Laura Mauro
There’s a game you play sometimes, when dusk is falling but there’s still daylight enough that your parents haven’t yet called you in for the night. It’s as close as you ever get to playing games in the dark together. Mina’s mother lets her stay out until midnight, and Jordan’s dad doesn’t much care where he is at any given time, but you and the others have to be in by nightfall, and so these are your mischief hours. The almost-dark hours, when the world is on the cusp of change.
All children know that the world is not the same once the sun goes down.
(Your nan says council estates accrue their own mythology. It’s urban folklore, she’d said once; you pass down stories and whisper them among yourselves until they weave themselves into the fabric. Until the concrete absorbs them, and they become real, in a way they never were before. All myths were hearsay once.)
There’s a game you play, but not yet. Not while the sun lingers. There are other games to play first. Ordinary games, everyday games. Knock Down Ginger, or Knock a Door Run; as many names as there are children in the world. And the other game – the special game, the almost-dark game – began its life here too, burrowing larval into your collective imaginations. Bursting from that fertile cocoon one wet, fragile wing at a time, the way night-things do, for ideas like this wither and die in daylight.
But the sun is still high, and this is the time for ordinary mischief.
Jordan has a bag of marbles. You take turns to reach in, pick one out; closed tight in your fists until everyone has taken their turn, and you imagine you can guess the offending marble by touch alone. That it is heavier, or colder, or bigger, or smaller, and so it’s possible to avoid it if you just pay close attention. If you just take care.
Whoever draws the blue marble has to knock on the Spaceman’s door.
* * *
Your friends tell stories, passed down third-hand by older siblings, who know everything; snatches of conversation gleaned from their parents, whose hushed tones betray the unquestionable truth of all they say. Your friends sit together on the grass – beneath the watchful eye of the sun, which keeps you all safe – and you pass these half-stories around, form them into strange shapes. That stairwell in Middleton House that nobody likes to linger in because it’s haunted. The abandoned car that someone supposedly died in, and if you touch it, you’ll die too. The Flea, who came before the Spaceman; who was once the centrepiece of the cruel and tiny theatre you all called a world.
The Flea lived alone on the ground floor of Boucher House. Everyone called her the Flea because – they said, that faceless consensus from whom all the most pernicious rumours emerge – she was small and full of spite, a terrible bloodsucker of a woman. You all believed it, even though nobody had ever actually seen her for more than a few seconds. She was so small that when she answered the door – and she did, every single time – she was visible only as a pale, fragile shape in that shard of unlit hallway; a tremoring hand clutching the security chain as though it was the only thing keeping her from floating away.
(Your nan says the Flea’s husband died in the war, her son in a car accident. She’s all alone in that house, she’d told you once, and you had known this was your nan’s way of scolding you; that guilt was a more potent formula than fear or shame. Barely knows what year it is, let alone who’s knocking on her door day in, day out. When you get to her age, the mind starts to wander, and if there’s nobody around to show it the way home…
She’d taken a long drag of her cigarette. Turned back to the TV.
Her memories are all she has, she’d said, after a moment. And someday soon, they’ll be gone too.)
You’d felt guilty about Knocking Down the Flea after that. You’d tried to reason with your friends, but stories have teeth, and they’d all built the Flea up in their collective mind as this hunched little beast – pale-eyed and withered and cruel – and so you’d gone along with it, tried extra hard to avoid that horrible blue marble.
You’d reasoned, with your eleven-year-old’s trembling sense of morality, that watching people bully the Flea was not the same thing as bullying her yourself.
And then the Flea was dead, and it was too late to change your mind.
* * *
You are wrong about the marble.
Your heart sinks as your small fingers uncurl, revealing blue like a plucked and hateful eye; cursed colour, ugly colour, and the others cheer at the sight of their green marbles as though they’ve been offered a stay of execution.
Unlucky, Jordan says, in a tone that suggests genuine contrition.
