First Song

The capsules flew through space at a respectable percentage of the speed of light, time dilation none of their concern. The capsules were tiny, approximately a meter in length with smoothed curves to their aerodynamic outer casing. Discolouration marred their external surfaces and some had minor dents, but they were all still here and mostly in one piece. They had been travelling for centuries.

Finally into the inner solar system, their target was the planet that they were rapidly approaching. It had only been a pale-blue dot until the last few hours and now it was rapidly increasing in size. If the capsules had had any windows, and any passengers that could look out of them, they would have seen the terminator line ahead.

Observers below had tracked the objects on their ballistic approach. Astronomers had determined that the meteoroids were too small to survive their interaction with the atmosphere and had settled down with some popcorn to watch the spectacular light show as they burned up overhead. That was, until the objects dispersed, changing trajectory in perfect unison.

At the predetermined moment, nearly all of the capsules turned and vectored away from each other; scattering. One remained on course for the terminator and it began to sharply decelerate to avoid skipping off the atmosphere.

It adjusted its orientation with small nudges from its internal gyroscopes, the air pressure growing around it. Flickering fire began to blossom around the capsule as its journey down to the surface compressed the air in front, causing it to glow. This was a sensation it hadn’t experienced in a very long time. It still had a mission. It had almost forgotten. Almost.

---

I awoke to the sound of my phone buzzing itself to death near my ear and I grumpily reached out to pick it up. It took two attempts to grab it, but I managed to get my fingers around the plastic case while it was dancing a jig. I squinted at the screen. It took me a moment for my eyes to focus to see the name displayed in bright white against a black background. Mum was calling me. I sat up with a groan and answered.

“Good morning! Why didn’t you answer my texts. We’re almost there. Put the kettle on, please,” came the distinctly feminine voice through the tinny speaker of my phone and I placed a hand to my head. Crap.

“Morning, mum,” I began to reply, my voice croaky, “Yeah, sure. How long will you be?”

“Oh, did you only just wake up? Davie…” she asked, disappointment clear in her voice but she knew this about me by now. I was useless at setting my alarm. “We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, darling.”

I closed my eyes at her saying my name, and nodded, even though she couldn’t see me. “Yeah, I forgot to set my alarm. I’ll be ready,” I replied.

“See you soon, my darling,” she said and then the line cut. I quickly checked the texts that she’d mentioned and saw that I had at least ten of them letting me know of their progress. She tended to do that. She’d give me updates as they worked their way across the country to come and pick me up.

I sighed and then scrambled to get dressed, remembering to put the kettle on after ten minutes or so had gone by. I had pulled on an old t-shirt and a faded pair of jeans. The t-shirt was shapeless and baggy, the jeans too. I finished my masterpiece of fashion with my usual once-had-been-white trainers and hoped I looked presentable enough for a three hour car journey.

I decided to do what Claire had done the previous night and began to move my things down into the living room. I knew that my dad didn’t like to spend too long getting my things moved into the family car – he considered it unnecessary hassle.

Just as I finished carrying my computer down the stairs, being careful to make sure that the vacuum cleaner was not at the bottom, I heard the sound of a car pulling up outside. I quickly moved to put what I was carrying into the living room and rushed to open the door as the kettle clicked off. Timing! It is mine!

I saw mum and dad as they were getting out of the car and moved towards the house. Mum gave me a once over with a slight lift of her eyebrow but she decided not to comment about how I looked.

As she reached the doorway, she reached out to pull me into a hug. I had to stoop down to return it. I wrapped my own arms around her and over her shoulders. I was at least half a foot taller than she was, but then again she was tiny. She had once had the same dark brown hair that I had but it was starting to thin out and go grey. There were signs that she had tried to dye it but you could see the roots coming through again. I also noticed that she was beginning to develop the very first hints of wrinkles around her eyes and mouth.

We didn’t linger in the doorway though, and I moved to allow her to rush upstairs. She had always had a small bladder.

My father came in after her, giving me that nod of his head as he saw me, “Davie.” He was a man on the larger side, approximately the same height as I was although much larger physically. His face had already started to show the cracks of age, his skin leathery and worn. Receding hairlines were also apparently a big thing for the men in my family, and he had hair that was definitely thinning on top.

Cold dread spread through me but I managed to swallow it down.

