Aliens

We were watching on the closed caption television set in a pub on Champion Hill, when we first heard about the aliens. They had been discovered by astronauts in outer space. And the aliens, the astronauts first reported, weren’t like in the movies. They weren’t like animals or like plants or like fungi or like other astronauts either. Instead, the aliens were like the feeling when you are really hungry and you think there is something in the cupboard that you want to eat but when you open the cupboard it is empty and you get this feeling like you have been stuffed full of bricks and thrown into a swimming pool, like the floor is melting and the whole world is out to trick you. The aliens were like that feeling.

The astronauts welcomed the aliens onto their spaceship and tried to teach the aliens about the human race, about history and culture and the inherent ambiguity and mysticism and loneliness of being alive, and they tried to learn about the aliens, where the aliens came from, if they had a history or culture and how the aliens felt to be alive, and the astronauts found that it was difficult to make conversation with a feeling and after a while the astronauts stopped talking to the aliens and they sat in silence and rumbled at their controls and dials and blinking dashboards.

The astronauts made radio contact with Camberwell and announced they had met aliens, that they were bringing them back to planet earth. Eventually everybody heard the news, though there were many who didn’t believe it. Ecstasy and doubt and fear and wonder spreading through South East London.  The astronauts made regular appearances on television, speaking from outer space, and the studio audiences cheered on the astronauts’ video monitors and the astronauts tried to cheer back and the astronauts had the feeling that they had been bought a shirt for their birthday and they had tried it on and it had bulged around their sides and made them feel fat.

When the astronauts stepped off of their space ship along with the aliens, the Mayor of Southwark was there to meet them. A million people stood in Ruskin Park and watched. The astronauts held their helmets under their arms and the fighter planes drew coloured contrails in the sky and the Mayor of Southwark smiled and a million voices roared in celebration.  Later, in the press conference, the Mayor of Southwark bathed the astronauts in praise. Promising them fame and love and remuneration and she saw that the astronauts had the look of people who had lost their house keys through a hole in their pocket and she asked them if they were OK and the astronauts said that they were OK and just a little tired from all the travelling.

Scientists were employed to discover more about the aliens. Imprisoning them in a secret research facility in Peckham. Disguised as an old church unit on Queen’s Road. Keeping the aliens in iron pens that they draped with curtains and suspended from the roof and they filled the pens with pillows and literature and peeled fruit and told the aliens that it was nothing personal. The scientists subjected the aliens to endless testing, to flashing lights and number puzzles and comprehension quizzes and calcium swabs. They stayed late at the lab smoking cigarettes and playing cards and asking the aliens about god. The scientists thought about the aliens every moment of every day, they puzzled over them on their way to work and on their way home and on their days off and when they struggled to get to sleep and when they woke up early in the morning to fetch a glass of water and after six years the scientists declared that the aliens were harmless and that they should be released.

Land was cleared in the local factory yards for the aliens. Warehouses and gas holders torn down in New Cross Gate. Planted with corn and plumbed with water and reconnected to the grid and ringed with barb wire fences so the aliens could live in peace. Rain washed through the loose rubble and police officers and scientists and prison wardens paced the perimeter and the aliens made a life for themselves in the rocky ground. Every few years protestors gathered around the enclosure. They would hike signs and bang drums and throw stones and demand for the aliens’ release and the protestors tried to stay positive and forge petitions even though they felt as though they had been caught out in the rain and had bitten into a bad apple and had returned home from holiday to find they had left all of the lights on.

The aliens were not like humans or hippopotamuses or restless flycatchers, who only live for a short time and go through growth spurts and only grow taller when they are children, the aliens were not like that, the aliens lived forever and they never stopped growing and they grew so slowly nobody noticed. Only an old gate keeper had a vague sense of some small sadness growing larger though he attributed the feeling to his diet and his age and his lonely, loveless fantasies of women. The aliens lived behind the barb wire gates for a hundred years. Growing. They grew slower than fingernails and they grew in all directions at once and as they grew they made the sound of pampas grass rustling and rain scattering across still water and when they had grown large enough they stepped over the fences of their enclosure and escaped.

Several aliens were captured years later and exhibited in a roving South East London circus. They were locked in fifty-foot container crates exhibited on Peckham Rye and circus goers would pay exorbitant prices to peer through the portholes into the darkness and be overwhelmed with feelings of disappointment and anxiety. Others fled to the waters of the North Atlantic and lived in the warmth under working oil rigs and drove all the workers to quit their jobs and go home to their families and say they couldn’t live another day on the ocean, deafened by drilling machines and feeling like they had forgotten all their loved ones birthdays. One alien lives quietly in the grouse moors of Scotland, growing taller and purring in the young ferns, and one day that alien might be discovered, if a road is built that passes too close to the moor and the commuters start to pull up in the hard shoulder and give up driving and turn off their radios and unbuckle their seatbelts and sob into their hands as if to catch their sadness.