ALICE SARGENT

Not Enough Space in this World

As soon as I step into the kitchen, I can see that something tragic has happened. Something that will change us forever. Mother sits, hunched, at the table; her face is frozen in a grotesque contortion, her lips pressed together so that they are barely visible, her eyes dull with anguish, her nose and cheeks scrunched up as though she is in agony. My little brother, Jamal, is writhing in his pram, waving his tiny fists and crying out for attention. But Mother does not hear him—it is as though her body is empty, her mind having slipped loose from the restraints of her skull. Rima, a young woman who has lived with us since her house was bombed, sits next to Mother, her hands hugging a steam-less mug of black tea. She is silent, and does not appear to notice that her hijab has slipped back, so that her hair can be seen.

Then Mother sees me, and it is as though I am a stranger to her. She stares at me, not saying a word. I stare back. Her face crumples, so that her lips come back, but they still twist themselves into inhuman forms.

For a moment, I struggle to comprehend what her bereft eyes are shouting. I look frantically around the kitchen, my breath catching as my searching gaze does not discover Father. I stumble out of the kitchen, my head smashing into the lintel as I pass into the hallway.

How could I have ever thought such a thing? Of course Father would always make sure he came back to us, whatever.

I shudder out a breath of relief, feeling quite light-headed as I see Father’s coat hung upon the wall, in its usual place next to the mirror.

Obviously he would never leave us. How could I have ever doubted him?

I press my hand to the sleeve of his coat, as though to reassure myself that it is really there, and not just a figment of my imagination.

But it is wet. Sticky.

Drawing my hand away from it, I slowly rotate my hand, horror invading my heart as I smell the sickly, putrid smell that is so bitterly familiar. My palm has a red plasma smeared across it.

Blood.

My father was shot by the Terrors, whilst out on patrol, just north of Aleppo. He was with a group of the Resistance when a group of terrorists gunned them down. In the name of Allah. When he is our One too.

“Karam, we are leaving at first light. Rima’s brother and a small number of the Resistance are going to escort us across the mountains, until we reach Hama.” Mother finally speaks, her face still torn but no longer frightening me. She gets up from the table and takes Jamal in her arms to soothe his frustration, so oblivious that our family has just ripped apart at the fragile seams.

“But where are we going? There is nowhere for us,” I ask Mother, the bewilderment showing in my voice.

“We’re going to England. Their government will help us, as refugees.” I don’t reply, as Mother continues.

“Father has left some money for us to scrape by. We haven’t gone before now, because there was not enough for all of us. But now…” Her determined voice has weakened into quiet sobs. She leans her cheek against Jamal’s and rocks back and forth on her heels. I go to her, wrapping my arms around the two most important people in the world to me. Already, at just fifteen I am taller than my mother, and now that Father is gone I must take care of my family.

Gone? Why am I thinking ‘gone’? The Islamic State murdered him… He is DEAD!

I feel the pent up fury within me lifting its ugly head, and taking my arms from around Mother and Jamal, I walk out of the house.

I feel like hitting someone. Punching something so that it becomes feeble and damaged. The way the Terrors have damaged my family, my home.

Stamping out onto the street, I endeavour to look away from the scenes of devastation around me. I crane my neck and look down alleys as I pass, desperately searching for something that has been untouched by the conflict. I turn away from piles of rubble that are all that is left of what were once strong, safe houses. I cringe away from an elderly woman who is knelt in the middle of the road, moaning and wailing until her skeletal frame sways with exhaustion. I try not to see the park where we used to have picnics, the sandstone paving stones now a myriad of cracked mosaics, the bench a mangled piece of weaponry.

Everywhere I look, there is a scene that punches another hole through my heart, until all that is left are tatters and shreds of bloody tissue.

Bending my knees, I drop to the floor and bash my fist against the concrete. I pummel the ground until my knuckles run with blood and great cauliflower bruises seep across the back of my hand. When I stop, my hands are shaking, and useless.

The rage within me is still there—will always be there—but it is dropping off to sleep.

The following sunrise, we gather the few precious items that we can carry, and walk out of the front door. Rima will stay in our house, as she must support the Resistance, and does not want to leave her home. She will fight with every breath in her body against the Terrors, who have destroyed our land and tarnished our religion.

I do not take many things with me, as I know that I will carry Jamal for most of the way. There is a small steel dagger that Father entrusted me with when the conflict started in Ad Dana, our town, almost two years ago. Then I carry a narrow bracelet, which I received when I first went through my rite of passage, and was bound to Islam.

The only other belongings in my rucksack are some clothes, and bundle of rags that will serve as Jamal’s nappies. There is also half a loaf of stale bread, a bag of oatmeal, and a second-hand book on edible plants growing throughout Syria. Tucked inside this is a wad of cash, that Mother has given me to safeguard.

We meet Hassan, Rima’s brother-in-law, at the top of the rise, just East to Ad Dana. With him, we see only two other men we are unacquainted with, and the Ashman family: a middle-aged couple with their three children.

“We are waiting for just three more. I am glad you have decided to leave, Amena,” Hassan says to my mother, carefully examining her expression.

