Authors: Danny Wallace
Once again the Tube was at a standstill. I joined the back of the queue and looked around me. Perhaps a hundred people were here, with more on the other side of the street, all of them waiting for the station to reopen, all of them cursing their luck or shouting into their phones or kicking their heels in the sun. It was a tired, frustrated mob, and for a moment I was nearly one of them … until
I remembered that the last time this kind of thing had happened to me was the night I’d met the man on the bus. And then I realised. This was
perfect
. This was another opportunity to see what life would throw at me! Did I want to stand here by a busy road with its dust and honking horns and smoke, or did I want to treat this as a
chance?
Did I want to stand here with an angry mob of commuters and tourists, or did I want to
do
something? What if I just walked away? What if I just walked past the Tube and just took life as it came? What would happen?
So I walked.
That night I walked to wherever the wind seemed to take me. Down Oxford Street into Soho, toward Picadilly Circus, and then Leicester Square. I was walking slowly, willing opportunities to come my way, but gradually noticing things I’d never noticed about London before. Just little things. Like the statue of Charlie Chaplin in the centre of Leicester Square. Or the telephone boxes in Chinatown that have been crafted to look like pagodas. Or the tiny dance put on by the little wooden peasants hidden inside the clock at the Swiss Centre, which they perform faithfully once an hour, on the hour, to the delight of tourists and tourists alone. I was starting to discover that for someone who lived in this city, I really didn’t know it very well.
I walked toward Holborn, exploring Fleet Street and stopping to study a plaque in honour of someone called Wallace. I walked through Chancery Lane and sat on a bench in the city of London, while I watched a man in a suit silently fit an entire bagel into his mouth. I sauntered and I meandered and I ambled along … and before too long I realised I was most of the way home. It was strange. Before, I’d always rushed my way around my city. London was just the collective term for lots of different places I’d had to get to, quickly. But tonight… I’d
walked
home. Slowly. And taken everything in. And enjoyed it. I had gradually rediscovered, and then quickly fallen back in love with, my own city.
I arrived back at my flat late but relaxed and happy. I shoved a curry into the microwave, flicked on the kettle, and sat down at my computer to check my e-mails.
Hi! I’m Sandi! Would you like to see me get hot and wild with my college roommates?
Now, I didn’t know who Sandi was, but she seemed friendly enough, and it was a lovely offer, but it could wait.
Another e-mail came from Robert the technician with full details of his party. “Bring a fact!” it read. “Stump a stranger and break the ice!”
And that was about it.
I got out my diary, added the date of Robert’s party, and added all the other things I’d said yes to today. But I was disappointed. My walk around London had enthused me. Surely I could find
something
else to say yes to?
I sat on the sofa with my cup of tea and started to idly flick through the
Tower Hamlets Recorder—
a newspaper I tend to hide when being visited by my mum, seeing as how every other story tends to heavily feature one or more of the words “stabbing,” “robbed,” or “police believe the muggers are targeting the bespectacled”—trying to find something of interest.
There was the usual array of crime. A fete. An article about a historic bench.
But there on the opposite page, tucked away next to a birthday advert and a picture of a very old cat, was the following important announcement:
The Starburst Group Would like to invite anyone and everyone to our third local meet-up! Come along if you are nterested in aliens, telepathy—any
think!
Blind Beggar, Whitechapel, Wednesday, 6 p.m. Ask for Brian
.
An invitation! To anyone and everyone! Including me!
Granted it looked a bit strange. Usually I’d go to great lengths to avoid hanging around with
anyone
who says “anythink” instead of “anything,” but not this time.
I smiled. Wednesday was tomorrow. I made a note of the address, I switched the computer off, and I went to bed.
Well, no, hang on.
I smiled, I made a note of the address, I clicked on a link and looked at a colourful picture of Sandi getting hot and wild with her college roommates, I smiled again, I switched the computer off, and
then
I went to bed.
Smiling.
The Blind Beggar pub, not too far from my own home, is a piece of East End legend.
