New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  ‘Just be a second, Orlaith. OK?’ He jammed the mouthpiece to his lips. ‘If we don’t know each other we can’t hurt each other. So don’t come looking for me, Eugene, for old times’ sake, don’t talk about me, don’t wonder what I’m up to. Just colour me dead, Eugene.’

  The coins clattered into British Telecom’s metal gullet. At the age of twenty-three, at ten o’clock and twenty-eight minutes, Johnny Considine took his best beloved black leather jacket off Orlaith Hughes’s coat rack, closed the door of 27 Malone Avenue quietly behind him and began to walk. At the cashpoint beside Simpson’s all-niter he withdrew all the money his card would allow. His outstretched thumb hooked in a passing Pandoro at the end of the West Link. Later, while the driver, rejoicing, stuck into his five a.m. Ulster fry in the truckers’ lounge, Johnny leaned against the aft rail and watched the land of his birth merge with the dawn grey as the great blue and white ship took him away into exile.

  ~ * ~

  The laws of universal perversity demand that while the way is open for you to go back you will not, but when you want to, more than anything, you cannot. When he was eight years old Johnny Considine was sent to Florida to summer with his Uncle Ciaran, headhunted by the bran and tan cyberdweebs of Microsoft Key. Knowing eight-year-olds, Uncle Ciaran took his nephew to Disneyland. As they had snaked along the line for Space Mountain (‘Half an hour from this point’, ‘Photographic opportunity here’) Johnny had noted a number of well-labelled Chicken Gates. ‘For those who just can’t go through with it,’ Uncle Ciaran had explained. His aspirant manhood impugned, Johnny had scorned the Chicken Gates. Ten persons from the car. His resolve faltered. Five persons from the car. He panicked. No more Chicken Gates. No way back. The smiling staff lifted him, strapped him in. Johnny Considine, age eight with nowhere to run, pissed himself.

  Fourteen years later the entrapment was subtler but no less sure. The disillusionments of a fresh IT graduate condemned by Dame Europa to a hand-to-mouth existence grubbing freelance subcontracts from the big SAs and GmBHs were easily bolstered. New injustices hung sweetly on ancient enemies. Men, or things that seemed men, had come from the stars to live upon the earth, but don’t you know, Johnny, the old griefs endure, the old wars never end, the old battle is unrelenting. Blandishments. Oh, Johnny, praise, Oh, Johnny Johnny rewards, Oh, Johnny Johnny Johnny. Seductions. Do this for me, Johnny, do this for us, Johnny. Hack this file, Johnny. Seed this virus, Johnny. Yet he saw the Chicken Gates. He knew what was happening to him, where he was being led, what he was being shaped into, and he consented. At any time he could have walked away. And when the time came that he wanted to, he could no longer do so.

  Brown Wednesday had been amusing; a cybernetic pantomime with lots of people running around and shouting ‘Behind you! Look behind you!’ Thirty billion wiped off share values in one morning. Johnny Considine could only marvel at the miracle of Chaos Theory, by which one tiny ripple in the fiscal ocean slowly, surely, inevitably escalated into a fifty-foot tubular of cascading prices. Between coffee and lunchtime, the Irish Republican Army cost the Ould Hoor Britannia more than fifty-three years of armed struggle. By lunchtime the next day, Ould Hoor Britannia had it all back again.

  The destruction of the Northern Bank PeeEllCee gave Johnny Considine great personal satisfaction. The virus systems had been immaculately designed; robust, untraceable, endlessly mutable. Within fifteen minutes of systems insertion they had spread their infection through every aspect of the bank’s operations. Sixty million pounds in personal, small business and corporate accounts vanished. After a month sterilizing the system with hunter/killers, the Data Protection Squad traced the source of the infestation to the branch that had once upon a time casually refused the account application of one Mr John Considine because, as a freelance, he was not considered to be in possession of sufficiently regular tranches of cash. The Northern Bank PeeEllCee had forgotten Mr John Considine. Mr John Considine had not forgotten the Northern Bank.

