They Came From SW19 Read online

  The guy on the other end of the line was obviously dismayed at this unwillingness to test-drive his mortician’s skills.

  ‘My church’, said my mum, with a certain amount of prim pride, ‘does not believe in burial as such. We give you carte blanche as far as Norman’s corpse is concerned. Do with it as you will!’

  ‘I see,’ said the undertaker.

  You could sense him trying to work out what this signified. Did it mean absolutely anything went? Were they to be allowed to stick him in a trolley and wheel him round the local supermarket? Or give every last bit of him away for medical research?

  ‘You do . . . er . . . want him buried?’ he said finally.

  ‘Buried? Not buried? What’s the difference?’ said my mum.

  ‘Well,’ said the undertaker, ‘to us, quite considerable.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Well, we don’t usually find ourselves dealing with non-burying situations. Cremation and burial are, so to speak, our raisons d’être.’

  ‘Quite,’ said my mum, rather meanly.

  It was possible, of course, that the guy was wondering whether to give my dad the full five-star treatment. Burmese mahogany, you could hear him thinking, silver-plated handles, top-quality professional mourners. Indeed, when the bill came in, it looked as if we had been charged for exactly that.

  ‘Are you a Hindu?’ he asked eventually, with some caution.

  ‘Certainly not,’ snapped my mum.

  He was well and truly stumped now.

  ‘Well, Mrs Britton,’ he said in the end, ‘we shall try and dispose of your husband’s body in a way that we hope will be suitable as far as you are concerned.’

  ‘What you do with his body is irrelevant. I will be talking to Norman in the next few days, and I assure you that one of the things we will not be discussing is his funeral.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the undertaker. Then, clearly desperate to regain some professional self-respect, he said, rather brightly, as if none of this conversation had taken place at all, ‘Would you like any photographs of the event?’

  My mum started laughing at this point. I was rather with her actually. ‘Photographs?’ she said. ‘Photographs?’

  I think the guy was simply wondering whether he would be required to furnish proof that he hadn’t sold the cadaver to some fly-by-night surgeon.

  ‘Norman’, she said pityingly, ‘has gone to a place more beautiful and more peaceful than anything you could imagine. You can’t take photographs of it and stick it on the mantelpiece. You can’t get package holidays to it. But those of us who have talked to people who have had first-hand experience of it know it is utterly, utterly beautiful!’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said the undertaker feelingly.

  And, leaving the poor sod trying to work out for himself exactly what place she was talking about, Mum put the phone down.

  This must have happened about a week after Dad died. But I don’t remember much about the days that followed that first, awful conversation with my mum. Perhaps because the night that followed it was so eventful.

  It was hot that autumn. The evening they took him to the hospital went out like a Viking funeral. I didn’t cry for long. I was frightened she might hear me. I cleaned up my face and sat looking out of the window. The plane-tree opposite looked how I felt. It hadn’t even got the energy to turn brown. But the sun was going gently, winking back at me from the windows of the neighbours’ houses in the way it can do, even when someone you care about dies. A few streets away, on the main road, a police car or an ambulance made the noise I most connect with cities – the pushy, important wail of a siren.

  Down the street I caught sight of a few stalwarts from the congregation, trying to park a car. You can never keep them away from a death. But they were on the job with unusual speed. Maybe someone Over There had tipped them off.

  Like many other things in the First Spiritualist Church, the parking was a team effort. Hannah Dooley, in a tweed skirt and a double-breasted jacket, was waving madly at the bonnet, while Leo Pike was sneering at the boot through his gold-rimmed glasses. I couldn’t work out what his expression meant. Maybe it just meant that Pike drove a large, uncontrollable Ford that was at least ten years old. This was a brand-new Audi. The guy in it was important business.

  The door opened and Quigley got out. Yo, Quigley! New wheels! You tapped into the bank’s computer, or what? Pike held the door for him. No one cringes quite like Pike. Humbling himself in the sight of God is not enough for him. He would crawl to me if I let him. As I watched his wintry little face, his shoulders hunched in his tweed jacket, his constant, half-bowing motions as Quigley emerged, I found myself wondering, once again, how it was that someone so humble could be, on occasions, so fantastically menacing.

