He narrowed his mouth into an O shape and pushed his eyebrows up into what was left of his hair. There was still foam from the beer on his moustache. I watched the bubbles wink in the ghostly light, glisten, and then die. You could see the pulse beat in his neck. You could smell him too – a whiff of new soap and old changing-rooms. You could see the broken veins on his nose and see the puffy skin above his eyelids, bunched up like old crêpe curtains. And you could watch those little blue eyes that never quite met yours. It was my dad, all right.
‘I don’t know how long I was in there before I sat up and looked around. I know I banged on the door, but no one heard. And when I looked down at my ankle they’d put this label on me.’
‘What did it say?’ I asked. ‘FRAGILE? Or, THIS WAY UP?’
He grinned. ‘You are a witty little bastard, aren’t you?’ Then he yawned. I could see the red trap of his throat.
‘Actually, it said NORMAN BRITTON, C OF E.’
‘Did it?’
‘It did,’ said my dad. ‘Not NORMAN BRITTON, MA OXON. Just NORMAN BRITTON, C OF E. After forty-odd years of being a good boy and paying the mortgage and . . .’
I could see that it had been an upsetting experience. But what did he expect them to write? NORMAN BRITTON, NOVELIST AND TRAVEL AGENT?
‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I wandered round and checked out the corpses. They all had labels on. You know? And there was one just next to the door that must have come in while I had been lying there, unable to move. It didn’t have a name on it. Just a ticket that said UNIDENTIFIED RTA. It was a real mess, I tell you. Looked as if someone had been practising three-point turns on its chest.’
He shuddered. I said nothing.
‘And I thought to myself: What’s it all for? You know? Did I want to go on being NORMAN BRITTON, C OF E? What’s so great about my life?’
I couldn’t, for the moment, think of an answer to that. So I still said nothing.
‘There are big pluses about being dead,’ said my dad. ‘You don’t have to take the dishes out of the dishwasher and put them in the dish rack and then take the cutlery out of its little plastic box and then put it in the cutlery drawer making sure that the spoons go in one compartment and the knives in another compartment and the forks in another compartment, except there are always forks in the spoons compartment and knives in the forks compartment when you get there, so it’s hopeless it’s always too late to get things right, it’s a total frost, honestly, is life, you are a lot better off dead, in my opinion. Do you know what being dead felt like?’
‘You tell me, Dad!’
‘It felt like a good career move.’
Of course. That long white robe I had seen him in that night was a sort of hospital gown. They dress them up like ghosts. But how had he got down to Stranraer Gardens?
‘They brought some other poor sod in,’ he said, as if in answer to my question, ‘but I was over behind the door and they didn’t see me. I just slipped out, walked down a corridor, out through a side exit and came down to home. I just stood there looking up at it. You know? Wondering whether to take up my life or walk right out of it.’
He put one hand on mine. ‘I changed the labels,’ he said. ‘I put my name on the road-traffic-accident victim and I walked out with UNIDENTIFIED clutched in my paw.’
He seemed to find this next bit difficult to say. His eyes were watering as he started it, and he looked away from me again, towards the deserted white tables around us.
‘It was so strange,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think there’s something at the back of all this that’s so . . . so bloody bizarre. You know? Roots of coincidence and all that . . .’
‘What, Dad?’
He looked straight at me.
‘The body they brought in during the night. The one on the slab. The unidentified traffic accident. I saw the face. It was your mate. Mr Marr. The guy who sat out on the Common, waiting for the spacemen to come. I walked out free, you see. And the undertakers buried him.’
27
It was at that moment that Mr Quigley passed the entrance to the pub garden. He stood under the street light, looking back from where he’d come. He shook his head and clucked to himself like the White Rabbit in Alice. He was carrying a bag of shopping. He looked annoyed about something. I got the impression he was looking for something to hit. Probably me. He didn’t see me.
‘What’s up?’ said my dad.
‘It’s Quigley, he’s after me!’
‘Quigley!’
