The Humans (19 page)

You are speaking like one of them. You are not a human. You are one of us. We are one.

I know I am not a human.

We think you need to come home
.

No.

You must come home.

I never had a family.

We are your family.

No. It isn’t the same.

We want you home.

I have to ask to come home and I am not going to. You can interfere with my mind but you can’t control it.

We will see.

The next day we were in the living room. Me and Isobel. Newton was upstairs with Gulliver, who was now asleep. We had checked on him but Newton was staying there, on guard.

‘How are you?’ asked Isobel.

‘It was not death,’ I said. ‘For I stood up.’

‘You saved his life,’ said Isobel.

‘I don’t think so. I didn’t even have to do CPR. The doctor said he had very minor injuries.’

‘I don’t care what the doctor says. He jumped from the roof. That could have killed him. Why didn’t you shout for me?’

‘I did.’ It was a lie, obviously, but the whole framework was a lie. The belief that I was her husband. It was all fiction. ‘I did shout for you.’

‘You could have killed yourself.’

(I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time – almost all of it – with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could
have been born with fewer moles and bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life form.)
‘But I didn’t kill myself. I am alive. Let’s concentrate on that.’

‘What happened to your tablets? They were in the cupboard.’

‘I threw them away.’ This was a lie, obviously. The unclear thing was who I was protecting? Isobel? Gulliver? Myself?

‘Why? Why would you throw them away?’

‘I didn’t think it was a good idea, to have them lying around. You know, given his condition.’

‘But they’re diazepam. That’s valium. You can’t overdose on valium, you’d need a thousand.’

‘No. I know that.’ I was drinking a cup of tea. I actually enjoyed tea. It was so much better than coffee. It tasted like comfort.

Isobel nodded. She too was drinking tea. The tea seemed to be making things better. It was a hot drink made of leaves, used in times of crisis as a means of restoring normality.

‘Do you know what they told me?’ she said.

‘No. What? What did they tell you?’

‘They told me he could stay in.’

‘Right.’

‘It was up to me. I had to say if I thought he was a suicide risk or not. And I said I thought he would be more of a risk in there than out here. They said if he tried anything like this
again then there’d be no choice about it. He’d be admitted, and they’d watch him.’

‘Oh. Well,
we’ll
watch him. That’s what I say. That hospital is full of mad people. People who think they’re from other planets. Stuff like that.’

She smiled a sad smile, and blew a brown tide of ripples across the surface of her drink. ‘Yes. Yes. We’ll have to.’

I tried to understand something. ‘It’s me, isn’t it? It was my fault, for that day I didn’t wear clothes.’

Something about this question switched the mood. Isobel’s face hardened. ‘Andrew, do you really think this was about one day? About your breakdown?’

‘Oh,’ I said, which I knew wasn’t in context. But I had nothing else to say. ‘Oh’ was always the word I resorted to, the one that filled empty spaces. It was verbal
tea. The ‘oh’ should have really been a ‘no’, because I didn’t think this was about one day. I thought it was about thousands of days, most of which I hadn’t
been there to observe. And so an ‘oh’ was more appropriate.

‘This wasn’t about one event. This was about everything. It’s not obviously solely your fault but you haven’t really been
there
, have you, Andrew? For all his
life, or at least since we moved back to Cambridge, you’ve just not been there.’

I remembered something he’d told me on the roof. ‘What about France?’

‘What?’

‘I taught him dominoes. I swam with him in a swimming pool. In France. The country. France.’

She frowned, confused. ‘France? What? The
Dordogne
? Two weeks in the Dordogne and a box of bloody dominoes. Is that your “Get Out of Jail Free” card? Is that
fatherhood?’

‘No. I don’t know. I was just giving a . . . a solid example of what he was like.’

‘He?’

‘I mean I. What I was like.’

‘You’ve been
there
on holiday. Yes. Yes you have. Unless they were working holidays. Come on, you remember Sydney! And Boston! And Seoul! And Turin! And, and,
Düsseldorf!’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, staring at the unread books on the shelves like unlived memories. ‘I remember them vividly. Of course.’

