Calling Major Tom

by David M. Barnett

Genres: Humor & Satire; Coming of Age; Action & Adventure Romance

Synopsis

CALLING MAJOR TOM is a funny, uplifting tale of friendship and community about a man who has given up on the world... but discovers in the most unlikely way that it might not have given up on him.

We all know someone like Thomas.

The grumpy next-door-neighbour who complains to the Residents' Committee about the state of your front lawn. The man who tuts when you don't have the correct change at the checkout. The colleague who sends an all-company email when you accidentally use the last drop of milk.

Thomas is very happy to be on his own, far away from other people and their problems.

But beneath his cranky exterior lies a story and a sadness that is familiar to us all. And he's about to encounter a family who will change his view of the world.

An irresistible and heart-warming tale of a very unexpected friendship, perfect for fans of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and A Man Called Ove. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you will cheer on all the curmudgeons in your life.

Read by David Thorpe

Release date: January 19, 2017

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 304

Sample

A long time ago in a cinema far, far away from where he is now, a boy and his dad are walking into darkness. The boy hugs a bag of Revels and a small popcorn to his chest, his dad steers him with a firm hand on the shoulder down the aisle, the carpet sticking to their feet. The film hasn’t started yet but already the faces of those seated are turned towards the advertisements, painted with pale light. Tendrils of cigarette smoke weave and knot together in the black void between the screen and the audience. Rising from the packed rows there is a muted murmur of whispered conversation.

Thomas Major has never been happier. It is his eighth birthday treat, coming to the Glendale cinema to watch this movie he has been aching to see – as though it is already, has always been, part of his life, imprinted on his DNA. At home, carefully positioned on the desk in his bedroom are his presents from his actual birthday, a month ago; a Star Wars Cantina playset, which comes with action figures of the aliens, Snaggletooth and Hammerhead, whom you can fix to little stands that twist and turn as though the characters are fighting; and a recording of the movie’s soundtrack by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, placed neatly next to his mum’s old Dansette and the stack of her old 45s she has given him to play on it.

And now, Thomas and his dad are at the film. The actual film. The opening weekend. They have queued around the block to get in to Caversham’s oldest cinema – and one of the oldest in Reading – and while they wait Thomas asks his dad if he would like to go to space.

‘I bet when you’re my age they’ll have cities on the moon,’ says Dad. ‘Not for me, though. No atmosphere.’ He guffaws and slaps Thomas on the shoulder. ‘You could go and live there. Be like that song. “Major Tom”. Your mummy was about three months gone when that song was out. I think that’s why she wanted to call you Thomas. She’s about the same time along now.’ Dad pauses, then looks at Thomas. ‘Bloody hell. Is that “Figaro” still top of the hit parade? I don’t fancy shouting that out of the back gate at teatime.’

‘“Space Oddity”,’ says Thomas absently. ‘It’s not called “Major Tom”, it’s called “Space Oddity”.’

As they queue to get inside, a beige car cruises past the cinema. Frank Major whistles. ‘Look at that. Volkswagen Derby. Only came out last year. Quite fancy one of those myself.’ He nudges Thomas. ‘We’d look like a right pair of cool guys, riding round in that, eh?’

Thomas shrugs. He isn’t really interested in cars. His dad continues, ‘Maybe we’ll get one this year. But I’d like to get a conservatory up this summer. Adds value to the house, does that. Maybe we could convert the loft as well. There’s a house in the next street with a conservatory and a loft conversion, went for nearly twenty-three grand last year, can you believe that?’

It’s only the afternoon but already the sky is deep blue, a full moon low on the horizon above the black rooftops. ‘Like a ten-pence piece,’ says Dad. Thomas closes one eye and puts his thumb and forefinger around the disc of the moon.

‘I got it, Dad! I got the moon!’

‘Put it in your pocket, son,’ he says. ‘You never know when you might need it. Come on, we’re going inside at last.’

