The Boy Who Turned Into A Man

A pleasantly warm, bright day in May. Just after his ninth birthday. The boy and his six-year-old sister climbed out of his aunt's car and crossed the road with her to the park. They walked up the grassed slope to the playground, where brightly-painted swings, slides and roundabouts beckoned. The boy loved playgrounds, and should have been excited at the prospect of a couple of hours playing in the warm sunshine. Not today. Both children walked in pace with their aunt, neither wanting to run ahead as usual.



They reached the play area and while his aunt pushed his sister on one of the swings, the boy wandered off towards his favourite piece of apparatus, something for which he never knew the correct name: a solid, wood-clad barrel mounted horizontally in a frame, the idea of which being that you stood on the barrel, supported yourself on the frame with your arms, then "pedalled" the barrel round with your feet as fast as possible.


He climbed up on the barrel and started running, slowly at first, building up speed, his feet slapping down on the barrel, sending it spinning round in a blur as he looked down on it. He ran and ran, for what seemed like hours. And as he ran, all his efforts focussed on spinning that barrel, he could for just a short while feel like everything was fine. He could feel like a normal nine-year-old boy who was just out for a day with his auntie and who would, in a few short hours, be back with his family, and everything would be fine. Normal.


But even the pounding rhythm of his legs as they spun the barrel, even his ragged gasps as he ran as fast as he possibly could, nothing could completely take away the knot of anxiety in his stomach, the sickening sense of something dreadful coming towards him, and just like running on the barrel, no matter how fast he ran, he couldn't escape it. Because he couldn't stop the march of time, bringing towards him the event that would, even though he couldn't have thought about it then in such terms, change his life utterly.


As little as he was really enjoying the afternoon, when it came time to leave the park, he desperately wanted to stay. Just a little longer. Just another few minutes of being able to pretend that everything was still okay. But he acquiesced and climbed into his aunt's car. They drove in silence.



~*~


He knew, the moment he opened the door, that it had happened. Nothing about his grandparents' house was visually different, and the smell was just as he had always known it (furniture polish and pipe tobacco), yet something ineffable but fundamental had changed. They walked through into the lounge, where his grandparents sat in their usual places, and his mother sat on the sofa next to his grandma. She wasn't crying, but he could tell she'd only just stopped.


She took the boy and his sister in her arms and hugged them for a long time, before sitting them both down on the sofa and kneeling in front of them. She took one of their hands in each of her own. "Kids, I've got something to tell you. You're going to have to be very brave. You know that Daddy has been very poorly, don't you? Well, he's gone to Heaven now. He was very poorly and in a lot of pain, so the angels came and took him. He's okay now, he's not poorly any more." Her voice began to waver and fresh tears welled in her red-raw eyes. She pulled the children towards her and hugged them again tightly, burying her face in their chests. The boy could feel her shaking, and started to feel the warm wetness of her tears through his shirt.


Some time afterwards, after his aunt had left, and with his sister, mum and grandma all in another room, his granddad talked to him:


"Now, you're going to have to be very brave, you know. Your mum's going to be very upset for a while, so you're going to have to help her as much as you can, okay? You're going to have to support her. You're the man of the house now."


He was nine. Nine years old and the father he worshipped had just gone from his life forever. And yet he didn't cry. He never did. Not from that day until adulthood. Because men don't cry. And he was the man of the house now. So he couldn't cry. Had to be strong. Emotions? Feelings? Strictly to be kept inside, bottled up. Hidden. "Are you okay, son?" "Yes, I'm okay." "Are you feeling sad?" "No, I'm okay." "You can always talk to me, you know, if you want to." "Yes, I know." But it never happened. Because he was a man now.


His sister was six years old. She never really knew their father. Not like he did. Was he luckier to have had three extra years with a father? Sometimes, many years later, he thought probably not. Sometimes he wished he had been three years younger and hadn't know him at all. Overwhelming guilt accompanied these thoughts, yet still they came. Because those three extra years meant, when it happened, three extra years' worth of memories, love, and having a dad, to be achingly missed when they ended.

Second Look -- A Story

The limbless, serpentine monster slid out of its labyrinthine lair, eyes blazing, with a snort and a high-pitched shriek. In this hollowed-out subterranean space, it disgorged the contents of its insides; then hungrily, it fed on fresh meat.

As the giant metal and glass snake hissed-squealed-juddered to a halt, all the doors on the platform side of the train opened, and he climbed aboard.

He took a seat in the sparsely populated carriage, pulled the worn paperback from his jacket pocket, and began reading. A brief interruption as he was politely reminded to mind the doors as they closed, then he returned to the text as the train smoothly slid away out of the light and back to the thick blackness of the tunnels.

The journey, and his reading, was punctuated by the train stopping at each station. After a while, he realised he wasn’t concentrating on the story, so he tucked the book back in his pocket.

A minute later, the train stopped again. Hyde Park Corner, Piccadilly Line. A busy station on London’s Underground, but tonight, strangely quiet. At the end of October, summer was over and the frantic build-up to Christmas chaos was still, thankfully, a few weeks away.