“I have Jamal to act for. Karam too.” Mother looks away from Hassan, her expression guarded, and her demeanour stiff. Hassan is a Hindu, and even now, after all that has happened and all the suffering we have shared, Mother cannot treat him as one of our own.

We wait for an indeterminate length of time, the group growing more restless with each minute we linger. Eventually, Hassan claps his hand together, his rucksack swinging heavily from one shoulder.

“We will leave without them. We cannot afford to lose the sunlight hours, if we are to reach Zitan by nightfall.” We gather our belongings from the ground, and gather around Hassan.

“We must let the infants walk themselves, until they are too weary to continue, and then we shall carry them. It is a long way to go, as we are having to travel slightly east in order to avoid the conflict at Aleppo and Idlib.”

With that, we abandon our homeland, our hearts laden with grief. However, we have only walked about a thousand metres, when we hear shouting behind us.

Instantly, everybody dives for the ground, falling hard, but lying still and silent so that we blend in to the dusty floor. My heart thuds, afraid that we are under attack already. Jamal lies beneath Mother whimpering, as she moulds her body into a cage around him.

“Everybody stay down!” Hassan hisses at us, even though there is no need.

But there is nothing. No explosions, no gunshots, no harsh fingers snatching at us. Hassan slowly raises himself up, and turns to look behind us, for the source of the disturbance. I look also, and see a slender figure athletically sprinting across the rocky terrain, with another person hobbling behind.

“It’s OK. Just the people who did not meet us, as they arranged,” Hassan says, the relief evident in his deep voice. We all get up and brush the dust from our clothes, the oxygen returning to our lungs, and our hearts beating once again. Now is not the hour when they will stop forever.

“I’m so sorry. We had not meant to alarm you,” a razor thin girl says loudly as she approaches us. She is about my own age, or perhaps a couple of years older. Though since the war, everyone appears to look older, with faces careworn and tread heavy, as though there is a physical burden sitting upon our shoulders.

“Sara Nasser?” Hassan questions, his tense expression relaxing slightly. She nods and then turns to look at the figure who is still about half a kilometre from us.

“Mother is coming, as you can see. Father passed away this morning.” Sara looks directly at Hassan who nods, as though an unspoken question and answer has passed between them.

“Please accept my sympathies…” ‘Sympathies’? Who wants sympathy? We want our father back, not for other people to feel sorry for us.

I look at Sara, hoping she will look at me, but she does not.

We reach Zitan just before nightfall. The town was evacuated several months ago, its inhabitants fleeing from the Terrors’ insatiable thirst for violence. Death. Destruction. All the poisonous words that were cruelly put into our vocabulary.

That first night, we sleep beneath the stars, in the shell of what must have once been a grand house. One of the men shot a couple of hyraxes during the day, but as we sit around the campfire, and look at the speared rodent, we realise that it is hopeless. The smell of decay permeates our hair, nostrils, and the women’s hijabs. Sara’s bony face shows an inner turmoil, torn between not wanting to injure the hunter’s pride, but also repulsed by the vile smell and strips of bloody flesh. Eventually she walks away from the ring of stinking smoke and flying ash.

We go to sleep hungry that night, needing to preserve our meagre rations for the days ahead of us. The stars wink at me from the charcoal sky. Once again, I wonder if there is anything up there. If Allah even exists. If the world has a soul.

After all the atrocities I have witnessed, I can feel my faith deserting me. Our religion is a mere fabrication of beliefs and events. Some people need that to carry on. I don’t.

We reach Lebanon four days later, our ankles swollen from trekking through the mountains, our hands calloused from the merciless heat and wind. The Ashman family turned back not long after we reached Zitan, after one of their children became feverish. We all feel the threat of contagion hanging over us.

Hassan left us at Hama, two days ago. He had to return to his family, and purpose in life. Fighting the Terrors.

On the coast of Lebanon, in a little fishing village, a boatman offers to transport us across the Mediterranean, to Europe. His vessel is relatively big, and I am grateful that it appears to be sturdy, and level in the water.

“We leave tomorrow morning. Be here at sunrise.” That is all the man says to us, not even asking for payment.

“Excuse me Sir—how much is each passenger’s fare?” The hunter says politely, his Arabic very well-spoken, as though it is not his first language. He has not spoken before now.

“Twenty-two pounds a person. The little boy may go for fourteen pounds,” he mutters, pointing at Jamal.

“What? But that’s an extortionate sum!” The hunter splutters, his gesticulating hands expressing waving around wildly.

“Your choice.” The boatman walks away, his expensive boots thudding against the concrete.

The following morning, we all wait at the agreed meeting point long before the sun peeps above the horizon. For once, we are all looking fresh, having swum on the beach the previous night. An hour after we get there, an intimidating group of about twenty people walk up to us.

“Why are you here?” an older woman says rudely, flicking her hijab towards our group.

“We are waiting for a boat to take us to Europe,” I reply. At that moment, we see the boatman walking towards us.

