by Liz Jensen
It seems like an innocent question, but I have said the wrong thing, because he whips round and shouts: ‘I told you, it’s not a story! You’re not listening! It happens!’
He runs around the back of the house, picks up a rock and smashes the ice on the bath tub, then starts hauling out the huge shards. They clatter to the ground, falling next to his red bare feet. I take a deep breath and shout back.
‘What happens, Freddy. Tell me!’
Frenzied, he grabs the chain and pulls out the bath plug: instantly, the freezing liquid glugs down the plughole and waterfalls down on to the icy mud, leaving the goldfish flipping about on the white enamel base in a swirl of mud. Then, too fast for me to react, Freddy has reached in, grabbed the creature, stuffed it into his mouth and run off.
Indoors, freezing, I strip off and dry myself. Then I go upstairs and sit on my bed and rock.
It’s not a story, Freddy said. It happens.
But when, and where, and why?
The soil is rock hard, but I dig it anyway because the fight of it soothes me. Darkness is closing in. You can see the dance of will-o’-the-wisp as the bog exhales its methane into the air, mixing with the distant froth of the shore. I stare at the silhouettes of clouds drifting across the horizon. I try to see the story Freddy is telling: the one he insists is not a story, but reality.
Once upon a time the Earth we know went amok: hurricanes crossing vast oceans; coasts drowned; lowlands steeped in salt; landscapes baked to desert; aquifers welling up and crystallising. Salt is born of the purest parents. Too much sun, too much sea. White Death. The Swiss demographer’s conference: The Perfect Storm: Climate, Hunger and Population.
A species in crisis. The exponential growth phase giving way to the stationary and death phases. The curve’s end: the collapse of humankind that Professor Whybray wrote of in his notebook. And the aftermath?
A place my boy knows well. A place he feels at home. A land of insects and dried seaweed, of stockpiled tins from a bygone era which this version of himself never even knew. Poison and sun-blindness. Mass death, mass graves of salted meat. And when the last food is gone, only one way to assuage the hunger.
Majd. Ikenie.
The eating of each other. And then fewer of them still.
Until – the opposite of a Creation myth: just one is left. And then none.
The children’s story is the story of man’s end on Earth.
An hour later he’s standing next to me, peeling the bark off a stick. Barefoot, as usual, despite the cold.
‘Freddy. The hand-print you make. What does it mean?’
‘Stop. It means we want you to stop.’
‘Stop what?’
He shrugs and throws down his stick. ‘Everything grown-ups do. Everything you did, when you were alive. Everything you did before you died.’
‘We’re dead?’
‘You’re from the Old World. Same thing.’
‘You say we want you to stop. Who’s we?’
He shrugs. ‘Me and the other kids. We have the same blood.’
‘So where do you come from?’
‘The place you are before you’re born. And after you’re dead.’
‘But you’re alive Freddy. You’re here with me. We’re both alive.’
He shakes his head. ‘No. You’re dead. This feels like now, for you. But it’s a zillion years ago.’
. . . beloved Hesketh . . . the very last to understand: the last to make the leap of faith . . . His need for proof blinds . . .
The Venns erupt in my head. Circles within circles. Fairy rings. Neutrinos. I lean harder on my spade and start to rock. The CERN experiment represented a seismic breakthrough in our grasp of the universe. Can undreamed-of dimensions be fused, in times of crisis, to the dimensions we know? Can a child be in two realms of time at once? Quantum physics would say yes. When the professor spoke of an ‘occupation’ he was being serious. But I dismissed it.
We belong to the Old World, said Naomi. Time doesn’t work the way you think. They’ve come back to stop us.
I remember a day in London, Ashok silhouetted against the sky, ranting.
Look what’s happening to growth! How can anything be rebuilt or even survive, when industry’s being sabotaged on this kind of scale?
Growth. Progress. More. Newer.
The Holy Grail.
Look behind and you shall be turned into a pillar of salt.
Beloved Hesketh, he called me. But it took Freddy to show me the thing I couldn’t see. It is not a hypothetical world to them. It is as real as ours.
The question is not how they came. Let string theory work that out. The question is, how could they not?
After Freddy wanders off, I stay in the darkness for a long time, leaning on my spade.
A few days later we go for the walk I will come to think of as our last. There’s a light rain.
The boy stops by the boulder that marks the sharp turn of the sheep-path and gazes up. The sunlight refracts in such a way that I don’t see it at first. But then I do.
High at the top of the dark granite, the familiar image scrawled in white chalk.
The eye.
He has been summoned.
In the weeks that follow, there’s a scenario I conjure as a comfort to myself. It comes to me when I sit at my desk, swivelling in my chair and watching the dancing shadows of the candle that I keep burning in the window just in case.
There is a sound that might be a tree branch banging against the door. But it’s a knock. I open the door, and the professor is standing there, his hair and beard spangled with rain.
‘I knew I’d find you here, boy,’ he says.
