‘Excuse me for saying so, but you’re not exactly a classic surfer shape.  Most have a lower centre of gravity than you do.  You’re more suited to a bike than a board.’

‘Perhaps that’s why I fell off and bumped my head.’

Unlike Chan, Sandy said what he meant.  He was easier to understand.  I was still some way from being adept at conversing with humans, but talking to Sandy, my synaptic firing turned itself into spoken word less clumsily.  He seemed fascinated by what I had to say, without giving me the sense that he was trying to uncover any deceit I might be attempting to engineer, or wanting to intrude into areas of my mind where I myself had no wish to go.  So I talked freely, and had soon told him that I was just visiting.  And where I was from.  He seemed neither surprised nor doubtful; simply accepting – again unlike Chan.  But there was none of the magnetism she had quickly come to possess for me, none of the emotional pull or physical draw.  It was strange, that awkwardness and attraction should be paired, but I took it to be an ungovernable aspect of human biology that must be closely aligned to the survival of the species.

‘Have you tried going back out on the water?  To see what you can do?  Surfing’s like riding a bike once you’ve learnt.  Even after twenty years without stepping on a board you could go out and the years in-between would vanish.  As long as you’d kept more or less in shape in between times, that is.  Day like today when there’s no danger of the waves roughing you up, you’d be alright.’

I shook my head, and took another mouthful of the bittersweet liquid that Sandy had served me.  I wasn’t going surfing again anytime soon.  Assuming I had ever been surfing in the first place.

‘What happened to me might happen again.  Except this time in reverse.  I might be picked up, in the same way I was – dropped.’  With my fingers I mimicked the motion of the pincers of a crab closing and opening.  Sandy looked at the point on the bar beneath my claw where the miniature, imaginary alien lay prone and in all likelihood seriously injured.  He nodded slowly.

‘So you feel you have unfinished business here on earth?’

‘I don’t know.  But not knowing suggests I do.  I need to establish something indisputable.  Everything has two explanations at the moment.  At least two.’

The bar owner nodded, more to himself than to me.

‘Say ‘celery’.

I looked at Sandy for a moment, failing to picture either the vegetable or its relevance to our conversation.  Then I said the word.

‘Now say ‘salary’.

I said that too.  It seemed to me that I made a sound much the same as before.  Sandy slapped his hand down on the top of the bar.

‘You’re from Victoria.’  Sandy had lived in Melbourne and surfed the nearby coastline when he was in his twenties.  On the basis of this and his two word test, he was convinced that my accent had its origins there.

‘Mind if I ask you a few more questions?  By way of testing what you know about the world?  Might help you find your bearings.’

He threw a few names at me, and I told him a little of what I knew about them.  First there were some British people who had in their various fields attained a degree of renown, which meant that most people would know who they were and what they did.  Then there were their Australian equivalents.  I knew who most of the British people were, and almost all the Australian, but what both sets had in common was that I knew what I knew about them in a cold, dispassionate way.  I could tell Sandy approximately how many wickets Dennis Lillee or Shane Warne had taken in Test cricket, but I could not see either man bowling in my mind, nor could I quite picture the concept of bowling, even though I could define it as the act of propelling a cricket ball down a wicket – a piece of grass hardened by rolling with heavy iron and keeping water from it – with a straight arm and the intention of getting a batsman out by any one of a number of means.  I had all the facts in the world, but nothing to turn those facts into the fluid, fleeting pictures that Chan described as part of her process of remembering a memory.

‘So who would be Warne’s equivalent on your world?’

I told him a name, one I knew instinctively, one which came unbidden.  Of course it meant nothing to Sandy, just as it would mean nothing to you.  Nothing but a short sequence of guttural sounds which for all anyone knew could be spontaneously and completely made up.

Those plates.

