Clockworld, by RJ Astruc, part 3

It's the future, and a future where rich families send their kids to expensive intergalactic boarding schools so they can "grow" as people. Josie and Aubrey are best friends at school until Josie shares a not-quite-a-kiss with War, Aubrey's not-quite-a-boyfriend. The fight that ensues sends their second-best friend Ping screaming and hysterical into the unexplored jungles of planet Clockworld...

3. Clockworld

Two weeks before Xiaoping Hathaway vanishes into the jungles of planet Clockworld, he's visited by an apparition of his great grandmother, Maud Royston.

It's eleven fifty at night — not quite the witching hour — and Ping is sitting on the roof of his dormitory at Blackhall, smoking a bit of namuto-leaf that he's nicked from the conservatory. He's climbed up here via the common room balcony. It's a hassle to get to the roof (you need a lot of upper body strength to pull yourself over the gutter) but it's pretty much the only public place in the dorm that doesn't have security cameras.

Ping is just hanging out, watching the moons (planet Clockworld has three: a big one that sits far too close to the horizon, and two small ones that follow it like a dwindling ellipsis), when his great-grandmother shows up.

At first she floats a few inches above the roof, uncertainly, like she's not sure she should be here at all. She's wearing a white dress and white slippers with flat soles that were probably a fashion like a million years ago. Her eyes (brown, round) stare up at the three moons and she lets out a little gasp.

“What — what —” she mumbles, slowly descending onto the roof top.

“Hi, Great-Granny Maud,” says Ping. He recognises her instantly from the family photos his mum keeps in boxes under the stairs back home. Great-grandmother Maud is dead, and has been for at least seventy years. This fact doesn't perturb Ping overmuch — not because he's used to seeing ghosts of family members past, but because namuto can sometimes give you bad-ass hallucinations.

“Who are you?” says Maud, blinking at him. She's only about twenty or so — she died real young. In childbirth, or a car accident, or something like that. There was some funny business happening with Maud, Ping remembers, stuff his mum and dad won't talk about.

“I'm your great-grandson,” Ping explains. “Odd,” he adds. “Usually I get, like, giant robots. Or squid. I get a lot of squid. But this is pretty neat, too. I just didn't expect it.”

Maud looks at him blankly.

“If I was going to hallucinate one of my ancestors, I would've thought my subconscious would have gone for one of the Chinese ones,” Ping continues, scratching his head. “On account of the whole ancestor-worship thing. I mean, culturally that seems more appropriate... am I rambling? Sorry. I might be stoned.”

“I've got to work this out,” says Maud. She's flustered now: little spots of pink have appeared on her cheeks. “This can't be happening. It's too weird.”

It really is weird, Ping thinks, examining his rollie. Not the usual namuto trip at all. He wonders if he should tell his friend Josie about this little hiccup of his subconscious. Although, knowing Josie, the guy will just say that he needs to talk to a shrink. Josie is American and every American Ping has ever met has been in some kind of therapy. Therapy for childhood problems or therapy for relationships or therapy for sex or therapy for — well, whatever is bugging Josie this week.

“I probably got some bad leaf mixed in there somehow,” Ping says apologetically. “Triggered something in my —”

But she's crying now, desperately, hopelessly, her head in her hands. “I can't do this,” she's saying, over and over, between her sobs. “I can't do this at all. I need to get... I need to get away.”

“Chill out,” says Ping. “I'm the one hallucinating.”

He takes another drag on the namuto, and Maud disappears mid-sob.

Ping feels... not right about that. Definitely not right. Ping takes a lot of hallucinogens — and why the fuck not, this planet grows them by the bushel, there's barely a plant, shrub or tree you can't get a good trip off — but this hallucination is different. It's come from somewhere deep inside his head, somewhere buried and forgotten. And Ping doesn't know why.

When he puts his hands to his face, he realises he's been crying too.

Anyway.

It’s two weeks later and right now Ping is running.

Watch him sprinting across the Blackhall courtyard, skinny legs and wild eyes and the wind bloating his shirt like a ship’s sail. Sneakers finding traction as he skids ‘round one of the Slovak’s jock friends; the guy jumps back, shouting; Ping ignores him and pounds on. Out of the courtyard, past Kruger-Wei and up the pathway that leads to the Mithandry. He springs up the hill, straight through a group of younger girls trading illicit yaoi magazines; he bowls over one, two, three of them before he’s off again, not even a break in his stride; their howls of pain and surprise seem to goad him onward. In fact he is fucking galvanised, fucking poetry in motion, as he leaps over the chickenwire of Blackhall’s west wall and on into the limitless Clockworld green.

