They Came From SW19 (12 page)

‘Would you like to go home, Britton?’ he said.

‘I think I’d just like to walk on the Common and think about things.’

No pupil of 4c had ever requested such a thing before. If this went on, it wouldn’t be long before we started ordering hot chocolate and croissants to be brought to the desk.

‘Is that all right, sir?’

‘Absolutely, Britton. Absolutely!’ said Flasher. ‘But . . .’

‘Yes, sir?’

‘Don’t do anything foolish, will you?’

‘No, sir,’ I said, in a voice that was meant to suggest that I was about to pen a short note describing Flasher’s insensitive attitude to the bereaved and then swallow a few dozen Nembutal.

I got to my feet. Everyone was looking at me. I wondered whether to tell them the whole story. But I wasn’t sure that Flasher was ready for my dad’s coming back to life. He had not really had time to adjust to Norman’s death.

I stopped at the door and gave him my best and bravest smile. ‘Thank you, sir, for being so understanding about my problem. There are times when geometry just doesn’t seem at all relevant.’

‘I realize that, Britton,’ said Flasher with some humility.

Very slowly and quietly I closed the door behind me. I could feel the lads’ appreciation as I headed off down the corridor. A round of applause would not, I felt, have been out of place. All I needed now was to bump into Mr Grimond, the games master, and for him to ask me what the
bloody hell
I thought I was doing.

Mr Grimond would fit quite well into the First Spiritualist Church. He is stark staring bonkers. He has been known to hold boys upside down on the rugby pitch and swat the ball with their heads. He regards brain damage as character-forming, which, for someone of his level of intelligence, is an entirely consistent position.

I walked out through the main entrance, past the picture of Sir Roger de Fulton, a rather dodgy-looking customer in a blue dressing gown, and the huge pokerwork version of the Cranborne School motto
QUID AGIS?
Or ‘Wha’ Happenin’?’ as we translate it. There was more sunshine outside than Wimbledon could really accommodate. The streets seemed rich with possibilities – the way they do when you know you’re supposed to be at school.

I thought I had better go down the hill and take a look at Mr Marr’s house. In my right-hand jacket pocket I could feel the weight of his front-door key, the one he gave me three years ago.

As I passed south of the War Memorial, I could see Mr Marr’s chair, standing out on the Common. Next to it, all his stuff was still laid out. It looked lost, like someone’s drawing-room suite abandoned in a junk yard.

Mr Marr had given his key to no one else. I was the only person he trusted. He had told me to use it only in emergencies. But this, to me, looked like an emergency.

‘There may come a time, Simon,’ he had said to me, as he handed it over, ‘when people from another galaxy who are not kindly disposed to us – and such people are probably out there – may . . . you know . . .’

‘ “You know” what, Mr Marr?’

‘Well . . . MIBs for example. You know?’

I knew. ‘MIBs’ stands for ‘Men In Black’. In Deepdene, Ohio, in 1958 Mr and Mrs John Wearing saw a large flying saucer three miles out on the highway to Sawmills Bridge. It was hovering over a petrol station. There was, according to Mr Wearing, ‘a sort of perspex shield where the driver’s cab might have been situated’, and he claimed to have seen a large ‘blob-like creature’ with its nose pressed to the windscreen. It let him know, without using earth language, that the whole of the Midwest of America was in grave danger.

Fine. These sorts of things are always happening.

Two days later, after the Wearings had contacted the local newspaper and given an extensive interview, two men in black suits turned up. They wore dark glasses and black trilbies but were by no means the Blues Brothers. In ‘cracked, automatic voices’ they warned Mr and Mrs Wearing that they had better not speak of these experiences to
anyone.
I’m not, actually, quite sure why or how the Wearings allowed the story to get out. I mean, I hope they’re all right. You know?

‘If I should disappear without trace, you know what to do,’ Mr Marr had said to me.

‘I know what to do!’

‘Here’s the number. Memorize it and destroy it.’

He gave me the top-secret telephone digits of a very senior guy in the Wimbledon Interplanetary Society. I was to ring him only in an emergency because, apparently, British Rail took a very dim view of his receiving calls about non-terrestrial business during office hours.

