They Came From SW19 (29 page)

It must have been weird lying there. Presumably trying to move a leg or an arm or get your mouth to move. And hearing these voices from a long, long way away. Voices that had been chattering away at you all your life.

‘The nurse said I was very good company, which I thought was praise indeed for a guy who had just had a coronary thrombosis. Then your mother went on about how I had always wanted to be buried at sea.’

‘That’s what she said to me.’

He scratched his head. ‘Did I ever say I wanted to be buried at sea?’

‘Not in my hearing.’

‘She seemed very convinced of the matter. From the tone of her voice, I thought I was not going to be able to avoid being slung in the box and slipped off the Isle of Wight ferry. I just couldn’t
move
or
speak
. You see?’

I could picture my mum and the nurse, who, for some reason, I had decided was Irish. A short, plump woman from Galway.

‘She said I was an interesting and sad man in many ways.’

‘Who? The nurse or Mum?’

He gave me a strange look. ‘Your mum, of course. Do you think I’m a sad man?’

‘No,’ I said, rather shortly.

He took another deep draught of his beer. He looked up at the pale white sky above the half-ruined trees. He looked like a guy glad to be alive. With each minute that passed he was getting less and less extraterrestrial. But, at the same time, more and more
alien.
I didn’t recognize some of his gestures. He’d got a new one where he crossed his feet, and a new version of his smile. It seemed to stay on his face for slightly longer than was necessary.

‘Anyway,’ he said, in a conversational tone, ‘then they took me down to the morgue.’

‘Christ!’

‘Indeed. Ganymede, they call it. I mean, the guys who took me down were
real
incompetents. They treat the dead with absolutely no respect.’

He sounded rather civic about this. As if his experience was going to lead to a campaign for the rights of corpses, or something.

He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘She didn’t cry or anything. It was just sort of, “Shall we take him down then?” and Bob’s your unc.’

‘She was . . .’

‘She was pretty calm about the whole business. I could have done with a bit of weeping and gnashing of the old teeth. We got a very low-key response.’

Well, that wasn’t how she had behaved at home. Hadn’t she said she’d gone wild? I didn’t feel like finding out whose version of events was true. I was too busy holding on to the edge of my chair and waiting for him to rise twenty feet in the air.

‘We had our problems, but . . .’ He sucked his lower lip. ‘It makes you think, being in a mortuary.’

I could see that this might well be true.

‘It makes you think, when you hear people call you Charlie as they sling you on the slab.’

‘Why did they call you Charlie?’

‘I think they call all the stiffs Charlie. I mean, they’re dead. They don’t count, do they? That’s it. Sling them aside. You know? Pickle the bastards in formalin and donate their remains to medical research.’

We were on to Dead Lib again. He looked quite morose at the treatment handed out to cadavers. Then he took another long drink of beer.

‘We don’t understand life, do we?’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s here and it’s so
sweet
, and we don’t understand it.’

‘I don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got a clue, I tell you.’

It was amazing, really, that he had managed to recover from the heart attack so easily. He looked, I have to say, absolutely great. Still, I suppose this was what happened in the Middle Ages. You rolled around, went blue and your eyes shot up into your head. And then, if you made it, off you went to till the fields or whatever. I had heard the National Health Service was in a bad way, but I didn’t realize that do-it-yourself, take-your-own-chances medicine had reached this level of intensity.

‘I started to come round when they put me on the slab. I was lucky not to go straight in the fridge, I tell you.’

‘I bet!’

‘The word “autopsy” kept running through my mind. You know? But they were at the end of their shift. They closed the old door behind them and there I was, alone with a few dozen stiffs. Assuming they
were
stiffs, and not a fresh consignment of medical mistakes.’

He narrowed his mouth into an O shape and pushed his eyebrows up into what was left of his hair. There was still foam from the beer on his moustache. I watched the bubbles wink in the ghostly light, glisten, and then die. You could see the pulse beat in his neck. You could smell him too – a whiff of new soap and old changing-rooms. You could see the broken veins on his nose and see the puffy skin above his eyelids, bunched up like old crêpe curtains. And you could watch those little blue eyes that never quite met yours. It was my dad, all right.

