As she droned on about the wonderful quality of the light Over There (she always makes it sound like one of my dad’s brochures for his holiday cottages in Connemara) I looked down at the old man’s desk. Below me, just to my right, was a pair of his glasses. He left them there, beside the Anglepoise lamp, because he only used them for reading. Next to the glasses was a letter that he must have been looking at before he got up to walk to wherever he had his first heart attack. At the bottom of the page the guy had written, rather optimistically, ‘See you Thursday.’
You should never say things like that. You never know if you’re going to see anyone on Thursday. When you kiss goodbye to your wife (or whoever) in the morning, don’t say, ‘See you tonight.’ That’s tempting providence. Say, ‘Might see you tonight.’ And if she gives you a hard time about it, you just tell her. There is no guarantee.
I saw those glasses horribly clearly. As if they were correcting my sight, from where they lay, on the shabby wooden desk. I could hear everything very precisely too. In the street outside, someone was playing a radio. The song on the radio was the Pet Shop Boys singing ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ I could hear the Maltese plumber’s water pipes singing along with them and, above my mum’s head, see the shelf that my dad had put up in the spring of 1986. It took him the whole spring to do it, but it still slopes, dangerously, towards the floor.
My mum shook her lank, grey hair and blinked like something from the small-mammal house. She’d moved on from the nature of Heavenly Light and had got on to how we would all float around like spacemen when we reached the Halls of Jesus and how we would not need to eat as such but would always be sort of three-quarters of the way through a most delicious meal. Something about my expression must have told her that even this was not going to get me to look on the bright side of this issue. She looked at me rather plaintively and said, ‘Auntie Diana will be so pleased to see him!’
I didn’t agree or disagree with this.
‘They always had so much in common,’ she went on. Then she folded her hands together, lowered her head and, without asking anyone’s permission, went straight into public prayer.
My mum is a leading member of the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist, South Wimbledon. Why didn’t I mention that? What do you take me for? It isn’t something I advertise. Only a few people at school know. It is, for reasons that will become clear, impossible to keep it from the neighbours, but whenever I am out with First Spiritualists I try to make it clear from my posture and expression that I am absolutely nothing to do with them.
I don’t know whether there was ever a Second Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon, but, if there was, I guess the First Church soon ran it out of town. The First Church has some very heavy characters in it indeed. In spite of a Youth Drive and the Suffer Little Children campaign, not many of them are under forty-five. But even the wrinkliest members can still act funky.
Four years ago, for example, my mum and I were on the Used Handbag Stand at the twice-yearly Bring and Buy Sale, when Rita Selfridge offered to buy my mum’s trousers. The ones she was wearing. She offered her five pounds for them and asked her if they qualified as Used or Nearly New. My mum didn’t do anything – she never does if people are rude to her – but my mum’s friend, Mabel, who is seventy-five, threw herself at Rita Selfridge and bit her, quite badly, on the neck.
The First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon was founded early this century, by a woman named Ella Walsh. They don’t actually use the word ‘founded’. What she did was to ‘renew’ a body known as the Sisters of Harmony and Obedience, a church which had been in her family for over a hundred years. Ella Walsh was the great-granddaughter of Old Mother Walsh of Ealing, of whom you may have heard. Old Mother Walsh was a prophetess who lived in a hut very close to what is now the North Circular Road. She had a dream in which she saw a huge snake wind itself around the planet. Fire came out of its mouth, and it bore the inscription TWO THOUSAND YEARS GO BY. It talked as well. It said that a woman was coming who would save the world and make it whole. She would be announced by a boy prophet ‘of pure heart and mind’ and, when she came into her ministry, ‘all mannere of thynge would be welle’. If she didn’t, it was going to gobble up the world. Some snake!
After Old Mother Walsh died, her memory was kept alive by her daughters and granddaughters. The Walshes bred like rabbits. Eliza Walsh, for example, had no fewer than six phantom pregnancies as well as the twelve that produced babies. Finally, around 1890, just after the Walsh family moved to Wimbledon, Ella Walsh, the Mother and Renewer of the Sisters of Harmony, was born.
Ella took the Sisters in a new and exciting direction. She kept some of the rules and regulations and printed a limited edition of The Sayings of Old Mother Walsh, and added her own angle. She brought in spiritualism, and soon there just wasn’t room for much of Old Mother Walsh’s doctrine, even though scraps of it survived and were still about when I was young. ‘Evacuate the noise of the bowel in your own place!’ for example. Members of the First Church still rush out of the room if they suspect they are about to fart.
Like all churches, the first thing it did was to set about getting some money in the bank. Ella Walsh met a guy called Fox, and, more importantly, got in touch with his brother, who had died four years earlier in a boating accident near Chichester.
Fox was loaded.
Ella Walsh and Fox spent many a happy hour talking to Fox’s brother. He was, it turned out, feeling pretty good about being dead. Apparently being dead was a lot more fun than being alive. They had snooker and whisky and quite good boating facilities over on the Other Side. And, after they’d contacted Fox’s brother, they called up all sorts of other people – including Robespierre and William Thackeray. It was all such fun that Ella married Fox and Fox gave her thousands of pounds to build the First Spiritualist Church.
