by Paul Magrs
They stared at the portable’s screen.
“Jesus God,” said Aunty Anne.
THIRTY-THREE
I’m going to tell you what I saw. We watched the tapes many times after that, both their original footage and the recording of the TV show, complete with cutaway shots of a delighted, aghast, drop-jawed audience. The film—only fifty-two seconds of it—caused a sensation first here in this country, and then abroad. Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed and reviewed it since, dredging over its frames individually and in sequence. They have been through its murk with a fine-toothed comb, looking for extra clues in the corners of its blatant obviousness. But I am going to tell you what I saw that first time.
And you must understand—hard to think back now, this side of the millennium—that up until then, what did we have for evidence of visitor incursions? A few crappy shots of lights-in-the-sky, like fag ends glowing in the fog. Or discs that could have been just about anything, or descriptions of individuals that were downright embarrassing. Grey men with faces like a foetus indeed.
What we saw was this:
The bulked, black headland of a portion of Scottish coastline in January. A night with a storm pending: the firm, tussocky grass steeping in violet, quagmire juices. Timon and Belinda are lugging the lightweight camera and the picture jerks around. We see Belinda in wellies, looking a fright with her hair hanging down (the audience laughs) then she’s jumping up and down and pointing straight up and up and up zooms the camera, swishing messily into focus, out again, until it finds the craft. Then the picture clicks into absolute clarity on a dark brown mass, the size of a council house in the air. There are small panels, glowing a gentle lemony yellow, and bodies clustered, peering out. The soundtrack is filled with Belinda’s shrill wails and she dashes towards the mass as its lurches onto the dark beach, sending up fans of damp sand, which crash and patter onto her and Timon and the camera, which goes dead.
The audience moans, thinking this is all. But it isn’t.
There is fuzzing and crackling and we see the grass and the swampy ground again, very close-up, as if Timon the cameraman is lying on his stomach. Vaguely we can see the opened vessel, its belly gashed apart, spilling light like a wild house party, but one going on in silence. There are figures scattered on the rough ground. We see Belinda, drenched and lathered with mud, nearly unrecognisable. She howls at the figures. They look at us.
For five whole seconds we see a group shot and they look like an outing of friends. There is a woman in a sheer pink frock which is meant to seem see-through. She sits in a wheelchair, a slash up her dress showing off her legs, a yellow wig that sweeps up from her face. She is pushed by a soldierly-looking gent with a moustache and a yellow jacket. There are others: an old man in a scarlet dressing gown, a fat woman with an anxious look about her. Beside them there is a white horse.
The shot slides away into darkness and the film goes dead.
Justin the slick TV host didn’t know what to say to that. His autocue, his script, his own words failed him. The audience were on their feet and the floor manager tried to calm them down. They wanted to see the film again. And again. They wanted to hear Timon and Belinda talk it through.
The show overran by half an hour. The BBC switchboard was—as they say—jammed.
Astrology Annie came on. She was meant to talk about horoscopes in Ancient Egypt but all she could go on about was the footage and surely that woman in the wheelchair was… but it couldn’t be… but it was… Marlene Dietrich.
At the end of it all, when we were finally allowed to leave, we were called taxis and ushered out of a side door, as if we had done something wrong.
I took charge. Come hell or high water we were going out to dinner. I shouted my instructions and we ended up with almost twenty people coming with us, to an upstairs room of a restaurant in Greek Street that Astrology Annie suggested. When we walked in we caused a stir. The place had been quiet until we turned up.
After the main course, which had arrived past midnight because there were so many finicky eaters in their number, Wendy went to the loo and decided to phone Kilburn from the payphone on the stairs.
“Wendy! Where are you?” It was Serena.
“We’re having dinner. Did you see it?”
“My dear, I saw something… What is going on?”
“No fucking idea! Is Aunty Anne there?”
“She’s furious.”
“Why?”
“She thinks you’ll be a laughing stock.”
“She always thinks that.”
“Was it a fake?”