See his dark hair for a second, silhouetted against a flat, open fern leaf; and then he’s gone, pushing on, pushing up, the trees and bushes whispering hss, hss, hss in the wake of his passing.

He’s not going anywhere in particular. He’s just running. Blindly. There’s nothing in his head but Aubrey and blood and Josie. At this point Ping hasn't even begun to think about vanishing — it hasn't occurred to him that running away really does fix all your problems.

All he wants to do is escape.

Like most students, Ping comes to Clockworld as a twelve year old. He rides in on a cargo shuttle; his parents aren’t rich and can’t afford to send him in on the first class student shuttle. There aren’t any private rooms on the cargo shuttle, just open rooms – they call them cells – where the students have to make do as best they can.

Ping has come on board with four packed meals for the trip, a sleeping bag, and a suitcase full of clothes. For the first few hours of the journey he stands miserably in a corner, too scared to do anything, almost too scared to breathe, watching the other students like a mouse eyeing off hungry cats. Beneath his feet, the cargo shuttle shudders and bumps. You can’t see outside a cargo shuttle; unlike the smaller, faster, cooler, (expensive) student shuttles it has no windows. But Ping imagines he can feel space flying past, this great quantum whoosh of distance, compressed and bundled and, most importantly, traversable through some combination of unimaginable, brain-breaking physics and (probably, because it might as well be) magic.

How big is this new world? he thinks. How impossibly small is he?

A big kid pushes past him – pushes him out of the way, really, to claim a good sleeping-spot by the wall. “Shit,” says the kid, when Ping stumbles, gasping out a protest. “Who the fuck you waitin’ for, your momma?”

“I’ve never been away from home before,” says Ping, clutching his suitcase. Trying not to burst into tears. He can hear a quaver in his voice. I will not cry, he thinks, closing his eyes. I will not cry. I absolutely refuse to be homesick before I even land…

“You’ll like it on Clockworld,” comes a girl’s voice from further down the cell, and Ping opens his eyes, looking to see who’s spoken. It’s another older kid, this one probably a fourth year. She’s obese and pale and has a cigarette in one hand and half a sandwich in the other. Her belly sits out over her knees, so round it looks fake. She has a round face too — a friendly face with freckles and a big mouth and very green eyes.

“I will?” Ping asks. Drifting toward her on wobbly legs.

“It’s like a holiday from real life,” says the round girl. “Give you a chance to concentrate on what’s important, instead of all the garbage back home.”

“What’s… what’s important?”

The girl puffs smoke. “Whatever you want,” she says.

It’s sort of Alice in Wonderland talk but it resonates with Ping, in a funny way. Like it’s something he should have heard. Ping falls a little in love with the girl — this random girl whose name he doesn't even know — but Ping is always falling in love with people.

“Okay,” says Ping. Emboldened he looks the round girl in the eye. “Could I have a cigarette?”

“Eh?”

“Please?”

The girl shrugs, flicks over a cigarette. Ping puts it delicately to his lips and tries to remember how people light up in the movies. Do they suck in when they do it? Do they blow out?

“You should save it,” says the girl, standing up. “Take the edge off after we land. That's what I always do.”

Ping nods like he knows what she's talking about and tucks the cigarette into the front pocket of his shirt.

So.

The reason Ping becomes everyone's go-to-guy for drugs and illegal shit is because on the first day of his first year at school, he gets busted smoking. It earns him a reputation he doesn't rightly deserve, but he spends the next five years trying to live up to it.

It’s a smart move, really. If you're not naturally world-wise, if you're gullible and naïve and find you think the best of people even when they abuse your trust, then the smartest thing to do is to go around acting like you're a drug-dealing, cigarette-smoking, hardcore motherfucker.

Otherwise people take advantage.

Ping crashes through the undergrowth. Screaming. His nostrils are filled with the smell of damp and rot. He pulls down vines and scrambles over fallen logs and literally throws himself over ditches, landing like a rag doll on the other side. Already he’s covered in mud and his trousers are ripped and filthy. There are leaves in his hair.

He’s not sure if he’s hallucinating right now. It probably doesn’t matter, either way.

Ping meets Aubrey in the library. Ping is in first year, Aubrey is in second year. Ping is in the library because he’s reading a comic book — Asterix, probably, or maybe Iznogoud. His mum used to buy him Asterix books as a little boy, and he uses them now on Clockworld as a panacea for his homesickness. (At twelve, he can get lost in a book the same way he’ll later get lost in a drug-haze.)

