The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 1

by Andy Ritchie

  I frowned for a moment, then nodded in agreement. After all, Mrs Bell next door (self-proclaimed Neighbourhood Watchwoman and purveyor of all things gossip) would no doubt have already twitched her net curtains and would now be quietly opening her living room window so she could tune her Jodrell Bank-type ears into our conversation.

  So I pushed open both the front door and the vestibule door and ushered Tukaal into my living room.

  ‘You can put your case at the bottom of the stairs,’ I said, pointing. ‘I’ll go and put the kettle on...I think I need a cup of tea.’

  At this point, I’d like to have a momentary digression. I’ve only a couple of years ago entered the realm of the 40+ brigade, but I have begun to notice that, rather than going to the fridge for a beer at the end of a long and tiring day, I more and more often find myself fancying a nice cup of tea — better still, a pot of tea so that I can have a couple of re-fills! Is that weird? Is it a sign of age? Is it something that happens to all of us as we get older, our body craving not only the drink, but the feelings of calm and contentment that so often come with both the brewing and the drinking? Who knows?

  ‘You seem to be taking all this very much in your stride, Jeth.’

  I had moved into the kitchen, filled the kettle, flicked on the switch and was now putting three tea-bags into my Wallace and Gromit teapot. He had followed me in.

  ‘Look, Mr Tukaal...sorry, Tukaal, I don’t want to be rude or anything, but this may all be very much business as usual for you, just another intergalactic encounter on some strange and whacky alien world, but for me this is some pretty weird shit and although I may not look like it, I’m pretty close to being totally freaked out! It’s bad enough finding yourself driving an alien into town, but its even more weird when the alien looks almost the same as me and doesn’t have three heads and a ray-gun, and is happy to talk about the weather and cricket!’

  ‘Would you have preferred it if I had taken your vehicle by force, threatened you with a terrifying weapon which could turn your body inside out, and demanded that you take me to your leader?’

  I thought about that for a few seconds.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘At least then I would only have to deal with being terrified!’

  ‘So you are not terrified now?’ he enquired, his voice a touch softer than before.

  ‘Er, no,’ I replied hesitantly, ‘I’m more...’

  ‘Confused?’

  I thought about that for another few moments as well.

  ‘Confused, yes,’ I eventually answered, ‘but not for the reasons you might expect. You see, if you had threatened me the moment you arrived, my response would have been simple — get away from you as quickly as possible, call the police and hope to God that I’m still alive when they come to take you away. But you haven’t threatened me...at all...in fact, quite the contrary, you’ve been the epitome of courtesy and good manners and, because of that, I have absolutely no idea what I should do next.’

  He leant casually against the work-top close to where I was now pouring water from the boiled kettle into my teapot.

  ‘It’s not my intention to make you feel at all uncomfortable, Jeth, particularly as you have already been kind enough to transport me to your town, invite me into your home and offer me a cup of tea. Therefore, let me ease your worries, if I can, by outlining what I am here for, on your planet. Maybe then you will be able to reach a conclusion about what you think you should do next. How does that sound?’

  His voice was smooth and captivating, at times almost melodic, just like it had been in the car, and his words seemed almost to massage away the tension, the fear, the worry that gripped me so tightly. I was on the point of asking him to continue when I did something that, at the time, must have appeared very odd to him and, with hindsight, appears very odd to me.

  I’m sure it will appear very odd to you too.

  I said no.

  That’s right, I simply said no.

  Why did I say no?

  Even now, several hours later, I’m not exactly sure. After all, it would have been so easy to let him tell me what his plans were and then, as he had suggested, decide on what, if anything, to do next. It would certainly have helped to clear the confusion I had.

  But it didn’t feel like the right thing to do, and I’ve always been one to trust his feelings (even though my feelings often get things very, very wrong!).

  Instead, what felt right was to finish making him a cup of tea, crack open the McVities Chocolate Hobnobs, sit down in the living room and...well...make some more polite conversation.

  Does that sound odd to you?

  It certainly does to me, now that I’ve come to explain it.

  But a brain...my brain to be exact, can only absorb so much, and I think I knew that. I had absorbed the fact that I’d witnessed the arrival of a well-dressed, well-spoken alien. I had absorbed the fact that I’d been privileged enough to engage with the alien, share a conversation with him. I had absorbed the fact that I had been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to help said alien and do my bit for making the Earth ‘a nice place to visit due to its charming and friendly indigenous population’. I had absorbed all of that, and still seemed to have retained my sanity.

  But I truly doubted that I could absorb anything else, including revelations about why he was here, what he intended to do, that sort of thing. All that, on top of everything else I had been forced to come to terms with, would simply be too much for my simple human mind to take!

  ‘Do you mind if I excuse myself for a few minutes?’ he asked as I poured milk into the milk jug and placed the sugar bowl along side it on my tea tray (yes, I have a tea tray and yes, I’m afraid I do have a couple of china cups, because tea certainly tastes better out of a china cup — get over it!).

  ‘Of course not. The spare room is on the right at the top of the stairs, the bathroom is next door to it.’

  Force of habit, I guess. I wasn’t even sure whether aliens used bathrooms.