It was now quite dark in the garden. For some reason we were both whispering. Out in the street, Quigley shouted off to his left. He was calling to someone, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. It sounded as if he was calling a dog.
‘What’s going on with Quigley?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he’s had a lot of heavy conversations with you. Apparently you’ve repented of your wicked life.’
‘I have!’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve been talking to you myself, you know?’
Dad looked away.
I said, ‘Quigley’s a bastard. He’s living with us, and he treats me like shit.’
My dad looked back at me. I tried to think of the worst thing that Quigley had done.
‘He’s gone and bought a dog!’
I wasn’t asked for any more information. But I gave it just the same. I told him about how he’d hit me. About how I was some kind of prophet as far as he was concerned, and he was desperate to have me Confirmed.
There was a bit of a silence when I’d finished, and then Dad said, with a grin, ‘Quiggers is right about one thing, old son. I had a really wicked life, and I repent!’
Somewhere in the distance I heard the growl of thunder. I looked up at the sky and saw that the clouds were one dark, lurid, compact mass. My father looked really ghostly in the light from the street, and for a moment I found myself thinking: He is a ghost. He really did die. This is all a story. As I did so, he got to his feet. His face changed suddenly. There was none of the humour you usually saw in it, and there was a fixed look about the eyes that I found almost frightening. He rose, slowly and mechanically, staring ahead of him and beyond me. Then he lifted his right hand with the index finger extended.
Behind me I heard a kind of yelp. It wasn’t a sound I ever remembered him having made, but certain things about it made me think it came from Quigley. There was a thump as his shopping hit the floor.
My dad still didn’t say anything. He just stood there, staring past me, his arm flung out in front of him and his attention fixed on what had to be the assistant manager of the National Westminster Bank, Mitcham. Dad didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. I could hear Quigley give a sort of low whimper, but otherwise he said nothing. The silence in the garden was as loud as Marjorie Quigley’s trousers. It went on and on and got louder and louder.
And then, finally, my dad spoke. Not in his normal voice but in a low, throaty baritone that reminded me of Vincent Price in The Haunted Palace – my dad’s favourite picture: ‘Albert Roger Quigley, do you remember me?’
It was fairly obvious from the noise coming from behind me that the man in question did remember him fairly clearly. In fact, as far as I could judge from the old hearing system, the effect on Quigley was fairly stupendous.
I mean, look at it from his point of view. My dad had recently been cremated. Quigley had sat there while the good people from the Mutual Life Provident Association had come round and told my mum the news about her death benefit. He had, in fact, been in close personal touch with the guy’s spirit via one of the finest psychic talents in south-west London. He just did not expect to come across the late Norman Britton in the garden of the Ferret and Firkin at half past six in the evening. And he certainly didn’t expect the said Britton to be pointing at him in a manner usually affected by people like Darth Vader or Banquo.
I turned round in my chair.
Look, I have seen people surprised in my time. I have seen people very surprised. I have, on occ
asions, seen very, very, very surprised people. But I have never seen anything like the expression on the face of Albert Roger Quigley that evening. He looked like a man who has just stepped into an empty lift-shaft. His mouth kept opening and shutting like a mechanical shovel, but no words – not even a direct appeal to the Lord Jesus Christ to be excused this experience on health grounds – passed his lips.
It was, in one sense, a stupid question. I mean, how short did Dad expect Roger’s memory to be? But the way he delivered it would not have disgraced your average member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It wasn’t just that he was pitching it lower. He gave each word an incredibly fruity emphasis. When he got to the R in Roger, he vibrated the old tongue on the palate with the brio of an international string player. The finger, too, seemed to be going down fantastically well with Quigley. He was staring at it the way a cat looks at a dinner-plate. Would he ever get over this initial shock period? Was he going to have a thrombie right here on the spot?
Come on Quigley, pull yourself out of it! Deal with the situation! This sort of thing should be right up your street. Think of the articles. Think of all the hands-on psychical research that is just coming at you free of charge. Make with the sketch maps of the area. Measure the ambient temperature. Get down the witnesses’ names and addresses. This is a one-off, my friend. If you move quickly you could bag this one – jam it into the specimen bottle and whip it off to the Society for Psychical Research prontissimo!
