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- Herausgeber: Cherry Red Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Fifteen-year old Zoe Love is missing without trace. While the police search the Earth for her, Zoe's ten-year-old brother Nathan has other ideas. A year earlier, when Zoe was abducted by aliens, no one believed her. Apart from Nathan. He realises the aliens must have taken his sister again. As his father grows more and more desperate, and with his home planet in Brixton in danger of dying, Nathan decides he must get himself abducted by the same aliens, find his sister and bring her back. What unfolds is is a heart-warming, heart-breaking and utterly compelling story of family love and loss, outer space, inner cities, and David Bowie.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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1
A GODAWFUL SMALL AFFAIR
By J.B. Morrison
3
In Loving Memory
David Jones 8.1.47 – 10.1.16
Jenny Morrison 12.8.29 – 10.1.16
4
5
‘Tonight, Big Brother is watching you
And I am watching too
I will watch over you’
And God Created Brixton –
Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine6
Contents
ONE GIANT LEAP FOR BOYKIND
Nathan checked the equipment and supplies in his backpack. He’d already eaten the cheese sandwich and the Kit Kat, but he still had half a bottle of Coke Zero left, and he hadn’t touched the Satsuma. There was a small Christmas cracker compass in the backpack and a notepad and pencil — he had originally packed a pen but remembered Zoe telling him that writing in zero gravity was like writing upside down. He’d packed a half-used disposable underwater camera and an old MP3 player. He’d found them both in Zoe’s room. There were thirteen photos left on the camera and sixty-four songs on the MP3 player. The songs were mostly by groups of girls shouting and swearing, but Zoe’s favourite David Bowie playlist was on there too.
Nathan looked up at the night sky. The stars didn’t seem as bright as when his dad had first stuck them onto the ceiling. Zoe said that most stars were either dead or dying, maybe that was true with the plastic ones as well. On the morning after his sister went missing, Nathan woke up with Jupiter stuck to his forehead. Zoe would have told him that as it was falling from his bedroom ceiling it was a meteor and when it landed on his head, Jupiter became a meteorite.
Nathan unzipped the front pouch of the backpack and took out his Space Torch. He switched it on and shone the light onto the photo of his sister. Every police officer in London knew what she looked like because of the same picture. It was on the posters and leaflets and it was the profile picture on the Where is Zoe Love? Facebook page. The photo was the screensaver on Nathan’s dad’s laptop and there were plans to have it printed on the front of T-shirts. In the television appeal there was an enlarged copy of the photo on an easel. Nathan’s dad’s friend Craig said it looked like the police were auctioning a painting.8
Nathan changed the setting on his Space Torch. He projected an image of a galaxy from eight million light years away, taken by the Hubble telescope, onto his bedroom wall. Nathan’s own telescope was in the backpack, but it wasn’t powerful enough to see into the flat opposite. He switched off the torch and put it in his backpack. He probably wouldn’t need it where he was going. The bright light was the first thing that Zoe had talked about. For a while it was the only thing she would talk about. The light had been so bright that, for a week afterwards, she had to wear sunglasses indoors. Craig had called her Bono. To protect Nathan’s eyes from the bright light, he was wearing his dad’s tinted swimming goggles. And to stop him coming back from space with the same cuts and bruises as Zoe, he had skateboard pads on his elbows and his knees.
Nathan put the red Swiss Army knife into the backpack. The knife’s two sharp blades probably contradicted the We come in peace slogan on the badge pinned to his bright orange Mission to Mars all-in-one astronaut costume. He didn’t know if they even spoke English where he was going – there was a small dictionary in his backpack just in case. He’d written his name and address on the back of his hand: Nathan James Love, Brixton, London, England, the World, Earth, the Solar System, the Universe.
Nathan took one last look around his room before pulling the swimming goggles down over his eyes. He looked at the model rocket and the Lego Space Shuttle and the three Buzz Lightyear figures and the books on astronomy and his Dalek money bank and the Star Wars figures guarding it. He looked at the NASA patches on the sleeves of his Mission to Mars spacesuit and at his Guardians of the Galaxy backpack and at the planetarium on his ceiling and he wondered if the aliens had gone to his sister’s bedroom by mistake.
9
10
1
Zoe Patricia Love was fifteen when she went into town with her little brother to pay respects to their favourite singer on the first anniversary of his death. Before they left the house, Zoe painted a red and blue lightning bolt onto Nathan’s face.
“Don’t get it in my eyes,” Nathan said.
