The Uninvited

by Liz Jensen

  He shouts back. ‘You’re a freakman, Hesketh. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘She made a sign at you and you made a sign back, I saw it! Like this!’ I imitate the signal again. The sign of the eye.

  ‘NO!’ he shouts. ‘I didn’t do anything! She didn’t do anything! I don’t even know her!’ His face is pink and hot-looking with rage.

  I can’t tolerate lying. But I can’t prove he isn’t telling the truth.

  ‘Come on.’ I start walking fast, folding paper mentally in an angry rhythm: a single sheet that gets smaller and smaller and smaller, beyond the nine folds that are physically possible, until it is a dense cube. By the time I turn left on to the B305, Freddy’s whimpering. I don’t want him to cry.

  ‘All right, Freddy K?’

  I reach down and hug him. The bike wobbles as he clings to me. I close my eyes. ‘It’s OK, Freddy K. I’m sorry I shouted.’

  For the remainder of the journey, I push him on the bike.

  Apart from a very small sign on the outer gate, Battersea Care Unit does not draw attention to itself. We park the bike under a fire escape. The building, set back from the road on an industrial estate, is a warehouse conversion spread over three floors. The reception area is unmanned, but there’s a computer and clear instructions regarding the electronic registration system. The names Hesketh Lock and Frederick Kalifakidis are already on a list marked SIGNING IN TODAY. I tick the box to confirm our arrival and scan in our identification documents as prompted. I notice a CCTV camera angled at us from the corner of the ceiling. A message saying CLEARED appears on the screen with a code number: 5672. I am to use it to open the red door and proceed with the child to the third-floor reception facility. We take the stairs. The walls are either bare brick or a milky yellow that Dulux calls Sundance. The third floor is a large, airy space overlooking an internal courtyard below, dominated by a spacious sandpit filled with children.

  The swirl of cochineal bodies makes me think of swarming blood cells.

  Freddy is instantly galvanised.

  ‘Hey, cool!’ He points at them and grins and I see the dark-haired pixie from page 392 again.

  There’s a lot of noise down there. The red uniforms consist of loose elasticated trousers and jackets that zip at the front. The children’s first names are stencilled on the back of the jackets in large black letters. Many of them are much younger than Freddy. There is the usual racial mix, for London, with skin colours ranging from Ecru to Burnt Ebony. Many – the fair-haired kids especially – are wearing sunglasses. There is a slide and a set of swings, but the kids aren’t using them. Those in the sandpit are digging industriously, raking its surface with their bare hands, or just sitting and sifting sand through their fingers. Elsewhere, there are groups clustered around the five rowan trees.

  ‘And hey, look in there!’ Freddy has turned, and he’s pointing to a room to our left with a glass door, through which we can see more red-clad kids circling, some at a run, others sauntering. When fish shoal, or birds flock, their movements are simple to model mathematically. I can imagine the same models applying here. Elias Canetti’s classification of crowds comes to mind too: the crowd always wants to grow; within the crowd there is equality; the crowd loves density; the crowd needs direction. Two female staff in white jackets stand at the edge, supervising what is effectively a bio-mass in a state of dynamic flux.

  ‘Hello, Hesketh. And you must be Freddy Kalifakidis.’ We both turn. Naomi Benjamin is just as striking in the flesh as she was on the screen. We shake hands. You couldn’t tell on Skype, but she’s a few years older than me – perhaps early forties. Big dark eyes. Short, dark hair and freckles. A short white jacket – it must be the staff uniform – over a Coral Sunset sweater and Charcoal jeans. ‘Freddy.’ She squats to greet him at eye level, giving me a view of her impressive cleavage. I will inevitably stare at her breasts in an inappropriate manner. I may even be doing so now. Kaitlin always accused me of being prone to this. ‘I’m Naomi. Welcome.’ She smiles and grooves form around her mouth, which means she must smile a lot. But unlike me, Freddy isn’t interested in Naomi Benjamin: he’s manoeuvring himself sideways in order to get a better look at the kids in the gym room. ‘I’m going to take you to the nurse. She’ll ask you some questions and then you can join the others. OK?’

  ‘Yeah!’ He punches the air with his small fist. ‘Bye then, Hesketh.’ He doesn’t seem at all fazed. I feel a pang. Am I going to lose him to this milling tribe so soon?

