They Came From SW19

by Nigel Williams

  It was possible that all this business with my dad was a deliberate ploy by Argol and his pals to destabilize yours truly. After all, I was close to Marr, wasn’t I? And he was the only guy on to them. Maybe my dad was really and truly dead and what I had been looking at, in the road outside our house and in Furnival Gardens, had been a hologram put out by the Tellenoreans. Maybe it was me they were after. Maybe the reason I had Testified the way I did was a kind of double bluff on Argol’s part. Maybe they had already got to me.

  I was running now. Putting one foot after the other in a style I have developed during cross-country runs organized by Cranborne School, I allowed my head to sort of loll forward and my legs to patter after it, leaving the middle bit of me completely free for inflation and deflation. At any moment I expected one of the masters, placed at strategic intervals to stop a guy taking short cuts or lighting up a Havana cigar, to leap out from a place of concealment, brandishing The Times and bellowing, ‘Come on, Britton! Come along there!’

  As I panted into Stranraer Gardens, following the no-hopers’ rule for cross-country – never run in a straight line – I was flailing my arms left and right and zigzagging at an angle of about ten degrees to the horizontal.

  Everything in Stranraer Gardens was as still as I had left it. The trees in the street were shamming dead. Every last bit of unkempt hedge in our front garden was taking the same attitude it had always taken. In whatever street we live, our garden is always the shabby one. ‘Gardening vexeth the spirit,’ my dad used to say to me with a broad wink whenever my mum asked him to get out and cut the lawn. Whenever she said to him, ‘But, Norman – don’t you want to sit in it, like other people?’ he would reply, rather grandly, ‘A garden, my dear, is a place for passing through as quickly as possible on the way to the pub.’

  I stopped a few yards from the house. All around the fences, the parked cars and the neat roofs was that weird stuff you get just before dawn in the suburbs – it isn’t light or darkness but some other thing entirely – shadowy, ghostly, but so much itself you feel you could reach out and run it through your fingers.

  I got my breath back. With that stupid feeling of relief you get when you’re home, I pushed open the door, tripped over what felt like a set of billiard balls and fell headlong into a carefully arranged selection of this week’s vegetables. As I went face first into about two kilos of potatoes, a large hand seized hold of my T-shirt from behind. The hand pulled me up towards the ceiling.

  ‘Where’ve you been, my laddio?’ said Quigley’s voice, quiet but deadly. ‘What have you been a-doing of ?’

  ‘I’ve been . . .’

  That was as far as I got.

  ‘It’s been on the Common looking for little green men, has it?

  And holding their little green hands and having little green drinks with them and having little green chats about their little green planet . . .’

  ‘Listen . . .’ I said.

  He was hitting me really hard. It was only when I swung to the left and broke free for a moment that I was able to observe that he was wearing my dad’s grey towelling dressing-gown. My dad wasn’t a tall man and it only just covered Quigley’s enormous willy. It made him look as if he was wearing a mini-skirt.

  ‘What are you trying to do to our church, Sonny Jim?’ he hissed. ‘Why are you trying to split us in two? After all I have done for you!’

  I could not think of a single thing that Quigley had ever done for me. But now was not the time to tell him. He hit hard.

  ‘Do you know what hangs on Mrs Danby’s covenant?’ he said. ‘Have you any idea?’

  I had an idea what the covenant was. It sounded as if all this was as much about money as it was about religion.

  From upstairs I heard my mum shout, ‘What is it? What is it?’ Quigley went mad. He started to clout me around the head, yelling, ‘Burglar! Burglar! Burglar!’

  ‘Burglar?’ came a cheeping from the back bedroom.

  ‘Burglar!’ yelled Quigley. ‘Burglar!’

  Pronouncing the word seemed to bring him to his senses. He stopped, looked over his shoulder and put both his hands up to my face. ‘O Jesus Christ,’ he said, looking over my shoulder as if JC had just wandered in from the garden, ‘did you die for this boy?’

  I kneed him in the balls as hard as I could.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said, doubling up in pain.

  ‘Oh, screw Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Screw him. And screw his mother Mary too!’

  Quigley gave what I can only describe as an eldritch screech and came at me with both arms, legs and the front bit of his head. ‘Blasphemer!’

