They Came From SW19

by Nigel Williams

  ‘Loosali,’ said Quigley, ‘beat Rumero in Athens!’

  I had absolutely no idea who either of these characters were.

  Hoisting his bag over his shoulder, Quigley jogged off towards a door marked MEMBERS ONLY. I followed him, marvelling at the change in posture he had achieved simply by wearing trainers that looked as if they were worth about £200. You knew, just from his equipment, that Quigley was the business as far as squash was concerned.

  ‘I’ll go easy on you, young shaver,’ said Quiggers, ‘for dear Norman’s sweet sake!’

  I’d played squash with my dad. He was banned from his club for smoking while playing. But before they gave him the boot, we did play. Just once. It was the funniest thing I can remember.

  ‘Oh no!’ he would shout, as he ran across the stone floor, waving his racket. ‘Oh no! This is going to be a disaster!’ His forecast was usually correct.

  Quigley’s approach was very different.

  He was the only guy I’ve ever met who took a shower before playing. ‘I like to be clean for the experience,’ he said. He looked like a man who would not need to shower after the game.

  I had to get in the shower with him, which was a pretty sobering time for me. Partly because he made very free with the old Quigley chopper, shampooing it and hosing it down as if he was about to enter it for some competition, and partly because he insisted on singing as we stood, man to man, under the steaming water.

  ‘Praise God I am not blessed with pain! Praise God I am in bliss!’ he carolled as he towelled himself down and sprayed talcum powder on what had to be the biggest cock in South London. No one laughed.

  A thin guy in the corner asked whether I was Quigley’s son. And Quigley, as he got into some figure-hugging shorts, said, ‘I am all the father he has, Walter.’

  Walter looked impressed. As we went out to the court, he said to me, ‘Lovely man, lovely, lovely man!’

  Maybe Walter had an account at Quigley’s bank. I don’t know.

  Greatly to my relief, there were no spectators.

  I was wearing a baggy pair of jeans, which Quigley had been pretty sniffy about. ‘We must be properly clad,’ he had said. But I knew, from the moment he closed the door to the court, that I was by no means underdressed for the event. About the most suitable garment to have worn would have been a suit of chain mail.

  He started by suggesting a ‘knock-up’ and then, almost immediately, whacked the ball against the rear elevation at about the velocity of light. It came back at me with such force that my one thought was to find some quiet corner, pull a rug over my head and let the ball finish whatever it had to do.

  But there is no place to hide on a squash-court. It is just you and the ball. And, when you’re playing with Quigley, it doesn’t feel like one ball. It feels like an angry swarm.

  The ball snaked round like a heat-seeking missile, cutting off my line of retreat. As I stood there, my racket held out in front of me like a serving-spoon, it made contact with the wall to my left and ricocheted back towards me. It seemed annoyed that I had missed it.

  ‘Move into the ball!’ yelled Quigley.

  I ran, hard, in the opposite direction.

  ‘It’s spinning!’ he yelled. ‘I’ve put top spin on it!’

  It looked like he had done a lot more than that. It looked like he had brainwashed the thing. It was coming after me like a Dobermann pinscher. I swerved to my left and the ball hit the far wall of the court. It showed no sign of slowing up. After the way he’d hit it, it could be whanging around the four walls for the foreseeable future.

  Quigley, his buttocks thrust out behind him, was bouncing up and down on the spot. ‘Thar she blows!’ he yelled. He seemed pleased with the way things were going. ‘She comes on hard, me dearios!’

  I have a pretty hazy grasp of the rules of squash. When Dad and I played, the idea seemed to be to keep the ball in the air for a few minutes and then award the points to the person who seemed to need them most.

  Quigley and I hadn’t finished knocking up yet, and already I was wondering if The Club kept an oxygen cylinder handy. The ball headed off in the direction of the service area, travelling waist height at about thirty miles an hour. With a kind of feeble cry, I set off in pursuit.

  I was getting angry. You know? I was fighting back.

  I caught up with it – or, rather, it caught up with me – as it was setting off from the rear wall on another leg of its journey south (or was it north? Or west? Or east?). I held out my racket, with my right arm fully extended, drew back my left leg and drove forward, hard. The ball hit me in the chest.

