Young Writers Society

Kirby could have done without the spaceship.

She’d had a hell of a day, the lowlights of which had included, but were not limited to, the alarm clock failing to go off, the mad dash into work which followed, the discovery that the office air conditioning had chosen this particularly hot day to spontaneously stop working, three hours on hold to the air conditioning repair company, a further hour arguing with the air conditioning repair man (when he turned up) about the nature of the word “broken”, an additional two hours working late to catch up with the paperwork she’d missed while communicating on the topic of air conditioning repair, and the fact that she had finally emerged from the office to discover that someone had crashed a train at Camden Town, injuring no-one but infuriating thousands by putting the entire Northern Line out of commission. It was due to this last that, having tried and failed to board several jam-packed, irately-driven buses, she had opted to just bloody well walk home, a course of action which, ninety minutes and several miles later, having just struggled to the top of Highgate Hill, she was very much regretting.

‘Home’ was a top-floor conversion (attic) in a period property in a stunning location (old house at the top of a hill) with many charming original features (single-glazed sash windows, a draughty fireplace, and a front door that unlocked itself if you kicked it in the right place). She rented the nominally three-bedroom flat with two friends from university, James and Anna, but increasingly seemed to actually be sharing it with Anna and Anna’s boyfriend. The boyfriend was becoming – in fact, had rapidly become and remained – a bit of sticking point, for a variety of reasons, foremost among which were the quantity of dirty socks he generated, his inability to tell one end of a dishcloth from the other, and the fact that he was, not to put too fine a point on it, a complete and utter dick. He’d been a de facto tenant for coming up on two months, now – which, coincidentally, was just slightly longer than the length of time since James had started spending a lot of time at his boyfriend’s flat – and Kirby had an uncomfortable feeling that sometime soon she was going to have to break the cordially venomous silence they’d been maintaining and say something to Anna about it.

She was trudging around the corner into the street on which the embattled flat was found, applying her bad mood with vigour to mental predictions of what fresh squalor she might discover on arrival, when she encountered the spaceship, which threw her out of the groove slightly.

It was parked, or at least, stopped, in the middle of the road. It looked … well. It looked both utterly alien and incredibly familiar. It appeared very much unlike a thing that would be at home in any of the blockbuster sci-fi films currently showing at the cinema in town, while at the same time, being quite undeniably a mode of transport which ought not to be sat in the middle of a residential road in North London.

The best description is perhaps this: if, back in the 1970s, the Ford Motor Company had taken an executive decision to stop all that messing around with highly successful Cortinas and Capris, and had instead turned to filling the much-neglected niche of affordable family spaceships, and if their product design team for this bold new venture had decided that pyramids were, generally, a pretty good shape for such a vehicle, but could perhaps be improved by having, not four sides, as might be considered usual for pyramids, but rather eight, or twelve, or indeed sixteen; if all this had been the case, then the thing sitting a few yards in front of Kirby Hollins would have been instantly recognisable as, say, a classic Mk II in Aztec Bronze, with one careful owner and just a couple of hundred light years under its belt.

As it was, it was mostly just recognisable as a blocky, pyramidal lump of metal.

Kirby wondered if she’d missed a notice about location filming for something – but there wasn’t a camera crew in sight. Cautiously, she edged along the length of the three cars separating her from the spaceship, peering at the blocky angles and slightly tinted windows as she went. Just as she decided that it wasn’t doing anything interesting, and that the way it neatly filled the entire street and blocked the two cars on either side of the road into their parking spaces was somebody else’s problem, and started to cross over the street in front of it, it made a sound, causing her to perform a magnificent deer-in-headlights impersonation in the middle of the tarmac.

The sound was a laboured, whining whir, and it was followed by a laboured, whining groan, and one of the spaceship’s many sides began to inch away from its fellows, rotating with some effort around an unseen hinge at the bottom. It creaked slowly out until the tip of the triangle that was presumably a door was about half a foot away from the tip of the rest of the pyramid, and then it swung the rest of the way to the ground with an ear-splitting screech and a head-splitting clang, all of six inches away from the spot where, until that split-second, Kirby’s feet had been.

As of that split-second, Kirby’s feet were some distance away, having followed the rest of her body when she had flung it backwards, away from the descending sheet of metal and into a rather ungainly sprawl. Her hands registered a number of complaints about this manoeuvre and the resulting lack of skin on her palms, but her brain was not paying attention, because her eyes were very much focused on the now-exposed doorway of the spaceship, and the almost cartoonishly alien figure framed in the light spilling forth from within.

