The Gate

“What does it mean?” asked Trent.

“How the hell should I know?!” growled Blaine.

Trent looked at his friend, he wanted to say more, that much was clear. But he knew to do so would be folly. When Blaine was in this mood he was a dangerous sort. It was Blaine who had received the message though, so as far as Trent was concerned, it was up to Blaine to decipher it.

“Tell me again what the message said,” Trent asked instead.

You are the keeper of the gate.

Trent had hoped that with a repetition of the words, all would become clear, but this was as clear as swamp water and just as palatable. He’d had more useful messages in fortune cookies. He may as well consult his horoscope for all that it was worth.

He shuddered.

“What is it?” asked Blaine upon seeing Trent shiver uncomfortably.

“Found myself thinking of bloody astrologists,” Trent chuckled dryly.

“Yeah,” Blaine smiled, “not all that appropriate these days is it?”

These days.

There hadn’t been all that many of these days, but already it seemed an age. A new age. An unexpected age. The age of the Squatters. Unwelcome visitors that were outstaying their welcome from the moment they arrived. No one knew what the aliens called themselves because they’d never told anyone, so the aliens had earned themselves a number of nicknames. Trent and Blaine liked to call them Squatters. They didn’t belong here and they needed to be gone as far as both of them were concerned.

That though, was easier said than done.

Aliens were supposed to be, well they were supposed to be alien. Giant slugs from Mars would have made it all a damn sight easier and more straightforward as far as Trent was concerned and Blaine wasn’t too far behind that particular curve. Insects was where it was at. Know your enemy was a thing, Trent hadn’t quite got why it was a thing, but then it was a struggle to know your enemy when the enemy in question was a lot like you. Very like you. So like you that telling friend and foe apart was a full time occupation that didn’t pay very well. It was like them there pronouns that seemed to have gone on holiday once the Squatters came to town. A guy was on a hiding to nothing because he didn’t have a clue. Maybe that was a prelude or a warning. A gentle introduction to sweet alien chaos. Not knowing where you were until you were up to your neck in trouble.

Then there was that message of Blaine’s. Since the Squatters had landed, brains were doing strange things. It were as though these visitors from outer space had ramped up the signals that brains both responded to and sent messages out on. There was a hell of a lot more going on between people’s ears these days and that was a shock to a lot of folks. Thinking had gone out of fashion a long time ago, but now it was doing unpaid overtime.

Trent pulled his phone out of his pocket and fired it up.

Gatekeeper.

“What you doin’?” asked Blaine.

“Lookin’ up gatekeeper,” Trent told him.

“Is that wise?” asked his friend.

Blaine was right to be wary. Everyone was on their guard. The Squatters knew stuff. Of course they did. They might look like people, but they’d come from a place so far away that the original inhabitants of Earth couldn’t see it and if they couldn’t see it, then they darn sure weren’t going to comprehend it. There were still conspiracists holding onto their beliefs that man had never made it to the moon, not to mention the flat-earthers. In fact, conspiracies were very much in vogue and no wonder, when there were people who weren’t people who knew stuff that made them dangerous. Just knowing what they knew would make a person alien, but Blaine stopped short of considering that because it made him feel sick and dizzy. So he circled back around to Trent and his phone. The suspicion there was that they monitored that sort of thing. That Alexa and her kind were collaborating with the Squatters and intent on selling humankind out. 

Trent shrugged, “it’s important.”

Blaine, put a finger to his lips, begging his friend for silence. The effect was charmingly comical.

Trent laughed.

Blaine pouted and then he swiped the phone from Trent’s grasp.

“Hey! What are you doing!?” Trent protested.

Blaine kept the phone away from Trent’s grabbing fingers, “don’t look it up!”

Trent lowered his hand, “OK, I won’t.”

“Promise,” it wasn’t a question.

“Promise,” said Trent.

“Good,” Blaine said, handing the phone back to Trent, “besides, we know what a gatekeeper is, don’t we?”

“Do we?” asked Trent.

“I reckon so,” confirmed Blaine.

“A person who stands at a gate and stops people going through it?” ventured Trent.

“At first,” agreed Blaine, “maybe.”

“Maybe?” said Trent.

“Yeah,” said Blaine, “I mean, what’s the point of a gate if you can’t go through it?”

“I suppose,” said Trent.

“You’d just padlock it and leave it be, if you wanted it permanently closed,” reasoned Blaine.

Trent nodded, that made sense, “so the person at the gate susses people out and decides who comes in and who doesn’t?”

“Yeah,” agreed Blaine, “like at a festival where you need a ticket to get in.”

“So,” said Trent, “you’re the collector of the tickets?”

Blaine sighed and gave Trent a dark look which was, he knew, unfair. He’d seen this assumption of Trent’s coming. Maybe a little too late did he see it. It was a natural assumption, but Blaine reckoned it was wrong, “I think I’m… we’re supposed to make sense of my role as a keeper of the gate and tickets don’t make sense to me.”

