Imagined Slights

by James Lovegrove

  As a direct result of the riots that left the FPP HQ at Gaijin Hello Friendly Island a burned-out husk, the Foreign Policy Police was disbanded and its component parts reconstituted to form the Resort-City Protection Department, an even more autocratic body whose powers were as wide-ranging as they were loosely defined. Out went the cream-coloured suits and the home searches and the forceful coercion. In came leather and street patrols and batons.

  They were years of terror and fire and fury. But beneath the tumult, behind the wide, angry eyes, there lay a deeper, stranger sadness - a sadness that was shared throughout the world. It was as though mankind had been handed a very wonderful gift and then, for no clear reason, had had it snatched away again.

  The Foreigners had gone. Without explanation, without excuse, without warning: gone.

  Bridgeville itself came to embody this sense of loss. Its gleaming plazas and promenades grew tarnished and litter-strewn, and its many tourist attractions were allowed to fall into disrepair and decay. Alligators were a not uncommon sight, prowling the streets with plodding reptilian certainty. Fewer and fewer cabbies plied their trade, and the dirigibles that rumbled overhead carried not tourists now but refugees heading north to the cooler climates that had been less favoured by the Foreigners and so not as reliant on them to generate wealth.

  As for Aaron, he weathered the lean times as well as anybody. Forced to give up his apartment in Seaview Tower, he moved from one rented accommodation to the next, each less salubrious than the previous. Gradually he shed his worldly goods along the way, selling valuables and objets d'art to black-marketeers for a fraction of their worth. First to go was the Steinway. The statuettes were last on the list; he was obliged to part with all but a handful of them. Eventually he found himself, like so many of his fellow Sirens, reduced to surviving on handouts and seeking menial labour wherever he could find it.

  The golden years were definitely over.

  It was after taking up residence in the Basin, which had always been one of the shabbiest quarters of Bridgeville, an area characterised by the quantity of waste - household and human - that littered its streets and floated in its canals, that Aaron first started hearing rumours of an English ex-FPP officer who had relocated there, too, and who was the object of universal scorn and spite: a moustachioed sad-sack of a man, with sparkling, startling ocean-blue eyes, who went from house to house offering his services as janitor in return for a meal and perhaps a small consideration of money if the home-owner felt that he had performed his duties well. The irony that a one-time ransacker of houses was now scraping a living through the restoration of domestic order and cleanliness was not lost on Aaron, and for this reason he initially dismissed the rumours as a vengeful urban morality tale.

  At this point he was renting a one-room cold-water walk-up above a fishmonger's and working in one of the Basin's seedier drinking dens, earning meagre tips by singing old standards to bleary-eyed barflies who liked to slur gratingly along to the choruses, dogging the pure cadences of Aaron's voice with their hoarse, tuneless, nostalgia-choked drones. He thought he was handling the reduction in his circumstances reasonably well, but then as far as he was concerned his apparent submissiveness had always hidden a core of resilience. What others might see as compliance he saw as adaptability. And he felt that it was thanks to this quality that he had so successfully put the past behind him, abandoning it piece by piece with every possession he had parted with, all those belongings he had so unsentimentally sold. Once he had been wealthy, praised and prized. Now he led barside singalongs in a down-and-out dive in one of a depressed resort-city's most depressed corners, and while this life wasn't exactly everything he could have wanted, he had just about stopped comparing it with his old life. He had just about forgotten his old life.

  But when he heard locals again and again talk about someone whose description matched that of Captain Silas Gregory in every detail, Aaron felt compelled to seek the old fellow out. For one thing, he was curious to know why Gregory had resigned. For another, he wanted to know why Gregory was making no secret of his earlier FPP affiliation. Few people had pleasant memories of that self-important bureaucracy, fewer still had anything but criticism of the army of leather-garbed, baton-wielding bullyboys that the FPP had become. In Gregory's shoes, Aaron would have done almost anything to distance himself from such past and present associations: emigration, reconstructive surgery, suicide, anything. But he had another reason for finding Gregory, too.

  Finally, after days of following false leads and winding up in dead-ends (one peripatetic janitor wasn't easy to locate in a city filled with a million such dispossessed wanderers), Aaron found himself one sullenly hot afternoon standing at the foot of a tall, fire-scuffed dosshouse that teetered at the edge of what had once been a pleasant green lagoon. Now half choked with the rubble of a demolished concert venue and a repository for excrement and shopping trolleys, the lagoon made a well-appointed lido for rats.

