Space Invaders
by Laura Williamson.
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Shortly after my father was made redundant, he lost his mind. His madness took a specific form – he became convinced that aliens were planning to invade. For weeks he sat out on the front porch, scanning the skies in search of a mother ship, the shotgun that he used to shoot ducks with resting in his lap. Mostly he was silent, but from time to time he would shake his fist and yell, “Come on ya bastards, I’m ready for ya. Bring it on. Bring it bloody on.”
We lived on a small hobby farm, six sheep, six cows, a couple of goats, a dam on which ducks and swans swam. Our farm, he thought, would make the perfect landing place. I’d tried to convince him to calm down and be sensible and come inside, but he wasn’t having any of it. He even slept out there, dozing in his chair, his head falling down to rest on his chest, just little cat naps, nothing major. He often stayed awake right through the night; he said that he didn’t want them to catch him sleeping. That, he said, would be the end of the world.
“Could be I’m the only thing that comes between them and the destruction of humanity,” he’d say. “Without me the rest of you could be doomed, doomed.”
“Christ, who does he think he is?” I asked. “The saviour of mankind. Please. Spare it.”
“Just leave him,” Mum said, as I stood beside Dad’s chair, begging and pleading with him to quit acting like a crazy man and come inside and join the rest of us. “Leave him be.”
She took him plates of food – corned beef and spuds, spaghetti bolognaise, roast beef with horseradish sauce. He would pick half-heartedly at the meal, and then put the plate down on the porch, lean back in his chair and yell, “Tea, Moira. More tea.” He took it black, strong, three teabags in every cup, no sugar, drank it in vast quantities, ten or more cups a day, gulping the hot liquid back. It kept him upright and alert. It kept him going.
He claimed to have picked up messages regarding the invasion on one of the many radios he collected, that were kept in the garden shed. Pre-invasion fever he’d been an accountant - he worked for a local firm, Johnson & Regus. A bean counter. He considered the work beneath him; he’d assumed that life held greater things in store. He was crippled by the gap between what he’d wanted to achieve and what he wound up attaining. He hadn’t intended to end up in the suburbs, locked in his white picket fence life, a salary slave. He’d hoped to become a great inventor, summoning up creations such as never before known to humankind. The da Vinci of his generation. But instead of dreaming up the modern day equivalent of a helicopter prototype, such as (for instance) a spaceship that could glide to distant planets, he tallied up debits and credits, his days lost in a haze of Excel spreadsheets and meaningless graphs. He had the notion that somewhere, ages back, he’d taken a wrong turn, gone left when he should’ve gone right, pulled into a parking bay when he should’ve kept driving. Simultaneously, contradictorily, he seemed to think that it was not him who had made bad decisions, but fate who had dealt him a cruel blow, refused to take care of him, let him down in indescribable ways.
Attempting to drown the disappointments of his life, he threw himself into his hobbies. His evenings had settled into a predictable routine. He would sit at the dinner table, unspeaking, mechanically eating his food, like a wind-up toy. Before the rest of us were even half-finished he’d push back his chair and head out to the shed, leaving his plate for his wife to clear away. He’d lurk out there in the shed for hours, wiring and re-wiring, twiddling with dials, seeing what he could pick up on short wave, before returning inside and falling asleep beside his wife. On the afternoon of his redundancy he came home and, without even breaking the news to the rest of us about his loss of job, he’d gone straight out to the shed. That was when the message had arrived, crackling, like thunder rolling in across the ocean. He didn’t tell us exactly what was said, but when he came back into the house he was convinced that an invasion was imminent. He was distracted, wide-eyed, twitchy, like a man possessed. Restless, he paced the house, unable to sit still for more than a second. Ants in his pants.
“Harold,” said my mother. “Harold, what is it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”
“Well, it must be something.”
“Alright, alright, I’ve been made redundant.”
