The Uninvited (28 page)
‘Fuck off
lap-sap,
’
says one of the boys who spoke earlier. The humming around us intensifies, punctuated with throaty clicking. The girl is still licking the professor’s arm, but now he stands up and gently tries to prise her off. But she hangs on, still licking.
‘Fuck off
lap-sap
,’ the boy says again, and other voices join in, until it’s a mounting chorus: ‘
Fuck off lap-sap, fuck off lap-sap, fuck off lap-sap.
’
Then, as if on an unspoken signal, they are upon us, grabbing our arms and licking our hands like little nuzzling animals. The humming is now a fierce, intense buzz. We are bigger and taller and stronger than them, but they are all over us. Until now I haven’t felt vulnerable. But now I do. Just then there’s a cry from somewhere above us. ‘Stand right back, sir!’ yells the man in the cagoule. ‘And you! Both of you, get clear of them!’
‘Come on!’ I call out to the professor. I have disencumbered myself and am halfway to the steps. I see that he’s largely succeeded in shaking off his own cluster, but when he kicks out to free himself from the last small hand he stumbles and falls to the ground with a groan. I shoot forward, haul him up from the sand and drag him with me towards the steps.
‘Cover your faces and don’t inhale!’ calls the cagouled man from above. We’re almost at the top of the steps when something hurtles past us and lands on the sandbank below. The children shriek and scatter. When we get to the top I see vapour spreading out from a canister.
Tear gas.
Below, the children are screaming. ‘Best clear right off!’ calls the cagouled man, as we rush towards the safety of the car. He’s with his companion: both are donning face masks. I call out a breathless thank you.
As we drive off, in the rear mirror I see the chemical vapour rising from the shore.
I glance at the professor. His face is crumpled and drained of colour. ‘I’d better get myself cleaned up,’ he murmurs, checking his watch. He turns and grins valiantly. ‘So. How did you enjoy your first bit of fieldwork?’
‘I didn’t. You could have been killed, Professor. I’m not a bodyguard.’ I drive on. Five minutes later I’m parking in front of a faceless building off Parliament Square. ‘And you’re wrong,’ I tell him. ‘It’s not like the old days.’
Birds are hopping about on the pavement. Blackbirds, pigeons, a sparrow.
He sighs and stares out at the sky. It’s still raining.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry, Hesketh. It was an absurd thing to say. It was wishful thinking, that’s all. To which, as you know, I am highly prone.’ He looks at his hands. ‘I want you to think very hard about this phenomenon, Hesketh. I want your ideas, however off-the-wall they may seem.’ It’s time for his meeting. But he seems reluctant to leave the car.
I’m still angry with him. I ask, ‘Why did you want me working on this?’
He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. ‘Because you understand the difference between fairy stories and facts. Because you are a materialist who will never be vulnerable to superstitious belief,’ he says.
‘The reason for that is that superstitious belief is extremely fanciful, Professor. And there’s no evidence to back it up.’
‘You could say the same about the notion of time travel, until Einstein’s theory of special relativity was thrown into question. For years, no one believed that the dinosaurs became extinct because of a meteor. The idea was ridiculed. Anti-matter was derided when it was first posited. So what if other theories now have to be reassessed?’ I glance sideways: he has covered his face with his hands. When he speaks again, it is through the lattice of his fingers. ‘Not just time, Hesketh, but space, and mankind’s place in both?’
‘Make me something I can hurl, man,’ says Ashok. ‘One of those water-bombs.’
We’re in his office on the eighteenth floor. Normally he’s proud of his panoramic view, but when I came in he said, ‘Welcome to my aerial goddam bunker.’
I slide some origami paper from the front pocket of my briefcase and begin folding. Through the picture window opposite me, the familiar ancient–modern geometry of London sprawls as far as the eye can see.
‘I just heard from Belinda an hour ago. That fire back there.’ Ashok jerks his thumb back at the horizon, where a billowing discolouration of air in fifteen shades of black and grey indicates a colossal conflagration. The smoke expands in the same way as a fast-growing fungus, sprouting new growth as it rises. It has great beauty. ‘Postal-sorting station. And someone’s sabotaged the water supply in Manchester. So now there’s another scare. And who knows how long the oil stocks will last.’
