What You Wish For Read online

  Marie? But she had a key, and knew the window was always locked.

  I went round to the back of the house, checking for footprints or other signs that someone had tried to break in. I spotted one immediately: the ladder, which I kept in the garden shed, was poking out of the door.

  It seemed pretty clear what had happened: someone had started to pull the ladder out, but had been disturbed or frightened off, quickly making an exit.

  Maybe they had been scared off by the sound of my car pulling up out front. They were probably in the back garden when I got home.

  I quickly ran to each side of the garden fence, peering over. A dog two gardens away began to bark. Whoever had been here was long gone.

  I went back inside and turned all the lights on, nerves jangling like I’d just watched a horror movie on my own. Someone had tried to get into my house. I knew there had been a number of break-ins in the area recently, and I should probably call the police. But I also knew, from reading the reports in The Herald, that the police hadn’t been able to do anything for the people who had actually been burgled. It would be a waste of time.

  No one had got in. Nothing was missing. I was lucky.

  But I couldn’t help but feel this hadn’t been a burglar.

  ‘Was it you?’ I whispered. Then I laughed at myself. What was I doing? Talking to Marie like she was a ghost. I needed to do something to shake this spooked sensation. I needed a drink.

  Sitting down with my second beer – I had guzzled the first one standing by the fridge, the radio turned up to blast away the creepy atmosphere in the house – I switched on the PC. Earlier, I had held off doing what I was about to do, because it felt like a violation, but now I thought ‘fuck it’. What other choice did I have? My emotions lurched between anger at her for running off and terror that something awful had happened. Whatever had happened, I felt justified looking at her emails.

  She used Gmail, where the password was also ‘chorus’. I knew that she would be able to easily access her email wherever she was, as long as she could get online. Would she know that I would be able to access them, that I had guessed her password? If I were her, I would assume my emails were private and would carry on sending emails freely. Within moments, I might know if she was alive and well, and where she was.

  Of course it wasn’t that easy.

  There were dozens of unread emails in the inbox, almost all of them junk. I went back a few pages and got a shock.

  I had last seen Marie on the sixteenth of October. All of the emails received before that date had been deleted.

  Unless Marie habitually deleted all her emails after she read them, which seemed unlikely, this indicated that her disappearance had been planned. That she had been worried that me or somebody else – the police? – would access them. Unless someone else had done it. Someone else who had, what, forced her to give them her log-in details?

  I rubbed my eyes, then opened the first of the only three messages that weren’t commercial. The first, dated yesterday, read:

  Hey, Cosmic Girl!

  Haven’t heard from you for aaaaaages! Whatcha doing with yourself? I’ve just got back from India. Life changed bigtime, babe. Met some Americans in Goa who are going to Roswell next summer. Gonna scale the fence. Asked me to join them. Cool, huh? Mail me and we’ll chat about life, everything, nothing.

  Love-vibes

  Alpha centaur xx

  The email address it had been sent from was [email protected], which wasn’t very helpful. I opened the next email, which had been sent earlier that morning. It was from a Louise Webster:

  Hello Marie

  I’ve just heard about Andrew. I can’t believe it! He was such an inspiration to me and I can’t believe I missed the funeral :(

  Please get in touch. Would be great to meet up.

  Seeya soon

  Louise xxx

  The final email, also received today, read:

  Hey Marie – how are you feeling, huh? I’m so bored right now I could scream. Thanks for the advice. It really helped. My head’s been kinda fucked up lately, since my visitation. I keep remembering little snatches of it. Like, I remember the leader standing over me and another visitor attaching this stuff to my – excuse me – balls and making me come.

  I feel kinda cheap but privileged too, you know?? It hurts that they didn’t ask me first, they just went ahead and did it. It’s rude, I think . . . Though I don’t mean any disrespect. I’m sure they know best and there’s a reason for the way they do it. Still, it would have been nice to be asked. What are your thoughts on this? Will I see you at the convention on the 19th? I hope so. We can chat then, face to face. That would be a great help.

