The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space

by Pippa Goldschmidt

  She was always trying to teach me to knit, helping me to bend my fingers in the correct way but everything I tried to make came out looking the same, no matter what it was supposed to be. I couldn’t follow her knitting instructions, it felt like trying to crack a code. It was far more difficult than maths.

  She told me stories, real and imaginary. She told me that when she came to England in 1946 she couldn’t pronounce the word ‘tea’. On her first night here in a boarding house somewhere near Dover she had gone hungry rather than ask someone the way to the nearest café. She had kept her mouth shut and read poetry to improve her English.

  She told me that where she came from, the winters were so cold she could go skating on the lake in the south of the city, and one day the ice cracked and the water beneath swallowed up a little boy. His body was never found. Afterwards I wondered if she’d known the little boy.

  She told me that her parents had owned a glove factory, and I wasn’t listening properly and thought she said ‘love’.

  She told me she was named after the Mona Lisa because it had been stolen in 1911, although when I was older I worked out that she must have been born several years before this.

  Her stories were all about the past, set in Germany and in England. But there were mistakes in them, and gaps between them. I calculated that there were about twelve years of her life which had produced no stories at all, or not ones she would tell me. But she must have had reasons for the mistakes and the gaps, and the stories all connected together in my head like her knitting stitches created around essential air. I sensed that if I asked her about the gaps then the knitting would come unravelled and the needles would clatter to the floor, where they would glint and be dangerous. So I never asked. I just listened.

  At some point in my teens I worked out that I was three quarters Jewish and one quarter Irish. The Jewish part was also German, Austrian and Polish. The Irish part was possibly Catholic, possibly not. I wasn’t sure which part was more important but I started wearing a Star of David around my neck. She asked me to remove it, she didn’t want me to identify myself in this way. So I removed it, and I replaced it with a silver skull which she didn’t like either, but which she could tolerate.

  As I got older and moved onto more complicated maths I realised that there were two circles for two sets of numbers, and these numbers mapped one by one onto the people who had survived the camps and the people who had perished. No intersection between the circles, people were either alive or dead. And there was no way of knowing which particular number was in each set. Nothing to distinguish one number from another, just by looking at it.

  Now that I knew so many integers had hidden histories I no longer felt comfortable doing sums with them, it felt like treading on ashes. It was a relief to learn about the irrational numbers such as pi, or e, or the square root of two. Numbers that weren’t related to integers and that went on forever so I could spend my whole life following rules to work them out. It was a relief to learn about such individual and eternal numbers.

  As I sat and waited in the hospital for the nurse to come, I continued to hold the hand that was once hers. The next programme started on the TV and this one was a documentary, the screen full of light reflecting off rushing water but I couldn’t work out what it was. A lake, a river, an ambitious bath?

  I sat on. In spite of the pale blue curtains of the hospital cubicle flapping around me and the huff of my gran’s oxygen cylinder which wouldn’t stop even though she had stopped, I eventually took this in: life on Earth may have started on the coasts of lakes and seas, in places which are both wet and dry. Liminal places that are difficult to define.

  I didn’t ask her if it had been Walt Whitman and his declaration that he was vast and contained multitudes that she’d read as she lay on the bed in the boarding house at Dover, but it would have been appropriate, because:

  She was an anti-Zionist who went to Israel for her holidays.

  She read the Telegraph and voted Labour.

  She ate bacon for breakfast and then cooked kosher lunches at the club for other Jewish pensioners.

  She put stones on my grandfather’s grave for the anniversary of his death. But she always selected three stones; one for the Father, one for the Son and one for the Holy Ghost.

  She said she was disappointed in me when I explained how to jiggle coins out of public phones, yet she stole small plants from Tel-Aviv airport and smuggled them back to England in her handbag.

  When I was twelve I decided to do German at school. She was upset, and then she got cross because I couldn’t understand her when she spoke German to me. But her German was stuck in the 1940s, and she had to slip in English words such as zebra crossing, package holiday, take away. They stuck out like known desert islands frilled at the edges with guttural and incomprehensible seas of syllables.

  Finally the nurse came. First she turned the TV off, then she turned the oxygen canister off. She told me that I could let go of my gran’s hand if I wanted to, that she needed to do some things. She made it clear that I should not be here when she did these things, so I went and sat on a rickety chair in the corridor. I took my gran’s handbag with me; a battered old-lady’s bag, the sort that was capable of holding everything from dentures to Strepsils, as well as stolen Israeli plants. I surprised myself by remembering to take her rings as well. They were in a plastic dish on top of her hospital pedestal. Two gold circles lying side by side, a symbol of two sets of numbers with no intersection. Or a symbol of infinity. I preferred infinity.

  I continued to sit, although I wasn’t sure why. I supposed I was waiting for the nurse to finish, although she didn’t say that I should.