  Hannah Dooley loves Pike, but the reverse is not the case. Maybe Hannah loves him because she loves all the things people throw away, and Pike has the look of something left out for the binmen. Left out but not taken. If I was a refuse-disposal operative, I would have nothing to do with him, but Hannah Dooley gives him the kind of tenderness she bestows on old chairs and smelly bits of carpet. She pulls them out of people’s gardens and waves them at the householders who are guilty of casting them aside. With her wrinkled face bright with eagerness, she calls, ‘Are you really throwing this away?’ To which my dad always used to reply, with scarcely controlled fury, ‘We are trying to, Miss Dooley. We are trying to!’

  Quigley was followed out on to the pavement by his wife and daughter. The wife is called Marjorie, and says things like, ‘Is there a plentiful sufficiency of baps?’ The daughter is called Emily. She is good at the cello. Need I say more?

  Some years ago, Marjorie, Emily, Hannah and Pike (who is a kind of unofficial chairman of these three) all decided that I was going to learn to play the saxophone properly. They bought me the examination syllabus. They bought me a year’s supply of reeds. They used to leave my instrument outside my bedroom door after evening prayers at our house. But they had reckoned without me. They couldn’t actually wrap my lips around the horn and inflate my lungs until I made a noise. Only my dad was allowed to hear me practise.

  Hannah Dooley shambled up to Quigley and started to whisper something in the great man’s ear. Quigley likes Hannah Dooley, but you never know which way he is going to go. I could see his big, bushy, black beard waggle up and down as he nodded at something she said, then he shot a quick glance at her when he thought she wasn’t looking. Sometimes he stroked the ends of his beard and lifted his nose rather sensually as he did so. Quigley is proud of his beard. I think it’s the kind of beard that conceals a great deal more than the owner’s face. When he had finished the listening/stroking routine, he turned smartly and walked towards our house. Even from the first-floor window you could see that his hand was in his right trouser pocket and was grasping his balls firmly. Just in case anyone tried to give them ideas.

  The whole Quigley family was wearing flared trousers, including Emily. Flares and bright colours. When someone croaks in the First Spiritualist Church, you let the relatives know you don’t feel negative. Pike was last across the road, waiting, as he usually does, for a car to come into sight before scampering in front of it like a spider. Pike is really keen to rip through the gauze that separates us from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Maybe he thinks he’ll get his hair back on the other side.

  Quigley rang the bell. You could tell it was Quigley. He hit it hard, as he always does. He kept the volume very steady and – the giveaway this – he left it that extra five seconds, as if to say: It’s no use hiding behind the sofas, guys! I know you’re in there! Downstairs I heard my mum scurry out of the kitchen and scrabble at the door.

  There was a pause as she opened it, then Quigley said, ‘Great day for Norman!’

  ‘Yes,’ said mum, rather feebly.

  ‘He’s crossed!’ said Hannah Dooley.

  ‘We’re so pleased for him,’ mumbled Pike.

  ‘Yes,’ said mum, again sounding as if s
he was past feeling pleased for anyone.

  I heard Quigley’s big feet come into the hall. ‘Have you experienced him yet?’ I heard him say.

  I assumed he was talking about my dad. He certainly sounded very up about the whole dying business. And I knew to my certain knowledge, that, after me, my dad was Quigley’s least favourite person in the Wimbledon area.

  ‘I . . . I’m not sure,’ said Mum.

  Mum is never fantastically sure about her spiritual powers. And the Quigleys do nothing to bolster her confidence in this area. ‘I sort of . . . had a whiff of him on the stairs.’

  ‘Yes!’ This from Mrs Quigley.

  ‘But then,’ said Mum, ‘he was always on the stairs.’

  He was actually. He was always on the stairs or in the hall. He hung around his own house like he was a lodger did my dad. As I sat listening to the Quigleys, I could almost see the poor old sod. I could see his ragged little moustache, his beaky nose, and I could hear his voice, rolling the words round his mouth like he was a voice-over for a cheese commercial: ‘I never wanted to be a travel agent!’

