They Came From SW19

by Nigel Williams

  I don’t think I would have made quite so much impact, however, if it hadn’t been for the fact that, while they were carrying me round the church yelling, ‘Aliens!’ ‘Jesus Christ!’ and ‘The snake cometh!’ the roof fell in. I say ‘fell in’. In religion these terms are relative. You know? One minute Jesus is a sort of cross between Batman and Captain America, next thing he is ‘just a bloke with a few special powers’, and before you know it he is a deranged Jew with a no more than ordinary claim on our imaginations. A couple of sheets of corrugated iron broke loose and fell on Mr Pugh’s head. That was all. But it was enough. In a week or so you would have thought a crowd of angels had wafted in from Putney singing my name and crying ‘Hosanna!’

  The burning bush, right? I mean, did it? You know? Or did it just look kind of . . . reddish?

  Nobody said much to me after the service. As we trooped out of the hall, the old lady in the wheelchair was still trying to get up and Clara Beeding was kneeling in front of her. I thought I heard her say, ‘Go on, you can do it!’

  A couple of people came up to shake my hand as we got into Quigley’s car. He stood back, a tight smile on his face, as Roger de Mornay said, ‘A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful speech!’

  Once we were inside the car, Quiggers allowed himself a full-blooded sneer. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘little green men!’

  I didn’t speak. In fact, nobody said much on the way back. Just as we came into Stranraer Gardens, Mrs Quigley said, ‘We have worked so hard to bring you to the Lord, Simon! You cannot know how important to the church this is. Mrs Danby . . .’

  Here Quigley cut her off sharply. ‘Don’t let’s talk about Mrs Danby. I’m sure we can manage Mrs Danby, Marjorie!’

  There was something really horrible about the way he said this. A pure flash of creepiness. I missed my dad more than ever as I went into the house, ahead of the others, and climbed the drab stairs to lie on my bed, looking out at the bright blue sky above the street.

  After a while, the door to my bedroom opened and my mum’s head peered round it. Her mouth was turned down and her little eyes were beady with worry. She blinked at me for a minute or two and then said, ‘Aliens!’

  I didn’t respond. She clicked her tongue in the way she does when I eat peanut butter straight from the jar.

  ‘Spacemen!’ she went on.

  I sighed.

  Mum went over to my window and looked down at the street. In a small, faraway voice, she said, ‘Mr Quigley’s awfully cross with you and Pike. He’s very worried. He’s very worried indeed. And he cares about you, Simon. He thinks about you and prays for you all the time. He does!’

  She went out then, and left me alone.

  The next week saw a constant procession of spiritualists in and out of our kitchen. Some of them came to talk seriously with Quigley and to shake their heads at me. Rather more, including Pike, came to shake me by the hand and ask me detailed and unanswerable questions about the nature of the extraterrestrials who had landed in the Wimbledon area. Once or twice, at mealtimes, I thought Quigley was going to speak to me about the matter. But he didn’t. Usually he likes to get you alone, as, I have noticed, a lot of Christians do. So, when he suggested that we all go ‘to furnish the larder’ on Saturday morning, I thought I was reasonably safe.

  Normal people go shopping. First Spiritualists go to furnish the larder.

  Shopping is a tricky one for them. You have to be very careful when prowling along the shelves. A First Spiritualist doesn’t drink coffee, or eat white bread or cheese (apart from Gorgonzola – the Good Cheese, as it’s called), and faced by a frankfurter is liable to scoot off into a corner, whimpering. Nobody quite knows who decided all these things were dangerous and evil, or why they did so. But they take the rules pretty seriously. Branston Pickle is ‘harmonious and honest’, but all forms of sausage are, basically, in league with Beelzebub.

  One of the reasons they go shopping in groups is because not everyone agrees about which foods are OK and which ones are going to plunge you into hellfire. Someone will reach for a jar of fish-paste only to be brought up short by another member of the party reminding them that fish-paste is unclean, while someone else may get as far as the checkout with a year’s supply of baked beans, when, across the crowded shelves of the supermarket, comes a voice reminding them of the danger they are facing.