  ‘In a while, Crocodile,’ I tell him.

  ‘See you later, Constipator,’ he says. He changed the Alligator a year ago, after a visit to the doctor.

  I turn and watch them walking off together.

  Naomi has a very firm-looking bottom.

  ‘Can I let you in on something?’ says a voice in my ear. I whirl around. ‘There are advantages to being my age. Fewer distractions.’

  ‘Professor!’

  ‘Hesketh!’

  He clasps my hand. We shake long and hard, and then he hugs me. He’s wearing a white jacket like Naomi’s. I am very happy to see him.

  ‘Delighted to see you, boy. Are you still very keen on justice?’

  ‘Is it something you turn your back on?’

  ‘Then you’ll agree it’s not fair that you’re still looking like a pin-up while I’ve turned into an old crock with angina and varicose veins.’

  I can see that he has aged. But when he smiles, he’s like a crinkled child. ‘Let me give you a quick tour.’ He drapes his arm across my shoulders just as he always used to, and together we walk down the stairs. The Unit has been running for a month, he explains. ‘But since Sunday, it’s been crisis management. There’s no telling if it’s peaked. And there’s certainly no keeping a lid on it any more. We figure that if we can understand the syndrome, we can work out how to reverse it. But it’s a race against time and right now, we’re losing.’ He glances at me sideways. ‘In fact, I’ll be frank and tell you I’m not hopeful. Some of the other units are experimenting with drugs. They’ve found they can suppress some of the symptoms. But these are strong medications with unpleasant side effects. They can’t be used in the long term. And they don’t address the underlying cause. Whatever that is.’

  Freddy’s not having drugs, I think. Full stop.

  At the bottom of the stairs he unlocks the door with a card-swipe.

  ‘Like a prison,’ I say. It’s just an observation of fact, but the professor turns and looks at me. His eyes are like they were when Helena was dying: wild, with dilated irises. Have I made a gaffe?

  ‘It is a prison. A very necessary one. From which, as you can see, they can’t escape.’ I nod. It’s not quite sinking in that Freddy’s becoming a prisoner. But I realise it needs to, and that I must adjust my perceptions accordingly. ‘We have army backup if we need it. But believe me, your boy’s safer in here than on the outside. There’s quite a crackpot movement developing. We’ve had staff targeted too.’ His smile is a small joyless wince. ‘For aiding and abetting extra-terrestrials in their nefarious bid to rule the world.’

  We enter the outdoor playground area, where he waves at the three supervising staff: a thin, muscular young man – I saw him before, on Skype – a girl of about eighteen with one arm in a sling, a semi-shaved head and a big red scar on her scalp and an older woman sitting on a bench. All three have the same alert, flitting look you see on the faces of bodyguards. ‘We have twenty medics but it’s nowhere near enough. The staff you see here are volunteers. The young one there: Hannah. She joined us straight from hospital. Her sister Jodie killed both their parents. They were all in the car. Kid grabbed the wheel and forced them off the road. You’d never guess she was a murderer, would you?’ He nods at a small girl with an angelic face and wildly matted hair, sitting with a group of others sifting sand through their fingers. ‘Not everyone’s up to it. Some’ll stay a day and decide they can’t handle it. Others don’t even last that long. Most parents who leave the
ir kids here can’t seem to get away fast enough. They get emotional when they see them like this.’ He stops and chuckles suddenly. ‘Naomi let some nuns in yesterday. But it turned out they were here to try out some sort of exorcism. So that was the end of that.’

  He stops and puts up a finger: we stand and listen for a moment. Some of the children are making low hooting noises. Others are clicking their tongues. Picture the monkey cage. ‘Their language degrades very fast in here. You’ll hear snatches of speech, but it’s pretty minimal.’

  ‘Glossolalia?’

  ‘Except that I’m sure the sounds actually mean something. They’re communicating. That’s one of the things I’d like you to investigate.’

  ‘Freddy used a Cantonese word yesterday,’ I tell him. ‘He said lap-sap. It means rubbish. It’s possible he heard it from me. But I was surprised. One of the saboteurs used it too.’ I wonder: How long before Freddy starts hooting and clicking like the others?

  Suddenly, the muscular man shouts, ‘Hey, stop!’ and charges up to a small boy who has wandered over to the corner of the sandpit where he has lowered his trousers, apparently to defecate.

