‘Hello?’
‘Oh, hello,’ said George, pushing the box aside. ‘I know this is a long shot, but are you Mr Forde by any chance?’
‘That depends on what you’re selling,’ he replied cautiously. ‘Are you selling something, because I’ve got everything I need?’
George could tell he was about to hang up. ‘Are you Mr D. B. Forde, author of Hands from the Sky?’
A crackling silence. ‘How did you get my home number?’
‘I thought you might have moved house since…’
‘How did you get my number?’ he asked again, firmer.
‘Sorry, Mr Forde. Please forgive me. My name is…’ He thought about it. ‘My name is Cameron Slade. I’m a writer. I was given your number by a man in the village of Petheram, in Somerset. He said…’
‘Sylvia Tredwin,’ Forde interrupted.
‘You remember,’ George said.
‘Yes I remember. What about it?’
‘I was born in Petheram, I was friends with Sylvia’s son. I knew the family quite intimately,’ he lied. ‘It’s only recently I came across aspects of Sylvia’s life story that has bothered me – and I was given a copy of your book…’
‘So?’
Definitely on the defensive, thought George. ‘So I wanted to find out more about what happened to Sylvia Tredwin. You spent some time with her, I understand.’
‘Are you from the newspapers?’ he fired bluntly. ‘Some kind of hack reporter?’
‘No, absolutely not.’
‘I’ve never heard of Cameron Slade.’
‘I’m not that well known, in all honesty.’
‘That makes two of us,’ he said, chuckling unexpectedly.
‘Can I meet with you personally?’ said George.
‘We can speak over the phone, if at all. I don’t meet with people anymore,’ he said. It had an ominous ring to it. ‘What I mean to say is I don’t trust people anymore.’
‘I’m not like other people,’ said George. ‘It wouldn’t take long and I’m not that far away from Plymouth. It would be great to meet with you to talk about your books and in particular the Sylvia Tredwin case. I’m a great admirer of your work,’ he said hopefully. He quoted the names of a few books authored by Forde which he’d looked up on the internet. ‘I have them in first editions,’ he lied again.
The silence crackled again. ‘I can spare half an hour or so, no more.’
‘Great!’ George said. ‘When?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘So soon?’
‘Get it over and done with,’ he said stiffly, though George could tell he’d made an impression with his improvised feigning of admiration. All writers were the same, he thought. Shallow seekers of the affirmation and love of complete strangers. And he should know.
They agreed a time and place and George set the phone into its cradle with smug satisfaction. His hand had lifted the lid off the box before he’d even had time to think about it. His school reports were all there, the earlier ones in book form, the latter on single sheets of A4 stuffed into envelopes. Neatly stacked in date order, earliest to the bottom. The mummification of his hated school days.
He was drawn to one of the earliest, to his time at the primary school that used to be in the village but which had closed down long ago due to falling numbers. His age, written in blue biro by his class teacher at the top of the page, was given as six years old. Reading age, below average; mathematics, below average; written work quite interesting and imaginative at times. And then the comment that got him a beating at home.
George still finds it difficult to make real friends or become involved in any class discussion or activity. George continues to believe he has an invisible friend called Cameron, which is no great worry as many children create imaginary friends to make up for real ones and is something they quickly grow out of. But George’s attachment to Cameron is, if anything, becoming stronger and more invasive, and it is something we will keep an eye on. Perhaps you may find ways to remind George that Cameron isn’t real, as continued belief in this character may hinder his personal and academic development.
He slammed the report back inside the box and thumped the lid back on. Bitch, he thought. What did she know about the creative mind? He remembered his father reading the report and getting all heated up over this thing with Cameron. So much so he gave him a beating on the backside and sent him up to bed, threatening that if he ever heard about that bloody Cameron ever again he’d send the boy away to a school for crazy children, because he had to be crazy to believe such a thing. And he couldn’t have a crazy kid in the house.
It didn’t work though, did it? Cameron said.
‘You ain’t real,’ said George under his breath. ‘It says so here in this report.’
What do they know?
God, I am really fucked up, George thought, resting his head in both hands and staring hard at the dusty, scuffed cardboard lid of the box of reports. So is that why you’re drawn to Sylvia Tredwin, because she was fucked up too?
He guessed it was, deep down. Because, let’s face it, we’re all fucked up in one way or another. Then he frowned thoughtfully, returning to the receipt for work done to his father’s car, the replacement of the corroded wing.
Surely a four-year-old car couldn’t have had that much corrosion, even a British-made car. He checked the MOTs for the Fiesta. There was a warning about a wiper on its way out, but nothing about corrosion. Uncle Gary wouldn’t have let his brother-in-law buy a naff car from him, nor fail to register any corrosion during its MOT a year later.
The image of Bruce Tredwin being knocked down in the lane by a hit-and-run driver flashed in his mind.
He shook his head. No, surely that’s impossible. But the wing replacement followed the accident almost immediately. Was it such a big leap of the imagination? Hang on, George; are you seriously thinking your father might have been the driver of the hit-and-run car?
He shook his head. His father had been many things, but he had never been one not to report such a serious accident.