I forced a smile back to him, my fingers immediately moving to twiddle in front of me in nervousness. He moved into the kitchen and I heard cups being pulled out of the cupboards. Those would need to be cleaned again before we left. Ugh.

“Where’s your coffee?” I heard him call out to me, his face appearing back in the hallway to look at me.

“We don’t have any. Tea?” I asked with an apologetic smile.

He rolled his eyes and just grunted, moving back into the kitchen again.

I gracefully stepped in after him and over to the cupboard, using my new found footwork agility from badminton. I found where one of the other housemates had left a few tea bags and pulled them down for him.

“Dance lessons are paying off then,” he almost grunted as he watched me.

“What?” I asked, my cheeks turning a shade of red. I took a couple of moments to try to allow the colour in my cheeks to subside before looking back at him.

He didn’t reply, just looked at me with an amused smile, and that observant, penetrating gaze.

I had no idea what he was talking about, but he had always made these remarks. Small, ribbing remarks aimed at embarrassing me, so I guessed that it must have been one of those. My defensive, coping mechanisms activated and I tried to deaden any emotion inside, almost like a fire suppression system.

With my heart still sinking, I just threw the tea bags at the counter where he was preparing the drinks and I walked out. I really didn’t need his shit right now. He chuckled and scooped them up, deposited a teabag into each cup.

Heading upstairs, I quickly made sure that it was clean and I did one last check around my room to make sure that nothing was hiding from me – underwear under the bed? Money in a drawer? Gold bullion in the wardrobe? Nope. Nothing.

I locked the door behind myself and sighed, staring at it. I knew that this is when I should be crying but I just couldn’t do it. Am I some kind of sociopath?

Mum took that moment to leave the bathroom and she looked at me, “The bathroom and toilet needs a clean, Davie. Do you want me to do it for you? You can help your father get the car loaded.”

I gave her a smile and dipped my head in a small nod, reaching forward to give her another hug. “That’d be awesome. Thank you.”

“Where’s your hoover, darling? Cleaning things?” she asked, returning the hug.

My mind went blank for a moment as I thought about the answer to that. Eventually I managed to remember and told her where they were. Cleaning supplies and students? Hahaha. Good one, mum.

I gave her one more smile and went back downstairs, slipping my room key into a jeans pocket so that I wouldn’t lose it.

We spent the next twenty minutes moving the boxes and bags out of the living room and into the family car. It was tiring but not nearly as bad as it had been when I’d moved in.

Putting all of my Earthly belongings into the car... well... it was like Tetris. Except my computer didn’t disappear once you made a neat row. That would have sucked. But, eventually everything was packed tightly into the car and the boot (trunk) was closed. We went back inside to clean the cups and make sure everything was ship-shape before I left for good.

Mum and dad got into the car as I locked the front door behind me. I looked over the place that had been home for the last nine months once more. Farewell house. You were kind and you kept me safe.

Tears would have been appropriate for what I should have been feeling right now, but they remained frustratingly absent, so I turned and stalked over to the car. My seat was in the back, surrounded by my bedding and pillows.

---

All of the paperwork finished and keys returned, we were finally on the road back home.

The thing about the United Kingdom is that going north to south you could be travelling for like nine hours if you really wanted to go from Cornwall to Scotland. But if you wanted to go from the west to the east side of the country then it would only take up to three hours at most. So, while our home was on the other side of the country, with a bit of north-south travel for good measure, it was still a do-able distance. What was that aphorism? “Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way, Americans think a hundred years is a long time.”

“So, how has everything been going? Do you think your exams went well?” Mum asked me once we were out of my university’s city. She had turned around slightly in the front passenger seat to look at me when she did, and I’d glanced to look at her with as much of a smile as I could manage. That is to say, not much of one.

“It’s all fine, yeah,” I said out of reflex, not even giving the question a single thought until after I’d replied. “The exams weren’t that hard and they don’t count anyway. I just have to pass them,” I continued, turning now to look back out the window at the green fields that were passing us by.

“I know, darling,” she responded back, continuing to flash me a tired smile, the one that seemed to clash with the concern I heard was in her voice.

“Still, you shouldn’t rely on only doing just enough. You should start as you mean to go on,” put in my dad, glancing at me in the rear-view mirror. I saw him out of the corner of my eye and turned to look into his eyes, reflected back at me.

I just nodded my reply.

