During the day he cleaned and fussed pointlessly about the house, and as night fell he finally relaxed in his favourite chair with the radio turned low and a plate of tuna and cress sandwiches together with a tumbler of iced tea on the coffee-table beside him on the veranda, both slowly diminishing as the stars rotated above, pins of light reflecting off the pale slatted roof. That paleness was somehow immune to age and mould, a beacon to any pilot lost in these forgotten parts, instructing him not to land. After a while he slept, untroubled by dreams, at peace with the perfect blackness, a respite, treasured and short-lived, from the soon to be reality of dawn. Benedict had a canvas prepared, and come the morning, joints stiff and mind reeling, numb from dislocation and the subsequent adjustment, he would begin the process of constructing a picture within its walls, its artificial frame, waiting, as always he'd wait, for the toilet to flush and his wife emerge, immaculate as ever.
21
It wasn't much, but for the next few months, the summer at least, it was home.
‘Where can we get some furniture?’ Rosemary wanted to know, posing the question not to Moses, who was absent, working, but to the paperless walls. She wandered in and out of the kitchen like a nervous hostess about to present (any minute now; I hope you're all hungry) her first executive troughing, split between small-talk, which she loathed, and gravy stirring, continuously opening the oven, paranoid over a soufflé, making vacuous excuses to the flatulent and porky.
The oven here was a Primus stove. They had between them a holed sleeping bag and a collection of weird and unknowable kitchen implements.
‘We were lucky to get this place,’ he'd said to her.
Rosemary was excited, wanting to share it, missing her man and his distinctive silences, craving his touch and desiring the penetration of his reproductive organ, suitably tumescent. She wondered what could be keeping him, forestalling his expected, anticipated return. Work for Moses was washing dishes, in one side and out the other, mash and dribble victim to pressured jets and detergent. By contrast Rosemary had spent the afternoon filling in forms at the social security office. She didn't feel too secure now. As the day grew older her excitement turned to trepidation; lava to stone. Where was he? May brightness lanced through the south-west facing windows and lit the bare floor, creeping toward her toes.
Somebody tried the door. They found it locked. Rosemary approached, unsure. He's lost his key, she thought. He's playing some practical joke. There was a rapping, fist on wood, shy noise. She asked, ‘Who is it?’
‘Me,’ came the reply. ‘Are you alone?’
Alone? What did he mean? She could feel cold springs unwind, soft and fragile.
‘Me who?’
Nothing. No answer. Rosemary couldn't stand it. Grabbing the latch she twisted, turned, yanked the door wide and matched troubled gazes with a man not her own, this one thin and nervous, who practiced a smile.
‘You're not her,’ he stammered.
‘You're not him,’ she countered.
They stood two feet apart, diminished.
‘I'm sorry,’ he added.
‘Yeah, me too.’ And they parted.
At the bottom of the stairs Scherzo paused to catch his breath, the air having escaped his lungs when she'd spoken, the opening door setting his heart thumping like an alarm. Obviously the flat had a new tenant. But one bearing such a likeness to Ruth? He hadn't thought it Ruth for more than a second, but the resemblance, here, now, at this time, was frightening.
Rosemary sat cross-legged on the floor and cried till she emptied herself of tears and the light faded from the room, deserting her as Moses had deserted her. Abandoned in the city of her birth, the city she wanted so badly to know, to confide in and be part of, the city whose milieu had thus far offered her scant comfort, intent it seemed on exposing her worst fears, magnifying them as flaws, making her its property, its ward, a component to replace one burnt out or fused. Her inhibited self was marked from the outset, packaged and received, plugged into this gaseous soul.
She didn't think it romantic. She lay stretched out on her back and felt sorry for herself, disturbed come daybreak by milk bottles and car horns, the first real noises she had heard since setting foot inside the city's imperfectly reconstructed walls.
Scherzo was discovered by the outside door, supping cream like a lost and found kitten, observing her silently as she descended to claim her share.