Aubrey is in the library because he’s trying to burn a word into Betts Darling’s arm using a lighter and a piece of bent wire, and the library has a lot of nice secluded places where no one can see you do fucked up shit. The word is COSMOPOLITAN, which is Betts’s favourite word right now. Betts got the idea of burning the word into her arm from a book on prison life in America, and Aubrey is nothing if not eager to please.

Ping usually has no problem blotting out the world around him when he’s reading, but Betts’s hissing and squeaking and the smell of burning flesh makes him look over the top of his comic book.

The three of them are sitting in a small, cushioned alcove behind the Z-end of the library’s fiction section. Betts has her eyes closed and her back arched; her expression is caught somewhere between ecstasy and agony. Aubrey is firing up the lighter. There’s no one else close by, no one within noticing distance anyway, although Ping can hear people talking in library-safe whispers several aisles away.

Despite the fact that Aubrey is in the process of scarring Betts for life, what Ping notices first about Betts and Aubrey (and what he’ll later remember most clearly) is that they are both beautiful people. Betts’s skin looks soft as cream and her face has the delicate, elegant structure of a doll’s. Aubrey’s eyes are almost freakishly startling; they make Ping’s heart hurt, really, just to look at them.

“What are you doing?” Ping asks. Has to ask.

“What does it look like?” says Betts, opening one bloodshot eye.

“Aren’t you the cigarette kid?” Aubrey asks, letting the lighter-fire die. The letter M hangs bright and red in the air. “Hathaway. I heard you can like, get stuff, if you know what I mean.”

“I guess,” says Ping. He’s still unused to his reputation, which invariably precedes him. “I guess if I asked around.”

Aubrey says: “Yeah? We should talk, you and me. Let me just finish this, okay?”

Betts says: “Do I get to talk too?”

Aubrey says: “Fuck off, skank.”

Betts says: “Fuck off, ugly.”

She screws up her face, hideously, but it doesn’t matter to Ping; he’s already fallen in love with them. He’d like to kiss Aubrey’s soft mouth and hold Betts’ creamy-pale hand against his chest. He wants to be between them, somehow; sandwiched by their beautiful bodies. Maybe on the banks of a river, on a picnic blanket, with the sun (or suns) high in the sky. He wants to talk to them about poetry.

Aubrey says: “Bitch, stop wriggling or so help me god I will put this M on your forehead.”

Betts says: “I hope you get dick cancer.”

Some months and many ‘talks’ later, Aubrey introduces Ping to Josie Cooper. “Just a guy we’re going to smoke weed with,” he explains, pushing Josie forward, almost like an offering. Josie is ridiculously tall, with an elegant, long body that makes Ping think of finely crafted puppets. Ping likes him. Likes his face, mainly, which is friendly and shy at the same time.

When they smoke — behind the Mithandry, backs against a crate of mangled ceramic pots — Ping watches Josie. Who is trying to disguise his new-smoker coughing as a ‘touch of asthma’ and keeps looking at Aubrey. Not for approval. It’s more like he’s trying to see what the hell he’s looking at; he keeps squinting and tilting his head.

(Later, Ping will realise that Josie is already high on Aubrey. Can lose himself in Aubrey the way people do in poems. When Josie looks at Aubrey like that, the thing he’s trying to parse isn’t Aubrey but his feelings for Aubrey.)

Aubrey says to Josie: “Me and Ping do shit like this all the time. You can too, if you want.”

“Okay,” says Josie. Blinking, a rabbit in headlights. For a tall person, Ping notices that Josie is really quite small. He's got a habit of rounding his shoulders and slouching, so most of the time he's only a head taller than Ping, not a head and a chest taller. He shrinks more, now, the collar of his jacket (designer-label, expensive) riding up high around his cheekbones.

“I can get purple flowers,” Ping offers. “The purple ones make you see things.”

“What kind of things?” Aubrey wants to know.

“I don’t know. I think it’s different for different people.”

“Fuck I love this planet,” says Aubrey, taking a long, serious drag on the rollie. “Everything turns you mental.”

On the way back to the dorms, Aubrey gets the idea in his head that he wants to find out Right Now what it’d be like if Betts Darling slapped him in the face, really hard. An experiment. For science. “Catch you later,” he tells Ping and Josie, and runs off before they can say bye.

