The Long Line
Bradley had never raced a crisp packet before, but then it was a day for new adventures. A breeze was coming from the ocean about a mile and a half behind him to push the litter a few lazy inches at a time along the dusty gutter. The rest of the queue didn’t seem to notice, busy as they were, excitedly chatting and laughing, pressing their phones against their ears as they said farewell to loved ones, or holding the camera high above their heads to show everyone back home the line of people snaking for miles down the street, around the park and towards LAUNCH. Some were crying. Some you could see the red around their eyes betrayed tears shed that morning. Most were joking nervously while a few were deadly silent, lost in thought. A few groups of lads had brought beers dragged with them on little trolleys that squeaked along the ground. A couple had even come in fancy dress. But none of them seemed to notice the crisp packet.
Bradley had phoned his mother a couple of weeks earlier, told her where he was going and what he would be doing. How long he would be gone for. She had started to cry so he made up an excuse to end the call. He hadn’t asked anyone to come down with him to keep him company while he queued; that notion seemed a million miles from where he lived.
The line moved forward a few feet and the couple in front of him; a man and a woman both carrying what looked like quite expensive luggage cases in one hand; entwining fingers with the other, stepped forward to fill the gap. Bradley picked up his own bags and followed them and his gaze unconsciously dropped down to the crisp packet. He had overtaken with this manoeuvre and snatched about an 18 inch lead. The couple in front of him — he assumed they were called Robert and Emily, Robert was probably a dentist and Emily a marketing exec. They had two boys; Steven and Robert Junior who were both doing very well at school and played the violin to a very high standard for their age. Emily would take their golden retriever out for a walk every morning out in the woods behind their large, modern and very tastefully decorated 3 bed 2 bath detached while Robert stayed home and made everyone a healthy breakfast. Robert had already started reducing his hours at work and was starting a little bit later in the day but he was looking to retire altogether and become a full time dad. Emily earned more than him anyway and she loved her work and he lived to make her happy. Bradley assumed they were that kind of family The kind that had a ski rack on their very high end estate car and twice a year used it for actual skis. The kind of family who had a continental breakfast on Christmas morning, the kind who played Monopoly without anybody cheating or falling out. The kind who went for family walks and never once threatened to leave one of the kids behind if he didn’t start to bloody behave. They were annoyingly happy and obnoxiously pleasant
And now the crisp packet was back in bastard front.
I struck Bradley, in a vague and distant sort of way, like being dropkicked by a shadow, that his fellow queuer uppers all seemed to be here for something. They were happy and scared, excited and reproachful, but when then they looked up from their calls and conversations, they all uniformly looked forwards. Granted this may have been because of the massive fuck off rocket that loomed over them; it was quite the attention grabber after all, but more than that there was a feeling in the air that this gathering of people were pioneers on their way to forge something fresh in a whole new frontier of firsts. That the end of this line represented something raw, something hitherto impossible, something brilliant and terrifying and remarkable, something that could change every — a wicked breeze came out of nowhere and flicked the crisp packet 30, 40 feet in the air and threw it down the street dancing along the tarmac as it landed, practically taunting Bradley as it came to a stop maybe 20 yards in front of him
Bradley couldn’t ever remember running towards anything. He had, without ever noticing, lived his life like the world’s least funny sketch show, bouncing from scene to scene with no plot or plan. He had gone to university when he was 18 because that was what you did if you scored well in exams and the government was willing to pay. He took his degree into a tedious, mid-pay admin job, putting numbers in boxes until it was time to go home. He rented a 2 bed terraced house on his own. He sat on the only chair around his breakfast table, eating cornflakes from the only bowl in the cupboard that every saw the light of day, A radio he never listened to filled the silence.
But he wasn’t unhappy. At least he never noticed that he was. He got up in the morning and he went to bed at night. He earned money, paid the bills and spent the rest. He drank at the weekend. He went somewhere warm in the summer. At Christmas he bought presents for those he was obliged to. And when someone that he knew died, he would put on his black suit and stand at the back of their funeral acting very solemnly. His face would be straight and his eyes would point downwards. He would look for all the world like he gave a shit.
