Walking in the Last Days (2000)

Ving remembered the alien on the bus that night. He never found out what became of the Speaker woman. He watched the news every day for a week, right through to the funny animal story, but there was no mention of her. The news blurred into the weather forecast which was always right because it never changed, which in turn mutated into a relentlessly positive teen magazine show whose themes that week were handcuff-play and killing your parents.

Ving turned the television off and listened to the wind rocking the caravan. As usual, it blew hard and steady through the park. Morning fell across the broken armatures of the swings, across the boating lake empty except for shopping trolleys gone belly up. He caught a flash of the woman crying soundlessly as she lay shattered on the concrete floor. He had to count back from a hundred to push it away. Ving didn’t want to think about it.

The only space left on the bus had been next to the alien. Ving couldn’t bring himself to sit there, so he was forced to stand. A Catsucker wasn’t so bad as far as most people were concerned; there were enough of them around for the novelty to wear off. At least they had two arms, two legs and a head in roughly the right places, although Ving couldn’t tell which ones were meant to be female, or where their strange, green, multifocal eyes were looking at any given time.

On television Ving had seen some disturbing variations on the legged mammal theme, and few based upon other blueprints entirely. Obviously only the ones who could breathe oxygen— or at least tolerate it— stayed here for very long. Ving averted his gaze from the creature, concentrated on the neat rows of tiny nodules on the grey rubber floor. The only others that Ving had seen for real were the huge, strange-bodied lizards who hung around outside public libraries. Most of them were far too big to fit through the doors, so they squatted outside, reaching through the windows, held books in their gigantic hands— large print, coffee table books, children’s’ books— slowly turning the pages with stupid-looking rubber-tipped sticks and squinting down at the tiny foreign things depicted there. Paperbacks were no good; they just tore them apart by accident or absent-mindedly ate them. Apart from books, they couldn’t stomach most food. Just cardboard, newsprint, Pot Noodles and sugary children’s’ cereals, all of which they seemed to approve of and consumed in vast quantities.

When Ving was a child he once had a sly feel of one as it lumbered past, ran an inquisitive hand along skin like pebbles set in an old and shabby handbag. He thought the thing hadn’t noticed until it turned its head back at an impossible angle, regarded him with that strangely human eye in its armoured turret, and vibrated an approximation of English words at the child. Yu Monkees Liker Tha Touch Eh? In that sub-bass vibrato was something akin to amusement.

The others he had only seen on the telly, on the endless hand-wringing programmes that asked what all this meant for humanity’s future. Ving couldn’t follow them at all, but he often watched anyway. Just to feel part of something that people far brighter than him obviously thought important. Just to say he had been alive in such times. Ving Haines was a good boy gone sceptical and susceptible. A nineteen-year-old pretty criminal. As he swayed on the bus under a thin strip of nicotine light he looked scarily skinny, even though he wasn’t particularly. His eyebrows hovered restlessly over the rims of his cheap, off the rack glasses; when he wore them, in private. He had a very slow, cherubic smile and baby seal eyes that always seemed to be on the verge of tears. But he never smiled anymore, and neither did he cry.

As he stepped off the bus, he was able to stare through a window almost opaque with city filth at the Catsucker who was taking up twice as many seats as it had paid for. A face with a raisin quality and the colour of a new conker. On the brink of translucence even in that feeble bus light, scarified and corrugated. Did that mean it was old? Hair that seemed to have a tough life of its own, swaying gently with the vibration of the bus’s diesel engine but at the same time shifting back automatically from the face. The Catsucker had small, shiny objects woven into it or caught there. Ving couldn’t make out what they might be. Mr Aitch said they didn’t wash because it was against their religion and that they stank.

Ving had a cat once. Closer to the truth to say that there was a cat, and that it sometimes dropped into any place it got fed. Then it stopped coming, and after a fortnight Ving’s mum told him to stop leaving food out to be wasted.
The Catsuckers thought they were doing people a favour by snaring the vermin that infested populated areas at night. They couldn’t understand why anyone would be so cruel as to keep an animal unless they intended to eat it; or why, if they were planning to eat an animal, why they’d let it go running wild. People stopped letting their cats out, and generally avoided kebab shops run by Catsuckers.

The bus cleared its throat and bore the alien away, unconcerned by Ving’s hostile gaze or oblivious to it. Seven gutted blocks of flats led Ving’s eye to the horizon, where those towers still fit for habitation— human or otherwise— scratched desperately, like drowner’s fingers, at clouds the colour of a black eye. A nearby shop had the shutter down over its entrance, strips of steel covered with mindless aerosol scribbles almost totally worn off, the graffiti overlaid in turn with meticulously stencilled Speaker slogans, with typically bad syntax. RACE WAR NEVER AGAIN KICK THE RUBBERS HEADS IN. Through the windows, the shop was a tiled twilight zone, its halogen-lit hush interrupted by the rattle of two uniformed and hollow-eyed teenage girls who had ventured out from behind bulletproof tills to restock the shelves. Three Talibanese women swept along the street, black tents floating along the wet pavement accompanied by red and white Kwik Save bags.