‘I don’t know how long I was in there before I sat up and looked around. I know I banged on the door, but no one heard. And when I looked down at my ankle they’d put this label on me.’

‘What did it say?’ I asked. ‘
FRAGILE?
Or,
THIS WAY UP?
’

He grinned. ‘You are a witty little bastard, aren’t you?’ Then he yawned. I could see the red trap of his throat.

‘Actually, it said
NORMAN BRITTON, C OF E
.’

‘Did it?’

‘It did,’ said my dad. ‘Not
NORMAN BRITTON, MA OXON
. Just
NORMAN BRITTON, C OF E
. After forty-odd years of being a good boy and paying the mortgage and . . .’

I could see that it had been an upsetting experience. But what did he expect them to write?
NORMAN BRITTON, NOVELIST AND TRAVEL AGENT
?

‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I wandered round and checked out the corpses. They all had labels on. You know? And there was one just next to the door that must have come in while I had been lying there, unable to move. It didn’t have a name on it. Just a ticket that said
UNIDENTIFIED RTA
. It was a real mess, I tell you. Looked as if someone had been practising three-point turns on its chest.’

He shuddered. I said nothing.

‘And I thought to myself:
What’s it all for?
You know? Did I want to go on being
NORMAN BRITTON, C OF E
? What’s so great about my life?’

I couldn’t, for the moment, think of an answer to that. So I still said nothing.

‘There are big pluses about being dead,’ said my dad. ‘You don’t have to take the dishes out of the dishwasher and put them in the dish rack and then take the cutlery out of its little plastic box and then put it in the cutlery drawer making sure that the
spoons
go in one compartment and the
knives
in another compartment and the
forks
in another compartment, except there are always
forks
in the
spoons
compartment and
knives
in the
forks
compartment when you get there, so it’s hopeless it’s always too late to get things right, it’s a total frost, honestly, is life, you are a lot better off dead, in my opinion. Do you know what being dead felt like?’

‘You tell me, Dad!’

‘It felt like a good career move.’

Of course. That long white robe I had seen him in that night was a sort of hospital gown. They dress them up like ghosts. But how had he got down to Stranraer Gardens?

‘They brought some other poor sod in,’ he said, as if in answer to my question, ‘but I was over behind the door and they didn’t see me. I just slipped out, walked down a corridor, out through a side exit and came down to home. I just stood there looking up at it. You know? Wondering whether to take up my life or walk right out of it.’

He put one hand on mine. ‘I changed the labels,’ he said. ‘I put my name on the road-traffic-accident victim and I walked out with
UNIDENTIFIED
clutched in my paw.’

He seemed to find this next bit difficult to say. His eyes were watering as he started it, and he looked away from me again, towards the deserted white tables around us.

‘It was so
strange
,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I think there’s something at the back of all this that’s so . . . so bloody bizarre. You know? Roots of coincidence and all that . . .’

‘What, Dad?’

He looked straight at me.

‘The body they brought in during the night. The one on the slab. The unidentified traffic accident. I saw the face. It was your mate. Mr Marr. The guy who sat out on the Common, waiting for the spacemen to come. I walked out free, you see. And the undertakers buried him.’

It was at that moment that Mr Quigley passed the entrance to the pub garden. He stood under the street light, looking back from where he’d come. He shook his head and clucked to himself like the White Rabbit in
Alice.
He was carrying a bag of shopping. He looked annoyed about something. I got the impression he was looking for something to hit. Probably me. He didn’t see me.

‘What’s up?’ said my dad.

‘It’s Quigley, he’s after me!’

‘Quigley!’

It was now quite dark in the garden. For some reason we were both whispering. Out in the street, Quigley shouted off to his left. He was calling to someone, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. It sounded as if he was calling a dog.

‘What’s going on with Quigley?’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘he’s had a lot of heavy conversations with you. Apparently you’ve repented of your wicked life.’

