They Came From SW19 (8 page)

‘What is your message for Simon?’ asked my mum. ‘What do you want to say to him?’

He didn’t answer. This was, I have to say, absolutely typical of my dad. You could ask him a question and he would take literally days to reply.

‘Want to say . . .’

‘Want to say what?’ Quigley sounded like a man trying to encourage his pet snake to dance.

There was no reply.

My mother, in a rare moment of independence, said, ‘You frightened him off!’

‘Don’t be
stupid
!’ said Quigley. ‘Don’t be
utterly stupid
!’

He was crouched over his wife, massaging her hands. Eventually that voice came out of her again. It was the one I didn’t want to hear. The voice of a child alone in a large house at night. It had fear in it, but it also had the things that make you afraid – darkness, and the things that comes out of darkness and makes you afraid to go to sleep. It was like a sinister baby – something very young that has already had another life and is only pretending to look at the world for the first time.

‘I lived my life . . . I drank my wine . . . I broke my bread . . .’

‘Yes?’ said Quigley. ‘Yes?’

Suddenly the voice changed again. It dropped an octave. It really was a bass voice, a voice thick with cigarettes and whisky, rich with the things that had helped to end its owner’s life. It was my dad, I swear it. Although it was Mrs Quigley’s lips moving, it was his voice I heard.

‘Simon, old son . . .’ he said.

It was so
like
him, you know? Right down to the way he couldn’t finish sentences. I couldn’t help myself. I just couldn’t help myself. I wanted to talk to him so much. I wanted him to say the things he always used to say to me. Not big, important things, but just those ordinary remarks that let you know you’re still here and ticking over. I was so desperate to hear his voice I didn’t care if it came from the mouth of Marjorie Gwendolen Quigley.

‘What, Dad?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter? What do you want? What’s the matter?’

Very slowly, Mrs Quigley started to lift her head off the floor. It wobbled loosely during the ascent, very much as Mum’s does when she is doing her aerobics on the bathroom floor. Madame Quiggers did not look well. She always says that intense mediumship can damage you permanently and that very intense spirit possession can take thirty years off your life. If these calculations are correct, she could well be joining Norman for a face-to-face confrontation rather sooner than she had anticipated.

What was weird was that she was looking straight at me, but she obviously couldn’t see me.

‘Oh Simon,’ said my dad’s voice, seeming to come from the pit of her stomach. ‘I am . . . I am . . . condemned!’

‘Condemned to what, Dad?’

‘To walk the earth.’

I could see Pike give a nervous glance out of the window. He takes these things very seriously, does Pike.

Suddenly Mrs Q started to writhe again.

‘Walk the earth where?’ said my mum, in a rather worried voice. ‘In any particular place? Or sort of roaming about across the sea, and so on?’

Although this was clearly exactly the next question on Quigley’s mind, he gave her a pitying look.

Mrs Quigley was working up her writhing and thrashing nicely. When she was at domestic-blender speed, the cucumberup-the-bum effect was reintroduced. It now sounded as if a team of construction workers was hammering it into place. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhhh!’

‘Where, Norman?’ said Mum, who really did sound genuinely concerned about the quality of the old man’s afterlife. ‘Where are you?’

The voice came again, and it was still my dad’s. He could have been in the room. You know?

‘Repent, Simon!’ he said, in a deep, hollow voice. ‘Repent! You hear me? You must repent!’

Repent of what? Was it my fault he had kicked off? What had I done that was so wrong?

‘Free me, Simon! I beg you, free me! Free me!’

By now Mum was practically screaming. ‘Where, Norman? Where are you?’

Rio de Janeiro? The Algarve? Have you come back as a lighthouse keeper in South Uist, or what?

With a snap, Mrs Quigley rose to a sitting position. It was not what any of us expected her to do, but, like a great actor, Mrs Quigley often throws in something very low-key, bang in the middle of a high dramatic passage. It surely does keep you watching. Quigley, her ever-faithful support act, ran to her side. He raised his hand to her face and kept it there for a full thirty seconds. Pike’s eyes were starting out of his head on stalks. Hannah Dooley was openly weeping.