Carl gazed idly through the window, bored. The journey was one he made regularly, so even if the view from the windows of the tube train had been somewhat more visually stimulating than the interior of pitch-black tunnels punctuated by milkily-lit stations, he would still have been bored. He was returning from the British Museum, one of his favourite haunts in the capital, although he could be found at many others: the National Gallery, both Tates, the good old V&A, even, on occasion, the Transport Museum. But always he returned to Great Russell Street and the grand imposing edifice, a forest of pillars protecting the treasures within. Walking through those doors was almost guaranteed to lift his spirits; today, however, when he was most in need of popping a few cultural uppers, it had failed to lift his gloomy mood.

Why was Charlene treating him in such a way? She said she loved him, yet behaved towards him as though he were an annoying stray mongrel that followed her home. If he was affectionate, she told him she needed space. If he gave her that space, her accusation was one of being unfeeling and uncaring towards her. Confusion was his steady state these days.

The train doors opened, admitting an unwelcome ghost of cold air. That was the trouble with underground trains: because they always stopped at every station, and since the stations were no more than two or three minutes apart, the temperature inside could never be maintained. The stations were almost always draughty, and the bitter wind fell over itself to tumble into the warming carriages the instant the doors opened, almost as if it were trying to warm itself up.

The old chap climbed aboard. Later, when he thought about it, Carl would swear that he hadn’t been waiting on the platform. And yet there he was. He took a seat not quite opposite Carl.

As the doors closed again, Carl couldn’t help sneaking a look at him. An oldish guy, without being elderly. Carl put him in his sixties, though ageing him was difficult. He wore a thick tweed overcoat, a small porkpie hat, and clutched tight to a carrier bag proclaiming “Harrington’s Cheese Shop” to the world. But the most striking thing about him, by far, and the thing that drew Carl’s gaze despite his concern for propriety, was the man’s eyes.

They were a deep, almost sapphire shade of blue, but that wasn’t the significant aspect. They were misaligned. Carl knew there was a medical term for the condition, but he either couldn’t remember it or had never heard it. Whilst the left eye looked straight ahead, the right seemed more interested in what was above and to the right.

Initially, Carl found this rather unnerving, since he was unable to know exactly where the man was looking. It was a little like looking at someone wearing impenetrable sunglasses; you could never be sure whether they were looking at you or not. But strangely, the more glances he sneaked at the man opposite, the less uncomfortable he felt. His expression seemed to be one of ‘amused bemusement’, the phrase that came into Carl’s head to describe it. There was something else there, maybe a certain melancholy, but it was slight, and played a minor role to the happier nuances in his face.

Knightsbridge; South Kensington; Gloucester Road; Earl’s Court; West Kensington. The station names were as familiar to him as the liturgy to a priest. They provided their own metronomic rhythm, and he found his thoughts returning to Charlene. What should he do? He loved her, he was in no doubt about that. The eighteen months since they met had without question been the happiest of his life. Frankly, he couldn’t believe that a girl, a woman, as beautiful as she would even look twice at an extraordinarily ordinary man such as he. But look twice she had, at that party they had both been invited to. Actually, as parties go, that had been one of the dullest he had ever attended. Some aspiring artist in Holland Park had thrown the soiree to showcase her ‘talent’. Carl was strictly of the “like what I like” school of art criticism, and this artist had definitely fallen outside of that criterion. But whilst working his way politely through all the pieces, he had been surprised to find himself standing next to the most attractive woman in the universe, whose opening gambit had been, “What a load of crap.”

He couldn’t remember quite when he’d fallen in love with her, but it was either during her first sentence or very shortly thereafter. Amazingly, extraordinarily, unbelievably, she had fallen in love with him, too. Each morning, without fail, from that occasion until this very day, he had thanked whatever higher power, supreme being, or quantum event had brought the two of them together. The intervening year and a half had passed by as quickly as the underground stations were passing the train tonight, and all but the last few weeks had been Arcadian. But for some reason, though she professed otherwise, she did not seem quite so close to him as she always had. And now he had a decision to make which it seemed could not lead to a happy conclusion for him either way. Did he just try and stay with it, hope that she returned to him? Did he confront her with it? Or did he walk away? For this moment, he had no idea.

Abruptly, he realised the train had stopped. Looking up, he spotted the station logo on the platform wall: Hammersmith. He jumped up from his seat, and was almost to the door when he heard the old man speak.

“Talk to her.”

Carl swung round, saw no one else in the carriage, and realised the man had been talking to him. “I’m sorry?”

The old man smiled, and his eyes, just for a second, seemed both to look at him and through him, beyond him. “Talk to her. You must. Otherwise you’ll lose her. Talk to her, Carl.”

“How the hell…?” The doors began to close, and he leapt through the narrowing opening, onto the platform, minding the gap as instructed via the loudspeakers. He spun round to look back into the train. The old man was still there, but Carl couldn’t tell whether he was looking at him or not, since his eyes had again gone their separate ways. But the faint, bemused smile was still firmly in place.

How the hell did he know my name? And how did he know what I was thinking about? The second question, he supposed, might be fairly easily answered; he must have looked pensive, possibly anxious, and it might not have been a particularly inspired guess that he had “relationship problems.” But the first question remained, as it still did years afterward: How the hell did he know my name?

