Squishy Taylor in Zero Gravity Read online

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  About the author and illustrator

  Copyright Page

  ‘Bzzzt!’ I say. ‘This is Squishy Taylor, exiting the space station. Over.’

  I swing myself out the airlock door towards the meteor damage. The space station is broken, and my legs float away from me as I grip tight. I’m hanging here in zero gravity. My life is in danger. If I let go now, I’ll go drifting into deep space, just a spinning white dot in a dark universe.

  ‘Bzzzt. Roger that, Squishy. Ground control on standby. Over,’ Vee says, because she’s ground control.

  ‘Bzzzt,’ I say. ‘Meteor damage is worse than we thought. I’ll need to be here for ages.’ I look closely at the red paint, my legs dangling into space.

  Vee’s voice changes. ‘Squishy, that’s not fair. It’s meant to be my turn doing space-station repairs.’ She’s stopped pretending to speak into the microphone. She’s standing on the tanbark, frowning at me, while I swing across the monkey bars.

  We’re at the playground just near our apartment. Our playground is extra cool because it has an actual pretend space station at one end of the monkey bars. Some people in orange vests with a truck came a few weeks ago and attached it. Just off the tanbark, they also put in a whole solar system you can turn with a handle. The sun is taller than my dad.

  ‘You’re breaking up, ground control,’ I say. ‘I can’t hear you.’

  ‘Squishy.’ Vee sounds a bit cranky.

  ‘I’m not getting any sound,’ I say, pretending to fiddle with my earpiece. ‘Maybe the moon has come in between us.’

  Vee’s twin Jessie laughs out loud. She’s been turning the solar system really slowly, watching the orbit patterns, but now she looks at us. ‘The moon can’t get between the earth and a space station, you duffer,’ she says.

  Jessie and Vee are my bonus sisters. They are the bonus I got when I moved in with my dad and their mum. Except sometimes Jessie and Vee aren’t a bonus, like now. They’re annoying.

  ‘Squishy, it’s my turn,’ Vee says.

  I swing myself up to sit on top of the monkey bars. I kick my feet, not wanting to come down.

  ‘Do you know how far away the moon is?’ Jessie says, coming to stand under me. ‘It’s three hundred and eighty-four thousand, four hundred kilometres away.’

  Jessie likes astronomy and she likes facts. So of course she knows this.

  ‘And do you know how far away the space station is?’ Jessie doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Four hundred kilometres away,’ she says, looking super pleased with herself. ‘So there’s no way the moon comes between the earth and the space station.’

  I do a roll-back-flip to the ground and stand in front of them. There’s something seriously dodgy about Jessie’s facts.

  ‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘The space station can’t be only four hundred kilometres away.’

  ‘Fine, we’ll google it when we get home.’ Jessie loves googling things to prove she’s right. But this time I know she’s wrong.

  ‘Jessie, Sydney’s nine hundred kilometres away from Melbourne. How can the space station be closer than Sydney?’

  We stare at each other.

  ‘Squishy,’ Jessie says, her eyes widening, ‘the space station is actually closer than Sydney. That is the coolest thing ever.’

  She’s so surprised that I almost believe her. We all laugh and it makes us forget to argue anymore.

  Vee has an idea. ‘Let’s do astronaut training,’ she says. ‘Then no-one has to be ground control.’

  Astronauts need to be really fit, so we’ve made up our own astronaut training routine. It’s mostly chin-ups, jumps, and special flips off the monkey bars. They’re things we already know, but the rule is you have to do them all in the right order really fast.

  ‘Ah. I reckon I’ll just …’ Jessie says, and heads back to the solar system.

  Vee and I jump to the monkey bars together. We do chin-ups. One. Two. Then we swing our legs up and under. Hang from our knees. Swing our bodies. One. Two. Aaaand flip off.

  We land on our feet and laugh.

  ‘Now, jumps,’ we say together, because we both know the astronaut training order. We run to the steps and jump them. Jump up, up, up. Jump down, down, down. We’re puffing and laughing and racing each other. Chin-ups again. My arms hurt. Hang from knees. Swing.

