2
Shelley Thomson had six toes. When she was wee her father told her that she was an alien from outer space and that she was found abandoned by her parents when a UFO dumped her in a field outside Rosewell. The truth, however, was that it was her father who had abandoned Shelley. When she was six years old, he simply did not come home one day from work. Her mother, Lillian, refused to tell Shelley whether she knew anything at all about her dad's disappearance.
As a result, Shelley somewhat idealised the memory of her father, and this was particularly the case when her adolescent battles with Lillian hit a particularly discordant pitch. Growing up into a dreamy, speculative fifteen-year-old, Shelley had developed a fascination for UFOs.
When she realised that she was pregnant after missing two periods and then scoring positive twice on different Boots home-testing kits, Shelley claimed that the father was a seven-foot alien who came to her in the night and took her semi-conscious to a place which may or may not have been a spacecraft and lay on top of her. She told her friend Sarah that there was the 'feeling of doing it' without any genital interaction.
— Aw aye? Sarah scoffed. — What was eh like? Brad Pitt? Liam Gallagher?
Sarah tried not to show that she was impressed that her friend did not allow herself that kind of indulgence. Instead, Shelley described the alien in classical terms: a long, thin hairless body, large slanted eyes, etc. Impressed though she was, Sarah was far from convinced.
— Aye, right, Shelley, she disdained. — It's Alan Devlin's fae the garage, eh?
— Nuhp!
Alan Devlin was an attendant at the local garage at the bottom of the slip road which led onto the bypass. He had an easy, engaging manner with young girls from the local school, whose grounds backed onto the filling station. Clint Phillips, Alan's bashful seventeen-year-old YT, would wait nervously outside and keep watch while the senior attendant indulged himself in the back shop with the local youngsters, Shelley and Sarah being among those he numbered in his schoolie harem. Clint longed for a piece of the action but was too shy in himself, due mainly to his bad spots, and therefore too unexotic to the girls, and Devlin would tease him mercilessly about it. Many times Clint wished that Mr Marshall, the garage manager, who was never there, would come by and surprise them, but he never did. Marshall was an alcoholic and always on the piss in one of the local pubs come lunchtime. Clint nonetheless liked to infer that he'd fucked Shelley; this annoyed the fuck out of his mate Jimmy Mulgrew, who had the hots for her in a big way.
Alan Devlin came from the city and had been involved with a gang of football casuals known as the Capital City Service in his teens, but gave up when his older brother Mikey mysteriously vanished one evening, never to return. Mikey Devlin had been a top boy. In the five years since the disappearance of his idolised big brother, Alan Devlin had re-evaluated life. The gig was basically fucked, you were here one minute and gone the next. The point was to take what you can get. For Alan, this meant shagging as many birds as possible. His success with young girls was based on charm, persistence, and an ability to tap into their obsessions. Shelley had allowed him to fuck her after hearing this story. As her father had vanished, she felt a bond to Alan Devlin. Previously, this tall, thin schoolgirl had only let him touch her small, pubescent breasts, often as he and Sarah had full intercourse.
Shelley, and for that matter Sarah, always vowed never to visit Alan in the garage again. They were drawn out of boredom, however, and unfailingly mesmerised by the older lad's easy flattery. Before they knew it, Alan's hands would be all over one, or both, of them.
3
The shanty town of travellers had spilled from the old municipal travelling people's site onto the toxic wasteland alongside it. The settlement was growing daily. Millennium fever: these wee cunts were crazy for it, thought PC Trevor Drysdale. They weren't real travelling people, they were just cheeky bastards out for bother. As if he didn't have enough of that from the local youths. There had been a fight outside the chip shop last night. Again. Drysdale knew who the troublemakers were, with their drugs and smart-arse behaviour. Later this week he was up before the promotion board. There was still time to get the kind of result that could swing it. Had he not scored brownie points with his firm, but sensitive dealings with the travellers? Sergeant Drysdale. It sounded good. That new suit from Moss Bros. It fitted like a glove. Cowan, the chairman of the promotion board, was a stickler for appearances. Brother Cowan was also known to him from the Craft. The job was as good as his.