  See you there then,

  Buzz

  Alpha Centauri. Buzz. Cosmic Girl.

  I felt like I’d entered some weird alternative world, a crazy world in which aliens really did visit men in the night and attach stuff to their testicles. Buzz’s email address, again unhelpfully, was [email protected].

  ‘Will I see you at the convention on the 19th?’

  That was the tantalizing line, the only one that gave me any kind of lead.

  What convention? Where? Marie often went to conventions, large and small, where she would meet up with like-minded people and talk aliens. She hadn’t been to any since Andrew died. But I vaguely remembered that she had some flyers advertising a convention that was coming up. If I could find out its location, maybe I could find Buzz. He might be able to help me.

  Maybe Marie herself would be there.

  I pulled open the desk drawers and rifled through. I found wads of internet print-outs, pages about abductions and conspiracies, Area 51 and theories about cosmic breeding programmes. I found bank statements and telephone bills, college notes and photographs of Andrew, Kate, Calico and various people that I didn’t recognise. I sat and flicked through, page by page, looking hard at every piece of paper, every photo, all the train tickets and receipts that she had hoarded. None of them offered any enlightenment. Nothing jumped out at me and grabbed my attention. By the time I had finished hunting through it was growing dark outside. Dusk fell across the country like a veil of lace. It was time to eat, but I wasn’t hungry. I made a pot of black coffee and smoked a cigarette.

  I went back to the computer and replied to Buzz, pretending to be Marie. If she looked at her emails from wherever she was, she would see what I’d done. But I didn’t care at that moment. I typed:

  Hey Buzz – I think I must be going crazy! ;) What conference are you talking about?

  Love Marie

  I also googled everything I could think of to try to find the convention, but nothing came up. I went back into Gmail and hit refresh a dozen times, with increasing desperation, hoping Buzz would respond. I was gripped by a kind of mania. I needed to find those flyers.

  I was about to leave the desk to start my search when I remembered that I probably now knew Marie’s forum name. I went on to the site and was about to enter a search for her name when I noticed that I had a private message sitting in my inbox.

  It was from somebody called The Watcher and contained two simple words:

  Forget her.

  9

  I turned the house upside down.

  I hunted through every cupboard, opened every drawer. I flicked through books on the shelves, thinking a sheet of paper might fall from between the pages and flutter to the carpet. I looked behind furniture, under the sofa and in the bathroom cabinet. I came across letters and photographs I had forgotten existed. I found a screwed-up ten-pound note behind the stereo. I disturbed a sleeping spider in the cutlery drawer. By the time I had finished downstairs it looked like I really had been burgled.

  I tried not to think about the message from The Watcher. I had no idea if he or she knew something or was just, as Marie would say, ‘some random’, a person interfering, trying to be clever or cool. I had fired back a message asking if he or she actually knew something, and if so, could they please tell me mor
e. I had resisted the urge to tell them to fuck off.

  I went into the spare bedroom, a room that contained nothing but junk and cat hair. This was where Calico slept, although right now he was back in his spot on the windowsill in the living room. The spare room yielded nothing. No bounty. No clues.

  I moved into my bedroom. I looked at the unmade bed which until recently had been the scene of so much pleasure. Now it felt too big, too empty.

  I missed her body so much. Not just sex, but the feel of her beside me, being able to stretch out my arm in the night and touch her. I missed the sound of her breathing in the darkness. I missed waking up and seeing her. I felt lovesick, bereaved, but the not-knowing made it even worse than that. I was tormented.

  I opened the wardrobe and, one by one, pulled out all her clothes. I threw them on the floor. I searched the pockets, shook each garment, held them against my face. When every article of clothing lay scattered on the floor I knelt among them and shouted, ‘Where the fuck are you?’

  I crawled through the discarded innards of the wardrobe towards the bed. It was a divan bed, with doors that slide open to provide storage space. This is where I keep junk: old birthday cards, holiday souvenirs, photographs, letters, schoolbooks, old copies of the Herald from my early days, when seeing my name credited beneath a picture was still a thrill. Marie, too, had started to store stuff here.

  I rooted through, dragging everything out onto the bedroom carpet. I sorted through the paperwork, finding Marie’s birth certificate among other old documents. There was no passport, though I didn’t know whether she’d ever had one.

  In a folder near the back of the storage space, I found it at last: the flyer. I sat back on my heels, letting out a sigh of relief. I was exhausted, the house was trashed. But here it was at last: what I’d been looking for.

  There were a few of them, slightly crumpled, though there was nothing to suggest they had been hidden on purpose. The leaflet featured a photograph of an old-fashioned flying saucer, below the words GALACTICA 99. At the bottom of the page it stated that this was the fifth annual Galactica convention, with guest speakers from across the world, many stalls, films, etc, etc. It was to take place on the nineteenth of October in Camden Town. My heart thumped. This had to be the one.

  I started to pack everything back beneath the bed, not bothering to put it away neatly, just shoving it back in. My mind was elsewhere now, planning my trip to the Galactica convention. Among the junk in the bed was some old jewellery that had belonged to Mikage, my old girlfriend, cheap stuff that she had left behind. As I shoved it back in I dropped a ring and it rolled and slipped beneath the bed. There was a gap of about half an inch between the carpet and the bed, just enough for the ring to roll in on its side. I put my fingers beneath the bed to fish it out and felt something there. It felt like the corner of an envelope. I pinched it between finger and thumb and pulled it out. It was an envelope – a brown A4 manila envelope. It was sealed but nothing was written on the front.

  I sat on the bed and opened it.

  Inside were four black and white photographs. They were of Marie. She was naked. She looked two, maybe three, years younger than she was now. The photographs were very good quality, quite professional looking. I would have been pleased with them myself, technically.

  I looked at all four in rotation, over and over. My whole body trembled. My stomach spasmed suddenly and I ran to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I rinsed my mouth and walked back to the bedroom, holding onto the wall for support. This couldn’t be real. I must have imagined it.

  But the photographs were still there, lying on the bed, and they were real. Although when I say real, I mean they existed. Because they were faked. Marie was real – she was there in the flesh, one hundred per cent real, but the pictures had been cleverly manipulated so she was not alone. In the photographs, she appeared to be having sex with an alien.

  It was a Grey: the standard image, with the large head, enormous deep-black eyes, tiny mouth, slight body. At first, I couldn’t work out if it was someone in a suit, but it looked too realistic. It had to be a computer image, I decided, something created on a machine. Then this image had been cleverly Photoshopped onto the image of Marie.

  In the first photograph, the Grey lay on top of her; then she was astride it; the third picture showed the alien with its lipless mouth on her breasts. In the final picture Marie knelt on all fours facing the camera, her face screwed up in mock ecstasy, the alien positioned so that it appeared to enter her from behind, its long fingers stroking her back. Every inch of Marie was on display.

  Marie, who would never let me take her photograph.

  I shook the envelope, but there was nothing else inside. Questions raced dizzily through my head. Who had taken the photographs? For what purpose? Was this connected to her disappearance? And were there more? I would have to search her computer. Maybe, I thought, there were videos too.

  I wanted to tear the pictures up, burn them, wipe them from existence. But I knew I mustn’t. I put them back in the envelope. I didn’t want to have to look at them. Not yet. I walked downstairs on shaky legs and opened a bottle of vodka. I drank straight from the bottle, until I passed out. My last thought was that at least now I had a photograph of Marie. A dark part of me laughed bitterly, and then consciousness slipped away.

  10

  I went to the Galactica 99 convention on my own. I would have liked to take a companion, but who? Certainly not Simon, because although his journalistic mind might have been useful there was no way I could let him see the pictures of Marie. I wondered whether I could involve him without showing him the photos, but it seemed too difficult. Instead, I took advantage of his offer of help by phoning him and asking if he could do some research for me. I wanted details about Andrew – biographical details, age, place of birth, schools, jobs, friends. As much as Simon could find.