  Then came the West Drayton operation and Johnny Considine came down from the high mountain with Robin Hood and Butch and Sundance and the blessed company of heroic rogues, and saw the hundreds who would die burning because of what they wanted him to do. He looked around then for the Chicken Gate and the Chicken Gates were all closed. The hands lifted him and set him in the slow climbing car. Johnny Considine waited until he reached the very top, and on the edge of the precipice into darkness he jumped.

  ~ * ~

  At the end of the twin rivers of blacktop that pushed through the day and the night he found a London so alien it might have been a district of the Shi’an capital world. Sampan suburbs jostled on the high tide beneath Cleopatra’s Needle; it was once again possible for a latter-day Dr Johnson to cross the Pool of London dryshod. Cardboard and packing-case bashes crowded the Inns and squares, the trees reduced to dismembered trunks for firewood. A white boy with a Stanley knife tried to rob Johnny on the westbound platform of Shepherd’s Bush Central Line and fled empty-handed at the sound of an Ulster accent. When Johnny saw his first alien - buying a cheese salad mayo baguette from a stand outside King’s Cross Thameslink - he stared, disturbed in spirit, so long that he missed his bus. However frequently he was to see Shi’ an abroad in the city, they never failed to evoke that second look, and stir disquiet in his good Christian Brothers’ soul.

  With the dregs of his money he put up the deposit and one month down on a flat in Limehouse. Opposite his window was a church steeple where every day the vicar would go out on to the parapet to examine the four corners of the world. Watching from his eau-de-Nil cube, Johnny imagined him deciding on the face of what he found whether to throw himself off or not. With the embers of his talent Johnny found a commission as a technical author writing User-Bibles for dismally uninspiring personal accountancy software. The tranches came no more regularly than in Belfast, but were larger.

  On his fifth Sunday Johnny went out to buy a paper and met a crusty sprawling in a doorway. The crusty wore thirteen-hole Docs, splayed out at an odd angle. The paper went unbought. By the time he got back to his room Johnny was shaking so hard he needed five attempts to open the door. He found himself inexplicably prostrate across his bed, heaving terrible, shuddering, dry sobs. He had not liked Joey. He had feared Joey. In the end he had hated Joey, but Joey was dead under the paisley lining of some passerby’s green Barbour, and Johnny was an inescapable exile in an alien nation.

  There was a place - modestly, and accurately, called Moe’s Diner and Bar - where he would flee the instant before the walls closed on him. It was that kind of good-food-cheap, pink-flamingos eatery that inevitably becomes fashionable through its absolute rejection of fashion. The mammoth cappuccino machine, topped by an Imperial Eagle, had been to Abyssinia with Mussolini. The records in the jukebox - coin-in-the-slot, no cards, certainly no sing-along videoke - had not been changed in forty years and could render even the most stony-hearted of patrons moist with nostalgia for an age when, in all probability, their parents had not even been conceived. Drum-head swivel stools with footrests ran along the bar for those who cared to eat publicly. For those who wished seclusion there were a number of Naugahyde booths with wipe-kleen menus, stainless steel cruets like elephantine dum-dum bullets and bottles of tomato ketchup wearing gamine paper neckerchiefs to conceal ghastly cut throats of dried drips. Moe himself was a genial bear of a man who kept a ‘98 World Series L’il Slugger above the wineglass rack for Grade One Trouble and a loaded self-targeting Fiuzzi automatic under the till for Grade Two Trouble. As a consequence he never had trouble of either grade. Moe’s front-of-house staff - friendly, well-trained, polite, efficient - numbered five: two Chinese, one West Indian, one Scot and one Shi’an.

  The first time the alien came to scribble his order on a little notebook, Johnny was so stunned he could do nothing but stare. He was within touching distance of something from sixty light years away. A lifetime of accrued abstractions and informations - childhood television documentaries hastily flicked
by mother to the snooker when they got on to Not Nice Stuff, school projects, National Geographic articles pasted into his Aliens Scrapbook, encyclopaedia entries, shareware research - all these were made concrete, actual, in a thousand little inhumanities. The texture of an alien skin. The strangely different cocktail of body musks and sweats. Tall - over average height, they came from a shallower gravity-well than Earth’s. Slim as a child; like a child, no external gender identifiers. Shi’an sexual identity is more pheromonal than physiological. His/her eyes were large, the oval irises almost black; nose broad - all that olfactory information, he supposed - mouth narrow, lips thin. The ears were very small, the scalp clad in a narrow strip of short, dark red fur that ran up over the centre of the skull and tapered into a spine-hugging line of soft fuzz beneath the neck of the Moe’s Diner and Bar T-shirt. Johnny was reminded of a terracotta Benin head he had once fallen in love with in an art gallery on Botanic Avenue.