It was there that Ronnie Kray, one of London’s celebrated gangster twins, the Krays, shot and killed a burly ex-con named George Cornwell. Every cab driver in London will tell you that they were there the night it happened, and it’s best
to just keep quiet when they say this. According to police reports, the only two other people who were there that night
were
a couple of rent boys, and I can tell you from experience that cab drivers don’t like it if you ask them what it was like to be a 1960s male prostitute.
The Krays, of course, did
something
almost
everywhere
in East London. Grab a pensioner in the East End and point at whatever you like.
“Yes,” they’ll say. “That is the very wall that the Kray Twins probably once saw on their way somewhere. Are you a tourist? Can I have five pounds?”
Of course some landmarks are more famous than others. There’s Pellicci’s Café, in which the Krays used to do their business and drink their tea. There’s Turnmills Nightclub, where Mad Frankie Fraser got shot in the head and lived to tell the tale. There’s the house on Evering Road in Stoke Newington, where Reggie Kray stabbed Jack “the Hat” McVitie. Who, before you ask, was a man and not a hat, and will doubtless remain that way until
The Animated Adventures of the Kray Twins
finally gets the green light.
The Blind Beggar, though, is the true East London Krays experience, and a bit of an odd choice for the Starburst Group to hold one of their meetings in, to be honest.
“Of course,” said James, one of the people I’d correctly identified as a Starburster, “I know someone who was here the night it happened. Saw the whole thing.”
The others—Laura, Bob, and Brian himself—all looked fairly impressed.
“Is he a cab driver?” I asked.
James looked at me, shocked. “Why, do you know him?” he said.
I decided it would probably be better for me not to introduce myself to the group with lighthearted tales of male prostitution, so I shook my head and said, “No.”
The Starburst Group, it turns out, meets once a month in various pubs around London and is essentially made up of these four people, the odd guest, and one other regular, who was currently on holiday in Malaga.
“There are others, though,” said Brian. “Plenty of others. Many in the States, a couple in France, and of course there are hundreds on the mailing list whom we’ve never met. Though I doubt we’ll ever truly meet
them….”
Brian looked knowingly at the others, and they chuckled.
“How come?” I asked.
“Let’s just say they know a little more about us than we do about
them,”
said Brian, and Laura, I
think
, mouthed the word “government.”
I was excited to be here. Saying yes had introduced me to my first bunch of strangers. Strangers with some rather strange ideas.
“So,” said Brian, “Bob’s got some things to run past us on his pyramid theories. Bob’s our resident Egyptologist, Danny.”
“Right!” I said, enthusiastically. “Brilliant!”
“Do you know much about the pyramids, Danny?” asked Bob, who was bald with a silver-grey-haired goatee and a waistcoat with little moons on it.
“Er, well, I know that they’re in Egypt.”
“That’s right, very good,” he said, sincerely. “But who built them?”
I thought it over. “Egyptians?” I tried.
Bob smiled. “That would certainly conform to popular opinion,” he said. “While it may be true that some Egyptians
were
involved in the process, I think they may have had a little help.”
At this point Laura, who was still wearing a hat even though she was indoors and there was central heating, made a little mm-hmm sound as if to confirm what Bob was saying.
“Who do you reckon helped them?” I asked.
Everyone looked at me, ready to gauge my reaction.
“Aliens,” said Bob.
My reaction was to blink a couple of times and then say, “Aliens?”
“Think about it,” said Bob.
I thought about it. It didn’t help.
“Are you completely sure about this?” I said.
“Actually, Danny, it’s not all that far-fetched,” said Laura. “Studies of ancient hieroglyphics show that the Egyptians often talked of beings from the sky who would impart great wisdom and bestow wonderous new technologies upon them. If you look at ancient Egyptian art, you will see many unusual shapes, some of which do bear an uncanny resemblance to spacecraft.”
James nodded and looked enigmatic. Brian sipped at his lemonade. Bob continued.
“Moreover the Pyramids at Giza are built in the exact layout of the stars in Orion’s Belt. And when you divide the circumference of the Great Pyramid by twice its height, you get the figure 3.141.”
“Pi,” said Brian with a wink.
“But … do aliens
have
pi?” I said. “Why couldn’t it just have been some Egyptians who, you know, were good at building?”
