What You Wish For (10 page)

I was about to leave the desk to start my search when I remembered that I probably now knew Marie’s forum name. I went on to the site and was about to enter a search for her name when I noticed that I had a private message sitting in my inbox.

It was from somebody called The Watcher and contained two simple words:

Forget her.

9

I turned the house upside down.

I hunted through every cupboard, opened every drawer. I flicked through books on the shelves, thinking a sheet of paper might fall from between the pages and flutter to the carpet. I looked behind furniture, under the sofa and in the bathroom cabinet. I came across letters and photographs I had forgotten existed. I found a screwed-up ten-pound note behind the stereo. I disturbed a sleeping spider in the cutlery drawer. By the time I had finished downstairs it looked like I really had been burgled.

I tried not to think about the message from The Watcher. I had no idea if he or she knew something or was just, as Marie would say, ‘some random’, a person interfering, trying to be clever or cool. I had fired back a message asking if he or she actually knew something, and if so, could they please tell me more. I had resisted the urge to tell them to fuck off.

I went into the spare bedroom, a room that contained nothing but junk and cat hair. This was where Calico slept, although right now he was back in his spot on the windowsill in the living room. The spare room yielded nothing. No bounty. No clues.

I moved into my bedroom. I looked at the unmade bed which until recently had been the scene of so much pleasure. Now it felt too big, too empty.

I missed her body so much. Not just sex, but the feel of her beside me, being able to stretch out my arm in the night and touch her. I missed the sound of her breathing in the darkness. I missed waking up and seeing her. I felt lovesick, bereaved, but the not-knowing made it even worse than that. I was tormented.

I opened the wardrobe and, one by one, pulled out all her clothes. I threw them on the floor. I searched the pockets, shook each garment, held them against my face. When every article of clothing lay scattered on the floor I knelt among them and shouted, ‘Where the fuck are you?’

I crawled through the discarded innards of the wardrobe towards the bed. It was a divan bed, with doors that slide open to provide storage space. This is where I keep junk: old birthday cards, holiday souvenirs, photographs, letters, schoolbooks, old copies of the
Herald
from my early days, when seeing my name credited beneath a picture was still a thrill. Marie, too, had started to store stuff here.

I rooted through, dragging everything out onto the bedroom carpet. I sorted through the paperwork, finding Marie’s birth certificate among other old documents. There was no passport, though I didn’t know whether she’d ever had one.

In a folder near the back of the storage space, I found it at last: the flyer. I sat back on my heels, letting out a sigh of relief. I was exhausted, the house was trashed. But here it was at last: what I’d been looking for.

There were a few of them, slightly crumpled, though there was nothing to suggest they had been hidden on purpose. The leaflet featured a photograph of an old-fashioned flying saucer, below the words GALACTICA 99. At the bottom of the page it stated that this was the fifth annual Galactica convention, with guest speakers from across the world, many stalls, films, etc, etc. It was to take place on the nineteenth of October in Camden Town. My heart thumped. This had to be the one.

I started to pack everything back beneath the bed, not bothering to put it away neatly, just shoving it back in. My mind was elsewhere now, planning my trip to the Galactica convention. Among the junk in the bed was some old jewellery that had belonged to Mikage, my old girlfriend, cheap stuff that she had left behind. As I shoved it back in I dropped a ring and it rolled and slipped beneath the bed. There was a gap of about half an inch between the carpet and the bed, just enough for the ring to roll in on its side. I put my fingers beneath the bed to fish it out and felt something there. It felt like the corner of an envelope. I pinched it between finger and thumb and pulled it out. It was an envelope – a brown A4 manila envelope. It was sealed but nothing was written on the front.

I sat on the bed and opened it.

Inside were four black and white photographs. They were of Marie. She was naked. She looked two, maybe three, years younger than she was now. The photographs were very good quality, quite professional looking. I would have been pleased with them myself, technically.

I looked at all four in rotation, over and over. My whole body trembled. My stomach spasmed suddenly and I ran to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I rinsed my mouth and walked back to the bedroom, holding onto the wall for support. This couldn’t be real. I must have imagined it.

But the photographs were still there, lying on the bed, and they were real. Although when I say real, I mean they existed. Because they were faked. Marie was real – she was there in the flesh, one hundred per cent real, but the pictures had been cleverly manipulated so she was not alone. In the photographs, she appeared to be having sex with an alien.