A box of light illuminated the tops of peoples’ heads as Mr Aitch’s monotonous baritone rumbled from cheap stacks with ruined tweeters. It was just playback, but everyone was there for the message, the massage, not the medium. The video projector was knackered as well so Mr Aitch orbited himself as three ghost Mr Aitches in magenta, yellow and cyan. In his youth Mr Aitch had been a photogenic Hollywood enigma more famous for turning down commercial scripts than for actually doing anything. He was mainly remembered as one of the overpaid male leads in short-lived cult sitcom whose characters were all drugged-up transgendered hipsters. Mr Aitch’s career as an offbeat celebrity ended when his girlfriend jumped out of a twenty-eighth floor hotel room window at his behest. They had been violently in love. Next Mr Aitch worked his way into politics like a rent boy’s hand into a rubber glove into an already well-used arse.

Mr Aitch’s face was projected twenty meters high on the dead grey wall of an abandoned out of town retail unit. The whole building was completely devoid of any sign of habitation, inside and out. A heavy winter rain had somehow worked its way in, leaving the place dank and musty. There weren’t even any chairs, which was one of the things starting to annoy Ving slightly. A more acute irritation was the man in front of Ving. The clear plastic hood of his latex suit kept bobbing about in front the screen. The hood came to a point on top, forming an absurd little teat, like a condom. The Prophylactics wore the rubber suits because they were afraid of catching germs from aliens. Perhaps they were afraid of catching alienness itself. It was inevitable that there would be a large contingent of them at a xenophobic playback.

In the shifting, slightly refracted light of the projector, the Prophylactics looked very like the alien Jellies they hated so much. Some people were just wearing the body parts without masks or respirators. The old school crowd had their shirts off underneath to display pseudo Aryan tattoos and t-shirt tans that ended at the elbows and the neck. There was a voice high up in the shadows of the unit’s roof. NEVER AGAIN she shouted, and she sounded to Ving like an indignant parrot as she squawked the same words over and over. Eyes swept up to pin her in the rafters, balanced on the middle of a perilously narrow girder, fifty meters above their heads. As two men trod the same precarious perch from either side of the woman, Ving couldn’t contemplate her jeopardy, mesmerised as he was by the Hs on their shirts (upper case, sans serif) and the idea of miniature helicopters landing on them. Mr Aitch went of speaking, unaware that he had lost another audience.

There was a crash and a cascade of sparks as someone plunged into the antiquated video projector, pulling a light fitting down with them. Ving couldn’t see whether it was the interloping woman or not. Aitch’s tirade continued. Without the video his voice somehow sounded less convincing, his heartfelt propaganda rendered into ludicrous camp. The playback ended in subdued chaos, blunted concern, mild interest. It wasn’t difficult for Ving to get near to the smashed projector and the smashed body on top of it.

The light was bad but he could see she was breathing loudly through the blood in her mouth. As she inhaled there was a moist rattling noise, which Ving assumed was from landing on her head. She lay on a deathbed of vitreous green boards and shattered beige plastic. Her intricately braided hair was dyed black, just starting to grow out. At first he thought there was broken glass in it. Looking more closely, he could see that, just like the Catsucker on the bus, she had little strips of white-silver material woven among the strands. He seemed to be finding it hard to focus. The metal, blood and hair remixed themselves, caught the light and the eye in alien ways. If others can be proud of their ancestry, hissed Mr Aitch, why can’t we?

Ving noticed that the woman’s eyes were filling with tears as their life sputtered out. He had an urge to reach out for her but the man beside him gently pressed a pale and hairy plastic-clad forearm against Ving’s chest to prevent him. Full Prophylactic, under the clear nipple a Rentapig haircut. Ving looked into the man’s eyes for a second and they were such a profoundly dark brown that they were almost black. A void. Like a shark. More alien by an order of magnitude than the expressionless but coruscatingly alive emerald marbles of the Catsucker he’d seen. Somebody fixed the power to the overhead fluorescent strips. As they flickered into life, two hundred xenophobes cowered away from the light like teenage boys at the end of the school disco. Ving remembered the alien on the bus that night.

© Alistair Gentry 2000. First published in 'Flesh'.
Also available in 'Uncanny Valley: Collected Short Stories'.