I look out at the middle distance. Grubby skyscrapers. Domes and bridges and riverboats and spires. The rigid cobweb of the London Eye.
‘
Earth hath not anything to show more fair
,’ I quote for Ashok, making more folds. Sometimes a line or two can cheer him. ‘
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight more touching in its majesty
. Wordsworth.’
I pass him the completed water-bomb.
‘Huh.’ Ashok does not care for poetry today. ‘This thing. It’s worldwide, right? You see the implications? What you see on the news, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Factories at a standstill. Public transport all but halted. Utilities operating on red alert. Bang go imports, bang go exports, bang goes what remains of the global economy, bang goes capitalism itself for Christ’s sake! We’ll be growing potatoes on the rooftops next. Bartering. Keeping goats on balconies. Filtering rainwater and darning socks, like we’re all living in some wrist-slitting documentary about Ceau
s
escu’s Romania. This is turning into a fucking war, man. The world’s most highly developed nations watch like dorks as their infrastructures are trashed from within. By a bunch of . . . random people claiming they’ve been hijacked by supernatural beings. Who also happen to be kids.’
Professor Whybray insisted he will still be joining us after his Home Office meeting. And rather to my surprise, Stephanie has texted to say she is on her way.
‘I still wonder how random it really is,’ I say.
‘Come on. If the saboteurs all shared some weakness that made them vulnerable to this shit, someone would’ve spotted it by now. You and Whybray, for example. Or some other team some other place. But that hasn’t happened.’
For a while, as I fold more water-bombs, we argue to and fro about the term ‘grassroots terrorism’ that has become the media term for the upheavals. I object to it on scientific and linguistic grounds.
‘Sure,’ counters Ashok. ‘You can split hairs. But I say it’s looking and behaving like a terror campaign, so we might as well call it one. Ten plane crashes now. Fifteen trains. Food poisonings. Factories producing fucked-up stuff, everything on its knees. You heard about the arrests: all those anarchist so-called ringleaders? Turns out they’re in the clear. As confused as the rest of us. You and Whybray have flow-charted this thing, right? Give me the worst-case.’
I run through the more drastic possibilities: restricted agriculture and manufacture, diminished utilities, minimal transport, little reliable news. With foreign imports halted, Britain’s island status will come into stark focus. Limited and dwindling food supplies will lead to further looting, lawlessness, gang warfare, black marketeering and regionalism. When the pandemic has run its course, daily life will eventually stabilise. But there will be fundamental changes. Enforced curfews. Draconian laws. New safeguards for industry. The opportunistic restructuring of institutions. Reinvented forms of government. A massive drop in the birth rate. A new focus on agricultural self-sufficiency and more transparent forms of corporatism are also possible. Either way, the world will never be the same again. I turn the origami paper and confirm the first set of creases. ‘But if it’s terrorism, that implies it’s co-ordinated,’ I finish. ‘In which case, where’s the strategy, where’s the communication, where’s the coherence?’
‘And what the hell’s the message?’ storms Ashok. ‘Unless the aim is simply to bring civilisation to a halt and stop everything in its tracks and . . . reverse all the goddam progress man has ever made since the Industrial Revolution. We’re heading back to the Stone Age. At least with Iraq, or the Pacific rim after the tsunami, there were reconstruction opportunities.’
‘We’ve got the Home Office contract.’
‘Whoop-dee-do. Followed by what? The Transition to Planet Fucked contract? It’s not the kids that matter. It’s the factory workers, the farmers, the managers. The adults, for Christ’s sake! Look what’s happening to growth! How can anything be rebuilt, or even survive when industry’s being sabotaged on this kind of scale?’
‘Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist.’
‘Uh?’
‘You asked a question. I replied with a quotation. From one of JFK’s advisers. Kenneth Boulder. A wise man.’
Stephanie arrives looking raddled, her hair wet from the rain.
