‘Lord no,’ the driver said. ‘But we’re not human, don’t forget. It’s … it’s hard to explain to you. With humans – with most animal species nowadays – you have males and females, right?’
‘Of course!’
‘There’s no “of course” about it. It’s just an arrangement, like any other arrangement in nature. Plants can be male and female. Snails, now … well that gets very complicated. But with the Sug and the Tellene, well …’
He trailed off. Stephen was almost hopping in his seat with impatience.
‘The old races were very different from each other,’ the driver said. ‘They had very different views of the world. Haven’t you wondered how they managed to share a small island without murdering each other, good manners or not?’
‘I thought they were … you know … enlightened or something.’
The driver snorted.
‘Enlightened! They had a much more practical reason, child. They had only one gender apiece. They needed each other to continue their races.’
Stephen’s mouth was sagging open again.
‘They what?’ he asked in a small voice.
‘The Sug, do you see, were all male,’ the driver said. ‘Or as close to male as makes no difference. The Tellene were ‘female’. I thought you might have guessed from my story – who else except men could spend ten thousand years sulking?’
Stephen was floundering badly now.
‘But …’ he said. ‘But … the bodies … ours … I mean …’
‘Tut! Bodies are just things we make. Male bodies are simpler, easier to make, and males have things better among humans. So we generally come here as males, that’s all.’
‘But then why is Kirsten a girl?’
‘Our children grow up here. As I told Simon, we want them to have memories. We want them to have memories appropriate to their actual nature. So they all grow as girls.’
‘But then I …’
‘You grew as a girl when you were first here.’
‘First? But then I …’ He looked suddenly blank again as he realised what the driver was getting at.
‘How old am I?’
The driver considered. ‘Oh, let’s see. There was myself and my mother … that time in Babylon … hmmm.’ He smiled at Stephen in the mirror. ‘Roughly speaking, I’d say you’re about three thousand years old. Give or take two hundred years.’
‘And who am I? I thought I must be Kirsten’s brother. Am I her sister?’
Again the two men laughed. Again the driver shook his head from side to side.
‘We Tellene do believe in keeping business in the family,’ he said. ‘But Kirsten has only one sister.’
He nodded at the younger man beside him.
‘This is Kirsten’s sister,’ he said.
‘So you’re, what, her mother?’
‘No, I’m her aunt. But we do like our children to grow up with a parent nearby. We think it’s healthier.’ Even as he spoke, the driver was slowing the car. He stopped it and turned around in his seat, facing Stephen squarely. ‘I don’t want you to worry,’ he said. ‘There’s really no need. But I can see that this is a bit of a surprise to you.’
‘A bit of a–’ Stephen stopped. He noticed that the driver was trying very hard not to laugh. Maybe Kirsten was trying too, but in her case it wasn’t working. She’d begun to titter as her mind leaped ahead to the conclusion of the driver’s news.
‘You’re Kirsten’s mother,’ the driver said. ‘My little sister.’
Stephen felt as though someone had put a spell on him, a freezing spell, as the Sug in the chapel had done to Philip, or as the driver had briefly done to Stephen himself in the courtyard. He sat there like a statue. Around him in the car the other three, looking at him, began to laugh helplessly. For a moment Stephen teetered on the edge of anger. And then, with a sort of mental shrug, he joined in the laughter. The driver restarted the car. Stephen sat back in his seat. Kirsten put her arm through his. When he looked at her she was smiling at him.
‘Well, Mum,’ Kirsten said, ‘here we are again, I suppose.’
‘I suppose,’ Stephen agreed.
‘I’m glad we’re related,’ Kirsten said. ‘I’ve got to like you in the past few days.’
Stephen sighed.
‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘you know what they say.’
‘What?’
‘A girl’s best friend is her mother.’
Kirsten giggled again. So did he – or she – or it.
If it matters.
42. Ministerial Functions
The Irish Minister for Defence looked out the window at the summer night. The summer night looked back in at him. Both of them were silent, but the Minister’s brain was busy. He was thinking about big purple bubbles and little fat women who could walk through walls. It wasn’t often that he thought about such things. Until a few days ago, in fact, he’d never given any thought to either.
