Spacewalk
If he was not careful, it would sometimes open up in front of him unexpectedly - in the middle of the kitchen floor, getting out of the bath, or worse, crossing the street. Fortunately it would exist for only seconds at a time, a howling void in the fabric of the world, swallowing small objects like forks and plastic bags and traffic cones before it vanished. The worst of it was traffic screeching to a halt and spinning off-course, people gaping in bewilderment. Did you see-? Did I imagine-?
His wife, after thirty-two years, was more than used to tolerating the intrusion that deep space made upon their marriage. His children, long since left home, had grown up with Daddy’s Funny Turns. They had learned not to pass comment, to reach out and grab loose crockery at a moment’s notice and straighten tablecloths as though nothing had happened.
He was haunted by a memory of his youngest daughter, Lucy, sitting on the living room rug in her nappy and screeching at the wheeling nebulas that suddenly yawned beneath her. He did not dare ask if she remembered the incident. If he was honest with himself, he would rather not know.
He and his wife never spoke of one particular night when, without warning, space had appeared in bed between them, jolting her violently from her dream and snatching their pillows and duvet into itself like a greedy child eating marshmallows. The billowing fury of the void invading the peace of the night was too much - his wife was sobbing, clinging to the bedpost for dear life, her nightdress almost torn from her.
He had felt the touch of the darkness on his cheek. He did what he had once sworn to himself he would never do again, and looked down.
His grip on the bedpost slackened. Galaxies winked beneath him and for a moment there was nothing but the prospect of blissful oblivion. But then his wife snatched at his wrist and as he turned he saw that her face had crumpled like an imploding star.
“Don’t - you - dare!” she had screamed over the groan of a billion empty light years. “Don’t - you - dare!”
A hundred lights winked beneath him but this was not it, this was not -
“Space,” he said, his mouth dry, “is the next wilderness.” His amplified voice echoed around the room. “We have walked every continent of this planet. We have documented its depths and its heights, from the frozen poles to the scorching planes to the teeming oceans. Mankind is hungry for a further horizon.”
In our hearts a hunger for infinity, he had meant to continue, this ravenous appetite to search, to discover, to journey ever outwards from ourselves as though we are migrant birds, the knowledge set in us of some far home that we have never seen. But he could not get the words out. The lights winked beneath him and he pulled out a handkerchief to mop his sweating forehead.
“We will go there again and again,” he managed to say. “We will be Columbus. We will be Drake. Our ships will touch new shores.”
The mass of people beneath the lights were writhing like one organism. He realised that they were waiting for him to continue, and wrenched himself back into the present moment.
“I am one of the lucky ones. I have been an ambassador for our race, up there, one of the chosen few…” In his pocket he twisted his handkerchief so tightly around his fingers that it cut off the blood supply. “Space changed me. Space changed me forever.”
When it was over he dutifully allowed himself to be taken by the arm and led to a chair where a long queue was forming. A succession of faces peered into his and he smiled obligingly for them, looping his signature over glossy photographs of rockets and the inner folds of book covers.
A young man with glasses who presented him with an encyclopedia of space travel to sign asked “When were you most afraid?”
He thought he saw a crack of darkness at the edge of his vision, and felt his heart plummet - not here, not now, when the screaming wind would pluck away flimsy photographs and spectacles and scarves, swallowing them into itself! But to his relief it subsided and he was left looking into the eager face, the usual lie ready on his tongue.
“Can’t say I never got a little anxious before the launch, son. With a couple of hundred pounds of explosives at my back.”
It was true that the hours sat strapped to a seat preparing for launch had set his heart thundering. But it had been excitement, always, the elation of leaving harbour. It was not the launches that had sunk their roots into his life, growing thicker and deeper until they begun to fracture the fabric of the world.
A little girl clutching at her father’s hand crept forward to the table. Her eyes were very round. He knew that she was surprised to see him in ordinary clothes; that she had been expecting moon boots, the white fishbowl helmet.
“What does it feel like in space?” she whispered shyly. It was the same question that his own children had asked him, years ago when they were small, when he had returned from his first mission. That had been before the spacewalk, in the days when he had fallen head-over-heels for the sight of the sun rising over planet earth as seen from a tiny metal capsule spinning through the void. He had been drunk on the beauty of it for months after setting his feet back on the ground, infatuated by the memory of rose-coloured and golden rays drenched richly over swirling cloud and mountains and azure oceans.
