‘My planet used to be third one along.’
– Used to be?
‘Yeah. The Pup imploded. Became a white dwarf. All its planets were sucked into it. Now that whole solar system’s not much bigger than a tennis ball.’
– But how come we can see it, if it’s not there any more?
‘You’re seeing the light from that star. It’s taken half a million years for that light to reach here, because it’s half a million light years away. So when you look at that star, you’re looking into the past. Half a million years into the past. A lot has happened since then. Now there’s just an empty space where my home used to be. I’ve got nowhere to call my own in the whole of space. Imagine if every one of those stars was a party you’re not invited to. Imagine every one was a door that won’t let you in . . .’
I remembered the day they took Grandad away. The woman from the Temporary helped me pack my stuff and took me off in her car. In the rearview mirror I saw the policewoman shut the door to Grandad’s flat. I haven’t been back there since.
– Don’t you miss it? Home?
‘Course I do. OK, maybe it wasn’t the biggest planet in the universe, but it wasn’t the smallest either. Had a lot of moons. It was nice to watch them following each other across the sky at night. It was, you know, home.’
– It was bad enough having to leave the flat in Traquair Gardens. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to leave your whole solar system.
‘See? Even planets don’t last forever.’
– You know, if we save the Earth, maybe you could stay here. Maybe you could live here. With me.
‘I don’t know.
– But we are going to save this one? I mean, Hadrian’s Wall – that’s got to be worth seeing. That is surely going in the Companion.
I finally felt we were beginning to save the planet.
‘I don’t think so.’
– But you loved it. You weed a message on it.
‘But it also fell down. Imagine if someone came all the way across the universe to see the wall just because they’d read about it in the Companion, and when they got here there was nothing but a heap of rubble. What would people think? They’d think Sputnik’s Guide was an unreliable source and the Sputnik is not unreliable.’
We climbed back into the digger, turned the key in the ignition and one blink later we lurched to a halt in the farmyard.
The front door was open. We could smell the chicken-and-mushroom pie. And by the way, it tasted braw, even if it was the result of an armed robbery.
10.
Spanish Lessons
Normally during meals, everyone was talking at once. Like . . .
But that night Jessie didn’t say a word. She stared sadly into her mashed potato as if it was a sleeping ghost. Without Jessie the conversation was more like:
‘No phones at the table.’
‘Eat your peas.’
Why wasn’t she talking? Because she was too busy thinking about Sputnik and how he always ignored her and went off with me instead.
After tea Sputnik sidled in through the back door. Ray didn’t notice because he was searching the kitchen for the TV remote control. The mum was busy checking her Facebook group for lost-dog notices.
Sputnik found the remote between the fridge and the sink and handed it to Ray.
‘How did he even know I was looking for that?’ said Ray. ‘You know, I think Sputnik is unusually clever.’ He flicked the television on. I was expecting the news to be all about the traffic congestion at Hadrian’s Wall. I worried a bit that there might even be a film of us. But there was no mention of any of it.
‘Looks like we got away with that,’ said Sputnik.
The next few evenings Jessie got quieter and quieter. The gaps where she would normally talk got bigger and bigger. Then bigger. After a while you could hear people chewing. After a while more you could hear the cows chewing outside.
When people are talking I feel nicely invisible. When it’s quiet I feel everyone is looking at me. The silence was in my face like a spotlight.
There were a few days of school left before we broke up. I was thinking, If I don’t say something, we are going to have a silent summer. I wanted to stand up and say, ‘Please, please can you go back to yelling at each other?!’
Maybe I would have done that too, but one night while we were eating Ray looked over at me, winked and said, ‘Did you all hear about Prez and the school alligator?’
Jessie looked up. ‘There’s an alligator in Prez’s school?’
‘Don’t speak with your mouth full.’
