I'm Telling You, They're Aliens!

by Jeremy Strong

  My heart had come to a complete stop. ‘Into their house? Are you mad? We may as well ask them to kill us now.’

  ‘Don’t be so wet. It’s not like we’re going to knock on the door. We sneak in when they’re asleep.’

  This idea was pretty mind-blowing. I mean, normally when you make a new friend and ask them round to your house, you listen to music together or maybe play a game on the computer. Bogbrush was suggesting we sneak into somebody else’s house in the middle of the night and take snapshots of them. It was fantastically exciting and horrifyingly scary… and it could just work. I nodded slowly

  ‘All right, we’ll do it, as long as I have time to make my will before we go. Have you got a camera?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bogbrush! Why suggest it if you haven’t got one?’

  Bogbrush lifted her chin and those vague eyes of hers suddenly went into sharp focus. ‘You call me Bogbrush and I’ll call you Chicken Licken, OK? How do you want to play this, Rob?’

  Talk about turning red! I felt like a nude beetroot. ‘Sorry’ I muttered. ‘I think my dad’s got a camera downstairs. I’ll see if I can find it.’

  ‘How do we get into the house?’

  I smiled. This was the easy bit. ‘I’ve got a key. The last people who lived there gave my parents a spare key so that Mum could feed their cat when they went away. We’ve still got it, and I don’t think the locks have been changed.’

  Marsha and I looked at each other. This plan was suddenly becoming a very real thing. We were going to do it. We were going to enter the alien stronghold, and I hadn’t even decided what I wanted written on my gravestone. My heart started fluttering again, like a little bird between a cat’s jaws. ‘OΚ,’ I said, ‘meet up by the bushes in our front garden at midnight, yeah?’

  Marsha nodded. The colour had drained from her face. I asked her if she was scared and she shook her head, her tight curls bouncing about her face. ‘No way!’ she said quickly. At the door she turned back to me. ‘I’m petrified,’ she said, and vanished down the stairs.

  I was astonished. I had never realized that Bogbrush – sorry, Marsha – had words like ‘petrified’ in her vocabulary. I had to go and look it up in the dictionary. She was turning out to be a dark horse. (Or a stone.)

  I was left in my bedroom, thinking. Suddenly this whole business was turning into something real. I wasn’t on my own more, worrying about alien invaders. Marsha was with me, and we were really doing something. Scary stuff, eh?

  5 What Kind of Cheese?

  We never made it that night. We managed to meet up all right. Marsha was already waiting when I finally got outside. It had taken me longer than I thought to get ready I kept forgetting things like my Swiss Army penknife, torch, compass, chocolate rations, signalling mirror, Dad’s camera and so on. Then I had to go back for bandages and plasters, just in case, and finally I went back for the emergency foil blanket. (I had read somewhere that shiny foil can protect you from some alien weapons.) I stuffed everything into a rucksack.

  ‘Where are you going?’ hissed Marsha, staring at the rucksack. ‘On safari?’

  ‘You never know what you might need,’ I explained. I felt a bit embarrassed, but I had to ask her. ‘Are you wearing clean underwear?’

  ‘None of your business!’

  We stood there shivering in the shadows and we were just plucking up enough courage to cross the road when this UFO turned up. Well, I say ‘turned up’, but I suppose that sounds as if it came wandering over like some kid at a party with nobody to talk to. (I know how that feels!) It sounds silly, but that’s how it was.

  This UFO arrived from nowhere, silently, up in the sky, high above the Vorks’ house. It was the faintly shimmering lights that first caught our attention. They rippled round its edges. In the darkness of the night sky it was difficult to make out its shape properly, but it appeared to be flat and circular, and there seemed to be a hole in the centre of the base. It stayed in the same place, hovering at high altitude, and it was all so strange. The sky was clear and full of stars, like any other night on Earth, and here, bang in the middle of it, was a craft from another world.

