They Came From SW19 (26 page)

Help me through the hitting-Simon experience! Why won’t you?

I could see my mum’s face on the other side of Quigley’s shoulder. I could also see something I had absolutely no wish to see at all, which was Quigley’s bottom. It was long and sausage-shaped and coated with fine, black hairs. It peeked out from under the rim of my dad’s dressing-gown with a horrible sauciness. Mum’s eyes were signalling to me – something faraway and desperate. I could not work out what it might be.

Eventually Quiggers rounded on me. ‘Now, Simon, apologize to your mother for that disgusting, manipulative little display. Could you?’

I was obviously not taking the punishment right. I was not observing the Christian decencies for getting thumped. How tactless could I get?

‘I’ll never apologize to you, Quigley,’ I said. ‘I hate you. And I hate your creepy wife and your creepy daughter and I wish you were all dead. I wish you were dead and my dad was alive. I think you stink. I think all religions stink, actually, but Christianity stinks worse than any of them.’

There was silence.

Just in case I hadn’t made this absolutely clear, I added, ‘I’ll never forgive you and I’ll never apologize to you, and I’ll never do anything you say.’

He was still looking pleased with himself.

‘Why is it so important to get me back in your rotten little church, Quiggers?’ I said. ‘Is there some grubby, horrible reason? I bet there is. Well I tell you, Quigley, by the time I’m through with it there won’t
be
a fucking church. The aliens are here, Quigley.’

He twitched slightly, like a lizard’s tongue. I pushed on, sensing a weak spot.

‘They’ve got into your congregation, Quigley, and they’re going to wreck the church. They are. You’re finished here, I tell you.’

It was then that my mum came over to me. She knelt next to me and, peering into my face, she said, ‘Testify, Simon. Please. Come back to Jesus. Please. I don’t want you to be damned. If you’ll be Confirmed in Faith, I’ll never ask you to come to the church again. And Mr Quigley will go. He will.’

She stroked my hair then, very gently, the way she used to do when I was a little kid.

‘I want you to be saved, that’s all, darling. And then we can get on with our lives. Please, Simon.’

I looked up at her.

She put her hand to my cheek. ‘It’s like Mr Quigley says – you’re a pure boy! You are!’

I remembered some of the nice times we’d had. Me and Mum and the old man. Laughing at things or sitting together round the table and my dad making jokes and . . . Why is life such a bitch? Why does it lay these things on you? Why does it pull your heart two ways? And why do feelings always surprise you?

I wish we were machines. You know? People go too far.

‘Why,’ Greenslade whispered to me, ‘isn’t semen an element?’

Up behind the desk, ‘Pansy’ Fanshawe was preparing to see how sodium reacted with something whose name I could neither remember nor pronounce. Pansy had a far-away expression on his face. He looked a bit like a sorcerer as he stirred the mixture in a small clay crucible.

‘It’s a pretty big element in my life,’ I said.

On the other side of me, Khan sniffed. He doesn’t like us talking like this. If Khan ever whangs off, it is probably for the purposes of spectroscopic analysis.

Pansy looked up wildly. He is about sixty and they should have retired him years ago, but he has nowhere else to go. I sometimes think they may not be paying him. ‘Now,’ he said, in a quavery voice, ‘molybdenum is . . .’

He stopped in mid-sentence, as he often did. I stared at him intently. It was about a week after my showdown with Quigley and I should have been at Harvest Festival. I have to avoid the last period on the second Friday in October, which is when the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist celebrates ‘the rich goodness of God’s vegetables’.

I was supposed to be there. But I wasn’t. Outside, on the sun-soaked Common, they were piling up French loaves and bottles of Beaujolais. But I was staying inside, learning about what the world was really like, or, rather, what Pansy Fanshawe thought it was like.

After the night Quigley had kicked my head in, I had finally seen something I should have seen a long time ago. I didn’t have to do any of these crazy things they made me do. I didn’t have to stand up and tell the whole truth of my heart unless I wanted to. I didn’t have to say shit to Jesus Christ if I didn’t feel like it. I had stayed in bed on Sunday morning, even though Quigley had nearly kicked the door down and then burst into tears all over my duvet. ‘We need you, Simo,’ he said. ‘We need your deep love! We need your purity!’ I was lying there thinking about fellatio at the time. How did they actually
do
it? Did it hurt?

