They Came From SW19

by Nigel Williams

  ‘Yes?’ I said, in as calm a voice as I could manage. ‘That’s me. What exactly can I do for you?’

  7

  You don’t talk directly to the dead.

  Over There, just like over here, you always have to go through someone if you want to do things properly. It’s a bit like when I used to phone my dad’s office and his secretary would say, ‘I’ll see if he’s in.’ I knew this meant that he was in but that she wasn’t sure if he wanted to talk to me.

  The dead are like that. They are guarded by a whole load of spirits, with names like Peony and Goldenrod, and by the time these have kept you hanging round for hours, telling you their life stories, you sometimes wish the dead would hire competent secretaries.

  Sometimes you get crossed lines. You’re looking for Aunt Elsie or little Camilla, but Lloyd George or Philip Larkin or somebody like that barges in and tells you what a great time they had on earth.

  This voice of Mrs Quigley’s was a spirit, right? The next thing on the agenda was for us all to start asking it who it was and where it came from. Spirits don’t volunteer any information. They don’t walk around with ID cards pinned to their robes. And they have to be wooed. Sometimes there are things they don’t want to tell you. Sometimes they are too busy to talk to you.

  I was buggered if I was going to woo this spirit. I didn’t, to tell the truth, like the sound of it. It rather freaked me out, in fact. And so, as so often happened at our seances, it was a member of the Quigley family who led us further down the passage to that Other World that lies in wait for us all.

  ‘What ith your name?’ Emily said.

  There was a pause while Mrs Quigley thought of a name. ‘Gossamer,’ she said eventually, in a thick voice. Was this another celebrated spirit? A founder member of the Durex empire?

  My mum is always good with the lower spirits. She’ll spend hours asking them how they float and what they eat and are their clothes comfortable. She often asks them really personal questions about their habits. I’ve heard them get quite offended.

  ‘Are you at peace, Gossamer?’

  The voice took on a slightly babyish quality. ‘I . . . at peace . . .’

  ‘Oh good,’ said Mum. ‘Oh good!’

  ‘I at peace, but . . .’

  Quigley moved in, fast. ‘But what?’

  He tends to threaten the more junior spirits as if they are hostile witnesses in a cross-examination.

  ‘Gossamer?’

  Mrs Quigley was writhing again.

  It sometimes occurs to me that it was only during seances that the Quigleys could say what they really felt about each other. Normally Mrs Quigley was subject to the usual restrictions that apply to married people. She had to sit there and grit her teeth while her husband went on about the mortgage rate, the need for competitive small business and the very real power of Jesus’ love. In the middle of a seance she was at liberty to grunt and throw herself around the room and ignore everything the assistant bank manager said to her.

  ‘Gossamer?’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘Gossamer?’

  ‘Fuck off!’

  The spirits often use bad language. Especially when Quigley is asking them personal questions. I have often thought of going into a trance myself simply to have the pleasure of telling Quigley to go and fuck himself with an iron bar. As yet, I fear, I have not had the nerve to do so.

  ‘Gossamer?’

  Mrs Quigley’s voice became plaintive and girlish.

  ‘What-a matter?’

  Quigley looked as if he was trying to resist the temptation to honk into his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘Gossamer . . . have you a message for Simon?’

  ‘Methage for Thimon?’

  Gossamer had gone babyish in a big way. Quigley responded by trying to out-yuck him/her/it.

  ‘Yes. What message for li’l Simey? What message ’oo got?’

  Mrs Quigley came back with the sort of scream Dracula comes out with when faced by garlic or wooden stakes. She drew her knees up to her chin and started to bang her right arm on the floor in pretty strict rhythm. At the same time she pushed her crotch up at Quigley as hard as she could. He looked impressed. When her voice came through, it was a tiny croak, distant and faraway. ‘Simon?’ it said. ‘Are you there, Simon?’

  ‘Is this Gossamer I’m talking to?’ said Quigley in a no-nonsense voice.

  It didn’t sound like Gossamer. It sounded like someone on a car phone going into a tunnel.

  ‘Gossamer gone . . .’ said the voice. ‘I am not Gossamer.’

