Stargazing for Beginners Read online

  ‘Not true,’ I say, smiling with relief. I wait for Grandad to join me at the front, but he just holds up Elsa and shrugs. Suddenly, I don’t want him to come and take over. I want to finish what I’ve started. I look back at the notes then hold up a roll of toilet paper. ‘Who knows how to use this?’ All around me hands shoot up, and children laugh, and that laughter helps me stand a little taller and clear my throat.

  ‘Good,’ I say, ‘because we’re going to use this toilet paper to learn how vast our solar system is, and this should help us understand the immense size of the universe.’ I turn to Grandad. ‘The sun is huge, Grandad Copernicus, but it’s just one of over one billion trillion stars in our universe and not nearly as special as you think.’

  Soon we’ve unravelled the toilet roll and it’s snaking out of the tent and into the courtyard; children are running around with melons, apples and grapes, trying to work out where the ‘planets’ should go. I’m so busy answering their questions and trying to stop them from eating the fruit that I haven’t got time to think about what I’m doing. ‘Everyone go and stand near Earth,’ I say, ‘but don’t tread on it!’

  The children rush towards Earth, a cherry tomato. ‘Jupiter’s the biggest planet in the solar system,’ I say, ‘which is why it’s a watermelon, but we still don’t have a sun. If earth is this big,’ I hold the tomato between my fingers, ‘then what fruit or vegetable could we use for the sun?’

  ‘A pumpkin!’ shouts out a dad, getting a bit too into it.

  ‘Not big enough,’ I say. I can’t quite talk to the adults in the way I can talk to the children, but at least they can hear me now.

  ‘A dinosaur?’ suggests a girl.

  ‘Good guess, but that isn’t a fruit or vegetable …Amazingly, if you took all the fruit in the entire world and mashed it together to make one giant, monster fruit, it still wouldn’t be as big as our sun!’

  Gasps of genuine amazement break out, and not just from the children. I look at Grandad and he grins. This was just what I had hoped would happen. I tear off one piece of toilet paper. ‘Can anyone guess how many kilometres this represents?’

  Answers are shouted back at me: ‘a hundred’, ‘a zillion’, ‘seventy-three!’

  ‘One piece of toilet paper represents ten million kilometres,’ I say. ‘Now, who wants to see an egg sucked into a bottle?’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  ‘Every single object in the universe is made of atoms,’ I say, ‘including you and me.’ I’m up to the last experiment. By my feet, one of the children yawns and another starts nibbling something off the end of her finger. ‘To show how alive atoms are, we’re going to play with balloons.’ I pick up the bin bags stuffed full of balloons and tip them out. The balloons float across the tent and the children jump to their feet and start hitting them into the air.

  ‘We’re going to see how many balloons we can stick to a person’s head using static electricity. I need a volunteer, but I should warn you, it’s going to do bad things to their hair!’

  ‘My brother!’ shouts a voice from the back of the room. ‘Pick my brother!’ Through the balloons and jumping children, I see a boy with messy blond hair stretching his arm high into the air. ‘Please, pick my brother!’ Sitting next to him is another little boy wearing a Minions T-shirt.

  Over by the exit, Maggie taps her watch. I need to hurry up.

  ‘OK. You come up here with your brother. We’re going to have to rub these balloons really hard if we’re going to get them to stick to him.’ I get the other children to sit back down and when I look up, the boy is pulling his brother towards me … only he’s not wearing a Minions T-shirt. His brother is tall and dark, and a gold watch is flashing on his wrist. I’d know that watch anywhere. My stomach drops as I stare at Ed King.

  He stops in front of me and folds his arms. ‘Hello, Meg,’ he says.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ my voice is a whisper.

  He shrugs, looking amused. ‘Learning about the Cool Cosmos.’

  ‘And you’ve been here …?’

  ‘The whole time,’ he says with a smile.

  He saw that boy throw the tomato in my eye … He watched me bounce an egg … He heard me say that the cosmos ‘blew me away on a daily basis’!

  And then my mind charges through what I’m about to do to my volunteer: rub balloons on their hair and body, then see if an electric shock will pass between our fingers.

