"Andy & Jennifer"

(with the aid of my beautiful co-author)

When Andrew first woke up, in a vague sort of way, it was 3:17am. He didn't care about the time, though. What he cared about was that he was cold. His quilt was in a heap at the bottom of the bed, and as he pulled it back up he glanced at the clock radio. Its LED display was completely blank. Power cut, he thought sleepily as he buried himself in the quilt and returned to sleep.
For much of the morning he drifted between the edge of consciousness and a dream-filled sleep. For a while he was in a tube station trying to find a train to Paris. Then, when he found a train, it turned out to be a large department store where he was trying to buy a working screen-dump routine for his computer. Then he was at school again, which was strange in itself because he hadn't actually been there for just over a year, and even stranger because the school seemed about ten times the size he remembered it, and he was being chased stark naked down endless winding corridors by something he hadn't actually looked at but which he knew was there nonetheless. Then somehow he forgot that he was being chased, and joined a class of people he hadn't seen in years for a maths lesson. It turned out to be a most unusual maths lesson because the next thing he knew he was in the gym at the top of a rope.
At this point he fell off the rope and landed in bed.
It took him a moment to realise where he was. He was in his bedroom. His clock radio was still dead. So was the bedside light, it turned out, but with the daylight filtering through the curtains he didn't need it. He picked up his watch and looked at it. 13:58, it told him.
Good God, had he been sleeping for that long? So it seemed. Well, at least it was Sunday, so he couldn't have slept through anything important.
Deciding that he'd had enough sleep for one day, he hauled himself out of bed. At least it was a bit warmer now. He fished a pair of underpants from a drawer, and put them on. Then he pulled on the shorts he'd been wearing the day before, and after a quick spray with the deodorant, he added a T-shirt.
Then he pulled open the curtains, and sat down in front of the keyboard. It really was time he got that screen-dump program working, he told himself. Then he remembered his dream of the department store. Could you actually buy that sort of software in the lingerie department? He didn't think so. Anyway, it was high time he got the damned program working. He switched on the machine.
Nothing happened.
The power was still off.
Well, he thought, so much for that idea. The program would have to wait, but what would he do with the rest of the afternoon? He looked out through the window for inspiration.
And then he knew that this was going to be a very unusual Sunday afternoon.
Some fortunate individuals who live on the coast in houses with windows facing the right way, can gaze through their bedroom windows and see the sea.
Andrew could see the sea.
Andrew lived in north-west London. Not within gazing distance of the sea.
He stood up, stepped up to the window, and pulled the net curtain to one side.
It was the sea. A huge, blue expanse of water stretched out all the way to the horizon, where it met a clear blue sky.
"Oh my God", he whispered.
He rubbed his eyes, if only because people always do when confronted with the unbelievable. Maybe somewhere, someday, it will do some amount of good for someone.
Andy was not that someone. The sea was still there. He opened the window wide and leaned out for a better view (once upon a time the window had been incapable of opening more than six inches, but a quick adjustment with a screwdriver had long since solved that).
There was more to see than the water. About three feet below the window was the ground, covered in grass, and a storey closer than it should have been.
The grass looked as if it had last been cut about six months ago and left in peace. There were patches of thick clover here and there, and the occasional daisy poking up its head. The grass, along with the ground, abruptly ended about thirty feet away, giving way to the distant sea beyond. Andy was looking out over the edge of a cliff.
Of Ettinsmoor Drive, Hamley, Middlesex, there was no sign.
"What the hell-?" he said aloud.
Had the rest of the family seen all this? He withdrew his head from the window, ran to the bedroom door, threw it open, and charged into what should have been the landing.
Only it wasn't. It was another room. He managed to stop just short of hitting a bed, so presumably it was a bedroom. It wasn't one he recognised, though, and it certainly didn't belong next to his.
Andy got as far as deciding that the bed had recently been slept in, when he realised that he was not alone. He did not realise this by way of some sixth sense, but when a female voice somewhere to his left said "Who are you?"
He turned to face the source of the voice. It was a girl of roughly his age, wearing a white T-shirt. She was as unfamiliar to him as the room.
"Who the hell are you?" he asked right back. "And where the fuck is my house?"
Then the girl looked through the door he'd just entered by. She stared at Andy's room, speechless but open-mouthed.
After a moment she recovered. "What the hell is going on here?" she demanded of Andy.
