Ticket To The Sky Dance

by Cowley, Joy

  Trevor stirred his coffee. ‘Do you think this trouble could be related to some gang fight?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Polanski said, ‘but I’ll try to find out. Oh, and I’m off-duty so this is unofficial. You don’t need bother Lieutenant Peachman.’ He sipped his coffee and bit into the velvety richness of home-made chocolate cake. Everything about the house, the garden, and Fern and Trevor, spoke of peace and well-being. He looked at the dogs panting in front of the stove, the golden pumpkins stacked in the back porch, bunches of herbs hanging from the ceiling. Through the window he could hear the cooing of doves. Then he thought of his own childhood, five kids raised in a two-bedroomed apartment on a fifteenth floor with sirens howling day and night.

  ‘Crazy!’ he said out loud. ‘They didn’t know when they were well off.’

  The supervisor of the West End Caravan Park pointed out the rusting green caravan surrounded by garbage.

  ‘The kid used to clean up, but he ain’t been here in over a week. I warned Donny, this morning. Straighten up, I said, or I get you towed to hell out of here.’

  Stephen Polanski picked his way round the cans and bottles and ruptured garbage sacks. The caravan door was open and a man in a check shirt without buttons was sitting on the bottom step in a fog of cigarette smoke. He looked up, squinting into the light.

  ‘Donny Pulo?’ Polanksi asked.

  ‘Who wants to know?’ grunted the man.

  Polanski saw that he was young, early thirties, but his skin already had the coarse texture of the alcoholic and his eyes were bloodshot.

  ‘Do you have a son called Banjo?’

  Donny sat back, slapping his hands on his knees. ‘Where the hell is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought you could tell me.’

  ‘He ain’t never been away this long before,’ Donny said. ‘He ain’t got no right. I’m his daddy. He does what I tell him.’

  ‘When did you last see him?’ Polanski asked.

  ‘Dunno. Been over a week. You tell that kid if he don’t get back to his daddy, he’s going to get thrashed to within an inch of his life. You say that, you hear?’

  ‘Mr Pulo, no one has seen Banjo. We don’t know where he is.’

  The man dragged on his cigarette and then snorted. His shoulders shook. Polanski thought he was laughing but then realised he was crying. Tears overflowed the red-rimmed eyes and ran down his face, his nose dripped. ‘He’s a good kid. He is. He’s a good little guy and I’m a piss-poor, no-good father. Tell him I miss him and I want him back real bad and things is going to change round here. Tell him that from his daddy?’

  ‘Please, Mr Pulo. Do you have any idea where Banjo might be?’

  The man shook his head and wiped his arm against his nose. ‘You got five to spare?’ he asked.

  For an instant, Polanski thought that this was the man’s way of asking him to shake hands. He almost offered his right hand when Donny Pulo said, with a glint in his watery eyes, ‘Twenty would be better. I ain’t eaten for two days.’

  Polanski was going to walk away but something stopped him. He took out his wallet and extracted twenty dollars.

  Donny Pulo snatched it from him and came to life, leaping up onto the steps with a joyous grin. ‘You’re a regular guy, you are. Good luck on your head!’

  Polanski did not want his thanks but quickly walked away through the trash, thinking it wasn’t just people who made a mess. Life itself was very untidy and, often, very unfair.

  ,

  Although he was not in uniform, the kids knew who he was. A few may possibly have recognised him, the rest smelled him the way mice sniff out a cat, and they disappeared into the recesses of the old fish factory, melting away like shadows. Only the girl called Alicia seemed willing to talk. She put her head on one side, stared bold-eyed at him and made clumsy attempts to flirt. She was, he thought, only about thirteen.

  ‘Shog and Jancie and Banjo went and got Shog some Zeus boots.’ She rolled her eyes at him. ‘But you know about that.’

  ‘I didn’t know Banjo was involved,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, well he was. He didn’t come back that night. The next morning Shog and Jancie went out to look for him but I don’t think they found him. Can’t say for sure, ’cause that’s when you and Peaches came and took them in.’

  ‘When did you see them after that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Alicia, Shog and Jancie ran away from the police station about two hours after we picked them up.’

