The Planet Dweller Read online

  1985 Reviews for The Planet Dweller

  Jane Palmer’s first novel Is a real find -definitely a specimen of higher lunacy. The Planet Dweller appropriates all the furniture of TV sci-fi and duly stands it on its head, with a wonderfully pragmatic absurdity - that’s been done before, of course (Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams), but not quite this way. How characters quite as insane as these - menopausal Diana and the radio-astronomer Eva, 11-year-old Julia, and the drunken Russian eccentric, Yuri - turn out to be as plausible as anyone you’d find in the average bus-queue, I do not know; but at one time or another I’ve met all these people. Real people are always more incredible than fiction likes to think...

  Mary Gentle Interzone

  Palmer has more in common with Muriel Spark than Marge Piercy. Her alien invasion of Earth takes place among the kind of people who cause havoc at the supermarket checkout. She also, with deft comedy, creates a Feminist who’s literally the size of a planet, and that is a daunting prospect...

  Jane Solanas Time Out

  Jane Palmer’s first novel The Planet Dweller comically (and Britishly) juxtaposes menopausal female reality with a farcical chauvinist SF subplot about the Molt and their plan to rule the galaxy. . . The Planet Dweller is the most easily readable of the four books, involving no noticeable shortforms. Anything even slightly scientific is explained in a no-lecturing manner, and if there is a feminist message, I can’t see it.

  The Guardian

  The Planet Dweller

  by

  Jane Palmer

  ___

  First published by The Women’s Press Limited 1985

  This edition published by Dodo Books

  Copyright Jane Palmer 2010

  This is a work of fiction and any resemblance

  to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Ros de Lanerolle

  ***

  Acknowledgement

  I would like to acknowledge the assistance of astronomer Heather Couper,

  for whose advice on certain passages I am indebted

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘But hot flushes can be very embarrassing,’ insisted Diana with a sincerity only the most stubborn of men could have doubted. Unfortunately Dr Spalding was one of those men. However charming, sympathetic and good with children he might have been, his biology would never allow him to comprehend what Diana was talking about.

  Although he was stubborn, it was with a genuine concern for Diana’s welfare that he assured her, ‘But Hormone Replacement Therapy can have very unpleasant side effects, my dear. I’ve heard of some women losing their fingernails and others being stuck with headaches for weeks on end - and do you really want to go on having periods until you’re past seventy?’

  ‘I’ve already worn my fingernails away by climbing up the wall and give my daughter regular headaches by screaming at every animate and inanimate thing that gets in my way,’ Diana persisted. ‘And won’t live to be seventy if I carry on at this rate.’

  ‘But in a short while these symptoms will be gone,’ Spalding said soothingly. ‘It would worry me to prescribe something I’ve misgivings about. Let me give you some more Prozac to tide you over.’

  ‘They make me twitchy,’ grunted Diana, knowing the quarry had managed to evade the net as he had done a dozen times before.

  ‘At least it will give Julia the chance to relax.’ He smiled, blissfully unaware that Diana was mentally digging his grave. ‘Just take them as you need them, but don’t overdo it. We don’t want you to get hooked, do we.’

  Diana managed to grimace a smile of false gratitude, and clutching the elegantly scrawled prescription, strode sullenly home.

  Only stopping to screw the prescription up and throw it in the pedal bin, she hauled her partially dressed daughter to the front door after her, and strode back outside.

  ‘Didn’t get it then, Mum?’ Julia asked, with an unusual understanding of the menopause for a child of eleven and a half.

  ‘You won’t find it so funny when you get to my age,’ Diana promised her daughter with a marked lack of motherly affection.

  ‘Oh, they would’ve thought of something much better by then,’ Julia assured her with practised indifference to her mother’s intolerance. ‘Besides, I haven’t even started my periods yet. Can I have some money for crisps?’

  Without a word, Diana took out some of the cash she had hopefully put aside for the prescription she wanted and thrust it into her daughter’s hand.

