They Came From SW19 (11 page)

The first thing I saw when I came off Parkside and across the Common was Mr Marr’s little canvas chair, his telescope, his night binoculars and the ten or twelve back numbers of
Flying Saucer Review
that are always to hand when he is waiting for the subjects of the periodical to show up. Everything was arranged just as it had been last night. It was like the lunch table on the
Marie Céleste
.

I was standing there trying to understand what all this might mean when a hand clapped me on the shoulder and a noise like an old goods train being shunted started up in my ear. Walbeck only makes one greeting noise and it is very distinctive.

He held up a small, grubby piece of paper, on which were written the words they took him away in a spaceship.

I looked at Walbeck. He pointed to the chair and the bins and the magazines. Then he nodded. He looked, I have to say, very serious indeed. I tried some direct speech.

‘Where to?’

Walbeck gave me an odd look.
Where do they take people in spaceships? Margate?
He was writing. When things get bad, Walbeck writes.

another galaxy, of course!

Of course! He started to cover the paper again. I could see that it was covered with fragments of Walbeck’s previous conversations. Discussions about joints and timber sizes (Walbeck is a carpenter by trade) lay next to words of comfort addressed to his elderly mum, and sometimes ran into them, so you got sentences that looked like
ARE YOU ALL RIGHT THERE MUM FOR TEN INCH NAILS?
Or
I GOT YOU SOME OF THAT FISH YOU LIKE FROM THE BUILDER’S MERCHANTS YOU IDIOT!

The message intended for me read: purkiss and me went for a hamberger then we went for a kip at purkiss’s place and when we come back around six in the morning we found . . .

I turned the page. On the other side was written
SIX SQUARE FEET OF CHIPBOARD.

Walbeck always runs out of paper at the crucial moment. We went back to lip-reading.

‘What did you find?’

Walbeck pointed at the chair, the magazines and the binoculars. Then he shrugged.

‘Maybe he went home.’

Walbeck shook his head furiously. Then he made the conventional sign for Purkiss, which is a kind of crouch plus leer, and did a fluttering movement with the fingers of both hands. They had been to Mr Marr’s and he was not there. I just
knew
, the way I had known about my dad. I knew when we left him peering up at the sky that something awful was going to happen. It was all laid out so neatly on the grass. Mr Marr would never leave his binoculars, and the canvas chair cost £15.99!

I wanted to stay and find out more. But we had run out of paper. There is a limit to the amount you can glean from pointing at things and grinning like an idiot. As I turned to go, Walbeck pointed at the arrangement on the grass. He looked really sad, suddenly. Then he pointed at the sky and raised his shoulders in a questioning sort of way.

‘I know, Walbeck,’ I said. ‘Why should they take a nice guy like Mr Marr? He was on their side, man. Why should they take him?’

I walked on towards school trying to work this out.

The same reason they had come for my old man, of course. Because life isn’t any fairer on the other side of the solar system than it is here. They come for the nice guys and leave the bastards behind. It’s always people like Mr Marr and my old man who get tapped on the shoulder by the small men with green leathery skin and fifteen fingers on each hand.

There
had
to be a connection. I didn’t yet know what it was, but there had quite clearly been an unusually high level of psychic activity in the Wimbledon area last night. The energy that was capable of lifting an electrical engineer off the Common might well have something to do with the fact that a forty-three-year-old travel agent had been dragged back from the grave to haunt 24 Stranraer Gardens.

Just before I got to the school gates, I got out
Tricolore 4
and started to read it. It lets people know you’re a serious person, doing something like that. And, besides, I am in correspondence with a girl called Natalie, who lives in Clermont-Ferrand. As far as I can make out, Clermont-Ferrand is even worse than Wimbledon. I was deep into the bit where Olivier and Marie-Claude are trying to buy some cheese in La Rochelle.
Tricolore
never gives you the stuff you really need to say to French people, like, ‘Can I hold your hot body to me?’ It is all about how to ask for a full tank of ‘
super
’ from the friendly ‘
garagiste
’ and what to say when they have run out of cardigans in Nogent-le-Rotrou.

I was late. We were almost into First Period.

