Frooks

  Ian McDonald

  Shian, Book #0.5

  First published in Interzone, issue 100, edited October 1995 by Lee Montgomerie and David Pringle.

  This copy derived from the above source.

  There was an address in the contact magazine but I still had difficulty finding the club. There was no name, only a peeling green door that you would think belonged to the Chinese butcher shop. I found the number: 88; drop-shadowed gilt numerals in a fan-light. Peeling, like the green door. Beneath it was painted the four-petalled yin-yang. That told me more than the address or the number that I had found what I was looking for.

  Through the fan-light I could see the stairs.

  I walked past. I could hear my heart. I thought that only happened in thrillers. My breath was shivering. I wanted to throw up. I must throw up. I didn’t. I walked past. Too many people around. They don’t know you, I told myself. No one knows you. You’re one man a long way from home, and they don’t even know that. You’re invisible. They don’t see you, they don’t see the green door, they don’t know what is behind it, up those stairs. They walk past it every day and it’s invisible.

  I turned and went back. But I walked past again. Once you go up those stairs, they will know you. Who you are, where you are from, what you want, why you are here. I will have declared myself. But everyone there has, I told myself. You are all there for the same reason, and so you are invisible.

  Did everyone in London have to go down this one street this evening? I couldn’t make myself believe they didn’t know, that they weren’t looking, that they wouldn’t nudge and wink and whisper when they thought they were safe behind my back, pushing on through the cold drizzle.

  I couldn’t let it go, not for what people I didn’t know might say. I stopped, turned. I saw the Chinese butcher lift up a rack of roasted ducks to hang in the lighted window. My breath went out and it was a long time before I thought to draw it back in. My heart kicked. Something melted in the bottom of my belly.

  Red, swinging meat, that was what the Chinese butcher was lifting up.

  It was like tunnel vision. All I could see was that green door, then my hand, stretched out to push, then the stairs. The pattern of the carpet was like my Grandma Joan’s. Strange, the things you think. At the top of the carpeted stairs, another door; a swing door, painted dark red, the red of the Chinese butcher’s swinging ducks. There was a wired glass window in the middle of the door, no more than a peephole. I hoped no one was behind it. I had come up the stairs so fast that I couldn’t do anything but push that door open. Momentum carried me into the club.

  It wasn’t as I had expected. Funny: until then, I hadn’t realized I had been expecting how it should be. It was smaller. The space was differently used. It looked like several rooms that had been knocked together. The bar was right behind the door; the dance floor was a postage-stamp in its own alcove beyond the bar. There were two steps up to it. The tables and chairs were crammed together in the rest of the available space. They were a mix of old church hall and office furniture liquidation. They looked cheap under the house lights. Everything looked cheap, even the murals of stars and galaxies and planets with rings around them and the big starships flying through space. I could see the beer stains and the cigarette burns and the messages scribbled in black biro on the silver spaceships. A glitterball broke a pinspot into a hundred stars, swimming across the decorated walls, the floor, the bar, the Airfix model starships suspended from the black painted ceiling. Up on the dance floor two effects projectors swirled multi-coloured galaxies over and through each other. The big sound system was shut down; the CD deck behind the bar was playing old 1990s ambient dance in an effort at atmosphere. Cheap.

  The place smelled of stale smoke, men, beer and something I have never smelled in any other cheap club. I could not recognize it, though it seemed exasperatingly familiar. Whatever it was, it made my heart beat faster and my penis swell in my pants.

  Of course. It must be the smell of them.

  * * *

  There were four men in the club, sitting at one table with pints and a newspaper. They and the barman were staring at me.

  “Are you open?” I asked.

  “We’re open,” the barman said. He had a South Wales accent. I felt much more at ease. “Are you sure you’ve got the right place?”

