Sputnik's Guide to Life on Earth Read online

  ‘Said I could fix it, didn’t I?’ said Sputnik, smiling more than ever. ‘Smell that burning hair! This is a great party.’

  – We have to stop this. Someone could get killed.

  ‘Why give her a lightsaber if you don’t want her to use it?!’

  – It’s supposed to light up and twinkle! Not cut things in half!

  ‘Twinkle? Where’s the fun in twinkling?! This is a fantastic party. I was told Earth parties were good, but I never realized they’d be this good. I never realized they’d involve so much fire and destruction. These kids are having a great time.’

  He was right about that. Having your hair cut by a fully functioning lightsaber was the new face-painting. A little girl held her pigtails out straight while Annabel slashed at them. A girl with a massive Afro stood with her eyes closed and let Annabel shave it all off in a confetti of hot sparks.

  – Can’t you get the lightsaber off her?

  ‘Are you asking me to fetch again?! Sputnik does not fetch. Oh! Get a lungful of that! That is true perfume. You could bottle that and sell it. Burning hair, hot sawdust and smouldering bark. Aaaahhhh.’

  – Bark?

  At the corner of the yard, next to the big gate that opens on to the field, there was a big, twisted tree. It must have been there since before the farmhouse was built. Its lowest branch was higher than the roof. Its highest was somewhere out of sight in a cloud of leaves. Thick, twisted roots anchored it to the ground. That’s where the smell of sawdust and scorched bark was coming from.

  Annabel was cutting it down.

  ‘She’s doing that all wrong,’ said Sputnik. ‘Anyone can see that if she cuts it at that angle, it’s going to fall straight on to the house, smash the roof to bits and kill everyone inside. Why don’t folk read the instructions?’

  – We’ve got to stop her!

  ‘You stop her. I don’t like to interfere. I’m just a visitor after all.’

  I made a grab at the lightsaber, trying to get it off her. Annabel swung it at me, burning the end of my nose. She was unstoppable.

  I ran back into the house, flung open the kitchen door. All the parents were standing around chatting. I shouted, ‘Quick! The children! Quick!’

  They stared at me. Barbara from the caravan site said, ‘I thought you said he couldn’t talk.’

  ‘Doesn’t. Not can’t. Of course you can talk, can’t you, Prez?’

  ‘The children!’

  There was a hideous, creaking, splitting sound from the garden.

  Mr Blythe ran out.

  The others ran after him.

  The tree shook.

  It groaned.

  There was a snap.

  The children were still laughing. That made it even more frightening. Mums and dads grabbed children, dragged them into the house, slammed the door. The tree toppled. Its branches clawed the windows. Its trunk bounced with a hollow thud. Birds screamed. Kids clapped. The littlest one shouted, ‘Do it more! Do it more!’

  In her mum’s arms, Annabel started crying.

  ‘It’s all right, sweetheart. You’re safe now. Thanks to Prez.’

  But I knew she wasn’t crying because she had nearly got herself and all her friends crushed in an underage lumberjacking accident. She was crying because she’d dropped the lightsaber and it was buried under the tree. She was crying because she wanted to do more Destruction.

  It was amazing the amount of Destruction she had done already. The big farm gate was a row of splinters. The hen house was firewood. The hens were in a state of shock. The tree had fallen so hard one of its branches had stabbed deep into the ground between the cobbles in the farmyard.

  ‘Sputnik?’ said Jessie. ‘Where’s Sputnik?!’

  No one said anything. No one needed to. He’d been crushed. Or spiked. Annabel cried louder. Her friends all joined in. Their parents tried to shush them. ‘It’s all right. You’re safe now.’

  Then the door banged open. ‘Now that,’ bawled Sputnik, swaggering in, ‘is what you call a party.’

  ‘Sputnik!’ cried Jessie, and went and hugged him.

  ‘Thank goodness you’re alive!’ Sputnik went on, as if it wasn’t totally his fault that we were all nearly dead!

  ‘Did you see that tree come down?!’ he whooped. ‘Wheee!! Crash! Love it. Nearly wrecked the whole house! This place has THE BEST gravity.’

