by Mick Jackson
So they all went roaring down the middle of Church Street. The grown-ups they passed had never seen the like. Cars had to pull up on to the pavement as the children ran cheering and screaming between them, and the owner of the sweet shop on the corner was so distraught at the sight of so many marauding youngsters that he decided to shut up shop and pulled down all the blinds.
Within five minutes the children arrived at the steps of the Town Hall and their defiant roar slowly subsided as it washed up against the hard grey walls of authority. Some of the children feared that their little adventure might now be over. They imagined themselves walking home, defeated and dejected. But the same young girl who’d rallied the troops back at the park brought her hands up to her mouth again.
‘We demand to see the mayor!’ she cried.
In no time at all the whole crowd was chanting, ‘We want the mayor, we want the mayor,’ which was quite exciting for all those doing the shouting and quite intimidating for everyone else.
In actual fact, none of the children had the faintest idea what the mayor actually looked like. The people peering out of the Town Hall’s windows could have sent just about anyone out to try and reason with them and they wouldn’t have known the difference. But the large, middle-aged man who eventually stepped out on to the balcony looked exactly how a mayor was meant to look, with a suit, a vague air of self-importance about him and a great chain of office slung around his shoulders, which he’d been wearing for some fancy reception before being so urgently called away.
Most of the chanting stopped, but here and there small pockets of agitation continued. The mayor stared out at the sea of faces and patted the air, to try and quieten things down. He looked utterly stunned. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he signed up for the job three years earlier. Most of his days were spent attending meetings about the bins or traffic lights, or having his photograph taken for the local newspaper at coffee mornings and sponsored walks.
He kept patting the air until some semblance of order had been established. Then, in a clear, strong voice, so that everyone could hear him, he called out, ‘What do you want?’
A skinny boy in a thick pair of glasses shouted, ‘Where are the aliens?’
This was quickly followed by other, similar enquiries, such as ‘Yeah, where are they?’ and ‘What’ve you done with ’em?’
A couple of minutes earlier, when the mayor had been informed that the town’s youth were demanding to see him, his first thought was that they must be upset about the quality of their school dinners or the state of their playing fields. But now that he was out on the balcony and had actually heard their concerns he was quite bewildered.
‘What aliens?’ he said at last.
It was just the kind of remark guaranteed to inflame the situation. Most of the crowd immediately started booing. Some children accused the mayor of being a liar, and went on to make some rather personal remarks about how fat and bald he was. And this commotion continued until one voice managed to make itself heard above all the others.
‘It’s a cover-up!’ he cried.
Those few choice words summed up the children’s mood quite perfectly: their frustration at the mayor’s denial that the aliens even existed, along with their growing suspicion that something deeply sinister was going on behind the scenes. The mayor raised his hands, but it was clear that no amount of patting or shushing was going to bring the crowd to order, so he decided to retreat to the safety of the building and consult some of the many advisers on his staff.
As far as the children were concerned, the facts could not have been plainer: either the aliens had been arrested or the spaceship had taken off again before they’d managed to reach it. Either way, the bigwigs at the Town Hall must have known what had happened and it was, frankly, insulting for them to pretend otherwise. A veil of secrecy had been drawn over the whole alien landing and any communication which had been made with them, but the people at the Town Hall hadn’t banked on a spontaneous uprising of the town’s younger citizens and their demand to be told the truth.
The mayor’s hasty retreat was seen as something of a minor victory and was accompanied by a great deal of cheering and chanting and stamping of feet. Deep in the throng Theodore Gutch was clapping and shouting with the rest of them. Theodore was having the time of his life. He looked around him and thought to himself, ‘I knew it. I knew it was an alien spaceship. We wouldn’t all be here if it hadn’t been.’