  I took the magazine out of my coat pocket and put it on the bar. Strange Attractors. Smooth curves of terra-cotta flesh on the cover. Nothing graphic, just skin, but the man in the shop where I had bought it had looked at me as I set the magazine down on his counter. I could not meet his eyes after that look. I had made a comment about the snooker on the portable television behind the cash desk, about how boring it had got with all this safety play, and he had grunted a reply, but I could feel his hostility. Surrounded by every human appetite and perversion, piled high, racked up to the ceiling, in full colour, but he could not accept this.

  The four men at the table had looked at me, but not like that. The barman was looking at me, but not like that.

  “You’ve got the right place,” the barman said, pushing the magazine back to me. “You’re a bit early. We don’t really start filling until after eight, and they won’t turn up until gone nine.”

  “I’ll wait,” I said. I took a stool at the front of the bar and peered at the chiller for bottled beers I knew. A dozen brands of water, sparkling and still. They can’t take alcohol. It’s poisonous to them. I saw the packs of aspirin along the optic.

  “Do you have Red Stripe?”

  The barman laughed.

  “We have Red Stripe.” As he opened the bottle, he added, “You’re a little off home base, aren’t you? What is it? North Wales?”

  “Rhyl.”

  “Rhyl.” He poured the beer. “I had a weekend in Rhyl when I was eight. Pissed down with rain the whole time and nothing was open.”

  “Sounds like Rhyl. And yourself: south, am I right? The valleys?”

  “Pontypridd. Pride of the valleys, what the Tories have left of them. That’ll be five-fifty, please.”

  “How much?”

  “Specialist club, specialist prices. So, you up on business, then?”

  “Store managers’ conference. I’m in fashion. Couple of times a year they call us all in and show us what to do with the new stock; how to display it, market it, so we’ll all look the same from Rhyl to Romsey. Thought I’d stay on, you know; see the sights.”

  “You don’t have to explain. You don’t get a lot of them in Rhyl. Nor Pontypridd, for that matter. Nice, but, to see the bloody English being the ones colonized this time, isn’t it?”

  We talked for some time about the things we held in common: Wales, and the rugby, of course, and the very real prospect that this year we might win the Triple crown—maybe even the Five nations Championship—for the first time this century; and how alien we found England, where if a thing isn’t on or just off a motorway it might as well not exist. We talked about everything except the thing that made him a barman serving me a punter a drink in this upstairs club off Lisle Street.

  It was a slow conversation, for the bar was steadily filling up and the customers needed drinks. I looked at them to try to discover some common factor between us. All sorts and sods: talls, fats, good-lookings, glasses, balds, well-dresseds, suits and casuals. Old. Young. Some women. That surprised me. How did those exciter and releaser chemicals allow it to work with them?

  None of them; yet.

  * * *

  By half-seven the club had filled to the bottom step of the dance floor and still there were none of them. A DJ went up to the mixing desk and tested the PA equipment. The barman—his name was Hugh—turned off the ambient. The DJ dimmed the house lights and put on a background mix. The mood in the club changed as if the DJ had switched it on with the music. It was their music. The night started here.

  All I know about them is what I see on the telly or read in magazines, but I understand that they have two kinds of music. I can’t remember the names, but one is for out-of-season and one is for in-season. It was the second music that was playing on the sound system. Heat-season music: the music the males play when they dress themselves up and dance in competition against each other for the women. All drums and percussion instruments; layer upon layer of them, weaving in and out and through each other in strange, complex rhythms the feet can tap to but the mind can’t catch hold of. I’ve heard it on the radio and the television, but those can’t play it right. It has to be loud, as though you’re down there in the street with them, in the heat season, so loud you can feel it, down there, where it’s meant to be felt. They can drum all night and all day, their males. There is a trick they can do with their anger that gives them inhuman strength and endurance. They’ve a word for that too, but I can’t remember it either. Inhuman. Ha.

  I had been concentrating on counting out the rhythms—I think it was eleven against three—when the smell alerted me. That same strange-but-familiar scent I’d noticed when I entered the club, but stronger. Very much stronger. I looked round. There. Beside me, leaning over the bar, trying to attract Hugh’s attention. One of them. A Shian. An alien.

