They Came From SW19 (25 page)

As I turned into Mr Marr’s I was shaking. I had to force myself down the street to his house. I had to force myself up the path to his front door. And, when I fitted the key into that lock, my hands were trembling.

Listen – no one could have got into Mr Marr’s. I had the only key. No one had forced any doors or windows, because they didn’t need to, did they? On Tellenor, according to the Jura alien, they have mastered the technique of passing through solid objects – one of the things Mr Marr said was worst about the Tellenoreans was that you never quite knew when they were there.

If it was them, they had been through the house very, very carefully. Since my last visit they had had another go. Someone or something had been through the fridge and taken away a few samples of earthling diet – a chilli con carne and a cold lasagne that was probably even now being scoffed by a load of blobs up in the ionosphere. They had also started to take away literature. They had been pretty systematic. Most of the stuff missing was from Mr Marr’s extensive collection of material dealing with invasions from other galaxies. And the huge file dealing with Operation Majestic
UK
8, which had taken pride of place in Mr Marr’s top-secret collection of UFO papers (in the cupboard under the stairs) was nowhere to be seen.

I thought about the police. But if these beings had left any fingerprints, I had the strong feeling they wouldn’t be the kind you get down at Scotland Yard.

He had kept the file under a pile of back numbers of the
Wimbledon Guardian
, because, as he said, ‘there were a number of people who would be only too happy to see all documents in the case suppressed’. At one point, I seem to remember, he’d kept the papers in the fridge – which is why the top sheet had a large blob of sweetcorn in the top right-hand corner.

Our Tellenorean friends had taken the
Wimbledon Guardian
as well as the
UK
8 papers. I didn’t like to think why they needed the local paper. By now, probably half the small ads in the current issue had been placed by aliens.

I was scared, though. I was really terrified.

And then, as I came out from under the stairs, I heard something moving upstairs. Two creaking boards, and that was it. I stopped. I listened hard. I could hear my heart tap against my ribs. My face suddenly felt very hot, and then, just as suddenly, very cold. There was silence. I wanted the silence to go on, but, as I listened, it felt as if I was racing it. That the thump of my heart was challenging it to go on and not to be broken by a . . .

Crrreak . . .

There was something up there. And, while I was not in possession of definite proof, my money was on it coming from somewhere a little further away than the Fulham Palace Road. As I changed from listening to walking mode, I tried to work out whether it had feet or flippers or ran on rollers. The noise had an insistent quality – like a small animal gnawing away at something or gathering food and stopping every few minutes to listen, as hard as I was listening in the dark of Mr Marr’s house.

I did not want to find out if it was friendly. If it was friendly, how come it was scurrying around stealing magazines and not coming out into the open and asking who was in charge round here? Everything seemed to indicate that it was our friend Argol, or some flunkey of his. I tried to remember if Mr Marr had ever said anything about how Argol looked. Was he a thing or a person? Hadn’t someone said something about his teeth? I was almost sure they had. His
teeth
! My Christ! The gnawing was starting again. Not content with stealing Mr Marr’s library, the bastard was chewing up his bedroom furniture!

Then I heard the humming. A high-pitched noise that seemed to come from the head of the stairs. It wasn’t the kind of sound an engine made – or a dishwasher or a television or any of the things I was used to seeing round the house. I only realized what it was when I got to the front door. It was a human sound, but unlike one I had ever heard before. It was more like the noise dogs make sometimes – a see-sawing musical phrase, as if it was talking to someone you couldn’t see. That was it. Human and yet definitely
not
human.

I looked up at the bedroom window as I closed the door behind me. I saw Pike’s face pressed to the glass. He looked as if he was lit from below, and his nose and cheeks were spread out in a white, lifeless slab against the window pane. But his eyes were glinting, as if he was looking at something no mere human could see. Or – and this thought only occurred to me when I was out on the street and running for the hill as fast as I could – as if there was something else behind his eyes, looking out at the world, waiting for the awful moment when it would start to take apart our little corner of the planet, piece by shabby piece.

They had done something to my dad. And now Pike was under their control.