  ‘Who are you?’ said Pike, clearly feeling the need to be included in all this.

  ‘An old spirit,’ said the voice – ‘one from the dawn of time. A tired spirit. A tired spirit that wants to sleep.’

  ‘What was your name?’ said my mum – ‘when you were on the earth?’

  Mrs Quigley thrashed a little. There was dead silence in the room.

  ‘On earth,’ said the spirit, ‘I bore the name of Norman Britton.’

  ‘And what’, asked Quigley keenly, ‘was your address?’

  ‘Address?’ said the spirit, feebly. ‘How do you mean – “address”?’

  It obviously didn’t know about addresses. They don’t have addresses over there, guys. There is a marked absence of the Filofax.

  ‘Which house . . .’ said Quigley, sounding a bit like my mum talking to a Swedish lodger we had once, ‘which house did you live in?’

  ‘I . . .’

  There was a tense silence. Then Mrs Quigley frothed lightly, twitched a little and said, ‘I Gossamer. I come back!’

  Everyone looked pretty cheesed-off at this. I think we all felt we had had Gossamer. He was fine as far as he went, but it was time to make contact with new and more exciting shades.

  ‘We want to talk to Norman,’ said Quigley, keenly, ‘not to Gossamer. Can you put us in touch with Norman? Norman Britton.’

  ‘He was a travel agent,’ said Mum. ‘He had a shop in Balham High Street.’

  Quigley glared at her.

  ‘Norman,’ he said, in an insistent tone. ‘Norman Britton.’

  ‘I Gossamer,’ said Mrs Quigley, brightly.

  This whole thing was beginning to resemble a bad transatlantic phone-call. Should we, you could see Quigley wondering, just leave a message and ask the guy to ring back? If we did get through, were we going to get any sense out of him?

  ‘Why can Norman not sleep?’ Pike asked.

  Maybe because of all you guys getting on the line and asking the old spirit pointless questions! You know?

  ‘Is there something that troubles you?’

  Mrs Quigley groaned. Long and low and quiet. ‘Ohhh! Ohhh!’

  ‘Thay if you have thinned!’ said Emily Quigley. Typical Emily. She’d never have dared talk to my dad like that when he was alive, even during the period when he was into the High Anglican church, Putney. I was quite prepared for my dad to get on the line and start talking about his period of Error – which is how the First Spiritualists referred to his going over to another church. But he didn’t.

  ‘What is your message for Simon?’ asked my mum. ‘What do you want to say to him?’

  He didn’t answer. This was, I have to say, absolutely typical of my dad. You could ask him a question and he would take literally days to reply.

  ‘Want to say . . .’

  ‘Want to say what?’ Quigley sounded like a man trying to encourage his pet snake to dance.

  There was no reply.

  My mother, in a rare moment of independence, said, ‘You frightened him off!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ said Quigley. ‘Don’t be utterly stupid!’

  He was crouched over his wife, massaging her hands. Eventually that voice came out of her again. It was the one I didn’t want to hear. The voice of a child alone in a large house at night. It had fear in it, but it also had the things that make you afraid – darkness, and the things that comes out of darkness and makes you afraid to g
o to sleep. It was like a sinister baby – something very young that has already had another life and is only pretending to look at the world for the first time.

  ‘I lived my life . . . I drank my wine . . . I broke my bread . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ said Quigley. ‘Yes?’

  Suddenly the voice changed again. It dropped an octave. It really was a bass voice, a voice thick with cigarettes and whisky, rich with the things that had helped to end its owner’s life. It was my dad, I swear it. Although it was Mrs Quigley’s lips moving, it was his voice I heard.

  ‘Simon, old son . . .’ he said.

  It was so like him, you know? Right down to the way he couldn’t finish sentences. I couldn’t help myself. I just couldn’t help myself. I wanted to talk to him so much. I wanted him to say the things he always used to say to me. Not big, important things, but just those ordinary remarks that let you know you’re still here and ticking over. I was so desperate to hear his voice I didn’t care if it came from the mouth of Marjorie Gwendolen Quigley.

  ‘What, Dad?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter? What do you want? What’s the matter?’