  I didn’t think this until after the moment of recognition. At that moment, I didn’t think at all. I reacted. Excitement surged up inside me like something I needed to cough out or it would choke me. My balls prickled and tightened. My penis heaved in its cotton-lycra restraint.

  I heard it say, “Any of those Boots-own brand, Taffy?” Its voice was a breathy contralto; not a man’s. Not a woman’s. Not any human voice. The accent was like none I’ve ever heard before, but everything sounded right in it.

  “Sorry, we’re right out of them, Loonturievo,” Hugh the barman said. “We’ve got Hedex Extra.”

  The Shian made an expression I did not recognize but must have been disgust, because it said, “Shit.”

  I never thought of them swearing. Clean, like angels, that was how they were to me. Pure of heart and lips.

  Hugh introduced me: “A brother from the Land of Song.”

  The Shian looked at me.

  I heard the breath of a thing from 60 light years away.

  I saw its eyes, like cat’s eyes: black ovals in golden green.

  I saw its skin, smooth burnt red, like finest terra-cotta. But soft, warm.

  I saw the wide nose—smell is as important to them as sight is to us, I read somewhere. The nostrils were flared. Scenting me. Human male.

  I saw the three fingers on the hands, and the small, low-set ears, and the stripe of soft dark red fur up the centre of the skull, tapering to a fine line down the spine.

  My penis was so hard my trousers must be like a Big Top. Oh my God; it must see it. It must smell it. I couldn’t speak. I had a dozen different inane conversation openers and not one of them made it out of my throat. I flapped my hands. I blushed. I grinned like a fool and spilled my Red Stripe on the bar. The alien danced back, quick as a knife. They are a fast people. A hunting people. Not as strong as us, but fast. I read that somewhere, too.

  Oh My God. I read in that same place that to them a smile—a stupid, inane grin—is a threat. A baring of teeth. They smile by blinking. Slowly. I might as well have shaken my fist in its face. It took its water and its inferior aspirins and went to a table where three men had been looking and nodding for it to come over. It moved like liquid. Like the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I still didn’t know if it was a male or a female—sex identifiers are chemical, not physical, with them. But when I saw one of the men put an arm around its waist and draw it close to him, I wanted to smash his head to jam with a chair for daring to pollute such a beautiful thing.

  “I blew it,” I said to Hugh.

  “There’ll be others.”

  * * *

  There were. Many others. Some were in human clothing—men’s, women’s, both; both sexes being physically alike, they could wear what felt good to them—some in their own styles and fashions. Some were dressed in extravagant, exotic costumes; those were the males, in their dancing outfits. Embroidered skirt panels; elaborate high collars that made them look impossibly tall and slender; beaded and wired head-pieces set with mirrors and jewels. These costumes had passed male to male for a hundred generations before the crossing to Earth. I watched these gorgeous creatures sit down with the humans and sip the drinks the humans bought them and blink their cats’ eyes at the jokes and compliments the humans paid them. How dare these dirty, meaty, corrupt little ape-people with their greedy little hormones and thrusting little penises and hungry little vaginas leave their fingerprints on that perfect red-earth skin, rub against those tall thin bodies on the dance floor, send their stinking fingers creeping under those beautiful, ancient costumes, hunting for ways to unbutton, unzip, undress?

  How could they let the ape-people do that to them? I found myself shaking with rage.

  Hugh caught my eye. “You’re in luck,” he said. “Just sat down.” He topped off a pint, flipped a soluble aspirin into a glass of Perrier and flicked his eyes to the end of the bar beside the cigarette machine.

  All alone; sitting on a stool, surveying the crowded tables, back to the bar. It was dressed in a white silk blouse, men’s black Levis and high-heeled cowboy boots. An empty glass rested between its three-fingered hands. Its gaze fell across me. I raised my eyebrows, the Shian greeting. The golden eyes held mine. Very slowly, they blinked. I carried my stool to the end of the bar and pressed in beside it.