Bradley’s section of the queue was in the park now. Trees in spring, blossoms of pinks and yellows and blues dotted all over, their brilliant foliage providing the shade for the people, the hundreds of people, who had sat themselves on blankets with food and drink and joyous conversations. It didn’t make sense that these people had left the queue to go and have a picnic — nobody would dare leave a queue this long so close to the end of it — so these could only be bystanders. Spectators who had been drawn down here to watch this moment; to be a small part of it.
The sunlight caught the crisp packet and it danced, fluttered, performed like the spotlight had shone down on it from a million miles away. The breeze billowed beneath it and it flew like a torpedo past the first line of metal detectors and into the expansive security checkpoint, settling between to pallets of what looked like boxes of pills. This was the finish line that it had chosen and it was victorious.
Minutes later, Bradley trudged up. He showed his paperwork to a short man in a dark blue uniform who robotically grunted directions to be followed. Then was the station where all personal affects were deposited and processed, then the small tents which had been erected in long rows, 10 or 12 deep. Here, people would enter with a cellophane package under their arm and re-emerge wearing a uniform shirt, trousers and lightweight jacket, all in a light brown. The final station was the smallest. People would arrive and moments later they would be ushered into a long plastic tunnel which looped in a single lap around the launch pad, arriving at a long metal ramp up to the rocket’s dock
Every station was manned by dozens of near identical people in uniform. Tall, short, bald, long haired men and women who all looked exactly the same, mumbled the same words in the same tone and order. An army of human androids monotenised by meniality.
Bradley wasn’t even entirely sure what his old job was. He knew what his day to day tasks entailed. He knew what desk to sit at and he knew when his dinner break was. He knew, on a tiny micro level, which numbers needed to go in which boxes but if he was ever asked what his company — the name of which was an acronym which almost certainly stood for something — actually did, he wouldn’t have had a clue.
He knew the e-mail icon at the bottom of his screen had a permanent ‘99’ sat in red right next to it. They had been piling up for well over a year now. He had become aware one day that although answering all correspondence was very, very important; it wasn’t really vital. He didn’t bother responding to any for a day and the world didn’t end. He ignored them for another day and nobody actually noticed. So he stopped altogether. Soon he had an inbox with well over a thousand unread messages hidden away like a dirty secret. He worried every day that his manager would see the little icon as he wandered past, or that he would miss a piece of information, or an instruction from above that he might actually need to follow, but he never opened the emails. Some days it felt like the main task he fulfilled was avoiding them.
It weighed down on him. His inbox taunted him. Then, one evening, he saw an advert for staff required to terraform Mars and he handed his notice in the next morning.
The journey lasted around 4 months, and was very much a working trip. The ship needed to be maintained, meals needed to be cooked and cleaned away. Vital preparation needed to be made for when they arrived. Bradley has been issued a small black laptop which he could work from for the duration of the journey. His job was something in auditing, or analytics or logistics or logarithms. He could open any one of a dozen spreadsheets and find a litany of numbers, and an abundance of boxes to put them in.
He kept the shutter down on his little porthole looking out on the infinite blackness of space. He sat with his back to the corridor and all his crew-mates who hurried by, occupied with the important business of inter planetary travel. He woke up when the alarm said it was morning. He went to bed when his clock said it was night. He earned money and put it in a very modest savings account. He watched DVD’s at Christmas and when a poor member of the crew passed away, the victim of a terrible accident in the engine room, Bradley stood at the back of his funeral procession. His face was solemn and his eyes and his eyes pointed down. He looked almost exactly like he gave a shit.
By the time they touched down on the surface of Mars, Bradley had learned his new job off by heart. He knew all his daily tasks. He knew exactly where to sit and when to take his dinner. He knew all the best numbers and which boxes to put them in. And he knew exactly how to cover up the email icon at the bottom of his screen if ever his manager stopped by to see him.