  The dosshouse didn't have a caretaker as such, but a man watching television in the main hallway, sitting on a plastic chair and shelling and eating peanuts from a supermarket carrier-bag, had heard of a resident by the name of Gregory and suggested Aaron try the ninth floor.

  There was no elevator.

  On the ninth floor, a profusely perspiring Aaron was told to try the eighth, but the eighth was a women's floor so he proceeded down to the seventh, and there was fortunate enough to encounter an emaciated octogenarian who was out in the corridor towelling himself down after a shower. The octogenarian knew a Silas Gregory, sure. Energetically rubbing the towel around his scrawny genitalia with one hand, he pointed down the corridor with the other.

  "Room seven zero three," he croaked, adding, "You're in luck. He's in," and also adding, "But he never receives visitors."

  There was an electronically controlled lock on the door to 703, but Aaron could tell at a glance that it hadn't worked in ages. The glass that covered its infra-red eye was cloudy like a cataract. The door looked flimsy, and he was tempted to try and kick it down, just so that Gregory would know what it was like to have your home invaded, but in the end he merely knocked.

  There was no reply, but the stifled silence from within told Aaron all he needed to know.

  "Mr Gregory? Silas Gregory? My name is Novak. Aaron Novak. Perhaps you remember me?"

  Aaron thought he detected a shuffling footfall.

  "You ought to remember me," he said. "You tried to bust me often enough."

  The voice that emerged from behind the door was frail and tremulous, hardly recognisable as the same brisk voice that used to answer Aaron's irony-laden remarks with such blithe equanimity. "I know who you are," it said. "Why are you here? Have you come to get even? You wouldn't be the first, you know. Not by a long shot. Seems like I gave half of Bridgeville a reason to hold a grudge against me."

  "I'm not here for anything like that. I just want to talk."

  "Why should I believe you?"

  "No reason. Except that had I really wanted to do you harm, I'd have broken in and done so by now."

  "Yes," said Gregory. "Yes, you have a point. You were never that sort of a person, Mr Novak, were you? In fact, as I recall, you were usually quite agreeable. All right. Yes. I'll let you in."

  Bolts were withdrawn manually, and the door shuddered inwards, Gregory dragging it hard against a moraine of damp-warped linoleum.

  Aaron had expected the former captain to have been reduced physically by his social abasement, but in fact in appearance Gregory was little changed. A little whiter of hair, certainly, but the moustache and the ocean-blue gaze were as proud and firm as Aaron remembered them. It was the first time Aaron had ever seen him without his cream-coloured suit on (it was hung neatly on a hanger on one wall) but even without it, in only a vest and slacks, Gregory had just as much presence. The room itself was small, shoddily furnished, its safety-glass windowpanes murky and cracked, and the walls and ceiling painted a shade of brown that was clearly designed to foster
suicidal depression, but for all this the place was free of dust and tidy. A ceiling fan rotated with a sluggishness that belied the strenuous whine of its motor. If there was anything apart from the room and his voice to show that Gregory had suffered in the intervening years or that the reduction in his status had left a lasting mark on him, it was the scar that ran from one armpit over his clavicle to the centre of his ribcage, curving around on itself at the tip. The skin around it was puckered and at its fattest the scar was at least half an inch wide. It must have been a deep wound, and it must have hurt and it must have bled.

  Once Aaron spotted the scar, he couldn't help but stare at it.

  "Ah yes," said Gregory, rebolting the door and nodding as he moved back into the room. "You've noticed." He pulled out a chair for Aaron to sit on. "I'm not surprised. It's very noticeable. An ex-cabbie gave it to me with a pocket knife. I suppose it served me right for citing him for overcharging." He uttered a short bark of a laugh. "I resigned the day after I was discharged from hospital. Used it as an excuse, really. It meant I lost my pension privileges and so on, but that didn't matter to me. I resigned because I didn't like what was happening. I didn't like the plans the FPP Council had for the FPP."

  He lowered himself on to the narrow iron-framed bed that occupied a good third of the available floor-space. Its stretched springs bellied beneath his backside.