~*~

Raymond Vincent Jones was going home. Whilst to some, homecomings might be pleasant journeys, filled with warm thoughts of welcoming fires, parents and hot meals, the images that filled Raymond’s head as he travelled were quite the contrary: arguments, the odd punch in the face, and at best, cold indifference to his arrival.

The middle of three brothers, he had neither the respect of which the first child could usually boast, nor the fondness often shown towards the youngest. He was just another. Not that he could see either parent dishing out much in the way of either fine sentiment. His father certainly hadn’t found much in the way of the milk of human kindness, despite years of searching for it in countless bottles, and his mother had long since given up the fight. So why was he going home at all? Simple: he couldn’t afford to live anywhere else.

The train rocked and rattled violently. Why did they always put the shittiest trains on this line? Why was he asking himself such a ridiculous question, when he knew damn well what the answer was? They put the least valuable rolling stock on this line because it carried some of the least valuable inhabitants of the city.

Back to his thoughts. The only reason he was making his way back to Bethnal Green, the only reason he wasn’t on the other side of the city, was money. Or lack of it. But that was about to change. Gil Brooks wanted him on the next job. And Raymond wanted in. Brooks, with two others, had already broken into at least a dozen shops. Now they were going into banks. They’d already pulled one off, last week. Got away with ten grand each. But Dave Landers had pulled out, and Brooks needed someone else. He asked Raymond. And Raymond said yes. By next week, he’d have enough to be able to tell his parents where to stick it, and he intended to do just that.

The ugly old bastard got on the train at Tottenham Court Road, and sat not quite opposite Raymond. Raymond immediately felt uncomfortable. He was sure the bloke was staring at him, yet every time he looked directly at him, he could no longer be as certain. The problem was the man’s eyes. They were all over the place. One was down at the floor, the other was out the window. One was at him, the other was up at the fucking roof. Yet each time Raymond looked away, he could feel at least one of the eyes staring straight at him.

He was already anxious enough. He was pretty much convinced he’d get a beating off his dad when he walked through the door, unless of course he’d drunk himself unconscious by then. His mum certainly wouldn’t be around. It was after eight, so she’d already be spotting her Bingo cards with that bloody ridiculous marker pen, hoping to win enough cash to fund her sixty-a-day habit for a few weeks. Not that she’d be any good if his dad decided he wanted a fight, anyway.

Coupled with this, he was thinking about his upcoming debut as a bank-robber. The money would be wonderful, but Gil Brooks didn’t mess around. He used sawn-off shotguns. Loaded sawn-off shotguns. Raymond had never handled a gun in his life, much less fired one. If someone rushed him, would he be able to shoot them? He supposed that was something you only found out when it happened, pretty much like being in the army. And anyway, it wasn’t likely to happen. Was it?

All in all he was pretty wired, and as the old train rattled and shuddered through the dank, brick-lined tunnels, the old bugger opposite was getting under his skin. By the time they reached Liverpool Street station, he’d had more than enough. He looked up, and though the man’s eyes were still showing no signs of a desire for common purpose, he knew that he was being looked at.

“What you starin’ at, mister? You want a fuckin’ photo?” He snarled, exaggerating his already thick East London brogue.

The man said nothing, just looked at him, a slight smile on his face.

“You wanna watch ‘oo you’re laughin’ at too, you old bugger.”

No apparent response to the threat. In black leather jacket—ripped—denim jeans—stained and ripped—and black welder’s boots—scuffed, and with three rings in each ear and one in the nose, Raymond knew he was a pretty frightening sight, especially to the generation of which this old git was a paid-up member. And yet, for all the reaction he saw in the man’s face, he might as well not have spoken. In fact, he actually began to feel a little embarrassed, so ineffectual had his posturing been. This made him even angrier. Fortunately for him, the train lurched to a halt at Bethnal Green station, and Raymond stood. He stared at the man a final time, intending to pass to the man, via the severity of his look, the message, One stop further and you’d’ve been in serious trouble, mate.

Except that while he was thinking this, the old bastard had the cheek to speak to him. “Don’t do it, son,” he said. “It’s not worth the risk. You’ll be caught, I’m telling you. Don’t risk it, Raymond.”

What the fuck…?

Raymond was off the train before he’d even registered what had been said to him. By the time he turned round, the train was already halfway into the tunnel and he couldn’t pick out the carriage he’d just alighted from. He stood for a moment in the draughty platform chamber, then made his way up to street level, the man’s words echoing in his mind as his footsteps echoed around the tiled walls of the station.

~*~

Damn it, she was late. It was always the way; whenever you were two minutes late leaving the house, there were more people than ever in the station, which meant you were even later getting on the train. The train would then, as if in conspiracy with unknown forces, travel slower than usual, not only depriving you of the chance of making up lost time, not even running the same number of minutes behind schedule, but later still. She wondered if this seemingly unbreakable rule of the universe had anything to do with the Third Law of Thermodynamics. Very possibly, she concluded; the tendency towards chaos and disorder was a consequence of this law, so why not a law of lateness? She formed the principle in her mind. In the customary scientific manner, she dubbed it after her own name: Gregory’s Lateness Principle: In any given day, lateness tends to increase as the inverse square of the time available. Pretty good for seven-thirty on a Monday morning, she allowed.