  Mrs Quigley was now at the head of the stairs. ‘Burglar!’ she screamed.

  ‘What is it?’ called my mum again.

  What indeed? A burglar who blasphemed? Who broke into your house in the middle of the night and, after paying the usual compliments to your stereo, got on with the job of pouring scorn on your most cherished convictions?

  Quigley beat me through into the back kitchen. I heard my mum’s voice. ‘Simon!’ she called, in feeble tones. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘It is!’ I yelled. ‘The one who was in your womb for nine months and a day, remember? And, if I didn’t think this bastard who’s making so fucking free with my dad’s house would follow me there, I’d jump right back in this minute!’

  ‘He called Albert a bastard!’ yelled Mrs Quigley.

  ‘Well he is,’ I said. ‘He is a bastard. He’s a complete and utter bastard, if you want to know.’

  ‘He thaith Daddy ith a bathtard!’ came Emily’s voice.

  Quigley clouted me smartly across the side of the head. I fell to the floor and crouched, Pike fashion, in a corner of the kitchen, covering my face with my hands. Quigley went to the door to check there was no one around, then, unable to stop himself, ran back to me and twisted my ear hard. ‘Stop play-acting; he said. ‘I didn’t hit you hard!’

  ‘Let go of my lugs.’

  He started to shake my head about. It was not going to be long, I reflected, before I made my contribution to discussions in 24 Stranraer Gardens via a Ouija board.

  I sensed, rather than heard, my mum come in. Quigley had made sure he had stopped hitting me as soon as he heard her on the stairs.

  ‘Mum . . .’

  ‘Oh, Simon . . .’

  Quigley leaped back, pulling down my dad’s dressing-gown with a surprisingly prim gesture. I looked up at my mum. I noticed that she was crying. Those little eyes of hers were red and angry, and her chin quivered helplessly above her neck as she came towards me.

  ‘Why do you let him do this to me, Mum? Why don’t you stand up for me? Don’t you love me, Mum?’

  My mum dabbed at her eyes. She didn’t answer.

  ‘If Daddy was alive he wouldn’t let him do this to me! Why do you? Why do you let him? You don’t love me, do you? You don’t even like me, do you? Why don’t you like me? What have I ever done to you?’

  Unable to answer this to her or my satisfaction, my mum started to cry. But they weren’t her usual tears. Usually she cries like the rain we had on a holiday once, up in Scotland – a soft, grey drizzle – but this time her body shook with real sobs.

  Quigley joined in. He’s a big guy, but he seemed to have got to like crying. It was him, not me, that went to her and got hugged. He needs a lot of help. I don’t think he finds himself any easier to live with than the rest of us.

  ‘Help me through it, Sarah!’ he was saying. ‘Help me through this!’

  Help me through the hitting-Simon experience! Why won’t you?

  I could see my mum’s face on the other side of Quigley’s shoulder. I could also see something I had absolutely no wish to see at all, which was Quigley’s bottom. It was long and sausage-shaped and coated with fine, black hairs. It peeked out from under the rim of my dad’s dressing-gown with a horrible sauciness. Mum’s eyes were signalling to me – something faraway and desperate. I could not work out what it might be.

  Event
ually Quiggers rounded on me. ‘Now, Simon, apologize to your mother for that disgusting, manipulative little display. Could you?’

  I was obviously not taking the punishment right. I was not observing the Christian decencies for getting thumped. How tactless could I get?

  ‘I’ll never apologize to you, Quigley,’ I said. ‘I hate you. And I hate your creepy wife and your creepy daughter and I wish you were all dead. I wish you were dead and my dad was alive. I think you stink. I think all religions stink, actually, but Christianity stinks worse than any of them.’

  There was silence.

  Just in case I hadn’t made this absolutely clear, I added, ‘I’ll never forgive you and I’ll never apologize to you, and I’ll never do anything you say.’

  He was still looking pleased with himself.

  ‘Why is it so important to get me back in your rotten little church, Quiggers?’ I said. ‘Is there some grubby, horrible reason? I bet there is. Well I tell you, Quigley, by the time I’m through with it there won’t be a fucking church. The aliens are here, Quigley.’