  There are a lot of scores paid off when shopping. My dad used to love chocolate cake, and, whenever they were having a row, my mum would remember that chocolate was ‘a poisonous thorn in the side of Creation’. At other times the two of them would wolf down a whole packet of After Eight mints with no apparent difficulty.

  This Saturday we went with the Quigleys, Hannah Dooley, Pike, the Clara Beedings (as Roger and Clara are known) and, to my surprise and dismay, Mrs Danby. She showed up in her Rolls in the car park of the supermarket, and, although there was a lot of nodding and smiling and remarks about coincidences, it was pretty clear that her presence had been arranged for someone’s benefit. I suspected it might be mine.

  I hate going around in groups. Especially groups of people from the church. I’m terrified we might see Khan or Greenslade on a day when everyone has decided to follow Mother Walsh’s directions about placing the feet on the ground without damaging the old insect life. But on this particular day we looked almost normal. Everyone was very friendly, and there was much jolly laughter as we passed the frankfurters and Quigley made as if to ward off the evil eye.

  He waited until we were browsing through the chilled fish before raising the issue: ‘Do you really think that Old Mother Walsh’s snake is actually going to wriggle down Wimbledon High Street when the time comes?’

  I didn’t ask what time he meant. The time of Snakes Wriggling Down Wimbledon High Street, presumably.

  ‘Er . . .’

  My mum was piling tinned ravioli into the trolley. She looked like a small animal that expected to be surprised at any moment.

  ‘I don’t think you do, do you?’ said Quiggers. ‘I think you think, as I do, that Old Mother Walsh wasn’t talking about a real snake. She was talking about the snake that is in all of us all the time!’

  What snake was this? A tapeworm perhaps?

  ‘A lot of the simpler souls,’ said Quigley, ‘probably think a great big snake is going to slither out at them and start gobbling them up in a few years.’

  You could see from Pike’s face that this was exactly what he thought. If this snake did show, I thought, please God it liked the taste of men with beards.

  ‘Cor lumme, young shaver!’ said Quigley. ‘Your little green chaps are no more than that snake, really, are they? They are a way of saying, “The world’s in pretty bad shape, Jesus, and pretty soon someone will come along and give us pain and suffering and woe.” ’

  I looked him straight in the eye.

  ‘No they’re not. They’re just there, that’s all. And I never said they were green. What I said was, it looks as if they’re here. You know?’

  Quigley laughed. He was still being Mr Nice Guy. My mum had finished shovelling the ravioli into the trolley. She and Emily and Mrs Quigley were headed for toilet tissue at a brisk pace.

  ‘Little talk with Jesus?’ he said, and, halfway through reaching for a tube of tomato purée, he closed his eyes and froze solid as if overtaken by a large quantity of molten lava. I waited for him to finish.

  When somebody pressed his play button, I said, ‘People think I’m stupid because I think there’s something in this alien business. But I’m not!’

  Quigley grabbed my arm. ‘No, li’l’ Simo,’ he said. ‘You are not. You are special! You are favoured.’

  He rocked to and fro, his eyes half shut. On the line to Jesus once again. ‘ “A boy will come ’fore the snake’s unfurled, and preach the woman to save the world!” ’ he said. A bloke who was trying to get at the tomato purée gave him rather an odd look, but Quigley was not bothered. I recognized another of Old Mother Walsh’s rhymes.

 
‘ “Go to the river in ones and twos, but be sure you put on your overshoes!” ’ I quoted back at Quiggers.

  He became enormously excited and, as the rest of the party started back towards us with a huge mound of lavatory paper balanced on the ravioli, he hopped from foot to foot, clutching my arm. Only Pike, I noticed, had stayed with us. He was watching Quigley, a sour look on his chapped little face.

  ‘That,’ said Quigley, ‘is the point. Old Mother Walsh didn’t always mean what she said to be taken literally. But, by God, the end of the world is coming and, by God, a pure and holy boy will preach the woman who will speed his coming!’

  With these words, he pointed dramatically at Emily Quigley.

  If anyone was going to be chosen to usher in the end of the world, she could well be the girl to do it. She had the face for it. Was this the deal? Did Quigley see me as some kind of John the Baptist figure? If he did, it wasn’t surprising he was trying to get me Confirmed in Faith. Anything to make Emily Quigley look good. I may not be pure in heart, but, since Mike Jarvis the skateboarder went to live in Nottingham, I am about the only fourteen-year-old boy in the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist.

