The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  In spite of himself, in spite of the day’s many tribulations and aggravations, Parry could not resist a smile.

  He entered a command and the e-card flipped over. On its reverse there was a short text-message:

  Greetings, Bold Sir Jack!

  So, now that you’re an internationally famous TV star and you’ve probably already got an agent and an entourage and a ton of groupies hanging around you, you won’t want to be consorting with lowly varlets like me and Ma. Still, if you don’t mind slumming it for an evening, Ma’s having one of her superduper soirées tomorrow, and frankly I’ll be bored out of my skull if you don’t come. It’s short notice, I realise, but I only got a look at the guest-list this morning and was shocked and appalled to find your name not on it. So how about it, brave English knight? Little bit of a do at the Fuentes homestead? Don’t say no.

  – the Lady Cecilia

  Again Parry smiled, although this time with a touch of condescension. Anna’s daughter was no fool, but life was still enviably uncomplicated in her teenage world. It was not the first time she had tried something like this. Last Christmas she had made sure he received an invitation to the annual festive Fuentes banquet. He had accepted. He had also been persuaded, with a little more difficulty, to attend Cecilia’s fifteenth birthday party in March. He had no doubt that on this occasion, just as on the previous two, she genuinely wanted to see him and would be glad of his presence among the partygoers. At the same time, her ulterior motive could not be more obvious, nor her attempt at deceit more transparent. To Cecilia, the logic was simple. Her mother was a widow. Her mother needed a man in her life. Parry, her mother’s closest unattached male friend, was clearly the best candidate. The more often the two of them were brought together, the more likely they were to realise this.

  Cecilia had no way of knowing that her mother and Parry had already been more than friends – much more. All she saw was two adults who seemed to get along well, who were right for each other, who could make each other happy, and she wanted them to be in love.

  It was ingenuous. It was touching. It made Parry’s heart leap and ache at the same time.

  It was also an opportunity he ought to take advantage of, but could not bring himself to. Would it really be appropriate for an FPP captain embroiled in a difficult and high-profile Foreign case to turn up at a social function? He did not think so.

  That, though, was not the only reason he was reluctant to attend. The other reason was that he did not want Anna to think him desperate for the least excuse to see her. He was playing the long game here, the subtle game, the waiting game. When Anna found out that Cecilia had invited him to the party and he had not gone, that would surely be a point in his favour.

  He sat down and composed a reply:

  Milady Cecilia,

  I’m afraid that you’re right. As an international celebrity I’m simply far too important to mingle with common peasants like you and your mother and speak with the sort of loathsomely ordinary people you consort with. Thus I will not be attending your mother’s modest little get-together tomorrow evening.

  – Bold Sir Jack

  He reread what he had written and decided a postscript was in order.

  P.S. Actually, Cecilia, I’ve just got too much on at the moment, as I’m sure you can understand. Another time, maybe?

  Having fired the message off to the Fuentes home board, he got up and threw open the balcony windows. It had rained again for a spell during the afternoon. Amoebiform splotches of unevaporated water spotted the tiles of the balcony, and a glaucous haze of humidity hung in the air, so that the buildings on the other side of the canal, some twenty metres away, looked out of focus, at one remove from reality. On his way home he had glimpsed fewer than usual Foreigners out and about – they were less inclined to venture from their hotels when the conditions were damp – and he predicted that Sirensong would be slow tonight.

  He settled down to his evening exercises. For background noise he switched the television on, selecting Current Affairs with the remote control. His home board had collated for him all the news items from the past twenty-four hours that pertained to subjects he was interested in or it thought he might be interested in.

  The shinju deaths were still garnering attention, but they had been toppled from the headline slot by the announcement that last year the global mean temperature had for the first time fallen instead of risen. Admittedly, the drop was only .26 of a degree Celsius and, as an interviewed climatologist pointed out, it was too soon to say whether this was the beginning of a reversal of the warming trend. It was a hopeful sign none the less, suggesting that the increasingly widespread use of crystech power sources in place of fossil fuels might at last be starting to have a remedial effect on the wounded ecosphere.

  Parry was halfway through his hundred sit-ups when an item came on that really made him sit up. It was introduced by an NN24 newscaster as a profile of the FPP officer at the centre of the shinju investigation, and it opened with a composite shot of his own caller-ID photo framed within the FPP’s TRUST logo. Grabbing the remote control, Parry upped the volume and watched as his life and career to date were condensed to a handful of sentences and a few stock library images.

  For the most part the profile was an accurate summation, although it did contain a couple of minor factual errors. It stated that he had been born and brought up in Kensington, not Kennington, and that he had achieved the rank of Detective Inspector in the Met. when he had only made Detective Sergeant. Neither mistake, however, reflected badly on him – if anything, the reverse – and, over-all, the tone of the piece was positive. He was described as one of the FPP’s finest assets (not the sort of evaluation with which he could sensibly quibble) and he was tipped as a potential future commissioner, which was a nice enough prediction to hear even though one unlikely to come true, given that van Wyk was in pole position for the job and moreover that, even if Parry was offered the commissionership, he would probably turn it down. The burdens of captaincy were sufficiently onerous for him, thank you very much.

