They Came From SW19 Read online

  ‘You’re a dark horse, Simon,’ Mr Marr said as we climbed the hill towards the Common. It was dark now, but still warm. We were moving past bigger houses than ours. Houses that seemed to put out their secrets for all to see, but were, nonetheless, more mysterious than the cramped terraces of Stranraer Gardens. ‘You never say what’s on your mind.’

  ‘Do you reckon?’ I said.

  He looked at me sideways.

  ‘But you’re on the right side, anyway!’

  Mr Marr reckons that we as a society are not doing enough about the extraterrestrials. When you think of all the money that is put into medical research and the English National Opera – why can’t we put aside a few quid to welcome the boys in the saucers. You know? I mean, what are they going to think?

  He’s particularly keen on what he calls ‘instrumentation’. I think this comes from being an engineer. He has instruments for listening to them, instruments for picking up their lights, instruments for talking to them and an amazing variety of gadgets for making the long night watches easier. Things to rest your head against, things to put your feet on, little chairs to make sure you are pointing towards the night sky at the right angle and little trays that enable you to have your dinner and keep your eyes on the Crab Nebula at the same time. We all miss a lot of stuff, Mr Marr says. We wander around looking at the ground – and up there, there’s a party going on!

  His wife died ten years ago. She was apparently the most beautiful woman you could ever wish to look at. Her name was Mabel. I’ve seen her photograph, and it obviously doesn’t do her justice. She has just the one head, but she definitely has an alien look about her. She was a terrific cook though, Mr Marr says.

  ‘Well . . .’ he said. ‘Anything happen today?’

  ‘My dad died!’

  He was the first person I had had to tell. For some reason it made me feel tremendously important. It didn’t seem a difficult thing to say. It was the sort of thing real men said to each other. I was so concerned with actually saying it, rather than thinking what it meant, that it came out wrong. I wanted to sound serious but unweepy. Instead, I sounded positively chirpy about the whole business.

  Mr Marr stopped. ‘Oh, Simon!’ he said. ‘Oh Simon!’

  He’s from the North, is Mr Marr. He has this funny voice and this great big tuft of ginger hair that sticks up in surprise from his head. He’s really nice.

  ‘Should you be out tonight?’

  ‘It’s OK, Mr Marr. Honestly.’

  Purkiss looked at Walbeck. He pointed at me. Then he raised his hands above his head. Then he pointed at the ground and made what looked like shovelling movements. They could have been something different, of course. It’s always hard to tell with Purkiss.

  Walbeck was looking at him, as usual, in total puzzlement. I don’t think he and Purkiss really communicate. They resent being so much together, I think – which, from both their points of view, is an entirely understandable reaction.

  Mr Marr took over. He set himself in front of Walbeck and said in a slow, clear voice, ‘Simon’s father is dead.’

  Walbeck nodded seriously. Then he turned round and started to wander off down the street. Maybe he thought Mr Marr had said, ‘Go home to bed.’ It’s that bad with Walbeck.

  Mr Marr turned to Purkiss. ‘Bring him back,’ he said, ‘and don’t try to tell him things. Write them down, OK?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Marr,’ said Purkiss, in a high, squeaky voice.

  Somehow all this was helpful. When I’m around Purkiss and Walbeck, it almost seems a plus that I am me. Mr Marr was making off up the street with big, confident strides, clearly anxious not to miss any aliens.

  I must say that it felt like a good night for them. Although it was late summer, it was still warm. That wind seemed to promise something. There was no one now on the quiet, wide streets that surround the Common. The thought that out there, somewhere between the stars and the moon, was my dad’s soul (I believe in the soul) gave the night a special feeling. As we came up to Carew Road and headed towards the War Memorial, I kept my eyes on the planets.

  Over to the left was something that I thought might be Venus. It turned out to be the masthead of the Sun Life Assurance Building. I looked to see if I could make out the Great Bear or Orion’s Belt, but all I came up with was a group of stars that seemed to be laid out in the shape of a condom. Was there, I wondered, a star called Durex Major? When you looked closer, however, you could see that it looked more like an aubergine. Or, indeed, a Renault Espace.