“Good. I see we are all here. Let’s get going then.” The boatman looks around at all the faces watching him disbelievingly. In a dumb stupor, we all follow him down to his motor boat. It no longer looks quite so sturdy.

“We can’t all fit in that!” several people say at once, our stress rapidly turning to panic.

“Right then. You can stay here then. Everyone else, life jackets on please,” he speaks cheerily, as though this is an everyday occurrence. Which it probably is.

Dumbly, we all pull the life jackets over our heads, and step into the boat, until the water splashes at our knees.

Why are we doing this, I think? There is nowhere else for us to go…

About ten hours later, we can see our destination on the horizon. The crossing has been smooth, the waters calm, and the air still. We are safe. Italy is within our grasp.

Then it all happens at once. People stand up to see the coastline, or crane their necks to my side of the boat. It tips.

Bodies smash against the water, as it hangs on its side above us. Then it comes crashing towards us.

Throwing my head under the water, I arch my back so that the deck of my boat hits against it. My lungs have swollen to twice their usual size, and I am trapped beneath the boat. My fingers scrabble uselessly at the wooden deck, my head thrashing against it. I try to swim down, so that I can get out from beneath it, but my life jacket will not let me. It harshly beats and bruises my body against the deck.

Then a hand closes around the back of my throat and I am dragged sideways. I am pushed above the surface of the water, my lungs exploding as a cacophony of water spurts from my mouth. Another different hand pulls at me from above, flinging me onto the dry decking of another boat.

I am alive.

It was an Italian rescue team that plucked me from the water. They did not pluck Jamal or Mother from it. Nobody did.

As soon as we reached the coast, a police lorry pulled up and bundled us into the back.

I was free.

But then we were driven to a camp. A camp with barbed wire and tall mesh fences. A prison.

“What’s going on? Why are we in here?” Our questions are answered by another Syrian who is already within the camp.

“We are being sent home. The government has said there is no space for us here. We are going to be shipped back to Lebanon at the end of the week.”

I hear only two words: no space.

There is no space in this world for me.

ANNE PETRIE

Space Wars

“Rules are there for a reason,” Eric said, for probably the twentieth time that evening. “When I was assistant manager at the bank, there were rules. Everyone had to keep the rules because otherwise it would have been chaos. The same principle applies here.” He put his pipe back in his mouth and leant back, arms folded across his waistcoat.

“But Eric,” Moira said, also for probably the twentieth time, “what are the reasons, exactly? You still haven’t explained. Surely it is the quality of the writing itself that matters.”

The clock in the church tower across the road struck eight. They had been in the Memorial Hall since six and still had made no discernible progress in their deliberations.

Brian, who was acting chairman in Gwen’s absence on an excursion to the Ideal Homes exhibition, stubbed his cigarette out in the saucer he was using as an ashtray. It was already overflowing. He picked a stray strand of tobacco from his tongue.

“I think that we really must take a vote now, or we will be here all night.”

Or until the pubs are shut, more likely, Moira thought. Brian’s hands, as he tidied the papers in front of him, betrayed the slight tremor of a man who has been too long without a drink.

“So,” Brian continued, “to sum up, the situation is this. You have decided by nine votes to three that the winner of the 1972 Hampton Minor writing competition is er…” he put on his reading glasses and riffled through his papers, “Paula Sykes with her short story I am Nemesis. Eric has suggested that young Paula’s entry should be disqualified because she has not abided by the rules, specifically,” he searched his papers again until he found the one he wanted, “specifically, rule number three, para. two, which states ‘entries will be typewritten and submitted with double line spacing and a double space dividing sentences.’ Paula has consistently used a single space between her sentences.”

“Except on page four,” Eric interjected, “between the fifth and sixth sentences. I checked them all.”

“Yes, thank you, Eric. So, I will ask you to vote on this proposal: that Paula Sykes be disqualified from the competition for failing to follow the instructions. All in favour? Six. Against? Oh, dear, six again. Well, as acting chairman I believe I have the casting vote.”

At home, Moira poured rather a large cream sherry. This was a bloody disaster. All those hours spent with the girl, working on that stupid story, making suggestions, correcting punctuation and spelling, and she couldn’t even be bothered to follow the damned instructions. Now she must call Phil and tell him that his princess was not going to win five pounds’ worth of book tokens and have her photograph in the Hamptons Gazette, nor have her story printed in the quarterly village newsletter, nor be able to say on her university application form next year that she was a published author.

Halfway through her second large sherry the first glimmers of a face-saving tactic came to her.

“Look,” she said, after Phil had digested the information that his treasured, and in Moira’s opinion spoilt rotten, only child had missed out, “look, I think we should fight this, don’t you?”

“Yes, we should,” he replied. “Come round tomorrow.”

She replaced the receiver, ecstatic. ‘We,’ he had said ‘we’. They were a team, a couple fighting together for justice against the odds. At last he had recognised what a true helpmeet she could be. Feeling reckless, she poured another sherry.

“Come in,” Phil said as he opened the door the next morning. “I’m sorry, we weren’t expecting you so early. The house is a bit of a mess. And Paula is, well, you know, upset.”