  She lifted the hair away from her face and gave him a distrustful look. ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yes, they did.’

  ‘Well no one saw them here,’ she said. ‘They never came back to camp.’

  ‘Never? You mean you didn’t see them again?’

  ‘Nope. We thought they’d been taken into care.’

  ‘And Banjo?’

  ‘Didn’t see him, either.’

  ‘Are you quite sure about that?’

  She put her hands on her hips and laughed at him. ‘Mister, I’m not as dumb as you look, so don’t you talk to me like I’m a sandwich short of a picnic.’

  ‘You haven’t heard anything?’ he persisted. ‘Any rumours?’

  ‘Nah.’ She was still laughing at him in a challenging way. ‘The last kid Peaches picked up got a modelling job.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘You know. McCready. He’s in Paris, working for Class Act. You can take me in, if you like. I’d fancy a modelling career.’

  ‘Alicia,’ he said, ‘I need to find out where the Donoghue twins are. Can you get some of the other kids to talk to me? Maybe someone else knows.’

  She was insulted by the suggestion. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘talk goes round. If anyone here had knowed, I’d of knowed. Understand?’ She turned, swinging her hips, and then padded away from him on small bare feet draped with silver ankle chains.

  Diagonally opposite the police station was the side entrance of the City Mission where the homeless people sometimes sat on benches, talking and waiting for soup to be served. He knew that often the kids from the fish factory mingled with the older folk and chances were that some of them would remember Jancine and Ashoga Donoghue.

  He parked at the front of the City Mission where he would not be seen by his boss, and strolled in. He was pleased to discover that nearly everyone knew the Donoghue twins, the woman who was buttering bread, the young curate who was stirring a cauldron of soup, the teenagers who were setting out polystyrene cups and napkins. It was the same with the bunch of homeless people who waited in the sun. Oh yes, some said. The coloured twins had definitely been in the food line on the morning of the tenth.

  Polanski asked, ‘What about the afternoon, close on three o’clock? Were any of you by the side entrance? Did you see them come out of the police station?’

  There was silence and a shaking of heads.

  ‘About three o’clock,’ Polanski repeated. ‘I thought they might have run through the City Mission grounds.’

  Again they all shook their heads.

  Polanski thanked them and turned away. The only thing left was to phone Social Welfare to see if the kids had been picked up by one of their officers.

  ‘Hey son, you’re not going without your soup, are you?’ An old woman in a purple hat was poking a bony finger at him. Her other hand pushed a stroller full of plastic bags.

  ‘No thanks. I’ve had lunch,’ he said.

  ‘Eh? What was that?’ She put her hand behind her ear.

  He leaned closer and yelled, ‘No thanks. I was just asking about the Donoghue twins—Jancine and Ashoga.’

  Her grin changed to a snarl and her finger jabbed him in the chest. ‘Copper, huh? Chasing the fancy boots, huh? You leave them kids alone. You never pinched anything when you was a kid, huh? But they got away, didn’t they? Heh heh. I seed them. Running down the road laughing.’

  Instantly, Polanski was alert. The woman had seen the twins leave the station but she had not anwe
red his questions because she was deaf.

  ‘Where did they go?’ he bellowed. ‘Which direction?’

  ‘That’s for me to know and for you to find out,’ she cackled.

  ‘It is important!’ he yelled. ‘They may be in danger!’

  Her eyes narrowed as she searched his face for the truth, then she shrugged. ‘This car stopped. Another kid was there, too. They got in and drove away.’

  ‘Did you notice what kind of car it was?’