The corporeal greed of the Skuduns, the fattest species in the system, is legendary, though – if we forget about Chan’s a priori ceramic depictions – news of it has yet to reach Earth.  Physically slow, they spent much the greatest portion of their lives eating, and only truly went out of their way to exert themselves in the production and preparation of the ingredients that ultimately ended up on their plates.  But they were not to be underestimated mentally, for round the business table they were quick as sunbeams and as deadly as intergalactic plague.  They were peace-loving in as much as they never initiated the indeterminate number of wars our system has fostered over the centuries, but when pushed they were deadly in defence and keen to speculate on the conflicts that perpetually beset or threatened to beset the other three.

Contrast the Skuduns with the ethereal insubstantiality of the slightest species, the Cintilars, whose next evolutionary step would be to disappear, their essential oils blending together and drying to become cosmic dust.  They had already achieved telepathy and a susceptibility to extreme forms of manifest distaste at their own physicality, such as the Cintilarian equivalents of anorexia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.  They were evasive, difficult to understand, and displayed an infuriating mixture of disdain and pity for the flesh-bound weaknesses of the other three.  If they felt their territory had been presumed upon, they let you know about it in disproportionate terms.  They were given a wide berth by all except the Skuduns, who effectively acted as procurers of goods for the Cintilars in return for cheap access to the vegetable and mineral wealth of their world.

The attitudes of the middle two species were the most humanoid.  I was a Badezon.  Ours was the pioneer strength which pushed back the boundaries of our system and then those beyond it.  Our itchy wings meant that we lived humbly, thinking that we would never be in one place for very long.  We had few possessions and had put all our resources into leaving our planet and seeking the experience of other worlds and the spaces in between them.  We excelled at sport, playing an airborne form of the game humans call football.  And we built our houses within the massive branches of gigantic arboreal plants.

As a result of this ever-outward drive, we Badezons would keep involving ourselves in wars.  It goes hand in hand with the role of explorer, I suppose.  For every contact with a new species which went well, there was another that induced suspicion, paranoia, disgust, outrage, or immediate hostilities.  And inevitably when engaged on one front we would leave ourselves exposed at home, for two of the other three nearby species to invade, lay siege and occupy.  But our spatial hardware was second to none, and warfare was necessarily the chief element in its design after engine speed and craft manoeuvrability.  We had lost count of the number of times we had retaken our planet; in our calendar there were more victory holidays than there were working days.

Chan might easily have lived among the Slessi, frequently the most reasonable and likeable species of the four.  But as a direct consequence of that rational bent, they were as likely as Cintilars to respond to a perceived injury or encroachment by taking the moral and then military high ground.  Spiritually attuned to their home world, they venerated nature and representations of it, building an artistic heritage that is without parallel in the known universe – and Earthlings, don’t be getting to think that you might in any way be a match for them.  Their music, if you heard it, would drive you mad with its sonic and melodious beauty.  Their art would astonish you with the richness of its colours and its conceptual clarity.  And their story-telling traditions keep even the semi-transparent behinds of the brain-heavy Cintilars on the edge of their seats.

I wish I had one or two of the Slessi’s finest works with me to share with you now.  But I don’t.  I can’t even give you the gist of any of them, for as I have indicated and Chan has affirmed, my memory is not what it was.

The plates were all painted in astonishing detail, which you might call photographic but for a certain lightness of line that gave them an air of the cartoon, or at least the graphic novels that I discovered Chan liked to read.  The hairs on my human neck, back and arms prickled in a way I had not previously experienced when I first saw them.  One showed a black shape striking the surface of water from above, so that the splash radiated out in blues, whites and greys from the centre of the plate to its circumference.  It was difficult to make out what had caused the splash – the shape was perhaps a man, or a torpedo.  Another depicted planets of jade and lilac hues in a system which was not Sol’s but that of some more distant sun seemingly of her own imagining.  The star itself was not shown in the scene but cast its light from beyond the western compass point of the plate, whiting out the left-hand side of each of the planets arrayed across the glazed black ceramic.  A further quartet of plates brought to life four different species of alien ranging from a corporeal caricature to a barely embodied figure, whose transparency suggested an evolutionary end-point, a wisdom as far-reaching as time.

I felt as I looked at these plates that it was not by chance that Chan was the one who found me.  I am not suggesting that it was our destiny to meet, because destiny has about it something eternally mysterious and coldly resistant to decryption, but I do believe it was to some greater or lesser extent planned.

