I called to Al. It took me a few moments to find my voice. He woke with a cry, like he didn’t know where he was. I told him to get himself over here, and take a look out of this window. My brother stood there in his rumpled sleeping shirt and pants and gazed down into the street.
‘What? What, Lora? What am I supposed to be looking at?’
He was right to look so mystified and perplexed. Because when I looked again, I couldn’t see them any more, either. The ghostly dancers had completely crept away.
‘Why do you say they were ghosts?’ Grandma snapped at me. ‘And why do you insist on saying they were Martians?’
I had waited until Da was out, off to see his friends at the Storehouse, before I brought up what I’d seen in the night. The old ladies clearly didn’t believe a word of it, and they delighted in quizzing me, turning me round in circles.
‘Martians and ghosts!’ old Ruby guffawed. ‘Damn girl doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She ain’t seen nothing like what we’ve seen in our lifetime!’
Grandma cawed loudly in agreement. ‘We’ve seen Martians. And we’ve seen ghosts. We’ve seen things like you wouldn’t believe. Things you would never brag about seeing afterwards. You kids these days – you’re all soft and mollycoddled.’
Both old dames were looking at me and Al defiantly but I shouted right back, ‘I saw them in the street outside! In the Earth light. They were looking in people’s ground-floor windows. They were peeping and prying.’
‘Hoodlums,’ scoffed Grandma. ‘Simple straightforward bandits and robbers. Why, they most probably come in from some other town. Some place we don’t even know about.’
‘They were Martians,’ I said.
‘All the Martians died,’ snapped Grandma.
‘They were their dead ghosts,’ I said. I don’t know how I felt so sure.
Al touched my arm gently. I shrugged him off. He said, ‘Lora. You’re scaring the two old ladies. You’re getting them all worked up.’
‘Toaster,’ I called, and he came scooting in from the kitchen. ‘Did you detect anyone – anything – lurking about outside last night?’
He mused on this, drying a cup with a tea towel. ‘Outside last night? I was deactivated last night, I’m afraid, Miss Lora. I never detected a thing.’
I tutted. ‘You’re no use,’ I said.
There was a complication with the grips for Grandma’s new leg and Da asked Al and me whether we’d mind staying one more night at Ruby’s place?
So we’d have another day of eating the weird concentrated foodstuffs the old ladies loved so much. Stuff like that reminded them both of their glory days when they were space travellers and early settlers and everything they ate came in dried-up capsule form.
Also, they loved to watch ancient videotape of the take-offs and landings of various spacecraft they’d been aboard. ‘I’m in there! So are you!’ ‘We’re both in that one!’ And they’d dissolve in giggles at the absurdity of it: of surrendering your life to such fragile-looking devices. The video films were crackly and it was hard to make out what was going on. But Ruby and Grandma sat there clapping and then blubbing together as they re-watched hours of this footage.
Occasionally they saluted the flickering screen.
Al and me watched and waited for the most interesting parts. The pictures of places on Earth. I have to admit that we were both fascinated to see folk in old-fashioned dress waving to the camera and going about their everyday business on this alien world. The cities were huge and impossible. It was like they were made out of boxes and tubes of cardboard and spray-painted silver. Did anyone really live in places like that? I tried to imagine what the din must have been like. Why wasn’t everyone driven completely mad living in crushed places like that?
But there are only so many hours you can sit looking at scratchy pictures with the old folk. Al and me decided to go out in the afternoon. Those five-credit notes were burning holes in our pockets. Grandma caught wind of what Da had given us and she was scandalised. ‘You’ll waste it! Kids with so much money to fritter away! No wonder your family hasn’t got anything! It’s like when you have a barbecue and go inviting the whole town! You lot will never amount to anything and then you’ll all starve!’
She shrieked this at us, standing on Ruby’s porch. Then she went back in to watch more of their movies behind the closed shutters.
Out in the street I examined the red dust of the road, trying to find marks left by the strange people I had witnessed in the night. Al sighed with impatience. ‘If they were ghosts, like you say, they’d hardly leave footprints, would they? They’d be lighter than air.’
The road was a blurry mess of different tracks. Already that morning too many people had been down this way. I gave up and we headed to Adams’ Exotic Emporium to blow our cash.
Mrs Adams’ store was relatively quiet. She was presiding over her counter, watching us like a lizard bird as we entered. I always got the feeling that she distrusted us. She thought because we were country children we were dirtier, rougher and inclined to thieve. Though I resented that, I was of course a first-class thief. As I moved through the store, my hands had a life of their own. I lifted trinkets and gee-gaws – rubber bugs and gobstoppers – and slid them into my pockets. I had warned Al many times never to copy me. His lack of subtlety and skill would get us caught.
Right now she was levering open the lid of a rusted steel drum. Dust swirled in the air. Mrs Adams drew out a brown paper parcel. Al and I stepped nearer. By the markings on the drum it was plain to see that the consignment had been sent from Earth many, many moons ago, and it wasn’t addressed to anyone still alive in this town. This was contraband, whatever it was.
Of course, it didn’t help that our town didn’t have much of a name. Being the earliest settlement of houses in this landmass, it had always simply been known as Our Town. Sometimes I thought that was a purposeful thing. Like we wanted to keep separate from everyone else. We didn’t really know what was happening on the rest of Mars. And very few of us even cared.
Al and I watched over her shoulder as Mrs Adams donned white cotton gloves to unwrap the ream of brown paper. Inside was a case of pale wood. And inside this was a mass of blue tissue paper. Between each sheet was a set of glass slides, each no bigger nor thicker than a fingernail.
Mrs Adams looked almost glad to see us. She’d had a shipment, she said, in which I would be very interested. A long-looked-for consignment of reading matter had come into the shop at last. I had been waiting along with her and several others in the town who were also avid readers. We had already read every scrap that Mrs Adams stocked in her lending library.
She flicked through them. Each bore a vivid smudge of colour. They were shimmering, beautiful objects. I was dizzy at the sheer profusion of slides, knowing that each contained a whole book. There must have been over two hundred inside that canister. I don’t think I had ever seen so many in one place before.
I forked out a good portion of my five-credit note to Mrs Adams that day. She let me choose a bunch of those glorious slides and she said I could keep them for a whole month. Take them back to the Homestead and everything. She gave me a printed list of titles so that I could choose the most exciting ones. I used the colours of those slides to help me, imagining that dark purple meant Romance, steely blue meant space adventures and green – for some reason – meant grand historical epics.