Читать книгу Down to Earth - Melanie Rose - Страница 13

Kevin stood there, ready for flight, his eyes squinting shortsightedly as though he ought to be wearing spectacles. He seemed to be taking in every minute detail of my appearance; my face, hair, the jumpsuit, right down to my bare feet. Eventually he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and swallowed hard. ‘Michaela? Is it really you?’

He was a good actor – I had to give him that. His reaction had shocked me almost as much as I had seemed to surprise him. Having recoiled several steps when he’d leapt up, I held my ground near the foot of the stairs and returned his scrutiny, taking in his features and comparing them with the Kevin I knew. There was a little fleshy padding on his face and chin, which seemed to round off a narrow angular jaw. The extra weight on his face and body made him look altogether chunkier and more solid. This was a pretty good impression of what a scrawny teenager might look like as a mid-twenty-something who hadn’t taken very good care of himself.

Clever.

Kevin approached slowly, his eyes taking on a gleam of excitement. ‘It is you, isn’t it? But where have you been? What did they do to you? Have you been kept in some sort of stasis? How did you get away?’

I glanced towards Matt and it was then that I saw what was written on the top of the pile of papers he’d had spread out in front of him. They looked like printouts from computer websites and the words that caught my eye, making my stomach churn afresh, were, ‘Unexplained Abductions’ and ‘People who have disappeared’.

I sincerely hoped that Matt and Kevin were not going to try and convince me that I’d been abducted by aliens.

Kevin was still staring at me with a look of wonder on his face.

‘I told you.’ He turned to Matt with a grin of triumph. ‘Everyone had me down as some sort of weirdo, but I was right all along.’

‘Not everyone thought you were a weirdo,’ Matt qualified. ‘There’s still quite a following out there for the abduction theory and the newspapers certainly latched onto the idea for a while.’

‘But why didn’t you tell me she was back? How long have you known?

‘Only since last night,’ Matt glanced at me apologetically. ‘Michaela rang me from the Royal Oak and I brought her back here so she could get a good night’s sleep. She didn’t want me to take her to the police station and I thought she needed time to adjust before announcing her return.’

Kevin clutched his head. ‘Man, are you telling me no one knows she’s back yet?’

Matt shook his head. ‘Just you and me and the landlord of the pub, though I don’t think he figured out who she was.’

I looked from one of them to the other, wondering how they expected me to believe such nonsense. I cleared my throat. ‘Excuse me, but I’d quite like to go home now – if you don’t mind.’

‘Aren’t you going to tell us what happened to you?’ Kevin had seated himself back on his stool and was picking up pages of the printouts. He waved a couple at me. ‘We’ve waited six and a half years wondering how the hell you disappeared so completely.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said huffily. ‘Yesterday I jumped out of an aeroplane and when I landed I found the airfield deserted and in apparent disrepair. But then you know that, don’t you?’

Kevin looked at Matt, who shook his head. Turning back to me, he raised his eyebrows and his voice came out almost as a squeal. ‘You mean you have no idea where you’ve been?’

I frowned, annoyed with myself for falling into the trap of forgetting to go along with their bizarre stories. ‘Look, a joke’s a joke, but I really do just want to go home.’

A look of concern crossed Matt’s face and he pulled out a stool. ‘Come and sit down, Michaela. Have some breakfast at least, you must be starving.’

I sat, partly because my legs were wobbling and partly because I realised I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten since lunch in the mess room yesterday.

‘What would you like, fruit, yoghurt?’

How did he know what I normally liked for breakfast, I asked myself? My eyes wandered longingly to the bacon and eggs however, and Matt laughed, turning to the frying pan where he laid out a row of bacon slices, which began to sizzle mouth-wateringly.

Kevin took the opportunity to push the paper entitled, ‘People who have disappeared’, under my nose. ‘You’re not the only one to have vanished without trace over the years’. He ran a stubby finger down the long list. ‘Look, people have been disappearing for centuries.’

I felt my eyes stray towards the list. It began with an account of the disappearance of Nefertiti, royal wife of the Pharaoh Akhenaten of Ancient Egypt in 1336 BC and continued with page upon page of unexplained disappearances right up to October 2008. Sifting through the pages I found an account of my own reported disappearance in 2002.

‘Well they’ll have to update their list now, won’t they?’ I shook my head and stuck out my chin. ‘Whether or not I was perceived to be missing when this list was compiled, I’m certainly not missing now.’

‘This is extraordinary!’ Kevin breathed, rising to his feet and peering at me from every angle.

Kevin fished in his pocket and produced a mobile phone. ‘Do you mind if I take a few pictures of you, maybe shoot a short film as you are now?’

I was puzzled. ‘Where’s the video camera?’

Kevin laughed. ‘This is the camera. It’s also my mobile and I can pick up emails on it too.’ He pressed a few buttons and showed me how it worked.

I frowned. How had he got hold of technology like that? And it was all so small, not like my chunky mobile phone which I had left in my bag. Before I could protest, Matt pushed a plate of food in front of me and I picked up the knife and fork trying to ignore the nagging doubts that crowded into my head. Not only had both Matt and Kevin visibly aged, but it seemed technology had moved on too. No matter how I tried to deny it, everything kept pointing to the fact that something terrifying and inexplicable had occurred.

