The Humans (24 page)

‘Hat and Feathers.’

I had no idea what she was talking about. Or indeed, who she actually was to me, or to the man who had been Professor Andrew Martin.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’

That was it, right there. My first mistake of the day. But by no means the last.

I soon discovered the Hat and Feathers was a misleading name. In it there was no hat, and absolutely no feathers. There were just heavily inebriated people with red faces
laughing at their own jokes. This, I soon discovered, was a typical pub. The ‘pub’ was an invention of humans living in England, designed as compensation for the fact that they were
humans living in England. I rather liked the place.

‘Let’s find a quiet corner,’ she said to me, this young Maggie.

There were lots of corners, as there always seemed to be in human-made environments. Earth dwellers still seemed to be a long way off from understanding the link between straight lines and acute
forms of psychosis, which might explain why pubs seemed to be full of aggressive people. There were straight lines running into each other
all over the place
. Every table, every chair, at
the bar, at the ‘fruit machine’. (I enquired about these machines. Apparently they were aimed at men whose fascination with flashing squares of light was coupled with a poor grasp of
probability theory.) With so many corners to choose from, it was a surprise to see us sit near a straight, continuous piece of wall, at an oval table and on circular stools.

‘This is perfect,’ she said.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right.’

‘What would you like?’

‘Liquid nitrogen,’ I replied thoughtlessly.

‘A whisky and soda?’

‘Yes. One of them.’

And we drank and chatted like old friends, which I think we were. Though her conversational approach seemed quite different from Isobel’s.

‘Your penis is everywhere,’ she said at one point.

I looked around. ‘Is it?’

‘Two hundred and twenty thousand hits on YouTube.’

‘Right,’ I said.

‘They’ve blurred it out, though. Quite a wise move, I would say, from first-hand experience.’ She laughed even more at this. It was a laugh that did nothing to relieve the pain
pressing into and out of my face.

I changed the mood. I asked her what it meant, for her, to be a human. I wanted to ask the whole world this question, but, right now, she would do. And so she told me.

She said being human is being a young child on Christmas Day who receives an absolutely magnificent castle. And there is a perfect photograph of this castle on the box and you
want more than anything to play with the castle and the knights and the princesses because it looks like such a perfectly human world, but the only problem is that the castle isn’t built.
It’s in tiny intricate pieces, and although there’s a book of instructions you don’t understand it. And nor can your parents or Aunt Sylvie. So you are just left, crying at the
ideal castle on the box which no one would ever be able to build.

I thanked Maggie for this interpretation. And then I explained to her that I thought the meaning was coming to me, the more I forgot it. After that, I spoke a lot about Isobel.
This seemed to irritate her, and she switched the subject.

‘After this,’ she said, circling the top of her glass with her finger, ‘are we going somewhere else?’

I recognised the tone of this ‘somewhere else’. It had the exact same frequency as Isobel’s use of the word ‘upstairs’ the Saturday before.

‘Are we going to have sex?’

She laughed some more. Laughter, I realised, was the reverberating sound of a truth hitting a lie. Humans existed inside their own delusions and laughing was a way out – the only possible
bridge they had between each other. That, and love. But there was no love between me and Maggie, I want you to know that.

Anyway, it turned out we
were
going to have sex. So we left and walked along a few streets until we reached Willow Road and her flat. Her flat, by the way, was the messiest thing I had
ever seen that hadn’t been a direct result of nuclear fission. A supercluster of books, clothes, empty wine bottles, stubbed-out cigarettes, old toast and unopened envelopes.

I discovered that her full name was Margaret Lowell. I wasn’t an expert on Earth names, but I still knew this was wildly inappropriate. She should have been called Lana Bellcurve or Ashley
Brainsex or something. Anyway, apparently I never called her Margaret. (‘No one except my broadband provider calls me that.’) She was Maggie.

