Starship Home (2 page)

The Poulos house was old by Dalrymple Ponds standards, and was weatherboard with an iron roof, which made a drumming sound when it rained. Around the house were sheds, the sheds of a market garden, and these were made entirely of galvanized but unpainted iron. Attached to the wall of one of these sheds was a basketball backboard and hoop.

A basketball hit the backboard with a thud and dropped neatly down through the hoop. Before it could hit the ground, a dark-haired girl dressed in a tracksuit with a Dalrymple Ponds High School coat of arms stencilled on it moved in on her toes and retrieved, bounced the ball, evaded an imaginary opponent, slipped the ball around behind her back, moved, bounced it three more times and leapt, slammed the ball down through the hoop again, and caught it on its first bounce.

Zoe Poulos was practising the art she loved best.

Zoe looked both younger and older than her 15 years. Her hair was tied back into a simple ponytail, revealing a strong face, with the high cheekbones and aquiline nose which were genetic markers of her Greek ancestry. It was the face of a woman, not a girl. But the slender figure was that of a girl not yet grown into full womanhood.

She was moving away from the goal now, bouncing the ball, practising sidesteps and turns when a small girl came out onto the verandah of the house. A three year old, barefoot, hugging a teddybear with her right arm, the arm anchored to her by the thumb which was in her mouth. Removing the thumb from her mouth, little Helena said: ‘Mum says miss bus.’

Zoe, still bouncing the basketball, looked at her wristwatch, and then moved to the verandah where her schoolbag lay. ‘Going, Mum! See you this arvo!’

Her mother’s voice came from inside the house. ‘Take a raincoat!’

Zoe looked at the pale blue dome of the sky. There was not a cloud in sight, but even as she looked, she could hear a distant mutter, like thunder. ‘Mum there’s no clouds!’

‘I hear thunder,’ said her mother’s voice.

‘Okay,’ Zoe said, and moved onto the verandah, still dribbling the ball. She grabbed her raincoat from on of the pegs on the verandah wall, jumped off the verandah, rolled the raincoat into a ball, and thrust it under the wooden steps. Now she hung her bag over her shoulder by its strap, and walked off, Helena following.

Mrs Poulos’s voice followed her across the yard. ‘And your father says no staying back at school, he doesn’t want you seeing that boy!’

‘No Mum!’

‘No seeing that boy,’ echoed Helena fiercely as she followed her big sister toward the gate.

‘No, ‘lena,’ said Zoe in exactly the same tone she had used to her mother. Helena was so dominant, even at the age of three, that Zoe sometimes felt that the little creature was her second mother.

They came down the dirt road together toward the market farm’s gate. Already Zoe’s father and his bachelor brother were working in the fields. She waved to them as she and Helena reached the main gate of the farm.

Zoe let herself through the gate, leaving Helena on the inside, and carefully chained the gate again. ‘Run home,’ she said, as she did every morning, and ‘Go school’, Helena replied as she always did, and fiercely stood her ground.

Zoe grinned, and turned and moved off along the edge of sealed road, bouncing her basketball.

Helena watched for a moment, and then turned back from the gate toward the house. Just off the track a yellow coreopsis bloomed. Helena moved to it and picked it. From where she was she could now see another golden flower. She moved it and added it to the other. Now three were in sight. Helena moved on to pick them.

Above her, distant thunder rumbled in the pale blue dome of the sky.

The Lewins’ car pulled away, leaving Harold standing by the bus stop. This was the end of the school bus route, and it was here the bus turned to start its run in to Dalrymple Ponds High School just outside the village.

Harold stood at the bus stop, reading a very thick book. The book was a one-volume encyclopaedia of science his mother had given him for his 13
^th
birthday against the counsel of his father. His father had pointed out that if they gave such a book to Harold he would read it and that this would only encourage him. His mother took the view that Harold was going to be a scientist whether they liked it or not, and they might as well live with the fact. His father replied that he did not mind Harold becoming a scientist as long as he did not read at breakfast and tell him more than he wanted to know about ions.

Harold’s mother won the argument, they gave Harold the encyclopaedia of science and now he read it at breakfast and told his father more than he wanted to know about ions as well as more than he wanted to know about lots of other interesting things as well.

Harold also read the encyclopaedia at lunch and dinner, and in morning recess, and on the bus each way to school, and indeed he read it at the school bus stop which was what he was doing when Zoe Poulos came along the road bouncing her basketball, and trying and failing to send a text message on her mobile phone.

Harold first heard the basketball, and then looked up slightly to watch Zoe approach. He pretended he was not watching. Zoe knew he was watching but pretended she did not know that he was watching.

Harold admired Zoe from afar, and Zoe knew this but did not know why. How could she? The reason Harold admired Zoe from afar was that she reminded him of a 3
^rd
level Half-Orc Warrior Woman he had once encountered in a hard-fought on-line fantasy role-playing game. Harold was not sure that Zoe would understand any of this even if he explained it to her, and besides, she counted as an older woman.

