A wild slim alien

This was happiness.  The day-to-day stuff, not the burn and scorch of fast-flaring love; that was now in the past.  Why did I not tell him that I was pregnant?  Because this was happiness.  And because I knew what havoc the introduction of a third party could wreak.  So I blocked out the knowledge when I was with him to avoid it showing on my face.  The physical effects of the pregnancy I blamed on bugs and food poisoning, trusting that if he really were an alien, human biology would not be his strong suit.  But of course, I would have to tell him soon; nightly our bellies came together, and whether for the purposes of alien research or out of plain human curiosity, he remained observant of our life together, sometimes astutely so.

I kept giving myself one more day; then, as each seemed as ordinarily perfect as the one before, I kept feeling disinclined to cast a possible shadow over it and all the days that followed.  When not lingering in the present moment, I made my memory work hard to avoid thinking about the future – about, for example, how I would navigate the health system with a life form that just might turn out to be regarded by it as freakish.  I knew I needed to think about that, but I didn’t want to yet.  So I wandered back to the last time I had been as happy as this, day-to-day.  The year before my parents died, the summer that began with the invigilator signalling the end of the last exam.  It was a song that sent me there, one of the ones the wild slim alien and I listened to in front of the fire, after eating, before bed.  ‘Harvest time’.  I found myself before the memory of a boy who worked holidays on the farm whose acreage surrounded our house, and of a girl who had nothing she needed to do with her summer, nor anything better than read or listen to music, except to meet the boy in his lunch hour, and on Sundays.

When we were aged thirteen he and his friend whose name I can no longer remember had on a perfect summer’s day chased us – me and my friend who I last saw a dozen years ago – along the rutted furrows of a farm track.  When we broke across the lines of discarded barley stems, they followed us, until eventually we tumbled down laughing, glistening and unrelenting in the shade of a stand of trees whose coolness was doubled by the neighbouring pond deliberately and artlessly dug into the shallow bowl of the landscape, its chalky sides the scummy white froth atop the muddy brew of weak coffee-coloured water.  An East Anglian oasis, and we on that day were their mirage, conscious for the first time of a power that we could call upon but they could not.  Straw stuck to our clothes, we flirted, and they learnt to take it, and deal with it the best they could, or could not.  They panted like dogs and begged to be petted, but they were boys and we were almost women.

Three years later and we were both full-grown.  His shoulders had broadened and his muscles were toned from working the sacks on the potato harvester.  I led him by the hand through the ancient corridor of interlinked barns, lit by gaps where the wood had rotted.  At the time it felt like we were the first who had ever made such a walk, the first who had ever settled in such a nest constructed and walled with hastily re-arranged bales of hay, but now I realise that the barns would have seen many such couplings over the four centuries that they had stood.  But at the time, of course, there were no ghosts, just me and the boy, and our beating hearts and sweaty palms.  His insistence, my acceptance, my choice of place.  I wanted the transition as much or more than I wanted him.  I knew I was not for him, but I was happy enough to let him be the one.  I couldn’t wait to tell the friend who had run with us that perfect summer’s day, the friend who had chaperoned me when I first visited his house.  In his surprise at our visit, he had leapt through the door of his bedroom and clunked his head on the lintel that long habit usually and automatically allowed him to avoid.  His mother brought tea and a cold flannel and we looked him in the eye to make sure he wasn’t concussed.  I sat next to him on his bed and gingerly dabbed at the cut with the flannel.  Emboldened by his injury, unembarrassed by my friend’s presence, I put my arm around him, lifted the blood-matted hair from his hot, damp forehead, and softly kissed him there.