  A hospital porter came rumbling past pushing a metal trolley. He manoeuvred it into the ward and I realised it was for my gran. He came back out of the ward without the trolley and sat next to me. I glanced sideways at him, looked at his hands resting on his lap. Big red beefy hands, a swallow drawn on each of them next to the thumbs. The two swallows faced each other with their long tails trailing across the back of each hand as if they were trapped in the process of some courtship dance. I didn’t even know if swallows did courtship dances. Maybe I was imagining too much.

  ‘Where’s she off to now?’ he asked, looking straight ahead at the closed doors.

  ‘Back to the nursing home,’ I said. And then Hoop Lane, I could have added. The largest crematorium in North London with vile chimneys constantly puffing smoke into the air.

  ‘Ah.’ He shuffled on the chair as if settling down and I realised he was also waiting for the nurse to finish, so he could take my gran away. He gave me a paper tissue and I realised I was crying.

  I didn’t like the swallows because it meant that I would remember him, that there was something linking him to my gran. I wanted some unknowable entity – as alien as an Ancient Greek to carry my gran on a ferry off to the chimneys in the Underworld, not someone who could be classified like a butterfly with a pin piercing his hospital overalls.

  ‘You like my swallows?’ He’d noticed me looking. I didn’t reply but he continued anyway, ‘You want to know why I got swallows on my hands?’

  I realised I was holding my breath, but I wasn’t sure whether it was from the effort of trying not to cry or because I didn’t want to find out about the swallows.

  Just then the doors to the ward clanged open and the nurse appeared. The porter got to his feet and disappeared into the ward without looking back at me. Neither of them had said a word. I picked up my gran’s handbag and I knew that I could open it now, because she was dead and she couldn’t tell me not to.

  The needle begins its journey into my skin. ‘Won’t take long,’ the tattooist says and I nod, trying not to wince and thinking that maybe I should have had a farewell ceremony for my skin before it is transformed. The needle whines like a mechanical mosquito and I am bitten with ink as dark as blood. I’m anxious, wondering if it will work and if the tattoo will look the way I planned. The tattooist is confident,
she keeps saying that most of the designs she does are much more complicated than mine, but I’m still nervous.

  Time stretches out. The pain is insistent, keeping me in this room and stopping my mind from taking me away.

  ‘All done,’ and I lie there for a moment longer listening to the sudden silence. The tattooist drifts to the other side of the room, as discreet as a GP after some intimate examination. I wonder if I will ever get up again because I feel so heavy, as if the needle has sewn me to the chair. I try to relax my jaw, move my teeth. I glance down at the arm, it no longer seems like mine, and I wonder what it’s been transformed into.

  When I first thought about getting a tattoo I decided I’d quite like a picture of the bones beneath my skin, making it look like the skin had been peeled back to show what was underneath. But although I liked the idea of having a tattoo of my body, I realised I wanted something more abstract.

  Finally I dare to look down at my new tattoo. The inner part of my left forearm is decorated by two thin black circles. The overlap between the circles is cross-hatched in red. There are no numbers.

  I know she asked me not to do this, but I think she would have liked the idea of being commemorated by an intersection, a mathematical picture of complexities.

  Safety checks

  The official arrived at 9am, just as expected. I’d arrived at work an hour earlier than usual, so that I could start running the checks on the telescope and save him a bit of time. I knew he wouldn’t want to miss the return bus to the city.

  He was a small, neat man who looked as if he’d just been to the barber’s. I’d already exchanged several phone calls with him but this was the first time we’d met face to face. His predecessor always insisted on some coffee, and so I played it safe and brewed a pot. I find it helps to pay attention to what these people might like.

  The telescope was parked so that the big dish was facing directly up into the sky. Whenever I look at the smooth dish I think how amazing it is that something like this can be second-hand metal, beaten out of gunships and destroyers that have been retired from the war and replaced by newer versions. Perhaps they too will become future telescopes after they’ve served their country.

  I was the only one to meet him at the main entrance. My staff were indoors, waiting at the controls.

  The annual safety check was part of my routine. I would put the telescope through its paces, and the official would make sure that it couldn’t overrun the brakes or stray into the forbidden zones around the horizon. Then he would sign off the paperwork, return to the Ministry and that would be that for another year. Once the safety check is complete we are allowed to get on with our work.

  He got off the bus and patted dust from his trousers. Not all the roads up here are paved yet; apparently the Government’s working on it. ‘Full moon tonight,’ he announced, by way of a greeting.

  ‘It makes no difference to our work here,’ I replied.

  We stood outside the gate to the observatory and he looked around at the low wooden fence that enclosed the telescope and the hut. ‘Not much security up here.’

  ‘We’re quite isolated.’

  ‘I can see that. Even so, I’d better order you some barbed wire.’

  He walked up the path and I followed him, he seemed to know where to go. These people always do.

  ‘Coffee?’

  He considered for a moment, ‘Yes, you might bring me one,’ and he opened the door to the control room. The other three members of staff were waiting in there, he nodded at them and sat down at my desk. I handed him the cup of coffee, and he set it to one side and ignored it.

  I’d already logged onto the telescope control system. He glanced through the manual that I’d left out for him and started to type commands. The staff watched him closely as he worked, they’re not so used to the Government as I am. They stood without speaking, as he printed off and checked the coordinates that define and limit the telescope’s movements around the sky.

