by Gary Weston
intimate.”
“No, I mean yes. The thing is, I can shuffle around the dance floor in a slow waltz, but anything more ambitious and I’d fall over. Even I like to hold a woman tightly having a smooch.”
“To mate?”
“Yes, no. Sometimes. Not always.”
“I see.” He didn’t.
“People often overlap with what they try to do. We like to experiment, try our hand at other things, find out what we are good at and what we are crap at.”
“You crap at making babies and dancing.”
“So damn what? I’m good at some things,” I insisted.
“Such as?”
I wish he hadn’t asked. Joe had been pretty accurate in his assessment of my limited capabilities. “All sorts of things.”
“Such as?” he persisted.
“Well,” I had to think hard. “I write. I’m a writer.”
“A good writer?”
I sighed. “I like to think so. The problem is, publishers don’t agree with my opinion. They put my writing ability on a par with my dancing skills.”
“They think you are a crap writer?”
“Some do. But what do they damn know? Most of them wouldn’t know a good book if you hit them over the head with one.”
“Why hit them on the head with a book?”
“Because it would be very satisfying.”
“Fun?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Creative?”
“Enjoyable.”
“Get them to publish book?”
“Highly unlikely.”
“So why do it?”
“I haven’t.”
“You want to.”
“Yes, I mean no. Not actually hit them. I was speaking metaphorically.”
“I see.” He didn’t. “Politicians,” Joe said. “Explain.”
“At last, something that does make sense,” I said. Then I thought about it. “Well, perhaps not make sense, but easier to explain than women.”
“Politicians crap.” Joe seemed to like that word.
“In a nutshell.”
“Politicians crap in nutshells?”
It wasn’t a sentence you heard every day.
“They have too much bull to fit in any nutshell I know of. We call them a necessary evil. Like tax inspectors and traffic wardens.”
“Have useful function?”
“Which ones?”
“Any of them.”
“As far as I’m concerned, not much. Politicians seem to be forever dreaming up ways to get the tax inspectors to take as much of our hard earned cash as possible. Pain in the ass.”
“Ass?”
Looking at Joe, it was entirely possible he didn’t have one. This would have presented him with problems smuggling drugs through customs. That and the complete absence of clothes.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just my way of saying that the afore mentioned occupations belong to another reality. We suspect we can’t live without them, but have we really tried?”
“Why not try?”
“Good question. A damn good question. I guess it’s fear of the unknown. We wouldn’t like to risk upsetting the future by getting rid of them. Many would like to, though.”
“Guy Fawkes.”
“Best damn politician of the lot, some say. And look what happened to him.” I decided to be serious and give a more sensible answer. “If we didn’t have rules and regulations, we’d be running around like savages. We’d be killing one another, robbing one another and generally be causing all kinds of mayhem.”
“Like you do now?”
“Clever devil.” I had to admit, he had a point. “It would be a lot worse.”
“Is that possible?”
“Are you judging us?”
“Merely observation.”
I had no answer for man’s increasingly persistent striving for self destruction. It was the way we were. Nobody's perfect.
“You like rules and regulations?”
“Of course not. I just want everyone else to follow them. It’s human nature to feel that way.” I was determined this wasn’t going to be a one way learning curve. “You must have rules in your society.”
“Why?”
“Don’t tell me you are all little goody two shoes.”
His eyes, all of them, looked at the end of his feet-less legs. “No shoes.”
It was impossible to tell if Joe was being sarcastic. “So, you have no crime, nobody parks on double yellow lines and you all file your tax returns on time and in full?” To the best of my knowledge, no unmanned probe to the red planet had picked up neatly parked rows of automobiles outside a tax office.
“No crime, no trouble.”
“What the hell do you lot die of, boredom?”
“Old age.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” Ask anyone who knows me, would they rather spend their time watching my life through a telescope, or poking their own eyes out with tooth picks, the tooth picks would win hands down. But to someone who apparently lives in a society where each day is nothing but mind-numbing predictability, I can understand why studying me would be incredibly exciting. It was sort of flattering, in a way. I wondered if I was networked. The bizarre idea of royalties went through my mind. Dream on. “Do you eat?”
