The Foreigners Read online

  Had she been among them? The young woman, the girl – had she been one of those thirty-two?

  The hell of it was, there was no way he would ever know. At the time, another rioter had grabbed him while he was beating her and he had turned his attention to this new threat, forgetting the girl in an instant. Had she crawled away to safety, or perhaps been hauled away by one of the mob? Or had she simply lain where she was, insensible, possibly dying, to be trampled on by all and sundry?

  It did not do to speculate. He could only hope. Hope that, whoever she was, she was alive and well. Hope that, wherever she was, she had forgiven him.

  He turned away from the plaque and with slow, trudging footsteps made his way north towards the West End.

  He had been back in London for a little over twenty-four hours now, and the capital remained as inhospitable to him as when he had arrived. He had spent the whole of the morning strolling around, trying to rediscover the city on foot but finding instead that he had a new city to discover, one that no longer matched the memory-maps in his mind. As though to express displeasure at his long absence, London had rearranged itself in all manner of subtle, confusing ways. Old shortcuts were no longer open to him. Old haunts turned out to be further apart or closer together than he remembered. Buildings that had been landmarks in his life had been altered beyond recognition. Some had disappeared altogether.

  London’s inhabitants seemed different, too, their faces more pinched, their attitudes less open, as though they had shrivelled inside themselves. The taxi driver who had ferried Parry into town from the airport yesterday, the staff at the hotel where he was staying, the sales assistant at the department store where he had bought the overcoat, the waitress who had served him a lunchtime sandwich at a Soho café – all of them exhibited a sullen closedness which he did not recognise and did not like. But he thought he understood the reason for it. England was seldom visited by Foreigners. The golden giants disliked cold climates, and so a few came here in mid-summer but none at any other time of year. The country was deprived of the full effect of their benignant presence, and it showed. It showed.

  Leicester Square was busier than Trafalgar Square. There were vagrants aplenty, and young people too, both groups in their different ways killing time. Sketch artists wearing fingerless gloves offered passers-by the opportunity to have their portraits done in charcoal, perhaps with a celebrity drawn in beside them, or a Foreigner. Cafés tried to entice customers to sit at outdoor tables by means of powerful gas heaters. Parry found the smell of burning fossil fuel both noxious and oddly nostalgic.

  He was drawn towards a crowd that had gathered in a loose circle around a Foreigner. He was curious to know what a Foreigner was doing here and why people were standing watching it. When he came close enough to have a proper look, however, he realised that the golden giant was in fact a mime perched on short stilts and dressed in a homemade Foreign outfit of mask, gloves and robe.

  The mime’s imitation of a Foreigner’s distinctive gait was well-observed and convincing. Had his (or it could have been her) costume been of a somewhat better quality, he might even have been able to pass himself off as one of the golden giants. Still – and Parry did not think this was just his imagination – there was something missing from the mime’s performance, some hard-to-define element that rendered his mimicry imperfect.

  Perfection. That was it. That was the missing element. Whenever Parry looked at a real Foreigner, he knew he was in the presence of something wondrous, something superior, something utterly free from human taint. He could not explain how he knew that any more than he could explain how he knew that a night sky full of stars was awe-inspiring or the sight of a mountain majestic. Some things just were what they were, and Foreigners were sublime.

  And this Foreigner was not. This “Foreigner” was a tawdry imitation, and the longer Parry observed its antics, the more peeved he found himself becoming. He was almost childlishly gratified to note that the beret which the mime had laid out on the ground for donations contained nothing but a few copper coins and an International Currency card that was showing its red expiry message.

  Deciding that he had had enough of London for one day, and that London had had enough of him, Parry headed for a nearby taxi rank where a dozen black cabs waited for fares, comp-res engines humming two-note intervals as they idled. The driver of the first cab in line pressed a dashboard button that opened the passenger door automatically and thus saved him from having to wind down his window and do the job manually. Parry bundled himself into the cab’s well-heated interior.