Thomas puts the invisible, weightless, ten-pence-piece moon in the breast pocket of his brown shirt with the wide collars. Thomas’s belly is weighed down agreeably with the Wimpy he had for lunch, but he still has room for sweets and treats. His dad shakes his head and comments on his ‘hollow legs’ before handing over the money at the kiosk.

Now Dad is directing him to a single empty seat on the end of a row, next to a man and a woman with three small girls. Thomas feels something knot inside him, something he can’t put a name to. He looks quizzically at his dad. ‘But there’s only one chair.’

‘Wait here,’ says Dad, and goes over to speak to the lady who sells ice creams. She has hair that looks as though it has been carved from granite and a face to match, which she turns towards Thomas, her pin-prick eyes peering at him through the gloom.

Dad gives her a pound note and she gives him two choc ices. She looks at Thomas again, then at Dad, who pulls a face and gives her another pound note. Then he walks back to Thomas with the lady behind him. Thomas has the popcorn balanced on his knees and the Revels in his pocket. Dad pushes the ice cream into his hands.

‘Thomas, son,’ he says. ‘Dad’s got to run an errand.’

Thomas looks at him, and blinks. ‘What errand? What about the film?’

‘It’s all right. It’s very important. It’s …’ He looks at the screen as though he might find inspiration there. ‘It’s a surprise for your mum.’ He taps the side of his nose. ‘Boys’ day out rules, OK? Just between us.’

Thomas taps the side of his nose, too, but without much conviction. He feels a yawning chasm open in his belly. Dad says, ‘This is Deirdre. She’s going to keep an eye on you until I get back.’

The woman looks down her nose at Thomas, her mouth set in a thin, bloodless line, as though the sculptor couldn’t be bothered to even try to make it human-looking.

‘How long will you be?’ says Thomas, feeling the weight of all that blackness in the cinema against his back, feeling very alone.

‘Back before you know it,’ says Dad, and winks. Then the music starts and Thomas turns to look at the screen as it fills with stars and words that begin scrolling away from him.

It is a period of civil war. Rebel spaceships, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Galactic Empire.

Thomas looks back to see his dad, but he’s already gone.

5 Across: The Latin sun, one masticated, though sadly misspelled (8)

Thomas Major closes his eyes to think, and decides that the absolute best thing of all is the silence. No car horns blaring, no voices shouting, no engines revving, no telephones ringing, no beep-beep-beep of reversing bin wagons.

Nothing.

No doorbells, no shuddering bass of someone else’s awful music, no slamming doors, no blasting televisions.

Just quiet.

No inane radio-host chatter, no incessant ping of incoming messages, no drilling of tarmac, no buskers murdering classic songs.

None of the things filed in his head under the label aural menaces.

Thomas Major has always wanted a shed. Cocooned and insulated, away from everyone else and their hateful noise, he taps the point of his pencil on the first page of The Big Guardian Book of Really Hard Cryptic Crosswords, and gets back to thinking. The tapping of the pencil is a good sound, an accompaniment to honest mental toil. And it’s his sound, his noise.

As is the slurping he makes when he takes a mouthful of tea, hot and far too sweet. No one in here to tell him to mind his manners. He’ll slurp if he wants to. He swishes the tea around his mouth until it’s cool enough to loudly gargle at the back of his throat.

‘Take that,’ he says when he’s swallowed it, to no one at all.

All his life he has wanted his own shed. He envied those men who could disappear to the bottom of their gardens and lock themselves away from everything and everybody. And now, here, on his forty-seventh birthday, he is finally alone, free to slurp tea, able to spend as much time as he likes doing his crosswords. He’s been saving this book and its 365 fiendishly difficult puzzles. He taps his pencil on the page again. Masticated? Chewed. But misspelled? Sadly misspelled?