  Very slowly, Mrs Quigley started to lift her head off the floor. It wobbled loosely during the ascent, very much as Mum’s does when she is doing her aerobics on the bathroom floor. Madame Quiggers did not look well. She always says that intense mediumship can damage you permanently and that very intense spirit possession can take thirty years off your life. If these calculations are correct, she could well be joining Norman for a face-to-face confrontation rather sooner than she had anticipated.

  What was weird was that she was looking straight at me, but she obviously couldn’t see me.

  ‘Oh Simon,’ said my dad’s voice, seeming to come from the pit of her stomach. ‘I am . . . I am . . . condemned!’

  ‘Condemned to what, Dad?’

  ‘To walk the earth.’

  I could see Pike give a nervous glance out of the window. He takes these things very seriously, does Pike.

  Suddenly Mrs Q started to writhe again.

  ‘Walk the earth where?’ said my mum, in a rather worried voice. ‘In any particular place? Or sort of roaming about across the sea, and so on?’

  Although this was clearly exactly the next question on Quigley’s mind, he gave her a pitying look.

  Mrs Quigley was working up her writhing and thrashing nicely. When she was at domestic-blender speed, the cucumberup-the-bum effect was reintroduced. It now sounded as if a team of construction workers was hammering it into place. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhhh!’

  ‘Where, Norman?’ said Mum, who really did sound genuinely concerned about the quality of the old man’s afterlife. ‘Where are you?’

  The voice came again, and it was still my dad’s. He could have been in the room. You know?

  ‘Repent, Simon!’ he said, in a deep, hollow voice. ‘Repent! You hear me? You must repent!’

  Repent of what? Was it my fault he had kicked off? What had I done that was so wrong?

  ‘Free me, Simon! I beg you, free me! Free me!’

  By now Mum was practically screaming. ‘Where, Norman? Where are you?’

  Rio de Janeiro? The Algarve? Have you come back as a lighthouse keeper in South Uist, or what?

  With a snap, Mrs Quigley rose to a sitting position. It was not what any of us expected her to do, but, like a great actor, Mrs Quigley often throws in something very low-key, bang in the middle of a high dramatic passage. It surely does keep you watching. Quigley, her ever-faithful support act, ran to her side. He raised his hand to her face and kept it there for a full thirty seconds. Pike’s eyes were starting out of his head on stalks. Hannah Dooley was openly weeping.

  This time Mrs Q gave us a new voice. It was my dad still, but he sounded as if he had been put through a mixer and someone had added echo, reverb and a few hundred dBs of extra bass on the way. It had a threatening ring to it, too – some traces of that earlier spirit voice. The voice that reminded me of a frightening and frightened child.

  Mrs Quigley’s tongue lolled out of her mouth. She started to laugh. Or, rather, something inside her started to laugh. It wasn’t a very pleasant sound.

  ‘In what part of the world,’ said my mum, in pleading tones, ‘are you condemned to walk?’

  ‘Wim – bel – don!’ said my dad.

  8

  Great!

  Not only does he die, he is condemned to walk the earth and find no rest. Worse than that, he is condemned to roam around Wimbledon for the next few thousand years. Have a heart, O Spirit of the Universe! Wimbledon is bad enough for an afternoon. With house prices the way they are, quite a few people are stuck there for rather longer than that. But at least they can look forward to stiffing.

  My dad was one of the undead. He was not being allowed to pass to the Other Side. He was going to miss the tea parties and the organized games. Although he wasn’t an enthusiastic Spiritualist, he often said he looked forward to seeing Auntie Norah again after she fell under the train at Norwood Junction. But even that was to be denied him. What had he done to deserve this?

  He used to get ratty about the neighbours. He could be quite vicious when asked to hoover the front room. But he was not what you would call a bad man.

  He said what he thought, did my dad. Maybe that was his crime. I remember the two of us came across a large poodle having a crap on the pavement outside our house. Dad picked it up by the collar and hurled it and its half-ejected turd into the middle of the road. Whereupon a woman in a fur coat threw herself upon him and demanded to know what he was doing with her dog. ‘Give me your address,’ said my dad, ‘and I’ll come round and shit on your doorstep!’