"Don't ask me!" he snapped back. "I just got out of bed and found an ocean outside and this attached to my fucking bedroom. So don't ask me what's going on!"
She pushed past him and strode into his room, and stood in the centre of the carpet, looking round and round her new surroundings.
"What the fuck is happening?" Andy demanded of no-one in particular.
"I don't know!" she yelled at him, and continued in a slightly calmer manner. "Now, since neither of us seems to have much idea what the hell is going on here, why don't we stop shouting at each other and try and find out?"
"Uh, yeah", Andy said, sheepishly.
There was a long period of silence. Finally Andy said, "That room's yours, right?"
"Right", she said.
"Well this one's mine, so, I guess we should be taking a look at what's out there". He nodded towards the open window.
"Come on then", she said, heading for the window.
Then she stopped and looked down. She was still only wearing a white T-shirt.
"Would you excuse me for a moment?" she asked.
"Sure", Andy replied, and she disappeared back into her room, closing the connecting door.
Andy waited at the window, looking out at the sea and the sky. Something off to the left caught his attention, and by the time the girl behind him announced her presence, he was still staring at it. Just above the horizon, rather faint in the daylight, hung a group of no less than three moons.
Jennifer sighed and approached Andy as he leant out of the window.
"I said, 'I'm Jennifer'," she announced once again. It elicited no response but she continued unperturbed. "And you are...?"
"What?" Andy muttered vaguely, suddenly aware that someone was mumbling behind him. Visual overkill had momentarily deprived all other senses.
"Moons..." he said suddenly.
"Is that your name, or are we talking about the round white thing that comes out at night?" she said, peering over his shoulder at the startling blue ocean beyond.
"Mmm?" he said, rather puzzled, turning to look at her briefly. He shook his head and said, "Andy."
"Ah", she said, "Andy Moon." She elbowed him viciously until he moved, and peered down the outside of the house. Her forehead crumpled into a frown.
"Moons", he uttered, emphasising the 's' and indicating the three fail-to-miss lumps of rock with a violent nod of his head.
"Andy Moons", she said, wondering at his strange behaviour. Andy tutted with exasperation, grabbed her arm, and pulled her in front of him.
"There! Moons!" He pointed at the three orbs.

For a long, long time, no-one said anything. The moons, although faint in the strong light from a sun no different to ours, were clearly discernible against the astonishing blue sky. They were similar in size to our own moon, the middle one being slightly larger than the others, and all had a very pale pinkish hue. Jennifer and Andy watched the smaller two do a kind of slow tango across the sky while the larger one hovered on the edge of the dance floor, occasionally venturing across their path like a persistent 'gentleman's excuse-me'.
"Bloody Hell", was all Andy could say as the last of the three moons dipped below the horizon, a tiny arc barely distinguishable in the glare of the bright sun. Andy looked at the ground. It was not normally as close as this to his room, apart from the one time when he'd had far too much to drink, and the one thing that had prevented him from learning how to fly and ultimately discovering the rather disturbing fact that it was just marginally further to fall than he had expected was that he was too pissed to open the window. Wasn't there a film about a house being plucked from Earth and being dumped somewhere else. A sudden race of images rushed through his brain. All of them seemed to consist of a television in a garish living room festooned with tinsel, cards, balloons, small scraps of paper bearing some of the worst jokes ever, and a rather sad looking tree drooping in the corner. Ah, yes, The Wizard of Oz. Andy resisted the temptation to tap his heels together, although a pair of ruby slippers was not amongst his personal array of footwear. But a pair of scuffed trainers languishing in a corner were, and sitting down on the bed he purposefully pulled them on and said resolutely, "Well, hanging around here is not doing us any good". He joined Jennifer at the window. "Let's go and see what's out there", he said, deftly pulling himself across the window-ledge.
"The sea's very blue", Jennifer said dreamily. Andy paused and looked back at her, and sighed heavily.
"Yes, but it's a very blue sea on a totally different planet, and that's what's really bothering me at this moment in time", he said irritably.
"Are you coming or not?" he continued, as she made no move to follow him.
"Wait!" she replied urgently. She dashed off to her room and returned a few moments later carrying a rather bulky bag. Clutching it to her protectively, she lifted one leg over the ledge. She hesitated, rummaged through the bag, swore, dropped the bag carefully onto the ground, and disappeared back into the house. She returned presently, holding tightly a small cylinder which she waved at Andy.
