They Came From SW19 Read online

He gave me a superior smile. ‘This is no time for you to be a dickhead, Britton. I have lost my geography project!’

  I never mind people saying I’m a dickhead. It’s the key to my popularity. I’m pretty controlled, if you know what I mean. I wait before I speak, and if I’m not sure what to say – which is quite a lot of the time – I just give this mysterious smile. Greenslade says it makes me look like the village idiot.

  This morning, for some reason, I really felt like blurting out what was on my mind. Not about my dad. About the aliens spacenapping Mr Marr. It was only when I thought about saying it out loud that I realized how crazy it would sound. Thinking how crazy it would sound made me wonder whether it was true.

  ‘Tell Baines you’ll bring it tomorrow,’ said Khan in a deep voice. Khan is always calm about things. I think it’s because he is so good at physics.

  The three of us moved through the gates towards 4c, or Cell Block H as it is known. Behind us, Limebeare was getting out of his dad’s BMW in that special way people get out of expensive cars.

  What possible reason would they have for spacenapping Mr Marr?

  He was an engineer. Maybe that was why they needed him. Maybe something had broken down out there on Alpha Centauri and he was the only guy able to fix it. Maybe the know-how of the London Electricity Board was the only thing that could save the atmosphere of some lump of rock light-years from sw19. They would set Mr Marr down, hand him a nineheaded spanner and, after he had done the job, he would be on his way back to Wimbledon.

  Maybe they needed my dad and Mr Marr. You know? Maybe that was why he had appeared to me last night. Maybe they had ways of breathing life back into people so as they could do their evil will – although I could not, for the life of me, think why entities from a distant planet should want a travel agent.

  ‘Why are we always late?’ asked Khan, as we trudged along the corridor towards the classroom. He sounded as if he was going to get philosophical about this.

  Maybe they had heard about him. Dad always said he was the best man in South London if you wanted two weeks in Provence with swimming-pool and maid provided. Maybe the fame of Sunnyspeed Tours had spread. And if there are galaxies where life-forms exist, on the other side of the long dark spaces that lie outside our solar system, why shouldn’t the life-forms need travel agents?

  ‘Flasher will kill us,’ said Greenslade, looking morosely down at his feet. Greenslade is tall and thin. There is always a gap between his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers.

  What, while we were at it, did Jesus Christ have to do with all this? Was JC somehow mixed up in the mysterious events of last night? What did I mean by ‘Jesus Christ’ anyway? I had certainly been pretty glad to talk to him, or indeed Him, last night, hadn’t I? Suppose He really did exist – not in the way Quigley thought, but as a kind of mysterious energy source? We didn’t necessarily mean the same thing when we said ‘Jesus Christ’. Any more than Sarrassett Major and I mean the same thing when we say ‘football’. Sarrassett Major means huge guys throwing each other at a ball, neck-deep in mud. I mean hanging round the goal and talking to Greenslade.

  We got into class just before ‘Flasher’ Slingsby. I moved into my desk, carefully chosen because it is in the darkest corner of the room. If you sit very still, people think you are part of the furniture. Flasher came in, threw his briefcase on the desk and started to pace around, draw pretty shapes in white chalk and talk the incomprehensible rubbish for which teachers get paid.

  I just sat there, my head in my hands, thinking about all this stuff and trying to make sense of it.

  ‘Britton! What have I just been saying?’

  I looked Mr Slingsby straight in the eye. ‘You were talking about triangles, sir.’

  This was safe ground. There was one on the board, for Christ’s sake!

  ‘What about triangles, Britton?’

  ‘Well . . . about how they are . . . amazing, sir.’

  There was muffled laughter. Britton was at it again.

  ‘In what way are they “amazing”, Britton?’

  ‘Well, sir, they are equilateral. Sometimes.’

  Mr Slingsby was enjoying this. He positively twinkled as he said, ‘And is that what I was saying? That they are “equilateral . . .” ’

  Here he gave the class a conspiratorial wink. They responded well. ‘ “. . . Sometimes.” ’

  I looked round at the faces of the class.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t paying much attention.’