To his children, in those days, he had said “It feels like being lifted onto the shoulders of God.”
They came back for Christmas, as they always did, lugging in carrier bags from their cars and unloading boxes of chocolates, bottles of liquor, nuts, biscuits, wrapped gifts which they stowed beneath the tree. As ever he was amazed by them, baffled into silence by these tall vibrant laughing adults, the exquisite familiarity of them, and the utter strangeness. His elder daughter and his son brought their partners and he was overwhelmed by the knowledge of the lives that his children lived now in houses of their own, with double beds and alarm clocks and conversations over the kitchen table.
His wife seemed to unfold and blossom in their presence and he realised afresh that she faded when it was just the two of them, receding into herself. Now she laughed and embraced and put on make-up. He half-heard her talking with Lucy in the kitchen on Christmas Eve, his name scattered through the conversation, their tones lowered. He sat alone in his chair in the corner of the living room reading the newspaper, and on the tree the little lights winked and flickered.
They were lost to him. They raised their voices when addressing him as though he might not hear them. He struggled to understand their jokes, the references they made, to follow the lightning speed of their conversation. His son’s wife, in ignorance of his preferences, brought him tea without sugar and tried to talk to him when he was immersed in the crossword. In the evening on his way to bed he found them chuckling over a box full of drawings they had done when they were small. Amongst these, Daddy. Daddy in space. A stick man with a bubble head surrounded by planets.
He held together until Christmas dinner, when over the lavish spread his elder daughter’s boyfriend, the one of whom he did not approve, leaned across to him and said with an effort, “I hear that back in the day you were one of the first to perform a spacewalk?”
The ominous sound of cutlery rattling against the table and the slopping of wine from glasses. He caught a glimpse of his wife’s white face and the way that her hands flew automatically to grasp the tablecloth. His children, too, seized by instinct at the objects closest to them, so that when space yawned suddenly beneath the table it was only the guest’s plates and glasses which were snatched away. His son’s wife shrieked, clutching at her cardigan as it was torn from her shoulders, and the blackness beneath them roared deafeningly. The ancient naked light of stars flashed into the dining room, and then almost instantly, was gone.
His son’s wife gave a small uncertain whimper. His daughter’s boyfriend looked down at the empty place where his plate had been.
His wife rose from her seat, hurriedly gathering empty glasses and dirty napkins into her hands. “Pudding,” said Lucy cheerfully, clattering together the remaining plates, and he watched as his children conjured a new conversation from nowhere and rearranged normality over the hole in the world. Their practised ease made him proud and it made him buckle with shame.
Stood at the sink next to Lucy half an hour later doing the washing-up, he let her chatter to him, which she seemed able to do more naturally than the others, wordlessly handing each item to her to dry. But she sank gradually into his silence and he found himself unable to stop himself looking sideways at her, the precious shape of her face hidden behind a swinging curtain of hair.
Too late he realised that she had caught him looking. She paused, tea towel clasped in her fist.
“Daddy,” she said, “it changed me, it changed me forever, but please don’t be sad. Don’t.”
And he knew that this strange creature who was his own flesh and blood had carried it too, all the years of her life, just as he had feared. He did not open his mouth and he did not say Lucy I am lost in the wideness of it, Lucy I cannot hold onto you any more. “What does it feel like in space?” whispered the little girl, and he answered listen, I have hung suspended in that starred womb with nothing but a thin umbilical to tie me to the place I have grown from to bind me to myself to hold me to everything that is not nothingness.
When they had all gone he lay on his back in the quiet of the night with his wife asleep next to him, and as he stared at the ceiling he found that it opened up easily before him. In the deep expanse he glimpsed clouds of dusty bronze and deepest crimson, streaks of pale dawn blue.
Silently he rose from the bed and moved slowly, barefoot, towards it, shivering in his thin pajamas. The void was still for once, the wind barely raising the hair from his head.
