They Came From SW19 (15 page)

Why was he telling me? Why did I have to remember? It wasn’t helped by his adding, as he went back out to start having another row with her, ‘She hems me in, boy! She hems me in! But
by God
I love her!’

He should have been on the stage really. But he joined the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist as a substitute.

I mooched down the main road, games bag on my shoulder. Why couldn’t we do the things normal people do, like go to bowling-alleys? Why did the First Spiritualist Church believe that the Charrington Bowl, Kingston, was ‘unclean and filthy with the work of the whore’? Why did we have to eat fish on Wednesdays? Was it absolutely necessary to follow Ella Walsh’s instruction to ‘avoid Ireland like the plague’? I’d quite like to go to Dublin. You know?

For some reason I turned off left down Furnival Gardens. Thinking about it afterwards, I decided that it must have been exerting a strong psychic pull. It doesn’t look like a road with any spiritual significance. It isn’t on a ley line or anything. At first sight it’s just another long, pointless South London street with too many cars parked in it. But, as I trudged up it, I started to feel weirder and weirder. It wasn’t simply that I felt depressed, although, if I had had a guitar and been able to play, I’d have sung the blues. As my eyes wandered from the dirt-stained pavement to the greyer sky, I could feel a presence in the air. And it was
him.

You always knew Dad was around. You knew it from his cough or his habit of breaking into song or his preference for bawling at people he wanted to go and see rather than walking around and trying to find them. Some people, like my mum, aren’t really present and correct even when they’re there, but there was never any doubt about Dad. The broken veins on his cheeks, the half-smoked tipped cigarettes, the low growl before he delivered an opinion about something – they were all so
vivid.

I couldn’t believe he’d died, you see. All I wanted was a middle-aged man with a big nose. That wasn’t so much to ask, was it? Surely the spirits that arrange the world could lay that on for me? I looked hard across the street, in between the cars, up towards the road ahead that was rising to another main street running across it, watching for that familiar face and listening for that unforgettable voice.

In one of the houses on the other side of the street an upper window was open. Loud classical music was coming out of it. I imagined someone lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling and watching the breeze stir the grey lace curtains this way and that. Up to my right I could see the black railings at the beginning of the patch of waste ground, and, ahead, nothing but roads and houses and, beyond them, houses and roads, cluttered with people as lonely and scared as me. The suburbs are hell. They go on and on and on, like Sunday afternoons.

He came out of a house about 150 yards away. He looked up and down the street, as if he was frightened of being followed. Then he looked up at the front bedroom window. He wasn’t wearing white. He didn’t
look
in the least ghostly. But he was wearing the sort of clothes he would not have been seen dead in, when alive. For a start he was wearing a hat, which is something my dad never ever did. ‘Headgear,’ he once said to me, ‘is an unnecessary indulgence, except when the temperature is below zero.’ But, although I was a fair way away from him, I could have sworn it was my dad. If it wasn’t him, it was an incredibly good simulation. He didn’t see me. He turned and walked up the hill, past the waste ground.

I thought hard about what Quigley had said. Was it all my fault that my dad was forced to walk the streets of Wimbledon? I remembered him once saying to me, the year we went to Cornwall, ‘I stay for you, boy. You know that, don’t you? I’m here because of you.’ And when they argued, which was a lot, it was often about me. I could hear them at the other end of the house, as I lay awake in bed. ‘You don’t appreciate him,’ one of them would say, and the other would answer, ‘No, no. It’s
you
! It’s you who doesn’t appreciate Simon!’

Had I made them both unhappy, and was this why he couldn’t be at peace? Or was I dreaming all this, making some poor, innocent, middle-aged person look like my old man, simply because I so much wanted to see him again?

The figure I was following – I still wasn’t certain it was my dad – didn’t look at all depressed to be hanging around South London. In fact, once it had got going, it looked pretty pleased to be here.

If it wasn’t my dad, then what was it?

