Then the show began in earnest.
From the dawn of time the mind of man has been asking himself the big, big questions. Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I begin? And he has to find his own answers. There are other mysteries, too, that the mind of man has worried at. About magic, religion, extraterrestrial life, and the inner world. Perhaps we can shed some light, some tiny chink of light on our profoundly dark darkness as tonight we consider once more… the world of Strange Matter.
The audience whooped.
For me, at any rate, their appearance, their debut, passed in a blur. First we had the carrot-haired, obnoxious host Julian, coming on and cracking wiseguy jokes at the expense of those credulous enough to watch his show. A drummer underlined his punchlines, and he waggled his glasses like Eric Morecambe to make the crowd, who weren’t offended by his ribbing, laugh even louder. Justin the host drew the cameras’ attention to the section of the audience populated by those who had come dressed as aliens from Babylon 5 and Blake’s 7. We looked (and whooped) at the monitor screens showing people seeming embarrassed in their tin foil and painted bubble wrap. Then there was a short film about a Christ who wept coke in Venezuela (it was boring) and then, before we knew it, Timon and Belinda were yanked out of their seats, paraded down the stairs and onto the stage. In all the clapping and yelling (as if they’d won something) the woman from the Church of the Silver Unicorn kept nudging me and saying, “It’s your friends! Look, it’s your friends!”
Justin introduced them briefly. “Timon what?”
“Just Timon.”
Justin pulled a ‘get him!’ expression at the camera. But the camera was busy loving Timon. He looked absolutely calm and assured as he sat on the overlarge settee. He really had the air of someone who had witnessed the extraordinary.
“Now,” said Justin chummily. “Tell us all about your film.”
Belinda became earnest. “You mustn’t treat it like a silly thing. It isn’t a funny home movie clip like someone falling on a cake at a wedding, or being attacked by a cat. What we’ve filmed is… well, it’s…”
“All right,” waved Justin crossly. “Roll VT.” He sat back heavily as the lights dimmed.
We all stared at the vast back projection.
“That was telling him!” Serena smiled.
“He’s an arrogant ginger gobshite,” said Aunty Anne. “I’m glad his wife walked out on him.”
They stared at the portable’s screen.
“Jesus God,” said Aunty Anne.
THIRTY-THREE
I’m going to tell you what I saw. We watched the tapes many times after that, both their original footage and the recording of the TV show, complete with cutaway shots of a delighted, aghast, drop-jawed audience. The film—only fifty-two seconds of it—caused a sensation first here in this country, and then abroad. Hundreds of thousands of people have viewed and reviewed it since, dredging over its frames individually and in sequence. They have been through its murk with a fine-toothed comb, looking for extra clues in the corners of its blatant obviousness. But I am going to tell you what I saw that first time.
And you must understand—hard to think back now, this side of the millennium—that up until then, what did we have for evidence of visitor incursions? A few crappy shots of lights-in-the-sky, like fag ends glowing in the fog. Or discs that could have been just about anything, or descriptions of individuals that were downright embarrassing. Grey men with faces like a foetus indeed.
What we saw was this:
The bulked, black headland of a portion of Scottish coastline in January. A night with a storm pending: the firm, tussocky grass steeping in violet, quagmire juices. Timon and Belinda are lugging the lightweight camera and the picture jerks around. We see Belinda in wellies, looking a fright with her hair hanging down (the audience laughs) then she’s jumping up and down and pointing straight up and up and up zooms the camera, swishing messily into focus, out again, until it finds the craft. Then the picture clicks into absolute clarity on a dark brown mass, the size of a council house in the air. There are small panels, glowing a gentle lemony yellow, and bodies clustered, peering out. The soundtrack is filled with Belinda’s shrill wails and she dashes towards the mass as its lurches onto the dark beach, sending up fans of damp sand, which crash and patter onto her and Timon and the camera, which goes dead.
The audience moans, thinking this is all. But it isn’t.
There is fuzzing and crackling and we see the grass and the swampy ground again, very close-up, as if Timon the cameraman is lying on his stomach. Vaguely we can see the opened vessel, its belly gashed apart, spilling light like a wild house party, but one going on in silence. There are figures scattered on the rough ground. We see Belinda, drenched and lathered with mud, nearly unrecognisable. She howls at the figures. They look at us.
For five whole seconds we see a group shot and they look like an outing of friends. There is a woman in a sheer pink frock which is meant to seem see-through. She sits in a wheelchair, a slash up her dress showing off her legs, a yellow wig that sweeps up from her face. She is pushed by a soldierly-looking gent with a moustache and a yellow jacket. There are others: an old man in a scarlet dressing gown, a fat woman with an anxious look about her. Beside them there is a white horse.
The shot slides away into darkness and the film goes dead.
Justin the slick TV host didn’t know what to say to that. His autocue, his script, his own words failed him. The audience were on their feet and the floor manager tried to calm them down. They wanted to see the film again. And again. They wanted to hear Timon and Belinda talk it through.
The show overran by half