Zoe the older woman regarded Harold Lewin as an amusing worm but nicer than the yobs who hung out of cars yelling at her outside the Blue Light Disco which the local police ran on Saturday nights. The police ran the disco to provide an alternative to the vandalism and automobile accidents which up until then had been the main Saturday night diversions of the youth of the district. There was some evidence that it was working, except in the case of the yobs who simply drove up and down outside yelling at Zoe and her classmates.

Zoe pretended not to watch Harold pretending not to watch her as she approached. As she reached him, he went back to reading about sub-atomic particles.

Smiling, bouncing her basketball, she watched him in silence, then said: ‘Hi Harold.’

‘Hi Zoe.’ He could feel his ears going red. There were times his ears felt bigger than his whole head.

‘You being a Spock would know why I can’t get a signal on my mobile phone.’

‘It could be the spikes. And the communications satellites are out. And my Dad couldn’t get a signal on his phone at breakfast.’

She smiled an evil smile. ‘In other words you don’t know.’ Then she paused, and decided to punish him further. ‘Mr Quayle missed you at track training yesterday.’ She managed to say it with the light menace of a Mafioso explaining to a small shopkeeper the strict definition of the word “protection”.

Harold grimaced. ‘Did he say “good pain”?’

‘He always says “good pain”.’ She paused. ‘If I could run middle distance, I’d really want to do it.’

‘I just want to do other things, all right?’ Harold had had this problem all his life. Everybody else had a plan for how he should be spending his time. The trouble was he also had a plan for how he should be spending his time and his plan never fitted in with anyone else’s.

‘Like what other things?’

‘Like trying to hack my way into the town library computer system.’

‘You’re weird.’

‘So I can reserve books without going there.’

‘You’ve got to go there to get the book you reserved.’

‘That’s not the point!’

She looked at him in silence, clearly wondering what the point then was.

He answered her look. ‘It’s the challenge.’

‘Oh.’ Challenge was something she understood. What she did not understand was why she always ended up liking Harold Lewin. So she laughed with cheerful malice and said, ‘you’re a real cack, Harold. Mr Quayle’s going to have you doing circuits for the rest of your life. Probably till you’re a hundred or something.’

The school bus, which had been approaching from the direction of the village, now roared past them on the other side of the road, flung itself into a U-turn and ground to a halt alongside them. The door slammed open and Zachary Owens looked out.

Whatever it is that a school bus driver was supposed to look like, Zachary Owens did not look like it. He had not been a school bus driver for long, and given his past record, it was unlikely that he would stay a school bus driver for much longer. For, at the age of 29, Zachary could not have told you how many jobs he had had. The longest stretch had been in the Army, and that had only lasted as long as it had because of a series of silly technicalities involving papers he had signed, oaths he had sworn, and legal commitments he had freely entered into. After that, the jobs had come fast and free because Zachary was by nature a wandering man who loved his two pairs of jeans and his leather jacket and his guitar and his freedom.

Taking the job driving the school bus had, he now realized, been a mistake. The man he had replaced had retired from old age just after his 23
^rd
birthday, and Zachary was rapidly beginning to understand why. This was not a job for a human being. He was getting tetchy with the kids. Tetchy, that is, as in homicidal.

Which is why, when Zoe dashed past him and threw herself onto the back seat without showing her pass, as she had every day for the past three weeks, Zachary rebelled. First he glanced at Harold’s school bus pass, and then he looked in his rear vision mirror.

‘The pass,’ Zachary said.

‘Show him your pass, Harold,’ said Zoe to Harold, who was now sitting in the front passenger seat reading his encyclopaedia of science.

‘Your pass, young lady’ said Zachary, looking at Zoe in the rear vision mirror.

‘I showed my pass.’ For someone with as much energy as Zoe had, there were times she could not make herself budge.

‘Okay,’ said Zachary, and picked up his guitar from where it was propped alongside his knee. He began tuning it.

Harold had Maths as first subject that day and did not want to miss it. ‘We’re going to be late for school,’ he said to Zachary.

‘That’s right,’ said Zachary, beginning to pick the tune of
Scarborough Fair
on his guitar. ‘So if you don’t want to be late for school, tell the lady up the back to show me her pass.’ And he began to sing. ‘Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley sage rosemary and thyme…’

‘He wants to see your pass, Zoe!’

‘Remember me to one who lives there. She was once a true love of mine…’

Zoe came sauntering down the aisle of the bus and flashed her pass with a look of ultimate boredom on her face. Zachary instantly put down the guitar, slammed the bus into gear and took off down the road.

Down the road, Meg Henderson waited for the bus.

