A wild slim alien

‘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.

I admit that I was jealous of the absence of the wild slim alien’s memory.  I wanted that blank slate – the chance to start all over again.  Without the disappointment, the hurt, the trauma and the grief.  Without the people who brought and left me here.  For a sense of the experience to remain, but the actuality to have been wiped clean away.  What a gift it would be, to be allowed to live again, free of my mistakes and those of others, but with knowledge enough never to repeat them.  That wasn’t quite his situation, I knew, but in a way which balanced anticipation andshame and found the latter wanting, I was keen to help Bill scratch marks into the wax of his new existence.  His new life was my new life – his resurrection would be mine too.

We went down to the beach together and tried to find the exact spot at which Bill woke up to his new life on earth, as if there would still be clues there about his past, alien or otherwise, after a fortnight of tides washing the slate of the sand clean.  On the sand we tried to triangulate his prone position, using the crests of the dunes and the paths through them as our markers.  After a while we thought we had it.  Bill stood upon the spot and looked out to sea.  Nothing but a far-out fishing boat nosing its way back into Porthleven.  The tide was just on the turn and the sun was dropping beyond the headland to the west, casting long shadows and turning the tubes of the first rollers a translucent green.  Bill lifted his gaze from the horizon, and cast his eyes to the skies above, craning back his neck so that the shaggy mane of hair fell away from his face.

He spent longer looking up than out.  He genuinely believed he came from the sky and not from the sea.  If his was a case of selective amnesia, perhaps we needed something that would loosen his mind.  And his tongue.

‘Come on, let’s go for a drink.’  I took his arm, and looked up into his face, now curtained again by his hair.  A flicker of assent in his aquamarine eyes.  A flash of pity, or knowledge.  Something that as far as I was concerned was unknowable, ungovernable.  I shivered, and pulled him tighter to me as we began to walk.

A succession of concrete blocks resolved themselves into a café, a bar, the office-shop of a surf school, surf wear spilling out the door, and a store selling beach gear and toys.  ‘The tat shop, I call it.’

Above the glass façade of the bar, a name was scrawled in as yet unlit green neon: ‘Sandy’s’.  ‘Owned by a surf-mad Scot name of Alexander.’  We were the first customers of the evening, or the last drinkers of the afternoon.

‘Alright Cissy.  The usual?  Hello sir, I don’t believe we’ve met.  I’m Sandy.’

Sandy reached a hand across the bar to Bill, who looked at it as if he were being offered a glassy-eyed John Dory landed at Padstow that morning.  Then, suddenly realising approximately how he was supposed to respond, he stretched out the wrong hand, seizing the back of Sandy’s.  Sandy batted neither of the lids beneath his heathery eyebrows.  Instead he asked my wild slim alien what he would like to drink, with just a hint of the extra solicitude he reserved for non-English speakers, the plain stupid, and English speakers having trouble with his accent.

‘I’ll have what Chan’s having.’

‘Give him a beer, Sandy.’  Now the Scot looked at me, puzzled.  ‘Bill had an accident recently.  Out on the surf.  Probably best if we don’t start him back on the hard stuff just yet.’

Sandy turned to Bill, moving the recently released hand between bar and the glasses behind him in a gesture midway between inviting the drinker to make his own choice and finalising the transaction with me.

‘The same as Chan.’  Sandy nodded his assent, reached for another tumbler, squirted a shot into it and added the mixer.

‘How’s business, Cissy?’  He meant had I sold many pots and plates of late.  I shrugged a so-so, and said that we were going to sit down and that I’d chat later.

We picked one of the window tables and watched the after-work surfers paddling out.

‘Cissy?’

‘It’s my initials.  Chanel Charlenny – CC – Cissy.  It helps that I do something arty-farty for a living.  Sandy is one of those people who hates calling anyone by their given name.  He mints a nickname for all his regulars.  Maybe he’ll sort you out with one before long.’

‘Perhaps I’ll remember my own name one of these days.’

We talked, and under the influence of the alcohol, I gently probed his memory, or his mind; or at least the part of his mind that wasn’t shut off from himself, or the world.  He could not remember ever having surfed, though once he used terminology that would be second nature only to surfers.  After the second drink, he said that he was Badezon.  I thought this must be some obscure piece of antipodean surfing slang, but no, he meant that if I were human, then he was Badezon.