‘We hardly saw you. And when we did see you, you were always so stressed about the lecture you were going to give or the people you were going to meet. And all those rows we had. We
have.
Until, you know, you got ill. And got better. Come on, Andrew, you know what I’m saying. This isn’t breaking news, is it?’

‘No. Not at all. So, where else have I failed?’

‘You haven’t
failed
. It’s not an academic paper to be assessed by your peers. It’s not success or failure. It’s our life. I’m not wrapping it in
judgemental language. I’m just trying to tell you the objective truth.’

‘I just want to know. Tell me. Tell me things I’ve done. Or haven’t done.’

She toyed with her silver necklace. ‘Well, come on. It’s always been the same. Between the ages of two and four you weren’t back home in time for a single bath or bedtime
story. You’d fly off the handle about anything that got in the way of you and your work. Or if I ever came close to mentioning that I had sacrificed my career for this family – at that
time when I had been making
real
sacrifices – you wouldn’t even so much as postpone a book deadline. I’d be shot down in flames.’

‘I know. I’m sorry,’ I said, thinking of her novel,
Wider Than the Sky
. ‘I’ve been terrible. I have. I think you would be better off without me. I think,
sometimes, that I should leave and never come back.’

‘Don’t be childish. You sound younger than Gulliver.’

‘I’m being serious. I have behaved badly. I sometimes think it would be better if I went and never returned. Ever.’

This threw her. She had her hands on her hips but her glare softened. She took a big breath.

‘I need you here. You know I need you.’

‘Why? What do I give to this relationship? I don’t understand.’

She clenched her eyes shut. Whispered, ‘That was amazing.’

‘What?’

‘What you did there. Out on the roof. It was amazing.’

She then made the most complex facial expression I have ever seen on a human. A kind of frustrated scorn, tinged with sympathy, which slowly softened into a deep, wide humour, culminating in
forgiveness and something I couldn’t quite recognise, but which I thought might have been love.

‘What’s happened to you?’ She said it as a whisper, nothing more than a structured piece of breath.

‘What? Nothing. Nothing has happened to me. Well, a mental breakdown. But I’m over that. Other than that – nothing.’ I said this flippantly, trying to make her smile.

She smiled, but sadness quickly claimed her. She looked up to the ceiling. I was beginning to understand these wordless forms of communication.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said, feeling kind of solid and authoritative. Kind of real. Kind of human. ‘I’ll talk to him.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I know,’ I said. And I stood up, again to help when I was supposed to hurt.

Essentially, social networking on Earth was quite limited. Unlike on Vonnadoria, the brain synchronisation technology wasn’t there, so subscribers couldn’t
communicate telepathically with each other as part of a true hive mind. Nor could they step into each other’s dreams and have a walk around, tasting imagined delicacies in exotic moonscapes.
On Earth, social networking generally involved sitting down at a non-sentient computer and typing words about needing a coffee and reading about other people needing a coffee, while forgetting to
actually make a coffee. It was the news show they had been waiting for. It was the show where the news could be all about them.

But on the plus side, human computer networks, I discovered, were preposterously easy to hack into as all their security systems were based on prime numbers. And so I hacked into
Gulliver’s computer and changed the name of every single person on Facebook who had bullied Gulliver to ‘I Am the Cause of Shame’, and blocked them from posting anything with the
word ‘Gulliver’ in it, and gave each of them a computer virus which I dubbed ‘The Flea’ after a lovely poem. This virus ensured the only messages they would ever be able to
send were ones that contained the words ‘I am hurt and so I hurt’.

On Vonnadoria I had never done anything so vindictive. Nor had I ever felt quite so satisfied.

We went to the park to walk Newton. Parks were the most common destination on dog walks. A piece of nature – grass, flowers, trees – that was not quite allowed to
be truly natural. Just as dogs were thwarted wolves, parks were thwarted forests. Humans loved both, possibly because humans were, well, thwarted. The flowers were beautiful. Flowers, after love,
must have been the best advert planet Earth had going for it.