  And then the colours came. They came in transparent waves, like drifts of coloured gauze: yellow, green and blue, radiating out from beneath the craft, spreading and sinking towards the ground, right behind the Vorks’ house. There was no noise, just the lights, and then they stopped and the UFO drifted away into the night. I was rooted to the spot.

  ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘Fabulous!’ said Marsha, with a rapturous smile.

  ‘How can you say that?’

  ‘I can hardly believe it. I’ve seen a real UFO!’

  ‘We have to tell someone. This is getting far too dangerous. We can’t handle this by ourselves. We must go to the police.’

  Marsha swung her torch on to my face, almost blinding me. ‘What do you think they’ll do? Chase it with a squad car? Arrest it for parking in mid-air?’ She began to laugh. ‘This road hasn’t even got double yellow lines. Anyhow, it’s gone.’

  ‘We have to do something,’ I insisted.

  ‘Tell your parents then.’

  ‘Oh come on! If they know I’ve been out here at this time of night…’

  Marsha nodded. ‘I know what you mean. It’s funny isn’t it? We could be out here saving the world and all my mum would say would be “Never mind the alien invasion – you get back to bed at once!” Crazy’

  ‘Snap.’

  We gazed at each other for several seconds and then decided. ‘Police!’ we chorused, and set off for the police station, running like the wind. Well, I ran like the wind – Marsha ran more like a drunken giraffe. She tripped over her legs at least once on the way.

  I guess we realized it was a mistake the moment we opened our mouths and said ‘aliens’ to the desk-sergeant. He began asking why we were out at that time of night, did our parents know, etc., etc. I mean, police are just like parents in uniform really, aren’t they?

  ‘And what did this UFO look like?’ asked the desk-sergeant, grinning at all his mates who had turned up to have a laugh at our expense. I struggled for words.

  ‘It was dark,’ I began.

  ‘Yes, a common phenomenon at nighttime,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘He meant the UFO was dark,’ scowled Marsha. ‘It was a hazy shape, shadowy.’

  I nodded. I could almost hear my English teacher hammering on about using similes to explain things more clearly.

  ‘It was like a giant, circular cheese-box,’ I said. ‘You know, the ones with little foil triangles inside.’

  The sergeant clicked his tongue several times and tapped his pencil on the desk. ‘So, let’s see if I’ve got this down correctly. There was this giant, round camembert floating through the sky…’

  ‘I didn’t say it was a cheese,’ I pointed out acidly.

  ‘Like a cheese-box,’ Marsha reminded him. ‘And it was too.’

  A stout policeman in his shirt-sleeves came and stood by the sergeant. He fixed us with a serious frown. ‘Are you sure it was a camembert? It could have been gorgonzola…’

  ‘… or cheddar,’ suggested a young constable, but the sergeant shook his head.

  ‘No, no, wouldn’t have been cheddar. That’s more sort of wedge-shaped.’

  Honestly, this attempt at humour was at my dad’s level. ‘You don’t believe us, do you?’ I asked.

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘And you’re not even going to ask around to see if anyone else saw what we saw?’

  ‘No. But I’ll tell you what I am going to do.’

  ‘Telephone our parents,’ sighed Marsha.

  The young constable grinned. ‘She can read your thoughts, sir! Spooky-doos!’

  Ten minutes later our parents turned up, all three of them. I hadn’t realized that Marsha lived with her mum. Her dad was somewhere else. (I’ll tell you later. Don’t rush me.)

  So, imagine the little scene that now followed. Imagine yo
ur parents turning up at a police station in the middle of the night to collect you. All this time they thought you were safe and sound in bed, fast asleep, and now they discover that you’ve been roaming the streets after midnight… with a girl.

  You know those English exercises you do at school sometimes, where you have to choose the right word to complete the sentence? Well try this one:

  Your parents discover that you have been roaming the streets, after midnight, in the company of a girl. Are they angry, furious, ballistic, raging, explosive, going nuclear, volcanic, delighted, happy, cheerful, laughing?

  I guess you would probably choose the same as me. Every one of those words except the last four.

