They Came From SW19 Page 7

  And then I saw him. He was standing outside number 20. Everything about him said ghost in very large letters indeed. And, if he wasn’t actually roaming, he looked like a man on the verge of roaming. He looked pretty condemned to wander to me.

  He was wearing white, as ghosts tend to do. A kind of long smock, almost down to his ankles. He was barefoot, of course, and there was, you had to admit, a kind of ghostly yellowish glow about him – although that could have had something to do with the fact that he was standing under a sodium lamp.

  The only other serious effect death seemed to have had on him was to deprive him of his glasses. But, I guess, Over There, you have no need of glasses. It certainly hadn’t made him any more decisive. He was just hanging round looking vague – the way he used to when he was alive. Maybe, I thought to myself, he hadn’t been assertive enough to get through to the Other Side. He looked a bit like one of those guys you see at airports, waiting for their luggage to come round on the carousel.

  I just assumed it was an optical illusion – in a couple of minutes, I’d look back and it would be gone. Either that, or we’d get a few special effects – a shooting star or a voice booming out round Stranraer Gardens telling us our days were numbered. But my dad proved to be as low-key posthumously as he had been when above the sod.

  I lay down on my bed, closed my eyes and counted to a hundred. Then, very slowly, I pulled myself up to the window and looked out. He was still there.

  That was when I got really frightened. At first I lay, not moving, listening for some other effect that would tell me that what I was seeing was supernatural. They do that in films. They play the music and you know. When it really happens, you do not know. It’s like death itself. One minute you are worrying about where the next cheeseburger is coming from, the next you have stepped into another world.

  I didn’t dare look again. I lay there, sweating, in the darkness. Then I decided to wake up Quigley.

  I mean – this was his field, right? And, appalling as his old lady was in most departments, she had been proved one hundred per cent right about this one. She had said he would roam Wimbledon, and there he was – roaming. I also felt, and I’m almost ashamed to say this, that it would be useful to have an adult male around. Quigley the Squash Player is quite famous in the Mitcham area. When he starts to call you Sonny Jim, you run for the door if you are wise. When he carried the cross in the pageant organized by the First Church (yes, he was playing his hero), he almost threw it across the room when he got to Golgotha.

  Without daring to look out of my bedroom window, I tiptoed along the landing. Quigley was in the spare room, lying under the grubby duvet, his right foot protruding from one end. It looked more like a vulture’s claw than a foot. His beard was bolt upright. It looked, as usual, as if it had nothing to do with Quigley. As if it had just perched on his chin for a couple of hours and was soon going to flap off to join its pals. His mouth was wide open and his arms were folded across his chest. I looked at them for some time, wondering how he managed to keep them there while remaining asleep. Maybe there was some religious significance to it.

  I shook him hard by the shoulder.

  ‘Mr Quigley!’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘Mr Quigley!’

  His eyes clicked open. His head jolted back into the pillow. Then he sat up, ready for action.

  ‘Simon? Yes?’

  He is a leader of men, is Quigley.

  ‘Mr Quigley . . . I . . .’

  I stopped. I just didn’t know how to describe what I had seen. Then I said, ‘I’ve seen my dad!’

  Quigley’s chin went into pleats. His nostrils flared. He described a very small 180-degree turn with his head, while keeping his eyes fixed on mine. ‘Simon, where have you seen him?’

  ‘In the road outside.’

  Quigley nodded. I was wondering when this might happen, his expression seemed to say. But he didn’t seem in a hurry to get over to my bedroom to check out the phenomenon. I was surprised by this. I would have thought a guy with Quigley’s background would have been reaching for the specimen jar and getting on the line to the Society of Psychical Research before you could say astral plane.

  ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Yes!’

  I suppose he might have been frightened he might not see the apparition. As it was, his old lady’s talents had been confirmed by an unprejudiced observer. It was also possible that the prospect of actually seeing my dad roam Wimbledon, rather than talking about it, made Quigley a touch nervous. My dad could have come back for any number of reasons. One of them might even be Quigley.

  ‘Let us pray, Simon,’ he said. ‘Let us kneel in prayer.’