  ‘That’s Flynn,’ says Professor Whybray. ‘He’s ex-army. Useful.’ Flynn grabs the boy around the chest, hauls him up, and marches over to a door marked TOILETS. ‘We get a lot of that. In the dissociative state basic knowledge is absent. Hygiene. Literacy. Speech. Take that one there.’ He’s referring to a blonde, skinny girl aged about eight. She’s standing still, with an alert and watchful look, both hands poised in mid-air, her line of vision constantly shifting. Suddenly, she makes a swift grab into the air and closes her fist. ‘Hattie’s our number-one insect-catcher.’

  I think of Freddy eating woodlice.

  ‘Does she—’ Just then the girl slams her hand to her mouth and licks her palm.

  ‘Strange, how when you spend time around something, it comes to seem quite normal. Excuse me,’ says the professor, reaching in his pocket. ‘Phone call.’ He walks off to take it, stuffing a finger in his other ear. On the other side of the playground a door opens and a small figure enters.

  ‘Freddy K!’ I call out. Naomi’s following.

  He’s clad in a red suit too big for him. I’m expecting him to run up and greet me, but instead he peels away and heads for some children squatting in a circle, all evidently focused on something. Within seconds he has been absorbed into the cluster. Naomi joins me and we stand watching them. The clucking and hooting reminds me of the soft babble of hens. A small blonde girl seems to be the ringleader of Freddy’s group: she’s clearly giving orders. Freddy looks anxious, then joins the others in an odd miming act involving furious digging movements.

  ‘You’ll see a lot of role-play like that in here,’ says Naomi. ‘Victor thinks it involves food. Hunter-gatherer stuff. By the way, Hesketh. I just wanted to say, I’m so sorry about Kaitlin. Poor Steph. She’s devastated.’

  ‘They’re lovers.’ I wasn’t planning to say this. It just came out.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So you’re a lesbian too?’

  She laughs. ‘I don’t see how that follows. As it happens, I’m not, no. As if it’s your business.’

  Next I want to know if she has a boyfriend, but since this might be perceived as not being my business either I ask, ‘Do you have children?’

  She shakes her head and makes a face that might be either rueful or humorous: I am not sure which. ‘Nope. And you know what? Lately I’ve been pretty happy about that.’ Is this what Freud called gallows humour? ‘Look at them.’ She gestures at them in a broad arc. ‘A new generation of unhygienic, insect-eating murderers. That’s the population crisis sorted. Did you know that condom sales have gone through the roof? And people are queuing up to get sterilised?’

  I do a mental flow chart. ‘Well it would certainly be good for sustainability,’ I say, remembering some of my conversation with the Swiss demographer. ‘But it would be bad for the economy in the short term.’

  She laughs. ‘A passion-killer on every front then.’

  I take another sideways look at her breasts. D. D is good. ‘I haven’t lost the sexual urge myself.’

  ‘So I see. Victor told me about your unique skill set, as he called it. But we need good staff and beggars can’t be choosers.’ The grooves on either side of her mouth reappear. I can’t fathom her. But I’d like to try kissing her. Professor Whybray comes back from his phone call.

  ‘Some new data’s come in,’ he says. ‘I need to go and check it. Let’s meet in the Observation Room. Naomi, can you finish off the tour? You can skip the staff room and the dorms.’ And he is gone.

  I like Naomi. I also like what is inside her Coral Sunset sweater. Though if we became intimate, we would have to have a discussion about the palette of her wardrobe.

  ‘The canteen.’ She points to a door on the other side of the playground. Inside, about forty children are congregated at long trestle tables, grabbing and jostling. They are wearing beige overalls over their uniforms, and scooping food directly from unmarked tins into their mouths. ‘They won’t use knives or forks,’ she explains.

  ‘What’s in the tins?’

  ‘A fresh, nutritious balanced diet in recyclable ring-pull containers. The kids inspect them quite thoroughly first. If one’s dented, they won’t touch it. They seem to know you can get botulism from damaged cans. Almost like an instinct.’

  ‘So on the one hand they’re anxious about food contamination. But on the other they’re happy to eat live, unwashed grubs?’