  “Where to, mate?”

  “The Elgar.”

  The driver engaged gear and the taxi whirred sedately off. As they wound around Piccadilly and up towards Regent Street, he broached a conversation.

  “Been away?”

  “Hm? Oh. Yes.”

  “Quite some while, by the looks of things.”

  Parry said nothing, which the taxi driver chose to interpret as an invitation to continue.

  “Only that doesn’t look like the kind of tan you get from a fortnight on a beach at Bridgeville.”

  “No,” said Parry, glancing reflexively at the back of one nut-brown hand.

  “Got out, did you?” the taxi driver said and, when his passenger was hesitant about answering, grinned knowingly into the rearview mirror. “Don’t blame you. I would, too. Like a shot. Tomorrow! If it wasn’t for the bloody Exit Levy... If it wasn’t so sodding hard for a working man to get an emigration permit...”

  And for the rest of the journey the driver continued in this vein, expounding alternately on the wisdom of leaving England and the impracticability of doing so. Parry, whose input was not necessarily being solicited, only half-listened.

  The Elgar on Bayswater was one of the first hotels to have been constructed in Britain after the arrival of the Foreigners. Parry remembered it freshly finished – a cylindrical tower of up-thrusting, sky-aspiring optimism, a monument of the new era, proud and gleaming and clean. The building outside which the taxi deposited him was a haggard version of its former self, drab and dilapidated and not a little forbidding, reminiscent of Soviet-bloc ministry offices. In its corridors, lightbulbs had burned out in their ceiling recesses and no one had bothered to replace them. The central hearing was turned up so high that the air smelled singed and was hard to breathe (Parry had tried opening the windows of his room for ventilation and found they would not budge). In his en-suite bathroom, lukewarm yellowy water flowed sluggishly from stiff-turning taps. The lifts were as cranky and unreliable as the staff. He had been pleasantly surprised that the wallscreen and telephone both worked.

  That evening, after an indifferent supper at the hotel’s restaurant, Parry set about phoning up old friends, people he had had little or no contact with since emigrating. He was dismayed to discover that two of them had passed away and no one had seen fit to inform him about the deaths. As for the rest, each sounded glad to hear from him and made the appropriate noises about meeting up for a drink or something, but, when it came to fixing a time and place, became vague and evasive. In each case, Parry did not press the matter. He said where he was staying and how long he intended to be there. If anybody decided renewing old acquaintance was not such a bad idea after all, they would know where to contact him.

  One of his friends, a colleague from Parry’s days with the Met., did agree to go out for a drink with him, and accordingly they rendezvoused the following evening at a pub near the friend’s house in Tottenham. It started out well, the two of them reminiscing pleasantly, recalling the characters they had known, both force and criminal; the practical jokes that had been played on various individuals at the station; the collars they had made, some of them hilarious, some hair-raising, some both. Gradually, however, the old friend became increasingly morose and sour, and by his fourth pint of bitter – for which, like the preceding three, he had been content for Parry to pay – he had become openly hostile and was verbally attacking Parry, accusing him
of selling out, the rat leaving the sinking ship and all that. Then he broke off and, astonishingly, burst into tears. A grown man, a senior police officer, still serving, just a few years from retirement age, he blubbered as helplessly as an infant, his beer slopping in his hand as the sobs racked him. After a while, when he had cried himself out, he wiped his eyes and apologised (“I was well out of order”) and then began berating himself. He should have left, too, you see. While he had still had the opportunity. Before the government brought the gates down. Should have upped stumps and headed south, same as Parry had done. It was the missus’s fault. She had refused to go. Said what would they want to do that for? All their friends and family were here, all their kids’ friends. He should have overruled her, or ignored her, and gone anyway. And now it was too late. These days only the really rich could afford to leave, and how many of them hadn’t? Precious few. Precious fucking few.

  The following morning Parry travelled to Kennington to revisit the house where he had been born and brought up.