Later that second day, another day of rest for a body which was bruised with the shock of the new, I tried at least to secure my immediate future in the face of so many unknowns.

‘Would you let me stay for a while?  Until more of my memory returns?’ I asked Chan, knowing that the peculiarity of my situation – the absence of a story which explained me – gave me some allowance to say what should not be said, to request what should not be requested.  She nodded, okayed it.  She did not have to.  She could have asked me to go as soon as it was clear I was rested and out of danger, at which point she might also have elected to turn me over to the authorities whether judicial, political, medical or social.  But I knew she knew that I was telling the truth even as she protested otherwise, laughing at her own ability to be taken for a ride.

I tried to make myself useful, studying what Chan did around the house.  Then when she went out, I attempted to do it myself, for myself, for the two of us.  The washing up I could do.  Peeling potatoes I could not.  My new hands weren’t yet dextrous enough.  The blood that dripped from the slice in my finger was beautiful, pooling on the kitchen worktop like no liquid I had seen on this planet or any other.

One morning at breakfast Chan intimated that the plates from which we ate our toast, and those on the wall, were her own work.  She had noticed me noticing them and gave me the chance to ask her about them.  I didn’t take it.  I was too busy trying to rationalise what this meant.

It meant that she had painted my arrival on this planet – in its seawater – on a plate mounted on the wall of her kitchen.  Not only that but she had painted the view a traveller might have the fortune to experience while waiting for touchdown, orbiting the planet on which I was raised.  And finally she had painted the inhabitants of the system in which l lived and the one neighbouring it; the four warring parties around an intergalactic political board game of almost infinite long-standing.

It was weeks before I knew it all for certain but I had sensed it on my first clear sight of the plates, that morning after my arrival, after the recreation in my dreams of falling from the sky into the sea.  It was months before I asked her about them, and the answer was perfunctory, disappointing, deflating.

‘I painted them ages ago, when I was reading a lot of sci-fi.  They’re scenes suggested by books, I forget which exactly.  I read so many.  Comfort reading, really.  The alien portraits are nothing more than crass human guesses about what aliens look like.  When I met one for real, I never expected him to look like a golden-maned surfer.’

Her human tongue in her human cheek, as was always the case when we touched on my origins.  It would be years before I could combat Chan’s sarcasm, and by then she herself would tell you that she believed me.  The child, when it came, was no great surprise, though of course we were both, alien and human alike, extremely curious to see exactly what form it would take.

The trilling of a bell woke me from images of tentacled creatures swimming through space, contracting and expanding their legs with imperceptible speed into closed and open patterns which propelled them through the vacuum.  With each opening, there was a glint of a raw, fleshy orifice, and a flash of incisor.  Creatures who could make a human being disappear in one gulp.

Was that what I had been – still was?

The light from the window was brighter than when I was last conscious, and the clouds raced in faster from the sea.  Presently two men appeared, dressed in a dull green uniform.  Chan stood behind and between them, her arms crossed.  I turned my chair round towards the men, who had started talking to me in a familiar tone.  Initially I assumed that I must have met them before.  But there was also a perfunctoriness about the questions that put me on my guard.  They were acting as they would with anyone they might then decide to take away.

‘Sir, did you drink anything before going out on the waves?’

‘Drink what?’

‘Alcohol, sir.’

‘I don’t drink alcohol.’

‘Can you tell me your name?’

‘Yes.  William Daniels.  Everyone calls me Bill.’  At this, Chan made a startled sort of a noise, and uncrossed her arms.  The paramedics looked round at her inquiringly.  She pursed her lips and refolded her arms.

‘Where are you from, Bill?’

‘Australia.  Brisbane.  Where are you from?’

‘Are you on holiday, or living over here?

‘Both, I suppose.  I’m living in London; down here for a couple of weeks surfing.  Probably not any more of that though after this morning.’

‘And where are you staying?’

‘In a B&B in Newquay.  The Stanton Guest House.’

