The Moon on the Lawn

“I was abducted by aliens, of course.” My mother probably told me that for the first time when I was about four years old. It was certainly before I started at mainstream school, but when I was old enough to be able to read (I was precocious in that way, if not in others). It could have been before. It could have been after. But I don’t think there’s much leeway either way. She was quite particular about her own age at the time – she’d been 22, in her last year at university, living in a shared student house.

     She did it in a practical, conversational manner, as if she might have been telling me that there was chicken for supper, or that it would probably be sunny that day, despite the gloomy and rainswept start. We always rose early. It was her way. Oh, I think that if I had expressed some petulant childish urge to lie abed she would not have made an issue of it. She made issues of very few things. She had her red lines, as politicians who want to prove both their tolerance and their firmness are wont to say. Her dictum on the matter of food was that you’re allowed to not like it, but you’re not allowed not to try it. I was also never permitted to get away with being unkind for the sake of it, though she never expected me to be a little ray of tolerant sunshine. 

     I don’t want to give any false impressions. My childhood was a happy one. Oh, not perfect, not some morning sunlit idyll full of fanciful or fictional stories. But I knew I was loved, and I knew things were expected of me, but unconditional love was a given, and that my Mother could be quirky and quixotic, but I was never even neglected, let alone ill-treated. I was bathed and fed and taken out and told bedtime stories, though, as I now realise, they may very well not have been those told to most children.

     Still, when I hear of more conventional childhoods, I’m never entirely sure whether I feel pity or envy.

     There were spells when I was home-schooled, some of it, at least, for purely practical reasons when we were living out on the moors (and to this day, for all its – well, quirkiness – I’m glad I wasn’t sent to boarding school) but also spells when I went to a normal school, and though I wasn’t the most popular or chatty child in the class, I wasn’t a bullied misfit either, and though my home-schooling had left me deficient in some areas (some of them for no more significant reason than that my Mother wasn’t that interested in them) it also left me ahead in others. I muddled through, no more joyfully nor more miserably than most children do. I do remember that my Mother advised me to “Do as your teachers tell you, unless it’s something that really matters, and treat them respectfully.” Looking back it dawns on me that she never defined what it really matters signified, and that she also said treat them respectfully rather than respect them. 

     Oddly, as it might seem to others, she rarely admonished me not to mention that she had been abducted by aliens. At most she said things along the lines of “there are things best not to mention” and I understood. Boasting about things, particularly things to do with your parents, was tiresome. I sighed and rolled my eyes along with the others when Billy kept telling us about his Dad meeting the Queen, or Gillian never missed a chance to bring up her mother’s participation in the 2000 Olympics – it wasn’t as if she won a medal or anything!

     I probably sighed and eye-rolled more than the others at that as under my Mother’s influence I didn’t have much time for sport. Often enough she said there was nothing that wonderful about being able to catch a ball or pass a baton or jump into a bit. Unlike many children who don’t entirely fit in (or that’s the stereotype, anyway) I was good at sports myself. Or at least had the capacity to be. I could run quickly, and hit a ball hard, and was a good swimmer. But things like rules and tactics bored me. “If only you would apply yourself, Olivia,” one of my games teachers once lamented. I do recall I replied, “I’m not a tin of paint, Miss,” and she couldn’t help chuckling before she told me off for being cheeky.

     People, whether my schoolmates or my teachers, often remarked that I could be quite funny and had a gift for puns. Well, I was good at English and particularly as I grew older, at least some of them were intentional and for effect. But I also genuinely did interpret things slightly differently at times. For instance, when, in a maths class, we finally got the hang of something to do with algebra (which I have never had cause to use at any subsequent time) our relieved teacher said, “Well, now you’re motoring,” and I meant it neither to be funny nor cheeky when I said, “But we’re too young to drive, sir!”

     I was in my teens before I found out more about the alien abduction. My mother had said she would tell me when she was ready and when she thought I was, and I hadn’t argued. She was incredibly lenient in some ways, but I also knew there were occasions when something she said was beyond dispute and it would only sour our relationship if I tried. This didn’t stop me reading all the books I could get my hands on about such matters, and by now it was easy enough to look on the Internet, too. She didn’t exactly approve, but I didn’t try to hide it from her either. “You won’t find anything about me in there, you know,” she once said. “And the vast majority of it is conspiracy theory hogwash to make a profit and make people with boring lives look important!”

     “So how do I know you’re telling the truth?” I asked. Then I added, because we were close and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings by suggesting she was a liar, “Or that you didn’t imagine it?”

     “So which would you rather have?” she asked. “A mother who’s a liar or one who’s a fantasist?” There was neither anger nor sorrow in her query, and that caught me more off-guard than either of them would.

     “Don’t answer that,” she said, wryly. “But I promise you I’m neither. Or okay, I’m no saint, maybe I am sometimes. But not when it comes to the craft.”

     She always referred to it as that, the craft – not the flying saucer or the spaceship. I had learnt from my books and websites that such crafts broadly speaking divided into 3 categories – the ones that looked like – well, the most familiar ones in the movies, the classic saucer or disc shape, then the cigar shaped ones, and the triangular ones. 