That’s if it was an accident…
He caught a taxi from Plymouth railway station. It had been years since he’d been to the city. It had changed dramatically. He didn’t recognise the place, with its modern thoroughfares and shops, its many new buildings, a city bombed to hell during the Second World War and having to be rebuilt almost from scratch. Still, in relation to its city counterparts in other areas of the country, it appeared to him to be a large town trying to be a city. Stuck at the arse-end of the country, too far away from London and the Centre of the World, and hindered by the fact it was in the South West anyway (a part of the country nobody else seemed to take very seriously and one of the reasons George Lee got away from it just as soon as he could) Plymouth reminded George of a prime minister trying to battle with MPs at Prime Minister’s Question Time using a broad South West accent. But those opinions belonged largely to Cameron Slade, he knew that. As the taxi skirted the city and into the suburbs he wondered whether he should adopt a new pseudonym. Cameron Slade had become too negative and bitter over the years. Too dominant. Maybe that’s what was hindering his sales…
Forde’s house was your regular semi, built in the 1930s. Now quite desirable, as most of the new stuff they threw up was never going to last as long or be as sturdy. It even had its original 1930s door, with its yellow oval glass and brass door knocker and letterbox.
‘Mr Slade,’ said D. B. Forde, standing in the doorway. He was a sturdy man, built like his sturdy 1930s house, in his seventies, George surmised; an easy-living paunch pushing at his shirt and trousers, his sleeves rolled up, silvery hairs on his arms, a pair of checked slippers on his feet. He didn’t look like George’s image of a man who wrote about alien abduction; he looked like he wrote books on how to plant carrots and pickle onions.
He invited George inside, directed him to the living room. It was a large sunlit room, with a full bookcase taking up most of one wall, and so crammed w
ith books they had, by necessity, spilled onto the floor and were forming a couple of neat piles on the room’s gaudy red carpet.
‘I’d offer you a drink, but you’re not staying,’ said Forde as George sat down. ‘I’m painting the spare bedroom, so we’re going to be quick.’
‘Fine,’ said George. ‘I’m pleased you agreed to see me.’
Forde sat heavily opposite George, his podgy fingers interlaced awkwardly. ‘I got a lot of stick from people,’ he said suddenly. ‘Over the years. Lots of negative press for my beliefs. For my theories. In the end I gave it all up. I’ve not written anything in ten years. I had hoped people would have forgotten about me.’
‘Was it really that bad?’
‘People in our business get called all manner of things, Mr Slade. From cranks to loonies, to New Age dreamers, forever being laughed at, scorned, dismissed and marginalised, forced to inhabit the scientific sidelines. I never wanted my books to be sold alongside those lurid tales of the curse of Tutankhamen, or the government-sanctioned assassinations of Princess Diana, President Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. My works are serious attempts to understand something that is quite bizarre and as yet unexplained. I am first and foremost a scientist. A scientist who happened to believe in the existence of aliens. Those other people, those Tutankhamen and conspiracy people, frankly, they’re all mad.’
‘Who happened to believe in the existence of aliens? You used the past tense.’
‘A slip of the tongue. I now find I want to lead a quiet life, see my retirement out with a little dignity. My skin is not as hard as it used to be; I find I cannot take the criticism as easily as I used to. I bruise quite readily, Mr Slade. Hence my reluctance to see you. But, being out of my head, I find I am here speaking with you when I should really have told you to shove off. So, you write thrillers, eh?’
George Lee raised a brow. ‘You know of me, then?’
‘A quick internet search. A little too bloody and insubstantial for my liking, but we all have to make a living. Well, what do you want? Time’s running out, in more ways than one. I’m not getting any younger and my wife would like me to finish painting the bedroom before I kick the bucket.’
‘Yes, quite,’ said George. ‘I expect you interviewed many people who said they’d been abducted by aliens.’
‘Many. But most were deluded individuals seeking some kind of personal publicity or elevation. Cranks and fraudsters, for sure.’
‘But, in your opinion, not all were cranks and fraudsters. What separated out the good abductees from the bad ones?’
Forde frowned deeply. ‘We don’t call the abductees now. There was a move in the 1990s to call them experiencers, a move from studying actual abductions to research on what people had experienced. The two things being entirely different. It was a move from the actual to the imagined. In my opinion, it did ufology no favours at all. It all but dismissed the notion of an actual abduction by actual aliens so that researchers could hang on the coat-tails of psychology, a rather more established and respected profession. It has been conveniently boiled down to religious archetypes shared by the human unconsciousness, neatly packaged as a series of sociological metanarratives and New Age illusions generated to fill the void left by a dwindling belief in God.’
‘But I detect that you are sticking to your guns,’ said George. ‘Rightly so. A man needs to stick by his principles.’
