‘She’s an old hag,’ said Mum.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I think I could do with a bit of exorcism!’
Mum and I get on a lot better these days. We’ll never be close, if you know what I mean, but we’ve got something worked out. Mum has been a lot more cheerful since Quigley was declared bankrupt, insane and guilty of fraud. She’s got bigger. Her eyes, which used to be dull and filmy, have got some of their sparkle back. She and Hannah Dooley left the First Spiritualists and founded a Household Church. They’ve called it the Fellowship of Christian Spiritualists of 24 Stranraer Gardens, and they have a lot of fun, singing and dancing and playing the tambourine in the back room downstairs. Once or twice my mum has even gone into a light trance, and, though she hasn’t yet contacted anyone interesting, we have great hopes of her.
They reckon it was all Quigley’s fault. That Old Mother Walsh had it right, and that Ella Walsh should never have led the church into the ways of men. They are quite down on men, but they seem to like me.
Mrs Quigley and Emily still live with us. They had to sell the house – what remained of it after Brunt had finished with it. Mrs Quigley doesn’t say a lot, and what she says, she says quietly. Sometimes, if she’s good, my mum lets her chop the vegetables. Emily turns out to be really quite decent. She has had a crisis of faith since her old man was put in the bin, and, a month or so ago, she took all her C. S. Lewis books out into the garden and burnt them. For some reason, shortly after the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist took its number out of the phone book, she started to forget to lisp. Who knows, one day I may marry her. On the other hand, I may not.
I used to think sex was all about condoms and fellatio and getting girls to show you their underwear. These days it seems something more mysterious, but also somehow more real. As if it’s just over the horizon, waiting to happen to me, as weird and wonderful as all the things that happened last autumn.
I think about the aliens quite a lot. I still think they’re out there. I think they’re still spacenapping people, if you want to know. Not in the obvious way. I don’t think they cruise into our atmosphere in saucers, exactly. But, whatever name you choose to give it, something gets into humans one way or another and makes them do things that are very hard to understand.
I’m staying as far out of it all as I can. I’m based on the moons of Jupiter from now on, and the only time I’ll come back to earth will be strictly on a day-trip basis. I’m behind that glass that separated us from Pike that night on the Common. I never wrote to that box number. I never will. I keep the piece of paper in a tin next to my dad’s glasses – the ones he’ll never come back for – but I know I’ll never use it.
You see, I was a little kid a year ago and I made the mistake kids make. I let things get to me. I let them all get to me – Quigley and Pike and my mum and Mr Marr. Most of all I let my father get to me. I let him get under my guard. But I’ll never let anyone do that again. From now on I’ll never let anyone under my guard. No one gets close to me. Not ever.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The Wimbledon Dharjees are, of course, an entirely fictitious Islamic sect, but the group from which they are alleged to come, the Nizari Ismailis, are a real and well-documented group of Shiite Muslims. A full account of the true, and incredible, story of Hasan the Second, the Twenty-third Imam of the Nizari Ismailis, is to be found in Bernard Lewis’s The Assassins (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967). Robert’s one guide to his assumed religion, Morals and Manners in Islam, a Guide to Islamic Adab, by Marwan Ibrahim Al-Kaysi, was published by the Islamic Foundation in 1986.
Unfaithfully Yours
Nigel Williams
ISBN: 978-1-47210-674-2 (HB) £18.99
ISBN: 978-1-47210-683-4 (Ebook) £12.99
When Elizabeth Price engages a private detective to investigate her husband’s suspected infidelity, she unwittingly sets off a chain of correspondence that will reunite four formerly close-knit couples. They all live just a few streets away from each other; they are all still married; so how – and why – did they become so estranged? In a series of painfully and often hilariously revealing letters, from love notes to condolence messages, all becomes clear.
Unfaithfully Yours is an uproarious and poignant portrait of four marriages; a tale of late-flowering love and suburban intrigue. It heralds the return of one of our finest comic writers, in peak condition: all hail Nigel Williams, chronicler of England’s sleepy suburbs, where all is not quite as cricket as it seems . . .
‘A brilliantly witty writer.’ Sunday Times
They Came From SW19 Page 25