‘Half the roads are shut off. So what have I missed?’ She’s shaking her hair and taking off her raincoat, which is a green that Dulux calls Autumn Fern. She’s even thinner than ever.
She called Freddy K a
creature.
‘Oh, just the usual discussion of the disintegration of the world as we know it,’ mutters Ashok, bouncing my newly finished water-bomb in his palm, ‘and how everything we thought we knew is bullshit because the rules have changed. Adapt or get screwed in the ass.’
There’s a knock at the door: it opens and Professor Whybray appears.
Ashok waves him into a seat and asks, ‘What’s new at the Home Office?’
The lines on his forehead deepen as he settles into a chair. ‘We had a briefing from the army. The ones running wild are moving out of urban areas and into the countryside. They’re going for woodland, mostly, where they can hide. In coastal regions they’re finding caves. A lot of them are living directly on the beaches. It’s unofficial for now. But the strategy is to house as many children as possible in one place. Other cities are taking a similar line. They’re converting the O2 building.’
‘The Dome?’ asks Ashok. He grins. ‘I saw Leonard Cohen play there. It has the capacity, I guess. Ha. Britain’s biggest playpen.’
‘I advised against it. I don’t like the way they’re headed with this. But there’ve been some developments. In view of which they feel they’re justified in rounding them up and keeping them locked in.’
‘What developments?’
He waves some papers. ‘Firstly, some autopsies. Three children have now died in British Units. Various natural causes. Nothing untoward for a cohort this size. Two had epileptic fits, one had an undiagnosed heart condition. And we’ve recovered the corpses of seven children who were probably murdered by vigilantes. I am sorry to say they were mutilated. But the autopsies of all of them – and there are similar cases documented abroad – also show an anomaly of the kidneys.’ I look at him. ‘Yes. Similar to what Svensson’s autopsy showed. In many cases the kidneys are simply larger. But in a surprisingly high number, there are multiple organs. It’s too rare a phenomenon to be pure coincidence. Alongside that—’ he stops and frowns. ‘I’ll show you.’ He flips open a folder. ‘It’s utterly baffling. There’s just no way to explain it.’ They are medical records. Names of children. Their birth dates. Their height and weight measurements. Various dates. And in each case, a graph that defies logic. ‘We’ve been tracking them.’
I run my eyes across the charts again, one by one, then hand them to Stephanie. She takes a moment to absorb them, then asks, ‘And these are otherwise healthy children?’ He nods. ‘Could there be a mistake?’
‘No. Staff at sixteen other UK Units confirm it. Others do worldwide. It’s not been made public yet, but it will be out there soon enough.’ He puts his head in his hands.
I ask, ‘Why aren’t they growing?’
‘Not growing?’ asks Ashok. ‘What, none of them?’
‘That’s what these figures show. They’re all exactly the same height and weight they were a month ago. In many cases longer than that.’
‘But if that’s the case—’ I stop. ‘Then what?’
‘Arrested development?’ asks Stephanie.
‘But that’s crazy!’ says Ashok. ‘So what happens, they just . . . stay this size? They’re children for ever, like Peter fucking Pan?’
The professor shakes his head. ‘They could start growing again any time. Or have a sudden spurt. I’m getting some nutritionists on to the team at Battersea. Let’s see what they can do. But in the meantime, we have a problem that goes beyond health. As in, ethical. Political. Moral.’
Stephanie says, ‘I don’t see how a medical oddity can alter policy.’
‘Me neither,’ says Ashok.
Professor Whybray sighs heavily and looks at me. ‘You’d better explain.’
‘It’s cultural. Anthropologically, the children already fit into the barbarian category. The unknown and feared outsiders. They’re seen as dirty and diseased and backward. This medical evidence – the kidney anomalies and the fact they’re not developing normally – suggests they might actually be different biologically. It’s not a small step from there to argue that they’re not strictly human.’ I address Stephanie. ‘Intelligent people are already calling them mutants.’ I pause. ‘Or
creatures
.’ She flushes. ‘If they’re in a separate species category, they don’t have the same rights.’