His wife shifted in her sleep, muttering something inaudible, oblivious to the shadow that had fallen across her. “What does it feel like in space?” whispered the little girl, and he said little girl it is like losing your footing and falling into the wound that is inside yourself it is like the black wave that rears up and speeds towards the land to engulf everything in its wake.
His wife, after thirty-two years, was more than used to tolerating the intrusion that deep space made upon their marriage. His children, long since left home, had grown up with Daddy’s Funny Turns. They had learned not to pass comment, to reach out and grab loose crockery at a moment’s notice and straighten tablecloths as though nothing had happened.
He was haunted by a memory of his youngest daughter, Lucy, sitting on the living room rug in her nappy and screeching at the wheeling nebulas that suddenly yawned beneath her. He did not dare ask if she remembered the incident. If he was honest with himself, he would rather not know.
He and his wife never spoke of one particular night when, without warning, space had appeared in bed between them, jolting her violently from her dream and snatching their pillows and duvet into itself like a greedy child eating marshmallows. The billowing fury of the void invading the peace of the night was too much - his wife was sobbing, clinging to the bedpost for dear life, her nightdress almost torn from her.
He had felt the touch of the darkness on his cheek. He did what he had once sworn to himself he would never do again, and looked down.
His grip on the bedpost slackened. Galaxies winked beneath him and for a moment there was nothing but the prospect of blissful oblivion. But then his wife snatched at his wrist and as he turned he saw that her face had crumpled like an imploding star.
“Don’t - you - dare!” she had screamed over the groan of a billion empty light years. “Don’t - you - dare!”
A hundred lights winked beneath him but this was not it, this was not -
“Space,” he said, his mouth dry, “is the next wilderness.” His amplified voice echoed around the room. “We have walked every continent of this planet. We have documented its depths and its heights, from the frozen poles to the scorching planes to the teeming oceans. Mankind is hungry for a further horizon.”
In our hearts a hunger for infinity, he had meant to continue, this ravenous appetite to search, to discover, to journey ever outwards from ourselves as though we are migrant birds, the knowledge set in us of some far home that we have never seen. But he could not get the words out. The lights winked beneath him and he pulled out a handkerchief to mop his sweating forehead.
“We will go there again and again,” he managed to say. “We will be Columbus. We will be Drake. Our ships will touch new shores.”
The mass of people beneath the lights were writhing like one organism. He realised that they were waiting for him to continue, and wrenched himself back into the present moment.
“I am one of the lucky ones. I have been an ambassador for our race, up there, one of the chosen few…” In his pocket he twisted his handkerchief so tightly around his fingers that it cut off the blood supply. “Space changed me. Space changed me forever.”
When it was over he dutifully allowed himself to be taken by the arm and led to a chair where a long queue was forming. A succession of faces peered into his and he smiled obligingly for them, looping his signature over glossy photographs of rockets and the inner folds of book covers.
A young man with glasses who presented him with an encyclopedia of space travel to sign asked “When were you most afraid?”
He thought he saw a crack of darkness at the edge of his vision, and felt his heart plummet - not here, not now, when the screaming wind would pluck away flimsy photographs and spectacles and scarves, swallowing them into itself! But to his relief it subsided and he was left looking into the eager face, the usual lie ready on his tongue.
“Can’t say I never got a little anxious before the launch, son. With a couple of hundred pounds of explosives at my back.”
It was true that the hours sat strapped to a seat preparing for launch had set his heart thundering. But it had been excitement, always, the elation of leaving harbour. It was not the launches that had sunk their roots into his life, growing thicker and deeper until they begun to fracture the fabric of the world.
A little girl clutching at her father’s hand crept forward to the table. Her eyes were very round. He knew that she was surprised to see him in ordinary clothes; that she had been expecting moon boots, the white fishbowl helmet.
“What does it feel like in space?” she whispered shyly. It was the same question that his own children had asked him, years ago when they were small, when he had returned from his first mission. That had been before the spacewalk, in the days when he had fallen head-over-heels for the sight of the sun rising over planet earth as seen from a tiny metal capsule spinning through the void. He had been drunk on the beauty of it for months after setting his feet back on the ground, infatuated by the memory of rose-coloured and golden rays drenched richly over swirling cloud and mountains and azure oceans.