There was still no breeze at all. It was dead still that September. On the house-fronts in Columba Road, the roses nodding on the brickwork, as big as soup plates, looked as if they were waiting for something. And, as I turned into the cul-de-sac where Mr Marr lived, it seemed to me that the whole suburb was holding its breath.

I had forgotten the number of the chairman-for-life of the Wimbledon Interplanetary Society. I could not even remember the name of this rather crucial person. It would have been good to talk to someone about all of this, I thought to myself, although, from the little Mr Marr had told me about him, he sounded pretty flaked. Anyway, by making the call I would be admitting what had really happened. There was still a chance that Mr Marr had been taken ill or something, or had decided to go and see a relative.

Except he didn’t have any relatives. And, if he had been taken ill, there was a card in his jacket pocket saying who he was. We take no chances in the Wimbledon Interplanetary Society. ‘Be always on your guard,’ Robert du Carnet, the secretary, had said at the last Annual General Meeting. ‘Don’t let
them
choose the time!’

We know that the things from hyperspace may want to blast us to bits. And that people who don’t even believe they exist will be at even more risk than we are. We have a duty to survive, Mr Marr says.

He chose this particular cul-de-sac, for example, for very good reasons. He liked to feel his back was secure. Although, as I often pointed out to him, the aliens could easily come at him over the tennis courts. His house is a funny little semi-detached affair, with bulging windows and wooden beams stuck to the bricks that are supposed to give it an Olde Worlde appearance. There are three uncared-for rose bushes in the front garden. There’s a white one for him, a red one in memory of her and a yellow one he planted just for me. He always said I was the son he never had. The white and red ones were supposed to grow into each other, but they never managed to do it. They just sort of droop grimly at each other across the ragged lawn. I don’t know what this says about the old Marr marriage. My bush has gone crazy. It grows out in all directions and showers petals all round it.

The front curtains were drawn, which was odd. I was a touch scared. I peered through the frosted glass in the front door. All I could see was the shape of Mr Marr’s bicycle. Through the letterbox I could see the usual pile of letters, plastered with stamps from all over the world. They write to Mr Marr from everywhere about sightings, landings, close encounters of the fourth kind and all the other things that those boring radio telescopes down at the Mount Palomar observatory fail to pick up.

I fitted the key in the lock. I pushed open the door and looked down the hall. The first thing I thought was: the blobs or the androids or the giant green lizards from Venus or whatever they were had paid Mr Marr a call.

Every drawer in the house had been pulled out. But it wasn’t like burglars. Things had been piled neatly on the floor, as if someone was packing for a long journey. Underpants were in one pile, socks another, and by the door there was a neat line of shoes. Over by the window the aliens had made a start on the reading matter, which, as it was mainly about them, was unsurprising. They were halfway through a book called
The UFO Report 1991.
It was open at a chapter entitled ‘Disturbing Encounters in Northeast Brazil’ by Bob Pratt.

A sentence on the first page caught my eye.
If a UFO were to land in my backyard I would certainly not run out to embrace it. I would be very wary – and with good reason
. Somebody had underlined this remark. It wasn’t Mr Marr, because he never writes in books. He’s fussier about how they look than he is about what’s in them. I say somebody. Something. Something which had used a Biro. I looked round carefully. There was a kind of chill about the place. I got up and went through to the kitchen.

Whoever had paid Mr Marr a visit had tried to make a piece of toast. Not very successfully. It was possible, of course, that these guys could handle speeds faster than light but a British toaster had them baffled. Mr Marr’s toaster is, as it happens, a particularly dodgy piece of equipment. But why should they take the things out of the drawers? I sat on the bed and tried to think.

Could it be a burglar? But if it was a burglar, where was the broken window or the forced lock? I checked all over the house and there was no sign of any such thing. The next thing I did was to ring Mr Marr’s office and ask if he had shown up for work. A woman at the other end said he hadn’t. She sounded very surprised. ‘He never misses,’ she said. And then, ‘Are you his son?’

That made me feel peculiar. I said I was his nephew. I don’t know why. She didn’t have any idea of where he might be if he wasn’t at work. Which figured. There just wasn’t anything else in his life. I was really getting worried. First my dad, and now Mr Marr. What was happening?

Why were all his things out on the floor, as if someone had been packing? Was it possible that he had run away? Had he done something awful and decided to leave without telling anyone? Surely he would tell me if he was in trouble. Wouldn’t he?

