Spaceman (Interesting) and which is Sicko Dick Swinger (Run Like Fuck) but he’s not running because in his own weird way this guy’s kind of a classic as in he doesn’t even have a name and that’s cool. So the kid turns and walks while the stranger stays on the bench. Sort of a start your life all over again kind of a moment as in everything’s been switched around in his head, black to white and left to right and time rewound, the kid walking out instead of the stranger striding in. That’s what it’s like in an infinite universe where anything is possible and everything is certain. That’s the Way It Is.

  5

  ‘More than twenty,’ Joe was saying to his wife as he came into the living room. He was just back from ASDA and on the way had been picking up discarded rubber bands from the pavement. He held the day’s takings in his outstretched hand like an accusation. ‘Two dozen in one stretch of road.’

  ‘Such a waste,’ Anne agreed from the settee where she sat with a book at her side, enjoying a temporary respite from pain.

  ‘What I want to know is why the postmen can’t put them in their pockets and reuse them.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be hard.’

  ‘But no, they’ve got to take the elastic off every bundle of letters and drop them in the street. Dogs could choke on them.’

  ‘You can’t stand dogs.’

  ‘Or children maybe.’

  Anne frowned. ‘Would a wee child swallow a rubber band off the road?’

  ‘It could easily happen,’ Joe insisted. ‘Don’t you remember how Janet used to be always picking things up from the ground.’

  ‘She didn’t eat them, though.’

  ‘Aye, but she might have. Anyway, don’t get me off the point, Anne, we’ve got to look at this logically. Twenty-four rubber bands in one wee stretch in one day. If you multiply that up to the whole country in a year you’d get …’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘A lot of rubber bands,’ Anne suggested eventually. ‘Something for you to think about in the toilet.’

  ‘How do you know I’m headed there?’ Joe asked, puzzled.

  ‘Because we’ve been married nigh on fifty years, Joe, so you elasticate off upstairs.’

  He nodded and left the room; Anne heard the heavy creak of his footsteps as he rose, then lifted the book to carry on reading. It was what she mostly did nowadays; sometimes she’d look at the television but she preferred reading because with a book you never feel lonely and if you wake up in the middle of the night it’s better than listening to rubbish on the radio with a wee earphone like Joe, you might as well switch on the light and open your book and in a moment you’re away with the story, you forget all your aches and pains and your troubles. Telly’s for youngsters but it was old people must have invented books because they’re the ones that get the benefit of them.

  There were plenty around the house, books that Robbie left behind, many of them with his name pencilled inside, sometimes a date too, fixing them in time like butterflies on a pin. Everything’s in the past eventually, that’s the plain truth of it, and fretting over it’s like worrying yourself about a few wee rubber bands. Anne opened her book at the page she’d marked; it was a very old book with a tattered red cover, the gold lettering on the spine faded and almost illegible, but the pages were still crisp and clean looking. Some of those paperbacks of his were falling apart already, gone yellow and foul and not worth opening but kept in a box because they could never throw anything out that was his, twenty-five years next week, she’d sent the In Memoriam to the local paper. But this book Anne was reading now was at least as old as she was, no, more, and here it was in her hands, a wee bit musty and ragged but perfectly useable. That’s how they made things back then, built to last. And now? If it’s last year’s thing it’s out of date. Chuck it away and buy another.

  The name inside the cover isn’t Robbie’s. The handwriting is the kind of copperplate she was taught at school and the signature is G. B. Tulloch; she knew his first name was Gordon but never learned what the B stood for. Brian or Bernard, perhaps, or his mother’s maiden name. Brown, Baillie, didn’t matter, really. Poor old fellow died alone in that house of his and got found by a neighbour; bit like Sam Dunbar, only they found Sam a lot quicker.

  The book is called Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Been sitting on a shelf for years; it never got put away in a box because the hardbacks looked nicer and this one was an a
ntique, Joe thought it might be worth a bob or two seeing as it was so old, though one time Anne looked in a second-hand bookshop she saw hundreds as ancient and in as good condition and some of them were going for 50p. Place was like a cross between a graveyard and a jumble sale and she walked out wishing she hadn’t looked. No, she’d never go on one of those antique programmes and hand her book over to some expert in a linen suit who’d open it and push his glasses up his forehead and hand it back and say it was worthless. All they want is money, those people on the telly, all they see is the monetary value in everything.

  For a long time she thought the book was in German because the only words on the spine were Wilhelm Meister and underneath it the name Goethe. Robbie had some other old books that were completely in German from when he learned the language, it was Tulloch advised him to do it, and she’d glanced in one or two and seen that horrid way they used to print, reminded her of old Adolf and made her feel sick. Joe said they shouldn’t even have such stuff in the house, said Goethe was a Nazi and for all Anne knew maybe he was, but you’ve got to live and let live.

  What surprised her about Wilhelm Meister, though, when she eventually decided a week or two ago to start reading it, was how easy it was to follow. She could never be doing with those books she had to read at school, longwinded and full of descriptions – there was one by Walter Scott, Waverley, sent her completely to sleep. And then that time she took Robbie to the doc for his bed-wetting and the old fool suggested Ivanhoe – and Anne going to the library to look for it! In those days she thought doctors knew everything and you just had to do what they told you, but poor Robbie was as bored as Anne had been and it didn’t do his vivid imagination any good.