Life in Red... • RED DWARF • Arnold Rimmer x OC story

15. Something to return to

I took a quick whiff of the pages.

"It smells... like furniture and beets." I looked at Lister.

"It's how to Cats wrote their books. Isn't that cool?"

"...They wrote their book with furniture and beets?"

"—Oi, you're not doing it properly, Hammond. You're supposed to put your nose across the page where the words would be. Like you're reading a book normal, but with smell."

Lister tried to explain to me Cat's stupid holy book. Earlier, Cat had showed Lister, a ton of old felisapien artifacts.

Lister was especially excited from this. His old cat, Frankenstein, was like the Virgin Mary, or the Eve of an entire human-feline species.

In the Cat's holy book, Lister was renamed 'Cloister the Stupid'. Apparently Listy was frozen in time so that the Cat species could live, or some preachy crap like that. It was all very boring in my opinion.

"You can have it back." I passed him the holy book. "It's obviously over my head." I hopped down from Lister's bunk where I sat and he took my place, artifact in hand.

"Cat said he'd help me read some of it later." Lister said as he stretched out, admiring the old book.

"Tell me how that goes..."

Frankly, I was getting sick of hearing about the whole thing.

I cracked my knuckles, looking down at Rimmer's bunk. I grazed my hand over his soft, clean bed sheets. He them starched, and overtly so.

Rimmer was somewhere in one of the cargo bays, dealing with the counting and organizing of the Dwarf's leftover food and equipment supplies.
It was his day off. So, as neurotic as Rimmer was, he spent the day counting and organizing.

I was allowed to be in the same room as Lister again, considering he was too good-natured to give me the silent treatment forever.

"...You used to live on Mimas, right? Do you miss anything about it?" Lister asked me. His voice was soft, unassuming.

Hearing about Mimas jolted me from my skin.
My name, it was Edith Hammond... I couldn't help but convince myself that it had never been anything different.

"Not really." I looked off to the side, facing myself in the mirror. "...But, I was just a nobody anyway."

"What about your family? What about them?"

My mother, Ginny Garland left me for her fiftieth boyfriend. And my father, who I'd come to learn was named 'Anderson' something,  was an addict and gone before my fist birthday.

"Um, yeah. I'm not much of a family-person." I said casually. "We were all quite independent from one another."

"What about friends, Hammond? Pets? Don't ya miss anybody?"

I paced through the quarters, taking a small look around. Their room no longer smelled lifeless. In fact, the whole floor lacked its signature mildew. When you spent time around things, you could almost forget they were dead.

"Is there a specific reason you're asking me?"

"No, not really." Lister said quickly, suspiciously. He seemed to have some ulterior motives.

"F-Friends?" I stammered. "Yeah, I had some friends, I guess." I didn't want to sound completely pathetic.

Anyway,
On Mimas, I was completely broke. I was probably the youngest damn person on that entire moon until I grew into working age. I had at least one or two awkward dates with some men and women who worked in the space corps during later on in my life. But, it was nothing notable nor long lasting.

"I really miss earth. You would've enjoyed it, I bet." Lister said. He placed his Cat book to the side, crossing his arms over his chest intead. "There's so much I wished I'd done before getting stuck out here. My plan was to go to fiji, with my cat, Frankenstein and,"

"—Kotchanski?" I interjected.

"If it worked out with her..." He smiled softly, playing with one of his dreadlocks. "What do you think of earth?"

"I dunno."

"Would'ya wanna go back there with me? Just think; me, you and Cat. We could all go back home together."

"You want to go home? Back to Earth?!" I screeched.

"Yeah, to earth." He chuckled softly, swinging his heels with mild, child-like cheerfulness.

God, even his eyes looked like they were smiling. It made me sick.

"Wasn't Earth like, super polluted?"

"It wasn't that polluted. Not where I lived, anyway."

"B-But..." I shuffled nervously. "It will take another three million years to get back!"

"We'll go into stasis. C'mon, it won't be that bad. We can go to fiji! Me, you and the Cat,"

"—And Rimmer?"

"Sure, Rimmer. Okay he can come, I guess... In the book," he poked at the holy book, "I'm the one that leads the Cats to Fuschal: to fiji! And I'll do it." Lister said gleefully.

That entire endeavour sounded like a pain in the ass. I could hardly stomach to imagine what had happened to the solar system. Earth had probably been destroyed by some terrible nuclear accident years ago.
Maybe the Y-chromosome had gone extinct and only a new race of superior, genetically modified super-women remained... That possibility wasn't so nightmarish, but the countless other possibilities certainly were.

"Look at the Felisapien race in three million years, Lister. Human beings could be disfigured beyond imagination. — just think of what Three million years means! Who says the Earth's still there?"

"Hey, it's possible." Lister said adamantly. "It doesn't hurt to hope for something, Hammond. I'm just putting the idea out there. But if you're content with floating around in space without a purpose, don't even worry about it."

"I was already floating around in space without a purpose! On Mimas. At least here, I've got free food and a bed that doesn't smell like someone's taken a leak on it."

"—What?" His brow cocked up, his eyes suddenly darting back to me.

"—I don't like this whole plan of yours." I muttered.

"So, you're not going to let me go back to Earth?" He whined. "What if I begged, Hammond?"

"I didn't say 'no', exactly..."

"But, you're not saying yes! Hammond, If you had to opportunity to go back to something that mattered, wouldn't you?"

The air was stiff and lifeless. My fingers clenched into two fists and I bit my tongue, upset that Lister was attacking me with all these important decisions. I shifted side to side, slowly pacing in a small circle.

Lister waited patiently. He wore one of Rimmer's old shirts, new coffee and custard stains already down the front.
The familiar appearance of debris littered the floor. Lister was a slob.

The world was his canvas, his garbage was the paint.

As for myself, I felt like just another piece of garbage. I considered laying on the ground to better suit my mental anguish.

Lister sighed and hopped down from his bunk.

"Think about earth for me, Hammond. Please?" He left his quarters and me too.

I wish I had answered him.
If I had something important, I'd surely do anything I could to get it back.

Maybe Kotchanski was that important thing to Lister; Maybe earth was as well.

It would be heartless to take both of those things away from him.