  But my knees aren’t gripping the bar as usual. I’m slipping. I’m falling! I’m going to land on my head.

  I twist myself around in the air. Get my head up and my arms out and land – thump!

  On my tummy. On the tanbark.

  Ow. I can’t breathe. It’s like my lungs are broken.

  I feel that thump crashing through my body, even though it’s over. I can’t breathe. Maybe I’m dead.

  Then I gasp, so hard it hurts the back of my throat. My hands start stinging. My knees start hurting. My eyes are three centimetres away from the tanbark.

  ‘Squishy, are you OK?’ I can feel Vee leaning over me. Jessie’s footsteps run over from the bench and the toes of her sneakers arrive at the tanbark where I’m staring.

  ‘I want to go home,’ I whisper.

  Usually I don’t care when I hurt myself. I’m not one of those kids who cries and needs a treat after every tiny, ouchy thing. But that thump was hard. My knees and hands hurt and I feel kind of shaky. I walk between Jessie and Vee along the footpath to our apartment.

  I can feel Jessie and Vee looking at me, like they’re really worried, but I don’t look at them. I’m biting my lip and I’ve got a big lump in my throat. I don’t cry in front of my bonus sisters.

  Jessie puts her hand on my back, like she’s trying to comfort me. But her hand feels shy.

  What I really want is a big warm hug from my mum or dad.

  We finally reach our building and catch the lift up to the eleventh floor, where we live.

  Vee pushes into the kitchen first. ‘Squishy fell off the space station,’ she announces.

  Dad isn’t home.

  My whole stomach drops. I forgot. It’s too early for Dad to be home on Tuesday. Alice, Jessie and Vee’s mum, is sitting at the table with a pile of paper and a laptop.

  I don’t hug Alice. I only just started living with her a few months ago.

  Alice keeps typing and doesn’t look up.

  ‘It was massive,’ Vee says. ‘Like, bang!’ She smashes her hands together, as though one hand is me and the other is the ground.

  ‘Shhh,’ Alice says. ‘Baby’s asleep.’ Baby belongs to Alice and Dad, so he’s all of our brother equally.

  ‘But Mum,’ Jessie says, ‘Squishy’s bleeding.’

  Alice pushes her laptop away. ‘All right, Squisho, let’s have a look at you.’

  I don’t want her to look at me. I want Dad to be here hugging me.

  ‘Can I skype Mum?’ I ask. I’m trying not to cry.

  Mum moved to Geneva for nine months to work for the United Nations. That’s why I live with Dad. I skype Mum every day, but it’s not the same as living in the same house as her.

  Alice takes my hand, turning it over to look at the grazes. ‘Let’s clean this up before you skype Devika.’

  Alice pulls out tea-tree oil and cotton buds and a bowl of warm water.

  ‘Her knees are grazed too,’ Jessie says.

  I want to tell them I
don’t care about the grazes. They’re nothing really. I just care about the feeling of the big thump when I landed. But if I talk, I’ll cry.

  I feel strange. Alice is nice, but I don’t know her enough. I watch her dab the blood off my knee and miss my mum’s soft cheek right next to mine.

  When Alice is finished, she smiles at me and says, ‘Well done, sweetie. Do you need a hug?’ She’s never called me sweetie before. I look at her open arms and shake my head. She’s only being nice because she’s supposed to. I want my mum.

  Finally, Alice gives me the iPad and I run to my bed with it. They tried to make us only use the iPad in the lounge room, but that didn’t last long. I tap through to Skype.

  ‘Hey, Squisho,’ Mum says. ‘What’s happening?’ She’s at her desk at work because it’s the start of the day in Geneva. Then she sees my about-to-cry face and leans in. ‘Oh, Squishy-sweet, what’s wrong?’

  My tears come out, hot and throat-achy. ‘I fell,’ I sob, ‘off the monkey bars.’

  ‘Oh, honey,’ she says.

  ‘It was a really big thump,’ I say, ‘and then I couldn’t breathe.’

  ‘It sounds like you winded yourself,’ Mum says, with just the right tone. She doesn’t sound very worried, but she loves me a lot. I just want to snuggle into her.

