“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 longstanding 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.
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* * * *
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 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.
* * * *
“Essentially,” it said, “I’m a dreamer. Unfortunately, the soil in which you’ve planted me isn’t doing a great deal to fertilize my imagination. It needs assistance.”
As you can imagine, I was somewhat taken aback by this revelation, but I won’t embarrass myself by trying to repeat exactly what I said during the next half hour, while I belatedly convinced myself of the obvious. Eventually, we got back to the nub of the matter.
“What kind of assistance?” I said. “There’s a young man at work who’s always bragging about tripping on LSD. I expect he’ll know where I can buy some.”
“I’m not talking about human-active psychotropics,” the plant said. “Do I look as if I have the kind of brain chemistry that could be stimulated or inhibited by the same things that play havoc with yourneurotransmitters?”
“You do when I’m staring one of your flowers in its temporary face,” I said. “But that’s not the point, I suppose. You don’t even look as if you have the same kind of carbon-fixing chemistry as your neighbors, so I’ll presume that we’re in a whole different ball-park, if you’ll forgive the Americanism. So what do you need?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” the plant confessed. “This isn’t a milieu I know anything about, and I haven’t a clue how I wound up here. I’ve sent out roots as far as I presently can, in order to sample the local resources, and the most promising location seems to be roughly north by northwest, on or above the surface.”
It took me a few seconds to work out which way that was, but I eventually figured out that I needed to look towards the far corner of the garden, at the shady covert sandwiched between the back end of the shed and the fence, diplomatically shielded by the bole of the pear tree.
“Oh,” I said. “The compost heap. You want composting.”
“There appears to be something in the soil in that region that has a stimulating effect,” the plant informed me. “I can access it by means of my exploratory roots, but it would be more convenient if you could transport the active compound to the immediate vicinity—and more convenient by far if you could identify it and procure more.”
“That might not be easy,” I said. “I compost all sorts of things—not just cuttings from the lawn and the usual sorts of garden waste but potato-peelings and apple cores, and leftover food when Mildred gets a rush of blood to the head and makes a bit too much for our feeble appetites to cope with. She means well, bless her, but I wish she wouldn’t try to feed me up. I’m a solicitor’s clerk, not a Sumo wrestler. I also buy fertilizer at the Garden Centre and mix it in with the stuff in the heap—not that vile chemical fertilizer, of course, but natural fertilizer: h
orse manure and the like.” In those days, of course, green politics was just getting off the ground, and there were only a few prophets of doom anticipating ecocatastrophe, but as a keen amateur gardener I already had many habits that would nowadays be thought progressive.
“That’s good,” the plant said. “It will make it easier to experiment. Just pack a few forkfuls of compost around the base of my stem, for now. Starting tomorrow, though, we’ll test out the elements of the mixture one at a time. We’ll do the household leftovers first, and then we’ll move on to the things you can buy at the Garden Centre.”
“I don’t have a lot of control over the kind of leftovers we generate from day to day,” I said. “Menu-planning is Mildred’s department, and she’s very keen on my respecting her boundaries. That’s only fair, mind, because she’s just as keen on respecting mine—which is why you haven’t met her, and probably won’t. She’s not a garden person. She hates bugs and gets allergies.”
Alien Abduction - The Wiltshire Revelations Page 12