‘Are you going to stand there all night?’ asked the young bum.
Homer thought this might be an invitation to sit down, but wasn’t sure. Nor was he sure if he could trust this person. But something impelled him to trust him. He wanted to trust him.
‘God takes it in the ass,’ said Homer as if giving a password, which in fact wasn’t far from what he intended.
‘You said it, man. Shit.’
This didn’t sound like a coded reply.
‘Anyway, yeah. I’m the one who writes that stuff.’
Homer said nothing and didn’t move.
‘I’m Kurt.’
Homer racked his brains for something to say next, since it was clearly his turn again. Finally he thought of something.
‘Homer B. Alienson.’
This was an extremely rare occurrence for him. It usually took him far longer to break down the barrier that he put between himself and others.
‘Homer B. Alienson,’ repeated Kurt. Then: ‘What does the B stand for?’
‘Boddah,’ said Homer, astonished at his own ability to reply without hesitation.
‘I used to have a friend called that. Boddah.’
Was this a pure coincidence? Homer wasn’t inclined to believe in coincidences. Life had taught him that they were very rare. There was always a design. Or almost always.
Kurt had turned away and resumed what he had been doing before.
‘Are you fishing?’ asked Homer.
‘I’ve got to eat something. Eating fish is okay. They don’t have feelings like other animals.’
‘They’re poisonous.’
‘Nah. You’re confusing them with snakes.’
‘The fish in this river are as poisonous as snakes.’
‘I’ll make sure I don’t get bitten, then.’
‘You’ll die anyway. The problem’s the water. It’s the water that’s poisonous,’ Homer said. ‘You can’t eat those fish.’
‘Fuck you,’ said Kurt, addressing the fish, or maybe the water. Or maybe Homer, who knows.
‘Is this where you live?’
‘Temporary accommodation. I got kicked out of my home. Sometimes I sleep in a friend’s van, other times I come here.’
‘What do you do in the daytime?’
‘I go to the library.’
‘The Public Library?’ Although he had stopped working there, and Aberdeen only had one library, to Homer this was a coincidence that required verification.
‘Sure. I read and take notes. Sometimes I go to sleep.’
Whenever he heard the word ‘sleep’, Homer couldn’t help shuddering, with a kind of cosmic regret. ‘What books?’ he asked.
‘What books what?’
‘What books d’you read?’
‘I like writers whose names begin with B.’
‘Like Boddah,’ said Homer on an impulse.
Kurt smiled. A smile that was more of a grimace than a smile. ‘Yeah, like Boddah.’ He had turned around now. There under the bridge, with the damp seeping out from every dark corner, Homer saw that the boy’s shadow was a shivering mass, a variegated repertoire of nervous tics and muscular twitches.
‘What about you?’
‘Me?’
‘Yeah, you. D’you wander around under bridges every night?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘I usually walk in the woods.’
He was on the point of telling him about the times he lay down on the riverbank to scream into the night, but restrained himself.
‘What’s the matter, don’t you like sleeping?’
Homer considered the question.
‘Well?’
‘It’s not that I don’t like it. I can’t.’
‘You can’t?’
Homer shook his head ruefully.
Kurt cracked his knuckles. One of those tics of his. One of the most frequent, Homer was later to learn.
‘It’s because of the people.’
Kurt looked at him.
‘The different people, I mean.’
‘And how long is it since you last slept?’
‘It’s eighteen years.’
‘What’s eighteen years?’
‘Since I last slept.’
‘Eighteen years?’
‘Eighteen.’
Kurt cracked his knuckles. ‘Fuck. Some problem you got there.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t you wish you could sleep sometimes?’
‘Yeah.’
Kurt sighed, gazed at a point far away in the night and said: ‘What you need is to find a system.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I have problems with people too, Boddah.’
‘Homer.’
‘Yeah, sorry. Homer.’
The rainy scent of the night grew more intense. ‘You have problems with people too,’ Homer prompted.
‘The different ones, I mean.’
‘The different ones.’
Kurt didn’t continue.
‘The different ones,’ Homer repeated.
‘Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Isn’t that right?’
It was, indeed, dead right. ‘Yeah,’ said Homer.
‘I was an alien too, when I was a kid,’ said Kurt. ‘I was convinced my dad and mom weren’t my real parents. I thought I was from another planet. I wanted to be from another planet. Real bad. At night I’d stand at the window and talk to my real parents. My family in the skies. My real family.’
This guy really seems to know the score, Homer said to himself.
‘And I thought there must be thousands of other alien kids. Kids from another world who’d been dropped off all over the place by mistake. I hoped I’d meet one of them, sooner or later. Maybe I did, I’m not sure. Maybe all kids are aliens, when they’re born. Then they change.’
‘They become different,’ concluded Homer.
‘Yeah, that’s about it.’
Homer waited for the boy to get to the point. But after a lapse of time that might have been a couple of minutes - an eternity when you’re waiting for someone to say something - he began to suspect that he wasn’t going to get to any point and was going to spend the rest of the night gazing into the darkness. Without saying anything else.
‘What I need is to find a system,’ said Homer, in an attempt to spur