  With someone who was seven, this would have been funny. But with Ed, it would be … so weird!

  Down by my feet, a boy is fiddling with his balloon. He must somehow undo it, because suddenly there’s a hiss of air and the balloon shoots out of his hands and flies round the tent. It flops on the floor by my feet, looking empty and a bit silly.

  Wow. I know exactly how that balloon feels.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say to Ed, ‘but you can’t be the volunteer.’

  ‘Why not?’ asks his brother.

  Suddenly I see a way out. ‘Because I need someone a bit smaller. Someone like you!’

  ‘No,’ he says, clenching his fists. ‘You said my brother could do it. You promised!’

  ‘I didn’t promise.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, George,’ says Ed, patting his shoulder. ‘If Mega Knickers doesn’t want me to do it, you can take my place.’

  ‘No way. She said you could do it!’ In slow motion, George’s bottom lip sticks out and it starts to tremble.

  ‘Bless,’ says a mum on the front row. ‘Let his brother do it, love.’

  Are his eyes welling up? I glance at the back of the tent where Maggie is watching me closely. I’m fairly certain she doesn’t want me to make any children cry. ‘Fine,’ I say, nodding. ‘He can do it.’

  There’s a scattering of applause and George shouts, ‘Yes!’ and punches the air.

  To get through this I’m going to have to stick to the plan and totally ignore who my volunteer is. ‘You’re going to remove some of the electrons from your balloons like this,’ I say, rubbing a balloon on my lab coat, ‘leaving them positively charged. Then when you put the balloon on to Ed’s hair,’ I reach up and balance it on his perfect hair, ‘the balloon will cling to the negatively charged electrons, proving that opposites attract!’

  ‘So cute!’ says a woman at the back.

  ‘Ignore her,’ whispers Ed. ‘That’s my mum.’

  In a panic, I let go of the balloon and it floats to the ground.

  George tugs on my lab coat. ‘You need to rub it on his hair.’

  ‘Why don’t you do it?’ I say.

  ‘I’m too small,’ he says with a smile. What’s happened to his wobbling lip?

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘I’ll rub his hair.’ I reach up and start rubbing the balloon all over Ed’s hair, flattening his sticky-up bit at the front. To cover my embarrassment at being chest to chest with Ed King, I rub extra hard. In the four years we’ve been sitting next to each other, we’ve never touched, not even an accidental blazer-brush, and yet here I am giving him a head massage … with a balloon.

  I mustn’t think about massages.

  I must think about Science and Electricity and Atoms.

  ‘Let’s get those electrons agitated!’ I say in a brisk voice, whipping the balloon backwards and forward then round and round. When his hair is a bushy cloud, I let go of the balloon and this time it sticks.

  I smile down at the children who are creeping closer. ‘Your turn,’ I say, ‘and make sure you all get a go.’ For the next few minutes, Ed is attacked by children with balloons. Some of their parents join in, and even Maggie has a go.

  Eventually, I tell them to sit down. Ed and George stay standing next to me. Ed’s looking slightly dazed, a single yellow balloon still clinging to his hair.

  ‘So that’s the end of the show,’ I say, and I can’t help smiling, because I’ve actually done it – I’ve stood up and spoken to a group of strangers for a long time. In my head, Valentina gives me a high five. ‘But there’s lots more to see and the tel
escope tour is about to start in Dome B –’

  ‘Hang on!’ shouts Grandad. ‘What about the electric shock?’

  ‘We’ve not got time for that.’

  ‘The tour can start a few minutes late,’ says Maggie.

  Ed turns to me and whispers, ‘What’re we supposed to do?’

  Everyone is staring up at us, waiting to see what we’ll do next. I shake my head. ‘It’s nothing,’ I say. ‘I was going to touch fingers with the volunteer to see if I would get an electric shock. But we don’t need to do it.’

  Our whispered conversation has gone on for too long, but this doesn’t bother Ed. ‘Why not?’

  I try to think of a good reason. The electric shock was supposed to impress a load of children, and make them love what I love, not provide the perfect punchline when Ed tells Bella everything that happened today. I can just hear her shrieking out in science, ‘Oh my God, she made you touch her?!’