  When I went to bed, Annabel gave me a hug and said, ‘Thank you for my happy party, Prez.’

  4.

  Mooring Hitch Knots

  Everyone seemed to think that now I’d finally said something I would start talking. But what could I say?

  Sputnik is dangerous?

  They thought he was a dog. If you say ‘dangerous dog’, folk think you’re talking about a dog that bites, not someone who hands out deadly weapons at children’s parties.

  Something had to be done. And I was the one who had to do it. It was like that time that Grandad was the only one awake on his whole ship, and he saw an iceberg floating right at them. The safety of the whole crew was in his hands.

  He saved them.

  I had to save the Blythes. From Sputnik.

  From the top bunk in Ray’s room I could see a little light shining in Sputnik’s stable.

  I sneaked down to the kitchen. The only sound was the hum of the fridge. I slipped out into the yard. If anyone saw me out there in the dark they’d definitely think I was trying to run away. But the curtains were drawn. No one was stirring. In the stables, the ponies were sleeping. The chickens kind of purred as I walked past them, but mostly it was quiet. Really, really quiet. I’d never heard quiet like it.

  No traffic.

  No voices.

  Nothing.

  Then something.

  A kind of slimy cough.

  My heart shrank.

  I must have gasped or something, because Sputnik poked his head over the stable door. ‘Is that you, Prez? Come in.’

  I know now that the slimy noise was a cow coughing. Now if I hear one at night I don’t even notice. It’s the country version of traffic noise. But I didn’t know that then.

  Sputnik had really made himself at home in the wee stable. He’d strung up a hammock in the corner using a proper mooring hitch knot. He’d turned the dog basket upside down and made it into a kind of bedside table, with a red notebook on it, a torch and a pencil. ‘The reason I asked you to come over—’

  – You didn’t ask me here! I just came.

  ‘. . . is that I have something very serious to say to you. I think I have to tell Mr and Mrs Blythe that you nearly killed Annabel. And all her friends. On her birthday. You’re a danger to this household. Really you should go back to the Temporary.’

  – I did what?! It was you who nearly killed them!

  ‘You gave her a lightsaber.’

  – I gave her a toy lightsaber. You made it into a real lightsaber.

  ‘It was her birthday! Who would make a child play with a broken toy on her birthday? You need to show more consideration.’

  – NO! You need to show more consideration. And sense. And—

  ‘We’re arguing. That can’t be right. The Mellows family always sticks together. Let’s agree to never argue again.’

  – You armed a five-year-old. She could have decapitated me.

  ‘Actually, lightsabers are rubbish at decapitation.’

  – If you get me into trouble, they’ll send me back to the Temporary. And if I go back you can’t come with me because they’ll think you’re a dog and there’s no dogs allowed.

  ‘Are you’ – tears seemed to fill his big brown eyes – ‘throwing me out?’

  – No. I’m saying we have to not cause trouble. We have to be good.

  ‘OK. OK. I’ll be good if you will. Come on, let’s fix the tree.’

  – Fix the tree? How do you fix a tree? And don’t say read the manual, because trees do not have manuals.

  ‘What made the tree fall down?’

  – You did.


  ‘Gravity. Gravity pulled it down so . . . gravity can put it back up.’

  – Gravity pulls things down. It does not pull things up. Gravity is a one-way street.

  Sputnik opened the stable door and strode out into the yard. ‘Even the most one-way street ever,’ he said, ‘has its twists and turns. Ow! That moonlight’s a bit strong.’ He pulled his goggles down, stuffed his red notebook into his backpack and set off towards the garden.

  The moon shone right on the tree trunk, lighting up the cracks and ripples in its bark. Sputnik climbed on to the trunk and I followed him along it. The tree looked bigger and more wrecked than it had in the daytime. Bark crunched under our feet. Branches creaked. Leaves rattled. A bird that must have been hiding flew up in front of us in a whirr of wings. The moon sailed low overhead. It was like being on a ship. Sputnik stood still, licked his finger and held it in the air, as if he was testing the wind. ‘North by north-west,’ he said, jumping down off the trunk. ‘Couldn’t be easier.’

  – I can’t feel any wind.