And why was she thinking such nonsense at this early hour? Could it be in order to block out the thoughts she knew would come flooding into her mind if there were any signs of a void? Too late; here they came.

Though she knew he loved her, and of course she loved him, the fear was undeniable. Even now, some three weeks after the home pregnancy testing kit had revealed the truth she’d already known, she felt a strong echo of that bolus of pain in the pit of her stomach that had come to her then. She hadn’t told him; couldn’t tell him. Because if she did, and if he was angry, and if he walked out on her…well, if all those conditionals took positive values, the unconditional result would be that her world would fall apart. She couldn’t bear to consider the possibility, and so she denied the reality by not speaking of it.

But she wasn’t naïve. She had a degree. She worked in an investment bank, for God’s sake. She knew it was only a matter of time, and not very much time, at that, before he would find out. And if that happened before she told him, then how would he feel?

And now, on top of this, he’d told her this morning that they needed to talk. Tonight. Important, he’d said. His face contained none of the humour she loved in it. He was serious. Despite her questions, he had refused to tell her what was on his mind. And now she had a new worry, a twin for the existing one: he wanted to break up. He’d found someone else. Notwithstanding his frequent declarations of his feelings towards her, he was going to leave her, right now when she needed him the most. The God to which her father had devoted his life to teaching others about seemed to have abandoned her, just as she had turned her back on His service in favour of a more materialistic career. Though she still believed, she had a profound feeling that she was out of favour with Him.

She looked at the man on the other side of the train. He’d been the only person in the carriage when she’d climbed aboard at Shepherd’s Bush. But now, as they approached Oxford Circus, all the seats were taken, and there were several strap-hangers. Normally she would pass up her seat in favour of someone either older or less hale. But today, her mind was not focused on the here and now. When she did think about it, she realised that she was now precisely the sort of woman to whom other people gave up their seats. The concept gave her such a jolt she thought the train had actually collided with something. Looking around, she realised that the only impact had been inside her own head.

The man looked back at her, or at least, she thought he did. With his strange eyes, it was difficult to tell. But he seemed to be smiling at her, too. She found herself returning the smile, though she knew it hadn’t been much of a smile, since it was probably the least appropriate expression of her current turmoil. Several stations merged together, the incessant ingress and egress of passengers a blur, and she found herself automatically getting ready to stand as the train approached Bank, at the heart of the Square Mile, London’s financial inner sanctum. As she did, and above the metal-on-metal rattlings of the train and the dozen morning conversations buzzing between commuters, she heard a voice directed towards her. The old man with the funny eyes was talking to her.

“Tell him, Charlene. You must tell him. He’ll be overjoyed at the news. Don’t worry about it. But you must tell him, tonight.”

The train had stopped, people were squeezing out, others were squeezing in, and suddenly she realised the warning to mind the doors had been issued, and she had only a second to get out. She jumped up, threw her bag over her shoulder, and plunged out through the closing doors.

For a moment she stood on the platform, her heart trying to beat a way to freedom through her ribs. Had that really just happened? How could a complete stranger know so much about her? As she wandered towards the escalators, being barged and buffeted by the morning crush, she tried to make sense of it. And a small, insistent voice inside her told her that, however the man had known what was in her head, he was right.

~*~

Two weeks later, Barnabus James sat at the kitchen table, reading the Hammersmith Gazette.

The Reverend and Mrs. Desmond Gregory are proud to announce the engagement of their daughter, Charlene, to Mr. Carl Preston, of Notting Hill.

Shortly afterwards, in the previous night’s London Evening Standard, he read the article on page five:

Three held after attempted armed robbery.
Three men are in police custody tonight after being arrested whilst attempting to rob the Natwest Bank on New Bond Street. Gilbert Brooks, 23, of Peckham Rye, along with Robert Marshall, 22, also of Peckham Rye, have been charged with armed robber. A third man, Raymond Jones, 20, from Bethnal Green, was additionally charged with actual bodily harm. Mr. Brooks accidentally fired his illegally shortened shotgun whilst attempting to avoid arrest, shooting woman police constable Sally Evans in the leg. She was taken to hospital, where her condition is said to be satisfactory. All three men are expected to appear before magistrates in the morning.

Barnabus removed his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. The strabismus with which he had been born meant that his eyes tired quickly, particularly when reading. But it was this very affliction which allowed him, somehow, to see into people.

He had stopped questioning his ability many years ago. The closest he’d got to an explanation was in the understanding that, in animals, the eyes were positioned at the front of the head to afford deeper perspective and distance judgement. His conclusions were that the non-alignment of his eyes in some way gave him the ability—and occasionally the curse—of being able to see things normally hidden. He had no idea whether that was anywhere near the mark. Many times, he had wished not to be blighted with such a talent. He had seen things in people he could not, even in his most evil and lurid nightmares, have dreamed could exist in the depths of the human soul. But now and again, he found he could help.

Carl Preston and Charlene Gregory would make a fine couple. And Carla, when she came along in about seven months, would have her mother’s beauty and her father’s humour. As for Raymond Jones...well, he had tried. He couldn’t have done any more. Maybe one day, after Raymond was realised from prison in about six years, he would happen across him again on the tubes. And maybe he’d get another chance.