To his children, in those days, he had said “It feels like being lifted onto the shoulders of God.”
They came back for Christmas, as they always did, lugging in carrier bags from their cars and unloading boxes of chocolates, bottles of liquor, nuts, biscuits, wrapped gifts which they stowed beneath the tree. As ever he was amazed by them, baffled into silence by these tall vibrant laughing adults, the exquisite familiarity of them, and the utter strangeness. His elder daughter and his son brought their partners and he was overwhelmed by the knowledge of the lives that his children lived now in houses of their own, with double beds and alarm clocks and conversations over the kitchen table.
His wife seemed to unfold and blossom in their presence and he realised afresh that she faded when it was just the two of them, receding into herself. Now she laughed and embraced and put on make-up. He half-heard her talking with Lucy in the kitchen on Christmas Eve, his name scattered through the conversation, their tones lowered. He sat alone in his chair in the corner of the living room reading the newspaper, and on the tree the little lights winked and flickered.
They were lost to him. They raised their voices when addressing him as though he might not hear them. He struggled to understand their jokes, the references they made, to follow the lightning speed of their conversation. His son’s wife, in ignorance of his preferences, brought him tea without sugar and tried to talk to him when he was immersed in the crossword. In the evening on his way to bed he found them chuckling over a box full of drawings they had done when they were small. Amongst these, Daddy. Daddy in space. A stick man with a bubble head surrounded by planets.
He held together until Christmas dinner, when over the lavish spread his elder daughter’s boyfriend, the one of whom he did not approve, leaned across to him and said with an effort, “I hear that back in the day you were one of the first to perform a spacewalk?”
The ominous sound of cutlery rattling against the table and the slopping of wine from glasses. He caught a glimpse of his wife’s white face and the way that her hands flew automatically to grasp the tablecloth. His children, too, seized by instinct at the objects closest to them, so that when space yawned suddenly beneath the table it was only the guest’s plates and glasses which were snatched away. His son’s wife shrieked, clutching at her cardigan as it was torn from her shoulders, and the blackness beneath them roared deafeningly. The ancient naked light of stars flashed into the dining room, and then almost instantly, was gone.
His son’s wife gave a small uncertain whimper. His daughter’s boyfriend looked down at the empty place where his plate had been.
His wife rose from her seat, hurriedly gathering empty glasses and dirty napkins into her hands. “Pudding,” said Lucy cheerfully, clattering together the remaining plates, and he watched as his children conjured a new conversation from nowhere and rearranged normality over the hole in the world. Their practised ease made him proud and it made him buckle with shame.
Stood at the sink next to Lucy half an hour later doing the washing-up, he let her chatter to him, which she seemed able to do more naturally than the others, wordlessly handing each item to her to dry. But she sank gradually into his silence and he found himself unable to stop himself looking sideways at her, the precious shape of her face hidden behind a swinging curtain of hair.
Too late he realised that she had caught him looking. She paused, tea towel clasped in her fist.
“Daddy,” she said, “it changed me, it changed me forever, but please don’t be sad. Don’t.”
And he knew that this strange creature who was his own flesh and blood had carried it too, all the years of her life, just as he had feared. He did not open his mouth and he did not say Lucy I am lost in the wideness of it, Lucy I cannot hold onto you any more. “What does it feel like in space?” whispered the little girl, and he answered listen, I have hung suspended in that starred womb with nothing but a thin umbilical to tie me to the place I have grown from to bind me to myself to hold me to everything that is not nothingness.
When they had all gone he lay on his back in the quiet of the night with his wife asleep next to him, and as he stared at the ceiling he found that it opened up easily before him. In the deep expanse he glimpsed clouds of dusty bronze and deepest crimson, streaks of pale dawn blue.
Silently he rose from the bed and moved slowly, barefoot, towards it, shivering in his thin pajamas. The void was still for once, the wind barely raising the hair from his head.
His wife shifted in her sleep, muttering something inaudible, oblivious to the shadow that had fallen across her. “What does it feel like in space?” whispered the little girl, and he said little girl it is like losing your footing and falling into the wound that is inside yourself it is like the black wave that rears up and speeds towards the land to engulf everything in its wake.