Mina smiles, gap-toothed and excitable. You have to Knock, she says, as though you don’t know the rules; as though this isn’t the twentieth, fiftieth, hundredth time you’ve made this stupid wager. You have to Knock Down the Spaceman.
You have a choice, still. The marble’s judgement is unequivocal. You cannot beg its forgiveness, or request a retrial, and the other kids would refuse, in any case, to relinquish the arbitrary safety afforded to them by those milky green spheres. But you can walk away. You wouldn’t be the first; Grant always sulks when it’s his turn, claims the game is f-in’ rigged, and that’s why nobody really likes him. You could walk away, but your heart lurches at the thought of their whispered disapproval. The looks they’d cast upon your departing shoulders. Disgust at your cowardice, and worse, your refusal to accept the marble’s judgement, because rules are rules, and hadn’t you all written them together?
The game sits ill with you. It always has. But the desire to be liked is all-powerful, and you are young, still. Your world is so small.
You place the marble in your pocket. Square your shoulders. All right, you say, and hope that the jut of your chin is enough to disguise the quiver in your voice, your frail confidence, which has always been your weakness. Turning to face the Spaceman’s door, a compass attuned to the strange magnetism, the oddity of him, like a force of nature. All right, you say again, louder this time. I’ll do it. Just watch me.
* * *
Nobody has ever seen the Spaceman.
Nobody is even sure he really exists. His flat is always dark, always silent. Nobody enters or leaves. But sometimes, just after dark, there is movement inside; papery curtains illuminated the sick yellow of streetlight, fluttering in the breeze, though the windows are shut. The hint of a shadow, as though seen in a dream.
You all call him the Spaceman because someone – Mina’s brother, perhaps, or Danny’s mum’s physical therapist, or the old postman, who died in spring and was replaced like a missing part – once said that he’d been part of the British space programme back in the Sixties. That he’d been sent into orbit, had been pencilled in to go to the moon, but the Americans had got there first, and he’d never recovered from the disappointment.
You hadn’t known there was a British space programme. You know the Russians sent people into space; they sent dogs too, though you know how that ended, and you don’t like to think about it too hard, because it makes you feel strange and hollow inside, like something has been scooped out of you, the way they scoop out the flesh of watermelons.
(You asked your nan once why he couldn’t just get over it, and she thought about it for a long moment. Placed her pencil beside her crossword puzzle, and you thought she was about to scold you; that she’d read in your question the ill intent you yourself had not yet shaped into being.
There’s nothing harder to let go of than the thing you almost had, she said, soft, and she said nothing more.)
* * *
You approach the Spaceman’s door.
From the outside, his house is unremarkable. Its state of disrepair is equalled by so many other houses on the estate that it barely registers as abnormal. Curtains the colour of old teeth, leprous window frames shedding paint in fat flakes. There is no doorbell, no knocker. Only a letterbox, rust-rimmed and unfriendly, like the mouth of something feral.
You glance over your shoulder, assessing the danger. A passer-by who catches you in the act might grass you up, and your nan would not be angry – she has never been angry, not once in all your twelve years – but she would fix you with her disappointed gaze, and the lines around her eyes would deepen, and her shattered expectations would fall around you like the ashes of something that had once been beautiful.
The estate is empty. Your friends are there, somewhere. Observing you from an unseen vantage point, peeking from behind cars, from around corners, because the act must be observed if the rite is to be fulfilled. You fill your lungs with air. He won’t answer, you tell yourself; it hardly counts as disturbing him at all. He probably doesn’t even hear it. Is there room for anything in his life other than the distant stars, which were denied him?
You lift the letterbox, and the door gives way.
You freeze. It isn’t supposed to go like this. The tinny slap of letterbox – one, two, three, always the magic number – and then the breathless panic of retreat, the sound of plimsolls echoing on concrete, and all your friends squealing in vicious delight as they await the arrival of the Spaceman, who never comes. Whose filmy shadow is the only assurance that he exists at all.