This time Mrs Q gave us a new voice. It was my dad still, but he sounded as if he had been put through a mixer and someone had added echo, reverb and a few hundred dBs of extra bass on the way. It had a threatening ring to it, too – some traces of that earlier spirit voice. The voice that reminded me of a frightening and frightened child.

Mrs Quigley’s tongue lolled out of her mouth. She started to laugh. Or, rather, something inside her started to laugh. It wasn’t a very pleasant sound.

‘In what part of the world,’ said my mum, in pleading tones, ‘are you condemned to walk?’

‘Wim – bel – don!’ said my dad.

Great!

Not only does he die, he is condemned to walk the earth and find no rest. Worse than that, he is condemned to roam around Wimbledon for the next few thousand years. Have a heart, O Spirit of the Universe! Wimbledon is bad enough for an afternoon. With house prices the way they are, quite a few people are stuck there for rather longer than that. But at least they can look forward to stiffing.

My dad was one of the undead. He was not being allowed to pass to the Other Side. He was going to miss the tea parties and the organized games. Although he wasn’t an enthusiastic Spiritualist, he often said he looked forward to seeing Auntie Norah again after she fell under the train at Norwood Junction. But even that was to be denied him.
What had he done to deserve this?

He used to get ratty about the neighbours. He could be quite vicious when asked to hoover the front room. But he was not what you would call a bad man.

He said what he thought, did my dad. Maybe that was his crime. I remember the two of us came across a large poodle having a crap on the pavement outside our house. Dad picked it up by the collar and hurled it and its half-ejected turd into the middle of the road. Whereupon a woman in a fur coat threw herself upon him and demanded to know what he was doing with her dog. ‘Give me your address,’ said my dad, ‘and I’ll come round and shit on your doorstep!’

He was basic. He was noisy and loud, and he was earthy to the point of being gross. Whether he was singing an Irish song called the ‘The Galway Shawl’ or clapping me on the back or trying, unsuccessfully, to kiss my mum, he was very much of this world rather than the next one.

But he wasn’t a bad man.

I could think of no good reason why he should have been doomed to roam up and down the local streets, or float in and out of the Wimbledon bookshops, trying to pick up the latest paperbacks with his see-through fingers. I did not understand why it was that Mr Lustig, the deputy headmaster, was going to be allowed to walk through him on his way to church, or why the Thompson family from three doors down, whom he had always hated, should be allowed to shoulder their way through his thick chest and big, balding head on their way to the pizza parlour.

It was to do with something I had done. It sounded to me as if he was being punished for something I had done. What
had
I done? For a moment I thought he might have been trapped on the earth he had enjoyed so much because I hadn’t appreciated him properly. And then it occurred to me that I had probably done quite enough bad things on my own account to allow something like this to happen.

I have done plenty. I am an averagely bad person. Fourteen earth years give you plenty of time to plumb the depths of human depravity. We cannot all be Emily Quigley. I have done things that would make your glasses steam up just to
mention.
You know? I am a sinner.

I do, for example, from time to time, indulge in a spot of selfabuse. I say ‘from time to time’. That isn’t quite accurate. I wank like a man demented whenever I get the opportunity. And I do seem to get an awful lot of opportunities. Nobody gets me to go on mountaineering trips or enter swimming galas or any of the other things that are supposed to be good for masturbation. They let me get on with it. As a result, although there are times when my hand does come off my chopper, I have to admit that they are fairly well spaced. I don’t think it’s going to make me go blind, but it must be having some effect. Maybe I’m going deaf. People are always saying I don’t seem to hear what they’re trying to tell me.

Could my wanging off until the sheets crackle be the reason why my dad had been condemned to waft through Wimbledon for the foreseeable future? I seriously thought about this possibility as I went to bed that night. But, then, you are not rational when someone you love kicks the bucket.

I lay awake, I remember, staring out at the moon above the street and trying, unsuccessfully, to keep my hand off my dick. There’s a poster on my wall. It’s of Bruce Lee, the Master of the Martial Arts. Looking at Bruce no longer gives me the thrill it once did. I keep it there because it reminds me of how simple and decent things used to be when it was enough to watch Chinamen kicking each other. As I gazed up at Bruce’s iron-hard stomach and the three red sword wounds on his chest, it reminded me of the good old days before pubic hair. I missed them.