  By the time they reached their different routes, Julia’s uniform was correctly arranged and buttoned, and Diana’s mood mellowed.

  ‘I’ll be back at four, so don’t go out to play until you’ve had some tea.’

  ‘Well, will you give Yuri his magnifying glass back as you go past then?’ Julia produced a flat box from her satchel. ‘I promised to let him have it as I came home.’

  ‘Oh. He wouldn’t mind you dropping it in later. I can’t see what he’d want it so urgently for.’

  ‘It’d be better if I didn’t take it to school with me. I’d hate to lose it.’

  ‘Oh, all right. I‘ve got a few minutes to spare. Now don’t be late, and I’ll see you at teatime.’

  ‘All right. Tarrah Mum,’ and Julia trotted off after some of her friends.

  As soon as they were out of sight, Diana made her way up the gravel path that led towards the open-air museum of architecture where she worked. In the sloping meadow overlooking her terraced cottage, stood Yuri’s less well maintained home. Having recovered enough of her natural tolerance, Diana braced herself to listen to her friend’s engaging babble for five minutes. Though totally harmless and likeable, his grasp of reality could seem a little crazy to a serious mentality, and Diana had a secret reason to wonder if she was becoming as crazy as he was.

  As she reached Yuri’s solitary cottage sitting like a delinquent’s dolls house tossed carelessly down in the meadow, it crossed Diana’s mind that he might be the only one she could confess the guilty secret to.

  As soon as she walked into the garden that idea was immediately dashed. Yuri was lying quite drunk under his ten-inch reflecting telescope with a fob watch in one hand and a gin bottle in the other. A hard night’s observation and excess of alcohol had undoubtedly affected his conversational ability for the next few hours.

  Having ascertained that Yuri was still alive, and as there wasn’t much of him, Diana hauled him to his feet. She helped him into the cottage and let him collapse onto an old horsehair sofa, still clutching the fob watch and the gin bottle.

  Knowing from experience that Yuri would sleep solidly until the effect of the gin had worn off, then wake up to be his usual muddled self, Diana placed the magnifying glass on the table by a pile of exercise books filled with scribble. Fortunately it was midsummer, otherwise a heavy dampening dew might not have let the astronomer off so lightly. Diana was almost fifty as well, and knew that as joints grew older they reminded their owners of their existence with more frequency before developing into full-blown arthritis.

  She covered the slumbering Yuri with a blanket and briefly watched his contented expression, then left, carefully closing the gate that was suspended on one hinge.

  The sun was obviously going to shine all day, so Diana left the carelessly discarded tarpaulin that protected the reflector hanging over the fence and made her way back onto the gravel path. She passed the museum’s reconstructed ancient buildings that sat like interlopers in the modern managed landscape. Many of them had never known cleaner or more pleasant surroundings, or even some of the parts that made them up. Most had been elegantly cobbled together from bits and pieces salvaged from demolition sites with the love and artistry of the dedicated. The brief glin
t of space-age technology above the trees as the sun’s rays caught the edge of a smooth dish no longer disconcerted Diana, though it must have stopped many a lover of ancient architecture dead in their tracks.

  The museum offices were housed in a large timber hall. She was grateful to get inside to a morning mug of tea.

  By the time she had finished photocopying maps of ancient stone huts once lived in by stone-age people and wondering how many of them had survived to endure the menopause, Diana’s desire to share her embarrassing secret had increased tenfold. Her thoughts were thankfully broken by the jovial tones of Mr Lowe, the curator.

  ‘Up to taking half a dozen kiddies round the iron-age farm, Di?’ his voice sang out sweetly from the adjoining room of the partitioned Tudor hall.

  In such an institution, a general secretary’s duties could be as diverse as explaining to six-year-olds how to smelt metal and explaining to eighty-year-olds how much more hygienic their new warden controlled homes were compared with the picturesque hovels they had been moved from. So the question came as no great shock.

