They Came From SW19 (20 page)

Here I raised my right hand and pointed my index finger straight at the bearded one. He didn’t flinch. He looked straight back into my eyes.

‘. . . is the important thing in the world. And arguing for what you believe, however stupid or illogical or plain mad it may seem. And standing up for what
you
choose to believe against those wicked people who just want you to believe what they tell you. Who just want to take over your mind and not let you think for yourself. Who . . .’

‘Who welcome the snake!’ said Pike.

I had a sudden vision of a reception committee for the snake. It wasn’t difficult to imagine it wriggling out of a cigar-shaped object on Wimbledon Common.

Pike did a sort of wild leap and whirled round to face the congregation. ‘Aliens!’ he said, sounding like the compère at a Hallowe’en party.

What I had said had clearly got to Pikey in a major way. Maybe I was more eloquent than I thought. It was only much later that I remembered my speech had been more or less word for word something my dad had said to me once. It was funny – when my dad had said it to me it seemed like the rather tired, friendly sort of thing that parents often say to you. Spoken, or rather screamed, by yours truly in the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist, it was
dynamite
.

It certainly put the wind up Quigley. He didn’t say anything at all as, led by his former lieutenant, the congregation swarmed up to the dais and lifted me high on their shoulders. Yelling ‘Aliens! Jesus!’ and ‘Aliens are come!’ and ‘Prithee the snake not be here!’ in about equal proportions, they carried me round the body of the hall. I shook my hair back and waved my arms above my head as Pike mopped and mowed in front of me and the band struck up an impromptu tune.

I could have been old JC himself, I tell you, riding into Jerusalem on his donkey, ready to spread the Good News. I could have been one of those prophets who foretold him. I could have been almost anyone I chose that day. I had testified, all right. I had put Unidentified Flying Objects right back on the agenda where they belonged, and, from this day forth, the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist was never going to be the same again.

That, more or less, is how the First Spiritualist Church experienced its last and greatest schism. I mean, it was ripe for it. I sometimes like to think it was my eloquence, but the fact of the matter is that if I had got up on my hind legs and suggested a bit of karaoke instead of the morning service, they would have leaped at it. They were ripe for change, and, as it happened, I couldn’t have chosen a better subject with which to widen the scope of the church’s activities. Or, indeed, to discomfort Quigley.

There was, as I subsequently discovered, quite a high crossover between ufology and fundamentalist Christianity. Hannah Dooley knew a bloke in Birmingham who had been set on by a group of small ‘pod-like’ creatures while out walking his dog. They did a number of very unpleasant things to him and left him, dazed and confused, at New Street station at two in the morning. Mr Toombs had been a founder member of the British Premonitions Bureau in 1967 (it registered 500 premonitions, most of which were concerned with major transport disasters). The place was a powder keg.

It wasn’t only ufology. There were six clairvoyants, four water diviners and nine people who had had direct contact with poltergeists. They all wanted space. Sheldon Parry, it turned out, was a life member of the Society for Psychical Research and had been deeply involved until he had lost his library books. They all needed to express what they felt.

All I did was get things started. There had always been schisms in the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist. There had been Lewis, the guy who was down on cutlery and condiments, and much earlier a bloke called Evans, who maintained that Old Mother Walsh was really a man in drag and that it behoved members of the church ‘to wear the clothes of the other kind’. Evans was arrested in Piccadilly in 1908, wearing ‘lace petticoats and stays and drinking from an opened spirit bottle’.

And there were a lot of memories. You know? Since the days of Ella Walsh, the real main event had been table-rapping, but people in the church still talked about Old Mother Walsh and her prophecies. It wasn’t only the snake with two thousand years go by on it. There was a whole lot of other stuff scheduled for the beginning of the second millennium: green rain, black snow, animals learning to talk and a heck of a lot of red-hot hail. One guy had already arranged to sell his house and go and live in the Caribbean in 1998 because, as he said, ‘You might as well have a decent last couple of years.’

I don’t think I would have made quite so much impact, however, if it hadn’t been for the fact that, while they were carrying me round the church yelling, ‘Aliens!’ ‘Jesus Christ!’ and ‘The snake cometh!’ the roof fell in. I say ‘fell in’. In religion these terms are relative. You know? One minute Jesus is a sort of cross between Batman and Captain America, next thing he is ‘just a bloke with a few special powers’, and before you know it he is a deranged Jew with a no more than ordinary claim on our imaginations. A couple of sheets of corrugated iron broke loose and fell on Mr Pugh’s head. That was all. But it was enough. In a week or so you would have thought a crowd of angels had wafted in from Putney singing my name and crying ‘Hosanna!’