He didn’t need my purity. He needed me to sweeten Mrs Danby. But I didn’t need him. You see, it was really my dad that made me go along with the church, even though he didn’t really involve himself. Somehow he managed to make it fun, the way he made so many things fun, and, now he was either dead or else taken over by some force I could not even begin to understand, there was nothing whatsoever to keep me in the church.

‘Now,’ said Fanshawe, ‘stand well back, because there may be a bang!’

Pansy’s chemistry lessons are mainly a question of lobbing stuff out of the cupboard into a crucible and trying to get an explosion going. Most of the time he doesn’t even know what elements he is trying to combine. He’s closer to a mad chef than a chemist.

Khan was trying to say something. He looked worried. ‘Sir,’ he said, in his precise, slow voice, ‘under certain circumstances, compounds of the substances which you are attempting to combine may have a reaction in which, say, the sodium . . .’ He did not get to the end of the sentence. With a mad gleam in his eye, Pansy lobbed a small chunk of brown rock into the crucible. There was a colossal bang and the sound of the clay crucible hitting the desks, walls, windows and members of the Fourth Form. Thackeray started screaming.

Greenslade and I had hit the floor early. We know Pansy. When we raised our heads above the desk there were clouds of smoke blowing across the chemistry laboratory. Fanshawe was giving a kind of war whoop as, through the grey fumes, I saw the unmistakable figure of Quigley.

He stepped in front of the class like a demon king making his appearance in a pantomime. Behind him I could see my mum, Emily and Mrs Quigley, who appeared to be carrying a large sheaf of corn. It was, I think, the worst moment of my life so far. I was absolutely terrified that Greenslade or Khan might discover that I was anything to do with these people. How had they got in here? I seriously thought of crawling through the smoke to the door.

But it was too late. Quigley was pointing at me dramatically. ‘I think this boy must come with us,’ he was saying.

Fanshawe clearly thought that Quigley was the product of the chemical reaction he had just engendered. He was goggling at the First Spiritualists like a medieval alchemist who has just raised the Devil. ‘Are you . . . er . . . a . . . parent?’ he said feebly.

My mum stepped forward as more smoke billowed across the laboratory, circling around the faces of pupils, master and visiting religious maniacs. ‘I am his mother,’ she said, in a quiet voice, ‘and he is excused today’s last period of chemistry to attend a Christian service.’

Pansy looked at her as if he was trying to work out how to combine her with deuterium and to calculate the effects of the resulting explosion.

‘It is,’ said Quigley, with quiet dignity, ‘a festival of the faith to which Simon belongs.’

Greenslade gave me a sideways look. I raised my eyebrows, resolving, as I did so, to let him know my side of the story as soon as possible. There was no point in fighting this one. Not in front of twenty-three members of the Fourth Form. I got up and walked, with some dignity, towards the door. When I got level with them, I rounded on Quigley. ‘This is the
last
time, scumbag!’ And with that, I stalked out into the corridor, as Pansy, still dazed from the effects of the explosion, meandered feebly after my mother, muttering about notes and the headmaster’s policy on being excused important school activities.

‘Where’s Pikey?’ I asked, as they marched me towards the car. Quigley did not answer this. Since Pike’s behaviour at the last seance, he had been banished from the Quigley presence. I noticed that the assistant bank manager was biting his lower lip and grinding his right fist into his left palm.

As we got to the car, I stood back from them and said, ‘You can do this to me once, but you can’t go on doing it. I don’t believe, you see. I don’t believe any of that rubbish you talk.’

Emily Quigley looked really distressed. ‘Thimon,’ she said, ‘it’th like in
Narnia
when Athlan thaith to Edmund that he mutht have
faith
!’

‘Narnia,’ I said, ‘is bullshit. Give me Wimbledon any day.’

I looked straight at her. ‘Why do you believe all this rubbish? It’s crazy. You all know it’s crazy. It’s only habit keeps you doing it. If you once stopped and thought about it rationally, you wouldn’t believe any of it.’

I looked back at the school buildings. I was amazed at what I was saying. And yet I knew, as I spoke, that this was what I had always thought but had been too frightened to express. Silently, we all got into the car.

There was a mood of quiet desperation about Mr and Mrs Quigley. As we drove up towards the Common, they looked at each other briefly, then looked away.