  ‘Stretcher case!’ yelled Quigley, in the grip of almost unbearable excitement. ‘Give that man a jelly bean!’

  With these words he danced up the court, his long legs waving elaborately, like a crane-fly’s. When he finally got the ball in his sights, he swept it up against the back wall. My one thought was to get as far away as possible from both him and it before he started whacking me into play as well.

  ‘Give it welly!’ he shouted as I shambled to the nearest corner, listening to the irritated whine of the ball. ‘Give it welly, young shaver!’

  I did not, I have to say, give it welly. I did not give it any kind of footwear. I gave it a kind of reedy sob as it slammed into some other surface that I had not known was there. How many walls were there in this court? And which way up were we? I was beginning to feel as if I was in a spaceflight simulator. As if Quigley might appear above me at any moment, grinning, as he slurped across the ceiling upside down.

  This time I stayed where I was. I tried to look like a man waiting for his opportunity. I stood on my points. I held the racket with both hands. I ducked. I weaved. I gave the ball some pretty nasty looks. But I did not make the mistake of actually moving in its direction until it had finished whizzing round the court and was trickling towards the door.

  It was time for a bit of conversation.

  ‘Mr Quigley,’ I said, ‘did I really see my dad out in the street the other night?’

  This did, at least, prevent Quiggers from scooping up the ball and sending it back into orbit. I was doubled up. My face felt like a large, red balloon and my shirt was dripping with sweat.

  ‘How d’ye mean, m’deario?’ said Quigley.

  ‘I mean, was it real? Or was it like a dream or something?’

  Quigley picked up the ball and folded his long fingers round it. Up in the gallery a couple of members had come in to watch The Boss humiliate me.

  ‘Life,’ said Quigley, ‘is a dream and a passing show. Hallo, Bertie!’

  ‘Hallo there, Big Man,’ said Bertie. He was a guy of about seventy, wearing a blue blazer and a yachting-cap. Had he, I wondered, come into the wrong club? Or was this a sort of special drinking outfit?

  Quigley put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You saw what you saw, Simey,’ he said. ‘You saw what God wanted you to see. You were led by God’s will. Because he wants you, Simey. He wants you for Our Church and for Jesus. Make no mistake about that, young shaver!’

  Quigley made these remarks in a loud, audible voice. A couple more spectators had come in behind the person in the blazer. One of them seemed to be wearing what looked like a sombrero. The other, a man of about eighty, nothing but a fluffy, white towel. They seemed to be nodding keenly. Maybe they were Christians, planted there by some committee of the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist.

  ‘What I mean,’ I said in a low voice, ‘is that there are things in the world, in the universe, that we can’t explain. Aren’t there? About why we’re here and what we’re doing here and what it’s all about.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Quigley. ‘Yes, me laddio – there are things in the universe that are pretty hard to make out. There are!’

  He thrust his face into mine. He did not appear to have sweated at all.

  ‘Sin is one of them,’ he said, ‘and wickedness is another!’

  This wasn’t a lot of help. I wanted some basic questions answered here, not the u
sual stuff about being good or bad.

  ‘I mean . . .’ I said, ‘suppose someone . . . well . . . disappeared?’

  ‘Who’s disappeared?’ said Quigley, sharply.

  ‘Well,’ I said, wondering if it was safe to say this out loud, as I did so, ‘Mr Marr.’

  Quigley laughed. ‘Oh, Mr Marr! Well, if he’s disappeared we know where to look, don’t we? It’s simple. Eh?’ He prodded me in the chest. ‘Spacemen got him!’

  He found this very amusing. So too did the guys in the gallery. There were all chuckling to themselves as Quigley handed me the ball and suggested I try to serve. He laid some emphasis on the word ‘try’. I was about to suggest that I went to lie down for an hour or so. Instead I held the ball gingerly between the first and second fingers of my left hand and braced myself for more pain.

  ‘Beef!’ said Quigley. ‘Beef in the service!’ I wafted the racket backwards and forwards a few times. The air resistance was pretty rough. Before I hit it, I had one more go.

