Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

The boys’ cabin was like the girls’, only a little smaller. The bunks were oblong alcoves in the walls with a net curtain for privacy. They had done little to decorate their space. Eliot’s was the only bed that was draped in a hand-knitted patchwork quilt and not the UKSA-issued navy duvet covers that reminded Juno of the spartan dormitories they had left behind at the space centre. All their beds were neatly made, the duvets folded under the mattress the way they had been taught. Only Jesse’s bunk was a mess. He had never properly unpacked, and his things spilled from his trunk. Tie-dyed scarves were draped over the curtain rails, old documents had been folded up into paper cranes that hung from threads above his bed. He was growing an ivy plant above his bed, the spidery arms of it pinned to the wall. It was beautiful to see this little bit of nature staking claim to a corner of their ship. ‘That’s cool,’ Juno said, gesturing to it.

‘Yeah, thanks,’ Jesse said. ‘I’m hoping that eventually all the walls around the bed will be covered in it, so I’ll feel as if I’m sleeping in a treehouse.’

‘You haven’t unpacked yet?’ Juno said, glancing at a pile of books atop a maroon rug.

‘Oh,’ Jesse said, and began to rummage through his things, ‘I never unpack. By the time I unpack I almost always have to re-pack a month later.’ He grinned. ‘Sorry. I might have cleaned up a little if I known I’d have company.’

‘I’m fine.’ Blushing, Juno stepped back to sit on Eliot’s pristine bed.

The bunk above Jesse’s belonged to Harry. He’d pinned up a few school ties, the full and half colours he’d received for academic achievements. Brass and silver tankards glistened on the shelf by his head.

‘Right.’ Jesse recovered a box from under a pile of crumpled clothes. ‘I think… in here…’ He was rummaging through it, chucking out books, sachets of coffee and bags of beads. Juno watched him. She had never been able to guess where exactly Jesse was from, and now it seemed too late to ask. His voice had a slightly Irish lilt but his skin was a kind of bronze that appeared coppery in the right light. Around his temples and under his braids his jet black hair was loosely curled. It occurred to Juno that she actually knew very little about this boy who she had lived with since the launch.

Jesse’s brow was furrowed in concentration as he rifled through his things, and Juno thought about how keen he had seemed to give Poppy a gift, how often he asked after her, the way he stared at her across the kitchen table. Then it occurred to her that he must like her. How obvious, she thought, and how uninspired. Everyone liked Poppy, with her delicate limbs and thick russet locks. Even now, unwashed as she was, Juno knew she would emerge from her bedroom, after much coaxing, and everyone would still look at her like she’d just walked off the pages of Vanity Fair. Juno stood up, caught off-guard by her own disappointment.

‘Aha!’ Jesse held something up in his hands like a trophy, then handed it to her. It was a conch, the most beautiful one Juno had ever seen, pearly orange with a hard spiralled shell and a flared slit along its length. Inside it was smooth and cool to the touch, pink as the wet skin inside lips.

‘Don’t you want to hear the sea?’ Jesse asked. Juno was puzzled for a moment before she remembered and held the conch to her ear to listen to the sigh of the waves inside its body. Such things didn’t excite her anymore. When she was younger she really had believed that sea shells remembered the sea as old women remembered their youth. The swansong of a domestic object that had once known the majesty of an ocean. ‘Seashell resonance,’ she said. Any curious child knew that the same sound was audible in mugs and empty jam jars or a pair of cupped hands held up against an ear. ‘Where did you get this from?’

‘I think… that was Mombasa. My sister saw it under the water and she dove right down and gave it to me.’

‘Oh, Kenya?’ She looked up.

‘Yeah, my mum’s Kenyan.’

‘Really? And your dad too?’

‘No, he’s from Dublin. But we lived in Nairobi for a while when I was little.’ He pointed to a picture pinned to his noticeboard of a smiling family. Jesse, younger, with springy shoulder-length black locks. Their faces blurred by candle light. ‘That’s my tenth birthday. That morning we went to Nakumatt supermarket and tried to buy a cake, but they were like “a ready-made cake?’ ” He mimicked their surprise. ‘So my mum bought a tart instead and then, just as I was blowing out the candles, the lights went out.’

‘Power cut?’ Juno asked, remembering her own childhood home.

‘Yeah.’ Jesse smiled. Juno examined some of the other photographs. Jesse’s sister smiling at a market stall. ‘Where’s that?’ she asked.

‘Istanbul,’ Jesse said casually.

‘Is that New York?’ Juno pointed at a picture of a white man and a dark woman standing in front of a yellow taxi.

‘Vancouver,’ Jesse corrected. ‘My family travel around a lot.’