‘Aye. Would you credit it? Lives in the hot tub in the staff toilets. Anyway, apparently it got out, slithered into Learning Resources. School alligator opens its jaws and – blurp! – school alligator swallows the IT teacher while she’s on the phone. And everyone is like, what are we going to do? Because no one knew what to do. But Prez jumps up on the table, prises its jaws open with the leg of a flip chart and helps her out. She was so pleased she gave him two merits.’
‘Rayyy. Monnnd. Don’t tease Prez.’
Jessie pointed out that me and Raymond didn’t even go to the same school.
‘It’s all over Facebook. I swear he’s practically a meme. Look! He’s got the merits to prove it. Show her, Prez.’
The mum was looking at me. She was worried I was going to get upset. I rooted round in my backpack, got my homework diary and showed her two merits. As if that proved I’d wrestled an alligator.
Everyone laughed and I laughed too. And then they all went back to shouting just like before. I leaned back in my chair and just listened.
Amazing Stuff That Prez Did Today became a thing. Ray did a different story every night at dinner. Like the time he said I’d won half a million quid in the school casino.
‘There’s a school casino?’
‘Yeah, don’t you remember? Prez’s school is the only one to have its own casino in the whole of southern Scotland. Anyway, the point is, Prez won half a million quid.’
‘Prez’s got half a million quid?! Really?’
‘Not any more. He staked the lot on black twenty-two. Lost the whole pile.’
I pulled out my pockets to show that they were empty, like they must have been full once.
All my days at school, other people had stuff I didn’t have. They had nice phones. Proper sports kit. Brothers and sisters. Mums and dads. Now I had something no one else had. I had a friend who could float a shed on a gravity eddy. And light cigars with a lightsaber. Knowing I had Sputnik, I felt like the secret millionaire.
At school, other people had always had homework; I had work to do at home. I was learning things like how to cook, how to sort out Grandad’s pension, how to answer all the letters he got from people he’d annoyed. The stuff you learned at school seemed far away and hard to do. But once you’ve learned to levitate a shed, lessons seem easy. It’s like Sputnik said: just follow the instructions. I actually tried it in Spanish, which was the very last lesson before the holidays. Mr McAlister was handing out new textbooks for next year and doing his speech about how if any of us were going to Spain for a holiday we should take that opportunity to speak a bit of Spanish to a real Spanish person.
I went straight to the instructions – the bit at the back with no pictures and rules about grammar and tables of verbs. Straight away the words there made me think of Grandad. He didn’t speak Spanish to me at home, but loads of his favourite things had Spanish names: paella, tortilla, chorizo, churros, cerveza. The words and the rules just went straight into my head like a tune, then stayed there the way tunes do. When Mr McAlister asked a question – ‘Como te llamas?’ – my hand went up.
‘Hola, me llamo Prez. Voy a pasar el invierno con la familia Blythe en una hacienda en Knockbrex, que se llama Stramoddie. Tengo un amigo nuevo. Se llama Sputnik; él también vive con la familia Blythe. Todo el mundo cree que él es un perro, pero no lo es.’ I was speaking Spanish, speaking it so quickly that even I
couldn’t understand what I was saying. Everyone was staring at me.
‘Hablas español con un acento excelente.’
‘Gracias.’
‘How come he speaks Spanish really well but he never speaks English, sir? Is he actually Spanish?’
‘Prez, eres español?’
‘¡Hombre! ¡Claro que no!’ I can’t tell you what it’s like to feel your mouth moving in the middle of your face, and to hear words jumping out of it and bouncing around the room like foreign mice. ‘Es que he leído las instruciones.’
‘No, he’s not Spanish.’
‘How come he talks Spanish so well?’
‘He says it’s because he’s read the instructions. I guess he means the textbook. An example to you all.’
‘Sir!’ Murder Bell had his hand up. ‘Sir, what’s the Spanish for “Grandad”, sir?’
‘Abuelo. Can you say it?’
‘Abuelo, sir. And what’s the Spanish for “mad”, sir?’
‘Tonto. Why?’