Because Thomas Major can do precisely what he wants in here, he decides he might like to have a bit of music to help him think. Proper music, mind, not the thud-thud-thud that issues from expensive cars driven by young men sweating arrogance. He would have liked to have his entire vinyl record collection with him, but there was the space issue. So he’s got it all digitised, every album track, every single and B-side, every rarity, every flexidisc that was taped to the front of a music paper or magazine. Everything. Because it’s his birthday, he thinks he might like to listen to something uplifting and jolly, perhaps The Cure. He fires up the computer terminal – grimacing at the laboured ticking and buzzing it makes – and decides on Disintegration. Magnificent return to gloomy form, 1989. The tracks start to shuffle, which Thomas doesn’t like – an album should be listened to in the order the band intended – but he hasn’t yet worked out how to stop it doing that. The first song it plays is ‘Homesick’.

Thomas grunts, and expels air through his nose, and gives a wry smile.

Almost. But not quite.

Latin sun – that must be Sol, obviously. One masticated – number? Thomas sucks on the pencil thoughtfully until the next track comes on. Perhaps a look through the window might help. It serves only to take his breath away, and he wonders if he’ll ever tire of this view, ever think it commonplace or lacking in wonder. He sincerely hopes not. Because here he is, all alone with his tea and his crossword and his music, and out there is everyone else.

The Earth fills the four-inch thick pane, blue and green and wreathed in cloud and quite, quite beautiful. So big he could almost reach out and touch it. He is in high earth orbit, 22,000 miles above the planet’s surface, and very shortly he will catapult out into the void, travelling away from it at 26.5 kilometres every single second. Soon it will shrink to nothingness, a speck in the velvet blanket of space. He closes his eyes and listens to the music, and tells himself that of course he’s done the right thing, that this is exactly what he wanted.

Thomas’s world is a hexagonal tube thirty feet long and dominated at one end by his workstation and the other by a large hatch that leads to an airlock and then to the great, unending void.

Thomas doesn’t go to that end of the capsule very often.

In between are banks and banks of electronics – Thomas knows what less than half of them actually do – a series of doors that open into storage compartments holding all manner of things – mostly dried – to keep him alive on his journey, and a treadmill, which he clips himself to in order to run and stop his muscles completely wasting away.

It is, for all intents and purposes, home. It even has its routines like home, too, but instead of commuting to a job and coming home to sit in front of a TV or listen to music while his dinner cooks, Thomas starts each day zipped into a sleeping bag on the wall. He’s tried sleeping free in the microgravity but he just gets sucked towards the air vents. Then he cooks breakfast – some tasteless dried food, or a nutritious fruit bar – and then washes himself and uses the toilet, which is always fun. The morning is spent carrying out checks on all the systems, then there is exercise, then he’s meant to read up on all the jobs he’ll have to do once he reaches Mars … chief among them: keeping himself alive. This seems to involve a lot of potato farming.

The music stops and is replaced by a jarring, insistent pinging noise. He turns away from the window, from the world, and pushes himself off the wall, swimming in the zero gravity to the monitor bolted to the wall, his crossword book and pencil floating above it. The screen is displaying the words INCOMING COMMUNICATION.

‘Bloody marvellous,’ he whispers as the screen dissolves into a mess of pixels, which turn into a laggy image of a huddle of people in suits standing before rows and rows of technicians sitting at computer terminals.

‘This is Ground Control to Major Tom!’ says the man in the middle of the huddle, tall and thin with slicked-back dark hair. ‘Come in, Major Tom!’

Thomas anchors himself in front of the monitor and a postage-stamp-sized image of his head appears in the bottom corner of the screen. He glances at it and wonders if he should have shaved; he can only use an electric thing up here and he hates it. He suddenly realises he’ll probably never have a wet shave again in his entire life. His brown hair, flecked with grey, is sticking up comically, like fronds of seaweed waving in a tide.

‘Hello, Ground Control. This is Shednik-1, receiving you loud and clear.’