He did not, I fear, seem to be prepared to experience the phenomenon in a truly objective, scientific way. He was kind of staggering, with one hand held to his temple, and from time to time making a noise like water running out of a bath.
Dad, warming to his role, moved a couple of steps forward, his arm still flung out in front of him. He looked, I thought, a touch over the top. ‘Quigley,’ he said in a spectral voice, ‘repent!’
There was another growl of thunder. Behind Quigley, Danzig appeared at the entrance to the garden. He lowered his head and, whimpering, sidled towards his master. Quigley looked ready to repent. He looked ready to tear his clothes apart. He looked rather less rational than his dog. ‘Oh!’ he said finally. ‘Oh! Oh! Ohhhhh!’
He gave me a quick look to check that I was really there, and an even quicker look round the garden to see if there were any other responsible local citizens around to witness this triumphant affirmation of an afterlife. But the drinkers at the far end of the garden were gone. There was only me and this spirit in the gloom of the garden.
‘Oh!’ said Quigley, again. ‘Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhh!’
‘Quigley,’ said my dad, moving into the shadows away from me, ‘I am in hell! And you will join me here!’
Quigley stared at me. It was weird. Once my dad had got started, I had started to believe him. To believe his act. You know? When I think about it now, he was an actor. He was a guy who could be something for a brief period of time, and then he vanished like the spirit he was impersonating. When I looked at him in the darkness, I began to wonder if all of what he had told me earlier could be some trick on me, played by the spirits who had sent him.
‘How can you sit there?’ said Quigley. ‘How can you sit there?’
I opened my eyes and gave him a puzzled look. ‘What do you mean, Mr Quigley?’ I said. ‘What are you staring at?’
‘That!’ said Quigley, ‘That . . . that thing!’
Quigley gestured feebly towards my old man. Then he turned to face him. Dad was flaring his nostrils and giving him a wild stare. I thought he was going well over the top, actually. But Quigley was not in a mood to ask why my dad had returned to earth. He was not in the mood to ask rational questions. I don’t think he’d have noticed if someone had dropped a set of kitchen units on his head from 30,000 feet.
Dad took a couple more steps towards him. Quigley started to whimper. ‘No,’ he moaned, ‘no!’
‘Yes, Quigley,’ said my dad. ‘Yes, Quigley! Yes! Yes!’ He looked as if he was all set to strangle the forty-four-year-old assistant bank manager.
My dad always was something of a ham. The sensible thing to do, having made the initial impact, was to walk off in a slow and menacing way, leaving Quigley to gibber. But Norman was determined to give full value for money.
‘Do you know what hell is like, Quigley?’
‘No,’ whispered Quigley.
‘Hell is being blown across vast empty spaces with the wind at your back and dust in your eyes. Hell is the taste of your own vileness, Quigley. The sour smell of your own wickedness and wrongdoing.’
If this was the kind of stuff he had put in his novel, it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t found any takers for it. But it was still kosher as far as Albert Roger Quigley was concerned.
‘Who are you talking to, Mr Quigley?’ I said, in what I hoped was an awestruck tone. ‘Who is it that you can see in the garden?’
‘O Jesus!’ said Quigley, suddenly remembering who was supposed to be in charge around here. ‘O Jesus Christ, help me! O Jesus Jesus Jesus! Jesus Christ!’
‘There is no Jesus Christ,’ said my dad, in solemn tones. ‘There is no God of the Christians. There are no prophets in your world, Albert Quigley.’
I hoped he wasn’t going to start rubbishing the Koran. You never know when those Muslims might be listening.
Quigley dropped to his knees, his face white and shaking. ‘Oh Lord,’ he whimpered to himself. ‘Oh dear Jesus Christ!’
‘There is no Jesus Christ, Quigley,’ said my dad, in a very authoritative way.
Quigley looked up at him, dog-like. ‘Who is there?’ he asked, pleadingly.
