An hour or so later, when I’m keeping Catsby entertained by swishing a piece of string around, my phone buzzes with a text message. It’s Georgina.
Hey, hope you ’re alright… thought I’d better check in with what’s happening. Are you OK? Xx
I think about what I want to say in reply – ideally I don’t want to reply at all, but that would be rude – when my phone buzzes again, this time an incoming call from Kay.
‘Hello?’
‘Dexter, have you got the news on? Are you seeing this?’ she half-screams down the phone at me. The television has been on standby. I turn it on and am treated to live footage alternating between Norway and Portugal. Two more craft have landed – and this time there’s actually footage of them settling down, slowly steaming and smoking their way onto terra firma. I feel very protective of the planet all of a sudden.
News reporters are flustered again, most of the ones I see having lost pretty much any semblance of professionalism. On the BBC, the presenter has taken his tie and jacket off, the top button of his shirt open, revealing a hairy chest. He has sweat patches the size of the Falklands under his armpits. On Sky, the normally unflappable female presenter has half her make-up done and is still wearing a paper towel around her throat, caught off guard in the dressing room when the news broke.
‘What the actual…’ I start, but Kay is shouting again.
‘It’s like 9/11 again,’ she shouts. As an American, Kay feels the vibrations of that incident stronger than I or any of my other friends do. A former New York City resident, she knows a thing or two about what it feels like to be invaded. Granted, an Iraqi or Native American probably knows even more, but I don’t know any of them, so I’m using the subjects I have to hand.
‘Has anything come out of these craft yet?’
‘No,’ she concedes. ‘The Paris one is inert. They had one of those heat sensitive cameras on it earlier and it was cold throughout.’
‘Well, none of this means it’s an invasion,’ I shrug. ‘E.T. and his people didn’t invade, they were botanists. Maybe these are scientists, or the galactic equivalent of teenagers out for a jolly in dad’s car.’
‘I’m glad you can be so fucking flippant!’ she snaps. The line goes dead. I probably went too far, but I don’t know what else to do in this situation. Humour is my default mechanism and I can’t take things seriously very often. I ponder going to Heathrow, to see if volunteers are needed to help clear up the mess but I decide that, given my lack of practical skills, I’d be more of a hindrance, and the odds of even getting there are small. I saw pictures of it on the news earlier and it was a mess, planes crashed and askew like a hurriedly abandoned child’s play set.
Defying belief and probability, London is almost entirely still in one piece. Only two planes out of what must be hundreds flying above it landed within the city border; one hit the Thames and the other came down in St James’s Park. The rest maintained autopilot and the correct height long enough to either stay in flight and head out across Europe or the Atlantic, or instead crashed out in the countryside or suburbia. Ridiculous odds, but those are the odds.
People always assume they know what they’ll do if a film scenario happened to them, such as finding a dinosaur walking towards them down a street or developing the ability to fly, but the truth is you can’t know how you’re going to react. Did I envision that the day after alien life was moved from a theoretical branch of science to a very practical one I would be calmly playing with my cat and wondering how to reply to my ex-girlfriend? No, probably not.
I try to think of a reason why we would all get the same burst of yellow. I guess the fact that we’re in an almost apocalyptic condition with mass death the world over should take precedence, but I feel so blasé about the whole thing. We’re a generation that is continually bombarded with films, TV shows and books about strange things happening, so when they happen for real, we go with it. The news stopped being a harmless distraction a few years ago, as technology and politics shifted and things that once felt only possible in the diseased mind of a science fiction author began happening for real.
The doorbell goes, I shout that the door is unlocked and Ruby-and-Alex let themselves in. She looks like she’s barely slept, the cuffs of her pale pink jumper damp and chewed. He is much taller than her and always has the look of a man trying to make himself comfortable in a hobbit hole. His blonde hair is spiked up and adds another inch or two to his height, so he brushes against the door lintel.
‘What are we meant to do?’ says Ruby, giving me a kiss on the cheek in greeting and dropping down onto the sofa. Catsby likes Ruby, and immediately jumps into her lap to nuzzle.
‘Wait to see if we’re about to be attacked or if Tom Cruise will pop out and announce his new film,’ I say, shrugging.
‘Either way, it’ll be bad news for the human race,’ says Alex. I’ll give him credit, that’s kind of funny, even given the circumstances. ‘I wonder how much longer we have to wait.’ As if responding to his words, the television cuts to footage of the craft in Norway which was steaming again, pale blue lights blinking up and down the shaft. The panicked voice of the newsreader is almost unintelligible but there can be no doubt that first contact is about to be made.
Here we go.
Nine
Peregrina-and-Pete
Peregrina Christopher erupted into my life covered in blood, her personality and charm taking up as much space in whatever room she happens to be in as her full name (Peregrina Genevieve Anastasia Christopher) does on any application form. We were fourteen years old and I was sitting in the nurse’s office at school with a burning stomach ache. I was begging to be sent home, but schools never seem keen on doing that, so the nurse was keeping me there to see how badly I was faking and fiddling about on her computer instead.