  The next thing to appear onscreen was an image of Anna arriving at a New Venice nightclub, dressed in white capri pants and a cornflower-blue cotton shirt knotted at the waist, and managing to look, in this simple, navel-revealing outfit, sexier and more glamorous than most women did in full evening regalia.

  Instantly, Parry’s every sense was on high alert. What was Anna doing in a profile about him? What did NN24 know about him and her? What were they going to say? There was nothing that could be stated as fact – no proof of impropriety, no evidence that they had a relationship that was anything other than platonic. Yet there was always innuendo. Implications could be made and the viewers left to draw their own conclusions.

  Dread nettled in his belly.

  Then the truth dawned on him. The profile of him was over. This was another item altogether, a society-column piece about some sort of concert Anna had attended last night. The segue had been swift, and he had not noticed it. The fact that the two items had been placed next to each other was coincidence, nothing more. A quirk of the shuffle. A gift from the cosmic trickster.

  Parry grabbed the TV remote, hit Pause, and waited for his stomach to settle down. The onscreen image of Anna stood frozen in mid-step, her head canted, her teeth surrounding a laugh like a string of pearls.

  Anna had long been a media favourite, but now more so than ever. There was no shortage of rich and famous and beautiful women in the world, or, for that matter, in New Venice, but having been visited by tragedy – the untimely death of her husband from cancer – Anna had been elevated to a rarer category, that of people whose otherwise idyllic lives have been blighted by a cruel twist of fate. The public preferred the rich and famous and beautiful to have suffered in some way. Envy of the better-off was supposed to be a thing of the past, but it was still comforting for the average man or woman to know that even those who seemed to have it all were not immune to random misfortune. It was proof, if proof we
re needed, that absolute happiness was not a natural human state. Foreigners were the ones who were sublime, golden, apparently carefree. People of Earth? Not so.

  Sitting on the floor, forearms resting on knees, Parry shook his head and wondered at himself. How could he have thought that his and Anna’s affair was about to be revealed on air? Ridiculous. They had gone to inordinate lengths to ensure it remained a secret. No one else knew about it, and even if someone by some extraordinary chance did, that hypothetical individual would surely have blabbed, were he or she going to, long before now.

  No, he was confident the affair was buried treasure, locked safely away in the minds and memories of just two people. He had been haunted by an old fear, that was all. The fear of discovery that had prowled around him and Anna throughout the year-long duration of their affair. The sense of danger that had sometimes added savour to, and sometimes soured, their love.

  From their very first tryst (and he liked to think of their irregular, infrequent assignations as trysts – the word having an old-fashioned ring to it, and an echo of Gallic sadness) Parry had been dogged constantly by thoughts of what would happen if someone were to find out. Anna was a high-profile figure, held up by all as a paragon of womanhood and wifeliness. She was noted for her charitable works, her fund-raising dinners, her vocal support of good causes, her involvement in city life. If it got out that she had taken a lover, and moreover that her lover was a captain in the FPP, another relatively high-profile figure who in all respects was supposed to be above reproach, then the media would have a field day. Anna would be publicly shamed, and his career would be over. Even if Quesnel did not demand his resignation, which she would, he himself would feel impelled to tender it.

  Those had been the risks, and they had both been aware of them. By pursuing the affair, they had been putting at stake nothing less than their reputations and their futures, and from the vantage-point of hindsight Parry could see that it had been a kind of madness that had gripped them, and could see that part of the excitement, a small but significant part, had been how much they stood to lose should they be caught and exposed. If the value of an abstract thing can be gauged only by the severity of the consequences of its removal, then his and Anna’s adultery had carried a very high price-tag indeed.

  They had first met a little over three years ago, while Parry was still a lieutenant. His superior, the softly-spoken Seamus Balfe, had appointed him to the Civic Committee in place of Lieutenant van Wyk, who had just been promoted to captain of the North-West district. The Civic Committee convened on a quarterly basis to discuss Foreign Policy issues from the perspective of New Venetian residents. Nothing much was ever achieved at these meetings, but that was not really the point of them. They enabled the residents to keep a closer eye on the FPP and the FPP to show that it was happy to submit itself to scrutiny. The benefits to both sides were primarily therapeutic.

  Parry knew this, but anything that fostered mutual understanding between citizens and law enforcement was, he believed, worthwhile. He also knew, even before he attended a meeting, that his role on the committee was to make up FPP numbers. Commissioner Quesnel would be doing most of the talking. He was there to back her up if necessary and smile reassuringly throughout.

  He could remember the date of that first meeting, November 12th, and even that it was a Thursday. He could also remember vividly following Quesnel into the conference chamber at HQ and setting eyes on Anna for the first time.

  Of course he had known who she was, but recognising one of New Venice’s better-known faces and encountering in the flesh one of the most breathtakingly beautiful women he had ever seen were two entirely different things.

