Chapter Six

The nights were the worst, Phinn mused, tipping the dregs of the bottle down his throat, feeling the burn numbing into acceptance. Nights were shitty when you were on your own. He bent his knees up until he could rest his elbows on them and scooted along the floor until his back rested against the bare plastered wall behind him.

The house was quiet. Link must have taken off again. Or found himself a room to sleep in, bloody place was big enough. Phinn tipped the bottle again but it was definitely empty this time and the mouth of it clattered against his teeth.

‘Bugger.’

He climbed to his feet using the wall as a support and stood there for a second, breathing heavily. He’d taken his glasses off so the room was all rounded edges and tucked in corners, with the alcohol making things a fizz and blur of shadows and he swayed for a second, fighting the urge to walk out.

Here is where it happens. Here is where the answer is.

Phinn Baxter hated himself. But he figured that was all right because he hated pretty much everyone else too, and huge chunks of the planet with small exceptions. Scarborough. Scarborough was nice, his parents had taken him there on holiday once. Mauritius. And that girl with the blue eyes, Polly … no, Molly. Molly put the kettle on. She was nice too. Nice. Was that all he could say these days, that some things were nice?

He whirled away from the wall and stomped over to the low-ledged window sunk into the stonework like a deep-set eye. He crouched down and leaned his arms against the sill looking out over the blackness of the moors behind the house. Nice. When once things had been magical, stupendous, astounding, breathtaking, now they all blended, swirled and sank into the greyness of ‘nice’.

He rested his forehead against the glass. Cool. Outside the window, the March wind whipped through the branches of the elder trees, flapped the bushes like a careless hand but left the distant hump of dark moorland untouched. He imagined the wind passing over its hunched surface like a caress, stroking the timeless contours like a lover and then cursed himself for his rising erection; useless, unwanted.

The sudden bang of the door made him jump and turn awkwardly back into the room.

‘Oy, Bax mate, what you doing in here?’ Link came in and stared at him, head on one side. ‘As if I didn’t know.’

‘I’m … nothing. Leave me alone.’ Phinn’s mouth felt thick, his tongue too wide. ‘’M thinking.’

‘Yeah, I can see that.’ With a sigh Link subsided onto the reinflated air bed, which gave a farty groan and lost another few pounds per square inch. ‘Bax, look, I thought we had this out this afternoon. Drink solves nothing. You’ve already found that anti-Ds solve nothing. Have you forgotten everything I’ve taught you these past few months, young Padawan?’

‘Knock off the Star Wars refs, Link. Astrophysicist, not freak.’

Link shook his head. ‘So. One screwed up relationship and you take to the bottle like vodka’s going to save you? You really think drinking yourself stupid is the answer to anything?’

‘I am not,’ enunciated Phinn carefully, ‘an alcoholic.’

‘I know that. If you were, you wouldn’t get pissed. Not on half a bottle of voddy, anyhow.’

Phinn could feel Link’s stare through the darkness. ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ he said finally. He could feel the alcohol draining from him, its effects slowly falling away to leave his brain heavy and his heart solidified in his chest. ‘Everything … everything hurts.’

‘That’s how you know you’re alive, Bax.’ Link stood up, ostentatiously brushing himself down. ‘You just need something to live for, that’s all.’

‘I’ve got something.’ Phinn’s voice sounded wrong, even to his own ears. Sounded sulky, self-justifying. ‘I’m working here, Link. Research.’

‘Research.’ The disbelief in Link’s voice was so strong it should have burned like acid through the air.

‘Yes.’

‘Into …?’ Link waved a hand. ‘Deaths from boredom? Rising incest rates? The fact that everyone living in the countryside has evolved an inability to digest Starbucks coffee?’

‘I’m going to write a book.’

‘Oh, yeah? And what might this mythical “book” be about? Because there’s not a lot of quantum theory going on in rural Yorkshire, as far as I know. Not a lot of dark matter being investigated, unless it’s the locals poking shit with sticks.’

‘Actually there’s a dark matter lab at Boulby mine. Went there on a trip when I was taking my A levels.’

