Close Encounters

Close Encounters by Chris Green

The Conference Room is the largest room in the Resource Centre. Seated, it holds about fifty, depending on how the tables are arranged. Around twenty attend the monthly Neighbourhood Coordination meetings which, as Centre Coordinator, I am obliged to sit in on. Susie Kew is the Community Liaison Officer for Camelot Housing, the largest housing association operating in Newbridge. On this occasion, I find her sitting opposite me. She is a wearing a short skirt, which throughout the meeting, she lets slip slowly up her endless legs, seemingly for my benefit. None of the other delegates appear to even notice her. Perhaps they are not so well positioned.

I put Susie’s behaviour down to harmless flirting. These meetings are pretty boring. Flirting might be Susie’s way to amuse herself while the delegates witter on about neighbourhood policing, inclusion initiatives, and community safety, punctuated only by Reverend Gandy’s update on the strange goings-on at St Decuman’s Church. Susie’s display is sufficient to distract me, and this is probably how I come to miss the bulk of Sergeant Fricker’s report on the UFO sightings. There have apparently been a dozen independent sightings of mysterious craft over the recreation ground in the past month, occurring around dawn and dusk. Newbridge is a sleepy suburban town in the West of England. There have been no alien sightings in the area since the sightings from Warminster, sixty miles away, back in the nineteen-seventies. Well before my time. But there is concern in the community about the fresh outbreak.

Instead of leaving the meeting in a state of anxiety about the perceived threat to our survival, I leave in a state of arousal. This is added to when, out of the blue, Susie invites me to join her for a lunchtime drink at BrewHouse. As it’s Friday, I reason why not? Nothing much goes on at the centre at the tail end of the week, unless someone has booked an event on a weekend. This week they haven’t, so I tell Susie I will just grab my things and I will be with her.

I would have gone along, blissfully unaware of any impending alien invasion, were it not for Councillor Jim Straight engaging me in conversation about volunteers for the floodlit three-a-side wheelchair rugby or some such minority sporting endeavour that Newbridge Council is invested in. Are we still prepared to offer volunteer support for the rest of the season in light of the new revelations about extraterrestrials, he wants to know. Rather than show that I haven’t been paying attention at the meeting, I wait for Jim to explain what he means, which he does in his familiar laboured fashion. Without simply telling him to sling his hook, a short conversation with Jim is unlikely.

Susie notices my change of humour.

‘I saw you talking to Councillor Straight,’ she says. ‘Carrying on where he left off about the potential alien invasion. Anyway, the men in black have probably been quietly mingling amongst us, undetected for years. Darius Go could be an alien, don’t you think? All that Gong Bath and Ear Candling nonsense. You have to admit, Darius is a little odd.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I say. ‘On both counts. Perhaps the UFO sightings have something to do with the sci-fi films they’ve been showing at the Arts Centre. They’ve had The Mn Who Fell to Earth, Independence Day and War of the Worlds.’

‘More likely, they’ve been showing the films at the Arts Centre to cash in on the local sightings.’

‘I’m sure it’s something of nothing,’ I say. ‘I was a bit lazy at school and put into the Can’t Write, Won’t Write group for wayward students. To get us motivated, we were given unusual assignments designed to inspire us. Mine was related to the psychology of inclusion. I discovered that following an individual UFO sighting, to get in on the act, their friends, neighbours, assorted aunts and uncles, and even their aunts and uncles’ gardeners and their gardeners’ hairdressers would add themselves to the ones who had witnessed the mysterious shapes in the sky. So that would account for the large numbers.’

‘Anyway, shall we forget about UFOs and get down to BrewHouse?’

‘For sure.’

‘This might help,’ Susie says, offering me a ready-rolled spliff from a fancy green packet. ‘A friend of mine ships these over from California.’

‘The spliff seems to do the job. As we make our way to BrewHouse, my thoughts become noticeably lighter. Although I pass it every day, I have never been inside. With its microbrewery and constantly changing interiors, I have considered it might be too trendy for community workers on their lunch breaks. The bar area is dimly lit and the low ceiling makes it seem smaller than it appears from the outside. It is designed perhaps to make the space seem more intimate. To accompany your craft beer, cosmopolitan or mojito, you can order from a lunchtime menu of Italian bites, bruschetta, calamari, pizza and risotto. If you can find a table to eat them at. It is a popular bar. Fortunately, there is a terrace area at the back and Susie and I plump for this.

It may be down to the lingering effects of Susie’s doobie, but I do not notice them at first, which is alarming, because once you spot them, the men in dark suits and Oakley sunglasses lurking in the alcove at the rear of the terrace are hard to miss. These shady figures seem well out of context in a lunchtime leisure situation. There is something other-worldly about them. It’s as if they are there, but not there. As if they might at any moment vanish in a waft of escaping vapour, much like that overused CGI special effect in surrealist mysteries. Despite my earlier scepticism, I find it difficult not to connect them with the UFO sightings.