“How could it be?”
“But it was so… ridiculous.”
“Did you see them?” Wendy was laughing. “Did you see the visitors?”
“I saw some people. They looked like pensioners.”
“What did Aunty Anne say?”
“That she wants absolutely nothing more to do with the pair of them.”
Wendy was down the other end of the table from Timon and Belinda, who were being toasted and feted by a gaggle of production staff, audience members and apparently scientific experts. Belinda looked beatific, carefully answering their questions, and Timon seemed wary, eating very little of the banquet that was paraded before them. Wendy hadn’t been able to ask them anything yet. She found herself sitting with the Unicorn woman, Astrology Annie and another woman, with lank brown hair, who she didn’t know, and who kept disappearing into the toilet. Wendy tried to make conversation that had nothing to do with UFOs.
“You brought my uncle luck, you know,” she told Astrology Annie.
“Did I? Where is he?”
“He’s dead now.”
“Not that much luck, then.”
“I mean, he won the lottery in a Rollover week. He died a millionaire. And you predicted it. You said that week it would be someone just like him.”
Astrology Annie sighed. “I wish people would write in and tell me when that happens. I might get a rise. Everyone thinks I’m a joke.” Then she went off to refresh her bilberry-blue lipstick. It took a lot of concentration, because she had to invoke her spirit guide to help her get it on straight. “I’m slightly wall-eyed, you see,” she said, staring past Wendy. Wendy had already noticed and said something pleasantly about that giving Astrology Annie a special psychic look. “Hmm,” sighed Astrology Annie.
“I don’t know what my church will make of this?” said the Unicorn woman, from over the dessert menu. “Strictly, I don’t think we believe in extraterrestrials of any kind? This might be banned?” She looked gloomy. “I might be guilty of blasphemy even now, just by being here?”
Wendy asked, “So what do you believe in?”
She looked at Wendy. “Horses with horns on their heads?”
“Everyone!” called the produced of Strange Matter. “I give you a toast. To our intrepid souls here. Tonight we have seen something that might prove to be a landmark in the history of the unknown. I give you… Timon and Belinda!”
We all applauded and shouted raucously. The Unicorn woman whooped.
Timon was called upon to make a speech. He smiled shyly and, I’m sure, won the hearts of everyone there. He said, “Something new, coming true.”
We all applauded again.
Timon coughed and said on more thing. “I’ve… um… written a little book about…” He was besieged by cries and quickly disappeared behind the backs of those who had risen from their chairs to talk with him. People were getting up from other tables, no doubt earwigging on it all. Some of them had actually seen the show. The next morning I learned Timon had been offered six contracts of varying generosity before he got to his peach melba sorbet.
Astrology Annie came back from the toilet. “Oh, is something happening?” She sat down and nodded at the unknown woman’s vacant seat. “I found her in the Ladies’. I thought she was throwing up. All this green business in the sink.”
The Unicorn woman shook her head. “That’s my friend, Lizzie. And it’s
not sick? It’s ectoplasm?” She looked disgusted with Astrology Annie. “You should know all about that?”
Serena checked the house. No one, surely, knew that Timon and Belinda were staying here. Still she peered out into Plympton Road and tried to make out shapes hiding in her garden. She knew the press would be round like a shot. But there was nothing.
Annie had flown to her room some time ago and hadn’t returned. Serena was too dazed, thinking too fast about all sorts of things to wonder why her friend seemed so upset.
Switching off lights, turning off the oven, checking doors were locked, slipping into shoes sensible enough for the cold night. She stopped and thought hard for a moment. Then she picked up her mobile and called for a cab.
The book was in a knife drawer. She took it out.
Serena checked to the final page and it seemed complete. The pages were numbered, even. It felt warm in her hands, as if Timon had only just set it down, newly-done.
The taxi honked once discreetly at her kerb, like a cough. Serena slipped out and clicked the lock after her.
“Greenwich, please,” she told the cabbie and gave him Joshua’s exact address.