“Oh love. Oh love. Listen, never mind. You’ll find another job. And weren’t you starting to get tired of that one anyway? You pulled an awful lot of sickies over the last five years. You seemed to be home more often than not.”
“Yea whatever.” He continued pacing, walking the length of the lounge and back, ceaseless, relentless, like a caged jungle animal.
“Is that all? Is there something else you’re not telling me?”
He shot her a fierce, dark look. “They’re coming,” he said. “They’re on their way.”
His eyes were wide, ferocious, possessed. He turned on his heels and stomped back out to the shed.
I followed him, but only so far. I stood outside, beneath the Milky Way with its wild, wheeling stars, the moon full and bright overhead. For a long time I lingered there in the darkness, looking in through the lit window of the shed as, inside, my father hunched over one of his renovated radios, his head pressed up to the speaker, waiting for further messages to come through.
God help us, I thought. What will become of us now that the old boy’s gone round the twist? It had been a gradual thing. It was not out of the blue. There had been signs.
As a child, my father had been struck by lightning. He’d been following his own Dad round the golf course acting as caddy when it’d happened, electricity falling from the sky, a jagged, spiteful finger, avoiding all the other golfers and striking him in the head. Why him? What’d he had that made him so special, that’d singled him out as a target? Why had he been chosen and the others ignored? It hadn’t hurt; it was over so quickly that he hadn’t really known too much about it. He woke up in hospital with second degree burns, three of his four limbs in bandages. His eyebrows and eyelashes had gone, along with half of the hair on his head. What am I doing here? he asked, and later What’s my name? Can anyone remember my name? Harold, a nurse told him softly. Your name’s Harold. But the name itself didn’t mean anything; it was attached to an empty vessel. It didn’t belong to him, nothing did, nothing was his anymore. He’d been wiped out, obliterated. He searched his mind for memories, but found none. He was a blank slate; tabula rasa. The doctor said he was lucky to be alive and that he would need careful nurturing if he was ever to return to full health. It was his mother, Sylvie, who tended to him, helped him understand who he’d once been, who he was. She showed him photographs, as if to jog him back to himself.
Here you are fishing, standing next to me on the end of a wharf. Here you are playing cricket for the school team. Here you are receiving your prize for coming first in mathematics.
Piece by piece, he remembered himself. Piece by piece, he put himself together, a patchwork made of memories, stitched together with flimsy black thread. He was a boy that could come apart at any time. He was something for Sylvie to molly-coddle. He spend the rest of his childhood cosy inside the cocoon she spun around him, often home from school, whether genuinely sick or not (a pattern that continued into his working life), envisaging his weird little visions, dreaming of the day when his inventions would conquer the world. Dreaming of all the things that would never come to pass.
It wasn’t Dad who had told me about the lightning incident, it was Mum. Dad could act weird sometimes, moody and silent one minute, prone to violent outbursts the next, as if he was a lightning storm himself. As if the lightning had acted as a kind of reverse ECT – rather then balancing out his moods, it had unbalanced him. One second he would be catatonic, lying in his bed, refusing to get up and go to work, the next he would be bouncing round the house singing,
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy, when skies are grey…
Or something like that. The doctor had told him to take up a second hobby to help him to relax, to distract his mind.
The radios are not enough, the doctor said. You need something more.
He’d chosen painting. He set up his easel in the spare room, stating, if it’s good enough for Churchill, it’s good enough for me. Sometimes I could hear him in there late at night, throwing paint around, Pollock-style, muttering to himself. He often missed the canvas and hit the walls – they were coated in splattered colour, great, vivid dollops of it. Mum tried to convince him to put on an exhibition, suggesting that it might help boost his sense of self-worth, but he’d turned up his nose at the idea.
What do you think I am? A battery hen? Valued only for what I produce?
He clucked and flapped his arms about a bit, then went back to the spare room and cranked up the Mozart he liked to listen to while he worked. Mum felt the need to provide some sort of explanation for his unpredictable behaviour.