Meg was a beautiful woman who was not in a pretty mood, and when Meg Henderson was not in a pretty mood then the world was doomed to suffer along with her. Meg was 24 years old, and a recent University graduate teaching English/History at Dalrymple Ponds High School. Meg had never actually been inside a school like Dalrymple Ponds High before in all of her privileged life. She herself had gone to private schools, then University and even her practice teaching had been to students from the same kind of moneyed background as herself.

She had actually heard of Dalrymple Ponds because her father Brigadier Sir Gerald Henderson (retired) and her mother Lady Henderson lived nearby in an old stone house which was set on enough acres to give horses a nice place in which to live. She had shopped in Dalrymple Ponds village, she had worshipped in the old Church of England on the highway there, and she had even driven past Dalrymple Ponds High School. But she had never entered its gates until this year, which meant that her life until this point of time had been a singularly happy one.

Meg and the denizens of Dalrymple Ponds H.S. did not agree. Knowing as she did that Charles Darwin had once visited Australia she sometimes wondered if he had called in on Dalrymple Ponds High School and there come up with his theory that the human race was descended from apelike creatures. Meg could have sworn that there were skulls loose in D.P.H.S. that more properly belonged in a museum of anthropology.

On this day, there were two things wrong in Meg’s life. The first was that she was going to teach anthropoid apes about English and History, and the second was that her car had broken down, her mother needed the second car for shopping, her father needed the four wheel drive to tow the horse float, her mobile refused to work when she tried to phone the auto repair place, and she in consequence was going to have to catch the school bus.

When she realized this, survival fought a battle against duty and duty won. She would not phone in sick, she would catch the school bus. Having followed the path of duty, she felt that she was owed one, and decided to disembowel with a sharp phrase or two any student who spoke to her. She would be, as far as all practicalities went, invisible.

As Meg waited at the roadside watching the bus approach, it did not seem to be slowing down. She signalled it and it came to a sliding halt, raising a dust cloud which engulfed her. Meg observed that there were now three things wrong with the day.

There was a man behind the wheel who looked nothing like the driver of a school bus. He was dressed in jeans and a checked flannel shirt and a leather jacket and was leering at her in the most objectionable manner. She mentally classified the person as quite goodlooking, the possessor of a hot body, but totally unsuitable. The person spoke.

‘I can see that you’re a lady of great beauty and distinction and you’re more than welcome to travel with me, but I have to warn you that this is a school bus and not fit habitation for a class act such as yourself,’ the quite goodlooking but unsuitable person said and then winked.

‘I teach at the High School,’ Meg said, and climbed the steps, ignoring the driver’s over-obvious appraisal of her. She sat in the front seat across the aisle from Harold, Zachary put the bus in gear and they drove away.

‘You didn’t ask to see her pass,’ Meg heard Zoe Poulos, the demonseed brat from Year 9, say.

‘That’s true,’ said the unsuitable person. ‘You got a pass?’

‘I told you. I’m a teacher.’

‘That’s class discrimination,’ the demonseed of Year 9 said. ‘Did you get that Harold? “Class discrimination”?’

Harold Lewin, the nerd who had corrected Meg in Year 7 History last week, was smirking.
Just wait until I get you two to school and in my power
, Meg thought.

‘I never had a High School teacher like you.’ The unsuitable person in the leather jacket was speaking. She suspected that he wore hair oil. Probably had tattoos. Piercings were not out of the question.

‘Really?’

‘Maybe I never would’ve dropped out.’

She let that pass. Zoe Poulos was moving up to sit right behind her. Meg wished that some more students would get on.

‘Miss Henderson has horses,’ Zoe Poulos the fiend of Year 9 said.

‘Thank you Zoe,’ said Meg, ‘that is “thank you” as in “shut up”.’

‘Hey, I ride horses,’ said the unsuitable person (clearly lying), ‘maybe sometime we could ride them together?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Meg. There was a chill factor in her voice sufficient to cause large birds to drop frozen from the sky.

‘Don’t you think he’s spunky, Miss Henderson?’ said Zoe Poulos, the Princess of Darkness of Year 9.

Meg turned in her seat and smiled. The smile had generations of breeding behind it, generations of putting common little people in their places, generations of duty and leadership and good diet and orthodontics.

Samurai smiled thus at people whom they were about to dismember, Guards officers smiled thus as they left their trenches on suicide missions, the congenital idiots who ordered and led the Charge of the Light Brigade smiled thus as they charged the guns, and thus did Meg Henderson smile now. This smile, which had terrified everyone who had ever seen Meg or any of her illustrious ancestors smile it, failed to terrify Zoe Poulos, because she smiled like that herself. So did her father, mother, brothers, uncles, aunts and grandmothers. All Greeks smiled like that.

‘Zoe Poulos, are you craving for a Wednesday detention? I can organize it, you can spend every Wednesday of your life behind bars if you…’ She stopped talking. She was staring ahead, as were Zoe Poulos, and Harold Lewin and Zachary Owens.

For hovering in the sky before them and coming up fast was a gigantic shape which years of watching television told them could be only one thing.

A space ship.