  ‘Welcome to our world,’ says Naomi. Her phone rings. She listens, then says, ‘Christ. OK, I’m on my way.’ She finishes the call. ‘Sorry, Hesketh. There’s been an incident.’

  ‘You get a lot of those?’

  ‘Too many to count. The Observation Room’s on the third floor. Catch you later.’

  It’s spacious, with rows of seats facing a mirrored window through which you can see a roomful of twenty children. Microphones hang from the ceilings.

  ‘You’ll find their interactions remarkable,’ says Professor Whybray, turning from the control desk to greet me. He adjusts the volume and immediately there’s a cacophony of grunting, humming, tongue-clicking and hooting. Here and there is what sounds like a word. ‘Record as much as you like. You’ll be seeing groups of twenty on a half-hour rota system.’

  ‘What are the non-English languages of this cohort?’

  ‘Arabic, Urdu, Gujarati, Polish, etcetera. I hereby appoint you Battersea Care Unit’s Chief Linguistic Consultant. Among your other duties. Get started, boy.’

  I spend the rest of the day alone in Observation, taking notes. The staff supervising the kids I’m observing have a desperate look, as if constantly aware of the menace the children represent. I wonder how many of these youngsters are killers. The atmosphere is one of barely controlled chaos. Freddy is in the last group to occupy the room. It’s four o’clock: he’s looking listless and is beginning to yawn. Other parents are already showing up to fetch day children. When the numbers thin further, I put my head around the door of Professor Whybray’s office.

  ‘I’m taking Freddy home now. He’s wiped out.’

  ‘Of course. Miranda’s got a car and she lives near Fulham. You’ll find her in the playground. Ask her for a lift. First impressions?’ He signals me to sit.

  I pull up a seat and glance through my notes. ‘Linguistically, the grammar’s very crude. There’s no comprehension problem. In English I’ve heard over there, this way and fuck you. Lap-sap’s common as a term of abuse. I heard dupek, which means arsehole in Polish. I heard yallah three times. It’s Arabic for hurry up, or go, or come on. Also ikenie. It’s Japanese. It means sacrifice. I couldn’t work out the context. So we have a mish-mash of up to fifteen different languages. There’ll be a whole phrase here and there, but never a whole sentence. There’s a lot of signing. I’m trying to map it. But I’ve seen the eye gesture repeatedly, used as a greeting. Take a look at this.’ I open my lapto
p and show him Sunny Chen’s suicide drawings.

  He points to the hand-print. ‘We see a lot of kids making that mark,’ he says. ‘In the sand or on the walls. I hear from the Home Office that the police say it’s been popping up as graffiti in the last few weeks. Always at child height.’

  ‘And look at this eye.’ I point. ‘See the similarity to the eye gesture the kids make? Originally I thought it was an all-seeing eye. Maybe a deity. But—’

  Naomi comes in and takes a chair.

  ‘We lost three volunteers,’ she announces. ‘One of them seemed headed for a full-blown breakdown.’ She glances at the eye. ‘Hey, that’s interesting.’

  ‘Why?’ asks Professor Whybray, alert.

  ‘Because I just saw the psychiatrist’s report on the Spanish twins. It said they both had the same nightmare, the morning before they attacked. It was about infected eyes.’

  I jump up. ‘That fits!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Because the ophthalmologist’s report on Svensson raised the possibility of his eye condition being connected to food poisoning. Apparently, some bacterial infections that begin in the gut can compromise the nasal cavity and put pressure on the optic orb, causing it to swell. If that swelling process is aggravated by bright light, it would explain the sunglasses.’

  Naomi says, ‘So the signal denotes membership of a kind of trauma club. Involving eyes that get infected and swell and then – what?’

  ‘The word Jonas Svensson used was pop. If the eye infection’s untreated, and exacerbated by intense sunlight, the eye could effectively burst.’

  There’s silence as we consider this. Outside, the rain begins to fall, slamming against the picture window. Then Naomi says, ‘Since we’re into speculating, Victor. Have you tried out your Big Theory on Hesketh yet?’

  He hesitates. ‘I’d like to hear it,’ I say.

  ‘OK. Maybe you’re quicker off the mark than I am, Hesketh. But wherever they think they’re living, it isn’t here. This behaviour belongs to a very specific place. A place they feel at home. The more time they spend together here, the more they tune in, and the more time they spend in the . . . other world.’