The burning bush, right? I mean, did it? You know? Or did it just look kind of . . . reddish?

Nobody said much to me after the service. As we trooped out of the hall, the old lady in the wheelchair was still trying to get up and Clara Beeding was kneeling in front of her. I thought I heard her say, ‘Go on, you can do it!’

A couple of people came up to shake my hand as we got into Quigley’s car. He stood back, a tight smile on his face, as Roger de Mornay said, ‘A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful speech!’

Once we were inside the car, Quiggers allowed himself a full-blooded sneer. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘little green men!’

I didn’t speak. In fact, nobody said much on the way back. Just as we came into Stranraer Gardens, Mrs Quigley said, ‘We have worked so hard to bring you to the Lord, Simon! You cannot know how important to the church this is. Mrs Danby . . .’

Here Quigley cut her off sharply. ‘Don’t let’s talk about Mrs Danby. I’m sure we can manage Mrs Danby, Marjorie!’

There was something really horrible about the way he said this. A pure flash of creepiness. I missed my dad more than ever as I went into the house, ahead of the others, and climbed the drab stairs to lie on my bed, looking out at the bright blue sky above the street.

After a while, the door to my bedroom opened and my mum’s head peered round it. Her mouth was turned down and her little eyes were beady with worry. She blinked at me for a minute or two and then said, ‘Aliens!’

I didn’t respond. She clicked her tongue in the way she does when I eat peanut butter straight from the jar.

‘Spacemen!’ she went on.

I sighed.

Mum went over to my window and looked down at the street. In a small, faraway voice, she said, ‘Mr Quigley’s awfully cross with you and Pike. He’s very worried. He’s very worried indeed. And he cares about you, Simon. He thinks about you and prays for you all the time. He does!’

She went out then, and left me alone.

The next week saw a constant procession of spiritualists in and out of our kitchen. Some of them came to talk seriously with Quigley and to shake their heads at me. Rather more, including Pike, came to shake me by the hand and ask me detailed and unanswerable questions about the nature of the extraterrestrials who had landed in the Wimbledon area. Once or twice, at mealtimes, I thought Quigley was going to speak to me about the matter. But he didn’t. Usually he likes to get you alone, as, I have noticed, a lot of Christians do. So, when he suggested that we all go ‘to furnish the larder’ on Saturday morning, I thought I was reasonably safe.

Normal people go shopping. First Spiritualists go to furnish the larder.

Shopping is a tricky one for them. You have to be very careful when prowling along the shelves. A First Spiritualist doesn’t drink coffee, or eat white bread or cheese (apart from Gorgonzola – the Good Cheese, as it’s called), and faced by a frankfurter is liable to scoot off into a corner, whimpering. Nobody quite knows who decided all these things were dangerous and evil, or why they did so. But they take the rules pretty seriously. Branston Pickle is ‘harmonious and honest’, but all forms of sausage are, basically, in league with Beelzebub.

One of the reasons they go shopping in groups is because not everyone agrees about which foods are OK and which ones are going to plunge you into hellfire. Someone will reach for a jar of fish-paste only to be brought up short by another member of the party reminding them that fish-paste is unclean, while someone else may get as far as the checkout with a year’s supply of baked beans, when, across the crowded shelves of the supermarket, comes a voice reminding them of the danger they are facing.

There are a lot of scores paid off when shopping. My dad used to love chocolate cake, and, whenever they were having a row, my mum would remember that chocolate was ‘a poisonous thorn in the side of Creation’. At other times the two of them would wolf down a whole packet of After Eight mints with no apparent difficulty.

This Saturday we went with the Quigleys, Hannah Dooley, Pike, the Clara Beedings (as Roger and Clara are known) and, to my surprise and dismay, Mrs Danby. She showed up in her Rolls in the car park of the supermarket, and, although there was a lot of nodding and smiling and remarks about coincidences, it was pretty clear that her presence had been arranged for someone’s benefit. I suspected it might be mine.

