The Biscuit

When I was younger than I am now, I made a rocket balloon with my father. We sent it into Space with a smiley-face biscuit wrapped in tin foil.

‘Be kind to those whom you don’t know or may not even meet’ my father would say. He didn’t say much but when he did he knew what to say and when to say it.

I never knew what to say so I hardly spoke. I thought for a long time we had a word quota: a limited number of words we could say before they ran out. No one told me otherwise so this is what I believed for a very long time.

I was a listener, I listened to everything – I tried to remember everything I heard but there was a lot - possibly too much. Even in school when the teacher asked me a question I knew the answer to, I would never say it.

I saw my father every other weekend; it was not enough time but it was all we had and therefore it was very precious. We made packages of food and wrapped them in tin foil so we would have enough to eat when the water rose.

My favourite thing to make was biscuits. I made them with faces, all different faces - like all the different people on Earth.

My father had a heart condition, which made it hard for him to walk, so I would push him in his wheelchair. He said it would help my muscles grow. He would say, ‘my boy, my boy’ and I never knew what to say back.

My father had trouble breathing so he wore a special mask. He called it his ‘air apparatus’. He blamed the pollution and we joked about how he could use it to breathe underwater.

My father said he was a professional stranger; he would say he knew no one but me.

He lived in a concrete bunker; it was well decorated with things from all over the world. Sometimes I wondered how he gathered so many strange things bound to a wheelchair but the main part of me enjoyed the mystery.

The day in class we had to say what our father’s name was and what he did for a job, I was laughed at because I did not know the answer to either question. Even if I had wanted to say it, I did not know.

I knew my father as a stranger. Forever strange yet forever known.

I had to wait another whole weekend to see him. When I arrived at the bunker there was no answer. I called down the air vent but there was no response.

I waited for ages for him to return; this was not like him. On the walk back, the boys from school threw stones at me. They said my father was a cripple, a weirdo, an alien. They said he should be left in the forest to die.

One stone hit my head; another hit my chest so hard it left a large dent there. I picked the stone up and looked at it.

Before I blacked out I marvelled at how the stone was once part of the earth and how it had come all this way just to touch me. I wondered if I was part of the earth.

I can’t remember how I got to hospital but when I woke, I woke to much calamity. The stone that cracked my heart I kept in a jar even though the nurse said it was ‘not healthy’.

I lay there one night trying to listen to the concerned murmurs outside my hospital room. It didn’t sound, look or feel good. The aching in my chest would only melt away when I slept on my side looking out the window.

The staff allowed the window to be open for two hours in the evening – this was my favourite time.

As per my dream, he came through the trees.

The curtains flapped in the breeze and between them I could see shards of light bouncing off his large visor. He held out his hand and there was a vivid flash.

I woke two or three times in a kind of stupor, dizzying lights and shapes and memories flashed. The Spaceman calmly stood over me, working on my chest with a tool made of light.

My eyes, half blinded by the glare, could just make out him reaching inside his chest and pulling on a lever. White-hot, burning light poured out and he recoiled, spiralling down to the ground.

I reached out to pull him up but my chest felt on fire.

I heard a voice from the floor and he said to me something I will never forget.

When I woke up there was a little silver foil package on my bedside table.

Inside was a biscuit with a smiley face on it.