There are a few more bursts of colour – green, gold, green, and then shades of blue slide around the edges of our vision.
What happens next happens quickly.
The first alien withdraws something small and silver from its belt and fires it above the crowd. A small grey cloud hovers and, as if sentient, descends on the nearest couple. In righteous fear, they cling to one another but the grey cloud surrounds them and slides up and down the bodies. It shrouds their heads for a moment, then their faces become visible again, although nicked with tiny bloodied cuts, and the cloud moves down to their torsos and legs. Seeming to multiply in size, the cloud envelops them entirely.
Everyone is screaming and some people have turned to run but many more stare on open mouthed. Ruby, Alex and I have leaned forward, intently staring at the screen; even Catsby has jumped off my lap and is sitting in front of the television in rapt concentration.
And then a leg falls out of the cloud. It’s severed with a jagged cut and coated in blue denim, but it is undeniably a leg and whatever blood was left in the femoral artery is spreading across the ground. An arm flies out next, followed by scraps of clothing. Thirty seconds or so later, the cloud disperses and returns to the device held aloft by the alien. Where the couple stood previously, now stands something that brings bile up to the back of my throat. And yet, if this was on a film, I would laugh at how outlandish it is.
The couple have become one being, much like the two-headed alien, although with much less precision and cleanliness. Blood and other unthinkable fluids leak over the remaining clothes and the human has two heads, connected clumsily in the middle, the woman’s eye stitched to the man’s cheek. The torso is twice as wide, sandwiched together with three arms sticking out from odd angles – one appears to have been removed and reattached at the waist on the man’s side. With the legs, too, there are three, although one is all but ripped open, just flesh clinging limply to bone, the meat scattered around the floor like a butcher’s offcuts.
The faces try to look at each other, try to scream, but there is a traumatised expression on each face. The now-joined body falls, dead.
Panic.
The screen is momentarily filled with the sight of Norwegians fleeing in every direction, tripping over one another, then more grey clouds following some of them or honing in on those couples paralysed with fear. It’s immediately noticeable, to me at least, that the clouds only gather on pairs. Taking us out of the moment, the screen restores the image of a news studio, although one with no newsreader and, behind the glass at the back of the studio, people in smart shirts and professional dresses running back and forth in panic clutching paper, phones and each other.
‘Fuck!’ says Alex, standing up abruptly, hitting his shin on the coffee table and releasing a second, ‘Fuck!’ This stuns Catsby who turns and leaps back up onto the top of my chair and looks at me with an expression that says, ‘Well, what are you going to do about this?’
‘Did you see that?’ whispers Ruby, the words catching in her throat like wool snagging on barbed wire. ‘They put them together. And they died. The blood… the leg…’ She’s lost, muttering, and a few seconds later screams in a tortured way that I never would have believed possible from her. She’s usually so calm, but I guess everyone has their limit.
Someone appears on the screen. It isn’t one of the regular newsreaders, rather it appears to be a cameraman wearing a bulky headset and a grey jumper with a prominent toothpaste stain on the chest. He doesn’t sit down, just stares out of the screen with the look of a man in court awaiting his sentencing.
‘If anyone is watching this,’ he shouts, breathless and crying, ‘more are landing, across the world. They… they must have been watching and waiting. The cameras from Norway and Portugal show more and more of… them… coming out. They’ve already landed in Scotland. They’re taking over the world. We’re dead! We’re all fucking dead!’ He rips the headset off and disappears.
Ruby has stopped screaming, Alex holding her tight to his chest. She burbles and sniffs wetly into his jacket. Alex looks at me helpless, and I stare back, unable to comprehend what has happened.
‘It’s the end of the world as we know it,’ I say.
But I don’t feel fine.
Eleven
Ruby-and-Alex
Ruby Miller and I had been in the same class for four years at primary school, but rarely spoke to one another until Mrs Marsden set up an after-school book club. It turned out we were both obsessive about a series that was popular at the time, although I can’t remember for the life of me what it was called.
What I do remember was that it was a series about a badger (who I think was called Basil) who was a detective and would hunt down and find whatever the other residents of the forest had lost – usually a cake, or necklace, or fishing rod. Probably in this day and age he’d find a dead body and be led on some huge epic journey through the seedy forest underbrush to find that there was a fraternity of evil stoats running everything. (Actually, that’s not a bad idea – if I was a writer, I’d do something with that.)
Anyway, Ruby and I were both really into this series and chose it to talk about in the first meeting. We’d chosen different books in the series, our preferred favourites, but it was enough to lay the foundations of a friendship. It would soon lead to us being asked to take to the stage together to talk more about the books.
In an effort to get more of the kids interested in reading, the head had organised an assembly which would involve two students from each year talking about their favourite books. Whether we volunteered or were nominated I no longer remember, but Ruby and I were the ones for our year.
Ruby was due to speak first, talking about the plot of this book which involved one of the characters – I believe Mrs Vole – being pregnant and how she was trying to keep it secret from her husband Mr Vole so she could surprise him on Father’s Day, or something like that. It was quite forward thinking for the time. How many pregnant animals does one see in literature? Mine was about Rupert Rabbit, who was trying to find his friends but was unable to track any of them down, because they were off planning a surprise party for his birthday. I forget what the badger had to do with any of this.