  ‘Oh!’

  Mr Slingsby sounded almost delighted at this news. He tapped his desk with his finger and gave me about twenty seconds to sweat.

  ‘Indeed. And why were you “not paying much attention”, Britton?’

  I paused. I let him hang there for a good half-minute. Then I said, ‘Because my father died of a heart attack yesterday afternoon, sir.’

  I have seen guys dropped across, but none like ‘Flasher’ Slingsby was dropped across that day. 4c were giving his performance very close attention. He looked, I thought, like a man who has opened his desk and found his wife’s head in it. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at the floor.

  ‘Britton, you . . .’

  ‘I what, sir?’

  He had dug the hole. He had jumped in. It was now up to him to play himself out. The lads were definitely with me. Greenslade had folded his arms and, his head on one side, was studying Flasher’s body language as if he was going to write an article about it for the school magazine.

  ‘You . . . you shouldn’t be here!’

  I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. I raised my head and looked straight at him. ‘I thought it might take my mind off it, sir.’

  I have never really let anyone at Cranborne School know too much about the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist. People can use information like that. People think I’m kinky enough as it is. Sometimes people ask why I have to leave early on Friday afternoons, but I do not – repeat not – tell them I am off to Gather in the Lord’s Fruit in a High and Seemly Way (which is why Mother Walsh deemed the hours between three and six thirty on Fridays to be sacred). I say I am going to the dentist. They must be really worried about my teeth.

  Flasher had turned a light pink. ‘You . . .’ He was opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

  ‘It was very quick, sir.’

  Flasher did not wish to know this. But I kept right on telling him.

  ‘He was having a pint in the pub at lunch-time, sir, and by early evening he was . . . You know?’

  My God, you could see Flasher thinking, this could be me!

  ‘Simon, I’m . . .’

  First-name terms! I kept my eyes on his face, waiting for his next move.

  ‘How old was he?’ he said eventually.

  ‘He was forty-three, sir.’

  You could tell he was dying to get the conversation back to sines and cosines and all the other wonderful things left to the world by Leibniz and Descartes. But there was no way he could do it.

  I looked over in Greenslade’s direction. Greenslade was carving a primitive figurine out of his rubber. Next to him, Khan was hunched forward across his desk. He looked as if he was about to put Flasher right on some tricky point of mathematical theory. The windows in our classroom are really high. I could only just make out the pale blue of the sky outside.

  Flasher coughed. ‘Don’t you want to . . . be with your family at this time, Britton?’

  ‘Not really, sir.’ It’s actually quite a relief to be here! Have you seen my family? ‘I just feel . . .’

  I started to play with my pencil.

  Feelings are weird. Here, where I was surrounded by people who were actually sympathetic to a person when they heard that a close relative of his had failed to make it, I didn’t really feel sad at all.

  ‘I thought it would be better if I just carried on, sir.’

  Flasher squared his shoulders. He is a captain in the Territorial Army. A year ago I was with him on
Army Cadet Force manoeuvres in the Welsh Mountains. Limebeare, who was, for some unknown reason, a corporal, stole a bazooka from the armoury and shelled the village of Aberfach for three hours before being arrested by the local police. They handed him over to Flasher, and Limebeare said afterwards that he would rather have served three years in Carnarvon jail than pass the afternoon he did with Slingsby.

  ‘Yes, Britton. Yes. I quite understand.’ He looked at me in a somewhat worried way. ‘I never know what goes on in your mind, old son,’ he said. ‘You’re a secretive chap, Simon . . .’

  You could see that he now thought he was in the clear. We had had this out, man to man. Although how he could say I was a secretive chap was, to me, a complete mystery. I’m an open book.

  He came towards me between the grim wooden desks, and for a moment I thought he was going to put his arm round me. I wasn’t finished yet.

  ‘I thought it would . . . but . . . I don’t think I can quite . . . manage it, sir.’

  Flasher looked at me narrowly. For a second you could see him wondering whether this might not be a wind-up. You could tell he still thought this was a strong possibility, but it wasn’t a chance he could afford to take.