Moira could hear pathetic sobs from upstairs. She cleared a space for herself on the settee and sat down. She would have this clutter sorted out pretty damn quick, she thought, given half a chance. Men were so bloody useless. Mind you, Phil’s late wife had been a bit of a slattern, too.

“My plan is this,” she said, after declining a cup of tea—she had seen the state of the kitchen before Phil had shut the door. “On Monday morning we will go to the press. That gives us the weekend to prepare a statement and get some support. I already have the names of the committee members who voted with me against Paula being excluded, but there will be others on our side. Let’s start a list.” Rummaging in her handbag, she produced a notepad and biro and started to write.

In a neat villa on the other side of the village, Eric answered his telephone on the third ring, as always, just as they had done at the bank. It was Miss Parkes.

“Oh, Mr Gardener, I’ve just heard. I can’t thank you enough,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?” Eric had no idea what the woman was talking about.

“That was such a clever plan, bringing their attention to the spaces. What a wicked old thing you are.”

Eric cringed and then the penny dropped. Miss Parkes had been runner-up in the competition, and now, with Paula’s disqualification, was de facto the winner. Surely she could not think that he had done this to help her? The idea was preposterous.

“My dear Miss Parkes,”

“June, please.”

“Miss Parkes, I can assure you that I acted out of purely disinterested motives. Those spaces are important. They are part of our heritage. Books are always printed with a double space between sentences, and it is important that we maintain standards, even in our little village.”

“I know, I know. Still, it was sweet of you to do it. It will be our little secret. Byeee.”

Eric started to protest again, but she had hung up. The woman was impossible. Ever since he had given her a lift to the library in Hampton Magna, when the mobile service had broken down, and she had insisted on buying him a cup of tea and a fondant fancy at Ye Olde Copper Kettle, ever since then she had been behaving oddly. He thought sometimes that she might be sweet on him. It was a horrible idea. She was not his sort, not his sort at all.

On Monday he was surprised, and not a little gratified, to find a reporter and photographer from the Hamptons Gazette on his doorstep. He agreed to an interview to set the record straight, just in case Miss Parkes had been spreading tittle-tattle. He spoke at length, quoting Hart’s Rules, the Complete Manual on Typography, and, to show that he was in no way parochial, the Chicago Manual of Style. They took a picture of him in front of his bookcase and left, seeming content.

Wednesday’s edition of the Gazette carried the story on page two, as the whole of the front page was taken up with the story of a Hampton St Mary parish councillor who had been caught stealing ladies’ knickers from washing lines. He had never done it before, he said, but twenty-seven other pairs were found hidden in a box labelled ‘brackets (assorted)’ in his garden shed, together with an unspecified number of brassières and two roll-on corsets.

The report on the writing competition was headlined ‘Space Wars’. The larger, by some way, of the photos was of Paula, pouting prettily and wearing a tight, skinny rib sweater.

Talented schoolgirl author Paula Sykes, 17, was stunned to learn last week that despite being voted winner of the annual Hampton Minor writing competition, she will not walk away with the prize. In a surprise move, the judges decided that she had broken the rules—by not putting enough spaces between her sentences.

Her widowed father, Philip Sykes said, “Is this any way to encourage creativity in our young people? Paula is heartbroken. She says she will never write again.’’

Retired bank clerk Eric Gardener, who the Gazette understands was behind the decision to put paid to Paula’s hopes, was unrepentant on Monday.

“Rules are rules,” he said.

There was a small picture at the bottom of the page of Eric, looking sour.

Eric was dismayed. Bank clerk indeed. He had been assistant manager for just over nine and a half months before he retired, as he had told them. He would write a letter. Moira, reading the Gazette with her morning coffee was thrilled. She was just about to pick up the phone to call Phil when he rang her.

“You won’t believe this, Moira, but the Sun has been on the phone. They want to run the story.”

After that, things happened very quickly. ‘Space Wars’ became national news. Using a combination of tears, wheedling and emotional blackmail, Paula overcame her father’s misgivings, and a picture of her wearing a very brief ‘Space Girl’ outfit and thigh-high white boots appeared in the paper on Friday, with the headline ‘No Space for Paula’. Every copy in Gwen’s village shop had sold out by lunch-time. Paula held court on the green for a gaggle of tongue-tied, gawping youths and giggling girls who basked in her reflected glory. In the public bar of the Waggon and Horses grown men who should have known better passed the paper between them and winked knowingly. Moira was aghast. This vulgarity was not what she had intended.

She was mollified when The Guardian took up the literary cudgels on Paula’s behalf, and printed excerpts from both Paula’s story and Miss Parkes’s effort, which they had cajoled Moira into giving them.

‘One of these pieces is original, clever, and although naïve, shows a real, raw promise. The problem is, it has the wrong number of spaces. The other is whimsy of the sort that, thank goodness, has largely disappeared since the nineteen-fifties. Never mind, its spaces are all present and correct, and in middle England, that is crucial. There are no prizes for guessing which was the winner.’

