What You Wish For (19 page)

I coughed. ‘Marie . . . Marie’s the name of my visitor friend. It’s the name she gives herself when we’re together. I guess I was so overwhelmed about being here and about . . . about what’s going to happen that I got carried away and flipped out for a minute. I expected to see her here. I’m sorry.’

‘Marie, huh?’ said Carl, not a hundred per cent convinced. ‘Weird name for a visitor.’

‘Oh no,’ said Zara. ‘I’ve heard of it before. Some visitors give themselves human names to make the contactees feel more secure.’

‘That’s what Marie said,’ I lied.

‘Hmm,’ said Carl.

‘Would you like to rest?’ Zara asked.

‘No, I’d like to meet everyone. If that’s all right.’

Zara kissed my cheek. ‘Of course it is.’

I went to get out of bed and realised I was naked. I wondered who had undressed me. Zara? Carl? Embarrassment tinged my cheeks. ‘Um, where are my clothes?’

Carl handed me a pair of white jeans and a shirt just like his. ‘Here.’

I hesitated.

‘Don’t be shy, dude. We have no secrets here. And clothes won’t be necessary after contact.’

Zara laughed at my look of consternation. ‘Poor Richard’s shy. Sweet thing. Come on, Carl.’

Carl rolled his eyes but followed Zara from the room. The ivory glare of everything around me was giving me a headache. I ran my fingers over the gold heart pinned to my shirt. I had a feeling I’d made an awful mistake coming here.

Zara took me downstairs and into what she called the open room. This was the room I had first entered, where a number of white-clad Loved Ones sat around drinking, chatting and watching videos on a widescreen TV. An episode of
Third Rock from the Sun
was on, the sound turned down. Rick sat in front of it, trying his best not to look out of place. Curtains were drawn across a large bay window that would otherwise have given a perfect view of the beach.

‘Everyone, this is Richard,’ Zara announced, and I squirmed awkwardly as a dozen heads turned my way.

‘Welcome, Richard,’ they said.

I knew from my dealings with believers so far that the people here would seem ordinary and normal on the surface. And so they were. There was one woman in her sixties, a couple of middle-aged men. They were all as white as their clothes, with the exception of one black man, who must have been almost seven feet tall, with a perfectly bald head. A woman with bad teeth smiled gruesomely at me. Next to her stood a hugely fat man, who held the hand of a skinny girl with raven-black hair. The only people who made me feel uneasy were a pair of bulky, muscular guys who lurked at the edge of the room, watching everything.

A group of six or seven people moved towards Zara and me.

‘Richard’s from England,’ Zara said.

The woman with bad teeth said, in a strong Mancunian accent, ‘Which part?’

‘Hastings,’ I whispered.

‘Oh.’ She looked disappointed.

‘Why were you running around the house when you came in?’ a man with a gold sleeper in his nose asked.

I looked to Zara for help. She said, ‘Richard was so stoked to be here he couldn’t control himself.’

There were nods of understanding. Rick looked over at me and sneered, though nobody else seemed to notice. They were all staring at me.

‘I’m so glad . . . to be among you,’ I said.

The fat man and his skinny girlfriend came over and wrapped me in a three-way embrace. ‘It’s good to have you, Richard. I’m Denny, and this is Laura.’

‘And I’m Cory.’

‘Emma.’

‘Merlin.’

They each came up and introduced themselves. The tall black man, who was called Jake, said, ‘A lot of the guys are in their rooms. But they’ll all be delighted to meet you. You and Rick. We rejoice every time somebody new joins our family.’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I was amazed that nobody had mentioned aliens. Maybe it was so taken for granted here, that that was what bound them together, that there was little need to talk about it. I soon learnt that they were waiting. Trying to be patient, superstitiously afraid that too much talk would postpone the momentous event.

I sat down on a floor cushion with Zara. She put her hands on my shoulders and gently massaged the tension out of them. It felt good. ‘Is there somebody here called Pete?’ I asked. ‘He’s the guy I got the flyer from in England. I expected him to be here.’

Jake overheard. ‘You talking about the Jinx?’

That was what Pete had called himself the night I met him on the East Hill. ‘Yes,’ I said, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice. ‘That’s him.’