  ‘Why don’t you walk me through your typical set-up at the start of each evening?’ he said, and he let me take my seat. While he looked out of the window and made notes, I directed the telescope to skim along inside the green line defining the edge of the permitted zone. Then, as a test, I gave it the coordinates of an object outside that zone. The blast from the siren was so loud that the staff put their hands over their ears.

  At the same time as the siren started, the official reached into his jacket pocket and removed a small black electronic device. It lay in the palm of his hand as he held it out to me, indicating a small red light that was shining on and off. Then he pressed a button on the device and out of the corner of my eye I could see the telescope glide back up to the zenith, and the siren stopped its din.

  ‘That’s a new feature,’ I said.

  ‘The Minister’s new too, remember? He felt things might have got a bit informal under the old administration.’

  ‘But the telescope hasn’t strayed over the green line for years.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry,’ and he put the device back into his pocket. I could imagine it by his bed at night, its red eye illuminating his dreams.

  ‘Would you like to see our latest results?’ His predecessor had seemed to show a genuine interest in our work, but this official merely glanced at the paper I’d drafted for him before he went on his way.

  I accompanied him back down the path, and I noticed he took small steps the way they do down in the city where nobody has any space of their own. Up here, it’s easier to move around more freely. After he’d gone I stood and waited until the sun went down behind one of the neighbouring hills and the scrubby grass lost its colour in the dusk. The birds started to roost and were as noisy as ever – we’re plagued by these small brownish birds which are well so camouflaged in this environment. But we never manage to shoot any of them, however hard we try. Perhaps they’ve adapted their plumage to evade us over the years.

  The horizon is lit up by the fires that seem to burn constantly outside the walls of distant towns. It’s just luck that there’s no town right here.

  The observing that night went well. We’re mapping the sky, to search for the dark objects. We can hunt them down by the way they disturb other objects, causing their trajectories to wobble and go off-course. It’s an ambitious project, but calculations have shown that around 90% of the predicted number of these dark objects can be found in this way. That night three more objects were detected and their positions noted. I’m afraid I don’t have the time to speculate as to the nature of these objects and why they are so dark, I leave that to others. After all, I have my hands full with everything else that I am responsible for.

  At around midnight I turned on the radio for the news headlines. The radio has always been capricious and only works in certain locations in the control room. Each night one member of staff wanders around, holding the radio in front of them as they search for the best reception. Tonight almost everything was drowned out by static and fuzz, but we could just make out the usual daily update to the number of people arrested as a result of the disturbances. For some time, my deputy had been plotting this number on a graph on the blackboard, to see if it was changing in any systematic fashion. It looked random to me but I was never much good at mathematics. The deputy claimed to spot a long-term trend but sometimes he said the number was increasing and other times he said it was decreasing. I supposed his interest in this subject was harmless, in any case I hadn’t mentioned it in my annual report.

  A week later the phone rang. The official wanted to make another visit. This was most unusual. In all my time at this observatory I couldn’t remember any officials coming here more than once a year. The place didn’t seem to be high priority for them.

  This time he accepted the coffee and drank it with quick sips like a bird from a feeder. I’d told the staff to carry on with their normal duties, this wasn’t the annual check. So they were at their desks, but quieter than usual. I’d even laid out the paper about the d
ark objects to see if he was interested in it after all. I could have posted it to him, of course, but the post is not so reliable these days – not since the post boxes started to be firebombed on such a regular basis.

  He handed me the empty cup. ‘Let’s get to work.’ The staff kept their heads down, as if they sensed that I was being admonished by him. Perhaps I was, but I didn’t remember doing anything wrong.

  He motioned with his hand that I should stand up and relinquish my seat to him and then he worked at my terminal for a few minutes. I was impressed that he didn’t need the manual, he must have known these commands off by heart. Or perhaps they weren’t in the manual. Almost as soon as he’d stopped typing the siren started blaring, and the telescope dish started moving away from the zenith. It swung further and further down towards the ground, until it stopped, the dish hanging there in a way which had to be severely taxing the struts and supports. For the first time ever I worried about metal fatigue. But I didn’t have much time to worry, because – bizarrely – even though the telescope had gone right over the green line and was now well within the forbidden zone, the siren stopped.

  The dish was almost but not quite entirely facing this hut and I could stare right into it. It was like staring into an enormous eye that never blinks or sleeps. The metal completely filled my vision, and I could see the rivets that had been used to join all the different components together to make a sort of patchwork of metal plates. At the dead centre of the dish was a collection of aerials and detectors, probably like all the paraphernalia that there must be at the back of the human eye to connect it to the brain.

  It was silent in the control room. I wrenched myself away from the sight of the dish and realised the official was waiting for me to turn my attention back to him.

  ‘I have made some adjustments,’ he told me, ‘in the way that the telescope can be used from now on.’

  ‘Adjustments?’ As I spoke, behind me I could hear the deputy breathing, short shallow breaths.