The Loneliness of Distant Beings

Chapter Nine

I'm there without really knowing how I got there. Production Bay 6, where I know he'll be working, and I see him and he sees me and there's this moment where he looks surprised and I wonder if I should have come, especially with the way he looks around a little as he walks over.

'Hey,' Dom says. 'What are you doing here?'

'I guess . . . I just . . . wanted to see you.'

It's weird how he takes this – he watches me, so serious for a moment, then he smiles a little, then he doesn't again, then he says, 'Oh man, Seren, it's . . . ' and shakes his head. Then he makes this weird growling noise to himself like he's completely, I don't know, frustrated, and just when I say, 'Look, I'll . . . I'm just gonna head home. I shouldn't have come,' he takes hold of my sleeve and says, 'No, stay.'

And so I do.

He says he has a couple of things to do before he finishes shift and so we walk over to this big set of double doors, he pushes this huge red button that opens them and we're inside where it is almost completely dark, smells vaguely like puke but sweeter, and is warmer than anything I've ever known. All around us there's this clucking, this soft sound. He answers a question I didn't need to ask:

'The chickens.'

We walk then, down the aisles between the cages with hundreds of thousands of them, packed in on both sides and there is just the tiniest amount of light, a dim bulb every hundred metres or so, and this is why we can see nothing at all of them really except the odd glimpse of light caught in their little round black eyes or glancing off their feathers. And it just seems so sad to me suddenly – so bottomlessly, achingly sad – that all they exist for is to lay eggs for us, to make meat, to occasionally breed and make more chickens, all just to float in a dark tin can in space at our whim. This is when I look at Dom and he has stopped next to a cage, opened it, reached a hand in, and picked one up so tenderly, holding her out towards me where I can touch her, touch the first bird I have ever touched, and she is amazing.

'So, I was watching Huxley-3 yesterday,' he says. 'At View. I wondered if I'd see you, actually.'

I smile. 'You did? You could have . . . called me.'

'I don't know.' He laughs a little, shakes his head. 'Like I said, I guess I probably shouldn't do things like that. Call you, I mean.' He looks at me, watching my face while I can't keep a smile off it.

'Well, look, why not?' I say. 'We're friends, aren't we?'

He seems to think about this for a moment, then nods, shrugs. 'That's true. Why shouldn't I call my friend and see if she wants to come and check out our friendly neighbourhood planet with me?'

'No reason at all.' I smile.

'In that case, next time, maybe I will.'

'And, I mean, if I want to come and see my friend at the end of his shift once in a while, why shouldn't I just go ahead and do that?'

'Not a reason in the world.' He smiles and I realise how quickly he can make me forget everything, everything except him, even when it's all such a mess, and he must see something on my face, he must see the shadow that crosses it, because he says, 'Bad day?'

And I say, 'I've had better.'

And he says, 'Tell me.'

And I say, 'Sick of this place.'

And he says, 'Yeah, that happens,' and nods, and all this time he carries on stroking the chicken, moving it around in his hands a little so that we are both watching the way she keeps her head steady no matter how you move her body, which makes us both laugh a little bit. 'You just gotta be a bit more like this chicken,' he says. 'Just go with it.'