The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  “Pa had this built as his thinking place,” said Cecilia, smoothing the bottom of her dress and sitting down on the little beach. “He came here whenever he didn’t want to be bothered. By me or anyone else. Now I come here when I don’t want anyone to bother me.” Slipping off her patent-leather pumps, she buried her bare feet in the sand and began flexing her toes. “You too, Jack. Off with the shoes. Trust me, it feels great.”

  Parry settled down beside her clumsily, his co-ordination not all it should be. He screwed the base of his beer bottle into the sand, then reached down, unlaced and removed his shoes, and peeled off his socks. He dredged his feet into the sand. The upper layer was cool, but beneath there was residual warmth, the stored heat of the sun, a memory of day. He wriggled his toes like Cecilia and felt the fine grains sift deliciously between them.

  “This takes me back,” he said with a grin. “I haven’t played in sand since I was about nine.”

  “What, back in the reign of Queen Victoria?”

  “Oy, cheeky. Watch it. No, we used to go on beach holidays when I was little. Devon, usually, though a couple of times it was Wales. My sister and I had buckets and spades and we’d take it in turns to bury each other, then we’d gang up and bury my dad. Funny, I was remembering beach holidays earlier when I was talking to the NACA Liaison.”

  “Mr al-Shadhalitosis.”

  Parry chuckled. “That’s a little disrespectful, Cecilia.”

  “Oh, I didn’t come up with the name. Ma did. She always calls him that behind his back. Once, by mistake, she even called him it to his face.”

  “Oh dear. Did he notice?”

  “I don’t think so. But I nearly wet myself trying not to laugh.” Cecilia shuffled forwards on her bottom until the tips of her toes were just within reach of the waves. “I didn’t know they had beaches in the British Isles. Sandy ones. I thought they were all pebbly.”

  “There used to be quite a few. Not so many now.”

  “You don’t miss it much, do you? England?”

  “Sometimes. Not much.”

  “Ma says you’re more at home here than you ever were there.”

  “Does she?” It was good to know that Anna discussed him with Cecilia. It was good to know that she talked about him when he was not there. “Maybe I am. Which is odd, because you don’t think of a resort-city as somewhere to put down roots.”

  “You find that, too? I mean, I was born here, I’ve lived here all my life, on my passport card it has my nationality down as ‘New Venetian’, but what does that mean? It means I belong in a place where everything’s new and almost nobody’s permanent. You know, other girls at school, they can say ‘I’m Swiss’ or ‘I’m Brazilian’ or ‘I’m Malaysian’ or whatever, and that tells you something about them straight away. It fixes them for you. ‘I’m New Venetian’ – it doesn’t really mean anything.”

  “Not yet it doesn’t. Maybe one day.”

  “Though it does remind me of a joke. How do you make a New Venetian blind?”

  “Presumably the same way you make a Venetian blind, which is –”

  “Poke his eyes out!” Cecilia exclaimed, before he could pre-empt her on the punchline.

  “Yes, yes. Very good. Update of an old, old, old joke, but never mind.”

  “I could always say I’m half-Spanish, half-Romanian, I suppose,” Cecilia said, resuming the thread of her argument. “But I don’t feel Spanish or Romanian, and I can’t speak either language except for the swear-words I picked up from Ma and Pa. When I was small, they used to swear in their own languages to protect my innocent little ears. Ma still does sometimes, but mostly she doesn’t bother any more, just uses English.”

  “There’s another way of looking at it, of course.”

  “Swearing?”

  “Being a New Venetian.” Parry found himself settling into a paternal, didactic frame of mind. It wouldn’t do any harm to give Cecilia the benefit of his opinion. “You said being whatever nationality ‘fixes’ a person, and it does, but not necessarily in a good way. It pins them in place. It ties them to a certain set of conventions and values that have become fossilised over centuries. It binds them to certain patterns of thought, patterns of behaviour, certain traditions they can’t always escape. And here you are, a mixture of two races, East and West Europe combined, living in a city designed by Italians and run by North Africans and filled with people from God knows how many different countries. As a New Venetian, no one can make assumptions about you based on race or cultural heritage. You’re free of all that. You’re a citizen of the world – the world as it is now, not as it used to be. You’re the Foreign-era generation. The way forward. Independent of the past, the first step into the future. That’s a great thing to be. An enviable thing to be.”

