The truth is in those two accounts somewhere, but I can’t get to it. I was eight years old when it happened and I’ve thought about it so many times, reimagined it over and over, and now I can’t get to the truth of what happened. I know what happened afterwards, I got the details of that. His mum found him. She noticed the front door was open, thought of Oliver, ran out and found him sat against the house. He tried to get up when he saw his mum and that was when he collapsed. The ambulance must have arrived with its siren off. I didn’t hear it and neither did Mum, but it made sense that it arrived silently; there wouldn’t have been much traffic to clear from Clifton roads that early on a Saturday morning. I wasn’t told when he died. I don’t know if it was in the ambulance, in the hospital, or if he was already dead when I was halfway up Hawthorne Road on my way home. They did tell me that it was internal bleeding. I’d hit him so hard that the damage on the inside was too much for him to survive. That shocked me. In both memories when I hit him it was like riding into a tiny mountain, a little lump of hard rock, and it was me that was sent flying, my steering that was knocked out. Something as solid as that on the outside shouldn’t crumble so easily on the inside. It was a catastrophic design fault. And if there was so much damage on the inside, how come none of it spilled out? How come it all stayed put inside? How can a chunky little two-year-old boy die so easily? So cleanly?
Eight years later I was no nearer an answer. I looked to the ground again but there was still no blood; still no evidence that any of it had ever happened. I noticed somebody watching me through a window from the house next door to Oliver’s and I came to. I realised I didn’t know how long I’d been stood there. I started to walk back up Hawthorne Road, past the kink in the road, up the steep stretch, the house numbers slowly crawling back up through the fifties and sixties. I wasn’t thinking what to do next. I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was getting closer to our old house and when I looked up I saw him leaning on his green wooden gate, watching me as I approached, his thick, heavy hands dangling over the side. As I got closer I realised it was Mr Mole. I couldn’t believe that he was still alive; he’d seemed so old to me all those years ago, but there he was, looking no older by a day than he had back then. I stopped when I reached him. We looked at each other and he said, ‘It’s little Donald Bailey isn’t it? From number seventy-five.’
I looked down at him and he smiled up at me and said,
‘Little!’
The house was the same. Maybe the carpet was different but I couldn’t be sure. I remembered that he decorated a room a year, but he never changed the colours, so nothing ever looked too old, but nothing ever really looked new either.
We were sat in his front room with a cup of tea each.
I looked around. ‘No Scruffy?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘He went not long after you left,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking about getting another one, but I can’t quite take the plunge.’
He blew on his drink.
‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.
‘She’s all right.’
‘Tell her I send her my regards.’
The clock out in the hall chimed, a cloud covered the sun and the room fell dark.
‘Does she know you’re here?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘I didn’t think so.’
He shook his head back at me.
‘I always thought it was a shame,’ he said, ‘that she whisked you away like that. I understood, but it didn’t seem right.’
I looked at the floor. After eight years I was finally with someone who knew all about it, someone who would probably be happy to talk about it, and I couldn’t say a word, wanted to keep it eight years away.
‘Anyway Donald, how old are you now?’ He put his head on one side and closed one eye and did some calculating.
‘Fifteen is it?’
‘Sixteen,’ I said.
‘Sixteen! And how are you? How are things? What brings you back here?’
I didn’t know how to answer. All I could think of was Jake in the quarry and the patch of blood and the scream he let out when he fell. We sat in silence for a minute before he sprang into action.
‘Wait there Donald,’ he said.
He disappeared upstairs and I could hear him rummaging away up there, opening wardrobe doors, shuffling through drawers. A few minutes later he came back into the room holding an old plastic spaceship across the palms of his hands like he was presenting me with a medal, a big grin plastered across his old face. ‘Do you remember this Donald? Do you remember how much you loved it?’
He held it out to me and I took it from him and turned it over in my hands. It was a model of the space shuttle Columbia. Other than my bike it had been my favourite present, I’d taken it everywhere with me, never let it out of my sight.
‘How come it’s here?’ I asked him.
‘The last time your mum dropped you off, not long before you moved away, you brought it with you as usual, but you weren’t in the mood for playing with it and I put it on the sideboard to keep it safe. Your mum turned up suddenly and took you back home and you forgot to take it with you. I kept meaning to drop it off round at your house but the next thing I knew you’d gone and nobody really knew where you’d gone to. I’ve had it here all these years.’
‘Why didn’t you throw it away?’
He shrugged. ‘It didn’t seem right. You loved it so much, I didn’t have the heart. I’d forgotten all about it until a few minutes ago.’
I turned the space shuttle over in my hands. It was the one thing that had shrunk. I remembered it being long and thick and heavy, like it contained the miniature workings of a real spaceship inside. Now it sat in my hands lightly, a cheap-looking toy, dated and faded.