Later, the bitter wind tugged at his tweed overcoat as he walked towards Mornington Crescent Underground station.

A story inspired by a curious gent I saw once on the Underground. The strabismus was real. Whether or not it gave him this particular gift, I can't say...

Leave The Rabbit In The Hat

Colours are an entirely human concept. They have no meaning outside of our consciousness. Words like “red,” “purple,” “orange,” and so on relate solely to light of specific wavelengths.

Newton, using two prisms, demonstrated that white light contained within it light of all wavelengths, and that once light of a specific hue had been extracted, a second prism would not—as widely believed—“stain” the light a different colour. The redness was intrinsic, not added.

Our understanding of the nature of light was further enlightened—pun intended—by the famous “double-slit” experiment, beloved of physics students the world over, which demonstrates the quirky, schizophrenic wave-particle nature of light, being both nuggety photons and rippling waves at once.

Science has unravelled the mysteries of the rainbow, which now reduces to a simple line-of-sight phenomenon caused by photons bouncing around in countless billions of water droplets before exiting at various refractive angles in the direction of our retinas.

So, that’s colour cracked then, isn’t it? It’s wavelengths of light, made up of odd wave-particle things.

And yet, somehow in peering into the magician’s hat, we lose the rabbit. Colours touch us in ways more profound, more fundamental, than a mere register of wavelength. We delight in a roseate dawn. Swathes of green bring us peace. Azure skies and aquamarine seas give us a sense of the vastness of the world, and perhaps a yearning to travel.

Colours affect our mood. We even use them to describe our mood: “Feeling a bit blue today…”; “He was green with envy…” We describe cowardice in term of yellowness, and a “purple patch” is what we all hope for. We use them to describe politic inclination. Red universally warns us of danger; green assures us that all is well. Colour words permeate our language and our thoughts. Indeed, we would describe such words as “adding colour to our language”, in a literal and self-referential way.

We are creatures of colour. Colour allows us to describe and understand the world, to differentiate, aggregate and classify, but beyond that it speaks to our innermost essence. Without colour, we would be very different animals indeed.

Away From Earth -- A Story

The first thing you notice, of course, is the silence. The science books are quite clear on the reasons for this. It was one of the first things I remember learning about in our physics class, and I can still quote almost verbatim from that stuffy, dusty old textbook: "Sound is carried in the form of waves in any gas, solid or liquid. Noise creates a compression and rarefaction pattern which moves, through air, at around 730 miles per hour. The speed of propagation depends on several criteria, including the density and temperature of the medium". The speed of sound, we learned, unlike that of light, is not fixed. Acoustics is not an exact science. One thing is absolutely certain from all of this, however: sound does not travel in a vacuum. And at the moment (and for the foreseeable future), I am immersed, if that is the correct term, in the most complete vacuum known to man: I am in space.

It is about two hours since I left the airlock of Space Shuttle Endeavour, exiting into the vast, glaring white cargo bay, the doors open to the Earth like a pair of giant communicant's hands, awaiting the precious body and blood of Christ. On NASA mission STS-124, our main task is to put into orbit the second of the next generation of Space Telescopes, this one named, wonderfully so in my opinion, "Sagan"; after Carl Sagan, of course, who was always a hero of mine. It was largely Carl who inspired me to pursue my dream of becoming an astronaut in the first place; a career path which is difficult enough to follow in the USA, but in Britain was and still is considered downright foolhardy. Nevertheless, here I am, twenty years after setting my heart and mind on the goal, orbiting the Earth at a distance of 250 miles, creating for it one more infinitesimal satellite to add to the swiftly growing collection of communications satellites, space stations and debris which now surround our planet like a swarm of wasps.

I am currently passing over Africa or—to put it equally precisely, since Uncle Albert taught us that in space everything is relative—Africa is currently passing beneath me. I can see the lush greens of the west and central regions, transmuting almost imperceptibly into the dull orange-browns of the East. The horn of Africa points down like an upturned wizard's hat, bent at the tip. As I gaze down on the Eastern regions—Ethiopia, Tanzania and Kenya—I am now in direct line of sight with the very place where humanity began. In that small area on the surface of our azure sphere, several million years ago, a group of apes, probably finding their natural arboreal environment dwindling in the changing climate, gradually came to spend less and less time in the trees, and more time in the savannah, slowly changing their diets, from almost purely herbivorous, to omnivorous with a vengeance. For this small group of creatures, life became tougher. Forced to eat virtually anything they could find, they had to become canny and aware, predation being much more of a problem down on the ground than it had in the safety of the forest canopy. Gradually they developed a way of living together, sharing food and baby-sitting, from which developed communication skills and improved dexterity. Over evolutionary time, this small group expanded and became the dominant and most wide-ranging of the old-world apes, and thus began an evolutionary story which is familiar to most. A story which Ends, at least for today, with this small group of their far descendants floating 250 miles above the very spot where it all began, carried aloft on a giant burning fuel tank, then flung into orbit in a glorified glider.

Of course, Africa has now passed away and out of sight, and my perpendicular position with the planet is now the deep cyan of the Indian Ocean, the triangular subcontinent above, the myriad dots of Indonesia, Micronesia and Polynesia directly beneath me, and Australasia further down. It took Sir Francis Drake three years to circumnavigate the Earth—between 1577 and 1580 if my history serves me; we do it once every 45 minutes. It is difficult to say which is the more remarkable achievement.