  Cecilia peered at him, her face reflecting the dancing cerulean glow from the pool. “Forsooth and i’faith, Sir Jack! ‘The first step into the future.’ Are you sure that’s not overstating it a bit?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.” He picked up his bottle and took a swig. “Pretty sure.”

  “Well, if you say so. At school they sort of tell us that, too – how different things are now. And when they teach us about the past it’s always like, how awful it was. They teach History as if it’s, well, history, and good riddance. As if we need to learn about it only so that we know what to avoid, what mistakes not to make. Kind of like the rape-awareness talk the headmistress gave us last term. You know: ‘This won’t happen, but just to be on the safe side, these are the risks, this is what you’ve got to look out for...’”

  “Not a bad comparison.”

  “Was it really so awful? Before the Foreigners?”

  Parry rested the rim of the bottle against his lips and mused for several seconds. “I’d say so, yes. Things were pretty terrible towards the end. By ‘the end’, I mean the end of the pre-Foreign era, but at the time we didn’t know it was that and it still felt like it was the end. End, capital E. Of the world, of Civilisation As We Know It. Everything seemed to be coming to a head at once. All the problems we’d created for ourselves. All the conflicts that had been simmering quietly away in the background, never really resolving themselves. All the bad things we’d stored up and ignored and hoped would go away. Suddenly it was all starting to get worse, much worse. I think it was the flooding that really opened the floodgates – if that makes any sense, which it doesn’t, but I know what I’m talking about. When Bangladesh became uninhabitable and several Polynesian island-chains disappeared from the map, and storm-surges began inundating estuaries and destroying coastlines, that was when we finally realised that the warnings were coming true. Here at last was incontrovertible evidence of how seriously we’d fu–” He caught himself. “Messed up the environment.”

  “It’s all right. You can say ‘fucked’ in front of me. I have heard the word once or twice before.”

  “Well, I’ll try not to, if it’s all the same with you. For my own peace of mind. Yes, the flooding. That was when we finally knew that the damage we’d done was irreversible. For the first time it became a real possibility that the planet might not be able to support us any more, and it seemed like the seas were just going to keep on rising and there’d be less and less land to go about and we’d have to head for the hills and climb and keep climbing while the water got higher and higher, lapping at our heels, and there’d be no escape and eventually we would all drown. That was how it felt. Honestly it did. And a kind of panic set in, and you know how people act when they’re panicking. They’ll do anything, tread on anyone, fight, claw, punch, kick, even kill, if they think it’ll give them just that little bit better a chance of surviving. That was probably why so many wars flared up. Wars in places you’d never heard of, wars between countries you’d no idea hated each other. Wars fought over the most inhospitable and useless scraps of land you can think of, wars waged for the stupidest of reasons, wars that were about as pointless as wars can be, and that’s pretty pointless. There’s never been a war in your
lifetime, Cecilia. Believe me, you don’t know how amazing that is or how lucky you are. Every night on TV, to see pictures of yet more soldiers’ corpses strewn on the ground, yet more civilians killed in crossfire, yet more towns burning and children sobbing and women telling stories of being rounded up and systematically raped... After a while, you just couldn’t go on being appalled. You had to give up caring in order to stay sane. And then there were the Riots.”

  Parry stopped, and for a while the only sounds were the distant party and the soft cat-lick laps of the marine feature’s waves. Cecilia, unsure whether to prompt him to continue, decided to keep silent and fixed her attention on a crown-of-thorns starfish that was crawling on its feathery frond-limbs toward her toes. Just before it reached them, she flicked her foot in the water, and the starfish veered away. The sound of the splash also had the effect of rousing Parry from his verbal fermata.

  “The Hunger Riots,” he said. “But you don’t want me to bore you about those.”

  Cecilia detected a certain note in his voice, a certain need, and with a generosity that most would consider was beyond her years said, “Go on. Bore me.”

