They Came From SW19

by Nigel Williams

  Sometimes, in hushed voices in the evenings, I heard my mum and the Quigleys talking about money. But nobody said anything to me about that, nor about where Mr Marr’s body had gone after Pikey ran into him with Lethal Weapon III.

  One evening, after he’d been answering more questions from Toombs and Beeding, Quigley came into my room when I was doing my homework. I didn’t look up. There was something scary about him these days. He just came over to my desk, looked down at what I was writing and whispered, almost to himself, ‘You’re as bad as your bloody father!’ Then, with the back of his hand, he hit me, hard, across the side of my face.

  One day, towards the end of October, I came home from school late to find my mum, Marjorie and Emily sitting in Quigley’s car outside the house. My mum looked as if she was in the middle of being kidnapped. She gave me a weak smile and a fluttery little wave. It gave her, suddenly, the helpless look of royalty.

  I tapped on the glass, and she wound down the window. ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

  ‘We’re off to write prayers,’ said Mrs Quigley, answering for her, as she tended to do these days.

  ‘Do come, Simon,’ said Mum.

  The back wall of the First Church is littered with scrap pieces of paper on which are written things like PLEASE HELP AUNTIE JOAN THROUGH THIS PHASE OF THE TREATMENT, or DEAR GOD, HELP ALL THE PEOPLE I SAW ON WATERLOO STATION THIS WEEKEND and PRAY FOR ALL, ALIVE AND DECEASED, AT 110 HOLDEN ROAD, FINCHLEY. I wasn’t sure for whom they would be praying. Under the present circumstances it could equally well have been me or Quigley.

  ‘Where is he?’ I said.

  They all looked shifty. ‘He’s out the back,’ said Marjorie. ‘With Danzig.’

  Danzig! It sounded as if Quigley had passed beyond the reach of prayer. Who the hell was Danzig? A German missionary, perhaps. I turned my back on them and marched towards the front door.

  ‘Danzig,’ called my mum, as I disappeared into the house, ‘looked as if he might do it. So Roger stayed with him.’

  This was getting even more mysterious. As I went through the drab little hall, I wondered whether there was an overseas branch of the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist and, if so, whether it contained a man called Danzig. He sounded like a guy with a problem.

  As I came to the door that leads out to the garden I heard Quigley’s voice. ‘No, Danzig,’ he was saying in a coaxing sort of way. ‘No, no, no. Not there, Danzig. There! There! See? There!’

  Had Quigley finally come out of the closet? Was he trying to get Danzig to do to him what no other man had ever done? I suddenly had a clear mental picture of Danzig – a hairy-chested man with a gold medallion and tight, white trousers.

  I walked through on to what my dad used to call ‘the wide green spaces of 24 Stranraer Gardens’ and heard Quigley’s voice again, this time low and thrilling. ‘Yes, Danzig,’ he gasped. ‘Yes, yes, yes! There! Good! Good! Good!’

  I turned to my left and saw a large Labrador. It was squatting on the flower-bed. Its back legs were straining furiously and its face wore a fixed and glassy expression. It was almost certainly going through the final stages of the digestive process. Quigley peered down at its bum. He looked pleased. ‘My dog,’ he said. ‘Hundred and ten quid!’

  The animal gave a final grunt and expelled whatever it had to expel. There was certainly a lot of it. When it had finished, it hared off across the garden as if it had done something clever.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘they’re off to pray.’

  He was wearing one of my father’s ties. My dad always claimed to have gone to public school, but he was never precise about which one. The ties all looked as if they came from a jumble sale. I never liked him wearing them, but I liked them even less round Quigley’s neck.

  ‘To pray for you, Simo,’ he said.

  ‘They needn’t bother, Quigley,’ I said.

  He came over to me then. He was breathing heavily. I could see everything about him very clearly. The black hairs on his hands. The ridiculous, wiry neatness of his hair. The pallid, clammy surface of his skin. ‘You need help, boy,’ he said.