  "The attack taught me a valuable lesson, besides," he went on. "It taught me that there's no point trying to escape the past. Better to acknowledge it. Better to embrace it."

  "Why?" Aaron asked. "Why cling on to the past if it only gets you into trouble?"

  Gregory appeared to ignore the question. "I'd offer you some kind of refreshment," he said, "but as you can see, I lack the facilities." He gestured at the wooden table to Aaron's left, on which there was a kettle and a half-finished packet of cookies. The plug socket that could have powered the kettle had been wrenched out of the wall to leave a rough hole in the plaster inside which Aaron glimpsed rustling activity and the dim glint of light reflecting off dun-coloured carapaces. Seeing this, he decided he wouldn't accept a cookie if Gregory offered.

  "But in answer to your question," Gregory said, "sometimes it's not possible. After all, you don't seem to have let go of your past either, have you? Not entirely. You're here, are you not?"

  "What's done is done. What either of us did while the Foreigners were here no longer matters. Agreed?"

  Gregory understood the implication. "Very well. I can accept that for the purposes of this meeting there are to be no recriminations. Embrace the past but don't disturb the past, eh?"

  "Sort of."

  "That still doesn't completely explain why you tracked me down to this place. Unless it's to crow."

  Aaron reached into his pocket, took something out and placed it on the table. The object hummed softly from the moment he took hold of it to the moment he let go of it.

  "Recognise this?" he said.

  Delight spread across Gregory's features. He reached towards the table, then drew his hand back. A frown clouded his face, not entirely extinguishing the delight. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just that it's been so long since I've seen one of those, I didn't even think to ask your permission."

  The statuette was about eight inches tall. Its hands were interlocked in an inverted steeple, thumbs outward, palms arched, little fingers interlocked. The symbol for TRANQUILLITY.

  "Ah, but they're beautiful things," Gregory sighed. "Even just to look at."

  "You don't want to hear it sing?"

  "Well, I do, and I don't, and I don't more than I do. I'm scared it'll..." He shrugged.

  "I tried to give you this once," said Aaron.

  "This statuette?"

  "This very one. You refused."

  "Yes, I did. Yes, I did."

  "You wanted it, but you said it wouldn't be appropriate."

  "It wouldn't have been. Very improper. More than my job was worth."

  "I have to say I felt bad about making the offer myself, afterwards."

  "Well, who would want to give away such a thing? Even you, who had so many of them."

  "This one in particular," said Aaron, and he seized the statuette and turned it upside down. Its note, suddenly kick-started into life, wailed up an octave as it was inverted, and then broke off when its head was pointing directly downwards.

  "You shouldn't treat it like that," said Gregory.

  Saying nothing, Aaron inserted his thumbnail into a notch in the underside of the corrugated base and after several attempts managed to lever open a panel the size of a postage stamp. The panel was so skilfully wrought that, when shut, it fitted undetectably into place.

  Poking an index finger into the aperture thus exposed, Aaron drew out a coil of slender, rubber-insulated wire which was attached to a wafer of chip which in turn was connected to a microphone no larger than a match-head.

  Gregory's ocean-blue eyes, which had grown wide at the sight of the hatch, grew wider still at the sight of a vocal enhancer.

  "Oh, my," he said. "And you even offered it to me. How brazen of you."

  "I was pretty sure you'd never accept it," Aaron replied. "I was testing myself rather than you, seeing if I could pull it off, if I had the nerve to look you in the eye and tell you exactly where what you were looking for was hidden. I'd only just bought the enhancer, you see. That last time you raided me was the first time I actually had anything unlawful in my possession."

  "Well." Gregory's mouth soured into a pout. "I hope you're pleased with yourself. You pulled the wool over my eyes, that's for sure." He delivered a slow, sarcastic handclap. "Well done. Bravo."

  "No, I didn't come here to show you how clever I am. I came here, if anything, to ... I don't know, to confess, I suppose."

  Gregory's eyebrows went up a notch.

  "I never used it, you see," Aaron said, toying with the wire that was the enhancer's sending antenna. "I bought it on an impulse, because so many of my friends who were Sirens were saying how great it made their voices sound, how it could drive Foreigners crazy with pleasure. I paid some greyware pirate way too much for it, and I still don't know if it works."

  "Didn't you even once wind it around inside your collar and try it out?"

  "Not once."

  "Why?"