  Kennington being one of London’s worst-flooded areas, the street could be reached only by means of a complicated system of walkways rigged up from duck-boards and scaffold. Counting along the row of terraced two-up-two-downs, he halted outside his childhood home. Its lower storey was submerged in freezing, waist-deep Thames water, and its front garden, in common with that of every other house in the street, was a rectangular pond, with just the top run of enclosing brick wall proud above the water’s surface. The front door was a decayed tooth.

  Hunkering down, Parry peered through the ground-floor windows’ paneless frames to the drowned living room. The wallpaper, what was left of it, the few soggy scraps of it that still clung in place, was the gold-on-white fleur-de-lys design he remembered from his youth – a design which, despite costing little per roll, his mother had considered classy. The patio doors that used to give onto the back garden were gone. He could just make out a rotten stump that was all that remained of the cooking-apple tree which had once flourished at the far end of the garden. He remembered the day he had climbed to the tree’s topmost branches in order to retrieve his sister’s beloved beanbag rabbit, which he had hurled up there for reasons that were lost in the mists of time and the mire of childhood motives. He had managed to reach the rabbit and toss it down to Carol, but during his descent he had lost his footing and fallen to the ground, fracturing his collarbone.

  An aluminium ladder running from the walkway to the top of the porch indicated that people had made their home in the house’s upper storey. Parry debated whether to clamber up, knock on the window and ask if he might take a look-round inside. He decided against the idea. No matter how polite he was, it was doubtful the homeowners would let him in. The inhabitants of London’s inundated boroughs were, as a rule, prickly types. It required a certain stoicism, to be sure, to endure the mud, the perpetual reek of stagnancy, the rat and frog infestations, the summer outbreaks of cryptosporidiosis, the ever-present, all-pervasive damp, and the myriad other inconveniences of living in the middle of what was essentially an urban lake. It also required a certain self-righteous masochism that seldom went hand-in-hand with kindness toward strangers. After loitering outside the house for several minutes, Parry simply turned and walked away.

  The next morning, he headed north to York.

  The journey took six hours, station to station. The train, trundling unhurriedly along tracks raised up on a chunky crystech viaduct, wound through what remained of Lincolnshire (frost-fretted marshes, barren and brown) and meandered across the Humber floodplains. Parry gazed out at passing fields of sparse, struggling crops and at snowbound towns and villages where people, fattened by layers of clothing, waded around as laboriously as deep-sea divers.

  Carol was waiting for him on the concourse at York station. Parry was startled by how old his younger sister looked, her hair greyed and her face grooved by the passage of years and the raising of two children. She, too, was unable to mask her surprise at the alterations that age had worked on him. The first thing she did after embracing him was reach up and playfully rub the scrubby strip of bristles that adorned the otherwise hairless top of his scalp. “Just like Dad,” she said, laughing. “Nearly all gone.” Later, at her house, he found the most recent photograph of him she owned. It sat in a tortoiseshell frame on the mantelshelf, a snapshot taken when he was in his early thirties, shortly before he left for New Venice. At that age, his face was still unlined and, from certain angles, it was not noticeable that his hair had begun to recede.

  He and Carol had had only sporadic communication since his move to New Venice – the occasional phone-call, e-cards on anniversaries. He had expected they would have a lot to say to each other but this turned out not to be the case. Carol’s life was domestic squabbles, the benchmarks of her children’s growth, and a hundred other small, private achievements. His life was Foreigners and Sirens and well-heeled tourists and the formalities and peculiarities of FPP work and the shimmering Shangri-La remoteness of New Venice. The disparity between their experiences yawned between them, until Carol found it necessary to apologise for the ordinariness of her existence and Parry for the exoticism of his, and in order to avoid further awkwardness they were reduced to talking in phatic platitudes – enquiries about health, remarks about the house, observations about recent events in the news, that sort of thing – as though the conversation had travelled backwards, ending where it ought to have begun. The bond they had shared in childhood had already grown weak by the time Carol decamped from London to York to be with her husband, Patrick, and to be closer to her and Parry’s parents. Now Parry sensed that it was all but gone, a vestigial link attenuated to an almost invisible thinness.