  ‘You ordering something?’ The voice: a breathy contralto, could be either a man’s or woman’s. The accent was at once utterly unidentifiable and maddeningly familiar. The left hand keeping pen poised above pad had three fingers.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ll have the... Excuse me, do you mind if I ask you a question?’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘Are you a man or a woman?’

  ‘I’m a girl,’ the Shi’an said, and her answer crystallized the flux of possibilities and contradictions she had been until that second. ‘Now, what are you having?’

  After she had cleared the dishes away, Johnny sat a long time in the booth, breathing in her intimate musks and perfumes and feeling things he could not quite comprehend but felt he had known all his life. She had not smiled once during the entire dining experience.

  Though Johnny became a fixture, it was a brave day the Tuesday he brought his Compaqt into Moe’s Diner and Bar. He had prevaricated three weeks over the decision. The booths were private, the atmosphere vastly more conducive to technical writing than the oppressive room with its view of the melancholy vicar, but he still feared people craning over the partition and asking him if he was a writer, had he sold anything, did he write under his own name? People didn’t. She did.

  ‘What you writing?’ She set his customary Coors on a paper Moe’s Diner and Bar coaster, and sneaked a peek at his rollscreen. Alien kinesis: odd relaxations and attitudes that looked distinctly disjointed to Johnny.

  ‘Just some computer manual. MicroServe Nemesis 4.2. It’s a link-in between accountancy and legal ‘wares.’ Courage, Johnny. Make the jump from passing strangers to occasional acquaintances. ‘Actually, I suppose this is kind of Stone Age to you.’

  ‘Depends,’ she said, and went to attend other customers. It was half an hour before she was free to return and add, ‘I mean, it’ll be eighty years before you can even begin to understand our quantum tunnelling processors; on the other hand, we’ve never thought of computerizing our legal system. Seyamang.’

  ‘Johnny.’ They shook hands, the human way. At some point in the thirty minutes she had waited tables, she had ceased to be an alien, a Traveller, a Shi’an, and become a person. He had still not seen her smile.

  He thought of her that night. He thought of her naked, her skin the colour and texture of Benin terracotta. He thought of the electric fuzz-prickle of her head fur against the palm of his hand. He tried to imagine her nipples, her genitals, the heat of her body orifices. The luxurious excess of his fantasy shocked him. He had only just learned her name and he was fucking her. And she was Shi’an. Not human. Inhuman. Like fucking a beautiful, glossy, rust-red Irish setter.

  He did not get to Moe’s for several days. He hid in his ugly little room, terrified by the understanding that the obscure object of desire he had chased down all his fumbled relationships had been the earth-red androgyny of the Shi’an. Terrified, elated.

  When at last he went back to check the fast-fading mental Seyamang against corporeal reality, she was not there. Panic-stricken, he asked where she was.

  The West Indian girl, Silelé, sat down beside him in his customary booth.

  ‘Why do you want to know where Seyamang is?’

  Caught. Crucified. He spread his hands helplessly, inviting nails.

  ‘Just wondering. I like her. I get on with her.’

  Silelé reserved a judgemental silence, then said, ‘You some kind of frook, mister?’

  ‘Some kind of what?’

  ‘Frook. Men who get off on Shi’an. Like gays get off on other men, pederasts get off on children, rubberists get off on black latex. Frooks get off on Shi’an. We get them in here sometimes; word gets round there’s a Shi’an working here. You get them wanking under the table, stuff like that. Moe makes sure they don’t come back.’

  ‘Jesus God, no, I mean, no ...’ You mean yes, Johnny. It’s true, Johnny. No, it was not like that, not filthy and soiled, like that. Then what is it like, Johnny-O?

  Silelé’s posture and expression had not shifted, but Johnny could see that the conviction behind his stammered denial had convinced her.

  ‘I believe you, Johnny. She’ll be back tomorrow. Don’t worry. If you really want to know, I think she likes you too.’