‘Anyone with you there that Chan could ring, get them to come and pick you up?’

‘No.  I came down on my own.  My friends are all up in London.’

‘Can you tell me who the British Prime Minister is?’

‘Can you tell me who the Australian one is?’  I told them the name of both of the then current incumbents.  The facts came to mind as far as I could work out naturally, without neurons scrambling to connect with each other in a desperate search.  Why was I able to tell them these things when what I had told Chan was the truth – that I could remember nothing about myself?  It seemed my life depended on telling the ambulance men lies.

I let them examine my head for signs of damage, but they found no more than Chan.  Then they set me some cognitive tests.  I deliberately avoided any attempt to reflect while answering, letting whatever instincts – long possessed or recently planted – guide me through without apparent fault.  To the paramedics, I was no mystery, just another antipodean surfer who’d maybe been a little careless but lived to tell the tale without injury or scar.

Chan talked to them before they left.  They weren’t whispering, so I heard most of what they said.

‘… seems to be alright.  He’s not concussed.  If he doesn’t want to come with us, we can’t force him.  You okay with keeping an eye on him?’

Even now, remembering the moment when I stated my name for the first time, I am not sure whether I plucked it from a fold in the matter of my brain under which it lay hidden, giving off a luminosity which made me grab for it in that previously dark and empty void of computation, or if I invented it out of thin air, through information that had been gathered during the short walk from the beach to the house, or pieced together from what I had seen in Chan’s house.  What I knew with frightening certainty was that the paramedics had the power to place me in the hands of the authorities, even being ignorant of what I was, and I would do – had done – everything necessary to avoid that fate.

As the heavy-sounding engine of a vehicle started up outside the house, I cast aside any doubt.  I was sure that I had dug the name from underneath the fallow earth in my brain because it was a seed sown there by the species which had set me down on this planet.  They had placed me among these people either in the spirit of research, or with a mission that would come to me once my body recovered from the shock of its displacement; a mission that would be revealed when I was ready to effect it.

She sat me in one of a pair of chairs in the bay window, and said she would get me a drink and some fresh clothes.  Sun was breaking through the clouds.  I shielded my eyes against the brighter light and immediately she reached for a cord at the right angle of the window, and used it to lower one of the blinds.  Venetian blinds.  I relaxed in the chair, which was made of a canvas material and gently rocked when I shifted my weight.  I rested my arms on its wooden arms and my head against the cushion which hung over the top of the chair.  I closed my eyes and saw the colours of space.  I felt suddenly tired and wished that I would never have to open them again.  Or move again.  I let nebulae, comets and meteoroids drift across the interplanetary screen of my eyelids.

‘Here, take this.  Careful, it’s hot.’

She gave me a lilac mug filled with a pinkish brown liquid.  Bubbles gathered around the inner perimeter of the mug.  The liquid had a suspiciously chemical, saccharine smell.

‘What is it?’

‘Hot chocolate.  It’ll warm you up.’

I wrapped my fingers around the mug and undeniably it warmed them.  I sniffed again and put the cup to my lips.  They flinched on contact with the liquid, almost spilling it, but I tried again, and this time managed to draw off some of the thin-tasting liquid.  The taste lingered in my mouth after I had swallowed.  Not unpleasant, but the sweetish tang suggested something diluted rather than its essence.   I took another sip, tracking the progress of the liquid’s heat as it descended into the internal organs of my new body.

The woman watched me as I sipped, her mouth occasionally forming into the encouraging shape of a smile.  Otherwise she gave no indication that she was aware of the novelty of the sensations to me, and I might even have come to the conclusion that she was amused, as if she were watching a human child assess a food it had not been served before.

‘I used to have hot chocolate when I was a kid, after I went swimming.  Still do, if I can.  Nothing warms you better.  I’ll go and see if I can find you something to wear.’

I cradled the cup in my human hands, enjoying its warmth.  I thought I heard the woman in the next room talking.  It must be to someone.  And because of the pauses, on what this civilisation called a telephone, or mobile.  I guessed I had better not let myself fall asleep.  A plant stood between the two chairs, its leaves gleeful receptacles for the energy disseminated by the planet’s sun.  I suspected hot chocolate was not the plant’s ideal choice of fluid, but that did not stop me from upending the remainder of the contents of the mug into its earth-filled pot.

