The Foreigners

by James Lovegrove

  “You have. Thank you, professor. I’m grateful for your time.”

  “Prego. Call me again if you would like to talk some more.”

  “I will. Goodbye.”

  “Ciao.”

  Parry hung up and stood up. It was nigh on noon. He walked out of his office and down a short corridor to his district’s operations room. Here, several dozen FPP officers worked within low-partitioned cubicles, answering calls and logging reports. At present the majority of them were elsewhere, either out on patrol or taking an early lunch, but Johansen, as Parry had hoped, was at his desk.

  Someone, in all probability Johansen himself, had tacked a printout copy of the Norwegian flag to the back of his chair with, beneath it in 36-point capitals, the slogan “NORWEGIAN FROM HELL”. Johansen hailed from the city of Trondheim, but there was not nearly so much comic mileage to be derived from that as there was from claiming he was from Hell, a small town twenty-five kilometres east of Trondheim and notable for not much other than its name.

  “Pål?”

  Johansen glanced up his work board. On the screen were the FPP Council Audit Bureau figures showing the results of the latest survey of Foreign population density in resort-cities. The only method anyone had been able to work out for gauging the number of Foreigners present on Earth was to take regular satellite photographs of specific open-air sites in resort-cities and then literally count heads among the crowds, distinguishing golden masks from human crania. The resulting totals were then tabulated in the form of graphs, all of which, allowing for minor fluctuations, demonstrated an upward trend, the notable exception being the graph for Koh Farang, which showed a line as flat as a dead man’s ECG readout.

  “Not gone for your usual lunchtime gym session?” Parry asked. “With all the other physical jerks?”

  “Ha ha. You know what, boss, every time you crack that joke I like it a little bit more.”

  “Yes. Sorry. But you’re not doing anything important right now.”

  “Nothing that can’t wait. Why?”

  “Fancy a little trip?”

  “Sure. Where to?”

  “You remember that Frenchwoman who was on Calliope a few months back? The one who said she’d had an affair with a Foreigner?”

  “Yeah. Calliope went too easy on her, I thought.”

  “She goes easy on everyone. That’s why she’s so popular. Can you remember what the Frenchwoman was called?”

  “No, but we can look it up.”

  Johansen turned back to his work board and hammered out a two-fingered tattoo on the keys. Soon, with the help of FPP privileges, he had accessed the NVTV database. Once there, it was a simple matter to pull up a list of the names of all the guests who had appeared over the past year on New Venice’s top-rated, world-syndicated television talk-show.

  Bending and squinting, Parry scanned the list, knowing he would recognise the woman’s name when he saw it. “There she is.” He pointed to the screen. “That’s her. Viola d’Indy.”

  “So what do you want with her anyway?” Johansen asked. “She’s a complete fruit-and-nut cake.”

  “Never mind. Pull up her address from the directory. We’re going to pay her a visit.”

  11. Rhapsody

  THE SEA-HIVE WAS one of New Venice’s cheap areas, although in a resort-city “cheap” was a relative concept. Anywhere else in the world, the Sea-Hive’s rents and utility costs would have been considered on the steep side. Here, they were deemed appropriate, even for an area whose purpose was to provide accommodation for those in the service industries and the lower echelons of the hotel trade.

  The Sea-Hive’s condominium blocks shouldered together in squat, hexagonal configurations, overshadowing narrow canals. It was in one of these blocks that Viola d’Indy lived, on the bottom floor, in a one-bedroom waterside apartment with a galley kitchen, a tiny terrace, and furniture supplied by the landlord.

  Viola was a petite, pale-skinned woman who held herself with a kind of febrile, pinched rigidity. Her hair was cut in a Louise Brooks bob and dyed a lustreless black. Her chin was small, her nose emphatic, and her eyes were like a doll’s, glassy and over-large for her face. Ringed with kohl, they rarely blinked, although her hands, as if to compensate for her eyelids’ immobility, were constantly aflutter, darting here and there as she spoke, two white flesh moths. She was wearing a knee-length dress of cerise-coloured crushed velvet, accessorised with trainers and sweatsocks, a hoop-la of bangles on either forearm, and a black silk scarf wrapped dramatically around her neck. She smoked FAVOURITE cigarettes in quick, nervous bursts, each slender, gold-banded tube spending the majority of its life smouldering on the rim of an ashtray.