‘He’s off on his travels,’ Jake said. ‘He’s been gone a while. All over the world, visiting the other embassies. Last I heard he was in Italy. I must admit I’m kind of hoping he doesn’t come back. Nothing ever seems to happen when he’s around.’ His laugh was deep and velvety, but there was something in the way he looked at me, like he was sizing me up, that made me uneasy.

‘But he is due back?’

‘Oh yeah. Pretty soon, I think. Lisa would know.’

I spoke to Zara. ‘Is that the friend that you told me about?’

‘Yes. But you can’t see her at the moment. She’s communicating in her room.’

‘Communicating?’

‘With the Chorus. Listening to the
vox celeste
. She says the voices are getting louder, which means they’re coming closer. But she can’t be disturbed. Although I’m sure you’ll meet her soon.’ Her voice brightened. ‘Hey, are you hungry?’

I was.

Zara led me into the kitchen, another room that I had run wildly into earlier. I must have looked crazy. I was so certain that Marie would be here, but I had come all this way and I was still no closer to finding her. What if I was wasting my time? I remembered watching a TV documentary once about a woman who spent twenty years searching for her daughter who had disappeared after attending a party. The woman scoured the world, devoted her life to the hunt, lost everything in her obsessive search: her husband, her money, her sanity almost. In the end, the deathbed confession of a man who had been at the party revealed that the girl had died on the very night she vanished. She had been murdered and thrown to the crocodiles in a Florida swamp. The twenty-year search had been a waste of time.

Was I wasting my time, looking for Marie? My search had veered into its current direction because I had become increasingly convinced she had run away. If that
was
the case, then the longer my hunt remained fruitless, the more my frustration grew. She knew I loved her; she’d said she loved me. But could she really love me if she had deliberately left me? Doubts whispered in my ear: was she really worth searching for? But as this thought popped into my head, more questions crowded in. If she had run away, was she of sound mind? Had she been coerced? Was she scared of something or someone?

And if she hadn’t run away, what had happened to her? Had she, like the woman who had been fed to crocodiles, been murdered on the day she’d gone missing? Was her body in Hastings somewhere? Had she been abducted? Was she, now, being kept prisoner somewhere, hoping desperately that I would keep looking for her?

I groaned and Zara looked at me, probably thinking I was regretting my earlier foolish behaviour. If I fully believed that Marie had run away, had deliberately and calculatingly left me in the lurch, then I might have decided at that moment to move on – or at least take the first step towards moving on. I might have given up.

But the possibility that she had been murdered, or abducted, or hurt . . . I couldn’t give up. Even though I was exhausted.

‘What do you want to eat?’ Zara asked.

We found some pasta in a cupboard and I stirred the sauce while Zara buzzed around the kitchen, setting out plates and breaking bread. There was a bottle of Californian pinot in the fridge, which Zara opened. We ate and drank and talked.

Zara asked me about my life back home, and I told her an edited version of the truth.

In turn, Zara shared her background: high school, college, dead end jobs in restaurants . . .

‘And then I discovered my gift. I was waitressing, and I found that I often knew what customers wanted before I asked. I spoke to Lisa about it and she encouraged me to develop my talent, to exercise it. I spent hours flexing my mental processes. It was tougher than any gym.’ She laughed and gulped wine. ‘Lisa says she knew it would be useful for the group, a way of seeing if people were genuine. We attract a lot of frauds. A lot of kooks.’

‘I bet.’

‘Yeah. It sucks. I mean people think
we’re
kooks. Group hysteria, they call it. Lost people with nothing else to believe in. But they’re the deluded ones. The last laugh will be ours, Richard.’

It was so much like talking to Marie. But with Marie I might have argued back, if I was in the mood, while with Zara I had no choice but to nod and agree.

She asked suddenly, ‘Why are you in so much pain?’

Why did she have to ask questions like that? I faked a smile. ‘I think I feel a little better now I’m here.’

She liked that. She reached across the table and touched my hand. I felt the spark, the
frisson
of lust, and I tried to fight it. I stood up and said, ‘Shall we join the others?’

