Human.4

'You are such an idiot,' she said.

'What did I do?' I protested.

'I think that it’s text, just not in a language we can read.' She mimicked me with a cruel tone that made it sound a whole lot sillier than when I’d said it. 'What’s that even supposed to mean? And how is it supposed to help us?'

I suppose that it’s time to throw some light on this… oddness . . . that was happening between Lilly and me.

Just to get it out of the way.

Now seems as good a time as any.

You see, I actually went out with Lilly for a few weeks.

This was quite a while before Simon did.

We were a couple of kids at school who fancied each other and ended up being girlfriend and boyfriend.

For a while.

I don’t really need to go into all the details. You . . . well, you know how it is. You spend a few break times together, you hold hands, you write their name in an exercise book or two, feel stupidly jealous if you see them talking to any other boy. You laugh at each other’s jokes, and find yourself thinking about them when you’re not together.

I even went back to her house once.

Just once.

That was kind of the trouble, really.

I was invited round for 'tea' one evening.

Lilly’s family live in the old village store. From the road it’s pretty unremarkable: a flinted facade of the kind that’s common in Millgrove; a couple of bay windows that were probably display windows when the place was a shop; a nondescript front door.

I’d never given it a second look.

It looked like an ordinary house.

When I walked through the front door, trailing behind Lilly, I found myself in a room that was shop-sized. Literally. The whole ground floor of my house would have fitted in that one room.

It had a black-beamed ceiling and what looked like an acre of parquet flooring. There was a grand piano in there and it didn’t take up much of the available space. There were two vast but somehow elegant sofas that must have cost thousands of pounds; there were oil paintings of horses and hounds on the walls that were . . . well, real paintings, not prints.

I’d never seen anything like it. Not in real life. And I realized two things:

1. Lilly’s parents were far wealthier than she had ever let on, and

2. I could never invite her back to my house.

I pictured showing Lilly into the front room of my house: a tiny room with no art on the walls, no piano, a little old TV and a tatty three-piece suite.

I imagined how bad, how ashamed, that would make me feel.

And then I met her parents.

Lilly’s mother prepared the food on a huge, enameled Aga. We sat on wooden pews around an ancient table, and Lilly’s parents made conversation that was bright, witty and very, very clever. They talked about music, literature and art; they made instant jokes and witty asides, and they made me feel so uncultured and stupid that I squirmed in my seat every time they spoke to me.

I pictured taking Lilly back to meet my folks.

Discussions about rubbish television.

Chris and his endless chatter about football.

I felt ashamed at the very thought of it.

I started avoiding her soon after.

I invented phoney reasons and engineered even phonier arguments.

I stood her up. Twice.

Time passed, she got the message, and she broke up with me.

Then, while I was playing at being dad, I neglected Simon. I was too busy. Or thought I was. And in that time he and Lilly became friends.

Then more than friends.

And I hated my parents for not being like Lilly’s parents.

I hated my mum for not having an Aga.

I hated my dad for leaving us.

I hated them both for letting my best friend get the girl I had been too embarrassed to have for myself.

I never told Lilly why I acted the way I did. She must have thought I was the world’s biggest jerk.

At least she hadn’t seen the truth.

Now, next to her at Mrs O’Donnell’s house, I realized that sniping at me was partly her way of dealing with things. Just as mine was making jokes and Mr Peterson’s was to cut himself off from it all, to deny its existence.

If her comments also meant she was paying me back for being such an idiot to her, then I reckoned I deserved it.

'I’m only saying that the groupings of symbols could be words,' I said calmly. 'Maybe we just don’t understand the language they’re written in.'

There was a moment of silence and, in the space between sounds, I thought I heard something. Something outside and probably distant, but as I listened harder it seemed to be getting closer.

It was a weird, disquieting sound, a bit like distant thunder, but somehow more electrical sounding.

Synthetic thunder?

What was I thinking?

'It makes no difference,' Mrs O’Donnell said bleakly. If she had heard the sound, she didn’t show it. 'The television can’t pick up a signal. The computer displays these weird symbols. The phones are down. So are the radios.'

She turned the computer off in disgust and turned around to face us.

'We’re on our own for now,' she said.

In the silence that followed I realized that the odd sound I had heard had stopped.

Had it just been a symptom of my already overstretched imagination?

Or was there really something out there?

Something that roared like counterfeit thunder?

That was moving towards us, silently now?

I shuddered and looked to Mrs O’Donnell for some kind of reassurance.

The fear in her eyes told me there was none there to be found.

Chapter 11

I guess I have always believed that grown-ups have all the answers.

They behave as if they do.

Looking at Mrs O’Donnell’s face I suddenly realized something. It’s not true. Adults are just making things up as they go along. And when they’re scared, adults have no more answers than us kids.

Mrs O’Donnell was scared and she didn’t know what to do. Everything that she knew and thought had been—