“Maybe they will in time,” Trent said hopefully.

But Blaine was shaking his head, “I think it’s more straightforward than that, and I think I’m already supposed to know what I’m supposed to do. There’s no pending great reveal. The message was the great reveal.”

“How about we get out of this place and go for a drink?” suggested Trent.

Blaine smiled, “now you’re talking! I could murder a drink. Eat it alive and ignore the screaming while I do so!”

Trent chuckled, “remind me that I’m not having whatever you’re having!”

At the pub, Blaine had a revelation of sorts. 

“Two lime and sodas,” he said to the barman.

The barman scowled at him, not at all happy that Blaine had confounded his expectations. Blaine felt a similar look from his friend, but he did not validate it with even a sideways glance. He handed his friend his share of the spoils from the bar and lead the way to a corner table. A table that was not entirely away from the clientele of the pub, and a seat that afforded a view of the whole bar.

“We’re not alone,” muttered Blaine.

Trent’s face creased up into a scowl of incomprehension, then the clouds of ignorance cleared and his face beamed with a warm smile, “oh,” he said.

Blaine nodded and looked meaningfully at his drink, “I think they come here for something like entertainment. Alcohol lowers inhibitions after all.”

“Oh!” said Trent more meaningfully.

They carefully went about their drinking. The intent to think more freely stifled by the prospect of prying minds prying into the lad’s minds.

“Tricky isn’t it?” said Trent.

“It is that,” agreed Blaine sadly, “but we’re here and we should make the most of it.”

They sat quietly, trying to make the most of it.

“It’s not the same,” said Blaine.

“It really isn’t,” said Trent morosely as he eyed the mostly undrunk contents of his glass.

“No, not that you eejit!” Blaine hissed, “have you not noticed your surroundings?”

Trent shrugged, “I generally don’t in a pub such as this.”

“Whyever not?” asked Blaine.

Trent looked at his friend as though he had taken leave of his senses, “there is a predominance of blokes in a pub such as this. To take an interest in them would lead to all manner of funny business, none of which I would be a willing participant of.”

Blaine was shaking his head, “it’s quiet, mate. Too quiet.”

“Pubs can be…” Trent began, and then he noticed. There was none of the hubbub that a pub should contain, booze being a social lubricant and pubs being places that brought people together with two aims in mind, to drink and to be social, and in being social drink some more.

“Let us attend to this unusual state of affairs,” said Blaine to his friend.

His friend looked askance at both the meaning of Blaine’s words, but also the use of those words in that particular order.

“My gran sometimes used to flourish words in a manner such as this,” Blaine explained.

“Do you think that maybe the pressure is getting to you?” Trent asked.

“The pressure?” asked Blaine.

“Of you know what,” Trent told him.

“Ah,” said Blaine, then for wont of anything else to do, he finished his drink and stood up, “another?”

“I’d rather not,” Trent told him.

Blaine sighed, there was something sacrilegious about this whole charade. A pub was holy ground. This was a place of sanctuary, “to hell with it, beers it is!” he cried. Quietly, so as not to alert any of the interlopers. How effective he was being on this front was anyone’s guess, and that was part of what was getting to him.

At the bar he ordered two pints of the black stuff and the barman eyed recriminations in his general direction in an attempt to ensure he never lose his way again. The bar visit was of a sufficient length, the black stuff requiring some effort to encourage it to calm sufficiently and become as sultry and drinkable as it was possible for a pint of anything to be. The fine bubbles danced in murmurations of joy, entrancing Blaine as he awaited the moment that the pints would be handed over into his ownership.

Returning to the table, he leaned in, “only the one, mind.” 

Trent was aghast, “we have never had just the one.”

Blaine nodded, not even in the most dire of situations would he resort to only the one pint, but today might be of that magnitude of dire. 

“I just wish…” he said aloud, too loud as far as he was concerned. He’d barely begun on his pint and already he was opening up and projecting not just one wish, but a whole host of them. His hopes and fears, the whole box of wish fairies was open and he was exposed and vulnerable, and really quite sad.

Then, as he tried to take it back.

Then, as his friend began to agree with him and follow suit with a heartfelt response, old Bill piped up, breaking the spell by way of an unprovoked and unexpected distraction.

You’re not my father!

The words cascaded around the confines of the pub and created shockwaves in their wake. There was something momentous about this moment. The pub had been out of kilter and almost broken by the presence of the Squatters. Those words of the old timer spoke of that, but in them there was the promise of a reset.

Blaine saw what had been hidden in plain sight in that very moment. Time slowed and afforded him a proper good look at the current proceedings. He saw it all and then some. 

Then he downed his pint.

“Another?” he asked his friend.

Trent smiled a smile that he hadn’t smiled in such a very long time. This was more like it. Times, they were a-changing and Trent would willingly drink to that, “does the Pope…” 

Blaine nodded grimly, “I have heard tell that he may well do.”