By the time they tumbled out into Charing Cross Road it was the early hours. Timon had pockets filled with scraps of phone numbers. The producer slapped his back and said he’d phone tomorrow. Belinda was shivering, pulling Timon’s jacket over her backless dress. We decided to head towards Trafalgar Square, looking for a taxi. “We should have phoned from the restaurant,” said Belinda dreamily.
“They were glad to see the back of us,” I said.
“Who paid for all that?’
“I did.”
“Oh, Wendy… you can’t.”
I shrugged. Raised my arms. I was drunk. “I’m a big heiress now, aren’t I? A big fucking humdinger of a rich heiress!” Using Colin’s favourite word made me miss him suddenly. I imagined his reaction to tonight.
“Hey, hon,” said Timon, becoming himself again. “That reminds me.” From his wallet he produced the cheque I’d written them and he started to rip it up.
“Don’t do that!” I made a grab and rescued it.
“Don’t fight, you two,” said Belinda, looking round. “That lot are still behind us, watching.”
It was true. Astrology Annie had dashed off ages ago, to write the whole thing up for her spooky column in the Telegraph. But behind us the Unicorn woman was helping Lizzie along. The ectoplasm woman had her handbag held up over her chin.
“Oh, let’s get out of here, kids,” said Timon. “I’m thinking of a nice goose-down bed.”
“I want you to have this money,” I said.
“We don’t want it.”
“I didn’t want it, either!” I shouted. “Uncle Pat gave me no choice!”
“He loved you, Wendy,” said Belinda.
“He loved you fellas as well,” I yelled. “Jesus God. Just go and spend it, will you? For me?”
“Well….”
“I don’t want the responsibility for all that money.”
“I’ll make money anyway,” said Timon blithely. “I’m going to publish my book. Pieces of Belinda will make us a fortune.”
Belinda glowed.
“Is that what you’ve called it?”
He nodded, watching out for a cab. Then he told me, “You can’t please everyone, you know. You’ll try to, but you can’t.”
Our taxi came.
“Yeah, well,” I said. “I can try, can’t I?” A thought struck me as we clambered aboard. “You do have a copy of that tape, don’t you? I mean, we haven’t left the only one back there?”
“We’ve got copies,” he grinned. “Plympton Road, please. The pictures are out in the world now, anyway, hon. You’ll see. By tomorrow they’ll be in everyone’s eyes.”
The cabbie asked us, “Did you see the telly tonight?”
“We saw.”
“Fakkin aliens! The fakkers’ve landed! And they looked just like fakkin ordinary people!”
“We know.”
The papers next morning gave their covers to Timon and Belinda. Almost all of them used Belinda’s chosen word ‘visitors’ and this word was repeated in bold across all the front pages.
Imagine an old film at this point. That thing they used to do, spinning the front pages, one after another, up to the camera.
The pictures they took from the video stills came out rather badly. Dark fuzz with tiddly figures. It was disappointing, so the papers mostly elected to use shots of Timon and Belinda themselves, stepping out of the BBC’s side entrance.
I was first up next morning. The phone was already ringing and it never stopped all that day. I checked the answerphone was on and let it be. Belinda and Timon lay in, under their goose down, and I could hear Belinda sneezing in her sleep. No sign of Aunty Anne, and Serena’s bedroom door was open, her bed untouched.
I went out for a walk down Kilburn High Street and bought all the papers.
I went to the launderette to see what Ute thought. I arrived just in time to turn the page for her. Please turn to page two and three for full story.
“Jesus God,” said Ute. “The aliens come and they look like this fat woman and black man.”
“They’re just the people who saw them,” I explained. “Those two aren’t the visitors.”
“That’s not what the Sun is saying,” said Ute.
“It was true. Their banner read: visitors go home and underneath it, Belinda and Timon’s faces looking startled, almost affronted.