The door creaks open half an inch. You jump back as if stung, instinctive. Your nerves fizz with adrenaline, your muscles poised to run. But there is nobody behind the door. You’d nudged it with your own scant weight, and the silent flat beyond had bid you wordless welcome.
You turn. It’s open, you say, in bemused wonderment, addressing the hidden cabal lurking just out of sight. The door isn’t locked.
And someone’s voice calls out: Catalogue.
There’s a moment of contemplative quiet. Then the cry picks up, like a flock of birds. A murmuration, passing back and forth against the newborn evening, echoing from unseen corners. You feel assailed by it. All around you, singsong, three wicked, dancing syllables: Catalogue. Catalogue. Catalogue.
The almost-dark hours have arrived.
* * *
You don’t remember who invented Catalogue. It is likely of shared genesis, a collaborative mind-child; an idea spun from a word, which birthed itself, grew fat on the nectar of your imaginations.
If Knock Down Ginger is mischief, then Catalogue is malice.
In truth, you have only played Catalogue once or twice since its invention, and never to its conclusion. The objective is simple: enter the victim’s home – an open window, a door left ajar, all methods of ingress are acceptable – and return with a pilfered item. The more esoteric, the better; a spoon might technically fit the requirements, but the spirit of the game demands a more interesting offering. Leon once took a T-shirt from someone’s back garden; Danny swiped a pot plant from an unattended windowsill. But these hardly count. The heart of Catalogue lies in ingress. In invasion.
It’s about going where you are not permitted to be. About observing – in the span of that inheld breath, those featherlight footsteps – what is hidden between the walls of another’s private space. The offering is formal proof, but Catalogue is a test of bravery above all, and not one of you has yet risen to its challenge.
It’s not a real game. The almost-dark games never truly are.
* * *
Catalogue, the other kids sing in unison, and you feel the weight of their expectation heavy on you like the air before a storm. You, the cowardly one, with your troublesome morals passed down by your meddling grandmother, and why don’t you have parents like normal kids do, anyway? Catalogue, Catalogue, like a tribal ritual, a rite of passage. And you realise that if you succeed – if you retrieve some oddity from the Spaceman’s house – you will set a precedent such that they cannot ever accuse you of cowardice again.
In your heart, you understand that it is the worst possible precedent to set. Children escalate. They push boundaries. What happens when the thrill of theft becomes mundane? Where then will you turn in pursuit of excitement?
You push the door inwards. It opens without resistance, sliding back to reveal a strip of darkened corridor. The scent of dust. You call out, tentative: hello? Just loud enough that anyone inside would hear you; quiet enough that your friends, scattered around the periphery, cannot. If the Spaceman comes, you can’t be blamed for failure – the point of the game is not to be seen, after all, and you can hide behind the plausible deniability of the open door, an act of neighbourly goodwill: your door was ajar. I thought you should know.
But nobody answers. And you realise, as you take a step inside, that there is no sound at all. No distant chatter of television through the walls. No creak of disturbed floorboards. No ambient hum of fridge. In fact – another step, your small body engulfed by the unlit corridor – the flat seems to swallow sound, so that even the passing cars and murmuring birds just beyond the walls are completely absent. Your own flat is paper-thin, draughty; it seems sometimes that you can hear every sound on the estate.
The silence unnerves you in a way the darkness does not.
You have never seen a dead body, but you are filled with a slow dread, the certainty that, when you turn the corner into the living room – the mirror image of your own flat, flipped sideways, the strange within the familiar – you will find in there the dried and ancient husk of the Spaceman. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep on the sofa one bright afternoon, and never woken up again. Perhaps he’ll be wrapped in blankets, an Egyptian mummy in cheap cotton. What a lonely death that would be, you think, as you hesitate outside the room; how sad, to die in silence, in darkness. To be discovered months later by a child who shouldn’t even be here. Who would leave with some stolen object and say nothing of the dead man on the couch, because then you’d have to report it, and to report it would be to admit your trespass.
