Grinny Read online

  I said yes and Beth kept tugging at my arm so I let her have another turn at the telescope.

  Suddenly she shouted, ‘Oh!’ and I said, ‘What’s happened?’

  She said, ‘It’s gone! Oh no, it hasn’t, it’s moved. But it went so fast …! It just flashed away! It’s all right, I’ve got it now …’

  Father was still fiddling with the film and trying to keep his eye on It at the same time. I felt sorry for him. Beth announced, ‘I’m going to get Mummy!’ and Father said, ‘No, don’t.’ I said, ‘She wasn’t well, she had a bad headache –’ Beth said, ‘Can I get Grinny, then?’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, just as Father and I had done. ‘The more people see it the better.’ Then she thought for a moment, shuddered, and said to me, ‘I’d rather you went to fetch her if you don’t mind,’ in the sort of polite voice girls use when they intend to pull their femininity on you and make it impossible for you to argue.

  Drawing by Mr Carpenter. He and his children each made a drawing of the UFO. They then compared their three drawings. Finally, they agreed on the sketch reproduced here.

  Many readers may find this drawing shows something familiar. If so, the reason is simple enough: UFO sightings most commonly relate to cigar-shaped, cross-shaped and saucer-shaped craft. The Carpenters say they saw what thousands of others claim to have seen – a ‘flying saucer’.

  The Author.

  I said, ‘Oh, all right,’ and went to wake Grinny.

  She sleeps in the spare bedroom up another flight of stairs. As I went up these stairs I remember looking out of the little window just at the moment when it suddenly darted off again. It seemed to accelerate instantly – one minute it was going slowly, the next very fast indeed, with no warm-up. It travelled some 30° through the sky and stopped in its new position just as immediately as it had started. A sheet of nimbus enveloped it so that for a moment you could only just see it through the veil. Then the yellowish lights were there again just as before.

  I then went on again up the stairs, walking very quietly so as not to disturb Mum, who was below me. I opened the door of Grinny’s room …

  At first I just couldn’t take it in. I couldn’t believe it. So I was not frightened, only shocked.

  Grinny was lying flat on her back on the bed, with her arms by her side above the covers. She was rigid and still, like a corpse or an Egyptian mummy. But she was luminous. There was even a faint glow through the bedclothes. I remember thinking in a matter-of-fact sort of way, ‘She doesn’t seem to need much covering. Just one blanket …’ Because of course the light couldn’t have passed through several blankets.

  I went closer – I wasn’t frightened yet – and saw another thing: her eyes were wide open. She was staring at the ceiling, staring at nothing. And her eyes were lit up from inside. Like water when you put the lens of a lit torch in it. Her mouth was open. She was grinning. I don’t mean she was making the movement of smiling, I mean her mouth was set in a grin. And from her open mouth I thought I heard a slight fluttering, twittering sound. But it might have been my own pulses.

  I think it was the reflection of her luminosity on her teeth that made me give a sort of scream.

  Then things happened very quickly. She woke when I made the scream or whatever noise it was. As she woke, her luminosity faded, just like that. At the same instant, I heard Father shouting and heard his footsteps and Beth’s in the passage. I think he said, ‘It’s gone!’ In fact, he must have said this, because at the very moment that Grinny woke up the spaceship just whipped off into invisibility. I heard Beth answer him and they must have been making excited comments while Grinny came to.

  If anyone ever reads all this, they will ask, ‘But surely you must know exactly what happened within those two or three seconds?’

  The answer is, No. It is still a bit vague and this is why. Grinny sat up in bed – I remember that she just sat straight up as if her body was hinged at the base of the spine – and gripped me by the wrist. It was like a claw, her hand. It fastened on me like a parrot’s claw, very strong and funny-feeling. Like a clamp.

  Anyhow, she clamped me with her hand and then looked me straight in the eye. I remember that her eyes still had a trace of the luminous, lit-from-within look about them. And she was still grinning. And I remember her mouth opening to say something. I remember that quite distinctly. What I cannot remember, however hard I try, is what she said. Everything seemed to go … furry. She was there, the room was there, she was speaking, Father and Beth were outside and about to enter – I had a furry impression of all this and still have. Yet I cannot remember what she said.

