Stargazing for Beginners Read online

  ‘Don’t apologise. Your speech just proved, once and for all, that Biscuit Club is not a waste of time.’ He passes me the box of broken biscuits. ‘Here. You deserve these. Go and celebrate with Annie.’

  I push through the crowd to the back of the hall, and find Annie sitting next to Elsa’s empty pushchair.

  She smiles up at me. ‘You just made me utterly happy,’ she says. ‘But for the record, it’s you, Jackson and Rose who are in my Earth crew.’

  ‘I know that,’ I say. I open the box and take a handful of broken biscuits. Suddenly I’m starving. ‘Biscuit bits?’

  She peers into the box. ‘An entire corner of a Bourbon cream? Yes please!’

  ‘So I have a question,’ I say. ‘What have you done with my sister?’

  ‘I gave her to a small, sunburnt hippy. I assume she was your mum.’

  ‘Sounds about right,’ I say. ‘Did she have Poyekhali! tattooed on one shoulder and a badly drawn Dumbo on the other?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ Annie goes back to rummaging around in the box. ‘So the big news is your grandad’s fine. He’s sprained his ankle but he’s back home and being cared for by Rose, Jackson and Ed.’ She looks at me. ‘Bit weird?’

  I try to imagine the three of them squeezed into Grandad’s house. ‘Just a bit …’

  ‘Oh, and your mum is waiting for you outside.’

  ‘Right.’

  Annie catches the look on my face. ‘I gave her a piece of my mind,’ she says. ‘Told her she was selfish and irresponsible and didn’t deserve an A-grade daughter like you.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Course I didn’t! To be honest, she was kind of quiet. Your big speech almost certainly made her cry, plus she has just survived an earthquake.’

  ‘I know.’ I say, but I still don’t move.

  ‘Well, go on!’ She gives me a shove. ‘You might as well get it over with. There’s a reception in the drama room so I’m going to go and eat crisps and talk to geeks.’

  ‘That sounds good,’ I say wistfully.

  ‘Go!’

  I walk out of school and blink in the sunshine. It’s quiet out here so it’s easy to spot Mum sitting at the edge of the field. Elsa’s on her lap and Mum’s holding both of her hands and talking to her. Annie’s right, she does look shaky. Even though she’s smiling, her eyes are tired and somehow she looks pale under her sunburn.

  I walk over to them. ‘Hey,’ I say.

  ‘Meg!’ Mum jumps to her feet and pulls me to her in a fierce hug. She smells sweaty and of suntan lotion, but I can just get a trace of sandalwood incense. ‘Sorry,’ she says, letting me go. She stares down at her dusty clothes. ‘I know I’m a mess. I came straight from the airport.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say, and then we stand there, Mum holding my arm and Elsa wriggling between us.

  Mum stares at me. At least her nose stud is still sparkling. ‘I didn’t know a lot of those things you said, Meg … or maybe I did, you know, deep down.’ She doesn’t take her eyes off me and I start to feel hot. Part of me wants to run away, but I force myself to stay exactly where I am. ‘The earthquake was bad,’ she says. ‘Not when it happened – I was so far away I only felt tremors – but how I felt afterwards. It shook me up inside.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re OK,’ I say, making myself look at her. ‘I saw all the pictures on the news. It was terrible. You had to help.’

  She nods, but she still looks uncertain. ‘I went to this temporary shelter and gave out food. One day, I got talking to this boy. He was all on his own, trying to look after his brother who was ill. When he told me he was fifteen, I felt so strongly that this was wrong: he should have been playing football with his friends, not worrying about how he was going to get medicine for his brother.’ She looks at me. ‘Then I realised he was the same age as you, Meg.’ She holds on tight to my arm. ‘I should never have left you.’

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘you shouldn’t. Not the way you did.’

  ‘I thought about it for hours when I was on the plane. Even if you had gone to Grandad’s, it wouldn’t have made what I did OK.’ A tear runs down her cheek, but I still can’t bring myself to comfort her. Elsa puts her arms round my legs and holds on to me. After a moment, Mum says, ‘Are you angry with me, Meg?’

  ‘I was,’ I manage to say.