The only comforting thing about this was that, although they were well placed to take over my brain, they had, so far at any rate, declined to take up the offer. Maybe I secreted some hormone that gave the average Tellenorean a violently unpleasant feeling. Or perhaps Argol had an enlightened policy towards young people. Maybe it was going to be like the Cultural Revolution in China, and we were all going to be given the chance to team up with the aliens. Certainly, if offered the choice between Quigley and an eighty-foot beige monster with a corkscrew head, I knew where my allegiance would lie.

I tried to remember what else the documents had said. A lot of them, of course, were so secret that Mr Marr couldn’t even show them to me. They were, he said, the kind of documents you eat rather than read. The guys at Mill Hill who had worked on the Jura alien had been very cagey about this, apparently, but I think Mr Marr said there was a lot of stuff about mind control. The Tellenoreans don’t talk the way normal people do. They just sit there by the fire projecting their thoughts into each other’s brains, like me and Greenslade. In fact, it was rumoured that one of the Mill Hill guys had had his brain messed around with by the visitor who screwed up the landing in the Hebrides.

The trouble with this alien business is that you cannot trust your senses. As Jenny Randles says in
Abduction
(according to Mr Marr, the only really reliable guide to the spacenapping phenomenon), ‘Of course I am making no assumptions about what it means to have been abducted [by aliens], but if some researchers are correct,
many of you reading this book might have undergone an abduction experience without consciously realizing it
.’

It was possible that all this business with my dad was a deliberate ploy by Argol and his pals to destabilize yours truly. After all, I was close to Marr, wasn’t I? And he was the only guy on to them. Maybe my dad was really and truly dead and what I had been looking at, in the road outside our house and in Furnival Gardens, had been a hologram put out by the Tellenoreans. Maybe it was me they were after. Maybe the reason I had Testified the way I did was a kind of double bluff on Argol’s part. Maybe
they had already got to me.

I was running now. Putting one foot after the other in a style I have developed during cross-country runs organized by Cranborne School, I allowed my head to sort of loll forward and my legs to patter after it, leaving the middle bit of me completely free for inflation and deflation. At any moment I expected one of the masters, placed at strategic intervals to stop a guy taking short cuts or lighting up a Havana cigar, to leap out from a place of concealment, brandishing
The Times
and bellowing, ‘Come
on,
Britton! Come
along
there!’

As I panted into Stranraer Gardens, following the no-hopers’ rule for cross-country –
never run in a straight line –
I was flailing my arms left and right and zigzagging at an angle of about ten degrees to the horizontal.

Everything in Stranraer Gardens was as still as I had left it. The trees in the street were shamming dead. Every last bit of unkempt hedge in our front garden was taking the same attitude it had always taken. In whatever street we live, our garden is always the shabby one. ‘Gardening vexeth the spirit,’ my dad used to say to me with a broad wink whenever my mum asked him to get out and cut the lawn. Whenever she said to him, ‘But, Norman – don’t you want to sit in it, like other people?’ he would reply, rather grandly, ‘A garden, my dear, is a place for passing through as quickly as possible on the way to the pub.’

I stopped a few yards from the house. All around the fences, the parked cars and the neat roofs was that weird stuff you get just before dawn in the suburbs – it isn’t light or darkness but some other thing entirely – shadowy, ghostly, but so much itself you feel you could reach out and run it through your fingers.

I got my breath back. With that stupid feeling of relief you get when you’re home, I pushed open the door, tripped over what felt like a set of billiard balls and fell headlong into a carefully arranged selection of this week’s vegetables. As I went face first into about two kilos of potatoes, a large hand seized hold of my T-shirt from behind. The hand pulled me up towards the ceiling.

‘Where’ve you been, my laddio?’ said Quigley’s voice, quiet but deadly. ‘What have you been a-doing of ?’

‘I’ve been . . .’

That was as far as I got.

‘It’s been on the
Common
looking for little green
men
, has it?

And holding their little green
hands
and having little green
drinks
with them and having little green
chats
about their little green
planet
. . .’

‘Listen . . .’ I said.