It was a Grey: the standard image, with the large head, enormous deep-black eyes, tiny mouth, slight body. At first, I couldn’t work out if it was someone in a suit, but it looked too realistic. It had to be a computer image, I decided, something created on a machine. Then this image had been cleverly Photoshopped onto the image of Marie.

In the first photograph, the Grey lay on top of her; then she was astride it; the third picture showed the alien with its lipless mouth on her breasts. In the final picture Marie knelt on all fours facing the camera, her face screwed up in mock ecstasy, the alien positioned so that it appeared to enter her from behind, its long fingers stroking her back. Every inch of Marie was on display.

Marie, who would never let me take her photograph.

I shook the envelope, but there was nothing else inside. Questions raced dizzily through my head. Who had taken the photographs? For what purpose? Was this connected to her disappearance? And were there more? I would have to search her computer. Maybe, I thought, there were videos too.

I wanted to tear the pictures up, burn them, wipe them from existence. But I knew I mustn’t. I put them back in the envelope. I didn’t want to have to look at them. Not yet. I walked downstairs on shaky legs and opened a bottle of vodka. I drank straight from the bottle, until I passed out. My last thought was that at least now I had a photograph of Marie. A dark part of me laughed bitterly, and then consciousness slipped away.

10

I went to the Galactica 99 convention on my own. I would have liked to take a companion, but who? Certainly not Simon, because although his journalistic mind might have been useful there was no way I could let him see the pictures of Marie. I wondered whether I could involve him without showing him the photos, but it seemed too difficult. Instead, I took advantage of his offer of help by phoning him and asking if he could do some research for me. I wanted details about Andrew – biographical details, age, place of birth, schools, jobs, friends. As much as Simon could find.

‘Why do you want to know all this?’ Simon asked.

‘I’m convinced that if I can find out more about Andrew it might help me find Marie. She was so close to him, but she hardly told me anything about him. It was because I was jealous – I didn’t want to talk about him. Except for when he was right there in front of me, I tried to pretend he didn’t exist.’

‘But they weren’t shagging, were they?’

‘So she said. But what if she was just saying that to stop me getting even more jealous?’ There had definitely been something between them. And if I had to take a wild guess to identify who had taken the pictures, I would say it was Andrew.

I had an idea that her disappearance had something to do with Andrew’s death. Either because his death had affected her more deeply than I’d realised and had prompted her to run away or – though I hated to think about it – harm herself. Or because something that I was unaware of had happened as a consequence of his death. Had she met someone at the funeral who was involved in all this? Had Andrew and Marie been working on a secret project that she now felt compelled to continue on her own? Did she suspect that foul play had been involved in his death and was out there, searching for the truth? This last one made my head spin. Was I searching for someone who was out there looking for answers herself?

Apart from Simon, I had nobody to help me. Marie’s friends were supposedly keeping their eyes peeled. Her mum was no use. And as for my friends . . . well, I had hardly been in touch with any of them since I’d started seeing Marie. I had been so besotted with her, so absorbed, that I had broken contact with the handful of friends that I had. Marie and my work had taken up all of my time and attention. Now I was paying the price.

I was walking into a world I didn’t know, and I was doing it alone.

I paid my entrance fee and walked through the double doors of the former concert venue in Camden Town into the main body of the convention. In my right hand I held a slim briefcase that contained the photographs of Marie. The briefcase was locked. I had a horror of the photographs falling into somebody else’s hands. But I knew I might have to show them to someone. They were the best lead I had.

I looked around at the tables piled high with merchandise: books, videos, T-shirts, badges, models . . . every piece of alien paraphernalia you could imagine. I walked up the first row of stalls, glancing at books and videos with titles like
Encounters
,
The Truth About Roswell
,
An International Conspiracy
,
Without Invitation
. I flicked through a couple of the books, which were packed with testimonies of people who believed they had been aboard alien spacecraft. I wandered around the hall, my head spinning.

In many ways, it was what I had expected. Get a group of like-minded people together and they will try to sell each other stuff. But I quickly realised that this was just the surface of the convention. This was where the money was. But in order to make any progress I was going to have to locate the hardcore alien obsessives. People like Marie and Andrew. And, I guessed, Buzz, who hadn’t replied to the email I’d sent. The Watcher hadn’t replied to my message on the forum either. In fact, the original message had been deleted.

