They Came From SW19 (7 page)

There was absolutely no response to this.

Quigley, rather like a guy on the radio filling in time between records, prayed a bit more. ‘Thy crop has been a good one, Lord, and the economy, as far as we can tell, is moving out of recession and into Steady Growth.’

Here he stopped, clearly aware that he was losing all grip on his capital letters. To mask any confusion he might be feeling, he squeezed his eyes tightly shut and drove forward into the next sentence. ‘But Britain still lacks a spiritual dimension, Jesus, and many people live their lives in complete ignorance of Thee.’

He lifted his head at this point, opened the Quigley peepers and looked round at the assembled company. His gaze ended on yours truly. I could have sworn he was trying to pick me up! It was only one step away from ‘Hi, let’s go back for a cup of coffee!’ You know? There was that much sincerity in the old Quigley glance.

There was still absolutely no sign of Norman.

Quigley ploughed on bravely. ‘Television is about to be deregulated and, as a result, there is a danger that pornography will be pumped into our homes. Old values are under threat. Motorways . . .’

He stopped. He now had his head bowed over the table. His fingers masked his forehead. He peered over them at the assembled company. He obviously hadn’t quite got the heart for motorways. Once again he looked in my direction. I had adopted the sort of half-and-half attitude to prayer I had perfected for the rather less intense religious services on offer at Cranborne School, Wimbledon. I sat at a slight angle to the vertical, with my eyes hooded like a hawk’s. This was the only concession I made to the spiritual. You could see this freaked Quigley. Was I on the team or wasn’t I? Was I working for the opposition?

‘Motorwayth’, said Emily Quigley, picking up the ball and moving well with it, ‘are an evil, Lord! They blight the beautiful countwythide. Thupport and thuccour uth in our thtwuggle to thtop thith ditheathe that thweatenth the thtandardth of the Thouth-Eatht!’

She has no shame, Emily. She looks for the nineteenth letter of the alphabet and she works it in whenever she can. Contentwise, however, she had clearly scored a hit. People were nodding as if they all felt this was something that needed saying.

My mum’s eyes were blinking very fast. She pulled at her straggly grey hair and, in the reedy, worried tones she always used to talk to him, she said, ‘Norman . . .’

This was clearly something that had to be stopped. The guy had not yet had clearance from air-traffic control and here she was weighing in with a direct address, using his first name. You could tell from the way both Quigleys looked at her that the death of her husband had not improved her standing in the very competitive field of psychic phenomena.

Mrs Quigley made her move. I felt her hand flutter in mine slightly. And then, one or two firm tugs at my wrist. On the other side of her, Emily started to brace her right shoulder. She knew her mum. When Mrs Quigley goes for it, you get out the protective clothing and nail the furniture to the floor. She is serious business.

‘Oh!’ said Mrs Quigley. ‘OH! Oh! Ohhhh!’ We all knew the main show had started. There is a fantastic amount of upstaging in the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist, but nobody was going to give Marjorie Quigley anything to worry about. They knew a class act when they saw it.

‘Oh!’ she said, as if someone was pushing a large cucumber up her bum. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhhhh!’

Then she started to tug hard at my hand. I held on as hard as I could, but she was moving into top gear. On her other side, Emily had whipped away her hand as if someone had just passed a few thousand volts through it. Her mum was sort of snaking forward and then bouncing back in her chair, then giving us a few good pelvic thrusts, before starting the whole movement over again. She looked as if she was in the middle of some complex, experimental swimming stroke.

‘Oh!’ said Mrs Quigley, as if she was getting used to the cucumber – even, perhaps, to like it a little. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!
Ohhhhhhhh
!’

She was bucking like a rodeo rider now. At any seance the rule was always to give Mrs Quigley a good strong chair, because there was no chance it was going to keep its four legs on the floor for any longer than was absolutely necessary.

On the other side of the table, Quigley was waving his hands. ‘O
Jesus
!’ he was saying. ‘Oh
Jesus Christ
!’

It was hard to tell whether Quiggers was talking to the Son of God or was merely in a panic at the unexpected violence of his old lady’s seizure. She always gives good value, but this one was a real corker. Everyone else was, quite literally, keeping a low profile. Pike’s profile was so low his nose was hitting the table. Toombs, one hand in my mum’s, the other grasping Hannah Dooley, was getting his head well down between his knees. He looked as if he was about to chunder all over the carpet. Only Marjorie’s old man, who had broken away from his two tablemates and who had bared his lips above his yellow teeth like a nervous horse, was giving it anything at all. But he never fails her.