Drysdale walked down the path to the edge of the reservoir. Beer cans, wine bottles, crisp packets, glue tubes. That was the problem with working-class youth today; economically excluded, politically disenfranchised and full of strange drugs. It was a bad combination. All these wee cunts wanted to do was to party into the next century and see what this cultural watershed brought. If the answer was 'the same old shite', as it surely would be, Drysdale morosely reflected, then the wee fuckers would just shrug and party on into the next one.
Trevor Drysdale was realistic enough to know that there had never been a golden age of a 'clip round the earhole' in enforcing the law in these parts. Yet he did remember the realpolitik equivalent of social control, 'the kicking in the cells'. The old school of rough-and-ready Scottish youth respected that great institution of law enforcement, the slippery steps. Now, though, most of them were too full of drugs to feel the kicking or even remember they'd received it. After a few jellies, that kind of damage went with the territory. Yes, such an activity could still be therapeutic for the individual officer, but as a method of enforcing the law it was worse than useless.
What a place, Drysdale mused, letting his gaze sweep over the reservoir down across the city's topography and back up to the Pentland Hills. It had changed here alright. Even as conditioned to its incremental development as he was, sometimes the nastiness of the arbitrary, incongruent nature of the locale jarred with him. Old villages, shoebox modern housing developments, barren fields, scabby, moribund farms and industrial estates, leisure and shopping complexes, motorways, slip roads and that rancid piece of brown, derelict wasteland they bizarrely called the Green Belt. That terminology seemed like yet another calculated insult perpetuated on the locals by the authorities.
But if there was one thing that concerned him more than the gloom which had solidified the place like a gel, it was this new wave of optimism. Millennium fever. In other words, another excuse for young cunts to go shagging and drugging while the rest of us have to work away in a state of loathing and fear, he reflected with rancour, feeling his ulcer bite. It had to be stopped. There were thousands of them now, crowded onto that strip of land.
Drysdale looked down from the steep bank by the water. He could see that makeshift village of lost souls expanding, getting closer and closer to his own Barratt estate. Thank fuck for the slip road that divided them. It was surely now time for the government to declare a national emergency; take off the kid gloves. But no; the sly fuckers were holding off, crossing their fingers for a few drug-related deaths. Then they'd whip up hysteria among a supposed moral majority and bring in some more repressive measures. It had to be worth a few percentage points in the polls and party conference season, and an election itself, were coming up soon. There would be a round of 'get tough' speeches followed by a few witch-hunts. Drysdale had heard it all before, but to hear it more loudly would at least mean that they hadn't given up. Let's get some fucking blood spilled here, he ruefully willed, dispatching a rusty can into the dank water with a crisp volley.
4
The young team's plan had been an inadvertent success. The next morning Clint Phillips woke up on Jimmy Mulgrew's floor in agony, and they had been forced to take him to the hospital, where he was X-rayed, examined and admitted. Jimmy considered it a bonus that Clint, rather than Semo, had been hospitalised, although with Clint not at the garage shop, they would have to watch what they nicked with that big Alan Devlin cunt around.
Anyway, Clint wo
uld be out in a day or so, then they could go round to the small police substation, and register the crime with the polisman Drysdale, blaming a group of the travellers for the assault.
5
The Cyrastorian pushed his long fingers against his temples. He could feel himself steadily moving from the centre of the Will, out into the peripheral zones of its influence. Sometimes Gezra, the Elder, felt that he had been wrong to pursue this line of work beyond his allotted span. It was as if he could feel the very chill of deep space insinuating itself into his flesh and bone, through the translucent aura of the Will, which protected him and all his world's sons and daughters.
