~ * ~
Afterwards, dressed again in my vamp-Viet gear, I left him, carrying my coat over my arm on account of the warmth, my black lace gloves stuffed in the pocket.
I knew at once it was Paul who came out of the room closest to the lift. He was whistling tunelessly in a show of nonchalance, in case any maid was in the corridor.
Rage. I felt such rage.
“Is she still in there?” I demanded.
He jerked. He didn’t recognize me instantly in my slit dress and pixie boots and blushers.
“No—” Only then did he realize. “Cath—!” How he blanched.
Already my anger had drained away. I could almost see the thoughts tumbling through his mind. He was like some gambling machine gone faulty. It just couldn’t halt its reels on any pay-out line. He was thinking that I’d suspected him of infidelity and somehow I’d trailed him to catch him out. Worse: I suspected him of unfaithfulness subsidized by me sitting all day in front of my Omega screen.
Would it be best if he invented some fictitious girlfriend and swore never to see her again? No, that wouldn’t wash—I would demand details and more details until his fib fell apart in tatters.
Yet why was I all vamped up? Was this my disguise?
“How did you—?” he asked.
“How often—?” I asked at the same moment. We seemed to speak in the shorthand of those who have known each other for a long time.
Manfred-Mustafa would still be showering, sprucing himself. He wouldn’t be stepping outside for five or ten minutes to attend to whatever business brought him here. I had the edge on the situation.
“How often, Paul?”
“Not often,” he protested. He hadn’t the nerve to claim that this was the first and only time. “Sam Henson sometimes gives me a bit of cash on the side, not in the books—”
So the gambling machine had selected a line-up featuring... money, of course. Me slaving in front of a screen. Him squandering. Cheating on the family budget. We would think that way nowadays, wouldn’t we?
I played along. By now it was quite impossible for him to accuse me, tit for tat, unless we wanted to ruin ourselves—and ruin Miranda’s prospects—by separating.
“You’re diddling the discount—”
“Or something,” he agreed.
Creative accountancy is the lifeblood of the motor trade. Selling cars to one’s own company to meet quotas. Marking trade-ins at imaginary values. Insurance and finance kick-backs.
He gawked at me, unsure that he had chosen the appropriate payoff line but unable to spin the reels again.
“Never again,” he promised. And I nodded. Actually, I could almost have laughed. Yet my laughter might have become hysterical.
“Well,” said I, “what a surprise.”
It wasn’t a total surprise—apart from the coincidence of our meeting here, and that wasn’t really too amazing. Was Paul a customer of Mrs Appleby or was his go-between somebody else?
“I’m going home now,” I said. “You’d better get back to work.”
“I’ll never do this again,” he vowed. “It’s just that—”
“No, it isn’t just.”
For him to chauffeur me home through the Rough—presuming that he’d driven to the Meridian in a Jag—would have been as impractical as it would have been absurd. The display model would need to be back toot-sweet in the armoured-glass showroom.
~ * ~
When Miranda came home just ten minutes after me, she was more tired than usual, but effervescent.
“We talked to Jenny O’Brien—didn’t we, Grandad? It seemed to help. How were the orchids, Mum?”
“Indescribable,” I said, quite truthfully. “All the heat they need to be so beautiful!”
We transferred Dad back into me. A day at school seemed to have done him a power of good. He settled back contentedly, deep inside me.
When Paul arrived home, he was extremely unsure of his reception.
“Denise Stuart called me this morning,” I said to him, “but I told her to fuck herself.”
Miranda gaped.
“You need to be firm with some people,” I told our daughter. “Without upsetting applecarts unnecessarily! Without rocking the boat so that it sinks.”
“That’s true,” Paul agreed feebly.
And I said to him, in a mock-foreign accent, “When a husband comes home, a wife should count his teeth.” Actually, what Manfred-Mustafa had quoted was exactly the opposite. No man should allow his wife to count his teeth; to know how much money he has.
Paul stared at me weirdly. Did he imagine I was proposing he should make love to me tonight?
“The marrow flowers open wide,” I said.
This too might seem suggestive. Yet I was thinking a few weeks ahead—to when I might reasonably ask Miranda to look after Dad for another day.
I would insist on a foreigner. Any foreigner. Not one of my own countrymen. The money tyranny had been getting worse for years—not in an ebullient American way (well, that’s a ridiculous generalization!)—but selfishly and divisively, breeding a society of fear and of foolish hopes, until it finally destroyed the soul of the country.
Being able to harbour a loved one’s soul or mind, all those acts of charity and sacrifice, might have seemed an exception. It damned well wasn’t.
Only foreigners, Mrs Appleby, only foreigners...! Of course they would have their own problems. Even including guests. Might I ever meet a man who would invite a guest to join in enjoying me?
