They Came From SW19 (21 page)

Pike gave him a curiously malevolent look. ‘Call it aliens!’ he said in a rather spooky, hollow voice. ‘I know it’s aliens!’

Quigley looked rattled. But, before he could say anything, Mrs Danby emerged from round a large pile of tins of tunafish. She was carrying an armful of cat-food cans and smirking to herself. Quigley, with a short, convulsive movement that was halfway between a bow and a twitch, took my hand and led me towards her. ‘Here’s your boy,’ he said. ‘Shall we away the noo?’

This whole thing had a prearranged feel. What were they going to do to me now? Take me out to a patch of waste ground and kick my head in for spreading dissent?

‘Where are we going?’

‘We have a sufficiency of ravioli,’ said Mrs Quigley, ‘and . . . er . . . Norman has something to say to us!’

‘What?’ I said.

They all started to look at each other rather furtively. Mrs Danby dumped the cat-food in the trolley and came close to me. She smelt of dried flowers and pepper. There were bags of skin under her neck, and she had a deep, posh, drawling voice, like an actress in an old film.

‘Norman has specifically asked to talk to us at Mr Quigley’s house,’ she said. ‘Even though the kitchen is only half-completed!’

‘Maybe’, I said, with a completely straight face, ‘he wants to see how the units are getting on.’

Mum gave an eager little nod. ‘Yes . . . yes . . . maybe he does!’

I marvelled, once again, at the rapid change in my father’s attitudes after his death. The last words he had spoken to me on the subject of kitchen units had been really quite abusive.

I wasn’t at all sure about this. Look what had happened at the last seance. And, since then, there had been Mr Marr’s disappearance and my dad’s own, frightening version of the Second Coming. I couldn’t bear the thought of hearing that voice again – the low, small voice like that of a child alone in a house at night.

‘Do we have to?’ I asked.

There was suddenly a very, very tense atmosphere. All of them were looking at me. Mum started to sing, in a light, quiet voice – something she only does when she is nervous. They had clearly been leading up to this all week.

‘Oh, Simon,’ Mrs Danby was saying. ‘I led your father down dark and narrow ways. Ways strewn with thorns and brambles and alive with venomous snakes! And now the whole church is in danger!’

Quigley nodded vigorously. ‘I think,’ he said, with a rather savage look in Pike’s direction, ‘that we are in need of Guidance. Splits in the church, Master Pike! Splits in the church! Remember the Lewis Doctrine! Remember the Schismatics of New Malden!’

I had not heard anything about these guys. But as, presumably, they had been wiped off the face of the earth by someone pretty close to Ella Walsh or Rose Fox, there seemed little point in asking about them.

There was nothing I could say. I am fourteen. I have no rights. I followed them out into the car park and sat, miserably, in the back of Quigley’s car as, in a mood of forced cheerfulness, we drove towards the Quigleys’ house behind Mrs Danby’s Rolls. I was squashed between Pike and Hannah Dooley in the back seat. The summer still hadn’t gone away, although we were almost out of September. Above us, great masses of cumulus clouds stood out in the sky like old-fashioned sculptures.

The Quigleys live further out than us. To get to their house you drive down arterial roads lined with buildings that are neither warehouses nor shops. They squat on ragged patches of grass like abandoned containers, painted bright colours, stuffed with more than anyone could want of Do-It-Yourself Equipment, Garden Furniture or, in one case, Pure Leather.

The Quigleys live next to a park. Their house is semi-detached. It is worth £300,000. So Mr Quigley keeps saying. I wouldn’t live in it if you paid me twice that amount. It is a big, square box painted dirty white, and, although he is always knocking through, extending, repapering and spring-cleaning, there is something dead about the place. The furniture stands around listlessly as if it is waiting to be sold. In the garden, the flowers and vegetables are as neat as Mr Quigley’s accounts. There is an apple-tree up against the fence that separates them from their neighbours, but it has been given a kind of Buddhist monk’s haircut. It does not look capable of bearing fruit.

The sun was still bright as we approached the Quigleys’ house, but it didn’t seem to have reached their road, which was the same as it ever was: dank and green and desperately quiet.