  There were three other residents’ representatives at the conference table, three other New Venetians of equal social standing to Anna, but it was only Anna whom Parry really noticed and, during the course of the meeting, only Anna whom he really paid any attention to. He could not remember at all what issues were discussed that evening, but he could recall without difficulty the way Anna had gestured when developing a point (describing a kind of horizontal spiral with her hand) and the way she had held her head on one side while listening to someone else speaking and the way she had taken sips of mineral water, pursing her mouth delicately so as not to leave lipstick marks on the glass. Most of all he remembered how, at one stage in the proceedings, her eye had caught his across the table and she had offered him a calm, easy smile. She was a woman accustomed to being stared at by men and gracious enough not to resent it.

  When the meeting was finished, during a period of informal chat before everyone departed, she came over to Parry, who was standing alone.

  “I didn’t feel we were properly introduced,” she said. “Anna Fuentes.”

  She held out her hand. Parry, on the point of manufolding SALUTATION, hastily untangled his fingers. “Of course you are,” he said, clumsily.

  Her hand felt soft. Not pliant, but gentle, accommodating.

  “And you,” she said, disengaging her grip from his, “are Jack Parry, and you have far too nice eyes for a policeman.”

  He spluttered a reply: “Well, you know, I don’t really consider myself a policeman. Not any more. An FPP officer is sort of a, well, a moral guardian. If that doesn’t sound too pompous.”

  “It does,” Anna said, laughing.

  He felt himself blush.

  “A little bit,” she amended, kindly. “But it’s good that you take your job so seriously. People in this city can be so frivolous at times.”

  “Thank you.”

  “May I make one small personal suggestion?”

  Parry hesitated, then manufolded INDULGENCE.

  “You’ll forgive me, I hope. It’s probably not my place to comment on such things, but your hair...” She winced, as if at her own presumption. “Sorry, this will sound rude, but I think it would look so much better if you did not do this with it.” She mimed brushing forwards over the top of her head. “A little bit of thinning is nothing to be ashamed of. If you were just to cut it short all over, it would look so much better. More distinguished.” She examined his expression. “But I’ve hurt your feelings, haven’t I?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Not at all.”

  “Perhaps you wear it that way because that’s how your wife likes it.”

  “I don’t have a wife.”

  “Girlfriend, then.”

  “Nor one of those.”

  “Boyfriend?”

  “Not my thing.”

  “I didn’t think so. So you’re unattached, captain. That surprises me. A man like you, with such nice eyes.”

  Parry mumbled some elliptical comment about work commitments and the dearth of single women in resort-cities, and then, to his relief, one of the other residents came over to talk to them.

  Three months later, at the next committee meeting, he was sporting an all-over Number Two crop.

  “I was right, wasn’t I?” Anna said after the meeting. “It does look better, doesn’t it?”

  Parry nodded. He was almost boyishly proud of the haircut. At first glance in the mirror at the barber’s, after he had undergone long, careful minutes of buzzing, tingling ministration with an electric razor, he had hated it. He had never before realised quite how knobbly and knurled and bumpy his head was, like a cauliflower floret. The haircut made him look like a mental patient, or a child-molester. At HQ, however, colleague after colleague had commented favourably on it, and their approval had won him over.

  “You weren’t offended, then?” Anna said. “I was afraid you might not be here today. That nasty Fuentes woman had scared you away.”

  “I think I’m made of sterner stuff than that,” he said.

  “I think you are.” So saying, she reached up and briefly, gently, stroked the bristles at the nape of his neck. “I do love the feel of close-cropped hair. It’s a bit like velvet.”

  Parry felt a tingle spread down his spine from the point where she had touched him. He darted a glance
around. No one, thank God, was looking.

  “And, you know,” Anna went on, “it’s much easier to trust a man who doesn’t try to hide his imperfections.”

  “Um,” said Parry.

  There was no more to that conversation, but for several seconds after Parry’s ineloquent monosyllable he and Anna gazed at each other, and her dark eyes, it seemed to him, were something you could fall into and keep falling into and never land, nor ever want to.

  Another three months passed, during which Parry found himself looking forward to the next Civic Committee meeting. Looking forward to it with a ridiculous eagerness. Even counting down the days till it was due.

  “I understand congratulations are in order,” Anna said, after the evening’s business was done. “Captain.”

  “Not quite. Seamus Balfe doesn’t retire for another two weeks.”

  “Still. A well-deserved promotion.”

  “Thank you.” Parry was convinced that Anna, although she could not know it, was in part responsible for his gaining the promotion. In some indefinable way she had changed him. Not just his haircut but his entire life had been improved by meeting her.

  “Your own wedge,” she said.

  “Yes. The South-West.”

  “It means we won’t be seeing each other at these meetings any more, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She lowered her gaze for a moment. “I think that would be a pity.”

  “Mrs Fuentes...”

  She gave him a comical, cockeyed look. “Is that how you’ve been thinking of me all this time? ‘Mrs Fuentes’?”

  “No. No.” For the first time aloud, he spoke her first name to her, as he had spoken it to her in his head countless times: “Anna.”