The Humans (21 page)

Another thing adding force to the relentless gravity dogging this planet was all the worry that Isobel still had for Gulliver. She was pinching her bottom lip quite a lot, and
staring vacantly out of windows. I had bought Gulliver a bass guitar, but the music he played was so gloomy it gave the house an unceasing soundtrack of despair.

‘I just keep thinking of things,’ said Isobel, when I told her that all this worry was unhealthy. ‘When he got expelled from school. He wanted it. He wanted to be expelled. It
was a sort of academic suicide. I just worry, you know. He’s always been so bad at connecting with people. I can remember the first ever report he had at nursery school. It said he had
resisted making any attachments. I mean, I know he’s had friends, but he’s always found it difficult. Shouldn’t there be girlfriends by now? He’s a good-looking
boy.’

‘Are friends so important? What’s the point of them?’

‘Connections, Andrew. Think of Ari. Friends are how we connect to the world. I just worry, sometimes, that he’s not fixed here. To the world. To life. He reminds me of
Angus.’

Angus, apparently, was her brother. He had ended his own life in his early thirties because of financial worries. I felt sad when she told me that. Sad for all the humans who find it easy to
feel ashamed about things. They were not the only life form in the universe to have suicide, but they were one of the most enthusiastic about it. I wondered if I should tell her that he
wasn’t going to school. I decided I should.

‘What?’ Isobel asked. But she had heard. ‘Oh God. So what’s he been doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Just walking around, I think.’

‘Walking around?’

‘When I saw him he was walking.’

She was angry now, and the music Gulliver was playing (quite loudly, by this point) wasn’t helping.

And Newton was making me feel guilty with his eyes.

‘Listen, Isobel, let’s just—’

It was too late. Isobel raced up the stairs. The inevitable row ensued. I could only hear Isobel’s voice. Gulliver’s was too quiet and low, deeper than the bass guitar. ‘Why
haven’t you been to school?’ his mother shouted. I followed, with nausea in my stomach, and a dull ache in my heart.

I was a traitor.

He shouted at his mother, and his mother shouted back. He mentioned something about me getting him into fights but fortunately Isobel had no clue what he was talking about.

‘Dad, you bastard,’ he said to me at one point.

‘But the guitar. That was my idea.’

‘So you’re buying me now?’

Teenagers, I realised, were really quite difficult. In the same way the south-eastern corner of the Derridean galaxy was difficult.

His door slammed. I used the right tone of voice. ‘Gulliver, calm down. I am sorry. I am only trying to do what is best for you. I am learning here. Every day is a lesson, and some lessons
I fail.’

It didn’t work. Unless working meant Gulliver kicking his own door with rage. Isobel eventually went downstairs, but I stayed there. An hour and thirty-eight minutes sitting on the beige
wool carpet on the other side of the door.

Newton came to join me. I stroked him. He licked my wrist with his rough tongue. I stayed right there, tilted my head towards the door.

‘I am sorry, Gulliver,’ I said. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry. And I am sorry I embarrassed you.’

Sometimes the only power you need is persistence. Eventually, he came out. He just looked at me, hands in pockets. He leant against the door-frame. ‘Did you do something on
Facebook?’

‘I might have done.’

He tried not to smile.

He didn’t say much after that but he came downstairs and we all watched television together. It was a quiz show called
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
(As the show was aimed at
humans, the question was rhetorical.)

Then, shortly after, Gulliver went to the kitchen to see how much cereal and milk would fit into a bowl (more than you could imagine) and then he disappeared back to the attic. There was a
feeling of something having been accomplished. Isobel told me she had booked us tickets to see an avant-garde production of
Hamlet
at the Arts Theatre. It was apparently about a suicidal
young prince who wants to kill the man who has replaced his father.

‘Gulliver is staying at home,’ said Isobel.

‘That might be wise.’

‘I’ve forgotten to take my tablets today.’

Isobel smiled. ‘Well, one evening off won’t hurt. Do you want a glass of wine?’

I hadn’t tried wine before so I said yes, as it really did seem to be a very revered substance. It was a mild night so Isobel poured me a glass and we sat outside in the garden. Newton
decided to stay indoors. I looked at the transparent yellow liquid in the glass. I tasted it and tasted fermentation. In other words I tasted life on Earth. For everything that lives here ferments,
ages, becomes diseased. But as things made their decline from ripeness they could taste wonderful, I realised.

Then I considered the glass. The glass had been distilled from rock and so it knew things. It knew the age of the universe because it was the universe.

I took another sip.

After the third sip, I was really beginning to see the point, and it did something rather pleasant to the brain. I was forgetting the dull aches of my body and the sharp worries of my mind. By
the end of the third glass I was very, very drunk. I was so drunk I looked to the sky and believed I could see two moons.

‘You do realise you’re drinking Australian wine, don’t you?’ she said.

To which I may have replied ‘Oh.’

‘You
hate
Australian wine.’

‘Do I? Why?’ I said.

‘Because you’re a snob.’

‘What’s a snob?’

She laughed, looked at me sideways. ‘Someone who didn’t used to sit down with his family to watch TV,’ she said. ‘Ever.’

‘Oh.’

I drank some more. So did she. ‘Maybe I am becoming less of one,’ I said.

‘Anything is possible.’ She smiled. She was still exotic to me. That was obvious, but it was a pleasant exoticism now. Beyond pleasant, in fact.

‘Actually, anything
is
possible,’ I told her, but didn’t go into the maths.

She put her arm around me. I did not know the etiquette. Was this the moment I was meant to recite poetry written by dead people or was I meant to massage her anatomy? I did nothing. I just let
her stroke my back as I stared upwards, beyond the thermosphere, and watched the two moons slide together and become one.

The next day I had a hangover.