A distinguished author appearing on a BBC2 arts programme was invited to comment on the story, and reminded viewers of James Joyce’s lack of reverence for the punctuation mark, let alone the double space, which, had he ever been asked, he would almost certainly, based on the available evidence, have dismissed as inimical to the true expression of genius. Later in the Green Room, the distinguished author and the programme’s presenter, a man much given to sarcasm and paisley cravats, admired the ‘Space Girl’ photo as they shared a brandy. They did not discuss Paula’s creative genius.

In Hampton Minor, Phil and Moira watched the programme together on Phil’s settee, sharing a bottle of Asti Spumante to celebrate the Guardian article. As the credits rolled, Moira, emboldened by drink, placed her hand over Phil’s and told him that she knew how difficult it must have been for him since his wife died. To her horror he started to weep, and subsided, sobbing, onto her bosom. She stroked his hair soothingly and after a while he raised his head and kissed her, rather wetly. Their brief and unsatisfactory fumble was interrupted by Paula’s return from the youth club. She stared at them suspiciously before leaving the room in quite a pointed manner, Moira thought. She left soon afterwards.

Men from the press descended on the village, lurking behind bushes in the hope of photographing ‘Space Girl’, and knocked on doors to get the villagers’ opinion on the debate of the day. Gwen, who was furious that she had missed the only truly interesting meeting the committee had ever held, especially as the coach had broken down on the way to Olympia and they’d only had time for a cup of tea and a pee before coming all the way back, told them it was a lot of fuss about nothing, and more importantly, what was being done to protect her underwear from predatory councillors? Some of the pack, scenting new prey, headed off to Hampton St. Mary. Gwen restocked her newspaper racks: business was booming.

The remaining journalists in Hampton Minor tried a new tactic and sought out those committee members who had supported Eric’s veto. Moira had given them a list. Two had gone away for last-minute holidays and one was indisposed, his wife told them. Olive Sheen burst into tears on her doorstep and said it was all horrible and her life was ruined. George Stapleton slammed the door on them but then returned, waving a revolver he had stolen from a dead German in Normandy nearly thirty years before and ordering them off his land. He got the idea from a western he had seen at the Odeon in Hampton Magna, and the fact that his land comprised a very small lawn and a rose bed did not deter him. He was delighted when, just like in the film, his callers disappeared at speed. Brian was tracked down to the saloon bar of the Waggon and Horses, where he had been drowning his sorrows since the story broke, and when questioned gave the press a slurred rendition of ‘My Way’ before falling asleep with his head in a puddle of beer.

Then, because it was June and the sun was shining, a protest group popped up at one of the Oxford colleges, led by a bright young man who had political ambitions in the Conservative Party. ‘Save Our Spaces’ he called his campaign. SOS badges were made, and demonstrations discussed. The bright young man invited another distinguished author, who happened to be his godfather, to address a public meeting. In fulsome phrases, the author praised Eric’s stand against the relentless march of modernism and the collapse of cultural orthodoxy. Eric, had he been there, would have been jubilant, but the organiser had unaccountably overlooked his invitation.

In fact, Eric had hardly been outside for days. He was maintaining a dignified silence. His curtains stayed shut, and he did not answer the door or the telephone. Miss Parkes had put a note through his door after the Guardian article had appeared and told him, quite plainly, indeed forcefully, that she was going to stay with her sister in Bridlington for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, she wrote, she wished to have no further contact with him or with anyone else on the writing competition committee. She also said that, as the newspaper had printed her words without her permission, she was suing it for breach of copyright. Whatever whimsicality she possessed had entirely deserted her.

A week after it started, it was over. A junior government minister was snapped in compromising circumstances on Clapham Common, and the nation demanded to be told the truth. The press obliged and the Space Wars were forgotten.

The headmistress of Paula’s school wrote to Phil and said that her pupil’s behaviour, which she could only describe as unseemly, fell short of the standards she expected of her sixth formers, who should be setting an example to the younger girls. He and Paula were invited to attend an interview with the governors to explain themselves. Paula locked herself in her bedroom and refused to speak. Phil blamed Moira. Moira told him it was no fault of hers if his daughter wanted to flaunt herself for all to see in a rag like that and she hoped that the girl had learnt a lesson. Phil told her she was an interfering old bitch and that she should keep her nose out of his affairs. She never forgave him that word: old.

An extraordinary meeting of the committee was called, which only managed to reach a quorum when Brian was fetched, protesting, from the Waggon and Horses. The seven people present agreed to abandon the competition for this year and give the book tokens to the local Dr Barnardo’s Home. The rules, they agreed, needed to be looked at, carefully.

Eric drew back his curtains and prepared to face the world again. Tie straight, shoes polished, moustache trimmed, he went to the village shop and bought a quarter of mint imperials and a copy of the Hamptons Gazette.

“Nothing much in it this week,” Gwen said, “except that my knickers are safe again.” She pointed to a quarter-column item on the front page. The Hampton St Mary councillor had driven down to Beachy Head and thrown himself off. He had left a note saying he was sorry. Fortunately, as it was dark, he had misjudged his jump and landed on a ledge only fifteen feet below, but had badly broken both legs and his pelvis and would be in hospital for months.