‘I have!’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve been talking to you myself, you know?’

Dad looked away.

I said, ‘Quigley’s a bastard. He’s living with us, and he treats me like shit.’

My dad looked back at me. I tried to think of the worst thing that Quigley had done.

‘He’s gone and bought a dog!’

I wasn’t asked for any more information. But I gave it just the same. I told him about how he’d hit me. About how I was some kind of prophet as far as he was concerned, and he was desperate to have me Confirmed.

There was a bit of a silence when I’d finished, and then Dad said, with a grin, ‘Quiggers is right about one thing, old son. I had a really wicked life, and I repent!’

Somewhere in the distance I heard the growl of thunder. I looked up at the sky and saw that the clouds were one dark, lurid, compact mass. My father looked really ghostly in the light from the street, and for a moment I found myself thinking:
He is a ghost. He really did die. This is all a story.
As I did so, he got to his feet. His face changed suddenly. There was none of the humour you usually saw in it, and there was a fixed look about the eyes that I found almost frightening. He rose, slowly and mechanically, staring ahead of him and beyond me. Then he lifted his right hand with the index finger extended.

Behind me I heard a kind of yelp. It wasn’t a sound I ever remembered him having made, but certain things about it made me think it came from Quigley. There was a thump as his shopping hit the floor.

My dad still didn’t say anything. He just stood there, staring past me, his arm flung out in front of him and his attention fixed on what had to be the assistant manager of the National Westminster Bank, Mitcham. Dad didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. I could hear Quigley give a sort of low whimper, but otherwise he said nothing. The silence in the garden was as loud as Marjorie Quigley’s trousers. It went on and on and got louder and louder.

And then, finally, my dad spoke. Not in his normal voice but in a low, throaty baritone that reminded me of Vincent Price in
The Haunted Palace –
my dad’s favourite picture: ‘Albert Roger Quigley, do you remember me?’

It was fairly obvious from the noise coming from behind me that the man in question did remember him fairly clearly. In fact, as far as I could judge from the old hearing system, the effect on Quigley was fairly stupendous.

I mean, look at it from his point of view. My dad had recently been cremated. Quigley had sat there while the good people from the Mutual Life Provident Association had come round and told my mum the news about her death benefit. He had, in fact, been in close personal touch with the guy’s spirit via one of the finest psychic talents in south-west London. He just
did not
expect to come across the late Norman Britton in the garden of the Ferret and Firkin at half past six in the evening. And he certainly didn’t expect the said Britton to be pointing at him in a manner usually affected by people like Darth Vader or Banquo.

I turned round in my chair.

Look, I have seen people surprised in my time. I have seen people very surprised. I have, on occasions, seen very, very, very surprised people. But I have never seen anything like the expression on the face of Albert Roger Quigley that evening. He looked like a man who has just stepped into an empty lift-shaft. His mouth kept opening and shutting like a mechanical shovel, but no words – not even a direct appeal to the Lord Jesus Christ to be excused this experience on health grounds – passed his lips.

It was, in one sense, a stupid question. I mean, how short did Dad expect Roger’s memory to
be
? But the way he delivered it would not have disgraced your average member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. It wasn’t just that he was pitching it lower. He gave each word an incredibly fruity emphasis. When he got to the R in Roger, he vibrated the old tongue on the palate with the brio of an international string player. The finger, too, seemed to be going down fantastically well with Quigley. He was staring at it the way a cat looks at a dinner-plate. Would he ever get over this initial shock period? Was he going to have a thrombie right here on the spot?

Come on Quigley, pull yourself out of it! Deal with the situation! This sort of thing should be right up your street. Think of the articles. Think of all the hands-on psychical research that is just coming at you free of charge. Make with the sketch maps of the area. Measure the ambient temperature. Get down the witnesses’ names and addresses. This is a one-off, my friend. If you move quickly you could bag this one – jam it into the specimen bottle and whip it off to the Society for Psychical Research
prontissimo
!