  That was a frightening one. There were guys out there who could just make you be a travel agent. And presumably the same people were lying in wait for me. They could saunter up and offer me even worse fates than the ones they had forced on my old man. ‘Ever fancied being a greengrocer, Simon? If you want to keep the use of your legs, I advise you to get your head round the old fruit and veg.’

  The Quigleys clumped through to the kitchen.

  ‘Ohhh,’ I heard Marjorie say. ‘You’ve got a new bin unit!’

  She sounded really excited about this. Hearing her reminded me of my dad’s reaction the first time he had seen it. He had said it was the most elegant wooden sculpture to surround a plastic bucket he had ever seen. He also said it was something called ‘post-modern’. Which, I think, is a term of approval. He was at Oxford, my dad, but he never did anything with it, apparently.

  ‘It’s actually a bin-housing unit,’ my mum was saying.

  I sat on the stairs and pulled at my T-shirt. If you can fluff it out, it makes you look as if you have quite a respectable chest. When I had finished fluffing out my T-shirt, I held out my right arm and tried to coax out my bicep. It did not seem to be its night.

  Downstairs they started laughing about something. Emily was joining in, the way she always does. I sat there, thinking about my dad. I couldn’t face going downstairs and telling everyone how terrific it was that he had stiffed. The window alongside me, which looks out over what Dad always called ‘the most disgusting back passage in London’, was coated with fine, grey dust. Why did we always live in places that other people had tried, and failed, to care for? And why was it we could never make them right? Once upon a time, years, years ago, I could have sworn we had lived in a big, clean house where the lights always worked and there was a garden you could go into without stepping in something nasty.

  I suppose Dad had made money once, a long time ago. Well, he certainly wouldn’t be making any now. If they have cash on the Other Side, it’s probably a bit like those currencies they have in eastern Europe. Not even worth earning.

  After a while I heard a snuffling sound on the landing. When I investigated, I found Pike rifling through the airing cupboard. He was holding up a green jacket.

  ‘Was this your father’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Nice jacket,’ said Pike.

  I went up to him and took it from his hands. I’m only fourteen but I’m as big as Pike. I put my face very close to his and said, ‘I’d better hang on to it, don’t you think? In case he drops back for it.’

  Pike snorted. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you don’t come back in the body. You don’t come back as yourself.’

  ‘What are you coming back as, Pike?’ I said. ‘A natterjack toad? That might be a big improvement come to that . . .’

  Pike snickered. ‘Toads are nice.’

  ‘Compared to you, Pike, the toad is Man’s Best Friend!’

  I heard a cough in the hall below. There, looking up at us, was Quigley. I could see more than I wanted of his teeth and nostrils. He spread his arms wide, as if he was about to conduct an imaginary choir – something he quite often does at bus-stops or (alarming, this one) when driving the car.

  ‘Simon,’ he said. ‘We have come a-visiting!’

  The last time my dad had seen Quigley was in the First Spiritualist Church Five-a-Side Football Team. Quigley had somehow got them a game with a nearby public school, and an enormous boy called Hoxton had put no fewer than eight goals past my dad.

  ‘Jump high high high, Norman!’ Quigley had called in a light voice as they ran back after goal number nine had slipped past my dad.

  ‘And stuff the ball up your arse!’ my dad had called in a loud, fruity voice.

  ‘New car,’ I said.

  Quigley smirked. ‘The Lord rewards His own.’

  Pike was slobbering over the banisters. It was time to go.

  ‘Well, Mr Quigley,’ I said. ‘I have to be going out now.’

  ‘Simon,’ said Quigley, ‘don’t you want to get in touch with Norman? He’s very, very, very strong at the moment. This is a very crucial time in his spiritual development.’

  I heard my mum call: ‘Will you have some root beer, Mr Quigley?’

  The First Spiritualist Church disapproves of all alcoholic drinks unless they are made ‘at home and cleanly in the sight of the Lord’. Which leaves the more adventurous a lot of scope for 300-per-cent-proof spirits of the kind that are best taken in through the scalp. The last time my dad had finished off a bottle of his home-made gin he had tried to put a pair of his underpants on Quigley’s head. Quigley had beseeched him in the sight of the Lord to abjure ‘strong wine and wickedness’. After that I was sent to bed.

