‘Exactly. So I’m glad I’m giving it to Poppy. Does that make it bad? Like, not really a gift?’
Juno thought. ‘Sometimes, for Lent, I’d give up tomatoes. But I’ve always hated tomatoes.’ He looked puzzled for a moment, so she continued. ‘It’s supposed to be a sacrifice.’
Someone coughed behind them and they turned to find Astrid standing at the door. ‘I found something,’ she said, and opened her hand to show Juno the bejewelled hair slide that looked worth more than the six pounds she’d paid for it in Camden. Now, it probably was.
‘Jesse’s got something too.’ She showed her sister the conch.
‘Wow.’ Astrid grinned, taking it from her sister and holding it up to her ear. Her eyes glazed over as if she could already see the crashing waves.
Chapter 23
POPPY
15.07.12
SHE HAD NOT BEEN ready for the darkness of space. Other astronauts had warned her that it came as a real shock, the complete unilluminated blackness. But, at the time, Poppy had been looking backwards and not ahead. She had been looking back down at Earth at everything she was glad to leave behind, not ahead into the vacuum.
Sometimes she felt as if the blackness was actually inside her. As if space itself yawned inside her, and the cold of it had leeched into her bones.
Two weeks after they’d arrived on the Damocles, Poppy had come down with a cold – a mild fever, airways stuffed with cotton wool, a head that felt like a fish tank – and Fae allowed her to take a day off work on the condition that she catch up with her chores over the weekend. Poppy had spent the next three days in bed, and sleep came so easily, submerged her again and again like warm water. Even when Poppy tried to get up, a few days later, her bones were heavy. Suddenly everything seemed like an awful lot of work and she no longer had it in her to do it. She couldn’t see the point. As the days passed more and more things fell away. She realized that she had spent her entire life blindly beating back against a tide of futility, performing tasks she would only have to do again and again: changing filters, cleaning rooms, updating software, scraping away the black dirt that aggregated under her fingernails. The others could not see with her keen eyes; they were still fighting, they were still working as if they had forgotten that one day their eyes would shut and maggots would wriggle into their stomachs and the marrow in their bones would turn to dust.
That was happening to Poppy already, only slowly.
The day of her birthday, Poppy opened her eyes and saw Harry’s face. He had twisted a sheet of coloured paper into a cone and tied it on top of his head like a party hat. ‘It’s your birthday,’ he said with a smile.
‘Is it?’ Her mouth was sour, her teeth furry and unbrushed.
‘You’re twenty.’
‘I’m twenty.’ The words came as a hollow surprise and made Poppy’s stomach twist.
‘Hey, don’t cry,’ he said, although she hadn’t realized that she was. Harry leant down, wiped a tear away with his thumb and then licked it.
Twenty, she had heard, was young in the scheme of things. And yet it was the oldest she had ever been.
‘We have a surprise for you,’ Harry said.
‘You do?’
He nodded. ‘Outside.’
When Poppy stepped outside, everyone shouted ‘Happy Birthday!’ They had cut strips of paper into ribbons and hung them from the beams in the crew module, made a banner with a red Sharpie and printer paper so the Ps in ‘HAPPY’ and ‘Poppy’ looked like candy-canes. They’d made her a cake, substituted apple sauce for the eggs they didn’t have and covered it with icing and hundreds and thousands. Commander Sheppard sang as Eliot thrashed out lively chords on his guitar. Fae, Igor and Cai clapped, while Juno, Astrid and Jesse gesticulated wildly, with all the glad energy of a circus troupe.
Poppy looked at all their smiling faces and felt the love. She smiled back, because these people didn’t know that it hurt inside her, and why should they have to? Their singing, peppy and discordant as it was, came to her as if from behind a pane of glass. She smiled numbly the whole way through and when they were finished she ate the cake with her fingers. It was good, the way the sugar entered her veins, and she closed her eyes and said, ‘This is good.’ It was the first thing she had eaten all day and she could feel it sizzling in the emptiness inside her. ‘I could eat the whole thing. I could eat several, every day for the rest of my life.’
‘Well, just a little for me,’ said Juno, leaning over Astrid’s shoulder as she held the cake knife. ‘No… No, less than that. Half – I said half – of that…’
‘Shame we don’t have any candles,’ Astrid said. ‘Fire hazard.’
‘Twenty’s a lot of candles,’ Harry teased.
‘It’ll be you in a few months,’ Juno reminded him.
‘Yeah…’ He was thoughtful for a moment. ‘You’re right.’
‘Twenty’s okay,’ said Astrid. ‘It’s eighteen or nineteen that’s the problem. When you have to buy two packs of candles and they come in these weird sets of, like, seven or eleven or prime numbers and you always have loads spare.’
‘Oh yeah…’ Poppy laughed at a memory. ‘Remember when we had to buy something like four packs of five for—’ She cut off suddenly and her eyes darted to Eliot in alarm.
He looked up from the ground. ‘You can say her name, you know.’ Everyone ducked their heads. ‘That was Ara’s birthday. I remember.’
‘Well,’ Fae said, nibbling at a spoonful of her cake, ‘just wait until you get to fifty-six, that’s all I can say.’
‘Or seventy-eight.’ Igor laughed.
After they finished eating, the adults politely absented themselves, leaving the Betas to continue the party without them.
Poppy stuffed the rest of the cake in her mouth then ran a finger around her plate, licking off the remainder of the icing. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘it was always Ara who had the best birthdays.’
‘No,’ Harry said quickly, ‘there was Sebastian Branwell’s eighteenth.’
For a moment the name drew a blank, but then Poppy remembered the thin boy with the living room the size of her mother’s flat. She remembered being happily drunk and looking up at all her faces reflected back in the crystal teardrops on the chandelier. ‘There must have been about three hundred people,’ she said. The rooms were packed, and students she knew distantly from the local schools were smoking weed in the garden, daring each other to leap topless into the marble fountain.
‘More than that, for sure.’
‘And that cake… it was like a wedding cake.’
Harry started laughing. ‘Yeah, Oliver Tammon and I played that game to see how far we could hit the ball out and I got it all the way across that field. Like four hundred feet.’
Poppy was still smiling when she looked at him quizzically and asked, ‘You did?’
‘Course I did. You were there,’ Harry said. ‘You were. And Oli bet you and Kate fifty pounds that you wouldn’t be able to get it back.’ Poppy shook her head with a shrug. ‘How could you forget that? It was so fucking awesome. Everyone was talking about it the whole night.’
‘Maybe I wasn’t there for that bit?’
‘You were!’ Harry shouted loud enough to make everyone start.
‘Okay,’ said Jesse, cutting another piece of cake from the plate in the middle. ‘Cool it. It’s not like it matters anymore.’
‘Right,’ said Harry, turning on him, ‘that’s your philosophy, isn’t it, nothing matters. I bet it makes you feel so cool. But something’s got to matter.’
‘Well, you know,’ Jesse stretched his legs out in front of him, ‘nothing really matters. I mean, Earth stuff. Think about how famous you guys were when we launched – all those people and all those magazines – for a while you were the most famous people on the planet. And what use is it to any of us up here? It’s not like it makes a difference anymore, not like we can take it with us. Even other things, like school, being popular or being rich…’ He trailed off with a shrug.