‘Yeah, thanks,’ Jesse said. ‘I’m hoping that eventually all the walls around the bed will be covered in it, so I’ll feel as if I’m sleeping in a treehouse.’
‘You haven’t unpacked yet?’ Juno said, glancing at a pile of books atop a maroon rug.
‘Oh,’ Jesse said, and began to rummage through his things, ‘I never unpack. By the time I unpack I almost always have to re-pack a month later.’ He grinned. ‘Sorry. I might have cleaned up a little if I known I’d have company.’
‘I’m fine.’ Blushing, Juno stepped back to sit on Eliot’s pristine bed.
The bunk above Jesse’s belonged to Harry. He’d pinned up a few school ties, the full and half colours he’d received for academic achievements. Brass and silver tankards glistened on the shelf by his head.
‘Right.’ Jesse recovered a box from under a pile of crumpled clothes. ‘I think… in here…’ He was rummaging through it, chucking out books, sachets of coffee and bags of beads. Juno watched him. She had never been able to guess where exactly Jesse was from, and now it seemed too late to ask. His voice had a slightly Irish lilt but his skin was a kind of bronze that appeared coppery in the right light. Around his temples and under his braids his jet black hair was loosely curled. It occurred to Juno that she actually knew very little about this boy who she had lived with since the launch.
Jesse’s brow was furrowed in concentration as he rifled through his things, and Juno thought about how keen he had seemed to give Poppy a gift, how often he asked after her, the way he stared at her across the kitchen table. Then it occurred to her that he must like her. How obvious, she thought, and how uninspired. Everyone liked Poppy, with her delicate limbs and thick russet locks. Even now, unwashed as she was, Juno knew she would emerge from her bedroom, after much coaxing, and everyone would still look at her like she’d just walked off the pages of Vanity Fair. Juno stood up, caught off-guard by her own disappointment.
‘Aha!’ Jesse held something up in his hands like a trophy, then handed it to her. It was a conch, the most beautiful one Juno had ever seen, pearly orange with a hard spiralled shell and a flared slit along its length. Inside it was smooth and cool to the touch, pink as the wet skin inside lips.
‘Don’t you want to hear the sea?’ Jesse asked. Juno was puzzled for a moment before she remembered and held the conch to her ear to listen to the sigh of the waves inside its body. Such things didn’t excite her anymore. When she was younger she really had believed that sea shells remembered the sea as old women remembered their youth. The swansong of a domestic object that had once known the majesty of an ocean. ‘Seashell resonance,’ she said. Any curious child knew that the same sound was audible in mugs and empty jam jars or a pair of cupped hands held up against an ear. ‘Where did you get this from?’
‘I think… that was Mombasa. My sister saw it under the water and she dove right down and gave it to me.’
‘Oh, Kenya?’ She looked up.
‘Yeah, my mum’s Kenyan.’
‘Really? And your dad too?’
‘No, he’s from Dublin. But we lived in Nairobi for a while when I was little.’ He pointed to a picture pinned to his noticeboard of a smiling family. Jesse, younger, with springy shoulder-length black locks. Their faces blurred by candle light. ‘That’s my tenth birthday. That morning we went to Nakumatt supermarket and tried to buy a cake, but they were like “a ready-made cake?’ ” He mimicked their surprise. ‘So my mum bought a tart instead and then, just as I was blowing out the candles, the lights went out.’
‘Power cut?’ Juno asked, remembering her own childhood home.
‘Yeah.’ Jesse smiled. Juno examined some of the other photographs. Jesse’s sister smiling at a market stall. ‘Where’s that?’ she asked.
‘Istanbul,’ Jesse said casually.
‘Is that New York?’ Juno pointed at a picture of a white man and a dark woman standing in front of a yellow taxi.
‘Vancouver,’ Jesse corrected. ‘My family travel around a lot.’
‘I gathered that much. Why?’
‘Well – my dad’s a journalist, sort of. He does this documentary series called Undiscovered Earth, maybe you’ve heard of it?’ Juno nodded. She had come across a few episodes on the BBC. The kind of Sunday-night viewing that was comfortable to fall asleep in front of, as surprising vistas of far-flung places lit up the screen. It was difficult to imagine that the gaunt presenter was related to the handsome golden-skinned boy standing before her.
‘And he travels around a lot to research disparate communities and the effects of climate change, and my mum’s an author so she can work anywhere. Wanderlust, my parents are sick with it. They took me and my sister out of school for eighteen months to travel across east Africa. My dad taught my sister most of GCSe chemistry. For Christmas, we took a cruise down the Nile.’
His braided hair reminded Juno of the overly tanned white boys she’d seen at Kenyatta airport, sunburnt and peeling, blond locks in cornrows. ‘That sounds… amazing,’ she said. ‘My dad is a missionary, he travels a lot too. But we didn’t really get to go with him so often.’ She paused. ‘I feel bad, actually. I don’t think I’ve asked you anything about yourself. You sound like you’ve had an interesting life.’
‘So have you,’ Jesse said. ‘You’re an astronaut.’
Juno rolled her eyes. ‘We’re all astronauts,’ she said, mimicking his tone. ‘But you’ve been to all these places. Places I’ll never get to go.’
Jesse shrugged. ‘It had up- and downsides – travelling so much. When I was younger it seemed like a lot more downsides, if I’m honest. But I got to pick some things up along the way; a suntan, some passing phrases in Arabic, this shell…’
Juno ran her fingers along its blunt spines. ‘You must like Poppy a lot, since you’re giving this to her.’
‘I dunno. I’ve been wanting to give it away ever since Morrigan gave it to me. I mean, it’s pretty and all, and it made me feel like Ralph from lord of the Flies but – you’re going to think this is so dumb – when it was on my shelf I kept thinking about how big it was, and how big the thing that used to live inside it must have been. I felt a little guilty because it was once something’s home, and I also got a bit grossed out.’ He seemed to shudder at the thought of the soft slimy animal that made its home in the shell.
‘Maybe it’s evolution,’ Juno said, trying to hide a smile.
‘People frightened of invertebrates live longer?’ Jesse teased.
‘I’m sure I heard that somewhere,’ she replied, and they both laughed.
‘I don’t even know how this ended up in my box,’ Jesse said. ‘It’s kind of spooky actually. I feel as if I’m being followed.’
‘Imagine if we got to Terra and there were hundreds of them all over the beach.’