You, Me, We Are All Mistakes

PROLOGUE. 1969, A MOON LANDING

WE ARE ALL MISTAKES

DAVID A MOORE

PROLOGUE

1969

The best way to predict your future is to create it.
Abraham Lincoln

A MOON LANDING

In two hours, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin will charm humanity by becoming the fifth and sixth men to set foot on the Moon.

Outside a deserted underground station in north London, Grimaldi tapped his smartwatch and it scrolled through 21st July, 1969, 01:56am BST, 87 bpm, SpO2 96%. He had a love-hate relationship with this device, often leaving it uncharged for weeks in his secret safe to enjoy a freedom from its tyranny. With a grudging acceptance that the raised heart rate was most likely due to his imminent lawbreaking, he returned his sleeve over the display to conceal its telltale glow.

Grimaldi was as old as this century and the Moon's clear brightness lit the creases of his eyes, whilst forming a perfect contrast to the dark hole in his soul shaped by his wife's sudden departure.

On this clear night he stared up at Armstrong and Aldrin's destination from his own vantage point. To his left stood the underground station, its metal grille gates ticking down the day's heat and sealing empty platforms from access by sleeping Londoners. The disinterested napped whilst the romantic few devoured their first ever, all-night BBC broadcast of The Eagle landing in grainy monochrome.

Grief, and the experience of advanced years, meant he remained unimpressed by humankind's space programme, and he viewed tonight's proceedings as another unnecessary vanity project. So, he would deliberately miss this live airing of yet more middle-aged men and their moonwalks. The different world Grimaldi inhabited stripped him of any true delight in such undertakings.

He inhaled deeply and resumed his short walk in the balmy twilight to break and enter the local Swiss Cottage library.

***

Seven hours later with the crime committed and his stress lifted, he stepped into a different London borough as the sun restoked West Hampstead with a heavy heat.

Grimaldi had always been a migrant. For so many years he had adopted London as his native city, yet he remained a Corsican struggling to dress on trend in a foreign land. It was the summer of '69, and despite his age, today he tried Brutus jeans, thick platformed shoes, and a needless tie to match his flowered shirt. The fitness tracker embedded in his watch now informed him of a resettled pulse-rate and regular blood pressure.

Just a year earlier his night of wrongdoing would have triggered an ongoing unease, but since she had gone his emotions were deadened.

He became conscious of two young boys violently rehearsing Clackers in Woolworth's doorway – the whiplash smash of the plastic spheres cracking the air above the roar of morning rush hour traffic. Their Mum struggled to stem the din with the appeasement of a Curly-Wurly chocolate chew.

Grimaldi wanted change for these people, and all their parallel humanity. How could this people's own path have evolved so differently to his own, and with such a negative outcome?

Yet he saw any attempt at confession from an old foreigner like himself as a path to his own ridicule, and such revelations would always remain unbelievable from a single source.

So, here he teetered at the end of the '60s, distributing miserable clues across London and New York boroughs, trusting in the future inquisitive nature of his fellow cohabitants. He could not put his remaining family in jeopardy again and these acts, willfully concealed from his masters, offered some internal peace to embrace an ageing and fractured heart. Losing her had been enough and returning to the old country was not an option.

Distracting himself by stepping past the young family and into the Woolworths, he bought his great-nephew a birthday Spirograph and Merit chemistry set. Leaving the store in a lighter mood, he entered a random café to order an Earl Grey tea. The north London denizens around him chattered, smoothing their side-swept bobs or hippy hair, and clinking their teacups and cake plates. Give Peace A Chance by the Plastic Ono Band played thinly as a backdrop, fading to and fro from a small Roberts medium-wave radio positioned on the countertop. Broadcasting from it was Yoko and John's one plea to mankind.

All we are saying, is give peace a chance...
If only you damn well could, Grimaldi thought.

As the waitress left him seated at a secluded corner table, he could no longer contain his intrigue and covertly connected to a private 5G wifi. The icon flashed a full signal, and he called his closest colleague Frank at SETI. The vidcon window flashed to say Frank was currently in Puerto Rico, but offline. Of course, wrong time zone! Curiosity unsated, Grimaldi settled into his chair to download a UHD videocast of the previous night's Moon landing to his GlasSlate® mobile phone.

"Here we go again," he whispered to himself.