Out to Launch Read online

‘Well, it looks like they have,’ said Primrose.

  Crumley, the Contrasts’ dog,40 came out of the house, walked over to the spaceship and sniffed one of its legs. Then he walked round the ship and sniffed the other three legs. Then he walked round again and peed on each one. A trickle of silver pee ran down onto the grass as the paint washed off. The crinkly bits of foil beneath the paint began to rot.

  ‘See, I told you it wasn’t aluminium cooking foil,’ said Fiona before Primrose could say anything.

  Fiona went back to the house to organise a crack team of trainee assistant junior engineers, who came back a few minutes later and covered the entire spaceship in a layer of clear librarian’s bookbinding plastic.

  ‘Just to stop any birds making a mess on it,’ Fiona explained.

  And it wasn’t a second too soon because it began to rain.

  It rained all morning and most of the afternoon. The top-secret Moon Launch Central launch pad got wetter and wetter, and very slowly the spaceship began to sink into the ground.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Perfect? What do you mean, perfect?’ said Primrose. ‘It’s sinking.’

  ‘That’s what it’s meant to do,’ said Fiona. ‘Have you any idea how much force and, um, power there is in the engines on that thing? If it wasn’t securely bedded into the ground before take-off, it could disintegrate.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Primrose.

  ‘No, my dear girl,’ said Radius, who had just arrived as the skies had opened, ‘Fiona is absolutely right. It’s designed to be set into the ground like that. In fact, if we hadn’t been so lucky with the rain coming at exactly the right time, my gardeners – I mean, technicians – would have had to be out there, bedding it in with hoses.’

  Inside Primrose’s head, a voice kept telling her it was all lies. The voice told her that the ship really was covered in cooking foil and held together with cheap gaffer tape. Another voice tried to tell her she was being silly because there was no way the world’s biggest TV company would send them up into the sky and to certain death in a cardboard spaceship.

  On the other hand, she thought, maybe he wants it to blow up. It would be a lot cheaper than sending us to the moon.

  ‘Well, I’m not getting inside it,’ Primrose said.

  The thing was, her parents, Stark and Laura Contrast, had signed a contract before they’d got on the helicopter and left the TV station, agreeing for the whole family to go and live on the moon for a brilliant new series called Watch This Space.

  The other thing was, neither Stark nor Laura had actually read the contract because Radius Limpfast had done what he always did with contracts – he had waited until it seemed like it was almost too late so that the people signing the contract never had time to read it. It was a well-known strategy used by successful businessmen and movie companies all over the world. The first few sentences – the ones in the big lettering – always said how wonderful everything would be. The stuff that really mattered, which most people never read, was printed in really tiny writing with the lines so close together it was difficult not to muddle them up.

  The other, other thing was, although Stark and Laura had read the big happy bits, neither Jack nor Primrose had read any of it. They were the children, so they simply had to do what their parents wanted.

  ‘You can’t make me,’ Primrose said.

  ‘We can, actually,’ said Fiona. ‘Your parents signed a contract. But we don’t want to fight or to have to do anything unpleasant, do we?’

  She put her arm round Primrose’s shoulder in an extremely professional way, which she’d learned in the Junior Commandos Brigade back in school. Anyone who’d been watching would have seen Fiona put her arm around Primrose’s shoulder like a best friend would, when in fact she had her in a super-death grip and could have pulled her head off in one quick move.

  Fiona’s middle finger was also pressing on a very specific nerve in Primrose’s shoulder, and though this was painful for Primrose, it also made her feel numb. For a second or two, Primrose thought this was just an accident, but when Fiona gave her a little squeeze, she knew it wasn’t.

  ‘Can you teach me that?’ Primrose said when Fiona loosened her grip enough to let her speak.

  ‘Teach you what?’ said Fiona.

  ‘That grip. It would be very useful on my annoying little brother.’

  Is this girl up to something, or is she just your typical fourteen year-old always annoyed with their little brother? Fiona thought. Maybe this girl could even work for us.