  ‘But if you saw something weird, and you had an explanation for that. And it was aliens. I mean, that was the one that made sense, then . . .’

  Quigley came over to me. He looked troubled. He thought I was still on about my dad.

  ‘Norman has a lot of unfinished business here. He was a man very much in medias res . . .’

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘Look,’ said Quigley, ‘we’ve had messages through about Veronica. He’s talked about the Veronica business a lot. And about Mrs Danby too.’

  From the way he said this, it sounded like he and Marjorie had been giving the old man some retrospective marriage guidance.

  ‘Who’s Veronica?’ I said.

  He stopped. He looked a trifle cagey.

  ‘There are some messages from the Other Side that are not suitable for young people’s ears.’

  He cuffed me. I think it was meant affectionately, but I staggered a few yards from the effect of the blow.

  ‘I don’t think the little green chaps have anything to do with your daddy’s continuing presence on the earth,’ said Quigley, ‘and I have to say to you that if I saw one of your aliens I’d go up to it and I’d give it a good hug! I’d say, “Cor lumme, Alien – haven’t yer heard about the love of Jesus?” And I’d take its little green heart to my bosom. Because the love of Jesus isn’t just for you and me, Simo – it’s for Venusians and Droids and the old ninety-foot green monsters from the planet Zog too!’

  I was getting nowhere with this. It would be hopeless to tell him about Mr Marr. I had been stupid even to try. Why had I ever imagined that Quigley would understand? I braced myself for the service.

  ‘Your dad did some very, very wrong things. He didn’t always do right by you, I’m afraid. But God will forgive him for that. What we mustn’t do is shut Jesus out from our hearts, because for as long as we do we hang around the places we loved and the ones we cared for like ghosts!’

  I hit the ball as hard as I could. It helped to imagine that it was Quigley’s head. It sort of trickled down from the racket and dragged itself up to the rear wall of the court. It was already looking tired as it made contact. It came down, rather meekly, towards the Quigley feet.

  Quigley looked at it sternly and did a sort of on-the-spot gallop. His long arms swirled his racket round in the air. The last movement was the sort of thing I had seen conductors do when they were in front of large orchestras that were playing loudly. There was a rush of air through the court and the squash ball was back in business.

  It really had it in for me this time. It clearly thought I had no business to be on the court. It went straight for my head. I held up my racket, purely in self-defence. The ball hit it dead centre and whizzed back against the rear wall. With a stab of fear I realized we were into a rally.

  ‘Good!’ yelled Quigley. ‘Whammo, whammo, whammo, good!’

  He plunged after it like a man possessed.

  ‘Beef in the service!’ he yelled. ‘Beefo, beefo, beefo, beefo, good!’

  There was an ache in the whole of my upper body. Water was running off my hairline like snow in a heatwave. When Quigley made contact with the ball it howled back into play, and, to my surprise, I managed to spoon it back to him.

  He was well away now. He was past caring how the ball had got to him. ‘Just keep it going, young shaver! Last man to the ball’s a cissy, eh?’

  Quiggers didn’t really need a partner. Once the ball was in motion, he just went. All I had to do was look keen and occasionally wave my racket at the ball. He would grunt as he ran past me to bash it back into play – ‘Nice try, Simo! Keep it coming, eh?’

  After a minute or so there was just him, the ball and the walls of the squash-court. He ran from side to side, grunting and thwacking and yelling, and I moved, very gradually, towards the more suitable role of spectator.

  I can’t remember at what point I stole towards the door. All I do remember is that Quigley was volleying and forehanding and backhanding and the spectators were cheering and waving. And suddenly I was tiptoeing back towards the changing-room. I could still hear him grunting and thumping as I made my way out of the front door of The Club, en route for anywhere that wasn’t 24 Stranraer Gardens.

  What had I seen that night my dad had died? And where had Mr Marr gone? None of the adults who made it their business to tell me things could tell me anything about this affair. The only person I could have talked to wasn’t around. I thought about him as I slouched off down the road. I thought about sitting with him after our squash game, him with his head in his hands, me sipping a Coke. But, no matter how hard I thought about him, it wasn’t going to bring him back or explain why the world had got so hard to understand since he died.