There was something of the Dunkirk spirit within Blaine as he strode forth, which was a turn out for the books for he was an objector of the slack kind, never having put the effort to be conscientious. He did not walk to the bar though and this perturbed Trent, the promise of a second pint and the semblance of an evening denied him for too long seemed to be striding away from the bar, not towards it. 

Trent and his vested interest watched Blaine approach a respectable middle-aged couple. He leaned down and said something quietly. They were getting up to leave before he had straightened, and as they did, Trent saw that they were quite, quite different to the image he had originally had of them. 

How had he not seen this before?

Now Blaine was walking toward a man who looked like he may once have been in the army. An officer and a gentleman. The sort to wear a stiff upper lip over his cravat. Blaine’s quiet chat with the man was much shorter and yet it yielded much the same result. The man’s veneer of respectability slipped and that upper lip of his wobbled. It actually wobbled.

As Blaine approached a third table, the young, studious man who had been sat nonchalantly minding his own business got up, and nodded as Blaine thumbed the direction of the pub’s exit.

It was when Blaine then turned to old Bill that Trent began to harbour more worrisome thoughts, but Blaine extended his hand and shook the old bloke’s hand in his, “what are you drinking, sir?” he asked the man with the rheumy eyes.

“I’ll have a pint of that black stuff,” said the grey haired old warrior, “I seem to have a wee thirst on this night.”

“And no wonder,” said Blaine, “you saved the day just now.”

“I did?” said Bill.

“You did,” confirmed Blaine, before heading to the bar to secure three of the finest pints to be found in the verdant lands of this blue planet.

Upon his return to their table, Blaine allowed himself a wry smile.

“What just happened?” asked Trent.

“I had an epiphany of sorts, courtesy of the old geezer across the way,” he raised his glass to Bill and the old man returned the gesture and grinned, “alright?” asked Blaine.

“I am now!” he replied.

“And of course he is,” Blaine said to Trent.

“I still don’t know what happened?” said Trent, obviously struggling to wrap his head around recent developments.

“Bill’s outburst made it all clear,” Blaine told him.

“And?” said Trent.

“We are all gatekeepers,” Blaine told him.

“Meaning?” asked Trent, beginning to get a little annoyed at the fog that continued to befuddle him.

Blaine drank some of his pint, “you are not my father. Often, people say that to someone who is far more than a bloke who slept with their mother.”

Trent looked none-the-wiser. 

“Don’t you see?” grinned Blaine.

Trent did not see.

“We are all the gatekeepers. We are the prime gatekeepers. Never mind the ticket collector, we decide whether we ever even go to the gate. We have the ultimate control, but this is easily forgotten. Bill reminded me of that with his outburst. An outburst prompted by his mind being invaded by those things that are not people at all.”

Trent was nodding, he got some of it now, “but what did you say to the Squatters, mate?”

“Simple,” said Blaine, “I told them they were barred and they left.”

Trent was grinning now, “is it really that simple?”

Blaine finished the rest of his pint, “most things are. We go around overcomplicating them.”

Trent bought another pint, happy in the buying of it and in being in a place that was familiar to him. As the boys settled into their next drink, Bill shuffled over, “I’ll be saying night then, lads.”

Both lads turned to the old man and bade him farewell. “Good night, Bill.”

A few steps towards his destination he turned to them both, “I was a wrong ‘un when I was a lad. Never listened to the man who would be my father. We’re built wrong you know. Own worst enemies.”

“There are no enemies here though,” Blaine reassured him, “only friends.”

Bill nodded, his eyes far away in a time long gone, then he came back to himself, “did you see those odd people earlier? Strange sorts. Glad they left if I’m honest.”

“They won’t be bothering us again,” Blaine told him.

“Good,” Bill nodded before turning back for home, “I like it here. Don’t want anyone ruining it.”

The lads watched him go.

After a time Trent turned to his friend, “what now?”

Blaine shrugged, “don’t let them in.”

“And that’s it?” asked Trent.

Blaine nodded, “we’re the gatekeepers. They cannot go where they are not invited.”

“But…” began Trent, so many questions fighting their way to the forefront of his beleaguered brain.

“They relied upon our confusion and our inaction. Maybe even our indifference,” Blaine leaned in, “tell me something, do you feel different?”

Trent nodded, “like I felt before the Squatters appeared.”

Blaine grinned, “and did you see them for what they were?”

Trent nodded, his face now grimly set.

“They don’t like that, they really don’t.”

“All of a sudden,” Trent said, “it feels like they weren’t aliens after all.”

Blaine’s brow creased, “maybe they weren’t, but there was something alien about them all the same, and now we see them for what they are, they are no longer a problem.”

“You really think so?” asked Trent, hoping that his friend was right.

“Yeah,” said Blaine, “it stands to reason.”

All the same, Trent thought it a good idea to have another drink for the road. He wasn’t entirely convinced that the road ahead was free from unexplained foreign obstacles and it didn’t bear thinking about what the implications were if Blaine was wrong.