The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  There were several humans other than Parry here, sitting or strolling, enjoying the random anemogenic performance. There were also, as Parry had hoped there would be, Foreigners, two of them stalking about, each tracing its own path among the instruments.

  Taking up a position at a corner of the garden, he watched the two golden giants wander. Every wail and whine of the instruments caused them to quiver, but it was the moments when the wind inspired a fortuitous euphony that really set them going. A tremor-racked ecstasy overcame them for as long as the chord endured, their shudders subsiding as it faded.

  On any other day, Parry would have found observing the Foreigners consoling; he would have derived a vicarious delight from their pleasure. Today, he quickly discovered that this usually reliable source of consolation was denied him. Watching the golden giants, he felt nothing. No emotion was stirred. Whatever it was in him that responded to Foreigners, like a string resonating in sympathy to the plucking of another identically-tuned string, was, at present, absent.

  He told himself that all was not lost. He told himself that Anna had not completely dashed his hopes.

  He would almost have believed this, too, were it not for the dull, sick ache in his belly – an ache that had nothing to do with hunger – and the hot, damnable pricking in his eyes.

  INTERLUDE

  One Month Ago...

  HIS APARTMENT’S ALMOST empty. You’ve seen jail cells with more furniture. There’s some kind of Zen thing going on here, you think. Contemplative space. What a loser.

  The guy is as anal as his surroundings. So anal, in fact, it’s a wonder he can ever stand up after he’s sat down. He comes across like a bit of a faggot, too. Maybe is a faggot.

  But you pour on the charm anyway. Pour it on all the more intently because you think he might’ve taken a fancy to you. You’re not above using your looks in this way. You know what you’ve got. You’ve seen what it can get you, this gilded exterior of yours. You can make anyone like you if you want to. Admire you. Love you. But no one’s ever allowed past the outside. No one ever gets to see how you are within.

  “Listen,” you say, “I know you still have your doubts. It’s asking a lot of you. I understand that. But think about what you stand to gain. As someone once told me not so long ago, you don’t get reward without risk, or words to that effect.”

  “But if I’m caught...”

  “You won’t be. Trust me. You won’t be doing anything that’ll make people suspicious. You’ll just be going about your business as usual. If you keep your head, no one’ll be any the wiser.”

  “I’m not a good liar.”

  “You don’t need to be. You only need to be a good actor. You only need to be able to play yourself. And anyone can do that. We do it all the time, don’t we? Playing the person we want everyone to think we are. It’ll be a piece of cake.”

  “It sounds easy.”

  “It is easy! This day and age, everyone’s prepared to take you for what you are. People aren’t geared to look for cheating and duplicity any more. They see what they see, and they’re content to leave it at that. Which makes life much simpler for those who are a bit smarter, who can play a cleverer game.”

  “Why me? Why, of all the people you could have chosen, did you choose me?”

  Here, you lay on the doe-eyes. You lean forward. Your voice is all sincerity.

  “Because I wanted someone my age. I wanted someone who has ambitions but maybe hasn’t gone the right way about starting to realise them. I wanted someone eager, hungry for more from life.”

  And you wanted someone who has yet to make his mark in this city, and therefore knows he has less to lose. Someone young and impressionable. You’ve had access to news files and official documents. It wasn’t hard to zero in on a suitable candidate.

  “You realise how much I’m trusting you here,” you add. “Already I’ve put this much faith in you. I wouldn’t have done that if I didn’t believe there was some kind of bond between us. I feel we share similar aspirations, similar goals. From the moment I first got in touch with you, I felt here was a person I had a lot in common with. Someone who understood me as I understood him. Maybe you got that impression also?”

  He bobs his head a little, looking shy. The hook’s well and truly embedded. Now to reel him in.

  “You promise I can’t get caught?”

  “Hey, I guarantee it. You’re smart, you’re quick-witted, unlike the rest of the dopes you work with. You’ll run rings around them.”

  “And once it’s over?”