As I mentioned, the first thing you notice out here is the silence. There is nothing on Earth, absolutely nothing, which prepares you for that. The second aspect to this experience is the isolation, not just of oneself, but of the entire Earth. In all directions other than Earthward, the blackness is more solid, more total and unyielding than anything ever experienced on the surface. Of course it is interspersed with a dizzying miasma of stars, hundreds of thousands visible from here, rather than the paltry two thousand to be seen in the night sky, and each of them burning with the steadiness and intensity of a laser. But the surroundings are predominantly black. The light of the sun, which is just emerging from the limb of the Earth, is not refracted as we have become accustomed to. When we look up into the daytime sky, the bright blue is simply sunlight being broken and spread out by the atmosphere, whereas in space, of course, this does not happen. When the sun becomes visible once more, and I slide my gold visor down the front of my helmet, it will show as an unbearably bright circle, with absolute blackness all around. Stark, white light. And yet it is that very star, its energy lethal in space, which has been the benefactor of all life on Earth. Its warmth coaxed organisms out of the primordial soup of the early Earth, nurtured those organisms, giving them precious energy, and provided the first link in the ever lengthening and complexyfying food chain. It has provided light for us to see our beautiful world, and to represent it in a million artistic depictions. It is not difficult to understand why all of the first human civilisations revered and deified the Sun. It was, and still is, the life-bringer.

There is an extraordinary peace in this unprecedented vantage point. A peace, and almost unbearable sorrow when looking down upon this most wonderful and wondrous jewel beneath me. To look at this planet, and then juxtapose the vision of awe with the knowledge of what we have done, and continue to do, to it. We have daily, for the last three hundred years, whether innocently or maliciously, worked towards the destruction of our world. Pollution and noxious emissions, beginning with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, and continuing even today—in our full knowledge of their consequences and despite the finely crafted rhetoric of politicians around the globe—threaten to choke and bake not only mankind but almost all other living organisms. We continue to destroy the equatorial rain forests at a rate that no bush fire, no pernicious disease, not even an encroaching ice-age could match. We are destroying the lungs of the planet, in the same way that billions of us still destroy our own lungs through smoking. Global emphysema, affects not only smokers, but every one of us.

I have to blink away a tear, and do my best not to let it be followed by others, since I cannot reach to wipe them away. And I need to be able to keep my vision clear for a while yet. My oxygen meter tells me I have about three hours’ worth remaining, and I intend to breathe every second of it.

I don't really know what happened. Somehow, my safety tether broke. As I began to ease away from the maternal bay doors of the shuttle, I could see the clasp still secured on the rail, floating dreamily as the momentum of the break was imparted into it. That clasp would, unchecked, move in the same way almost forever, with no friction to slow it. The realisation that I was now unconnected with any part of humanity, that my umbilical had become severed and I had been, effectively, born into the wider Universe, was, of course, initially petrifying. To see the serene white bird easing away from me, knowing that any kind of movement on my part would be totally ineffectual, was, for a while, so frightening and panic-inducing that my normally rational mind gave way completely to hysteria. I could vaguely hear voices in my headset, I think Charlie was telling me that they would manoeuvre the Shuttle using the Vernier jets and come and pick me up, but that might have been just my imagination. That is the proper procedure in such an emergency, but as yet there is no sign of it happening. Occasionally I catch a brief glimpse of Endeavour, just when the sun catches it. It is now a mere pinprick amongst a million others.

Yes, those first minutes were terrifying, mind-numbing. But gradually, as I have watched the Earth revolving beneath me on its invisible axis, my mind has reached an almost Zen-like sanguinity. If Endeavour reaches me and I am rescued, I would, of course, be overwhelmingly relieved. The thought of never seeing my family, never seeing anyone, again, is one I have pushed to the back of my mind. But if these are to be my final three hours in this world, then I cannot think of a better way of spending them. And so I will float around the Earth, as it floats beneath me, and pray to God, the sun, or whichever other Supreme Deity happens to be watching and listening to me at this moment, that they will in some way give my fellow humans the wisdom which they lack, and which I have briefly glimpsed, to finally understand that Earth is the most precious, important place in the Universe for mankind and for every other living creature upon it. It is, so far, the only life-bearing body we know of, and may even be the only one in the entire Universe. If everyone on it could spend just a few minutes orbiting in its gravitational thrall as I am now, maybe they would understand. Since that will not happen, I can only pray that this revelation comes to them in some other way. If this does not happen, then my last three hours in the Universe may bear witness to the last era of humankind. And now my vision has gone completely, and the tears will not be wiped away.

Are You Sitting Comfortably? -- A Story

Gordon Stafford drained his third can of the evening, crushed it with sausage fingers and dropped it by the side of his chair, where it clanked against the other two. The last few drops of lager spilled out, adding to the permanent dark patch where countless other such spillages had stained the carpet. On the other side of the chair was a matching bare patch where several discarded dog-ends had scorched the fibres before he put them out properly; usually by pouring lager on them, because he couldn’t be bothered to get out of the chair.