The Minister looked bleakly around the office. There on the wall were the pictures of himself with various world leaders, the old team photos of rugby teams he’d played on, the pictures of himself as a young politician. Some people like to surround themselves with photos of themselves, as though they might somehow forget what they looked like – as though they might look in a mirror one day and find a stranger looking back.
The Big Bubble, Reputation One, had frightened the Minister very much. But the little fat woman had frightened him much more. That is, if it had been a woman at all. If so, what kind of woman? The kind that could walk through walls and paralyse with a single touch. The kind who could claim to be responsible for the Big Bubble in all its impossibility. The kind who spoke, moreover, in terms of ‘we’, meaning there were more like her. How many – a hundred? A thousand? Was there a whole army of little fat women in pink cardigans inside the Bubble? It hardly mattered. One of her was more than terrifying enough: how was a simple Minister for Defence to defend against a creature like that?
At least the Minister wasn’t alone. The other men in the conference room, including the representatives of the most powerful countries on earth, had been thinking the same thing. It had been written plainly on their faces – mortal terror is hard to disguise. Even General Tubb had been shaking when a few moments after the woman left, he’d regained the use of his limbs.
The Minister for Defence felt unreal. He ran a finger absentmindedly along the surface of his desk, feeling the hard reality of the mahogany, the stiff leather corners of the blotter. They felt real enough. Maybe it was just him: maybe he was unreal.
The conference delegates had sworn an oath to keep the little fat woman’s visit secret. They’d tell their governments, of course, but such things couldn’t be revealed to the public. If the woman had been telling the truth and the Bubble disappeared, then it would go down as perhaps the greatest mystery in recorded history. If it didn’t … well, they’d cross that bridge when they came to it.
The Minister looked at his watch. It was 10.36pm. Many of the delegates were still underground. Some had gone back to their hotels and embassies. The Minister had come up to his office at around six, which meant he’d been sitting here thinking for four and a half hours. In all that time he hadn’t had a single pleasant thought.
There was a knock on the door. The Minister straightened his collar and tried to look ministerial. It was hard when you hadn’t shaved in three days.
‘Come in!’ he called.
The excited face of his deputy popped round the door.
‘Paddy!’ she said. ‘We’ve had a call! From the northwest! It’s gone!’
The Minister squawked.
‘The northwest is gone?’
His deputy shook her head.
‘No – the Bubble. The Phenomenon. It’s disappeared!’
‘Dis … it …’ The Minister shook his head, to clear it. ‘How do you mean?’
‘The word is it simply … disappeared,’ she said. She was very excited. ‘The report said that one second it
was there, and the next it wasn’t. As if it had been … switched off – like a light.’
The Minister drew a very deep breath, and sat there holding it for a very long time.
‘Tell the army to get in there!’ he roared then. ‘And call my helicopter!’
The Deputy Minister nodded and left. The Minister didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. His telephone purred before he’d had time to decide. The Minister picked it up. It was his secretary. She said the Minister for Tourism was on the line. He’d heard a report that the Big Bubble had vanished. He wanted to know what he was supposed to say to the Tourist Board. They were complaining already.
The Minister for Defence found himself grinning almost crazily.
‘Tell the Minister for Tourism,’ he said, ‘to drop dead. Tell him I said so. Officially.’
43. Revels End
In a chapel in a monastery in the northwest of the island of Ireland, late one summer night in the last year of a gruesome century, a tall bearded man in dark robes landed hard on a stone floor with a sharp curse. He sat looking around him, blinking, as though surprised by the place he found himself in. The chapel, he saw, was lit only by the soft light of candles on the stone altar just behind him. He was alone.
The tall man stood up and rubbed the butt of his spine absentmindedly. He shook his head, then walked thoughtfully out of the chapel.
He met no one in the corridor outside, but passing the open door of the abbey’s communal television room he saw a sight that made him smile. A young monk was curled up on the low round table there. The bearded man went in to waken the young man and pack him off to his bed. Had he been sleepwalking, perhaps? But the younger man looked so peaceful, and smiled so broadly in his sleep, that the bearded monk thought better of it. Leave him be.