‘Aged about eight.’ Link sounded sour. ‘Come on, you’re a sodding genius, we both know that. And you’ve decided the best way to use all that brainpower is to hole yourself away in this … this … swamp and write a book? You could be, I dunno, curing cancer or developing star-drive or something and you’re here, drinking yourself into a fog every night. If you’ve knocked off taking the anti-Ds, replacing them with the fun juice isn’t exactly cleaning up your act, you know. At least the pills just made you boring, alcohol makes you slur and boring. Suppose I should be grateful though, I don’t have to listen to it if it all comes out “fnnfffnnnn”. I can just nod and smile.’

Phinn turned back to the window again. ‘I’ve taken leave. Giving myself twelve months to write a book and after that …’ He rested his forearms on the ledge again and gazed deep into the night. ‘After that I’ll go do something worthy, all right? Cut me some slack here, Link, it was a bad time, and I never asked you to come looking for me.’

‘Yeah, I know that but—’

‘So why are you still here? You’ve found me, you’ve seen I’m alive. What more is there? Are you waiting to see whether I’ve finally learned to juggle?’

‘Hey, don’t flatter yourself. I’m not just here for you. I’m lying low for a bit. Woman trouble, you know the kinda thing, and this place is on the map as “here be dragons”, so no bunny boiler’s going to come looking for me round here. It’s like compassionate leave.’

Phinn glared at him. ‘From what? You haven’t got a job to take leave from!’

‘Hey, millionaires need compassion too. It’s not my fault I’ve got a trust fund, is it? I’m taking leave from women. No more women for me.’ He looked down at his watch. ‘Right, now that’s over, where are the women?’

Something caught Phinn’s eye and he twisted his head to look sideways, where the shoulder of moor slumped down, curving into the dale. A light. A bright speck, almost like a star but brighter, moving. Moving fast. ‘Where’s the camera?’

‘There’s one on my phone if you—’

‘No, the video camera. We’ll need it, and the Canon with the 50mm lens. It’s over there in that box. Come on, hurry.’

There was a knot in his stomach, that tight, wound feeling as though he was somehow connected to the light in the sky by an invisible thread and it was tugging at him, pulling him out into the darkness to follow it.

His ankle wrenched as he missed his footing but the alcohol prevented any pain messages getting to his brain. Rationally, he knew that he was tearing his hands on bracken as he used its tough stems to haul himself up the hill behind the house. His nails split and his boots slid on the peaty soil but he didn’t care, wasn’t even aware of the pain, keeping his eyes on that spot high in the sky where the lights were merging now. Dancing, swooping, then breaking off and moving away as he dragged the camera from its box and tried to focus.

‘Get the video on them, Link!’ he shouted. ‘Try to get the house in, for scale! They must be bloody enormous!’

Beautiful. So serene and lovely, riding the air like messages from deep space. He found he was lowering the camera to watch as the lights separated, whirled once more then formed into stately constellations before waltzing decorously away behind the curve of the moorland. The knot in his stomach had moved to his throat, his eyes stung with tears and he had to fight the urge to lie down on that heather covered mound and sob like a child, although whether with relief that they’d returned or disappointment that they’d left again, he couldn’t have said.

‘Come on, Baxter,’ he whispered to himself, using the newly felt pain from broken nails and bleeding palms to pull himself together. ‘Objective. You are objective. You are a scientific observer not a teenage girl. So for goodness sake, don’t cry.’

‘Bax?’ Link’s voice floated up to him from somewhere down in the field below. ‘Where’ve you gone, man?’

‘Here. Hang on.’ With an effort Phinn swung himself around, noticing that the track where he stood was broken and torn with hoofmarks, and that the churned peat had covered his jeans to the knee with crumbly smears. ‘Coming.’

He threw himself back down the path of bashed bracken that he’d ripped on his way up. ‘Did you see them? Did you get film? It’s incredible, just …’ He arrived between two stunted rowan trees which delineated the edge of the Howe End property, bursting from between them and making Link jump, ‘… incredible,’ he repeated, trailing off as he noticed the way Link stood, camera trailing from his hand, the ‘standby’ light not even winking in readiness. ‘Link?’

Link sighed, flicking a hand through his hair, then letting it drop, heavily. ‘Bax,’ he said, and Phinn wondered about his tone. It was wary, almost scared. ‘You need help, man.’

‘What?’ Phinn could sense what was coming. ‘What do you mean? Link?’