“I won’t, if you’d just keep still.”
When Zoe was finished, she gave Nathan a mirror and the album cover she’d been copying from. Nathan compared the record sleeve to his reflection.
“I could shave your eyebrows off too, if you like?” Zoe said.
Nathan put his hand and the record in front of his face, until Zoe swore on their dad’s life and their mum’s grave that she wasn’t really holding a razor.
In spite of Nathan thinking his make-up looked cool, he moaned so much to his sister about not wanting anyone else to see it, that when the security light came on over his head the second he stepped out of the front door, like a spotlight pointing him out to the world, Zoe laughed and didn’t stop laughing until the bus came.
Nathan zipped his parka right up to his chin and kept the hood pulled over his head, even when they were on the bus. The snorkel hood was so long that he couldn’t see where he was going without turning his whole head. Zoe said he looked like a meerkat. When they got to the mural and Nathan saw he wasn’t the only one with a lightning bolt on his face, he removed the hood. And when he saw the painting of David Bowie with the same bolt of red and blue, Nathan wanted everyone to see.
There were hundreds of messages for David Bowie, written on the mural and on the walls surrounding it. People had tucked postcards and scraps of paper underneath the square of see-through Perspex that protected the mural. 12Messages were written on train tickets and till receipts, with different coloured pens, and with lipstick and eyeliner pencil. The messages were in English and French, Italian and German, and what Nathan thought was Japanese. One message was written on a Brixton ten-pound note – the one with David Bowie’s face on.
The pavement in front of the mural was covered with candles. Decorative church candles in posh candlesticks, plain white power-cut candles planted in their own melted wax, and tea-lights in flimsy tin cups. There were a lot of flowers in front of the mural. Bunches of garage flowers still in their wrapping and single red roses poking out of wine bottles and beer cans. A star-shaped balloon anchored to the buckle of a gold high-heeled shoe swayed in the breeze. When the wind picked up, the balloon bashed against David Bowie’s face.
After Zoe explained why somebody had left a Mars bar on the pavement, Nathan quickly worked out the reason for the box of Heroes chocolates next to it. Neither of them knew the significance of the three plastic bottles of milk.
A man played ‘Five Years’ on an acoustic guitar. Another man joined in on a school recorder and a group of girls sang, following the words on their phones. Zoe squeezed Nathan’s hand, pumping it in time with the music. There were so many people with the same lightning bolts on their faces now that Nathan couldn’t believe he’d ever tried to hide his. Zoe borrowed a lighter from a Japanese girl. She took a tea-light out of her pocket and lit it. Shielding the flame with her hand, Zoe placed the stubby candle on the ground. She took another candle out of her pocket.
“One from Mum,” she said. Or it might have been one for Mum. She lit the candle and put it on the ground. When she stood up Zoe closed her eyes and Nathan thought she was praying or making a wish. She took a red felt pen out of the pocket of her green army jacket and she wrote on the wall next to the mural: 13
WE MISS YOU SO MUCH DAVID NATHAN AND ZOE (THE GIRL WITH THE MOUSY HAIR) X
They stayed at the mural for almost an hour. When Nathan admitted he was shivering because he was cold, they walked home, letting buses pass them by. They sang David Bowie songs – ‘Starman’, ‘Let’s Dance’ and Nathan’s favourite, ‘Kooks’ – remembering the family sing-alongs on long journeys in their bright red car, with the noisy engine in the boot and their luggage under the bonnet at the front. People overtaking in their boring square and rectangle, round-the-right-way cars, looked at them as though they were a family from outer space. ‘Kooks’ was Nathan’s favourite David Bowie song to sing in the car. Whenever it got to the bit about David Bowie throwing his son’s homework on the fire, Nathan and Zoe would sing the line really loud. Zoe once asked their dad, if her homework ever got her down would he throw it on the fire and take the car down town. He said they didn’t have a fire, but he promised to leave her homework by the radiator and turn up the central heating and see what happened.
They walked home from the mural, their journey captured on CCTV cameras outside chicken shops and banks. The camera on the wall of the library filmed them when they stopped to look at a huge picture of David Bowie, projected onto a bare brick wall that had the word BOVRIL painted on it. It was the first time Nathan had even noticed the wall was there, as though it had been built especially to project David Bowie’s face onto. Zoe told him the wall had been there forever and that Bovril was a bit like Marmite.