     “The craft wasn’t like any of them,” she said. “If anything, it looked more – like a jewel. A topaz, if I had to put the name of anything earthly to it. And round, but not like a saucer, not at all, more like a ball hanging in the sky.” It crossed my mind that that sounded suspiciously like the moon, given the right atmospheric conditions, but I decided against saying so, not least because I knew what the answer would be. “And before you say was it the moon,” she went on, without my asking, “No, it definitely wasn’t. It was a clear, quite frosty night, and there was a half-moon, a silver one. Anyway, the moon doesn’t come and land on the front lawn, and the moon doesn’t have a door that opens, and I think we can fairly say it’s been established that though men have been on the moon, there aren’t any moon men.” She went on, “It’s hard to describe this to someone who didn’t see it for herself, but – it was as if the man, and I’m saying that for convenience’s sake because he was humanoid in form, at least when I encountered him – was a part of the craft itself. He could detach from it, like an astronaut doing a spacewalk, but he was the same colour, and – he felt like a hard, sparkling topaz, too. But he was gentle with me. I know in those books of yours you read about some who aren’t, and I daresay there’s an odd instance where it’s true, but he meant me no harm.” When you’re in your mid-teens you aren’t always the most willing audience for details of your mother’s love life, whether with human or alien. I couldn’t help being curious as to whether he was her first, but decided against asking, though I knew she would have replied honestly and without taking offence. She was good about things like that. 

     “You were in a shared house,” I said, “Were none of the others disturbed?”

     “Laura could have slept through an earthquake, and Tina was away visiting her parents at the time. But he’d only come for me.” She paused. “The craft wasn’t entirely silent – it made a kind of whirring noise, but quite a melodic one. But he told me you could only hear it if you chose to listen.” 

     The topaz sphere, with its melodic whirring, drifted around for a while, apparently under its own power or some kind of remote control. Topaz Man (as I had started to call him, not original but handy) appeared to be the only – entity – on board. She didn’t say anything about it seeming like an eternity or the blinking of an eye, or moving into another dimension , but quite practically that though, like many lovers, they lost track of time, when they landed back on the lawn it was about an hour later. 

     Well, I’m going to “fast-forward” myself now, to when I was a couple of years older than my Mother was at the time of her abduction (and yes, I tended to put quote marks round it in my mind at times!) and helping to finance my MA by working in the university library; updating the online catalogue, making sure that good old-fashioned books were on their right places on the shelves and the like. 

     It must have looked like one of those reconstructions they do on the compensation claim ads. But in this instance, it was entirely my own fault. We’d had Move the Steps, Don’t Lean drummed into us. It was even on little labels on the steps. But it wasn’t leaning far, and though the work was by no means unpleasant, I wanted to get to some reading of my own. I mentally cursed careless undergraduates who didn’t replace books in the correct alphabetical order, whilst by no means innocent on that count myself.

     This was one occasion when time did seem elastic. In the span of a second I thought that okay, it was wobbling a bit, but it would be fine, and then that perhaps Health and Safety Rules had some point after all, and then that, fair enough, I was going to tumble, but at most I’d have a bruised backside and bruised dignity.

     Well, my backside escaped unscathed, and as the long second came to an abrupt end I realised I had more to worry about than my dignity. Folk have asked me with that morbid curiosity I’m by no means immune to if I heard the famous ominous crack. No, I didn’t. But my left arm was at an angle no arm ever should be, and don’t believe anyone who tells you breaks don’t hurt.

     I have a fairly high pain threshold, but it’s perhaps as well that my memories of the subsequent few hours have become quite hazy. 

     I woke up in hospital, still mercifully in the grips of morphine, but awake enough to realise that my arm was in a heavy cast.

     Later that day, the orthopaedic surgeon came to have a word with me. He told me that I had fractured my elbow and my wrist. “Nasty injuries, and it will be a couple of months before your arm is anything like back in working order,” he said. “You’ll almost certainly need physio, too. But the good news is that I’m not inclined to think there’ll be any permanent problems. There’s no need for you to be in hospital when we’re absolutely sure that you’re not woozy any more – I gather there’s someone to look after you, and you’re right-handed, aren’t you?” I nodded. He paused as if making up his mind whether to say something or not, and then went on. “I’m well aware this is a singularly irritating thing to say, Olivia, but in the long run, this may have done you a favour.”

     “How so?” I asked, too intrigued to be irritated.

     “We found a foreign body in your arm – we don’t know how long it’s been there for, and so far it had done no harm, but there’s always the risk something like that can get infected. We removed it while you were under the anaesthetic.”

     “Can I see it?” he asked, “Unless it’s – gone to surgical waste!”

     “Not yet,” he smiled, “And I don’t see why not – there’s nothing gruesome about it! In fact it’s quite attractive, in its way!”

     He returned a few minutes later, and unclasped his own left hand. In it I saw a little sphere. “Looks a bit like a topaz, doesn’t it?” the doctor asked.