  ‘I’m not talking about the wind. I’m talking about the gravity stream. The tree twisted as it fell. All we’ve got to do is twist it back up again. If we can just get the tree upright . . .’

  – How are we going to get a tree upright? I’m a boy, not a crane.

  Sputnik sucked his teeth. ‘Easy. We’ll use the shed!’ He put his back to the wall of the shed and started to push. ‘Come on. Let’s shove it.’ The wooden shed stood on a concrete platform. When we shoved it, it scraped across the concrete. The door shook. The window rattled. The latch jingled.

  – What are we doing?

  ‘We’re trying to launch this shed. Come on.’

  – Launch? A shed?

  ‘Gravity’s not a sleepy bulldog. It doesn’t just plonk itself down on the ground. (Come on, shove harder.) It comes in waves (push it sideways). Way out there, two black holes bump into each other and (nearly there come on) that sends huge gravity waves rolling through the universe (one . . . two . . . three). The waves break on your planet and you’ve got gravity swishing and swirling everywhere. Very handy if you know how to use it.’

  I was expecting the shed to drop off the edge of the concrete on to the grass. It didn’t. Very, very slowly, the front end drifted upwards. The back end was still touching the ground. But only touching it – like a balloon. Not really resting on it – like a shed.

  ‘One more little nudge.’

  The whole shed wobbled, then straightened up. It was floating in the air.

  ‘There’s a gravity eddy just . . . here,’ said Sputnik. ‘If we can settle the shed on top of it. There we are.’

  The shed started to drift away, like one of those paper lanterns with a light inside. When it was a few feet up in the air, Sputnik jumped. No, he didn’t jump, he leaped. He bent his knees and sprang, catapulting himself in through the door of the shed. He reached into his backpack and tugged out a bright blue rope. ‘Grab the rope!’ he called, dangling one end in front of me. ‘Get the tree! Great. Great job. Now, hold on.’ I had slung the rope around the biggest branch. ‘Can you tie it on?’

  Of course I could. Grandad was always very clear about the importance of being able to tie a good firm knot. I could do a clove hitch, a half hitch, a reef, a stopper, a . . .

  ‘Just tie the knot!’

  I tied a proper bowline knot, grabbed a handful of the lag and we both pulled it tight. Next thing I knew, I was leaning in through the shed doorway with my legs dangling behind. Sputnik pulled me in. ‘Welcome aboard!’ he said. ‘Climb right in. We need the weight.’

  – Won’t the shed stop floating if it weighs more?

  ‘You really don’t understand a thing about gravity, do you? The more mass a thing has, the more gravity it has. The more gravity the shed has, the more easily it’ll lift the tree.’

  We leaned out of the door. The shed floated higher and higher until the rope grew taut. It tugged at the tree.

  ‘Jump up and down! That usually helps.’

  We bounced around inside the shed for a while, making it rock from side to side. Soon it leaned sideways as though it was taking a breath, then shot upwards so fast that we sat down, giggling, in surprise. Through the doorway we could see the huge tree rising like a giant waking up. Its branches clutched at the air as it steadied itself.

  ‘Haul her in,’ ordered Sputnik. ‘Bring her round.’

  We hauled on the rope. The tree turned, its arms stretched out, like those of a massive dancer. It waved once and stopped still. The fallen trunk had clicked back into place on the stump.

  ‘There. I knew this place had the best gravity. You may be a danger to life and limb, but you know how to fix a tree.’

  I’d tied the rope around one of the biggest branches, about halfway up the tree. Now that the tree was standing upright, the shed floated right up as far as the rope would allow. We sat in the doorway, looking down on the treetop.

  ‘Look what I found in the branches,’ said Sputnik.

  It was the red lightsaber.

  I didn’t want anything more to do with lightsabers. I just wanted to sit and look out across the farm and the hill. Quick little shadows fluttered all around us.

  ‘Bats,’ said Sputnik. ‘Going back to their home in the tree.’ Everything went hush. Sounds we didn’t know we were listening to stopped. As if someone had pushed the world’s mute button. A feathery shape ghosted by.

  ‘Barn owl,’ said Sputnik. ‘Did you hear how everything went quiet? Even you stopped breathing for a second. No one wants to be eaten by the owl. Oh. Hear that?’