‘Chanelcharlenny.’

Something about the way she said this string of syllables suggested to me that it was her name.  Despite her faith in the warming powers of hot chocolate, I was still cold, and began to regret watering the plant with the remaining half-cup.  How did human beings cope with such a thin dermatological rendering and such a raw and penetrating atmosphere?  I felt sure my own species must be fur-covered.

As if in answer to my thoughts, the woman re-appeared with the clothes, and a blanket.

‘Chanelcharlenny – is that your name?’

She seemed disturbed by the question, and was slow to answer.

‘Yes, but it’s Chanel…’ – she paused – ‘… Charlenny.  Chanel’s my given name.  Charlenny is my surname.  It’s Cornish.  You can call me Chan.  Here, put these on.’

She turned on her heels and left the room.  I stood up unsteadily then slowly peeled off the wet suit.  Momentarily I was disturbed by the anatomy of this sex of the species, but so many novel experiences were homing in on me, I determined to think about this very particular one later, and quickly put on the trousers.  Of thickish material, they were short on my legs.  A red t-shirt with the phrase ‘I’m a noun!’ printed across its front in white, and a grey hooded top.  Black socks, pink at the heel.  They must be her clothes – Chan’s – because they were a little tight-fighting, even compared with the wet suit.

I sat back down on the chair and drew the blanket over me.  Through the part of the window which was not screened by the blind, I could see the beach on which I had woken up, part in sun, part-shadow, also the sweep of a bay, and three successive headlands pointing crooked, rocky fingers out to sea, accusing the same point on the horizon.  Above them clouds were banked, their flat bottoms rolling beyond the final headland, its mass considerably more substantial (factoring for distance) than the nearer two.  Waves lapped the beach in long, lacy frills of white.  I watched them form and dissipate.

Despite myself, I returned to the state I had been in before Chan found me on the beach – the regenerative condition she would call sleep.

I wasn’t sure if I was healthy and well, or sick and hurt.  I wasn’t sure what or who I was.  I wasn’t sure of my body, or how I came to be in it.  How I came to be here, standing on unsteady legs on a beach in what I somehow knew was dawn light.  So I reached for certainty, for the being – the woman, my brain prompted – before me who had been concerned enough to stop and check on my well-being.  That must mean that she knew who she was, where she had come from, and where she was going.  She must know that she was human, and be unafflicted by a sense that she was not quite familiar with this planet.

The woman’s hair was not unlike mine, except that it was dry.  Without questioning the logic of how I knew it, I was aware that she was one sex of this species, and I was encased within the body of the other.  I found I was immediately attracted to her face.  It caught and reflected the morning light.  It suggested openness even as I guessed that my own face, of which I still had no clear physical conception, was one which had the air of being closed off, craggy like a rock.

‘I – I don’t know how I got here.  Or who I am.  Where I am, even.  In fact – this is going to sound strange – I don’t even know how it is possible for me to talk to you.’

I must have mumbled the last sentence, because the woman ignored it.  Perhaps she had understood nothing at all of what I said – it sounded strange enough to my ears.

‘You’re dangling a leash from your ankle.  You must have taken a knock – to the head, from your surfboard.  Don’t you know you shouldn’t go out on the waves late at night with no-one else around?  Let me have a look.  You’ll have to drop down a bit for me to see.’

I dropped to my… haunches and the woman took a step forward, taking a handful of my hair and checking the scalp underneath.  Her hands moved through my hair swiftly, methodically.  When her fingers touched the shell of my skull, I could feel their warmth.  Unconsciously I pitched forward, my face meeting more warmth in the form of the soft clothing she wore.  Unhurriedly she moved to the side, evading further moments of contact.

‘See anything?’ I said, knowing as I did that I was able to corrupt this language, abbreviate it, and be understood.