  ‘All right.’

  He grabbed my hand and sprang out from under the duvet, keen as ever to get on the line to Jesus Christ, God the Father or whoever else was on the switchboard at four in the morning. He was stark naked.

  I kid you not, he had the biggest chopper I have ever seen in my life. It was gigantic. It bounced around furiously for a moment or two, and then Quigley, as if he had only just remembered it was there, jammed both hands over it. I thought at first he was going to start twanging it backwards and forwards, like a piece of elastic, but instead he said, ‘O Lord, Thou seest my nakedness!’ I didn’t say anything. I left this between him and Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

  Quigley did not quite have the neck for the full-frontal nude approach to the Almighty. Or maybe he was just cold. He wrapped his balls in the duvet and knelt by the bed. For a moment I thought he might still, in fact, be sound asleep. Maybe I was asleep. Maybe we were all of us dead to the world and it was only my dad, out there in the lonely street, who was really alive.

  I knelt. I don’t mind saying that. I knelt.

  Look, I was impressed. It isn’t every day you see a ghost, is it?

  ‘O Lord Jesus Christ,’ said Quigley, ‘help this boy! Help him through the difficult phase he is experiencing and return him as soon as possible to Thy bosom where so many others of us . . . er . . . nestle.’

  There was a pause. Then I said, in my own time, in a low voice, ‘Yes, help me!’

  I needed help. It was either Jesus or an optician. I mean, either I was cracking up or else I had got the world badly wrong. Maybe it was a mistake to go around being proud of being so cynical. I was cynical.

  ‘I am cynical, Lord,’ I heard myself saying out loud.

  Quigley was nodding furiously. ‘Yes, Lord, he is! Alarmingly so, for one of his age.’

  I wasn’t sure I went all the way with this. But then, to my surprise, I found myself saying, ‘I do awful things!’

  Quigley shot a glance in my direction. He seemed keen to know more about this aspect of my life.

  ‘Fleshly thoughts?’ he said, in a rather wheedling tone.

  ‘I . . .’

  I stopped. I realized I didn’t want to discuss my need to pull the wire with Quigley. Not, at any rate, as we were both placed at the moment. There was only a duvet between me and his enormous whangdoodle. Once I had got on to the subject of my dick, maybe Quigley would bring up the subject of his own equipment, and from there we would go on to discuss our private parts generally, after which it would probably be time for a bit of the old gay sex.

  ‘I’m mean . . .’

  Quigley’s eyes were shut tight and he was chewing his moustache furiously. This was what he really enjoyed. Impromptu prayers at 04.00. Brilliant.

  ‘. . . I’m selfish . . .’

  Prayer is a very insidious thing. My advice is: don’t start! Once you start, it is really hard to stop. Because it was true. You know? I really am mean and selfish. I give my mum a fantastically hard time. All she is trying to do is keep the house clean and give me a good education, and I sit at the table, pick my nose and think about nothing except the next television programme, the next video and the next chocolate biscuit. I sit like a mule and I undermine her. I know I do this because this is what she tells me about fifteen times a day. Which is why it is getting worse. I am ge
tting really good at sitting like a mule. No one undermines like me, apparently!

  So, as I started to list my faults – well, the clean ones anyway – it came as a fantastic relief. I felt I was talking to a real person, and that there was nobody else in the world I could talk to like that. I mean, not even Greenslade! You can say things to Greenslade, but not those things. I was praying. I was talking to Jesus!

  ‘I am conceited as well. I think I know all the answers.’

  ‘You don’t know all the answers, boy!’ my dad used to say to me. Especially if we were talking about current affairs. Along with, ‘You’re a long time dead,’ and ‘The mind is its own place,’ it was one of his favourite sayings. As I said it I started to blub. Again!

  Look – it had been a hard day. And as I said it I saw him as he had been in life, sitting at the wheel of our car while my mum went into the shops, reading a travel book and biting his lower lip. I saw him laughing like a hyena down the phone or coming out with one of those brief, completely inexplicable things he used to come out with at the dinner table: ‘There are passages in Tennyson that force one to conclude he had experienced air travel. How can this be?’ I saw him in life and I saw him in death. I saw him out there under the street lamp, roaming. And I sobbed my heart out.