Just before the assembly began, Mrs Marsden asked us if we’d fetch some poster paints from the art supply cupboard for the post-assembly lesson. To this day I’ll still never understand why she asked us, given she had a whole class of other kids to do her bidding. The closest I’ve ever come to a theory is that she was trying to take our minds off the upcoming endeavour.
The art supplies cupboard was near the staffroom so, entrusted with the key, Ruby and I trotted off to find the poster paints required, unlocking the door and yanking it open by its heavy metal handle. I brushed my hand against the wall to find the interior light switch and flicked it, bathing the shelves in weak light. Ruby followed me inside and we were so distracted by the mountainous supplies of sugar paper, paintbrushes, oil paints, sticks of charcoal, boxes of dried pasta, tubs of glitter, safety scissors, glue pots, bottles of PVA, chalk, hidden bottles of gin, sketchbooks, fabric swatches, abandoned projects from previous classes and coloured pencils that we didn’t properly register the door clicking locked behind us.
We became aware of our predicament once we’d selected a rainbow of colours in little lidded pots – Ruby realised that she still had hold of the key and we were on the wrong side of the door. The door was thick and designed so it could only be unlocked from one side, although why that was the case was lost to us.
‘If we shout do you think they’ll hear us?’ said Ruby, biting her lip and shaking like she was suffering from a bad case of tectonic shift. I was thinking that the assembly would be starting any moment without us, and the panic had caused my brain to revert to a prehistoric form and demand that my bladder empty itself soon before I had to run. I put the paints down and tugged on the handle a few times, but the door didn’t move.
‘We can try it,’ I said, so we both s
houted, our mouths pressed up against the door, screaming for help. No one came. I wanted to cry, but fought back the urge. I bashed my fists against the door, but it was thick and they had no effect. Everyone else was in assembly, I guessed, but surely they’d notice that we were missing. After all, we were to be star performers.
Ruby slumped down on the floor and hugged her knees, her lip trembling. She looked at me with the look of a child who has just learnt that Santa doesn’t exist and said, ‘What if they never find us?’
‘They will,’ I said, bending down and stroking her shoulder. ‘Mrs Marsden will notice in a minute and they’ll come find us. She knows where we went.’
In a show of what was probably one of the most disorganised and shameful moments ever witnessed in a British primary school, we were locked in the cupboard for half an hour. In the end we had a piece of sugar paper with HELP charcoaled onto it ready to slip under the door when someone outside called our names. No one bothered explaining to us why it had taken so long – we were seven, so what did we matter? – but I presume our parents received explanations.
It was definitely an episode that wasn’t going to be forgotten in a hurry, but in that half an hour Ruby and I grew closer. We chatted about nothing in particular, the way that small children do, riffing on television shows, books we liked and favourite toys, but the sensation of being trapped in a small cupboard surrounded by so much junk was something that only we could understand and share. If I ever saw a crack in Ruby’s eternally bouncy demeanour again – before first contact, of course – I don’t remember it, and so I later came to think she had shared something more with me than she had meant to. Even at seven, you know how and when it might be best to hide your feelings.
Because of the drama, we never did get to do our presentation in assembly, but it didn’t matter. We’d each gained a new best friend instead, and friendship is the one thing that can top reading in its importance and excitement.
That and alcohol, but we were still a long way to go until we discovered that.
*
Tall, thin, quiet and erudite, Alex Playfair is the polar opposite of everyone that Ruby dated during her teenage and university years. They didn’t get together until after they’d both graduated from their universities (her Reading, him Canterbury Christ Church) and since then the course of love has run smooth, but it took long enough to get there.
It transpired, in time, that Alex had fancied Ruby since they were eleven years old and he’d watched her playing netball when he should have been playing rugby. It actually turned out that there were a number of girls in the year he was obsessed with, but Ruby was the one he carried a candle for with a light the size of Betelgeuse. He was far too shy to do anything about it though, and instead looked on from the sidelines as from fourteen to twenty she dated a string of dark, loud, domineering boys. She and Alex had friends in common, so often ended up at parties together, sometimes talking to one another, with her oblivious throughout to the fact that he would have rearranged the constellations for her if she’d simply asked.
It was only post-bachelors-graduation and at the start of their PGCEs (both commuting to Brighton) that Ruby realised that maybe Alex wasn’t such a bad catch. Annie was perhaps the only one who may have had any concerns as she’d dated Alex for a few months a couple of years before, but she and Ruby were friends through me and Lara, so it wasn’t a case of stealing a friend’s ex.
Within a year they had moved in together. He had dropped out of his PGCE to work for a small Internet start-up company that had since gone from strength to strength. They were also supported by generous parents on both sides who wanted to see their children succeed in their endeavours, meaning that nothing came across as a struggle and they could dedicate rather more time to cultivating their relationship than others may have done.
Their lives together are catalogue comfortable. Although they’ve been shacked up for such a long time, there are still no signs of wedding bells in the air, and we assume no hidden receipts from jewellers in Alex’s desk drawers. In fact, on the outside everything looks so perfect in their little paradise that I’ve always wondered if it is.