  I see condoms everywhere. I am obsessed with them. It’s pathetic. The chances that I’ll ever get to use one for anything remotely like the purpose for which it was intended are very, very low. The best thing I could do with one, really, would be to pull it over my head and breathe in deeply.

  I gave up and looked at the moon. You know where you are with the moon. It was in the usual place – just to the right of Wimbledon Public Library – and it was the usual colour – De Luxe Oatmeal, the colour we’ve painted our bathroom. It has lost its glamour, has the moon. Too many people have been there. These days, they say, the Sea of Tranquillity is littered with probes and undercarriages and the remains of astronaut picnics.

  It’s the far galaxies that get to me. All I want to hear about is Sirius Four and Betelgeuse and Star BXY5634256 in the Milky Way. Stars that are light years away, and moving away from us at speeds you couldn’t begin to imagine.

  Khan says it’s all to do with something called String Theory. Khan is in my class, and, although he is only about three feet high and his father is an Islamic sex maniac, he does know about physics. Apparently the world was all string before it was what it is now. Or something like string. It’s full of things that are so dense that matter sort of pours into them – white dwarves and black holes. And it makes a noise, too. There’s a sort of background hum out there, like static on a radio. There’s Solar Wind and Solar Dust and Bargons and Protons and, according to Khan, something called Axion Radio, which is not a local broadcasting station but some vibration that happened minutes after that key moment 150 billion years ago when everything was in excess of one billion Kelvin. Don’t ask me who Kelvin is – some friend of Sharon’s or Tracy’s, I suppose.

  I don’t know. That’s what makes looking at the sky so absolutely amazing.

  ‘I liked your dad,’ Mr Marr was saying, while I thought about the universe. The War Memorial was in sight now. Beyond it was a dark patch of grass and the shallow pond next to which Mr Marr always takes up his observation post. ‘He was a nice bloke.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he was a nice bloke.’

  My dad always used to say that you should be very suspicious of people who said you were a nice bloke. It means they really despise you, apparently.

  My dad said a lot of things that were quite hard to fathom. I didn’t think it was true that Mr Marr despised him. Dad despised himself, I suppose. At least, he said he did. When he wasn’t claiming to be the greatest unpublished novelist in western Europe.

  He hadn’t always been a travel agent. He had been a lot of other things while he was trying to be a novelist, but he had ended up as a travel agent. Which, it seems, was the worst possible thing that could have happened. Some jobs, he used to say, go quite well with writing. A guy called Trollope worked at the Post Office. Melvyn Bragg is a television personality. But, according to my dad, there has never been a really successful writer who was also a travel agent. The two just do not go together.

  ‘He was a disappointed man in many ways,’ said Mr Marr, who had moved into the past tense a touch too easily for my liking, ‘but he was a man of real calibre.’

  I nodded. I just do not get remarks like that. Calibre! Get serious, why don’t you? Mr Marr would never have said that about Dad when he was alive. He used to drink with him sometimes, but I don’t think he knew him well enough to decide whether or not he was of real calibre. Whatever that may mean. And what, while we were at it, did he mean by ‘disappointed’? It wasn’t
his fault they made Dad become a travel agent and forced him to marry my mum.

  Mr Marr was practically running now. He always gets like that when he’s close to the action. It’s as if he expects the aliens to sneak in a landing before he’s in place. And that somehow, if he wasn’t on his canvas chair on the edge of the Common, it wouldn’t really count. You know? Like when you tell yourself that if you don’t get to the red light before it changes you’ll die at school today.

  He put up the canvas chair. Walbeck and Purkiss, as usual, hung back in the darkness. Walbeck, his head tilted so far that the point on the end of it practically brushed the back of his jacket, was staring at the stars like they were the faces of old friends. What’s so great about Walbeck is that he really expects them. Any moment now. He just can’t wait to start nodding and waving at the little green guys, and trying to get them to write him messages on the back of that envelope he carries with him.

  ‘Walbeck’s frisky,’ I said.