  However, that only describes my very predictable parents. What I found odd, as I was being dragged away to my hundred-year jail sentence at home, was Marsha’s mum. She didn’t seem surprised at all. She sort of sighed and apologized to the police for wasting their time. She gave me a strange look and asked Marsha if she’d been out star-gazing again. Marsha nodded and winked across at me.

  That was the last I saw of her that night. In the car going home I was subjected to the kind of questioning that spies are put through in order to extract top-secret information from them, and then finally Mum and Dad got on to the big stuff.

  ‘This has to stop, Robert.’

  ‘There was a UFO,’ I insisted. ‘The Vorks are aliens.’

  ‘Stop it at once! You are living in a fantasy world. You spend far too much time worrying about things that can never happen.’

  ‘I only…’

  ‘Not another word. That’s enough. We’re fed up to the back teeth with all this. Go to bed and stay there!’

  I went up to my room and stood at the window, gazing across the street. OK, Vorks, I thought. You win for the time being, but I’m coming back and I won’t be alone. I shall have Marsha with me.

  Somehow I didn’t think the aliens would be terribly scared, but I went to bed feeling a bit better.

  6 Serious Stuff

  Today’s horoscope: You make a discovery that could change everything. Romance is in the air. Watch out for that new person in your life.

  You probably want to know what happened to Marsha’s father. At lunchtime the next day at school, Marsha told me that he had fallen in love with another woman. ‘Now they’re living with each other. He left two years ago.’

  I was a bit shocked. To tell you the truth I didn’t really know what to say next, and when I did, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. ‘That is gross.’

  Marsha snorted back at me. ‘Grow up, Rob.’

  This remark made me feel small and pathetic, and I don’t mean in the cuddly hamster kind of way I mean that snapped rubber band feeling, and a manky wet rubber band at that. I couldn’t understand how Marsha could be so cool about such a thing.

  ‘I’m sorry’ I offered.

  ‘That’s exactly what Dad said when he left,’ Marsha answered in a tight voice.

  ‘Do you miss him?’ She nodded and I said brightly that she could have my dad if she wanted.

  ‘Don’t joke about it, Rob. You’d miss him if he wasn’t there, I’m telling you.’ Marsha gave me a twisted kind of smile. ‘You don’t want to, but you do.’

  This was getting embarrassingly heavy for me and I desperately tried to change the subject. ‘Why did your mum ask you if you’d been star-gazing again?’

  ‘It’s my hobby, astronomy’ Everything began to click into place, how Marsha had known about distant galaxies and all that stuff. ‘I go out sometimes with the telescope Dad gave me last year. I have to go out at night. You can’t see stars by day’.

  ‘I do know that.’

  ‘Of course you do, only my mum doesn’t. She doesn’t like me going out when it’s dark.’

  I was struck by a thought. ‘Maybe she doesn’t like it because you’re using the telescope your dad gave you.’

  Marsha gave me a sharp look. ‘Never thought of that. Quite a little psychologist, aren’t you? I suppose you read about it in your medical encyclopedia?’ She saw the look on my face, apologized and began to laugh.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just that in the last five minutes we’ve both had to say sorry to each other.’

  We were silent for a while, until I eventually plucked up enough courage to ask Marsha why she let people at school call her Bogbrush. ‘You don’t like me doing it.’

  ‘You should know better. Anyhow, I don’t care about them. I don’t need them as friends. They don’t bother me. When I want a friend I’ll find someone I actually like, and it will probably be someone who doesn’t care what small-minded people think about them, somebody who’s just his own self.’

  ‘Everybody is his own self!’

  Marsha shook her head. ‘No way. Most people go around trying to be the person they think others want them to be.’

  Wow! I mean, what do you say when someone comes up with something like that? It took me almost five minutes just to work out what she meant. It was no wonder everyone kept clear of Marsha. Just listening to her talking made me want to go ‘Ah! Stop it! My brain’s hurting! It’s turning to jelly!’ So I did.

  ‘You’re making my brain turn to jelly.’

