Lost on Mars (2 page)

Al and me went round upstairs, finding more damage, looking for Grandma in her favourite hiding places. Toaster was busying about already, putting things to rights and cleaning up the mess she'd made. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,' we heard him say in his singsong voice. ‘Someone has had a busy day. Oh dear!'

Upstairs, through the thin roof covering, the sounds of the approaching dust storm were louder. Closer. More ominous. Al looked pale as he lit the lamps. He knew that the natural daylight coming through our windows would vanish, all of a sudden, very soon. None of us wanted to be sitting in the dark when the dust came.

‘Grandma, are you in there?' Al asked, sounding such a scaredy-cat now, I wanted to push him aside and yell at her myself. I didn't feel like she was venerable or historical. I felt like she was a dumbass old woman who was making our lives hell. She was giving Ma way more work and heartache than she needed to have.

‘You better get out of there, Grandma,' I said, pounding on her door. ‘Come on. Open up. Da says it's best if we're all together, downstairs. He wants us all gathered together.'

‘Go away,' came the old lady's voice. Now she sounded weak. But I knew she was just weaseling. She was scared we'd be mad about the mess she'd made. Now she was turning back into being the sad old lady who wouldn't do nothing wrong.

‘Please, Grandma,' said Al, in his most winning voice. He knew that Grandma had a special soft spot reserved for him. He knew he was the best at getting her to behave. Apparently he was just like her brother at that same age. Her lost brother, the fantastic hero, Thomas. Sometimes when Grandma was crazy confused, not even knowing what year she was in, it was like she thought her Thomas was still with her. Al didn't mind.

The door opened and she stood there, in her nightgown smeared with ashes. She had eyes only for Al.

‘Dust storm's coming, Grandma,' Al said, though it was kind of pointing out the obvious. By now the noise was pounding through the whole house. The windows had gone dim already. When I looked at the landing window there was a grainy fuzziness out there, like the haze on a broken monitor.

Grandma's expression went clear like she briefly stopped being mad. She said, ‘Did you rescue the crops?'

Al nodded. ‘Yes! Yes, we did it. Well, we got some of them. Enough, Da thinks.'

Grandma looked down at her hands. ‘That's good,' she said. ‘I wish…'

‘Come and sit with us,' said Al. ‘Ma's making some broth and some soda bread.'

As he led her away, Grandma said, ‘I wish I could have helped you all.'

‘Hush, now,' Al said, taking her towards the wooden stairs. I followed on behind, listening to the skittering and tapping noise on the tarp roof of the house. I was feeling bad, I guess, because I couldn't feel sorry for Grandma. I felt kind of cold inside about her. I just didn't care as much as Al did anymore and I thought that probably made me bad.

Downstairs Da had gathered everyone around the table where we ate our meals and prayed together each day. ‘Lora,' he told me. ‘Come and sit down with us. Look, we're all here. You sit with us now. Remember – nothing bad can happen to us. Not when we're all together.'

That time, at least, this was true. Nothing bad happened to us that night. None of our family was hurt or killed by the storms that raged till the next dawn light came.

I don't think any of us slept except Hannah and Grandma. We stayed together in our kitchen as the walls were battered. It was as if wild creatures were out there, trying to come inside to get us.

I think we sang every song we knew that night. When it seemed we had run out of singalong songs, Ma played her harp. It was a miniature harp, all gold, and she kept it wrapped in cloth underneath her and Da's bed. It always made me feel drowsy, and half-awake, the liquid strings sent me dreaming of the rivers and seas of Earth. I had heard the grown-ups talk of such things, and I had even seen pictures. And I dreamed about them on music nights.

The storms raged and howled in the darkness outside and we did our best to ignore them. Then, when we were almost too tired to move or think, Da started telling us the old stories again. He told tales about Earth and our family and who they had all been in that other life. And then he told the story of Grandma and Grandpa's generation, and how they had given up almost everything to create a new life for us.

We heard once more about the first landings and the first wave of settlers. The early disasters and the fights that broke out between folk when they tried to make homes for themselves. The constant struggle each day to bring subsistence out of the hopeless soil. They had it so much harder than we do, he said. We must be so grateful for the sacrifices of the previous generation. We were second and third generation settlers and we had an obligation to create a better life for those who came after us: that's how it all worked. Each generation made it easier for the next, and they did it all out of love.

I guess I slept for a while that night in my chair, with thoughts like those going round in my head. When I woke up I thought I'd gone deaf. The roaring and the howling had stopped.

It sounded like a great big emptiness. I cleared my throat, just to make sure I could still hear anything at all. Then the whole kitchen started coming to life. Ma clattered about, cleaning our crocks with sand.
I could hear Da stomping, carrying Grandma upstairs to her bed. There was the mechanical whirring of Toaster's ancient joints as he began work again.

We had survived!

I felt like jumping up out of my chair, running outdoors and doing a lap of honour around our Homestead. Al grinned at me like he felt just the same way. Da came downstairs and he started to take down the wooden boards that covered the windows and doors. He got us kids to help him and we were so excited, we felt like we hadn't been outside for several weeks. Martian sunlight felt so good on your face when you'd been shut inside like that. It felt slow and old. It warmed you right down to your toes.

Da tackled the door. It was stuck. The sand had been swept into a dune against the front of the Homestead. We all put our backs into it. It was only when Toaster put his hydraulic strength behind the door that we got it open.

We stepped out into an alien landscape.

Really, in the new morning, it looked nothing like it had the day before. My heart was hammering with excitement and shock.

Someone had reached down from heaven, or wherever, and smoothed his great big palm over our world. The sand had blown over everything so deeply it had smothered the whole lot. We were worried about our crops being damaged, but they had completely disappeared. Even the shape of the horizon had shifted, at the far edges of our familiar prairie. It looked hillier now.