  She stares down at the ground and I have this weird feeling that she’s the child and I’m telling her off. ‘I guess I just told myself that Grandad would be looking after you …’

  ‘He tried to,’ I admit, ‘and we could have gone there, but I wanted to be at home so much.’ I laugh and shake my head. ‘I think I wanted to prove that I could do it on my own, teach you a lesson or something.’

  She looks up at me. ‘But I thought you both loved being with Grandad?’

  ‘We do,’ I say. ‘But we want to be with you more.’

  ‘Really?’ I nod and she laughs. ‘Sometimes I don’t think you like me very much … Or need me. We’re so different.’

  ‘I know.’

  We look at each other and even though we’re standing together, and Mum’s hand is on my arm, I’m still holding back from her. ‘I’ll change,’ she says. ‘I’ll stop the campaigning and the volunteering –’

  ‘Mum,’ I interrupt, ‘don’t change. Stay the same, just … stay here.’

  Sometimes the smallest, simplest things are the hardest to do. I step closer to her and put my arms around her, then I rest my head against her, just like I did when I was little. The sun shines on us and I feel safe inside. Mum’s probably always going to drive me mad, and I’m never going to be the daughter she imagined having … But that’s OK. I only have to look at the stars shining in the night sky to know that beautiful things can come from chaos.

  Honestly, it’s not a great hug – Elsa is stuck between us and the beads in Mum’s hair are squished into my face – but it’s definitely one small step for Meg and Mum.

  Elsa’s muffled screams make us step apart. ‘I guess we should go and see Grandad,’ says Mum. She picks Elsa up and goes to put her in the pushchair, but Elsa wriggles and says, ‘Beb, Beb!’, reaching towards me.

  ‘I’ll carry her,’ I say, and I pick her up. Mum grabs her rucksack, then the three of us walk out of school.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  When we get round to Grandad’s, I leave Mum in the hall, sorting out the pushchair, and follow the noise coming from the front room.

  A surreal sight meets my eyes.

  Grandad’s lying on the sofa, a pile of pillows propping him up, Nina Simone is blaring out of the hi-fi, Jackson’s simultaneously dancing and fiddling around with the home brewery system, and Ed is bandaging Grandad’s foot.

  Ed King is bandaging Grandad’s foot!

  ‘Meg!’ Grandad cries when he sees me at the door. ‘I was just telling the boys all about fermentation … Tell me how it went!’

  He looks at me eagerly, but I can’t speak. I’m still frozen with horror at the sight of Ed winding a bandage round and round Grandad’s gnarly foot.

  ‘Did you blow them away?’ he adds.

  ‘Ed, you don’t have to do that,’ I manage to say.

  ‘I’ve finished now,’ he says, looking up. ‘I got my first-aid badge when I was a scout. It’s good to finally use my skills. Rose was going to do it, but she disappeared.’

  ‘Well, OK, just … wash your hands.’

  Jackson turns up the music and I look around the room, trying to take everything in. ‘Where is Rose?’ I say.

  ‘With the hamsters,’ says Grandad.

  Of course, I think. … And then lots of things happen at once and Grandad’s tiny living room suddenly gets very crowded. Mum appears with Elsa, making Grandad leap to his feet in delight – and then crash back down on the sofa, I discover Jackson necking Grandad’s Badger Foot ale, Rose creeps in with a pregnant hamster, Pongo barks and Elsa starts crying.

  ‘This stuff is lush,’ says Jackson, sipping at his mug of ale. ‘You’re right.
It does taste of biscuit and burnt raisins!’

  ‘I’ve got a keg of Diabolo stored under the stairs,’ says Grandad. ‘Why don’t you go and find it, Jackson? It’s a bit strong, but this is a celebration: Alice’s home!’

  ‘No,’ I say, shaking my head at Jackson, but he darts out into the hallway anyway.

  Mum is down on the floor whipping Pongo into a frenzy, saying, ‘Who’s missed me? Who’s missed me?’

  Ed comes over and joins me at the door.

  ‘So,’ I say, surveying the scene, ‘you’ve met my family.’

  He nods. ‘But I haven’t met the chickens.’