She must have creamed off most of the money, because the First Spiritualist Church makes your average scout hut look like the Taj Mahal. It is a kind of tin and concrete shack, somewhere at the back of South Wimbledon station, and I’m always hoping some enterprising businessman will see that it has restaurant potential and offer us money for it.
It has no restaurant potential.
On the back wall there is a letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, thanking the First Spiritualist Church for all their help and saying how great it was to talk to them. The letter is signed, in his absence, by one Rebecca Furlong, and it’s only when you look at the date that you realize it was written fifteen years after Sir Arthur snuffed it. He sounds pretty chirpy, and gives no indication, in the text, that he has croaked. He doesn’t really mention much about himself at all. But maybe after you’ve been on the Other Side for a certain length of time it all gets pretty samey. Certainly, dead people seem pretty keen to get on down to the First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon, so there can’t be a lot happening over there.
If I ever die they won’t see me for dust.
Pike and Hannah Dooley won’t have the chance to ask me how am I doing, and do they have skateboards in the afterlife. Marjorie can use every single one of her internationally renowned psychic tricks on me and I will guarantee not to respond. And Quigley, oh Mr Quigley – he can rap the table for as long as he likes but I will not be answering!
They did great business, apparently, after the First World War. In the early 1920s you couldn’t get in. Just before the war, Ella and Fox had had a daughter called Rose and – guess what! – she turned out to be a Psychical Prodigy. Rose, as far as I can gather, was a real all-rounder. She wasn’t as hot on Jesus as her mum had been, but when it came to automatic writing, Ouija board, ectoplasm and something rather dodgy-sounding called cabinet work, there was no one to touch her in South London. About the only thing Rose Fox didn’t do was levitate, but, as she was nearly sixteen stone, that is hardly surprising.
I saw her when she was in her mid-seventies. She rolled into Sunday service supported by Mr and Mrs Quigley and gave us this big s
peech about how the spirits never talked to her any more. The last time anyone from the Great Beyond had given her their valuable time was, apparently, during something called the Suez Crisis, when she had had a short conversation with the late Admiral Nelson. ‘They want me to join them,’ she said. ‘Their silence beckons me!’ And then, as people frequently do down at the First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon, she burst into tears.
I quite often burst into tears on my way there. On one occasion, when I was about seven, my mum had to untwist my hands from about every gatepost in Stranraer Gardens. ‘It’s not as if it’s the Spanish Inquisition,’ she used to snap.
No, it was the First Spiritualist Church of South Wimbledon! That was what was worrying me. If it had been the Spanish Inquisition it would have been fine. I thought I knew where I stood with the Spanish Inquisition.
Some people blamed Rose Fox for the decline of the First Spiritualist Church. She went too far, people said. There were all these poor bastards who had lost relatives in the First World War, trying to get in touch with them. But with Rose it was hard to hear anything through the table-rapping or the squelch of ectoplasm being flung about the room by men in black jerseys. She started to take photographs of the spirits too, and that is how she came to be accused of trickery.
‘Did I ever tell you’, my dad said to me once, when we were walking, as we often did, in the direction of the off-licence, ‘about how Rose Fox was photographed beneath the spirit reality of Franz Josef of Austria?’
‘I don’t believe you did,’ I replied.
Whereupon, from his pocket he produced a black-and-white photograph of a plump woman in a loose white dress. It was hard to make out what was behind her – a chair, a table and what looked like a wardrobe of some kind. But what was directly above her head was easier to see. Hanging in the gloom, at a height of about five feet, was the gigantic face of an elderly man with mutton-chop whiskers and a helmet with a steel point on it. I happened to know, because we were doing it at school, that the face balancing on Rose’s bonce was that of the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
‘My God,’ I said, ‘it looks just like him!’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ said Dad.
He wrinkled his lips appreciatively, as if he was already tasting the first drink of the day. ‘It also’, he went on, ‘looks amazingly like a photograph of the old boy that appeared in the Illustrated London News in June 1924!’
That was typical of my dad. He always took great delight in any reports of trickery. And anything that reflected badly on Rose Fox, who was a great heroine of my mum’s, always went down particularly well.
The worst thing Rose Fox did was not to organize spirit photographs of internationally famous dead people – it was to get married. She got hitched to a man called Stuart Quigley, in the year the Second World War broke out. Quigley died in 1950 and was so boring that no one could bear to speak to him much, even after he’d croaked. But, before he opened that last little door into the unknown, he managed to make Rose pregnant. And so it was that in 1948 Rose Fox gave birth to the man born to make my life a misery – Albert Roger Quigley, MA – part scout leader, part amateur opera singer, part Christian, part Spiritualist and one hundred per cent complete and utter arsehole.
Quigley is an assistant bank manager. My mum once took me into his branch to show me his name, which is written up on a board. He is billed just below someone called Mervyn Snyde, who looks after International Securities. I think they are making a grave error of judgement in letting anyone know he’s there. Quigley, like quite a few other members of the First Church, is downright sinister. It was quite horrible to think that someone like him should be left alive when my dad was dead.
