Who Goes Home? Read online

  ‘Well?’ said his uncle, smiling expectantly. ‘It’s a genuine model spaceship. You can open it up and see the whole works inside. There’s even a battery to produce flashing lights.’

  Lydia gave her son a warning glance. Steven put one hand quite heavily on Jacob’s shoulder. ‘Maybe you’d like to take it to your room,’ he said. ‘I know I always like to examine stuff like that on my own, gives you more chance to get to know it.’

  ‘Yes, I will,’ said Jacob. ‘Thanks, Uncle Mark. See you later.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mark. ‘We’ll have to be going shortly. Don’t want to miss the train. You go off and enjoy yourself. Don’t worry about using up the batteries – I’ve put a spare pack in to keep you going.’

  When Steven and Lydia were alone again, Steven said, ‘How does he do it? I mean, he’s got Molly – and Michael’s seventeen now. How does he not realize that a thirteen-year-old doesn’t play with toys like that?’

  ‘Some do,’ said Lydia, trying to be fair. ‘Jacob’s always been old for his age. And it must have been quite expensive.’

  The present also made Steven feel uncomfortable in quite a different way. It reminded him that there were things he should discuss with Jacob; things about a real spaceship resting in the soil in Highgate Cemetery. It was smaller than the toy Jacob had carried to his room, but much more functional. Four years from now it would complete its mission and shoot off into outer space.

  ‘I think I’ll see if Jacob would like to go for a walk,’ said Steven.

  ‘At this time?’ said Lydia. ‘It’s nearly dark and turning chilly.’

  ‘We can wrap up well,’ said Steven. ‘I need a walk and I think he does too.’

  Lydia was quite used to Steven and his evening rambles. On the whole, she approved of them. It did him good to get away from the computer desk. But to take Jacob with him was something new. New, and pleasing.

  ‘Don’t expect too much intellectual equality,’ she said with a smile. ‘He knows the words, but I don’t know if he quite appreciates what they mean.’

  Steven was momentarily startled. It was as if Lydia had read his mind. She couldn’t of course. After all these years, she still knew nothing.

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  Into the Night

  They walked quickly, in step, out of their own little street, then down Chester Road and up nearly to the top of Swains Lane. There was no one about this chilly evening. This was not part of the city that never sleeps. The school and the library were in darkness. The gate of the cemetery was shut; lamplight lit up the ivy growing about its walls.

  By the time Steven and Jacob reached their destination, it was already dark. They talked from time to time, but Steven did not mention the spaceship. He concentrated upon other things.

  ‘Are you happy, Jacob?’ was one question.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ said Jacob, almost aggressively.

  ‘It’s not a question I have ever asked you before,’ said his father. ‘I always think it’s a pointless question to put to a child. But if we are to be equals, I feel I can ask it now.’

  ‘And I can wonder why you think I’m not,’ said Jacob, prepared now at least to talk round the question. ‘You must think that I am somehow short on happiness, or you wouldn’t bother to ask.’

  ‘True,’ said his father. ‘I am asking because you have always seemed to me to be too isolated, and I blame myself.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can do that,’ said Jacob. ‘I am a bit of an outsider, but I’ve figured out that must be part of my make-up. Everybody’s different. It’s not your fault. And I can’t say it makes me desperately unhappy. It’s just one of those things.’

  Jacob felt uncomfortable with this conversation. Loneliness did trouble him, but he would never tell anyone, not even his father. He knew, only too well he knew, what it was to go unnoticed, to be forgotten, to seem totally invisible. And it hurt.

  What hurt most was the strangeness of not being like other people, when there was nothing he could pinpoint that made him different. He was of average height and build, his colouring attractive rather than otherwise – a sallow complexion, perhaps, but he had fine, dark eyes and good, even features. In fact, he strongly resembled his father. Nothing in his appearance could account for the way in which everyone he met simply ignored him.

  ‘It might be my fault,’ said Steven cautiously, not looking directly at the boy but directing his glance through the railing at an obelisk, beneath which was buried not only a famous man but also, at a lesser depth and at its outer rim, a spaceship from the planet Ormingat.