Eric folded the paper under his arm and walked home. Crunching a mint, he made up his mind that if the committee thought the rules could be changed so easily, then they had a fight on their hands.

As events had so clearly shown, rules were there for a reason.

HOLLY CARTWRIGHT

The Fallow Sons of a Failed Astronaut

Father tells us that during the day the sky is merely a leafy branch which shades us from the heat of the sun but at night it is a window to outer space.

I lie on my back feeling the ocean rock below me, contemplating this phrase which has rolled over our father’s tongue so many times it wears the same rusty hue as the pages of a treasured, well-thumbed book.

The only thing my older brother Cheveyo and I have against our father is the fact that he’s never been to space. The man has crossed mountains, walked from one coast to the next, avoided being vanquished by the forces which vanquished his tribe and supposedly the white man too. But he’s failed to travel through the window he talks of so often to the place beyond the sky.

The sky is blue and white and soft as a fresh egg, yet heavy as the sun.

Cheveyo is on the shore, hunting for the pebbles which feel like warm palms. He is a small black shape standing against the wall of sky. His hand is waving, and he is hollering my name. I swim over to him and get out of the water. He points to something on the horizon, shielding his eyes with his other hand.

“You see that?” he asks. I look where he is pointing. Dots of white light fog my vision momentarily and all I can see is Cheveyo’s long dark finger wavering in the heat. But then I see it: miles away at the other end of the bay, there is a long, thin spear-like structure sticking out of the ground with another thin spear jutting off it.

“What do you think it is?” he asks. I shrug my shoulders. “I know,” he continues, his voice deep and confident in his chest, “it’s probably one of those trees; those really big trees that father told us he once saw in the forest.” He looks at me, his dark eyes probing my face. “Those really big old trees,” he clarifies. “Don’t you remember?”

I nod because you don’t disagree with a man with a voice like that when your own voice is as young and unruly as a small mouse. In fact, you don’t disagree with Cheveyo at all. It’ll occur to him eventually that we’d have noticed the strange object before, had it been there long enough to become like those wise, gnarled old men of Nature. Our parents named him Cheveyo because of his spirit, not because of his brain.

“Or it might be a really tall man,” he says. “A giant.”

“Let’s ask father,” I say, kicking my feet out of the sinking sand. “I’ll race you home.”

We run and the wind lifts our bodies high in the air and the sand burns the soles of our feet. Cheveyo, though, keeps turning his neck to look towards the end of the bay, and so I win.

When we tell our father about what we saw, he shakes his head. He is sat on the ground, carving small figures onto thin pieces of wood. Mother comes into the room to listen.

“It is best to leave it alone,” he says, not looking up from his task. “It should be gone in a day or two.”

“But what is it, father?” Cheveyo asks, looking disappointed.

“It is nothing,” father says. “Just a big piece of metal.”

He looks up at us then, and sets down his work in front of him. His eyes are great and black in their sockets, drooping slightly as if struggling to cope with the weight of the knowledge which rests above them. He sighs deeply when he sees my brother’s face.

“You remember me telling you about the concrete path by the ocean?” he asks. We nod. Last winter the wind was so strong that half of the beach was either washed or blown away, and a path as hard as rock was uncovered. Father told us it was made of something men that were here before us called concrete. They loved the stuff, he said.

“Well,” father says now, scratching his head, “this is something to do with that. It is called a crane.”

“Cha’akmongwi,” mother warns. She folds her arms across her chest and stares at father.

“I know, Hakidonmuya,” he says, closing his eyes. “But I tell you it’s nothing to worry about.”

“How do you know?” she demands. She is frowning down at father. Mother frowns down at father a lot. This is probably why he spends his time carving his dreams into wood rather than speaking to her about them.

“You know them, Hakidonmuya.” He looks at her meaningfully, his eyes wide and pleading. “They never finish anything. They get ill or get bored before they do.”

“Who’s them?” Cheveyo asks. I could kick him now. He’s already dug enough of a hole for the both of us already by allowing his curious nature, like always, to seep through his lips like poisoned sap.

“The white man,” mother says. Her face suddenly crumples into a bird’s nest of wrinkled flesh and trembling lip and pain. “White man,” she whispers at us, then rushes out of the room.

“This is a very sensitive topic to your mother,” father says sternly. He resumes his work. “Don’t bring it up again in her presence.”

“Alright father,” I say. “We won’t.” But we already know about our mother’s aversion to the elusive, phantom-like white man. It has something to do with a time when people like us and the white man lived together. Whenever we ask father about the white man, though, he puts a finger to his lips and looks silently up at the sky, so our guess is that the white men are in space.

“Crane,” Cheveyo whispers under his breath as we walk back to the beach. “Strange word. Aren’t cranes some kind of bird?”

“Yes,” I say. I wonder why I am not as fascinated as he is by this new discovery. I feel no need to taste the word crane with my own tongue, nor to stare towards the thing with longing as my brother is doing.

“I had no idea this had anything to do with the white man,” my brother continues thoughtfully. “It is a real mystery, isn’t it?”