  ‘That depends,’ said Fiona. ‘It’s pretty powerful stuff and with your hostility towards everything, especially the amazing spaceship we have spent so much time and money on, I think it might not be a good idea.’

  ‘But …’ Primrose began.

  ‘Of course, if you were a bit more enthusiastic about the whole project, that would be different,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Can you guarantee the spaceship is, like, really safe?’ said Primrose.

  ‘Well, of course it is. Do you think we’d be going to all this trouble if it wasn’t?’

  Primrose told Fiona that it had crossed her mind how much cheaper it would be for LIMP-TV if the rocket just blew up. ‘And we both know that would make a great show.’

  ‘Yes, but there would only be one episode then, wouldn’t there?’ said Fiona. ‘Or maybe two, when they do the documentary to try to find out why the spaceship exploded. But if we get you to the moon, just think of how many hundreds of episodes there could be.’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose,’ said Primrose.

  ‘So you’ll go then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’

  So Fiona showed Primrose how to do the super-rip-your-head-off grip.

  ‘And now,’ she said, ‘come and meet your new granny.’

  When Fiona and Primrose reached the lounge, the rest of the family were there, having afternoon tea with Granny Apricot.

  The Contrasts seemed to be getting on really well with the old lady, especially Crumley, who had his head in her lap and was looking adoringly at her.41

  Jack was sitting at Apricot’s feet, doing his best to cover himself from head to foot in chocolate cake. Some of it was actually going into his mouth – enough to stop him from speaking, though he did keep making happy dribbley grunts as he forced more and more cake down his throat. When there was no more cake left on his plate, he picked as many crumbs as he could off his clothes and then began licking it off Crumley’s fur. Finally he collapsed onto his back, too full to move, and fell asleep.

  OMG, check out that awful cardigan and those thick baggy stockings with all the wrinkles, Primrose thought, looking at Granny Apricot. I bet she sings hymns and does knitting too.

  ‘Hello darling,’ said Laura. ‘Come and meet our new granny.’

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Primrose, sitting down on the chair furthest away from the old woman.

  It turned out that the fantastic chocolate cake had actually been made by Granny Apricot, and eating two slices of it did make Primrose a bit less hostile.

  ‘Are you going to, like, cook cake for us on the moon?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, of course, dear,’ said Apricot and, turning to Fiona, added, ‘so you better make sure we’ve got all the cake-making stuff on the ship.’

  Fiona texted someone who texted someone else who texted back and said they’d organise it.

  Oh damn, Fiona said to herself. I hope the girl didn’t notice that or she’ll realise the phones are working here.

  Primrose was far too busy stuffing a third piece of chocolate cake into her face to notice anything.

  That’s good, thought Fiona.

  Except Primrose had noticed.

  But she said nothing. She’d realised a while ago that at least half of what she and her family were being told were lies, so there’d be no point in saying anything – she’d just get more lies. There would, however, be a lot of point in stealing Fiona�
��s phone later on. Primrose would only need it for a few minutes, just so she could message every single one of her Facebook friends. She wouldn’t waste time trying to return the phone, though. She’d just throw it into the lake at the bottom of the garden. That way, they’d never be able to prove that she took it.

  After tea, Granny Apricot asked Primrose if she would take her out into the garden to have a look at the spaceship. Jack said he wanted to go too, but changed his mind when Primrose gave him a quick, very subtle and greatly toned-down version of the super-rip-your-head-off grip.

  Once they were outside, Apricot put her arm through Primrose’s and led her towards a quiet bit of the garden, out of everyone’s sight.

  ‘We need to have a little chat, dear,’ she said.

  ‘What about?’ said Primrose defensively.

  ‘I saw your face when you came into the lounge room. You were probably thinking, “OMG, look at that awful cardigan and those thick baggy stockings with all the wrinkles”, and “I bet she sings hymns and does knitting too.” Am I right?’

  ‘Well, yeah,’ said Primrose, deeply impressed.

