The Foreigners Read online

  At the graveside, Carol tutted and crouched down to pluck weeds – hawkbit, plantain, cat’s ear, clover – from the grass. Parry, after wondering for a moment why she would undertake such a futile task, bent down to help her. Then, standing up and lowering their heads, brother and sister silently paid their respects, while a raw wind scoured in at them from across the fields, gusting and buffeting. And as they stood there, Parry felt Carol’s hand grope for his and felt her gloved fingers squeeze themselves around his gloved fingers, and the contact generated warmth, and all at once he saw in his mind’s eye the four of them – himself, Carol, their mother, their father – as four corners of a rectangle, the living at one end, the deceased at the other, joined to one another by slender etched lines of remembrance. And he understood that these were connections that could never truly be erased, not by time, not by distance, nor by any other alteration of circumstances, not even by that ultimate alteration of circumstances, death.

  The next morning, as scheduled, he returned to London.

  With the children at school and Patrick at the hospital, only Carol was there to see him off at York station. A peck on both cheeks, an embrace too light and short-lived to be called a hug, and then Parry hefted up his suitcase and, inclined against its weight, lumbered towards the ticket barrier. When he was through, he set the case down and turned to look for Carol. She was still there on the concourse, watching him, smiling. Without thinking he raised his hands to chest-height and clasped them together in FAREWELL. It was an automatic, reflexive gesture. He had forgotten that hand-symbols, so prevalent in New Venice, particularly among FPP officers, were not in common use in places like England. Carol’s smile faltered and she gave a curt, embarrassed wave, and before he could offer her any form of apology, she about-faced and strode away, her arms folded, her shoulders hunched against the chill, wraith-wisps of breath vapour skeining around her ear. Annoyed with himself, Parry watched her go. Later, on the train, he wondered whether that would be the last time he ever laid eyes on Carol and whether he minded, and he decided, with a saddeningly slight twinge of regret, that the answers were probably yes and probably no.

  That night at the Elgar he stayed in and watched TV, restlessly and ruthlessly channel-hopping. Among the many programmes he dipped in and out of was a rerun of an edition of Calliope that he did not recall having viewed before. It included an interview with a Frenchwoman who was convinced, against all reason, that she had had a month-long love affair with a Foreigner. There was also a feature on a pressure group that was campaigning for all the calendars of the world to be reset and retroactively synchronised so that they all began the year of the Debut, which would be known as 1 AP, Anno Peregrinorum. Parry’s opinion of the Frenchwoman was that she was a semitone short of the full octave, and as for the calendar pressure group, he wished it well but held out little hope of success for its campaign. In the political and business spheres the will was there for this unification of dating systems, but religious leaders of every persuasion were dead-set against it. Pope, archbishop, rabbi, imam, lama, all were of one accord, united on this issue as on no other: their calendars were not for changing. And, given that there is nobody more intransigent than an intransigent religious leader, Parry knew that in the face of such vehement and vocal opposition the campaign was destined to fail.

  He also watched a whole episode of Resort-City Beat, something he had never done in New Venice. America’s long-running cop opera and TRUST!, its somewhat more staid English equivalent, were consigned to late-night slots in New Venice and regarded with a certain condescending disdain. Over here in England, both were peak-time, mainstream viewing and enjoyed by millions who, not realising how unrealistic their protagonists and plotlines were, had no reason to consider them anything other than an authentic representation of life in a resort-city.

  Throughout the episode Parry veered between amusement and exasperation, the latter mainly directed at the portrayal of Foreigners. Mask-makers and costumiers had recreated the look of golden giants wonderfully well, and some over-tall actors in stacked-sole shoes did a very creditable job, like the mime in Leicester Square, of rendering the Foreign gait and mannerisms accurately. Unfortunately, the televisual Foreigners did not behave like any Foreigners Parry had ever encountered. There was even a golden giant, nicknamed “Goldie”, who hung around the show’s fictional FPP HQ and served as a kind of communal agony aunt, dispensing manufolded advice when consulted by the human characters. Absurd!