‘O Jesus,’ he said, ‘are you come amongst us?’

As if in answer to this, Mrs Quigley gave a loud howl and headed for the floor like a rugby forward crossing the line. My hand snapped out of hers. She must have gone about five yards. Then she started to writhe.

Mrs Quigley writhes brilliantly. She does an aerobics class with my mum, who says she can hardly get her knees in the air. But get her in a darkened room and mention Jesus a couple of times and she is doing things a world-class athlete could not manage. She goes in about eight different directions at the same time.

Quigley got to his feet, his eyes shining.
This
, his expression seemed to say,
beats anything at the National Westminster Bank.
‘What is it, my sweet one?’ he said. ‘What is it, my sweet precious?’

Mrs Quigley started to grunt. The grunt was new. I thought it was pretty good. I don’t think Quigley was too sure about it. He kept looking at her as if she was about to drop her drawers and flash her gash at us.

‘Darling,’ he said, reaching for her hand. ‘Darling . . . Darling . . . What is it, sweet darling?’

It’s a normal day, Quigley. I always do this. Remember?

Quigley looked up at the light fittings. ‘Jesus,’ he said, fixing his eyes on them, ‘what is the spirit that is in her? Jesus? O Jesus? Jesus? Jesus?’

Jesus was still saying
nothing.
Mrs Quigley started to bang her head on the floor. Over on the other side of the table I saw Pike sneak a look at his watch.

She made us wait for it. She always makes us wait for it. But when the voice comes out it is always good. This time it had a weird, distorted effect on it. It was hard to see how she could have possibly produced this timbre on her own, but what La Quigley doesn’t know about voice production could be written on a very small postcard. A guy from the Society for Psychical Research once frisked Marjorie just before she got in touch with the late Elvis Presley. Although she was clean, she made, I am told, a noise like a container ship’s fog-horn and broke three windows.

But this voice was really creepy. It had a sharp little edge to it. It sounded lonely. There was an ugly ring to it, too, as if it belonged to someone who had mean, nasty things to say about the world.

Whoever it belonged to, it was calling my name.

‘Simon!’ it said. ‘Simon Britton! Simon! Simon! Simon Britton!’

Everyone looked at me.

‘Yes?’ I said, in as calm a voice as I could manage. ‘That’s me. What exactly can I do for you?’

You don’t talk directly to the dead.

Over There, just like over here, you always have to go through someone if you want to do things properly. It’s a bit like when I used to phone my dad’s office and his secretary would say, ‘I’ll see if he’s in.’ I knew this meant that he was in but that she wasn’t sure if he wanted to talk to me.

The dead are like that. They are guarded by a whole load of spirits, with names like Peony and Goldenrod, and by the time these have kept you hanging round for hours, telling you their life stories, you sometimes wish the dead would hire competent secretaries.

Sometimes you get crossed lines. You’re looking for Aunt Elsie or little Camilla, but Lloyd George or Philip Larkin or somebody like that barges in and tells you what a great time they had on earth.

This voice of Mrs Quigley’s was a
spirit
, right? The next thing on the agenda was for us all to start asking it who it was and where it came from. Spirits don’t volunteer any information. They don’t walk around with ID cards pinned to their robes. And they have to be wooed. Sometimes there are things they don’t want to tell you. Sometimes they are too busy to talk to you.

I was buggered if I was going to woo this spirit. I didn’t, to tell the truth, like the sound of it. It rather freaked me out, in fact. And so, as so often happened at our seances, it was a member of the Quigley family who led us further down the passage to that Other World that lies in wait for us all.

‘What ith your name?’ Emily said.

There was a pause while Mrs Quigley thought of a name. ‘Gossamer,’ she said eventually, in a thick voice. Was this another celebrated spirit? A founder member of the Durex empire?

My mum is always good with the lower spirits. She’ll spend hours asking them how they float and what they eat and are their clothes comfortable. She often asks them really personal questions about their habits. I’ve heard them get quite offended.

‘Are you at peace, Gossamer?’

The voice took on a slightly babyish quality. ‘I . . . at peace . . .’

‘Oh good,’ said Mum. ‘Oh
good
!’