It sounded trite to George, but Forde took it favourably. ‘Yes, I am sticking to my guns. I believe there were – are – actual visitations from somewhere in this vast universe of ours. People have been physically taken, and physically examined. There are just too many cases that have been impossible to disprove. Of course, the argument is that people have always been subject to abduction throughout history, long before the coming of the flying saucer scares in the late-forties and throughout the1950s. Early records are full of the tales of goblins or fairies who stole people away…’
George was reminded of the medieval Flinder girl and the tales surrounding the ancient burial mound in Flinder’s Field. ‘They say the flying saucer flap in the 1950s was a direct result of nuclear proliferation, of the growing tensions in the cold war, Sputnik and all that.’ He’d done just enough research to appear at least half informed. ‘There was an earlier airship flap, before the invention of aeroplanes and dirigibles, when people claimed to have seen men flying overhead in giant airships. I remember one case where an anchor from one of these phantom airships got caught in the weather vane of a church steeple and a man clambered down the rope to free it. He was captured by locals, but escaped, I believe.’
‘Attested to by crowds, not by delusional individuals.’
‘Cases of mass hysteria?’ George was finding himself pulled into the discussion, his natural curiosity aroused by this very earnest and apparently quite sensible man.
‘It is a war that is easy to take sides in.’
‘A war?’
‘For every theory supporting the existence of UFOs, there is a counter-theory to dismantle it. It is therefore a war with two opposing sides, with a lot of people scared to pick a side, a war no one can win until there is definitive proof one way or the other.’
‘So how does Sylvia Tredwin fit into all this? Do you believe she was abducted?’ George licked his lower lip unconsciously. ‘There was precious little about her case in your book. Nothing convincing.’
‘True, I only referred to it obliquely. She was very credible, but in the end I simply didn’t feel convinced one way or the other. I only published what, in my mind, was scientifically probable, with a body of evidence to back it up, as much as was possible. So I hung back on the Sylvia Tredwin case even though I knew there was something important going on. The signs were all there, all the cards on the table – what the psychologists might call an archetypal narrative.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You are, of course, aware of the case of Betty and Barney Hill…’
He nodded. Thankfully, the books were all full of this case. It was back in 1966. The Hills were an interracial couple who both suffered memory loss while driving in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Concerned with the memory loss, and each of them plagued by bad dreams, they were subsequently subjected to hypnosis under which they confessed to being abducted by aliens. Their case became very famous, which seemed to be the spark that lit a whole load of other similar stories of abduction throughout the 1970s.
‘Sylvia spoke of something comparable, I got that much from your book,’ said George.
‘Sylvia’s story had many of the elements present in a lot of abduction tales, the similarity making it easy for many to dismiss. But why shouldn’t there be a recognisable narrative to abductions? One might say it is a process, after all, this coming to earth, taking people, examining them, bringing them back. And processes, as we know, all follow similar lines, even if they vary slightly in the detail.
‘When I met her in 1979 she was in a pretty bad state. She’d lived with the experience for five years, never willingly broadcasting it, in fact trying her best to submerge it. But she suffered from recurrent nightmares that ensured she hardly slept at all, and she could hardly bear to be with her four-year-old son, whom she was convinced was the result of artificial insemination of the alien kind. She was a very tired, emotionally frail young woman, shunned by the locals of Petheram, whose beauty had been bleached by an unknown experience, to whom, without a shadow of a doubt, something very traumatic had indeed happened. I told her I could help her by listening to her talk about her experience, by not making judgements as the local newspapers had done. I genuinely wanted to help this sad woman. Gradually, over a period of time, she came to trust me and allowed me to interview her. I had three sessions, each lasting about three hours…’
15
Bad Egg
The room was quiet and small and perhaps a tad too dark for Daniel Baker Forde. He didn’t like it to be too gloomy for these kinds of interviews. Didn’t like anything to influence the
replies. He would have preferred a plain, bright room of his choice, but obviously this woman was in no fit state to even leave the house without panicking, he thought.
In front of him, on a small wooden table, stood a cup of steaming coffee going cold and a plate with two custard creams on it, provided by Sylvia’s husband, Bruce Tredwin. A nice guy, thought Forde. Honest, down-to-earth man. Someone who didn’t strike you as being the publicity-seeking type. Quite the opposite, in fact. It was partly down to him that this interview was taking place at all. Sylvia Tredwin had refused his advances point blank. But on hearing of her case he knew he just had to try and see her. When she refused him over the phone and by letter, he did what he never did, and that was visit her in person. That’s because he knew there was something to be had here.
She was a beautiful woman, he thought, staring at her as she sat hunched in the armchair opposite him, every now and again casting nervous glances at the window over which the curtains were all but fully drawn. But it was a faded beauty, as if someone had set about defacing it, rubbing it away with an eraser. Dark lines sat under her wide eyes, and there was the appearance of premature wrinkles at their corners, spiking outwards like hairline fissures in her pale skin, acting as signposts towards the tiny streaks of grey hair appearing at her dark-haired temples.
‘Are you afraid of something, Sylvia?’ he asked gently.
‘Hmm?’ She turned to him.
‘You keep looking at the window.’
‘It’s nothing,’ she said. Her body was crumpled, almost screwed up like paper, as if attempting to shrink herself smaller than she was, her hands locked together clam-like on her lap. ‘Will this take long?’
‘As long as you want. When you’ve had enough just tell me and we’ll pick it up another time.’
FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) Page 12