  He twitched slightly, like a lizard’s tongue. I pushed on, sensing a weak spot.

  ‘They’ve got into your congregation, Quigley, and they’re going to wreck the church. They are. You’re finished here, I tell you.’

  It was then that my mum came over to me. She knelt next to me and, peering into my face, she said, ‘Testify, Simon. Please. Come back to Jesus. Please. I don’t want you to be damned. If you’ll be Confirmed in Faith, I’ll never ask you to come to the church again. And Mr Quigley will go. He will.’

  She stroked my hair then, very gently, the way she used to do when I was a little kid.

  ‘I want you to be saved, that’s all, darling. And then we can get on with our lives. Please, Simon.’

  I looked up at her.

  She put her hand to my cheek. ‘It’s like Mr Quigley says – you’re a pure boy! You are!’

  I remembered some of the nice times we’d had. Me and Mum and the old man. Laughing at things or sitting together round the table and my dad making jokes and . . . Why is life such a bitch? Why does it lay these things on you? Why does it pull your heart two ways? And why do feelings always surprise you?

  I wish we were machines. You know? People go too far.

  23

  ‘Why,’ Greenslade whispered to me, ‘isn’t semen an element?’

  Up behind the desk, ‘Pansy’ Fanshawe was preparing to see how sodium reacted with something whose name I could neither remember nor pronounce. Pansy had a far-away expression on his face. He looked a bit like a sorcerer as he stirred the mixture in a small clay crucible.

  ‘It’s a pretty big element in my life,’ I said.

  On the other side of me, Khan sniffed. He doesn’t like us talking like this. If Khan ever whangs off, it is probably for the purposes of spectroscopic analysis.

  Pansy looked up wildly. He is about sixty and they should have retired him years ago, but he has nowhere else to go. I sometimes think they may not be paying him. ‘Now,’ he said, in a quavery voice, ‘molybdenum is . . .’

  He stopped in mid-sentence, as he often did. I stared at him intently. It was about a week after my showdown with Quigley and I should have been at Harvest Festival. I have to avoid the last period on the second Friday in October, which is when the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist celebrates ‘the rich goodness of God’s vegetables’.

  I was supposed to be there. But I wasn’t. Outside, on the sun-soaked Common, they were piling up French loaves and bottles of Beaujolais. But I was staying inside, learning about what the world was really like, or, rather, what Pansy Fanshawe thought it was like.

  After the night Quigley had kicked my head in, I had finally seen something I should have seen a long time ago. I didn’t have to do any of these crazy things they made me do. I didn’t have to stand up and tell the whole truth of my heart unless I wanted to. I didn’t have to say shit to Jesus Christ if I didn’t feel like it. I had stayed in bed on Sunday morning, even though Quigley had nearly kicked the door down and then burst into tears all over my duvet. ‘We need you, Simo,’ he said. ‘We need your deep love! We need your purity!’ I was lying there thinking about fellatio at the time. How did they actually do it? Did it hurt?

  He didn’t need my purity. He needed me to sweeten Mrs Danby. But I didn’t need him. You see, it was really my dad that made me go along with the church, even though he didn’t really involve himself. Somehow he managed to make it fun, the way he made so many things fun, and, now he was either dead or else taken over by some force I could not even begin to understand, there was nothing whatsoever to keep me in the church.

  ‘Now,’ said Fanshawe, ‘stand well back, because there may be a bang!’

  Pansy’s chemistry lessons are mainly a question of lobbing stuff out of the cupboard into a crucible and trying to get an explosion going. Most of the time he doesn’t even know what elements he is trying to combine. He’s closer to a mad chef than a chemist.

  Khan was trying to say something. He looked worried. ‘Sir,’ he said, in his precise, slow voice, ‘under certain circumstances, compounds of the substances which you are attempting to combine may have a reaction in which, say, the sodium . . .’ He did not get to the end of the sentence. With a mad gleam in his eye, Pansy lobbed a small chunk of brown rock into the crucible. There was a colossal bang and the sound of the clay crucible hitting the desks, walls, windows and members of the Fourth Form. Thackeray started screaming.