  Quigley put a manly hand on my shoulder. He kept the other one (thank Christ!) on the duvet. ‘Cry, little one,’ he said. ‘Cry out your pain and your sorrow and your sin!’

  That is normally the kind of line that would send me reaching for the sick bag. Not then.

  That’s what I mean about praying. I was enjoying it. I could see the man on the other end of the line. He looked a bit like Peter Falk in Columbo, except he was in pyjamas and he smiled more than Peter Falk. He was as real, as solid and as lifelike as that hologram I had seen out in Stranraer Gardens.

  ‘I’m sorry . . .’ I was saying. ‘I want to believe in you. I am sorry. I am sorry . . .’

  I was talking Quigley’s language. He let go of the duvet and put both his lean, muscular, Christian arms round me. There was nothing between me and the Quigley organ but my brushednylon pyjamas.

  ‘Go to the window,’ he said. ‘He will be gone. He is at peace.’

  9

  Quigley was spot on.

  There was absolutely no sign of my old man anywhere in the street. I checked out the upper atmosphere, but he wasn’t whizzing around the chimney-pots either. Quigley stood beside me. He had given up the duvet. He seemed to enjoy the opportunity of flaunting his tackle at old Mr Walker opposite.

  ‘He has gone, Simon,’ he said, ‘and Jesus is a bit like that.’

  ‘He doesn’t hang around either, you mean?’

  Quigley laughed amiably. Now we had prayed together I was obviously going to be given a lot more latitude.

  ‘Jesus can do anything for you. He can bring your daddy back and He can take him away. He can bring joy or sorrow, pain or pleasure.’

  They had said he would be roaming and he had roamed. I had prayed and he had disappeared. The First Church of Christ the Spiritualist was scoring very high marks indeed.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry I was cynical.’

  ‘That’s all right, Simo,’ said Quigley, putting his left arm round my shoulder. I saw his willy bounce up and down and his balls go jingle-jangle in the direction of old Mr Walker. ‘All I want to do, young shaver, is to love you and cherish you!’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I said, a touch nervously.

  Quigley squeezed me, rather hard. ‘Your daddy is with Jesus, and he’s got a lot of personal things to go through before he is really at peace. But we’re going to be talking to him about that, and getting him to come to terms with what his problems are. And you’re going to help!’

  I wiped a tear from my cheek. I must have looked a right dickhead. ‘Yes, Mr Quigley.’ I sniffed.

  ‘Because’ – here he stabbed me with his forefinger in quite an aggressive manner – ‘what you do and think and feel affects him. How you behave affects his spirit.’

  I was past debating this remark. You know the bloke who fell off his camel on the road to Damascus and started to hallucinate? St Paul – that’s the guy. I think that what I had experienced was probably very like what happened to him. And, just as St Paul resolved to keep off the hand-jobs and stop frenching the local Syrian girls, so I started to think how I could change my life so as to make things easier for the late Norman Britton.

  ‘You have come to Christ!’ said Quigley, raising his eyes to heaven. ‘O Jesus!’

  I looked sideways at him. Now I was almost a Christian, you would have thought I might find him a little less repulsive. Weren’t Christians supposed to love their neighbours – all of them – even Quigley? I looked into my heart but found there was still no space for Albert Roger Quigley. If anything, I realized, I found him even more repulsive than usual.

  ‘I am going to wake the others,’ he said, his chopper waggling excitedly.

  I must say, I would not have relished being hauled out of bed at four in the morning to be told that some idiot had just come to Christ, but this is the kind of thing Christians adore. They like anything a bit showbiz. You know?

  ‘Marjorie!’ he boomed, as he headed out on to the landing. ‘Sarah! Emily! O Jesus!’

  Was he going to put any clothes on? Was all this proving too much for him? Was he ever going to get any clothes on?

  ‘Oh, Simon!’ I heard him shout. ‘Little Simon has come to Jesus!’