He was hitting me really hard. It was only when I swung to the left and broke free for a moment that I was able to observe that he was wearing my dad’s grey towelling dressing-gown. My dad wasn’t a tall man and it only just covered Quigley’s enormous willy. It made him look as if he was wearing a mini-skirt.

‘What are you trying to do to our church, Sonny Jim?’ he hissed. ‘Why are you trying to split us in two? After all I have done for you!’

I could not think of a single thing that Quigley had ever done for me. But now was not the time to tell him. He hit hard.

‘Do you know what hangs on Mrs Danby’s covenant?’ he said. ‘Have you any
idea
?’

I had an idea what the covenant was. It sounded as if all this was as much about money as it was about religion.

From upstairs I heard my mum shout, ‘What is it? What is it?’ Quigley went mad. He started to clout me around the head, yelling, ‘Burglar! Burglar! Burglar!’

‘Burglar?’ came a cheeping from the back bedroom.

‘Burglar!’ yelled Quigley. ‘Burglar!’

Pronouncing the word seemed to bring him to his senses. He stopped, looked over his shoulder and put both his hands up to my face. ‘O Jesus Christ,’ he said, looking over my shoulder as if JC had just wandered in from the garden, ‘did you die for this boy?’

I kneed him in the balls as hard as I could.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he said, doubling up in pain.

‘Oh, screw Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Screw him. And screw his mother Mary too!’

Quigley gave what I can only describe as an eldritch screech and came at me with both arms, legs and the front bit of his head. ‘Blasphemer!’

Mrs Quigley was now at the head of the stairs. ‘Burglar!’ she screamed.

‘What is it?’ called my mum again.

What indeed? A burglar who blasphemed? Who broke into your house in the middle of the night and, after paying the usual compliments to your stereo, got on with the job of pouring scorn on your most cherished convictions?

Quigley beat me through into the back kitchen. I heard my mum’s voice. ‘Simon!’ she called, in feeble tones. ‘Is that you?’

‘It is!’ I yelled. ‘The one who was in your womb for nine months and a day, remember? And, if I didn’t think this bastard who’s making so
fucking
free with my dad’s house would follow me there, I’d jump right back in this minute!’

‘He called Albert a bastard!’ yelled Mrs Quigley.

‘Well he is,’ I said. ‘He is a bastard. He’s a complete and utter bastard, if you want to know.’

‘He thaith Daddy ith a bathtard!’ came Emily’s voice.

Quigley clouted me smartly across the side of the head. I fell to the floor and crouched, Pike fashion, in a corner of the kitchen, covering my face with my hands. Quigley went to the door to check there was no one around, then, unable to stop himself, ran back to me and twisted my ear hard. ‘Stop play-acting; he said. ‘I didn’t hit you hard!’

‘Let go of my lugs.’

He started to shake my head about. It was not going to be long, I reflected, before I made my contribution to discussions in 24 Stranraer Gardens via a Ouija board.

I sensed, rather than heard, my mum come in. Quigley had made sure he had stopped hitting me as soon as he heard her on the stairs.

‘Mum . . .’

‘Oh, Simon . . .’

Quigley leaped back, pulling down my dad’s dressing-gown with a surprisingly prim gesture. I looked up at my mum. I noticed that she was crying. Those little eyes of hers were red and angry, and her chin quivered helplessly above her neck as she came towards me.

‘Why do you let him do this to me, Mum? Why don’t you stand up for me? Don’t you love me, Mum?’

My mum dabbed at her eyes. She didn’t answer.

‘If Daddy was alive he wouldn’t let him do this to me! Why do you? Why do you let him? You don’t love me, do you? You don’t even like me, do you? Why don’t you like me? What have I ever done to you?’

Unable to answer this to her or my satisfaction, my mum started to cry. But they weren’t her usual tears. Usually she cries like the rain we had on a holiday once, up in Scotland – a soft, grey drizzle – but this time her body shook with real sobs.

Quigley joined in. He’s a big guy, but he seemed to have got to like crying. It was him, not me, that went to her and got hugged. He needs a lot of help. I don’t think he finds himself any easier to live with than the rest of us.

‘Help me through it, Sarah!’ he was saying. ‘Help me through this!’