I remind him I am thirty-six. Then I show him around the cottage, warning him to mind his head on the beams. He smiles when he sees the antique optometrist’s charts he gave me all those years ago. He inspects my dictionary collection and applauds my shelving system, noting what’s arranged on it, and in what configuration. And I show him the hermit crab.
‘It’s nearly finished,’ I tell him. He admires the intricacy of the legs and eye-stalks. The way they emerge so neatly from the shiny concertinaed shell. I explain some of Lang’s origami principles. ‘When I complete it, it’s for you. A gift. I wish I could have done it when you were still alive. But I wasn’t ready. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry I was the last person on earth to understand. You were right. About the new paradigm.’
‘I know. I’m glad you saw it. I didn’t think you would.’
‘Freddy showed me.’
‘We make a good threesome.’
‘He’s gone.’
‘But he’ll be back. When they’ve finished what they came to do. When mankind has changed enough. When the new course is set. You know that, Hesketh.’
‘Do I?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Hoping and believing aren’t the same.’
He smiles. ‘No. But you can make them be. So when will you finish this famous hermit crab of yours?’
‘When I’ve got past hoping. And seen beyond.’
More and more, I think about the never-ending universe of things that man does not know.
If the old Freddy were here, he would say, ‘Yet’.
But there is no Freddy any more. He is off with the fairies.
And what does ‘yet’ mean, now that time has a whole new meaning?
I love him, no matter what. I know that. But what does a man do with such a love? No stories I know can tell me how this ends. But all flow charts contain a range of possible outcomes, so I have a set of hopes. And some things are already clearly foreseeable. The process of recalibration is quietly under way on Arran. When people dare to breed here again their offspring will be fewer, and better cherished. This new generation will learn that it was children like themselves who halted the juggernaut at the brink of the abyss. That they did not come all this way to destroy us. They came as saviours, bearing the undeserved and astonishing gift of a second chance. And that it is
thanks to them that we discovered a new metaphysics of being. I am not a great communicator. But in the work I plan to write, I will try to convey this. I will dedicate it to Professor Whybray, and to Freddy.
I walk on the shore, alone, listening for the cry of the black guillemot.
Lately, more rain has been falling, borne by a fresh spate of hurricanes in the mid-Atlantic. The wind picks up moisture from the ocean and hurls it far inland.
Then, one day, I see him. He’s just a dot in the distance, but I know it’s him, even before I lift my binoculars. I adjust the focus. All that’s left of his clothing is a pair of pants and a torn vest.
‘Freddy!’ I shout. But he’s too far away to hear me.
They all are.
Twenty or thirty of them are coming into view, shoaling by the black stone, naked or in rags, with clumps of salty bladderwrack on their heads and wet ribbons of seaweed or strings of bones around their necks. The lenses of their dark glasses flash weakly in the fading light. Their little bodies are skinny and streaked with grime. Their fingernails are black. Their dry, sunburned skin twinkles with crystals of salt. The crusted-up wings of insects and the legs of miniature sand-crabs cling to the edges of their mouths.
The hidden internal folds of an origami model in progress operate like flower buds or the folded wings of a bird. When you open them out, their intended shape, and their place in the whole and their function, become clear and true.
In that moment, when hope becomes belief, there is enlightenment.
The next morning, with the high, bright sun illuminating my desk, I complete the last fold of the hermit crab.
Outside, I turn my face to the wind and feel the salt mist on my face.
And I am filled with something I can hesitantly call joy.
Acknowledgements
No book of mine is ever completed without a huge amount of help from friends, family and colleagues who read the manuscript at different stages. The Uninvited is no exception. I owe a huge debt to Polly Coles, Amanda Craig, Gina de Ferrer, Humphrey Hawksley, Ide Hejlskov, Sally Holloway, Carsten Jensen, Tom Jensen, Claire Letemendia, Annette Lindegaard, Kate O’Riordan, Matthew Quick and Ian Steadman, for their sharp critical eyes and generous encouragement.
My thanks also go to Marika Cobbold, Raphaël Coleman, Adam Grydehøj, Bill Hartston and Felicity Steadman for their specialist input on matters as varied as Swedish vocabulary, action scenes, folklore, Venn diagrams and industrial relations.
And I am deeply grateful to Clare Alexander, Lesley Thorne and Sally Riley of Aitken Alexander, and to Alexandra Pringle and Erica Jarnes at Bloomsbury for their support, patience and inspiring feedback during the editing process.
A Note on the Author
Liz Jensen is the bestselling author of seven acclaimed novels, including the Guardian Fiction Award-shortlisted Ark Baby, War Crimes for the Home, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax and, most recently, The Rapture, shortlisted for the Brit Writers’ Awards and selected as a Channel 4 TV Book Club Best Read. She has been nominated three times for the Orange Prize for Fiction and her work has been published in more than twenty countries. She lives in London.