They carried on walking, filmed by the security cameras outside Halfords, PC World and Sainsbury’s. They passed the big pub on the corner and the wooden 14fence surrounding it, where soon their dad would stick a long row of posters, making it look like HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? was one of the bands playing at the pub. The remainder of their journey was filmed by CCTV cameras mounted to the walls of council estate blocks and the gated private community new-builds and by the cameras inside the Tesco garage, where they stopped to buy crisps and Cokes. The girl who served them complimented Nathan on his face paint. The police said the quality of the images from the garage’s security cameras were of a high enough quality to say that when Zoe paid for the drinks and crisps, she looked happy.
2
When they got home, Zoe changed into her favourite black onesie – with the white star pattern on the hood and body. Nathan put on his Mission to Mars astronaut costume.
“It’s Guantanamo Boy,” Zoe said when he came into the living room in the bright orange boiler suit. Nathan asked who that was, and Zoe opened a Wikipedia page on her phone and gave it to him. She found a music video channel on the television and they listened to back-to-back David Bowie songs while they ate the crisps and drank their Cokes. Nathan said he was still hungry, and Zoe made toast, with Marmite because of the Bovril wall.
They took the toast into the living room and sat next to each other on the carpet with their backs against the sofa. Nathan pulled his knees up to his chest, copying his sister, and they watched E.T. on a movie channel. They’d missed the beginning, but Nathan knew the story off by heart. It was one of the films that came with an old home movie projector their dad had won in a card game when Nathan was seven and Zoe was eleven. Their dad would show the films in the living room, projecting the washed-out images onto the wall. He removed pictures, pulled out nails and filled in holes but he could never get the wall smooth enough or the room dark enough. In the years since, if Nathan ever saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T. on television, he always expected there to be a break halfway through, when he’d help his dad change the reels of tape while Zoe and their mum made popcorn in a wok. He could see the ghost of the living room wallpaper pattern and the holes his dad had filled in when he watched the films on television, even though they weren’t there.
“Zo-ee,” Nathan said. “Were your aliens like E.T.?”
Zoe gave him a sideways look. “My aliens?”
“The ones who took you.”16
Zoe looked at the television. E.T. was building a communication device out of old toys.
“You do know this isn’t a documentary, right?” she said. “And they didn’t ride BMX bikes or celebrate Halloween, if that’s what you mean. And I’m sure I’ve told you this before, they weren’t the aliens.”
“What do you mean?”
Zoe sighed. She’d been answering Nathan’s questions for ten months now. On and off, but predominantly on. At first she’d refused to answer them at all, and then she was reluctant, begrudging, but eventually her brother’s persistence and enthusiasm wore Zoe down and she seemed happy telling Nathan what the spaceship looked like and how fast it went and where she thought it was going to and what it was like there when it arrived. Now though, after ten months of the same old questions, Zoe actually sounded bored by the whole thing. Nathan couldn’t understand that. If aliens abducted him, he’d never tire of telling people about it. Sometimes he thought his sister didn’t realise how lucky she was.
“You know like if you go to a foreign country,” Zoe said. “It’s you who’s the foreigner? Well up there, I was the alien.”
She pointed at the ceiling.
“So, are you still an alien then?” Nathan looked at her pointing finger, expecting it to glow.
Zoe shook her head.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m home now.”
Nathan tried to hide his disappointment.
“Have they contacted you since you’ve been back?”
“Only in my dreams.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s when they make contact. When you dream about them.”
“I dream about aliens all the time.”17
“I don’t mean dreaming about a film you’ve just watched. And you need to believe, of course.”
“In what?”
“Their existence, for a start.”
“The aliens?”
Zoe nodded.
“I do believe in their existence,” Nathan said.
“I mean truly, properly believe.”
“I do truly, properly believe.”
“And you have to want them to contact you.”
“I do want them to contact me.”
“In that case,” Zoe said. “They probably already have. You just haven’t realised it. When they come for you, they’ll wake you up.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
Zoe nodded.
“Did you want them to take you?”
“I suppose I must have done. Otherwise they wouldn’t have woken me up. People call it an abduction, but it’s more of a two-way street.”
“What does that mean?”
“They wouldn’t take you if you didn’t want to go. It’s not a kidnapping.”
“I want to go,” Nathan said, looking at Zoe as though she might be able to fix that for him somehow.
“Hmmm,” Zoe said, like she was considering it. She picked the blue varnish off her fingernails. Nathan hated the sound it made.
“Do you want them to take you again?” Nathan asked.
Zoe shrugged, as though it didn’t make any difference to her one way or the other.
“What if they didn’t bring you back this time though?”