Supposing we weren’t dealing with something as local as spacenapping. Supposing we were talking invasion. Suppose the extraterrestrials had moved beyond the initial, exploratory stages and on to one of their favourite ploys: full-scale invasion of planet earth. Method? Bodysnatching. Aliens, as I am sure you know, are no slouches when it comes to taking people to bits and reassembling them, programmed to do the will of the War Lord of Ro or the Headless Things of Jupiter.

Sure. Crazy, I know. I didn’t, as yet, actually
think
this. But it was as good as any other explanation on offer.

The normal procedure is to pull a guy behind the hedge on his way to the office, strap him to a bit of Venusian technology and drain off the old cranium before you can say ‘Bob’s your uncle.’ After this, the individual heads on into town – the only clue to the fact that he has been taken over by aliens being a slightly glassy look about the eyes and a tendency to give all words in any sentence a roughly equal amount of stress.

Why not dead people? You know? Dead people are perfect. We leave them lying around the undertakers’ for days, just waiting to be reanimated by the guys from Orion or a highly developed corner of the Magellan Cluster. Stiffs from all over South London could be swarming towards some prearranged meeting point, their expressions devoid of all traces of emotion. Maybe what I had seen outside my window in Stranraer Gardens had come to me courtesy of the same firm that had lifted Mr Marr!

If it was a simulation, the extraterrestrials had done a fantastically good job. It even walked slightly to one side, the way my dad always did. It stopped, just as it got to Garratt Lane, and hitched up its trousers in exactly the way he used to do.

I still hadn’t got a close look at its face.

It turned right into the next main road and headed off south. The funny thing was – they hadn’t got the clothes to fit. The suit jacket hung limp and awkward from the creature’s shoulders, and it was wearing huge brown boots. They were not the sort of thing Dad would ever wear. It’s a standard mistake the aliens make. They run up a pair of trousers out there on some moon of Jupiter, and they never get it
quite
right.

They had also reckoned without human psychology. They probably didn’t know about families and how humans sort of, you know,
like
each other. Their planet was probably not unlike the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist, and when people died they hung out the bunting. If my dad was alive, he would have let me know.

As I watched the entity tiptoe down the highway, I remembered Dad on the night I passed Grade Two Saxophone with merit. He was practically going up to people in the street on the way to the restaurant, grabbing them by the lapels and shouting, ‘
Merit! You hear me? Merit!
’ in their faces. I remembered him at the table in La Paesana too, his face flushed with wine, his fists clenched aloft – ‘Nail the bastards! That’s what you’ve got to do, Simon! Nail the bastards!’

It’s funny, when I think about any of these gatherings, although my mum must have been there, when I try to picture them I can’t see her. It’s as if she’s been painted out, the way Trotsky was painted out of all those photographs after the revolution in Russia. It was my dad and me. It was always my dad and me.

Whatever was slouching down Garratt Lane, its hands deep in its unfamiliar earthling pockets, was something else again.

I started to feel angry.

Why had I believed that garbage from Quigley? Why had I ever assumed that any of this was my fault? How had I got into the absurd position of believing that, just because I occasionally pulled my wire, my dad had been forced to roam some of the least attractive parts of South London after his death? People will believe anything, that’s the fact of the matter. It’s all too easy to dismiss a new idea – like, things from the Crab Nebula are trying to take over the planet – simply because it sounds strange. Why is believing
that
any stranger than believing that God punishes sinners? Or that Britain is a democracy? Or any of the other crazy things adults ask young people to believe?

Steady on, Simon, I told myself. Let’s sort out what’s possible, here. What do we actually think, Britton?

Why shouldn’t a take-over of the world begin in Wimbledon? It’s as good a place as any other to start restructuring the DNA of earthlings. It’s got the edge on northern Brazil, where, according to Bob Pratt, there is a phenomenal amount of this sort of thing going on.

I kept a respectable distance from the creature as it moseyed down through South Wandsworth. Was it headed for Tooting Bec and a quiet pint with some finned, semi-amphibious pile of green blubber with four heads? It wasn’t an obvious monster. It looked, superficially, quite normal. But the more closely I looked at it, the shakier it looked as a human being. Everything looked a bit . . .
put on.
Very cleverly done and very neatly thought out. But missing the thing that divides us from the rest of creation: humanity.