  “This was nearly two years ago,” she said to Parry, while beyond the living-room windows a canal-bus lumbered by, filling the salt-clouded panes with its bumbling bulk. Seconds after the double-decker boat had passed, its wash hit the outer wall of the apartment and waves thumped and bumped against the building with diminishing intensity until the canal calmed again. “My life has not been so wonderful since. But the time I had with him was very special. A golden memory.”

  “Him?” said Parry. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Johansen looking surprised, too.

  “Oh yes. Without a doubt he was a him.” Viola coughed into a loosely-clenched, jangling hand. “Excuse me.”

  “So there were certain aspects of this Foreigner’s behaviour that enabled you to determine its sex?” Parry managed to keep all but a tiny trace of scepticism out of his voice.

  “Doh-Fa-Sol. His name was Doh-Fa-Sol.” She crooned the three notes in a husky, harsh coloratura. “He liked me calling him that. It was his favourite sequence. And in answer to your question, I don’t know how I know, I only know that I do know. And yes, I’ve read Vieuxtemps of course.”

  She waved a hand in the direction of a stack of bound downloads on the smoked-glass coffee table. The topmost of them was François-Joseph Vieuxtemps’s Foreigners Are Neither From Venus Nor From Mars. Current claimant of the never-too-hotly-contested title of World’s Most Famous Belgian, Vieuxtemps was a behavioural psychologist and latterly Xenologist who had been studying Foreigners since the Debut. His book, which had become an international best-seller in both onscreen and hardcopy formats, asserted among other things that golden giants were sexually identical and exhibited no traits that could be distinctly defined as masculine or feminine.

  “All I can say is, Monsieur Vieuxtemps clearly has not spent time in close contact with a Foreigner,” Viola continued. “He should have consulted me. I would have told him that what may not be perceived by the eyes may be perceived with the heart.”

  “And how long were you and – I won’t attempt to sing his name – Doh-Fa-Sol together, Mademoiselle d’Indy?”

  “Five weeks, three days, captain, although I am sure that I sang for him at least twice before I knew who he was, if you see what I mean. He was checking me out, you see. Anonymously. He was interested in me from the start but he was shy and it took him a while to pluck up the courage to ask me to be his companion.”

  “Which he did how?”

  “Like so.” Viola slotted her hands together, index and middle fingers extended, other fingers bunched, thumbs tip-to-tip and forming an O. COMRADESHIP. “It was beautiful, that moment. I shall never forget it. I cried because I felt so honoured, so chosen.” She picked up her cigarette and lifted it to her lips for the briefest of drags before returning it to the ashtray. “And for thirty-eight days I was in heaven. We met up regularly, Doh-Fa-Sol and I, even went on day-trips together. A bus tour up the coast. A cruise around Old Venice. Have you ever visited Old Venice, captain?”

  “I’ve seen pictures.”

  “Pictures don’t do it justice. It’s quite remarkable. The ruins – like coral reefs. And every evening I would sing to him. My voice – such raptures I would send him into with my voice! It’s not what it used to be. These damned cigarettes are taking their toll, and I keep meaning to give up, but you kno
w... But Doh-Fa-Sol adored my voice. I could leave him weak and shuddering with my song. I swear, as I left his room he would be barely able to stand. And I myself...” A blush deepened the redness of the rouge on her cheeks. “Well, captain, I won’t go into the matter too deeply, but there were occasions when I even brought myself ... pleasure. I did not have to touch myself. I only had to sing and to see what my singing did to Doh-Fa-Sol. That was enough.”

  Parry averted his eyes from Viola’s unwavering gaze. Her frankness made him uncomfortable.

