Spinners: A Novel

"It was some time on Saturday night after work but before closing time down at the pub that Delia Chapman saw a spaceman. Well, that wasn't quite true. She saw ten of them. They stayed for about half an hour. And they took her on their vessel. They had silver suits and stainless-steel boots."

So begins Anthony McCarten's wildly original debut novel. A tightly knit New Zealand community is in an uproar when sixteen-year-old Delia, a feisty and unapologetic girl who packs cow hearts at the local meat-packing plant, insists that she had group sex with the spacemen. The town wonders if she's just trying to be more hip, more "American," with her claim of alien contact. But then two other girls--also pregnant--tell of similar experiences. Fueling the talk is a dead cow lying in the center of a scorched, perfect circle in a nearby field.

The rumor mill goes into overdrive with the sudden appearance of Phillip, the mayor's handsome young nephew. Enchanted with Delia, he discovers the secrets behind her past and gradually uncovers other sinister goings-on in the town. Deeply smitten despite his findings, he helps Delia prepare for the coming--possibly extraterrestrial--baby.

The gossip becomes public when a tabloid reporter camps out in the town, waiting for what he hopes will be the story of his career. But he soon wonders what he's doing with his life.

In the end, McCarten reveals the sincere emotions of a town shaken by revelation and honesty, which have changed the community far more than the landing of a flying saucer ever could.
EXCERPT: One

FACTORY GIRLS

It was some time on Saturday night after work but before closing time down at the pub that Delia Chapman saw a spaceman. Well, that wasn't quite true. She saw ten of them. They stayed for about half an hour. And they took her on their vessel. They had silver suits and stainless-steel boots. The vessel was ultra-modern and entirely impressive.

Delia had completed her third straight split shift in the small-goods packing section at Borthwick's Freezing Works. Her body, therefore, was still at breakfast, her head at midnight, her internal clock as scrambled as an international flight attendant's, and although she was completely exhausted she was too confused to sleep. Still wearing her white factory clothes and gum boots, she left her family farmhouse on foot, bought a bag of hot chips at the Texacana Take-away Bar and wandered on the river road toward the highway leading out of town.

Who expected to see something like a spaceman in Opunake? Since Delia was unprepared for such a nationally significant experience she was, at best, clumsy in her observations. Two hours later she was able to report that she had had a nice time, seen some lights and a few shapes, and had received a dozen or so nonverbal commands. But beyond that, and when pressed for more explicit details, she could add only that her guests had been extremely polite throughout the incident and had treated her as if she were extremely important.

Only when the earliest and most amused reactions to Delia's claim had been voiced the next morning in the bakery, the betting shop and in the express lane at the New World supermarket, and only after people had purged their systems of terms like "silly bitch" and "stupid mole" and "total spinner," did any more open-minded appraisals begin.

Delia Chapman was sixteen years old. In her penultimate year of high school, she was one of a raft of light-headed young women to have taken summer jobs at Borthwick's. Requiring of its employees an inhuman rotation of day and night shifts as the seasonal kill reached its peak, it was known that 80 percent of the town's female population were being taxed to the point of near nervous collapse by the factory's unrelenting regimen. Delia's hysterical claim had therefore to be seen in the mitigating light of a record-breaking slaughter.

There were other theories why she would invent such a story. Delia Chapman was known to wear a Lakers NBA basketball cap wherever she went. Often she added to this a University of North Carolina T-shirt and imported sneakers, and with a Walkman player on her hip and gum in her mouth, she seemed to have become a living, breathing showcase of Americana. Could not the sighting of a spaceship, then, be viewed as just the next logical step in her metamorphosis into a Yank?

At the time of the visitation, put later by the town's resident policeman at approximately 9:20 P.M., most of the town was glued to a much-delayed broadcast of a rugby test match between the All Blacks and England played at Twickenham: A bitter fight for screening rights had left the area deprived of the live program and those gathered in the public bar were tortured with the pent-up passion of a day spent avoiding even a hint of the final result.

By 9:50, while the game was still in progress and the outcome far from certain, Delia's life had been changed forever, but except for the painfully dull boy at the Texacana who remembered that Delia had bought one scoop of chips and declined vinegar, nobody could corroborate a single aspect of her strange story.

Harvey Watson, the local policeman, who also doubled as Delia's weekend netball coach, used a gentle tone with her, more akin to that of a priest hearing a confused confession, when he drove her home an hour later that same night. Why was she telling him a story like this? Had she just seen a movie? Half of the holiday movies and all the television shows nowadays were about aliens; perhaps she'd been watching too many. He could tell right away that she was in some kind of shock; she would feel better if she told him the truth, he said. He could sense her internal search for another story which could otherwise explain her tousled hair, the bruises on her arm and the unfocused look in her eyes. And yet something seemed to prevent her from finding an alternative explanation for her bewilderment. As her mouth opened, her expression faltered. And when the words came out, they were merely a reiteration.

"The ship was like um ... kind of like a . . . ball of light, I s'pose. A great ball of light. And it was sort of resting on a . . ."

"on a ..."

"Yes, on a what?" he asked, craning forward. "Resting . . ."

"On a tripod."

Delia was not dressed for ambassadorial duties when she saw the glorious visitation. How must she have seemed to these visitors, standing before them in her rubber boots, holding her bag of chips? Her white uniform must have suggested that the human race was a much more practical life-form than is really the case: a pale breed, brown-haired, wide-eyed, uncertain, mute, compliant, vegetarian and polite.

Delia represented billions that Saturday night.

Copyright (c) 1999 by Anthony McCarten