In the darkness of his craft, illuminated only by the images which panned up of the observed planet, the Appropriate Behaviour Compliance Elder for this sector pondered as to the likely destiny of the rogue youth's ship. Earth seemed almost too obvious. After all, their specimen had been from that world. Specimen. Gezra smiled across his thin lips; he would have to stop using such a pejorative, demeaning term. After all, the Earthman had been inducted, electing to stay a part of Cyrastorian culture, rather than return home with a memory wipe, and this in return for strangely modest rewards. There was little to be gained in attempting to understand the primitive psyche of the Earth creature.
The Appropriate Behaviour Compliance Elder reluctantly decided that he needed to use external technology to locate the renegade youths. This prospect filled the Elder with distaste. Cyrastorian philosophy was based around the dismantling and demobilising of external technology, and the ruthless promotion of the Will, those individual and collective psychic powers, by which his race had developed and advanced their civilisation from their own decrepit, post-industrial age, now several millennia past.
As with Earth humanoids, the early history of Cyrastor had been dominated by a procession of prophets, evangelists, messiahs, sages and seers who had contrived to convince both themselves and their followers that they were privy to the secrets of the universe. Some achieved little more than ridicule in their own lifetime, others would have an influence on generations.
The remorseless rise of science and technology conspired to undermine the great religions as the basis of truth, without ever reducing the humility, wonder and reverence experienced by all intelligent life forms as they contemplated this immense, amazing universe. Yet as Cyrastorian technology itself advanced and opened up what seemed like a vast expanse but would retrospectively only be regarded as a corner of their civilisation, it simultaneously threw up more mysteries than it had the capacity to resolve. This was always the way with knowledge, but of greater concern to the Cyrastorians was their culture's inbuilt tendency to gear all such technology towards the consumption of resources without being able to eliminate poverty, inequality, disease and the wasted potential of its citizens.
At the very height of their technological advancement, this pragmatic and idealistic people faced up to their spiritual crisis. A body known as the Foundation was established by the Principal Elders. Its brief was to promote spiritual enlightenment, and to liberate the Cyrastorian potentialities of the mind from its hitherto supposed physiological limitations. Centuries of meditation resulted in the creation of the Will, a collective pool of psychic energy that every Cyrastorian could draw upon, and, by the very act of living and thinking, contributed to in accordance with the levels of their personal training and their ability to learn. As the Will had all but eradicated cultural and social differences, this proved to be very similar in all Cyrastorian citizens.
It had previously been somewhat hilarious for Gezra to fritter away leisure moments watching primitive cultures like Earth continue down their blind alley of external technology development. Now however, many of the renegade Cyrastorian youth were moved by at least the idea of this visceral touch, feel and taste nonsense. Primitivists, they sought physical types of interaction for its own thrilling sensation, and often with races who were little more than savages. Gezra knew, however, that the renegade leader, the Younger called Tazak, had, for all his rhetoric about the cult of physicality, extremely developed psychic powers, and would sense any Elder attempts at the detection of his presence through the exercise of the Will.
6
The young team were sitting drinking cheap wine by the reservoir. Jimmy remembered that, only a few years ago, they had fished for perch and pike in its waters. Glue had taken over. It wasn't really that it was less boring, more that being glued up was like the excitement of a catch spread over the whole day. There was an aroused sense of wasted purpose and at the same time a comfort in the oblivion it produced. Of course, they all knew that it was going nowhere. While intoxication provided a multitude of misadventures, tales of which could, under certain conditions, get you through periods of mind-crushing straightness, it too often only led to greater frustration and anxiety.
But fuck it though. Jimmy yawned and stretched, feeling the pleasurable unravelling of his limbs, you always tended to follow the line of least resistance. What else was there? Jimmy thought of his parents, now split up, their quaint notions of 'respect', hued from an era of full employment and half-decent wages, floundering on the remorseless, depressive nothingness around them. He couldn't respect them, nor could he respect society. He couldn't even respect himself, only band together with his pals to enforce others to respect him, in a way which became more limited and proscribed every day. You just had to stick together with your mates, and make sure there was a clear tunnel ahead and hope for a better world if and when you emerged into the light.