‘Whenever you came round, for about a year, you always used to have that with you. And books about space, do you remember?’
I did remember. I remembered my first vanishings to Neptune. My escape to space. I remembered staring out of my bedroom window at the night sky, knowing that the stars I could see might be dead already, but not quite grasping how that could be, not believing that it was possible. A thought stirred at the back of my mind.
‘I always thought you were going to be an astronaut,’ Mr Mole said and looked at me and smiled. I managed a smile back.
‘So,’ he said. ‘You’ll stay for some tea?’ Before I had time to answer he was already up and walking off, and a minute later I could hear him chopping away. I sat back in the chair, closed my eyes and breathed in the smell of the room. The house was the happiest place I’d ever known and to be here like this felt like I was ruining it.
As I tried to eat something he said, ‘Do you want to ring your mum Donald? Let her know where you are?’ I shook my head, and he smiled and said, ‘That bad is it?’ I tried to smile back but it was impossible. After he’d washed up I was ready to leave, I had an idea where I was going next, but Mr Mole said, ‘The spare room can be ready in minutes Donald.’ As soon as he said it my legs nearly gave way with tiredness and I had to sit down. I went to bed early and slept until lunchtime. Mr Mole insisted I had some food when I finally came downstairs. He left me to it and went out to work in the back garden. When I’d finished eating I went out and helped him for the rest of the afternoon, just like I had done years before. When it got to four I told him I’d better be on my way, I had somewhere I wanted to go. ‘Let your mum know you’re OK Donald. She’ll be worried sick.’ I nodded that I would and Mr Mole walked me to the front gate where we shook hands like men in a film. He closed the gate behind me and resumed his position with his hands dangling over into the street, watching as I walked down Hawthorne Road, back towards the centre of Clifton.
I asked at the library. A bus from Clifton would take me to a village called Hethersby, from there it was a three-mile walk. Most people drive, I was told. The bus took for ever, winding its way through villages, waiting at stops for ten minutes without anybody getting on. The driver turned to me and said, ‘This is it, this is Hethersby’ at one of the stops in one of the villages. As soon as I stepped off the bus I could see it. There was nothing else to look at; it was massive, the only thing on the horizon. A huge white satellite dish supported by crisscrossed scaffolding. An antenna in the middle of it all, pointing to the sky. The Pilchard Telescope, finally. It didn’t look anything like a telescope. I set off walking.
I found my way to the entrance, walked through the car park and followed the signs to the visitor centre. I tried the door but it was locked. A man in a blazer with a walkie-talkie appeared and told me it closed at five, but I could walk to the base of the telescope, he said, walk the path around it. He said that they locked the gates at eight, so I had forty minutes. He pointed out which path to follow and I set off walking again. No one else was around that late so I stood alone, staring up at the telescope. Faded boards with facts about Thomas Pilchard and the telescope were spread out along the route. I stopped at each one, but couldn’t take any of the information in, the words refused to add up to anything that made any sense. I stared at the telescope again but could only see Jake lying in the quarry. My legs felt weak and I sat down on a bench. Eventually an announcement crackled out of a speaker somewhere. The site would close in ten minutes, would visitors please make their way to the exit. I looked around and saw a wooden shelter over by a small clutch of trees. I walked into the trees. After a few minutes the man with the walkie-talkie appeared and walked the path around the telescope, whistling. He walked over to the shelter and peered inside. On his way out he picked up a little teddy that had been dropped in the grass. He looked it over and put it in his blazer pocket. He locked the gates behind him. I heard a car start up and drive off.
I moved into the shelter and sat down on the floor and looked over at the telescope. Massive and silent. Miles above the sky ended and space began and planets and stars existed. Somewhere up there Neptune was spinning, like it always had done. Nothing down here making any difference to anything up there. Dusk fell, the sky darkening, slowly at first, and then suddenly, the huge telescope fading impossibly away. I fell asleep easier than I thought I would but slept badly. I dreamt of falling boys, and broken boys. I woke at dawn when the birds started singing. It was worse than the morning I’d found out Oliver Thomas was dead. It was a long time before anyone arrived but eventually the man in the blazer turned up, walked around the path again, and ten minutes later opened the front gate. After half an hour visitors began to arrive. First through the gate was a man holding a little girl’s hand. They approached the blazer man, the man explained something, the girl stood shyly at his side. He ruffled the little girl’s head as he spoke. The blazer man crouched down and pulled the teddy out of his pocket and presented it to the girl. A smile raced over her lips, she took the teddy quickly, pulled it into her chest and wiggled. The men laughed and shook hands, the little girl was made to say thank you and they turned and walked back to the car park, the girl still clutching the teddy closely to her chest. I waited until a few more visitors turned up and left the shelter and walked to the exit. Nobody noticed me leave. I walked out through the gates, across the car park and onto the country road. I was in the middle of nowhere.