As I sat and suffered a battle of supremacy between two narwhals in my stomach, the door opened and in came a mass of tissues wearing the purple blazer of our school. Somewhere under the tissues was Peregrina, and my first sight of her face included a lot of blood when she took the tissues away.
‘I’ve got a nosebleed,’ she said, as if this wasn’t clear. The nurse tutted and moved round from her desk, balling up the tissues and handing Peregrina some more. Blood ran from each nostril like someone had left a bath running. Peregrina had pushed her glasses up into her copper – never blonde, never ginger, always copper – hair to keep them free of blood and sat down next to me, her breaths burbling liquidly.
‘Hi,’ she gargled. The new tissues were already almost entirely sodden. Before or since, I’ve never seen anyone with blood so desperate to escape its confinement.
‘Unf,’ I replied, grasping at my stomach. ‘Hey.’
‘I don’t believe we’ve ever met,’ she said. Even at fourteen I knew that this was a posh voice, and the feeling was driven home when she said, ‘I’m Peregrina.’
No one is called Peregrina, or at least no one that you’ll ever be allowed to speak to as an equal. Despite the pain, I had to look up at her, her hazel eyes full of innocence peering over red tissues.
‘Dexter,’ I said, and resumed groaning and grunting.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Was it something you ate?’
I grunt in the negative, wishing I was making a better impression, but there was very little I could do. The nurse got up from her desk again.
‘I need to pop to the staff room; don’t either of you do anything silly.’ She left. Peregrina got up and helped herself to more tissues, dumping the used lot in the pedal bin. She then insisted on making conversation.
‘I think I’ve seen you around before,’ she said, voice once again muffled by tissues. ‘You’re in my year, right? What form are you in?’
‘10D,’ I wheezed.
‘Ah, well that’s it,’ she said. ‘I’m 10J – we don’t have classes together. Oh look, you are in a lot of pain aren’t you? Come on, get down.’ She indicated the floor and I raised an eyebrow towards the ce
iling which I hoped sent the message, Are you out of your tiny, posh mind?
‘No, come on, lie flat and it’ll help the pain,’ she said. ‘There’s no point scrunching yourself up like that – you’ll just feel worse.’ Figuring I had nothing to lose, I gingerly manoeuvred myself off the hard plastic chair and sprawled out on my back.
Peregrina knelt down beside me, still clutching her nose with one hand, but these tissues were far less sodden, so it appeared her nosebleed was slowing down. She stretched out a large hand with piano player’s fingers and began gently massaging the area that was in pain.
It was the most surreal moment of my life up until that point.
Moreover, it was working. A bit.
The pain subsided a little, but it was still there. Whoever was stabbing me had traded in the sword for a butter knife. When the nurse came back in, she kicked up one hell of a fuss about the situation, got me back on the chair (which brought back the pain) and, once satisfied that Peregrina had stopped bleeding, sent her off.
‘Thanks for trying,’ I groaned at her.
‘That’s quite all right,’ she smiled. She looked very pretty now her face was bloodless. She could pass for a minor royal. ‘See you around, Dexter.’ She left, stumbling over her own foot as she did so.
I didn’t know at the time that this very weird but innocuous meeting would lead to me noticing Peregrina everywhere, swapping phone numbers with her, joining forces on the school paper, sneaking off from the sixth form prom to drink cider and pontificate about what the future would hold, going to the same university, flying to New York together for a weekend to celebrate graduation, and being asked to give a toast at her upcoming wedding.
It’s more likely I would’ve realised something brilliant was happening if it hadn’t been for the rather more pressing matter of my burst appendix that eventually did get me sent home from school, indeed for a whole week.
On balance, Peregrina was a more than adequate replacement for my appendix.
*
Peregrina met Pete Dunn over a photocopier at work about eighteen months ago. She’d come down to the third floor because the one on the fifth had given up the ghost for the umpteenth time that month, and while fiddling about with it trying to stop it from copying in A5, she was offered a helping hand by a tall, bearded man with tiny glasses perched on the end of his nose. He was wearing a navy blue polo neck, scruffy jeans and his hair looked like it had been slept on funny. They’d never met before, despite both working at the same company for about three years, as she was a writer and he worked in HR, although they knew one another’s names from emails.
He introduced himself, and she did likewise, sensing immediately the butterflies in her stomach that hatch (I’m told) the moment you meet The One. He revealed later that he felt the same, which was very awkward as he had moved in with the woman he’d been dating for six years nine days ago.
They both claim, of course, that their relationship didn’t overlap with his and Raquel’s, but I’ve done the maths and it almost certainly did. It began at around the same time that Raquel admitted that she’d been having doubts about the move and that she’d cheated on Pete a couple of times in the last month. They split up and Pete fell into a far healthier relationship with Peregrina within a matter of weeks.
It was originally strange, having someone so much older than the rest of us around, but despite being almost forty when they started dating, he never came across as that much older. A more polite, charming and intelligent man you couldn’t meet, and he patently adored Peregrina in a serious way, meaning that after six months he proposed. Peregrina – until then a staunch advocate of a future that involved her raising seventeen cats and shouting at kids to get off her lawn – accepted, throwing herself at him with such ferocity that the pod on the London Eye wobbled a little more than the other passengers liked.