I don’t think I would have said anything if it hadn’t started running for the bus. Sometimes you only
see
a person when that person does a particular thing. As it thrust itself down on its right foot, it jerked its elbows down at the ground as if it was going to use them to lever itself forward – exactly the way my dad used to do. ‘In my youth,’ he used to tell me, in a way I have to say I didn’t entirely trust, ‘I was something of an athlete.’ It was the exact movement, I swear. I couldn’t help it. I called, just once – ‘Dad!’

Immediately I had called his name I regretted it. I felt that I had been ridiculously naive. If this thing was from the other side of the galaxy, it would be ready for such eventualities. It probably had a tape packed with all the things my dad ever said. In my dad’s case it wouldn’t need to be a particularly long tape, because he only ever said about thirty or forty things, in fairly strict rotation. It had probably got them all in there, stacked away neatly in its nasty little alien head. ‘Mine is a pint,’ and ‘I am easy, old son!’ and ‘Have you seen the
Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook
anywhere?’

But they never, as I said, get humans
quite
right.

It turned and looked towards me. Just for a moment I saw something behind its eyes I thought I recognized. But then it wasn’t there any more. Its face changed and what I saw on its features was extraterrestrial panic, as if someone was getting on the line to it and calling, ‘Re-turn to ship! A-bort mi-ssion! The hu-man-oid earth-ling has re-cog-nized you!’

It lowered its hat so that it covered its eyes and ran for the bus. The trousers really were
laughable
, my son. I mean, this was supposed to be my dad, right? The man for whom time stopped at some moment in the 197os. This thing’s trousers were trailing on the pavement, and were made of some coarse tweed, quite unlike anything Norman Britton had ever worn. It was bent over double as it reached the bus. Whether this was because it was still under orders to keep its face away from the light, or whether it was because it was finding our atmosphere difficult I didn’t care to guess. The atmosphere in Garratt Lane is not great, even for humans.

‘Dad!’

I couldn’t help it. I called again. Not being a highly disciplined blob from a star system billions of years older than our own earth, but a flesh-and-blood boy of fourteen, I was a little at the mercy of the old
emotions.
But it didn’t turn. It had to get to grips with the amazingly primitive transport devices still in use in the Wimbledon area, to look with some degree of confidence into the eyes of driver-conductors and tell them it had not got the right change.

It made the bus. The bus pulled away. I was left there on the pavement.

The real road-to-Damascus moments are the ones you work out for yourself. No one helped Archimedes, right? There was just him and the bath. What I went through on the pavement that evening was a revelation. I knew I wasn’t crazy. I had never felt so utterly and completely sane. But I knew, the way you know the answers to a difficult exam when you’ve prepared the paper really well. These guys weren’t buddy-buddy-give-us-a-football-pitch-to-land-on-and-let’s-get-pally. They were devious. They were unscrupulous. They were unbelievably good at genetic engineering. And they were
here.

I would have to be very careful who I started trusting with all this information, though. In some ways, the violent ward of the local mental hospital was an attractive alternative to number 24 Stranraer Gardens, and this was probably just where the extraterrestrials hoped I would be placed. But I didn’t think I was ready for it yet. I needed a sympathetic audience. Not necessarily ufologists – they do not need convincing about
anything.
But people who would spread the word. People who would let me get through the details of this story without trying to take my temperature and asking me where I stood on mind-expanding drugs. I needed a fairly large body of people who were good at believing things. Who else, my friends, but the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist, South Wimbledon?

As I crossed back towards Wimbledon Park Road, a hymn from my childhood came into my mind:

Tell them the word!

Tell them the word!

Why don’t you ever just try? If you have some news

That you really mustn’t lose,

Come along and Testify!

I found myself singing this out loud as I walked towards Stranraer Gardens thinking about the extraordinary things I had seen and heard since my father’s death. And when I got to the chorus, I practically shouted it into the faces of the astonished passers-by: