I laughed again. ‘It sounds like joining the European Union. Will there be a single currency? Will we be able to opt out?’ Another look. ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s all right.’ She looked sad as she looked up at me. ‘So now you think I’m a complete nutter and you’re never going to want to see me again. I guess I don’t blame you.’
I took her hand. ‘Don’t be silly. It doesn’t bother me at all. If you were a neo-Nazi or believed that you were a vampire or something, then I would be put off, but believing in aliens . . .’ I shrugged. ‘I really like you, Marie. I think you’re beautiful and . . . different. That’s why I like you.’
She leaned into me and kissed me again. We lay down on her bed and I kissed her neck and face, and she put her hands inside my shirt and touched my skin. I closed my eyes and inhaled her, the sensation of a body against mine. I had forgotten how good it felt. Outside, the sun went down and the room darkened. I pushed up Marie’s T-shirt and kissed her belly. She sighed, but when I moved to unbutton her jeans she said, ‘Not yet.’
Warm in the fading light, I kissed her and smiled. I forgot all about aliens and UFOs and intergalactic councils. This was here, this was now, and this was real. For the first time since I could remember, I was happy.
5
‘Move in with me,’ I said, three weeks later.
She was naked beneath the quilt in my bedroom, warm and drowsy and beautiful, looking up at me with her hooded eyelids, her make-up smudged and hair tangled on the pillow.
‘It makes sense,’ I said. ‘You won’t have to worry about rent or being evicted. And I want you to live with me. I love you. I want you in my home. I want you in my bed every night.’ I kissed her.
‘I’m in it every night anyway.’
It was far too soon to ask someone to move in with you. But I didn’t care. I was smitten. No, more than that. I felt possessed, as if some spirit had got inside me and was running around my body, bumping into my heart, spinning in my stomach, filling me up with energy. I felt half delirious. Marie, Marie, Marie. I whispered her name to myself as I walked down the street or drove my car. I breathed in and could smell her, her scent in my nostrils, like she was a perfume that I wore on my skin. I could taste her on my tongue, feel her imprint on my body. I couldn’t concentrate on my work; I drove Simon mad by repeatedly breaking off in mid-sentence and smiling secretively, some memory of Marie rising up and making rational thought or conversation impossible. I must have been a nightmare to be around.
‘Well?’ I said to her. There was a pink flush across her collar bone. ‘Will you move in with me?’
‘I might . . .’
‘If?’
‘If you do what you just did to me again.’
I put my head under the quilt and she giggled.
One night, a little while after she’d moved in, I woke up and became aware that Marie was not lying beside me. I looked up. She was silhouetted against the window, holding the curtains aside and looking out at the night sky.
I pushed the quilt aside and stood up. She turned and smiled. I put my arm around her waist and said, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Listening,’ she said. ‘I’m listening for the voice.’
I gave her a quizzical look.
‘Do you know what brought Andrew and me together initially? It was because I told him I could hear the stars. It’s like a very high-pitched call, very faint, like a choir heard from a very great distance.’
‘Does it play tunes?’
She ignored my sarcasm, which slipped out occasionally. ‘It’s more abstract than that. It’s more like a voice than music. The voice of the Chorus. Andrew can hear it too. Of all the people we know here, we’re the only two who can hear it.’
It made me uncomfortable when she spoke like this. It was like listening to somebody who has embraced religion, who talks in awed tones about their god, a god that I could not believe in. It made me feel excluded, especially when she mentioned Andrew. I accepted her beliefs, and I was happy that she felt so passionately about something. But it wasn’t a faith we shared.
We stood and looked up for a few moments, her head resting on my shoulder. I ran the tip of a finger over her small, pale breasts, causing goose bumps to spring up on the surface of her skin. Her nipples hardened and I lowered my mouth to them. I wanted to distract her from the stars and their voice and make her concentrate on me. I moved my hand down her spine and pulled her against me. I led her to the bed and we fell among the rucked-up sheets and made love slowly with the starlight filling the room where she had left the curtains half-open.
I wonder if she could still hear the celestial voice as we made love. Did she listen to it as I moved inside her, as our pelvic bones pressed hard together, as she bit into my shoulder? Did the voices take on a higher pitch – did they reach a crescendo – when she came? Her eyes were closed and she wore a smile. I put that smile down to me – my body, our lovemaking – but maybe it was down to something else. Maybe she was smiling at the sound of the stars.
‘They’re coming closer,’ Andrew said, his voice coloured with excitement.
I passed him a glass of Coke. He had just got here and was sweating; the temperature outside was rising daily. The weathermen said that we were on the brink of a record-breaking heat wave, as the mercury in our thermometers crept into the mid-thirties.
Marie sat beside him on the sofa while I sat on the floor cushion. She was almost bouncing up and down with excitement. This was one of the things I loved about her: her child-like enthusiasm.
‘We’re getting so many reports of UFO sightings at the moment,’ Andrew continued, addressing me. ‘All over Sussex and Kent. It’s pretty much unprecedented in this area. This morning alone I had six reports of sightings in a forty-mile radius, including a sighting by a police officer. You can probably write half of them off as mis-sightings – where people have seen planes or balloons or natural phenomena – but not all of them. There’s a real buzz in the ufology community at the moment.’
He smiled and pushed his glasses up onto the bridge of his nose. He looked at Marie, who leant forward, listening keenly. ‘And it’s not just UFO sightings either. We’re getting a lot of reports of abductions. A man in Tunbridge Wells has contacted me. He says he was taken aboard a craft and he can remember them carrying out some medical procedure on him. He’s going to see a hypnotist to try to remember the rest. Plus there have been loads of reports of crop circles, especially over towards Ashford. Do you know a village called Wye? There’s a big agricultural college there. Anyway, there have been a load of crop circles appearing. Marie and I are going to go over there this weekend and check it out.’