  I couldn’t hear anything.

  ‘A bat’s last squeak. The owl just swallowed it whole.’

  The moon was higher in the sky now and smaller. But the stars . . . the stars were fierce bright and there were billions and billions of them, like grains of sugar spilled on a huge blackboard. I know now that the sky looks like that every night if you go somewhere dark enough. But that was the first time I’d ever seen the night sky properly. The shed rocked like a ship at anchor in a sea of stars. Sputnik took off his goggles and sniffed. ‘Woodsmoke, roses, wild garlic, lemonade, beer. Lovely peaceful smells. Want a cigar?’

  He took a cigar the size of a hot dog out of his pocket, snipped off the end with his scissors, then lit it with the lightsaber.

  – Smoking is so bad for you. Why does everyone think you’re a dog?

  ‘I’m just very – you know – adaptable.’

  – But you don’t look like a dog to me. Why not?

  ‘Because you are the reason I’m here.’

  5.

  Laika

  ‘A long time ago,’ said Sputnik, ‘we came across a tiny primitive spacecraft – Sputnik II – the very one that was flown by Laika.’

  – Who?

  ‘Laika. You must have heard of her. I thought everyone on your planet would have heard of her. Laika the dog. First Earth creature in space.’

  – No.

  ‘Well the R-7 sustainer on her craft was packing in. She was just drifting around space, running out of oxygen, so we rescued her and took her in.’

  – Wait a minute. Why did you call it my planet? Where are you from? Space?

  ‘Everyone is from space. There’s nowhere else to be from. What do you think this planet is floating around in? Soup? Listen. So we rescued Laika and she told us all about this planet. But the things she said about it sounded too good to be true. She made it sound like a magical, mythical place. So no one believed her. And she looked so sad that I decided to defend her. I said, ‘Just because a place is magical and mythical, does that mean it’s not real?’

  ‘And everyone said, “Well, yes, it does, to be honest.” Then I said, “Lo! I am Sputnik, and Sputnik says nothing in this universe is too good to be true.” Then I took an oath. I said, “I will voyage to the ends of the universe in search of the magical, mythical Earth and if I find it, I’ll let you know. Goodbye.”

  ‘And now I’ve found it.
I went off and discovered your planet. Thanks to me, your planet is now a real planet. Not a fairy tale. What do you think? How does it feel? More solid? More wet? More gritty?’

  – No. It was always pretty solid. And wet.

  ‘Before I left, Laika gave me a copy of the guidebook to Earth she’d written.’

  He pulled a little red school notebook out of his bag. On the title page someone had written ‘Laika’s Companion to Life on Earth’.

  I flicked through it.

  ‘It was written with this special pen,’ said Sputnik, ‘that can write in weightless conditions and never runs out of ink.’

  – We have those. We call them pencils.

  ‘Yeah. Amazing piece of technology. What do you think of the book? Is it accurate?’

  The book was a list of all the good things about Earth.

  It said, on Earth everything is edible.

  – That’s not true for a start.

  It said that on Earth there is a race called humans . . .

  – That’s true. That’s me. I’m a human.

  . . . and another race called dogs.

  – Laika was a dog.

  If you’re visiting Earth, you should definitely go as a dog. Dogs are the dominant species.

  – Hmmm. Not sure about that.

  Humans will bring you food, throw balls for you to fetch. When you do a poo they pick it up and put it in a bin for you. They welcome you into their home.

  – Those things are probably mostly true.

  ‘So this book, it’s not accurate?’

  – Maybe that’s how Earth looks if you’re a dog, but it’s not the whole story.

  ‘OK,’ said Sputnik. He flipped his pencil over and started to rub out everything in the book. ‘More amazing technology,’ he said. ‘It allows you to move on from your mistakes.’

  In the end there were just a few sentences left on one page. ‘I nearly forgot about this,’ he said. ‘It says, “Please say hello to Mellows of Traquair Gardens, Dumfries.” That’s you, isn’t it?’

  – Yes, but how would she know about me?

  ‘ “And please take care of him, signed Laika.” Now I’ve passed the message on, I can rub that out too.’