Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

When he’d asked her to dance, she’d asked herself why not. When he’d kissed her under the disco ball, his mouth had tasted of grenadine syrup and rum. He’d hailed a taxi back to his empty townhouse and when Poppy had slipped her shoes off in the entrance hall the marble beneath her heels felt glacial.

When he brought the condom out between his fingers, pink and shiny and cheap as toffee, she said it out loud: ‘Why not? Why the hell not?’

Harry had been tipsy and slurring his words, his eyes bright, his face flushed.

It’s happening, Poppy had thought, waiting for the explosion inside of her.

It was nothing like she’d imagined. She’d hoped that sex would be the opposite of loneliness. Perhaps during all those nights spent staring into the gloom at Dalton or watching her mother sob into her coffee, perhaps what her empty body had yearned for was another body. Despite the bathroom stall chatter, Poppy hadn’t really believed that it could hurt. Not as much as it did. She would tell her dorm-mate later that, ‘it was like shoving a fist in your mouth.’ But even more of a surprise was that, otherwise, sex felt exactly the way she had feared it would. Like getting drunk for the first time, the giggly numbness, the sickening lack of control, the uneasy topple back to consciousness and the ‘is that all?’ Like turning thirteen, like turning twenty. It was a surprise that it wasn’t a surprise.

He could have chosen any girl but he chose her. This beautiful boy. This rich boy. The only part she’d liked had been the end, Harry’s eyes squeezing shut and then the sound he made, like a child almost, plaintive and soft.

When he’d rolled over afterwards she’d found that a barrier had dissolved between them. They talked about ‘How does it feel to be loved?’ and laughed about it.

They had both been disappointed by fragile mothers, and ignored by their fathers. They were filled with the caution that children of single-parent homes are heir to. If you ever watch the pavement yawn open and swallow whole all the idle pedestrians on the street, you might never stride along it with the same careless ease ever again. You’d never be certain it would hold you. Hungover and sleepy, they’d talked about that as the night slipped by. ‘How does it feel to be loved?’ They agreed they would never be sure.

She knew that it would end, but not as suddenly as it had. At school the following week he could barely look at her, and then he told the boys in her class that, inside, she felt like sandpaper.

It was only a year later, when they were both accepted into the Beta, that Harry approached her at the bus stop and suggested the arrangement. He’d tiptoed around the exact words, his lips hiding a smile in the twilight. ‘Twenty-three years is a long time,’ he’d said. ‘It’ll look good to the public. And since we’re both going, and we’ve done it before, and you won’t be able to get pregnant…’

WHEN THEY WERE FINISHED, Harry helped to wash her hair. It grew so fast and thick it was already halfway down her back, and the feeling of his fingers on her scalp, the sweet kiss of the suds slipping down her shoulders, was so good that she began to cry. Harry stopped what he was doing, swept her hair aside like a curtain and kissed her neck. She could feel his nose pressing along the side of her spine; his lips brushed the little hairs that grew there. She longed more than anything to fall asleep in his arms as he stroked her hair, but instead he stepped back, pulling his lovely bare skin away from her, and the cold stung.

‘You need to talk to someone,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’s something wrong.’

‘With me?’ she asked, and was ashamed to feel more tears welling up in her eyes.

‘No. Yes.’ Harry switched off the shower and reached for his briefs. ‘With your head maybe.’

‘Maybe.’

‘When my mum stopped acting she cried for months and months. All the time. She drew the curtains and slept all day and they said she was ill. Like, mentally… so, maybe talk to Fae.’ He shrugged and towelled himself off, flipping his hair back from his chiselled face. He was shrugging off her sadness as if it was still hanging on him, and when he left the bathroom Poppy felt like skin that had been shed.

LATER ON, WHEN SHE talked to Fae, the doctor offered, again, the silver-sided blister pack of pills she had been recommending for some time. ‘Try them,’ she said. ‘You have to give it a few weeks to start working. Don’t give up.’

Poppy finally accepted them. ‘Do you think I caught it from my mother?’ she asked.

Fae smiled sadly, ‘It doesn’t work that way, Poppy. I know it feels serious, but this happens to lots of astronauts on long-duration missions. It’s completely normal.’

‘Will these make me feel happy again?’