  He was basic. He was noisy and loud, and he was earthy to the point of being gross. Whether he was singing an Irish song called the ‘The Galway Shawl’ or clapping me on the back or trying, unsuccessfully, to kiss my mum, he was very much of this world rather than the next one.

  But he wasn’t a bad man.

  I could think of no good reason why he should have been doomed to roam up and down the local streets, or float in and out of the Wimbledon bookshops, trying to pick up the latest paperbacks with his see-through fingers. I did not understand why it was that Mr Lustig, the deputy headmaster, was going to be allowed to walk through him on his way to church, or why the Thompson family from three doors down, whom he had always hated, should be allowed to shoulder their way through his thick chest and big, balding head on their way to the pizza parlour.

  It was to do with something I had done. It sounded to me as if he was being punished for something I had done. What had I done? For a moment I thought he might have been trapped on the earth he had enjoyed so much because I hadn’t appreciated him properly. And then it occurred to me that I had probably done quite enough bad things on my own account to allow something like this to happen.

  I have done plenty. I am an averagely bad person. Fourteen earth years give you plenty of time to plumb the depths of human depravity. We cannot all be Emily Quigley. I have done things that would make your glasses steam up just to mention. You know? I am a sinner.

  I do, for example, from time to time, indulge in a spot of selfabuse. I say ‘from time to time’. That isn’t quite accurate. I wank like a man demented whenever I get the opportunity. And I do seem to get an awful lot of opportunities. Nobody gets me to go on mountaineering trips or enter swimming galas or any of the other things that are supposed to be good for masturbation. They let me get on with it. As a result, although there are times when my hand does come off my chopper, I have to admit that they are fairly well spaced. I don’t think it’s going to make me go blind, but it must be having some effect. Maybe I’m going deaf. People are always saying I don’t seem to hear what they’re trying to tell me.

  Could my wanging off until the sheets crackle be the reason why my dad had been condemned to waft through Wimbledon for the foreseeable future? I seriously thought about this possibility as I went to bed that night. Bu
t, then, you are not rational when someone you love kicks the bucket.

  I lay awake, I remember, staring out at the moon above the street and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep my hand off my dick. There’s a poster on my wall. It’s of Bruce Lee, the Master of the Martial Arts. Looking at Bruce no longer gives me the thrill it once did. I keep it there because it reminds me of how simple and decent things used to be when it was enough to watch Chinamen kicking each other. As I gazed up at Bruce’s iron-hard stomach and the three red sword wounds on his chest, it reminded me of the good old days before pubic hair. I missed them.

  The Quigley family had stayed over, something they did quite a lot if they thought one of us was in spiritual danger. They were always trying to insinuate themselves into our house when my dad was alive. But he used to do things like open the front door and call ‘Homes to go to!’ if they stayed past ten. Any later than eleven and he would appear in his pyjamas and begin winding the alarm clock.

  ‘We need to be with Sarah,’ Quigley had announced after the seance was over. We had asked Jesus, and Jesus had thought it was a fantastically good idea that they stayed. Toombs and Dooley had gone for their bus, and Pike had shambled off to his secondhand Ford, dubbed by me Lethal Weapon III.

  I could hear Quigley snoring. He didn’t just snore, he made a sort of satisfied grunting sound in between snores. At one point I could have sworn his old lady was giving him a blow job. I kid you not – the noise he made was remarkable. But, when I got up to check, it turned out Mrs Q was sleeping with Emily in a room at the back of the house. Quigley was capable of sucking himself off, mind you. There are no limits where Quigley is concerned.

  At about four I got up and went for a walk. I walked along the landing and looked in on my mum. She was lying with her nose in the air, giving out a light snuffling sound. Mrs Quigley and Emily were locked together in a rather awkward-looking clinch. Between them was Emily’s teddy bear, whose name, in case any of you are interested, is Mr Porkerchee.

  I went back to my room and looked down at Stranraer Gardens. Surely, I thought to myself, they wouldn’t make him roam Stranraer Gardens? Death brought you some privileges, surely? He might not deserve the Elysian Fields, but he hardly deserved that.