  Jacob glanced sideways at his father. ‘Genes?’ he said. ‘Heredity?’

  ‘Not as easy as that,’ said his father. ‘You are different because you are my son.’

  ‘Beth and Josie are your daughters,’ said Jacob with a smile as he thought of his noisy, bubbly sisters. ‘No one could ever say that they were in any way isolated.’

  ‘They were not presented,’ said his father. ‘You were.’

  ‘Presented?’

  ‘If I had not presented you, Javayl ban,’ said Steven anxiously, ‘you would have died. I had no choice.’

  The pronouncement of the Ormingat name, in vibrating Ormingat tones, made Jacob shiver; his arms prickled and the hairs grew stiff on the back of his neck. He had known the story of his infancy: the recovery that no one could explain. Till now he had accepted it as a gift from God. That anyone on Earth had played an active part in this miracle was beyond imagination. Yet now, as he heard his Ormingat name for the very first time, he experienced some sort of recognition.

  ‘Explain,’ he said tersely.

  ‘Not here,’ said Steven. ‘Out here in the open air of a London street, with evidence of humanity, living and dead, on every side, I would not know how to tell it and you would find it impossible to believe.’

  ‘Where then?’

  Steven took from his coat pocket an old steel ruler, which he unfolded to its full length. He grinned at Jacob, saying, ‘Not the latest technology – but effective improvisation.’

  Jacob stared at him, uncomprehending. There they were, standing nearly at the top of Swains Lane, outside the rusty railings of the cemetery, and his father’s words about technology were too cryptic to mean anything at all. What in the world was he talking about? Why in the world were they here?

  Steven put the ruler through the railings. Then he bent it at its topmost joint so that the first segment straddled the crumbling brick wall and the rest of the ruler went diagonally down into the cemetery. ‘Now you must hold my hand,’ said Steven. He stretched one hand out behind him for his son to clutch.

  ‘One question,’ said Jacob, refusing to be fazed by all this strangeness. ‘What is your name? If I am Javaylban, who then are you?’

  Steven turned from the wall, the ruler still in his hand. It was an Ormingat question. An Earth child would have been asking other questions at this point.

  ‘You are Javayl. I suppose ban is a term of endearment – love of a parent for a child. I am Sterekanda. Now, quickly, take my hand and let’s waste no more time. Just trust me.’

  Jacob looked at his father’s face, so like his own, high-cheekboned, fine-featured, with eyes thick-lashed and dark. ‘I do trust you, Dad, though what you are planning to do with an old steel ruler is a mystery to me. Is it some sort of joke?’

  ‘Trust me, Javayl ban,’ said Steven urgently. ‘Take hold of my hand and trust me.’

  ‘I trust you, Sterekanda ban,’ said Jacob, trying hard to be trustful but feeling mainly doubt. He held out his right hand towards his father’s left.

  The words were not quite right but the accent and intonation were perfect – even the voice had an unearthly sound. Jacob had a rare talent for listening and imitating.

  ‘Sterekanda mesht,’ said Steven softly. ‘That is what the child says to the parent. Now, come.’

  Javayl grasped his father’s hand, not knowing what would happen next, but conv
inced that something would.

  From her turret window in the mansion block above Swains Lane, a very old lady looked out into the dusk. One heavily ringed hand, wrinkled and claw-like, held back a long velvet curtain. Lady Maudleigh was caught in a frozen moment. She had paused there much earlier to watch for the Friese-Greene fox, as she liked to call it. If she were lucky, just at sunset, she would catch a glimpse of the little animal doing a sharp leap in front of the obelisk, his bright eyes occasionally catching the light from the streetlamp. It was an exciting thing to see in the city of the dead. The clustered graves, mainly hidden by trees and undergrowth, held for her neither fear nor misery. She had known them too long, and loved them too well. They were at peace.

