Free Human Croquet by Kate Atkinson Page A

table knitting something as delicate as a cobweb in a pattern of cockleshells and ‘silver bells’?
    ‘Hearts.’
    ‘It’s beautiful,’ I say, fingering its snowy falls. ‘A shawl, for my sister’s first grandchild,’ Mrs Baxter says. ‘You remember, Rhona in South Africa.’ Mrs Baxter always looks sad when babies are mentioned, perhaps because she’s lost several babies herself. ‘Never mind,’ I try to comfort her, ‘you’ll be a grandmother one day, I expect,’ and Audrey, who’s standing at the cooker making unseasonable convalescent hot chocolate, accidentally knocks over the milk pan, sending it crashing to the floor.
    When I come back from Sithean I find Charles has also returned and is sitting on a deck-chair amongst the ruins of the barbecue. The new-found shoe has disappeared back into obscurity. When closely questioned, Vinny – whose waste-disposal motto is, ‘if it doesn’t move, burn it’ (and sometimes if it does move too) – admits to having barbecued it.
    I pull out a deck-chair and join him in the twilight garden. The rooks are coming home late, hurtling on their rag wings towards the Lady Oak, racing the night, caw-caw-caw . Maybe they’re afraid of being transformed into something else if they don’t get back to the tree in time, before the sun dips below the horizon that saucers blackly beyond the tree. Perhaps they’re frightened of shifting into human shape.
    What’s it like to be a caw-cawing crepuscular rook ripping through the sables of night? A black bird flying high over the chimney-pots and blue-slate roofs of the streets of trees? The last rook, a straggler, dips its wing in salute as it flies overhead. What do we look like from the air? A bird’s-eye view? Pretty insignificant, I expect.
    ‘Shape-shifting,’ Charles says dreamily, ‘that would be interesting, wouldn’t it?’
    ‘Shape-shifting?’
    ‘Into an animal or a bird or something?’
    ‘What would you like to be, Charles?’
    Charles, still wretched at having lost the shoe, shrugs his shoulders indifferently and says, ‘A dog, maybe,’ and then adds hastily, ‘a proper dog,’ as he catches sight of Gigi squatting indecorously in the middle of the lawn.
    ‘Maybe people can shape-shift into replicas of themselves,’ Charles says after a pause, ‘and that’s how you get doppelgängers?’
    ‘Oh, do shut up, Charles, you’re giving me a headache,’ I say irritably. Sometimes Charles’ ideas are just too complicated to bear thinking about.
    ‘Do you think the aliens are already here?’ he carries on relentlessly.
    ‘Here?’ (On the streets of trees? For heaven’s sake!)
    ‘Living on the earth. Among us.’
    Wouldn’t we have noticed? Perhaps not. ‘What do they look like – little green people?’
    ‘No – just like us.’
    Just because you feel alienated, I explain to Charles, it doesn’t mean you’re actually an alien , but he turns his face away, disappointed in me.
    It’s quite dark by now, the moon pale and distant, a white coin flipped up into a sky the colour of washable ink. The stars are all out, sending their indecipherable messages. Starlight, starbright. Debbie comes out into the garden and asks us what on earth we are doing out here in the dark and Charles says, ‘Starbathing.’ Really, the sooner he can hitch a ride back to his own planet the better.
    * * *
    I lie in bed for a long time trying to get to sleep even though I’m bone-weary. Wouldn’t it be peculiar if Charles was right? If we came from somewhere else, far, far away and didn’t know it? Perhaps on our own planet things are much better, like in the parallel world. The parallel planet.
    I wait for the noise of gravel, like flaw-blown sleet, on my windowpane. I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight – Malcolm Lovat shinning up the Virginia creeper that’s slowly smothering Arden and entering my bedroom window so that our two bodies can melt into one. (‘Melt?’ Carmen says