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ said Apricot. ‘The TV people dressed me up like this. This isn’t me at all.’

  Pulling her dress up above her knees, she added, ‘This is the real me.’

  On her left thigh was a great big tattoo.

  ‘When I was your age, I was in a psycho metal band called The Squalling Pustules. It was brilliant. We did all sorts of wild stuff, most of which was illegal. I’m the only one who survived,’ she said.

  ‘I’m fourteen,’ said Primrose. ‘You can’t have been the same age as me!’

  ‘Yeah, that’s true,’ Apricot said, laughing. ‘I was only twelve when we started. It was all over by the time I was fifteen, and with the other band members being dead, there was no chance of a reunion.’

  ‘Wow!’ said Primrose.

  ‘To be honest, when I met your mum and dad, I thought about them exactly what you thought about me. You know, dead boring,’ Apricot continued. ‘You’ve no idea how happy I was when you came in.’

  ‘Wow,’ Primrose said, grinning. ‘And yeah, you’re right about Mum and Dad. They’re really boring.’

  ‘Yeah, great days, great days,’ Apricot said, remembering the day when she’d been Primrose’s age.

  They hugged each other.

  It looks as if life on the moon might not be so bad after all, they both thought.

  Granny Apricot was nobody’s granny.

  She also wasn’t anybody’s wife, mother, sister, aunt or cousin and she liked it that way. All her life, there had been no-one she had to listen to.

  Her father, who had owned a fruit shop and had named his only child Apricot after his favourite fruit, adored her. Her mother had run away with a clown shortly after Apricot had been born. To mend his broken heart, Apricot’s father had built up a fruit shop empire, branched out into vegetables and built up a vegetable shop empire. Then he had merged the two together and formed a fruit and veggie shop empire before dropping dead.

  The doctor said he had died of a heart attack, but there were rumours that his daughter, Apricot, had arranged a line of banana skins on the top stair of the top floor of their four-storey house and that he had crashed down all three flights of stairs to the bottom, where the housekeeper had found him dead with Apricot weeping into her handkerchief. The housekeeper swore in court that she had seen Apricot wiping slimy banana from her dead father’s shoes, but there was no reliable evidence to support this claim, and it was suggested the housekeeper had made it all up to try to get her hands on Apricot’s now substantial fortune. Everyone who knew Apricot pointed out that she

  adored her father

  wasn’t that interested in money, because if she was she wouldn’t have dressed like she did.

  So the housekeeper, who may or may not have been telling the truth, was sent to prison and Apricot became seriously rich at the age of twelve.

  With her newfound fortune, Apricot had gone into show business. She had started The Squalling Pustules, a death-thrash-punk-extremely-heavy-mental-metal band, and hired some of the best rock musicians of that day. Within two years she had used up most of her fortune and been forced to sell the fruit and veggie shop empire, which had kept the band going for a bit longer.

  The highlight of The Squalling Pustules’ career had been when their single ‘Baby Come and Squeeze My Boils’ entered the Belgian charts at one hundred and eighty-seven. From there, it then went rapidly down the charts and disappeared. Total sales for the group’s recording career were slightly more than eight hundred and fifty – and Apricot had bought seven hundred of them herself.

  By the time Apricot was eighteen, all she had left was the big four-storey house, which was beginning to fall to bits and was now empty, apart from one chair and a mattress.

  So that was how Apricot came to be working as a tea lady at LIMP-TV. In the evenings, she still wrote songs and dreamt of making a comeback with a new group, The Poisoned Pensioners.

  The launch was set to take place from Radius Limpfast’s estate, the one so well hidden and so far away in the countryside that even Google Maps couldn’t find it. LIMP-TV was swamped with phone calls from every major TV company in the world, asking for permission to be at the launch. They begged. They offered lots of money. But none was allowed to send even a single reporter with one tiny camera. LIMP-TV would be the only company in the world to film the launch and everyone else would, for an enormous fee, be allowed to broadcast an edited version supplied by Limpfast Enterprises.

