Alien Abduction, page 11
“I know,” Milly said. “She asked me to keep an eye on you.”
Steve had no idea whether that was true, or what it might imply if it was, or what it might imply if it wasn’t. “Bang go my chances of chatting up Amelia Rockham, then,” he said, figuring that there was always safety in absurdist humor.
Milly was still in her uniform, having only just finished her shift, and Steve had to wait for her to change. Unlike Janine’s bedsit, Milly’s flat had a separate bedroom, so there was no possibility of any undue embarrassment. Steve was able to sit on a sofa studying the sparse furnishings while the operation was completed. He had glanced around on past visits, but had never taken the time to consider the implications of the various visible objects. He observed that Milly had a CD collection, which fitted into a pair of forty-slot towers, but he didn’t know whether that signified that she wasn’t particular fond of music or whether she had moved on to MP3s as soon as the opportunity presented itself. The pictures on her walls were mostly prints of flowers, ranging from Monet-esque studies of water lilies to intimate Georgia O’Keefe-style close-ups. She had a rowing-machine propped up beside the window that overlooked the street, and a flatpack set of bookshelves crammed with paperbacks.
Figuring that the books were more likely to offer an insight into Milly’s personality than anything else, he squinted in an effort to make out the titles. They all seemed to be fiction, but there was no evident genre specialization and many of them were far from contemporary. She did seem to like thick books whose page-count offered value for money, though: Gone with the Wind sat beside Doctor Zhivago, Star Maker, Atlas Shrugged, and Lady of Hay.
Milly came out of the bedroom dressed in a pink T-shirt, blue jeans, and trainers while Steve was still leaning forward and squinting. “The non-fiction section’s in the bedroom,” she said. “Self-help books are my preferred material for reading myself to sleep, but if I get really desperate I’ve got an old copy of the Highway Code.” She laughed before adding: “I always buy second-hand—it’s much cheaper.”
“I used to,” Steve said, smiling in response to the laugh, “but I spend so much more time on-line these days that I don’t have time for reading, except for the occasional text-book. Even that’s rarely necessary, given the amount of stuff there is on-line.”
They left the flat and went downstairs. “Good day?” Steve asked, once they were in the car and on the move.
“Fair to middling,” she replied.
“Made your ticket-quota without any difficulty, then?”
“No problem. The world’s full of people who can’t see a double yellow without wanting to park on it—especially mums on the school run. They seem to think that motherhood sets them above the law—not that they behave like madonnas if they catch me in the act. They go off like cluster-bombs, spraying expletives about like the Israeli air force.”
“They probably think you’re failing in your duty as a member of the great sisterhood, rather than doing your duty as a police auxiliary,” Steve said. “It’s a question of priorities.”
“No they don’t,” Milly told him. “They hate me more for not being part of their sisterhood of breeders than for being a traffic warden. They think I should be pumping out kids, taking my share of the misery. They’re not as likely to accuse me of being a lesbian as male drivers are, but that’s only because they think that would somehow be letting me off the hook. On the other hand, they never threaten to rape me—just to gouge my eyes out with carefully-painted fingernails.”
“Must be a fun job,” Steve observed. “Any prospect of moving up to management, like Janine, and getting out of the firing-line?”
“Not really,” Milly admitted. “Janine’s lucky in that respect, at Tom Cook’s. There are far more career-paths mapped out there than in my line. On the other hand, I am a civil servant of sorts, like Ali, so there’d be a possibility of transferring to some other line of work within the sector, if I wanted to.”
“But you don’t?”
“Maybe, in time. For the moment, I’m still in the frame of mind where I’ll be damned if I’ll let the bastards grind me down. At the end of the day, I’m the one who hands out the fines, so I always get the last laugh—at least until someone really does gouge my eyes out with fake fingernails or bend me over a bonnet and fuck me up the back passage. Has any of your pupils pulled a knife on you yet?”