  “You can stay, you can leave – it’s up to you. Since no one’ll know you were involved, no one’ll care what you do afterwards. The money’s in blind trusts. Live on it unobtrusively, spend it carefully, and there’s no reason anybody’ll ever link you to this.”

  “Blind trusts,” he murmurs. He looks at you. Gazes hopefully. Longingly.

  You gaze back.

  Blind trust.

  FOURTH MOVEMENT

  31. Anticipation

  PARRY AWOKE IN the still small hours of Sunday morning and knew, with an awful visceral certainty, that bad news was on the way.

  Lying on his back, sprawled diagonally across the bed with the top sheet corkscrewed around his torso, a sure sign of a restless night, he waited for the sense of foreboding to subside. Around him he could hear a faint hum and whisper and hiss within the walls, the noise of the building’s circulatory and nervous systems carrying on their ceaseless surreptitious activity. Snug-fitting window blinds shut out all external light, so that he was surrounded by a darkness that was seamless and absolute. The bedroom wombed and cocooned him, and he told himself that there was nothing to worry about. He must have had a bad dream, that was all – a nightmare that had evaporated at the moment of waking, leaving no memory of itself, just a residue of anxiety behind.

  He told himself this, but as the minutes passed the sense of foreboding would not go away. He felt it as a weight beneath his solar plexus. As an itch in his fingers. As a dry ache at the back of his throat.

  In the end, there was nothing else for it. He knew he was not going to go back to sleep. Sighing, he groped for the bedside-lamp switch.

  After putting on a bathrobe and emptying his bladder, he went to the kitchen and switched the kettle on. The clock on the electric stove read a quarter to five. He stood there, blearily eyeing the line of empty beer bottles that were waiting by the sink to be washed and sent down the recycling chute, like a row of condemned prisoners lined up for execution. It had been a bit of a session last night. He had visited Britten’s for Britons on the way back from the Da Capo, bought a brace of four-packs of imported stout, and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening working his way through them while at the same time spinning aimlessly through the almost unending range of TV channels and e-ther feeds. By about six he had become physically numb. By eight he had become mentally numb as well. He could barely recall undressing and getting into bed. Surprisingly, he did not feel too hung-over now. Perhaps it was too early for that. Possibly he was still drunk. The main thing was that thanks to the beer he had been able to stop thinking about Anna for a while, and about the shinjus; he had been able to blank these painful preoccupations from his mind and be, if only temporarily, just a simple, untroubled man once more.

  The kettle bubbled to the boil, and Parry, every action stupor-slow, warmed the teapot, scooped in tea leaves, poured in steaming water, grabbed a mug and a carton of milk, placed them with the pot on a small woven-rush tray, and carried the tray into the living room. As he slid open the balcony windows one-handed, tendrils of chilly air seeped in, snaking around his bare calves, spurring his leg hairs to rise like quills. He took the tray out onto the balcony and laid it down on the small plastic table there, then pulled up a chair and, drawing the bathrobe’s lapels tight together under his chin, sat.

  All around him the city lay silent and dreaming, motionless in the pre-dawn dark, static beneath the icy spindle of the fading stars. There
were lights on outside front doors and in the heads of lamps along the canal and bridges, their glows blurry, faintly hazed. The surface of the canal itself had a perfect, gleaming smoothness, as though its water were black glass, solid enough to walk on. Palms with their firework bursts of frond stood frozen in the breezeless air. Paused between the hurly-burly of late-night escapades and the gummy-eyed stirrings of a new day, poised as though mesmerised and ready to come round on command, New Venice waited. Refreshed and cleansed by the night, it waited like a shrived penitent dressed all in white. Innocent again, for now.

  The only thing moving in the stillness was the steam from the teapot spout, which rose hypnotically in a twisting, self-wrapping wisp that dissipated into invisibility some twenty centimetres above its point of origin. And gazing at it, Parry found his thoughts drifting inexorably back to another sleepless early morning.