  That’s when I realise something. You can’t hug over skype. It makes me cry even harder.

  ‘Hey,’ Mum says, after a while. ‘Isn’t that meteor shower tonight?’

  The meteor shower! I’d forgotten about that. We’ve been talking about it all week.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ she asks.

  My crying stops and I feel myself starting to smile. ‘The building people gave Dad a rooftop key this morning,’ I say.

  ‘Woohoo!’ Mum cheers.

  The building people nearly said no to us going on the roof. Dad and Alice said we weren’t allowed to pick the lock either, even though we know how. But they did try really hard to get the key. And finally, yesterday, the building people said yes.

  ‘We’re taking the telescope and we’re allowed to stay up until ten o’clock,’ I say.

  Mum has a special cheeky face for when rules get broken. She used to be a bit of a rebel and she still thinks breaking rules is fun. As long as they don’t get broken too badly.

  Mum grins. ‘Ten o’clock,’ she says, with her cheeky face on. ‘No way!’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘On a school night!’

  Mum laughs. ‘And I’m on a workday. So I should go, Squisho. Big hugs.’

  She hangs up and my smile doesn’t last long. I start to remember how hard I fell. That thump was ginormous.

  At nine o’clock, Alice and Baby go to bed. I don’t. And neither do my bonus sisters.

  We’re watching Lightspeed Kids again while we wait. Lightspeed Kids is the best. It’s the movie that made me and Vee obsessed with being astronauts in the first place. Jessie was already obsessed with astronomy.

  ‘Righto, kids,’ Dad says. ‘Shoes and coats on. Let’s go.’

  Jessie has packed the telescope neatly in its case and folded the tripod up small. We pull our coats on over the top of our pyjamas.

  Dad takes out the rooftop keys and waves them like a prize. We all troop out the door.

  There’s one more floor above ours, and after that, it’s the roof. Dad leads the way up. The last stairs are more like a ladder. They’re metal and steep. They also have a special gate on them to stop people getting out. (Not that it can stop me, or Vee. We are super ninja-climbers and got over it twice already. Easy.) After that there’s a door.

  After that, the sky.

  I follow Dad out onto the roof.

  ‘Woooo!’ I call. The big night makes me want to cheer and spin in circles. The city is electric-sparkly around us, reaching up towards the stars. The sky is completely clear. Vee spins with me, yodelling. Dad laughs. Jessie sets up the telescope, opening the tripod and lengthening all its legs.

  Then the meteor shower starts.

  It’s like fifty shooting stars all at once. Jessie’s watching through the telescope.

  ‘Amazing!’ Dad says. He’s got his arm around me and we’re both tipping our heads back.

  The meteors just keep on falling.

  ‘My turn! My turn!’ Vee says, jiggling Jessie’s elbow.

  Jessie moves aside and comes over to me. ‘The telescope isn’t that good anyway,’ she says.

  ‘Hey, where are the meteors?’ Vee says, squinting into it. ‘I can’t see them.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jessie says. ‘They move too fast, so there’s no time to focus. Better without the telescope.’

  Dad lies down on his back and I lie next to him on the hard concrete, looking up. My head leans into his warm shoulder. The meteors zoom across the sky. It’s like watching magic. Only it’s better than magic because it’s real. It makes my heart thump and my mind feel calm.

  ‘Imagine being out there, floating in space,’ I say. ‘Zero gravity.’ It’s so hard to imagine being somewhere there’s no down.

  ‘It’s not zero gravity,’ Jessie says, in her know-it-all voice. ‘It’s microgravity.’

  I groan and Vee laughs.

  ‘But “zero gravity” sounds so much cooler,’ Vee says. So I don’t care about being corrected.

  Vee wanders away from the telescope. Jessie has another turn, trying to focus it on Mars. I snuggle in closer to Dad.

  Vee’s voice comes from the other side of the roof. ‘Hey, cool! Check this out.’

  She sounds excited. When Vee has that voice, there’s usually an adventure on its way.

  ‘Squishy, come and look,’ Vee calls.

  I leave Dad looking up at the stars, and Jessie trying to focus the telescope, and walk over to Vee.