‘There is no one!’ said my dad. ‘There is no one beyond this life. Those who return, return as themselves, condemned to live out the circle of their lives again and again!’
Thunder broke again, and this time there were two or three brief flashes of lightning. The chestnut-trees opposite me were suddenly vivid green and, as suddenly, dark again. The brick wall round the garden broke into focus and faded to black. Once again I had the feeling that what my father had said to me in the garden could all be some horrible trick. That he really had died, and that what he was telling Quigley was the truth. Not what he had told me.
Quiggers was gibbering. ‘What . . . There must be . . . What is . . .’ It was almost as if he’d stopped seeing Dad at all. That made it all scarier. Because I started to believe that I wasn’t seeing him. That the familiar switchback nose and scraps of grey hair were going to melt away into the darkness. ‘There must be . . . something!’ Quigley said. ‘There must . . . God . . .’
My dad came back well. He raised his hands above his head and then stretched them both out at the unfortunate First Spiritualist. He was now doing quite a lot of acting tormented. His head was wobbling violently, and there was dribble down his chin. Whatever he did would have gone down well with Quigley. The presentation was right. Albert Roger was very involved with the performance. He had suspended disbelief completely.
‘There is nothing,’ said my dad. ‘There is nothing. No faith. No light in the darkness, Albert Roger Quigley! Nothing but the smell of your own loneliness and guilt!’
This was very much the kind of stuff that Quigley was used to dishing out. But it didn’t look as if he was capable of taking it. He hunched up his shoulders. He looked as if he was about to cry.
‘What’s the matter, Mr Quigley?’ I said again. ‘Who are you talking to?’
There was no stopping my dad. I wanted to say to him: Get off! Quit while you’re ahead! And a bit of me wanted him to stop the way you want an actor in a film to stop. Because he is so damned real that you think this pain and suffering is really him. You know?
‘Death,’ said my dad, ‘is not a journey to some pleasant place. Death is simply the stopping of your heart. The end of sensation. The not being able to smell or taste or screw. Death is death. And there are no spirits. There are things. Fleshly, heavy things that come back to mock and torment you!’
‘Argol,’
cried Quigley, who was, rather gamely I thought, trying to make some radical alterations to his cosmological system. ‘Argol of Tellenor!’
Dad laughed. The laugh was really horrid. It was low and cracked to begin with, then it rose up the scale, eerily, and shook out its top notes across the damp, half-lit glade until I really did think that my father had come not from the hospital but from some horribly cold, empty region that lies in wait for us instead of all the heavens we have dreamed up to make things bearable.
‘I am not he of Tellenor,’ said my dad, who was always good at bluffing. ‘I am he that was Norman Britton when on the earth, now returned to haunt you, Albert Roger Quigley, and to tell you that you are an evil man and that you will fall as I have fallen! Down and down, until you can fall no further!’
There was another roll of thunder, and once again the lightning lit up the garden and the surrounding trees.
As the sky’s noise faded, my father moved into exit mode. He walked, slowly and stiffly, towards the ramp that led from the garden to the street. As he approached Quigley, Quigley started to sob. Then my dad paused.
‘What must I do?’ asked Quigley – always a man anxious for instructions.
My dad gave him the sort of look that only someone declared clinically dead can manage. ‘I will come again, Quigley,’ he said, ‘when you least expect me! I will haunt your dreams and yea, your waking moments!’
‘What must I do?’ said Quigley, understandably keen to get on the right side of this spirit.
‘Touch not my son, Quigley,’ said the old man. ‘Leave him be!’
I found myself wondering who we could haunt next. There were a few members of staff who could do with a visit from beyond the tomb.
Dad did a bit of sneering, then he said, ‘Farewell, Albert Roger Quigley!’
‘Farewell,’ said Quigley, clearly anxious to keep up the tone necessary for spirit dialogue.
My dad started off again towards the street. From the back he looked even better. He kept the shoulders stiff and he rolled a little, like a sailor back from a long voyage.
They Came From SW19 Page 23