I wasn’t a good person back then. Well, no. I always tried to be. If I’d had any idea that my views or my values – my whole ethos, I guess – were wrong, then I’d have changed. But I was trapped in the cage of what I’d been taught.
I left Earth completely by accident on Christmas Eve 1990 as I was driving to… As I was driving. It doesn’t matter where I was going. I’m not even sure I knew where I was going – I just couldn’t be at home right then.
I got in my car and I drove. Headed out of town. Got on the highway – the motorway, I guess you’d call it – and put my pedal to the floor.
My car had this really crappy stereo system. Even by the standards of the day, I mean. No cassettes, no CD player. Definitely nothing like the virtual systems you get out here. Strictly AM/FM radio. I had it tuned to 630 CHED and it was blasting out the tunes. I suppose I couldn’t have been that far out of the city if I hadn’t lost signal.
That’s when it happened. I’d been singing along to Whitney Houston’s ‘I’m Your Baby Tonight’, when it just cut out. The song, that is. And the car. I’d been thumping my hand on the steering wheel and belting out the title line when … when … I dunno. I carried on singing for a bit before I noticed anything.
It’s been more than 30 years and I still can’t properly describe it. There was light. Blinding light. And in my mind I feel like I crashed the car. I know I did. But I can’t have done. I wasn’t hurt. Like, at all. But then I was standing on the road next to … something. Part of my brain says it was one of them weird little cars you see on films set in England.
But another part of my brain says it wasn’t that at all. It was a get-off: a ground-to-orbit vehicle. So it had to be bigger than a car. And it had definitely crashed. I think. It was pulled over on the side of the road, four-way flashers blinking. Or no, I suppose, it can’t have been. It’s like I have two sets of memories superimposed over one another. Or more than two.
Grace says they used a probability field and that it kinda fractured my memory of that night. You don’t know about Grace but whatever. The point is, I have a few different layers of memories of what happened next. They’re all jumbled up together and each fragment seems equally real.
In one, I hit a moose or a stag or something. I think I probably died in that one.
In another, I pulled over to help a driver who’d crashed into a tree. I helped them change a tyre and then carried on my way.
But mostly, I know that when I opened that car door, what I found was a whole new world. A whole new life.
I knocked on the window – but I couldn’t see into the little car. It was too dark. I had just decided to go back to my car and get my emergency kit when the door slid aside.
‘Don’t just stand there,’ said a strange child. ‘Get in if you’re going to. I’m not paying to heat the whole planet, you know. You lot are doing a fine job of that all on your lonesome. Burning all those fossil fuels like you think oxygen grows on trees.’
I’d never heard anyone talk about things like that before.
‘Come on, lad.’ The kid waved me in. ‘He needs your help if he’s going to survive. In a bad way, he is.’
I should probably pause here and tell you that the person I thought was a human child was actually a… Well, I call them lilliputians. You may have a different name for them. Lilliputians look like human children. Kind of. This was Grace. We would go on to become good friends. Eventually.
Where was I? I sound like a complete idiot, don’t I? Paul’s always telling me I could win gold for Earth at the digression olympics. If there was a digression—
Wait. You don’t know Paul yet. We’ll get to that.
So. Christmas Eve 1990. Side of the road. Just outside Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I could just see the tops of the Rocky Mountains silhouetted in the distance.
The kid told me to get in. Kept talking about someone being in a bad way.
That kicked my brain into gear. I was still a cop back then. Have I told you that part already? Anyways, I was. I got into the car that wasn’t a car. And then I must’ve stood there gawping at the scene for a minute or two before I could make any sense of what I was seeing. Never mind that I most definitely was not in a small car.
There, stretched out on the bench seating, was a corpse. Not just a body – this guy looked like he’d been mummified. All the meat was gone from him. Nothing more than waxy skin pulled taut over a skeleton.
Taking a slow breath, I put my hand to my weapon. Except, no weapon. This was Canada, not the US. Just because I was a cop didn’t mean I carried a weapon everywhere I went. Normally I hated the thing. I never once used it. Never even touched it. Put it on at the start of my shift and took it off at the end. That and always jostling it with my elbow. But you know what I mean. Never sat right with me. But right then… I wished I’d had it.
‘Pull the car over.’ I hadn’t even been aware we’d started moving again.
‘No can do, sonny boy,’ replied the child. ‘We’re already six kilometres off the ground.’
Glancing out the windscreen, I swear I almost pissed myself. He was right. Nothing but black sky and a million, million stars.
‘I don’t want to hurt a child.’ I held my hands out in front of myself. ‘But I’m going to need you to turn this vehicle around right now.’
‘Auntie Paula needs to be on my ship as soon as possible if she’s going to survive.’
There was a wet noise behind me. ‘Don’t mind our Grace. She’s got a flare for the dramatic.’
Never in my very short life had I been as terrified as I was in that moment.
I spun slowly back around to look for the source of the voice. The corpse’s eyes – which had been closed a moment before – were wide open. And then the person – the one I’d been so utterly convinced was dead – was overcome by a coughing fit.
My baba – sorry, my grandmother – had emphysema. I’d looked after her when I was a kid, despite my father— No. No. That’s a whole other story. Maybe I’ll tell you eventually. But probably not. Suffice it to say, I knew that cough.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was on my knees before the person who was definitely not dead. I helped lift him up, supporting his head to make sure his airway was open.
‘Is there any water?’ I looked around, hoping to find a bottle or a cup. Something, anything.
The corpse who wasn’t a corpse gestured at a tube hanging from the ceiling. ‘Oxygen.’
Seizing the hose, I brought it to the man’s face. His lips parted to receive it. He sucked the air in and it seemed to calm him down somewhat.
‘The oxygen’s laced with a pain killer and cough suppressant,’ said the kid. ‘Now hold on to your britches. We’re nearly there but we’re coming in hot. Shouldn’t have left it this long, but the bitch wouldn’t believe me.’
I thought the man in my arms was coughing again. It took me a moment to realise he was laughing. ‘I’d have to be daft to believe young Mr Grace when she told me she had a spaceship hidden in her allotment.’
