The White Album

By Chris Snape

Keith Maskell lives in Adelaide, South Australia, with his father, John, and mother, Alison. Having migrated from England, they struggle to build a life in their new country. It is a time of dramatic change for Keith, whose fumbling attempts to forge a relationship with Jenny, a girl at his school, is coloured by the slow freezing of his parents’ marriage.
John takes a job driving buses interstate and becomes friendly with his new boss, Beatrice, a development not welcomed by Alison, who suspects Beatrice is interested in more than friendship.
At a party thrown by Beatrice, Keith meets Beatrice’s daughter, Marina. Both sensual and assertive, she takes a liking to Keith. Though he tries to resist her, Marina refuses to take no for an answer. As Keith’s parents’ relationship descends into bitter arguing, Keith finds himself torn between Jenny and Marina.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Snape
• Release date: Jun 2, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310763175

Chris Snape

Christopher Snape was born in the Midlands, England, and migrated to Australia when he was ten years old. He is obsessed with music of any form, but particularly The Beatles - he once met Ringo Starr and spent the next several days trying to convince himself it was not a dream. In between teaching History and English to senior school students, playing blues guitar and reading he likes to write fiction and travel articles. His work has appeared in The Adelaide Advertiser, Write Away, The Black Country Bugle and Aurealis.In his spare time he likes to indulge his passion for old television shows and trying to keep his blog up to date. He lives with his wife and two cats in Adelaide, South Australia.

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The White Album

Christopher Snape

Copyright © Chris Snape 2011

The right of Chris Snape to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Chapter 1

Spring 1973.

Skylab streaking towards our section of the world, a dot of light in the expanding dawn, a star in motion while all other stars remain steadfastly in place. My father and I, still in our pajamas, hair disorderly, standing at the window scanning the south-western sky. My father saying, Should be easy to spot. Just look for a white light that’s moving.

The day brightening gradually, shadows starting to appear, pointing towards the Gulf, the curved peaks of the South Mount Lofty Ranges showing more and more detail. Down in the valley the odd rectangular window-shape of light, people preparing themselves for work. Cars moving along Brodie Road, headlights glimmering between the dark greens and blues of the vineyards, heading north, most of them, towards the city.

Our valley marks the southern edge of the city, the limit of the sprawling metropolis. Just over the next ridge is where the country begins, though the boundary moves all the time, it never stands still. The city, restricted by hills on one side, sea on the other, expands north and south.

It’s funny, I remember thinking, how the world comes alive in stages. While some people are waking others are already preparing for sleep. The world in a continual state of sleep-wakefulness. Or waking-sleep. The boundary between night and day, what the astronauts call the terminator, a constantly moving line, in perpetual motion. All time existing on the earth at once.

It occurred to me that the world’s population is neither awake nor asleep. It occupies both states of consciousness at once. While one person’s synapses are firing, another’s are dormant, in recuperation, restoring their energies. So that brain activity the world over is in a permanent state of limitation. What, I wondered, would happen if everyone, at the same time, was awake? All those thoughts flying through the atmosphere, the brain patterns clogging it up, an over-abundance of psychic noise, a deluge in the collective unconscious.

I told my father, who said, Where do you get this stuff?

Magazines, I said.

Specifically, a back issue of Science Fiction Monthly I’d discovered in the book exchange on Beach Road. On the jacket a picture of a spaceship, looking more like a diving bell, at rest on a foreign world, its tilt suggesting disaster, a bad ending. Though the illustration was in no way related to any of the stories inside. I read the magazine from cover-to-cover and through again. Looking for an explanation.

My father nodded. He understood. He would not interfere with my dreams. Yet he did ask if I knew what the collective unconscious was all about.

I tried to remember the story I’d read, told him in a roundabout way that it was all the knowledge that’s ever been thought or imagined floating about in the air somehow. So that it invades peoples’ perceptions. Which is why everyone knows certain things instinctively.

Just checking, he said. He seemed impressed, as well as a little skeptical. Though he never asked me just what I thought instinctively meant, and I didn’t have to tell him that I’d looked it up in The Readers Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary, Volume 1, that my mother ordered through the mail after finding a coupon in Woman’s Day. I guess my usage must have been correct.

We waited for what seemed the longest time, our eyes sweeping the gradually brightening stratosphere, the color of the sky changing from deep dark blue to a rich cerulean. My father now and then consulting his watch, saying, It should be here any minute. Any second, even.

I’d read stories about Sputnik, how people used to go outside after dark to watch it pass overhead. The thrill, the wonder, the dread fear. Because it was the Russians who’d put it up there. Communists in space. But a temptation to forget all about politics and just revel in the moment. A man-made object in orbit around the earth. What a day for the human race. Communists or not.

I asked my father if he remembered it and he said, Of course I remember it. It was in the newspapers. Never went outside and looked for it, though. Not like this.

Must have been an exciting time, I said.

It certainly was special, he said.

Then why doesn’t it feel like that now? I wondered aloud.

My father thought a moment, then explained, Because the space program’s not going anywhere. We’ve seen men land on the moon, now we’re waiting for Mars. All we’re doing is flying round the world. Going in circles. It’s been done before. It’s nothing new.

Maybe that was it. Or maybe it wasn’t.

And there’s your science fiction magazines, he continued. How can reality match up to the things you read about? At some level you’re always going to be disappointed.

But I thought, Reality should be better.

When Skylab came my father pointed, said, Look, Keith. There!

A star-shaped speck of light moving steadily towards us.

My father, knowing I felt let down, tried to make something of it. Just think, he said. There’s people inside that thing. A tiny light floating above the world. I can make them disappear as easily as this, he said, lifting his hand in front of his face. And when I move there they are again, as though they’d never been gone, they were there all the time.

Imagine how much they can see from up there, I said.

