Jackie French

The Cafe on Calisto

School was okay. I wore my new orange overalls with red and green apples embroidered down the front, bright blue sneakers and turquoise socks, and no one stared, so I reckon I looked pretty much like everyone else.

I guess school work is probably about the same anywhere in the universe. But the school itself was as different from my school back on Earth as Corridor 25 on Earth is from Blackberry Pie Street, Fullness of Heart.

First of all the school was big. There must have been at least 200 kids, maybe more! (Our corridor school cube had only seven kids, though of course all the lessons were vid-linked with every other kid in the country.) It took me days just to work out how to get around the school. Open spaces just aren't logical like corridors are.

The school itself was a long building, shaped like a lazy snake, that wandered in and out of gardens that no one ever seemed to tend, with geese to keep the grass down (and pinch your lunch if you didn't watch out) and eat the fallen apples and apricots and avocados as they plopped off the fruit trees planted around the school and sometimes munch a few flowers for dessert.

Sometimes it was hard to concentrate in maths - actually it's always hard to concentrate in maths - what with the thud of ripe fruit on the grass and the scent of flowers so thick you could almost slice it and the twitter twitter pobble pobble of all the bright birds in the trees.

I'd never realised that fruit has so many smells before - one smell when it's on the tree, a hot dirt and warm fruit smell when it's on the ground, a ginger beer and almost clean garbage bin smell when it starts to rot and yet another scent when it's all cut up and chilled from the fridge.

What was I saying? Oh, the birds. I never knew there were so many birds in the universe either! They were a zillion bright colours, just like the people's clothes, and they were fat!

The birds were native to Callisto, unlike the geese. They were fruit eaters and it seemed as if they had just been waiting for humans to move in and start planting more fruit trees so they could start gutsing.

Native Callisto fruits are pretty small by comparison, and those birds must have thought they were in paradise when they first discovered Earth fruit.

'They're called pobble-pobble birds,' said Cherry, who sat next to me in class. 'You get great flocks of them sometimes - hundreds and hundreds. They move around, depending on what's ripe. Sometimes you can hardly see the trees, there are so many pobble-pobbles in them.'

'Don't the pobble-pobbles damage the fruit trees?' I asked.

'Nah.' Cherry opened a date and banana sandwich, inspected it, then threw it to one of the geese. The goose pecked it halfheartedly. The geese were so fat they could hardly waddle. 'There's more than enough fruit for everyone.'

Cherry unwrapped a tiny quiche, sniffed it, then offered it to me. 'Want one?'

'Hey, thanks.'

'Don't thank me. I'm sick of them. Mum's always making quiches. It's her speciality. Chicken quiche, spinach quiche, mushroom and almond quiche...'

'Dad cooks too. That's why we came here. Dad's going to reopen the café...'

Cherry blinked. 'What's a café?'

'Huh? A café's where you go to buy meals.'

'Oh sure. Now I remember,' said Cherry vaguely. 'They've got cafés on Earth, haven't they? I read about them in geography.' She sounded totally uninterested.

'They've got cafés on other places.'

'Not on Callisto,' said Cherry.

'No, Callisto's only got one. We swapped it for our café on Earth and...'

'I never knew we had a café here!'

'But...' I hesitated. Surely the café had been open before? I mean, it was there, with tables and everything. How come Cherry had never heard of it?

'I suppose you like cooking too,' said Cherry disgustedly. She threw another crust to the goose.

'Not much. I really like eating though.'

'You don't like cooking!' Cherry's face lit up. 'Wow! Neither do I! Hey, do you want to come over to my place sometime? I'm building a go-cart.'

'Sure.'

Cherry bit into an apple thoughtfully. 'I'm really glad you don't like cooking. You've no idea how boring it gets around here.'

 *          *           *         *           *         *           *

Cherry asked me to dinner at her place the first weekend I was there.

'Mum says I have to,' she explained glumly.

I blinked. 'Don't you want me to come over to your place?'

'Sure,' said Cherry. 'You're totally supanova great! But dinner!'

'What's wrong with dinner?'

Cherry sniffed. 'Just don't feel you have to eat everything to be polite. Especially not Mum's quiches. You're not family or anything, so you don't have to eat anything you don't want to!'

'Yeah, okay,' I said, bewildered. It was going to take a while to find my feet.

Cherry's house was supanova sensational. It was almost as long as our school and built out of real wood too. It sort of wondered along by a creek with all these deep rocky pools and splashy little waterfalls where you could swim all day, except when you were making a go-cart or a cubby among the fruit trees, and when you were hungry you just had to swim up to the bank and pick a few squashy blueberries from the bushes that grew along the bank.

Cherry's dad and mum and baby sister lived in one part of the house and her grandparents lived in another, and somewhere a few aunts and uncles fitted in too. But, like I said, there was plenty of room.

There was plenty of food too.

'Have another apple tart, Samdolyn dear!' insisted Cherry's mum.

'Mum! She's already had four!' wailed Cherry.

'I'm sure she can fit in just one more.'

'Er...I'm sort of full of pumpkin soup spinach quiche roast chicken goose bean and sausage casserole corn on the cob potato bake stir-fried cauliflower steamed snow peas stuffed cabbage stuffed tomatoes carrot surprise buttered noodles cheesecake lemon meringue sticky-date pudding and an apple. But thank you anyway,' I said politely.

'Maybe just a slice of pineapple upside-down cake then,' offered Cherry's Auntie Apricot. 'With my special vanilla custard sauce.'

'Auntie Apricot!' hissed Cherry. 'You are so embarrassing!'

'Nonsense,' beamed Auntie Apricot. 'Children on Earth hardly get anything to eat. Isn't that right, Samdolyn?'

'Er, sort of,' I said. 'Not food like this anyway. But my Dad's a cook, so I ate pretty well. He's going to open a café here.'

'A what?' demanded Cherry's great-grandmother. 'Speak up, girl! I can't here you!'

'A café,' I yelled down the table.

'She said "a café", mother!' yelled Cherry's dad even louder. He hadn't eaten much during dinner. His plate was still piled almost as high as it was when we'd started eating. He was really skinny and had a sort of grey indigestion look about him too.

'A café! A café on Callisto! Oh dear! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!' Cherry's great-grandmother started laughing so hard she choked on her cherry and cream cheese strudel with walnut ice-cream, and had to be helped from the table.

I was definitely getting the feeling Dad and I might be in trouble.

The Café on Callisto © Jackie French, 2006. Published by Catnip Publishing.