“Of course I eat.” There was a hint of what do you take me for you idiot?, in his tone.
“It’s just that I’ve just gone incredibly hungry all of a sudden. And, as I assume you haven’t brought a packed lunch with you from Mars, I thought I could throw something together.”
Joe stared at me, in what may well have been a quizzical manner. After a while, a man learns to pick on a strangers body language, even a body that looks like something that wouldn’t be unexpected in the rubbish skip in a horror ‘b’ movie film studio.
“If you just get rid of that bubble thing,” I suggested with a wave of my hand, “We can go to the kitchen. I do a really wicked cheese and chilly omelette.”
“Bubble gone long time ago.”
“Hell. So it has.” Our conversation had been so intense, I hadn’t noticed I was no longer confined. Was this some kind of trust Joe had developed for me or had the batteries run out? “Right, my interplanetary gatecrasher. Let’s have a feed.”
Not taking no for an answer, I led the way into the kitchen. I was relieved to find it was reasonably tidy, apart from two days washing up soaking in the sink and an old potato sack filled with re-cycleables by the back-door ready to go out. It hardly smelled at all. So I merely had to shift the un-ironed washing that had been left in the basket on the kitchen table for the last five days and I thought the place unusually clean. Nothing to be embarrassed about at all, apart perhaps from the dead mouse in the trap on the worktop, which now seemed to be alive with maggots. I really must throw that out tomorrow. First thing.
“So, what do you fancy?” I said, opening the fridge door. The cheddar was evolving nicely into blue cheese and something revolting had happened to the tomatoes in the vegetable compartment. Joe stood behind me, examining the mysterious contents of the cold white box. As he had no experience to draw from I didn’t think he would be able to form an opinion on the state of my fridge. Wrong.
“Crap,” he said.
Well, Joe didn’t actually say crap, his translator decided the expletive was the nearest earthly equivalent to the Martian vernacular. Deciding Joe’s considered opinion about my food storage system wasn’t far off the mark, I opened the little freezer compartment on the top. A packet of fish-fingers escaped and fell on the floor.
“Right then. Fish finger sandwiches it is then.”
“Fish have no fingers. Like me,” he said, waving a tentacle at me. “I have studied your planet. Fingers no.”
“No, Joe, they haven’t. That’s because we cut the things off and eat them.” With a sheet of kitchen paper, I carefully pushed the mousetrap to one side. A man has to have space when creating a culinary masterpiece. I scraped the remains o
f the liver and onions I’d had for my dinner (what had I been thinking?) out of the frying pan into the overflowing rubbish bin and got the thing up to a high enough temperature to kill off any bacteria threatening to evolve into a higher life form and emptied the packet of fish fingers into it. I counted nine of them. Enough for a decent sandwich each.
“Are you okay with Earth food, by the way?” If he wasn’t, it meant more for me.
“Soon find out,” he said.
All four eyes were watching the fingers swimming about in the half inch of liver flavoured fat. Then he watched the incredible digital dexterity with which I cut doorstops out of a loaf and spread copious amounts of butter on them. I could tell he was impressed. I flipped over the fingers before they were incinerated, shuffled the pan like some head chef from Paris and then layered the bread with them.
“The secret of this masterpiece, Joe, is to smother the whole damn thing with brown sauce. And there we have it. A feast fit for a king.”
We sat at the kitchen table and I was half way through my sandwich before Joe had even touched his. The feeding tube that had popped out of his mouth hovered over the sandwich, and one of the tiny tentacles around its rim was prodding at the bread with the same enthusiasm a food critic would have for an offering from a Calcutta backstreet stall. His eyes looked up at me, then back at the sandwich and he did a little shudder that must have been a Martian sigh. And then, with reckless abandonment, his feeding tube opened out to the size of a dinner plate, and the whole sandwich was gone. Just like that.
“Damn, Joe. You don’t mess about, do you?”
Joe leaned back in the chair and belched so loud it swept my hair back. I took it to be a compliment. “You enjoyed that then, eh?”
“Crap.”
“That’s gratitude for you,” I said.