Her hands kept exploring a while longer before she said ‘No’.  One or two more unmethodical back-trackings followed before she stepped back and looked me over.

‘You don’t remember anything about yourself, or how you got here?’

I rose, considered the question, and said no.  ‘Nothing.’

‘What’s your name?’

No name that might be mine came to me.  The woman pursed her lips and moved hair from her eyes.

‘I can’t see a cut or a bump, but you must have amnesia or something.  We should get you to a hospital.’

‘I don’t want to go to a hospital,’ I said hastily, as images rolled through my mind of my body on an operating table subject to the examining whim of some clumsy human doctor equipped with the crude implements of a backward medicine, universally-speaking.

‘You must be from down under to judge from your accent.’

Down under?

My brain’s linguistic prompting process had so far provided me with every verbal eventuality, thought or spoken.  I must have spent many years studying this language to the degree that I could speak it without arousing suspicion of my… extraterrestrial nature.  But ‘down under’ had me stumped.

The cheek of my human face was pressed against something wet.  I opened my two new eyes, shutting them instantly against the bright grey light.  In the moment these overtly light-sensitive organs had been open, I had observed packed brown stretching away from me, fringed by white.

Somehow I knew that what lay firm beneath my cheek and stretched into the distance was sand, and the white, water.  I raised my oddly heavy head.  Wet strands of hair fell in my eyes.  Limbs that must be attached to the torso of my new body lay prone against the sand, numb with cold but dressed in some textured material but for which I knew I would be colder still, or dead.  A wet suit, wet from the sea.

I had command of my thoughts, and my thoughts commanded this strange language without trouble.

Curtained by the damp hair, my eyes were adjusting to the light, and the organism’s brain – my brain – was modifying its original assessment of the nature of this light from bright to dim.  I bent my upper limbs – arms – at their elbows and pushed my body up using hands – fingers – muscles until I was kneeling.  I noticed the rhythmic sound behind me which first I had taken for granted.  Waves breaking on the sand; a beach.  Never stopping, varying only in strength.

I looked down at my new body – so different from my old one, I thought, before realising I could not remember what shape or size or colour or texture the earlier version had been.  I watched my chest rise and fall as I breathed in the sharp, ruffled air, noticing also the tangy smell of the sea.  My hands felt for the fastener of the black suit at my neck, wanting to release it so that I might breathe deeper still, and more easily.  My numbed fingers fumbled for some time before they were able to draw the zip down.  Hair appeared, and beneath it, skin.  The wind crept in and tickled the reviving flesh I had exposed.  I adjusted the zip upwards a fraction.

Though my legs were heavy, they responded immediately to the mental urge to stand up.  I wobbled uncertainly on my feet, instinctively putting my arms out by way of balance, finding nothing but that fluid air.  Somehow I steadied myself, and looked down at my legs, where there were flashes of colour – light blue and fluorescent yellow stripes which produced a green blend where they crossed.  Around my left leg was some kind of cord, frayed at the loose end, as though I had been chained to something.

‘A surfboard.’

This grainy guttural utterance honked out of my mouth.  It seemed I could speak the language as well as think it.  I pictured an object which was long and curved and made of some kind of hard lightweight substance which served to make it buoyant.

 ‘Are you alright?’  said a voice which was not my own.  It was lighter, higher, kinder.  I turned slowly towards the point I guessed it came from.  There, not many human steps from me, stood another of the kind, with mostly similar bodily attributes, but seemingly softer and rounder, beneath a different kind of clothing.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said in answer, because I wasn’t.

Two dozen or more wetsuited surfers, like black seabirds, shags or cormorants, sitting on the sea as it swells beneath their tucked-in legs.  Or seals getting up on their tails to follow the waves as they become two-third or three-quarter circles in rolling, tubular motion.

The plane of the sea, rising up towards the horizon, its undulating body threatening at any moment to swell and engulf the bay window of the house in which I sit.

The Land’s End peninsula erased by a seamless blanket of mist and low cloud. The froth painting the golden sand a brilliant white, glossy in the sunshine.

That’s the sand that I washed up on.  How did I get there?