‘Arrivals can do strange things to a person,’ Rosemary said, finding a place next to him on the chill concrete step. ‘The problem is you don't always realize when you're there. Take me for example. I hitched from London, met a boy on the road, lost count of the days and arrived here.’
‘Just like that?’ queried Scherzo, drinking from a fresh bottle.
‘Just like that,’ she echoed. ‘The more I think about it, about what actually happened, the less I seem to know.’
He sympathized, and they talked of dead ends and roundabouts and various sorts of junctions, among them T’s and Y’s, to which all roads led sooner or later.
22
The altered nature of the components puzzled her. Mackintosh had stated in his report that the satellite's reactor had failed, causing a terminal loss of power, but went only so far in explaining the orbital collapse, the spiralling in to earth. She walked round the wreckage a subsequent time, picking shapes from its sad heap. Shot down was a favoured interpretation. But why and by whom? Who on this planet had the capacity, the intent? Where lay the interest in destroying a harmless communications satellite? And those components, transmogrified; not by heat, she felt sure of that.
23
At the end of his shift, the machine switched off, gurgled empty, sprayed clean, the dishes stacked and the floor mopped, Moses left for home, his feet hot and fingers wrinkled, bloated and satisfied that his position in the world was presently secure, the lease good for a few unimaginable years. It was a sunny afternoon. He decided to walk through the park, a route which promised flower-beds and rioting children, laughter and the calls of diving kites, danger and the whistle of skimming Frisbees. Was there a pond? Boats and ducks? Moses liked the water. He felt nine years old again.
‘Dad?’ If I had one of those big blue balloons, he thought, smacking lips, I could fly like Winnie the Pooh.
‘What...’ dad replied, slowing, distracted by miniskirted school-girls and their full-roasted thighs, glazed with sun and youth, this the Easter holiday, late this year for reasons that were of no consequence to Moses.
‘I want a balloon.’
‘I thought you wanted an ice-cream?’
‘I do.’
‘Well,’ dad said, dropping his hand, ‘you can't have both; you'll have to choose.’
Moses sagged. What a choice!
Dad lit a cigarette, impatient with the boy, eyelids fluttering like the vanes of an Xpelair, breezing the grey smoke from his face.
Moses ran away. He ran straight and fast, charged across the new-mown grass, scattering people like the wind leaves, spinning them to either hand, making them dance a blurry dance, one he glimpsed in his mirrors, those streaming speed-tears. He threaded dangerously between ash and oak, beech and alder, crunched through picnics and sent flying bottles of warm lemonade, coke and cider, throats erupting in his wake, spittle and foam casting surf on the humid air, suspended for hours like toy clouds or wool snagged on fishing lines, the thunder of voices slow to materialize, fast to decompose as he broke from the storm his passage stirred and sped over the bowling green, nearly tripping. He out-rolled the weighted balls only to collide with a deck chair the far side of a tall hedge, tearing its striped fabric, tearing his hooped shirt, rushing next headlong into a shallow lake and vanishing like ice in boiling water, dropping from sight at the edge, sinking not three feet past the flaking cement border.
Was rescued, his older self, by a mermaid, a green girl with no fish's tail. No fins at all as it transpired. Her name was Rhoda. ‘After the TV show,?
?? she said.
Moses replied, ‘My mother used to love that. All Mary Tyler Moore's stuff.’
‘Mine too. I used to watch it with her, you know?’
He said he did.