“No. Must crap.”
“Oh. I see. Okay. You know where the bathroom is. Just, you know, off you go.”
“Outside.”
“What?” I wasn’t sure about this at all. I mean, what would Mrs Willis next door say, if she saw a Martian taking a crap in my back garden? If nothing else, it would be something different for them to talk about at the over sixties club. “Are you sure? Couldn’t you just…” I nodded towards the bathroom door.
“Outside.”
“Okay. Keep your hair on.”
“No hair.”
“I meant, just do whatever it is you must do. Just be…discreet will you?” He was through the back-door before I’d finished. More than twenty minutes had passed by the time he came back.
“Constipation?”
“Not crap like you.”
“I guess not. I made a brew while you were outside.”
We sat a while, sipping tea. Joe only drank a little. “I got the fire going in the lounge as well. No point in being cold.”
Joe made himself comfortable again on the sofa and he watched the flames dance in the log-burner. I wondered if I was going to find some strangely coloured pile of something on my lawn in the morning. For some inexplicable reason, I figured it wasn’t going to be the regulation brown.
“Why you not got woman?”
“We’ve done that one,” I reminded him. “I had a woman. We finished.”
“Why no new woman?”
“You’ve got a one track mind,” I said with a sigh. “You’ve travelled God knows how far to find out about men and women.” I looked at him, and four wayward excuses for eyes looked back expectantly at me. “I can’t help thinking there’s more to this than scientific curiosity. Give it to me straight, Joe. Are you and your kind planning some kind of mass invasion of this planet?”
Once the translator finished hissing, Joe’s eyes pointed disbelievingly at the ceiling, and a throaty cackle of laughter came back at me. “If we destroyed all of you, what would we do for fun?”
Although reassuring, there was something fundamentally disturbing in that comment. In one sentence, Joe had let it slip that, should they choose to, they could wipe us out without breaking into a sweat, and, even more of a worry, the reason they didn’t, was because they found the human race so sufficiently entertaining, we would be allowed to continue our miserable existence. I had the bizarre idea of a roomful of Martians, eating live maggoty things off a tray, watching the latest episode of my life as if it was the Flintstones or something. I just hoped the ratings didn’t slip.
“I’m glad you think I’m amusing.”
“I…admire you,” he said.
This was a new twist. Never having seen much that’s admirable about humans, particularly myself, this was a concept I had difficulty with.
“Why? Because we are resilient individuals, inventive and resourceful?” Even as I said it, I knew I was grasping at straws.
“It is true. No matter how much crap you self-inflict, you succeed in clawing your way to the top of it.”
I don’t get many compliments and when someone, even a Martian, gives me a merit badge for being the one who sticks the national flag into a dung heap, I will happily pin it on my chest. “Thanks, Joe. It’s nice to have my finer qualities recognised. I suppose I’ve always been tenacious, even when…”
“But why do you cause yourselves so many problems?” Joe asked, deflating me at a stroke. I wasn’t too sure if he meant just me, in which case he was right on the money, or all humans, which meant, damn it, he was right on the money.
“The greatest thinkers throughout our history have speculated on that,” I told him. “That and which came first…”
“…chicken or egg?”
“Exactly. But if it helps, we have a saying. If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.”
“Meaning?”
“Damned if I know, Joe. It just seemed appropriate.”
The clock on the wall above the fireplace informed me it was now seventeen minutes past three. But this was ridiculous. Only a couple of minutes had elapsed since this crazy episode had begun. Perhaps the clock had stopped; the batteries had run down at last. My watch, a reliable, bomb proof Casio, was on the table in front of me. I had left it there before going to bed. The LCD display agreed with the Roman numerals of the clock on the wall. A chill ran through my entire body. Somehow, it seemed, Joe had the ability to slow time down to a crawl.
This diminutive, sickly yellow, four eyed visitor was not to be underestimated.
“Doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself?” I muttered.
“You could all live much easier lives if you so wished,” Joe said, ignoring my grumblings. “My impression is that you choose not to. Why?”
“A good question and very good observation. I’m not too sure I could give you a good answer to it though, not one that made much sense.”