I felt like I was dancing with phantoms.

I looked around the hall. Marie and Andrew would not have wasted their time perusing the stalls at these conventions. I knew that. But where would they have been? I had to find the inner sanctum.

I wandered around for another hour, soaking up the atmosphere, flicking through pamphlets, listening in to conversations. I was surprised by the variety of people present. It was a true cross-section of society, from the predictable computer-programmer nerds in cheap glasses to smartly dressed pensioners. There were young couples with babies in tow, suited businessmen, hippies, Goths and people who dressed like me. Ordinary people united by one thing: the belief that we are not alone in the universe. These were the masses Marie had told me about. I wondered how many of them had seen a UFO. How many of them claimed to have been abducted? How many had seen an extraterrestrial? How many wanted to? They paid their ten-pound entrance fee to spend a day among fellow believers, away from sceptics like me. They bought goodies and chatted and exchanged email addresses and Twitter names. I overheard them talking about other conventions, about trips to the States. I listened out for names. Margaret, Roy, Kevin. No Buzz or Alpha Centauri. No references to a Cosmic Girl. Again, I had the thought that this was just the surface of this world. I was going to have to stop listening and do something if I wanted to dig deeper.

An announcement came over the PA:
‘Ladies, gentleman and any friends from other galaxies who might have joined us today . . .’
There was a ripple of laughter.
‘The eminent UFO research scientist Dr. Jonathan Grimes, PhD, all the way from Boston, will be beginning his lecture on Patterns of Abduction, starting in the lecture hall in five minutes . . .
’

People started to shuffle out through a set of double doors into a hall filled with wooden chairs. I followed them, but remained standing. The seats filled quickly. The audience rustled and murmured until Dr Grimes appeared to a tumult of applause. Just as he was about to start the lecture, I slipped back through the double doors into the main hall, which was now much quieter.

I approached a stall near the centre of the hall. It seemed less commercial than the others. A man sat alone behind piles of photocopied pamphlets. He had long hair, greying at the temples, and thick glasses. He rolled a cigarette with yellow-edged fingers and looked towards the exit.

As I approached he looked up. I smiled and took a cigarette from my shirt pocket. I said, ‘I was about to sneak out for one myself.’

He asked someone to mind his stall and accompanied me
outside
.

He squinted at me through a cloud of smoke. ‘You’re not in the business, are you? How come you’re not in there listening to Dr James?’

‘No seats left,’ I lied.

The man snorted. Smoke puffed out of his nostrils. ‘He’s a bullshit merchant anyway. Most of the people here are.’

‘I get the impression most of them are in it for the money.’

‘Very astute, my friend. Money, money, money. Not enough truth.’ He put out his hand. ‘I’m Don.’

I shook his hand. ‘Richard.’ We looked at each other for a moment. I said, ‘This is the first Galactica I’ve been to. I came here to meet a friend of mine, but I haven’t been able to find him. His name’s Buzz.’

Don shook his head slowly. ‘Don’t know the guy. Maybe he’s upstairs?’

‘Upstairs?’ For a moment, I thought he meant in space, and suppressed a laugh when I realised he merely meant upstairs in the building.

‘There’s a gathering upstairs. For the VIPs.’ He sounded bitter.

We finished our cigarettes and went back inside.

‘How do I get into the VIP area?’ I asked

He looked meaningfully at the pamphlets on the table. I got the message. I picked up a few and paid for them. Another ten pounds gone. Don put his hand in the air and waved at a teenage girl who was drinking tea near the exit. She came over. She was no older than sixteen, with copper hair and freckles. She looked me up and down, a slight sneer on her face.

‘What is it?’ she said.

‘Hey, Lottie, meet Richard. Can you take him upstairs? He thinks a friend of his might be up there. Guy by the name of Buzz?’

She sighed melodramatically. ‘OK. If I have to.’ She walked off towards the exit at a brisk pace and I followed.

‘May you find what you’re looking for,’ Don said behind me.

Lottie showed me a door concealed behind a curtain. She pushed the door open and led me up a narrow staircase. At the top of the stairs was another door. ‘Through here,’ she said. ‘This is the real Galactica. Good luck.’