  Although the Debut had been almost exactly a third of his lifespan ago, he remembered it more vividly than he did any other event in his past, with the possible exception of the Hunger Riots. He imagined the same must be true of every human being who had been old enough at the time to be aware of what was going on. He could recall the entire experience in immaculate detail, starting with being roused by a neighbour, one of the gay marrieds who owned the flat below his (a couple of night owls, they were almost always out clubbing after dark and seldom got to bed before three a.m.). He remembered the gritty prickle in his eyes and the woken-too-soon heaviness in his head as he was wrenched from sleep by a hammering on the main door to his flat and a male voice calling out, “Mr Parry! Mr Parry! Turn on your TV! Now!”

  His first thought, as he groaned out of bed, was that it had finally happened: one of the world’s many nuclear powers had finally gone and done it. That was the only reason he could think of why a neighbour would wake him at – Christ! – half-past three and tell him to watch television. So who had dropped the Bomb on whom, he wondered as he stumbled grimly out of the bedroom, struggling into the first item of clothing that came to hand, a pair of sweatpants. Korea on Japan? Pakistan on India? Israel on Iraq? Brazil on Mexico? Burma on Thailand? Russia on one of the satellite republics with which it was constantly skirmishing? Those were chaotic days, before the Debut. As he had told Cecilia, it was hard not to believe that an End was on its way.

  In the living room he had fumbled with the On button on the television remote control, expecting that no matter which channel the TV happened to be tuned to, it would be transmitting fuzzy, shuddering images of devastation: firestorms, charred bodies, shattered buildings, roads crammed with frantic evacuees, the terrible grey snow of fallout, perhaps even (if someone had had a camera to hand and the presence of mind to use it) a shot of a distant mushroom cloud on the horizon, like a gigantic fist clenched against the sky. What now? he remembered thinking as the wallscreen ignited into life. What will become of us now? The genie is out of the bottle. If one country has pressed the button, others won’t think twice about doing so. This is the first step down the long, slippery slope.

  But of course what appeared on the TV screen was not images of humankind’s final, irredeemable descent into Hell. What appeared was almost diametrically the opposite.

  The reports were coming in from Sydney and Guadalcanal, where it was mid-afternoon, and from Lhasa and Rangoon, where it was mid-morning, and from Manila and Beijing, where it was midday. They were coming in from Hawaii and Tahiti, where dusk was gathering in the west, and from Aden and Johannesburg, where rosy-fingered dawn was creeping in from the east. They were coming in from Seattle and Vancouver, where it was late evening, and from Washington and Lima, where it was close to midnight. They were coming in from the Canaries and the Azores, where it was just a little earlier than London, and from Rome, Madrid and Tel Aviv, where it was just a little later, and from London itself, too. All across the planet, British foreign correspondents and local English-speaking reporters were relaying the news, those with handheld microphones gripping them tightly, and all of them talking in tingling, incredulous tones.

  “It appears as if it could be some kind of publicity stunt...”

  “Nobody is exactly sure what time the first one was sighted...”

  “All I can say is, it’s approximately two-and-a-half metres in height, and...”

  “And as you can see, it’s just wandering around, looking around. I say ‘it’, but it could be ‘he’, it could be ‘she’...”

  “So far there’s been no word from the White House or from the United Nations, where the ten-nation Security Council has just convened an emergency session...”

  “Incredible, absolutely incredible...”

  “People are scared to approach them, but as far as I can see, they are not hostile. I repeat, so far these creatures, these beings, have not acted in any way whatsoever that could be perceived as hostile...”

  “The feeling among people I’ve been talking to here is that this must be a practical joke of some sort, but if so, no one has any idea who might be responsible, and I think if you look at the images we’re sending you, you’ll be able to see quite clearly that this cannot be a joke, this has to be something else altogether...”