  ‘Come on,’ says Ed, sticking his index finger out, ‘it won’t kill you.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say and I move my finger towards his. By our feet, the children lean closer. Ed smiles and raises one eyebrow, and the situation is so funny that I can’t help smiling too as I bring my finger closer to his. And then, the moment our fingers touch, there’s this tiny flash of white light and a jolt of electricity jumps from Ed to me, tingling through my hand.

  ‘Ow!’ he says, pulling his hand back and laughing.

  I stare at my buzzing fingertip. ‘I didn’t think it would work,’ I whisper.

  ‘Shock me!’ says George, jumping up and down. ‘Shock me!’

  TWENTY-SIX

  After everyone’s given me a clap and Maggie’s thanked me for my ‘highly original and messy show’, the audience files out of the tent.

  I watch them go, slightly dazed, slightly amazed and totally happy. I bend down and pick up a blueberry that’s rolled between my feet. When we were arranging fruit into the solar system, this was my moon. I hold the slightly squished berry between my fingers.

  If I can do this, with children, their parents and even Ed King watching me, then maybe I can stand up and do my speech at the NASA competition. And if I can do my speech, then maybe Houston isn’t totally out of my reach …

  ‘So –’ Ed says, turning to me.

  ‘Come on!’ says George, pulling at his arm. ‘Don’t talk to her. I want to see the telescope.’

  ‘Go with Mum,’ Ed says, pushing him away. ‘I’ll be there in a bit.’

  I start packing the rest of the fruit away while Grandad gathers up the toilet roll.

  ‘You’re keeping this?’ asks Ed, holding up the grapefruit.

  ‘If it’s not bashed,’ I say, not quite able to meet his eye. The science centre has paid for the props, but I don’t think they’ll mind if I take them home to make smoothies for me and Elsa.

  For a few minutes, we pack up in silence. Even though I’ve been talking non-stop for an hour, I don’t know what to say now it’s just me and Ed. This is starting to feel like school.

  ‘Sorry about suddenly appearing like that.’ Ed breaks the silence. ‘George wanted me to volunteer and it’s easier to go along with what he wants. You didn’t look very pleased to see me.’

  ‘I was surprised. That’s all.’

  He helps me arrange the watermelon so it doesn’t squash the other fruit. ‘Right at the start I didn’t realise it was you,’ he says. ‘At school, you’re so quiet and serious … plus you don’t wear a wig.’

  I snatch the wig off my head – I’d actually forgotten I was wearing it. For a moment, I try to imagine being like that at school, just going to French on Monday morning and chatting to whoever is waiting outside the room, telling them what I did at the weekend … It just seems impossible.

  Harriet seemed so much better at talking to people that I let her get on with it. She was a science geek like me, but she knew about other things too, about music, TV and clothes. She could talk to me about moon phases, then turn around and talk to someone else about Ed Sheeran, just like that … But it’s not just because I’m out of practice that I don’t talk. Honestly, I don’t think people want to hear what I’ve got to say. That’s why what I’ve just done has given me such a massive buzz. A buzz that I don’t want to go away.

  I make myself look at Ed. ‘Maybe I should try to be less serious at school,’ I say. ‘Do you think I should roll toilet paper down the corridor and arrange fruit on it?’

  He laughs. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Do you want a grape?’ I hold out the bag to him.

  ‘OK,’ he says.

  We stand there eating grapes until I realise that it’s my turn to speak. ‘So … Why did you come today?’

  Ed shrugs. ‘It’s my brother’s birthday so Mum said I had to come as a treat for him …’ He trails off and stares into the corner of the tent. ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘but I think someone’s left a baby behind. It’s playing with plums.’

  I look over and see Elsa mushing two plums together. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘I washed them.’

  ‘Yeah, but –’

  ‘And she’s my baby.’

  Ed’s eyes widen. ‘She’s your baby?’

  My cheeks flush. ‘I mean, not mine, obviously, but related to me. We share DNA. Fifty per cent from the mother, our mother. We’ve got different dads.’

