Aliens In The Family (10 page)

"There are a few clouds. Well, it probably just came out from behind a cloud," suggested Jake.

"But it changed so suddenly!" Philippa exclaimed. "I know what David's getting at, I think. One moment behind a cloud, the next absolutely bright. Besides, come to think of it, I'm sure I saw the sun go under that cloud just a moment ago. Now it's going to go under it again." Everyone continued to stare into the sky suspiciously—or almost everyone. David and Dora both noticed Bond hang his head, rather as if he did not wish anyone to read his expression.

The world looked still and green and completely innocent. Dora seemed to shake herself. "Let's trot for a bit," she suggested. "We're allowed to trot here, it's a good place for it. Can we canter?"

"I'll come with you," said Philippa. "How about you, Jake? Cooney loves a canter just here." She took off effortlessly, with Dora following on immediately, and Lewis following Dora—but looking back at Bond as if he was reluctant to leave him behind. To her horror Jake saw Cooney's ears go forwards. Within moments he set off in a trot, unwilling to let the others go without him. For the terrified Jake, it was the most uncomfortable, jolting movement she had ever felt. She and Cooney seemed to be acting in opposition to one another.

"Off you go!" said her father, smiling as she trotted past him. He was sure she was just longing for the freedom to canter Cooney, to gallop him. With each jolt, Jake felt one of her legs seem to grow longer than the other—she was sliding sideways in the saddle. Then at once the pace changed. Cooney was cantering. Jake thought she would dissolve with fear as she slipped still further sideways. Her right foot had come out of the stirrup and she had nothing on that side to brace herself against. She tried to cling on with her legs. In books people controlled horses and made them do what they wanted just using their hands and legs. But Jake's legs were like stuffed stockings sewn onto the edge of her jacket, with no power, no strength in them at all.

Jake pulled desperately on the reins. Cooney turned his head sideways, opening his mouth crossly, but continued to move obstinately forward. Then he slowed to a trot again. Jake had time to think that if ever she was being machine-gunned by gangsters it would be rather like this. She pulled on the reins again, but she was not dealing with an idea—Cooney was a powerful animal with likes and dislikes of his own. He did not want to stop, but when she fell forward and clung about his neck she did at least confuse him, and he got slower and slower until he at last slowed to a walk, his ears flicking bad-temperedly with disappointment. He neighed to Scoot who neighed back at him. Jake, tilted almost horizontally in the saddle, straightened herself and regained her lost stirrup. She felt dazed and shocked and her body was limp and sore. The ride had sandpapered the insides of her legs. However she had not fallen off and was quite boneless with relief at feeling in charge again (at least a little bit), and at no longer being a piece of jolting baggage, bumping along on an irritated horse. The surrounding scarred tree trunks looked calmly down at her. The riders on ahead had not seen her and the valley did not care.

"Jake!" said a voice beside her, and she looked around to find Bond staring at her. "Jake, you can't ride," he said bluntly. "They said you could ride well but you can't ride at all."

Because he simply stated the facts, without asking for an explanation, Jake didn't bother to argue. She sat motionless, thinking that whether she could ride or not, she was still entitled to dress as if she did, because they were the clothes of adventure, and once you gave difficult or even sad things the name of adventure their meaning changed. Then Jake had a very strange experience. She felt Bond move, not in the outside world, but inside her mind. He began as a single light like a candle flame in a dark hall, investigating one side door then another, branching out and out again. She could trace his movement in the dark land behind her eyes as if he had taken root and grown there like a tree of fire. He divided and this division divided again and again, lighting up dark places, gently searching her memories. Then he was gone—she was alone again. Bond sat beside her on Scoot studying her with a kindly interest.

"Fear is a sort of electricity and I can follow electrical traces," he told her. "I can make pictures of them when I untangle them. And now you know my secret too. I'm not supposed to tell anyone," he added. In reading her, in becoming a fiery tree, a river of fire flowing through her head, Bond had allowed Jake to discover something astounding about himself that she had not been able to see before.

"You're not a real person—you're—you're—you're an
alien!"
Jake blurted out at last. "You come from outer space!"