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Gulliver, as we sat down on the bench.

‘What doesn’t?’

We watched Newton sniffing the flowers, livelier than ever.

‘I was fine. No damage. Even my eye’s better.’

‘You were lucky.’

‘Dad, before I went out on the roof, I’d had twenty-eight diazepam.’

‘You’d need more.’

He looked at me, angry for saying this, as if I was humiliating him. Using knowledge against him.

‘Your mum told me that,’ I added. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I didn’t want you to save me.’

‘I didn’t save you. You were just lucky. But I really think you should ignore feelings like that. That was a moment in your life. You have a lot more days to live. About twenty-four
thousand more days to live, probably. That’s a lot of moments. You could do many great things in that time. You could read a lot of poetry.’

‘You don’t like poetry. That’s one of the few facts I know about you.’

‘It’s growing on me . . . Listen,’ I said, ‘don’t kill yourself. Don’t ever kill yourself. Just, that’s my advice, don’t kill yourself.’

Gulliver took something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth. It was a cigarette. He lit it. I asked if I could try it. Gulliver seemed troubled by this but handed it over. I sucked on the
filter and brought the smoke into my lungs. And then I coughed.

‘What’s the point of this?’ I asked Gulliver.

He shrugged.

‘It’s an addictive substance with a high fatality rate. I thought there would be a point.’

I handed the cigarette back to Gulliver.

‘Thanks,’ he mumbled, still confused.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’

He took another drag, and suddenly realised it wasn’t doing anything for him either. He flicked the cigarette in a steep arc towards the grass.

‘If you want,’ I said, ‘we could play dominoes when we get home. I bought a box this morning.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Or we could go to the Dordogne.’

‘What?’

‘Go swimming.’

He shook his head. ‘You need some more tablets.’

‘Yes. Maybe. You ate all mine.’ I tried to smile, playfully, and try some more Earth humour. ‘You fucker!’

There was a long silence. We watched Newton sniffing around the circumference of a tree. Twice.

A million suns imploded. And then Gulliver came out with it.

‘You don’t know what it’s been like,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all this expectation on me because I’m your son. My teachers read your books. And they look at
me like some bruised apple that’s fallen off the great Andrew Martin tree. You know, the posh boy who got expelled from his boarding school. The one who set stuff on fire. Whose parents gave
up on him. Not that I’m bothered about that now. But even in the holidays you were never around. You were always somewhere else. Or just making everything tense and horrible with Mum.
It’s just shit. You should have just done the right thing and got divorced years ago. You’ve not got anything in common.’

I thought about all this. And didn’t know what to say. Cars passed by on the road behind us. The sound was very melancholy somehow, like the bass rumble of a sleeping Bazadean. ‘What
was your band called?’

‘The Lost,’ he said.

A leaf fell and landed on my lap. It was dead and brown. I held it and, quite out of character, felt a strange empathy. Maybe it was because now I was empathising with humans I could empathise
with pretty much anything. Too much Emily Dickinson, that was the problem. Emily Dickinson was making me human. But not
that
human. There was a dull ache in my head and a small weight of
tiredness in my eyes as the leaf became green.

I brushed it away quickly, but it was too late.

‘What just happened?’ Gulliver asked, staring at the leaf as it floated away on the breeze.

I tried to ignore him. He asked again.

‘Nothing happened to the leaf,’ I said.

He forgot about the leaf he might have seen the moment he saw two teenage girls and a boy his own age walking on the road that ran behind the park. The girls were laughing into their hands at
the sight of us. I have realised that, essentially, there are two broad categories of human laughter, and this was not the good kind.

The boy was the boy I had seen on Gulliver’s Facebook page. Theo “The Fucking Business” Clarke.

Gulliver shrank.

‘It’s the Martin Martians! Freaks!’

Gulliver cowered lower on the bench, crippled with shame.