  “Did he give you all those?” Johansen asked, nodding in the direction of a wood-laminate sideboard on which was arrayed a collection of Foreign statuettes, some fifteen of them in all. The rest of the room was shabby, grubby, in need of a thorough clean, but the statuettes had been kept scrupulously dusted. They were without question the most valuable items Viola d’Indy possessed, perhaps the only valuable items she possessed. Everything else in her apartment, including her, had seen better days.

  “Some,” she replied. “The rest I bought after...” She faltered, then collected herself. “After it was over. I spent almost all my savings on them. They make me think of him.”

  So saying, she rose and approached the statuettes and, choosing a medium-sized one, laid her fingertips lightly on it. Straight away a mid-register note vibrated out, ceasing abruptly the instant Viola took her hand away. She touched the statuette again, this time running her fingers down its length, and the note issued forth again, its upper harmonics deepening as she traced a line from the statuette’s shoulders to its feet. Lowering her arm, she returned with a wistful air to her seat.

  “Wonderful, n’est-ce pas?” she said. “It always cheers me up to hear one sing. I imagine you, captain, must have several at home yourself.”

  Parry, smiling, shook his head. “No.”

  “But surely an FPP captain has done plenty of things to make Foreigners grateful.”

  “Obviously not grateful enough to reward me with a statuette.”

  “And you haven’t bought one second-hand?”

  “On my salary?” Parry said, and laughed. “Anyway, Mademoiselle d’Indy. Perhaps if we could get back to your relationship with this Foreigner...”

  “What else is there to tell?” Viola heaved a tragic sigh. “It was love, pure and simple. A time of utter happiness for me. Occasionally, when we were in public together, I would catch people giving me this sort of look.” She mimed ugh. “But that was only when we were outside New Venice. In a resort-city everybody is more tolerant, are they not? Besides, what did I care what others thought? They could not know, could not understand, what Doh-Fa-Sol and I had together. We were joined at the heart. Different species, joined at the heart. United by our love.”

  “I suppose, then, that you must know of other Sirens who’ve formed such close relationships with golden giants.”

  Viola’s current FAVOURITE had smouldered down to the filter on the ashtray rim. She picked up the packet with its gold hand-symbol logo, tapped out a fresh cigarette and lit it. “Not until Calliope,” she said. “In fact, that was one of the main reasons I did the show – to find out if there were others like me out there. I couldn’t believe, you see, that I was the only one. And sure enough, after the interview aired, dozens of Sirens from all over the world got in touch with me to say that they, too, had been involved with Foreigners. None of them, I have to say, seemed to have enjoyed quite such an intensity of passion as I did with Doh-Fa-Sol.” Now she blinked – a slow, deliberate meshing of the eyelashes, profoundly smug. “But then I suspect, deep down, that for them the money was a factor, however strenuously they denied it.”

  “But you were paid for your companionship.” Parry gestured towards the statuettes.

  “Doh-Fa-Sol insisted. But I would willingly have accompanied him for free.”

  Parry took out his notebook and pencil. “Then, mademoiselle, perhaps I could ask you if the name...” He thumbed through the notebook until he found the page he wanted. It was an entirely superfluous action, a piece of stage business intended to give the impression of methodicality and orderliness. “The name Daryl Henderson means anything to you?”

  Viola thought for a moment. “No. I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Absolument.”

  “He wasn’t one of the Sirens who contacted you after Calliope?”

  Viola shook her head. “No. Definitely no. I would remember.”

  It had been worth a try. “Well, mademoiselle.” Parry stowed away the notebook. “You’ve been extremely helpful, and we wouldn’t want to take up any more of your time...”

  “Don’t you want to know how it ended?”

  Parry, having half-risen, lowered himself back into his chair. No harm in letting her finish her story. It obviously mattered to her, unburdening herself of the tale in its entirety.

  “He left,” she said simply. “Without warning. Without excuse or explanation. One evening I went to Sirensong and he did not come. I went to the last hotel he had been staying at and he was no longer there. And more days passed, and he did not come to Sirensong, and I soon understood that he had gone home. Do I hate him for that? Yes and no. Yes, because it was cowardly, but no, because it was a typically male thing to do, so in that sense he wasn’t to blame. He couldn’t help himself. He’d decided our time together was up, and that was that. Men brood silently on things, arrive at sudden decisions, and then act on them. That’s just how they are. I know this from experience. And a male Foreigner is no different.”