  14

  The afternoon had clouded over when I got out of The Club. There was a line of grey clouds, lying like boats at anchor, above the hill. I slung my bag across my back and walked back down Wimbledon Park Road. I headed away from home, towards the big main road noisy with lorries and bright with the signs of tobacconists and fast-food places that never seemed to close.

  I felt low. I stopped just before I got to the main road and tried to see if I could see my right bicep. It was still acting cagey, even though I took off my blazer and rolled up my shirtsleeve. There was still a vague depression where my chest ought to be. Maybe that was why I was so hopeless at all forms of sport.

  But I didn’t really feel bad about being thrashed by Quigley. I think it’s important to rise above such things. I’d rather people thought I was intelligent than superbly muscled and well coordinated.

  I felt my bicep again. It seemed to have disappeared completely.

  What I felt bad about was that I had actually wanted to confide in Quigley. That’s how desperate I was. And it reminded me how much I wanted to have a normal family. You know? The kind that they have in that soap-powder ad where they’ve made a home movie and dad laughs when she gets the stains out. I mean, I know it’s schmuck. I know they’re only a bunch of deadbeat actors, but sometimes I wish I could step inside the screen and become part of them. Khan gets kept in to do homework most evenings. Greenslade’s dad hit his brother with a cricket bat. And Richthofer’s mum – who isn’t really his mum – had an affair with a chiropodist. But, compared to my family, they are all normal.

  I can’t understand how my mum and dad ever got together. You know? I can remember dad coming in one day, when we were on holiday in Dorset, grasping me by the arm and saying, in the serious voice he used to talk about religion, ‘Always remember, Simon, I love your mother very much.’

  Why was he telling me? Why did I have to remember? It wasn’t helped by his adding, as he went back out to start having another row with her, ‘She hems me in, boy! She hems me in! But by God I love her!’

  He should have been on the stage really. But he joined the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist as a substitute.

  I mooched down the main road, games bag on my shoulder. Why couldn’t we do the things normal people do
, like go to bowling-alleys? Why did the First Spiritualist Church believe that the Charrington Bowl, Kingston, was ‘unclean and filthy with the work of the whore’? Why did we have to eat fish on Wednesdays? Was it absolutely necessary to follow Ella Walsh’s instruction to ‘avoid Ireland like the plague’? I’d quite like to go to Dublin. You know?

  For some reason I turned off left down Furnival Gardens. Thinking about it afterwards, I decided that it must have been exerting a strong psychic pull. It doesn’t look like a road with any spiritual significance. It isn’t on a ley line or anything. At first sight it’s just another long, pointless South London street with too many cars parked in it. But, as I trudged up it, I started to feel weirder and weirder. It wasn’t simply that I felt depressed, although, if I had had a guitar and been able to play, I’d have sung the blues. As my eyes wandered from the dirt-stained pavement to the greyer sky, I could feel a presence in the air. And it was him.

  You always knew Dad was around. You knew it from his cough or his habit of breaking into song or his preference for bawling at people he wanted to go and see rather than walking around and trying to find them. Some people, like my mum, aren’t really present and correct even when they’re there, but there was never any doubt about Dad. The broken veins on his cheeks, the half-smoked tipped cigarettes, the low growl before he delivered an opinion about something – they were all so vivid.

  I couldn’t believe he’d died, you see. All I wanted was a middle-aged man with a big nose. That wasn’t so much to ask, was it? Surely the spirits that arrange the world could lay that on for me? I looked hard across the street, in between the cars, up towards the road ahead that was rising to another main street running across it, watching for that familiar face and listening for that unforgettable voice.

  In one of the houses on the other side of the street an upper window was open. Loud classical music was coming out of it. I imagined someone lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling and watching the breeze stir the grey lace curtains this way and that. Up to my right I could see the black railings at the beginning of the patch of waste ground, and, ahead, nothing but roads and houses and, beyond them, houses and roads, cluttered with people as lonely and scared as me. The suburbs are hell. They go on and on and on, like Sunday afternoons.