Gordon farted into the chair cushion and cracked open another can. He wondered vaguely if the man who invented the six-pack had been a piss-head like himself. It seemed such a stroke of genius to pack cans in batches of six: four just wasn’t enough for an evening; eight was better but maybe just a little over the top for a normal night. No, six was the number: start drinking around eight o’clock, make each one last half-an-hour or so and you take your last sup around eleven. Perfect. If he bothered to go to bed any more, it would be just about the time he’d have got up and stumbled to the bedroom. As it was, eleven o’clock was about the time he fell asleep in the chair.

Halfway through the six-pack, he generally found, was the Golden Moment. It was exactly where he was now, and it was a magical point of perfect equilibrium, poised midway between sobriety and oblivion, where thought was still possible but slowed by the alcohol, and filtered so that negative thoughts seemed to lose their potency. After three cans of Special Brew, everything was fine. Three cans later the filter turned from translucent to opaque and precious few thoughts got through. At this moment, as he took a first sip from can number four, things were just about as right with his world as they could ever be. For these few precious minutes at nine-thirty every night, Gordon could almost believe he was happy.

He picked up the satellite remote control and switched channels. He subscribed to the total package. He was what could be described—with an unpleasant irony—as a ‘heavy user’. He reckoned he generally put in a twelve- to fourteen-hour TV shift every day. The Big Brother house appeared on the screen, the nine remaining housemates engaged in some inane challenge that would bring them a crate of beer if they won. Gordon took a long pull on the Special Brew and belched loudly. There was a nice-looking Asian girl in the house this season, and he was enjoying keeping an eye on her. He hoped she wasn’t voted off early. Mainly for her benefit, he’d been waking up in the middle of the night and putting in a couple of hours watching the digital-only channel that generally showed the housemates sleeping, but occasionally something a bit more “interesting.” It was many years since Gordon had had any kind of sex life, and even then it was a pretty lacklustre affair. Occasionally while watching the Asian girl he felt the familiar stirrings, but any tumescence was short-lived and whatever discharge there was happened without force or manual intervention. It was many months since he’d been able to reach round with his hand to assist. Or been aroused enough to want to.

Some hours later, he woke from a rough sleep. He was aware that he’d been snoring harshly, as he always did.  The neighbours had complained, but what the hell did they expect him to do? They’d been round a couple of times: the first, very apologetic and rather embarrassed; the second, less apologetic and more annoyed. The third time they came, he didn’t even bother going to the door. Now they just thumped on the wall, sometimes loud enough to wake him.

He had the familiar sour taste in his mouth and reached over the chair arm to pick up the last of the six cans he’d drunk earlier. There was a mouthful left in the bottom and he swigged it, washing it around his mouth before swallowing.  He felt peckish and wondered if there was any food left on the low table by the chair. He tried to reach across with his left arm but discovered that he couldn’t lift it. For a moment he had the terrifying idea that he’d suffered a stroke while he slept and was now paralysed on his left side. Maybe his brain was sending signals that weren’t reaching their target. But that thought quickly left his head because he knew he could feel his arm, could feel the pressure of its contact with the chair. And now he realized that when he really strained, there was a slight movement, before it met some kind of resistance. In the meagre TV light, he tried to see what was stopping his arm from rising. It looked—it couldn’t be, though, could it?—It looked as though somehow his arm had slipped under the fabric of the chair. He tried to pull it free but it seemed stuck fast, maybe caught on the tough fibres. He strained to reach across with his right hand, but couldn’t quite make it. He was breathing hard with the effort already, and eventually gave up, with a grunted “fuck it.” The empty can dropped onto the carpet, and he fell asleep again.

Pale light from a steel sky pushed weakly through the curtains. At ten past nine, it finally woke Gordon. A rancid fart escaped him and he felt his bladder straining for relief. He prepared himself to stand up, getting his feet into the right position to support his bulk. When he moved—or rather, tried to move—his arms, he couldn’t. He suddenly remembered the strange experience earlier, when he’d been unable to move his left arm. It seemed like a dream, but this certainly was not. Looking down at his left arm, he could see that just below the elbow it disappeared into the fabric.  Turning to his right, he now saw that his right arm too was embedded somehow in the chair arm.

Now he began to panic. This couldn’t be real. The chair wasn’t old, there were no tears or worn areas in the covering, despite the fact that he generally sat in it for twenty hours a day. How could his arms have slipped inside? He wrenched first at one, then the other. They barely moved. He could still feel his fingers, still feel the sponge padding beneath them. There didn’t seem to be any one particular place where his arms were catching, they simple felt bound to the chair at all points. As the morning light grew steadily brighter, he was able to more clearly see his situation: both arms disappeared within the chair at the elbows. He could make out no splits in the fabric into which they had slipped; his forearms just simply weren’t there. No matter how much he pulled and twisted, there was nothing he could do. His bladder ached and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer.

He called out, noticing without caring the shake in his voice; he was scared, and at this stage he couldn’t care less who knew it. He shouted until his throat was dry and raw. No one came. He knew his neighbours worked. Maybe they had already left. Or maybe they were so sick of his thunderous snoring every night they were ignoring him. Two hours later, his bladder finally let go and he pissed himself.