Da looked grimly disgusted. He knew the storm was a bad one. He knew that chances were it would wipe the slate clean. But we checked on our storage hut and – amazingly – the building was still standing safe, and the crops we collected the previous day were all fine.

‘Praise the Lord,' Da muttered, under his breath. I thought I even saw him wipe his eyes with relief.

We did a circuit of the Homestead. Da said we had to be careful of the shifting sands; they could be treacherous.

At the back of the Homestead we found our burden beasts. They were dead, of course. Their heads poked out of the new dune, and I stared at their closed eyes and their fringed lashes. I had names for our lizards. I called them Molly and George. Which was stupid and sentimental when they could die so easily.

Da sighed as he started digging the dead beasts out. ‘We'll have to train up another pair,
'
he said. ‘We'll be lucky to get two as good as these. Will you come to town with me, Lora? Al? There's all sorts we need. Plus we have to check on the townsfolk. See that everything's OK there.'

Both Al and I nodded, holding back our excitement. We loved to go to town.

‘Come on. Back indoors,' said Da, staring at our dead animals. ‘We'll tell Ma she's got her work cut out for her filleting and salting these beasts for storage. At least we know we won't starve, eh?' He tried to make light of it, and talked about us having a grand barbecue maybe, and inviting all our friends from town.

But I didn't want to think about eating Molly and George.

See? I was sentimental in those days. I tried to focus my thoughts on our trip to see the townsfolk.

And if I remember rightly, it was on this trip that we heard about the Disappearances. They had started up again.

3

The going was hard. Usually Molly and George would pull the hovercart all the way into town. With our beasts dead Da had to tinker with the complicated insides of the engine to make it hover again. The circuits of the instruction manual had long ago fizzled out. Like so many of the devices we'd inherited, we'd forgotten the original instructions and everything was a guessing game.

Da was a kind of super genius and he battled away with his whole box-load of greasy tools and what do you know? Pretty soon that old hovercart was lifting off the sand upon a cushion of jellified air. It quivered like heat haze on the prairie.

Al and I whooped, clambering aboard, and the cart wobbled underneath us. Da was busy kissing goodbye to Ma and Grandma and fussing over Hannah. He was always like that. He departed as if every trip was his last. He had seen too much calamity during his life on Mars. He had seen too many folk set off and never come back.

But Al and I were impatient that day. I wanted to feel the air streaming past us, all cool and sharp on my face. We both wanted to experience that lurching excitement in the pits of our stomachs as the hovercart accelerated to what would seem like impossible velocities.

As Da gunned the engines, Grandma stood alongside us in her old woollen dress and shawl and she had that crazy glint in her eye again.

‘You be careful in that town, do you hear?' She narrowed her eyes at us. ‘You watch after these kiddies.'

Da nodded, pretending he was paying heed to her madness. We could tell that he was as keen to be off as we were. He jumped up in the driver's seat, let out a yell, and wrenched the rusted wheel around. The hovercart shivered and bucked, and then we were off. Riding across the newly smoothed dunes that the storm had created.

We found town busy. People were out and about, using shovels to clear away sand drifts that had settled against the fronts of stores and houses. Folk were up ladders fixing windows and signs and tiles on rooftops. There was a cheery, businesslike atmosphere, as if the town was determined to carry on as usual. They wouldn't let something like a storm get in the way of their everyday lives.

Al and I watched all of this as Da steered the hovercart down Main Street. He called out to a few men he knew and they answered him with gruff replies, or waved as they concentrated on their tasks. Da parked in a sandy lot behind the abandoned Post Office and gave us a handful of coins each, plus a list. He had the bigger list, detailing the heavier goods he would pick up at the Storehouse. Our list consisted of the no-less-important smaller items we could get from Mrs Adams' store. Da always sent us there, so that we would have a vital task of our own to perform, he said. But Al and I knew it was also because Da couldn't stand gossipy Mrs Adams holding court in her fancy goods emporium. I was surprised though, because that day he said, ‘Be sure to invite the Adamses to our barbecue. Don't you forget, Lora.'

We watched our Da lope off towards the Storehouse where he'd be meeting up with other farmers and men from town and they'd spend the remainder of the afternoon discussing the storm. They'd be jawing about the impact of the disaster and drinking the homebrew. Then they'd be congratulating each other on getting through the worst of another stormy season.

But more had been blowing through town than hot wind and sand.

There were rumours. Tales of something terrible. Everyone was talking about it, as Al and I found out in the cool interior of Mrs Adams' store.
There were hushed voices and a kind of electric nervousness in the air. Al and I joined the huddled group of ladies and we eavesdropped.

I breathed in the hundred spicy scents of Adams' Exotic Emporium. I examined beautifully arranged displays of dainty soaps and candles and dried flowers. Everything was scented with lemon verbena, cinnamon and white musk. I gazed at ribboned boxes of jellied fruits and sugar biscuits and all kinds of unguents in jars for prettifying and pampering yourself. All these things were lavishly displayed, even though none of the townsfolk could afford them.

We went to Mrs Adams' place to spend money on things such as flour and sugar, powdered milk and eggs. All them costly frou-frou things from the Earthly past were left to rot luxuriously on the shelves and in cabinets. Really, Ma would say, whoever had need of talcum powder from Paris?

Tittle-tattle would tell you they were all thieved goods anyhow. The Adamses were profiteers from other folks' misfortunes and everything in the Exotic Emporium had been filched from a shipwreck out in the desert.

It was true that once upon a time it was thought a good idea to transport luxury items from Earth to Mars. This was back when they were expecting the rich to come here in great numbers and to find this a world full of hope. That seems like a fairytale now – to think that they sent their expensive goods ahead of themselves, as if pampering was the most important thing those Earthlings could imagine.