By now, everybody was thoroughly enjoying themselves and a giddy, end-of-term atmosphere had taken hold, when it occurred to Sandra Ward, a girl of eight who played the violin and was already up to Grade Four, that she hadn’t seen Miss Bowen, her music teacher, recently. The way in which her thoughts unfolded was probably due in no small part to all the talk of spaceships, along with the fact that Sandra was quite an excitable child. She pictured Miss Bowen walking in the park, and a spaceship hovering high above her. Saw a bright beam of light suddenly pick her out. Miss Bowen shielded her eyes as she looked up. And the next second poor Miss Bowen had been snatched away.
‘Miss Bowen!’ Sandra exclaimed and grabbed the arm of Lucy Gambol, who had a powerful imagination all her own. ‘The aliens have abducted Miss Bowen!’
It took a little longer for this rumour to circulate than Theodore Gutch’s, which wasn’t surprising considering the size of the crowd. Miss Bowen was a tall, bespectacled woman in her early forties with an eccentric taste in clothes. She could play the piano, the recorder and just about any other instrument you’d care to put in front of her, including a crumhorn, which looked like a walking stick and, when turned upside down and pumped full of air, made a reedy sort of sound which was very popular with the children, as indeed was Miss Bowen herself. In her music lessons they were encouraged to clap and stamp their feet very much like they’d just been clapping and stamping their feet a minute earlier. Her popularity may also have had something to do with the fact that most of her pupils only saw her once a week.
Miss Bowen was something of a free spirit. Rumour had it that she attended belly-dancing lessons and she once famously burst into tears in front of a class of twenty whilst playing them a recording of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. So the idea of her being abducted or forced to do anything against her will greatly upset the children, in a way that the abduction of, say, Mister Morgan or Bernie Blakelock, the school janitor, would not have done.
Very soon the chanting had turned into ‘Where’s Miss Bowen?’ and a few minutes later, once they’d managed to get the hang of it, ‘If there ain’t no aliens where is old Miss Bowen?’
Some of the children were beginning to get quite emotional. Who knew who might be abducted next? What Sandra Ward, Lucy Gambol and everyone else had failed to remember was that Miss Bowen only worked on Mondays and Fridays, so whilst they were now convinced she was being held aboard some alien spacecraft she was actually at home, having a bath and reading a book about Sri Lanka – a country she hoped to visit the following year.
Meanwhile, deep in the Town Hall the mayor and his staff were sitting in emergency session around a vast mahogany table as Mrs Haworth, the catering lady, went round with a large pot of strong, sweet tea. One of the mayor’s advisers suggested calling the police, but the mayor wouldn’t have it, knowing that photographs in the local paper of children being handcuffed and bundled into police vans would spell an end to his career.
‘No,’ he said, ‘we’re going to play it softly-softly. We’re going to negotiate.’ And he appointed his youngest, best-looking assistant to talk to the mob in order to try and establish exactly what their demands were and how far they were prepared to go to ensure that they were met.
Five minutes later, Malcolm Bentley stepped warily out on to the balcony and requested that the crowd nominate three children to meet him on the steps in ten minutes’ time.
‘We’re willing to talk,’ he said, and before creeping back to the window, added, ‘We’ve got to find a way through all this,’ which was
the first positive thing anyone from the Town Hall had said all afternoon and was met with a polite ripple of applause.
Not long after, the locks on the large oak doors at the front of the building could be heard clanking and turning. One of the doors creaked open five or six inches and Malcolm Bentley slipped out, to be met by the three children who had been chosen as representatives – partly due to their skills in diplomacy and partly because they were bigger than everyone else. The man from the Town Hall shook hands with each one of them. Then he produced a notebook from his jacket pocket and pulled the top off a pen between his teeth.
‘Now then,’ he said, ‘what are your demands?’
‘The first thing’, said Daniel Taylor, ‘is where’s the spacecraft?’
For a moment the young man from the Town Hall stared, baffled, at Daniel. Then he slowly started scribbling ‘Where … is … spacecraft’ on his pad. He nodded his head as he wrote.