  I started down the stairs.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Quigley,’ I said. ‘I have to go out.’

  Quigley put his head to one side. ‘And where is young Simon going to, I wonder? Is he going to tell us where he’s going, do you think? Or what time he’s going to be back? What do you think, Mother?’

  This was to Mrs Quigley, who, with my mum beside her, had appeared at the kitchen door.

  ‘I’m going,’ I said in a quiet, patient voice, ‘to see if any Unidentified Flying Objects have landed on the Common. I’ll be back for supper. OK?’

  4

  It is a perfectly reasonable assumption that there are intelligent beings somewhere else in the universe. They may be more than intelligent. They may be very, very intelligent. So there is a possibility that they are on their way to the earth. And if they do get to land, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be in SW19. That’s my position.

  If you look at the literature, you will discover that the aliens have landed in quite a number of suburbs all over the world. A group of squat but distinctly humanoid creatures dropped in on a residential district just outside Munich in the winter of 1979. A bunch of ‘leathery-faced people in cloaks’ was seen coming out of a large silver object in a commuters’ sector of Barcelona as recently as 1989.

  I am not saying I have seen them. But a hell of a lot of perfectly sane people have. I am not denying that irresponsible individuals invent sightings. Or that the ufological movement has as many crazies associated with it as, say, the Conservative Party. I do not believe, for example, that Hans Kluigtermeier was, and I quote, ‘anally raped by a group of nine entities in red cloaks just outside the town of Poissy-le-Vaugin in northern France, last September’. But the volume of evidence is so considerable that it is irresponsible to ignore it. Why, I ask you, should we be the only intelligent life anywhere in the galaxy? They are out there. And they may well be on their way here.

  My friend Mr Marr is actually an electrical engineer. I mean, he really does go out and mend things for the Council. No one has tapped him on the shoulder and tried to take him away in a van just because he chooses to clip on the old infrared binoculars and get out there on the Common
every night, clutching a tape-recorded message saying WELCOME in thirteen languages.

  There are those who say he should have been taken away in a van years ago. I know this. He knows this. But he is pretty calm about it. ‘I know I may never see them, Simon,’ he says to me sometimes. ‘But if they do come, and if they decide to come to Wimbledon, I want to be there to see it!’ Which seems reasonable.

  He’s a bit like those people at the January sales. You know? Who camp out for weeks in advance because they’re terrified of missing a bargain. Or the guys who doss down outside the Royal Albert Hall because they want to be first in with a chance to hear some brilliant cellist.

  He was waiting for me on the corner with his Thermos.

  ‘Who knows’, he said, as we walked up the hill towards the War Memorial, ‘what will come out of the sky tonight?’

  I didn’t answer this.

  ‘It’s a nice, clear night for them, anyway,’ he went on.

  ‘Indeed, Mr Marr,’ I said. ‘I hate to think of them getting wet.’

  He laughed. He does have a sense of humour does Mr Marr. You can take the piss out of him and he doesn’t mind.

  ‘Weather is no problem for the aliens. They laugh at weather.’

  I didn’t ask how he knew this. Partly because, on the corner of the street, I could see Purkiss and Walbeck waiting for us. Walbeck was jumping up and down on the pavement and grinning. As we got closer, he pointed a finger at the sky and shook his head violently. Purkiss laughed.

  Purkiss is small with a shock of black hair and the beginnings of a hump. Walbeck is huge but lost. They both wear anoraks. Walbeck is deaf and dumb. But he is fantastically talkative. I’ve worn out many an envelope in conversation with Walbeck.

  As usual, Mr Marr just nodded to them as we passed and they fell in behind us. He lets them come along, but they’re not top-quality ufologists. They’re apparently very unscientific in their attitude to the beings who are hurtling through space-time towards Wimbledon Common. I often worry whether the four of us are enough. You know? What will it be like when they spin down out of the upper atmosphere and cop a load of me, Mr Marr, Purkiss and Walbeck? Will they be impressed?