  ‘Why do you want to know all this?’ Simon asked.

  ‘I’m convinced that if I can find out more about Andrew it might help me find Marie. She was so close to him, but she hardly told me anything about him. It was because I was jealous – I didn’t want to talk about him. Except for when he was right there in front of me, I tried to pretend he didn’t exist.’

  ‘But they weren’t shagging, were they?’

  ‘So she said. But what if she was just saying that to stop me getting even more jealous?’ There had definitely been something between them. And if I had to take a wild guess to identify who had taken the pictures, I would say it was Andrew.

  I had an idea that her disappearance had something to do with Andrew’s death. Either because his death had affected her more deeply than I’d realised and had prompted her to run away or – though I hated to think about it – harm herself. Or because something that I was unaware of had happened as a consequence of his death. Had she met someone at the funeral who was involved in all this? Had Andrew and Marie been working on a secret project that she now felt compelled to continue on her own? Did she suspect that foul play had been involved in his death and was out there, searching for the truth? This last one made my head spin. Was I searching for someone who was out there looking for answers herself?

  Apart from Simon, I had nobody to help me. Marie’s friends were supposedly keeping their eyes peeled. Her mum was no use. And as for my friends . . . well, I had hardly been in touch with any of them since I’d started seeing Marie. I had been so besotted with her, so absorbed, that I had broken contact with the handful of friends that I had. Marie and my work had taken up all of my time and attention. Now I was paying the price.

  I was walking into a world I didn’t know, and I was doing it alone.

  I paid my entrance fee and walked through the double doors of the former concert venue in Camden Town into the main body of the convention. In my right hand I held a slim briefcase that contained the photographs of Marie. The briefcase was locked. I had a horror of the photographs falling into somebody else’s hands. But I knew I might have to sho
w them to someone. They were the best lead I had.

  I looked around at the tables piled high with merchandise: books, videos, T-shirts, badges, models . . . every piece of alien paraphernalia you could imagine. I walked up the first row of stalls, glancing at books and videos with titles like Encounters, The Truth About Roswell, An International Conspiracy, Without Invitation. I flicked through a couple of the books, which were packed with testimonies of people who believed they had been aboard alien spacecraft. I wandered around the hall, my head spinning.

  In many ways, it was what I had expected. Get a group of like-minded people together and they will try to sell each other stuff. But I quickly realised that this was just the surface of the convention. This was where the money was. But in order to make any progress I was going to have to locate the hardcore alien obsessives. People like Marie and Andrew. And, I guessed, Buzz, who hadn’t replied to the email I’d sent. The Watcher hadn’t replied to my message on the forum either. In fact, the original message had been deleted.

  I felt like I was dancing with phantoms.

  I looked around the hall. Marie and Andrew would not have wasted their time perusing the stalls at these conventions. I knew that. But where would they have been? I had to find the inner sanctum.

  I wandered around for another hour, soaking up the atmosphere, flicking through pamphlets, listening in to conversations. I was surprised by the variety of people present. It was a true cross-section of society, from the predictable computer-programmer nerds in cheap glasses to smartly dressed pensioners. There were young couples with babies in tow, suited businessmen, hippies, Goths and people who dressed like me. Ordinary people united by one thing: the belief that we are not alone in the universe. These were the masses Marie had told me about. I wondered how many of them had seen a UFO. How many of them claimed to have been abducted? How many had seen an extraterrestrial? How many wanted to? They paid their ten-pound entrance fee to spend a day among fellow believers, away from sceptics like me. They bought goodies and chatted and exchanged email addresses and Twitter names. I overheard them talking about other conventions, about trips to the States. I listened out for names. Margaret, Roy, Kevin. No Buzz or Alpha Centauri. No references to a Cosmic Girl. Again, I had the thought that this was just the surface of this world. I was going to have to stop listening and do something if I wanted to dig deeper.