We took our glasses of wine into the open room. There were about twenty-five people, glowing in their all-white clothes, sitting or standing around, drinking, passing around spliffs, laughing, chatting. Somebody had put a Calvin Harris CD on and a couple of girls were dancing together in the corner; every couple of minutes they would beam and hug each other.

‘They’re on E,’ said Jake, coming up and saying hello. ‘I don’t touch that shit myself. I don’t need artificial joy. I’ve felt the real thing.’

I asked him what he did before joining the Loved Ones.

‘I was a teacher in LA. Same hood where I grew up. Kind of place where the kids have to walk through a metal detector on the way in. I left a couple of years ago and travelled all over the States. I was looking for the truth. This is where I found it.’

The others told a similar story. They had all had encounters. Seen UFOs close up, been abducted, or had visitations during the night. Rick loitered behind me, making mental notes for his story, while I talked to a group of Loved Ones. They were all so friendly and welcoming, it was instantly apparent to me how someone could get sucked in to one of these groups – a cult, if that’s what you wanted to call it. They made you feel special and worthwhile. They were beautiful and happy and seemed to be having so much fun. And they had found something to believe in. Each of them had experienced an epiphany; now they were awaiting the rapture.

Denny had been a self-professed bum in Wisconsin. ‘I sat in front of a TV all day, watching adverts and eating junk. I didn’t even know I was looking for anything until I came across Lisa’s website one day. It hit me right here.’ He tapped the flesh that padded his heart. ‘I went to see a hypnotist and he retrieved all these memories from when I was a kid, every night being taken from my bed by visitors. They wiped my memories. But they were still there, buried deep, waiting to be retrieved.’

Laura was a farmer’s daughter from the Deep South. ‘We were plagued by crop circles. One would appear practically every week. And the cows . . . mutilated, poor things. My daddy went crazy; it damn near killed him. But I knew the reason. I’d seen the ships.’

Merlin ran a bookstore in San Francisco. ‘I was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge at night and I saw these lights above me. I stopped my car and got out. There were flashes of silver in the sky, like, y’know, quicksilver. All the other drivers were tooting their horns. I think they thought I was going to jump. When I got home and told my partner he told me I must have imagined it. I left him.’

They must have told these stories so many times, but they weren’t bored with repeating themselves. This was the core of their existence. It drove them, influenced everything they did. Most of them had given up everything, signed over their property and possessions to the group. Only those with children had not done this, like Joan, who was sixty-two, whose sons wrote to her every week, begging her to leave this crazy life and return to normality.

‘Once they tried to take me home by force,’ she said.

‘I remember,’ nodded Jake.

‘They came in their van and tried to snatch me. Said they were going to take me back home, where I belonged. I had to tell them this is where I belong. This is my family now. Why would I want to return to that world of drugs and violence and dirt and hatred? Jake and some of the others had to scare them off and tell them to never come back.’

Her eyes were wide, and burned like the eyes of a zealot. But it was the fire of passion. What did I have to be passionate about in my life? I drifted along like a raft on a placid lake, never really going anywhere. I’d had a job that bored me, and I didn’t even have that any more. I earned money and used it to pay bills and buy clothes, books, DVDs, furniture. I acquired stuff. I watched TV. I got drunk and had hangovers. I worried about my health. I phoned my parents when I had to. I slept. I looked forward to weekends so I could lie in bed late.

That was my life.

And then when Marie had come along she changed things. She gave my life, and heart, a new beat. She made me happy to get out of bed in the morning, to come home at night. She gave me ambition. I spent money on presents for her. We drank together to have a good time; blurred memories. We made love and slept in each other’s arms. I looked forward to weekends so I could spend more time with her.

She was my passion; she was what I believed in. And again I thought that if she didn’t come back, if I didn’t find her, I would have nothing.

I looked around me at the radiant faces. Did it matter if they were deluded, if one day they would be disappointed? These people had something to believe in, a dream to follow, a creed to defend. All I had was my need . . . my search.

‘Have you ever heard of someone called Candy?’ I asked Denny and Laura quietly, using Marie’s alias.

‘It sounds familiar.’

‘She was on some alien porn sites,’ I said.