  It wasn’t fright that makes me forget. I don’t know what it is. I can even remember another thing – when she caught hold of me with her clamp-like hand, I remember my wrist trembling in her grip, and thinking to myself how solid and strong her grip was. I was vibrating against something solid, so to speak.

  But what she said to me – what really did happen during the few seconds before Father and Beth came in – well, I just cannot bring it back. I keep searching my memory but it is no good.

  Father and Beth came in very excited, both talking at once. They said that the UFO had just whisked away and gone without a trace, etc., etc. Grinny was full of old ladyish excitement – she kept saying, ‘Oh, I wish I could have seen it!’ and things like that.

  I was still feeling a bit furry or fuzzy and didn’t say much. A week ago I had to fight Stannard, who is a very good boxer. He doesn’t hit all that hard but he just seems to get through to you and you can’t get through to him. Anyhow, we fought the usual three rounds and he of course was announced the winner and I went back to the centre of the ring to shake hands and so on and so on. What I am getting at is this: after being hit so many times by him, I was quite cheerful and normal and all the rest of it but I did feel a bit cloudy; as if I was watching myself going through the actions.

  And that is just how I felt now. As if I was watching myself being Timothy Carpenter.

  In the end, everyone went to bed and the house became quiet. I lay awake for a long time. I was trying to work it all out. I could remember seeing Grinny in that horrible luminous state, with her eyes lit up and her teeth glinting. Remember it? – I couldn’t forget it! But then what? Had she wiped me out – my memory, I mean? And if she had, why hadn’t she done it better? Why leave me remembering the luminous bit?

  Here is another funny thing. When I try and write about my thoughts, as in the preceding paragraph, I get a sort of mental itch. I just cannot get going. To sort it all out. And I keep getting different ideas about what happened and didn’t happen. Mind you, it is very late and I didn’t sleep properly last night of course. Yet I don’t feel sleepy. I wish I could get it going. Unscramble it.

  Feb. 25

  Talked to Beth about Grinny, but didn’t tell her very much as she is already hysterical enough about the subject. I just said, ‘It was very odd that night before you came into the room.’ She kept saying, ‘I told you so, there’s something awful about her, I told you so,’ etc., etc. I kept the pot boiling without letting it boil over – in other words, I kept picking at her, trying to find out her opinions about Grinny. I got her to the point where she ticked off all the things she doesn’t like about Grinny. She was ticking them off on her fingers, mouth pursed and her eyes completely circular. Her list amounts to this:

  G isn’t real. Metal bones, etc. She doesn’t smell right (or doesn’t smell at all).

  She is frightened of electricity. I really cannot see this one at all. Many perfectly reasonable people are frightened of electricity, gas, losing their keys, going out without their spectacles, etc., etc., etc., etc. Beth, however, says it is sinister.

  She asks stupid questions or makes stupid comments, yet –

  She is not stupid at all. In fact she is very lively minded.

  She keeps looking at you, especially when you have no clothes on.

  She never says anything, she only talks.

  Points 5 and 6
are fairly new to me. Point 5 – she keeps looking at you … I asked Beth what she meant. She was very embarrassed (so was I) but she got it out in pieces in the end. She said that Grinny looked at her all over when she was in the swimming pool and looked at me too. I said Nonsense, but Beth said, ‘No, it’s true. She had a good old look. And she asks questions about Sex!’

  I couldn’t help laughing at this, but Beth flew into a temper and said, ‘It’s all very well for you to laugh, but it’s true. I know it’s ridiculous, but she does. She wants to know about me and your dim friend Mac – oh, go on, laugh, but he is fond of me because he hasn’t got a sister of his own and his mother isn’t all that nice to him and he wants someone pretty just to smile at him –’

  (I interrupt this flood of Bethism to point out that I think she is absolutely and 100 per cent RIGHT. If Mac could, he would live here and be a Carpenter. His mother is a cold fish and his father is worse and he does fancy Beth because he sees in her something he hasn’t got at home. So WAW, as usual.)