As I came up to the gates, I looked cautiously over the book and saw Khan and Greenslade. Khan was sitting on his games bag. Greenslade was going through his pink nylon rucksack with an expression of desperation on his face.

‘Est-ce que tu as oublié tes condoms?’ I said.

He gave me a superior smile. ‘This is no time for you to be a dickhead, Britton. I have
lost
my geography project!’

I never mind people saying I’m a dickhead. It’s the key to my popularity. I’m pretty controlled, if you know what I mean. I wait before I speak, and if I’m not sure what to say – which is quite a lot of the time – I just give this mysterious smile. Greenslade says it makes me look like the village idiot.

This morning, for some reason, I really felt like blurting out what was on my mind. Not about my dad. About the aliens spacenapping Mr Marr. It was only when I thought about saying it out loud that I realized how crazy it would sound. Thinking how crazy it would sound made me wonder whether it was true.

‘Tell Baines you’ll bring it tomorrow,’ said Khan in a deep voice. Khan is always calm about things. I think it’s because he is so good at physics.

The three of us moved through the gates towards 4c, or Cell Block H as it is known. Behind us, Limebeare was getting out of his dad’s BMW in that special way people get out of expensive cars.

What possible
reason
would they have for spacenapping Mr Marr?

He was an engineer. Maybe that was why they needed him. Maybe something had broken down out there on Alpha Centauri and he was the only guy able to fix it. Maybe the know-how of the London Electricity Board was the only thing that could save the atmosphere of some lump of rock light-years from sw19. They would set Mr Marr down, hand him a nineheaded spanner and, after he had done the job, he would be on his way back to Wimbledon.

Maybe they needed my dad
and
Mr Marr. You know? Maybe that was why he had appeared to me last night. Maybe they had ways of breathing life back into people so as they could do their evil will – although I could not, for the life of me, think why entities from a distant planet should want a travel agent.

‘Why are we always late?’ asked Khan, as we trudged along the corridor towards the classroom. He sounded as if he was going to get philosophical about this.

Maybe they had heard about him. Dad always said he was the best man in South London if you wanted two weeks in Provence with swimming-pool and maid provided. Maybe the fame of Sunnyspeed Tours had spread. And if there are galaxies where life-forms exist, on the other side of the long dark spaces that lie outside our solar system, why shouldn’t the life-forms need travel agents?

‘Flasher will kill us,’ said Greenslade, looking morosely down at his feet. Greenslade is tall and thin. There is always a gap between his shoes and the bottoms of his trousers.

What, while we were at it, did Jesus Christ have to do with all this? Was JC somehow mixed up in the mysterious events of last night? What did I mean by ‘Jesus Christ’ anyway? I had certainly been pretty glad to talk to him, or indeed Him, last night, hadn’t I? Suppose He really did exist – not in the way Quigley thought, but as a kind of mysterious energy source? We didn’t necessarily mean the same thing when we said ‘Jesus Christ’. Any more than Sarrassett Major and I mean the same thing when we say ‘football’. Sarrassett Major means huge guys throwing each other at a ball, neck-deep in mud. I mean hanging round the goal and talking to Greenslade.

We got into class just before ‘Flasher’ Slingsby. I moved into my desk, carefully chosen because it is in the darkest corner of the room. If you sit very still, people think you are part of the furniture. Flasher came in, threw his briefcase on the desk and started to pace around, draw pretty shapes in white chalk and talk the incomprehensible rubbish for which teachers get paid.

I just sat there, my head in my hands, thinking about all this stuff and trying to make sense of it.

‘Britton! What have I just been saying?’

I looked Mr Slingsby straight in the eye. ‘You were talking about triangles, sir.’

This was safe ground. There was one on the board, for Christ’s sake!

‘What about triangles, Britton?’

‘Well . . . about how they are . . . amazing, sir.’

There was muffled laughter. Britton was at it again.

‘In what way are they “amazing”, Britton?’

‘Well, sir, they are equilateral. Sometimes.’

Mr Slingsby was enjoying this. He positively twinkled as he said, ‘And is that what I was saying? That they are “equilateral . . .” ’

Here he gave the class a conspiratorial wink. They responded well. ‘ “. . . Sometimes.” ’

I looked round at the faces of the class.