Ping and Josie walk back to the dorm in silence. They don’t know each other, so they’ve got nothing to talk about — well, Ping knows that Josie is American, but how many times has the poor guy had to answer questions about America since he’s been here? Yes it’s big and yes everyone has a gun and yes surprise surprise what you see on television isn’t the whole story of a nation that’s been around in some form or another for about thirteen thousand years. Ping wonders if Josie likes sport — Americans always seem to like sport, you always hear them talking about the game, whatever game that is — or if he’s more of a quiet, nerdy type.

He doesn’t ask anything though, and it’s only when he’s at the door of his dorm room that he twigs to the fact Josie’s escorted him home.

“Er, I’ll be fine now,” says Ping, a hand on the door knob. “So, er. Is your room even on this floor?”

“I thought I was walking you back to your room,” says Josie.

“I don’t think people do that,” says Ping. “Unless they’re dating.”

“More of a safety thing,” says Josie, scratching the back of his neck. “Guess I’m used to walking my little cousins home from school back home. Sorry.”

He grins, shyly. Josie is a Good Person. He might as well have it written on his forehead. Ping doesn’t understand how Aubrey and Josie fit together. He doesn’t understand how they met or what they could possibly have in common or why Aubrey’s shouted the guy so much weed, especially when Josie clearly hasn’t smoked before and didn’t particularly seem to like it.

“It’s okay,” says Ping. “It’s kinda cool, in a way. Makes it like I’ve got a bodyguard.”

“Yeah, sort of.” Josie’s smile widens. “Hey, about Aubrey…”

“Yeah?”

“You, um, know him long?”

“Not really. Few months, maybe.”

Josie laughs. He does this easily. He has amazing teeth. “He’s a bit mad, isn’t he?”

“He’s a sociopath,” says Ping.

“Can’t be. Can he? I mean I heard. You hear that. But. He’s very friendly.”

“He is, yes. He talks a lot.” Ping’s brain is slowly catching up on the subtext of this conversation. So, tell me more about your friend. “Josie, are you…” Ping tries, wondering how to phrase this, wondering if you’re allowed to ask someone you’ve only just met, “Are you…” But in the end he doesn’t say it. Can’t bring himself to. He likes Josie. And if Josie likes Aubrey, well, Ping can fit that into his fantasies of picnic blankets and river banks, too.

Josie-and-Aubrey works better than Betts-and-Aubrey, anyway. If mainly because Josie and Aubrey don’t call each other cunts all the time.

“Are you doing anything tomorrow night?” Ping winds up saying instead.

Ping trips, falls headlong into the undergrowth. Knees hitting soft mulch, outstretched hands landing in a warm bed of moss. It’s like falling into a giant cushion. The second he inhales — gasping, spluttering — his head starts spinning and little sparks appear at the edges of his vision. There’s something rotting nearby and it’s definitely hallucinogenic. He lies there, prostrate, face in the mud, and breathes in the noxious fumes of Clockworld’s heart.

When he stands up his brain feels small and shallow and the world about him moves unsteadily. He feels like he’s on water, rocked by a tide.

He staggers on.

All his life, Ping has been an avoider. It’s his nature to close his eyes, to walk away, to pretend everything is okay. He can escape most things with drugs, and as for the rest, well, shit, all of Clockworld is an escape, because nothing in Clockworld is really-real. It’s like what they used to say about that old American city: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. The simple fact is that Clockworld has no consequences. Clockworld is a fucking fantasy.

That’s why Ping can sell drugs and cheat tests and kiss girls without even the slightest quirking of his conscience. At some level he recognises that none of this matters. It’s like a game. Once he finishes school (and it’ll be this year, too, none of that uni-prep bullshit for him, thanks) and goes back home things will be different. But for the moment, he feels like he’s just playing a character. Killing time.

Although that’s not completely true.

There are two things in Clockworld that are real to Ping, that he believes will exist beyond the limpid blue skies of the planet.

Those two things are Aubrey Partington-Hale and Josie Cooper.

Ping isn’t jealous of what Aubrey and Josie have together, the whole best-friends-forever deal, the unrequited love, the lean-on-me, stand-by-me bullshit. Really. He’s just happy to be part of what they have. When Ping daydreams of his future, his life-after-Blackhall, he’s always living in a big house with Aubrey and Josie. Aubrey and Josie are a couple now (they were always meant to be, even if Aubrey isn’t technically queer and self-conscious Josie will probably never admit to loving him). They have a dog, two cats, and lots of large bookshelves filled with the sort of books no one reads. Ping has a room with a window that overlooks a park; he spends his days painting or doing something else artistic while Josie is out being successful (a doctor? a lawyer? Ping can’t decide) and Aubrey is… well, just being Aubrey.