THIRTY-FOUR
All this time Mandy was pregnant in the north. And she was getting huge, she wrote. She wrote and told me she was like the swans on the canal by the Professor’s house, where he walked each morning to clear her head from writing through the night. She wrote at night to keep the Professor from seducing her.
She felt like the swans, full-breasted, heavy-bodied, on the frozen canal. They had nowhere to swim and Mandy said she laughed when she saw them skidding from bank to bank, trying to crack the ice. If they cracked the ice with their weight they’d still have nowhere to swim, she said.
She wrote and asked what I meant by sending her money. That was the beginning and end of her qualms about accepting it and she cashed the cheque, put it to good use. She stored it up for her escape from the Professor, the learned, bearded Sultan who kept her all that winter and sometimes, she said, he tried to get his end away with her. He knew she never wanted him really and he turned glum and folded in upon himself. He carried his years and learning heavily that winter. When she read—her voice getting stronger and surer—chapter by inevitable chapter, he sometimes played with himself surreptitiously in the firelight and she didn’t mind.
She wrote and asked what was all this fuss about Timon and Belinda. No TV in the Professor’s house. That was how he kept himself free from the pernicious hold of the everyday. He didn’t know anything he didn’t want to know: he had no inadvertent knowledge. Only Mandy could surprise him, or he permitted her to. But they both read the papers when they knew Timon and Belinda were in them.
Had the world gone mad? Mandy wanted to know. Listening as it was to Timon and his funny, old girlfriend. They had been on telly again and again those early months of the year. And there was talk of Timon having a book out, the literary companion to his short film. The papers talked about the book being published soon, though Timon held them off. An artist, such an artist, Mandy said. He’ll be finicking the details and holding his publication off. Booting up his price. Mandy hoped he’d keep holding them off, since she wanted to be the first in print. Her story was coming out in March, her novel was almost complete. Hers and Timon’s was a race to get into print, a wager they’d made way back in Blackpool. I’d never heard of their wager before.
Mandy said that when her story came out in March, she would come to London and see me at last. In April her baby ought to be ready to drop.
The Professor’s hold over her was by no means complete. She pitied him now. He was a Su
ltan only in his own house, masturbating over her nightly tales.
That winter and Mandy’s letters seemed so clear to me now. Yet that was a time when none of us yet knew her daughter, Lindsey, who still hadn’t been born. Mandy wasn’t yet published, she was waiting. Those facts make it seem a very long time ago. What also makes it seem an ago to me, is that I still hadn’t met my Joshua, my eventual husband, and his daughter. That was all about to happen.
Mandy hadn’t yet had her reviews for her story in March. Those reviews, I remember, drove her crazy. It was very full of meaning, they said, it was laden with a—big breath—superfluity of meanings, resonances, allusions. And so it was a success. Her story was called ‘Me in the Monster Museum’ and that was to be the name of the novel too: a sprawling, compendious book, written and finished off during that winter.
“Allusions? What fucking allusions?” our Mandy asked when she read the reviews in London. “They’ll say I was cheating next.” And, like many a successful woman, they wanted to know about the man they felt sure was behind her. Sure enough, they turfed out the Professor, her hirsute beaming Professor, although the Professor didn’t need much turfing.
They thought she was Collette and he was her Willy.
‘What?!’ Mandy shouted.
When she arrived at King’s Cross that March she didn’t think to ask for a porter to help with her bags. Down the platform she came, her face in a rictus. I went running through the oncoming crowd to help her. I hadn’t seen my sister for most of a year and the changes were alarming. I hadn’t reckoned on seeing her big like this, with the baby virtually poking its head out of her. She was still Mandy to me, Mandy who would never get caught, Mandy who knew a thing or two.
Still drinking and smoking though, even with the lump in front of her. We dragged her cases into the pub at King’s Cross that was meant to look like a country pub, with flock wallpaper and horse brasses. She looked very pale and her face was luminous with sweat. It was two in the afternoon and she made me fetch two pints of lager for us. “I’ll never get on the Tube with this little lot,” she said numbly, taking in her lump with her baggage.