The marrow flower opens wide.
Paul was bewildered but he knew better than to ask what I meant.
<
~ * ~
ATTACK OF THE CHARLIE CHAPLINS
BY GARRY KILWORTH
SCENE I
A subterranean bunker somewhere in South Dakota. Feverish activity is taking place within the confines of the bunker. In the centre of it all a middle-aged, general is musing on the situation which unfolds before him.
Reports are coming out of Nebraska that the state is under attack from heavily armed men dressed as Charlie Chaplin. My first thought was that a right-wing group of anti-federal rebels was involved. It seemed they were using irony to make some kind of point. After all, Charlie was eventually ostracised to Switzerland for having communist sympathies.
As more accurate reports come in however, it becomes apparent that these are not just men dressed as Charlie Chaplin, they are the real McCoy—they are he, so to speak.
“It’s clear,” says Colonel Cartwright, of Covert Readiness Action Policy, and the Army’s best scriptwriter, ‘that these are aliens. What we have here, general, is your actual alien invasion of Earth. Naturally they chose to conquer the United States first, because we’re the most powerful nation on the planet.”
“Why Nebraska, colonel?” I ask. I am General Oliver J.J. Klipperman, by the way. You may have seen my right profile next to John Wayne’s in The Green Berets. I was told to look authoritative, point a finger in the direction of Da Nang, but on no account to turn round and face the camera. I have this tic in my left eye and apparently it distresses young audiences. ‘Nebraska isn’t exactly the most powerful state in the Union. Why not New York or Washington?”
Cartwright smiles at me grimly. ‘Look at your map, General. Nebraska is slap bang in the middle of this great country of ours. It has one of the smallest populations. You get more people on Fifth Avenue on Christmas Eve than live in Nebraska. You simply have to wipe out a small population and you control this country’s central state. Expand from there, outwards in all directions, and you have America. Once you have America, you have the world. It’s as easy as that.”
I nod. It all makes sense. Nebraska is the key to the control of the U.S. of A. The aliens had seen that straight away.
“What do we know about these creatures?” I ask next. ‘The President will expect me to sort out this unholy mess and I want to know who I’m killing when I go in with my boys.”
The
colonel gives me another tight smile. ‘These creatures? Nothing. Zilch. But we have a trump card. We’ve been preparing for such an invasion for many, many years and our information is voluminous.”
“It is?” I say. ‘How come?”
“Hollywood and the Army connection,” says the colonel. ‘Army money, personnel and expertise have been behind every alien invasion movie ever made.”
“It has?” I reply. ‘I mean, I knew we had fingers in Hollywood pies— I’ve been an extra in over a dozen war movies—but every alien invasion movie? Why?”
[Zoom in on colonel’s rugged features.]
‘Training,” the colonel says, emphatically. ‘Preparation. If you cover every contingency, you don’t get surprised. We’ve been making films of alien invasions since the movie camera was first invented. We’ve covered every eventuality, every type of attack, from your sneaky fifth column stuff such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers to outright blatant frontal war, such as Independence Day. We know what to do, general, because we’ve done it so many times before, on the silver screen. We know every move the shifty shape-changing bastards can make, because we’ve watched them in so many films. Alien, War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you name it, we’ve covered it. On film.” He pauses for a moment, before saying to himself, ‘That speech is a little long—I’ll have to think of some way of cutting it when we make the actual movie of this particular invasion.”
[Back to middle-distance shot.]
Something is bothering me. I put it into words.
“Weren’t they friendly aliens in Close Encounters?”
“No such thing, general. What about those poor guys, those pilots they beamed up from the Bermuda Triangle in December 1945? They kept them in limbo until their families were all dead and gone, then let ‘em come back. Is that a friendly thing to do?”
“I guess not. So, colonel, we’ve had all these exercises, albeit on celluloid, but what have we learned? What do you suggest we do with them?”
“Blast them to hell, general, begging your pardon. If there’s one thing we’ve learned it’s that if you give ‘em an inch, they’ll take a planet. They’ve got Nebraska. That’s almost an inch. We need to smash them before they go any further. Blow them to smithereens before they take Kansas, Iowa or Wyoming or, God forbid, South Dakota.”
I always err on the side of caution, that’s why I’m still a one-star general, I guess.
“But what do we actually know about these creatures? I mean, why come down here looking like Charlie Chaplin?”
The colonel’s eyes brighten and he looks eager.
“Ah,” he says, ‘I have a theory about that, sir. You see, we send crap out into space all the time. I don’t mean your hardware, I mean broadcasts. They must have picked up some of our television signals. What if their reception had been so poor that the only thing they picked up was an old Charlie Chaplin movie? What if it was one of those movies in which he appears on his own—just a clip—and, here’s the crunch, they thought we all looked like that?”