  Sometimes he seems to pick up what you say. As I made this remark, he started to frolic on the patch of grass, waggling his head to and fro and grinning as he did so. Mr Marr looked at me. He had a deadly serious expression on his face. ‘Tonight’, he said, ‘is the night!’

  It was funny. He says that every night. The fact that, so far, in ten years of watching there has not been a sign of them only makes him more convinced that he is getting closer to the moment when, from a saucer hovering over the birch trees, a steel ladder is let down on to the Common and entities start shinning down it and asking the way to the nearest fast-food restaurant.

  My dad was like that about his book. Every time he got a letter back from a publisher, he was convinced that, this time, it wasn’t going to start:

  Dear Norman Britton,

  I am afraid we are having to return the MS of Jubal’s Lyre to you. Much of it has a Dickensian breadth but ultimately it fails to convince. The drawings, however, impressed us all!

  Yours,

  A. Bastard

  Things were always just about to get better for my dad. Which is perhaps why he got on so well with Mr Marr. ‘The thing about old Marr,’ Dad would say, ‘is that he’s committed. You know?’ Sometimes he would add, with a little wink, ‘There are those, of course, Simon, who maintain he should be committed. If you take my meaning . . .’

  I sat next to Mr Marr on the grass, and I could see that he was sort of quivering, like a retriever. As I looked up at the sky, I could have sworn I heard a distant humming sound.

  Watching for the aliens is always a nerve-racking business. You never know when they are going to come. Every time a car backfires or a plane flies in low over Raynes Park, Purkiss and Marr are up and gibbering like loonies. Quite often Mr Marr has started the tape and we’re halfway through ‘We hope you had a pleasant journey and that our atmosphere is proving satisfactory’ before we all realize that we have been straightening our ties for a 150 CC Kawasaki.

  Tonight was different. Tonight was the night. There is some mysterious force at work in the world, because I swear I had foreknowledge. Even before all this happened, I knew that something was on its way and that, by the end of the night, my life would be utterly changed.

  5

  We were about twenty minutes into the session. Purkiss had already frothed at the mouth at a Boeing 747. Walbeck suddenly started rubbing the top of his head with the palm of his hand.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked Purkiss.

  ‘It means’, said Purkiss, ‘that he’s hungry.’

  I didn’t get this.

  Purkiss looked rather superior. ‘It’s his impression of a cheeseburger,’ he said.

  From the High Street I saw an elderly man in a dark grey suit walking towards us. Jacob Toombs. Toombs is an elder of the First Spiritualist Church, which means he can do anything he likes apart from shag the choir in full view of the rest of the congregation. He was walking in a very peculiar way. Each time he lifted his foot he waggled it around in the air before placing it, very carefully, on the ground in front of him. He looked as if he was trying to avoid dog turds.

  Toombs was elected an elder a few years back, after a pretty dirty campaign in which a lot of famous dead people endorsed his candidature heavily. He’s pretty extreme, even by First Spiritualist standards, but I couldn’t work out why he was carrying on like a man trying to walk along two separate tightropes at the same time. Then I remembered.

  ‘Place the foot carefully upon the ground,’ Old Mother Walsh is reported to have said, ‘and hurt not any living thing with the soles of thy feet.’ Toombs was trying to make sure he was doing right by the local insects. Every so often he stopped and peered closely at the pavement to check they were all all right. Then he looked over his shoulder.

  About twenty yards behind him I could see my mum, Pike, Hannah Dooley and the Quigleys, all waggling their feet like astronauts. They were on their best behaviour because Toombs was there. Why had they brought him to see me? If they’d brought Toombs with them, it must be serious.

  Toombs looks great, which is more than can be said for most members of the First Spiritualist Church. He has a hawklike nose, fierce blue eyes and a great mane of white hair. It’s when he opens his mouth that the problems start. You think he’s going to make with some deep remark about the meaning of the universe. In fact, what you usually get is, ‘There’s nothing worse than a bad-mannered dog!’ Or, ‘The English abroad often wear shorts.’ That, for Toombs, would be a pretty bold statement. He is usually a lot less controversial than that.