"What's 'outer space'?" asked Bond smiling. "A centimetre in front of your eyes—that's where it begins—half a centimetre, a millimetre! And what's an alien?" Bond continued, watching the others who were now riding towards them. "It's just a word for a person out of their own environment. I'm out of my place here, but you are out of yours too. You're a stranger here, just like me."

"I haven't got a place," Jake said quietly.

"Yes, you have," countered Bond. "I know you have to be the man of the family when you're at home with your mother, but here you can let yourself be a daughter."

He turned his head, and Jake saw David drawing alongside them on his horse, a startled expression on his face as if only now was he really beginning to recognize her. He opened his mouth to speak then glanced at Bond and fell silent as the rest of the party trotted back towards them.

"It was lovely," cried Dora, forgetting to worry about what Bond was thinking of her. "Why didn't you come, Jake? I suppose it's nothing very exciting for you."

"I don't think that's quite the case," said David slowly. "But never mind. Let's just box on and enjoy the day's outing together."

Jake looked back at Bond. Now that she had got over her shock she noticed him more clearly and thought he looked pale and sad and rather frightened. "Snakes in the head!" she whispered. "The sun stepped back in the sky! Are you being followed?"

"I'm afraid so," said Bond. Lewis looked at him too but said nothing. For a brief instant a smile flashed across his face—a smile that was not altogether his own.

They rode on, following sheep tracks in a leisurely manner, up over gradual slopes of tussocky grass interspersed with the odd broom bush. As they moved, the slopes seemed to revolve around them very slowly, opening and closing like the pages of fold-out books, every now and then revealing long valleys of bush or—through long clefts, scars or erosion—bright turquoise triangular views of the sea. The group was able to spread out. Dora and Philippa trotted away once more, pleased to have the slow descent over and done with. Jake hung back and felt the pressure of David's curious stare. Bond gave her a gentle smile then rode on ahead with Lewis trailing along behind.

Jake looked after them, contemplating something which had been happening since yesterday but which she had only just recognized. She was no longer alone. She was part of a group which had Bond as its focus. The family, which had seemed at first to consist of David, Philippa and her children, with Jake clumsily attached like the tail pinned to a party donkey, had shifted and divided into those who knew about Bond and those who didn't. Adults on one side and children on the other. Children might believe, as Jake now believed, that Bond was a boy from outer space who was being pursued by enemies. Adults could not believe such a thing. If they did, the world would be changed too much for them to bear. And if they were forced to believe it they would then become interested, not in Bond himself, but in what he might know. How did he come to be here, and why? She herself was suddenly anxious to know the strange things that Bond must know—she was burning to be told what sort of world he belonged to and what his purpose was in her world.

David, also hanging back, had fixed Jake with his glittering eye like the ancient mariner, not wanting to
tell
her a story, but to hear the one she had to tell. She tried not to look at him but he drew alongside anyway, Enchanter snorting at Cooney as if even the horses had secrets to exchange:

"If you watch me," her father said, "you'll see that you don't have to hold the reins as if you were Hercules strangling snakes. Hold them like this." Jake looked sideways at his hands. "You can't ride," he said. "I watched when you nearly fell off, but over and above that—you just can't ride."

Jake looked up defiantly. "No," she said. "Mum's horses were all sold and she didn't bother to get any more. They take a lot of looking after, horses."

"In your letters..." David began.

"I was telling lies," Jake broke in stiffly.

"Why?"

Jake sighed deeply. "Why?" David asked again, but still she would not answer. "Are you unhappy at home? Is something wrong with Pet or your grandparents?" David persisted, looking more and more dismayed, while Jake glanced from side to side out beyond the hills as if searching for a way to escape. Her face expressed the impossibility of discussing such great and complicated imperfections whilst sitting astride a horse.

Just then the others appeared, trotting back to meet them, laughing, having obviously enjoyed their small excursion.

"You sounded so happy in your letters," said David, perplexed. "All the riding..." he drifted off. "Oh Jacqueline," he said and shook his head.