While no evidence exists for them to have ever even shared one cross word with one another, I (and indeed Lara and Iris, too) have often contemplated the idea that it’s a very clever front for two people who are apparently engaged in a relationship that is beyond the realms of normal pleasantness, but actually are always two minutes away from beheading one another.
I think, deep down, we’re all a bit jealous.
Twelve
Convergence
Quarter of an hour or so later, during which time we’ve stood there dumbfounded and exchanging little more than repeated whispers of ‘Oh my God’, there is a swift rapping on the door and it opens with such ferocity that I think it might burst off its hinges. We scream and Catsby leaps up like he’s been electrocuted and shoots off into the corner between the bookcase and the sofa. It isn’t aliens. Kay bowls in like a tiny whirlwind, mascara-streaked tears running down her face. She runs at me and throws her arms around my waist and I’m stunned for a second, before returning the gesture, squeezing her tight.
‘What’s the matter?’ I gasp, fearing the worst of Jay, but he follows in a moment later, phone clamped to his ear, talking in a low, sombre voice. Kay lets go of me and falls down on the sofa, crying into her palms. Ruby sits down next to her and slides a comforting arm over her quivering shoulders.
‘No, it’s fine, um, well, I’ll be in touch,’ Jay says into the phone. ‘Yeah, I know. Yes. I love you too.’ He gulps out a goodbye and hangs up. His hands are shaking. ‘Hi guys, sorry to barge in like this.’ Polite to a fault, as usual.
‘Under the circumstances… I don’t think… um… well… did you see it?’
‘Yeah, we did,’ Jay says, sitting the other side of Kay and taking over comforting duties from Ruby, who leaps back up to Alex’s protective embrace. ‘ITV announced that New York had been invaded.’ A hand involuntarily leaps to my mouth. Kay’s family. We, tough as it is, must fear the worst. I go to the kitchen and pour a large glass of whisky for Kay, which she glugs back, tears still streaming down her face. I ask Jay, ‘What about you?’
‘Mum and Dad are alright,’ he shrugs. ‘The Midlands are supposedly safe. Scotland isn’t, though.’ Alex picks up the remote control and skips through the channels, all of them showing empty newsrooms, panic in Norway, or the snowy fuzz of inactivity. Facebook and Twitter become our news source and we skip through updates.
‘Not just Scotland,’ I say, flicking through the statuses of people who haven’t yet considered that there might be more important things to do at the moment. ‘Brighton, Oxford, Cardiff, London…’ I think briefly of Gavin-and-Frederik. Other statuses talk about other countries falling. Spain is inundated. I wonder if Lara-and-Steve are safe at sea. Are the oceans any safer than the land?
It becomes too much and I excuse myself, slipping out of the front door to sit on the low wall that separates the pavement from the grotty patch of brown grass that constitutes my front garden. I light up a cigarette and let the nicotine calm down my brain, which is struggling with the idea that I’ll never see Lara-and-Steve again. And Gavin too.
‘Mind if I join you?’ Jay says, sitting down next to me. I offer him a cigarette and we both sit there smoking for a few moments. I notice that, sweetly, despite the impending collapse of civilisation, he not only drove here but has parked his Mini neatly in front of the house.
‘What are we going to do?’ he says, lifting his sunglasses up onto his forehead, his brown eyes shot with red and worry.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, adding, ‘Why did you come to me?’
‘Kay said that you shouldn’t be alone,’ he says, although he sounds embarrassed by it. It’s one of the misconceptions about being alone. People assume that if you’re alone, you’re lonely, but I don’t think that’s always the case. It’s nice to know, however, that my friends care enough to
worry about me given everything else.
There’s a cry and we look up to see Shell-and-Terry pelting down the road towards us. I think at first they might be rushing past to Terry’s parents’ house, but instead they stop and Shell throws her arms around me, knocking the cigarette from my hand. I don’t remember the last time Shell hugged me – she’s not especially tactile outside of the bedroom, and I’m not welcome there.
One may wonder why my friends seem so intent on surrounding me, but I don’t know if I can answer that. I’ve always been lucky with my friends. They’ve been there for me through the difficult times and, in turn, as far as I know, I’ve been there through all of theirs. There’s a lot to be said for simple loyalty, and it’s about to mean even more soon. I’ve always (whenever possible) done right by my friends and while they’ve always had other people besides me – we’ve never exactly lived in one another’s pockets like friends in any sitcom you care to name – they think me worth keeping around, for whatever reason. I’m sounding a little maudlin, and more than a little vain, so I’ll move on.
Terry bends over to catch his breath and I prise Shell off me. She smells of cigarettes and apricots.
‘Are your families OK?’ I ask.
‘Mum and Dad are in Dubai and I can’t get hold of them,’ says Terry, speaking with little emotion. The army kicks some of that out of you, from what I’ve seen. ‘Shell’s dad is alright. He said there’s nothing in Portsmouth yet.’ The question of Shell’s two younger brothers, both at Birmingham University, is left unanswered, and I don’t probe further.
The Third Wheel Page 7