Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

Then we got to an airbase in a valley somewhere in Suffolk, where there were planes and heatships and even some Auroras and Flarehawks standing around the muddy runways. And Harris said, ‘Well, have fun up there,’ and rather stupidly I said, ‘You too,’ and he smiled but his face was tight and he said he would be going north again soon and it would be good to see the rest of his squadron. But he didn’t look as if he expected it to be fun.

So he drove away and a lady led me into a rec room in one of the boxy buildings where there was a snooker table and a television and a games screen.

Through the rest of the afternoon other kids turned up looking dazed and lost, until by dinner time there were fourteen of us. There were a couple of little kids and a lot of teenagers, who monopolised the games screen and the TV, so I felt a bit stuck on my own and I thought, Oh God, is it going to be like this for the next four years? Because I didn’t know how many of us were going altogether.

But there was this girl called Kayleigh who was fifteen and very excited about everything in a slightly desperate way and she had multi-coloured hair and a bag full of all sorts of things she wasn’t meant to have. Most of it got taken off her later, but not before she and some of the other teenagers got fairly drunk after supper and Kayleigh had helped me dye pink streaks into my hair, which my mum probably wouldn’t have let me do and Muckling Abbot definitely wouldn’t. And that made me feel bold and intrepid and up for adventure. Well, relatively speaking, anyway.

So there was some unpleasantness when the soldiers found out what was going on and a corporal shouted at us for being so irresponsible and a disgrace to the Exo-Defence Force uniforms we were going to end up wearing, and after various people burst into tears because of that and other reasons, and when the boys and girls had been sorted back into their separate dormitories, we all went to sleep. And the next morning we were all packed on to a distressingly battered-looking plane and off we went to the middle of the Atlantic.

Kayleigh had cried a lot the night before, but she seemed to change mood very quickly and now she got everyone singing. And while endless cheery singalongs generally rather annoy me, I had to admit hers were better than the songs at Muckling Abbot.

They played some films on the flight but I was feeling too nervous to concentrate on them and so mainly I looked out the window a lot. Underneath the plane, the world turned green and then blue and it was the most colour I’d seen in ages. Even now I’m not exactly sure where we went, but I saw what had to be the coast of Africa rolling past all huge and golden, and once a scattering of islands. And I remembered my little green biro drawing on the wall in the Muckling Abbot staffroom and my heart started pounding too hard as I thought, But that’s where I’m from . And there’s so much I don’t know about it yet and what if I never come back.

At last we landed on a platform in the middle of the ocean like a small round metal island, maybe two hundred metres across. And crouching on this platform was a large spaceship shaped something like a stick insect with the name Mélisande on its bow. There were soldiers stationed around to stop people climbing on it, although nothing could stop the seagulls from perching all over it and pooing, which I thought was quite amusing because it made Kayleigh’s song almost prophetic.

Even with all the seagull poo, I thought it was an amazing place. There was no ice at all and the water and the sky were blue and sparkling and it was so warm .

Planes kept swooping down and dumping loads of children on the platform until there were about three hundred of us rattling around. There were some international games and sandwich-swapping, in the spirit of comradeship and standing united against a common foe. And there was also some international fighting, which was more in the spirit of history and tradition. But it was so sunny that after a while a lot of us just sprawled around on the painted steel, feeling completely dopey and blissful in the heat and really not wanting to go anywhere.

I was lying near the edge of the platform gazing dreamily at the glittery water, thinking that what I really wished I could do was go for a swim, when a pair of bare feet whisked right over my head and I looked up just in time to see someone leap up on to the barrier and go catapulting over it. It was too fast and the light was too bright for me to get a good look at this person, but I heard a yell like a kind of war cry and, a second later, an equally loud splash as he hit the water.

I jumped up, wondering if someone really objected to our looming Martian exile so much that he was prepared to drown himself over it. With several other kids and nearby alarmed crew members, I looked over the side. What I saw was a big fizzing patch of white bubbles, and in the middle of it a pair of legs in jeans was waving idly in the air. Then the legs tipped over with another splash and up came the head of a stubbly-haired boy about my age, who looked maybe Malaysian or Filipino or something. He bellowed: ‘EVERYONE COME IN, THE WATER’S AWESOME!’

He was Australian. He had an amazingly loud voice. I don’t know how there was even room for the lungs he must have had to produce that kind of noise. And all the crew had to react pretty quickly to stop about fifty of the nearest kids from doing exactly what he said and plunging into the water right then and there. And… well, I guess I might have been one of them. Although I did also think that kid was an idiot. I don’t know. I was torn.

So the platform crew were ordering us in their scariest military voices to get back from the edge while a forlorn little boy with tously hair was hopping about, clutching what must have been the older boy’s abandoned shirt and shoes and shouting, ‘Kuya…! Kuya…!’

And meanwhile the kid was happily turning another somersault and whooping and spitting spouts of water into the air until an extremely annoyed soldier stomped down a ladder to the ocean, jumped in after him and fished him out.

By the time the kid was sploshing across the deck, we were all lined up in our National Groups to stop us from acting on any more clever ideas. But I was still fairly close and honestly, I think even people in orbit could have seen that here was someone who wasn’t the least embarrassed at being hauled out in front of a couple of hundred people soaking wet with no shirt on. On the other hand the little boy clutching his shoes, who was now lined up with the other Australian kids, looked mortified.

The wet soldier turned the boy over to a sergeant who roared at him, ‘NAME?’

Even when the boy wasn’t actually yelling, his voice had a bit of a boom to it. He said, ‘Carl Dalisay,’ which was a little confusing to me because of the ‘Kuya’ thing.

‘You think you’re funny, do you, Dalisay?’

Carl Dalisay just gazed up at the sergeant with wide earnest eyes and said, ‘Come on! It’s my last chance to go for a swim on my own planet!’

The EDF people were all so angry I almost thought the sergeant might shoot Carl Dalisay right there as an example to the rest of us, and tell his family he unfortunately fell off the spaceship. But instead he just made him do push-ups, which Carl did, sploshily, while giggling the whole time.