And Maggie, it transpired, was an unconventional human. For instance, when asked about her religion, she answered ‘Pythagorean’. She was ‘well travelled’, the most
ridiculous expression if you belonged to a species that had only left its own planet to visit its moon (and Maggie, it transpired, hadn’t even been there). In this case, it merely meant she
had taught English in Spain, Tanzania and various parts of South America for four years before returning to study maths. She also seemed to have a very limited sense of body shame, by human
standards, and had worked as a lap dancer to pay for her undergraduate studies.

She wanted to have sex on the floor, which was an intensely uncomfortable way of having it. As we unclothed each other we kissed, but this wasn’t the kind of kissing that brought you
closer, the kind that Isobel was good at. This was self-referential kissing, kissing about kissing, dramatic and fast and pseudo-intense. It also hurt. My face was still tender and Maggie’s
meta-kisses didn’t really seem to accommodate the possibility of pain. And then we were naked, or rather the parts of us which needed to be naked were naked, and it started to feel more like
a strange kind of fighting than anything else. I looked at her face, and her neck, and her breasts, and was reminded of the fundamental strangeness of the human body. With Isobel, I had never felt
like I was sleeping with an alien, but with Maggie the level of exoticism bordered on terror. There was physiological pleasure, quite a good deal of it at times, but it was a very localised,
anatomical kind of pleasure. I smelt her skin, and I liked the smell of it, a mixture of coconut-scented lotion and bacteria, but my mind felt terrible, for a reason that involved more than my head
pain.

Almost immediately after we had started having sex I had a queasy sensation in my stomach, as though the altitude had drastically changed. I stopped. I got away from her.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked me.

‘I don’t know. But something is. This feels wrong. I realise I don’t want to have an orgasm right now.’

‘Bit late for a crisis of conscience.’

I really didn’t know what the matter was. After all, it was just sex.

I got dressed and discovered there were four missed calls on my mobile phone.

‘Goodbye, Maggie.’

She laughed some more. ‘Give my love to your wife.’

I had no idea what was so funny, but I decided to be polite and laughed too as I stepped outside into cool evening air, which was tainted with maybe a little more carbon dioxide than I had
noticed before.

‘You’re home late,’ Isobel said. ‘I’ve been worried. I thought that man might have come after you.’

‘What man?’

‘That brute who smashed your face in.’

She was in the living room, at home, its walls lined with books about history and mathematics. Mainly mathematics. She was placing pens in a pot. She was staring at me with harsh eyes. Then she
softened a bit. ‘How was your day?’

‘Oh,’ I said, putting down my bag, ‘it was okay. I did some teaching. I met some students. I had sex with that person. My student. The one called Maggie.’

It’s funny, I had a sensation these words were taking me somewhere, into a dangerous valley, but still I said them. Isobel, meanwhile, took a little time to process this information, even
by human standards. The queasy feeling in my stomach hadn’t gone away. If anything, it had intensified.

‘That’s not very funny.’

‘I wasn’t trying to be funny.’

She studied me for a long while. Then dropped a fountain pen on the floor. The lid came off. Ink sprayed. ‘What are you talking about?’

I told her again. The bit she seemed most interested in was the last part, about me having sex with Maggie. Indeed, she was so interested that she started to hyperventilate and throw the pen pot
in the direction of my head. And then she began to cry.

‘Why are you crying?’ I said, but I was beginning to understand. I moved closer to her. It was then she launched an attack on me, her hands moving as fast as laws of anatomical
motion allow. Her fingernails scratched my face, adding fresh wounds. Then she just stood there, looking at me, as if she had wounds too. Invisible ones.

‘I’m sorry, Isobel, you have to understand, I didn’t realise I was doing anything wrong. This is all new. You don’t know how alien all this is to me. I know it is morally
wrong to love another woman, but I don’t love her. It was just pleasure. The way a peanut butter sandwich is pleasure. You don’t realise the complexity and hypocrisy of this system . .
.’

She had stopped. Her breathing slowed and deepened, and her first question became her only one. ‘Who is she?’ And then: ‘Who is she?’ And soon after: ‘Who
is
she?’