“Not yet,” Steve admitted. “I’ve never even been punched, even though they know I’m not allowed to hit them back. A year eleven girl kicked me in the shin last year, but she was wearing trainers, so it wasn’t a crippling wound. She’s in the sixth form now, but she isn’t doing Biology A level, so I’m no longer at risk from that direction. The present year elevens are mouthy, but so far it’s all obscenities and bad breath—no one’s tried to bite.”
“It’s the same with my lot, really,” Milly admitted. “All talk and no action. They know as well as I do that it’s not me they’re really angry at. I just give them an opportunity to let it out.”
“I don’t have that consolation,” Steve said. “It really is teachers that make the kids angry and frustrated, because we’re the ones who have to try to discipline their behavior from nine to four—or, increasingly, to half-past five or six, because we have to hold on to them till their parents get home from work. Somebody has to do it, I guess. Janine mostly deals with people in search of leisure pursuits, so she gets a much more hopeful and even-tempered class of client, on the whole.”
When they went into Amelia Rockham’s front room, Milly immediately went to her usual armchair rather than moving towards the settee with Steve. Steve took one to the folding chairs, figuring that he ought to leave the Naugahyde nook to a couple, but he took one opposite Milly rather than in parallel with her.
As things turned out, there were no newcomers at the group that night, and it was one of those occasions when nobody wanted to relate any new experience. A few of the regulars looked at Milly in a speculative fashion, but no one looked at Steve. Steve didn’t know whether or not to feel insulted by that, but decided to believe that it was just a matter of seniority. Milly was evidently not yet ready to step in and plug the gap, and Steve was certainly in no rush to fill the breach, so there was a full minute’s awkward silence before Walter Wainwright began talking again.
Walter explained that when occasions such as these presented themselves, the normal practice was to ask whether one of the long-standing members might care to retell a story that the younger members of the group hadn’t yet had the opportunity to hear. After all, he went on to say, because the group was very scrupulous about not keeping minutes, stories sometimes needed to be retold, so that recent abductees could discover what their forebears had gone through in the difficult days when abductees hadn’t had the same opportunities for obtaining a sympathetic hearing.
Steve hoped, briefly, that Walter might be about to retell the story of his own abduction, or at least ask Amelia to oblige by retelling hers, but in the event the chairman followed his preamble by asking a man named Arthur if he would mind repeating his story, for the benefit of all the people who’d joined since the last time it had been told. Arthur, it seemed, was only too happy to oblige.
CHAPTER SIX
THE FERTILE IMAGINATION
I haven’t been in the group quite as long as Amelia and Walter and I thought at first that I didn’t really belong here. If I’ve ever been properly abducted, before or after the events I’m about to describe—which happened way back in the seventies—I don’t remember it at all. Walter very kindly told me, though, that AlAbAn meetings are open to anyone, and more than willing to offer support to people who’ve had any kind of alien encounter whatsoever. The members have always been good to me, and I hope that’s not just because of the boxes of organic vegetables I bring along in the season and the jars of chutney I give out as Christmas presents.
As those of you who haven’t heard my story before will have guessed from what I just said, I’m a keen gardener. Now that I’m retired, of course, it’s my sole occupation, but for twenty years before I turned sixty-five it was a convenient way of not getting under Mildred’s feet too much. Mildred is my late wife. She liked to keep the house nice, and didn’t approve of clutter in her territory, so it suited us both for me to spend Sundays and summer evenings in the garden. She used to joke that if we ever got divorced she’d get custody of the house and I’d get custody of the garden shed, but of course we never did. Forty years without a single argument, and then the silly old girl goes and gets cancer. What can you do?
Anyway, I found the tuber—the tuber that the story’s about, that is—in a bag of tulip bulbs I bought at the local Garden Centre. I could see immediately that it didn’t belong, and my first thought was simply to throw it away, but I didn’t like to do that without knowing what it was. I tried to look it up, obviously, but it’s actually very difficult to identify the species of a tuber unless you’ve got a dissecting kit, a set of stains and a high-powered microscope. If, on the other hand, you plant it and let it grow, you can usually tell what it is as soon as it begins to produce leaves—or, at the very latest, once it produces a flower.