  I heard Mrs Quigley squawk from the landing below – ‘He’s what?’

  She didn’t sound at all wild at the news.

  ‘Simon has come to Jesus! Oh Marjorie! Oh Sarah! Oh Emily! We are getting such messages! We have seen visions, my children!’ I went to the window and looked down at the street, at the very spot where I had seen my dad. I could see the actual section of pavement where he had been standing. I wanted to go down and mark the place. You know? Like pilgrims do. A placard: norman britton appeared here. And I felt fantastically sad too, as if I had just learned something, but didn’t yet know what it might be.

  It’s funny. Everyone has been young but none of them really remembers. None of them remembers how complicated it is. How sometimes time goes too fast and sometimes it goes so slowly you want to get up and push the hands of the clock round. How you never get the things you want when you want them because all you know how to do is to want. You want so much, so many things. And none of them seem to be for you.

  When I turned round, my mum, Emily, Marjorie and Albert Quigley were filling up the door to my bedroom, beaming at me like I was the school photographer.

  ‘Oh Thimon,’ said Emily, ‘thomething thtupendouth hath happened! You have theen Jethuth’th light!’

  I was beginning to have doubts about the wisdom of having prayed with her dad. If I went back now there was going to be a major incident. It occurred to me that there was something pre-planned about all of this. As if they knew, or had somehow contrived all this to happen, not just because it was good to get a guy to come to Jesus but because . . .

  Because what? I didn’t know. And it certainly wasn’t an issue I could raise out loud. My mum was peering at me. She looked, I thought, vaguely disappointed.

  ‘Let’s get on our knees,’ said Quigley, who seemed to feel uncomfortable when he was off them for more than ten minutes at a time, ‘and thank Jesus!’ To my relief, he was wearing pyjama trousers.

  The others had no difficulty in coping with this. They swarmed into the room, found themselves a nice quiet space and got the old knees in contact with the carpet. I was the last to get down, after one more nervous glance in the direction of the street. Quigley was in touch with Jesus before I even hit the deck.

  ‘Thank you, Jesus,’ he said, ‘for showing little Simo his daddy.’

  Here he flashed a quick look at Marjorie. Once again I had the uneasy feeling that there were things on the agenda that little Simo was not going to be told. There was a desperation
about the guy. As if he wanted me to go further. To get a full confession down in writing so that he could use it for . . .

  For what?

  ‘And now,’ Quigley went on, ‘Simo is going to talk to you about his new-found faith!’

  He is? I looked up at the rest of the family, who were all waiting for me to begin. More praying. In those days I was naive enough to think that prayer is conversation without the hypocrisy. And when I started to pray, I made the fatal mistake of saying exactly what was on my mind.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, trying to keep my tone matey without being offensive, ‘you know how much I . . . er . . . liked my dad and how much I . . . er . . . want to see him.’

  You could tell this wasn’t enough for Quigley. He shot me one short, fierce glance. I tried again.

  ‘If he really is walking the earth, then tell me . . . tell me why . . .’

  A strong right arm gripped mine. A fierce, bearded face was thrust into my line of vision. ‘Simon,’ hissed Quigley, ‘you don’t make deals with Jesus!’

  Why not? He’s supposed to be a nice guy. He’s a Jew, for Christ’s sake – why not make deals with Him?

  ‘Faith,’ said Quigley urgently, ‘is a leap. Faith is a jump. You must believe, Simo. You must have faith. And then blessings will flow!’

  Mrs Quigley nodded furiously at this. My mum was looking at me, red-eyed. She looked as if she was beginning to have doubts about the session.

  ‘There is no time left,’ said Quigley. ‘You must believe now! Now! Now! Now!’

  You can’t take Jesus back to the shop, guys. He doesn’t come on approval. He is even harder to dispose of than a subscription to the Reader’s Digest.

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Do you want your father to be at peace? Do you want his soul to find rest? Do you want to be able to talk to him? To hear his voice sweetly like the . . .’ Quigley groped for a simile ‘. . . lark?’ he asked eventually.

  I looked around at the circle of faces. ‘Well,’ I said cautiously, ‘I . . .’