  Ed looks at me. ‘You mean she’s your sister.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We watch as Elsa abandons the plums and grabs the edge of a table. It tips forward and one of the bags of flour lands next to her, spilling over the grass. Elsa shrieks and plunges both hands into it.

  ‘Oh!’ I run over and start scooping the flour back into the bag.

  Ed helps me. ‘Is she all right with that?’ I look up and see that Elsa’s turned her attention to one of the eggs we were using earlier. She’s trying to put the whole thing in her mouth.

  ‘Yeah … Or do you think she could choke on it?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Too big.’

  ‘I think it’s one of the hard-boiled ones.’

  I put the flour back on the table and try to wipe myself down.

  ‘So what’s good here?’ Ed asks, looking out of the tent.

  ‘Everything,’ I say. ‘The Thompson telescope is one of the largest in the world and the floor rises up when you press a button. Oh, and I love the spark disc where you can move electricity with your fingertips.’ I spread my fingers wide to show him what I mean, then cross my arms. I was getting carried away. I need to remember exactly who I’m talking to.

  ‘Can you show me?’ he asks.

  I stare at him, trying to work out if he’s joking, but he just stands there, a blank look on his face, waiting for me to answer.

  ‘OK,’ I say. ‘I suppose I can tidy up later.’ I walk towards the exit. ‘We can start in the light and colour room.’

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ Ed says.

  ‘Oh, oops!’ I run back and pick Elsa up and she starts slamming the boiled egg into the side of my head. ‘See,’ I say. ‘Definitely hard-boiled.’

  That evening an amazing thing happens: I put Elsa in her cot and she falls asleep. No screaming, no tramping over the Downs, no astronomy lessons delivered with a gentle sway. She simply closes her eyes and sleeps.

  She must be exhausted from being dragged around the science centre. I showed Ed nearly everything. I thought he’d just look around, but straight away he started freezing crystals and spinning planets. I know he said I was different to how I was at school, but he was different too. It was just small things, like his smile. At school, he does this half-smile, with one eyebrow raised, but when he twisted the dial and heard the squeak of the hidden sound wave he did a proper smile and both sides of his mouth shot up. And I noticed that he bites his nails … I’ve been sitting next to him for years, but I’ve never noticed that before.

  I hover outside Mum’s door until I’m sure Elsa’s asleep, then I drift round the flat, doing all the things I’ve not
been able to do during the week. I get some washing-up done, start the washing machine and finally get the paddling pool out from behind the sofa and put it away. As I’m trying to force it back into its box, I think about what Ed said when he realised he had to go and find his mum: ‘Thanks for the science lesson, Meg, it was electrifying.’

  I shove the paddling pool box to the back of the cupboard.

  Electrifying? What does that even mean?

  I go into my room, open the window, and flop down on my bed. I don’t turn on the light. Instead, I lie in the dark and stare up at the perfect semicircle of the moon. Was Ed saying hanging out with me was good? Or was he talking about the electric shock? Maybe he was just being sarcastic … Who knows.

  A sudden breeze from the window makes the planets on my mobile spin. I raise my finger – the one Ed touched – and with it, I trace the outline of the moon. What I do know is that, right now, I can still hear the laughter from the children when the melon landed in the flour and I can still feel the tingle from when my finger touched Ed’s.

  What I do know is that right now, I feel alive.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Grandad decides to cook us Sunday lunch, or rather he shoves a couple of jacket potatoes in the microwave and opens a tin of beans. This suits me. I much prefer eating canned food when I’m at Grandad’s. He has too much furry stuff growing in his fridge.

  After we’ve eaten, Elsa lies on the floor scrunching up the newspaper while I try out my presentation on Grandad. I’m still filled with confidence from the Cool Cosmos workshop and I want to make the most of it before it slips away from me again.

  Grandad sits on the sofa, arms folded, and I stand in front of him holding my speech cards. I read each one in turn and Grandad listens intently as I describe in detail the biomolecules required to start life on a planet, the pros and cons of G- and K-type stars, and how it’s possible to photograph exoplanets. Every now and then, he calls out, ‘Eye contact, Meg, eye contact!’ and I force my eyes to shoot up to meet his for a moment before going back to the cards.