She trotted back down the stairs, leaving me alone. I felt nervous. My palms were clammy. I opened the door.

I found myself at the end of a narrow corridor. There was a door at the far end and another to its left. As I watched, a young woman came through the door to the left – which, I soon discovered, was the ladies’ toilet – and went through the other door. I followed her.

A group of people were sitting around on rickety wooden chairs and old tables.

Some of them were smoking joints or cigarettes, blatantly breaking the law; most of them had alcoholic drinks. A few people looked up at me and then went back to their conversations. The first thing I did was scan the room for Marie, but of course she wasn’t there. I wasn’t sure what I should do next. While I thought about it, the woman I had followed through the door turned around and said, ‘Hello.’

‘Do I know you?’ she asked, smiling. She was very thin, on the verge of anorexia by the looks of her. To add to this impression she was wearing a Karen Carpenter T-shirt.

‘I’m a friend of Buzz’s,’ I said, trying to sound confident, like I fitted in.

She frowned. ‘I don’t think I know him.’

‘What about Marie Walker? You must know Marie.’

She chewed her lower lip. ‘It rings a bell, but I can’t place her.’ She spoke slowly, dreamily, as if she was on something. Stoned, I guessed.

‘Do you come to a lot of these conventions?’ I asked.

‘A few.’ She smiled and suddenly took my hand. ‘What’s your name?’

I told her.

A look of sheer horror came over her face. ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you.’

‘What?’ Before I could get any sense out of her, she had retreated across the room, where she hid behind a large group of people.

I stood there with my mouth open. These people were weird.
Very
weird. Maybe I should go. But then a man sidled up to me and nodded over to where the anorexic girl had gone. ‘Don’t worry about her,’ he said. ‘She’s one of the Karens.’

‘Pardon?’

He laughed. He was about my age, tall and thin, hair receding a little. ‘There’s a group of them. They believe that Karen Carpenter was an extraterrestrial who was sent to Earth to teach us how to love each other and heal the world’s ills through the power of song. They say that her ‘brother’ Richard is also from another planet, but that he was sent to sabotage her aims. They’ve built up quite a complex mythology around it. Your name doesn’t happen to be Richard, does it?’

I nodded.

‘I thought so. The Karens think that anyone called Richard is evil and is going to want to harm them.’

‘That’s crazy.’

‘Exactly. The kind of people who give us a bad name.’ He stuck out his hand and I shook it. ‘I’m Oliver. I haven’t seen you around before. Are you with somebody?’

For some reason, I instinctively trusted this stranger. I needed to trust someone. ‘Actually, I’m looking for someone – my girlfriend. Her name’s Marie Walker.’ I looked at him expectantly. ‘She comes to a lot of these conventions.’

He stroked his chin and frowned. ‘No, I don’t know the name.’ He looked at me curiously.

‘She’s gone missing,’ I said, deciding to be open. I told him the story.

‘Have you got a photo?’ he asked.

I hesitated. I didn’t want to have to show the pictures, but what else could I do? I realised I should have photocopied the pictures and cut out a section just showing Marie’s face. Another mistake.

‘Is there somewhere private we can go? I’ve got pictures, but they’re rather, um, well. I’d prefer not to show them in public. You’ll see why in a minute.’

‘How intriguing.’ He led me through the crowded room to another door. I felt eyes on my back as we went through the door, but when I turned, nobody was looking my way.

Oliver led me into an empty room that contained nothing but a woodworm-eaten desk and a couple of dusty armchairs. A small window offered a view of the neighbouring buildings.

‘Here we are,’ Oliver said. ‘Why the need for this secrecy?’

I unlocked the briefcase and clicked it open. I took out the photos and handed them to him. He looked through them without changing his amused expression. Then he laid them on the table between us.

It hurt me to look at the photographs. To see Marie’s image like that . . . It tainted my memory of her, the times when we had made love, starlight brightening the room, words of love on our lips. The pictures were grotesque and upsetting. And not just that. They bewildered me. Why had they been taken in the first place? Oliver was about to answer some of my questions.

‘Alien porn,’ he said. ‘This is a pretty sophisticated example, although I have seen some that were even better – where you would swear the scenes are real. You can see the joins in these, but only if you look closely.’ He nodded. ‘I’m impressed. Did you create them yourself?’