Zoe shrugged again.
“What about school? You’d miss school.”
“I hate school.”
Nathan nodded. “So do I.”18
“No you don’t. You love it.”
“Well, what about your friends at school then?”
“What about them?”
“Wouldn’t you miss them?”
“I doubt they’d miss me. Most of them are dicks anyway.”
“Girls can’t be dicks.”
Zoe assured him they could.
“What about me and Dad then?” Nathan said. “We’d miss you.”
“And I’d miss you too,” Zoe said, messing his hair up like he was a puppy. He pushed her hand away.
Zoe got up and went over to the window. Nathan tipped his head back to look at her. She opened a gap between the curtains and looked out. Sometimes Zoe would sit at the window with her eyes fixed on the same spot in the sky for such a long time that Nathan thought she was asleep or in a trance. Now he wondered if she was homesick.
“If you go again,” he said. “Me and dad could go with you.”
“Maybe you could but definitely not Dad.”
“Why not?”
Zoe closed the curtains and turned to face him.
“You really have to believe first, remember.”
“I do believe.”
“I know you do. But Dad doesn’t.”
Nathan muted the television. He got up from the carpet and knelt on the sofa. He put his arms on the back and rested his chin on his hands. He watched Zoe take a blue inhaler out of the pocket of her jacket. She shook the inhaler and took two long puffs. Nathan wondered if she wasn’t fully human again after all and still needed some sort of artificial breathing apparatus to keep her alive. He waited for her to breathe out and then asked if he could have a go on the inhaler. She said no. He decided that’s exactly what an alien would have said.
3
When Zoe was abducted by aliens, she was back in bed before anyone had the chance to notice she was gone. It was easy for her dad to believe she hadn’t been anywhere at all and had woken up screaming in the middle of the night because she’d had a bad dream. When he noticed his fourteen-year old daughter had wet the bed and there were scratches and bruises on her arms and legs, he upgraded her bad dream to a nightmare.
In the days and weeks that followed, Zoe’s dad found earthly explanations for everything. Her sensitivity to light he blamed on headaches caused by her reading in bed too late at night, and when the headaches worsened, he Googled ‘migraine cures’ and took her to the doctors. They gave her stronger pills. Zoe couldn’t seem to remember what day or year it was anymore, or if it was summer or winter. Her dad said he could be forgetful himself. He called it an early onset senior moment. It was supposed to be a joke, but Zoe didn’t laugh, and Nathan didn’t get it.
When Zoe had been back for nearly a month and she forgot how to tell the time, her dad blamed her iPhone. The tapping, humming and scraping noises that no one else could hear were the fault of the loud music Zoe listened to and because of the earphones she constantly wore, even when there was no music playing. When Zoe started sleepwalking, her dad fixed a gate to the top of the stairs as though she was a toddler or a dog.
Zoe’s dad refused to believe that toast popped up when it was still bread if Zoe was in the kitchen, or that the television switched itself off or changed channel when she walked into the living room. He said it was just a coincidence that light bulbs didn’t seem to last as long anymore, and mobile phones lost their signal if Zoe was nearby. He said she was making everything up, and probably for her brother’s entertainment. Nathan thought 20his sister was a superhero.
He watched her take another puff from her inhaler.
“Do you want to play a game?” Zoe said.
“What game?”
“A question and answer game.”
She took a thick block of Post-it notes from the top of their dad’s desk. The block was made up of three different coloured layers. The top and bottom layers were each an inch thick and both pink. The layer of notes in the middle was white and half as thick. Zoe peeled off the top pink layer and half of the white Post-it notes. She replaced the top pink layer and returned the now much thinner block back to the desk. It reminded Nathan of the time he’d caught her topping up a bottle of their dad’s best wine with tap water when she was thirteen.
Zoe took the red Sharpie she’d used to write a message for David Bowie out of her jacket pocket and came over to the sofa.
“Budge up,” she said.
Nathan shuffled along the sofa on his knees. Zoe wrote something on the top Post-it note and peeled it off. She reached her hand out and lifted Nathan’s fringe. He pulled his head away.
“What are you doing?” Nathan said.
“Trust me.”
Nathan sat round the right way on the sofa and let Zoe stick the Post-it note to his forehead. Her hand on his head reminded him of when their mum used to check his temperature when he was trying to get out of going to school. He went to remove the Post-it note to see what it said.
“Leave it,” Zoe said.
She gave him the pad of Post-it notes and the red pen and told him to write a name down.
“What name?”
