Matt Haig - The Humans

She didn’t seem worried at all.

But of course she should have been. We all should have been. And just how worried we should have been would become clear to me only a few hours later.

She woke me in the middle of the night.

‘I think I heard someone,’ she said. Her voice indicated a tightness of the vocal folds within her larynx. It was fear disguised as calm.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I swear to God, Andrew. I think there’s someone in the house.’

‘You might have heard Gulliver.’

‘No. Gulliver hasn’t come downstairs. I’ve been awake.’

I waited in the near-darkness, and then I heard something. Footsteps. It very much sounded like someone was walking around our living room. The clock’s digital display beamed 04:22.

I pulled back the duvet and got out of bed.

I looked at Isobel. ‘Just stay there. Whatever happens, stay right there.’

‘Be careful,’ Isobel said. She switched on her bedside light and looked for the phone that was usually in its cradle on the table. But it wasn’t there. ‘That’s weird.’

I left the room and waited a moment on the landing. There was silence now. The silence that can only exist in houses at twenty past four in the morning. It struck me then just how primitive life was here, with houses that could not do anything to protect themselves.

In short, I was terrified.

Slowly and quietly I tiptoed downstairs. A normal person would probably have switched the hallway light on, but I didn’t. This wasn’t for my benefit, but for Isobel’s. If she came down and saw whoever it was, and they saw her, well, that could have been a very dangerous situation. Also, it would have been unwise to alert the intruder of my presence downstairs – if they hadn’t already been alerted. And so it was that I crept into the kitchen and saw Newton sleeping soundly (maybe even suspiciously so) in his basket. As far as I could tell, no one else had been in here, or the utility room, and so I left to check the sitting room. No one was there, or no one that I could see anyway. There were just books, the sofa, an empty fruit bowl, a desk and a radio. So then I went along the hallway to the living room. This time, before I opened the door I sensed strongly that someone was there. But without the gifts I had no idea if my senses were fooling me.

I opened the door. As I did so, I felt a deep fear lightening my whole body. Prior to taking human form, I had never experienced such a feeling. What had we Vonnadorians ever had to be scared of, in a world without death or loss or uncontrollable pain?

Again, I saw only furniture. The sofa, the chairs, the switched-off television, the coffee table. No one was there, not at that moment, but we had definitely been visited. I knew this because Isobel’s laptop was on the coffee table. This, alone, wasn’t worrying, as she had left it there last night. What worried me, though, was that it was open. She had closed it. But not only that. The light emission. Even though the computer was facing away from me I could see that the screen was glowing, which meant someone had been using it within the last two minutes.

I quickly went around the coffee table to see what was on the screen, but nothing had been deleted. I closed the laptop and went upstairs.

‘What was it?’ Isobel asked, as I slid back into bed.

‘Oh, it was nothing. We must have been hearing things.’

And Isobel fell asleep as I stared up at the ceiling, wishing I had a god who could hear my prayers.

The next morning Gulliver brought his guitar downstairs and played a bit for us. He had learnt an old piece of music by a band known as Nirvana called ‘All Apologies’. With intense concentration on his face, he kept perfect time. He was very good, and we applauded him afterwards.

For a moment, I forgot every worry.

It turned out that Hamlet was quite a depressing thing to watch when you had just given up immortality and were worried that someone was watching you.

The best bit came half-way through when he looked up at the sky.

‘Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?’ he asked.

‘By th’ Mass,’ said another man, a curtain-fetishist called Polonius, ‘and ’tis like a camel, indeed.’

‘Methinks it is like a weasel,’ said Hamlet.

‘It is backed like a weasel.’

Then Hamlet squinted and scratched his head. ‘Or like a whale.’

And Polonius, who wasn’t really in tune with Hamlet’s surreal sense of humour: ‘Very like a whale.’

Afterwards, we went out to a restaurant. It was called Tito’s. I had a bread salad called ‘panzanella’. It had anchovies in it. Anchovies were a fish, so I spent the first five minutes carefully taking them out and laying them on the side of the plate, offering them silent words of grief.

‘You seemed to enjoy the play,’ said Isobel.

I thought I would lie. ‘I did. Yes. Did you?’

‘No. It was awful. I think it was fundamentally wrong to have the Prince of Denmark played by a TV gardener.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you’re right. It was really bad.’

She laughed. She seemed more relaxed than I had ever seen her. Less worried about me, and Gulliver.

‘There’s a lot of death in it, as well,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you scared of death?’

She looked awkward. ‘Of course, I’m scared to death of death. I’m a lapsed Catholic. Death and guilt. That’s all I have.’ Catholicism, I discovered, was a type of Christianity for humans who like gold leaf, Latin and guilt.

‘Well, I think you do amazingly. Considering that your body is starting a slow process of physical deterioration leading ultimately to…’

‘Okay, okay. Thank you. Enough death.’

‘But I thought you liked thinking about death. I thought that’s why we saw Hamlet .’

‘I like my death on a stage. Not over my penne arrabiata.’

So we talked and drank red wine as people came and left the restaurant. She told me of the module she was being cajoled into teaching next year. Early Civilised Life in the Aegean.

‘They keep trying to push me further and further back in time. Think they’re trying to tell me something. Next it will be Early Civilised Diplodocuses.’

She laughed. So I laughed too.

‘You should get that novel published,’ I said, trying a different tack. ‘ Wider Than the Sky . It’s good. What I’ve read of it.’

‘I don’t know. That one was a bit private. Very personal. Of its time. I was in a dark place. That was when you were… well, you know. We’re over that now. I feel like a different person now. Almost like I’m married to a different person too.’

‘Well, you should write fiction again.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s getting the ideas.’

I didn’t want to tell her that I had quite a lot of ideas I could give her.

‘We haven’t done this for years, have we?’ she said.

‘Done what?’

‘Talk. Like this. It feels like a first date or something. In a good way. It feels like I’m getting to know you.’

‘Yes.’

‘God,’ she said wistfully.

She was drunk now. So was I, even though I was still on my first glass.

‘Our first date,’ she went on. ‘Can you remember?’

‘Of course. Of course.’

‘It was here. But it was an Indian then. What was its name?… The Taj Mahal. You’d changed your mind on the phone after I wasn’t too impressed at the Pizza Hut suggestion. Cambridge didn’t even have a Pizza Express back then. God… twenty years. Can you believe it? Talk about the compression of time through memory. I remember it better than anything. I was late. You waited an hour for me. Out in the rain. I thought that was so romantic.’