You wonder if the Spaceman has any family.
Inhaling, you turn towards the living room. There are no objects of any kind save for the curtains, long and pale and heavy. There is nothing in this room to Catalogue.
You turn back to the corridor. Beyond this point lie the bedrooms, the bathroom. Private spaces. If the Spaceman is here – dead, or alive, or at some stage in-between – he’ll probably be in one of those rooms. You baulk at the scent of sterile dust, the sheer weight of the place, which seems to increase with each step you take; thick, like moving through liquid. Like amniotic fluid in a chambered womb.
Glancing down the hallway. At home, these walls are covered in pictures. Photographs taken a long time ago: Polaroids bleached sepia by the sun, fuzzy pictures snapped with a throwaway camera, in which you are very small, and your parents are alive, still. The cliffs in Antalya, where your father was born. Jewel-blue sea. Your nan, before she was weathered. Before she was sad.
It might as well be another child in those photos, for all you remember.
The Spaceman’s walls are empty. The floor underfoot is bare board. Each step sends a cloud of grey dust swirling around your ankles. And you realise, as you tiptoe, that the flat is getting colder. Not a gradual cooling, the way the moon leaches all the warmth from the world at night, but sharp, like plunging into a pool of cold water.
From the furthest bedroom, a faint humming sound emerges. You freeze momentarily, afraid that the Spaceman has awoken; readying your body to bolt at the first indication of motion, Catalogue be damned. But as you stand there – back pressed against the bare-plaster wall, breathing bird-rapid, teeth clenched tight – the sound holds steady, low-pitched and unchanging. It isn’t a person, you realise. A person would have to stop for breath.
You think of the way the boiler hums when your nan deigns to switch it on, because heating is expensive, and you only have so much money on the meter. You feel the hum in the floorboards, gently trembling, and the dust rises in response, each mote dancing in the scant light of the half-closed front door. The walls shiver with it. Your feet move in time with a rhythm so indistinct only your body can decipher it; automated, a gentle hypnosis, tilting your head backwards, eyes slipping shut. For a moment, you feel weightless. You feel peace.
By the time you reach the door at the end of the hall, you cannot remember ever taking a single step.
The room sings, a low melody like whalesong, like the winter wind howling mournful at the windows. It sings inside your head, and you put a hand out to steady yourself, press the other to your skull. The wall is reassuringly solid; a patina of loose plaster crumbles beneath your palm. The flat is real. You are real. You can still leave, you tell yourself. Aren’t there worse things in the world than cowardice? Things like ghosts, and curses. Things like haunted corridors and death-cars and the black, vacant mouths of flats gutted by fire. Like lonely old women who have forgotten that they are alive.
You can still leave.
* * *
In your nan’s room there is a box. It’s not a special box, at least not to look at. Plain wood, unvarnished; the logo of some imported rum printed messily on the side. It’s not a special box, but it lives on the top shelf of her wardrobe, where you cannot reach it. You shouldn’t even know about it. But sometimes – in the dark, when you can’t sleep – you walk the corridor like a ghost, your footsteps swallowed by threadbare carpet. You’ve seen her sitting with that box on her lap, staring into it so intently that you wonder if there’s another world contained within.
You don’t remember your parents dying. You don’t remember them living, either. You have the vague recollection that they were once there, that they existed, in some other space, some other time. They must have been important, but you understand this second-hand, the way you understand that the war was terrible, and that your nan was beautiful once.
The photographs prove that they were real. You wouldn’t be sure, otherwise.
The box sits in your nan’s wardrobe like an unuttered promise. Once, when she was out, you dragged a chair in from the kitchen, clambered up so that you could see the box clearly. And you’d expected that box to call to you. You’d expected to feel something. Your history, calling from inside. The secrets of your parentage begging to be understood. But you hadn’t felt anything. Not even when you’d laid your palms atop the lid, and there was no lock to stop you, nobody to tell you no.
Sometimes, a box is only a box.