  There is so much I need to say to Ed, but I don’t know where to start. Then Ed does one of his half-smiles and I suddenly realise that it’s not an arrogant smile. It’s a shy smile, and I wonder why it’s taken me so long to realise this.

  ‘Ed,’ I say, ‘would you like me to show you the chickens?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, nodding his head.

  I take him out into Grandad’s wild garden and we sit on the bench under the holly tree. Chickens peck round our feet and the sun finds its way through the canopy of leaves.

  We sit like this for a while, with me swinging my legs and Ed telling me about their rescue mission. He’s just describing how they had to drag Grandad out of the hole then wheel him down the hill on his bike when I interrupt him. I can’t wait another second.

  ‘Thank you –’ the words burst out of me ‘– for giving up your place like that … It was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.’

  He looks at me and smiles. ‘That’s all right.’

  I’m not sure what to say next, so to cover my embarrassment I pick up a chicken, but she just flies out of my hand with a burst of clucking. ‘Can you do your speech another time?’

  ‘Nope,’ he says. ‘I met Ms Edgecombe outside the hall and she made it very clear that it was now or never.’ He laughs. ‘I don’t think my mum’s going to be too happy.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘What a disaster. Will you still be able to go?’

  ‘Go where?’ he says, like he’s forgotten why we were even entering the competition.

  ‘To Houston on the NASA trip. Your mum and dad could pay for you, couldn’t they?’

  He laughs. ‘Meg, do you know how much the trip costs?’

  ‘But I thought …’ I trail off. What did I think? That Ed’s family had so much money he was doing the competition for fun, or just to try to beat me?

  ‘When I told Mum about the trip, she said if I wanted to go, I’d better win the competition.’

  ‘So you just gave up your chance of going to Houston …’

  ‘… For you.’ He looks right at me as he says this.

  ‘But, Ed, I might not win!’

  He shrugs. ‘I don’t care. You deserved the chance more than I did. I’ve watched you working towards this for years, plus I’ve seen your bedroom.’

  ‘Oh … that.’ We both fall quiet and look across Grandad’s messy garden. ‘It is pretty spacey,’ I say, and we laugh.

  ‘Oh, there was one other reason why I did it.’

  Something about the way Ed says this makes me look down at the ground. Our hands are close together. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I did it because I like you.’

  And I know he means like like, because as he says this, he takes my hand in his, and there is no way this is an accidental touching of fingers. This is a total hold: palm to palm, fingers wrapped around fingers, and it feels like all the billions of atoms in our hands are bonding and joining. I look up at Ed. ‘I like you too,’ I say.

  ‘You do?’ He sounds slightly amazed.

  ‘Yes … I do.’

  Then he says in a rush, ‘Good, because I want to ask you out next Saturday.’

  Down at my feet, a chicken scratches at the soil and a warm breeze blows my hair. ‘The night of the dance?’

  He nods. ‘I know you said you’d never go out with me, even if every other person on the planet had been fried by a meteor –’

  ‘Asteroid,’ I correct him, then I carry on nervously, ‘a meteor is a much smaller rocky particle that vaporises when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere –’

  ‘Right,’ he squeezes my hand, ‘so I know you said you would never go out with me even if every other person had been fried by an asteroid, but have your feelings changed, Meg?’

  I look up at him. Even though we’re sitting so close together and I know what he did for me this afternoon, I can’t help remembering the gleeful look on Bella’s face when she announced that Ed wanted to ask me to the dance. ‘You’re not joking this time?’

  ‘Meg, I was never joking! That lunchtime on the science trip I was planning on asking you out – Bella had even made me rehearse it because she knew how nervous I was – but you seemed so angry with me about the whole Mega Knickers thing that I couldn’t go through with it.’ He laughs. ‘Asking someone out is really difficult. It’s probably more difficult than understanding relativity.’

  ‘Relativity isn’t that difficult to understand,’ I say. ‘You just have to remember that the laws of physics don’t change and –’

  ‘Meg!’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Next Saturday. Date with me. Yes or no?’

  ‘Yes!’ I say, and I nod as well so he knows I really mean it and to convince myself that this is actually happening, that I, Meg Clark, am about to boldly go where I have never gone before: on a date.

