by Liam Livings
He sat next to me, and did he have any questions? They came one after another: how does the bus move? How does it know where to go along the road? How does it know to stop and let more people on? How do we tell the driver we want to get off?
Each everyday answer I gave was met with total silence, a nod, and usually a follow-up question. I supposed that a life of leather-bound manuals and flying about up there made how we lived our lives on Earth spectacularly different from what he had been used to.
“This is us. Do you want to tell the driver we’re getting off?” I said as we arrived at the Monument in the City of London.
Sky pressed the button, and as the bell rang, he smiled.
“We can’t get off from up here. I’m going down the stairs, I don’t know about you.” I led the way to the back door, and Sky followed closely behind.
“Thank you, Driver,” Sky shouted as we left the bus.
A couple of teenagers, slumped at the back of the bus on the bottom deck, started to laugh. The driver didn’t respond, but the bus was soon gone in a cloud of diesel fumes and air brakes swooshing.
“Did I do it wrong?” Sky stared at the road where the bus had been.
I shook my head. “People don’t normally thank bus drivers. Not in London anyway. And they don’t queue for buses either. Outside London they do, but not here.”
He looked at the ground, his bottom lip sticking out slightly and beginning to wobble. “I’m sorry. Is that why they were laughing? Will the driver laugh too?”
Internally I rolled my eyes. There had been quite a bit of this since I’d taught him all the new things he needed to know to live a life on Earth as a human. He was so worried about doing the wrong thing, getting it wrong, and people suspecting him. “There is no instruction manual or guidance book for being a human being. It’s all just learned as you grow up. You’ve missed all that, so you’ve a lot to pick up.”
“But they were laughing at me. I got it wrong.”
“They won’t give you a second thought now you’re gone. The bus driver won’t have thought anything. You can’t live your life worrying about people laughing at you. Soon enough it’ll all be normal to you. Besides, if you get stuff wrong, people will think you’re quirky, different, interesting. And that’s not a bad thing.”
“Sure?”
“Let’s go up the Monument, you can see for miles around once you’re at the top.”
We paid our entrance fee, then climbed the narrow spiral staircase to the top of the Monument—a tower in the middle of the city of London commemorating the Great Fire of 1666. I pointed out my office building in one direction, then we walked round, and I showed him the Thames winding its way through London. We walked round again, and I pointed him to a green mass in the distance. “That’s Hampstead Heath, and my flat’s beyond that. Mum’s is even farther.”
“Where’s mine?”
We walked around the small tower and I pointed. “About fifty miles or so that way, down to the sea, way in the distance. That’s Brighton.”
He held my hand and pulled me towards him for a kiss. He put one hand behind my head, stroking my hair, and the other rested on my bum. He pulled back from the kiss, smiling.
“Bet you didn’t think you’d be doing this a few months ago, did you? What’s your big leather handbook got to say about this?”
He kissed me. Despite some tutting from a few people on the other side of the tower and some quiet “aaah, how cute” noises from another group, he kissed me and continued to kiss me as I closed my eyes and forgot where I was.
Sunday evening I was on my laptop, catching up on a few bits of work to get a head start for Monday’s meeting, when Sky appeared behind me, staring at the screen.
I turned to him. “I won’t be long, then we can snuggle up on the sofa or have an early night, whatever you want. When are you going to start looking for a job?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know. Do you think I’m ready yet?”
I thought back to him screaming as the Tube train had appeared on the platform on our way back from Central London after the trip up the Monument, and me having to calm him down and explain it was all perfectly normal, that the train knew where it was going and no, we wouldn’t run out of air in the tunnel underground. “Not quite yet.”
“I understand why people have jobs. But what is yours? What do you do?”
I tried to explain investment banking, offshore accounts, and managing portfolios for rich clients for investment, and, at length, I failed.
He pointed to my laptop screen. “What’s this?”
“A computer. I’ve explained that. It’s a bit like the big screen we watch films on.” I pointed to the TV.
“Not the screen, on the screen. It’s not a film, so what is it?” He jabbed at my laptop screen, leaving a dirty great smudge.
I saved my work, leant back, cracked my knuckles, and replied, “The Internet.”
“And what’s that?”
“Imagine if you could go into a pub where you meet people, buy things, chat to people, do all the things you do in real life, but through a screen. Well, the Internet is like a pub all over the world with different rooms for everything. Literally everything. If you’re a mum looking after her kids wanting to meet other mums, there’s a room in this pub where you can all chat, share ideas. If you want to tell everyone what you’re doing at any time of the day, you can do that too, in this pub. If you want to check how much money you have in your bank account, there’s a room in the pub for that too.”
“Sounds amazing.”
“It kind of is, but it’s everything, everyone in the whole world, remember. So there will be people who aren’t so nice, who don’t agree with what you think, who may call you horrible names. There’s illegal stuff and disgusting stuff, all in different rooms in this huge pub. Imagine a really disgusting thing, and there’s probably a room where people come together to talk about, meet up, and do that disgusting thing. That’s the Internet.”