  Greenslade and I had hit the floor early. We know Pansy. When we raised our heads above the desk there were clouds of smoke blowing across the chemistry laboratory. Fanshawe was giving a kind of war whoop as, through the grey fumes, I saw the unmistakable figure of Quigley.

  He stepped in front of the class like a demon king making his appearance in a pantomime. Behind him I could see my mum, Emily and Mrs Quigley, who appeared to be carrying a large sheaf of corn. It was, I think, the worst moment of my life so far. I was absolutely terrified that Greenslade or Khan might discover that I was anything to do with these people. How had they got in here? I seriously thought of crawling through the smoke to the door.

  But it was too late. Quigley was pointing at me dramatically. ‘I think this boy must come with us,’ he was saying.

  Fanshawe clearly thought that Quigley was the product of the chemical reaction he had just engendered. He was goggling at the First Spiritualists like a medieval alchemist who has just raised the Devil. ‘Are you . . . er . . . a . . . parent?’ he said feebly.

  My mum stepped forward as more smoke billowed across the laboratory, circling around the faces of pupils, master and visiting religious maniacs. ‘I am his mother,’ she said, in a quiet voice, ‘and he is excused today’s last period of chemistry to attend a Christian service.’

  Pansy looked at her as if he was trying to work out how to combine her with deuterium and to calculate the effects of the resulting explosion.

  ‘It is,’ said Quigley, with quiet dignity, ‘a festival of the faith to which Simon belongs.’

  Greenslade gave me a sideways look. I raised my eyebrows, resolving, as I did so, to let him know my side of the story as soon as possible. There was no point in fighting this one. Not in front of twenty-three members of the Fourth Form. I got up and walked, with some dignity, towards the door. When I got level with them, I rounded on Quigley. ‘This is the last time, scumbag!’ And with that, I stalked out into the corridor, as Pansy, still dazed from the effects of the explosion, meandered feebly after my mother, muttering about notes and the headmaster’s policy on being excused important school activities.

  ‘Where’s Pikey?’ I asked, as they marched me towards the car. Quigley did not answer this. Since Pike’s behaviour at the last seance, he had been banished from the Quigley presence. I noticed that the assistant bank manager was biting his lower lip and grinding his right fist into his left palm.

  As we got to the car, I stood back from them and said, ‘
You can do this to me once, but you can’t go on doing it. I don’t believe, you see. I don’t believe any of that rubbish you talk.’

  Emily Quigley looked really distressed. ‘Thimon,’ she said, ‘it’th like in Narnia when Athlan thaith to Edmund that he mutht have faith!’

  ‘Narnia,’ I said, ‘is bullshit. Give me Wimbledon any day.’

  I looked straight at her. ‘Why do you believe all this rubbish? It’s crazy. You all know it’s crazy. It’s only habit keeps you doing it. If you once stopped and thought about it rationally, you wouldn’t believe any of it.’

  I looked back at the school buildings. I was amazed at what I was saying. And yet I knew, as I spoke, that this was what I had always thought but had been too frightened to express. Silently, we all got into the car.

  There was a mood of quiet desperation about Mr and Mrs Quigley. As we drove up towards the Common, they looked at each other briefly, then looked away.

  ‘Has Pikey left?’ I said. ‘Has he joined the true cause? Is he out looking for the bastards who stole my father?’ They didn’t answer this, but my mum leaned forward and patted my hand absently.

  In the boot was a large pile of tins of tuna fish and a harvest wreath that had clearly been designed by Marjorie Quigley. We were coming to the end of the day, and the light was starting to fade.

  The First Spiritualists were camped out at the edge of a grove of birch trees. There weren’t many of them. When I was a child I could remember gatherings of two or three hundred people, but there were fewer than a hundred out on the dry grass. Someone had told me that no fewer than twenty people had left the church after my speech, many of them to join the Raelian Society, a group that exists to set up embassies on earth for alien intelligences wishing to make contact with earthlings.

  ‘What’s keeping them away, Quiggers?’ I said. ‘Is it the weather, or what?’

  Quigley twitched, then decided to ignore this remark. As we walked towards the circle of Spiritualists, he turned to me and said, in a high, pleasant voice, ‘I know you will come back to us, Simo! The Lord Jesus will make a way for you!’