The Atavists

Over shoulder, dog rest paw; salivating maw moisten smelly floor as jaw works; mechanical mandible. Ball grate molar, great flappy lips hang along a limb like jelly velvet curtain. Breath and death and shit and piss, whistling in nostrils. Cat approach, case joint, sniff at and tap it with leathery pads where splintered flesh remains. Dog growl, show teeth. Cat feign indifference and leave.

            Dog watch cat (covetous cat); crack leak marrow, turn to wall to maul and worry arm to pieces, in peace.

            Stupid cat sniff bones. Master not wake up.

Latent Instincts

Joe Jones walks across the open-plan office in squeaky shoes. I had to look his surname up on the site organogram but would never have guessed that, with a name like Joseph, it would be Jones. Now that I know it, it suits him. His glasses ride low on his nose so that his grey eyes peer over them in a permanent gesture of mild surprise. Clean-shaven jowls ripple a little with every tiny shake of his head, with every murmur he makes to himself.

I overheard him once, just mundane stuff, as he opened a cupboard full of files and documents. ‘Oh there you are,’ he said, selecting one. ‘You’re coming with me, you little beauty. Fully compliant, fully compliant, fully compliant.’ And off he squeaked back to his desk, flipping cheerily through it as though it were old family photos, shaking his jowls and moving his lips in quiet commentary. I heard him in the changing room, his whispers amplified by the metallic lockers. I allowed myself a nervous smirk as I changed my shoes.

Now I’m writing about him, because he’s a real person in the world. Maybe nobody’s written about him before. I watch him, absorb his mannerisms and gestures, but switch quickly to the window when he stops working and looks back.

The Spider and The Sparrow

Landing was easy. Jumping around in suits, gathering dust, fixing robots? Easy. Colonising the place? Impossible. The sullen red ball didn’t want any long-term residencies. Those who went there said it was the suits, that they were unable to withstand the perpetual sandstorms, the absolute dryness.

It wasn’t the suits, but the people in them.

There were no smells but the smell of their own rancid breath inside helmets. No sounds other than their own rancid, shallow breathing and the slow churr of passing robots. There was the standard initial excitement: touchdown, the flag, selfies with the dusty, motionless antiques, dead in their experiments. All but Curiosity, found at the foot of Olympus, its wan cameras staring at the peak.

So the M.O.O.N., Martian Occupation by Orbital Nearness – or the Web –, was built; a spindled hexagon a mile at the radius. Each spoke joined by three thin corridors around a rotating spherical hub, the Spider. Its occupants were known as Flies. A similar, smaller station occupied Venus, the Fly-Trap.

The Web, the largest man-made structure ever built off-planet, dwarfed the lunar science estate and launch-pad. It orbited Mars like the ISS orbited Earth, decades ago. Nothing orbits Earth now. Nothing but the Moon. A big clean-up was ordered by new laws, and people took interest in space again. All the shit just got in the way.

The Web followed Mars’s two onion-moons, criss-crossing over the Valles Marineris. The storms of Jupiter, visible with the naked eye when the planets were closest. What the Flies were there for, was the Sparrow.

Hallam Coop was the test pilot. At forty-two, his hair was greying at the temples but through vigorous spacetime exercises, his musculature and complexion were as taut as they were twenty years previous.  The sparrow was a small, light spacecraft that could be worn like a suit. He stepped into the neoprene boots and trousers, strapped on the triangular, jet-powered wings and Teflon helmet. Coop shuffled, performed a little shadow-box for the cameras on his way to the launch-bay.

‘Sparrow Test Flight. Single circumference of the M.O.O.N. Attempt Number One.’

The bay doors parted with a steely groan. No profound words of pioneering endeavour from Coop. They heard him scream something beginning with ‘F’ as he was sucked away around the west side of the Red Planet. They looked at each other, wondering who to blame for this failure. A man was lost in space.

‘He’s back!’ someone said. And all moved to see their colleague spiralling around from the east. His voice re-appeared in their speakers, still screaming. The Sparrow smashed into the Spider. All were killed, but the web remained, drifting around the sombre planet like a lost wish in the wind.

I Never Did See Battle

The night spent sleeping in a Prius in the car park of the King’s Arms in Frating was warmed by the generosity of the patrons in that village pub. In the morning I arrived, by walking and hitching along the A120, at a Premier Inn outside Colchester where I took breakfast. From there I had gotten to Enfield, then Slough, and eventually to Bexhill. Eager to visit the site where King Harold II fell on my way back north, I began to inspect the BMW as the air felt suddenly cool: a salty scent; thunder, like a raised cudgel, caused me to flinch; the warm rain spattered off the concrete like sparks from an angle grinder.

            Dismissing the inspection and hastily acquiring a signature, I drove away without attaching my trade plates and made it to Middlewich before an observant policeman pulled me over.

I never did see Battle.

Providence

Having failed to hitch for over two hours outside Thorne, I was picked up by a thin, balding man in an HGV. Wiping the rain from my brow, I entered the cab without caring where he was headed which was, as it happened, his depot just off the M18 outside Sheffield. He had to drop me, though, at the junction so as not to ‘get done’ for having unauthorised passengers. Then I noticed he was wearing a black pleated miniskirt, his legs like woolly breadsticks exposed as though trousers were for fools. The clouds had broken and I was gladly purblind in the sunset.

            In twilight, he pulled into a gravel driveway, explaining that this was as far as he could take me and wishing me all the best. My thanks were as swift as my exit. He remained there a minute, perhaps changing into something less weird.

After circumambulating the busy junction for my bearings, I wrestled with my rucksack to find my A-Z. Too far from Leeds where I have friends, too unfamiliar with Rotherham, I decided to hitch into Sheffield where I might catch a train to Stockport.

            A futile endeavour.

            In darkness I tramped four miles along the A630. My sore eyelids blinked at the tower of a Morrisons looming over distant trees like a mirage. That big green ‘M’ was a beacon.

I washed my face in the gents, bought fags and apples, mumbled something of desperate gratitude to an insouciant cashier, and sat outside alternately smoking and eating for an hour.

Reluctance

In Bridgwater, a colleague and I took a hire car in which we were to collect another colleague in Glastonbury and another in Westbury. Two of these I was to drop in separate parts of London before taking the third to Walton-on-the-Naze and returning to Hemel Hempstead. With only sideways glimpses of the Tor, the White Horse, Stonehenge, I smoked a cigarette beneath a full moon, flicked the amber end into the black North Sea. The satisfying fizz, the filter bobbing on the breakers at my feet, I turned my back to the beach.

Tortured by Industry

The first car I collected was a BMW from nearby Tilston, a cobbled red-brick village decorated with greenery, history and affluence. This I drove to auction in Doncaster where I was then directed to Kirk Sandall, just a train station away.

            On the train, young men in oiled blue overalls and tatty beards told jokes in poor taste.

            I alighted into a neo-Dickensian scene of grubby metal bridges and buildings bleeding rust, tortured by industry; coarse umber grass just surviving beside razor wire, the exposed rail track, and broken pavements. Diesel-choked, oil-spattered stunted trees tried to grow there.

            Leaving in an Audi on that Monday afternoon, I wondered how many days would pass before I went home.