"Lipstick", she stated by way of explanation.
"Oh well, that's alright then", Andy said sarcastically. He watched her climb over the sill with a cautiousness that suggested she was three thousand feet above the ground and not three. He instinctively took her arm. "When we get murdered by the alien inhabitants of this planet, at least we'll look respectable."
"I might", she snapped, glancing distastefully at his attire. Carefully she placed one foot on the ground and wrenched her arm from his helping hand.
"Couldn't you have found a decent pair of shoes to wear?" he said, noticing the ridiculously high stilettos she was wearing as she swung her other leg across the ledge. "Careful!" he added, as she caught him painfully on the shin with one of the heels.
"Oh, I am sorry", she said angrily as she stooped to pick up her bag. "Of course!" she smacked her head in feign forgetfulness, "I should have known that my entire bedroom was going to be yanked from planet Earth and dumped on alien soil. I knew I should have bought my hiking boots upstairs to bed with me!"
They stood for a moment, glaring at each other, Jennifer delicately applying another layer of lipstick, and Andy nursing his wounded shin.
"Look", he said reasonably calmly. "Since it seems that we are the only two here at present, wherever 'here' may be, and God knows I don't have a clue, let's just make the best of a bad situation and try to get along, okay?"
Jennifer sniffed dismissively and examined her fingernails. "Okay?" he said again.
"Okay", she said with just the right amount of intonation in her voice to suggest that she really didn't give a fuck either way. She turned and walked away. Andy sighed and followed her.
To start with, they circled right round the outside of the rooms. Of the rest of their houses there was no sign. It seemed that the two bedrooms were all which had been brought here (wherever here was). The brickwork which normally made up the exterior of Andy's house now ran round the three exposed sides of his room. Like the doorway inside, it merged seamlessly with Jennifer's side, except that her side was pebble-dashed. The building had even been fitted with a roof - each half in tiles of a slightly different colour.
Somehow the way the rooms had been so neatly joined like this was even more unsettling than the fact that the two of them were here in the first place. Jennifer stopped and shuddered - probably unaware that right behind her, Andy was doing exactly the same. She looked around. In all directions (except for the sea) lay more undulating grassy slopes. She picked a direction and then strode purposefully away from the hybrid building.
Andy stopped for a moment by one of his walls, bent down, and experimentally touched a blade of grass. It felt quite normal for grass. He examined his finger for ill-effects and found none. Then, pushing the grass out of the way, he looked at the base of the wall. The brickwork ran right into the ground.
He looked round for Jennifer. She was about thirty feet away, walking roughly parallel to the cliff, on a slight upward slope.
As he got up, she turned her head to look in his direction, and seeing him looking back, hurriedly faced forwards again as if she didn't want him to know she'd been looking to check that he wasn't too far away.
He ran to catch up with her. Although she must have been aware of him arriving at her side, the only way she showed it was by moving a few inches away from him.
Unperturbed, he told her how the brickwork ran right into the ground and how the grass felt like grass.
"What else would it feel like?" she asked a trifle scornfully.
"This could well be another planet", he told her, "we can't take it for granted that what looks like grass is actually grass."
"What else would it be?"
"I don't know. It could be a plant that looks like grass, but stings - like nettles."
"Nettles don't look like grass."
"I didn't say they do. I said whatever this stuff that looks like grass is, it might sting like nettles."
"But it doesn't sting", she said, glancing down at the grass as it brushed past her ankles, "otherwise I'd have noticed by-"
That was as far as she got. The heel of her left shoe, with remarkable precision, found a crack in the dry earth under all that grass, where it firmly embedded itself. Her left foot stayed with it, while the rest of her body carried on moving for as long as it could, which wasn't really very long at all. She managed to stop just short of falling flat on her face, wrenched the offending heel out of the ground, and silently strode onwards just ahead of Andy.
"I've got a spare pair of trainers", he told her.
She said nothing.
"They are clean", he added. "They don't smell or anything."
"No thank you", she said stiffly, without turning to face him.
He shrugged and continued walking just behind her - and a little to the right just in case she stopped without warning again.
They were still heading roughly parallel to the cliff, on a slight upward slope. As they neared the top, they sped up a little, hopeful that there was something a bit more helpful than more grassy slopes on the other side.
