My brother is the spaceman

I was supposed to be launching into space with my big brother. He’d spent all this money, and so here we were in the capsule, in the launch craft. Until we started getting ready for space travel, we had lost touch with each other. It’s difficult when your brother is interested in space, and can afford to go to space. To begin with, it was nightclubs and restaurants - exclusive places where I was served by people with these happy faces - like such effortlessly friendly faces that when they came near, I wondered if we in fact knew each other and were close friends, but they were just at work, they were working harder than I probably ever have, because it was my brother. And now me and him were in a spaceship. Nothing is more exclusive than space.

He was holding my hand, exactly the way he held my hand when we received bad news about the family. The way he held my hand when we had to walk each other home at the end of the day, after pretending it had been arranged that way - he’d hold my hand and explain to the teacher, our mother is working late today, that’s all.

Six hot miles home and holding hands in silence with jaws clenched as we passed the field, the tower, the box hedges, corners and eyes on us and animals turning to sniff the air off us.

In space, my brother had once said, there is no dirt on anything. In space, there is no bacteria - everything is just elements and there is no air.

He seemed to love this idea that there was no air. To him the lack of air was an exciting prospect. When he breathed, space itself would slide into him. Hard space, cold and sharp, it would be better than air. It would be purifying.

He smiled at me as we sat in the spaceship, waiting for launch. Do you want anything? He said. He has been asking me that since forever. Do you want anything? Like he had any power to get me anything. A glass of water. The cheapest possible crisps from the corner shop or in summer a 5p icepop.

Except now he meant, before we are launched into space in this rocket I bought, would you like a snack? There are nut-free energy bars in the pantry. There are gluten free brownies. There is a block of solidified champagne he was saying he wants us to suck on later.

Can I go to the toilet? I asked, feeling quite pathetic.

Sure! He said. Then he pressed a button near his seat and told them we needed five. This is a literal rocket launch and he just told everyone they have to wait five minutes while I go for a piss. You could hear the pain, the medically worrying stress in the voice of the engineer who was forced to say ‘of course, no problem sir.’

They all call my brother sir. He has no rank or anything but they call him sir and he never contradicts them.
Thank you, I mouthed as I unlocked myself and climbed out of the luxury pod area to the luxury pod area toilet.

It was whilst sat on the toilet that I noticed the flap. It was down in the wall by the toilet door. A small flap of flexible tile. It was gold in colour and luxurious like everything else, but it also looked quite savagely broken. It was worrying that any detail at all would be so jaggedly loose like this. I reached down to see if it could be pressed back into place, and I don't know what happened, but the tile came away from the wall. Suddenly I was sitting on the spaceship toilet holding what looked to be an integral part of the shielding in my hands.

I have to say that I did a further small wee before anything else. But then I got my trousers back up and my spacesuit organised somewhat - this was not a suit for being out in space in, I should say. It was like a pretend military uniform for travelling to space. Think very very very expensive cabin crew action suit.

Without thinking much about it, I bent down to take a closer look at the damage I had done. I have to be honest, I really didn't expect anything to be really that bad. But there was a breeze. Fresh air was coming through the gap where the tile had been. I crouched down and put my eye to the area where the tile had come from. It was only very tiny, but there was a crack there. Like a tear in an old marquee tent, and outside I could see the desert and the temporary buildings and the advertising hoardings for my brothers new spaceship company. I texted my brother with a picture of the hole I had made. the clear blue sky slashed into his golden spaceship toilet wall.

Fuck that, was his reply.

What do you mean? I asked.

It'll be fine. Just lock the toilet door on your way out if you're worried, but there's no way that's a true breach. It looks blue because some plumbing component is painted blue. There is literally an impregnable, thermal controlled skin around this craft. The toilet isn't even near the outside of the ship.

And yet, I could see it. I poked, I'm ashamed to say, my tongue out through the slash. I wanted to taste the air. It was clean village air. I looked again, and saw that the desert around us had been swallowed by mist. Lancing out of the mist were jagged, branching shapes. I pulled away from the hole. I stood and gathered myself - looking in the mirror, looking at the face of my brother, buried in my own much more ragged, much more pessimistic face. I really love you, I said. I think I was saying it to him, but I was really saying it to the child him. The child who needed to hold my hand, even though he was the eldest. The child him who went just a bit hungrier than I did when there was no food in the house and no money in the house and no presence of responsibility in the house. I made sure the toilet door was locked and then returned to the slash in the wall.

My fingers and then my arms slid out easily. I pushed my head and shoulders through, and found myself suspended above the mist and the village area down below. I could hear the sounds of voices down below me, the working sounds of people who work for my brother. Their joyful compliances, and the stretched vocal chords as they perform more and more out-of-scope procedures at his bidding from within the spaceship. I felt very confident I would be ok as I edged myself out and tumbled down the impervious hermetic skin of the rocket. I saw him fly away, my brother, from the high branches of an ancient birch. suspended there, hardly breathing, I saw my brother launch himself away, I could see, although of course this was impossible, I could see the tanned bean shape of his head, grinning down at me as he headed into that airless paradise of his. I love you , I said again.

I have been in the village ever since. They're very kind here, and I have been joining a working group lately who are interested in starting a simple postal service. Getting letters, we have agreed, is one of the good things in life. When someone is far away, then a letter is like a gift - more than a gift.

Even if I got a letter from my neighbour, I said to the working group, even if it was Nora or Nancy in the dwelling next to mine, that would be from a far away place. You are far away from your neighbours, I said. You are far away even from yourself, when you sit and imagine what you might like to say to someone. How spectacularly far away you are, on the other end of the universe, when you are about to become the recipient of a letter.