Flowers are, of course, the structures that provide the fundamental plan of the Linnaean classification system. The move was very controversial at the time, I understand, because flowers are a plant’s sex organs and most amateur botanists back in those days were clergymen, some of whom thought that Erasmus Darwin’s poetic account of The Loves of the Plants was an exceedingly racy text.
Anyhow, I decided that the simplest thing would be to plant the anomalous tuber and see if it would grow. I had no idea what kind of soil would suit it, or how much water it might need, or how much shade it could tolerate, but I wasn’t that worried. I just bedded it down it in a five-pint pot in early March and shoved the pot into a quiet corner that I wasn’t using for anything else, in a little covert between the edge of the patio and the back wall of the garage. I left it to its own devices, fully prepared not to give it another thought if nothing actually materialized.
I suppose I must have glanced at the pot occasionally during the next three weeks, but it wasn’t until a shoot began to appear that I actually took any notice of what was happening. The shoot was mostly white at first, as shoots often are, but the first time I saw it I noticed that its sprouting tip was tinted purple rather than green.
That’s not entirely unknown, of course; these days, you see that crunchy purple rubbish in all the bags of mixed salad the supermarket sells. Not that I’d ever buy such a thing, mind. You don’t grow fancy lettuce from tubers, but I already had the suspicion that the thing might be an exotic kind of potato, and I had the vague idea that some potatoes with purple skins also had purple tints in their foliage.
In South America, where potatoes come from, there are thousands of different kinds, although Europeans only imported the ones that were best to eat. Globalization hadn’t really got off the ground in the seventies, but there was a certain amount of new interest in exotic vegetables even so, and it seemed perfectly plausible to me that the Garden Center’s suppliers might have been investigating neglected potato species, and that one such sample might have gone astray and accidentally fallen in with the tulip bulbs.
There’s nothing very exciting about potatoes—even exotic ones—so I didn’t pay any special attention to the purple plant during April, even though I was mildly surprised by just how purple it was. It wasn’t until May Day—I always spend the whole of Bank Holiday Mondays in the garden—that it became obvious that the thing had become far too bulky for the five-pint pot and that I’d have to plant it out. When I did that, I took the opportunity to take a good look at the root system, to see how the new potatoes were getting on.
That was when I realized that I’d made a mistake. There weren’t any new potatoes forming amid the roots. The original tuber was still in one piece at the centre of the tangle, and it had grown considerably. The roots themselves looked like any other roots—white, thin, expanding in every direction—but the thing that now sat at the bottom of the stem was like nothing I’d ever seen before: round, plump and very solid. It was a lighter shade of purple than the stem and leaves—Mildred would probably have called it mauve—but that still seemed odd. It brought it home to me for the first time how strange it was that all of the plant’s upper body was colored deep imperial purple. Obviously, it wasn’t using chlorophyll for the purpose of photosynthesis but had substituted some other compound of similar efficiency.
When I planted it out, its growth rate accelerated. On May Day the stem had attained a height of about two-and-a-half feet, and the leaves had expanded in a spray that was maybe two feet wide. Three weeks later, the thing was nearly as tall as I am, and it was pushing out branches that were four and five feet long—not woody branches, mind, but branches whose texture was more like plastic. In fact, the whole thing looked suspiciously artificial. If it hadn’t been growing so enthusiastically, it could easily have been mistaken for a giant version of one of those plastic plants they put on restaurant tables, which had been mistakenly cast in the wrong color of polystyrene.
It was late flowering, but that didn’t surprise me, and the buds it eventually produced grew to be as big as my head before they began to open, but that didn’t surprise me either. By then, I thought nothing would surprise me. If the thing had unfolded flowers like a Venus fly-trap’s, with a gape like a crocodile, and started catching cats and urban foxes while building up to a career as a man-eater, I’d have been alarmed but not surprised. I knew, you see, that I had to be dealing with something alien—the product of some Arrhenius spore carried across the interstellar void by the wind of some ancient supernoval explosion, which had fallen to Earth in a meteor shower.