"Mum reads my letters," said Jake, dropping her gaze to the reins lying limply in her hands. "She likes me to sound happy. I
wanted you
to think I was happy. I am sort of happy most of the time." She glanced fleetingly up at David as if she was frightened of his reaction to what she was telling him. "Nothing's ever perfect, is it?"

"Jake?" called Dora across the clearing. "We're going to stop soon and have a rest," she said, her voice loaded with hidden meaning.

"All right, off you go!" David said to Jake. "I'll catch up with you later. How
is
Pet, by the way?" he said suddenly, which wasn't quite fair. He was looking at Jake with his sad-monkey expression, as if she was the cause of his unhappiness—but after all, she thought, he was the one who had told her to go and live in a land of wonderful horses and had then gone off and got married without even asking her to the wedding.

"She likes to be looked after," she said cautiously, and David sighed.

"She always has," he said and turned away. By now the others had gathered around them, talking and patting their horses.

"Is there any reason why we shouldn't take a break now?" asked David. "Don't we usually stop about here?"

"We certainly do. There's a rail just up ahead where we can tether the horses," said Philippa.

They rode on in silence, for they each had something to worry about. David worried about Jake and Philippa directed an occasional, puzzled glance at the back of Lewis's head, and they were all still ringing a little with the 'mild lightning'. Now her secret was out, Jake felt a bit better about her lack of riding skill and was determined to improve. She tried to make Cooney catch up with the others without actually trotting again. However her efforts to encourage him to go a little faster were so timid and uncertain that he ignored them contemptuously, even insisting on putting his head down every now and then to snatch at some grass.

"How come you can ride?" she hissed at Bond. "Do you ride in your... where you come from?"

"I have a way with animals," he said. "I can control them... but we're not supposed to, and we must never, never control people. Not that I can do people. I'm only a student."

"Even now if you're being followed?" asked Jake. "Couldn't you control the ones that are after you?"

"I may be being followed but I can't feel anyone close and neither can—" he broke off and laid his hand on his transistor. "The world's quite empty."

Dora came up beside them. "Bond says he's being followed," Jake told her. Dora gazed around. The line of the hills against the sky was entirely empty. Nothing moved on the track behind them.

"There's nobody there," she said. "They couldn't be ahead of us."

"I don't know what to do," Bond said. He was talking aloud, but not to Dora or Jake.

"We'll look after you," Dora promised him.

They rode out along a flattened ridge which fell away on either side into deep bush. The sound of water came faintly to their ears, for somewhere below them hidden among the trees was a stream that must, by the sound of it, be flowing over stones.

"Webster's Bush," announced Philippa. "There are the tethering rails. We'll take a break here."

"It does look haunted," Dora said, staring uneasily down the slope at the dense, green, uneven canopy of trees below them. They dismounted and Philippa went from one to the other checking that they put the stirrups up correctly.

Lewis let Philippa do the task for him. "You know how to do this, Lewis!" she said. "Come on—shake out of it!"

"I don't remember," said Lewis in a composed, but slightly childish voice.

"You do!" Philippa exclaimed. "You must. What's wrong with you today?"

"I'm fine," he replied. "Really I am. It isn't my fault if I forget. It's eagle weather. I'm looking with my eagle eyes and my eagle claws can't do up stirrups."

"Aaah, I see," Philippa looked relieved. "Dream on, you old eagle you!"

As soon as they stopped talking they were engulfed in a sunny silence, not hostile, but not exactly welcoming either. It was as if the hills did not mind them being there but would not mind if they went away. Jake thought it was very restful. Lewis, having been firmly summoned by Philippa, became quite interested in the tea, orange juice and biscuits that were being offered and forgot all about Bond for a few minutes. Dora jiggled from one foot to the other watching the tea being poured. She really preferred orange juice, but on the other hand, tea would be warm and comforting. She felt her stomach glow a little with anticipation.

"Have some tea, Bond," she called as she turned around, looked once, looked again, and then immediately felt her stomach grow cold once more. There was only one person behind her... Jake, forlorn without her cowboy hat prop. Dora moved away from her chattering parents to Jake's side. "Bond's gone," she muttered. "I just turned around and he wasn't there anymore."