  Actually, scrap the ‘boldly’ …

  But I’m definitely going on a date … and I might be going to Houston. I can’t quite bring myself to look at Ed right now, but I want to show him how happy I feel so I go with squeezing his hand back.

  ‘Oi!’ A shout from the back door makes us look up. Annie is standing there with Rose. ‘Are you two holding hands?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Ed, holding our linked hands up in the air and gripping tight so I can’t let go. ‘Yes, we are!’

  FIFTY-SIX

  And then the party moves to the garden, because that’s what it’s become: a party.

  Mum gets fish and chips for everyone and we put Grandad on a deckchair in the sun. A combination of Diabolo, strong painkillers and the chips makes him fall asleep, and then Mum decides she should go home and have a shower.

  Elsa’s loving having so many people give her attention and she’s walking around handing out presents like stones and screwed-up flowers. ‘It seems a shame to take her with me,’ Mum says, watching as Rose pulls Elsa on to her lap.

  ‘I’ll bring her home later,’ I say.

  Mum’s tired face brightens. ‘Really?’

  ‘I might take her for a walk first,’ I say. For the past hour, Mum’s done everything for Elsa – fed her chips, picked her up when she’s fallen over and cried, changed her nappy. Although it’s been great handing over the responsibility, it’s been strange too. I feel like I want Elsa all to myself again, just for a while.

  When Mum’s gone, the five of us just hang out in the garden, talking over Grandad’s snores and the distant sound of Nina Simone, and even though I could never imagine us doing this in school, right now, in Grandad’s garden, it seems like such a natural thing to do. Annie describes a conversation she had at the reception with a boy called Alistair. ‘He couldn’t stop staring at my crutches, and I thought, maybe he’s from a boys’ school and doesn’t get to talk to girls very often and doesn’t know what to say, but then he went, “Did you know that the memory foam on your crutches was developed by NASA?”, then he walked off!’

  ‘He’s right,’ I say. ‘It was: it was to improve seat cushioning and crash protection.’

  ‘That’s enough from you,’ says Annie. ‘You’ve had your moment.’

  ‘So how did it go?’ asks Rose. In the chaos of Mum being back and getting the fish and chips, we’ve barely talked about the competition.

  ‘Ah …’ I glance at Ed. ‘I kind of scrapped my entire speech and made up a new one on the spo
t.’

  ‘What?’ Ed stares at me. ‘I gave up my chance to do my, frankly, amazing talk on space and the environment, just so you could make something up?’

  ‘You should have heard it, though,’ says Annie. ‘She mentioned all of us.’

  Ed’s eyes narrow. ‘Really … What did you say?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ I say. ‘They’re going to put the speeches online.’

  There’s a ring of the doorbell and Ed jumps up. ‘That’ll be my mum,’ he says. Earlier he arranged for her to come and pick him up.

  ‘No!’ says Annie. ‘You can’t go now; it will ruin the party.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says Ed, ‘but I’ve got to face the music. She’s about to give me hell for dropping out of the competition.’

  He looks at me, and I look at him, and an awkward silence falls across the garden. Annie rolls her eyes. ‘See him to the door, you idiot,’ she says.

  Ed follows me through the house. When we open the door, there’s no one there, but then I see a very ordinary-looking blue car parked at the kerb with Ed’s brother’s cheeky face peeking out of the back. The lady sitting in the front waves at us. She doesn’t look like she’s going to give Ed hell. She looks like she’s going to give him a lovely dinner.

  ‘So …’ says Ed, turning to look at me.

  How do you say goodbye to someone when they’ve just asked you out … and their mum is watching you? ‘So … Bye,’ I say. Bye … bye?!

  He nods. ‘Call me later?’

  As he goes to get in the car, I shout out, ‘Thank you!’, and he does this sort of salute which I love because it is exactly the sort of thing Buzz Aldrin might have done. In fact, the more I think about it, I realise Ed does have the air of a man from the 1960s. I feel a smile spread across my face. Somehow I’ve managed to get myself a date with a boy who looks like a retro astronaut.

  I literally dance back out into the garden and the other three look up at me.

  ‘Yeah, he’s hot,’ Annie says. ‘Congratulations. Now wipe that smile off your face. It’s making me feel queasy.’

  FIFTY-SEVEN