I was reluctant to speak. Speaking to a human you cared about, I realised, was so fraught with hidden danger that it was a wonder people bothered speaking at all. I could have lied. I could have
backtracked. But I realised lying, though essential to keep someone in love with you, actually wasn’t what my love demanded. It demanded truth.

So I said, in the simplest words I could find, ‘I don’t know. But I don’t love her. I love you. I didn’t realise that it was such a big thing. I sort of knew, as it was
happening. My stomach told me, in a way it never tells me with peanut butter. And then I stopped.’ The only time I’d come across the concept of infidelity was in
Cosmopolitan
magazine, and they really hadn’t done enough to explain it properly. They’d sort of said it depends on the context and, you see, it was such an alien concept for me to understand. It
was like trying to get a human to understand transcellular healing. ‘I’m sorry.’

She wasn’t listening. She had her own things to say. ‘I don’t even know you. I have no idea of who you are. No idea. If you’ve done this, you really are an alien to me .
. .’

‘Am I? Listen, Isobel, you’re right. I am. I am not from here. I have never loved before. All this is new. I’m an amateur at this. Listen, I used to be immortal, I could not
die, I could not feel pain, but I gave that up . . .’

She wasn’t even listening. She was a galaxy away.

‘All I know, all I know beyond any doubt, is that I want a divorce. I do. That is what I want. You have destroyed us. You have destroyed Gulliver. Again.’

Newton appeared at this point, wagging his tail to try and calm the mood.

Isobel ignored Newton and started to walk away from me. I should have let her go, but bizarrely I couldn’t. I held on to her wrist.

‘Stay,’ I said.

And then it happened. Her arm swung at me with ferocious force, her clenched hand an asteroid speeding towards the planet of my face. Not a slap or a scratch this time but a
smack
. Was
this where love ended? With an injury on top of an injury on top of an injury?

‘I’m leaving the house now. And when I come back, I want you gone. Do you understand?
Gone
. I want you out of here, and out of our lives. It’s over. Everything.
It’s all over. I thought you’d changed. I honestly thought you’d become someone else. And I let you in again! What a
fucking
idiot!’

I kept my hand over my face. It still hurt. I heard her footsteps head away from me. The door opened. The door closed. I was alone again with Newton.

‘I’ve really done it now,’ I said.

He seemed to agree, but I couldn’t understand him any more. I might as well have been any human trying to understand any dog. But he seemed something other than sad, as he barked in the
direction of the living room and the road beyond. It seemed less like condolence and more like warning. I went to look out of the living-room window. There was nothing to be seen. So I stroked
Newton one more time, offered a pointless apology, and left the house.

I walked to the nearest shop, a brightly lit and unsympathetic place called Tesco Metro. I bought myself a bottle of Australian wine.

I walked along a cycle path and drank it, singing ‘God Only Knows’. It was quiet. I sat down by a tree and finished the bottle.

I went and bought another. I sat down on a park bench, next to a man with a large beard. It was the man I had seen before. On my first day. The one who had called me Jesus. He was wearing the
same long dirty raincoat and he had the same scent. This time I found it fascinating. I sat there for a while just working out all the different aromas – alcohol, sweat, tobacco, urine,
infection. It was a uniquely human smell, and rather wonderful in its own sad way.

‘I don’t know why more people don’t do this,’ I said, striking up a conversation.

‘Do what?’

‘You know, get drunk. Sit on a park bench. It seems like a good way to solve problems.’

‘Are you taking the piss, fella?’

‘No. I like it. And you obviously like it or you wouldn’t be doing it.’

Of course, this was a little bit disingenuous of me. Humans were
always
doing things they didn’t like doing. In fact, to my best estimate, at any one time only point three per cent
of humans were actively doing something they
liked
doing, and even when they did so, they felt an intense amount of guilt about it and were fervently promising themselves they’d be
back doing something horrendously unpleasant very shortly.