  He was staring at me now as he got closer. Was he looking deep into my soul? Or was he trying to remember whether he or his wife was taking the kids to school in the morning?

  When they got close enough, they sort of formed up in a line – something the members of the First Spiritualist Church are incredibly good at doing. Then Quigley coughed and stepped forward a pace. ‘Well, Simon,’ he said. ‘Mr Toombs has got something to say to you.’

  A look of panic ruffled the calm of Mr Toombs’s handsome face. What was it? his expression seemed to say. Quigley looked sideways at him and muttered something. I couldn’t hear what it was. Then Toombs took two paces forward from the line and cleared his throat. ‘Simon,’ he said, eventually, ‘your father is dead!’

  A lot of people seemed keen to emphasize this fact. As if I hadn’t heard them right the first time. As if I might have thought they’d said, ‘He’s in bed,’ or, ‘He has a bad head.’ I am getting the message: he is dead!

  ‘But’, Mr Toombs went on, ‘there have already been very strong messages coming through from him.’

  ‘What kind of messages?’ I asked.

  I didn’t care for this. They seemed almost pleased about whatever it was my dad had had to say. All I could think was that this sort of behaviour was not typical of Norman. He was not a talkative man.

  ‘Messages about his deepest feelings.’

  This was even weirder. The one thing my dad never liked to talk about was his deepest feelings. And he hated other people, especially my mother, talking about their deepest feelings.

  Mr Toombs was nodding solemnly. Quigley stepped up to the elder, whispered in his ear and then retreated to the line, combing his beard for nits as he did so.

  ‘There have never been quite so many messages coming through so soon after a coronary thrombosis,’ said Toombs.

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  Purkiss and Walbeck were busy clocking all this. Mr Marr had the bins trained on the front gates of Cranborne School. He was absolutely motionless. From the look of him you would have thought a green man with horns and a ray gun was drifting out past the Porter’s Lodge at that very moment. But maybe he was just trying to ignore Quigley and company.

  ‘And we are of the opinion’, went on Toombs, ‘that Norman has something very important to tell you.’

  He prodded me in the chest with his forefinger. I looked straight at him.

  ‘That is why we have come,’ he went on rather
menacingly. ‘We want you to join with us now in trying to make contact with him. We must find out exactly what his problem is.’

  ‘His problem’, I said, ‘is that he’s dead.’

  Quigley gave a superior laugh. ‘We have a very simple view of the world, don’t we, Simon?’ Then he turned to Mr Marr, who, like Nelson, was keeping his eye to the lens. ‘How are the “little green men”?’ he asked.

  Mr Marr did not respond to this. He twitched slightly though. He hates aliens being called ‘little green men’. As he says, we don’t know what shape or size or colour they’ll be. And why be so sexist? They may be hermaphrodites.

  Mrs Quigley weighed in next. The First Spiritualists often talk like this. As if they all had one sentence in mind and had agreed to share it out between them. As if they were all controlled by some central brain.

  ‘The feelings are very, very bad,’ she said, in a low voice – ‘very, very negative. We feel he has something very, very important to tell us. And he can’t quite get through.’

  ‘Maybe we need a bigger aerial,’ I suggested.

  Mrs Quigley looked intently at me. She gave me the impression I had just uttered a great and important truth. ‘Yes – maybe we do!’

  I just stood there looking at them. Then my mum said, ‘Please, Simon. For me. Will you? For me.’

  This is it with mums. There you are, trying to have a rational conversation, and then, suddenly, they’re looking deep into your eyes and reminding you that, just over fourteen years ago, you were in their womb. So – you were in their womb! Just because you were inside them they think they have some kind of hold over you! Actually, Mum usually says something even more embarrassing than that. So embarrassing that I can hardly bring myself to write it down: ‘I carried your maleness inside me for nine months and a day.’

  I was frightened she was going to say something along those lines now. Right here, in front of Emily and everything. So I did the quite tactful thing I do at such moments. I sucked at my teeth and looked at the ground. But I could still feel her looking at me. Eventually, I looked back at her. She had come out as she was, in her flour-covered apron. She seemed smaller and more frightened. The way she always does when the Quigleys are around.