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CHAPTER 1.5
Any chance Barington might once have had at remaining a very normal town in Sussex was now about to be well and truly shot to shit...
Oriononians had been colonising the dankest gardens from Wales to Wellington for centuries and their colonists had managed in all that time to make no discernable difference to the hearty character of the people found therein; Centauris had been flocking to Glasgow for even longer - and eaten many a deep-fried orphan as well along the way - without so much as raising an eyebrow. Yet after just one day in England five Andromedans who'd never left their home world even once until recently had managed to screw the place up so completely that many of her former enemies had been rendered tragically supine by the effort of their laughter...
In Dublin, especially, the morning’s news was delivered with a decided slur which by midday was a very sloppy sing-along and by tea-time an abortive brawl between the news presenter and the meteorologist brought to you live from the RTE car park... All of which was positively idyllic compared to the reaction in France, which you wouldn’t have thought would have so damn many highly flammable suburbs left.
Of course, the British media was too busy that day chasing Princesses of one class or another into early graves, then chasing their coffins even more zealously, to notice that some strange happenings had begun beginning in Sussex...
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Here again is where we get ahead of ourselves.
Tempting as it might be to jump ahead to all the pageantry and that of Gary Carlisle’s funeral it would all take time to plan, during which period many hilarious events best described with a truly baroque arrangement of adverbs will occur; it seems such a waste to let them go undescribed.
Anyway, such logistics as required of an authentic Andromedan royal burial normally would have come most easily to just one person on the Bishop’s staff, which anyway was a staff of one, other than himself; alas, it was the same person who was just then being loaded into the back of an ambulance before making its slow, gravelly way down the drive followed closely by the Bishop’s Jaguar on its way to hospital in Brighton. Fortunately for Miss Reed her constitution was one of the most durable in all of Europe - even more so than Switzerland - and so it would take more than a close call with the Andromedan national anthem to keep her down, even if witnessing it up close meant she'd been temporarily unable to keep the contents of her lunch down.
In the opposite direction went Felicia Fripp and Victor Vickers, off to plan some scheme or scheme some plan or other from the relative comfort of her kitchen table while the aliens went more or less in the same direction - albeit on foot - having first assisted the driver of the hearse with the by now truly fragrant corpse of Gary Carlisle. A third direction, north, saw the diminishing figures of Trudy Carlisle and Frederick Toady, heads bent together to some unknown (or indeed heretofore un-thought of) aim.
So while following them all seems like the likely thing to do, which of them to follow first...
[CONTINUE]
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