Down to Earth

‘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.’

Chapter Nine (#ulink_a5e3370b-7c6e-5528-a9e0-193b0302dac5)

My eyes snapped open again and I turned to look at Kevin in dismay. ‘Was he really suspected of murdering me?’

‘The most popular explanation for your disappearance was that Matt killed you in that plane after Graham, Ingrid and I jumped.’ I noticed he kept a wary eye on Matt as he moved about outside the car. ‘The theory being bandied about at the time was that once we had left the plane and he had you all to himself, he tried to assault you. You spurned his advances,’ Kevin seemed to warm to the drama of his story, ‘so he killed you and threw your body out over some water somewhere. As far as everyone else was concerned, what other scenario could there have been? You were last seen in that plane with him, there was no sign that you had landed anywhere, and you were never seen or heard of again. Well, until now, that is.’

For a moment I forgot that I was still trying to refuse to believe a word of what he or Matt was saying. My face paled at the thought of what he’d been accused of. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Once the papers got hold of the fact that he’d been asked to help the police with their enquiries, the media hounded him for months. We’d all been questioned extensively of course, but my alibi and Graham and Ingrid’s were watertight. We were visibly in the air until we landed and once on the ground we were surrounded by airfield personnel. We all swore you had been fine when we exited the aircraft. For a while, every time I set foot outside my door there were flashbulbs going off in my face, reporters shoving microphones under my nose. But for Matt it was much worse. The police had no evidence of foul play and the pilot absolutely denied that anything untoward had happened inside the aircraft, but the press publicly tried Matt and found him guilty. Mud sticks, Michaela. He had his instructor’s licence taken away and he lost his job. It wasn’t a good time until I got in touch with the papers and offered them a new theory to sink their teeth into.’

I glanced up at him. ‘The abduction theory, I assume?’

‘You got it. Aliens have their uses, babe.’

I nearly laughed at Kevin’s peculiar use of the English language, but I could tell from his lack of diplomacy that he was still almost as socially inept as he had been as a gangling teenager.

I watched idly as Matt headed across to the pay station, pausing to pick up a newspaper from the display before going inside. I wondered at the strange friendship between these two men. One was handsome, confident and in control; the other, who was busy breathing stale bacon fumes down my neck, was ill-at-ease and seemed uncomfortable in his own body.

‘I’m surprised he didn’t whisk you off to the nearest police station to clear his name and repair his ruined reputation,’ Kevin commented as Matt walked over to us. ‘If it was me, I wouldn’t just take you home and let bygones be bygones. I’d want you up there on a podium with hundreds of journalists, making a statement and shouting my innocence to the world.’

Matt climbed back into the car and tossed the newspaper onto my lap. Kevin fell silent as I picked it up and looked at the date. There was no doubt about it, it was genuine; I had seen him buy it. The date was Tuesday 21 October 2008. Staring blankly ahead I folded my arms and sat back as he turned the key in the ignition and headed back onto the motorway.

It was only when Matt drew the car up outside Calum’s house that the nerves really struck home. Eyeing the familiar tall, thin semi-detached house with its narrow front garden shaded by overgrown shrubs and brambles, I felt a sudden reluctance to leave the safety of the car. The untidiness of the garden struck a jarring chord. Neither Calum nor I were keen gardeners but we did keep the property under control between us. Only the previous weekend we had given the lawn its first cut of the season. Now there was an old banger with peeling paint parked amidst long, tangled grass and overgrown weeds.

‘Is Calum alright? Nothing terrible has happened to him, has it?’

‘Not as far as we know.’ Matt was staring at me. ‘I really think it would be better if we went to the police station before you tell your boyfriend you’re back. We have to let the authorities know you are safe.’

‘I want to see Calum. I want to hear from him that I’ve been missing for six and a half years.’ I’d tossed the jumpsuit and the toothbrush onto the back seat some time ago and sat with my hands clenched in my lap, suddenly not sure if I could face him after all. At least it was a Tuesday, I reminded myself, and Abbey would be at school so I’d have Calum to myself for a few hours. He would hold me safely in his arms and everything would be alright again. ‘I must go in and see him,’ I tried again, this time with a little more conviction.

