‘ET is this baby alien who finds himself lost on earth, three million light years away from home. He makes friends with a ten-year-old boy and they start to have a very special connection with each other.’
Claude gave the little alien in his kitchen a leering wink. ‘What sort of connection?’
Jurgen swung his dreadlocks over a freshly baked pear tart cooling under the kitchen window as if to summon a plot he had long forgotten.
‘So … if ET gets sick the earth boy gets sick, if ET is hungry earth boy gets hungry, if ET is tired or sad then earth boy suffers with him. The alien and his friend are in touch with each other’s thoughts. They are mentally connected.’
Claude grimaced, because he was being called by Mitchell for another basket of bread and a slice of the pear tart, newly written into the menu. Claude told Jurgen he couldn’t work out why the fat man never had any money on him despite staying in the luxurious villa. His tab had gone off the scale. ‘So anyway how does ET end?’
Jurgen, who was usually too stoned to remember anything, had just spotted Joe Jacobs in the distance, walking among the sheep grazing in the mountains. For some reason he could remember every line the baby alien uttered in the film. He thought this was because he was also an alien, a German nature boy living in France. He explained that ET has to disconnect himself from the boy because he fears he will make him too sick and he doesn’t want to harm him. And then he finds a way of getting home to his own planet.
Jurgen nudged Claude and pointed to the English poet in the distance. He looked like he was saluting something invisible, because his fingers were touching his forehead. Claude quite liked the poet, because he always left big tips and had somehow managed to produce a gorgeous, long-legged teenage daughter whom Claude had personally invited to the café for an aperitif. So far she had not taken him up on his offer, but he lived in hope because, as he told Jurgen, what else was there to live in?
‘He is superstitious, he’s just seen a magpie. He is famous. Do you want to be famous?’
Jurgen nodded. And then shook his head and helped himself to a swig from a bottle of green liquid leaning against the cooking oil.
‘Yes. Sometimes I think it would be nice to no longer be a caretaker and everyone wants to kiss my arse. But there is one problem. I don’t have the energy to be famous. I have too much to do.’
Claude pointed to the poet, who looked like he was still saluting magpies.
‘Perhaps he is homesick. He wants to go home to his planet.’
Jurgen gargled with the green drink that Claude knew was mint syrup. Jurgen was more or less addicted to it in the same way some people are addicted to absinthe, which had the same fairy green colour.
‘No. He is just avoiding Kitty Ket. He has not read Ket’s thing and he is avoiding her. The Ket is like ET. She thinks she has a mental connection with the poet. He has not read her thing and she will be sad and her blood pressure will go up and she will murder them all with the fat man’s guns.’
MONDAY
The Trapper
Mitchell lay on his back sweating. It was three a.m. and he had just had a nightmare about a centipede. He had hacked it with a carving knife but it split in two and started to grow again. The more he hacked at it the more centipedes there were. They writhed at his feet. He was up to his ears in centipedes and the blade of his knife was covered in slime. They were crawling into his nostrils and trying to get into his mouth. When he woke up he wondered if he should tell Laura his heart was pounding so hard and fast he thought he might be about to have a heart attack. Laura was sleeping peacefully on her side, her feet poking out of the bed. There was no bed in the world that was long enough for Laura. Their bed in London had been specially designed for her height and his width by a Danish shipbuilder. It took up the whole room and resembled a galleon beached on a pond in a civic park. Something was crawling towards him along the whitewashed wall. He screamed.
‘What is it, Mitch?’ Laura sat up and put her hand on her husband’s heaving chest.
He pointed to the thing on the wall.
‘It’s a moth, Mitchell.’
Sure enough it spread its grey wings and flew out of the window.
‘I had a nightmare,’ he grunted. ‘A terrible, terrible nightmare.’
She squeezed his hot clammy hand. ‘Go back to sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.’ She tugged the sheet over her shoulder and lay down again.
There was no way he could sleep. Mitchell got up and walked upstairs to the kitchen, where he felt most safe. He opened the fridge and reached for a bottle of water. As he put the bottle to his lips and thirstily gulped down the iced water, he felt in bits and pieces like the centipede. When he lifted up his aching head, he noticed something lying on the kitchen floor. It was the trap he had set for the rat. He had caught something. He swallowed hard and made his way towards it.
A small animal was lying on its side with its back to him, but it was not a rat. He recognised the creature. It was Nina’s brown nylon rabbit, its long floppy ear stapled under the wire. He could see its worn white ball of a tail and the grubby label sewn inside its leg. The green satin ribbon around its neck had somehow got tangled in the wires too. He found himself sweating as he bent down to free it from the wire and then noticed a shadow on the floor. Someone was there with him. Someone had broken into the villa and he didn’t have his guns with him. Even his ancient ebony weapon from Persia would see off whoever was there.
‘Hello, Mitchell.’
Kitty Finch was leaning naked against the wall, watching him struggle not to catch his fingers in his own trap. She was nibbling the chocolate he had left for the rat, her arms folded across her breasts.
‘I call you the trapper now, but I’ve warned all the owls about you.’
He pressed his hand on his pounding heart and stared at her pale, righteous face. He would shoot her. If he had his weapons with him he would do it. He would aim for her stomach. He imagined how he would hold the gun and timed the moment he would snap the trigger. She would fall to the ground, her glassy grey eyes wide open, a bloody hole gouged in her belly. He blinked and saw she was still standing against the wall, taunting him with the chocolate he had placed so carefully in the wires. She looked thin and pathetic and he realised he had scared her.
‘Sorry I was so abrupt.’
‘Yeah.’ She nodded as if they were suddenly best friends. ‘You gave me a fright, but I was frightened anyway.’
He was terrified too. For a moment he seriously considered telling her about his nightmare.
‘Why do you kill animals and birds, Mitchell?’
She was almost pretty, with her narrow waist and long hair glowing in the dark, but ragged too, not far off someone begging outside a train station holding up a homeless and hungry sign.
‘It takes my mind off things,’ he found himself saying as if he meant it, which he did.