He approaches the table. “Hi, darling,” he says, “I’m Rob. Can I buy a book from you? Will you sign it for me? How is Jason these days? Is he happy? Has he got many friends?”
“No,” Ann says, “Jason doesn’t have many friends at all. In fact, it’s been awful, really. He’s socially shunned.”
“When did this social shunning begin?” Robbie asks. “What age?”
“I suppose it was when my first book about him came out,” Ann replies, “when he was fourteen.”
“Jason, My Indigo Child?” I ask.
“He lost all his friends at school,” Ann continues. “Nobody wanted to know him. And, of course, word got around the small village where we live. It got very nasty.”
“I can completely relate to that,” Robbie says. “What is it he encounters from people?”
“In England, in particular, people are really spiteful,” Ann says. “They ridicule him. They call out things from across the road like ‘Oi! Mental boy!’”
Robbie puts his hand on Ann’s hand.
“Even if this was all made up—which I don’t believe, by the way—even if it was,” Robbie says, “compassion should be shown anyway. Well, thank you.”
Robbie pays for the book and goes to leave.
“You know,” says Ann, “you look very much like Robbie Williams.”
“I am Robbie Williams,” he says.
“Can I just say I’m a big fan of yours?” she says.
“Oh, bless you. Thanks, darling,” he says. “And please send Jason my best. Maybe we can have a chat one day. In fact”—Robbie writes out his e-mail address for Ann—“tell him to drop me a line if he wants. It must have been a terrible time for you, and an awful time for him. It’s just so sad to hear it happens. It’s happened to me.”
“Really?” Ann says.
“I think joining Take That was like leaving on a spaceship,” Robbie says, “and coming back and all your friends going, ‘He’s weird now.’”
• • •
WE QUEUE FOR the lunch buffet at the restaurant.
“I’m glad I had a chance to sit down with her and talk to her, so I could see her eyes and read her,” Robbie says. “She’s a really beautiful woman.”
“So you identified with Jason,” I say.
“That’s not what I want to talk about,” Robbie says. “Because it’s long-winded, and whinging, and nobody wants to hear whinging. But if I was doing your job, I’d be asking that, because I’m asking the same question of myself—about why that nearly moved me to tears.”
Everyone starts asking for his autograph, including one elderly American who says, “I don’t know who you are but my daughter works for MTV and so she might.” Word has obviously got around the conference that, in the absence of any aliens, the most interesting thing to have come down from the sky today is Robbie Williams. One conference organizer asks him if he’ll consider being their official spokesperson.
“We need someone like you to spread the word and get the young people in,” he says. Robbie seems quite attracted by the offer.
“This is possibly the most important thing ever to happen to the planet,” he says. “It just amazes me that people aren’t as interested as I am in this stuff.”
There is so much commotion, we miss much of the next presentation and consequently never find out “what happened when four artists embarked in 1976 on what was expected to be a routine fishing trip.”
This isn’t the first time that Robbie’s fame has hindered his forays into the paranormal world. A few years ago he invited the TV psychic Derek Acorah to his home for a psychic reading. A story subsequently appeared in the Sun under the headline, “I Helped Robbie Williams Talk to His Dead Gran.”
Robbie invited me to his apartment in London. We chatted and he told me how much he loved the program [Living TV’s Most Haunted]. He said he had given Most Haunted DVDs to lots of friends, including Robert De Niro, Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal, and they were hooked. I was able to contact a couple of his loved ones, including his grandmother, whom he dearly loved. It was very emotional.
“The twat used my dead nan to sell his DVD!” Robbie told me, quite furiously, at the time. “Plus, I’ve never met Robert De Niro, Danny DeVito, and Billy Crystal. I’ve never even met them!”
Robbie never spoke to Acorah again, but he persevered with psychics for a while. He met one he liked a lot more, but then one night over dinner the man told Robbie that he wasn’t only a leading psychic, he was also “one of only eight people outside Japan ever to be awarded a samuraiship.” He said if anything were to happen in Japan, he would have to drop his psychic career “and fly over there to protect the emperor.” After dinner Robbie did a bit of research and discovered that nobody has been awarded a samuraiship since 1872 and that “samuraiship” isn’t even a real word.
“Haven’t all those bad experiences with psychics shaken your wider faith in the paranormal?”
“I suppose they have,” he says. “I never watch psychic TV shows anymore.” He shrugs. “And I suppose it might happen with UFOs too. And then I might be able to get on with my life.”
But if that day ever comes, it’s not going to be today, for at this moment an intriguing rumor reaches us. Apparently, a woman tells Ayda, a number of conference attendees spotted a battle between two giant reptilian beings in the desert outside the hotel the other night.
“Did anyone take any photographs of the battle?” Ayda asks her.
“No,” she says, “but someone collected a tissue sample and gave it to Dr. Roger Leir. He might show it to you, if you can find him.”
Robbie says he’d recognize Dr. Leir if he saw him. He has been a talking head on UFO documentaries Robbie has watched. And, sure enough, he spots him in the coffee shop adjacent to the casino. Robbie says he feels starstruck around UFO experts in the way other people feel starstruck around pop stars.
“Doctor,” he says, “sorry, I’m Robbie. I saw you at the Conscious Life Expo. And I’ve seen you many times on the Discovery Channel.”
“I’ve been to a lot of places,” Dr. Leir growls.
“We’ve heard that you have a reptilian tissue sample here in the hotel,” I say.
“Have you done any tests on it?” Robbie asks.
“I only got it yesterday,” Dr. Leir says.
“Can we see it?” I ask.
“Sure,” he replies.
He takes us to his room. Dr. Leir is the surgeon who claims to have extracted from patients fifteen implants that are not of earthly metal. In the lift I ask if he has brought any of the implants to the hotel. He looks at me as if I’m an idiot.
“That would be absolutely ludicrous, unscientific, and ridiculous,” he barks. “I keep them locked away.” We reach his bedroom.
“Where’s the skin stored?” Robbie asks. There is a silence.
He produces it from his wardrobe. It is a tiny flake at the bottom of a jar. Robbie, Ayda, and I crowd around and examine it.
“It could be a scale,” I say. “It could be a reptilian scale—which is, of course, the hope—or it could be a little bit of a wing of a moth. Could it be a moth wing?”
“It could be a lot of things,” Robbie says, cutting me off. “So, Dr. Leir, this was given to you last night. Are you excited about what it may be?”
“In a word,” Dr. Leir replies, “no.”
“Oh,” Robbie says.
“It could be a piece of nothing,” snaps Dr. Leir. “I was recently sent an object that was surgically removed from an abductee. I put it under the electron microscope. It looked like an organic compound, so we went to the next level. We did a test that uses infrared spectroscopy. Long story short, it was a piece of wood.”
“Ah,” says Robbie, a bit disappointed.
“So I just spent twenty-five thousand dollars to look at a piece of wood,” Dr. Leir says. “You ask me if I get excited? No.”
We fall into a melancholy silence.