  ‘I’ll set things up in the living room,’ I said, ‘then you can tell me whether you take milk and sugar.’

  The rest of the evening was a very relaxed affair. We sat in my living room. We talked about lots of things, watched a bit of television, listened to some music — lots of different stuff — a bit of The Jam, a bit of RandB, a bit of gay 80s, some Queen, some geek rock from the Barenaked Ladies. He looked at some of my photos...and was quite complimentary.

  We had more tea, more biscuits, some peanuts, then I had a beer (Tukaal abstained).

  I offered him some food but, as he had stuffed his face with over half a packet of Hobnobs, he said he wasn’t hungry.

  As for the so-called ‘elephant in the room’ (the question of what would happen tomorrow), well, it was barely even noticed, and certainly not mentioned.

  He retired at about 10.30 p.m., taking his little metal case and the fresh towels I had given him into the spare room.

  *

  There...finished.

  It’s about 2.30 in the morning now and I’m absolutely knackered. Yet, I’m also on a bit of a high...

  My fingers hurt, my brain feels as if it’s about to explode, I’ve been typing solid for almost 3 hours, something I’ve never done before, but then I’ve never had to, or wanted to do that before, but I felt I simply had to, had to try to get as much of it as possible down on paper so that I didn’t miss a thing, not one detail, not one feeling, not one emotion. I’m really surprised about how much of it I could remember, especially the things we talked about. I hope I got most of the dialogue right.

  Tired now, but wow.

  What a fucking weird day!

  What a truly fucking weird day!

  -----

  Diary Entry 2

  Saturday 11th September

  [Collator’s Note: JP’s second typed entry, also a Word document on the ‘Diary’ CD. He must have written this at the end of the day.]

  How do you turn a sceptic into a believer?

 
I guess that was the challenge which Tukaal faced today.

  How did he convince me, a fairly level-headed bloke who has reached that stage of his life where he has become sceptical about most things and downright cynical about some, that he was indeed the ‘real deal’, a bona fide ‘man from outer space’, and not part of some incredibly elaborate ‘Truman Show’-style deception that would soon be shown to the giggling masses on a prime-time Saturday evening TV show hosted by the jovial Geordie duo of Ant and Dec.

  And he did need to convince me, in spite of what had happened up on Winter Hill yesterday, in spite of what I had witnessed with my own eyes. I had had a night to sleep on it, you see, a night where my brain had done everything it possibly could to rationalise the events of that evening, to try to re-package the truly extraordinary into something more...acceptable ...and that was it, I was having trouble accepting what I had seen, in spite of the fact that I know I saw it, to the point where I had begun to doubt what I had seen, begun to look for alternative explanations for what had happened, and what was still happening.

  It’s all some sort of ultra-practical joke, I told myself...but then I’d realise that they don’t go to all this trouble to play a practical joke on a world-famous celebrity, let alone an insignificant plebeian like me!

  I’m in the middle of a drug-induced hallucination, I suggested to myself...but I haven’t ‘done drugs’ since I smoked a spliff with a couple of mates of mine when I was about 18 — I never did it again because it made me puke!

  I’ve been in a car accident and I’m currently in a hospital in a coma and what I am experiencing now is some strange ‘world in my head’ like Sam Tyler went into in ‘Life on Mars’...there was no way of knowing whether that was the case, but somehow I doubted it...and if it was, how really disappointing that the best my brain could come up with was the same pretty dull and boring life I had had before, with just a spaceship and an alien thrown in to add a bit of spice! It could have at least taken me back to the 80s, as happened to Keeley Hawes in ‘Ashes to Ashes’. The 80s were pretty damn good, better than the 90s, and better that the noughties, that’s for sure.

  That was about as far as my imagination could go with alternative explanations which, let’s face it, wasn’t very far.

  Was it Sherlock Holmes who once said that if you eliminate all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

  [Collator’s Note: Actually, in The Sign of the Four, he asked Watson: ‘How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?’]

  If so, then the only possible conclusion I could reach was that Tukaal was real and his spaceship was real and I had indeed spent yesterday evening chatting with an alien...

  It was the only plausible explanation.

  And yet, I still couldn’t bring myself to accept it. My natural scepticism simply would not allow it.

  That was why he needed to convince me.

  That was why he had to somehow turn a sceptic into a believer

  ...and he did it, even though it’s hard to believe, he actually did make me believe that what he was telling me was true.

  Did he succeed because I’m gullible?

  Did he succeed because I am easily persuaded?

  No, I don’t think so. If anything, I believe my natural scepticism makes me more difficult than most to inveigle (don’t ask me why I know about the word ‘inveigle’, I just do!).

  So how did Tukaal manage it, manage to convince me about who he is, where he has come from, what he is doing here, etc?

  On the face of it, the answer to that question must seem pretty obvious. Surely it comes down to a combination of his persuasiveness and the weight of evidence he was able to produce to back up what he was saying.

  And maybe it is just that and I’m trying to think too deeply about all of this (which makes a change because I don’t tend to think deeply about very much at all these days).

  But I do have another viewpoint.