“Someone famous. And don’t let me see.”21
Nathan looked at the small square blank page like it was homework.
“Anyone?” he said.
Zoe nodded. “Not one of your mates from school though. Somebody I would have seen on telly or at the cinema. And no footballers. Unless it’s David Beckham or Wayne Rooney.” Nathan went to write something down. Zoe arched her eyebrows. “Not David Beckham or Wayne Rooney.”
Nathan sat back on the sofa. All he could think about was his sister in a spaceship and what the aliens looked like. Since Zoe had been back on Earth, that had been Nathan’s most frequently asked question – what did they look like? He’d even made an Alien Guess Who? game to try and find out. Nathan had cut pictures of aliens out of comics, TV listings magazines and from the toy section of the Argos catalogue. He’d spread them out on his bedroom floor and asked Zoe if the aliens – her aliens – were green, and did they have eyes or beards, tentacles, antennae and so on, turning pictures over every time Zoe said no. When every single picture was turned over, Zoe had shrugged and said, “I suppose aliens don’t look anything like aliens.”
Zoe gestured at the still blank Post-it note in front of her brother. “Take your time,” she said sarcastically.
“I’m thinking,” Nathan said. “Can he be from a film?”
“So, it’s a he, is it?”
“Might not be.”
“Yes, then,” Zoe said. “He, or she, can be from a film, and stop chewing my pen.”
Nathan thought again. Zoe picked at her blue nail varnish. He tried to block out the horrible sound.
“I’ve got one,” he said. He turned his whole body away from Zoe while he was writing it down.
Zoe gathered her hair in her hand and tied it in a ponytail with a black scrunchy and Nathan stuck the Post-it note to her forehead.22
“Don’t look,” he said.
“I can’t see through my skin,” Zoe said, and Nathan wondered if she really could. He put the lid back on the pen and gave it to her. She wiped his drool off on the arm of the sofa.
“What do we do now?” Nathan said.
“We ask each other questions about the name of the person written on our heads. But the answers can only be yes, or no. Shall I start?”
“It’s like Alien Guess Who?”
“What’s that?”
“You remember.”
Zoe shook her head.
“Shall I go and find it?” he started getting up.
“Can’t you concentrate on one thing for five minutes? Sit,” Zoe said. “And stay,” like he was that puppy again. “Right. Am I male?”
Nathan had forgotten what he’d written. He leaned closer to look at the piece of paper he’d stuck to his sister’s forehead. “Yes.”
“Your turn,” Zoe said.
“Am I male?”
“It doesn’t have to be the same question.”
“Am I female?”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “You’ve already had your question. My answer to your first question is, yes, you are male. My turn now. Am I alive?”
“Yes.”
“Am I in acting?” Nathan asked.
“Hmm,” Zoe said. “Sort of.”
“You said we could only say yes or no.”
“Okay. No. You aren’t in acting. Am I American?”
“No,” Nathan said. “Am I black?”
“No. Am I a singer?”
“No. Am I a man or a boy?”
“Is that one or two questions?”23
“Am I a boy then?”
“Yes. Do I play a sport?”
“No. Am I Elliott?”
“Whoa,” Zoe said. “Yes, you are.”
Nathan peeled off the Post-it note. From the way he smiled, Zoe immediately knew what was written on the piece of paper stuck to her forehead.
“Am I E.T.?” she said.
Zoe folded the two Post-it notes in half and poked them through the slot of a fat pink piggy bank on the mantelpiece. In its time the piggy bank had been everything from a swear box to a phone money honesty box and their dad’s ‘tattoo fund’. Most recently the piggy bank had been raided to buy ice creams from the ice cream man. Now it was a bin for used Post-it notes. They both wrote more names and stuck them to each other’s heads. Nathan asked the first question.
“Am I a famous singer?”
“Yes.”
“Am I David Bowie?”
The speed in which they guessed each other’s identities was like a magic trick. Some names were easier to guess than others. David Bowie was easy, of course, and Zoe got George Best because Nathan kept looking over at the picture of the footballer hanging on the wall. Zoe had allowed it, even though she’d said no footballers. After six or seven games the magic started to lose its power and more and more questions were required, clues had to be given to make the games end and twice Zoe gave up. The final game was as slow as Monopoly and ended with both of them giving up, even though Nathan suspected he was Taylor Swift but didn’t want to have to ask, “Am I Taylor Swift?” And also because Zoe was never going to get Hugh Jackman as long as Nathan thought his name was Hugh Jackson.