‘So “Mad Grandad” is Abuelo tonto. Is that right, sir? What about “locked up”, sir? How would you say, “Your mad grandad got locked up”?’
By now everyone in the class was giggling. They knew Murder was trying to wind me up.
The thing about Murder Bell is that he’s in the Temporary with me. Only he doesn’t want anyone to know. So he picks on me. How scared do you have to be to be scared that someone who never speaks is going to tell people that you’re a Temporary Kid?
11.
Eggs
I did feel bad about Jessie. I really would have liked to tell her everything. But how could I? What could I say? ‘Sputnik is not a dog. He’s an alien. He can talk and he’s good at fixing stuff. But he’s fairly unpredictable and heavily armed. Plus maybe he’d like to play with you, but he really should be concentrating on saving the world.’
You’d think it would be easy enough to find ten things worth seeing or doing on Earth, but I couldn’t guess what Sputnik would like. I really thought he’d love Hadrian’s eighty-mile-long wall. But no. ‘A wall’s just a wall in the end. And walls fall down.’
– But you fixed it!
‘I tell you what I liked. That yellow jacket that Pavel in the hard hat was wearing.’
– It was just a high-vis jacket like people wear when they’re doing roadworks or working on a ferry.
‘Yeah. High-vis jackets. I’ve never seen them anywhere else in all the wide universe. I love the way it glowed in the twilight. That can go in the Companion. We can put it on the list.’
Last thing at night the dad would go round and make sure all the sheds and stables were locked up properly. I’d go with him and say goodnight to Sputnik. He’d always be lying in his hammock with his notebook, planning possible expeditions.
Sometimes Jessie would follow me over, with a plate of food for him. It seemed sad and wrong that I was talking to Sputnik about saving the entire world and she couldn’t understand a word. After all, it was her world too. One night I thought, Whatever we do tomorrow, we should take her with us.
But Sputnik had other ideas.
1. Get up
2. Wash face with cold water (This stops you wanting to go back to bed)
3. Make bed (Then you can’t go back to bed)
4. Brush teeth (Feels good)
5. Go (Breakfast can wait)
Sputnik had said we were going to make an early start. I was downstairs and ready to go by six o’clock. I’d forgotten that that’s not that early on a dairy farm. I had my hand on the front-door knob when I heard the mum say, ‘You’re first out, Prez.’
She was looking at my backpack. I always keep it with me. But maybe she thought I was trying to run away. She said, ‘A wee job for you. First out always brings in the eggs, OK? As many as you can get.’
When I lived with my grandad, he used to take me to school every morning and pick me up every afternoon, until the day when he didn’t come. When I was at the Temporary, a minibus took us in the morning and brought us back after school. You couldn’t get past the front door without a grown-up. So it felt amazing now to just open the door and be outside in the morning. The world looked different.
‘The shadows are all pointing the other way,’ said Sputnik. ‘You normally don’t see long shadows until the afternoon when they’re going the other way because your sun is setting. In the morning, when it’s rising, the shadows point east to west. Your brain noticed the difference but it didn’t tell you. Let’s go.’
– Can’t we wait for Jessie?
‘Time and tide wait for no man.’ He waved a little book in my face.
– Where did you get that? That’s my grandad’s tide timetable.
‘It tells you the times for high tide and low tide.’
– I know it does. That was in my bag. Look, it’s got Grandad’s name in the front. How did you get it?
‘Stole it,’ said Sputnik. ‘Come on.’
We tramped across the pasture. Slowly this time, so the cows didn’t get scared. When we got to the gate of the Coo Palace we stopped. There’s a hedge there – a spiky one with little yellow flowers – and through a gap in the hedge something was shining. Bright blue.
‘There it is,’ said Sputnik. ‘The sea.’
I knew it was the same place that we’d seen the other day – the Coo Palace was still there, and I could see the tops of the poles for the salmon nets – but it looked like a different country. The other day it had been flat mud with no sound except for some whistling birds. Today there was no mud – it was all waves crashing against rocks and seagulls screaming.
