T-Minus

They give you a place to stand. That's the first thing. A viewing area with a fence and a big screen and a man on a loudspeaker, and it's five kilometres from the pad, which sounds far and isn't, because the thing on the pad is taller than my whole street. Daniel is somewhere in a building I can't see, in front of a console. He's thirty-four. He did the wiring for something on the second stage. He tried to explain it to me at Christmas and I nodded in the right places, and what I retained is: if it fails, it's his, and if it works, it's everybody's. He said that. He was laughing when he said it. I don't think it was entirely a joke. The countdown clock on the screen says 00:14:22 and it's been holding there for twenty minutes. "Weather," says a woman next to me, in a lanyard. "Upper level winds. They'll go or they won't." I want them to go. I want them not to go. I've never been more clearly of two minds about anything in my life, and I've been divorced. I think about him at eleven, in the garden in Leeds, with the water rockets from the science shop. A pump, a plastic bottle, a launch pad made from a garden fork. Three hundred and forty-one launches. He kept a log in a school exercise book. The record was thirty-one metres, which he measured by pacing, which was probably wrong. He didn't care. He wrote it down. I still have the book. It's in my handbag. I don't know why I brought it. 00:14:22 becomes 00:14:21. The woman in the lanyard says, "Oh. Here we go." Fourteen minutes is a long time and no time. The loudspeaker man says things, "propellant load complete", "range is green", and each thing he says the crowd goes a bit quieter. At two minutes nobody is talking at all. At one minute I realise I've got the exercise book out and I'm holding it against my chest like a hymn sheet. Ten. Nine. I'm not going to describe it well. There's a light before there's a sound. The base of the thing goes white, then gold, then a colour I don't have, and it doesn't move, it just sits there being on fire, and then it moves, slowly, so slowly you think it's going to stop and fall over, and then the sound arrives. The sound is not a sound. It's the air deciding to be something else. It hits your ribs. People around me shout and I can't hear them.

It climbs. It leans over, on purpose, the way he told me it would. It's a spark. It's a star. There's a flash and a bit falls away and I grab the lanyard woman's arm and she says, "That's normal, that's the first stage, that's good," and I let go and say sorry. The screen shows a graph. A line going up and to the right. The loudspeaker man says "nominal" and the crowd makes a noise. I don't know what nominal means. I understand from the noise that it's the word you want. Then it's gone. Just a contrail bending over the ocean and the light going out of it. My phone buzzes. I'd forgotten I had it. "MUM. Second stage lit. Nominal. It's fine. It's all fine. I have to go. Love you." I stand there. The crowd is dispersing. The lanyard woman has gone. The exercise book is still against my chest. I open it, for some reason, to the last page, and the last entry is from August 2002, and it says, in his eleven-year-old handwriting, "Launch 341. 29m. Fin came off. Need better tape." I take a photo of the page and send it to him. He won't see it for hours. That's fine.