  “Foreigners come, Foreigners go, Mademoiselle d’Indy,” Parry pointed out. “We don’t know how and we don’t know why.”

  “Naturally you leap to his defence, captain.” Somehow the weariness in Viola’s voice was more scathing than bitterness would have been. “You are, after all, a man.”

  Gender loyalty was not at issue here. Parry simply did not like hearing someone ascribe common human failings to a Foreigner. “But they’re not like us,” he said. “They have their own motives. Perhaps you ought to give it – him – the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Oh, I have. You see, he’s coming back for me.”

  “He is?”

  “I’m certain of it. Doh-Fa-Sol didn’t abandon me. He hasn’t forgotten me. I know this, and so every night I go out to Sirensong and sing. The way my voice is these days ... well, let’s just say I don’t get many takers. But that’s not the point. That’s not why I do it. I keep going out there because one day Doh-Fa-Sol will come back and he’ll be looking for me and he’ll hear me and find me ... and then we’ll be together again for ever.”

  The rapturous conviction of these last few words crumbled into a series of rough, racking coughs.

  Yes, that’s just what’ll happen, Parry thought. If the cigarettes don’t kill you first.

  “Love, captain,” Viola said. She had to wrench the words out between coughs and gulps for air. “It’s the final thing. The only thing. It’s all that we have. When everything else has gone, love is all that matters. For you, for me, for everyone – even for Foreigners.”

  12. Promenade

  VIOLA’S TUSSIVE UTTERANCE was still resonating in Parry’s head as he and Johansen returned to the jetty where their launch was moored. He had no idea why a few comments made by a desperate and bereft woman should have lodged themselves in his brain and be screaming significance at him. What Viola had said about love had been no more profound or insightful than the lyrics of the song he had heard on his home board yesterday evening. Crude aphorisms, nothing more. Clichés.

  Yet he could not deny that there were certain parallels between Viola pining for her lost Foreigner and his own situation with Anna. The Frenchwoman had convinced herself that her Doh-Fa-Sol was going to return for her. She had to believe this. It was all she had left to cling to, all that gave her life shape and aim. And likewise was there not an element of necessary self-delusion in his conviction that Anna would eventually, if he hung on lon
g enough, consent to a resumption of their relationship?

  Well, no. For one thing, unlike Viola and her Foreigner, he and Anna still communicated with each other. Infrequently, to be sure. A phone call once a fortnight on average. But at least they had contact. And not only that, they met up in person every now and again, for a drink, sometimes a meal, and on those occasions they would have conversations, long ones – although admittedly nothing of much substance was ever said. They would talk trivial events to death, smothering inconsequentialities beneath an excess weight of words, while the important stuff, the subjects Parry felt they should be discussing, went, by unspoken agreement, unspoken. There were questions that he needed answered, but he was afraid to ask them, afraid that asking them would contravene the terms of the relationship as it now stood, terms he had not set and did not know, and meanwhile Anna, obstinate Anna, had no intention of volunteering an explanation for why she had abruptly and unilaterally called off their affair after her husband’s death, and thus a great deal remained unresolved between them ... and this he knew now (although he had endured months of anguish before reaching this conclusion) was not altogether bad. What was unresolved was unfinished and what was unfinished might be restarted. As long as he and Anna still had a friendship – and they did, albeit an awkward one, with a significant region of its established territory cordoned off and marked taboo and always to be carefully circumnavigated – then there was always a chance that one day, once again, that friendship could become something more. That was what made their phone conversations and dinner dates endurable. That was how he could bear to be physically close to Anna but not at liberty to touch her and could accept a peck on the cheek instead of the kiss on the lips that he craved, because in proximity and dry gestures of affection, wintry echoes of summer plenty, there was always the promise of regeneration, spring’s eternal hope.