‘You get doors and microwaves that talk, don’t you?’
‘That’s because someone’s made them that way!’
It’s gone seven o’clock.
Cooking can be a pain when I’m on my own. (CHAIR doesn’t eat anything, you see.) And my diet is horrific. I suppose I hate fresh fruit and veg because my mum was always telling me to get my five-a-day in. She’d always be saying, ‘It’s good for your looks. Ugly girls need all the help they can get!’
So, three pieces of stale cake it is – straight in my gob.
‘Aren’t you going out?’ She knows everything.
I take a bath, which makes me sleepy. I put my pyjamas on and lie in bed. The clock by my bedside reads a little before eight.
‘Get dressed, do your make-up!’
‘I’m shattered. Be quiet for a bit.’
‘You’re scared, aren’t you? That’s what it’s really about. You’re worried you’ll mess it up again.’ I hear mockery in her voice.
‘Sure, maybe. But why did it happen before?’
‘Because you had no self-confidence. Naoshi’s always surrounded by girls, looking bored, right? And you were just too damn proud to let anyone know how that made you feel. You hid it from him. Never even occurred to you that he might doubt himself too.’
‘What did you say?’ I ask, leaping up.
I’d heard CHAIR’s words, though – we both know that. So she says nothing more.
It’s way past eight o’clock.
Emi must’ve left by now. I consider calling her… But only consider. I don’t actually do it.
‘How long are you planning on staying on this planet?’ asks CHAIR after about half an hour has passed.
‘I want to stay here forever.’
‘Everyone says that, dear. But you can’t, can you? You have to live your life. You have to cook, clean, look after the kids when they’re sick. You have to go out to work.’
‘Why do I have to keep on living that life?’
‘Well, I’m not sure why.’ Her voice strikes a gentler chord, all of a sudden.
And I repeat that phrase in my head. ‘I’m not sure why.’ I fluff my pillow, turn off the lights, and chant a spell. Sleep, sleep. Make the world disappear.
Two days later, and I’ve made it to Friday’s Angels. ‘Heroin’ is playing, which is a major plus – but no sign of Naoshi.
‘Apparently he was just here,’ Emi yells. You have to shout to be heard. ‘He came in with that girl there,’ she says, pointing to a blonde dancing centre stage. A different girl to the one he was with at the spaceport.
I go to the bar and order a 7Up.
There’s a strobe light pulsing, and people’s movements skip between each flicker. It could be a time-lapse video, with a fresh troupe of frozen corpses searing every flash-lit frame.
The lighting becomes more psychedelic. I cut through the middle of the dance floor (keen to get a good look at this blonde) and make for the door. Not particularly pretty. (Not that I’m particularly pretty, either.)
Naoshi’s there, sitting on the stairs.
‘Aren’t you coming inside?’ I ask, standing still.
He keeps his head down and says something back. I don’t hear him.
‘What?’
He repeats himself, but the sound coming from inside the club swallows his words, and I can’t make out what he’s saying. I sit down beside him. He’s repeating, I think, the same words again, and with great patience.
‘This girl said she wanted to come, so along I came… But I just hate people looking at me.’
I say nothing.
Apparently he came to this planet around the same time Emi did, whenever that was. And he’s famous, so I knew his name straight away.
He cuts a very striking figure and there’s a distinct aura about him. Some would say he has a sort of ethereal beauty, and you can’t help but know he’s only half human.
He was one of the first alien ‘blends’ and, well, his almost completely green head of hair is hard to overlook.
Expressionless and gloomy, he has these severe, empty eyes that seem to say he’s long given up on any kind of hope or ambition.
I take a sip from my bottle and pass it to him. He looks back at me with that wide, unsettling stare – it’s like looking into the glass eyes of a creepy doll. His eyebrows are also a deep green and bushy around the sockets.
Meekly, he sips the 7Up.
‘I don’t get it. Girls always want to come to these crowded places. I just wanted us to be alone together, somewhere quiet.’
‘Well, it’s because they want to show you off.’
He runs his long fingers through his hair.
I can hear some popular song playing through the door. The dry superficial performance sounds pretty funny to me now. The melody is so monotonous, and the phrases are excessively long. Grand old golden-ratio tunes just don’t seem to suit this era.
‘You know, lately,’ I begin, slowly, ‘I’m finding it hard to identify what happiness and pleasure are.’
He looks up.
‘Well… Does it matter? If something feels good, that’s pleasure.’ He gives a weak laugh. ‘Nothing more to it.’
‘Seems like you live a pretty straightforward life.’
‘Oh, I’ve got my problems. You know, I used to comb over and pick apart every single day. Then, all of a sudden, I stopped thinking – I became ill… My brain cells took some damage, and I lost the ability to, I dunno, think like I used to.’
It’s as if he’s talking about someone else entirely.
‘What do you mean, you’re ill?’
‘I’m a drug addict.’
He looks up at me after giving this blunt answer, trying to gauge my reaction. I fight the muscles in my face, trying to keep from expressing anything.
He gets up.
I follow his line of sight to find a boy standing at the bottom of the stairs, seemingly fixed to the spot, looking like a glitch in the scene. He’s an absolute fashion victim, with a bandana tied around his calf. Brilliant. Doesn’t suit him at all, sadly.
The boy makes his careful way up the stairs, step by step. He’s smaller than Naoshi height-wise, but sure makes up for it in width. One of those baby gym-rat types.
‘Need to have a word with you, pal,’ the boy says, with a cracked voice.
Here we go, I think to myself.
‘I don’t think I know you,’ Naoshi says, apparently racking his brains.
‘About the girl.’ He glares at me. ‘Her, there.’
‘Sorry, what?’ I step closer.
‘Don’t be moving on other people’s girls, you hear me?’ He looks at us both.
‘Since when am I your girl?’
‘Look, there’s no sense in pretending. We met twice before, out there, and you made them moves on me, remember? “The world’s gonna end soon,” you were saying. “Let’s watch it go, together.” And I’ve been preparing for it! But here you are, spilling all the fucking beans to this one.’
‘He’s a nutcase!’ I say.
Naoshi lets out a long sigh. ‘Everyone’s messed up here.’
The boy tries to grab my arm.
He falls down the stairs. Naoshi yells something. The boy hits the landing hard.
Seems I’d kicked him over with my very own boot. I say ‘seems’, because my body moved before I’d even thought about it. I stand very still, surprised by my own actions. ‘Is he knocked out?’
Naoshi is intolerably calm. ‘It’s fine. He didn’t hit his head.’
The boy gets up, clumsily, trying to recover his dignity.
Emi comes out through the door. ‘Fancy getting something to eat? Oh, dear. That blonde girl’s looking for you, you know.’
Naoshi makes to leave, but pauses and asks me, timidly, ‘Mind if I come see you tomorrow?’