* * *
The door hums.
You glance left, then right. An empty bedroom. A bare-bones bathroom; sink, toilet and bath rising crooked from the floorboards like teeth in a mildewed mouth. This is not a house anyone lives in, and yet the floor beneath you pulses like blood beneath the skin.
Sometimes, a room is only a room. Isn’t it?
You could leave, but you have to know. The room calls you in a way the box never did. And it isn’t that you’re not afraid – your body is a cut wire, sparking adrenaline, you coward, you fearful little creature – but you can no more turn away from the door than you can undo your trespass. You broke into the Spaceman’s home, and here is your reward. Here is your Catalogue.
The light is waning. It will be dark soon. Perhaps your friends have already left. Perhaps they have grown bored of this game. Perhaps they think you’ve been caught, that the Spaceman is on the phone to the police, have cleared the area so you can’t drag them down with you. You are not the only coward.
You lay your palm flat against the door. Slow heartbeat, like a sleeping animal. Like something enormous, and silent, and alive. You breathe deep. Push the door open. Step inside, into the frozen dark, and feel your body drift weightlessly towards the ceiling.
* * *
Her memories are all she has, your nan had said once – a long time ago, now – and someday soon, they’ll be gone too.
Will you remember any of this when you are old? Will you keep a wooden box full of memories in your wardrobe, fill it with the things you hope never to forget?
You have already forgotten so much.
* * *
The Spaceman looks up as you drift towards him. Curled up, foetal; silver-white spacesuit, the broad glassy dome of his helmet, in which you can only see your own face, your look of wide-eyed surprise. The air is so cold; it seems to crackle in your lungs, exit on a plume of shimmering ice crystals.
You shouldn’t be here, the Spaceman says.
You kick your legs, ineffectual; your body turns a slow circle, and you realise, as you spin, that you are no longer sure which way up the ceiling is, if there is even a ceiling at all. I thought you might be dead, you say, which is only partly a lie.
Dead, the Spaceman repeats. Uncurling limb by limb, the careful stretch of arms which have not moved in a very long time, legs which mourn solid ground. He is tall. Proud-postured, despite his containment. I should like very much to die, I think.
Are you old?
His laughter is muffled by the helmet, but you recognise it all the same. Must I be, he asks, to die?
Maybe. Once, when you were younger, your nan took you to Ireland, where her sisters lived, and one night you’d driven by a lough so black and so still that when you’d stepped out of the car and onto the shore, it seemed that every single star in the sky had found its double in that mirror-smooth water. And as you squint into the infinite distance – helplessly floating, untethered – you wonder if this is how it would feel to drown in that lough.
What is this place? you ask.
I don’t know, the Spaceman says. Solemn, now. He doesn’t sound old, you think. He sounds lost, and sad. I think…I must have brought a little of it back with me. When I came back down to Earth.
Do you miss space?
He turns his head, slow, towards the empty horizon. The black glass of his visor is a single, unblinking eye. It’s the only place I’ve ever belonged, he says. The beauty of it. The silence. Perfect chaos, and perfect order.
You follow his gaze. But there’s nothing there.
Nothing?
You shake your head. It’s empty, you say. Like all the other rooms.
For a long moment, the Spaceman is still. Nothing, he repeats, in grave wonderment. And then he moves. Propels himself into motion, the slow drift of outstretched limbs. A silvery fish in midnight seas, riding the currents until he is there, beside you, taking off his helmet. Fixing you with bleached-blue eyes, so pale they are almost colourless. You marvel at his gaunt skull, his grey pallor. You sense his fragility as he holds out his hands, and the spacesuit hangs from his bones like old skin.
You take the helmet. Despite its size, it too is weightless, smooth and round, marble-glassy in your palms, but warm, like an animal. You feel its pulse the way you did the door, and you understand that this is the centre of it all. This thing that you hold is the reason. It is the answer.
Tell me what you see, he says.
So you do.
* * *
If you don’t eat that quickly, it’ll melt.