  It all unfolded at a strangely leisurely pace, like the telling of some old familiar legend. Indeed, there were times when Parry felt as though what he was witnessing was something which had happened years ago; that the entire broadcast was a lavish, documentary-style recreation of some famous historical event. This sense of déjà vu came and went throughout the morning, and he wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that numerous science-fiction films had dramatised various versions of this scenario, the arrival on Earth of beings from beyond, so that the scenes on television – the satellite-bounced reportage, the faces of the studio presenters as they strove to keep their expressions impassive and unperplexed, the politicians with their mantra of no-comment-at-this-time, the shots of the non-terrestrials themselves – echoed images that were ingrained in the collective unconscious. Perhaps humankind had rehearsed this fable so often in its celluloid imagination that, now that the fable had actually become fact, everyone involved seemed to be playing a part, spouting lines of dialogue from a script, copying gestures and expressions that had been perfected by actors. Life, in other words, imitating art, and faithfully, but with little spontaneity.

  That was not to say it was not exciting. It was. It was thrilling to see the footage of these “golden giants”, as one commentator dubbed them, swishing here and there in a world-spanning variety of locations, and to hear the quiver in the reporters’ voices (that quiver, more than anything else, confirmed that what was going on was way out of the ordinary). It was thrilling, but alarming, too, for of course no one had any idea what the creatures wanted, what they were here for. They looked peaceable enough, but again, science-fiction films had warned of the possibility that a race of non-terrestrials might have sinister designs on good old Planet Earth. There had been no death-rays as yet, no demands to be taken to Earth’s leaders, no attempt to grab hold of bystanders and start snacking on their brains, but that did not necessarily mean the tall golden visitors’ intentions were honourable. These first arrivals could be merely a scouting party, here to reconnoitre the terrain while the invasion fleet loitered somewhere beyond Earth’s atmosphere, cloaked against detection, ready to swoop once the signal was given.

  And yet somehow it was obvious that these humanoid beings were not inimical, nor likely to be so. With their slightly stooped posture and their laboured way of walking, they did not have the bearing of fearsome, anthropophagous conquerors from the stars. On the contrary, there was a distinct gentility about them. Everywhere they went, they looked around them with a kind of donnish bemusement, as though everything they saw was new and different and ever so fascinating. When they gathered together in those gaggles of two or three, they really looked as though they were conferring, comparing notes, silently recommending one another to go in a certain direction to view a certain sight. Parry was not t
he only person to draw the conclusion, on the strength of the television footage alone, that the creatures’ reason for coming here was nothing more insidious than curiosity. They were checking the place out. They were, quite simply, tourists.

  Few people went to work that day. Some stayed at home because they feared the end of the world was nigh, but most stayed at home simply so that they could continue watching television. Parry, while as keen as anyone to keep abreast of the situation, felt that keenness outweighed by a sense of duty. He knew he really ought to show his face at the station, and so around seven-thirty, the usual time, he reluctantly got dressed in his customary sports-jacket-and-trousers ensemble and left his flat, walking out into an autumn morning that was brisk and bright but with just enough of a chill snap in the air to augur yet another long, harsh winter.

  He had never, not even on Christmas Day, seen a London so quiet or so still. It was as though some apocalypse had taken place after all. The streets were empty of moving vehicles apart from the occasional taxi or bus, whose engines, blatting echoingly between the buildings, sounded inordinately loud in the hush. The urban birdsong, by contrast, was muted, as though its participants were so stunned by the lack of competition from traffic that the most they could muster was the odd timid peep or warble. Parry came across several dogs trotting around untended, their owners presumably having let them out for a walk and neglected to let them back in again, and he passed a front garden where a pair of children, too young to understand the full import of what was going on, were bouncing solemnly up and down on a wooden seesaw. Whenever he did encounter another adult pedestrian, it was either a tramp too crazed or booze-blitzed to register that there was something unusual about the city today, or it was someone like him, trudging unwillingly to work. In the latter instance he and the other commuter might exchange a remark as their paths crossed, something to the effect that there was no rest for the wicked, or they might simply share a rueful look. Either way, in the phlegmatic British manner, neither made reference to the phenomenal events that were taking place, except obliquely, by indicating the fact that, for some people at least, life had to carry on as normal, no matter what.