“How does it work? Who made it? Can it break? Could I break it?”
“You remember I said there are, in life, some things that you either don’t need to know or aren’t really meant to understand?”
He nodded.
“Those questions fall into that category. But if you want, there are online encyclopaedias to look up those things.”
“What did people do before the Internet, or has it always been there?”
“Books, libraries, phone a friend, or talk to your Mum or Dad—they could usually clarify an argument or answer a question. Do you want to have a go? Ask the Internet a question.”
He sat in the driving seat, fingers hovering over the keyboard. He looked at me, biting his bottom lip. “What shall I ask it?”
“What about one of the questions I didn’t answer.”
He very slowly two-finger typed “who made the Internet” into Google.
I explained what the search results meant and how he could click the links and they’d take him to another room in the pub, another bit of the Internet. He soon got the hang of navigating his way around, and I left him while I made dinner and got ready for work.
An hour and a half later, Sky was still at the laptop, completely oblivious to me standing behind him.
I put my hands on his shoulders and kissed the back of his neck.
He continued reading the screen.
I sat next to him, snapping my fingers in front of his face, obstructing the screen. “Okay, Internet lesson number one—you can have too much of a good thing. The thing about having the whole world at your fingertips is you’ll never run out of things to read, look at, or listen to, so you have to stop yourself, because the Internet won’t run out of stuff to show you.”
He turned from the screen and looked me in the eyes. “I just want to see what this bit means, and there’s an interesting thing I started reading, but it’s down the bottom of the screen, one of these little things….” He pointed to a window at the bottom of the screen. “
You carry on getting ready for work and tell me when dinner’s ready.”
“Step away from the laptop.”
He continued staring at the screen.
I leant across the laptop and pressed the power button, holding it down until it fell silent with a black screen.
“What happened, did you break the Internet?” He touched the screen, peering behind it. “I was in the middle of that. Did I do something wrong? I broke it, didn’t I?”
“You’ve not broken the Internet. You can only do that if type Google into Google, then it all goes wrong.”
He looked back at me, mouth and eyes wide open.
“But you did do something wrong.”
“Oh. What was that?” He pulled his little notebook from his pocket where he wrote down things I told him that he didn’t think he’d remember.
“The great thing about the Internet is it means you can go all around the world, see anyone you want, all through your laptop. But you mustn’t let that replace all this”—I waved my arms around—“real life. This is what it’s about. Come outside and get some fresh air.” I took him by the hand and soon we were walking along the road. “You asked if there’s a handbook for humans, like your guidance book from the Higher Ones.” Remembering Amy’s plea to always keep an open mind about everything—ley lines, crystals, astrology, reiki, everything—I continued, “Not in the same way, but there’s spirituality and religion, which give you some rules to live by so we all rub along together better. It’s a sort of rule book in that sense.”
“What about you?”
Mum’s Catholic beliefs had kept her going through all the ups and downs in her life, and I had often wished I could have something that gave me as much comfort as her religion did for her. But it wasn’t for me. Spirituality felt more me—a bit more fluid than the structure of religion. And if believing in angels wasn’t some form of spirituality, I didn’t know what was. “I used to believe in nothing, then Amy convinced me to keep an open mind. Then I started seeing angels, so it was a lot more open than before.”
“What about me? What do I believe?”
“I’m guessing you believe in angels.”
“And miracles.”
“That sounds like a good start to be getting on with. It’s up to you. I’m not going to tell you what you should believe in.”
We walked in silence as I pointed out the moon in the distance, looked at the buses full of people and the group of very drunk, very young teenaged girls wobbling their way along the road, kebabs in hands, giggling all the way.
We stopped at the iron gates of the graveyard.
Sky knelt onto one knee and picked a light blue flower that was poking through the gates. He stood, then handed it to me with a smile. “Smell it.”
It was lavender, with its unmistakeable scent.
Sky said, “Thank you.”
“What for?” I handed him back the flower.
“For being so patient. For being such a good teacher. For telling me about all this stuff without making me feel like a child. For making it all seem so wonderful as I discover it with you.”
“Yeah, I suppose. Let’s get back. I’m getting cold, aren’t you?”
He squeezed my hand. “I mean it. You keep asking if I miss anything, if I regret my decision, but I really don’t. If there was someone I’d happily give up everything I had for, it is you.”
We walked back to my flat, holding hands all the way along the Harrow Road, despite a few shouts from passing strangers. I felt like nothing could touch us, like we were invincible.
“You can’t put off joining your life they’ve set up for you any longer. You’ve got a flat that’s standing empty for you to start your life rather than staying in mine.” We realised Sky could only hang around my place during the day while I was at work for so long, so I’d agreed to take him to his flat and settle him in. “You’ve got to go back to it sometime.”