There’s a cheer from the technicians, though a very muted, polite, British one. The man in the suit – Director Baumann – glares at him through the camera. ‘Are you going to keep calling the Ares-1 that silly name, Thomas?’

‘Are you going to say “this is Ground Control to Major Tom” every day for the next seven months?’

Director Baumann has hair so dark he must dye it. He is also never without a tie, top shirt button proudly fastened. Thomas is suspicious of anyone who wears a tie to work in this day and age. It’s completely unnecessary. Ties are for funerals – of which Thomas has much experience – and weddings, of which he has a passing knowledge. Baumann’s shirts are so neatly pressed he either has obsessive compulsive disorder or a wife chained to an ironing board in his basement. But what Thomas loathes most about him is, he realises, Director Baumann’s love affair with clipboards. He is never without one. He consults the one he is holding now. ‘All your systems are running A-OK from our diagnostics here. Have you completed your on-board checks?’

Thomas swats away the crossword book that’s hovering incriminatingly in front of the camera and mumbles something non-committal. Baumann says, ‘Your launch went perfectly, as I imagine you know. You’re properly aligned with the Hohmann Transfer route and the engines are firing. You’re on your merry way, Thomas. Three hundred and ten million miles to go. NASA tells us there’s a bit of a micrometeoroid shower in your vicinity, but it shouldn’t cause you any problems.’

Talking about the weather, even in space. How very British. ‘I knew I should have packed my umbrella.’

There’s more laughter from the technicians. A woman holding an iPad like it’s a baby flicks her hair with her free hand. ‘We’re recording this session to release to the media. And we believe it’s your birthday today …?’ Her voice rises in a hateful sing-song effect.

This is Claudia who handles public relations. Thomas knows she detests him for what he did a year ago. She is tanned and toned and Thomas imagines that she spends all of her free time engaged in some form of highly costly exercise, punching leather bags, trying to focus and seeing only Thomas’s wayward hair and pale face. Every day Thomas has seen her she has worn a different outfit, quietly imparting the name of the label or designer to anyone within earshot as though they’re the secret passwords to her better and more expensively clad world.

‘January 11. Same time every year. Don’t tell me there’s a cake in a tube somewhere? It’s got to be better than that tea I squeeze out. Too much sugar. And certainly not Earl Grey like I asked for.’

Baumann waggles his eyebrows, semaphoring for God’s sake stop being such a grumpy bastard. Claudia prods at her iPad. ‘We’ve got someone very special here to talk to you, Thomas …’

He opens his mouth and closes it again. Really? Someone special? Has she … is it Janet?

‘That’s Nan’s phone,’ shouts James.

Then: ‘I haven’t got a clean shirt.’

And: ‘It’s PE today, where’s my kit?’

Followed by: ‘And I hate ham sandwiches. Can’t I have a school dinner?’

Gladys sits in her chair by the fireplace in the small living room of number 19 Santus Street, Wigan, admiring her long, pink quilted dressing gown. It’s like the duvets they used to call Continental Quilts back in her day. She wonders why. Did they come over from the Continent? And why did they have them over there? Wasn’t it always warm on the Continent? Or at least the places people used to go when they used to say they were going ‘to the Continent’? Benidorm and suchlike?

James is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, no shirt, his white, bony elbows touching either side of the frame as he holds his arms out, as though imploring someone to do something. He’ll catch his death, standing there with practically nothing on in the depths of January. Gladys thinks for a moment she might try to help. That is, after all, her phone ringing – James is quite right. Though it sounds very dull, like it’s in a bucket down a well. It’s amazing what they can do these days – James put an old song on the phone instead of a ringing sound. It’s ‘Diamonds and Rust’ by Joan Baez, one of Gladys’s favourites, though it makes her sad, and she often can’t say just why that is. Maybe it’s because it’s about remembering things from a long time ago, and that’s pretty much all that Gladys has these days. She remembers something then, quite unrelated to anything, but a fact worth remembering, she thinks. ‘Wigan is one hundred and thirty four feet above sea level.’