  She’s peering out, with her elbows on the wall that goes all around the edge of the roof. ‘Look,’ she says, and points.

  Straight across from us is the really tall building where Boring Lady works. We always see her typing from our bedroom window. Next to it there’s a building that’s nearly the same height as ours. That’s where Vee is looking. Because on the roof of that building, somebody is moving around.

  ‘Probably watching the meteors, like us,’ I say.

  ‘No, look,’ Vee says.

  I squint. The person is far away and it’s hard to see, but it seems like they’re wearing a space helmet. A dark one with a window over their face.

  ‘It’s practically midnight,’ I whisper. ‘Why is there an astronaut on the roof?’

  The astronaut is standing next to something tall and cylindrical and pointed. Something rocket-shaped? I squeeze Vee’s arm. The astronaut hoists something up into their arms and leans over. Then there’s a massive shower of sparks. Bright white sparks, flying off the astronaut and up into the night.

  ‘Whoa!’ Vee and I say at the same time.

  We lean against the wall, trying to make out what’s going on, but it’s too dark. All we can see is sparks. Finally, the sparks stop and the astronaut pulls off her helmet. It’s a woman with lots of red curly hair. She shakes her hair back off her face and leans towards her rocket. Is it really a rocket?

  I can’t believe we were playing astronauts and now there’s one in real life.

  ‘Bedtime, kids,’ Dad says.

  ‘But Dad, you should see this,’ I start.

  I can hear Jessie beginning to pack away the telescope.

  On the roof, across the street, the sparks start flying again.

  ‘Squishy,’ Dad says, but I ignore him, trying to figure out what the spacewoman is doing.

  ‘Squishy, if you don’t come now, what am I going to say next time you ask to do something special?’

  I tear myself away, but I’ve already made a secret promise: I’m going to find out who that spacewoman is. Dad can make us go to bed right now, but he doesn’t watch us every second of the day.

  ‘What was that?’ Vee whispers from the top bunk.

  We’re lying on our triple bunk-bed
in the dark, with me in the middle bunk.

  ‘It was a whole meteor shower,’ Jessie says dreamily from underneath us. She doesn’t seem to care that she didn’t see it through the telescope.

  I try to bring her back to reality. ‘Jessie, there was a spacewoman on the roof and you didn’t even look.’

  ‘There was not a spacewoman,’ Jessie says.

  ‘There was so,’ Vee insists. ‘With sparks flying everywhere. We both saw it. Squishy’s not making things up.’

  Jessie snorts like she doesn’t believe anything.

  ‘Seriously, Jessie,’ I say, using my most serious voice. ‘It’s true.’ I roll over and crane my neck, looking out our bedroom window to the building next to Boring Lady’s. ‘The spacewoman was right … there.’

  Our triple bunk-bed creaks as the others roll over and try to look. The spacewoman’s floor is one above ours, so you can’t actually see the roof. Right then, a fountain of sparks shoots out, exactly where we’re looking. Jessie and Vee squeal.

  I cheer like it’s fireworks and say, ‘I told you. I told you. Didn’t I tell you?’

  Our bedroom door slams open and Alice is standing there. ‘That is enough!’ she growls.

  I open my mouth. ‘But there’s an astro–’

  ‘Astro-nothing, Squishy,’ Alice snaps. ‘Not another peep. It’s late and you’ve got school tomorrow.’

  Alice is being super unfair because she likes her own kids better than me. I wasn’t the only one looking at the astronaut. But there’s no point trying to tell stuff to grown-ups who are that cranky. As soon as she closes the door, we all creep out of bed and stand by the window where the telescope usually is.

  ‘Can we set up the telescope?’ Vee whispers to Jessie.

  Jessie shakes her head. ‘I left it in the lounge room and it’s so heavy and clunky. They’d hear us for sure.’

  The sparks fly again and Jessie grips my arm. Vee shuffles closer and I’m tingling like the sparks are inside me.

  Weird stuff like this is the best.

  I wake up with Baby on my head. Vee has put him on my pillow and is laughing at us both. Baby baffs my face and dribbles on my cheek. He’s got mushed food down his little T-shirt.