‘I at peace, but . . .’

Quigley moved in, fast. ‘But what?’

He tends to threaten the more junior spirits as if they are hostile witnesses in a cross-examination.

‘Gossamer?’

Mrs Quigley was writhing again.

It sometimes occurs to me that it was only during seances that the Quigleys could say what they really felt about each other. Normally Mrs Quigley was subject to the usual restrictions that apply to married people. She had to sit there and grit her teeth while her husband went on about the mortgage rate, the need for competitive small business and the very real power of Jesus’ love. In the middle of a seance she was at liberty to grunt and throw herself around the room and ignore everything the assistant bank manager said to her.

‘Gossamer?’

‘Go away!’

‘Gossamer?’

‘Fuck off!’

The spirits often use bad language. Especially when Quigley is asking them personal questions. I have often thought of going into a trance myself simply to have the pleasure of telling Quigley to go and fuck himself with an iron bar. As yet, I fear, I have not had the nerve to do so.

‘Gossamer?’

Mrs Quigley’s voice became plaintive and girlish.

‘What-a matter?’

Quigley looked as if he was trying to resist the temptation to honk into his inside jacket pocket.

‘Gossamer . . . have you a message for Simon?’

‘Methage for Thimon?’

Gossamer had gone babyish in a big way. Quigley responded by trying to out-yuck him/her/it.

‘Yes. What message for li’l Simey? What message ’oo got?’

Mrs Quigley came back with the sort of scream Dracula comes out with when faced by garlic or wooden stakes. She drew her knees up to her chin and started to bang her right arm on the floor in pretty strict rhythm. At the same time she pushed her crotch up at Quigley as hard as she could. He looked impressed. When her voice came through, it was a tiny croak, distant and faraway. ‘Simon?’ it said. ‘Are you there, Simon?’

‘Is this Gossamer I’m talking to?’ said Quigley in a no-nonsense voice.

It didn’t sound like Gossamer. It sounded like someone on a car phone going into a tunnel.

‘Gossamer gone . . .’ said the voice. ‘I am not Gossamer.’

‘Who are you?’ said Pike, clearly feeling the need to be included in all this.

‘An old spirit,’ said the voice – ‘one from the dawn of time. A tired spirit. A tired spirit that wants to sleep.’

‘What was your name?’ said my mum – ‘when you were on the earth?’

Mrs Quigley thrashed a little. There was dead silence in the room.

‘On earth,’ said the spirit, ‘I bore the name of Norman Britton.’

‘And what’, asked Quigley keenly, ‘was your address?’

‘Address?’ said the spirit, feebly. ‘How do you mean – “address”?’

It obviously didn’t know about addresses. They don’t have addresses over there, guys. There is a marked absence of the Filofax.

‘Which house . . .’ said Quigley, sounding a bit like my mum talking to a Swedish lodger we had once, ‘which
house
did you
live
in?’

‘I . . .’

There was a tense silence. Then Mrs Quigley frothed lightly, twitched a little and said, ‘I Gossamer. I come back!’

Everyone looked pretty cheesed-off at this. I think we all felt we had had Gossamer. He was fine as far as he went, but it was time to make contact with new and more exciting shades.

‘We want to talk to Norman,’ said Quigley, keenly, ‘not to Gossamer. Can you put us in touch with Norman? Norman Britton.’

‘He was a travel agent,’ said Mum. ‘He had a shop in Balham High Street.’

Quigley glared at her.

‘Norman,’ he said, in an insistent tone. ‘Norman Britton.’

‘I Gossamer,’ said Mrs Quigley, brightly.

This whole thing was beginning to resemble a bad transatlantic phone-call. Should we, you could see Quigley wondering, just leave a message and ask the guy to ring back? If we did get through, were we going to get any sense out of him?

‘Why can Norman not sleep?’ Pike asked.

Maybe because of all you guys getting on the line and asking the old spirit pointless questions! You know?

‘Is there something that troubles you?’

Mrs Quigley groaned. Long and low and quiet. ‘Ohhh! Ohhh!’

‘Thay if you have thinned!’ said Emily Quigley. Typical Emily. She’d never have dared talk to my dad like that when he was alive, even during the period when he was into the High Anglican church, Putney. I was quite prepared for my dad to get on the line and start talking about his period of Error – which is how the First Spiritualists referred to his going over to another church. But he didn’t.