James groans and stares at his elbows, his arms twisted in on themselves.

‘Ellie!’ Gladys calls from the chair. ‘James needs … stuff. I’ll iron his shirt.’

There’s a muffled shout from upstairs. James – Gladys clicks her tongue at his hair, far too long and curly for a boy of ten – and hauls her thin frame up. The living room is small, only a chair and the sofa and the telly, a door into the kitchen where the stairs are. Behind the sofa is a plastic basket piled high with a teetering tower of washed clothes. The ironing board is already set up beside it, has been for months. For ever. Gladys rummages through the pile, finds a white shirt, and plugs in the iron.

‘I’ll give you a shilling for your dinner.’

James rolls his eyes and roots through the washing basket himself, pulling out a pair of shorts and a rugby shirt. ‘Shall I iron that for you as well?’ she says.

James stuffs it into his bag. ‘Don’t bother. It’ll only be full of mud and probably blood by teatime. I don’t know why we have to play rugby in January. We should do that in summer.’

‘Your granddad was always good at rugby. He could have played for Wigan when he was younger.’ Gladys peers at the buttons on the shirt she’s spread out on the ironing board. The stitching’s awful. They wouldn’t have got away with that in her day. She peers at the label. Made in Taiwan, she shouldn’t wonder.

‘Nan!’ Ellie has appeared in the kitchen doorway. Far too much eye make-up on, as usual. Hair looks like she’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. And that skirt. Practically a belt. Not that Gladys has any room to talk. Liked a miniskirt did Gladys. Great legs. All the boys said so. That was the first thing Bill ever said to her, when they were outside the chippy near the Ferris Wheel pub. ‘Tha’s got great legs, lass.’ She used to like the Ferris Wheel. Nice glass of stout on a Saturday night. She wonders if it’s still open, then remembers that they knocked it down to build the big supermarket.

‘Nan!’ Ellie rushes over, squeezes between the sofa and the wall, and grabs for the iron, which has been laying face down on James’s shirt.

‘Oh, great.’ There’s a big, iron-shaped brown mark right over the breast pocket.

Ellie puts her hands over her face. ‘He’s only got three shirts.’

‘Here, I’ll do another one,’ says Gladys. She holds up the shirt and inspects it critically. ‘Stitching was very poor on this, anyway. I’ll cut it up for dusters.’

‘I’ll do it,’ says Ellie, gently steering Gladys away from the ironing board by her elbows. ‘You sit down. Have you had any breakfast yet?’

‘Piece of toast and a cup of tea would be lovely. Have you seen my phone? I heard it ringing.’

James is already climbing into a creased white shirt. ‘It’s fine,’ he says, though in a voice that suggests it’s anything but. ‘I’m going to miss my bus.’

‘Don’t forget your butties,’ says Ellie, rubbing at her earlobe. ‘Has anyone seen my earring?’

‘Has anyone seen my phone?’ says Gladys. ‘I plugged it in when you brought home the shopping last night. I was putting the food away. I remember now.’

James is standing at the fridge, staring into it as though it contains all manner of wonders. He reaches in and pulls out his clingfilmed sandwiches. ‘It’s here, Nan. Your phone. You’ve left it in the fridge. In the butter dish.’

James starts laughing and walks into the living room with the phone. Ellie shakes her head. ‘Nan.’

Gladys rubs her chin. ‘I could have sworn blind I plugged it in last night. Over there, on the sideboard.’

The sideboard is under the window, just a small, cheap thing. On it is a bowl with a couple of shrivelled tangerines in it, flanked by photographs of Ellie and James’s mum and dad. James points and laughs again. ‘Oh, Jesus. That’s rank.’

Behind the fruit bowl is the snaking lead of Gladys’s phone charger, the contact rammed into a block of Anchor that’s begun to melt and spread over the varnished wood.

