One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (4 page)

“
But they said he was dead.” My voice was a thick whisper through the crying. “Mum got a letter. He never came home. We lit candles every night.” My mind was turning over and over, trying to understand, trying to see a way in which it had all been a mistake, a way where no one had lied to me, where my father hadn’t walked out and not wanted to come back.

The woman had turned back towards my father. “Is that what she was told? That you were dead?”

He was shaking his head. “I didn’t tell her anything. I have no idea what Mary told her. It just seemed best that I stayed away for a while.”

“
You mean you just left? Without even talking to her?” The woman was angry now too. “How could you be so gutless? God, if I’d known that was the way you’d dealt with it, I would have thought twice about letting you move in.”

I couldn’t stand it any longer. I pulled free of the woman’s grasp and ran blindly into the crowd. My thoughts churned, tumbling over themselves out of sequence; relief that my father was alive falling beneath the knowledge that he had abandoned me; anger at my mother mixing with the understanding that I was not the only one that he had walked out on.

My vision was still blurred by tears and before I realised it I had escaped the crowds and was standing beyond the market square. The transport stop was before me, at the end of the street, the road train waiting to begin another loop. I looked down to where my fingers clutched tightly on the bag of odds and ends I’d so happily scavenged earlier.

I couldn’t turn around and go back into the crowd. What would I say to Mark, or my mother, or worse still my father? I couldn’t even bear the thought of it. I had to be far away from here. I jumped on the transport train as it began its trundling trip towards home.

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By the time I reached the stone field it was mid-afternoon. It was awkward managing the squashing boards and my bulging sack at the same time, so my progress was slower than usual. That was good. It helped calm the horrible swirl in my mind. Worst of all, the magical euphoria that had infected everyone that day kept trying to push in. I resisted it because it felt perverse and wrong, but it only increased the muddle. I began to feel nauseous.

The two aliens waited patiently just out of touching distance while I emptied my loot onto the ground, though they were already waving their tentacles in anticipation. I think they knew I wasn’t frightened of them anymore, because they were already inching forward as I began my retreat.

Perhaps because of everything else going on in my brain, I didn’t pay enough attention to the boards beneath my feet. You have to place them just right, so there aren’t any uneven clumps or hollows beneath them or they can tip when you stand on them and suddenly you’re in serious trouble. The flowers made it harder than usual to judge how the Grass was arranged and whether there were any dips in the ground. I didn’t test the stability of the board properly before transferring my weight onto it. My foot came down and the board tilted sharply to the side. My foot slid with it and suddenly I was falling.

I had a split second of realisation; I was dead. In my hurry to get here I hadn’t gone home and put on my leather coveralls. No one knew where I was. I would bleed to death, quickly or slowly. I had time to hope that the Grass would hit a major artery and everything would be over in a minute or so. Then the tangle of green was rushing towards my face. In futile reflex, I closed my eyes.

Then everything stopped. Something clamped around my chest so tightly I could barely breath and I had the sensation of being lifted.

I opened my eyes just as I was set, feet first, on the stony ground.

The alien released the tentacle it had wrapped around my chest and the appendage retracted back into its body with a leathery shlupping noise. We gazed at one another. The two of them were only a metre away. I could have reached out and touched their knobbly, armoured hides. Their great dark eyes gazed at me. They looked expectant.

“
Thanks,” I said, unable to think of anything else to say.

The look of anticipation didn’t change. Then the one on the right waved a tentacle at me, as though beckoning. They both turned, heads swiveling to look up the hill. The structure they had built sat there, outlined against the sky, the golden haze of the afternoon air around it.

The tentacle beckoned again and then both aliens turned and lumbered up the hill.

I stood there for a moment, gaze going to my boards, still lying in the Grass. I could get back on them and go home. I could wait in the silent house for my mother, questions and accusations going around and around in my head. Or I could stay. Part of me knew I should be cautious. If there was one rule about alien species it was that you could never predict what they would do. Part of me also knew that my mind wasn’t working normally. The euphoric golden haze in the air had turned off my caution and my fear and these two beings in the field with me probably knew that.

I stared at my boards for a moment longer then turned and headed up the hill.

The aliens ahead of me were obviously excited and for a moment I wondered if they were as affected by the pollen as I was. They kept swiveling their little heads around, making sure I was following them. As I drew nearer to the structure they had made, my footsteps slowed. I’d expected a glued together mass of old hut beams and God knew what else, but this was more than that. Much more. It was all made out of the same material, for starters, something smooth-lined and luminous. Its poles and struts held the glow of the light, beautiful in their clean simplicity. My gaze went over the angles and lines and came to rest on what hung in the centre. It looked like a seat, but it wasn’t the right size for either of my companions. I stared at it, my already overwhelmed brain trying to grasp the bizarre truth.

It was a swing. These two creatures from another world had built a swing. And they wanted me to use it.

They were looking at me, the expectation back in their eyes.

I took a step forward and they waved their tentacles in excitement.

I had to straddle the seat like a horse to sit on it. It yielded ever so slightly beneath my weight, as though the whole structure was flexible. Poles ran down to the sides and at the front and back, sloping inwards to a central axle above. I tilted my head upward and even that slight shift in weight sent the thing moving in a fluid arc, as though on perfectly oiled hinges. I gasped in surprise and without thinking shifted my weight forward and then back, feeling the seat and attached poles shift with me, magnifying my movements. Around me the landscape swayed. In reflex I pushed myself higher.