The men in black don’t evaporate before our eyes. They flicker in and out of sight amongst the lunchtime crowd. Although there is still an air of menace about them, we gradually become used to their presence and order our pizzas. We chat about Italian cars, Giacomo Puccini, and holidays in Tuscany, and eventually they leave. The service at the bar speeds up, and the tension leaves the faces of the lunchtime revellers. Our food arrives and we order a bottle of Bardolino to help it along. I don’t think Susie and I are planning to do much work this afternoon.

I retrieve my Kangoo van from the Resource Centre car park and follow Susie in her Mini to her place in Sutton Bassett, three miles away. We encounter nothing untoward along the way. But why would we? It’s all too easy to get taken in by the crazy stories you hear day to day that have no veracity. We use the afternoon instead to get to know one another better. Thoughts that we might not be alone in the universe are returned to the pages of Phillip C. Dark where they belong.

We discover we are both fans of The Simon Somerset Sextet, admirers of Juan Loco’s art, and both enjoy Leif Velásquez’s films. It is good to be away from the office and take time out for some pleasurable r and r. Susie is stimulating company and I would be happy to stay longer, but I have to get home to feed Elvis. I can’t even remember if I gave him his gourmet pouch this morning.

It is dark, and the street lights are out along Avalon Way. The roadblock is still unexpected. It is a resilient-looking defensive barrier manned by military personnel. Up ahead. I see the flashing blue lights of a battalion of emergency service vehicles. Sergeant Crowley introduces himself. He has a grave, soldierly look about him. He tells me I must turn back. He seems reluctant to tell me what the emergency is. But I stay on the case, and he eventually confides that there is an unidentifiable craft in the field that Berkeley Homes is surveying for the new luxury housing development. He cannot tell me more, he says, but I really do have to turn back, or he will have to take me in. I don’t much fancy army detention, so it is I end up back at Susie’s.

‘I imagine it’s classified,’ I say to Susie. ‘But it might be worth looking online to see if anything has leaked out. You are better at research, I imagine.’

‘That’s a cop-out, Shaun,’ Susie says. ‘But you are probably right. My research credentials aren’t too shabby. Why don’t you make us a cup of tea?’

When I return with the tea and biscuits, Susie looks flustered.

‘There’s nothing definite here about this particular incident,’ she says. ‘But there are literally thousands of pages of posts on UFO sightings and men in black, and that’s just in the UK. A majority of these are within sixty miles of here. It would take me all night to sift through them and then a bit.’

‘I wondered if that might be the case.’

‘Among the random facts I uncovered was that there were over 137,000 sightings of UFOs in the UK in the first six months of the year and many of these claim to have known someone who has been abducted. And in County Mayo on the West Coast of Ireland, 87% of people have seen something unexplainable in the sky or know someone who has. You get big numbers when you ask questions in a certain way, I suppose. It definitely supports your Can’t Write, Won’t Write exercise conclusion. ….. Look! We don’t want to be doing this. I have a much better idea. Let’s call it a day and relax a bit. We’d be more comfortable upstairs.’

‘I was hoping you might say that,’ I say. ‘I’ll just phone my brother to get him to look in on Elvis, and I’ll be with you.’

When I drive home the following morning, the road is clear. There is no trace of the roadblock, and the housing development field is empty. No hint that there has been any violation. My head is spinning. Something’s definitely not right. Just as I am getting back into the van, I get a call from the security company. All the alarms at the Resource Centre have been triggered. It’s a Saturday, and the centre is closed. I am down as a keyholder. ‘Am I able to attend?’ the call centre operative wants to know.

‘All of the alarms?’ I say. ‘You realise there are sixty-four cameras in the centre? That means the intruders not only forced entry but have been into every corner of every room and gone up onto the roof with the alarms sounding.’

‘It looks that way, yes,’ the operative says. ‘Unless it’s what we refer to as an Apocalyptic Event. An Act of God like an earthquake or a tsunami or something.’

‘H’mmm.’

‘Or an alien spacecraft landing even,’ he adds, laughing. ‘But it’s probably not going to be any of those, but intruders have been picked up by every camera in the centre. You’re on your way, are you?’

As a Resource Centre Coordinator, you have to take the rough with the smooth. There are bound to be ups and downs in the course of a working week. Community work may not be well paid, but at least my role is varied. On Monday, assuming that there hasn’t been a localised earthquake or tsunami, and assuming that aliens haven’t taken over the Resource Centre or spirited me away over the weekend, we have a Health and Safety Executive audit. Our H and S Officer Neville disappeared without a trace last November, so I’ll probably have to fill in. That is sure to be a hoot. I haven’t ever looked at the H and S records. On Tuesday, there is a Circus Skills workshop, and the Newbridge Over 70s weekly Indoor Bowls, and as I recall, our new partially sighted volunteer, Tariq took bookings for a Gangsta Rap workshop, and the Church of Jesus Christ AGM to run alongside these at the same time. What could possibly go wrong?

Copyright © Chris Green, 2025: All rights reserved

 

An earlier version of this was posted as Can’t Write, Won’t Write