‘I’ll clean it up.’ Ellie sighs loudly. She looks at her phone. ‘James, you need to go.’

‘See you,’ he says, and Gladys watches him stuff a biscuit into his mouth before he leaves. She winks at him. Our secret.

Ellie looks at her phone again. ‘Crap. I’m going to be late for school.’ She rushes into the kitchen – she’s always rushing around that girl – and Gladys hears the kettle hissing and the toaster going. Five minutes later Ellie is bringing her a cup of tea and a piece of buttered toast on a plate, a folded-up slice of toast hanging out of her own mouth.

‘You’re a good girl,’ says Gladys.

Ellie squats down in front of Gladys and takes the toast from her mouth. ‘Nan,’ she says. Always serious. Rushing around and serious. ‘Nan, promise me you won’t go out today. And don’t plug anything in. I’ve put a Tupperware bowl in the fridge with your dinner in it. It needs to go in the microwave for two minutes. I’ve written it all down and Sellotaped it to the lid. Follow the instructions exactly, OK? Are you all right making cups of tea?’

‘Of course I am,’ sniffs Gladys. ‘I’m not a baby, you know. I’m seventy-one next birthday.’

Ellie nods. ‘Don’t answer the door and ignore any phone calls unless it comes up on the screen that it’s me or James, you understand?’

Gladys gives Ellie a little salute and laughs. Ellie doesn’t laugh. She looks around for her rucksack, locates it by the sideboard, and hefts it over her shoulder. ‘I’ll be back at four. James will be home at half three. OK? You just watch telly. Don’t forget your dinner. I thought we could have fish fingers for tea. Then I’ll have to go out to work.’

‘Lovely,’ says Gladys. ‘Though I might like a pie, I think. Meat and potato. Do you know, they’re not allowed to call them that any more? They have to call them potato and meat because there’s more potatoes than meat. Be nice with a bit of gravy though. Have a good day at school.’

When Ellie’s finally gone, Gladys heaves a sigh. Sometimes she can’t hear herself think in this house. She looks around for the zapper and finds it on the mantelpiece, and she points it up close to the telly and jabs at the buttons until it comes on. News news news. Those idiots on that sofa. Some American rubbish. People going up into space. All this choice and nothing to watch. Gladys might read her book if she can find it. Or remember what it’s called. Or even what it’s about.

She picks her phone up and wonders who was calling earlier from the fridge. No, not from the fridge. In the fridge. While the phone was in the fridge. It might be her boyfriend, though he doesn’t normally phone. Well, never phones. Email’s his thing. Gladys peers at the screen that says ONE MISSED CALL followed by a number she doesn’t recognise – well, one that doesn’t have a name attached to it, anyway. Then she jumps, almost dropping the phone as it rings again.

‘Hello?’ Gladys listens for a moment to what the nice-sounding young woman on the other end has to say. She thinks about it and says, ‘Why, yes, I think I do have payment protection insurance. How many loans? Ooh, six or seven I should think. Eight. Claim it back? That sounds interesting …’

Thomas glances at his image in the corner of the monitor and tries to flatten down his hair, which just springs up again. He wonders if he can take a break to have a shave. What he doesn’t wonder is why his ex-wife would be there, several months after she told him she would not be speaking to him again.

Then a man in a checked shirt and a small child shuffle into view. And no, not Janet at all. Claudia beckons at the girl. ‘We ran a competition with your old primary school in Caversham for one pupil to get the chance to ask you a question.’ She puts her arm around the child, who is perhaps nine or ten. ‘This is Stephanie. And this is Mr Beresford, her form tutor. Go on, Stephanie, say hello, don’t be shy.’

Thomas peers at the teacher. He looks actually young enough to conceivably be Thomas’s son. The girl waves a shy hello and Thomas says, ‘My form tutor was Mr Dickinson. Whatever happened to him?’

Mr Beresford says, ‘Ah, is that Tony Dickinson? I think he retired some while back and died about a year ago. I remember seeing something on one of the newsletters.’