You look up. The woman beside you looks so much like your nan that you think it must be her, for a moment, until you realise that she’s at least thirty years too young; red-haired, shielding freckled skin from the sun with a pale green parasol. Rivulets of ice cream run down your knuckles. You lap melted strawberry from your fingers. Squint out at the sea, impossibly turquoise. Jut of pale cliffs at the far end of the beach, scrubby vegetation and honey-coloured rock.
(what’s wrong with this picture?)
You’ve got your dad’s skin, the woman says, with something like envy. You won’t burn in this heat. But we should put some sun cream on, just in case.
I don’t like sun cream, you hear yourself say. You don’t sound like you. You sound like a child. Petulant and small.
Nobody likes sun cream, she says. But if you don’t use it, you’ll look like Judith Chalmers by the time you’re eighteen.
Who’s that?
The woman laughs. Finish your ice cream, she says, gazing back out at the sea. Daddy will be here soon. Don’t you want to go swimming with him?
(no, you think, in some faraway part of you; my dad is dead. He’s been dead for a long time)
You dig your toes into the hot sand. Yeah! you say, in that voice that is not your own, and the woman smiles fondly. The ice cream is sweet and cold. You don’t like strawberry. You can’t remember ever liking strawberry. The sea whispers in the distance, jewel-bright and gleaming, and you don’t remember any of this, you don’t remember, you don’t
* * *
You pull the helmet off.
The Spaceman’s pale eyes meet yours, entreating you to share. You pause, catch your breath; your heart is racing, and you can still hear the sea, still taste strawberry sweet and cloying in the back of your throat.
I saw the sea, you say.
The sea. He nods. And did it make you happy?
It didn’t make me feel anything, you say, which is the truth. As the alien sensations dissipate into the winter dark, you are left only with the vague discomfort of exposure, like too much sun. This dead memory. Voices you were never supposed to hear again.
He frowns. Didn’t it capture something perfect?
Cold glass against your skin, humming quietly. A snowglobe, you think; a moment frozen in time. But it isn’t real, you say. Your own face, staring back at you in black glass. You look nothing like your mother. You never did. It’s just moving pictures. That’s all.
The Spaceman’s frown deepens. He is neither young nor old, you realise; the stasis of the helmet has preserved him at the exact moment of orbit, living the same few hours over and over, but his heart is old. His bones are fragile. He has been dreaming for so long that he exists outside of time, outside of space. This empty room. This nothing-place. The almost-dark.
Here. You hold the helmet out in your hands. I have to go back home now.
He looks at the helmet for a long moment. Take it, you think, with growing impatience. You want to feel solid ground beneath your feet again. You want to breathe air that doesn’t make your lungs ache. But he lifts his head. Blinks, as though seeing the emptiness all around him for the first time.
You came here for something, didn’t you? Drifting away again. Without the imposing bulk of his helmet, he seems very small. Take it.
But don’t you—
It’s all right, he says. Smiling, now; growing distant, though his eyes are so pale, still, so bright. I think it’s time I went home, too.
* * *
When you come back down to earth and find yourself again in that silent corridor, in that empty flat, the memory you’d felt so vividly begins to scatter. You let it go, feel it dissipate, the way dandelion seeds float away on the spring wind. Someday soon, you won’t recall any of it.
The helmet in your arms is heavy, awkward. You realise, as you lower it to the ground, that it is no longer humming. It is a cold, inert object, a functional item that does not belong here, in this flat, on this estate. It is a wooden box on the top shelf.
It isn’t alive. Perhaps it never was.
You leave it there, at the Spaceman’s door. You could Catalogue it. You could be the marvel of your friends – the one who met the Spaceman, the one who was brave – but you sense their approval would be short-lived. Maybe it’s time to stop all these games, you think, as you walk towards the front door. The sliver of waning light peeling in from the scant gap. The sound of cars on the main road, a dog barking somewhere far away. Maybe it’s time to grow up.