  There had been a co-option at the Motherhouse down in Docklands, Seyamang told him on her return. All the Sorority were supposed to be there. They’d flown some in from Amsterdam. Somewhere between a wedding and a bar mitzvah, but a good bash, she said. Yet Johnny felt that she had not enjoyed the party and was glad to be back in her too-big Moe’s Diner and Bar T-shirt, among the humans. Screwing his courage tight, he asked her if he could buy her a drink.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘You have one for yourself, and I’ll have this on you.’ From the hip-pocket of her black PVC jeans she produced a dimple-pack of aspirins and popped one into her three-fingered hand. ‘Aspirin. Cheap thrills from Superdrug; pound a packet.’ Seyamang swallowed the aspirin, dry, while Johnny swilled back his beer, and the spirit of the late-night diner that lives in the spiral scratch of old black vinyl whispered in his ear that for the first time in his twenty-three years he was truly living.

  Johnny Considine was in love with the alien.

  ~ * ~

  Because word had passed, because the right periodicals had used the right degree of capital city cynicism, Moe’s Diner and Bar graduated from merely fashionable to famous. A desert storm of bright and beautiful descended upon it.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Moe, what happened?’ Johnny asked, pushing between besuited Friday-nighters towards his place at the bar. Moe, wiping glasses as ever, smiled ruefully.

  ‘We’re the place to be seen, Johnny-O. I’ll give it ten days, if we’re not deeply unfashionable by then, I’ll make us deeply unfashionable.’

  ‘Hiya, Johnny!’ Seyamang shouted over the din. She blinked long lashes at him: a Shi’an smile, Johnny had learned. The bared teeth of a human smile they read as a threat.

  ‘Hiya, Seyamang. Well, it’s off. Bit-squirted to Albuquerque off some balloon moored in the jeststream over Greenland, and the discs Fed-Exed, just to be on the safe side. I think this deserves a bottle of something good.’

  ‘Certainly does, Johnny.’

  ‘Oi!’ An overweight West Indian twentysomething in a collar so tight it squeezed out extraneous rolls of flesh, levered into Johnny’s personal space. ‘Never mind ‘im, where’s my Sloe Screw?’ As Seyamang moved to the racked bottles behind the bar, twentysomething stage-whispered, ‘Fucking Sheenies. At least they could have got someone speaks English.’

  The thrilling vertigo was exactly the same one Johnny remembered feeling keying in the passwords to the Northern Bank PeeEllCee’s managerial hierarchy. He heard his voice, razor-edged and precise, say, ‘Excuse me. Don’t call her that. She’s a Shi’an. Her people were travelling between the stars while ours were eating each other’s fleas. She is no more a Sheenie than you are a nigger. Nigger.’

  A blur of the hand. The beer glass, shattered on the edge of the bar, was ten centimetr
es from Johnny’s eyes. Behind it the livid, bestial face raged.

  ‘What did you call me, you paddy bastard? What you call me, fucking paddy fucking murdering fucking IRA bastard? Eh, Paddy?’

  ‘Johnny,’ said Johnny. His body, the body of the raging man, the entire substance of the diner and its late-nite Friday clientele, seemed to be constructed out of brightly coloured helium-inflated PVC. Rise up, and blow away. ‘My name is Johnny. Sir.’ At some great remove in this luminous void, Moe was shouting, his faithful Number One ‘98 L’il Slugger the rod of absolute justice. The vinyl universe whirled like a kaleidoscope. Faces loomed, voices boomed, and Johnny was all-alonio at the bar.

  ‘Johnny, by rights I should throw you out too,’ Moe said, but Seyamang, slipping in behind him, squeezed Johnny’s hand.

  ‘Thanks, brother.’

  ‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Johnny said, suddenly pale and sweaty. He just made it to the cubicle.

  They waited an hour and ten minutes for the Diner and Bar to close. Fatboy and six fat friends. The fat friends brought Johnny down, kept him down with a kick to the kidneys, held him down to the piss-stained concrete while Fatboy told Johnny once again just what he thought of fucking treacherous murdering paddies, underlining his comments with repeated blows from size twelves to ribs, neck and head. Fucking murdering fucking paddies.