The Fourth Bear

“Sir, I just want to go home.”

Briggs looked up at the hotel and gave a mournful sigh.

“Agatha is in there, and I think she’s waiting for someone. Who do you think it is?”

“I’ve no idea, sir. Why don’t you go home?”

Briggs nodded agreement, and the whole sorry chapter might have ended right there and then had not Agatha, in a masterful display of bad timing, appeared from the entrance of the Bastardos yelling, “Jack, come back!”

Briggs scowled angrily and, before Jack could even try to explain, punched him painfully on the chin, then strode off. Jack staggered backward with the blow and momentarily saw stars. He’d been avoiding Agatha for years but had never reported her continual pestering in order not to cause trouble and to help her help herself. If there was a situation that had “unfair” stamped all over it, this was it.

“Are you okay?” said a passerby, helping him to his feet. “I can call the police.”

“I am the police,” said Jack, who’d always wanted to say that, but preferably in a better set of circumstances, “and so is he. Thanks, I’ll be fine. I’m going home.”

When he got to the house, it was locked and bolted. He was about to knock when a small voice said, “I shouldn’t bother if I were you.”

It was Caliban. He was sitting on a garbage can reading a copy of The Beano by the outside light.

“What did you say?”

“I said,” repeated the small, misshapen ape, “I shouldn’t bother if I were you.”

“Oh? And what makes you say that?”

“I heard what she said she’d do if you dared to show your face.”

“And what was that?”

The door was suddenly flung open. Madeleine marched out, struck Jack a glancing blow on the head with a rolling pin and went back inside in one swift movement. Jack fell over, more from surprise than the blow itself.

“She said she’d do that.”

“Why?”

“She got a call from Briggs about something.”

“Shit,” he murmured. Implausibly, things had gotten worse. Much worse.

29. What Ashley Did That Night

Least likely alien abduction suspects: The Rambosians, who when asked if they’d been involved in reported medical experiments on “abductees,” replied, “You must be joking. If we wanted to know about your physiology—which we don’t—we’d just watch BBC2 or read Gray’s Anatomy.” When pressed, they had to admit they couldn’t think of any life-form bored enough to want to travel halfway across the galaxy to push a probe up an ape’s bottom, nor what it might accomplish—apart from confirming that in general apes don’t like that sort of thing.

The Bumper Book of Berkshire Records, 2004 edition

The front door to Ashley’s house opened, and two almost identical aliens stood in the hall and blinked rapidly at Mary. To the untrained human eye, every alien is identical to every other alien—much the same way as all humans seemed identical to aliens. Indeed, to the more unobservant alien, all mammals looked pretty much the same. “It’s the backbone that’s so confusing,” explained an alien spokesman when asked how a sheep might appear indistinguishable from a human in a woolly jumper. The reason Mary could tell Ashley’s parents apart at all was that one was wearing a large and very obvious brown wig, had a folded newspaper under its arm and was wearing slippers, and the other wore a blue gingham dress with an Alice band perched precariously on its shiny, high forehead.

“Hello,” said Mary politely to the one in the slippers, “you must be Ashley’s father.”

“No, that would be me,” said the one in the gingham. “Roger’s the name. This is Abigail, my wife.”

“Hello,” said the one wearing the slippers, proffering a three-fingered, double-opposable-thumb hand for Mary to shake.

Mary did so with some trepidation, as Rambosians tend to transmit their thoughts through touch. Still, she thought it would be rude not to, and her hand was enveloped in the warm, dry stickiness of Abigail’s grip. Almost instantly the image of a wedding popped into Mary’s head, complete with a large white Rolls-Royce, church, confetti and with Mary herself dressed in a quite stunning white wedding gown, with Ashley in morning suit.

“Sorry about that,” said Abigail, hurriedly letting go of Mary’s hand.

“It’s quite all right,” she replied, her close contact with Ashley having prepared her for almost anything. “But just out of interest—where did you see that dress?”

“At Veils R Us,” replied Abigail wistfully. “Wasn’t it just the most beautiful thing ever?”

“Why did you assume I was the mother?” asked Roger, who had been thinking about this for several moments.

“It’s the dress and Alice band,” explained Mary. “They’re usually considered female-gender apparel.”

“I told you the sales assistant didn’t seem that bright,” he said to Abigail. “We better swap.”

Mary half expected them to strip off in front of her, but they didn’t. They just placed a sticky digit on each other and trembled for a second or two.

“Right,” said the one who used to be Abigail. “I’m now Roger. Why don’t you come in?”

Roger led her into the living room, which was decorated as though from the seventies. Earth’s TV signals had taken eighteen years to reach distant Rambosia, so it was understandable that this was the era in which they felt the most comfortable. The furniture was dark-colored, the wallpaper and carpet patterned, the music center one of those combined radio-cassette-turntable things, and the obligatory plaster ducks flew across the wall next to a print of The Hay Wain.

“How long have you had this bad knee?” asked Abigail, rubbing the offending joint of her body-swapped partner.

“A few days,” replied Roger.

“You should look after yourself better—and your arms feel a bit low. When did you last have a pressure test?”

“This always happens when we swap bodies, doesn’t it?” replied Roger with a baleful glare. “Nag, nag, nag.”

“If you looked after yourself, I wouldn’t have to.”

“Maybe I like having a dodgy knee—ever thought of that?”

“Sorry about this,” said Ashley.

“You’re a pompous old windbag sometimes, aren’t you?” said Abigail. “Give me back my body.”

“It would be even more confusing for our G-E-U-S-T, dear—show some manners, eh?”

“Manners?” replied Abigail, opening her already large eyes still wider. “I’ll give you 10100101 001 you, 1001 010011.”

“Oh, yes? Well, you can 1001001 001010010 0101001 00101010 1001011111100110100111 0000001010 010101101 011100100100 10001111110011100 010010010 01110 0100100 10010 0100100101111011,” replied Roger, lapsing into pure binary in his anger.

“100101010101111110011100100101010111111!” yelled back Abigail. “11 1 1001 0101001 100001010111!”