  It gave me a spooky feeling, actually. Maybe he had a point. Maybe what I was saying wasn’t so very different from what Old Mother Walsh had given the troops all those years ago.

  He could see I was wavering, and he held my arm tightly as the others came up. ‘Extraterrestrials’, he said, ‘may well be on their way. I don’t dispute that. Who knows what the Lord will send us on Judgement Day? But, cor lumme, snakes and aliens don’t have to be taken literally. All we know is that, as Mother Walsh said, when the pure boy preaches the woman . . .’ – here he gave Emily a meaningful look – ‘. . . something pretty nasty is going to be heading in our direction. Don’t call it aliens, Simo, call it Sin. Call it Wickedness. Call it Pain and Suffering!’

  Pike gave him a curiously malevolent look. ‘Call it aliens!’ he said in a rather spooky, hollow voice. ‘I know it’s aliens!’

  Quigley looked rattled. But, before he could say anything, Mrs Danby emerged from round a large pile of tins of tunafish. She was carrying an armful of cat-food cans and smirking to herself. Quigley, with a short, convulsive movement that was halfway between a bow and a twitch, took my hand and led me towards her. ‘Here’s your boy,’ he said. ‘Shall we away the noo?’

  This whole thing had a prearranged feel. What were they going to do to me now? Take me out to a patch of waste ground and kick my head in for spreading dissent?

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘We have a sufficiency of ravioli,’ said Mrs Quigley, ‘and . . . er . . . Norman has something to say to us!’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  They all started to look at each other rather furtively. Mrs Danby dumped the cat-food in the trolley and came close to me. She smelt of dried flowers and pepper. There were bags of skin under her neck, and she had a deep, posh, drawling voice, like an actress in an old film.

  ‘Norman has specifically asked to talk to us at Mr Quigley’s house,’ she said. ‘Even though the kitchen is only half-completed!’

  ‘Maybe’, I said, with a completely straight face, ‘he wants to see how the units are getting on.’

  Mum gave an eager little nod. ‘Yes . . . yes . . . maybe he does!’

  I marvelled, once again, at the rapid change in my father’s attitudes after his death. The last words he had spoken to me on the subject of kitchen units had been really quite abusive.

  I wasn’t at all sure about this. Look what had happened at the last seance. And, since then, there had been Mr Marr’s disappearance and my dad’s own, frightening version of the Second Coming. I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing that voice again – the low, small voice like that of a child alone in a house at night.

  ‘Do we have to?’ I asked.

  There was suddenly a very, very tense atmosphere. All of them were looking at me. Mum started to sing, in a light, quiet voice – something she only does when she is nervous. They had clearly been leading up to this all week.

  ‘Oh, Simon,’ Mrs Danby was saying. ‘I led your father down dark and narrow ways. Ways strewn with thorns and brambles and alive with venomous snakes! And now the whole church is in danger!’

  Quigley nodded vigorously. ‘I think,’ he said, with a rather savage look in Pike’s direction, ‘that we are in need of Guidance. Splits in the church, Master Pike! Splits in the church! Remember the Lewis Doctrine! Remember the Schismatics of New Malden!’

  I had not heard anything about these guys. But as, presumably, they had been wiped off the face of the earth by someone pretty close to Ella Walsh or Rose Fox, there seemed little point in asking about them.

  There was nothing I could say. I am fourteen. I have no rights. I followed them out into the car park and sat, miserably, in the back of Quigley’s car as, in a mood of forced cheerfulness, we drove towards the Quigleys’ house behind Mrs Danby’s Rolls. I was squashed between Pike and Hannah Dooley in the back seat. The summer still hadn’t gone away, although we were almost out of September. Above us, great masses of cumulus clouds stood out in the sky like old-fashioned sculptures.

  The Quigleys live further out than us. To get to their house you drive down arterial roads lined with buildings that are neither warehouses nor shops. They squat on ragged patches of grass like abandoned containers, painted bright colours, stuffed with more than anyone could want of Do-It-Yourself Equipment, Garden Furniture or, in one case, Pure Leather.

