The Best of (21 page)

On Saturday Sally and I met for lunch. Afterwards, we started off in the car for a little place in the hills which seemed to me an ideal spot for a proposal. But at the main crossing in a High Street the man in front jumped on his brakes. So did I, and the man behind me. The one behind him didn't quite. There was an interesting crunch of metal going on on the other side of the crossing, too. I stood up to see what it was all about, and then pulled Sally up beside me.

"Here we go again," I said. "Look!"

Slap in the middle of the crossing was—well, you could scarcely call it a vehicle—it was more like a flat trolley or platform, about a foot off the ground. And when I say off the ground, I mean just that. No wheels, or legs. It kind of hung there, from nothing. Standing on it, dressed in coloured things like long shirts or smocks, were half a dozen men looking interestedly around them. Along the edge of the platform was lettered:pawley's peepholes . One of the men was pointing out All Saints' Church to another; the rest were paying more attention to the cars and the people. The policeman on duty was hanging a goggling face over the edge of his trafficcontrol box. Then he pulled himself together. He shouted, he blew his whistle, then he shouted again. The men on the platform took no notice at all. The policeman got out of his box and went across the road looking like a volcano that had seen a nice place to erupt.

"Hey!" he shouted to them.

It didn't worry them, but when he got within a yard or two of them they noticed him, and they nudged one another, and grinned. The policeman's face was purplish, he spoke to them luridly, but they just went on watching him with amused interest. He reached a truncheon out of his back pocket, and went closer. He grabbed at a fellow in a yellow shirt—and his arm went right through him.

The policeman stepped back. You could see his nostrils sort of spread, the way a horse's do. Then he took a firmer hold of his truncheon and made a fine circular sweep at the lot of them. They kept on grinning back at him as the stick went through them.

I take off my hat to that policeman. He didn't run. He stared at them for a moment with a very queer expression on his face, then he turned and walked deliberately back to his box; just as deliberately he signalled the northsouth traffic across. The man ahead of me was ready for it. He drove right at, and through, the platform. It began to move, but I'd have nicked it myself, had it been nickable. Sally, looking back, said that it slid away on a curve and disappeared through the front of the Penny Savings Bank.

When we got to the spot I'd had in mind the weather had come over bad to make the place look dreary and unpropitious, so we drove about a bit, and then back to a nice quiet roadside restaurant just outside Westwich. I was getting the conversation round to the mood where I wanted it when who should come across to our table but Jimmy.

"Fancy meeting you two!" he said. "Did you hear what happened at the Crossing this afternoon, Jerry?"

"We were there," I told him.

"You know, Jerry, this is something bigger than we thought—a whole lot bigger. That platform thing.

These people are away ahead of us technically. Do you know what I reckon they are?"

"Martians?" I suggested.

He stared at me, taken aback. 'Now, how on earth didyou guess that?' he said, amazedly.

"I sort of saw it had to come," I admitted. "But," I added, "I do have a kind of feeling that Martians wouldn't be labelled 'Pawley's Peepholes'."

"Oh, were they? Nobody told me that," said Jimmy.

He went away sadly, but even by breaking in at all he had wrecked the mood I'd been building up.

On Monday morning our typist, Anna, arrived even more scattered than commonly.

"The most terrible thing happened to me," she told us as soon as she was inside the door. "Oh dear.

And did I blush all over!"

"Allover?" inquired Jimmy interestedly.

She scorned him.

"There I was in my bath, and when I happened to look up there was a man in a green shirt, standing watching me. Of course, I screamed, at once."

"Of course," agreed Jimmy. "Very proper. And what happened then, or shouldn't we—"

"He just stood there," said Anna. "Then he sniggered, and walked awaythrough the wall . Was I mortified!"

"Very mortifying thing, a snigger," Jimmy agreed.

Anna explained that it was not entirely the snigger that had mortified her. "What I mean is," she said, "things like that oughtn't to be allowed. If a man is going to be able to walk through a girl's bathroom wall, where is he going to stop?"

Which seemed a pretty fair question.

The boss arrived just then. I followed him into his room. He wasn't looking happy.

"What the hell's going on in this damned town, Jerry?" he demanded. "Wife comes home yesterday.