  “There isn’t much to say about them anyway. The crops failed. No one’s quite sure why, though everybody has an opinion.”

  “Cross-pollination from a batch of wheat with a faulty terminator gene. That’s what we were told. The final nail in the coffin of the whole genetic-modification thing.”

  “Could have been. Could have been. Or it could have been some pre-existing crop blight that mutated, or it could just have been the fact that the weather was up the spout and there was so very little rain that spring. Whatever the reason, in Europe and America there were incredibly poor yields. It wasn’t a complete wipe-out by any means. There was enough grain to go round. But we were used to super-abundance, we were used to an excess of food on the supermarket shelves, and suddenly that wasn’t the case any more and we got scared. Other continents had bad harvests too, but ours were the worst affected, and it all compounded the general sense of panic. All over the country there was hoarding of food, black-marketeers were prospering, shops were getting looted, and in London there were protests on the streets, demonstrations against the government. Our leaders were telling us not to worry, you see, to stay calm, the situation was not as dire as it seemed, and that wasn’t what people wanted to hear because back then it was automatically assumed that whenever politicians opened their mouths they were lying. And the protests went on for days and tempers frayed and then things turned violent.”

  He took a long pull on his beer.

  “The thing was, I could see their point. It was my job to help control the rioters, but I could see their point. We were sent in, the police, hundreds of us, to contain the situation, and we did eventually, but all the time I was thinking: I could be one of these people – the people I was staring at through my visor and shield, the people I was trying to stop damaging property and hurting one another and us. I could be one of them. Because we were all feeling it to some extent. The fear. The sense that civilisation was slipping out of control, that things were falling apart, the centre not holding. If not for my job, my oath as a policeman, I could have been among of the crowds I was being ordered to charge at. Because they looked angry but they weren’t. Not in their eyes. In their eyes they were just plain terrified. And then...”

  His voice trailed away and, after several seconds of silence, he slowly he turned his head to gaze at Cecilia.

  “She was about your age,” he said softly. His eyes looked off-kilter in their sockets, beer-bleared.

  “Who? Who was?”

  “Perhaps a shade older.”

  “Jack?” Cecilia had never seen Parry in anything other than full control of himself. Now he seemed to be drifting, his own centre not holding, and she was unnerved by the sight. And who was this “she” he was talking about, this unknown female who had intruded into the conversation?

  Parry raised a finger, then lowered it; opened his mouth, then closed it. “No,” he said finally, and Cecilia was relieved to see him straighten up, sharpen, regain focus, recover self-mastery.

  “Old thoughts,” he said. “Bad thoughts. I should really have put it all behind me by now.”

  “It can’t have been fun,” Cecilia said, and immediately congratulated herself on having come up with the world’s most banal statement.

  “It wasn’t. Any of it. They were dark days. Looking back you feel a bit foolish, but at the time it truly seemed as though we were on the downward slope, gaining momentum, a big chasm somewhere unseen ahead, and nothing to stop us, nothing to save us. For once the sandwich-board loonies began to look as if they might be right after all. Apocalypse. Catastrophe. Cataclysm. Even the sanest of us were starting to have doubts. Even atheists were turning to the Bible, flicking through the last pages for clues. Room running out, food scarce, war everywhere... Without the Foreigners we might still have pulled through, who knows? Possibly. Sometimes I like to think that we would have. Most of the time I’m just glad we never had to try.”

  The waves of the microcosmic ocean fell over themselves several times, struggling vainly up the sand.

  “We’d got into a state where we were like a classroom full of children before the lesson begins,” Parry said. “Chaos reigning. Ink-pellets flying. Everyone yelling at the tops of their voices. Pigtails being pulled. And then in walks teacher, and all of a sudden it’s hands on desks, spines straight, books out, and the room has gone so quiet that you can hear the last paper plane come skimming in to land on the floor.”

  “Ink-pellets? Books? When were you last in a classroom?”