Mam and dad. Mother and father. They went like this: mam a teacher's daughter, dad the son of a mechanic, mother in a rush to leave home and home's regime sees this leather-clad young buck straddling a purple-tanked Triumph come roaring with his desperadoes into town, one of those small places with leaky roofs, father with a cigarette behind each windy ear and a third wagging in his lips as he talked, conversation modelled on Elvis movies, slouch on Jimmy Dean, mam totally head over heels for this fast bad person, hot for his motorbike, dad only too pleased to take her for a ride, mother - before she even knew it - with those high-waisted knickers round her white-socked white ankles and flesh-padded not foam-packed leather between her bandy legs, father yet to slow down, motoring like crazy, this his first time but he'd never admit it, blood spotting the flattened grass, fake ladybirds beneath the sycamore tree mam had carved her initials in the weekend before, linking them with JG, JG the boy she was quietly, patiently hoping, despite herself, would turn into something other than a ridiculous plump baker's boy, the same that was sitting in the tree while the biker and the Saturday shop-assistant swapped fluids, dad grunting now, worried about grass stains on his knees, how cool or uncool they would look to his buddies, coming with a stiffening of the spine just as the boy JG landed on her hair and his jacket, mother screeching and father unplugging to rise and crack the interloper on his pug nose, eliciting a toylike squeak that mother would never forget, JG fleeing the woodland arena and his nameless rival to spread the tale of the teacher's daughter and the escaped lunatic, her ruination and his branding, a host of fathers and brothers to scour with rusted shotguns and polished implements of garden and shed sharp at one end, mam and dad making a run for it, life in his bike as they sped off into a corpulent sunset...
‘And that's how you were conceived?’ inquired the green girl, perhaps unbelieving, tossing her glassy green hair.
‘Yes,’ Moses said, with practised conviction.
The green girl came from a family of water wraiths, or naiads as they were more properly called. No-one realized she was green, she told Moses, her true identity only becoming obvious if she, as in this instance, was to share water with a non-fabulous being. She was on a quest, and he was bound to her until its completion, however long that might be.
‘What kind of a quest?’ queried Moses, edging away, his heart ahead of him, making for home and Rosemary, a girl with more than one colour in her spectrum, waiting for him now by a cracked window.
‘The quest for a tale,’ the green girl stated.
Moses misunderstood, found it difficult to move, to supplant himself with distance. ‘A tail?’ he said, aching to be gone, missing Rosemary already. ‘So you can swim out to sea, is that it?’ His skin crawled at different speeds, stretching and slacking. The park misted round him, the air’s dampness a clinging drizzle.
‘I must search till I find a story,’ the green girl clarified, once more twirling her locks. ‘I must wander the endless paths, pass through the countless doors, travel the roads and gaze into hollow trunks, under stones, beside the craters of shooting stars, between lovers and fighters, inside the shells of crabs and nuts, by the unsteady walls of burning houses and along the barely discernible banks of dried up rivers; over mountains, across deserts I must go, barren and manifold, always with my eyes and mind open, never sleeping, hunting below and above ground until I trace my story and capture it, returning then for that tale to be told.’
Moses saw his chance, an opportunity flimsy but maybe his last. ‘I have a story,’ he braved.
The green girl smiled. ‘Is it about love?’
‘Yes - love,’ he confirmed. ‘How did you know?’ A powerful sense of loss crept down his arms, stretching them, limbs elongated now like a monkey's.
‘You're human,’ she answered tersely, ‘and human stories are always about love, even when they're about hate.’
Moses had no reply to that. It was plain her story existed somewhere other than his newly refashioned head, plain that for him there would be no form of abstention, plain that he, in whatever guise, would join the green girl in her quest for a tale or a tail, the latter sprouting from above his blossoming anus, the former hidden in another world, a world as distinct from this as the last.
She took his lead, a strong thin leather band, and walked into the thickening pall, Moses knuckling at her lissom hip.
Time lapsed.
