Lost on Mars (27 page)

First thing the next morning Toaster demanded, ‘What was in the parcel? What secrets did the Archive find inside itself? Have you opened it yet?'

He was serving me breakfast. Grape jelly on wholemeal toast. Every scrape of the knife was war on my nerves. I couldn't give our sunbed adequate reason for not opening the box yet.

He kept asking, several times a day, in the days that followed. His voice became grating and impatient.

Once, I distracted him by asking, ‘Toaster, did you ever think more about your idea? About this City not even being real?'

He stood there, face frozen, hefting a large basket of laundry he was taking to the basement. ‘Did I say that?'

‘Not so long ago. You said you thought this whole City might be inside the living red globe that the Queen Lizard showed us.'

Incredulity was plain on his face. Toaster looked at me like I was making stuff up. ‘The what? Who… Why would I think something so peculiar?'

I shook my head and dismissed him. Then I thought again. ‘Toaster, would you try to get Al's phone working for me? I want to look at his pictures of the globe of Mars. Maybe I can find the City Inside on the globe and then…'

But Toaster was looking highly annoyed. ‘Is that all I'm good for? Charging up phones?' He stomped off with his laundry basket. He'd be away with his robot cronies in the basement for hours.

If I looked at those pictures of the globe, I thought, maybe I could find this City and also the ravines where we last saw Ma and the others. I could work out how far away they were. I could find the prairie and everywhere we'd been. If I could see it all together on a map it would all seem logical and laid out somehow. It would all make sense. And then I could start to make plans.

More days went by, and outside our apartment the City Inside became noisier and more Christmassy. Al came dashing in, clutching parcels and bags, excited and pleased with himself. Sometimes he went with Tillian, other times with Toaster, who privately told me that he was spending credits like there was no tomorrow. Al had never had so much money in his pocket before.

He reminded me of my promise to go Christmas shopping with him. I'd been keen enough the night I came back and brought him a shirt and those scarves and cologne. The truth was, I no longer felt like it. It just didn't feel like real Christmas to me.

Tillian came to our apartment one or two times, and I watched her warily. Just to check that nothing crazy went on with her eyes. I listened hard for that tell-tale giggling.

A creeping thought obsessed me in the run-up to Christmas. Could human beings from Victorian times have mated with Martians? Could their descendents be living here today? Most of the time they were normal. But sometimes – just sometimes – when the light caught them strangely or when they were turning on you with sinister intent … you could see it in their eyes. You could see who they were underneath. Neither human nor Martian. But something worse than both.

I couldn't shake this ghastly thought. It went whirling on and on round my head.

‘My parents were very impressed by you,' Tillian told me, during one visit.

‘I can't see why,' I frowned.

‘They're very grateful to you, actually,' said Tillian, in her refined City accent. ‘For looking after Al and seeing that he has turned out to be such a fine young man. You must take the credit, you know. He tells me he was a wild ragamuffin at one time. I believe you are responsible for taming your brother. And so I thank you, too.'

‘I can't take any credit for how Al's turned out. He's his own man.'

Yes, I thought. He's a young man, now. He was taller and smarter, but also more calm and thoughtful. Nothing like the endlessly questioning and cross little boy I once knew. He seemed alien to me. I no longer knew what was going on behind those quicksilver, sparkling eyes.

During Tillian's visit that morning there was a funny thing with Toaster. The sunbed was in a flustered mood when he brought in our mid-morning tea. When I asked what the matter was, he was evasive.

Then there was a knock at the door and it was two repairmen, who showed me their identification badges and told me they had come to collect Toaster.

‘Collect him?'

‘His memory circuits, miss. When he filled out his evaluation form he complained that we hadn't been able to do them much good during his recent refurb.'

Toaster appeared at my elbow. ‘That's right. I'm here. I'm ready.'

They were taking him away again. When I watched him gathering his few necessary things, I felt a clutch of fear.

‘It's all right, Lora. They did a good job on me before, didn't they?'

Al appeared, dressed for going out with his girlfriend. ‘Oh, Toaster. Are you off?'

So he knew about this!

‘Now,
'
Toaster said. ‘I won't be gone for long, Lora. I've made these gentlemen promise to return me home on Christmas Eve at the very latest. Don't fret! I shall be here to cook your dinner for you on the big day!'

It wasn't that. It wasn't as a servant that Toaster was important, and I hoped he knew that. He looked at me earnestly and said softly, ‘Imagine if they can reboot my whole memory? What then? We shall know everything then, won't we?'

I nodded and tried to smile. Then the two repairmen took him away.

Al and Tillian thought nothing of it. They were soon ready to go out themselves. Today Tillian was going to take my brother to Eliot District, where the most wonderful stores were to be found.

‘Are you sure you won't come, Lora?'

I told them I had things to do in the apartment.

Once they were gone, I went straight to my room and opened the little door in my bedside cabinet. The box was waiting there, just as it had since our night at the Graveleys'.

I put it on my knee and tugged the pink satin ribbon free. It felt heavy enough, as if it had a hard-backed book inside, or a whole ream of computer paper. When I opened the lid, I saw that it did. Inside a wrapper of frayed grey silk there was a stack of perhaps five hundred pages. Five hundred very clean, white pages of paper.

They were all blank.

My heart rate went sky high as I leafed through, faster and faster. Why would Tillian bring us this? What was she playing at? Each page was attached to the next by little perforations. The whole lot flew out of the box and concertinaed around me.

Nothing. Nothing. The box of secrets had nothing whatsoever inside.

Except. On the very last page. In the smallest possible type, there was this:

536 / Appt D

Bolingbroke District

900044 NNVX

‘It's an address,' Peter told me.