‘Hey Chan.’  A trio of Sandy’s regulars had taken the chairs behind me.  I turned round to talk to them for a moment.  When I turned back to introduce Bill, he was gone.  So were our glasses.  He was at the bar, with my purse, fetching us another drink, and talking to Sandy.  That was okay.  Regulars shared their secrets with Sandy.  Oiled with medicinal fluid, the locks to those privae compartments yielded to the key which Sandy put in their minds merely by being a willing and patient listener.  It helped that he had the discretion of a physician.  So nothing Bill could say would be repeated other than perhaps to me, and nothing he might say would surprise Sandy or disturb his equilibrium, or his view of the world.

I wasn’t being entirely straight with Bill.  The aliens were suggested by the nightmares I had following my miscarriages.  Each successive plate, a foetus transformed into an alien with a greater degree of self-awareness.

You might think it some sick test of strength to hang such a sequence on the wall of my kitchen, a daily reminder of a deeply unhappy time.  And at first you’d have been right.  No-one goes through that experience without coming unstuck.  Apart at the seams.  Your glaze cracked.

But making them had been cathartic.  I befriended the horror and created something new and wise and – a long time coming – comic from it.  I’m a ceramic artist; that’s what I do.  Though now it’s usually seascapes of the kind that the galleries and gift shops of Cornwall flog to the browsing tourist looking to chance upon a picture for the bedroom wall or porcelain for the mantelpiece.  Mementos from a rare week in which they have had time to look for mementos.  I guessed they wouldn’t be looking for foetal aliens and kept those back for myself.

I am beginning to forget how alone I was before the wild slim alien came.  As lonely as the unforgiving space between planets; between plates.  Bereaved too, with grief still a constant backdrop to my waking hours, I had become an explainer of unexplained deaths, a historian, a detective, a psychologist, a pathologist.  My subject was my own body, my mind, and the would-be and actual people that lived and died in both of them.

My parents went when I was seventeen.  An only child with no surviving relatives, I stayed with the family of a school friend to complete my A levels, into which I threw myself as a means of avoiding having to think about the past or the future.  College alternately disguised and enhanced my loneliness.  That’s when I started drinking.  Cheap beer and cheap wine in the students’ union.  Cheap spirits as a means to come by cheap spirit.  Unions with students selected with alcoholic serendipity.  Nothing serious, until the end of the second year.  The beginnings of bouts of serious depression.  Nothing serious, until the third year.  Nothing that hollowed me right out, until the third relationship.  We got through that early mental derailment and lived together for a decade.  It was trying to bring a third party into the relationship that eventually led to me slamming myself into unbreakable clear acrylic.  Instead of a being bearing both our characteristics the third party that finally entered our lives was a full-grown woman.

His father was a Henry VIII figure; he was more Elizabethan, but still struggled with an anachronistic belief in the divine right of kings.  And like Elizabeth I, there were elements of character inherited from the paternal side.  So the field was played.  After the genuine consideration he showed, the awful helplessness he felt in the time following each miscarriage, he – or something in him that he was powerless to defeat – could take no more of me, of the pain.  He left me.

He left me for a woman who already had a child.  He left me for a woman who already had a child and then he had a child of his own with her.

He was sensitive enough to attempt to hide all of these facts from me as one by one the layers of their sedimentary pressure bore down on me, a grain of human sand in unbearable proximity with a million other grains.

When the pressure lifted enough that I could lift the telephone, I found myself reminded that my friends had lives so busy that they could barely find any time for me, let alone the time I needed.  In any case I doubted that even the most considerate of them could cope with and manage the awfulness of my situation.

All the while I kept presenting my best face to the world.  It wasn’t for him, or for other men.  It was habit, or rather, ritual, without which the world could not be faced with confidence.  But each time I face a mirror and apply my make-up, I think of those times, that succession of mornings whose grimness was too much for too long.  No plate, no art can do worse to me than any mirror I look into with a gaze that is necessarily detached, appraising a being who is not me.  If it were really me, if I really saw me, I could not bear to look.

Perhaps the only sensible thing you can do in such a state, short of throwing yourself in the sea, is to go and live by it.  Only at the ends of the earth is it truly possible to lose yourself in something bigger than you.  I was an artist, and the loss of self that creation involved had always come easily to me.  Now I needed to mould that familiar sensibility to an unfamiliar place and make the effort to silence the ghosts demanding that I explain to them why they no longer existed; demanding the right to have their story told.

The plates hung on the wall as a means of rendering the experience they betokened over, finished, dead and gone to heaven.

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.