In the barn we lay a while, straws of straw marking our backs as we gazed into the time-blackened depths of the roof above the cross-beams; there were bats up there somewhere, for sure, and mice beneath the bales.  Occasional sparrows flitted over us, having found their way in through the same gaps in the wood as the sunlight.  Arms flung over each other, I reflected on his absence of knowledge, his expectation that I would know what to do, that I would be his guide rather than he mine.  And so with clumsy directness and overswift accomplishment on his part we both made the transition.  But oh! the extraordinary particularness of it, the feel of him slipping hard inside me.  I had had a taste of the tidal tug that existed between those two overlapping forces, desire and satisfaction, and I wanted more of it.

Today the barns are unrecognisable.  I went back to East Anglia for a period, before coming to Cornwall.  I ate a meal in the fancy restaurant that had once been home to bales and bird shit and a girl and a boy, and drank wine from the vineyard which became the farm’s chief raison d’être; the rest of its thousand acres sold to an agribusiness.  No-one recognised me, and I didn’t declare myself.  The young waitress who served me might have been me.  I didn’t doubt that there was a kitchen hand who coveted her, nor that the after-hours privacy of the restaurant’s toilets or linen store cupboard ensured that the barns still saw their fair share of transitional moments.

Sandy’s seasonal workers had moved on, and though he didn’t really need help in the autumn and winter months, he let me pot-wash and collect glasses on the busier nights of the week.  Pot-washer by night, glider by day, or at least on those days that the school decreed it safe to take to the air.  The gliding burned off the excess of human adrenaline that – I now saw – had precipitated my mental crisis; strangely it also left me physically tired in a way that flying under power of my own wings had rarely done. 

Over the winter months I built back Chan’s trust.  I could see it returning in small increments (I had been with her long enough now to be able to begin to perceive these little human signs); in the momentary relief that showed before she composed her face each time I returned from gliding, and in the way she would half-smile as I described a typically ordinary evening at Sandy’s.  Her eyes clouded only at the mention of Badezon, which I had begun to talk about again.  I wanted to normalise the notion of what I was, and talk freely about my origins as I had in the period after she found me on the beach.  So, talking about the hang gliding, I would say, ‘I’m Badezon; we need flight to feel alive.’ And then wait hopefully for the kind of questions she used to ask, about life lived in the air, life lived on my planet.  Now and again, usually late at night, she would humour me.

I understood that she would have preferred me not to hang glide.  But she had also quickly understood that it was for me what ceramics were for her.  Before long I had flown from all of Cornwall’s recognised launch sites – Sennen, Perranporth, Chapel Porth, St. Agnes Head, High Cliff, Vault Bay, Carbis Bay, Carne, Carn Brea, Rosewall Hill, again from Godrevy, and from one or two unofficial places.  I never felt in the slightest danger.  I knew I could fly, whether with real or artificial wings; bird-alien that I was, I turned and dived in a way that few of the other professional pilots would dare to try.  Soon the school’s manager started to talk about me gliding competitively, even though he knew it meant that he himself would drop a place in any competition we both entered.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  Like any Badezon, I wanted to show off my prowess in the air.  But obviously it would draw attention to me, too much attention.  Chan immediately said no.  Now that I had begun to talk about my planet again, I could tell that she feared the stress of competition – of exposure – would force another crisis, another moment of dangerous madness; another hang gliding fatality.  She needed me to carry on existing and she did not have – could not have – my conviction that in the air I was safe from harm.  I agreed not to put myself forward, but the urge was strong, and I knew that eventually I would give in to it, and risk the consequences.

But that winter, alien-human relations were at their best.  When I came home from the bar or from the air, and Chan from her potter’s wheel and kiln, we would both ache with virtuous exhaustion.  After preparing and eating a simple meal, we would sit before the flickering open fire and listen to music – Earth songs about the sea and the moon, or Spain, or hearts entwined with human complications.  When the songs finished we would allow the wind to slip in and take its place, and listen to the music of the onshore breeze rising off the sea, ascending the hill, deviating over the roofs of the houses that clung to it, until it gusted down our chimney, scattering the flames in all directions, and left behind a sound like the fading shimmer of a cymbal.  And then we ourselves would rise on an indoor thermal and without any seeming effort find ourselves in what I began to think of as not Chan’s but our bed.