‘You can have two hours,’ Matt said firmly. ‘After that, we’re calling the police.’

‘Must the police be involved?’ I pleaded. ‘I simply want to go home and be left in peace. Surely I’m entitled to that?’

‘Matt simply wants to clear his name,’ Kevin countered. ‘After what he went through surely he’s entitled to that.’

‘Leave it, Kevin,’ Matt gave him a severe look and Kevin fell silent.

‘OK, two hours.’ I sighed deeply and rested my hand on the car door handle. My body quaked at the prospect of seeing Calum again. I wanted to see him with all my heart, but that same heart hammered with apprehension. This was the moment of truth, the moment when I discovered whether the last few hours had been some elaborate hoax or whether something truly unthinkable had happened.

The catch on the gate was still as stiff as I’d remembered and it opened with a small familiar clunk. At least something hadn’t changed, I thought, biting back a faintly hysterical laugh. By the time I reached the house and climbed the two steps to the front door my hands were clenched clammily at my sides. I glanced back at the sound of Matt’s car pulling away and his departure left me with an unaccountable feeling of abandonment. I swallowed and stared impotently at the door. I could hear the doorbell ringing inside the house and waited anxiously. Calum’s office was at the top of the house and it would take him a few minutes to come down. When at last I heard footsteps in the passage and the catch being pulled back, my breath caught in my throat with anticipation.

The door opened and I thought at first that the man standing before me was a complete stranger. The Calum I’d left the previous morning had dark unruly hair and blue eyes set in a handsome face. He had always dressed with care, and even when working at home he’d been a stickler for neatness and order; I’d always teased him, it was probably a throwback from his strict Scottish upbringing.

This Calum had dark circles under his eyes, the once glossy hair dull and lacklustre. He seemed pale as a ghost. He peered at me from tired eyes and then those eyes widened in recognition and fixed on me in shock. He clutched the doorframe as if to stop himself from reeling backwards. ‘Michaela? Oh my God. Is it really you?’

His reaction was as violent in its own way as Kevin’s had been. It sent my last hopes plummeting to the depths of my stomach where the butterflies crash-landed in a sickening heap.

‘It’s me,’ I confirmed, standing stock still. This man was a stranger; I didn’t feel at one with him at all. Not only did he look haggard but he also smelled faintly stale and musty as if he’d just crawled out of bed. The gloomy interior behind him didn’t look or smell much better.

He stared at me for a moment or two then seemed to pull himself together. His mouth settled into a grim line as he stepped back and beckoned me inside. ‘You’d better come in.’

After one last glance at the empty road behind me, I followed the man I had lived with into the house I had called home. It was unrecognisable.

The once cosy sofa in the sitting room, where Abbey and I had sat only a couple of days ago and pored over her homework, and Calum and I had curled up to watch TV together, was covered with a filthy throw; it appeared that someone had spilled tomato ketchup and nacho crumbs over it and no one had bothered to wash it. The coffee table was full of half-eaten pizza in greasy boxes. Beer and coke cans littered the floor. I spotted a couple of empty whisky bottles stashed behind the television set. When I continued to stand, Calum rounded on me with what seemed to be a mixture of anger and confusion.

‘I don’t know whether to hug you or throw you back out the door. I thought you were dead.’ He rubbed his throat where the top button of a blue, checked shirt gaped open, and slowly shook his head from side to side. He sank suddenly onto the sofa as if his legs could no longer support him and sat staring up at me with an incredulous expression on his tired face. ‘So where the bloody hell have you been for the last six and a half years?’

‘I haven’t been anywhere.’ I adjusted my weight awkwardly from one foot to the other, uncomfortable looking down at him but not sure if he would want me to sit down. ‘I don’t know how to explain this, but I’ve just come back from the airfield.’

He stared at me in silence, his angry eyes roaming from my dark blonde hair to the tips of my toes. ‘What do you want?’