  ‘Would you like to go home, Britton?’ he said.

  ‘I think I’d just like to walk on the Common and think about things.’

  No pupil of 4c had ever requested such a thing before. If this went on, it wouldn’t be long before we started ordering hot chocolate and croissants to be brought to the desk.

  ‘Is that all right, sir?’

  ‘Absolutely, Britton. Absolutely!’ said Flasher. ‘But . . .’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Don’t do anything foolish, will you?’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, in a voice that was meant to suggest that I was about to pen a short note describing Flasher’s insensitive attitude to the bereaved and then swallow a few dozen Nembutal.

  I got to my feet. Everyone was looking at me. I wondered whether to tell them the whole story. But I wasn’t sure that Flasher was ready for my dad’s coming back to life. He had not really had time to adjust to Norman’s death.

  I stopped at the door and gave him my best and bravest smile. ‘Thank you, sir, for being so understanding about my problem. There are times when geometry just doesn’t seem at all relevant.’

  ‘I realize that, Britton,’ said Flasher with some humility.

  Very slowly and quietly I closed the door behind me. I could feel the lads’ appreciation as I headed off down the corridor. A round of applause would not, I felt, have been out of place. All I needed now was to bump into Mr Grimond, the games master, and for him to ask me what the bloody hell I thought I was doing.

  Mr Grimond would fit quite well into the First Spiritualist Church. He is stark staring bonkers. He has been known to hold boys upside down on the rugby pitch and swat the ball with their heads. He regards brain damage as character-forming, which, for someone of his level of intelligence, is an entirely consistent position.

  I walked out through the main entrance, past the picture of Sir Roger de Fulton, a rather dodgy-looking customer in a blue dressing gown, and the huge pokerwork version of the Cranborne School motto QUID AGIS? Or ‘Wha’ Happenin’?’ as we translate it. There was more sunshine outside than Wimbledon could really accommodate. The streets seemed rich with possibilities – the way they do when you know you’re supposed to be at school.

  I thought I had better go down the hill and take a look at Mr Marr’s house. In my right-hand jacket pocket I could feel the weight of his front-door key, the one he gave me three years ago.

  As I passed south of the War Memorial, I could see Mr Marr’s chair, standing out on the Common. Next to it, all his stuff was still laid out. It looked lost, like someone’s drawing-room suite abandoned in a junk yard.

  Mr Marr had given his key to no one else. I was the only person he trusted. He had told me to use it only in emergencies. But this, to me, looked like an emergency.

  ‘There may come a time, Simon,’ he had said to me, as he handed it over, ‘when people from another galaxy who are not kindly disposed to us – and such people are probably out there – may . . . you know . . .’

  ‘ “You know” what, Mr Marr?’

  ‘Well . . . MIBs for example. You know?’

  I knew. ‘MIBs’ stands for ‘Men In Black’. In Deepdene, Ohio, in 1958 Mr and Mrs John Wearing saw a large flying saucer three miles out on the highway to Sawmills Bridge. It was hovering over a petrol station. There was, according to Mr Wearing, ‘a sort of perspex shield where the driver’s cab might have been situated’, and he claimed to have seen a large ‘blob-like creature’ with its nose pressed to the windscreen. It let him know, without using earth language, that the whole of the Midwest of America was in grave danger.

  Fine. These sorts of things are always happening.

  Two days later, after the Wearings had contacted the local newspaper and given an extensive interview, two men in black suits turned up. They wore dark glasses and black trilbies but were by no means the Blues Brothers. In ‘cracked, automatic voices’ they warned Mr and Mrs Wearing that they had better not speak of these experiences to anyone. I’m not, actually, quite sure why or how the Wearings allowed the story to get out. I mean, I hope they’re all right. You know?

  ‘If I should disappear without trace, you know what to do,’ Mr Marr had said to me.

  ‘I know what to do!’

  ‘Here’s the number. Memorize it and destroy it.’

  He gave me the top-secret telephone digits of a very senior guy in the Wimbledon Interplanetary Society. I was to ring him only in an emergency because, apparently, British Rail took a very dim view of his receiving calls about non-terrestrial business during office hours.