Jennifer got to the top first. There was another grassy slope ahead, somewhat steeper than the one they had just ascended, which ran downwards. It seemed to be one side of a wide valley, the other side of which was covered with trees. At the bottom of the valley, a stream trickled its way from right to left, to finally meet the sea beyond a golden sandy beach.
"Oh look", said Jennifer as Andy appeared at her side and admired the scenery, "by those things that look like trees. There's something which looks like water down there, flowing into that thing which looks like a sea. Do you think it stings?"
"Stop taking the piss", Andy said.
"We can't take these things for granted", she reminded him.
"I know, but you're still taking the piss."
"Ah, but it could be something that just looks like piss."
"Have you quite finished?"
"Yes thank you", she said politely.
"So are we going to go down there and take a look or what?"
She replied by setting off down the slope. About halfway down one of her heels got stuck again. She freed it and carried on, only for the other one to get stuck moments later. This time she did fall over. Then she swore, picked up herself and her bag, pulled the shoe from the ground, thought about putting it back on, said "oh bugger it", took off the other shoe, shook them both to remove the few grains of sand which had mysteriously been inhabiting them, shoved them in her bag, and stomped off down the hill in her bare feet.
"Told you they were bloody stupid shoes", Andy said, still marvelling at the way the bag had effortlessly swallowed them.
She tutted. "We've already been through this once."
They descended the rest of the way in silence.

"Do you think it is water?" Jennifer asked, standing by the stream and looking down into it. Whatever the crystal-clear liquid was, it gurgled pleasantly over a pebbly bed.
Andy shrugged. "How can we tell?"
Jennifer knelt carefully on the bank. "I don't see why it shouldn't be", she said. "Everything here seems so natural. The grass, the trees, the sea, the sky, everything. All we've seen to suggest that this isn't Earth are those three moons. If this is another planet, how come it's so much like ours? Maybe it is Earth..."
"What about the moons then?" Andy asked.
"We're not where we were yesterday", Jennifer pointed out, "maybe the moons have been moved here too."
"Then where on Earth are we? There's no sign of life anywhere. It's the middle of summer, it's a beautiful day, there's a beach over there - where is everyone? Places like this don't just get left alone!"
"We can hardly see the beach from here though", Jennifer pointed out, "and that's where people would be."
"So why can't we hear them? Where are all the screaming kids? The beach is less than fifteen miles away you know."
"It was only a suggestion", said Jennifer, getting up. "But why don't we take a look at the beach anyway? The more of this place we see the better."
"Why not", said Andy, getting up. They headed downstream. Before long, the grass petered out, giving way to rock underfoot, which became more broken and eroded as it approached the beach, descending about twenty feet over the course of a forty-five degree slope before it reached the sand.
It was not a difficult climb down for the two of them. Having the advantage of footwear, Andy reached the sand first. Mind you, Jennifer reflected, clambering over rocks was easier barefoot than it would have been in her stilettos. She stopped on a small rock just above the sand.
"There's no-one here", Andy reported. The only occupants of the beach were the two of them, and various pieces of seaweed. Even the tide was out, the sea quite a distance from them.
"I'm not trying to take the piss", said Jennifer, "but this stuff is sand, isn't it?" she asked, "I mean, it is safe to touch?"
"Oh, yeah, sure", Andy said vaguely, looking out to sea.
As Jennifer stepped onto the beach - which did indeed feel like perfectly ordinary sand - she noticed that Andy's trainers were no longer on his feet, but held in his right hand.
"What happened to the sensible footwear?" she asked.
"I don't want them full of sand", he replied.
Jennifer nodded. Like most people, she knew all about the mysterious properties of sand. The way it could penetrate any form of footwear, sneak home with you, and distribute itself over an incredibly wide area. It was two years since Jennifer had been anywhere near a beach (not including the one she was now standing on), and just a few minutes ago she'd found grains of sand in a pair of shoes which probably hadn't even existed two years ago. She wouldn't be surprised if the sand leapt up about two feet in the air and straight into Andy's trainers.
Andy continued to watch the distant sea.
"It's a long way out", she remarked, also looking at it.
"There's not much of a slope on this beach", he pointed out, "and remember, this place has three moons all together, and they're moving a good bit faster than ours. They must cause some pretty incredible tides."
"Do you think it's safe to go and take a look at the sea?" she asked.
"I should think so", he replied. "The moons set over there not long ago, so it should just be going out. As long as we can run back faster than it can come in we should be okay."