Matt Haig - The Humans

She had stopped. Her breathing slowed and deepened, and her first question became her only one. ‘Who is she?’ And then: ‘Who is she?’ And soon after: ‘Who is she?’

I was reluctant to speak. Speaking to a human you cared about, I realised, was so fraught with hidden danger that it was a wonder people bothered speaking at all. I could have lied. I could have backtracked. But I realised lying, though essential to keep someone in love with you, actually wasn’t what my love demanded. It demanded truth.

So I said, in the simplest words I could find, ‘I don’t know. But I don’t love her. I love you. I didn’t realise that it was such a big thing. I sort of knew, as it was happening. My stomach told me, in a way it never tells me with peanut butter. And then I stopped.’ The only time I’d come across the concept of infidelity was in Cosmopolitan magazine, and they really hadn’t done enough to explain it properly. They’d sort of said it depends on the context and, you see, it was such an alien concept for me to understand. It was like trying to get a human to understand transcellular healing. ‘I’m sorry.’

She wasn’t listening. She had her own things to say. ‘I don’t even know you. I have no idea of who you are. No idea. If you’ve done this, you really are an alien to me…’

‘Am I? Listen, Isobel, you’re right. I am. I am not from here. I have never loved before. All this is new. I’m an amateur at this. Listen, I used to be immortal, I could not die, I could not feel pain, but I gave that up…’

She wasn’t even listening. She was a galaxy away.

‘All I know, all I know beyond any doubt, is that I want a divorce. I do. That is what I want. You have destroyed us. You have destroyed Gulliver. Again.’

Newton appeared at this point, wagging his tail to try and calm the mood.

Isobel ignored Newton and started to walk away from me. I should have let her go, but bizarrely I couldn’t. I held on to her wrist.

‘Stay,’ I said.

And then it happened. Her arm swung at me with ferocious force, her clenched hand an asteroid speeding towards the planet of my face. Not a slap or a scratch this time but a smack . Was this where love ended? With an injury on top of an injury on top of an injury?

‘I’m leaving the house now. And when I come back, I want you gone. Do you understand? Gone . I want you out of here, and out of our lives. It’s over. Everything. It’s all over. I thought you’d changed. I honestly thought you’d become someone else. And I let you in again! What a fucking idiot!’

I kept my hand over my face. It still hurt. I heard her footsteps head away from me. The door opened. The door closed. I was alone again with Newton.

‘I’ve really done it now,’ I said.

He seemed to agree, but I couldn’t understand him any more. I might as well have been any human trying to understand any dog. But he seemed something other than sad, as he barked in the direction of the living room and the road beyond. It seemed less like condolence and more like warning. I went to look out of the living-room window. There was nothing to be seen. So I stroked Newton one more time, offered a pointless apology, and left the house.

I walked to the nearest shop, a brightly lit and unsympathetic place called Tesco Metro. I bought myself a bottle of Australian wine.

I walked along a cycle path and drank it, singing ‘God Only Knows’. It was quiet. I sat down by a tree and finished the bottle.

I went and bought another. I sat down on a park bench, next to a man with a large beard. It was the man I had seen before. On my first day. The one who had called me Jesus. He was wearing the same long dirty raincoat and he had the same scent. This time I found it fascinating. I sat there for a while just working out all the different aromas – alcohol, sweat, tobacco, urine, infection. It was a uniquely human smell, and rather wonderful in its own sad way.

‘I don’t know why more people don’t do this,’ I said, striking up a conversation.

‘Do what?’

‘You know, get drunk. Sit on a park bench. It seems like a good way to solve problems.’

‘Are you taking the piss, fella?’

‘No. I like it. And you obviously like it or you wouldn’t be doing it.’

Of course, this was a little bit disingenuous of me. Humans were always doing things they didn’t like doing. In fact, to my best estimate, at any one time only point three per cent of humans were actively doing something they liked doing, and even when they did so, they felt an intense amount of guilt about it and were fervently promising themselves they’d be back doing something horrendously unpleasant very shortly.

A blue plastic bag floated by on the wind. The bearded man rolled a cigarette. He had shaky fingers. Nerve damage.

‘Ain’t no choice in love and life,’ he said.

‘No. That’s true. Even when you think there are choices there aren’t really. But I thought humans still subscribed to the illusion of free will?’

‘Not me, chief.’ And then he started singing, in a mumbled baritone of very low frequency. ‘Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone…’

‘What’s your name?’

‘I’m Andrew,’ I said. ‘Sort of.’

‘What’s bothering you? You got beat up? Your face looks like shit.’

‘Yeah, in lots of ways. I had someone love me. And it was the most precious thing, that love. It gave me a family. It made me feel like I belonged. And I broke it.’

He lit the cigarette, which flopped out of his face like a numb antennae. ‘Ten years me and my wife were married,’ he said. ‘Then I lost my job and she left me the same week. That’s when I turned to drink and my leg started to turn on me.’

He lifted up his trousers. His left leg was swollen and purple. And violet. I could see he expected me to be disgusted. ‘Deep vein thrombosis. Effing agony, it is. Effing fucking agony. And it’s gonna bloody kill me one of these days.’

He passed me the cigarette. I inhaled. I knew I didn’t like it, but I still inhaled.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘Winston bloody Churchill.’

‘Oh, like the wartime prime minister.’ I watched him close his eyes and suck on his cigarette. ‘Why do people smoke?’

‘No idea. Ask me something else.’

‘Okay, then. How do you cope with loving someone who hates you? Someone who doesn’t want to see you again.’

‘God knows.’

He winced. He was in agony. I had noticed his pain on the first day, but now I wanted to do something about it. I had drunk enough to believe I could, or at least to forget I couldn’t.

He was about to roll his trousers down, but seeing the pain he was in, I told him to wait a moment. I placed my hand on the leg.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Don’t worry. It’s a very simple procedure of bio-set transference, involving reverse-apoptosis, working at the molecular level to restore and recreate dead and diseased cells. To you it will look like magic, but it isn’t.’

My hand stayed there and nothing happened. And nothing kept on happening. It looked very far from magic.

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m an alien. I’m considered a useless failure in two galaxies.’

‘Well, could you please take your damn hand off my leg?’