  But tonight, before she came out of her reverie to close the curtains, a man and a boy came and stood close by the cemetery railings, just in front of the obelisk. They had their backs to her, as if peering in at the graves. Her ladyship’s nose pressed childishly against the windowpane. What were those two doing there? They must be up to something. She hoped they would not harm or frighten the fox. She watched them anxiously.

  Then, as if by magic, the strangers disappeared. One second they were there; the next they were gone!

  Lady Maudleigh shook her head vigorously. ‘You imagined that, Theresa!’ she said to herself. ‘You can’t possibly have seen what you thought you saw!’

  She shivered nevertheless. Then she pulled the cord that drew the curtains, and very firmly shut out the night.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Revelations

  The tip of the ruler barely touched the soil. That was enough. The ship’s sensors detected it and knew who was holding it. With the speed of lightning, the man and the boy rapidly diminished until they were invisible to the human eye.

  Jacob felt the weird sensation of somehow being pulled from without and from within. A great dizziness overcame him and he closed his eyes. When next he opened them he was seated on a sofa in a very strange room.

  ‘We’ve arrived, Javayl ban,’ said his father, taking the boy by both hands now and trying to project reassurance. ‘Now is the time for me to explain.’

  Jacob looked around the room. Half of it was an ordinary living room, comfortable and neat, but with books scattered here and there, and a lived-in look about it. The other half was impossible to understand; its proportions were all wrong, as if its ‘half’ were somehow infinitely bigger.

  ‘That is what I call the laboratory,’ said Steven, nodding towards it.

  High up on one side of this space, under the slope of the dome, was a green, opalescent cube. On the floor of the ‘laboratory’, deep down, ticking softly with the rhythm of a clock, was a huge disc covered in stars. Its face was dark blue velvet. Points of jewel-like light spun across it. A wand three-quarters full of gleaming lights turned as on a pivot around the disc’s equator. It was the most wonderful, mystical thing that Jacob had ever seen.

  ‘Where are we?’ he said, turning to his father. ‘Where are we, and how did we get here?’

  ‘See my hands?’ said Steven, cupping his hands together as if holding a ball.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jacob doubtfully.

  ‘We are inside a ball that in the outside world I could hold like this in the palms of my hands. That ball is the spaceship that brought me here.’

  Jacob gave him a look of disbelief.

  ‘Outside view! Action replay!’ snapped Steven, flicking his fingers at the cube. It turned from green to silver and then gave a complete re-run of what had happened just seconds before. The man held the steel rule; the boy held the man’s hand. Then man and boy and rule seemed to dissolve into nothingness.

  ‘We disappeared?’ said Jacob, recognizing himself and his father and the very street where they had stood.

  ‘No,’ said Steven. ‘We simply diminished and became the size required for these surroundings. And, before you ask, no, I am not a magician. This is pure science – Ormingat science, Javayl ban.’

  The cube, which had turned to green again, selected this moment to speak.

  It was time to bring the boy. How much has he been told?

  The voice spoke in English, but its tone and accent were not of this world.

  Jacob felt a shiver run down his spine at the sudden sound of this robotic voice. He stared first at the cube and then at his father. What was coming next? What could come next?

  ‘Till this evening,’ said Steven to the cube, ‘he knew nothing, except perhaps in his deepest soul. Today is my son’s thirteenth birthday, by Earth reckoning. It was time to make him acquainted with his origins.’

  How much has he been told?

  ‘He knows he is Javayl and that he is very special.’

  Take time. Tell him more. Tell him all he needs to know.

  The cube then went totally blank, its surfaces an oily, phlegmish grey.

  Steven knew what that meant: he was to be left alone with his explanations. So, in as few words as possible, he told Jacob of his own journey from Ormingat, a faraway planet in a different solar system.

  ‘. . . And I landed in Highgate Cemetery, just inside the wall. It was not exactly where I was meant to land, but near enough for me to find my way. My preparation was superb. I had the speech of this land and the map of this location firmly in my brain. I was Steven Bradwell, a young man with a whole Earth background etched in around him. But the true me is Sterekanda and I remain an alien on this planet.’

  ‘And I am half alien?’ said Jacob, ever quick in his deductions.