By the Same Author
Egg Dancing
Ark Baby
The Paper Eater
War Crimes for the Home
The Ninth Life of Louis Drax
My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time
The Rapture
Also Available by Liz Jensen
The Rapture
The TV Book Club Best Read
In a merciless summer of biblical heat and destructive winds, Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is to rebuild her career as a psychologist after a shattering car accident. But when she is assigned Bethany Krall, violent, delusional, cruelly intuitive and insistent that she can foresee natural disasters, she begins to fear she has made a terrible mistake. And when catastrophes begin to occur on the very dates Bethany has predicted, the apocalyptic puzzle intensifies and the stakes multiply. A haunting story of human passion and burning faith, The Rapture is an electrifying psychological thriller that explores the dark extremes of mankind’s self-destruction in a world on the brink.
‘An end-of-days blockbuster to haunt your nightmares … Unputdownable’
The Times
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The Ninth Life of Louis Drax
Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child. He’s bright, precocious, deceitful and dangerously, disturbingly accident prone. On a family day out it seems almost predestined that something will happen. But this time it is worse than anyone imagined. When Louis falls over a cliff into a ravine and lapses into a deep coma, his father vanishes and his mother is paralysed by shock. In a clinic in Provence, Dr Dannachet tries to coax Louis back to consciousness, but the boy defies medical logic and the doctor is drawn into the dark heart of Louis’ buried world. Only Louis holds the key to the mystery and he can’t communicate. Or can he?
‘A wonderfully unsettling psychological thriller’
Mail on Sunday
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My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time
In fin-de-siecle Copenhagen, part-time prostitute Charlotte and her lumpen sidekick, Fru Schleswig, have taken on jobs as cleaning ladies of dubious talent to tide them over the harsh winter of 1897. But the home of their neurotic new employer, the widow Krak, soon reveals itself to be riddled with dark secrets – including the existence of a demonic machine rumoured to swallow people alive. Rudely catapulted into twenty-first-century London, the hapless duo discover a whole new world of glass, labour-saving devices and hectic, impossible romance.
‘Unashamedly gleeful: a kind of topsy-turvy Jane Eyre with added time travel ... Sit back, suspend your disbelief, and enjoy’
Daily Mail
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War Crimes for the Home
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
‘You know what they say about GIs and English girls’ knickers,’ ran the wartime joke, ‘One Yank and they’re off.’ When Gloria met Ron, he was an American pilot who thought nothing of getting hit by shrapnel in the cockpit. She was working in a munitions factory in Bristol during the Blitz, but still found time to grab what she wanted. Ciggies. Sex. American soldiers. But war has an effect on people. Gloria did all sorts of things she wouldn’t normally do – evil things, some of them – because she might be dead tomorrow. Or someone might. Now, fifty years on, it’s payback time. In her old folks’ home, Gloria is forced to remember the real truth about her and Ron, and confront the secret at the heart of her dramatic home front story. In a gripping, vibrant evocation of wartime Britain, Liz Jensen explores the dark impulses of women whose war crimes are committed on the home front, in the name of sex, survival, greed and love.
‘Breathtakingly coarse, wryly amusing and gut-wrenchingly tragic’
Marie Claire
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The Paper Eater
Meet Hannah Park, slave to the democracy machine, and Harvey Kidd, the man the system spat out. Atlantica, a world of compulsive consumption, fervent Utopianism, emotional discovery, and love on the rocks. Torn from his family, exiled from his native island, and imprisoned on the former Disney ship Sea Hero, one-time computer whiz Harvey Nash has found solace in the voodoo art of papier-mache. But as the execution date of his violent cellmate approaches, he is confronted with daily reminders of the wrongful sentence meted out to him by the consumer-dedicated system he once voted for. In a witty, satirical vision of the future, Jensen evokes a world of rampant consumerism, blind obedience and virtual love.
‘Sparkling ... sharp, funny and richly imagined, this is as timely a warning about rampant consumerism as Orwell’s 1984 was about state control’
Sunday Express
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Ark Baby
Shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
Since the year all British women became infertile, Bobby Sullivan’s London veterinary clinic has been packed with primate ‘children’ and, speaking as an alpha male, he’s sick to death of them. Hoping to reincarnate himself, he moves north, but finds there is no escape from the Darwinian imperative – or from the sexual pull of the luscious twins Rose and Blanche. As the legacy of the girls’ ancestor, Victorian freak Tobias Phelps, begins to connect with a century of history, religion, and evolutionary theory, new hope looms for the nation's future. Pointing the finger of destiny firmly at Bobby...
‘Superb … A complex, intelligent novel which draws upon a vast array of ideas without ever losing coherence … magnificently crowded, wonderfully funny fiction’
Daily Telegraph
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Egg Dancing
Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction
With only a schizophrenic mother and a militantly hostile sister for backup, Hazel Sugden, food-splattered mum and queen of low self-esteem, is palpably unfit to save the future of mankind as we know it. But when embryology, psychiatry and religion clash over the miracle designer drug Genetic Choice, the dysfunctional trio is propelled into action with explosively comic results…
