The Red Ugly Old Big House By Ken Foxe
“They can’t grasp it,” said my dad, “no matter how hard they try. And we don’t even know we’re doing it.” I nodded obediently, as if to say I understood, but I didn’t really because I was only seven. “Look at that awful house across the road,” he said. “It’s old, it’s red, it’s ugly, and it’s big. Describe it back to me using those words.” “It’s a big, old, red, ugly house,” I said. “You see,” he said, tapping hard on the kitchen table in front of him with his knuckles. “You can’t help yourself. You wouldn’t call it a red ugly old big house. And I never taught you that. You didn’t learn that in school. You just know it. It’s like an unwritten rule.” We were sitting at the kitchen table of our house in Dublin, eating a steaming pile of noodles. I loved everything about my dad, the way he spoke, his flaws and foibles, the way he looked at me with barely-concealed awe when he thought I couldn’t see him. That was before I started to think he was crazy. He’s dead now. He was killed by one of ‘them’. My dad was right all along. That grammatic rule we hardly know exists, it was the aliens’ weakness. They were able to mimic us in almost every way. They could take our shape physically, echo the patterns of our mind, wear the cloak of our religion, but verbally - this one tiny subtle tic of the world’s lingua franca escaped them. It was something about the description of objects that frazzled their minds, a word order we English-speakers cling to like the palmar grasp reflex of an infant child. The way their language painted pictures with words was somehow deeply in conflict with ours, almost as if our system of ordering was repulsive to them. Opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Almost without exception, you cannot break that rule in English, whether living in the UK, USA, Ireland, or Oceania. You can’t say ‘an old big red ugly house’. You just can’t; it sounds all wrong. I’m sure there are similar rules in other languages but I don’t speak any of them well enough to know. I can hear my dad saying this, repeating it, mantra-like, as if it was the most important thing he could ever teach me. Turns out it was. I was maybe nine or ten. We were at the kitchen table, eating tuna pasta again, a favourite of his because it wasn’t so hard to make. “They might get it right 98 times out 100, but eventually – they’ll slip up,” he said. I was nodding intently because his face told me this was important, that this was what consumed him, as if he had broken the Enigma code. “They’re everywhere now,” he said, “they’ve infiltrated every level of government, the military, the media. They’re obviously not strong enough yet to fight us head on. They have to lay the groundwork first. If you suspect one, you have to draw them into conversation, keep them talking. Eventually, you’ll catch them out.” When we finished our dinner, I went to my dad’s study, picked up his heavy Collins dictionary, leafed through the pages, and looked up the word ‘infiltrate’. As the years went by, my dad’s obsession grew – it got too much for me. I began to think my mam’s death from cancer had driven him mad. The fact he barely left the house except to buy necessities, his long rambling internet posts talking about adjectives and word order. I think he lost me for good when he talked about their colony ship being out there, waiting patiently somewhere in the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud, standing by until their frontiersmen were in the right positions. It got worse when he figured out YouTube and started his videos. He would agonise over public appearances and media interviews by the ‘aliens’, parsing their words for the incorrect use of adjectives. How they never slipped up when they had access to an autocue or written script. He had theories that some used hidden earpieces to ensure they got things right. Or he would explain how some spoke perfectly but almost to a fault, like they were constantly re-evaluating the order of their words. I remember that putrid feeling when the other kids at school figured out this man on the internet was my dad. There was a cartoon picture on my locker of a wild bearded figure, standing upon a tiny earth. There was a toy-like spaceship in the stars above him, and these words scrawled in capitals: ‘OLD CRAZY MAN BELIEVES IN SCARY BIG ALIENS.’ I went to university in Manchester, so that I could keep some distance from my dad. I rang him once a week on Sunday, always half-drunk or half-stoned, and would listen to him rambling on for half an hour about the latest ‘alien’ developments before I’d tell him politely I had an early lecture the following morning. And then the words that would end every phone call. “I love you son, you know that don’t you?” Jesus, what I’d give to hear that one more time. Every morning before lectures began, I would open my email to find links to videos of press conferences, TV chat shows, live interviews of all types. There would be meticulously detailed instructions telling me to scroll to exactly eight minutes and thirty two seconds to hear the latest ‘slip up’. Sometimes, one of ‘them’ was even interviewing another of ‘their’ kind; that’s how embedded they were now, he said. “It can’t be long now,” he’d write, “I think they nearly have all the pieces in place.” I never responded to those emails, barely even skimmed them. I wanted to help him but I didn’t know how. He was functional in his own strange way. He drank a little too much and his fingers and crooked teeth were stained by the Camel Lights that were never far from hand. He was inclined to let his hair and beard grow a bit ragged before shaving off the lot, and all he ever wore were tracksuit pants and t-shirts. But he never failed to have a shower each day, even when his ‘alien research’ delayed it until evening time. The family home got paid off by the insurance company when mam died, in a time before I even had memories. Dad always picked up bits of work, writing advertorials and for those