Maybe the travellers had the right idea, Jimmy thought. Perhaps movement was the key. Why the fuck had the sad cunts come here though? The stretches of wasteland, between the Barratt schemes, industrial estates and flyovers, had become home to people from all over Britain and even further afield. All those fucked-up cunts, talking about a 'force' that had brought them here. Here! For fuck sakes. Anyway, to fuck with all those cunts, Clint was out tomorrow. They'd register the crime with Drysdale and then take the criminal injuries compensation wankers to the cleaners. Easy.
Jimmy swigged back half a bottle of Hooch lemonade. They had graduated to beer and spirits, their current favourite tipple being a few Hooches, super lager and fortified wine with capsules of temazepam if available. Their mate Carl had almost drowned the other week, falling asleep by the side of the reservoir, only for it rise in the evening. When the others, who had staggered back into town, had realised he was absent and gone back to find him, it was nearly over his mouth and nostrils.
Looking up at the ugly, hollow sky, Jimmy wondered if there was anything out there. This was one of the top places in Britain for UFO sightings, and every six months or so, scientists and journalists and UFO spotters would be hanging about the town. It was always in shitey redneck places like this where there was fuck all to do that people saw those things, he reflected bitterly, lobbing an empty bottle into the reservoir. Why the fuck would aliens come here? He'd been talking to that dippit wee Shelley too much, her that was getting fucked by that Alan Devlin cunt, the city boy from the garage. He resented the city boy, not just for fucking a girl he had sexual designs on (after all, he had sexual designs on almost any girl), but because Devlin had threatened to baseball-bat him after he'd caught Jimmy stealing some crisps.
It had to be said, though, that Shelley was pure class. Jimmy knew that from the time at the chippy when he had offered to buy her chips; she had asked for curry sauce on them. It was these wee touches that marked out the top manto from the park-and-ride brigade. But this aliens baws, though, it got on his nerves. That was how that Alan Devlin was riding her, getting her head messed up with all that shite.
Glue had always been Jimmy's drug of choice. He loved the stunning rush of the vapour, the way it stuck to his lungs, catching his breath. He knew that it meant he possibly wouldn't live long, but every auld cunt in the town seemed as miserable as fuck so there seemed to him to be no real virtue in longevity. It was quality of life that counted and he consi
dered that you were better being cunted than on a fuckin training scheme for a pittance with some red-faced tossbag shouting at you and then paying you off after two years to make way for the next dippit cunt. If any cunt couldn't see that, then, as far as Jimmy was concerned, they didn't have a fuckin brain. — The logic is inescapable, he sniggered to himself.
— What you sayin, ya daft cunt? Semo laughed.
— Nowt, Jimmy smiled, dropping some Airfix model glue on his tongue, enjoying the nip and sensation of asphyxiation. n, when air filled his lungs, he savoured the spinning in his head. As the throbbing in his temples receded, he squirted the rest into an empty crisp packet and went for it.
— Pass it ower, Jimmy ya cunt, Semo moaned, guzzling a can of super lager and wincing. It tasted foul. You were better starting on the hooch until you got cunted enough no tae taste the lager, he decided. It wisnae too bad cauld, but warm . . . fuck it.
Jimmy reluctantly passed the bag to Semo. For a brief second he felt that the ground was going to rise up and smack him in the chin, but he weathered that storm and rubbed his eyes in an attempt to restore some vision.
Dunky was chewing on something or other.— Mind when we used tae fish here? Good times, he mused.
— Borin as fuck but, eh? Semo said, then, with a sudden abruptness which caused Jimmy to start inside, asked him: — Hi, you rode that Shelley yit, Jimmy? Yuv been sniffin roond it enough.
— Mibbe ah huv, mibbe ah huvnae, Jimmy smiled. In his fantasy they were going out together. He liked the way people were starting to associate them. He played his desire like a poker hand, flirting with his friends about his feelings for her, in a strangely deeper way than he ever did with her.
— Some cunt wis sayin she's up the kite, Dunky said.
— Fuck off, Jimmy snapped.