  The final day of his trip to England Parry spent roaming London once more, absorbing final impressions of the capital that he could take back with him to New Venice. The city had not noticeably mellowed towards him. If anything, it was unfriendlier than before, as if punishing him because it knew he was about to abandon it again. It assailed him with fast-moving businesspeople, striding along barking staccato sentences into their barely-visible cell phone headsets, like the world’s best-dressed lunatics. It accosted him with skinny, wizened prostitutes who stepped out from doorways to ask him if he had the time. It threatened him with cursing beggars and passing pedestrians who bumped shoulders with him – sometimes deliberately, it seemed.

  There had been a snowfall in the south of the country while Parry had been up in York, and though most of the snow had melted, some persisted on the pavements in hard icy spatter-patterns that crunched like peanut brittle underfoot and were treacherous. The temperature had dropped further, and the wind came at Parry around street-corners like a hawk, sinking talons into his bones. Before moving to New Venice he might have been able to weather such weather conditions with a manful shrug, but twelve years of living in a subtropical climate, twelve years of year-round warmth, had lowered his tolerance, thinned his skin, considerably.

  He stuck it out as long as he could, but eventually, in need of warmth, he ducked inside the British Museum and wandered its well-heated galleries and aisles for a grateful hour or so. The museum boasted a collection of (genuine) Foreign statuettes, allegedly the only complete chromatic scale in existence, which it had put together assiduously and at no small expense.

  The figurines were displayed in a semicircle, starting on the left at one metre tall and decreasing in size at regular increments, the rightmost one being no larger than a grown man’s handspan. There were ninety-six of them all told – Parry counted, just to be sure – and apart from size and the position of their hands they were all identical, like a set of impossibly intricate matrioshka dolls. All were made of a smoky yellow crystalline material, within which tiny flecks of gold glinted like mica in sunlit granite, and all had slender limbs, high, hunched shoulders and upturned, expressionless faces whose features were less well-delineated than a human’s but better defined than the vague, nubby contours of a Foreigner’s mask. The fingers of each were folded into a different configuration, exhibiting the entire range of what were known officially as Verhulst manufolds, more often just as manufolds, and most commonly as hand-symbols.

  A crimson velvet rope cordoned the statuettes off from the public, and a set of notices were ranged around the display, each bearing the same message:

  Please Do Not Touch

  Parry had to ask himself whether it had occurred to the museum’s curators that this edict entirely defeated the purpose of the statuettes’ existence.

  He endured one last night of the Elgar’s coarsely-starched sheets, and after breakfast the next morning packed his suitcase and went downstairs to check out.

  “Leaving us then, sir?” asked the concierge, a slovenly, acne-pocked post-adolescent who had been treating Parry throughout his stay at the hotel with a mixture of curiosity and contempt, as though he were a three-legged dog.

  “Yes,” Parry replied. “I’m going home.”

  He did not think anything about the remark – I’m going home – until an hour later, when he was travelling by taxi to Heathrow. Then he was struck by the significance, not of what he had said, but of the way in which he had said it.

  Of course he h
ad referred to New Venice before now as home, but always it had been with a certain irony, a certain incredulity even. On this occasion the word had tripped easily, thoughtlessly, from his lips, without having to be smiled around or stammered over or half-apologised for or bracketed in inverted commas, and all at once Parry knew that what had been an otherwise frustrating and disheartening seven days had had one redeeming feature. The coldness (both meteorological and metaphorical) that he had encountered in England confirmed what he had for a while been suspecting was true. His motherland was inimical to him now. The bonds of nationality and blood no longer held him to this place. He had become a stranger, an outsider, an alien, in the country of his birth.

  With the glad heart of a returning prodigal, Parry boarded the Jessye Norman, the airship that was to take him back to the city he had come to regard as – and at last knew for certain was – where he wanted to be and where he belonged.