  Beth went on to say (this time I won’t try and write her own words as they were so rambling) that Grinny looks at Beth and me and anyone else as if they were foreign bodies. She wants to see how they are made, why they are made like that, what effect it has on them and their behaviour and so on and so on.

  It sounds like nonsense to me but that is what she says. And the puzzling thing is this: though I disagree with Beth simply on logic, I feel Beth is right. And then, what about the dogs? – the ones mating on the lawn?

  Beth’s point 6 was that Grinny never says anything, she only talks. This is absolutely true and quite obvious. She is like the wise old owl who lived in an oak, the more it saw the less it spoke. But I cannot see that it matters much, there are many people who go through life ‘not committing themselves’. You hear two women in a bus, one does the talking and the other one just says, ‘She never!’, ‘He didn’t!’, ‘Well, it goes to show!’, ‘Fancy that, then!’ This woman is the Receiver and the other one is the Sender. If Grinny chooses to play the part of Receiver, that’s her affair.

  Yet, once again, I can see what Beth means. Grinny never tells you anything about herself, about Granny, about the old days (most old people love talking about the old days) or about anything at all.

  In the end, I got into an argument with Beth, which is always fatal because she cannot argue. She just gets passionate or stubborn. This time she became both at once and shouted, ‘You don’t take any notice of me, you think I’m just stupid. Well, if I’m stupid, so’s Grinny, only worse! What about Grinny and the cast-iron conker?’

  I admit I had quite forgotten it. It happened only last night and did not seem important at the time. But Beth thought it important.

  We were having dinner and Mac was with us. Mac and I were talking about the crazes at school – the crazes that sweep the whole place for anything from a week to a term, it might be anything at all with the juniors. I said to Mac, ‘I’ve still got All-time Champion, the cast-iron conker!’ He said, ‘You haven’t? What, Old Cast-Iron himself? I don’t believe you!’ etc., etc. Grinny said, ‘I don’t quite understand … What is a conker?’

  I was a bit surprised, but told her. She said, ‘Oh, of course, conkers!’

  I went upstairs and got it. Mac said, ‘It’s not quite the conker it was, it looks clapped out. But its soul goes marching on.’

  Grinny was peering at it so I said, ‘It’s unique, Aunt Emma, it came from the only cast-iron conker tree in the world – just over there, by the bottom of our garden! Every conker warranted gen-u-ine solid cast iron!’

  She reached out her hand and I gave her Old Cast-Iron. She looked at it for some time, turning it over and over, and then, quite shyly, said, ‘I don’t think it really is cast iron, Tim … it seems to me to be made of vegetable matter, not cast iron at all!’

  Then, poker-faced, she handed it back to me.

  Was she serious or wasn’t she? Beth swears she was. We (Beth, Mac and I) have formed the GCG Council to explore Grinny’s Credibility Gaps. We are going to do it conscientiously, systematically and artistically, so that we can find out who’s fooling who (whom).

  The object is to discover (a) Is she suffering from lapses of memory – or (b) has she just a very dry sense of humour, so that she pretends to believe impossible things, or not know things she ought to know? (c) Just how far can we push her ignorance, innocence, cunning, dry humour or whatever it is? (d) And if it turns out that there is something odd about her, how can we learn what particular oddity it is?

  To fulfil these objectives, we are going deliberately to stage impossibilities between the three of us. That is, we are going to contrive situations that she must react to. When she reacts, we can judge her reactions. When we judge her reactions, we can also come to some sort of conclusion about her ‘realness’ or the opposite.

  Feb. 27

  The first exposure of Grinny’s Credibility Gap came this evening. It was quite unplanned. It happened after dinner. Mac was not with us which is a pity, but he can take our word for what happened – it was all very simple.

