I remember the September day my best pupil told me she was from an alien planet. The children were all getting changed for gym – where they would learn to play a sport I didn’t understand myself – and she approached me with a kind of shameless guilt a person can only have while being a child. She couldn’t come to gym class, she’d said earnestly, because she’d received an urgent message from her home planet, 100 million light years away. And I’d smiled, said it was more original than saying the dog had eaten her shorts, and sent her on her way. A real alien wouldn’t have said that, I’d said as an afterthought. Messages can’t travel faster than lightspeed: if they were urgent, they probably stopped being so millions of years before now. I didn’t think anything of it. I didn’t quite think she would understand.
I started worrying when she failed to come in the next day. For the first time, I realised I hadn’t thought to check if she’d been serious. Many of the kids in my school don’t have the best of things at home; inventing a vivid fantasy life wasn’t entirely out of the question. I wondered if – in her way – she’d been trying to tell me she wanted to run away from her real family, and if I’d missed her coded cry for help. I asked for the contact details for her family, and found there were none. Nobody in the school remembered there ever being a girl of her name in my class. Her work tray had disappeared; her chair had gone away from the yellow table. My insistence that she had existed was tolerated with concern for me, then later with exasperation.
Some people would worry they’d gone mad, after an experience like that. My worry was that I might be sane. If my memory of that girl was real, and if she’d managed to remove all other memory of her from the rest of the world, it made sense to me to believe that she had not, after all, been lying to me. If I wasn’t mad, then the world must be madder than I had previously thought.
It wasn’t the thought that I may have had an alien in my class that bothered me. It was strange, yes, but in a somehow acceptable way: it meant the world was bigger in a sense I could comprehend. Rather, it was the horror across her face when I’d said it; that a message from 100 million light years away would be, upon reaching us, 100 million years old. How could she not have known? That fact seemed fundamental to me, essential to our understanding of the universe— but she had reacted as if I had told her the sky was made of bears.
If I had idly considered aliens as a young man, it would have been in terms of the knowledge they possessed that we – and I – did not. I hadn’t thought to think of them in terms of their ignorance. If there were things that could spirit a child from memory without knowing how far they had come, what did that imply for what the universe was really like? There was a chill in the wind that winter, which did not go away with the changing year.
She didn’t come back, in person or in memory. I sunk into myself, my teaching erratic. The parents who viewed all male teachers with a tense suspicion began to grump and agitate. My job became untenable, in the end. I felt at one end of a vast, vast distance, grasping at light a million miles away…
…I look up at the stars, and wonder if she is also lost.
Robert Shepherd: Writer 