Free Cryers Hill by Kitty Aldridge

tell your teacher. Miss Day, I have something to say. Sean thinks he has something to say. But he has decided not to say it. The policeman said there was no reason to be frightened. Sean thinks this is probably a lie. The policeman said they would leave no stone unturned. Sean thinks this is the most beautiful thing he has ever heard.
    'Coo-coo-ka-choo, Mrs Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you will know. Ho ho ho.' Sean wondered if these were the correct words. His dad had quite a good singing voice, Sean reckoned. No one else in the family seemed to notice. His mother closed her eyes as she laid each plate down around the dinner table. Sean wondered if she was praying, if it had come to this. They watched as she set her own plate down and sat down to join it without opening her eyes. Ty and Sean knew it was not their place to enquire, so they didn't.
    'S'matter now?' enquired Gor, as gently as his natural impatience would allow him.
    Cath opened her eyes and looked at them as though she'd expected to find herself somewhere else.
    'I'm quite happy,' she replied. 'Can't you tell? I am ecstatically happy.'
    Well, that was all right then. Except somehow it wasn't. It was the game: you had to guess the liar words.
    'Let battle commence,' said Gor, picking up his knife and fork. Sean wondered if this was a just-add-water meal or whether his mother had done it the old-fashioned way. Ty began to eat, expressionless, like a panda. You could put a blob in the oven nowadays and it would come out as a roast dinner with all the trimmings. The television said women should go to work because they had nothing to do at home all day; modern appliances did it all for you.
    'Headache?' Gor offered. Ty and Sean looked across at their mother. Cath closed her eyes again. Her eyelids were her most effective weapon. Against her eyelids Gor's words bounced off like toy arrows. Once the lids were down, nothing could penetrate. They would have to wait. She would come out when it suited her. Sean wondered what happened behind the lids. Did she switch off? Or, was it possible she had established contact with a superior intelligence? Some sort of extraterrestrial life form perhaps, some kind of outside influence. There were a lot of alien sightings these days, many of them in Buckinghamshire and nearby Oxfordshire. You could hardly stroll down the road for a paper without spotting a UFO or bumping into someone who had. Aliens were everywhere, TV, newspapers, cereal packets, people's brains. It was only a matter of time before they would be competing in the Olympics and starring in Z Cars.
    Sean kept an eye on his mother's eyelids in case, for example, a coloured light flashed. He listened too, for beeps or buzzes that might indicate she was in radio contact. When she finally opened her eyes, he would avoid her again, just in case. Aliens could control you through eye contact, through thought control, and it was best to play safe, even with members of your own family, sometimes especially.
    'Three wheels on my wagon, but I'm still rolling along.' Sean reckoned his dad was just as good at singing as Tom Jones. Women liked men who sang, his dad said. Gor was an expert on women. It was his specialist subject, along with natural history and the evolution of humankind. Sean knew this to be a fact, and he felt cringingly proud about it. When he was next to his father in the passenger seat of the car, for instance, it would come up. The fairer sex, that's what his dad called them, though there didn't appear to be anything fair about it. There were two main types of woman, his dad explained: decent girls, birds and tarts. OK, three. Only not to tell his mother he said that. Then there were the women's libbers, who burned their bras. Gor didn't know why. Men and women, Gor expanded, were little different to how they were in prehistoric times, which was why these days women got their knickers in a twist about things. What they didn't understand, he explained, was