  ‘Sure I did. Who wouldn’t, huh? It was a big white stretch limo.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Jancie followed Shog round the station because she did not want to be left on her own, but she found the movement through solid objects increasingly difficult. Each time she went through a door or wall, the dimensions of the ship altered in strange ways. Surfaces blurred, became unreal, fittings grew thin, edges dissolved. Slowly the vessel would come together and strengthen once more, but she still had the feeling that she was lost in a dream that could fall into a nightmare at any moment. She wanted to wake up but didn’t know where that would happen. Was the laboratory at Class Act House part of the dream? It must be since the dream was being directed by Dr Frey. What of the camp at the fish factory? Would she wake up to the sea wind whistling through the boards and some kid beating drumsticks on the bottom of a plastic bucket? Or was that a dream too—all of those things just dreams? Would it end with Gran shaking her on the shoulder and saying, ‘Jancie me darlin’, you’ll be late for the school,’ and her eyes opening to hot chocolate and toast on a tray in her pink rosebud bedroom with the sun shining through the window and the picture of Jesus watching over her, his hand touching a heart like a prickly cactus. Yes, that was it. In all her searching to find what dreaming was and wasn’t, back home with Gran was the real wakening she was looking for. Even in this dream, next to the planet Mars, she could hear Gran’s voice, beyond her sleep. ‘I’m right here, Jancie girl.’ All she had to do now was find a way to wake up.

  But how did you wake up from the inside of a dream?

  ‘You thinking of Gran again?’ It was Shog.

  She sent the thought to him, ‘How do we wake up, Shog?’

  ‘It’s like a dream but it isn’t a dream,’ he replied. ‘We have to get Dr Frey to wake us up.’

  ‘But she’s the dream, too, isn’t she?’

  ‘No, Jancie. Dr Frey is real.’

  There were times when they could think back and forth without interruption, and other times when the Dr Frey voice came over them like a public address system, every few minutes. There were only two rooms in the entire vessel that she was interested in and, no matter how often they went there, she wanted them to return, to observe, to focus, to concentrate. They knew what she was going to say as soon as her voice, with its long-distance echo, cut through their thoughts.

  When Dr Frey left them, they chose to spend more time with the people on board. They listened to the big bearded Russian physicist play his silver flute. They watched games of magnetic chess. They floated by the bunks observing the different sleep habits, how some tossed, others lay still, others muttered, others snored. They saw that when the crew washed they did not use water but wet paper towels in small packets. Food, too, came out of packets and sometimes the crew played games with it. One day, someone shook out a container of milk and a white blob as big as a hand slowly revolved in the air. A man hit it with a plastic dish and the blob burst into small white drops which spun through the room, some sticking on surfaces, others hanging like snowflakes in a photograph. It took ages to clean up. Another time, a woman squeezed a tube of some green food in the air and it stayed there like a long green worm.

  One of the scientists seemed to sense their presence. This was the woman they had first met in the transjection room, the one who had felt Shog pass through her. If they floated close to her, she would sometimes pause and look thoughtful.

  One day she said to the Chinese commander, ‘Have there been any deaths on this ship?’

  ‘No mortalities,’ he assured her. ‘It was particularly designed for RUSAC and this is only the second voyage. No illnesses. No accidents.’

  ‘What about when it was being built?’ she said. ‘Couldn’t someone have fallen or got electrocuted?’

  ‘I do not know that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I’m telling you, it’s haunted,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a gift for that sort of thing.’

  At a time when Dr Frey’s voice was absent, Jancie and Shog exchanged thoughts about the people on board the vessel, especially the woman who could feel them near her.

  ‘Do you think it’s right to spy on them the way we do?’ Jancie asked.

  Spy, spy, spy. She heard the word skip across Shog’s thinking like a stone on the surface of water. Spying! Spying!

  ‘Heck, Jancie. That’s what Frey is doing! I know it! Oh, I know it! I thought all this astral travel stuff was about scientific experiments. It’s about spying! She shoots kids all over the place, to pick up information for her. Banjo is in Alaska. You and I are here. We are spies!’

  ‘That’s why she makes such a fuss about getting clear readings,’ Jancie responded.

  ‘And what’s the bet she makes heaps out of it? I mean heaps, Jancie. The staff at Class Act are in on it. Peaches, too. They’ll be making a packet. Espionage, they call it.’

  ‘Fresh air kids,’ Jancie thought. ‘They let just a few of them through on the modelling course, to prevent suspicion. The others go upstairs.’

  Then the huge thought struck them both at once.

  ‘What happens when we get back?’

  Before Dr Frey’s voice returned to them, they had the answer.

  Her tone was as cool and calm as ever. ‘It is a one-way process. You cannot return.’