supplements in the newspapers – the type people drop straight into the recycling bin. It was enough though to keep him in food, drink, and cigarettes. He would buy them all in bulk on his infrequent excursions from the house. I was only 21. What exactly was I supposed to say? “Dad, you’re a certifiable lunatic and I think you should be locked away in a psychiatric facility.” If only I could talk to him once more – to tell him he was right and I was wrong, and to tell him I knew how much he loved me. The alien ship sent out its SOS, picked up by one of those giant telescopic arrays my dad was forever talking about. The aliens said they were refugees, that they’d been driven from their home planet because of their belief in a religion that bore an uncanny resemblance to our Christianity. Out in deep space, they picked up transmissions from Earth. They had learned English because that seemed the most surefire way of making themselves understood. They pleaded for safe passage, saying any sparsely populated region would do. Somewhere like the wilderness of Wyoming, Montana, Alaska, or even the empty tundra of Northern Canada. There were fewer than 100,000 of them on board the refugee ship, running out of food and near starving. They made assurances that there were no more of them to come. They drank the same water we did, ate the same food, breathed identical air. They had medical technology they were eager to share. And I couldn’t help but notice in those days after the first contact how some of the loudest voices in favour of apportioning them a new ‘homeland’ were the exact same people who appeared most frequently in the videos that my dad sent me. I remember speaking to my dad on the phone one of those evenings. He was in a pure frenzy. He said he had figured out exactly why the aliens were here. He told me to be on my guard with everyone I met, fellow students, lecturers, even my co-workers in the Castlefield coffee shop where I had a part-time job. “They’re on to me,” he said. There had been unidentified vans outside the house. He was convinced his web connection was being interfered with as his YouTube videos wouldn’t upload. A manuscript of his research, which he hoped to publish as a book, went missing from his office drawer. I told him not to worry. It was nearly half-term and I would be back in Dublin soon. “I love you son, you know that don’t you?” he said. My dad died in a house fire two weeks after the aliens made their first contact. The police said he had been smoking in bed but he never smoked in bed; that wasn’t like him at all. I was standing in the garden, my family home a charred ruin, and thinking there was no way a fire that started from a cigarette could have caused this much damage. Across the road from me was the ugly house that he hated so much. I could hear the sound of my dad’s knuckles rapping on the table. I could feel his embrace. I could see his fierce eyes and how he would fall into a sort of paradise just because he saw my face. I don’t know if a man ever cherished a son as much as my dad did. The young chief of police was at the scene, and I remember finding it peculiar that such a senior officer was troubling himself with an ‘accidental’ house fire. He gave me his condolences and shook my hand, his palm a little moist with sweat. “There must’ve been an accelerant in the bedroom that caused it to spread,” he said. ‘Keep them talking.’ I remembered my dad’s words. There was something in the chief of police’s manner that seemed off, like he was uneasy, as he fidgeted with his glasses. This man had hardly gotten this far in life by feeling nervous around a college student who was less than half his age. “I didn’t know a house fire could do so much damage,” I said surveying the blackened remnants. “It can happen.” The police chief was scratching at his ear now looking like he wanted to be elsewhere. “Would your father have stored anything in the bedroom that might have gone up quickly?” “I don’t know. And I never knew him to smoke in bed. He always had his very last cigarette of the day in his office with a glass of brandy. It was nearly a ritual.” The police chief hesitated a moment. “Maybe he had been drinking more than usual.” “I don’t think so,” and I looked him straight in the eye. He wasn’t used to being challenged. “You hadn’t seen him in how long?” he asked. “It’s been a couple of months; since the start of my semester.” “Sometimes, you know, people can struggle when they’re by themselves.” He said it in a way that was meant to subtly apportion a little blame. I answered forcefully, more forcefully than I had intended. “Dad was much the same as always when we’d speak.” The chief of police seemed intent on leaving, like he had taken my measure and found I came up short. I could hear my dad’s words: ‘Keep them talking.’ “Was there anything at all that could be salvaged?” I asked. It was the first question that came to mind even though I knew everything had been destroyed. “I’m afraid not.” And I could see he was now itching to leave, growing ever more uncomfortable, perhaps becoming aware I was gently probing. I racked my brain for other ways to prolong the conversation. “Will it affect the insurance – that it was caused by a cigarette?” “You’d have to talk to the insurers about that,” he said. I couldn’t but notice how abrupt he was now. I kept talking for talking’s sake. “My parents – they’re both gone now; I never really knew my mother, Dad was all I had.” “I know.” He went to leave again. “And who raised the alarm?” I said. “We had a call from one of the neighbours.” “Which one?” He turned around as if seeing the house opposite for the first time. “Those neighbours,” he said gesturing across the road, “from that old red ugly big house.” Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He has written two non-fiction books based on his journalism and when not working, or hanging out with his kids, enjoys writing short stories and speculative fiction.
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