  There was still no breeze at all. It was dead still that September. On the house-fronts in Columba Road, the roses nodding on the brickwork, as big as soup plates, looked as if they were waiting for something. And, as I turned into the cul-de-sac where Mr Marr lived, it seemed to me that the whole suburb was holding its breath.

  I had forgotten the number of the chairman-for-life of the Wimbledon Interplanetary Society. I could not even remember the name of this rather crucial person. It would have been good to talk to someone about all of this, I thought to myself, although, from the little Mr Marr had told me about him, he sounded pretty flaked. Anyway, by making the call I would be admitting what had really happened. There was still a chance that Mr Marr had been taken ill or something, or had decided to go and see a relative.

  Except he didn’t have any relatives. And, if he had been taken ill, there was a card in his jacket pocket saying who he was. We take no chances in the Wimbledon Interplanetary Society. ‘Be always on your guard,’ Robert du Carnet, the secretary, had said at the last Annual General Meeting. ‘Don’t let them choose the time!’

  We know that the things from hyperspace may want to blast us to bits. And that people who don’t even believe they exist will be at even more risk than we are. We have a duty to survive, Mr Marr says.

  He chose this particular cul-de-sac, for example, for very good reasons. He liked to feel his back was secure. Although, as I often pointed out to him, the aliens could easily come at him over the tennis courts. His house is a funny little semi-detached affair, with bulging windows and wooden beams stuck to the bricks that are supposed to give it an Olde Worlde appearance. There are three uncared-for rose bushes in the front garden. There’s a white one for him, a red one in memory of her and a yellow one he planted just for me. He always said I was the son he never had. The white and red ones were supposed to grow into each other, but they never managed to do it. They just sort of droop grimly at each other across the ragged lawn. I don’t know what this says about the old Marr marriage. My bush has gone crazy. It grows out in all directions and showers petals all round it.

  The front curtains were drawn, which was odd. I was a touch scared. I peered through the frosted glass in the front doo
r. All I could see was the shape of Mr Marr’s bicycle. Through the letterbox I could see the usual pile of letters, plastered with stamps from all over the world. They write to Mr Marr from everywhere about sightings, landings, close encounters of the fourth kind and all the other things that those boring radio telescopes down at the Mount Palomar observatory fail to pick up.

  I fitted the key in the lock. I pushed open the door and looked down the hall. The first thing I thought was: the blobs or the androids or the giant green lizards from Venus or whatever they were had paid Mr Marr a call.

  12

  Every drawer in the house had been pulled out. But it wasn’t like burglars. Things had been piled neatly on the floor, as if someone was packing for a long journey. Underpants were in one pile, socks another, and by the door there was a neat line of shoes. Over by the window the aliens had made a start on the reading matter, which, as it was mainly about them, was unsurprising. They were halfway through a book called The UFO Report 1991. It was open at a chapter entitled ‘Disturbing Encounters in Northeast Brazil’ by Bob Pratt.

  A sentence on the first page caught my eye. If a UFO were to land in my backyard I would certainly not run out to embrace it. I would be very wary – and with good reason. Somebody had underlined this remark. It wasn’t Mr Marr, because he never writes in books. He’s fussier about how they look than he is about what’s in them. I say somebody. Something. Something which had used a Biro. I looked round carefully. There was a kind of chill about the place. I got up and went through to the kitchen.

  Whoever had paid Mr Marr a visit had tried to make a piece of toast. Not very successfully. It was possible, of course, that these guys could handle speeds faster than light but a British toaster had them baffled. Mr Marr’s toaster is, as it happens, a particularly dodgy piece of equipment. But why should they take the things out of the drawers? I sat on the bed and tried to think.

  Could it be a burglar? But if it was a burglar, where was the broken window or the forced lock? I checked all over the house and there was no sign of any such thing. The next thing I did was to ring Mr Marr’s office and ask if he had shown up for work. A woman at the other end said he hadn’t. She sounded very surprised. ‘He never misses,’ she said. And then, ‘Are you his son?’