  I didn’t know what to say. So I said that.

  “You could start by buying me a drink,” the Shian said.

  Voice quivering, I ordered a Red Stripe. “And whatever my friend is having.”

  “Low-alcohol for me,” the alien said.

  “I thought alcohol was poisonous to you.”

  “It’s poisonous to both of us. The dosages are different, that’s all. Some of us get a taste for it.”

  Hugh brought the drinks, and charged me a sum that anywhere else, any other time, in any other company, I would have told him was utterly obscene.

  “What does it do for you?” I asked.

  “Find out.” The alien slowly blinked its eyes again. I suppressed a smile and blinked back.

  I talked. All stupid stuff, about myself and where I came from and apologized for that, as we always do, and what I did and why I was in London and how I found the club and how we didn’t have anything like it at home in Wales; in fact, we didn’t have any Shian, even, and all the time I wished I would shut up because all I wanted was to look at this beautiful, sleek, incredible, attractive alien sitting in front of me blinking its eyes. And look. And look.

  “Hey, mister,” it said, interrupting my flow of inane conversation. “You want to dance?”

  All night I had been hearing the Shian music, trying to get the feel of what it did, how it worked. On the floor with the alien—Serracord, it whispered in my ear as we clinched—I understood. It only works when you dance to it. Then it feels like the greatest thing you have ever heard. There was nothing but me and Serracord and the Shian music. The projected stars and galaxies moved over our skins like seasons. I could have danced all night. Exactly like that song in the old musical. I wanted too. I knew I could. I may have. I couldn’t tell. I have never felt anything I wanted never to end as much as dancing pressed close to the warm, alien skin of Serracord the Shian. Time evaporated. Place fell apart.

  I came out with a start. Serracord was pulling my ear-lobe. The club was suddenly half empty. Hugh the barman was pulling down the shutters. Had we been on the floor so long? There were only two other groups up on the floor with us; a threesome of two men in suits and a Shian, and a woman with a male resplendent in ceremonial dancing costume.

  “What?” I shouted over the sound system. Serracord lifted up my hand and tapped my watch.

  “It’s getting late.”

  “So?” Thinking, oh no, oh God, it’s all going to end, it’s all going to turn back to ashes and junk like Cinderella.

  “So, Mr Earthman,” the alien said, bending down from its great height and whispering in my ear, “so, Mr Welshman, do you want to come back to my place?”

  * * *

  At that hour, the quiet was almost holy. Serracord paid the taxi—a gay minicab firm, they could be relied on to be discreet—and I listened to the silence it left behind. I could feel the whole city breathing, muttering like a man turning in his sleep. There was enough beer and music in my blood to make me feel alive several times over.

  Serracord’s flat was above a Jewish bagel bakery on Salmon Lane. The shop survived though the people it served had long moved on. In the end it would go too. The Shian, who were almost certainly the last immigrant wave to occupy the streets of Limehouse, had no taste for its services. Their huge extended Sororities—families somewhere between a clan and a club, I remember seeing in one of the many documentaries I have taped—are largely self-sufficient. They are not a buying and selling people.

  Serracord was a free swimmer outside the Sorority family net.

  “My wander years,” the Shian explained as it put music on the micro system and hunted in the fridge for something we could drink. The cold blue light caught the alien features in a way that sent a prickle right down to the bottom of my scrotum. We were here to have sex. There was no other purpose to the invitation to the flat above the bagel shop. I felt dizzy. I felt afraid. I wanted to run, but something stronger held me in the seat by the window overlooking Salmon Lane. Serracord brought two bottle of imported lager and sat opposite me. The street lights illuminated one half of our faces, threw the other into shadow. “It’s our way. When we mature, we leave our birth families and travel the world, going places, seeing things, meeting people, falling in love and falling in lust, falling out again as the seasons come and go, until we find a new place to settle. We’re a hunting people, a people of the open plains. That’s why we colonize worlds: racial wander years. I’m between worlds.”

 

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