As far as I can tell, Pete had genuinely never encountered his betrothed before that day at the photocopier, but he’s a shrewd old bugger and I wouldn’t put it past him to have somehow engineered their meeting. They kept the relationship quiet from most of their colleagues as well – dating and day jobs often mix about as well as potassium and water – which meant it came as a shock to some of their office mates when their engagement was announced.
Maybe it is the age gap, or maybe that Peregrina has one of those jobs that looks glamorous to outsiders, even though it’s a lot of chasing up phone calls and sitting in airports in foreign countries with spotty Internet access, but they are probably the most mature of us. I’ve always adored Peregrina, and Pete is totally the right man for her. There’s someone for everyone, and sometimes all it takes to meet them is to use a different photocopier.
Ten
First Contact
The lounge is filled with the eerie silence that accompanies an early morning snowfall – it seems harmless but you’re very aware of it and its potential to complicate your day – as Ruby-and-Alex, Catsby and myself stare open mouthed at the television screen.
What appears to be a door on the side of the craft slides open and two figures are present in the gap. They appear humanoid in shape, although very slender, but they are mere shadows due to the way the lighting falls. The cameras are too far away, but the BBC cameraman, hands apparently shaking like an aspen in a high wind, is trying to zoom in.
‘What the actual…’ begins Alex, but Ruby shushes him. The aliens – they have to be aliens – are still several feet from the ground, and it is clear that they are wearing some sort of spacesuits. As the figures step forward, something else becomes clear.
It isn’t two figures – it’s one. What I had taken to be the two large round heads of a pair of aliens belong to the same creature, one with two arms and two legs, but also two heads, each encased in its own helmet. The streets around these events – taking place in the coastal Norwegian town of Moss – are packed with people but as quiet as a graveyard at midnight. You could hear a photograph cough.
The world freezes and then there is a little flicker of something bottle green in the corner of my eyes.
‘Did you just…’
‘Yes,’ say Ruby-and-Alex. The bottle green is replaced with the turquoise of Caribbean oceans, then slides into onyx. The figure steps from the door and floats down to terra firma, landing silently on asphalt. The heads don’t look at one another, but nonetheless you get the sense they are communicating. Occasionally I see flashes of colour – maroon and cream, chestnut and tangerine. The whole planet holds its breath.
The cameras have zoomed in as far as they can, but what the alien actually looks like under its suit remains a mystery. The helmets have small black visors in a position that suggests their eyes are located in the same place as ours. The alien reaches for a silvery pack on its chest and holds it up to one of the visors, looking at something I can’t begin to imagine, a readout of some kind, perhaps. It thumbs at something on the pack and clips it back onto its chest.
‘What’s it doing?’ whispers Ruby.
‘Might be reading the atmosphere for breathability, or something,’ I murmur back. There is another flash of colour, mint green this time, but with flickers throughout of the same dark yellow of the night before, although this time we don’t pass out. Surely it would be easier for the invasion – if that’s what this is – to occur if the entire population is rendered comatose? I mean, I’m grateful that we’re not, but still. If you’ve got a Planet Buster Weapon, you use it, right?
The alien reaches up and grabs at one of the helmets, the left one, and, without much fanfare or notification, pulls it off. The world gasps as one.
The head beneath is human only in that there appear to be two eyes and a mouth. It has very little colour, slightly blue, almost a translucent sheen to the skin, behind which are thin veins and what I assume is the brain, a fleshy mound of mushroom in the top of the head. The eyes are thin but wide, barely open and very black. There is no nose, or external ears, but a wide mouth with no lips. The expression is
impossible to read; it’s the sort of face that doesn’t move around too much.
The second helmet is removed and the second head looks out onto the world and the gathered Norwegians. This one is similar to the first, but not identical. The head shape is different, thinner and with a pointier chin. Behind the spot where the right ear would be, a thing that looks like a feather or a fern protrudes a few inches, the colour undulating between red and gold.
‘So,’ I say. ‘That’s an alien, then?’
‘Better than Jar Jar Binks,’ says Alex.
‘And less terrifying than a Dalek,’ says Ruby, her voice cracking.
It might not be a Dalek, but it’s still pretty damn scary. Here is undeniable proof of alien life, and none of us know what we’re supposed to do about it. I struggle to cope with the regular pitfalls of adulthood like rent and taxes – self-help books are famously silent on what to do in case of first contact. That’s why I’d fashioned a plan of escaping to the Natural History Museum in case of an emergency, although it wasn’t a plan I ever thought I’d have to use.
A couple more bodies appear at the open door of the spacecraft and in turn float down to join the first, removing their helmets and revealing more of the weird heads. On one of the pairs, both of them have the weird feather, again in red and gold. Six pairs of eyes look out, but don’t appear to be able to focus on anything.
The first alien steps forward to approach the nearest humans, who back away slowly. The cameras can’t show us their faces – we’re looking at the wrong angle – but I’d put good money on the nearest faces being disgusted. There is still silence. A few of the Norwegians at the front of the crowd grab one another; husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, I imagine. Despite the events, I still take it as a personal affront and bitter reminder that I’ve no one here to grab.
The Third Wheel Page 6