That was the night I remembered making love with another of my species, in the air above the semi-translucent sloping fields of quartz, as Badezon’s two dying suns set them aflame.  In our sleepy, stream of consciousness bliss, I immediately relayed this flashback to Chan, who to my surprise roared with laughter.

‘Well, that brings a whole new meaning to the Mile High Club,’ she said.  Then, laughing hysterically, ‘Don’t even think of trying that in a hang glider.’

The hang gliding school were wary of my credentials, and warier still when I appeared not to know certain technical terms which were their lingua franca.  I said we’d developed our own Aussie slang for the kit we used, and improvised some names for them on the spot: goblet, tinny, short leg, gastropod.  They were still wary, and later I learned that one of them had checked the internet to satisfy himself that the club I purported to teach for really did exist.  But Chan and I had done our research; she had meticulously faked a certificate from the Australian hang gliding association, and, with the help of an acquaintance of Sandy’s, had come by a marriage certificate and proof of joint nationality.  With this and one or two other easily acquired items, I could open the bank account I would need to become employable.

I committed to memory all the basics of hang gliding, and visualised what in artificial terms I needed to do to become airborne.  Once in the air, I was convinced that my genetic, natural flying ability would be there waiting for me to reclaim it.  There might be some bumpy moments as I adjusted my centre of gravity to the fact that my wings were no longer attached at my shoulders but were instead held by a frame some number of feet above my head; I would ride those out.

At the end of that first meeting with the people from the school, they seemed more or less satisfied, and told me that they would ring me when the weather was set fair for flying.  As for teaching, well, they’d have to see how I flew; but even then, I’d need to take the national association’s qualification before they’d let me near novices.

When the day came, my skin prickled and my mind exploded with flashbacks to Badezon.  The clouds were the flat-bottomed cotton-wool puffs of cumulus that signified safe gliding, and as the pilots gathered on the hillside at Godrevy, there was talk about streets, glassoffs and elevators.

I was impatient to feel the air about me as I had on Badezon, but I carefully and methodically adjusted my kit as protocol required, and waited my turn.  As I launched myself from the hillside, I tucked my legs into what they called the cocoon and I the gastropod – like the bottom three-quarters of a sleeping bag – and was transformed into a giant wasp with chevron sails.  Immediately I felt myself rise on a thermal, sniffing the air for its feel and its path.  These wings were clumsy in comparison with my own, but I soon had their measure, and knew they would do.  So I swooped down and into and up on a thermal.  I wheeled like a gull, and wheeled again.  Then I glided for miles along the coast, watching the human flyers drop behind me and away.  I ignored the variometer.  The climatic conditions were near-identical to Badezon.  When my wings had first been strong enough to lift me into the air, I discovered that what my parents said was true – you’ll know what to do, and where the good air is.  And then I was alone, I was free, soaring as we used to do on Badezon across the plains of rock that heated the air and created the uplift which bore us higher, lighter than a single one of our feathers.

From the skies, I could see the beauty of the planet I had found myself upon.  If the coastal walks with Chan had given me a glimpse, now I had a three-dimensional panorama all about me.  But to what astonishing effect the planet’s weather systems and the bodies of water and earth interacted; light reflecting and deflecting off clouds and sea, and colouring the emeralds, yellows and greys of the land with a degree of intensity that momentarily dazzled me and took my breath away.  And as I had come to expect at such moments, a flashback hit me, and I remembered the exhilaration of flying over features of the Badezon land- and waterscape that I had never before encountered.

While I was in the air, the wind changed direction, and I was able to head back the way I had come, landing to everyone’s astonishment on the very hill from which we had taken off.  I was a natural bird-man, they said.  Unusual technique.  But very effective.  ‘So you believe me now?’ I said, softening the impact of the implicit criticism with a smile.  The school’s manager cracked a smile in return, and I knew I was in.