Sputnik licked his lips and rubbed his hands. For a minute I thought he was going to pick up the entire sea and swallow it like a pancake.
– I’ve never seen the sea before.
‘What do you mean, you’ve never seen the sea? I thought you’d been all over the world with your grandad.’
– Yeah. Well, I mean, I haven’t seen this bit of sea. Of course I’ve seen other seas. I’ve sailed all Seven Seas in fact. I just don’t remember very well.
‘What’s this sea called?’
– I’m not sure. This is Rumblecairn Bay, so the sea must be . . .
‘I’m going to call it the Punctual Sea, because it got here bang on time, according to your grandad’s book.’ He handed me back the tide timetable. ‘How do they know what time it will come in?’
– It’s all to do with the moon. The moon’s gravity makes the water move around.
‘That’s something I love about this planet. Only one moon. No wonder you have the best gravity. We had a dozen moons where I used to live. Imagine that – a moon going past every half an hour. The tide was up and down like a frog on a frying pan.’
I’d never thought about that before.
‘Definitely the tide is going on the list.’
We squeezed through the gap in the hedge and found a little sandy path that went along the shore – a sign said ‘Rumblecairn Bay Caravan Site Only’. We strolled along it with the little waves swooshing next to us. It felt like we were taking the sea for a walk.
Sputnik made sure to stand between me and the water in case I got swept out to sea. ‘It’s my job to look after you, remember. You know,’ he said, ‘I’m really getting to like this planet. It’ll be a real shame if we don’t stop the destruction.’
Every time he talked like this, I looked up into the sky in case I could see the Destruction of Earth coming.
‘Look at that! That is un-be-lievable!’ Sputnik was standing very still, staring at a fat bloke with a walking stick who was leading a spaniel along the track towards the caravans. Every now and then he’d throw a rubber ball and tell the dog to fetch. I couldn’t see much amazing about it.
‘In all my travels,’ he said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. A dog that speaks English!’
– What makes you think it speaks English?
‘He’s talking to it and it’s doing what he tells it to.’
&nb
sp; – I don’t know much about dogs, but I’m pretty sure they don’t speak English. I think you can just train them.
‘Train them to speak?’
– No, train them to, you know, fetch a ball.
Whenever the dog dropped the ball, the man picked it up and started going on about what a good dog it was and how it should keep away from the water and not touch the ducks. He even asked if it was starting to feel the cold and mentioned that it was colder today than yesterday.
‘This doesn’t look like fun for either of them,’ said Sputnik. ‘The big man doesn’t want to throw the ball. The little dog doesn’t want to fetch it. You’re right. They’re not communicating. They need help. They need me.’
He dashed off after them down the path. The man looked round when he heard us coming. He smiled at Sputnik, then looked at me and said, ‘What’s his name?’
‘Sputnik,’ said Sputnik.
‘This is Figaro,’ said the man.
‘Sometimes you’d swear they could understand every word you say,’ said Sputnik.
‘What breed is he?’ asked the man.
‘Tourist,’ said Sputnik. ‘Prez is my tour guide.’
‘It’s like he’s really talking,’ said the man.
Then he crouched down and he barked – Woof woof woof – right in Sputnik’s face!!
‘I’ll tell you something for nothing,’ said Sputnik. ‘This joker is never going to learn to speak dog.’ Then he strode off after the man’s dog. ‘If the man can’t speak dog,’ he said, ‘then the dog’ll just have to learn English for real. Hey, Figaro! Come to Sputnik!’
The spaniel scampered over and stuck his head up Sputnik’s kilt.
‘They’re getting to know each other,’ smiled the man.
I’m pretty sure sniffing someone’s bottom is not good manners or the best way to get to know them. Sputnik didn’t seem to mind though. They both ran off down the path towards the caravans. Then Sputnik rooted around in his backpack, pulled out a textbook and started showing the dog various pages from it.
‘Here they come. Come on, Figaro. Come to Daddy!’ called the man.