Or was he playing them along? I thought about this as I loosened my school tie and paced about the empty front room, feeling like a detective. I quite liked this line of approach. Maybe he had expressed keenness to visit their galaxy, but asked if he could pack a few things first. The blobs or the lizards, or whatever they were, follow him back from the Common and stand over him while he makes preparations.

‘Come on, Marr,’ they say, ‘Threng, our King, is waiting.’

‘I’ll be right with you,’ says Mr Marr, ‘I’m just packing a pair of
boxer shorts
. . .’

All the time his eye is on the phone. If he can call me or Purkiss or, preferably, someone better qualified than either of us, he is in with a chance.

I sat back on the bed. This great detective I once read about used to go to the scene of the crime, close his eyes and visualize. Very often it turned out that he tuned in to what had actually happened. I closed my eyes and tried to
see
the aliens with Mr Marr . . .

He brings them back to the house and plays for time. But they don’t give him that chance. The clothes pile up. More and more drawers are opened. Finally the blobs tap him on the shoulder and say, ‘It’s time to go, Marr!’ That’s when he makes the toast. Will there be anything to eat in the Crab Nebula – you know? But he’s nervous. He burns the toast. The blobs are getting restive. Their ship is parked up by the War Memorial and at any moment some local is going to start asking questions.

Come on, Simon. You need more than this. This is just guesswork. You need some sign. If he really had been spacenapped (I wasn’t yet sure that he had) he wouldn’t go down without a fight. He’d leave some sign, wouldn’t he? He’d leave a clue. For me or Purkiss or Walbeck.

He’d ask to go to the lavatory. Of course.

‘Lavatory?’ say the aliens. ‘What is this?’

The aliens have progressed light years ahead of us. They have no need of toilet facilities on their planet. Man gives them a GCSE lesson in biology and they laugh behind their flippers at how primitive we are. He explains the cultural need of humans to lock the door when they go to the bathroom. And then . . .

I was already walking towards the bathroom. The door was closed. I tugged at it hard. When it opened, the first thing I saw was the mirror. It was flecked with tiny white spots. Mr Marr had been spitting at it for years. On the washstand in front of the mirror were four or five tiny, deformed pieces of soap. But, in the middle of the glass, dead in the centre, someone had scrawled a single word:
HELP
!

They had used lipstick. My first thought was:
Where did Mr Marr get lipstick?
But then I realized. It was probably his wife’s. He keeps all his wife’s things, just as they were. There are even pairs of her stout, sensible shoes in the back kitchen.

You see, I do think we
know
things before they actually happen. There has to be a sense beyond seeing or hearing or taste or touch or smell. Not everything they tell you down at the First Church is idiotic. Great scientists, like Einstein, for example, sort of
suspected
things like relativity before they had had a chance to prove them. He had an idea and found that the facts fitted it. I had had an idea, and it was looking as if the facts fitted it only too well.

Other stuff in the bathroom had been disturbed. The cupboard on the wall had been ransacked. Toothpaste and toothbrushes were on the floor. Someone had opened a bottle of shampoo and sprayed it around the place like it was champagne at a Grand Prix.

I pinched the bridge of my nose with my thumb and index finger and began to visualize.

Mr Marr is surprised at the mirror. The aliens follow him and catch him writing. ‘This is going to the lavatory, Marr?’ they say, their metallic voices sounding a bit like Flasher Slingsby at his most evil. There is a struggle. They cover him with poisonous slime or zap him with a laser gun. Then they have fun! They play with earthling cosmetics! Because, deep down, these aliens are just a bunch of kids. And then, suddenly bored, they tuck him under their flippers and saunter back through Wimbledon.

No one sees them. No one would blink twice if a 400-foot reptile wandered through Wimbledon Village after eleven at night. It is
dead
!

I was not jumping to any conclusions, but I thought we could well be talking spacenapping here. At least, it seemed as possible as any other explanation. Quite
how
this linked up with what I had seen outside 24 Stranraer Gardens the previous night I didn’t know. But one thing seemed pretty certain. I had been wasting my time talking to Jesus about it. It was not His department. This was a very practical issue, with very serious implications for me and everyone else in the Wimbledon area.