“Hmmm,” I say. The sky is becoming red; the sun is descending into the sea. A warm breath of air crosses the bay, like a relieved sigh after a long day.

“I wonder what is over there,” Cheveyo says, looking in the direction of the breeze. “I wonder what the land is like where that breeze is made.” But I just look upwards, towards the place where the stars grow in speckled heaps of light against the black, and where the moon blooms out of the shadow like a man’s newly awakened face emerging from the cradle of his arms.

Night time is my favourite time of the day. Every night my brother and I lie beneath the window of the night sky, looking out into the cosmos and watching the constellations play out their stories.

Tonight the waves wash quietly against the shore: the sound of the sea sucking land away then sucking it back out again. The moon is full and clear and bright.

“You’ve been quiet today,” my brother says beside me. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” I reply. “What could be wrong with me?”

“I don’t know. I thought maybe the thing with the crane scared you.”

“It takes more than a crane to scare me,” I say, hating the small boy sound of my voice.

“Then let’s go and see it.”

His words are heavy in the silver dark. I look at him out of the corner of my eye, and he is lying on his back, staring peacefully up at the stars.

“You’re not serious, are you?” I say, though I know he is. “Father told us to leave it.”

“Well we wouldn’t tell him, of course.”

“You rely too much on words, brother. If it has something to do with the white men, it means it is dangerous.”

“You said you weren’t scared.”

I don’t reply.

“Fine,” he says. “I just thought you would, that’s all.”

“And why’s that?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking.” He pauses for a moment. I can almost hear the fragile machinery of his mind clicking and churning in its brutal, honest way. “That thing must be really tall when you get to it. I think it touches the sky.”

“And?”

Cheveyo rolls himself onto his feet then. He stands above me, tall and manly and important. He points upwards, his arm and hand reflecting the light of the moon.

“We could climb it and get to space,” he says.

The next night we say goodnight to our parents and head, as usual, towards the beach. Instead of flopping down near the shoreline and making ourselves comfortable on the warm sand for sleep, though, we continue walking along the beach. It is cloudy tonight: our parents won’t know we’re missing if they happen to look outside.

My heart begins to jump and bounce in my chest as we step into the water to get around the headland which separates our beach from the next one. A sickness jabbers in my stomach and sloshes from one lung to the next like the writhing body of a drowning fish.

I start to wish I’d never agreed to this, but when the spirit heard the word space it lost touch with reason and sense, and forced silly words into my mouth like: “Yes, brother, I will accompany you on this quest.” Cheveyo said that the white men must be using the crane to get down from space, and that we can therefore use it to get into space. I fear the white man, but the prospect of succeeding where father has failed, and of actually being in space, weakens the restraint of fear considerably.

To make myself feel better, I summon the image of my hand touching the sky, of somehow breaking through the window and walking out into the black of space. I imagine the Earth beneath my feet, a soft membrane squelching between my toes.

We step onto the land again, and begin to run across the sand in the direction of the crane. For some reason it looks smaller now that we’re closer to it. Cheveyo said that it wouldn’t take us long to reach it, perhaps half the night. I remind him of this while we run.

“We’ll get there,” he says, panting slightly. “It probably just looks smaller because we’re not used to seeing this part of the bay.” I try and agree with him. The sea is itching at the sand; the sky is black.

Cheveyo was right. The crane stands above us, huge. It is taller than the tree father told us about; it is taller than a giant, even the giant men of the forest who mother says she is a descendent of. Small lights glow at the top of it, above the cloud. This is reassuring to me: if the crane is tall enough to break the clouds it must be tall enough to break the sky.

I grow dizzy looking up at it, and my brother lays a hand on my shoulder.

“All we have to do now is climb it,” he says. With that he is jumping onto the ladder running the terrifying length of the thing. He starts scrambling up this ladder like a cat as it escapes from the dogs. A harsh bright light illuminates his figure; he is grinning, and he looks crazy.

“Come on,” he shouts at me from his perch above my head. “It’s easy.” He continues scrambling, and then pauses on about the twentieth spoke, probably to catch his breath.

My cheeks burn with something like shame. I wait for inspiration, some bravery or courage or even a brief shard of numbness to eclipse my fear for a moment but nothing comes. And so I begin climbing the ladders with the brittle, terrified bones of a boy. I close my eyes and feel my spirit shrinking and sinking low to the ground, where my body wants to be. Up above I hear the hard clanging of my brother’s ready feet as he begins moving again.

“Say,” Cheveyo calls down to me as we climb. “What do you think space is like?”

“Black and big and flat,” I call back faintly. My fear dissipates slightly, though, as my words are released, as if the terror is a huge house inside of me composed of loose words instead of loose bricks. Realising this, I continue talking, howling my fear through my chattering teeth and into the empty night.

“Or do you think it’s flat like the sky or the sea?” I shout. “Or like the mouth of a whale as it bellows into the deep? Maybe the moon is the place where the people in space live, where we will meet others like us. Maybe the stars are not very far away suns, like father says they are, but are the souls of dead sailors lost to the rages of the sea, and we’ll get to talk to them and ask them what really happens when the ocean meets the horizon.