The first thing I noticed was that the whole of the top half of the house was swathed in what looked like green plastic bandages. There was scaffolding rearing up the face of the house from the front garden and, next to the front door, a large notice saying:

GORDON BRUNT

GENERAL BUILDER

SINCE 1964 SERVING SOUTH LONDON

Next to the notice was a fat man in blue dungarees and a white hard hat. He looked as if he might well be Gordon Brunt. He also looked as if his mission might be to make South London completely and utterly miserable. As the crowd of us came out of the car, he leaned backwards over Mr Quigley’s fence and spat, slowly and deliberately, into the geraniums.

‘What do they do, Marjorie?’ said Quigley, with sudden and violent passion.

Mrs Quigley was curiously calm as she replied: ‘They take our money. They abuse us. They leave their
filthy newspapers in the loo
!’

When she actually spoke to the guy she was quite amiable. ‘Hallo, Kevin. Are there problems?’

Kevin looked at her blearily. ‘It’s a bastard, this one, Mrs Q,’ he said. ‘It’s a real bastard!’

Quigley coughed. ‘We need,’ he said, rather stiffly, ‘to use the house for prayer.’

Kevin looked at him suspiciously. ‘You what?’

‘We need,’ said Quigley, with deliberate, offensive clarity, ‘to use our dwelling to talk to the Lord Jesus Christ.’

Kevin looked at him doubtfully. ‘I’m not sure about that,’ he said. ‘The plumbers are in.’

At this moment, a loud banging noise came from one of the upstairs windows. Quigley, who seemed not quite in control of himself, grabbed the man by the ears. ‘This is my house, wherein I dwell. And I would be grateful if you could get up there and tell that
oaf
Duncan to stop whatever it is he is doing!’

I hadn’t understood, until now, why it was so important for the Quigleys to make contact with my dad at their house. Now it was clear. When he’s at home, Mr Quigley is even more masterful than he is in other people’s houses. The man shambled off into the house, and the rest of us picked our way across the front garden.

As we came into the front hall I heard Kevin yelling up the stairs, ‘Stop the hammering! They want to pray!’

‘You what?’ said an invisible plumber.

‘They want to pray!’ said Kevin.

A large, hairy youth came out of the bathroom at the head of the stairs. He was carrying what looked like a huge steel club. ‘Why can’t the idiots pray somewhere else?’ he said. Then he saw Mr Quigley, and his hand went to his mouth. Quigley clearly had a master–slave relationship with these people.

‘We will be in the back room,’ said Quigley in tones of quiet authority, and, watched by several more astonished employees of Gordon Brunt Ltd, we all filed through into Quigley’s dining-room.

The ceiling had been removed, and we were looking up at where the roof of the house once had been. That, as I had seen from the outside, was shrouded in green plastic, and, as all the windows seemed to have been boarded up, there was scarcely any light at all. It felt as if you were in the middle of some enormous forest where the trees had grown together, blocking out the day.

Quigley pushed the seance table into the middle of the room, grinning at me over his shoulder as he did so. ‘We’re rough and ready, young shaver,’ he said. ‘But we’re homey, aren’t we?’

His confidence, which had slipped a little since my Testifying, was coming back. Here, surrounded by his family, his vast collection of Gilbert and Sullivan records, his several hundred bound copies of
What Car
magazine, his three watercolours of Wimbledon under snow and his collection of rare antiques, he was a man again. Even though all these objects were shrouded in heavy-duty plastic, he was a man again.

‘Shall we pray?’ he said, in an insidious voice.

‘Yes!’ said Hannah Dooley.

Mum sat at the table and pushed the grey hair back from her eyes. She pressed her hands together. They were red and raw from cooking and washing, and the lines on her face seemed to have multiplied since I last looked at it. ‘Norman,’ she said quietly, ‘is very, very near.’ Mrs Danby, who was dressed in sporty tweeds, as if for a shooting party, gave a superior kind of nod. I wondered whether there was anything in the teaching of Tai-Ping that could get me through the next half an hour. I thought about
sei-sei-ying
, or the condition of being a birch leaf in early autumn, but did not find it helpful. What was needed here, rather than a meditative technique, was a pump-action shotgun.

I had no choice. They were all sitting waiting for me. With a mounting feeling of dread, I went to a chair at the far end of the table from Quigley and lowered my head in the gloom. Quigley stretched out both his arms across the table and looked up at what was left of his roof.