It was well into the afternoon and Gordon realized with amazement that he must have fallen asleep. There was a moment of utter relief when he realized he’d been dreaming about being stuck in the chair, and then a heart-sinking thud as he tried to move his arms and felt them utterly pinned, as they had been before. His mouth was desert-dry, his throat was burning, and the room smelled of stale urine.

He attacked his bonds with renewed urgency, calling all the time with ever-decreasing volume. Then he realized something had changed. His arms were no less constricted, but now the bottom half of his body seemed less manoeuvrable than it should be. He tried to raise his left leg and found that he couldn’t. His right leg was equally immovable. There was no way of leaning forward enough to look down at his feet, but somehow he knew that if he could, he would see them wrapped within the pelmet at the base of the chair.  And now he knew that his arms hadn’t just slipped under the chair covering through tears that had opened up while he slept. Though half of him knew it was totally crazy, and most of the other half wondered if he were either dreaming or had actually suffered some kind of mental damage—maybe a stroke or an aneurism or one of the other things that could go wrong in there—the small part of him that was left knew with utter certainty that the chair was eating him.

The consumption of Gordon Stafford took another day. Thankfully for most of it he was asleep, and towards the end unconscious. It didn’t seem to happen while he was awake, in fact. But always when he came to wakefulness, a little more of him had disappeared. In his final few hours, his only thought was to wish he could at least have a drink of water: a long, gut-stretching drink of fresh, ice-cold water. It was all he wanted. His struggles had long since stopped. His throat was now a ragged tunnel from which he could produce nothing more than a hoarse, painful whisper. He knew there was no way out now. Only his head and neck were free of the chair, and he was sure that the next time he lost consciousness would probably be the last time. Oddly, he was okay with that. It was a bizarre way to go, and he wished it could have been otherwise and otherwhen, but everyone had to go sometime, right? If only he wasn’t so damned thirsty. And then he felt the dry fabric easing over his chin, could smell and taste the dust in it, and he knew that soon the thirst would go away.

“When was the last time you saw him, Mrs. Robertson?” The constable was young, with a pale face and a smattering of freckles. His uniform didn’t quite fit. Joyce Robertson guessed he’d not been in the force more than a year. “I’m not sure I can say,” she replied, realizing that although she had called the police about her next door neighbour, she couldn’t actually be certain about when she’d last seen him, or even been aware of him. Gordon Stafford wasn’t exactly a gregarious individual. Now she thought about it, she wasn’t sure she’d seen him in the last two or three months. But of one thing she could be sure: “I haven’t heard him snore for over a week, now.” She explained how the man’s deafening snoring regularly kept them awake at night, how she and Mr. Robertson had mentioned it to him several times, and even resorted to banging on the wall some nights. “But we haven’t done that since...well, it must be nine or ten days at least.”

The constable nodded, trying to look thoughtful when she was sure she knew exactly what was going through his mind. After knocking on Mr. Stafford’s door and calling through the letterbox, all with no response, he asked her to stand away from the door, took a couple of steps back and ran forward, barging it with his shoulder. The wood around the Yale lock split violently and splinters flew everywhere. The door slammed back against the interior wall. They both steeled themselves for the expected stench of a long-dead body. But apart from the vague odours of stale beer, stale urine and body odour, there was nothing. They walked along the short hall and turned into the living room. It was empty. They checked out the back kitchen, then climbed the stairs and went through the whole upper floor. Finding no-one, they descended the stairs.

Joyce Robertson was relieved, albeit puzzled. She didn’t know Gordon Stafford particularly well, but in the seven years they had been neighbours, she couldn’t recall a single occasion when she’d been aware of his absence. Neither had she ever known him to entertain visitors. She knew that in the last six months he had barely left the house, even to visit the shops. In fact the only callers she’d ever seen had been the postman and the man delivering his groceries each week. She glanced around: there were no signs that he had gone away, and yet he clearly wasn’t around. Baffled, she followed the young constable out of the house, and returned home. Rather uncharitably, she began feeling a certain hope that the snoring was now a thing of the past.

“The bed’s no good, and the dining table and chairs are scrap, but we can take the rest.” John Andrews, manager of the local charity shop, was quite sure he’d manage to sell most of the furniture in the house. Some of it wasn’t really fit to sell on, and most of it was a bit dated, but there were a few nice items, and since it was all free, he couldn’t really lose. The armchair in particular looked in very good condition. It would need a clean—he could detect the body smells emanating from it—but other than that it didn’t appear to have been much used.

The two men spent an hour loading up the van with everything that he’d decided to take, then he followed them back to the shop, where it was unloaded. Several days later, it was all for sale in the shop. The armchair, the best piece of the lot, was sold within a week.

The two delivery men carried the armchair into the cramped, cluttered sitting room, according to Miss Holloway’s instructions. She was a short lady, made shorter still with age, but held onto the last of her independence with tenacity. “Over here please, by the fire. So that I can see the T.V. and reach the radio on the sideboard. That’s fine.” She looked admiringly at the chair, which was still in very good condition and looked so inviting. “Lovely. I think I’m going to be spending a lot of time in this chair.”

Hello, Miss Holloway. Come to join us, have you? My name’s Gordon Stafford. Don’t worry, there are lots of us in here. You’ll soon make plenty of friends...