Finds two incredible girls in the sittingroom. Thinks it's something to do with me. First bustup in twenty years. In the middle of it girls vanish," he said succinctly.

One couldn't do more than make a few sympathetic sounds.

That evening when I went to see Sally I found her sitting on the steps of the house, in the drizzle.

"What on earth—?" I began.

She gave me a bleak look.

"Two of them came into my room. A man and a girl. They wouldn't go. They just laughed at me. Then they started to behave just as though I weren't there. It got—well, I just couldn't stay, Jerry."

She went on looking miserable, and then suddenly burst into tears.

From then on it was stepped up. There was a brisk, if onesided, engagement in the High Street next morning. Miss Dotherby, who comes of one of Westwich's most respected families, was outraged in every lifelong principle by the appearance of four mopheaded girls who stood giggling on the corner of Northgate. Once she had retracted her eyes and got her breath back, she knew her duty. She gripped her umbrella as if it had been her grandfather's sword, and advanced. She sailed through them, smiting right and left—and when she turned round they were laughing at her. She swiped wildly through them again, and they kept on laughing. Then she started babbling, so someone called an ambulance to take her away.

By the end of the day the town was full of mothers crying shame and men looking staggered, and the Town Clerk and the police were snowed under with demands for somebody to do something about it.

The trouble seemed to come thickest in the district that Jimmy had originally marked out. Youcould meet them elsewhere, but in that area you couldn't help encountering gangs of them, the men in coloured shirts, the girls with their amazing hairdo's and even more amazing decorations on their shirts, sauntering arminarm out of walls, and wandering indifferently through cars and people alike.

They'd pause anywhere to point things out to one another and go off into helpless roars of silent laughter. What tickled them most was when people got angry with them. They'd make signs and faces at the stuffier sort until they got them tearing mad—and the madder, the funnier. They ambled as the spirit took them, through shops and banks, and offices, and homes, without a care for the raging occupants.

Everybody started putting up 'Keep Out' signs; that amused them a lot, too.

It didn't seem as if you could be free of them anywhere in the central area, though they appeared to be operating on levels that weren't always the same as ours. In some places they did have the look of walking on the ground or floor, but elsewhere they'd be inches above it, and then in some places you would encounter them moving along as though they were wading through the solid surface. It was very soon clear that they could no more hear us than we could hear them, so that there was no use appealing to them or threatening them in that way, and none of the notices that people put up seemed to do anything but whet their curiosity.

After three days of it there was chaos. In the worst affected parts there just wasn't privacy any more. At the most intimate moments they were liable to wander through, visibly sniggering or guffawing. It was all very well for the police to announce that there was no danger, that the visitants appeared unable actually todo anything, so the best way was to ignore them. There are times and places when giggling bunches of youths and maidens demand more ignorepower than the average person has got. It could send even a placid fellow like me wild at times, while the women's leagues of thisandthat, and the watchcommitteeminded were living in a constant state of blown tops.

The news had begun to get about, and that didn't help, either. News collectors of all kinds came streaming in. They overflowed the place. The streets were snaked with leads to movie cameras, television cameras and microphones, while the pressphotographers were having the snappypicture time of their lives, and, being solid, they were almost as much of a nuisance as the visitants themselves.

But we hadn't reached the peak of it yet. Jimmy and I happened to be present at the inception of the next stage. We were on our way to lunch, doing our best to ignore visitants, as instructed, by walking through them. Jimmy was subdued. He had had to give up theories because the facts had largely submerged him. Just short of the cafe we noticed that there was some commotion farther up the High Street, and seemingly it was coming our way, so ,we waited for it. After a bit it emerged through a tangle of halted cars farther down, and approached at a rate of some six or seven miles an hour. Essentially it was a platform like the one that Sally and I had seen at the crossroads the previous Saturday, but this was a deluxe model. There were sides to it, glistening with new paint, red, yellow and blue, enclosing seats set four abreast. Most of the passengers were young, though there was a sprinkling of middleaged men and women dressed in a soberer version of the same fashions. Behind the first platform followed half a dozen others. We read the lettering on their sides and backs as they went by:

Pawley's Peepholes on the Past
—Greatest invention of the age
History Without Tears
—for £1 See How Great
Great Grandma Lived
Ye Quainte Olde 20th Century Expresse
See Living History in Comfort
—Quaint Dresses, Old Customs
Educational! Learn Primitive Folkways
—Living conditions
Visit Romantic 20th Century
—Safety Guaranteed
Know Your History
—Get Culture—£1 Trip
Big Money Prize if you
Identify Own Grandad/Ma

Most of the people on the vehicles were turning their heads this way and that in gogeyed wonder interspersed with spasms of giggles. Some of the young men waved their arms at us and produced silent witticisms which sent their companions into inaudible shrieks of laughter. Others leant back comfortably, bit into large, yellow fruits and munched. They cast occasional glances at the scene, but reserved most of their attention for the ladies whose waists they clasped. On the back of the nexttolast car we read:

Was Great Great Grandma as Good as she Made Out? See the Things Your Family History Never

Told You

and on the final one:

Was Great Great Spot the Famous before they got Careful—The Real Inside Dope may win you a Big Prize!

As the procession moved away, it left the rest of us looking at one another kind of stunned. Nobody seemed to have much left to say just then.

The show must have been something in the nature of a grand premiere, I fancy, for after you were liable anywhere in the town to come across a platform labelled something like:

Was Great Great History is Culture—Broaden Your Mind Today for only £1!

or:

Was Great Great Know the Answers About Your Ancestors with full, goodtime loads aboard, but I never heard of another regular procession.

In the Council Offices they were tearing what was left of their hair, and putting up notices left, right and centre about what was not allowed to the 'tourists'—and giving them more good laughs—but all the while the thing got more embarrassing. Those 'tourists' who were on foot took to coming close up and peering into your face, and comparing it with some book or piece of paper they were carrying — after which they looked disappointed and annoyed with you, and moved on to someone else. I came to the conclusion there was no prize at all for finding me.

Well, work has to go on: we couldn't think of any way of dealing with it, so we had to put up with it.

Quite a number of families moved out of the town for privacy and to stop their daughters from catching the new ideas about dress, and so on, but most of us just had to keep along as best we could. Pretty nearly everyone one met those days looked either dazed or scowling—except, of course, the 'tourists'.

I called for Sally one evening about a fortnight after the platform procession. When we came out of the house there was a dingdong going on farther down the road. A couple of girls with heads that looked like globes of gilded basketwork were scratching the daylights out of one another. One of the fellows standing by was looking proud of himself, the rest of the party was whooping things on. We went the other way.

"It just isn't like our town any more," said Sally. "Even our homes aren't ours any more. Why can't they all go away and leave us in peace? Oh, damn them, all of them! I hate them!"

But just outside the park we came upon one little chrysanthemumhead sitting on apparently nothing at all, and crying her heart out. Sally softened a little.

"Perhaps they are human, some of them. But what right have they to turn our town into a horrible funfair?"

We found a bench and sat on it, looking at the sunset. I wanted to get her away out of the place.

"It'd be grand away in the hills now," I said.

"It'd be lovely to be there, Jerry," she sighed.

I took her hand, and she didn't pull it away.

"Sally, darling—" I began.

And then, before I could get any further, two tourists, a man and a girl had to come along and anchor themselves in front of us. That time I was angry.YOU might see the platforms almost anywhere, but you did reckon to be free of the walking tourists in the park where there was nothing to interest them, anyway—or should not have been. These two, however, had found something. It was Sally, and they stood staring at her, unabashed. She took her hand out of mine. They conferred. The man opened a folder he was carrying, and took a piece of paper out of it. They looked at the paper, then at Sally, then back to the paper. It was too much to ignore. I got up and walked through them to see what the paper was. There I had a surprise. It was a piece of theWestwich Evening News , obviously taken from a very ancient copy indeed. It was badly browned and tattered, and to keep it from falling to bits entirely it had been mounted inside some thin, transparent plastic. I wish I had noticed the date, but naturally enough I looked where they were looking—and Sally's face looked back at me from a smiling photograph. She had her arms spread wide, and a baby in the crook of each. I had just time to see the headline: 'Twins for Town Councillor's Wife,' when they folded up the paper, and made off along the path, running. I reckoned they would be hot on the trail of one of their damned prizes—and I hoped it would turn round and bite them.