Lost At Sea Part 15

We go to his TV room. It's bright outside but the curtains are closed. His girlfriend, the actor Ayda Field, is in there, watching a UFO DVD. We all watch it. This isn't all he does nowadays-he has been writing songs and playing golf too-but the paranormal has become a very big part of his life since he disappeared from public view.

Robbie first contacted me in 2005. He telephoned me out of the blue from a hotel in Blackpool where he was filming the video for his song "Advertising s.p.a.ce." He said he liked a book I had written and was thinking of spending a night in a haunted house.

"Do you know any?" he asked.

I spent a week sending e-mails: "Dear Lady , I've read that, if the portrait in your drawing room is moved, a ghost is apparently disturbed and manifests itself. Recently I have been contacted by the pop star Robbie Williams who would like to spend a night in a haunted house and so I wonder whether he and I can pay a private visit."

I expected not to hear back from anybody, but, in fact, once I invoked Robbie's name, owners of country piles started flinging their ghosts at me as if they were their debutante daughters.

"One of the guest bedrooms is definitely haunted by a young woman called Abigail who was starved to death by a monk in 1732," e-mailed one baroness. "Robbie is more than welcome to spend the night."

I was surprised to find how widespread the belief in ghosts was among the aristocracy. One hundred percent of the people I contacted responded instantly to say their houses were definitely haunted and Robbie was more than welcome to spend the night. Then Robbie e-mailed to say he didn't really have time to spend the night in a haunted house after all.

"I've put a week into this," I crossly thought. "Now I see why Robbie Williams gets on so well with ghosts. They both only manifest themselves when it suits them."

But we kept in touch. For a while we planned to go on a cruise together-hosted by the psychic Sylvia Browne-through the Mediterranean. But he pulled out due to concerns that if the ship happened to be filled with Robbie Williams fans, there'd be nowhere for him to flee to. He also considered going to Peru to take ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic so powerful-a shaman told me when I inquired on Robbie's behalf-it awakens our dormant plant DNA. But that trip was canceled when it dawned on him that ayahuasca is a terrible idea if one is in a fragile mental state. He'd speak wistfully about some future day when he'd have less work on and could investigate the paranormal for real. And now that day has come.

LAUGHLIN, NEVADA, looks from the sky like a tiny Las Vegas, a cl.u.s.ter of crumbling themed casinos poking strangely out of an expanse of desert. We are traveling here in a private plane that Robbie has rented for the day. He's brought along Ayda and a friend, Brandon. The flight attendant was there to meet us on the airstrip.

"Welcome to your plane," she said to us. "I just want to tell you that Snoop Dogg uses this plane a lot. What I'm saying is," she added in a lower voice, "you can do anything."

We all looked at each other. We're middle-aged now. None of us could really imagine what "anything" might mean anymore.

"Are we allowed to stand up as the plane lands?" asked Brandon.

WE LAND. A car is waiting on the tarmac to take us to the nearby Aquarius Casino Resort. We take the escalator to the second floor, walk past the stalls selling DVDs with t.i.tles like Secret s.p.a.ce: What Is NASA Hiding? and into the cavernous conference room where British speaker Ann Andrews has just begun her audiovisual presentation to an audience of five hundred.

I have to say, after all the antic.i.p.ation, she seems a bit boring to me. She's recounting various tales of alien visitations in quite a dull voice. I half switch off and glance over at Robbie. He is engrossed. He is leaning forward, taking in every word. I decide to pay more attention so I can try to understand why.

Ann Andrews's life was quite ordinary, she says, until 1984, the year her son, Jason, was born. She flashes onto the screen a snapshot of a sweet little boy sitting in a field in Lincolnshire with a horse in the background.

"That's Jason," she says.

One day, when Jason was a toddler, Ann says she noticed he had a terrified look on his face. She asked what was wrong. He replied that aliens had appeared the night before at the foot of his bed and taken him to their s.p.a.ceship, where they conducted tests on him. He said it was happening every night. As the weeks and months pa.s.sed, Jason's story apparently never changed. When n.o.body was looking, aliens would come, float him up to a s.p.a.ceship, and teach him the mysteries of the universe. They would teach him that he was placed on earth to become an Indigo child-a psychic sage.

"We took him to a psychiatrist," Ann says. "We cried so much. We had him tested. But the tests all came back negative."

And then one day, when Jason was twelve, Ann says she made a very big decision. She decided to believe her son. Every word. She has subsequently written a series of books about Jason, including one called Jason, My Indigo Child: Raising a Multidimensional Star Child in a Changing World.

I lean over to Robbie.

"She believes Jason!" I whisper. "She believes it all!"

"What's the other side of that, though?" Robbie whispers back. "It's either believe everything the boy is saying or remain steadfast to earthly beliefs and have a black sheep in the family. 'Oh, it's him again.' For her own sanity she has had to believe him." He pauses. "But for me, right now," he says, "everything she's saying is true."

Ann's audiovisual address ends with her projecting onto the screen behind her a series of extremely blurry photographs. From time to time, she says, Jason is summoned to the s.p.a.ceship again. When this happens, Ann tries to photograph the UFOs. But she has only a disposable camera, and so the pictures always come out fuzzy and inconclusive.

It's time for the Q & A. Robbie's friend Brandon stands up and walks to the front. Brandon is a record producer and cowrote some of the songs on Robbie's last alb.u.m, Rudebox.

"I just wanted to ask: Why don't you buy a better camera?" he says. A slight gasp reverberates around the hall. People don't usually ask cynical questions at UFO conferences.

"I'm absolutely useless at anything technological," Ann replies.

"Have you ever had any psychiatric evaluation or presented yourself for that?" Brandon asks. Robbie flinches.

"No, I haven't," Ann says. "I'd like to think I'm all there, but if I'm not, there are quite a few of us that have these experiences, so maybe we're all crazy!" She laughs, awkwardly.

"Thank you very much," Brandon says.

Robbie goes outside for a cigarette. I tell Brandon I'm surprised Robbie brought him along after what he'd said about not wanting to hear any debunking.

"There's two sides to Rob in that respect, though, aren't there?" Brandon says. "There's the side that wants to go along with it, but there's also a very sarcastic, skeptical side." He pauses. "Which I'd like to think is the real side."

Robbie comes back.

"My toes curled up the moment you walked toward the stage," he tells Brandon. "But I think questioning somebody's sanity when this is happening to them is perfectly acceptable. I question my own."

We're standing near the table where Ann is signing copies of her various books about Jason.

"She reminds me of my mother," Robbie says, glancing at her. "Mum was a tarot card reader. She'd have people round and read their palms. She'd talk about spirits and ghosts. On the shelf of books just outside her room, there'd be the books about the world's mysteries, elves, demons, witchcraft. I was so scared. I'd never talk to her about it. Instead, I just lived in fear of all of this stuff. Maybe that's why I want to investigate UFOs and ghosts and everything. So I can work out why I get scared at night." He pauses. "I'll go and say h.e.l.lo to her."

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. "n.o.body 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, "compa.s.sion 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."