A slow, steady, appraising look. ‘What is it? ’Cos I’ve never even seen you smoke the regular; which doesn’t leave much. Tabs? You dropping the acid like a sixties boy? Because the way you hauled ass out here I was expecting, I dunno, some kind of Battlestar Galactica moment, and then we’re here and …’ An expressive hand and a backwards tilted head indicated that the universe had let him down in some fundamental way. ‘Nothing. Nowt, as they say round here.’

Phinn felt his flesh creep closer to his bones. ‘But – the lights, Link …’

A slow headshake. ‘Sorry. You’re tripping, man. Something in that voddy, I reckon, something that shouldn’t have been there, that or someone’s cut your coffee with mushrooms. You want to watch yourself, Bax, because if you carry on like this there won’t be a job for you to go back to when you’ve written your great masterpiece. Sod the Uni research programme, you’ll be lucky to get in as night security at CERN.’

* * *

The chilly breeze that came at me through the thrown-open window scoured my skin and whipped the curtains into dog-tail flapping until I struggled the catch into its hole and shut the night out. I sat back down on the edge of my bed with my eyes aching.

My legs were shaking. Two nights ago I’d hardly believed my eyes when I’d seen them swooping and looping above the high moor, leaping like so many prismatic fairies. But today I couldn’t put it down to a vivid dream or a sleepy-eyed mistake. I was wide awake and vibrating with curiosity as to what they might be. Low flying planes? But those would have droned their way through the skies like a squadron of wasps at an open-air doughnut eating competition.

These lights had moved silently and surely been far too agile to be any kind of aircraft. Party lanterns? But the way they’d grouped together and then wheeled in patterns, kaleidoscopic breaking and reforming of colours, it had looked far too purposeful to have been simply windborne candles beneath paper globes.

What were they? The mysterious Alice Lights that Caro had mentioned?

I drew the curtains, leaving a thin slice of night visible at the window, just in case they should come back and climbed into bed. As usual, the village was completely quiet. A dog barked somewhere down the road and my next-door-but-one neighbours returned from a late-night shopping trip in their car with the squealing fan belt, but apart from that there was no sound.

I hunched under the duvet and pined for London for a moment. Not just the noise … in fact, not the noise at all … but the solidity of knowing who I was and what I was doing with my life. My neat little flat, where the sun sloped in through the windows early in the morning rather than being blocked until breakfast at this time of year by that claustrophobic threat of bog and fell which lay surrounding the village like a sleeping dragon around its hoard. Tim, coming to pick me up in his snappy Aston Martin, making me feel like a Bond girl as we headed out of town to country pubs and chalk downs. The lunches, the awards dinners, the …

… UFOs.

The initials snapped into my head almost as if they’d been said aloud. I fumbled for the light switch and sat up. UFOs. That’s it. Not that I subscribed to the little green men theory, of course – why would anything fly halfway around the galaxy for the fun and stimulation of anally probing humans? No. But these things, these lights in the sky, they had to be something.

I got out of bed again and peered out of the window. It was past midnight, almost everyone in the village was in bed, although a dim glow at Caro’s bedroom window told me she was awake and reading. A few houses further down a bright pink glimmer showed that a Barbie-princess had her nightlight fully activated. Nothing moved. Not so much as a cat prowling through shrubbery broke the darkness, although somewhere distant an owl hooted and was answered.

The strange lights in the sky were gone completely. But surely if they were UFOs there would be something, some residual oddness, wouldn’t there? Not this manifest normality of bedside lamps and hunting birds; an atmospheric change or some kind of meteorological abnormality – rains of fish, perhaps?

And then, as though the possibility of oddness drew him to mind, I thought of Phinn Baxter. He had something to do with UFOs. Was it coincidence him turning up here when these lights were appearing overhead? Or was it pure fluke, just an accident that he’d arrived in the village now?

I snuck back under the covers where it was warm and tucked my feet up under the hem of my pyjama trousers to thaw them out, turning the whole thing over in my head. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe the lights were something normal, something so everyday that anyone who did see them simply brushed the sighting off. I’d heard of UFO sightings being put down to marsh gas and, well, it was certainly marshy up on the high moor that the lights had appeared over.

Marsh gas. Yes. Even though I only had the sketchiest idea of what that was, it was comforting to think that what I had seen had some normal explanation, and I snuggled back into the pillows and turned the lamp off, only to switch it back on when another thought struck me.

Maybe he wasn’t here because of the lights – maybe they were here because of him.