  ‘No,’ said his father. ‘You remain your mother’s son, of course, but you are totally alien: that is what happened when you were entwined with your name.’

  ‘So that is why I have always felt so set apart?’

  The cube glowed green again. It had detected a truth about the boy. Javayl appeared to be standing in the faintest of shadows.

  Not so. Ormingatriga are not necessarily isolated. You were overprotected. Mistakes can be made. Sterekanda made one in ordering your life so.

  Steven looked puzzled and then annoyed.

  ‘I had to protect him,’ he protested. ‘No one must ever hurt him.’

  It is you who have hurt him. You put such a cloak of protection between him and the world that he escaped not just harm but all possibility of happiness.

  Jacob turned on his father and his look demanded an explanation before he could even put a question into words.

  ‘What was the cloak of protection? What did you do to me?’

  ‘I surrounded you with love,’ said his father helplessly. ‘We were so near to losing you.’

  Tell him the truth.

  ‘That is the truth,’ said Steven. ‘I never lie.’

  It is not whole truth.

  ‘So what is the whole truth, Dad? What are you keeping back from me?’

  He surrounded you with science.

  That didn’t make sense either. Steven’s office at the top of the house was full of computer equipment, not to be touched by the family. That was the nearest they came to anything that could be called ‘science’.

  ‘Well?’ said Jacob, giving his father a harsh look.

  ‘At home,’ said Steven, ‘among my earthly computer stuff, there is the item we always call “the Brick”. Remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jacob. ‘It is orange and shiny and has buttons set in its faces, but it does look a bit like a builder’s brick. That’s why we gave it the name.’

  ‘It is not Earth equipment. It came with me from the faraway planet. It is my responsibility and the source of my power.’

  ‘Power to do what?’ said Jacob suspiciously.

  ‘Power to direct attention away from anyone or anything that needs such protection. It is highly specialized and very sophisticated. That, I suppose, is why it was such fun to call it a brick!’

  Steven smiled, but Jacob was not smiling.

  ‘You directed attention away from me!’ he said, outraged. ‘You made sure that I
would never be noticed.’

  ‘No one ever hurt you,’ said Steven defensively. ‘No one ever teased or bullied you.’

  ‘No one ever knew me,’ said his son, and for the first time since infancy he began to cry, letting out tears that had been held back for years.

  You have much to make up, Sterekanda.

  ‘I will,’ said Steven, grasping the boy’s hands in his. ‘I truly will.’

  To withdraw the shield will not do. You have left it too late for that.

  Steven shivered. ‘What can I do then?’ he asked, with unusual humility.

  Give him a full part to play in your life. Let him share in the work of Ormingat. Whenever you come to the ship, make sure that he comes too.

  ‘I will,’ said Steven. Then he said, in self-defence, ‘His sisters know him and love him. His mother dotes on him. There has been no shield within the family home.’

  There could not have been even had you so desired.

  As they walked home, Jacob was lost in bewildered thought. It was all so impossible. What had just happened to his own body filled him with a sense of unreality. Because, throughout his short life, he had been so little recognized or accepted by the outside world, his home and his family were all and everything to him. Now that safe little boat had been well and truly rocked.

  ‘What about Mum?’ he asked. ‘How much does she know?’

  They were at the corner of Chester Road, making ready to cross. A cyclist came out of Holly Village just as Jacob spoke. Steven gripped his son’s arm and they both stood back. He did not speak until the rider was well past. That gave him time to consider what to say.

  ‘Your mother is so important a part of my life,’ he said eventually, ‘that sometimes I think she must really know everything.’

  ‘What have you told her?’ said Jacob, knowing that he could not take these words at face value.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Steven.

  ‘Then she knows nothing,’ said Jacob sternly.

  Steven smiled wanly. In all the years of his married life he had never been tempted to tell Lydia anything about his other self. The rules of Ormingat would have forbidden it, naturally, but Steven had little respect for the rules. He had great love for Lydia and a fear of saying or doing anything that might destroy her fragile happiness.