Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘You know what this has to do with you,’ she said, and then her voice softened a little, ‘it hurts to see you in pain like this.’

She had left the week after he discovered that he was not going to Terra-Two, and returned months later to find that he was still hunched over with the ache of disappointment. For Jesse, not a day went by where he didn’t glare at his sleep-swollen face in the mirror and curse his own inadequacy. Not an evening went by without pushing his food away at the dinner table, silently wondering what hateful thing had caused him to fail at the final hurdle. He would never know.

He’d trained with the Beta until January and after he’d been released the six of them had become his new obsession. He bought an issue of every magazine that featured their smiling faces, choked down the breakfast cereals that promised tiny figurines of the shuttle and kept the models themselves in his pockets, which were already heavy with the commemorative coins he collected – the ones with the two earths emblazoned on one side and THE OFF-WORLD COLONIZATION PROGRAMME stamped on the other – and would roll them across his knuckles until his fingers were numb.

‘How do I do that?’ he asked his sister. ‘Since you have all the answers. You talk about worry as if it’s a jacket that I could shrug off. Don’t you think I want to? Don’t you think I want to crawl right out of this anxious body and forget about the space programme and about dying. I can almost imagine how good it would feel. I can almost imagine the vanish of weight. Go on then, Morrigan. Tell me how to do it and I will.’

She was silent for just a moment, her green eyes filled with pity. The radio hissed in the background. ‘Oh Jess—’ his sister reached out to rub his shoulder. ‘Destinies don’t change.’

JESSE WAS TOO NERVOUS to sleep that night. He stood up every half hour to limp over to the mirror and check his body for visible signs of disease, not including the shadows under his eyes or the hollows his new restrictive diet had worn into his cheeks. Whenever he closed his eyes, he dreamt of malignance, of cells multiplying in the soft tissues of his body, of spores floating into his open windows and settling in the membranes of his lungs. Sleep was an abandoned hope.

Instead, he thought about off-world colonization. Of the exquisite design of the spacecraft and the people who would be climbing on to it in a little over twenty-four hours.

Over a million spectators were camped out at the launch site, filling the roads and the surrounding fields with their nocturnal celebrations. It’s like a music festival , one of Jesse’s friends had texted, and he could imagine it now. Most of the people would be the amateur astronomers who had developed a sort of offbeat cool over the past few years. They would be parading their homemade telescopes, the astrolabe apps downloaded onto smartphones. Some of them would be schoolchildren with the Union Jack painted on their eager faces, eyes lifted towards the skies waiting for history to be made.

Jesse didn’t know, even as he began shuffling through another day, that Ara had already taken her final steps towards the bile-black river.

What he did know was that the shuttle that would carry the Beta into orbit – the Congreve – was lit up on its platform behind guards and barricades, and that when it disappeared into the sky the following day, so would the last of his hope.

He was going to die. He was no astronaut. He was no pilgrim, he was no humble dreamer fated for the stars.

12.05.12

T-MINUS 12 HOURS

HE HEARD IT ON the radio first. The headline, that the body of an astronaut had been recovered from the Thames in what appeared to be an accident. His nerves quivered as if they’d been struck by a tuning fork.

He rushed down the stairs to the kitchen, where his mother was half-watching Strictly Come Dancing on the small television above the fridge. Jesse grabbed the remote from the table and switched to the news. The saucepan hissed as his father set it on the stove. Jesse’s heart was racing as he watched the headlines rolling. Saw the words ‘ARA SHAH’, and ‘ACCIDENT’ and ‘MISSION IN CRISIS’. He didn’t even notice that he’d dropped the remote until he heard the sound of plastic crashing against the kitchen tiles and saw the batteries roll under the table. Then he turned around, and began to run.

He stopped outside his front door, standing alone in the cloying late spring air, his eyes stinging. In his sleep-addled mind, he was certain that, tonight, his life was about to change, but he didn’t know how. A blood vessel bulging in his brain, about to burst? A car lurching around the kerb, its headlights bright as jack-o-lanterns in the split second before it crushed him into the concrete? Or a call from the space agency at the last minute?

‘Destinies don’t change,’ he told the silent street. At nineteen years he would leave this world, he had been told.

Jesse took a tentative step forwards. The cars were still as sentinels, catching the moonlight, and the air buzzed with flies. Inside the window of every house families crowded before television and laptop screens, like the night before new year. The launch was predicted to be the most watched television broadcast in history. Tomorrow, if it went according to plan, there would be street parties all across the UK. Jesse could already see the sherbet-coloured bunting strung up between the lamp posts in preparation for the festivities.

He started down the street and towards the main road. It wasn’t until he reached the corner, the unlit shop fronts and blinking traffic lights, that he began to run. His feet knew where to take him.

He was used to running with no destination in mind. The first few minutes always felt like flying, momentum sending his knees careening up in front of him as he neared the city lights. Then his muscles would begin to clench, heart striking at his sternum, lungs burning, sending hot tendrils of pain through him until he was one galloping vessel of flame.

By then, though, Jesse knew some things about pain. He knew that if he just kept running his heart would keep beating. He knew that pain was just a symptom of being, and he would endure it all – savour it even – if he could only live a little bit longer.

His feet striking familiar pavement, Jesse slowed his pace. He knew this quiet street, lined with beech trees, illuminated in the sodium yellow of the streetlamps. He had emerged down the road from Dalton. He took a moment to catch his breath, wiping his wet forehead with the back of his hand.

He should have expected the traffic outside, the crush of reporters, the flickering shutters of cameras. During his time there, it had not been unusual to spot a stray photographer lingering by the entrance or pushing a lens through the bars. And today of all days, footage of the school’s extensive grounds would flicker across every news channel. Jesse dodged past the swinging heads of microphones, towards the entrance.

It was surprising how little time it had taken for the tall iron gates of Dalton Academy to become an eerie relic of his past. It was even stranger to see the provost, standing in the centre of the throng, just below the school’s crest and emblazoned motto: It’s better to fly like a falcon for half a year… She was more hunched over than he remembered. Two security guards were pushing the crowd of shouting reporters back. She poked her glasses up the damp ridge of her nose and read aloud from a piece of paper.

‘All we can confirm at this time is that there has been a tragic accident involving a member of the Beta…’ Had she said accident, or incident ? Some reporters had believed that it had been a rusted railing, a twisted ankle, a yelp of surprise. Others, a barefoot dive, a shout of exhilaration before the crash of water.