It was very tall, very pale, and very slender – of course. Its head, naturally, was incredibly bulbous, and narrowed, as one would expect, to a very pointed chin. It goes without saying that the eyes on this head were large, ovoid and entirely black, so that the nearby streetlight reflected quite clearly in them.

Kirby stared at the alien, and felt annoyed. Not only had this … this being turned up on her street, prolonging a day that already felt twenty-five hours long, and almost flattened her with its spaceship door to boot, now it was standing there in front of her, looking more like an alien than any real alien had any right to look. It wasn’t on. She scrambled to her feet, all fired up to tell it just what she thought of aliens that parked in the middle of quiet, residential streets in North London.

“What the hell?” she began. “You can’t just –”

The alien pottered down the shallow ramp formed by the open spaceship door, and peered at Kirby with an air of suppressed excitement. It gabbled something unintelligible, and then called back over its shoulder something else that Kirby completely failed to understand. In response, presumably, three more figures, one tall and two short, appeared in the doorway and scuttled down to huddle beside the first alien, large eyes fixed on the bewildered and irate woman before them, who suddenly lost the thread of the rant she’d been about to deliver.

“Whadd’you want?” she said, narrowing her eyes at them.

The second tall figure was holding something, she noticed, which it now handed with some ceremony to the first. It was a book of some description, which the first figure began to thumb through rapidly, muttering under its breath. The lettering on the cover was as unfamiliar to Kirby as the language the alien had spoken, but the glossy photo below the book’s title was one of those sweeping shots of the Thames that, by some magic of lighting or Photoshop, made the river look like a sunny, pleasant place to spend time. Kirby recognised the book with a jolt – she’d seen the like clutched in the hands of every bright-eyed, camera-toting tourist that ever got lost on the Underground. It was a guide book of London.

The lead alien seemed to have found the page he – now that she’d made the tourist connection, Kirby couldn’t help but frame the unearthly quartet as mum, dad and two kids on holiday – was looking for. He stared at it for a long moment, moving his lips silently, then looked up at Kirby and said, drawing each syllable out carefully, “Good night … kind … stranger. What is the way to … South Ken-sing-ton?”

Kirby blinked.

She opened her mouth. And closed it again.

Quietly, and without fuss, the part of her brain responsible for logical and reasonable explanations got up and walked away, explaining as it went, quite reasonably, that this was where it got off.

The alien waited, expectantly.

The rest of Kirby’s brain realised that some kind of response was required, and, after some hunting, managed to find and turn on the autopilot.

“Er,” Kirby said. “You, er, you’re too far north,” she said. “You want to go that way.” She pointed over her shoulder to the south-west. “About … five miles, I think.”

The lead alien bobbed cheerfully, bent his head back to his guidebook, and looked up again to give her a cheerful, “Thank you!” He turned to the other aliens arrayed beside him, and gabbled something that Kirby suspected would translate as “back in the car, everyone!”. They turned and shuffled back up the ramp, the two tall aliens shepherding the small ones with gentle waves of their elongated arms. At the top of the ramp, the one who had spoken turned back, wafted an arm in Kirby’s direction, and said again, “Thank you!”

The ramp raised itself creakily off the ground by a few inches, and then swung the rest of the way shut with a clang that made Kirby jump, for all she was expecting it this time. She stood and stared at the bizarre pyramid, which made a great deal of determined revving, before leaping suddenly twenty foot into the sky above her.

And then it was gone.

Kirby stood in the middle of the road for a few minutes longer, replaying the interaction in full in the cinema of her memory. It didn’t make any more sense the second time around, but she did find herself filling up with the kind of serene confidence that often turns up when one has reached the limit of things that can be coped with in one go.

A car turned into the street, and slammed on its brakes to avoid decorating its bumper with the serenely confident young woman standing in the middle of the road. It flashed its headlights and honked its horn, to show what it thought of this state of affairs.

Kirby turned and looked at the car, nodded once to it, strode calmly across to the pavement, and made it the rest of the way down the street without incident. On the back of which success, she decided, on the way up the stairs, she might just take this evening to giftwrap a piece of her mind for Anna’s darling boyfriend…

And that would probably make up for the spaceship.  

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1903 words. Written for Show Us Your Shorts Month.