‘I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘I wasn’t paying much attention.’

‘Oh!’

Mr Slingsby sounded almost delighted at this news. He tapped his desk with his finger and gave me about twenty seconds to sweat.

‘Indeed. And why were you “not paying much attention”, Britton?’

I paused. I let him hang there for a good half-minute. Then I said, ‘Because my father died of a heart attack yesterday afternoon, sir.’

I have seen guys dropped across, but none like ‘Flasher’ Slingsby was dropped across that day. 4c were giving his performance very close attention. He looked, I thought, like a man who has opened his desk and found his wife’s head in it. I didn’t say anything. I just looked at the floor.

‘Britton, you . . .’

‘I what, sir?’

He had dug the hole. He had jumped in. It was now up to him to play himself out. The lads were definitely with me. Greenslade had folded his arms and, his head on one side, was studying Flasher’s body language as if he was going to write an article about it for the school magazine.

‘You . . . you shouldn’t be here!’

I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. I raised my head and looked straight at him. ‘I thought it might take my mind off it, sir.’

I have never really let anyone at Cranborne School know too much about the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist. People can use information like that. People think I’m kinky enough as it is. Sometimes people ask why I have to leave early on Friday afternoons, but I do not – repeat
not –
tell them I am off to Gather in the Lord’s Fruit in a High and Seemly Way (which is why Mother Walsh deemed the hours between three and six thirty on Fridays to be sacred). I say I am going to the dentist. They must be really worried about my teeth.

Flasher had turned a light pink. ‘You . . .’ He was opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

‘It was very quick, sir.’

Flasher did not wish to know this. But I kept right on telling him.

‘He was having a pint in the pub at lunch-time, sir, and by early evening he was . . . You know?’

My God
, you could see Flasher thinking,
this could be me!

‘Simon, I’m . . .’

First-name terms!
I kept my eyes on his face, waiting for his next move.

‘How old was he?’ he said eventually.

‘He was forty-three, sir.’

You could tell he was dying to get the conversation back to sines and cosines and all the other wonderful things left to the world by Leibniz and Descartes. But there was no way he could do it.

I looked over in Greenslade’s direction. Greenslade was carving a primitive figurine out of his rubber. Next to him, Khan was hunched forward across his desk. He looked as if he was about to put Flasher right on some tricky point of mathematical theory. The windows in our classroom are really high. I could only just make out the pale blue of the sky outside.

Flasher coughed. ‘Don’t you want to . . . be with your family at this time, Britton?’

‘Not really, sir.’ It’s actually quite a relief to be here! Have you seen my family? ‘I just feel . . .’

I started to play with my pencil.

Feelings are weird. Here, where I was surrounded by people who were actually
sympathetic
to a person when they heard that a close relative of his had failed to make it, I didn’t really feel sad at all.

‘I thought it would be better if I just carried on, sir.’

Flasher squared his shoulders. He is a captain in the Territorial Army. A year ago I was with him on Army Cadet Force manoeuvres in the Welsh Mountains. Limebeare, who was, for some unknown reason, a corporal, stole a bazooka from the armoury and shelled the village of Aberfach for three hours before being arrested by the local police. They handed him over to Flasher, and Limebeare said afterwards that he would rather have served three years in Carnarvon jail than pass the afternoon he did with Slingsby.

‘Yes, Britton. Yes. I quite understand.’ He looked at me in a somewhat worried way. ‘I never know what goes on in your mind, old son,’ he said. ‘You’re a secretive chap, Simon . . .’

You could see that he now thought he was in the clear. We had had this out, man to man. Although how he could say I was a secretive chap was, to me, a complete mystery. I’m an open book.

He came towards me between the grim wooden desks, and for a moment I thought he was going to put his arm round me. I wasn’t finished yet.

‘I
thought
it would . . . but . . . I don’t think I can quite . . . manage it, sir.’

Flasher looked at me narrowly. For a second you could see him wondering whether this might not be a wind-up. You could tell he still thought this was a strong possibility, but it wasn’t a chance he could afford to take.