Come Home
A steady drip patters onto my forehead. I poke out my tongue and swill the drops around my mouth but it’s more of a tease than anything. Remembering my milk bottle, I grab it from outside the hedge and gulp down the inch of water.
It’s day time, human time – this body is human, even if I don’t consider myself fully such, and it’s hard to overrule instincts like the sleep cycle. It’s different inRessy, of course, where inbuilt brain-stems give me a different pattern of wakefulness, but I don’t have that luxury now.
In the light, I can finally make out the interior of the hedge I found after running from Grandma Wolf. The ground is clotted with crisp packets and the sad worm of a condom. I push the rubbish into a corner with my heel, then try to find a position to avoid the dripping. With enough contortion, I succeed, but within a second it’s clear that sleep is beyond my reach. My stomach is screaming hunger and my bowels for a shit. At least I think that’s what the sensations mean – sometimes it can be hard to distinguish the two.
Venturing out right now would be foolish; it’s broad daylight and this isn’t far from ShenCorp. I shut my eyes but it feels like my abdomen is in a vice. The fox is asleep but it would be bound to take offence if I shat here; it’s not going to help our relationship if it thinks I’m marking territory. Not to mention that it would be unpleasant to wait out the rest of the day with the smell.
Pain knifes my side again. No choice. I poke my head from the shrub and give a cursory sniff – the iron scent of rain and car fumes. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around, though traffic zips past the mouth of the street. No way to avoid being seen but so long as I’m not recognised it’ll be fine. Being a phenomenaut is all about calculated risk.
The light is cruel in my eyes as I slip out, my muscles uncoiled and impotent, like when I’m cold-blooded and the sun has yet to blush life into me. My tongue runs over the blunt instrument of my teeth; this body has none of the weaponry I’m used to relying on for hunting. Still, I scour the pavement as I walk – you never know what someone might have dropped.
It’s bizarre to stand alongside other humans again, to walk in step as they make their way to work or the shops. I keep expecting someone to call out – ‘impostor’, ‘not human’, ‘not one of us’. Can’t they see through the thinness of skin? I feel I must wear my otherness on my sleeve, but for the most part people don’t even look. The rain helps, people are too busy hurrying to reach the dry to take much note, and yet it seems there really is nothing to mark me out. So I’m almost glad when a suited lady lifts her umbrella to flash my bare feet a frown. Sinking seamlessly into the morass of humanity would feel like a lie.
And yet it makes me queasy to wonder who could be watching. A casual remark passed to the wrong person could end in disaster. At least ShenCorp won’t go to the police. They’ll want to keep this quiet. For a second I ponder going to the station myself but dismiss the thought quickly. Who in their sane mind would believe my story over Mr Hughes?
It must be a recycling day because a green tub sits outside every house and after a bit of rummaging, I find some shoes held together with a rubber band. But they just squeeze against my blisters, so I toss them back.
A small bush overhangs the street, heavy with red berries; even without the ultra-violet allure seen through a bird’s eyes they look tasty, yet eating them wouldn’t be a good idea. I’m going to have to be careful not to confuse foods that are safe inRessy with those the human body can handle. No Buckley to remind me what’s poisonous now.
Finding somewhere to go to the toilet isn’t any easier. I hesitate outside a pub for a good five minutes, not because I don’t believe that I could sneak in without being seen, but the idea of being trapped inside four walls fills me with panic.
In the end I find a patch of scrub in a derelict garden and scrape out a small hole to squat over. The shit is loose and smells worse than it should but this isn’t exactly a surprise, not after my stomach has had nothing but milk and nutrient drip for over a week. I bury it with the earth and stamp it down. Leaving my scent around like this feels risky but Mr Hughes thinks like such a human he can be relied on not to track me by smell.
Back via the pub, the greasy waft of cooking rises from vents below the street. It’s almost too much. On the other side of the building some industrial rubbish bins sit in the side alley. I lift a lid and rummage. Admittedly the human digestive system is more fickle than others but opposable thumbs have their uses – if Tomoko and I had been able to open these we never would have gone hungry.
Sniffing the bags doesn’t reveal much; all I can identify with this nose is the stench of refuse. The only human sense one can ever really rely on is sight, so I pull out a bag at random and gut it. Slimy gunk slides out, wriggling with maggots. Their squirming transfixes me. Those sightless, tender bodies. The stark scent of rot.
My feet stumble back before my thoughts catch up and the lid slams shut. No. Maggots may be a tasty protein snack as a fox but not a good idea in this body.
‘Hey!’
A man stands in the alley entrance. I don’t recognise him from ShenCorp, but that means nothing. I leap up onto the bin and launch myself at the top of the wall. One foot is seized, but then the other connects with flesh and I’m free. I land hard on the other side and launch into a hobbling run.
His shouts thin to nothing at the end of the street – he’s not following, didn’t even try. Not ShenCorp then, surely? Maybe just one of the pub employees. The relief surges into my head and I sink to the pavement.
A woman across the street looks back at me as she pushes on a door, face twisted with pity and fear. What must I look like to her? Some homeless teenager? And yet, isn’t that what I am now?
Animals without territories never last long.
I shrug my chin inside the coat. Until I work out a way to get inside the Centre, I need to figure out how to survive. That means I need shelter, water, food – the three essentials I’d scout out at the beginning of any jump, so why does the thought seem so daunting now?
I grind the ball of a palm into my forehead. Hunger has thinned my thoughts to a thin gruel. InRessy it was never like this; even when my body was starved, it never affected my thinking to this extreme – my brain, back at the Centre, always had enough substance from the nutrient drip.
When it’s clear that pummelling my brow isn’t going to work, I let my head fall back. Black clouds distend the sky, their weight reaching down to settle into my bones. I’m trapped – the past unreachable, the future a gaping chasm; my only option slipping sideways along the numb infinity of nows. If ShenCorp finds me they will lock me up, four tight walls, the stranglehold of their truth, accept it or rot.
I should have seen it coming. People can never stand the challenge of another point of view. It was there when I told people about my job; clear in the curling of lips, or widening of eyes. Once or twice people simply turned away. Animals are just animals, they would proclaim, for eating, for servitude, for entertainment, not for understanding. Buckley would call them idiots, yet it never seemed to me as simple as that. They were more scared than stupid. Sometimes I can almost see it myself: if the sun can’t revolve around the earth and men must be born of monkeys, shouldn’t at least our version of reality go unchallenged? For the alternative is, what? Uncertainty as far as the eye can see. It’s much easier to call any challenge mad, stupid, animal, much easier to silence the alternatives. I curl my fists against the crumbling concrete.
But I’m being watched.
The woman from earlier is at the window, frowning. Though I don’t recognise her, that doesn’t mean anything when it comes to ShenCorp. I rush back to my hedge.
Back inside, I curl up shaking. Sleep still seems an impossibility; the leap from the wall burst my blisters and now my feet throb with the kind of dull hurt that spreads throughout your entire body. It’s just a matter of focus but right now I can’t seem to push the pain away.
During jumps I’m a master of waiting – the long sleepless nights crouched in the roots of a tree or the slow stalk of a hunt, these are the kinds of infinite spaces that will drive you mad if you try to fill them, so instead I learnt to let them fill me. But something more than pain is keeping me from that space right now. Can’t think straight, but can’t not think either. I wrap the babygros around my feet and tug on the knots until the new ache is almost worse than that of the blisters.
At a huff, I look up and see the shadow of the fox stir. it freezes at the sudden movement.
‘Hey, it’s just me.’
But the turn of phrase leaves me cold. ‘Just me.’ I’m not sure who that is any more.