29. What Ashley Did That Night

The front door to Ashley’s house opened, and two almost identical aliens stood in the hall and blinked rapidly at Mary. To the untrained human eye, every alien is identical to every other alien—much the same way as all humans seemed identical to aliens. Indeed, to the more unobservant alien, all mammals looked pretty much the same. “It’s the backbone that’s so confusing,” explained an alien spokesman when asked how a sheep might appear indistinguishable from a human in a woolly jumper. The reason Mary could tell Ashley’s parents apart at all was that one was wearing a large and very obvious brown wig, had a folded newspaper under its arm and was wearing slippers, and the other wore a blue gingham dress with an Alice band perched precariously on its shiny, high forehead.

“Hello,” said Mary politely to the one in the slippers, “you must be Ashley’s father.”

“No, that would be me,” said the one in the gingham. “Roger’s the name. This is Abigail, my wife.”

“Hello,” said the one wearing the slippers, proffering a three-fingered, double-opposable-thumb hand for Mary to shake.

Mary did so with some trepidation, as Rambosians tend to transmit their thoughts through touch. Still, she thought it would be rude not to, and her hand was enveloped in the warm, dry stickiness of Abigail’s grip. Almost instantly the image of a wedding popped into Mary’s head, complete with a large white Rolls-Royce, church, confetti and with Mary herself dressed in a quite stunning white wedding gown, with Ashley in morning suit.

“Sorry about that,” said Abigail, hurriedly letting go of Mary’s hand.

“It’s quite all right,” she replied, her close contact with Ashley having prepared her for almost anything. “But just out of interest—where did you see that dress?”

“At Veils R Us,” replied Abigail wistfully. “Wasn’t it just the most beautiful thing ever?”

“Why did you assume I was the mother?” asked Roger, who had been thinking about this for several moments.

“It’s the dress and Alice band,” explained Mary. “They’re usually considered female-gender apparel.”

“I told you the sales assistant didn’t seem that bright,” he said to Abigail. “We better swap.”

Mary half expected them to strip off in front of her, but they didn’t. They just placed a sticky digit on each other and trembled for a second or two.

“Right,” said the one who used to be Abigail. “I’m now Roger. Why don’t you come in?”

Roger led her into the living room, which was decorated as though from the seventies. Earth’s TV signals had taken eighteen years to reach distant Rambosia, so it was understandable that this was the era in which they felt the most comfortable. The furniture was dark-colored, the wallpaper and carpet patterned, the music center one of those combined radio-cassette-turntable things, and the obligatory plaster ducks flew across the wall next to a print of The Hay Wain.

“How long have you had this bad knee?” asked Abigail, rubbing the offending joint of her body-swapped partner.

“A few days,” replied Roger.

“You should look after yourself better—and your arms feel a bit low. When did you last have a pressure test?”

“This always happens when we swap bodies, doesn’t it?” replied Roger with a baleful glare. “Nag, nag, nag.”

“If you looked after yourself, I wouldn’t have to.”

“Maybe I like having a dodgy knee—ever thought of that?”

“Sorry about this,” said Ashley.

“You’re a pompous old windbag sometimes, aren’t you?” said Abigail. “Give me back my body.”

“It would be even more confusing for our G-E-U-S-T, dear—show some manners, eh?”

“Manners?” replied Abigail, opening her already large eyes still wider. “I’ll give you 10100101 001 you, 1001 010011.”

“Oh, yes? Well, you can 1001001 001010010 0101001 00101010 1001011111100110100111 0000001010 010101101 011100100100 10001111110011100 010010010 01110 0100100 10010 0100100101111011,” replied Roger, lapsing into pure binary in his anger.

“100101010101111110011100100101010111111!” yelled back Abigail. “11 1 1001 0101001 100001010111!”

“Why don’t you just swap your thoughts back and then your clothes?” suggested Mary. “I’d not be confused—and you could then have your own bodies and be dressed human-gender-specific.”

They stopped their argument and stared at her, blinking, for some moments.

“Brilliant!” gasped Abigail.

“Such wisdom,” added Roger in awe, and they both ran off upstairs without another word.

“Good move,” said Ashley, clearly impressed. “We’d not have thought of that solution in a million years.”

Mary was going to ask how it was possible not to think of that solution when a car horn sounded outside and another alien came running down the stairs holding a spotted bow and a glue gun. Ashley looked to heaven.

“My sister,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth. “Total bimbo—IQ barely crawls into the double-century.”

“Ash!” she exclaimed in a state of extreme fluster as she handed him the bow and glue gun. “I’m sooo late! Stick this on, would you? Hello, you must be Mary. I’m Daisy. Ashley told us all about you.”

She put out her hand, and Mary shook it, catching a glimpse of a great number of aliens all crammed into a Honda Civic and chanting Monty Python’s dead-parrot sketch in unison.

“Stand still,” said Ashley as he squeezed a blob of glue onto the top of Daisy’s translucent head, then placed the bow on it and held it while the glue dried.

“Is Ash a good policeman?” asked Daisy, wincing with the heat of the glue.

“Yes, he is.”

“Then why is he data-crunching down at the NCD and not out on the beat?”

“Training,” said Mary.

“Really?” replied Daisy scornfully. “I thought it was because no one wanted to work with him.”

“You’re done,” muttered Ashley, taking his hands off the bow,

“and try and keep your 1010111010101 closed, why don’t you?”

Daisy showed Ash the finger, skipped off to the front door and went out.

“You put her bow on backward on purpose, didn’t you?” asked Mary.

“Yes. Come and meet Uncle Colin. He fought in the First Zhark Wars, you know.”

Ashley led Mary through to the lounge, where a smaller alien with a slightly wrinkled appearance was watching Man About the House on the TV.

“Hullo!” he said. “Who’s this?”

“This is Mary, Uncle. Mary Mary.”

“No need to repeat yourself, young fella-me-lad. What do you think I am, deaf?”

“How do you do?” said Mary.

“Not at all,” he said genially. “Quite the reverse.”

Mary frowned and looked at Ashley, who crossed his eyes and rotated a finger next to his head.

“I fought in the Zhark Wars, you know,” Uncle Colin continued, his eyes going all dreamy as he stared off into the middle distance. “I’ve seen things you would not believe. Zharkian battle cruisers massing near the Rigellan crossover—”

“Here we are!” said Abigail and Roger, who had just scampered back down the stairs. “Would you like a drink?”

“Thank you.”

“We’ve got most types of hooch,” said Roger cheerfully, opening the top of a globe that tastefully doubled as a drinks cabinet. “I like to keep the house well stocked. We’ve got diesel, castor, olive, groundnut, multigrade or sunflower.” He looked among the bottles. “I think we might even have some crude somewhere—that’ll put hair on your chest.”