I want you to know that your father’s lived through rather a lot in his time. Things that could scar a person. Catastrophes. Acts of God. He was once struck by lightning. She launched into the story of Dad and the golf course and how he’d once forgotten completely who he was. I didn’t really understand her when she started up with that kind of talk; I thought she was just making excuses for him.
Can’t he be fixed? I asked her one day, as she stood at the kitchen sink, peeling veges for our dinner.
She stopped what she was doing, put down the peeler, spun to face me.
Your father, dear girl, is one of life’s Great Unfixables. It’s best you get that straight in your head.
It was as clear as a pane of newly cleaned glass – Dad was something for us to tip-toe around. Somebody to handle with kid gloves.
Our hall cupboard was full of supplies that he’d bought for when they showed up; canned fruit, canned veges, SPAM, candles, torches, batteries, fishing gear, the works. The items that had once resided in there, the towels, the linen, the washcloths, had been shunted onto the floor to make room for what he termed ‘necessities.’ I woke up one morning and the door of the hall cupboard stood open and you could see that a lot of stuff was missing. He’d taken other things as well; painkillers from the medicine cabinet, his walking stick, his shotgun, three of our best knives from the kitchen.
“Dad?” I yelled. “Dad?”
We searched the entire house but he was nowhere.
“Oh Christ,” said Mum. “Oh Christ. I knew something like this was going to happen.”
If you knew it was going to happen, I thought, why the hell didn’t you do something to prevent it, but I didn’t say anything aloud. Instead, I put one arm around her shoulders and told her that everything was going to be okay, even though I didn’t really believe that it was. It wasn’t until later on that day that we found the note, penned in bright red ink, impaled on a toothpick that was stuck into a bit of steak he’d put in the fridge to defrost.
I can’t fend them off single-handedly, it said. The time grows nigh. Save yourselves.
So weird. Why steak? But I’d given up, by then, on trying to understand my father’s mind, his thought patterns that looped and spiralled like an out of control fighter plane, his curious little habits. His strange ways.
He’d always been unusual, but since his redundancy his behaviour had become increasingly bizarre. There’s no such thing as normal, they say, but sitting out on the front porch for seven weeks waiting for aliens to land, then buggering off and leaving your family with nothing more by way of farewell than a note impaled to a piece of steak in the freezer would probably qualify, in most people’s book, as abnormal. After the redundancy it’s like it wasn’t even really him there anymore, as if somebody else had taken up residence in his body. One of those aliens, maybe, that he’d spent so much time raving on about. Maybe it’d all been a ruse, sitting out there, waiting for them to land, all cunningly designed to throw us off his path, to keep us distracted, while his fellow invaders from outer space took up residence inside our actors, our politicians, our novelists. Took over our businessmen and women, our shopkeepers and housewives and librarians. Took over planet earth.
“He’ll come back,” said Mum.
But would he? She seemed willing to just let Dad go, let him waft off elsewhere, like a kite whose flier has let go of its string. But me, I couldn’t give up just like that. I had to keep hanging on – it was in my nature. I didn’t know how to let go.
He hadn’t gone very far. I found him at the end of our property, standing by the river that flowed down into the dam. He wore a green papier mâché alien mask. The eyes on it were enormous, white and bulging, bug eyes. A tube hung from his mouth, held on by a thick black elastic strap that encircled his head. It looked like a piece of old vacuum cleaner hose. It made him look elephantine. He was making weird noises, like a cornered animal, breathing in and out through that tube. Snuffling.
“They got me,” he said. “They got me. I’m one of them, dear, I’m one of them. Get away, get away.”
There was a whirring in the sky and then a great sucking sensation, like being hoovered up inside a tornado.
“We come in peace,” I thought I heard somebody mutter and then there was nothing, just the vast darkness of outer space and the earth a tiny, spinning blue and green marble receding beneath the two of us as we were beamed up into the heavens.
©2005 By Laura Williamson