Kevin was holding the tiny mobile towards me, but I held up my hand. ‘Please, don’t.’

‘Enough, Kevin,’ Matt’s voice was calm but authoritative. ‘There’s an awful lot for her to take on board. You can collect evidence later. Let her eat in peace.’

I finished the food in record time. Although famished, I kept thinking about Calum and Abbey and my mum and dad. Whether there was any truth in what Matt and Kevin were telling me or not, my family would be worried that I hadn’t returned home last night at least. Glancing at my watch again, I pictured Calum trying to get Abbey ready for school; he’d have to make up her lunch box himself and was probably cussing at my absence. Wondering also about why my parents hadn’t answered the phone the night before, I pictured Dad getting ready for a day at the bank where he had been manager for ten years; Mum rushing round getting their breakfast so they could eat together before he walked to the station. They would probably be talking about me, wondering why I hadn’t reported in to tell them how the charity jump had gone.

I pushed the empty plate away with a sigh. ‘I must ring Calum and my parents and let them know I’m OK.’

‘Your parents? Didn’t Matt tell …?’ Kevin began.

He broke off abruptly.

My head shot up. ‘What? What haven’t you told me?’

‘Nothing,’ Matt said hastily. ‘Look, I’ll drive you to Calum’s house and we can talk on the way.’

Deciding he’d tell me anything he wanted in due course, I finished the meal with a pile of toast and marmalade and another cup of tea.

‘I’m surprised all that stuff I’ve just eaten isn’t banned in the new world of 2008,’ I murmured sarcastically as I sat back, replete.

‘It’s frowned on, certainly,’ Matt agreed. ‘But I knew the promise of a good old-fashioned cholesterol-rich fry-up would bring Kevin scurrying over here without any questions.’

I almost laughed, but it was short lived. ‘Look, I really do have to ring home.’

‘You’ll be back there before you know it.’

Recalling last night’s string of abortive phone calls, I almost capitulated. ‘You’re probably right, but I have to try again. Can I borrow your phone?’

Kevin shot Matt a look.

‘Go ahead,’ Matt was holding out his mobile phone.

I punched in Calum’s number and listened to it ring and ring unanswered. My parents’ number produced the same effect and I began to feel uneasy all over again. I’d call work, I told myself, and if everything seemed normal there, I’d reconsider trying Calum or my parents again in a little while.

The call to Wayfarers confirmed my worst fears. A young girl answered my call but professed never to have heard of me. She reluctantly answered my anxious questions. It seemed she had been at the insurance company for two years and in that time most of the staff had changed. Graham had retired because of ill health several years before, she told me. She had never even heard of anyone called Ingrid Peters.

I disconnected and silently handed Matt the phone.

We left the house half an hour later. I sat in the front passenger seat of Matt’s car, with the jumpsuit now folded and resting on my lap. I wanted to curl back into a ball and cry. Yesterday had been a glorious spring day, vibrant with the promise of summer, yet today it looked and smelled like autumn. Matt and Kevin would have had to be pretty amazing illusionists to have changed the seasons I realised. And if not con men, I thought miserably, then what? The feel of the borrowed toothbrush, the one tangible possession I had to my name, felt strangely comforting in my hand.

We sat in virtual silence as the car burnt up the miles towards Calum’s house. Every so often I glanced at Matt’s profile, taking in his even features with his prominent nose and designer stubble. He had programmed a kind of navigating device with the address and postcode of Calum’s house before setting out. The thing was built into the car with a screen showing a map of the route. Every so often a robotic female voice would give instructions and Matt would turn right or left accordingly. I’d heard of the possibility of these satellite navigation gadgets; they already used GPS at sea, but I’d never seen one used in a car before. It was quite unsettling. Eventually however, Kevin, who was in the back seat, leaned forward and broke the silence.

‘Are you sure you can’t remember anything at all? Not even one itsy bitsy flash of a spaceship or a strange grey figure?’

‘The dashboard of this car looks like a spaceship to me, but no, you’ve been reading too many abduction stories,’ I admonished lightly. Turning round in my seat I looked him in the eye. ‘I wasn’t taken by aliens, Kevin. Those abduction stories were fabricated by the US military to cover up their research into new weapons and aircraft back in the fifties.’

‘Try telling that to the thousands of abductees who swear they’ve been taken and experimented on!’

‘Those accounts were probably caused by mass hysteria due to people watching too many science fiction films,’ I told him firmly.

‘What about all the disappearances that happened long before America was even discovered? According to this list, people have been going missing ever since records began.’ Kevin leaned even further forwards. ‘If you weren’t taken, did you have a good reason to disappear, Michaela?’

‘I need to fill up with bio diesel,’ Matt butted in suddenly as the sign for a service station flashed by.

‘I’m not even going to ask what that is.’ I closed my eyes, folded my arms and slid down the seat, trying to stay invisible as he turned into the service slip road and pulled up by a pump. I heard the driver’s door open and close as Matt got out and Kevin said quietly, ‘You might sneer at it, but the abduction theory is what eventually saved Matt from being hounded by the press for your murder.’