Zoe put all the used Post-it notes in the piggy bank and 24Nathan went upstairs to the toilet. He left the bathroom door open and aimed his wee at the sides of the toilet bowl and he didn’t flush, in case the aliens used the noise of the rushing water to mask the sound of their spacecraft landing. Ten months after Zoe’s abduction and Nathan still couldn’t leave his sister on her own without thinking she wouldn’t be there when he got back.
4
Nathan looked at his lightning bolt make-up in the bathroom mirror. There was a square patch of red missing, where the Post-it note had been, but it still looked cool. Nathan came out of the bathroom and walked along the landing to his bedroom. He pulled a large drawer out from under his bed. His dad had fixed the heavy drawer to castors so that Nathan could easily get to it and keep his room tidy. Once the drawer was full and pushed under his bed though, it rarely came out again.
Nathan looked through some of the toys and games in the drawer. Things he’d broken, grown out of or lost interest in, and yet he would never allow his mum or dad to give anything to the charity shop or sell them on eBay. He took the dried-up slime and hard Play-Doh out of the drawer and put them on the floor. He pulled out plastic dinosaurs, trading cards and Panini stickers, the Power Rangers ninja star blaster that was snapped in half, Spider-Man with one arm missing and three Action Man dolls.
Both the WWE figures in the drawer would never wrestle again. Stone Cold Steve Austin was headless and Dolph Ziggler’s leg had been melted with a lighter by Nathan’s friend Arthur. There were four board games at the bottom of the drawer – Battleships and Bingo, Snakes and Ladders, and a maths game he’d really hated – but he couldn’t find Alien Guess Who? He did find his Space Torch though, and the notebook his dad had bought him from the National Space Centre. The cover of the notebook was red and made of plastic. Nathan had crossed out the words ‘National’ and ‘Centre’ with a black marker pen and added Zoe’s name, so it said:
ZOE LOVE. Space Cadet.
Nathan squeezed the notebook into the one pocket of his Mission to Mars spacesuit that was real and tested the Space Torch. The batteries were flat. He threw everything 26except the torch and the notebook back into the drawer and pushed it underneath the bed. He went back downstairs, taking the steps two at a time. Halfway down, he could see into the living room. When Zoe wasn’t there he panicked. He took the last three stairs in one big jump.
Zoe was on the other side of the living room. She’d switched the television off and was trying to close the door of their dad’s overstuffed desk. She had a large roll of Sellotape hooked over her wrist and a thin wad of copier paper held between her teeth.
“What are you doing?” Nathan said.
Zoe said something that with the paper in her mouth Nathan couldn’t understand. She pushed the sofa back, exposing a crime scene on the carpet beneath. Nathan picked up a tiny plastic ray gun, Spider-Man’s missing arm and the head of a Bratz doll. He stuffed the ray gun and Spider-Man’s arm in the same pocket as the red notebook. He pretended to bowl a cricket ball with the doll’s head. It was hard to imagine Zoe had ever played with dolls. It was easier, in fact, to picture her decapitating the doll than it was to picture her playing with it.
“What are you doing?” Nathan asked again.
Zoe took the paper out of her mouth. “Making contact.”
She laid four sheets of copier paper on the carpet to form one larger rectangle, and with the roll of tape still around her wrist she peeled off long strips and taped the paper together. She tipped her arm up and let the roll of tape slide down into her open hand. She put it on the sofa behind her. With the red Sharpie Zoe wrote the letter ‘A’ and continued writing the alphabet in an arched line across the centre of the paper. When she ran out of space, she started a second curved row of letters underneath.
“What is it?” Nathan said.
“The alphabet.”
“Duh, I know that. What’s it for?”
“I’m making a Ouija board.”27
“What’s a Luigi board?”
Zoe laughed. “It’s a device for speaking to the dead.”
She was now writing numbers in a straight line under the letters, from zero to nine. Nathan sat on the carpet next to Zoe.
“Do you mean Mum?” he said. The only other dead person he could think of was their gran, their mum’s mum, who he hadn’t liked talking to when she was alive. She was always in a bad mood and he always felt like he was in trouble with her for no reason, until she forgot who everyone was, which was worse because she didn’t even give him money from her purse anymore.
“This Luigi board isn’t for speaking to the dead,” Zoe said. “It’s for speaking to life.”
“What life?”
“Other life. On other planets.”
“Mars?”
“Maybe.”
“Cool.”
Zoe wrote a large YES at the top of the paper and a NO at the bottom.