‘O Jesus, we seek Thy help. As our church is itself in a confusion Thee Thyself often experienced when on this earth in places such as, for example, Gethsemane, which was, by anyone’s standards, a pretty tough time for You. Hear us now as we attempt to contact Simon’s father, and help him in the great spiritual work that awaits him in this prime time of his boyhood!’

He shot me a quick look from under those bushy brows. I kept my eyes down. Emily was looking at me in a way I found frankly flirtatious.

Suddenly Quigley stopped praying. His old lady was bearing down in her chair and generally showing signs of getting off the psychic runway in double-quick time. She hadn’t even frothed yet.

I was two down from her, but I could see Hannah Dooley wince as Marjorie started. Quigley stopped, clearly expecting her to give it a bit of movement, but, instead, she went into a sort of mammoth clench. She bound her brows and bit her lower lip and generally carried on like someone with serious constipation. After a quite incredibly long time she said, shaking her head wildly, ‘No!’

Everyone looked a touch put out. In twenty years of psychic work, Marjorie Quigley had never yet refused her fence. I looked up and saw Emily looking at her mum in consternation.

Her mum shook her head again. ‘No no no no no!’ she said. She gave a huge sigh. ‘There’s no one there!’

Look. This was ridiculous. We’re going out to lunch, or what? We
knew
there were loads of people there. We’d only just put down the phone to them. The woman was just not doing her job and getting through.

She started to tap herself on the forehead. ‘Total blank,’ she said. ‘Nothing there at all!’

We did her the favour of pretending that she was not talking about her own lack of brains.

She bit her lip furiously. ‘Damn!’ she said, like a tennis player who has just lost a point. ‘Damn! Damn! Damn! Damn!’

Mrs Danby leaned across and took her hand. ‘Gently,’ she said. Then she looked at me and sighed. ‘Norman always liked to go gently.’

This struck me as amazingly suggestive. Why was she looking at me like that? I looked across at Mum, and found she was looking at Mrs Danby with an expression I did not recognize. It could have been fear or sympathy or irritation or a combination of all three. I thought about her and about Dad and the Danby woman. I had no idea, really, what any of them thought or felt.

Mrs Danby was simpering at Mum. When she’d finished simpering, she said, ‘I blame myself!’

My mum looked vaguely hurt. She scratched herself behind the ear and said, ‘Oh don’t do that, Mrs Danby!’

‘If it hadn’t been for me,’ Mrs Danby said darkly, ‘Veronica would never have gone to that wine and cheese party. Or to Angmering, for that matter.’

Everyone started to sigh and shake their head. Mrs D held up her claw-like hand. Quigley started to ooze humility. He bowed forward over the table. He got his head so low you could practically see the cleft in his buttocks. ‘Oh Mrs Danby,’ he said, in the tone of voice he usually reserves for Jesus Christ. ‘Oh Mrs Danby!’

Mrs Danby smirked. She didn’t have to do a lot to get results. But I’ve noticed that a certain amount of loot helps to invest even your most casual remarks with a certain significance.

Mrs Danby shook her lizard-like head and pointed at me dramatically. ‘When all’s well with the boy,’ she said, ‘we will come into our own!’

I felt they had money on me. You know? Like I was a horse or something.

Mrs Danby was well away. She broke her hands free of the grip of those on either side of her and pressed her palms to the table. ‘Thou seest me, Lord,’ she said. ‘Thou seest this boy also. Help him! Grant that he be not in Error! Help him back to the circle! And may he be the healing of the things I wrought with his father!’

‘
Wrought
’, eh! What had she and my dad wrought, I wondered? Suddenly I was in Error! Error is pretty bad. If you’re in Error you are one step away from the thumbscrews. If there had been less enthusiasm among the congregation for ufology, maybe they would have devised a public punishment for me.

People who fail the church are sometimes made to appear at morning service ‘as they were first made before God’, which these days usually means in their underclothes. If they have been just very bad, and if they have someone to stand up for them, they are given three strokes of the whip, usually by Sheldon Parry, the born-again television director, and then made to put on a short green smock for the duration of the service. If they have been very, very bad and are not well connected inside the church, the man with the wart gobs all over them, people chuck potato peelings at them and then they are turned out into Strathclyde Road in their underpants.

I was moving dangerously close to the potato peelings. This much was obvious. I checked under the jeans to make sure I wasn’t wearing the Donald Duck boxer shorts.