  We were talking about last Christmas – what a panic it had been, our presents, etc., etc. Beth was talking about her school nativity play and she was getting very enthusiastic about it in a rather showing-off sort of way (she had been chosen to play the Virgin Mary and didn’t intend us to forget about her starring role). She was being all little-girlish and starry eyed, rambling on and on, until she came to the point where she said these words –

  ‘– And then they put the Baby in my arms and of course I cuddled it and the funny thing was that that was the first time I’d ever really and truly felt like a real, proper mother!’

  This was the only part of Beth’s sickening speech that Grinny heard – she had been upstairs and was now down with us. Anyhow, Grinny leaned forward and said, ‘A baby, Beth…? But I never knew! Where is it?’

  Beth was thrown for a moment by the sheer idiocy of this question. Then I saw that cunning look come on her face. She said, ‘Oh, Aunt Emma, you can’t expect me to start having babies yet. I mean, it’s physically impossible for at least another year or so.’

  To which Grinny replied, perfectly seriously, ‘Yes, of course.’

  Beth said, hammering it home, and glancing at me to make sure I was getting the point, ‘When I am nine. Or even ten.’

  Grinny made no answer in particular. She just made some sort of noise of agreement and fumbled with her cigarettes.

  Let us recap.

  Here we have Beth saying, in effect, ‘I have had a baby’ (at the age of eight) and Grinny saying, ‘Let me see it.’ Beth then says, ‘No, you are mistaken, girls cannot have babies until they are nine or even ten.’ Grinny does not quarrel with this. In fact, Grinny does not do anything except look lost and confused.

  What are we supposed to make of that?

  March 10

  News from GCG.

  The next test situation we put Grinny to came about of its own accord. We (the whole family) were talking about the UFO we had seen and Grinny was saying she wished she had seen it, how terrible to have missed such an extraordinary event, etc. Beth looked at the clock and said, ‘Oh dear, you’ve just missed some beauties.’ Now, I knew what she meant, so did everyone but Grinny. Beth meant that half an hour previously, the TV programme LONESPACE had been on the air – and if Grinny had been watching that, she would have seen all kinds of superdeluxe spacecraft, UFOs, etc., because that is what the programme is all about. She would also have known that the spacecraft are carefully made models and the actors are puppets, etc., etc.

  But Grinny did not know this, she took Beth’s remark at face value. Grinny said – very sharply – ‘Where? When? What spacecraft? What did you see?’

  By luck, I managed to catch Beth’s eye for a split second and she played it straight when she answered. She said to Grinny, ‘Oh, the sky is absolutely full of them, Grinny –’

  ‘At certain times of year –’ I put in. I
meant, of course, when the LONESPACE series is running.

  ‘That’s right, at certain times of year,’ Beth went on. ‘Tim and I love watching them, don’t we, Tim?’

  She said this without a blink, which was clever of her. But then she is always quick to catch on. Grinny was by now taking it still more seriously. I have never seen her look more alert and determined. She said, ‘How long have you two been seeing them? What did they look like?’

  ‘Two or three years,’ Beth replied. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, Tim?’

  I said, ‘No, even longer than that.’

  Grinny rapped out, ‘But that is impossible! I mean, it is most unlikely … What were they like?’ She seemed really upset.

  I let Beth answer, because I could see she was in the mood. She did it perfectly, picking at a tuft of wool in the carpet and not looking at all interested – just matter-of-fact. ‘Well, some of them have a lot of jet things at the back, whole clusters of them,’ she began. ‘Those ones are often pointed, rather like a dart, and then there’s the jets at the back with smoky stuff coming out –’

  ‘Have you seen spaceships like that?’ Grinny asked me, leaning forward in her chair.

  ‘Oh yes. I think they must be the interstellar ones – the really big craft, carrying lots of people – if they are people … But then there are several other sorts, aren’t there, Beth?’

  ‘Sometimes you get the flattish ones, rather like rays – you know, manta rays, the fish – they go much slower. And they don’t leave jet trails, they just go.’

  ‘And then there are the container-shaped ones,’ I cut in. ‘Very elaborate sort of tin cans, some of them linked together with a sort of lattice of steelwork. And you might see ones like huge rings with the living quarters in the middle –’