  FIRST MOVEMENT

  1. Air

  OVERNIGHT, THROUGH THE buoyant, throbbing dark, the Jessye Norman nosed southwards across continental Europe. Parry, tucked away in her belly along with three hundred other passengers, found sleep difficult to come by. It had been the same a week ago, coming the opposite way: the bed hard and narrow, the cabin windowless and claustrophobic. It seemed like only moments after he finally dropped off that a chime began sounding repeatedly in the corridor outside – a soft, sonorous sequence of four notes, awakening, awakening.

  Washed and dressed, he went blearily to the port-side viewing lounge, to take breakfast four kilometres above the Mediterranean. The sun, rising over Gibraltar, steeped the lounge in golden light. As he nibbled a croissant and quaffed cup after cup of tea at a table by himself, Parry cast a bloodshot gaze over his fellow travellers. The flight had originated in New York and almost everyone on it was American. Those who had joined at its stopovers in Halifax, Reykjavik and London accounted for no more than a twentieth of the onboard complement.

  To amuse himself, he decided to play a little game. Which of the people eating and drinking and chatting around him were genuine holidaymakers, and which were coming to New Venice to try their luck as Sirens? It was impossible to tell from appearances alone, but therein lay the fun.

  For instance, that fat man over there tucking heartily into a heaped plateful of bacon, sausages, eggs, fried bread and mushrooms – his was an opera maestro’s fig-shaped figure if ever there was one. And those two women over there, shuttling snippets of conversation between them, elaborating on each other’s remarks – Parry could picture them engaged in a duet, each threading her melody line around the other’s. As for those four clean-cut, crewcut young fellows sharing a table together, it was easy to imagine them bunching together with beatific smiles as they crooned sweet barbershop harmonies. And that man with the three prepubescent boys might be a father with his three sons but equally might be a choirmaster shepherding three of his purest-throated trebles.

  An announcement from the captain over the airship’s internal PA system broke in on all conversations and thoughts, commandeering attention.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We hope you-all had a pleasant night’s sleep and are enjoying your breakfast.” The voice was deep and reassuringly sincere, with a down-home Texan tinge. The sentences undulated like rolling hills. “We’re presently cruising at an altitude of approximately four thousand metres and, as I’m sure you’re aware, it’s a gorgeous day outside. You might like to know that our final destination is just coming into view ahead. Please feel free to go take a look, but” – a folksy chuckle – “my co-pilots and I would appreciate it if you-all wouldn’t rush at once, so’s we have time to compensate for the shift in weight distribution.”

  The passengers bore the captain’s warning in mind as they rose from their tables and crossed over to the sloping observation windows. Keen though they were for a first glimpse of the place to which the majority of them had spent more than forty-eight hours travelling, they were equally (and sensibly) keen not to risk unbalancing the airship. They moved sleepwalker-slow, and only when they reached the windows did they allow their excitement to manifest, making animated gestures and vying with one another to come up with the most effusive epithets, the loudest oohs and aahs.

  Parry remained seated, waiting till some of the tourists began to drift back to their meals, having seen as much as they wanted to for now. Then he stood and ambled over to join the crowd at the window handrail.

  Ahead, roughly ten kilometres away, set amid a sheen of gleaming sea, lay New Venice.

  From this height and distance, the resort-city resembled nothing in the world so much as a snowflake – a gigantic snowflake that had somehow fallen from the clear, cloudless sky to alight, unmelted, pristine, fantastically intricate, on the ocean’s surface. Distinguishable were the fine dendritic patterns of the quays at the city’s periphery and the gently-shelving inclines of its glassy beaches, laced with breaking waves. Also distinguishable were the honeycombs of the outlying residential estates and the spikes and spires of hotels and apartment complexes, which grew taller and clustered closer together the more central their location. All the buildings were as white as wedding cakes, and between them could be discerned numerous intersecting, crisscrossing azure threads of canal. To the south, the mainland was a jagged-edged strip of terracotta, fading into horizon-haze. Over everything arched a sky like a dome of polished sapphire.