‘We’re looking into it,’ he said.
‘Secondly,’ said Janet Barber, ‘is Miss Bowen safe or has she been experimented on?’
‘Miss Bowen,’ said Malcolm Bentley, writing.
Janet told him how to spell it. ‘Our music teacher,’ she said.
Malcolm continued to write. ‘We’ll look into that as well,’ he said.
When he had finished, Malcolm Bentley waited to see if there were any other demands and the three children briefly wondered if they might add one or two of their own. But they had only been sanctioned to present those already given and didn’t want to push their luck, so Daniel Taylor drew the proceedings to a close by saying, ‘That’s it then,’ and nodded his head.
Malcolm Bentley shook hands with all three again, making sure to look each one in the eye, for extra sincerity. ‘We’re going to need a bit of time,’ he said, ‘but I’m sure we can work this out.’
Daniel Taylor was not at all impressed with Malcolm Bentley. He thought he was a creepy piece of work. ‘Well, put it this way,’ said Daniel, ‘we’re either going to be here or we’re going to be at home doing our homework. Where do you think we’d rather be?’
*
A couple of miles away, in one of the town’s grander houses, in one of the better neighbourhoods, the headmistress of the school, Mrs Lambert, was slumped at her kitchen table listening to the radio. She had a mug of tea before her into which she was dunking a succession of ginger biscuits. She had already dunked at least four or five and was telling herself she could dunk just two more and then that would be that or she’d have no room for her baked potato.
She’d once dunked and eaten a whole packet of biscuits in a single sitting – something of which she was neither particularly proud nor especially ashamed. Just as her next biscuit went into her tea the telephone started ringing. She was still busy eating it when she picked up the phone. It was the mayor, who seemed to be doing his best to sound quite calm whilst actually being quite frantic.
He explained how the town square was currently packed with Mrs Lambert’s pupils and how they were becoming increasingly restless. Mrs Lambert found this hard to believe. Her pupils could get a little rowdy from time to time but had rarely shown any inclination to actually go on the rampage.
‘Are you sure they’re my lot?’ she said, which the mayor didn’t find especially helpful.
‘We are,’ he said. ‘They seem to have got it into their heads that an alien spacecraft landed in Lowerfold Park this afternoon and that we’re keeping it from them.’
There was a long pause at Mrs Lambert’s end of the line.
‘That’s not true, is it?’ she said.
‘Of course not,’ said the mayor, before pausing himself.
‘At least, not that I’m aware of. The thing is, they also seem to think that your music teacher has been abducted.’
The pause at the other end was even longer than the last one.
‘Miss Bowen?’ she said.
The mayor confirmed this.
‘Well, why don’t you just tell them that they’re mistaken?’ said Mrs Lambert.
The mayor was beginning to lose his temper. ‘I think we’ve got a bit beyond that,’ he said. ‘They’re all so mad keen on this alien idea that anything we say which they don’t like the sound of is seen as part of some great conspiracy.’
Eventually Mrs Lambert told the mayor she’d see what she could do and promised to call him back in ten minutes. After she put the phone down she stood in the hall for quite a while, just thinking. She was not a woman who was easily flummoxed. She once had five members of staff all phone in sick on the same Monday morning. She had managed to find a way through that little mess and would find a way through this one. She picked up her address book and flicked through the pages until she came to the letter ‘H’ for Mrs Holland, another member of her staff and the woman in charge of the arts and crafts cupboard.
‘Hello, Barbara?’ she said, when the phone was answered. ‘It’s Molly. Listen, we’ve got a bit of a situation.’ She took a deep breath. ‘We’re going to need as much tinfoil and papier mâché as you can conjure up.’
*
Back at the square, the crowd was steadily growing in number as the children on their way home from all the other schools stopped to ask what was going on. They heard about the alien landing, Miss Bowen’s disappearance and the whole Town Hall cover-up and all pledged to stand shoulder to shoulder with the demonstrators and demand the release of poor Miss Bowen … or the aliens … or possibly both.