At night in this fictional, day-dream life, the three of them sit on the roof of their big house and smoke weed — real Earth weed, not Clockworld weed — and Ping lies there and watches the other two laugh and talk and kiss and simply loves their love. This is what Ping wants, the only thing he wants, the only thing he’s ever wanted.

So.

The reason Ping is running — a reason that’s more of an amorphous, scream of a thought rather than anything conscious, anything sane — is because he thinks he’s responsible for the end of Aubrey-and-Josie. Maybe Josie isn’t dead (because Aubrey lies, Aubrey lies all the time) but the thing that’s always held the pair together, the bond between them, the best-friends-forever-ness, has been shattered.

Because Ping lied.

Because Ping spluttered out untruths and half-truths and maybe-truths under duress.

Ping is Iago, a liar, a bastard. The Slovak is just a horny jock, a clumsy, ill-advised, ill-timed lover, but it’s Ping — fucking Ping —who spilled his guts, who tattled the tale, who made Aubrey hate Josie.

Everything is ruined.

Ping climbs a hill on his hands and knees, sobbing; at this point he looks more like some sad alien mud-child than a flesh and blood human. There’s not a part of him now that isn’t saturated with Clockworld, isn’t thick with its stench. His head sings like a bird, like a fucking dolphin. He finds a hollow place amongst the gnarled roots of a tree and squats there. Below him lies a valley of poisonous greens and pinks. Everything is bright and terrible.

Something in the back of Ping’s head says, “Ping, you took this way too far.”

“I know,” says Ping. “I know. I panicked.”

“I used to do this sort of thing a lot. Maybe it’s in our blood. The running. It was a bad idea, anyway. Do you know where you are?”

“No,” says Ping. “Clockworld, I guess.”

“You guess. How are you going to get home?”

“I don’t know, Maud,” says Ping, finally recognising the voice. He claws mud from his eyes, his mouth. “I don’t know at all.”

He falls asleep on a clump of moss. In the morning he realises that he has no idea which way he’d come from, which way Blackhall is: he has no concept of east and west and he’s never bothered to check which way the suns on this fucking planet rise. He is utterly, completely, lost.

He walks into the jungle, the apparition of his great-grandmother Maud Royston at his side.

On his second day in the jungle, Ping comes across a plant with a leaf of every colour of the rainbow that opens like a giant fan, or the extravagant span of a peacock’s tail. Maud says that it’s garish but Ping is secretly delighted by it. He takes some of the leaves and puts them into his pocket, but that evening when he searches for them, they aren’t there.

On his fourth day in the jungle, Ping enters a deep valley that smells like potpourri. There, he finds a huge bush that grows tiny, strawberry-shaped fruit that he recognises (from his drug-dealing) as something Blackhall students call chill-pills. A handful of the fruit mellows you like fuck. Ping eats a bunch of them and gurgles through the rest of the day, moving like a somnambulist. Maud is disapproving but impotent.

Later Ping gets the chronic shits something awful, and Maud doesn’t say I told you so but Ping knows she’s thinking it.

On his ninth day in the jungle, the trees close and smothering, the heat licking his bare chest, and so fucking high he can actually see his thoughts rising from his head, Ping discovers a great lake surrounded by mountains the colour of candyfloss. He takes off his shoes, throws away what little remains of his socks, rolls up his trousers as far as they’ll go, and goes wading in to his thighs.

He splashes water on his face, on his bare chest — he’s lost his shirt, days ago: a casualty in a fight with a bush of sticky fruits. He feels very native, very Lord of the Flies. He puts his whole head under, scraping clotted mud out of his hair. When he opens his eyes underwater he sees yellow and blue weeds twisting in and out of each other, a field of floating school ties.

He wades back to shore and sprawls out, face-down, on a big rock. The suns are dazzlingly bright today, and he closes his eyes against the glare on the water.

“Better,” says Maud, sitting beside him. “You’d really started to smell, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

Ping yawns. “I don’t.”

Maud tucks her feet up underneath her and sights across the water, at the steep rise of the land that rolls pinkly to the sky. “This is a wild place you’ve brought me to,” she says. “It scares me. I don’t mind telling you that. I worry about you, here. I’m still amazed you know enough about plants to survive.”

“I know what I can eat. The problem is whatever I eat gets me high. Higher.”

“Look on the bright side,” Maud suggests, uncharacteristically cheery for once. “If you weren’t high, you wouldn’t be hallucinating me. If that’s what’s really happening here, which frankly, I doubt.”

