4
I sat in the Coffee Bean, stirring damp Demerara sugar into a latte and looking out of the window. Marie was late, but only by five minutes. I sipped my coffee, feeling the caffeine add to the buzz of anticipation.
It had been a while since I’d had a serious relationship, or any relationship at all, for that matter. Three years since Mikage left me. We had lived together in the house where I still lived. It lasted for two tempestuous years. Two years in which all we ever seemed to do was fight – real screaming matches, thrown crockery, thrown punches (her fists, my body), the works. Mikage was dark and pretty and half-Japanese.
I loved her but we brought out the worst in each other, and when the passionate fights turned to snide remarks and bickering, when the fights ceased to be an intense form of foreplay, it was time to call it a day. It turned out she already had another man lined up and she moved in with him. They’re married now, with a baby.
I missed the feeling I’d had when Mikage and I first got together. That pounding, heart-squeezing feeling. The way I felt now, waiting for Marie. Just this side of sickness. Not that I thought about love, not right then, not until a little later, but I think I fell in love with Marie almost as soon as we met. Love at first sight. It’s easy to be cynical about such things. But sometimes, maybe once or twice in your life, if you’re lucky, you meet someone and it’s like planets colliding.
I looked at my watch again. She was fifteen minutes late. I had finished my coffee. I looked out of the window, trying to see if there was any sign of her. I had definitely said the Coffee Bean at six, hadn’t I? What if she had just been trying to get rid of me when she had agreed to meet me? She might be laughing about me this very minute with one of her friends. In a few short seconds my paranoia grew from a tiny seed to a full bloom. I told myself to stop being so stupid. I would give her another quarter of an hour.
Fifteen minutes passed.
I slurped the sugary, cold dregs of my coffee and went out into the street. I was embarrassed and disappointed. I saw a girl with light red hair walking towards the cinema and my heart jolted, but it wasn’t Marie. I considered walking along to her bedsit but decided that would be too humiliating, too much like begging.
I made my way past the cinema, past the pretty but shabby Georgian terraces of Wellington Square, and as I looked up from the dusty pavement I saw her. She was about twenty feet away,
sitting
on a bench outside McDonalds. She was with Andrew and they were arguing, quite animatedly. I could see both their faces: he looked angry and hurt; she wore a shocked expression. I hesitated for a moment then walked up to them.
‘Fancy bumping into you here,’ I said.
They looked up at me, startled. Marie got to her feet. ‘Oh, Richard . . . I was on my way. Am I late?’
‘Only a bit.’ My annoyance evaporated at the sight of her. She looked wonderful, fresh and bright, and her freckles had come out in the sun.
Andrew gave me a look that I couldn’t read. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve made Marie late. It’s entirely my fault.’
I shrugged. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
The tension between them crackled. They avoided looking at each other, and I noticed that Marie’s fists were clenched.
‘I’d better get going,’ he said to Marie, who still didn’t look at him, pretending to be fascinated by a one-legged pigeon pecking at a discarded chicken nugget. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He nodded goodbye to me and walked off, holding himself straight, his hands in his trouser pockets.
‘I’m really sorry,’ she said again.
‘Don’t worry, honestly.’
I waited to see if she would say any more, tell me what the argument had been about. After a long pause I said, ‘So what do you want to do? Eat, drink? Play Crazy Golf?’
She laughed. ‘You really know how to spoil a girl.’ She took hold of my hand and said, ‘Let’s just walk.’
We walked down to the beach and trod along the pebbles, still hold
ing hands. Hers was very warm. My heart was doing all sorts of strange acrobatic things in my chest. There were still people sunbathing, even though most of the heat had gone out of the sun by this time of the day.
‘What were you and Andrew arguing about?’ I asked, unable to hold back any longer.
‘We weren’t really arguing,’ she replied. ‘We were having a discussion. We’re going to a convention in London tomorrow and we were talking about which train to catch. Andrew wants to leave ridiculously early to get there before the doors open, but I don’t see the point.’
It seemed a rather petty thing to be arguing so vehemently about, but I didn’t want to push it. I asked, ‘What kind of
convention
?’