The children gathered in groups to discuss Important Issues – something they’d never much done in the past. And when their parents finally appeared, wondering where on earth they had got to, and threatened them with dinners gone cold, burnt or fed to the dog, no one moved an inch. Some mothers and fathers tried to drag their child away against their wishes, but the other children linked arms and clung to their trousers and here and there a bit of a scuffle broke out. Tempers frayed, hackles were raised, but in the end the parents relented. To be fair, they didn’t have much choice. They were outnumbered, but could see no immediate danger to their children, and if they were completely honest they might have admitted that what bothered them most was the fact that nothing half as exciting had ever happened to them when they were young.
As the evening wore on, flasks of soup and blankets were handed out to the children. If they were going to be staying out all night, their parents reasoned, there was no sense in them getting cold or going hungry. And as darkness fell the children began to congregate around lanterns and candles and their conversations gradually grew more hushed. The stars came out and they lay on their backs, wondering if their music teacher was somewhere up among them and if she was, whether she was enjoying the experience.
The children slipped deeper under their blankets and their eyes grew heavy, until the only thing to be heard were renditions of ‘Greensleeves’ and ‘Cockles and Mussels’, sung in honour of their missing teacher, complete with all the harmonies she’d taught them the term before.
The night crept by. The children slept and the earth turned on its axis. Now and then, a child would wake and look around at all its sleeping comrades – would blink, smile, then lie back down again. Until, at last, the sky grew pink and the birds gathered on the Town Hall’s window-ledges to warm themselves with the rising sun.
Some of the children were just beginning to stir when the Town Hall door creaked open and Malcolm Bentley slipped out again. He tiptoed over to the sea of bodies, crouched down beside a boy who still wavered somewhere between sleeping and waking and whispered a few words in his ear. Then he moved on, bent down by another child, whispered the same few words, and moved on again, and kept on crouching and whispering before finally creeping back to the Town Hall.
This latest rumour swept slowly through the masses. The children sat up and shook their neighbours. They called out to friends who lay nearby, until one boy got to his feet and made an impassioned announcement.
‘The aliens,’ he cried. ‘They’ve lande
d in Lowerfold Park again.’
The children kicked off their blankets and in less than a minute they were on the move again. They all went hammering back up the hill towards the aliens. They raced up Church Street, past the school and through the park gates. They ran beside the bowling green and the tennis courts. Through the gardens and round the duck pond, under the horse chestnuts and out into the playground, where, at long last, they came face to face with the alien spacecraft as it sat on the ground in all its silvery majesty.
The children skidded to a halt. Those at the back pushed forward to try and get a better view. Those at the front resisted – didn’t want to get too close.
It wasn’t quite as big a spaceship as they’d expected. It was a squat little thing, about ten feet tall with a rounded top. More like a small caravan than a dish or a rocket. And, if truth be told, it was a little lumpy: not half as smooth or sleek as alien spacecraft are meant to be.
But there it sat, as solid and real as the swings and the seesaw, with the sun behind it, which gave it an ominous glow. Nobody said a word. The only sound was the chimes of a church bell, away in the distance.
For quite a while nothing happened. And some of the children began to wonder how long they might have to stand there waiting when, without warning, a hatch in the side of the spacecraft fell open. Not slowly and accompanied by a sinister hissing, like on the telly, but just sort of dropped open and hung there, suspended by what looked like a piece of string.
The children held their breath. Who among them would have the courage to step forward and greet the Martians? Certainly, Daniel Taylor began to wish he’d not been such an eager-beaver the previous day. But as they watched, a foot slowly emerged through the open hatch and stepped on to the tarmac. It wore a silver boot. Then the creature’s backside emerged … an arm … its head. Until the children saw that it was actually Miss Bowen. Miss Bowen setting foot back on Planet Earth.