It was then that I saw the flashing blue lights and heard the tell tale warble of sirens as they rapidly approached us from behind. Dad pulled over into the middle lane to allow them to pass, which they did. Very quickly. There were also a couple of army trucks thundering along behind them, their rear flaps closed so that I couldn’t see inside. I felt a tingle of dread run up my spine but I ignored it.

“Something’s happening there,” dad said, and we all peered to see if we could see where they were going. It didn’t take long for the police cars and army trucks to disappear off into the distance, though.

Mum started to put their music in to play on the stereo once it became apparent that nothing more would be happening. Dad drove on in silence. The pregnant silence seemed to be asking for me to ask how everything was going at home, how Sarah was doing, how Mum’s new job was going, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just wanted to be alone.

I listened to one of the songs to begin with – some old 70s or 80s tune that reminded me of our trips to the seaside all those years ago, but I just wasn’t feeling it. The clash of emotions was really driving my mood into a brick wall.

I plugged my headphones into my phone and started to look for the appropriate playlist for this moment. I found it, put the earbuds into my ears, and let the music take me to another place – the right place – my head resting lightly against the window.

“The right place” was a world of melancholy that I needed to be in at the moment, remembering the friends that I wouldn’t see again for months. I knew that once I was home things would immediately start to slip into how they had been before I’d left. Being treated like ‘Davie’, the inadequately manly teenaged boy. It would be a place where I couldn’t reinvent myself and would instead be expected to conform to how things had been. I had to be the older sibling, the son, the big brother.

A warm, wet bead worked its way from each eye, tracking down cheeks before I wiped them away with a hand.

I must have sniffled because I saw mum turn around to look at me, some concern in her eyes. I gave her a forced smile, which she returned and then shifted back to looking forwards again.

After a quickly typed message to Rishaan and Claire about how I was going to miss them until October, I tucked my phone into a pocket and closed my eyes. I allowed the soft rhythms and female vocals to wash over me, lulling me into sleep.

---

I’m not sure how long I was asleep for before the change in the vibrations and deceleration of the car woke me. I pulled out the earbuds, wincing at the soreness that they left behind, while I looked out the window to see what was happening. It sounded like they’d moved onto another of their “oldies but goodies” albums while I’d been asleep.

The traffic was slowing down as the road became increasingly congested in front of us and I saw a bunch of emergency vehicles at the top of a hill in the distance. The area near those vehicles looked like it was was cordoned off, judging by the blue tape. There were even a few army vehicles that looked very similar to the ones that had passed us, which was somewhat worrying.

“What’s happening over there?” I asked, pointing in the direction of the vehicles. Mum turned to look at me and then at where I was pointing.

Her mouth twisted to one side as if to say I have no idea, then she shrugged at me, “It might be why the traffic is so slow?” She then turned to look at dad with hints of worry in her voice, “I think we should take the next services, my dear.”

There was that weak bladder again. I was starting to get a little concerned for her.

It took about ten minutes for us to arrive at the next service station’s exit from the motorway and I noticed mum’s increasingly agitated state as time wore on.

“I won’t be long, just park us near the entrance...” Mum was saying to dad as we pulled around and into the car park.

There was a problem, though. It looked like a lot of people had had the same idea and the service station was absolutely heaving.

Oh no. No, no, no… I couldn’t handle a crowd right now.

The only free spaces were really far away from the building itself, and there were only a few left. Dad drove frantically to make sure that he found a space for his wife, reversing expertly into the bay before they both unclipped their seat belts and turned to look at me.

“I’ll… uh… I’ll wait here. Someone has to keep an eye on my things…” I said to them pre-emptively.

In reality I really didn’t want to have to deal with the sheer mass of humanity that would be inside. People were judgmental and generally inconsiderate of others. Maybe I’m a hypocrite for saying that but I didn’t care. Now is not my best moment to be seen in public.

After refusing their offer for something to eat and drink from inside, I watched them leave and power walk towards their salvation that was public lavatories. I let out a sigh. My attention was taken by the sheer mass of people as they moved around. I mused that they all walked or ran towards that one building that was the only civilised place to relieve oneself in a large radius.

As I was smirking to myself at that, something caught my eye in one of the mirrors of the car. It was a flash of… something?

I twisted in my seat to see if I could find it, my eyebrows furrowing themselves together in confusion. It had seemed to be coming from the hedges that dad had reversed against, our rear bumper almost touching them.

I shook my head and was about to turn back around when I saw a faint glow of something in the hedgerow.