  ‘Listen,’ I replied, ‘pretty soon the whole of south-west London is going to be under the iron heel of Argol of the planet Tellenor. I should move on out if I were you.’

  Quigley sneered. ‘You never believed any of that rubbish, did you? It was just a stick to beat me with, wasn’t it?’

  I didn’t move back, although he shoved his face close to mine. ‘No,’ I said. ‘The really pathetic thing about all of this is I did. I still almost do believe it. That’s how badly you bastards have fucked up my brain!’

  Quigley started to twitch. ‘I’m not leaving, Simon,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be here for the rest of your life.’

  I still didn’t move.

  With a sort of grunt, he wound his hand back and again clouted me, hard, on the face. It hurt a lot, but I didn’t let him see that. I just stood there. After a while he didn’t seem to see me. He turned to the dog and said something to it. For a moment I looked away, and when I looked back he was gone. A minute later I heard the car engine start. I was alone in the house.

  My dad was dead. There were no aliens. Or, if there were, they were playing it so cool as to be almost unnoticeable. There were no ghosts or gods or any of that stuff. There was only the unlimited prospect of Quigley. It was time to go.

  I went back into the house and, when I was sure no adults had sneaked back in to spy on me, I went upstairs to my bedroom and started to pack.

  I didn’t take much. A few computer magazines, some cash I pinched from Quigley’s drawer and my Abbey National card. I have £300 in there, which is quite a lot of money. My dad always said it was for when I got married. If I hung around here any longer, it would all go on a nose job for Emily Quigley. I took two paperback books, a toothbrush, my Ventolin inhaler and a copy of the repeat prescription, four T-shirts, two pairs of jeans and my other pair of trainers. Everything I really care about fitted into my games bag, which, according to the principles of Tai-Ping, is how it should be.

  I looked round at the picture of Bruce Lee, the travel poster of Malaysia my dad gave me, my certificate of merit for Grade Two Saxophone, my 320 computer discs, my colour picture of an iguana and the tattered remains of a portable snooker table we got when I was twelve.

  I thought about Mum and wondered whether to leave her a note. I decided not to – simply because I couldn’t think of what to write.

  Outside, the October day was darkening. I headed down the stairs into the silence of the early evening. When I got out on the street, I would just keep going. The sun was almost gone, but that was OK. I’d find a field or a park bench, and early next morning I’d head on down to the sea. Somewhere or other is a place my dad took me once, where there are tall stone buildings huddled above a blue sea, donkeys, and guys in grey suits with open white shirts and faces that look like their owners have had time to consider every move they make. Somewhere there’s somewhere that isn’t Wimbledon. Some place that isn’t full of narrow grey streets and closed-up lives and people like Albert Roger Quigley.

  I had one call to make before I hit the road.

  There’s a pub about four streets away from us where I used to go with my dad. Sometimes he’d look across at me, when my mum was deep in a copy of Psychic News and there was nothing on the television any time from May to October. He’d say, ‘Fancy a pint?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  Not that I ever drank beer. I’d sit with a Coke and some crisps and watch him drink. Watch him sip in that amazingly slow way that adults do. Watch him stretch, yawn, look across at me and come out with those perfect forty-year-old cliches they use to make the time pass easily and without controversy.

  ‘It’s a hard road, Simon.’

  ‘It is, Dad. It is.’

  It is.

  I wasn’t going to drink, or anything. I’m not one of those fourteen-year-olds who go to pubs. I look my age. You know? I’m a straight-down-t
he-middle, ten-plus-four wonder. One of those aimless youths you stumble over on their way from the pinball machine to the nearest shop that sells electrical equipment. A blurred, white, not-quite-grown-up face in the crowd.

  The garden there, where we used to sit, has a swing and a slide and is framed by a huge chestnut-tree. This mother was in the terminal stages of yellow. From time to time, a leaf would detach itself and sashay down to join its friends, slicing sideways, plunging headlong and then ripple-dissolving to the damp grass. There was dew on the white steel tables and a feeling that, at any moment, a man would come out of the bar and start stacking the chairs away. It was just dusk, when things start to look not quite themselves. I watched the light drain away and felt the cold clawing at the earth between the tables. The end of the year.