  You see, as far as my relatively simple thinking goes, making someone accept something which they are naturally inclined to reject is all about how well those charged with doing the convincing can get rid of the ‘in’s, the ‘im’s and the ‘un’s.

  People are generally prepared to believe anything if what they are told, how it is told to them, and who tells them, is free of the ‘in’s, the ‘im’s and the ‘un’s.

  What I mean is this:

  The implausible is made plausible.

  The incredible is made credible.

  The unbelievable is made believable.

  The untrustworthy is made trustworthy

  Getting rid of the ‘in’s, the ‘im’s and the ‘un’s gets rid of doubt, and it is usually the lingering doubts which prevent any of us from being convinced about something. And doubts are often the legacy of ignorance, forming in those gaps in our knowledge where uncertainty can gather and breed, infecting our convictions and our certitude.

  That is why, I guess, Tukaal was willing to tell me so much today, was willing to share so much information about the Confederation, its history, what it has done on Earth and what it plans to do on Earth in the future.

  He was keen to make sure there were no places left for lingering doubts to hide.

  That was how he did it.

  I made notes, so many notes.

  I’m typing now and my arms and hands ache terribly.

  All day I have been trying to record as much as I could as quickly as I could because in getting it down on paper I made it all real to me. If it was there in black and white, I couldn’t doubt myself in the future.

  Bizarrely, I found myself on quite a few occasions today thinking about what Tukaal had said yesterday, just before we set off back home, about alien visitations happening quite often because they’re so confident that people won’t talk about it and even if they did then no-one would believe them. Surely it followed that the more information he told me, then the more potential credibility my own story (should I ever choose to share it with anyone else) would have...and eventually, there must come a point at which people will start to think: ‘Hang on, this isn’t just the wild ramblings of some whacko who’s lost his marbles, there’s just too much to all this now, too many believable threads, too much sensible evidence...no-one would go to all this trouble to perpetuate a lie, creating so many intricacies, weaving so many subtle inter-relations...would they?’

  Unfortunately, I think the answer is ‘Of course they would’. They’ve done it many times before and they will no doubt do it many times again.

  [Collator’s Note: Look up George Adamski on the internet.]

  That was when I realised Tukaal was right.

  No matter how much he chooses to tell me, no matter how many notes I write, my knowledge will never be so complete as to enable me to dispel every single one of the ‘in’s, the ‘im’s and the ‘un’s that will undoubtedly come up when I relate this tale to others.

  But then again, this is not really about convincing others, is it?

  No.

  This is about convincing me, not now, because now I am convinced, but in the future, when I’m old and grey and I’m looking back at my life and wondering whether any of this ever happened, whether any of it was really real. That’s when I can pick up these notes and let them transport me back to the couple of days when a man from outer space stayed at my house and revealed to me the realities of the universe.

  And, to cap it all, on one of those days, the man from outer space actually made me some breakfast!

  I was still pretty tired when I woke this morning. Last night had been a very late night and I had sort of hoped to sleep well towards midday (which in hindsight is a pretty anti-social thing to hope for when you have an extra-terrestrial guest in your home, but there you have it).

  Unfortunately, I didn’t.

  I remember looking blearily at my bedside clock and seeing the red numbers cheerfully tell me
that it was 08:28.

  I remember cursing softly.

  I remember desperately needing a pee and getting up and going to the toilet.

  I remember going back to bed and trying to nod off.

  I remember at 08:33 that I remembered what had happened last night and who was in my house, and at 08:35 I was out of bed and heading downstairs in my dressing gown.

  Tukaal was already awake, fully dressed in his immaculate grey suit, clean-shaven, hair styled, eyes bright in anticipation of the day ahead. It was sickening.

  ‘I heard you moving about upstairs and I thought you might like a nice cup of tea. I was getting a refill myself.’

  My Wallace and Gromit teapot sat on a mat on the kitchen table, along with a couple of cups (also on mats), a bag of sugar, a bottle of milk and a couple of teaspoons. Steam rose gently from the teapot’s spout, and only now did my nose decide to recognise the pleasant odour of Twinings English Breakfast (okay, so that was the ‘breakfast’ which Tukaal made me, but it’s better than nothing!).

  I said ‘Thank you’, but I think it came out as more like a vaguely appreciative grunt.

  ‘How long have you been awake?’ I asked eventually, popping a couple of slices of bread into the toaster.

  ‘About three hours,’ he replied.

  ‘And you’ve just been sat around all that time?’ I made no apology for the fact that I’d been asleep whilst my intergalactic guest had apparently been kicking his heels waiting for me to surface from my pit. After all, I had only had about five hours sleep! Anyway, who gets up at 5.30 in the morning? What was he (as Blackadder would ask) ‘a giant lark’?

  ‘I had a few things to be getting on with,’ Tukaal responded, almost apologetically.

  ‘Have you had anything to eat?’ I enquired as my toast popped and I took the Utterly Butterly from the fridge, ‘Or can you go for days without needing to eat as well as not needing to sleep?’

  ‘I ate some of your Corn Flakes, but I think, along with the tea, it has left you almost out of milk.’

  ‘No worries,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a couple of pints in the freezer. I’ll get that out and then pick up some more tomorrow from Sainsburys.’