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
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The Planet Dweller
by
Jane Palmer
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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 glint 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 r
eply.
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?’
‘Now look, Mog,’ said Eva firmly, ‘I’ve had the same trouble with Yuri. We can’t go swivelling the dishes about at the whim of someone who hears voices from outer space. We have to work to a programme. And even if we could be sure you were receiving a signal from “out there”, we would at least have to know that it was coming from more specific co-ordinates than the general direction of “up”.’
‘You don’t believe me,’ Diana accused.
‘You obviously believe it. That will have to be enough. Though I’ve no doubt Yuri would find some sympathy with the condition if he could stop entertaining his own fantasies for five minutes.’
‘There’s no need to be so mean about him,’ Diana warned. ‘He may not be right in the head, but we don’t know what made him like that in the first place, do we?’
‘It’s a pity someone doesn’t confiscate that reflector of his. I’m just thankful he busted the camera so he can’t take any snaps of planets colliding.’
‘It keeps him happy, and I’m sure he’s not so stupid. He’d probably be away with the little green fairy if he didn’t have that telescope.’
‘Him – no. Gin will always be his poison.’ Eva smiled. ‘And he’s already a perfect example of matter over mind. Do you know what he told me?’
‘No. And I don’t want you to tell me either. If he does ever want to let me know anything, I prefer him to tell me in his own way. I don’t want you sneering to me about it before he has the chance. Anyway, he does look after himself.’ Then, as an afterthought, she remembered the state he had been in that morning. ‘Most of the while.’
Realising that her irrational friend was prepared to defend the crazy Yuri beyond the bounds of any reason she was liable to entertain, Eva asked innocently, ‘What does the voice say then?’
Diana looked at her hard and long before replying, ‘Moosevan.’
‘Moo-se-van,’ repeated Eva objectively. ‘What’s that?’
‘What this voice keeps saying,’ Diana said stubbornly, knowing she was wasting her breath in trying to convince Eva of anything.
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else. Just “Moosevan”.’
‘Oh, good grief...’ muttered Eva under her breath. ‘Don’t you think you should have some time off?’
‘I am. Julia breaks up in a couple of days. No more parties of sticky little urchins coming down here and wanting to look through your radio telescopes for at least a week. Just think of that. You can hunt Bert Wheeler in peace, and roll those outsize ears up and down to your heart’s content without needing to bother whether there are any bodies on the track. But if they do come across Moosevan in the process, just remember who heard it first.’
‘Why don’t you keep tuned in and let me know if it ever says anything else?’ asked Eva mischievously. ‘We’ll let you have the credit for discovering it.’
‘Oh really..?’
‘Why not? There are some things radio astronomy shouldn’t have to take the blame for,’ and before she could say any more there was the report of a shotgun in the distance. ‘Bert Wheeler!’ Eva screeched with renewed vigour, and was off before Diana could tell her that a flock of starlings were showing interest in the furthest radio dish.
Strolling leisurely back to the Tudor hall, Diana felt the thankful mists of numbness creep over her. It was more bearable than hot flushes and messages from outer space. A refreshing summer breeze brought back the recollection of the balmy, almost carefree, days of her long-lost youth and the bright-eyed, smiling child the convention of that time would not allow a sixteen-year-old unmarried mother keep. Eva was right about looks. She had managed to appear so dowdy the boys allowed her to continue her studies in peace. Diana had been all high heels and lipstick and was consequently flattered into believing attraction was all, until she had the rewards of that attraction taken from her. From that time, caution had been her second name. Never to want marriage, yet determined to have a replacement for her lost offspring. Just as she thought it was becoming too late, a man discovered that she was the girl of his dreams. Thinking a woman in her late thirties would be easy to hold, he slackened his grip by not insisting on marriage only to find his ladylove and daughter had flown within a year. Diana should have felt guilty about the deception but all she could do was smile at the man’s self-confidence.
‘Come and meet the new temps,’ sang out Mr Lowe as Diana entered the cool timbered hall. ‘They’re both from college so will need some local digs. Know of anyone who could put them up?’
Diana was about to recommend Flora and Irene who were sisters with a house too large for their prim activities. Then she set eyes on the students. Both looked as though they could not only have been happy to live in the iron-age farm, but blend in quite convincingly with its surroundings. One face was concealed by an outgrowth of beard unnatural on one so young and the other looked angelic enough for Diana not to be able to distinguish its gender.