‘It’s called Encounters.’
‘Let me guess – it’s about online dating.’
‘Very amusing. It’s actually a convention for people who are interested in UFOs and alien abductions. It should be really interesting. There are some visiting American researchers who are going to give some lectures, and there’s this guy who used to work for the FBI . . .’
‘A real-life Fox Mulder!’
‘Sort of. And basically people can get together and discuss their beliefs and experiences and hopefully learn something.’
‘And buy the merchandise.’
‘You really are a cynic.’ She stooped to pick up a pebble that had caught her eye. It was smooth and round and green. She offered it to me. ‘Here, have a present.’
Her face took on a serious expression. ‘Please don’t mock me, Richard. If you want to be my friend, you don’t have to believe too, but you do have to accept that it’s what
I
believe. Do you think you can cope with that?’
She fixed her huge eyes on me and I felt myself melting.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I do respect your beliefs. Really.’
‘OK,’ she said, after a long pause. ‘Though you’re right to be cynical about these conventions. They do attract some real weirdos. But Andrew thinks this will be a good one.’
‘I would like to know more about what you believe in,’ I said.
She gestured across the road. By accident or design she had led us to her flat.
‘Come in and I’ll tell you.’
The hallway smelt of fried eggs and dog hair. We climbed six steep flights of stairs to reach Marie’s front door. ‘Welcome to paradise,’ she said, pushing open the door.
She lived in a box-room with just enough space for a single bed and a wardrobe. A door to the left revealed the smallest bathroom I had ever seen: just a sink and a shower in a space the size of an airing cupboard. She had a Baby Belling cooker and a tiny fridge – more a coldbox, really. The walls were papered with
pictures
of extraterrestrials, stills from the Roswell autopsy among them. An ancient-looking PC gathered dust on the floor beside a litter tray. There was a cat sitting on the bed, purring and dribbling on the quilt.
Marie sat beside the cat and stroked its beige and brown fur. ‘This is Calico.’
‘Hello, Calico,’ I said, stroking the cat, which looked pretty old. Its purr rattled like an old motorbike that needed attention.
‘I’ve had him since I was nine,’ Marie said. ‘When I left my mum’s house I couldn’t bear to leave him behind. Not with her.’
‘How old are you now?’ I said.
‘Twenty-three.’ She kissed him between his ears.
‘Isn’t it unkind to keep a cat locked up in a little place like this? He can’t get any exercise.’
Marie smiled. ‘He does. Look, I’ll show you.’ She leant over and pushed up the sash window. ‘Go on, Calico, go play.’
The cat stood up, blinked, stretched and jumped out through the window. A broken fire-escape stretched up to the roof. Calico ascended the twisted black metal, then leapt onto a piece of drainpipe and finally jumped onto the roof, where he had plenty of room to run around and chase seagulls.
‘Cool cat,’ I said.
She nodded proudly. ‘Very cool.’
‘I bet your Facebook page is full of pictures of him.’
‘Uh-uh. I don’t use Facebook, or Twitter, or any social networking sites.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘They’re New World Order tools. A perfect way to monitor us.’
I wasn’t sure what to say to that.
She opened the mini-fridge and produced a bottle of wine. ‘I only have plastic cups, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘and the wine is very cheap.’
‘What are you studying at college?’ I asked. There was no sofa in the room so we sat on the bed, very close to each other. I wondered if she could hear my heart beating.
‘Coding.’
‘I thought you seemed like a geek . . .’
‘Hey!’ She slapped me playfully.
‘Have you got a job too or do you live off your student loan?’
‘A job, kind of. Andrew and I offer a consultative service. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? All it actually means is that we offer people help and advice and charge them for it.’
‘What kind of help?’
‘Well, say somebody’s seen something that’s worried them, or is
having
strange memories, or thinks they’ve been abducted – anything
along those lines, really – we talk to them and either put them in touch
with others who have had the same experience, or just try to make them feel better. For example, I had an email yesterday from a man in Scotland who believes his wife has been, um, tampered with by aliens. Apparently she’s gone off sex, her eyes keep glazing over when he’s talking to her and
she spends a lot of time staring out of the window at the sky.’
