“Right,” I announced, mind made up. “I’m going now. I’m sorry you’re going to have to move, but – hey, there it is. But let me tell you this. If you think breaking into people’s houses and leaving stones in their living rooms makes a jot of difference, then you’re very wrong.”
His face began to show panic. “I’ll send the pictures to the police! You’ll be back in the slammer with all the other scum!”
“Don’t you get it?” I tried. “It’s over. This building is falling down. It’s had its time. They’re trying to get you somewhere better, more accessible. You can’t fight for this sort of stuff with bits of goddamned moon, Buzz. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is.”
He blinked slowly. “I’ll send the photos to the police.”
“No, you won’t,” I said.
“Try me.”
“I don’t have to.” I shook my head, walked towards the door.
“What makes you so sure, thief?”
I turned, looked at the confused, angry old man sitting in the detritus of his lonely delusions. “Because, Buzz,” I slowly explained, “you’d have to give the police a signed statement. As, indeed, would I, wherein I’d detail exactly what has happened here tonight. There’d most like be some sort of court case. You’d be called as a witness; forced to swear on a Bible as to your name. Then it’d all come out, wouldn’t it, Buzz? That you weren’t who you claimed to be? That you were really an odd little bloke who needed a ground-floor flat and help from the Social Services.”
He stared back, blank-faced.
“Put it this way, Buzz. You shop me, and we’re both going down…”
I got to do a fair bit of reading in the next eight months, spent so much time reading about space and space travel that the other lags on the wing got to calling me Buzz, a name I was happy with, though I never let on precisely why.
The court case lasted for three days, and to be fair, in a slow news week, attracted a few columns in the tabloids. I guess it was simply the absurdity of it all. I’m not going to tell you his real name, but rest assured he wasn’t an astronaut, which came as a bit of a disappointment, in a weird sort of way. His eyes never met mine as he gave evidence, and at no time during the trial did he ever mention any of the crazy moon stuff. He came out as a decent old star-gazing vigilante, photographing misdeeds from up on high – and I came out with eight months.
Rambling Ian came to visit, told me the case had attracted enough attention to warrant Social Services moving in on the old guy and “re-accommodating” him. Apparently a crowd had gathered to see the huge telescope being winched back down the side of the building, clapping and cheering. Buzz, he told me, had simply watched, tears in his eyes.
A few months later, I made the usual right noises to the panel, and left Her Maj’s Pleasure a cosmologically enlightened man. Sure, I was going to be a thief again, always would, we all have to live, don’t we? We’re all stardust, after all.
True to form, the Probation set me up in a cosy little dump just south of the river. Three days later, returning from a midnight sortie, I found a note slipped under the doorway:
You walked south for four minutes. Turned right, stayed outside number 27 for twelve minutes until the owners returned. You hid in a bush as they went inside. I’m just wondering if you needed a former employee of NASA’s mission control to help guide your mission status in a safer and more profitable way? Between us, we could reach for the moon.
Opening the front door, I scanned the horizon, looking past disused warehouses and over the river towards a distant tower block, its top-floor lights blazing.
I nodded, bowed – and I swear something winked back.
HE DID NOT ALWAYS SEE HER by Claire Seeber
JEFF HELPED OLIVIA choose the February book, steering her heavily towards Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There were a few inward groans when Olivia had mumbled her idea at the last meeting. The group preferred modern books: they often enjoyed the Daily Mail’s selection, or the ones that chat-show couple chose. But actually, they all agreed at the meeting, Shelley had hit on something with the creation of the monster. It was hard to imagine it being written by a woman. And, of course, they were most happy to be at Olivia’s house with Jeff on hand, so charmingly attentive.
When the women left that evening, tapping out into the cold clear night beneath the few stars visible in Chiswick’s busy skies, Olivia loaded the dishwasher, wiped all the worktops down, and went up to bed. Jacqueline had lingered; was taking a particularly long time to finish the oily Chardonnay Jeff had so thoughtfully provided, still simpering with spectacular adoration at his jokes. Olivia didn’t worry that they’d think her rude for slipping off; her husband would be happy to see Jacqueline out.
Upstairs Olivia peeped in at her daughter, cleaned her teeth and then checked her son. Her heart turned over to see he’d slipped his thumb into his mouth, a habit long fought. His hair was slightly damp and his face flushed. Olivia turned the radiator down and gently tried to disengage his thumb, checking quickly over her shoulder. By the time Jeff had managed to steer an equally flushed Jacqueline out towards her enormous car, Olivia was asleep. He didn’t want to have to, but Jeff woke her anyway. He was off on business for ten days early the next morning.
If you keep still for long enough, do you cease to exist? Olivia wondered as she stared out of the kitchen window. The late snow was melting slowly on the small green lawn until the patch looked rather like the Pacer mints she used to steal from Woolworth’s as a child. Absently Olivia rinsed the last plate until it shone, gazing at the pathetic leaning ball of raisin eyes and carrots that had once been a snowman, the radio beside her rattling with a phone-in about women being ignored in the bedroom.
“If he doesn’t see me as I want to be seen, do I not exist?” moaned a well-spoken academic-type called Miriam. “Do I simply not count in his eyes?”
The presenter murmured sympathetically and moved on swiftly.
Olivia felt a sudden urge to scream loudly. Instead she staunched the hot tap, sealing off the heat that aggravated the deep welts on her left hand. She stared down at the marks, labels of her own weakness. Her youngest wandered in, treading neat muddy footprints across the spotless floor.
“Can I have some crisps?” she asked, but she was already rifling through the cupboard where they lived, her auburn ponytail sleek against her back.
“Can you see me?” Olivia asked her daughter curiously.
“Dur!” her daughter replied, rustling plastic. “I’m not blind, Mum, you know. I don’t have a white stick.” She chose a packet of prawn cocktail flavour and wandered off again. They were ridiculously pink, Olivia observed vaguely, wiping down the sink. Prawns weren’t naturally that pink, were they?
He came home early, before Olivia had a chance to clean the mud off the back step. “Hello,” she said nervously. “Good trip?” He checked the kitchen in silence. She held her breath; she thought she’d got away with it – then he opened the back door to check. He looked at her just once, his handsome face inscrutable. In silence, he went upstairs; in silence he came down again, out of his shirt and tie now, wearing a blue tracksuit with white stripes down the side that showed off his tall frame nicely but was frankly horrible in Olivia’s eyes. He wasn’t the young boy she’d fancied from afar in the refectory any more; he’d taken up running recently to fight his paunch. She wondered if he thought the stripes would make him go faster. Not that she would offer such a frivolous opinion these days.
Olivia had cleaned the mud up now but it was too late, she knew. She also knew that if she crouched in the corner she only inflamed his rage, inflamed it ’til it bubbled; he saw her rather like a dog, cowering from its master. Well, she was a dog, to him.