He enjoyed the train journey, watching the countryside whizz past on our way from Victoria in London to Brighton in Sussex, asking endless questions about things as they passed the train, writing down notes as I replied as well as I could. “It’s almost like flying,” he said, staring at the fields rushing past the window. “Much quicker than the bus and a better view than the Tube trains.”
I’d agreed to stay at his flat for a few nights to get him settled into his own space, so after the weekend at his place and wandering about in Brighton together, I went back to work in London, while Sky stayed in his flat during the day.
One evening a few weeks later, I returned to Sky’s. I found him sitting on the floor in the hallway, staring at the washing machine.
“What’s wrong? It’s not leaking, is it?”
No water on the floor, it was doing its washing machine thing happily as Sky stared at it intently.
I kissed his forehead. “Good day? Any luck with jobs?”
He looked up at me and kissed me on the lips. “How does it know?”
“It knows what?”
He tapped the glass door of the washing machine. “This. It fills with water and doesn’t leak. Then it goes round one way, then the other. Then it goes round really fast and the water goes out, then it puts more water in and does it all again. I read the little book it came with.” He handed me the user manual. “It’s a very interesting book. You should read it. I’ve tried all the programmes it has. They’re all a bit different. What is it for? The clothes are dry, then they go in there, and it gets wet, then you can’t put them on again. I tried, but it was cold.”
“You put on clothes out of the washing machine?”
“That’s what clothes are for, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t deny that. I sensed this was going to be a long evening. “Come here. Give me a hug, and I’ll explain.”
“I don’t want to miss it. This is the silk wash, whatever that is, and it’s not moved for a while. I’m sure it’s going to wake up again soon, and when it does, I don’t want to miss it.”
“You don’t have to watch it. It knows what to do without you sitting there. Come through to the sofa, and I’ll explain.”
“But you don’t walk away from a film or a programme on TV in the middle of it, do you? So why should I walk away? He’s doing the silk programme for me, and I don’t want to miss how it ends.”
This was going to be a really long night. I explained that a washing machine’s programmes weren’t entertainment, like a film or a TV programme, so you didn’t have to watch it in the same way. You could leave it to get on with its own thing. I dodged the “how does it know” question with a vague response about computers and them being in charge and it was best to leave it at that. The really hard bit to get him to understand was the whole—it seemed almost philosophical—question of why we put clothes in the machine in the first place. Once I’d got him to leave in the middle of the “silk programme,” and join me on the sofa, I asked him to smell my chest, to take a really deep inhale and tell me what he smelt.
“You. You smell of you. Is that wrong?”
Having braved an early start, a long day of meetings, a client lunch, then a Tube journey and a train back to his, I knew I was far from my freshest. I lifted my armpit and told him to give that a good sniff.
“Stronger. You. You still smell of you. It’s sexy. I like it.” He started to kiss me.
I inhaled his musky smell as I kissed him. Soon we were taking our clothes off, and we sat on the sofa pulling at each another’s cocks at first gently, then harder and harder, until with a shudder and a gasp, staring into each other’s eyes, it was over.
“This”—I pointed to the mess we’d made on his T-shirt—“and the smell, that’s dirt. You can’t wear clothes that smell too much or have dirt and mess on them. Not everyone finds your smell as sexy as I do. And you won’t find the smells of other people as sexy as you find mine. So that’s why we wash the clothes. They get wet, and it takes off the dirt, and the smells go, so we can wear the clothes again.”
“And they get dirty and smelly again?”
“Pretty much.”
“And you wash them again in the white box with the magic glass door that doesn’t leak water.”
“We tend to call them washing machines, but yeah.”
“Like when we have a bath or shower, but for clothes.”
He stared at me, brow furrowed and mouth pursed. “Why don’t we wear clothes when we bath, then, and get two done at the same time?”
I couldn’t argue with his logic. When you put it like that, it did sound a bit odd that we washed our clothes and ourselves in different ways. “You couldn’t feel the water on your skin in the same way, and the machine gets them cleaner than we would, so it all works out for both.”
“Sounds like it does.” He walked to the wardrobe. “I don’t have much to wear, because you said we don’t wear wet clothes.”
“What have you done with all yours?”
“They are in the bath.” He paused. “Is that wrong?”
We dressed in my clothes from my weekend bag. “Is this what you’ve done all day?”
“I followed the instructions, put clothes in, and watched it as it did the programmes. When it finished, I put them in the bath or they would get the floor wet. Is this wrong?”
“As a day’s activities, it could do with some work, but as a way of getting to know what your washing machine does, it’s pretty perfect.”
I showed him how to hang up the damp clothes, and soon the flat was festooned with his clothes on every horizontal surface, giving it a Chinese laundry feel from an old film.
As we finished he handed me a flyer for a nightclub in Brighton. “This came through the metal slot in the middle of the front door. What does it mean?”
I read the flyer—a huge straight superclub along what locals called Fight Street in Brighton city centre. “A place where people dance and meet. But if we’re doing that, I can do much better than that place in that street. No, thank you.”
Chapter 34