“A possibility! Certainly a possibility!” said Bob. “But there is absolutely no record of who built them. And the Egyptians recorded
everything
. Wars, kings, pharoah worship, everything that went on. But not the building of the pyramids. Odd, eh?”
Brian let out a sudden and short burst of totally inexplicable laughter.
I tried to work out how simply not knowing who built the pyramids meant that aliens did it. I mean, I don’t know who nicked my bike from outside Loughborough Leisure Centre when I was nine, but it seems unfair to lay the blame at the feet of our extraterrestrial cousins. If they have feet.
“But anyway, to the new stuff,” said Bob, and James and Laura leaned in slightly. “An American Starburster put this to me this week over MSN Messenger, and I promised I’d share it with the group.”
He looked at me, and I suddenly realised I was considered one of the group. I was a
Starburster!
Brilliant!
“Now, I hadn’t heard this before, but the Cydonia site on Mars provides us with better evidence than ever that the pyramids were indeed built by aliens. Early pictures of Mars—and I have checked this out on the Internet—do show what appears to be a face and some pyramidical monuments located side by side.”
James got a pad out and urgently made a note of something.
“Closer inspection of the face shows it to be humanoid in structure …”
This was the first time I had ever heard the word “humanoid” used by any humanoid, ever, and I enjoyed it greatly. I nodded along, fascinated.
“And in many ways very similar in form to that of the sphinx.”
Everyone just sort of looked at one another, and then at me. I looked back at them and stuck my bottom lip out, nodded, and raised my eyebrows as if to give the impression that I had been won over by the weight of their evidence, which was only polite. “Yep,” I seemed to be saying, “it appears that the pyramids were indeed built by aliens.”
“Fascinating,” said Laura. “That is fascinating. You have to wonder how pyramids got up there on Mars.”
James looked up at the ceiling, probably for clues.
“Maybe it was some Egyptians,” I tried, and immediately regretted it.
But then Bob laughed. And James laughed. And everyone laughed. And then Bob spoiled it by saying, “No. It was
definitely
aliens.”
“So, what made you decide to come to one of our meetings?” asked Brian half an hour later.
“You invited me,” I said. “Well, you invited
everyone
. I saw your ad.”
We were standing by the bar, away from Bob, Laura, and James.
“I was a little annoyed by that advert, I’ll be honest,” Brian confessed.
“Why?”
“Well, I phoned it in, and they put a little border of stars around it, for a start, which I did
not
ask for, and which just makes us look
mad
. And then they played with what I’d written. I said, ‘Come along if you are interested in aliens, telepathy—anything at all.’ And they changed it to ‘Come along if you are nterested in aliens, telepathy—any
think!
And on top of that, they missed the i in ‘interested,’ and they capitalised the
w
in ‘would.’ The woman on the end of the phone even added her own exclamation marks. Still, I suppose it worked. You came. You just thought, ‘I’ll go to that,’ did you?”
“I … um … I don’t know,” I started. “I guess it just felt right. I just thought I’d be open to it and say yes.”
“Well, that’s good. The closed mind is a disease. You need to have an open mind; otherwise life will just pass you by. You’ll be an observer rather than a participant. Does that make sense?”
It did.
“I’m trying to say yes more in general,” I said. “As a person, I mean.” You’ll notice I glossed over the part about “in general” meaning “all the time, to everything, ever.”
“Are you? That’s a good idea. Be open to experience. Why did you decide to do that?”
“Something someone said to me. A bloke on a bus. I’d ended up chatting to him after our Tube home got cancelled, and there we were on this bus, when he came out with it. ‘Say yes more,’ he said. Out of virtually nowhere. So that’s what I’m doing.”
Brian pulled an overly intrigued face.
“Wow,” he said. “And you’re taking him seriously?”
“Well, yes,” I said.
“Who was he?”
“I dunno. He was an Asian guy—a teacher, he said. From around here, actually. Aldgate.”
Brian stuck his bottom lip out and raised his eyebrows.
“A teacher,” he said. “Makes sense. So he struck a chord, did he? When he said that?”