As he neared the door of the room where he and his fellow monks had their meals, the big man thought he heard soft movement inside. He looked in through the open door. Another tall man stood inside the room. He too was robed. He wore a skullcap on his salt-and-pepper hair. He was standing with his arms crossed, his chin cupped in one hand. He was staring at the ground, and he looked puzzled.
‘Paul?’ asked the bearded man. There was some hesitation in his voice.
The other man, startled, looked up.
‘Philip!’ he said. He sounded relieved. ‘You gave me a fright.’
‘How about a last cup of tea for the night?’ Philip asked.
‘Why not?’ Paul said. ‘My throat is very dry.’
The two men walked companionably to the front hall and looked out into the courtyard beyond. Light flooded from the open doorway into the kitchen wing, but otherwise all was dark.
‘Someone’s working late,’ Paul said.
Philip gave a little chuckle.
‘Simon. He likes to get everything ready for breakfast, but he prefers to do it when no one’s around. He doesn’t want us to know he’s concerned about us.’
The abbot allowed himself a small smile.
‘He has a gruff exterior,’ he said, ‘but he’s a good man.’
‘I know,’ Philip said. ‘I respect him.’
The two men walked towards the light. The soles of their sandals crunched on the gravel. It was a beautiful still night. The stars hung in heaven like lamps. The call of a night bird from the trees around the nearby lake was perfectly audible. The abbot looked up at the sky as they walked.
‘The air is lovely tonight,’ he said.
‘Mountain air,’ Philip agreed. ‘A tonic in itself.’
In the kitchen they found Brother Simon asleep at the table, his head in his arms. He was smiling.
‘He must have nodded off,’ Philip said quietly. ‘We should wake him.’
‘The spirit is willing,’ the abbot said fondly, ‘but the flesh is weak. Simon is old, Philip. It frightens me sometimes to think how old he is.’
But the sound of their voices had already disturbed the old man’s sleep. He stood up abruptly, groggy but fierce, looking blindly at them for a moment before some sleeping vision faded from his mind. He said something muffled and gruff in German, his tone questioning, demanding something from some figure in his dream.
‘Was ist es, Simon?’ Paul asked gently. ‘Was willst du?’
But the old man at the table just shook his head and rubbed his eyes with both hands. He stood blinking at them, palefaced.
‘My word!’ he said. ‘Paul? Was I asleep? I had a dream, but … it’s gone now.’
He blinked some more.
‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. But it’s late. Close to midnight, I’d say.’
Simon frowned in thought, trying to recall his dream. But it had shattered like soft crystal fragments, drifting and fading from his mind.
For a long moment the three men looked at each other in silence, all somehow aware of something odd. But even that awareness faded as they stood. Then, in that silence, they heard them – faint and distant, but growing quickly both closer and louder. They were somewhere on the mountain road outside, howling like the demons from some dead superstition, like some utterly alien thing invading the peace of the hills and the glens: sirens, by the dozen, by the score, by the hundred, as the transports of the army and the fire service and the police and the reporters and the television crews and the thrillseekers and the rest of the wide world converged on that one lonely spot in the ruptured calm of the mild summer night.
About the Author
GERARD WHELAN was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford. He has worked in various capacities in several European countries, but now lives in Dublin. His first book, The Guns of Easter, won the Bisto Merit Award and the Eilís Dillon Memorial Award. He followed this with Dream Invader, which won the Bisto Book of the Year Overall Award in 1998. His third book, a sequel to The Guns of Easter, was A Winter of Spies, and he has also edited a major anthology of children’s literature, Big Pictures.
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2012 by The O’Brien Press Ltd,
12 Terenure Road East, Rathgar, Dublin 6, Ireland
Tel: +353 1 4923333; Fax: +353 1 4922777
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.obrien.ie
First published 1999
eBook ISBN: 978–1–84717–488–8
Copyright for text © Gerard Whelan
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© The O’Brien Press Ltd.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Whelan, Gerard
Out of nowhere
1.Children’s stories
I.Title
823.9’14[J]
The O’Brien Press receives assistance from
Layout and design: The O’Brien Press Ltd.
Out of Nowhere Page 17