I thought I was ready for anything. I even bought a new camera so that I could record its further progress—we were still in the pre-digital era, alas, so I suppose I paid over the odds for something that would soon be obsolete. However, as even those of you who haven’t heard the story before will probably have anticipated, I wasn’t ready for anything at all. When the buds opened, they weren’t like hungry mouths ready to devour anything they could get their teeth into, although they did eventually develop mouths of a sort.
At first, when the flowers opened, they looked like huge carnations, with multitudinous petals. There was no scent at first. By most surprising thing about them by far was their color. The sepals folded around the buds had been purple, of course, and the tips of the corolla protruding from the bundle had seemed to be grey, but when the flowers expanded, it turned out that they were more silver than grey, if they were any color at all. I say if they were any color at all, although it doesn’t quite make sense, because the whole ensemble was strangely reminiscent of a mirror. I say strangely reminiscent because the petals didn’t form a smooth and shiny surface at all; they bore no more resemblance to a bathroom mirror than they did to a dandelion-clock. There was still a sense, though, in which the flower was reflective: capable of capturing and reproducing an image.
The images took time to form, but it was only a matter of days. They weren’t consistent or stable—if you looked at the plant from a distance they looked like little cumulus clouds or bundles of cotton wool—but when they had some nearby presence to reflect they became much more clearly-defined. When I was there, they immediately began to look like me. The only other Earthly face I ever saw in them was next door’s cat. I never asked Mildred to come out of the house and take a look, because it wasn’t her sort of thing. I did take a lot of pictures with my new camera, though, so I do have proof, of a sort.
I’ve got pictures of flowers reflecting the cat as well as pictures of flowers reflecting my own face. Pictures don’t lie. Unfortunately, they don’t always tell the whole truth either, and they came out rather fuzzy. I did my best, but I never could get the images in the flowers properly in focus. When I showed them around here, the first time I told this story, most of the members could see what I meant, but when I showed them to Mildred, she couldn’t see anything at all.
Cameras don’t record sound, either. You couldn’t get camcorders back in the seventies—not at the sort of price I could afford, anyway—and I didn’t have a Dictaphone, so the second aspect of the flowers’ marvelous properties went unrecorded. The reflections weren’t just surface appearances, you see. The flowers had depth, and those plastic stems obviously had versatile xylem at the core. As to what was going on underground, where the central tuber must have been much bigger than a football by then, I could only speculate. At any rate, the flowers soon began to reflect more than the appearance of my face. By the second week of July, the plant was able to talk.
I’ve always talked to my plants. That’s not the sort of thing I confess readily, even in a safe environment like this, because I remember the reception poor Prince Charles got when he said that it was a good thing to do—but it is a good thing to do, even if you never expect them to reply. It helps them to flourish, to make the most of themselves. I talk to my tulips and my geraniums, my rosemary and my fennel, my rose-bushes and my pear tree. I always have and I always will. So I’d been talking to the purple plant ever since I first transplanted it from its pot and started taking a greater interest in it.
I suppose I talked to the purple plant—which I had begun to call “my purple emperor”, although a purple emperor is really a kind of butterfly—more than any of the other plants in the garden, especially when it got to be about my height. I had no idea that it was actually listening, but it must have been. It must have been smart, too, to learn English simply by listening. It didn’t say a word until it had mastered the language; it wasn’t the sort of creature to go in for baby talk.
I don’t know how many times I’d put questions to it before I finally got a reply, but it must have been far more than a dozen. They were all intended rhetorically, of course. The answer, when it eventually came, had obviously been carefully considered. It was right at the end of July, on the thirty-first, when I asked it for the umpteenth time what the hell it was, and it told me.