I didn’t start crying until after my mum had left the room. But the thing that started me off wasn’t the fact that Quigley was still above ground. Or the thought of my dad lying on a slab with all his dental-work showing. It wasn’t the thought that I would never see him again, because he still seemed too real for me to imagine that as a possibility. I mean, that guy in the letter, right? He’d planned his Thursday round Norman, you know? And I had so many things that I could have been doing with him, now, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, that it was literally impossible to believe that he wouldn’t be doing any of them.
The thing that started me off was the last thing my mum said before she headed off down the stairs. She tried a tentative embrace, patted my head vaguely and went across to the door. She looked, I thought, almost pleased with herself as she turned back to me. I didn’t crack. I just kept right on looking at her, with my head slightly to one side. I think I was trying to look intelligent. My dad always used to say that intelligence was the only thing that made humans bearable. Which makes his ever being involved with the First Spiritualist Church even more puzzling.
‘Over There,’ she said, ‘they are probably organizing some form of official welcome for him!’
I goggled at her. All I could think was that my dad hated parties. Especially official ones. In order to avoid replying, I looked out of the window. Over Here, the late afternoon sun was slanting down on to the impassive red brick of Stranraer Gardens. I could see our cat slink into the opposite garden, her shoulders pressed towards the ground.
‘We are going to be talking to him in the very near future,’ she said. Then she walked back towards me and nodded significantly. ‘I am sure that he has a great deal to discuss with you. And I have a very great deal to tell him now that he has Passed Across!’
There was something almost menacing in the way she said this. She straightened her narrow shoulders and gave me a blink from those worried little eyes of hers. ‘Conversations with Norman,’ she said, ‘are only just beginning!’
With a kind of smirk, she bounced out of the room. I could hear her steps on the stairs, sounding, as usual, a note of warning, of some kind of trouble on the way.
That would be the last thing the poor old bastard wanted. He finally gets through with the mortgage and the weekly shopping and putting the rubbish in a grey plastic bag and trying to fit it into the dustbin, when what? She’s calling him up and telling him the news about the latest jumble sale and my failure to pay attention in French. I would have thought the only plus about being dead was not having to listen to her any more.
She’ll have him back before he knows it, I thought. She’ll send his ghost out to Sainsbury’s.
It was Sainsbury’s that did it. I suddenly saw my dad wheeling the trolley round the delicatessen section. The way his face lit up at the sight of the salamis and the smoked fish was beautiful to behold. I saw him purse his lips as he sorted through the bottles of rosé wine, trying to find that special one that was going to make an evening with my mother bearable. I saw him finger his paunch at the check-out counter and grin when he caught sight of the chocolate biscuits, Swiss rolls, soft drinks and all the other things I had managed to smuggle aboard the wagon: I saw his big, round face and neatly combed, balding hair, and I saw the heavy gold ring on his left hand. I saw him. You know? I saw him.
It was only then that I thought: He’s not coming back any more. I’ll never see him again as long as I live. And I may not see him when I die, either.
I put my face down on his desk then, and cried like a baby.
3
A friend of my mum’s once said that my dad looked a little seedy, and at the time I was very offended. But there was some truth in the remark. When I saw his clothes, without him, in the weeks after his death, I could see that that was what they were. The suits were neither flash nor respectable. The jerseys were all torn and ragged, and the pairs of shoes (my dad loved buying shoes) were never quite expensive enough to achieve whatever effect he had intended.
But he was more than his clothes. None of his possessions made sense without him. And what made it even harder to understand that he really had died was the fact that, as is usual in the First Spiritualist Church, he was not buried. Not by us anyway. A day or so after he was tra
nsferred from the hospital to the funeral parlour, the undertaker rang my mum and said, in an unctuous tone, ‘Will you be wanting to arrange a viewing, Mrs Britton?’
‘No,’ said my mum.
‘What I mean is,’ said the undertaker, sounding a touch peevish, ‘he is here at the moment. If you want to see him . . .’
He hasn’t run off or anything! You know?
I was listening to all of this on the extension – which is the only way you ever find out anything in our house – and this last remark was followed by the longest pause in British telephone history. I seriously thought my mum had gone off to make a cup of tea.
Eventually the undertaker said, in a wheedling tone, ‘He looks very nice now.’
Come on down! We’ve laid on tea and biscuits and a video!
‘He really does look at peace. It’s amazing what we can do!’
I thought this was a bit much, frankly. I wouldn’t have said my dad was a good-looking guy, but I didn’t think he needed the services of an embalmer to make him palatable.
‘No one,’ said my mum, eventually, ‘will be coming to see Norman.’
‘Oh . . .’ said the undertaker, going back into peevish mode. ‘If that’s how you feel . . .’
In that case we’ll take him out of the window. He’s taking up space! We’ll screw the old lid down and get on with it.
‘Anyway,’ the guy said finally, ‘he will be here till about a quarter to five . . .’
So boogie on down while you have the chance! I mean, what do you require here? A funeral, or what?
‘No, thank you very much,’ said Mum. ‘Thank you for the opportunity of a viewing, but in this instance the family must decline.’
They Came From SW19 Page 2