  It was a relief, then, when the children came home from school and filled the house with their noise and fluster and impatience. Parry had known Tom and Cecilia as toddlers. Meeting them after such a long interval – Tom was now sixteen, his sister fifteen – was like meeting two new people for the first time, two strangers who happened to be close relatives of his. Both youngsters, after a few searching glances, decided to be unimpressed by their uncle, who up until this moment had been something of a fabled figure, a creature of family myth. Perhaps they had expected him to be taller, more imposing, less wiry, not so bald. He was a Foreign Policy Policeman, after all. Upholder of fairness and justice and decency. Watchman on the walls of the world. But in no way at all did he resemble the square-jawed, teeth-gritting, fully-thatched actors who played FPP officers in television dramas such as TRUST! and Resort-City Beat.

  They were equally unimpressed by the present he had brought for them, a replica Foreign statuette with “A Gift From New Venice” stamped onto its base. The instant he produced it from his suitcase, they knew it was a fake because it was not singing in his hand. They accepted it with grudging gratitude. The word “Thanks” had to be physically dislodged from Tom by means of a nudge from his mother.

  The two days Parry spent in York with Carol and family were, for the most part, a trial. In particular, Parry found Carol’s husband Patrick, who was a gastroenterology specialist, hard to stomach. Patrick insisted on harping on about his job at every opportunity he could, claiming that medical practitioners of every variety were more vital than ever in this country in this day and age, when the predominant causes of death were no longer cancer and coronary but the more readily preventable and treatable conditions of hypothermia and pneumonia. Each time Patrick spoke in this manner about the importance of his vocation, Parry could not help but discern an aggrieved undertone in his voice, and he knew that what he was hearing was, thinly disguised, the same resentment he had discerned in most of the Londoners he had encountered – the resentment which his old friend from the Met. had given voice to in his outburst at the Tottenham pub. It was as though those remaining in England considered themselves a besieged army whose ranks had been dangerously depleted by deserters.

  As for the children, his nephew Parry dismissed almost straight away. There
would never be any empathy between him and Tom. Beneath the teenage obnoxiousness and self-absorption there was nothing, no spark, no encouraging glimpses of the adult-in-embryo. Cecilia, on the other hand, for personal reasons, interested him. She was a pretty girl, but over-conscious about her appearance. She appeared not to have much of an appetite on her, nor much to say for herself. Even at her tender age she seemed aware that she would be able to obtain almost anything she wanted in life simply by keeping quiet and staying slim and looking good. And he was unable to prevent himself measuring her up against another fifteen-year-old Cecilia he knew. That other Cecilia was lively, bright-eyed, level-headed and smart, and had enough self-confidence not to care what anyone thought of her. Again and again he found himself measuring the two of them against each other. Again and again his niece came off worse from the comparison.

  One thing occurred during his time at Carol’s that hinted to Parry that he was not entirely cut adrift from his family. He and Carol made a pilgrimage to their parents’ graves, driving out of York to the small village to which their mother and father had moved after their father had been laid off at work and taken early retirement. Their mother had been a Yorkshire lass and had always vowed she would return some day to her native county.

  John Edward Parry and Theresa Mary Parry lay buried side-by-side, within arm’s reach of each other, in a churchyard on a high plot of land surrounded by drystone-walled fields. The death-dates on their headstones were separated by just a few months. Parry’s father had passed away while on a trip to the shops with his wife. Parry’s mother was driving and had thought her husband had simply fallen asleep beside her. He had become a terrible one for napping. Forever nodding off at inopportune moments! Only when they reached their destination and she was unable to wake him up did the awful truth dawn on her.

  They had been devoted to each other. Her grief had brought a swift decline.