Exhausted, he lay supine not far from the hole. Night fell, threatening to crush him, and it grew colder, darker as Moses struggled to unseal his many eyes. Without moving he registered all round him a comforting, near perfect blackness, a heavy curtain wall that was deliriously familiar. He crawled away from the opening, toward some jumping lights in the distance, those that faulted his isolation, red and white and yellow and orange illuminations which gave off strange odours, like rotting fish, primordial gases housed these past aeons in ulcerous rocks, gastric buildings he understood to be flats and offices filled with self-combusting bipeds. People of a different ilk. This was a city up ahead. Moses could hear its approach. Cars zoomed by to his left while to his right a train screamed bloody abandon, scaring the few birds whose thankless task it was to keep the telegraph wires raised and thus the city's communication lines open. An off-duty contingent had circled him for languid hours in the false twilight, descending periodically to peck at his lacklustre carcass, that which had frequently changed, sailing away bad tempered each time he flinched. And this was only the outskirts, he reminded himself, hoping for a kind of sanctuary here, shelter from the avians who would rob him of silence.
Almost lifeless he came to an open door and crawled through it.
On the other side he slept, plagued by dreams of the green girl and their many adventures together in a land of tales that were not for the telling. Where was she now? he wondered. Would he start this adventure alone?
When he woke, stiff and hungry, dizzy from the polluted air, there were three people observing him, two male and one female, stood far off but impossibly close.
One of the men was grinning a grin of outsized triumph.
‘Excellent work,’ that man said.
Despite his weariness, Moses got to his feet. He looked down at his ungainly body. His head felt swollen. Had it, in these foreign climes, expanded?
‘It's disgusting,’ said the woman.
The grinning man turned his smile on her. ‘Come on, Rita,’ he said mockingly, ‘have you no appreciation of genius?’ His head appeared swollen, too. ‘Taylor here's an artist; you'll hurt his feelings. Isn't that right, Taylor? You're of a delicate disposition.’
Fuck you, Taylor seemed to answer.
The grin was superseded by a gun, likewise smiling.
Bang, the gun said, and Taylor died.
Fuck you.
Moses, distracted, unprepared, was meanwhile experimenting with a host of multi-directional appendages.
‘Oh, God, shit, Tony,’ the woman said, caught in the smoke embrace, the warm pistol lifting her skirt, marking her goose-pimpled thigh, pressing her cotton-packaged sex.
Joints slackening, Rita shape-shifted as she spilled to the dusty floor, unconscious.
Oh, God...
Moses, distracted, surprised, watched as, blood running into her hair, the pistol man raped her.
He soon found he was unable to talk. He could make sounds with his tongue which his minder then interpreted, but they were not sounds he himself intended or understood. The translations grew increasingly complex. There were papers to sign, various contractual documents that blurred before his eyes, as there were rides on empty jets, a sensation the constricted Moses enjoyed, but with the inevitable city their destination, the unsettling, torpid reality of a news conference and glaring crowd. He would sit or stan
d at these protracted gatherings, depending on whether a suitable chair could be found. He'd wave his colourful limbs, aware of the wide stares and pointing fingers, his keeper becoming more and more agitated as the same questions were repeated, aimed at Moses even though Moses wasn't in.
‘Which planet are you from, son?’ His keeper had told them he was only a boy. ‘Is your star visible from here? What does your world look like? Do you have much crime there? What about this invasion - it is an invasion, isn't it? Are we all gonna be wiped out? Do you like hamburgers? What do you think of the girls? Is it true you've signed a record deal with Salami?’
That again.
‘There is absolutely no factual basis for that assumption which is entirely based on spurious and wrongful information of a sort unworthy of polite enquiry...’
And then there was the shooting in Ontario, another city much the same as the last.
Moses, distracted, scratching, barely noticed. The bullet bounced right off.
And then he escaped the clutches, ran from his keeper one moonlit night after watching a cartoon about an elephant. The newspapers were full of the story come morning, of the rift between the alien and his agents, Lupid & Molhenny. Speculation grew that the deal with Salami was on, that the alien was unhappy with some of the merchandising, that he failed to recognize the validity of his original contract and that Lupid & Molhenny were preparing to sue, that the sensation of the millennium had returned to space because the holidays were over and he was back at school, that he was considering a career in game shows and/or pornography.