  ‘You said you would bring us back!’ said Shog.

  ‘Did I? I don’t remember saying that. I do not readily tell lies. It is quite impossible to reverse the procedure. Once the astral body has been projected it is no more possible to bring it back than it is to return the sun’s light to its source. This realisation should not upset you too much. The astral body is relatively detached from emotions.’

  ‘You said we could not be hurt or killed,’ Jancie thought at her.

  ‘Quite correct,’ Dr Frey said. ‘There is no such thing as death, Jancine. Nothing ever finishes. We do not know what happens to your astral body when it separates from your physical body, but we know that, as pure energy, it cannot be destroyed. Likewise your physical body. When your heart stops beating, the process of decay begins. Think what that means. From the moment of your conception, everything that your physical body is comes from the earth. All your food. All your drink. All from the earth. When your heart stops and your astral body becomes disconnected, the physical body goes back to earth.’

  Jancie moved closer to Shog and they both felt the faint buzz of light against light.

  Dr Frey went on, ‘These days, we tend to accelerate the process by having bodies vaporised. All water is driven off in steam and what is left is a handful of dust that becomes a part of the earth again. That, in turn, will feed new living things. Meanwhile, your astral body, the essence of the real you, moves on.’

  ‘Where?’ demanded Shog.

  ‘I told you, I don’t know. People have different theories which have grown out of their religious beliefs. Quantum theory and New Science have firmly established that death is not an ending but a transformation. I expect that you are closer to finding out more about that than I am. As an astro-biophysicist, I almost envy you.’

  ‘Why don’t you project your own astral body?’ Jancie snapped the thought at her.

  ‘Who would write up my research?’ asked Dr Frey. There was a pause filled with something like a sigh. ‘I fear that you are too young to be objective. The truth is, none of us is important. We are but a generation of leaves in a forest. The important thing is the forest which is the entire history of humankind. My life is dedicated to the forest, ev
en if that means wasting a few leaves.’

  ‘You are dedicated to making money!’ Shog thought strongly.

  ‘Ah. The spying? As you so quaintly put it, I do shoot out astral bodies on missions of industrial espionage. That funds my research. In the old fairy-tales, princes rode off to do battle in distant kingdoms. These days, the kingdoms are the big multinational companies, and the princes are the smaller companies who would like to take over. It’s the same myth. In the fairy-tale I would be the woman on the side of the road who gives the prince three magic wishes in return for a good deed. But you are not a part of that particular story.’

  ‘We are your spies,’ said Shog.

  ‘I prefer to think of you as my research assistants, Ashoga. What you have been doing is gathering information to aid my own research on time travel. Yes, time travel. Imagine it! Time will no longer be linear. It will form loops as people move back and forth, and with that will come some dramatic changes in the nature of reality.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Jancie.

  ‘Think of it this way. In a year or two, it could be possible for me to send someone into last week to bring you two into the future—you, who do not exist in the future. Is that not extraordinary?’

  ‘But you wouldn’t do that,’ said Shog.

  There was a pause. ‘No.’

  Jancie thought the question that Shog was getting ready to ask. ‘How long will our physical bodies last?’

  ‘Yours, Jancine, has one or two days left. Ashoga could last for another week.’ There was another pause, then Dr Frey went on: ‘Ashoga, I do not know how you are going to be affected by your sister’s passing but I would be most grateful if you could closely observe her transformation, for me.’

  Shog’s thought came back like laser fire. ‘Go to hell! You hear me? Just you go to hell!’

  ‘It’s all right, Shog,’ soothed Jancie. ‘She is already there.’

  Chapter Twenty

  For two days Lieutenant Warren J. Peachman had worn the same shirt, and he was all too aware of it. He had tried phoning Mandy again that morning, but all he got was her old man telling him he should communicate through his lawyer. That was too much. The old man had been a trucker and a veteran of Operation Desert Storm. He wasn’t any namby-pamby to be taken in by women’s talk, and Peachman had been counting on him to send his daughter packing right home to her husband. That was the right thing to do. What was all this about lawyers? For crying down the sink, he was the law!