“It’ll probably smell like space as well, like the opposite of mother’s hugs: a long cold smell that tastes of metal and all the places the air has touched. The taste and smell will probably feel like the sound: it’ll be silent, and in the core of the silence there’ll be a low hum which goes on and on because it is so quiet. It’ll be so quiet that the quiet will make a sound. The sailors won’t break the silence because they don’t need to talk to each other: they’ve had enough empty time to share all their stories already.

“But do you think it’ll rain a lot there? Do you think the air will be still or do you think there’ll be storms? Yes, massive monstrous storms that rumble and thunder and pour. But then do you think there’s a sky in space for the storms to happen in? If there isn’t a sky what is there? There could be a window like this one, and then there could be another space leading on from that, and another space leading on from that one, and another space leading on from that one and so on. Or could it go on forever? Cheveyo, do you really think space could go on forever, like the spirit?”

“I don’t know,” he admits, “but we’ll soon find out. We’re half way there now, I think.”

And we are. I open my eyes and the ground is so far away it seems like a dream or a distant memory.

We continue to climb in silence, our bodies moving in almost perfect synchronization. My breaths are heavy in my throat and my muscles burn, but my head feels light and free, like an eagle soaring.

By the time we reach the top, the black horizon is turning a vague honeycomb orange colour.

“We must hurry now,” Cheveyo says. But he just stands there on the platform of the crane, the harsh wind rippling his clothes. His shoulders are slumped slightly, and, from behind, he almost looks like our father: disappointed and tired. I look upwards, expecting to see space, but all I see is black.

“What do we do now?” I ask. “I don’t think we’re high enough to reach the window.” I stand on tip-toes and reach upwards, straining my arms and wiggling my fingers. They touch no glass, though.

“Cheveyo?” I say because he is still standing there. “What should we do?”

“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “I thought once we got to the top it’d be here.”

“Well it has to be here somewhere,” I say.

I begin to walk around the platform, stepping around my brother to search the four corners of it for signs of space or further uplift. I try and walk across the metal bridge leading to some kind of small cabin, but get too scared of falling. Even I know it is futile though: we’re clearly not high enough.

“Maybe the crane jumps,” I suggest, flopping down at my brother’s feet because the platform is so small that there isn’t really anywhere else to flop down. “Maybe that’s how they get down from space.”

“Who?”

“The white men.”

I am suddenly aware of a reversal of positions: it is me consoling him now, instead of the other way around. I feel giddy, despite the fact that we didn’t make it into space. We’ve never been this far away from our parents before, nor ever done anything as daring as this, and I tell Cheveyo so as I look across at the land that is slowly creeping into focus as the sun rises in the east.

I see the dense green of a forest towards the north, and, just beside the forest, I see a cluster of small white houses with red roofs. I stand up and search for our house. I spot a white dot huddled close to the shoreline, and decide that that must be it.

“Cheveyo,” I say. “Come and see our house.”

“I’ve seen it so many times before,” he says sulkily, but he stands by my side anyway and nods as my finger points.

“What do you think mother and father are doing right now?” I ask.

“Wondering where we are,” he replies.

“Yes,” I agree. It is not an unpleasant thought, but rather a manly one, an alone one.

We then hear the clanging of heavy feet on the ladder. A bright white face appears from under the platform, and the body of a large man follows it.

He looks at us strangely: his heavy red mouth hangs open, and his blue eyes twitch like they’re eating. His dark eyebrows move upwards and downwards as if punctuating the bites his eyes are taking of us; there is no hair on his head whatsoever.

His hanging mouth shuts suddenly, and then opens again to let out a barking hum of a noise which sounds like a word. Another noise escapes this way, then another and then another until it seems he is purposefully showering us with the musical grace of his tongue.

It occurs to me that this man is a white man, and so I smile. Father always tells us to be friendly to those you happen to meet, even if they are white men. He holds up his hands, which are red like his mouth, and then runs across the bridge to the cabin, shutting the door behind him.

I hear air escape Cheveyo’s lungs.

“Do you think we’re in space now, then?” I ask.

“How’d you figure that?”

“Well, there’s a white man,” I begin, thinking.

I catch sight of the white man through the window of the cabin, staring at us and moving his mouth. Mother calls the white men invaders, but this man is not invading anything. He picks up a large, black, rectangular shaped object and holds it to his ear, and his other arm begins flailing wildly in the air. He watches us like a cornered animal, and I’m reminded of a mouse being shoved into the wall by the greedy feet and hands of those chasing it. No: this man is clearly the one experiencing invasion, not the other way around.

“Of course we’re in space,” I confirm. I nod wisely with that bend in my neck which adults seem to have when they teach. “Someone must’ve left the window open. I just didn’t think it’d be this big.” I look at the moon, and it glows faintly in the distance, as if being slowly sapped of light. “I mean, the moon is still so far away, isn’t it?”

“Let’s go home then,” Cheveyo says. “I’m too tired to go to the moon now.”

“I’m not,” I say, but he is already climbing down the ladder. I notice his face is relieved in the way that father’s never is.