  I sat at the table we used to use and tried to think what I really believed. I felt I ought to be thinking something momentous. It isn’t every day you run away from home. Surely I had got some things clearer since he died?

  I hadn’t. I was just as confused as that day she came in and told me the news. Did life go on like this, I wondered? Did it offer absolutely no solutions? Is it all punishment from now on in?

  There were a couple of drinkers in the far corner, but no one noticed me. I was just getting up to go and make my way on down to Greece when I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard a deep voice. ‘Hi, kid!’

  I looked up. It was my dad.

  26

  I jumped. For a moment I was right back in my bedroom that first time. I blinked. I closed my eyes and opened them again. He was still there. Viewed from close up, he showed absolutely no sign of being controlled by an extraterrestrial intelligence. The guys from Tellenor were probably so good that they had overreached themselves and programmed free will into him. You know?

  He was holding a pint of beer in his left hand, and, when he smiled, I could see the fillings in his teeth. The dentalwork was a perfect match. They had worked wonders on the timing, too. He drank, wiped the froth off his mouth, put the glass on the table, readjusted it, dropped his hand and then put it behind his head.

  I sat there, waiting for him to dematerialize. He didn’t. Instead, he did a couple more fortysomething things. He pursed up his lips, looked at me, then away, and then, after shifting carefully on his seat, he farted.

  What more do you want? It drinks beer! It picks its nose! It farts! We will never catch up with this galaxy, no matter how hard we try. They mimic our greatest achievements in a way that puts our own selves to shame.

  ‘I was not as surprised as I thought I was going to be,’ he said eventually, ‘to hear myself pronounced clinically dead!’

  I goggled at him.

  ‘I hadn’t been feeling terrific,’ he went on, ‘since I got into the hospital. A coronary thrombosis doesn’t exactly leave a guy feeling perky!’ He yawned. ‘They don’t really check on you very closely. It’s very much a wing-it oh-he-looks-a-bit-stiff situation. I mean, they don’t hold a mirror to your lips or anything.’

  ‘They don’t?’

  ‘They do not, old son. They thump your chest a few times and call the old crash unit and then they grope around for your pulse, but it’s a very amateurish affair really.’

  He wasn’t wearing the suit he’d been wearing in Furnival Gardens. He was wearing jeans, a sports shirt and a cardigan. For some reason I found the cardigan really offensive. It wasn’t the sort of thing my dad would wear at all. Maybe the aliens had got into shopping.

  ‘I don’t think that your average British doctor is very good at diagnosing death,’ he went on. ‘I don’t think it’s taught at medical school. I wonder the mortuaries aren’t full of people banging on the doors and trying to get out!’

  ‘Do you mean,’ I said, ‘that you weren’t dead?’

  He grinned. ‘I didn’t experience myself as dead. Although that was the medical profession’s analysis of my condition. At first I thought I might be having an out-of-body experience. Then I thought it might be an in-body experience – that my soul was to be confined to my body for some sinister theological reason.’

  I reached out across the table to touch him. He took my hand and held it in a very un-Tellenorean way. This was him, all right. This was my dad, just as he had always been.

  ‘What did . . .’

  ‘I think the first clue I had that I might still be on the team was when your mum pitched up to inspect the body.’

  ‘You mean . . .’

  ‘They got me out of the ward and put me under a sheet in this side room. I lay there, quite quiet. I could hear everything that was going on, but I couldn’t move or speak.’

  I tried to picture him under the sheet. The light filtered through. Like lying in bed in the morning when they call you to get up and you lie there, listening to the noises in the street below, wondering whether you’ll ever get up and join them.

  ‘I heard the nurse ask her if she wanted to take a last look at me. She said she didn’t think that would be necessary.’

  ‘Typical!’

  ‘I was a bit pissed off,’ said my dad. ‘I mean, it isn’t every day you get the chance to view your old man’s corpse, is it? It’s an experience, isn’t it?’

