You liked to remind people that you’d been to space – even though the actual experience had lasted for less than five minutes and had ended in shame and embarrassment for everyone involved

(Deleted chapter from current project)

The trip had been on one of your first sub-orbital spacecraft, back when you were still experimenting with piggy-backing rocketships to the edge of space by carrying them on specially adapted aircraft.

The rocket had been designed by your business partner, who was a grizzled former test pilot and engineer with twelve space missions under his belt and his own aerospace company into which you’d invested – by that point – over five hundred million dollars.

The crew consisted of the two of you plus six assorted celebrities – pop stars, actors and social media influencers – who had all been paid over a million dollars each to join the promotional trip – and who had all eaten the same fateful macrobiotic breakfast before boarding that morning.

The ship was called “Marybelle” in honour of your mother.

Like the rocketship, your mother had been sleek, beautiful and expensive. And like the vacuum of space, she had been cold, empty and cruel.

As a small boy you often had nightmares and would beg to be allowed to sleep in your mother’s bed. Your mother always refused, telling you that you were weak, and a coward, and no kind of man at all.

“You think the nightmares are bad now?” she would ask. “Just wait until you’re grown up, then you’ll find out what real nightmares are like!”

Instead, you’d wait until your mother had drunk herself into oblivion – which she did, reliably, every night – and then you’d sneak into her bedroom and curl up beside her unconscious body.

You’d sneak out again in the early hours, long before she woke.

Your mother died when you were nine years old. It wasn’t clear exactly how. She was found dead by the servants at the bottom of the grand staircase one morning. The official story was that she had been drunk – which was almost certainly true – and had fallen and broken her neck. But there had been whispers among the staff about a series of increasingly heated arguments with your father in the run up to the event, and rumours of secret lovers and pregnancies, and threats to expose stories on both sides. The inquest had been concluded very quickly and signed off by a friend of the family.

Within six months your father had re-married, and the first in a succession of distant, uninterested, and successively younger stepmothers had been moved into the family compound.

And no one was allowed to mention your mother’s name in the house ever again.

On the day of the launch, conditions had been perfect. There was a light breeze coming off the sea. The celebrities all looked young, sexy and rich. Everyone was live streaming to their fans around the world, or being interviewed by the press, or being recorded for future music videos or documentaries. There was gossip about who might be sleeping with who, or potentially cameoing on each other’s next records, or coming out of or about to go into rehab.

For most of the celebrities this trip was just another milestone on the road to success, as planned out by their management months or even years in advance, and precisely mapped against exposure opportunities across multiple platforms and markets.

Possibly some of the celebrities didn’t even realise where they were that morning, or what they were doing, or where they were about to go.

You’d often wondered whether your mother thought about you in that last moment after she felt the ground go from under her.  Whether she wondered if she was going to see you again, or worried about how you’d cope without her, or if there were things she wished she’d had the time to say to you.

Or whether, as usual, she’d just thought about herself, and her own feelings, and her own gigantic and unfulfilled needs.

“But what about me?” you’d imagined her screaming as she fell.

By the time the engines cut out so the passengers could experience weightlessness, fifty miles above the surface of the earth, half of them were already vomiting into their helmets. It was a perfect combination of motion sickness and a fruit salad kept overnight at the wrong temperature. Nobody was marvelling at the experience. There would be no usable content coming out of the event – except for some very cruel memes.

Even your business partner, the veteran astronaut, was throwing up.

And you had soiled yourself and were screaming in terror at the vast and infinite cosmic emptiness that you’d suddenly glimpsed outside the porthole windows.

You scrapped the ship six months later. You’d fallen out with your partner over who got to call themselves the founder of the company. You pivoted to ground-launched rockets and never looked back.

But you never forgot that feeling of horror at confronting the endless nothingness of outer space. 

And you never named a rocket after anyone ever again.