  The spectacled Mr Lowe poked his head round the temporary wall. ‘The fresh air might agree with you.’

  Diana marvelled at the older man’s concern for her health, though she was convinced he didn’t know what made her break into trembling sweats and moods of uncontrolled irritation. Mrs Lowe had somehow managed to escape into her sixties with a graceful ease she envied.

  ‘How far do they go?’ Diana asked.

  Mr Lowe was relieved that she appeared to be in a moderately humane mood. ‘Only as far as the dishes, they’ve got a teacher to take them round the rest.’

  ‘All right.’ Diana left the photocopier and braced herself for livelier company.

  The teacher of the six junior-school pupils was wearing the same enthusiastically expectant look as her charges. Diana could tell they were anticipating wondrous revelations about the past from one who spent her life working next to it. Their guide was already entertaining as much knowledge about ageing as she wanted, however, and was unable to take a sympathetic view of thankfully vanished bygone times. Diana had always been puzzled about more recent generations wishing themselves back into the unhygienic, monarchical, and impoverished epochs of their ancestors, and it was with only a supreme effort that she could describe them as being anything other than that.

  None of the children could imagine the shades of such poverty in those beautifully arranged and reconstructed buildings and gawped at each in admiration and wonder. Those carved doorways and arches must have been chiselled by inspired sculptors, not the bonded masons and carpenters who were the ancestors of council house builders. Despite all this, it was inevitable that when they reached the iron-age farm the attention of the small group would be distracted. The massive metal dishes pointing skywards as they rumbled sedately down their tracks were more fascinating than early architecture.

  Diana dutifully did her piece about how people lived so many hundreds of years ago, making it sound more like spring in Marie Antoinette’s farm than midwinter in the frozen pig sty it must have more closely resembled. Her romantic interpretation of the near unspeakable was lost on the young audience. They wanted to know what those huge tilted cereal bowls were doing.

  ‘They’re listening to the stars,’ Diana explained, with the experience of someone who knew better than to use the word ‘telescope’ to describe them.

  Before any awkward questions beyond the limited scope of Diana or their teacher could be fired, deliverance was suddenly at hand.

  ‘Mog! Mog!’ screamed a figure running alongside the track and waving her arms in a state of high agitation. ‘Have you seen Bert Wheeler? I’m going to kill him!’

  With an open overall flapping round her legs and the hair escaping from her bun streaming about her face, the angry creature bounded towards them with strides that should have been beyond her short legs.

  ‘Hello, Eva.’ Diana smiled sweetly. ‘Just the person we wanted to see.’

  ‘What for?’ demanded Eva, suspecting her friend was trying to divert her mind from murder.

  ‘These children would like to know what those dishes are for.’

  ‘Listening to the stars - and other things,’ Eva explained automatically to the children who were already flinching at her arrival.

  ‘And how do they listen to the stars, Eva?’ Diana insisted.

  ‘In the same way an optical telescope mirror collects light and reflects it to the eyepiece. These dishes reflect radio signals onto the dipole at the centre. With a computer we can combine the output from several dishes, which gives a better picture than if we used just one of them,’ she went on, ‘-or at least we could if some idiot didn’t keep opening up with a shotgun at any crows that look as though they’re going to perch on them!’

  ‘Oh ... Bert Wheeler?’

  ‘Bert Wheeler,’ agreed Eva menacingly.

  The teacher quickly made her farewells, fearful of having her pupils treated to the spectacle of this demented female and crow-shooting gentleman trying to beat each other to the draw.

  ‘Of course,’ Diana went on, when the tunics and felt hats had scuttled from sight through the cobbled courtyard of a market hall, ‘he does think they’re an invention of the Devil. His mother was the local witch and brought him up to believe that the only things to come from the stars were bad omens and lumps of rock.’

  ‘The woman must have been an idiot.’

  ‘You’d think a lump of rock that crashed through your greenhouse on a Sunday morning was a bad omen.’

  At that, Eva’s interest was instantly aroused. ‘A meteorite? Where is it now?’ she demanded.

  ‘The old girl got her own back on it. She told Bert to take it to Joseph of “Ironsides” and to melt it down in his furnace. They smelted it and turned it into a cast-iron foot-scrape and a plaque to ward off the evil eye. Somebody got too vigorous with the foot-scrape, though, and it shattered.’

  ‘The man’s an idiot!’ snapped Eva.

  ‘I know,’ agreed Diana. ‘They should have worked it into wrought iron.’

  ‘I meant - to melt the thing down in the first place. The man can’t have any sense at all.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but there’s not many who’ll do Bert’s job for the pay.’

  ‘You pay him to shoot at our telescopes, Mog? Your crowd are just as decadent and heathen as he is.’

  ‘No we’re not!’ Diana wished Eva would for once call her by her right name. ‘We just take things a little more sedately. After all, we’re hardly paid anything like the wages you mob get.’

  ‘There you go. On about money again. It’s not my fault you wouldn’t swot at school. We both had the same chance, you know.’

  ‘I never said we didn’t.’ Diana felt her body tighten for one of her moods. ‘It’s just that you somehow managed to end up successful and prosperous and I ended up menopausal and broke.’

  ‘Why don’t you get something done about it? You’ve been like it for long enough.’

  ‘Because Spalding is the only doctor in the area and I can’t afford private treatment.’

  ‘Never mind,’ sniffed the short untidy female beneath a mop of tangled grey hair. ‘You’ll always be better looking than me. Always were, so I don’t see why you shouldn’t do some suffering for it. If you did manage to get HRT, it’d only make you stay young, and you don’t want that, do you?’

  ‘Yes!’ Diana’s voice was high-pitched and desperate. ‘Just because it’s impossible for you to look any scruffier than you do now, doesn’t mean all women have the same rational acceptance of ageing that you’ve managed to work out in your logical mind.’

  ‘So I’m a mess. If I had half your looks I would never have been taken seriously.’

  ‘And apart from that-’ Diana found herself blurting out.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I think I’m going mad.’

  ‘Oh really. Like violently, or like Yuri?’

  ‘Like both,’ was
the taut reply.

  Knowing at that point she would have been better off pursuing Bert Wheeler, something in the expression of her friend’s hazel eyes riveted Eva to the spot. Her dotty companion didn’t become serious very often, even at the height of one of the moods she’d been having for the past year. Diana may have ranted at her daughter, canvassers, and the birds fouling the washing, but never tried to bundle the stands of her humdrum life together with logic. The Almighty knitter in the sky ensured that the single mother’s existence was a perpetually unravelling lace doily. A bad fairy was always trying to shit on that as well.

  Eva had sense enough to read the warning signs and was on guard against saying the wrong thing. ‘What’s the problem then?’

  ‘I hear a voice,’ Diana admitted. ‘It’s as though someone keeps turning on a switch and transmitting something, then switching it off again just as suddenly.’

  ‘Told Spalding? You shouldn’t be having problems of any sort after all this time.’

  ‘I know!’ was the furious reply. ‘I’m not imagining it. There really is a voice.’ She could tell her friend’s credence had been stretched beyond its non-elastic bounds.

  Determined not to trigger another outburst, Eva attempted to sound interested. ‘If there is, then it must be making some sort of sense?’

  ‘It may be making sense to whoever owns the voice, but it doesn’t to me. It only ever says one word, and I can tell when it’s there but not speaking, as though it had left the transmitter open.’

  ‘Where do you think it comes from then?’ Eva’s gaze slowly followed Diana’s finger as it pointed heavenward. Convinced that she knew as much about that direction as anyone, Eva slowly shook her head.

  ‘Why not?’ demanded Diana.

  ‘The human brain, in most cases, is a marvellous thing. However, it does not have the receptivity of a radio telescope.’

  Diana could tell that Eva was on the verge of an explanation and cut in. ‘Perhaps you aren’t pointing them in the right direction?’