The colonel steps back for effect and nods.
“You mean,” I say, ‘they think the Charlie Chaplin character is representative of the whole human race?”
“Exactly, sir. You’ve got it. We all look alike to them. They came down intending to infiltrate our country unnoticed, but of course even most Nebraskans know Charlie Chaplin is dead, and that there was only one of him. The dirt farmers see a thousand look-alikes and straight away they go, “Uh-huh, somethin’s wrong here, Zach...”
“So they did what any self-respecting mid-Western American would do—they went indoors and got their guns and started shooting those funny-walking little guys carrying canes and wearing bowler hats.”
“I see what you mean, colonel. They’re “not from around here” so they must be bad guys?”
“Right.”
“Blow holes in them and ask questions later?”
“If you can understand that alien gibberish, which nobody can.”
“I meant, ask questions of yourself — questions on whether you’ve done the right and moral thing.”
“Gotcha, general.”
I ponder on the colonel’s words. Colonel Cartwright is an intelligent man—or at least what passes for intelligence in the Army—which is why he is a senior officer in CRAP. He has obviously thought this thing through very thoroughly and I have to accept his conclusions. I ask him if he is sure we are doing the right thing by counter-attacking the aliens and blowing them to oblivion. Have they really exterminated the whole population of Nebraska?
“Every last’s mother’s son,” answers the colonel, sadly, ‘there’s not a chicken farm left.”
[Gratuitous shot of a dead child lying in a ditch.]
‘And we can’t get through to the President for orders?”
“All lines are down, radio communications are jammed.”
“The Air Force?” I ask, hopefully.
“Shot down crossing the State line. There’s smoking wrecks lying all over Nebraska. Same with missiles. We were willing to wipe out Nebraska, geographically speaking, but these creatures have superior weapons. We’re the nearest unit, general. It’s up to us to stop them.”
“How many men have we got, colonel?”
“A brigade—you’re only a brigadier-general, general.”
“I know. Still, we ought to stand a chance with four to five thousand men. They…they destroyed our whole Air Force, you say?”
[Zoom in on TV screen showing smoking wrecks.]
The colonel sneers. ‘The Air Force are a bunch of Marys, sir. You can’t trust a force that’s less than a century old. The Army and the Navy, now they’ve been around for several thousand years.”
There had never been much call for the Navy in Nebraska.
[Back to half frame shot.]
‘Are we up to strength?”
“No, sir, with sickness and furlough we’re down to two battalions.”
“Okay’ I state emphatically. ‘We go in with two thousand, armour, field guns and God on our side.”
“You betcha!”
[Enter Army corporal carrying sheet of paper.]
‘Yes, corporal?” I say, icily, recognising her as the extra who upstaged me in the remake of The Sands of Iwo Jima by obscuring my right profile with her big knockers. ‘I’m busy.”
“I thought you ought to see this message, sir.” She offers it to me. ‘Just came through.”
“From Washington?” I ask, hopefully.
“No, sir, from the alien.”
“The alien?” I repeat, snatching the signal. ‘You afraid of plurals, soldier?”
“No, sir, if you’ll read the message, sir, you’ll see there’s only one of him—or her.”
The message is: YOU AND ME, OLIVER, DOWN BY THE RIVER PLATTE.
“Looks like he’s been watching John Wayne movies, too,” I say, handing Cartwright the piece of paper. ‘Or maybe Clint Eastwood.”
The colonel reads the message. ‘How do we know there’s only one?” he asks, sensibly. ‘It could be a trick.”
“Our radar confirms it, sir,” the corporal replies. ‘He’s pretty fast though. It only looks like there’s multiples of him. He seems to be everywhere at once. He’s wiped out the whole population of Nebraska single-handed.”
“Fuck!” I exclaim, instantly turning any movie of this incident into an adult-rated picture. ‘What the hell chance do I stand against an alien that moves so fast he becomes a horde?”
“Fifty percent of Nebraska was asleep when they got it,” says the colonel, ‘and the other half wasn’t awake.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Some of ‘em actually do wake up a little during daylight hours.”
“You think 1 stand a chance?”
The colonel grins. ‘We’ll fix you up with some dandy hardware, sir. He’ll never know what hit him.”
“But can I trust him to keep his word? About be
ing just one of him? What if he comes at me in legions?”
“No sweat, general,” says the colonel. “This baby—
[Close-up of a shiny gismo with weird projections.]
“—is called a shredder. Newest weapon off the bench. One squeeze of this trigger and it fires a zillion coiled razor-sharp metal threads. Strip a herd of cattle to the bone faster than a shoal of piranha. You only have to get within ten feet of the bastard and you can annihilate him even if he becomes a whole corps.”
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