Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

‘Why me?’ Poppy finished for her.

‘Right. And I didn’t think I’d find out from the Channel Four news.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I don’t know.’ Poppy cast her mind back to the strange disbelief that had clouded her thoughts over the past week. ‘I guess I didn’t properly believe it either. Like, maybe they’d made a mistake or something. It was too good to be true.’

‘Too good to be true,’ her mother repeated and then her expression broke and she was sobbing fat ugly tears, her face twisted in misery, nose dripping. When Poppy leant over to hug her she felt guilty as a thief. She had nothing good to say to her mother, whose future life she could see suddenly and horribly. She imagined her mother growing old in her dressing gown in their dirty flat, her cholesterol soaring, hair turning coarse and white. If her heart didn’t kill her, the loneliness would. When she slipped away in the light of the television the reporters and talk-show hosts on-screen would shout at her corpse for two weeks before the smell became so bad that someone came to find her.

Was it possible to save your parents? Poppy wasn’t sure. The only thing worse than watching her mother was becoming her, becoming a woman in that house where despair lurked, waiting to swallow her whole.

‘Hey,’ Poppy leant back as a thought occurred to her. ‘Now I’m in the Beta they’ll take care of you for life. You know that. They’ll pay you. You could move maybe – to a nicer place.’

Her mother choked on her sob. ‘Is that why you’re doing this?’ she asked.

Poppy shrugged. ‘I’m just saying, that’s one thing. At least there’s that.’

‘Yes—’ her mother sniffed. ‘At least there’s that. And will they be writing a cheque for nineteen years of my life as well? Giving me all those hours back. For your red hairs in the bathroom sink? For a child I’ll only watch grow up behind a television screen? Will they pay me for that too?’

12.05.12

T-MINUS 30 HOURS TO LAUNCH

THE MORNING BEFORE THE launch, Astrid woke up starving.

She’d had a nightmare about the rocket exploding on the launch pad, and all their bodies roasting in their seats. In the dream, the air smelt of rocket fuel and roasting flesh. Astrid opened her eyes at 5 a.m. longing for meat.

The sun was only just rising behind the space centre, and clouds rolled up the horizon, bringing a storm that was scheduled to pass by lunchtime. Her sister and the other girls were asleep, bundled up in their duvets in quiet heaps at the four corners of the dormitory. Astrid tried to climb out of bed without waking any of them, but as her bare feet hit the floor, Poppy rolled over and her eyes flew open.

‘Sleeping?’ Poppy asked in a whisper. She was wearing her retainer, and her voice was full of metal.

‘No,’ Astrid said, ‘I’m awake.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To the bathroom,’ Astrid lied. Poppy closed her eyes again and turned away.

They hadn’t left the space centre for almost nine days. Nine days of intense training, the twice-daily medical checks and briefings. Astrid felt as if she had not seen the sky for months.

She stepped out into the corridor, looking up and down for any security guards or medical inspectors, but it was empty. The fastest way to the kitchen was via the emergency staircase, so she headed in that direction and rushed down steps, cold as stone under her bare feet, two at a time.

As the launch approached Astrid had developed the strange sense that her stomach was yawning open like a dark well. She woke up every morning weak with hunger, longing for the roasted potatoes soaked in butter her grandmother made at Christmas, blistering hot on the tongue. She wanted to leave the space centre’s clinical refectory behind and return to the humid, joyful cave of her grandmother’s kitchen, the tiled floor on which she’d played from birth, watching the old woman’s wrinkled hands as she set cauldrons of stew bubbling over the fire. Astrid remembered a cornucopia of food on the table, the air so thick with spices that she could taste it. Everyone candlelit and laughing.

The afternoon they’d reported to the space centre had been thrilling, the approaching days rich with possibilities. Yet Astrid had realized, as she waved her father goodbye, that she had traded his earthy espressos for the rancid instant coffee that dripped from machines in the space centre’s refectory. She’d chosen macronutrient power bars over the raspberry and white chocolate cookies her mother baked in obscenely large batches. Astrid’s mouth watered at the memory of the silky sweetness of the chocolate, shot through with the tart skin of the raspberries.

She remembered the midsummer’s day their family made a trip to the Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens. Astrid and her sister had been nine or ten, then, and they ate mint ice creams in front of a wooden pirate ship. Their father took a photo, which Astrid still had, the image sun-bleached and overexposed, two brown girls, their tongues green, toes caked with sand. Astrid wanted to eat it all, the sweetness of turning ten. The first time she tasted a lemon and squealed at the acid bite of it, the time Juno – out of spite – had stirred a spoonful of washing-up liquid into her squash and Astrid’s mouth tasted so strongly of soap that she cried, in the car, all the way home. She used to think that you could taste the spring, even. That when she grew tall enough to pluck cherry blossoms they would melt in her mouth like liquorice. But spring was almost over now.

Astrid was empty inside and she was running out of time. On the spaceship, their meals would be bowls of macronutrient broth, cereals and rehydrated meats, or vitamin-fortified spag bol, until the hydroponic greenhouse began producing crops. Astrid had seen a spreadsheet of everything she would eat for the next twenty-three years and it turned her stomach.

Astronauts who had gone up before her said that in the darkness something changed in their mouths and foods they loved came to taste like rubber, sapped of every delight. They were known to add liberal amounts of salt and spices to everything in hope of reinvigorating miserable meals. Astrid thought with dread that she had around twenty-four hours left on this rich planet and there were so many things she had never eaten.

She slipped into the cool pantry. The motion-sensitive lights flickered and the clinking sound of it made her breath catch in her throat for just a moment. She looked around. It was nothing like their busy pantry at home, where some shelves were stacked precariously with pots of wildly growing basil and thyme, others with the lurid cardboard boxes of their childhood cereals.

This pantry was more like a laboratory, the food arranged carefully in cupboards marked with all of their names – their portions were tightly controlled by a consultant dietitian – sticky labels loaded with cryptic etchings referring to specific nutritional and caloric values.

Astrid peeled open a fridge, and her eyes fell on the shelf marked Juno. There was her sister’s breakfast, glistening with condensation. Cooked salmon and pickled eggs, a salad, soft pearls of mozzarella and sun-blessed tomatoes swimming in oil.

Was it stealing?

Astrid reminded herself that she was running out of time. Thought again about all the foods she would never try. Quails’ eggs – spotted ivory treasures the size of olives that she lusted after every time her mother took her to the farmers’ market. She wanted to eat a blood orange, with its eerie crimson flesh, which she imagined tasted like rust. For a whole year now, whenever she’d gone off-campus, she’d lingered by restaurant windows, green with envy, as she watched people devour little langoustines, guinea fowl, golden pears. Last Christmas their mother had won an ornate jar of quince jelly at a raffle but dropped it in the car park on the way home. Astrid had stared down at the shattered glass and the carmine splatter on the tarmac as if the jelly might as well be a million miles away. Her stomach ached for it now. For any and everything.