I hate going around in groups. Especially groups of people from the church. I’m terrified we might see Khan or Greenslade on a day when everyone has decided to follow Mother Walsh’s directions about placing the feet on the ground without damaging the old insect life. But on this particular day we looked almost normal. Everyone was very friendly, and there was much jolly laughter as we passed the frankfurters and Quigley made as if to ward off the evil eye.

He waited until we were browsing through the chilled fish before raising the issue: ‘Do you really think that Old Mother Walsh’s snake is
actually
going to wriggle down Wimbledon High Street when the time comes?’

I didn’t ask what time he meant. The time of Snakes Wriggling Down Wimbledon High Street, presumably.

‘Er . . .’

My mum was piling tinned ravioli into the trolley. She looked like a small animal that expected to be surprised at any moment.

‘I don’t think you do, do you?’ said Quiggers. ‘I think you think, as I do, that Old Mother Walsh wasn’t talking about a
real
snake. She was talking about the snake that is in all of us all the time!’

What snake was this? A tapeworm perhaps?

‘A lot of the simpler souls,’ said Quigley, ‘probably think a great big snake is going to slither out at them and start gobbling them up in a few years.’

You could see from Pike’s face that this was exactly what he thought. If this snake did show, I thought, please God it liked the taste of men with beards.

‘Cor lumme, young shaver!’ said Quigley. ‘Your little green chaps are no more than that snake, really, are they? They are a way of saying, “The world’s in pretty bad shape, Jesus, and pretty soon someone will come along and give us pain and suffering and woe.” ’

I looked him straight in the eye.

‘No they’re not. They’re just
there
, that’s all. And I never said they were green. What I said was, it looks as if they’re here. You know?’

Quigley laughed. He was still being Mr Nice Guy. My mum had finished shovelling the ravioli into the trolley. She and Emily and Mrs Quigley were headed for toilet tissue at a brisk pace.

‘Little talk with Jesus?’ he said, and, halfway through reaching for a tube of tomato purée, he closed his eyes and froze solid as if overtaken by a large quantity of molten lava. I waited for him to finish.

When somebody pressed his play button, I said, ‘People think I’m stupid because I think there’s something in this alien business. But I’m not!’

Quigley grabbed my arm. ‘No, li’l’ Simo,’ he said. ‘You are not. You are special! You are favoured.’

He rocked to and fro, his eyes half shut. On the line to Jesus once again. ‘ “A boy will come ’fore the snake’s unfurled, and preach the woman to save the world!” ’ he said. A bloke who was trying to get at the tomato purée gave him rather an odd look, but Quigley was not bothered. I recognized another of Old Mother Walsh’s rhymes.

‘ “Go to the river in ones and twos, but be sure you put on your overshoes!” ’ I quoted back at Quiggers.

He became enormously excited and, as the rest of the party started back towards us with a huge mound of lavatory paper balanced on the ravioli, he hopped from foot to foot, clutching my arm. Only Pike, I noticed, had stayed with us. He was watching Quigley, a sour look on his chapped little face.

‘That,’ said Quigley, ‘is the point. Old Mother Walsh didn’t always mean what she said to be taken
literally.
But, by God, the end of the world is coming and, by God, a pure and holy boy will preach the woman who will
speed his coming
!’

With these words, he pointed dramatically at Emily Quigley.

If anyone was going to be chosen to usher in the end of the world, she could well be the girl to do it. She had the face for it. Was this the deal? Did Quigley see me as some kind of John the Baptist figure? If he did, it wasn’t surprising he was trying to get me Confirmed in Faith. Anything to make Emily Quigley look good. I may not be pure in heart, but, since Mike Jarvis the skateboarder went to live in Nottingham, I am about the only fourteen-year-old boy in the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist.

It gave me a spooky feeling, actually. Maybe he had a point. Maybe what I was saying wasn’t so very different from what Old Mother Walsh had given the troops all those years ago.

He could see I was wavering, and he held my arm tightly as the others came up. ‘Extraterrestrials’, he said, ‘may well be on their way. I don’t dispute that. Who knows what the Lord will send us on Judgement Day? But, cor lumme, snakes and aliens don’t have to be taken literally. All we know is that, as Mother Walsh said,
when the pure boy preaches the woman
. . .’ – here he gave Emily a meaningful look – ‘. . . something pretty nasty is going to be heading in our direction. Don’t call it aliens, Simo, call it Sin. Call it Wickedness. Call it Pain and Suffering!’