I’d been on swings before, but not like this. In the pollen-laden air, with the sea of red and green stretched out, it felt as though I could fly. Every movement of air took my breath away. Every pull of gravity as the swing reached its highest point, hung weightless for a moment, then dropped, was overwhelming. It felt as though my body couldn’t hold the entire, startling experience of it. Everything else fell away, all the turmoil of the day, all the problems in my life, inconsequential. How could they matter when it felt this amazing to be alive?

I don’t know how long I stayed on that swing. But when I finally allowed the everyday world to intrude, my face was wet with tears and my fingers ached from gripping. My legs shook as I stepped back onto the stony earth.

Two pairs of large dark eyes were still watching me and suddenly I was glad that we couldn’t talk, because my fumbling words would have spoiled it all.

“
I’m sorry,” I said at last. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

One of them shuffled forward, eyes blinking in turn, and it reached a tentacle out to me, something wrapped in its tip. I held out my hand in automatic response.

A weight dropped into my palm. I stared down into flashing green. It was a stone, intricately faceted and coloured the blazing green of the Grass. Deep within, motes of red swirled and shifted. Somehow, I knew that they had made it, and now they had given it to me for some unfathomable reason that I would probably never know. I had never seen anything so beautiful, and I had never felt as undeserving as I did at that moment, as I said my clumsy goodbyes and walked away.

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My mother came home late that night. I heard her footfalls come to my door and stop. I hunched beneath the bedclothes, pretending to be asleep while she stood there for an endless time. Eventually she went away.

Perhaps she didn’t know what to say either.

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The next morning I woke to an unnaturally bright room. I stared at the ceiling for a moment, sudden dread churning in my stomach, then raced to the window. Snow lay in a heavy suffocating blanket over the ground.

I pulled my coveralls over my nightdress in a matter of moments and ran from the house. Snow slid into my shoes and the icy air stung my skin. I didn’t care. I slogged down the road towards the stone field, exertion burning the back of my throat, my breath clouding in the air before me. The world was silent and still, the sound of my breathing the only evidence of life. Around me the Grass was deep in snow, not a single flash of red in sight.

It was worse when I needed to leave the road. The snow was deep over the Grass and the boards skittered and slid. I stayed on my hands and knees, hoping that if I slipped the snow would shield me. Only a light drop in the landscaped defined the edge of the stone field, as Grass gave way to bare earth.

The field was empty.

I stood, gasping for breath, gazing over the unblemished blanket of white. There were no footprints, no signs of a ship landing. The swing still stood, its cross pieces and seat mantled in snow.

I stared at it for a long time before I noticed the two large bumps in the snow at its base.

I walked forward slowly, my feet punching down through the crust of the snow. Sun glittered over the perfect expanse of white and part of me felt that I was desecrating something sacred, that it should all be left as it was, silent and untouched in the morning sun. But I had to know.

Up close the mounds were more obvious. They were neatly side by side at the foot of the swing, as though the two of them had settled down together and waited patiently as the snow formed their shroud. I wanted to believe that they were just hibernating, that they had shut themselves down as protection and would wake when their ship came for them. But the truce was over. No one would come for them now. They would stay here, in this field on this foreign world, beneath the funeral monument they had built to bring a human child joy.

I cried for a time then left them there.

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The stone field didn’t hold the only death that day. The Grass, vulnerable as it reproduced, collapsed beneath the weight of the snow and turned to brown mush when the thaw came. It never got a chance to form seed, at least where we were. After the snows melted, I found I disliked the new brown, naked landscape around me, every hollow and rock exposed, but for the first time our claim was truly ours.

In other places the Grass remained. The Council analysed the pollen we had all been affected by and it started to become clear why a race might plant a world with such a thing and then travel light years to retrieve it.

I sold the stone they had given to me. I cried as I did it, even as I knew it was the right thing and that they would have approved. We bought chickens and rabbits for meat and eggs, seaweed to enrich our soil and seed for green manure. Our claim bloomed green for a few short weeks until it was all ploughed back in again and planted anew. The chickens roamed through the tilled soil, energetic blobs of life. We chose fruit trees and planted an orchard. We sowed three paddocks with fodder-weed and clover, in anticipation of the cows we were going to buy. The vegetable garden thrived and expanded and suddenly we had produce to sell. Somewhere during all of this, my mother began to smile again.

It was after that I went and saw my father. What he did still sits between us, despite the spoken apologies and forgiveness. I have no idea how to take the past and use it to strengthen our shared future, so the guilt and the resentment remain. But nothing is forever. I went back to the stone field once after the snow had melted. I felt I owed it to them, that I should make some attempt to bury anything that remained.

All that was left were a few small scattered pieces of metal, as though everything else had melted away with the snow. Even the swing was gone.

I stood there for a time looking out over the brown, muddy landscape around me. It was so ugly and so full of promise.

I turned and headed for home.

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T
he cunning
woman heats salted water, carefully stirring in clumps of bee propolis. Spoonfuls of honey. Rosemary sap. Aloe dew. Sweet-scented steam rises from the surface, softening the ever-dark wrinkles in her cheeks. She skirts the round hearth to gather ingredients, heels scuffling and scraping with each step. Old injuries, these, but persistent. When the woman was much younger, much less cunning, she could sprint. She could give frantic chase. Fast as a hare across her yard,
fast fast
down to the bog. She could splash in night-mud up to the thighs. She could dig in the mire, getting right down into the grime. Splashing, scooping, sobbing, searching. She could hobble herself on half-sunken blades, corroded silver, jagged bones. Ancestral offerings, once flashing in late afternoon sun, now glinting through the murk, so shiny and tempting. So dangerous underfoot.