  ‘It’s called thinking, Rob,’ Marsha

  declared. ‘It’s just that your brain’s not used to it.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘Sorry. You’re better than the others at school, but you could try using your brain a bit more, you know.’

  ‘It’s OK for you,’ I whined. ‘It doesn’t hurt your brain.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  I thought, Here we go again. She’s got an answer for everything. Quick, time to change the subject. (This is basically my trick for getting out of anything that seems to be going the wrong way – change the subject.)

  ‘What are we going to do about the Vorks?’ I asked in desperation.

  Marsha folded her arms and smiled at me. ‘That’s typical,’ she murmured, ‘trying to change the subject.’ So now Marsha was reading my thoughts too! She gave a long sigh. ‘All right, I guess we shall have to try and get in there again. Without proof, nobody will listen to us.’

  ‘Tonight?’ I suggested, and she nodded. ‘We’d better make it later than last night then. My parents will be on double alert.’

  ‘I doubt that. They’ll never think you’ll be stupid enough to try it two nights in succession. Tonight will be ideal.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. What about two o’clock?’

  ‘OΚ. I’d better go. If people see us talking like this they’ll start thinking stupid things.’

  ‘I thought that sort of thing didn’t bother you?’ I said.

  ‘I was thinking of you,’ Marsha snapped back and she strode off, this time without tripping over herself.

  That evening I sat upstairs and re-read my horoscope.

  You make a discovery that could change everything.

  That could only mean what was going to happen tonight. Tonight was the night! We were really going to see the aliens!

  Romance is in the air. Watch out for that new person in your life.

  Uh-oh. I didn’t want to know about this. ‘I’m too young for romance,’ I said and was startled to hear Mum the other side of my bedroom door.

  ‘Are you talking to yourself in there, Robert?’

  ‘It was the aliens,’ I grunted.

  Mum opened the door and put her head round the corner. ‘Don’t be cheeky. I told you, not another word about aliens. Poor Marsha’s mother. Heaven alone knows what she thought about last night. Who is that girl anyway? She seemed ever so strange.’

  Mum thinks most people are strange for one reason or another. She’ll say things like, ‘Look at that man. Isn’t he strange?’ or ‘What a strange woman!’ Then you look at the people she’s looking at and there’s nothing strange about them at all. What is strange is that you can put a couple of aliens right in front of Mum and she doesn’t even notice.
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  ‘Her name’s Marsha. She’s in my class. She’s clever.’

  ‘She didn’t look clever, and it certainly was not at all clever to go gallivanting round the streets at midnight.’ She paused and then asked, oh so casually, ‘Is she your girlfriend?’

  ‘Mum, that is so predictable.’

  ‘Ooh! That’s a big word, Robert.’

  ‘It was in our spelling test last week,’ I muttered. ‘Can I get on with what I was doing now?’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Thinking.’

  Mum widened her eyes and tiptoed theatrically from the room so as not to disturb the Great Thinker. She didn’t know that I was actually thinking about Marsha, or, to be more precise, about Marsha and her parents. I tried to imagine what it would be like not having a dad and I just couldn’t. It was too difficult.

  Then I began worrying. Suppose my dad went off? Or Mum? I would probably be the last to know. I remembered the times they quarrelled, the times they hardly spoke to each other.

  Maybe this was what my horoscope meant. This was the discovery that could change my life! Maybe the romance was not about me at all, but about one of my parents! Maybe the new person in my life was going to be a stepfather or stepmother.

  NO! This was all going horribly wrong! I jumped to my feet and pounded downstairs. Mum was just sitting down in front of the television. I swallowed hard. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You won’t be cross, or laugh at me or anything?’

  Mum shook her head. Any other mother would probably have said, ‘I can see there’s something worrying you, son,’ but Mum knew that I was always worried anyway She kept quiet and waited for me to speak. You know what I wanted to ask? I wanted to say, ‘Do you still like Dad? Are you thinking of leaving?’ But I knew it was stupid. I couldn’t ask her questions like that. I tried to think of some other way of putting it, but nothing seemed right.