  Gazing down at the city, Parry was struck by its apparent fragility. As a resident, he was confident of its permanence, its intrinsic solidity. Up here, though, from this Olympian vantage-point, all he could think was how delicate it looked, how vulnerable, how evanescent. A breath could have demolished it. How could he have left it to fend for itself without him, even for just a week? His responsibility was to New Venice’s inhabitants – its citizens, the tourists and Sirens and Foreigners who visited it – but all of a sudden he was conscious of another, perhaps greater responsibility: to the city itself, the stone and stucco and glass and concrete of its structures, the crystech foundations on which it rested. The emotion was strong in his chest, a tugging ache, fond and profound, and he thought to himself, This must be how a father feels, watching over his child.

  The Jessye Norman skirted anticlockwise around the city’s western edge and with a hiss of vented hydrogen commenced her descent to the airport. The thrumming whine from her engine nacelles changed pitch, rising and falling in fits and starts, as captain and crew made the complicated manoeuvres and fine adjustments necessary to bring their craft in to dock at the assigned mooring mast. Tacking and turning with a grace that belied her leviathan bulk, the Jessye Norman took her place alongside a dozen other airships, her stars-and-stripes livery settling in beside representations of the flags of a dozen other nations. Ground crew secured her nosecone and tailfin cables, and she was reeled down to the landing area. Gangways swung down from the base of her passenger section, and the passengers began filing out, ushered on their way by the flight attendants who smilingly wished them farewell and a pleasant vacation.

  Inside the terminal building, the majority of the disembarked were presented with a choice. Those willing to have their passport cards checked and their entry into the city recorded could join one queue; those not wishing to do so could join another queue and undergo a brief but pertinent questioning by a Customs official. Parry was one of a mere handful entitled to take a third option and enter the fast-track channel reserved for resident New Venetians. At the automated barrier he showed his passport card to an electronic eye. At a subsequent barrier, a Customs official checked him over with an electronic wand for personal telecommunications devices. Cell phones and any other items of technology utilising microwaves were not allowed in resort-cities, out of respect for Foreigners, who appeared to find proximity to microwave emissions disagreeable. It was one of the many courtesies that resort-cities extended to the golden giants.

  Because Heathrow had been the flight’s last stopover, Parry’s suitcase wa
s among the first to be offloaded and appear on the luggage carousel. Heaving it off the circling conveyor belt, he made for the doors that led to the main concourse.

  Beyond the doors, a pack of people waited to pounce. No sooner had Parry entered the concourse than he was beset by taxi-gondoliers touting for custom, holiday reps wanting to know if he was with their tour companies, hotel scouts eagerly thrusting brochures and discount vouchers at him, and guides, both official and unlicensed, offering to show him the sights. They would not have accosted him, any of them, had he been in uniform. As it was, incognito in civvies, he lowered his head and bulled his way through the clamouring throng, muttering polite but firm rejections as he went. The idea of taking a taxi-gondola home was tempting, but one of the canal-bus routes from the airport had a stop directly outside his condominium. Besides, taxi-gondolas were principally for tourists and Foreigners, and were expensive. The canal-buses were free.

  The concourse was huge, and walled and roofed with glass, like a cross between a conservatory and a cathedral. Echoing through its vastness, female voices intoned the phrase “Welcome to New Venice” in every known language. Reinforcing this aural message visually, and serving as a centrepiece, was a five-metre-high sculpture atop a chunky octagonal pedestal. The sculpture, fashioned from white crystech with an alabaster-like lustre, consisted of a pair of hands clasped together, palm pressed to palm, fingers spaced out, thumbs crossed.

  Beside it Parry spied a pair of FPP officers. At first all he could make out of them was their cream-coloured uniforms, and he assumed they were there to keep an eye on the crowd and ensure that newly-arrived holidaymakers were not unduly harassed or hassled. As he drew nearer to them, however, he discerned that one of the FPP officers was a large man, broad-shouldered and strawberry-blond, and that the other was a petite, olive-complexioned woman whose dark hair was pinned tightly up at the back. He recognised them then. Lieutenant Pål Johansen and Sergeant Rachel Avni. Both worked in his district, under his direct command ... and both of them had faces as grim as any gravedigger’s. Their expressions eased little when they caught sight of him heading towards them. They were here for him. They had been waiting for him.