‘We’re very lucky,’ Mr Lowe babbled. ‘They’re both studying anthropology and know something about archaeology.’
Noting Diana’s reluctance to say anything in haste, the bearded student mumbled something in an amiably low voice to which she managed to smile non-committally.
Then she remembered something. ‘Do you like farms?’
Mr Lowe’s eyebrows shot up towards his bald pate (he had obviously drawn the same conclusion about the iron-age village as she had) then they relaxed as she went on.
‘One of our local farmers, Mr Cooper, has converted a stable to put up hikers. It has running water, and Mrs Cooper will cook if you don’t mind eating with the farm hands. If you like the idea I know she won’t charge you much.’
As though she had just described a palace, the students’ eyes lit up in enthusiasm. Diana sighed in relief that she had stopped herself from mentioning Irene and Flora in the nick of time. Although they had known her for years, the sisters still insisted she should refer to herself as ‘Mrs’, as though illegitimacy was s
till a word not to be found in any dictionary. As they were coming to tea in a couple of days, guiding two inoffensive, but visually amazing, students to their doorstep might not have endeared her to them.
‘What do I call you?’ Diana suddenly thought to ask.
‘My name’s John,’ announced the beard gravely.
‘My name’s Fran,’ announced the other in a voice that still gave Diana no clue as to what gender its owner was.
‘I’m Diana. Most people call me Di.’ She was about to add that that was because she often felt like death, but decided it would have been in extremely bad taste and broken up the good-natured atmosphere. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay here. If you’re interested in astronomy, I know one of the doctors at the observatory. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind showing you around.’
Although the heads nodded in gratitude, Diana could see acute disinterest register in the eyes. She wondered how they would cope with the questions that were bound to be fired at them about the perambulating monsters at the bottom of their garden; not to mention the occasional enraged astronomer chasing Bert Wheeler whenever he had the urge to chase crows.
‘Yes,’ continued Diana, smiling inwardly at the thought of what delights awaited them, ‘I’m sure you’re going to enjoy yourselves here.’
‘Sure,’ murmured John shaking his head knowingly. ‘This is our thing. Old places really appeal to us.’
‘People too,’ agreed Fran in a way that sent irritable prickles down Diana’s back at the unintended faux pas.
‘You won’t mind showing John and Fran around, will you Di?’ asked Mr Lowe. ‘I’ll have to finish these plans for the bridge before teatime.’
‘Of course not.’ Diana smiled as she choked back a bad taste in her mouth brought on by sudden nausea and the unwelcome awareness of ageing. ‘I’ll show them the way to Mr Cooper’s afterwards if you like?’
‘Marvellous idea,’ agreed Mr Lowe. ‘You can go straight home after that.’
Diana needed no second bidding. Seizing a handful of literature about the exhibits, she led them outside. John and Fran followed, laden with knapsacks like two obedient yaks. The students drank in every word she uttered with rapt attention as they examined the reconstructed antique world they had such affinities with. Being more modern in outlook, Diana found their fascination baffling. She had genuine terrors of fires in thatched roofs and bats in belfries. Until meeting these two, she had thought of her work as being little more than a matter of economics. Their reverent, lulled tones echoing about the empty living spaces made her feel quite guilty, and for the first time she actually found herself concentrating on the wonder of it all.
As she looked up with Fran and John into the silent timbers of a fourteenth-century barn, a faint familiar click sounded in the back of her mind. Gritting her teeth and clenching her fists, she froze for fear of letting out some exclamation as the soft melodious voice broke into her thoughts.
‘Moosevan,’ it whispered. ‘This is Moosevan.’ then nothing for a few seconds before it seemed to fade with a sigh and distant click.
Fran and John must have taken her taut expression as being one of rapture and waited patiently while she reorganised her attention sufficiently to lead them on to the next exhibit. Although they hardly glanced at the huge dishes gleaming in the sunlight, Diana found herself glaring at the nearest of them with an expression of suspicion and resentment at its smug indifference to her voice. When she was able to hear this creature so clearly, it seemed an almighty waste of time and money that they between them could not.
Diana was relieved to be able to return home early and have a quiet half-hour in the privacy of the bedroom she had papered in peaceful pastel posies.