‘Good. He was a hateful, sadistic bastard. He once caned me three times on the arse because I scratched my nose in class. I hope he died in agony.’

‘Major Tom …’ says Baumann through gritted teeth. ‘Major Tom has a very … funny sense of humour, Stephanie. He doesn’t mean that at all.’

‘I bloody do. I think old Dicky actually got off on smacking boys.’ He directs his attention to Mr Beresford, all trendy haircut and hipster beard. ‘I suppose they don’t let you do that sort of thing these days. Criminal background checks and all that.’

Claudia is elbowing her way in front of Baumann, who’s tugging at his shirt collar. ‘Anyway, Thomas, Stephanie has a question for you.’

‘If this is going to be about how I take a shit in space, I can tell you now that it’s time-consuming, awkward and undignified.’ Thomas sees Baumann put his hand to his forehead.

The girl looks up at her teacher, then at Claudia, who smiles tightly and nudges her. She looks down at a card and recites in a tremulous voice, ‘What’s the best thing about being in space?’

Jesus Christ, was that really the best they could come up with?

Too late, Thomas realises he’s said that out loud. The girl’s face crumples and she starts to cry. Thomas closes his eyes. ‘Okay. You want to know the best thing about being in space? It’s the not being on Earth. I was probably about your age when I realised something, and that was that the world is shit and so is everybody in it. I’ve spent my whole life watching my ambitions wither and die. So when the opportunity came to leave it all behind – I mean literally bloody leave it all behind – I grabbed it with both hands. I’ve got the only thing I ever wanted. No people. I’m alone. Complete and total—’

Sol. One. Chewed. Sadly misspelled. Sad. Misspelled. Chewed. Tude.

‘SOLITUDE!’ Thomas yelps, opening his eyes and looking around for his crossword book. Then he realises the monitor is blank and dead. The bastards have cut him off.

His pencil is floating somewhere over by the window and he’s just about to retrieve it when a shrill buzzing sound issues from a slab of grey plastic he hasn’t noticed before. He picks it up cautiously, and realises it’s some kind of telephone.

‘Hello?’

‘Thomas, this is Director Baumann,’ says a voice, blanketed in hiss. ‘We lost comms with you just before you started speaking. Don’t worry though, we’re on it at this end. Probably just a software glitch. But I might bone up on EVA procedures if I were you.

Bone up? Who says that these days? And Thomas lets the EVA comment slide in favour of a world-weary sigh. ‘Serves you right for buying all the computer systems in the PC World sale.’

Director Baumann ignores him. ‘We’re all over it now. In the meantime, we’ll have to use this system to stay in touch.’

‘I didn’t know I had a phone.’ Thomas momentarily takes the slab of plastic away from his ear to inspect it. It looks like something from the seventies. Given that Shednik-1 is a bastardised hybrid of bits of going-cheap Soviet space tech, it probably is. But at least it works.

‘It’s an Iridium phone,’ says Baumann. ‘It uses the satellites in orbit around Earth to relay a signal between us. The thing is, you’re not going to be in range for very long. The technology is a little old and clunky, but there is something like sixty-six satellites which can bounce the signal, so we should be able to stay in touch.’

‘There should be seventy-seven,’ says Thomas absently. ‘That’s the atomic number of iridium.’

‘It doesn’t really matter,’ says Baumann crossly. ‘We anticipate having the main comms up and running again before you know it.’

‘So you can’t see me? At all?’

‘Well … no, not directly. As such. Don’t panic, though. The tech guys are all—’

‘All over it, yes,’ says Thomas. Like a cheap suit. He makes a grab for his hovering crossword book. ‘Well, if you’re sure you can’t see me … I suppose I’ll just do some, um, checks. And stuff.’

‘Good man,’ says Baumann. ‘It’s just visuals that are down so I’m going to email you some numbers that you can contact us on in an emergency f