  The Quigleys live next to a park. Their house is semi-detached. It is worth £300,000. So Mr Quigley keeps saying. I wouldn’t live in it if you paid me twice that amount. It is a big, square box painted dirty white, and, although he is always knocking through, extending, repapering and spring-cleaning, there is something dead about the place. The furniture stands around listlessly as if it is waiting to be sold. In the garden, the flowers and vegetables are as neat as Mr Quigley’s accounts. There is an apple-tree up against the fence that separates them from their neighbours, but it has been given a kind of Buddhist monk’s haircut. It does not look capable of bearing fruit.

  The sun was still bright as we approached the Quigleys’ house, but it didn’t seem to have reached their road, which was the same as it ever was: dank and green and desperately quiet.

  The first thing I noticed was that the whole of the top half of the house was swathed in what looked like green plastic bandages. There was scaffolding rearing up the face of the house from the front garden and, next to the front door, a large notice saying:

  GORDON BRUNT

  GENERAL BUILDER

  SINCE 1964 SERVING SOUTH LONDON

  Next to the notice was a fat man in blue dungarees and a white hard hat. He looked as if he might well be Gordon Brunt. He also looked as if his mission might be to make South London completely and utterly miserable. As the crowd of us came out of the car, he leaned backwards over Mr Quigley’s fence and spat, slowly and deliberately, into the geraniums.

  ‘What do they do, Marjorie?’ said Quigley, with sudden and violent passion.

  Mrs Quigley was curiously calm as she replied: ‘They take our money. They abuse us. They leave their filthy newspapers in the loo!’

  When she actually spoke to the guy she was quite amiable. ‘Hallo, Kevin. Are there problems?’

  Kevin looked at her blearily. ‘It’s a bastard, this one, Mrs Q,’ he said. ‘It’s a real bastard!’

  Quigley coughed. ‘We need,’ he said, rather stiffly, ‘to use the house for prayer.’

  Kevin looked at him suspiciously. ‘You what?’

  ‘We need,’ said Quigley, with deliberate, offensive clarity, ‘to use our dwelling to talk to the Lord Jesus Christ.’

  Kevin looked at him doubtfully. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said. ‘The plumbers are in.’

  At this moment, a loud banging noise came from one of the upstairs windows. Quigley, who seemed not quite in control of himself, grabbed the
man by the ears. ‘This is my house, wherein I dwell. And I would be grateful if you could get up there and tell that oaf Duncan to stop whatever it is he is doing!’

  I hadn’t understood, until now, why it was so important for the Quigleys to make contact with my dad at their house. Now it was clear. When he’s at home, Mr Quigley is even more masterful than he is in other people’s houses. The man shambled off into the house, and the rest of us picked our way across the front garden.

  As we came into the front hall I heard Kevin yelling up the stairs, ‘Stop the hammering! They want to pray!’

  ‘You what?’ said an invisible plumber.

  ‘They want to pray!’ said Kevin.

  A large, hairy youth came out of the bathroom at the head of the stairs. He was carrying what looked like a huge steel club. ‘Why can’t the idiots pray somewhere else?’ he said. Then he saw Mr Quigley, and his hand went to his mouth. Quigley clearly had a master–slave relationship with these people.

  ‘We will be in the back room,’ said Quigley in tones of quiet authority, and, watched by several more astonished employees of Gordon Brunt Ltd, we all filed through into Quigley’s dining-room.

  The ceiling had been removed, and we were looking up at where the roof of the house once had been. That, as I had seen from the outside, was shrouded in green plastic, and, as all the windows seemed to have been boarded up, there was scarcely any light at all. It felt as if you were in the middle of some enormous forest where the trees had grown together, blocking out the day.

  Quigley pushed the seance table into the middle of the room, grinning at me over his shoulder as he did so. ‘We’re rough and ready, young shaver,’ he said. ‘But we’re homey, aren’t we?’

  His confidence, which had slipped a little since my Testifying, was coming back. Here, surrounded by his family, his vast collection of Gilbert and Sullivan records, his several hundred bound copies of What Car magazine, his three watercolours of Wimbledon under snow and his collection of rare antiques, he was a man again. Even though all these objects were shrouded in heavy-duty plastic, he was a man again.