I realised that if getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered. I woke with a headache, a dry mouth, and a bad stomach. I left Isobel in bed and
went downstairs for a glass of water, then I had a shower. I got dressed and went into the living room to read poetry.

I had the strange but real sense that I was being watched. The sense grew and grew. I stood up, went to the window. Outside the street was empty. The large, static redbrick houses just stood
there, like decharged crafts on a landing strip. But still I stayed looking. I thought I could see something reflected in one of the windows, a shape beside a car. A human shape, maybe. My eyes
might have been playing tricks. I was hungover, after all.

Newton pressed his nose into my knee. He released a curious high-pitched whine.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I stared out of the glass again, away from reflections, to direct reality. And then I saw it. Dark, hovering just above that same parked car. I realised
what it was. It was the top of a human head. I had been right. Someone was hiding from my stare.

‘Wait there,’ I told Newton. ‘Guard the house.’

I ran outside, across the drive and onto the street, just in time to see someone sprinting away around the next corner. A man, wearing jeans and a black top. Even from behind, and at a distance,
the man struck me as familiar, but I couldn’t think where I had seen him.

I turned the corner, but there was no one there. It was just another empty suburban street, and a long one. Too long for the person to have run down. Well, it wasn’t quite empty. There was
an old human female, walking towards me, dragging a shopping trolley. I stopped running.

‘Hello,’ she said, smiling. Her skin was creased with age, in the way typical of the species. (The best way to think of the ageing process in relation to a human face is to imagine a
map of an area of innocent land which slowly becomes a city with many long and winding routes.)

I think she knew me. ‘Hello,’ I said back.

‘How are you now?’

I was looking around, trying to assess the possible escape routes. If they had slid down one of the passageways then they could have been anywhere. There were about two hundred obvious
possibilities.

‘I’m, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Fine.’

My eyes darted around but were unrewarded.
Who was this man?
I wondered.
And where was he from?

Occasionally, in the days that followed, I would have that feeling again, of being watched. But I never caught a glimpse of my watcher, which was strange, and led me to only
two possibilities. Either I was becoming too dull-witted and human, or the person I was looking for, the one who I could sometimes feel watching me in university corridors and in supermarkets, was
too sharp-witted to be caught.

In other words: something not human.

I tried to convince myself that this was ridiculous. I was almost able to convince myself that my own mind was ridiculous, and that I had never actually been anything other than human. That I
really was Professor Andrew Martin and that every other thing had been a kind of dream.

Yes, I could almost do that.

Almost.

Isobel was at her laptop, in the living room. An American friend of hers wrote a blog about ancient history and Isobel was contributing a comment about an article on
Mesopotamia. I watched her, mesmerised.

The Earth’s moon was a dead place, with no atmosphere.

It had no way of healing its scars. Not like Earth, or its inhabitants. I was amazed, the way time mended things so quickly on this planet.

I looked at Isobel and I saw a miracle. It was ridiculous, I know. But a human, in its own small way, was a kind of miraculous achievement, in mathematical terms.

For a start, it wasn’t very likely that Isobel’s mother and father would have met. And even if they had met the chances of their having a baby would have been pretty slim, given the
numerous agonies surrounding the human dating process.

Her mother would have had about a hundred thousand eggs ovulating inside her, and her father would have had five trillion sperm during that same length of time. But even then, even that one in
five hundred million million million chance of existing was a terrible understatement, and nowhere near did the coincidence of a human life justice.

You see, when you looked at a human’s face, you had to comprehend the luck that brought that person there. Isobel Martin had a total of 150,000 generations before her, and that only
includes the humans. That was 150,000 increasingly unlikely copulations resulting in increasingly unlikely children. That was a one in quadrillion chance multiplied by another quadrillion for every
generation.

Or around twenty thousand times more than the number of the atoms in the universe. But even
that
was only the start of it, because humans had only been around for three million Earth
years, certainly a very short time compared to the three and a half billion years since life first appeared on this planet.

Therefore, mathematically, rounding things up, there was no chance at all that Isobel Martin could have existed. A zero in tento-the-power-of-forever chance. And yet there she was, in front of
me, and I was quite taken aback by it all; I really was. Suddenly it made me realise why religion was such a big thing around here. Because, yes, sure, God could not exist. But then neither could
humans. So, if they believed in themselves – the logic must go – why not believe in something that was only a fraction more unlikely?

I don’t know how long I looked at her like this.

‘What’s going through your mind?’ she asked me, closing the laptop. (This is an important detail. Remember: she
closed
the laptop.)

‘Oh, just things.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Well, I’m thinking about how life is so miraculous none of it really deserves the title “reality”.’

‘Andrew, I’m a little taken aback about how your whole worldview has become so romantic.’

It was ridiculous that I had ever failed to see it.

She was beautiful. A forty-one-year-old, poised delicately between the young woman she had been and the older one she would become. This intelligent, wound-dabbing historian. This person who
would buy someone else’s shopping with no other motive than simply to help.

I knew other things now. I knew she’d been a screaming baby, a child learning to walk, a girl at school eager to learn, a teenager listening to Talking Heads in her bedroom while reading
books by A.J.P. Taylor.

I knew she’d been a university student studying the past and trying to interpret its patterns.

She’d been, simultaneously, a young woman in love, full of a thousand hopes, trying to read the future as well as the past.

She had then taught British and European history, the big pattern she had discovered being the one that revealed that the civilisations that advanced with the Enlightenment did so through
violence and territorial conquest more than through scientific progress, political modernisation and philosophical understanding.

She had then tried to uncover the woman’s place in this history, and it had been difficult because history had always been written by the victors of wars, and the victors of the gender
wars had always been male, and so women had been placed in the margins and in the footnotes, if they had been lucky.