“You’re a lovely girl,” said Captain Simon to her one night when she walked into the kitchen to fetch a glass of water. “A really lovely girl. Isn’t she, Pat?”
Uncle Pat twinkled. “Apple of my eye.”
“You shouldn’t be drinking booze, Uncle Pat. Not on top of your pills.”
“Listen to how she thinks about me!” cried Uncle Pat, as if she had said something startling. “See, Simon! That’s the kind of woman you want. A thoughtful woman like that.”
“I’ve done with the female of the species,” said Captain Simon.
“Pish,” said Uncle Pat. “It’s never too late to enjoy a pretty face around the place. Your sister’s a fine woman. Where’s she tonight?”
Captain Simon chuckled. “She’s gotten the hang of my telescope. She’s sworn on pain of death to treat it kind. I left her star-gazing. She’ll be happy for hours.”
Belinda saw something in the night sky over Calton Hill. She
was certain of it. That very night she got the knack of mastering the telescope, its beautiful, brassy complexity: she looked up into the orange-tinged sky and saw exactly what she had been looking for.
All in the eye of the beholder, Wendy might have told her. You were looking at the world with strange-tinted glasses.
Nevertheless, excitably, Belinda stole into the flat above. Everything came right for her that night. The door melted before her. She was a ghost, slipping inside, and up the spiral staircase, to shake Wendy, her accomplice, awake.
Belinda could still see the impression, the blaze of light across her eyes as she watched Wendy stir herself.
“This is your chance,” she told the girl. “To see the proof that they exist. The visitors! And to prove I’m not bananas after all.”
What she really meant, thought Wendy, dressing hurriedly in the curious dark-before-dawn, was that this was her chance, Belinda’s chance, to find the proof in the pudding.
Up Calton Hill in the middle of the night.
They staggered into the creeping dark of the Royal Circus, and found themselves a cab with its yellow light on. The gods are on my side, thought Belinda gleefully.
To the base of the hill. They hopped out at the Scottish Parliament buildings and they set off, up the slow, spiraling path. Belinda led Wendy, sure that the next bend in the rocky, gravelly path would give her evidence. Something had come here tonight. Belinda’s shoes were white with rock dust in the gathering light. All they could hear was the slither of gravel under Wendy’s boots. The light was turning blue.
They could see the observatory, unmanned, staring out over the town, and the docks to the north. A thousand trees bristled round the base of the hill.
Belinda, in hushed tones, started to explain one of her theories.
“It is the reason that the space men were attracted to Marlene. They already knew of her and her luminous beauty. Celebrity travels further, you see. Sound waves, light waves, space waves from our planet, from the television and radio, travel forever, until they encounter the other people, far away. The space people know about our celebrities first, well before they know about ordinary old us. They know nothing about our struggles. But I got gathered up by accident, in a female job-lot with Marlene. I was their only clue to what everyone else in the world is like! And they’re coming back for me.”
They paused for a rest on the terraced path leading down to London Road. Wendy wondered how long she could leave it before telling Belinda that there was absolutely nothing here.
“There are people,” said Belinda suddenly. “Standing against that wall. A line of them, look, with spaces inbetween. Men.”
They both stared and, instinctively clutching each other, started to walk towards the gathering.
“They saw it, too!” said Belinda happily. “See!”
As they drew closer they saw that the men were standing singly. They made for one burly man standing by a lamp. He looked perplexed by them as they approached. Belinda wasn’t shy.
“Are you here for the UFOs too?” she called, saying it all in one word—yoofo’s—like Americans do. The man gave her a sickly smile. He looked straight past the pair of them.
Wendy looked sideways, at the next man along the wall. She saw another join him. And she realised.
“Let’s leave them to it, Belinda,” and started to walk away.
“But...but if they’re having one of them Close Encounters...”
“I don’t think you want to be part of it.”
Wendy led her friend gently but firmly down the hill, and onto London road, through a knot of more men, drifting about in the dawn. She flagged them down another cab.
On the terraced pathway, with his back against the rough wall, an astonished Colin watched his cousin and their neighbour leave the hill behind. Colin was having the erect and oddly tapering cock end of a shy boy called Gary pushed into the hole he’d worn in the crotch of his favourite jeans. The hole hadn’t been worn on purpose, and nor had the jeans: this was an ad hoc al fresco adventure.
Colin, against the wall, hadn’t taken a single breath since he had seen Belinda and Wendy straggling over the grassy brow of the hill, coming towards him. As he realised who they were, he thought, how light and blue the light is becoming, just as Gary’s thin hard cock jammed its whole way into his jeans. And suddenly it was very squashed in there.
Colin imagined that Belinda would come straight over. The boy would yelp, filch himself out of Colin’s jeans, and hare off, down the crunchy gravel decline. Belinda and Wendy would barrel up to him. “Fancy seeing you here! Did we scare your friend off?” Belinda would be huffing and puffing in the dark, disconcerting the other men around them, and causing them to drift off.
But Wendy and Belinda had gone. They had taken one look and hurried away again. They hadn’t even seen me, thought Colin, as Gary suddenly made him spunk up into the dark grass. His come hung amongst the dew