‘Has Pikey left?’ I said. ‘Has he joined the true cause? Is he out looking for the bastards who stole my father?’ They didn’t answer this, but my mum leaned forward and patted my hand absently.

In the boot was a large pile of tins of tuna fish and a harvest wreath that had clearly been designed by Marjorie Quigley. We were coming to the end of the day, and the light was starting to fade.

The First Spiritualists were camped out at the edge of a grove of birch trees. There weren’t many of them. When I was a child I could remember gatherings of two or three hundred people, but there were fewer than a hundred out on the dry grass. Someone had told me that no fewer than twenty people had left the church after my speech, many of them to join the Raelian Society, a group that exists to set up embassies on earth for alien intelligences wishing to make contact with earthlings.

‘What’s keeping them away, Quiggers?’ I said. ‘Is it the weather, or what?’

Quigley twitched, then decided to ignore this remark. As we walked towards the circle of Spiritualists, he turned to me and said, in a high, pleasant voice, ‘I know you will come back to us, Simo! The Lord Jesus will make a way for you!’

‘Listen, Quigley,’ I said, speaking in a clear voice, ‘Jesus Christ is out of the picture. When beings from another planet get started on you they will
laugh
at your beliefs. You’ll be like some savage to them, clutching a wooden idol.’

Although they could all hear me, no one responded to this remark. Quigley looked more than usually Christian.

The First Church of Christ the Spiritualist was arranged in a huge circle around a large pile of groceries. The produce did not seem to be of high quality. The recession seemed to have hit Harvest Festival rather badly, I thought. I saw a lot of tins of spaghetti. Old Mother Walsh had urged her followers to ‘bring living things and offer them to the Lord’, and there is an account somewhere of the Sisters of Harmony sacrificing a sheep. These days people bring hamsters and terrapins and rabbits and dogs, but nobody quite has the nerve to pin them down on a slab and cut their throats. As we sat down a little way away from the rest of the group, I saw a small girl waving her hamster’s cage at the sky. ‘There You are, God!’ she was shouting. ‘There’s Hairy! You can have him if You want!’

There are a lot of children at Harvest Festival. It’s quite a jolly occasion. Looking at it now, I suddenly started to feel old. Older than anyone else there. A group of little kids were doing what is called the Carrot Dance, over by the groceries. It’s a crazy thing where one child pretends to be a carrot and the others top and tail him and put him in boiling water. As I watched them, I thought about all the crazy things the people I’ve grown up with believe and do. How we bury people, how we marry people – First Spiritualists are always married as close to 3 February as possible, and, when the bride has made her vows, someone pours a bottle of milk over her head (‘to feed her young’) – how we pray, how we hang sheets out of the upstairs window to celebrate a birth, how we seem so utterly and completely deranged and yet feel so utterly and completely sane.

For a moment I wondered whether the First Spiritualists are any crazier than other people. People who pride themselves on being rational won’t walk under ladders. Famous physicists talk about God without really knowing what the word means. Much of the faith of my mother and father’s church would seem bizarre or laughable to Greenslade and Khan. But to me, standing there in the autumn sunlight, it suddenly seemed natural and comforting. Maybe because, at last, I had finally lost it. I was no longer part of the First Church of Christ the Spiritualist. My dad was dead, and he was never coming back.

Over by the birch trees, Mervyn Finch had started to play his squeezebox to Vera ‘Got All the Things There’ Loomis, and a few of the adults were dancing the old dances that have been passed down for nearly 200 years. Old Mother Walsh’s ‘Rabbit, Skip O’er the Lump of Bacon’ and, my personal favourite, ‘Who’s Away to Jesus?’ Hannah Dooley was pressed close to Sheldon Parry, the born-again television director, crooning softly to herself. Clara Beeding was chatting amicably to the man with the wart. The sun was over the rim of the Common now, and there was the beginnings of darkness in the tangled trees.

‘Danth with me, Thimon,’ said Emily’s voice at my elbow. I looked down at her as the music grew louder. She was so full of hope and decency and trust. And that voice! Emily was, according to her mother, an absent-minded girl, but she never forgot to lisp.
Why not?
I thought to myself.
This is the last time I’ll be part of these people.
I took her hand and led her into the centre of the dancers, as the light failed over Wimbledon.