‘Well, I can see that,' I snapped.

He looked at me, hair falling into his eyes. I'd hurt his feelings with my brusqueness. I ploughed on. ‘Can you find it? Can you help me get there?'

‘Sure,' he said. ‘Easily. Actually, it's not too far from the park and the Den. You've been quite near the place yourself.'

‘I have?'

My palms were sweating against the greasy oilcloth of our café table. We were having frothy coffee at a stall quite close to Peter's busking spot. After I opened the box and found the address in that heap of computer paper, I knew I had to go straight to the Downstairs Market.

I'd been so relieved to see Peter standing there, playing one of the old tunes on his harp. Folk were buying papers and walking by him, tossing him coins, as he concentrated on drawing that golden music out of the strings. Christmassy music now, of course. Pure. It bubbled over everyone's heads and drew me to him with my scrap of paper with the address on it. The address that had come out of the archive when Al had punched in Grandma's name.

Sure, there were thirty-two women of that name on the list. Why was I so keen on finding a namesake, or even a distant relative?

Now we were in the smoky café drinking coffee together, I realised that I'd neglected Peter for a few days. He casually suggested I was keeping my distance since I'd learned he lived somewhere as grotty as the Den.

‘No!' I said. ‘Not at all! You must never think that.'

He nodded. I looked at Karl, who was bundled up on the bench in Peter's coat. The twisted cat-dog was trembling worse than ever, but his tongue was pink and he shuffled forward to be petted by me. Whatever was wrong with him seemed to be getting worse, I thought. Karl wagged his stumpy tail harder, but couldn't manage to jump up at me.

The waitress brought us coffee refills and slipped the cat-dog a tough biscuit to chew. Karl poked it with his dry nose, but didn't eat it.

‘It's just a touch of cold he's got,' Peter told me. ‘It's since the weather's been worse. It's kind of damp in the Den.'

I thought about the dinginess of the place they lived. I still didn't understand why they had to live there.

‘We could go to this place this afternoon if you like,' Peter said. He flicked at the paper with the address on.

‘Not yet. I've another appointment today,' I said nervously.
‘At the university.'

38

Dean Swiftnick didn't seem to be in a great mood. He was grumbling from the minute I first saw him.

‘You'd think they'd be more interested,' he was saying when I walked into his book-lined office. ‘After all, they chose to do this course and they paid for it. Can you believe that? Out of the whole group only three had finished the set text and none of them could say they actually enjoyed reading it.' He was waving what looked like a very old soft-back book at me.

The room smelled of books. It was like a blend of fallen leaves, vanilla extract and stewed tea. And tobacco, too, for Dean Swiftnick was smoking a pipe that had, over years perhaps, turned his hair and beard yellowish.

‘What was the book?' I asked. He blinked at me owlishly and tossed the very delicate article to me. An actual book! It was called
Our Astounding Voyage to Mars
by G.E Watson. A subtitle ran: ‘How Earth Insiders Invaded the Red Planet'. I had never even heard of it, but I coveted it at once.

Dean Swiftnick sat down heavily at his messy wooden desk. ‘How I wish I was reading Mr Watson's firsthand account for the first time like my lucky students ought to be, and not for the twenty-ninth. I think I am growing just a tad jaded…' He plucked off his spectacles and rubbed his red eyes with dirty cuffs. Then he glared at me. ‘Am I expecting you, young lady? Do we have an appointment?'

I hugged the book to me, wondering if the old professor would notice if I slipped it into my shopping basket for later perusal. I was in my bonnet, clutching a basket, duster coat over my dress. I knew I looked like a girl dressed up in her mother's clothes, or perhaps the cleaner come to deal with the impossible task of tidying this office.

But I had been invited. I was supposed to be there, in the Department of
True Life Stories. I told him so.

The Dean's eyes widened and he came scuttling around his desk to grasp both my hands in his own. ‘Oh, you're here! You are here!' He beamed at me. ‘You found us all right, then?'

‘Oh yes,' I said as, with a showman's flourish, he pulled out a chair for me.

Peter had shown me the way. The University of the City Inside sprawled within the square mile of Ruskin District. There were a bewildering array of orange-bricked edifices, surrounding the verdigrised dome of the Central Library and Royal Planetarium. Peter had surprised me by confiding that several years ago he had begun a degree in the very department where Dean Swiftnick taught. But he had been thrown out for reasons he didn't go into, one term short of completing his qualification in True Life Stories.

‘Ah, it was all just gobbledegook and bunkum,' he said, as he led me through the dark warren of streets. We had to squeeze past crowds of begging students. ‘It was much too theoretical. It had hardly anything to do with real or true life. And yes, I remember old Dean Swiftnick!'

It seemed that being close to the university and talking about his days there put Peter in a very odd mood. Like he was going back to a part of his life that he'd rather forget about.

For me, I was amazed to be there. In that ‘august seat of learning' – which was the kind of thing they used to say in the novels I'd read. I didn't mind the dirt and slime in the alleyways, or the coughing and sickness of the students all around me, or the shouts that rang out as we went by. All I knew was that one of the esteemed professors up in those towers, in one of those hidden offices, wanted to hear all about my True Life Story. Through him, my life was about to go down in the records. It would become a part of History.

Even though Peter had looked sceptical about the whole visit, he led me into the reception of the True Life Stories Department and saw that I was taken to the right place. ‘I'll wait in the little quadrangle outside,' he'd said. He had Karl bundled up in his arms. Karl was trembling harder than ever. I couldn't help thinking Peter should have left him home at the Den today, damp though it might be.