“Do people enjoy suffering?”
I thought about this. “A tiny percentage called masochists gets off on having pain inflicted. I never saw the point of that, actually. I certainly don’t like pain myself. It hurts.”
“I was thinking more of emotional pain rather than physical. I suspect the percentage of humans that derive some pleasure or satisfaction in this is far higher, am I correct?”
“You’ve learnt well, Grasshopper.”
“I have four limbs. I am not insect.”
Joe hadn’t taken offence, I figured, merely ensuring I hadn’t gotten the wrong idea about him.
“Sorry, Joe, you have to forgive my perverse sense of humour. It gets me in trouble all the time.”
“I struggle with this thing you call humour. What is a joke?”
This might be easier. “Humour tends to be a release mechanism. We need to let off steam now and again, and humour is a relatively harmless way of doing this. Jokes are merely the way we express our humour.”
He nodded, causing his eye stalks to wave on the top of his head. It was both repulsive and fascinating to watch. “But you say your humour gets you in trouble?”
“On occasions,” I said. “Sometimes my jokes are taken too seriously an
d misunderstood. Not just my jokes, you see, but everybody’s jokes can backfire. What I might find funny might piss somebody else off completely. And visa versa.”
“Tell me a joke.”
“What?”
“A joke, so that I may understand.”
“Oh, God.” I couldn’t believe I was sitting here, trying to tell a joke to an alien from space. “Okay. There was this bloke, sitting on a camel…no, you’d never get that one. Right, try this one. A Martian walks into a bar in New York, right? And the barman said… this’ll kill you, Joe, he said…the real estate agents convention is next door. Get it, Joe?” reading expressions from Joe’s face was like de-scaling a dragon. Impossible. No reaction. “See, the barman thought…Joe, if you have to explain them, it’s a waste of time.”
“I do understand,” said Joe, “You are inferring real estate agents look like …me.”
“Well…”
“I am much better looking.” When he said that, he rocked back and forth on the sofa, his eye stalks flopping about all over the place and the most maniacal laughter crackled out of the translator. “Funny?” he asked when he’d settled down again.
I was also laughing, more at Joe’s over the top convulsions to his own joke rather than the corny offering itself. “You’re getting the hang of it. When you get back home, you’ll be a sensation.”
“Why do you drink?”
I was beginning to dread Joe’s questions. They seemed to come from such diverse tangents and with a barb that stung me deeply. Looking down at the empty tumbler on the table, I realised that I had indeed been thinking of getting another drink for me at least and who could tell, maybe another for my guest.
“It’s the way I am, Joe. Not good, not bad, just me.” I picked up the glass, turned it around in my hand, letting the light reflect its pretty innocent patterns from the deeply etched moulded surface. Right then, I needed a drink more than anything else in the world. Wasn’t it reasonable enough, under the circumstances? I was, after all, dealing with a most unusual situation, and, patting myself metaphorically on the back, doing a damn good job of it.
“Maybe it’s because I’m a writer,” I offered, lamely. Writing clichés is bad enough; living them is unforgivable. Even so, there was a modicum of truth in it. “You see,” I laboured bravely on, “Creative people are …different. We think differently from the others. And…” was this just crap or could I claw my way out of this pit of lies. “We think on many levels…” God, it was getting worse. “Sometimes, we crave substance abuse of one kind or another, to draw out this creativity.” There, I’d said it. I had put my hand inside my chest, grabbed my still beating heart and wrenched it out for all the world to see. Belching out this lie didn’t absolve me from my guilt.
“So, destroying your brain and internal organs with alcohol, releases your creative ability?”
“Yes, no, oh stuff you, you…” I couldn’t deny Joe’s logic. “It isn’t as simple as that.”
Joe nodded, causing his eye stalks to wave rhythmically. “I know. That is why I came here.”
“Would you care to zap a few brain cells and blitz your liver, assuming you have one?”
“What?”
“Would you like another drink, my Martian friend?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
I poured us both another shot of bourbon. A smaller one for Joe. I wasn’t yet ready to kill off my space travelling drinking buddy. He took the tumbler from me, holding it in the tip of his tentacle.