  "Because I thought I was a good enough Siren without one? Because I thought it would be cheating? Because I was scared of being shopped to the FPP by a rival? I don't know. A little bit of everything, I guess. Too much pride, not enough nerve."

  "And if I had accepted the statuette?"

  "I'd have let you take it. It would have freed me from the moral dilemma. You'd never have found the panel, so you'd never have found the enhancer."

  "And then the Foreigners solved your problem for you by dropping Earth from their travel brochures," said Gregory wryly.

  "Exactly. I suppose you have a theory as to why they stopped coming."

  "I don't, as a matter of fact. They first chose us on a whim, so maybe they changed their minds on a whim, too. Maybe another planet became popular, another dimension. Maybe we'll never know. Maybe it was enough that they rescued us from the mess we'd got ourselves into, and now we either learn the lessons they taught us or else we go under again for the final time. Sometimes I wonder if they weren't actually some sort of divine visitation."

  Aaron had heard this sort of Revelation-myth talk before. He didn't think it a very helpful way of dealing with the Foreigners' departure. Leaving the vocal enhancer on the table, he closed the panel and set the statuette the right way up. Immediately its note sang out around his fist, the vibrations tickling his fingers.

  "Would you like it now?" he asked Gregory.

  "Are you sure?"

  "It's one of the last few I have left, but I'm busy severing my ties, one by one. Casting myself adrift. I'm thinking of moving to somewhere a bit cooler. Canada, possibly. I've just enough left from my savings to cover the journey, and there I can reinvent myself. There
I won't be an ex-Siren. I won't be an ex-anything."

  "I'm told there are plenty of jobs going up north. I'd move there myself, if I could afford it."

  "Sell the statuette and you could." Aaron rose to go. He held out a hand. "Thank you for your time, Mr Gregory. And no hard feelings?"

  Gregory took his eyes off the statuette. He shook Aaron's hand. "None at all," he said.

  Aaron had pulled back the last bolt and was preparing himself for a battle with the recalcitrant door when Gregory said, "Mr Novak? I know this is going to sound terribly presumptuous, seeing as you've given me the statuette and everything, but I was wondering if you could do me another favour."

  "I can try."

  "It's more of a request, really." Gregory blinked back his nervousness. "I know I don't have a right to ask this, but would you sing for me? Just one song. Just so that I can hear you for myself, see if you're as good as I suspect you are. I wouldn't ask this normally, but" - the ocean-blue eyes were shimmering behind a film of tears - "it's been a while since I've actually thought about the way things used to be with anything like pleasure."

  "I thought you said you'd embraced the past."

  "Embraced it like a drowning man embraces a lifebelt. Please. It would mean a lot to me."

  Aaron couldn't see the harm. "OK, what do you want? I've perfected a nice line in rousing, sentimental show-tunes recently."

  "No, not that. Not a song. Sing to me the way you used to sing to Foreigners."

  "Well, I'm a little rusty, but..." He gave a Las Vegas grin. "I'll give it a go."

  Aaron took a few deep breaths to flex his diaphragm, then drew the high F out of the statuette with a fingertip. Taking this as his keynote, he began to improvise a series of arpeggios in his sweetest alto, his voice going over the runs like a child making its way carefully over stepping stones. Then he settled into a soft trill that spoke of ancient cathedrals and guttering ranks of devotional candles and a nightingale swooping through the hollows of a vaulted ceiling, something solitary in an emptiness, something sacred yet mundane. From this he developed a theme of glissandos that flowed in silky ripples of increasing depth and frequency - a vocal feat that had quickened many a Foreigner to a swaying, shuddering climax. Now he pictured in his mind's eye a field of corn and imagined his voice a breeze brushing across the golden swathe, gusting out in several directions at once to expose the undersides of the stalks in glossy swirls and curlicues. He sang inarticulate word-forms that sounded sometimes human and sometimes Foreign but never quite one or the other. Easily (though he hadn't sung like this for three years) he found himself slipping into that calm, hollowed-out state of mind where he was no longer the originator of his song but its vehicle, to be driven wherever the whim of the music took him. Time collapsed and elapsed, as images of seas and seasons and valleys and ancient green forests crowded through his brain and took flight on wings of vocal-cord-construed breath, emerging from the very heart of him, transmuted from thought to sound by an alchemical process he himself did not quite understand.