The Quigley family had stayed over, something they did quite a lot if they thought one of us was in spiritual danger. They were always trying to insinuate themselves into our house when my dad was alive. But he used to do things like open the front door and call ‘Homes to go to!’ if they stayed past ten. Any later than eleven and he would appear in his pyjamas and begin winding the alarm clock.

‘We need to be with Sarah,’ Quigley had announced after the seance was over. We had asked Jesus, and Jesus had thought it was a fantastically good idea that they stayed. Toombs and Dooley had gone for their bus, and Pike had shambled off to his secondhand Ford, dubbed by me Lethal Weapon III.

I could hear Quigley snoring. He didn’t just snore, he made a sort of satisfied grunting sound in between snores. At one point I could have sworn his old lady was giving him a blow job. I kid you not – the noise he made was remarkable. But, when I got up to check, it turned out Mrs Q was sleeping with Emily in a room at the back of the house. Quigley was capable of sucking himself off, mind you. There are no limits where Quigley is concerned.

At about four I got up and went for a walk. I walked along the landing and looked in on my mum. She was lying with her nose in the air, giving out a light snuffling sound. Mrs Quigley and Emily were locked together in a rather awkward-looking clinch. Between them was Emily’s teddy bear, whose name, in case any of you are interested, is Mr Porkerchee.

I went back to my room and looked down at Stranraer Gardens. Surely, I thought to myself, they wouldn’t make him roam Stranraer Gardens? Death brought you some privileges, surely? He might not deserve the Elysian Fields, but he hardly deserved
that.

And then I saw him. He was standing outside number 20. Everything about him said
ghost
in very large letters indeed. And, if he wasn’t actually roaming, he looked like a man on the verge of roaming. He looked pretty condemned to wander to me.

He was wearing white, as ghosts tend to do. A kind of long smock, almost down to his ankles. He was barefoot, of course, and there was, you had to admit, a kind of ghostly yellowish glow about him – although that could have had something to do with the fact that he was standing under a sodium lamp.

The only other serious effect death seemed to have had on him was to deprive him of his glasses. But, I guess, Over There, you have no need of glasses. It certainly hadn’t made him any more decisive. He was just hanging round looking vague – the way he used to when he was alive. Maybe, I thought to myself, he hadn’t been assertive enough to get through to the Other Side. He looked a bit like one of those guys you see at airports, waiting for their luggage to come round on the carousel.

I just assumed it was an optical illusion – in a couple of minutes, I’d look back and it would be gone. Either that, or we’d get a few special effects – a shooting star or a voice booming out round Stranraer Gardens telling us our days were numbered. But my dad proved to be as low-key posthumously as he had been when above the sod.

I lay down on my bed, closed my eyes and counted to a hundred. Then, very slowly, I pulled myself up to the window and looked out. He was still there.

That was when I got really frightened. At first I lay, not moving, listening for some other effect that would tell me that what I was seeing was supernatural. They do that in films. They play the music and you
know.
When it really happens, you do not know. It’s like death itself. One minute you are worrying about where the next cheeseburger is coming from, the next you have stepped into another world.

I didn’t dare look again. I lay there, sweating, in the darkness. Then I decided to wake up Quigley.

I mean – this was his field, right? And, appalling as his old lady was in most departments, she had been proved one hundred per cent right about this one. She had said he would roam Wimbledon, and there he was – roaming. I also felt, and I’m almost ashamed to say this, that it would be useful to have an adult male around. Quigley the Squash Player is quite famous in the Mitcham area. When he starts to call you Sonny Jim, you run for the door if you are wise. When he carried the cross in the pageant organized by the First Church (yes, he
was
playing his hero), he almost threw it across the room when he got to Golgotha.

Without daring to look out of my bedroom window, I tiptoed along the landing. Quigley was in the spare room, lying under the grubby duvet, his right foot protruding from one end. It looked more like a vulture’s claw than a foot. His beard was bolt upright. It looked, as usual, as if it had nothing to do with Quigley. As if it had just perched on his chin for a couple of hours and was soon going to flap off to join its pals. His mouth was wide open and his arms were folded across his chest. I looked at them for some time, wondering how he managed to keep them there while remaining asleep. Maybe there was some religious significance to it.