  Parry gave a rueful laugh. “The point is, the Foreigners couldn’t have chosen their moment better. What we needed right then was something that would force us to stop and take stock and start to behave again, and we got it. You know that religious movement based in Wyoming, I think it is? The one whose followers believe Foreigners are emissaries of God, sent to Earth to deliver us in our hour of need? I don’t hold with that myself, because it doesn’t really fit the facts and because it’s just a little too metaphysical-mumbo-jumbo for my liking. But, annoyingly, there is something to the idea. If the golden giants had come any earlier, there’s a chance we might not have appreciated them so much, and if they’d come any later, there might not have been any humans left on Earth to greet them. Deliberately or not, they arrived at exactly the right time. Our hour of need.”

  “What are they, Jack? Aliens? Angels? What?”

  “I don’t know, Cecilia. The simplest, bravest, most honest three words any human being can say: I don’t know. And I don’t think we’re meant to know, any of us. If Foreigners have some kind of higher cosmic purpose, and I don’t believe they do, but if they do, then it’s to keep us wondering, keep us guessing.”

  He bent forward and started brushing sand from his feet.

  “Anyway. Perhaps we ought to get back to the house. They’ll be missing us. Missing you, certainly.”

  27. Slur

  THEY WASHED THEIR feet in the water, shook them dry and put their shoes back on. Cecilia patted sand from her skirt while Parry briskly brushed the tail of his jacket and the seat of his trousers.

  Outside, Cecilia extinguished the underwater light, and they waited as their eyes adapted to the gloom and the path glimmered back into visibility.

  The return journey to the house was a slower, less sure-footed affair than the outward journey had been. Both of them were feeling the effects of the beer, and the surface of the path now seemed less even and the shadows that striped it hid all sorts of obstacles that had not been there previously. Each laughed whenever the other stumbled. Soon each was stumbling on purpose, just to make the other laugh.

  It pleased Parry that he and Cecilia got on so well. It also struck him as remarkable that two people who in so many ways were so utterly unalike should have sensibilities so similar. Here was she, fifteen years old, born into fabulous wealth, educated by home boa
rd as most children were these days until the age of eleven, then sent to boarding school so that she could acquire “interpersonal skills” as well as further knowledge – and here was he, nearly fifty, a car-worker’s son from Kennington, educated at state schools of the common-or-garden desks-and-teachers variety, a former copper, a Foreign Policy Police captain. Talk about chalk and cheese. It just went to show that...

  Well, he could not think exactly what it went to show. But he liked the comfortable familiarity between him and Cecilia, and he felt that, were he presented with the opportunity, he would make a good stepfather to her, and he flattered himself that she, in turn, would enjoy being his stepdaughter. In an ideal world, it might come to pass. And this was, was it not, an ideal world? A world where the right things happened to the right people when the time was right? Yes, he believed that more firmly than ever. Infused with alcohol and agapé, he was convinced that everything would be resolved for the better. Even his current travails with the shinju deaths. It would all work out for the better.

  Eventually the path brought him and Cecilia back through the rhododendron thickets and pines to the edge of the lawn. There was more than sufficient light to see by here, and thus no excuse any more to pretend to be clumsy. Both of them, as with one mind, straightened up and tried to look sensible and dignified, but the sight of each other doing so set them off laughing again. Still chuckling, heads bent together conspiratorially, they ambled across the lawn to the house.

  Guests were on the terrace, clustered in knots. Parry spotted Reich there, standing with two people – the NACA administrator with responsibility for transport in New Venice and the owner of The Gondoliers, one of the city’s trendiest bar-brasseries. Reich was engaged in animated discussion with his companions but was also eyeing Parry and Cecilia sidelong as they approached, his face creased in squinting curiosity. Parry guessed that he and Cecilia were silhouetted against the tree spotlights and that Reich could not make out who they were. The trad-music promoter continued to watch them until they reached the foot of the terrace steps. Then the glow of the house lights revealed their identities, and his look of curiosity was almost instantly replaced by a smile. Almost instantly. In the moment of transition between the two expressions, Parry saw – thought he saw – something else flit fleetingly across the American’s features, something tight and cunning that vanished into the smile like a fox into undergrowth.