  Radius Limpfast was only too well aware of the potential risks involved in the launch. There had probably been a few too many corners cut in building the spaceship, so the odds of it reaching the moon were very poor indeed. The odds of it actually making it into outer space, even to the closest bit of outer space to Earth, which was less than a hundred miles away, were not good. The odds of it even leaving the lawn behind the house were not the sort of odds a gambler would take unless he was stupid.

  So, in a secret studio in the basement of Limpfast Manor, Radius had built tiny models of the moon, the spaceship and everyone on it. With the help of a very skilled cameraman and a computer programmer, he now had an almost perfect recording of the ship leaving Earth, travelling perfectly across space and coming to land right next to the exquisite space pod where the Contrasts were going to spend the next very long time.

  ‘It’s just in case things go a tiny bit wrong,’ he explained to Fiona, as the cameraman and computer programmer were being hypnotised and told to forget everything, and the hypnotist who had done that was then hypnotised and told to forget everything, and the hypnotist who had hypnotised the hypnotist was then hypnotised and told to forget everything twice.42

  ‘I’m sure everything will turn out just fine, RR,’ Fiona said.

  She wasn’t totally convinced any more than Radius himself was, but they were both blessed with the wonderful gift that everyone who makes movies and TV programs has, and that is the ability to say something will happen when, in fact, it’s what they would like to happen and what might never happen at all, but hey, that would be tomorrow, which, as everyone knows, never comes.

  So when they both said that everything would be fine, they really did believe it, even though it could so easily not be.

  The MUD (Moon Unit Dwelling) had been secretly launched in the middle of the night and landed on the moon. It was sitting quite near to where it was supposed to have landed. It had come down on a slight slope above the right place and was now slowly sliding down the slope towards the right place. Amazingly, it was looking very likely that by the time the Contrasts arrived on the moon, the MUD would have slid into exactly the right place and, with a bit of luck, it would then stop sliding.

  rRego had been taken from Limpfast Manor and sent to the moon inside the MUD and was now going from room to room checking everything. Although he didn’t really feel like fixing the hundreds of mistakes Radiu
s had made because of the cost-cutting, rRego knew that five humans and a dog would be arriving shortly and it was his job to do everything he could to keep them alive.

  rRego had seen the Contrasts at Limpfast Manor and quite liked the look of them. He had been sitting inside the control room on the window sill, watching them observe the spaceship. rRego had picked up every word the Contrasts had said with his super-sensitive microphones and developed the sort of affection for them that humans develop for puppies.

  Meanwhile, the Contrasts had not seen rRego. They imagined the robot would be about as big as a full-grown man, not less than half that size. So they had ‘seen’ him in that their eyes had passed over the robot when they’d been back in the control room, but it hadn’t occurred to any of them that he would be the one looking after their survival. The family had assumed the robot was a sort of fancy wastepaper basket or maybe a hi-tech coffee machine.

  So rRego went round patching up all the little gaps and leaks until the MUD was as safe as he could make it. It was long and tiring work. rRego decided that when everything had been fixed to the best of his ability, he would take a day off to soak his joints in oil and clean the moondust out of all his little crevices.

  Radius sat at his computer and made the first contact with rRego.

  ‘Earth calling rRego,’ he said. ‘Come in please. Over.’

  ‘rRego calling Earth, I am in,’ rRego replied. ‘Over.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Radius. ‘I mean is everything ready yet? Over.’

  ‘NO. Over and under and out.’

  And before Radius could say another word, rRego switched over to his message bank, which he’d put on silent with the message, ‘Thank you for calling. I’m afraid rRego is unavailable. Please leave your message at the beep.’

  And then as soon as Radius started to speak, a second beep went almost immediately after with a voice telling him that his message had been recorded and would be dealt with as soon as possible. What made the whole thing even more infuriating for Radius was that rRego used Fiona’s voice as the voice of the message bank.