  There was a pause. Then he sucked at his teeth and went on.

  ‘She was actually surprisingly complimentary about me.’

  ‘I know,’ I said glumly.

  ‘They all were. The nurse said I had been a very good patient. Christ, I’d only been in the hospital for about ten minutes before I snuffed it!’

  It must have been weird lying there. Presumably trying to move a leg or an arm or get your mouth to move. And hearing these voices from a long, long way away. Voices that had been chattering away at you all your life.

  ‘The nurse said I was very good company, which I thought was praise indeed for a guy who had just had a coronary thrombosis. Then your mother went on about how I had always wanted to be buried at sea.’

  ‘That’s what she said to me.’

  He scratched his head. ‘Did I ever say I wanted to be buried at sea?’

  ‘Not in my hearing.’

  ‘She seemed very convinced of the matter. From the tone of her voice, I thought I was not going to be able to avoid being slung in the box and slipped off the Isle of Wight ferry. I just couldn’t move or speak. You see?’

  I could picture my mum and the nurse, who, for some reason, I had decided was Irish. A short, plump woman from Galway.

  ‘She said I was an interesting and sad man in many ways.’

  ‘Who? The nurse or Mum?’

  He gave me a strange look. ‘Your mum, of course. Do you think I’m a sad man?’

  ‘No,’ I said, rather shortly.

  He took another deep draught of his beer. He looked up at the pale white sky above the half-ruined trees. He looked like a guy glad to be alive. With each minute that passed he was getting less and less extraterrestrial. But, at the same time, more and more alien. I didn’t recognize some of his gestures. He’d got a new one where he crossed his feet, and a new version of his smile. It seemed to stay on his face for slightly longer than was necessary.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, in a conversational tone, ‘then they took me down to the morgue.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Indeed. Ganymede, they call it. I mean, the guys who took me down were real incompetents. They treat the dead with absolutely no respect.’

  He sounded rather civic about this. As if his experience was going to lead to a campaign for the rights of corpses, or something.

  He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘She didn’t cry or anything. It was just sort of, “Shall we take him down then?” and Bob’s your unc.’

  ‘She was . . .’

  ‘She was pretty calm about the whole business. I could have done with a bit of weeping and gnashing of the old teeth. We got a very low-key response.’

  Well, that wasn’t how she had behaved at home. Hadn’t she said she’d gone wild? I didn’t feel like finding o
ut whose version of events was true. I was too busy holding on to the edge of my chair and waiting for him to rise twenty feet in the air.

  ‘We had our problems, but . . .’ He sucked his lower lip. ‘It makes you think, being in a mortuary.’

  I could see that this might well be true.

  ‘It makes you think, when you hear people call you Charlie as they sling you on the slab.’

  ‘Why did they call you Charlie?’

  ‘I think they call all the stiffs Charlie. I mean, they’re dead. They don’t count, do they? That’s it. Sling them aside. You know? Pickle the bastards in formalin and donate their remains to medical research.’

  We were on to Dead Lib again. He looked quite morose at the treatment handed out to cadavers. Then he took another long drink of beer.

  ‘We don’t understand life, do we?’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s here and it’s so sweet, and we don’t understand it.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got a clue, I tell you.’

  It was amazing, really, that he had managed to recover from the heart attack so easily. He looked, I have to say, absolutely great. Still, I suppose this was what happened in the Middle Ages. You rolled around, went blue and your eyes shot up into your head. And then, if you made it, off you went to till the fields or whatever. I had heard the National Health Service was in a bad way, but I didn’t realize that do-it-yourself, take-your-own-chances medicine had reached this level of intensity.

  ‘I started to come round when they put me on the slab. I was lucky not to go straight in the fridge, I tell you.’

  ‘I bet!’

  ‘The word “autopsy” kept running through my mind. You know? But they were at the end of their shift. They closed the old door behind them and there I was, alone with a few dozen stiffs. Assuming they were stiffs, and not a fresh consignment of medical mistakes.’