Literally half the world, he said.

You think so?

I know so.

There’s people on that thing.

July 1969. My mother took me out back, gazed up at the moon sitting fat and heavy and brilliant in the night sky, said, Right now there’s two men up there. Living and breathing like you and me. Just walking round collecting dust. Leaving their footprints.

Moon dust, I said. Of course, I’d seen the entire thing on television. The flight, the descent, the landing. Indistinct shadowy black-and-white pictures beamed over thousands of miles, the camera attached to the leg of the Lunar Module, angled towards the lunar surface. But it was a different thing altogether looking up at the moon, the actual moon, and knowing there were people on it.

The Sea of Tranquility, my mother said. Right there.

What I was thinking was, That’s so amazing! And, How lucky I am to be alive right now. Men walking on the moon! It was exciting, exhilarating.

When you’re my age, my mother said. Or maybe a little older. You’ll be able to go up there. You! There’ll be spaceships just like we have airplanes now. You’ll buy a ticket and go on a sight-seeing tour.

How old are you? I asked.

My mother laughed. Twenty eight, she said. As if you didn’t know.

But I didn’t. It wasn’t anything I’d ever thought about. So when I’m twenty eight, I said, calculating, it’ll be 1989.

What a clever boy you are, my mother said.

And I’ll be going to the moon, I said.

At least, she said, by the year 2000.

Back then in 1969 anything seemed possible. The moon shot proved we were on our way. Not long before, maybe in April or May, my mother had taken me to the Imperial Cinema in Spon Lane to see 2001: A Space Odyssey. The most boring, tedious film I’ve ever had to sit through, she told my father. Who said, I thought boring and tedious were the same thing. But to me it was a wonderful film. The space program, the movie, they pointed me towards science fiction. Fired my imagination, applied a spark to the kindling of my daydreams. From that point on I was hooked. In quick succession I went through Robert Heinlein’s Space Family Robinson and Have Space Suit, Will Travel, John Wyndham’s The Outward Urge, H.G. Wells’ First Men in the Moon. The last terrified me. How, I wondered, would the astronauts fend if the Selenites suddenly decided to show themselves, emerging from the cavernous underside of the moon with mandibles twitching?

Then Skylab. Watching it fly overhead. My father and me staring out the window on a clear spring morning.

But, as I said already, it was vaguely disappointing. A single pin-prick of yellow-white light sliding over the roof of the world, from one horizon to the next, its movement uniform, graceful, it’s impact nebulous. My father must have felt the same way because the next thing he said was, Well. At least we can say we’ve seen it. Though we would never see it again, it just wasn’t that interesting, the glory days of space exploration were already over. No matter which way you looked at it, Skylab just didn’t match up to Gemini and Apollo. Not to mention Mercury. Though I was too young to remember that period, which is why I didn’t mention it.

So we hung the net curtains back in the window, went into the kitchen, set about preparing breakfast. Strangely enough, neither of us mentioned Skylab again. It was a school day, over cornflakes and toast my father grilled me about what I thought I’d be doing in class. Yesterday, I told him, my teacher, Mr. Manuel, was sick. We had a substitute, Mr. Davies, who spent the whole day talking about himself, he didn’t teach a thing from Mr. Manuel’s list. We just had to sit there listening while he went on and on. I was hoping Mr. Manuel wouldn’t be sick again today.

Five years later Skylab came crashing down somewhere over the Nullabor Plain, a magnificent streak of light across the southern sky, smashed to pieces in Western Australia, ending up scattered across the desert, right next door in cosmic terms. Though I didn’t see it, it was too far away, only a few witnessed its fiery demise. It had out-served its usefulness, had been empty for a few years at least, a massive uninhabited hulk, its orbit decayed exponentially to zero.

My father, too, had ceased to exist. In real terms, at least. Vanished completely. Like I’d put my hand in front of my face, made him disappear. Not even a pile of debris to show where he’d gone out of my life. At least, nothing I could see.

Winter 1975. An exceptionally severe period, weather wise. Much colder, much windier, much more precipitous than usual.

I was at the kitchen table working on my algebra, scratching equations into an exercise book. My room tended to be too cold. There I’d sit at my desk, arched over my work, no movement to create heat, just a smooth sinking into frigidity, a corresponding descent into melancholia. Breath condensing into vapor, settling over the pages of my maths book, beclouding the problems. If I wanted to read I’d climb into bed, turn the switch on the electric blanket to its highest setting, pull the covers right up under my chin. I couldn’t sit in the lounge room with the heater going because my mother, if she was home, tended to interrupt me. Wanting to know what I was reading, whether or not she’d like it, she’d cut through the imaginative process. Besides, I valued my privacy.

Sometimes I’d do homework in front of the television, but, being too easily distracted, it would take me two hours to complete what should take only one. My mother said I should avoid looking at the screen. How, I argued, can I do that when it’s so interesting? It wasn’t my fault, either. I couldn’t be blamed. People have carried out studies, stood in shopping centers asking questions, advertising and network executives paying them to find out what people most like to watch. Grabbing the viewers, keeping them enthralled, is practically a science. That’s what social scientists do. I tried explaining this to my mother, but all she said was, Then perhaps you should turn it off. Your homework’s more important. So most nights I opted for the kitchen, where there were fewer, if any, diversions. Where my mother wouldn’t get on at me about not concentrating enough. And, I thought, by way of consolation, where the fridge is handy.

My mother, leaning against the sink under the stark light of a bare globe, was planning dinner. Earlier she’d said, Your dad will be home soon. I should make tea.

That’s as far as she got. She didn’t look up to it. Her face was bleached of color, compressed, drawn in. She was dying on her feet. Nodding listlessly, head slipping forward. I thought she might be falling asleep until she lifted her nurses’ watch, attached to her uniform by