“Has to be. If you were a ghost — and I’m not saying ghosts exist — why would you be haunting a different planet?”

“Maybe I’m your guardian angel,” says Maud. “I am wherever you are.”

“Maybe. Why do I need a guardian angel?”

“Because you’re lost in the jungle on a planet about a million light-years from earth,” says Maud. She pauses. “I can think of other reasons, too, but that appears to be the most pertinent.”

“Fair call.” Ping grins. He’s discovered he doesn’t mind being lost. It might be just the incredible amounts of drugs he’s inhaled, eaten and smoked since he ran from Blackhall talking, but he’s never felt more calm, more at peace. If life at Blackhall represents an escape from reality, then the jungles of Clockworld are a wormhole to fucking Neverland.

Like Aubrey, he has always feared Clockworld, the threat of unknowable chaos lurking outside the school grounds. Now he sees that his fear is unfounded. Clockworld is simply the next level you reach after you’ve given up all your worldly goods, all the last little things that connect you to The Real World. Its weird flora is beautiful to him now — exotic and elegant and lush. For the first time he feels he’s truly experiencing the planet, not just a dried, chopped up, rolled up, diluted version of it.

He looks sideways at Maud, still prim and proper in her outdated costume, her white slipper-shoes unsullied by all the mud they’ve tracked through. As a companion she’s not ideal company (he still longs for Josie and Aubrey), but Ping does like her. Admires her as a woman before her time, a woman who’ll speak her mind.

“Why did you kill yourself?” he asks.

It comes out before he can stop it. He’s been thinking this question for days now, and the white-tipped cabbage plant he’d eaten before bathing has loosened his tongue.

“I’m sorry,” he says, quickly, sitting up. “I’m sorry, Maud, I didn’t — ”

“I didn’t kill myself,” says Maud. Not offended. Perhaps even mildly amused. “I was out driving one day. And I thought, I wonder what would happen if I just… stopped.”

“Stopped what?”

“Stopped everything. Stopped caring. Stopped moving. Let everything slide.”

“What happened?”

“Eleven car pile up on the M15. That’s a motorway, or it used to be, in my day. I was twenty. Or maybe nineteen. I can’t remember.”

Ping has a memory of this now. Remembers the memory as she says it. Was it his mother who’d told him? An aunt? “Why did you want to stop?” he asks. “I thought you preferred to run. I thought you were like me.”

“I did prefer to run. I ran all my life. I just… got tired of it. Was exhausted by it.” She runs a hand through her fair hair, eyes unfocussed. “It was a girl. About a girl. Didn’t work out, of course. Well, it wouldn’t have. We were both married — ”

“No, that’s not true,” Ping interrupts. “Absolute rubbish. No one ever told me you were gay. I’d have bloody remembered having a queer granny, thanks. My sub-conscious probably made that secret-girl-lover bit up because I’ve been thinking of Josie and Aubrey.”

Maud shrugs. “Honestly, Ping, I thought that was why I’d appeared to you in particular. You and no one else. It’s our connection, don’t you see? We’re both — ”

“But I’m not,” Ping groans, pulling a face. “My problems are bigger and wider and wilder than some… than some shit about that which I’m honestly not bothered about.”

“You aren’t?”

“I’m going to be an artist when I grow up,” says Ping, sprawling back on the rock again. “No one is going to care who I fuck.”

Maud snickers. “Come on. Josie or Aubrey? If you had to choose.”

“Ugh, you don’t understand. I want them to choose each other.”

“Vicarious pleasure?”

“You must be a ghost,” says Ping. “It’d be impossible for anyone inside my brain to completely fail to understand me that much.” Sulkily he stares at the sky. Above the mountain ranges, part of a cloud seem to detach from the rest and glide swiftly downward, its edges shimmering silver in the suns’ light.

“Avoid. Run. Watch from a safe distance. No, I understand you fine, grandson.”

“They’re my friends. I don’t think about them like that.” Ping’s still watching the cloud-part. For a while the thing zigzags unsteadily in the air, then careens suddenly sideways. Bright fire — a sunbeam reflected? — spills from its left side. Curious. “Look, Aubrey might be handsome but he’s also a sociopath. And Josie…”

“And Josie?”

“Shit,” says Ping. “Shit.”

Maud folds her arms, satisfied. “I thought as much.”

“No!” Ping splutters, already running. The sun has been eclipsed by a lance of metal and flame. “Up there! Coming down! It’s a fucking shuttle!”

(To be continued)

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