‘And he sees this as evidence that she’s been abducted?’
‘Well, it’s possible! I gave him a list of other possible things to watch out for and took his credit card number.’ She smiled.
‘So you make a lot of money out of this?’
She exhaled a thin stream of smoke. ‘Not much. Just enough to cover my rent, my broadband and phone.’
‘So this is all paid for by suckers.’
Marie frowned. ‘That was an extreme example. We don’t rip people off. We offer genuine advice to people who are frightened or confused and need reassurance. Like Fraser. I mean, we didn’t charge him but we talked to him and made him feel a lot better about what he’d seen.’ Her voice rose a little in indignation.
‘Hey, I’m sorry. I wasn’t judging you.’
I put my cup down and reached across and lightly took hold of her wrist. She looked into my eyes and something shifted in the air between us. My breathing became deeper. Her pupils expanded.
She crushed out her cigarette on the window ledge and orange sparks fell into the open air. I shifted closer to her and put my arms around her back. I kissed her cheek then her lips. She kissed me back. She tasted of wine and smoke. I could hear blood pounding in my ears. I was kissing her. This was what I’d wanted to do since that night on the hill. I felt my lips curl into a smile against hers.
I opened my eyes. Marie was looking at me. We broke off and laughed, holding each other’s hands, foreheads touching. I felt exhilarated and light-headed. She kissed me again and made an ‘Mmm’ sound as her lips left mine. I felt hot. There was very little air in the bedsit. We had used it all up.
‘I was going to tell you what I believe in,’ she said.
I wanted to carry on kissing her, but she was calling the shots here. I could wait.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she spoke. She was so animated, gesturing, drawing symbols in the air with her hands.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘There are four recognised types of close encounters. Type one is merely a sighting of a UFO.’
‘Like the sighting over the East Hill?’
‘That’s right. Type two is when the UFO has some sort of physical effect on its surroundings. For example, a patch of ground might be scorched or trees might be damaged.’
‘This is simple so far.’
She smiled. ‘Type three is the famous one, and that’s when aliens are actually sighted, like in the film, though we don’t really like to call them aliens because it has negative connotations. We call them visitors.’
She lit another cigarette. ‘The fourth kind of encounter is one where a human is abducted.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Please, Richard . . .’
I kissed her. ‘Sorry. Carry on. I’m interested, genuinely.’
‘OK. So, abductions. The most common description is that somebody will be in their house and they’ll be seized by a beam of light and be taken aboard a spacecraft. Or they might be in their car. The car stalls and they don’t know what’s going on. Very often people only remember this under hypnosis. They get home and find that their journey took two hours longer than expected. They call this “missing time”. There are a lot of variations, but the basic encounter is usually the same. The people tend to find themselves lying on an examination table. That’s when they see the visitors. Often the visitors will talk to them – sometimes telepathically – and usually they carry out some kind of . . . procedure.’
‘Like what?’
‘Well, it might be a physical examination, or sometimes they pass lights over the human, or they might simply talk to them.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Sometimes the encounter is sexual. There are loads of reports of women being made pregnant by extraterrestrials. Or men being asked to father half-human babies. Hybrids.’
It took all my willpower not to laugh.
‘The similarity between people’s experiences is incredible. It’s one of the reasons why the abduction phenomenon has so much credibility now. Everyone’s telling the same story.’
‘But surely—’ I was careful not to offend her. ‘Surely that’s because they’ve all heard it before and they’re copying each other.’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that that many people would lie. Why risk all that mockery?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps they’re attention seekers. Maybe they’re the kind of people who will do anything to get in the paper. Or they’re – how can I put it? – crazy.’
‘No, Richard.’ She shook her head. ‘These are ordinary people. And there are thousands of testimonies, books filled with interviews and stories – true stories. Some people have said it could be a mass hysteria, but I think it’s the truth. Every day, people are having encounters. And the people who come forward, well, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. How many are too frightened to tell anyone? And there are thousands more who have blotted out the memories because they’re too traumatic. So many people have had memories of abductions brought back under hypnosis or during therapy. And they all tell the same stories.’