They Came From SW19 (23 page)

‘Look, Argol,’ I said, trying to get the boy-to-alien tone just right, ‘if that is your name. How did you get here?’

Pike’s face was now pressed firmly into what was left of the Quigleys’ wallpaper. He had stopped using his legs. He was just concerned with getting his nose as far into the brickwork as humanly possible.

‘I think,’ said Mrs Quigley, sniffing the stale parlour with her long, dog’s nose, ‘that there’s a bit of
play-acting
going on here!’

Pike leaped into the air. He sort of bounced off the wall as if he was on a piece of elastic and someone had just yanked it from the other end. He whirled round, stood in a kind of ape-like crouch and started to swing his arms in front of him. Mrs Quigley backed away nervously. It was, I thought, the last time that she would make sarky remarks about a fellow medium’s performance. When Pike spoke again it was in that mechanical voice. But there was nothing human about it at all now. It was 100 per cent artificial. It sounded like a menacing version of my Amiga 500.

‘Why do you not believe?’ it said. ‘Why do you pretend you are the only beings in the universe? Why should that be, my friends? Why do you not recognize us? We are here. We are among you.’

Quigley folded his arms. He was starting to get annoyed with Pike, you could tell. ‘Just in Wimbledon?’ he said. ‘Or are you all over the place?’

Pike started to walk towards him. His mouth was open and he was dribbling down his front.

‘Leonard!’ said Quigley, his voice shaking slightly. ‘Don’t be . . .’

Pike’s face started to distort. One hand came out in a kind of claw and swiped at Quigley. My mum jumped and screamed. Hannah Dooley, her nostrils flared, was muttering something to herself. When the voice came back it was the full robot job – an awful, grating sound. ‘We landed in Wimbledon,’ it said, ‘and soon the rest of the planet will be ours!’

With these words, the forty-eight-year-old accounts clerk leaped at Quigley’s throat and, pinning him to the floor, started to bang his head on the dust-sheets that shrouded the household’s £700 Persian carpet.

This was, I thought, just what Quigley needed.

He was not of this opinion. He got his hands round Pike’s neck and started to squeeze. But Pike kept on banging his head against the floor.

‘Look,’ said Quigley, ‘let’s be reasonable about this, shall we?’ Not an easy thing to say when someone in the grip of an alien being is trying to make scrambled eggs out of your brains. ‘Let’s . . . er . . . discuss . . .’

You had to hand it to Quigley. But Pike would not stop. His face was dark purple and there was that look in his eyes again. I didn’t say anything, guys. I had remembered where I had heard that name before.

‘Leonard . . .’

‘I do not know of
Leonard
,’ said Pike. ‘I am Argol from the planet Tellenor in the constellation of the Bear. And I bring death with me. I am the bringer of death to your world!’

And death number one looked set to be that of Albert Roger Quigley. Mrs Q was pulling at Pike’s cardy, and even Mrs Danby was weighing in on Quigley’s behalf, but Pike kept right on banging.

‘Argol,’ said Quigley finally, ‘I beseech you in the name of Jesus Christ – Argol!’

Pike stopped banging and a slow smile spread across his face. When he spoke he sounded more like Pike than anyone else. ‘Argol,’ he said, with childlike delight. ‘Do we have to bang our heads on the floor before we understand?
Argol.
It isn’t difficult to say, is it? You can say
Persil
, can’t you? You can say
Daz
and
Flash
and
Bold
. You can say
Argol
, can’t you? Argol is my
name
, lunkhead!’

Quigley remained cool. If he wasn’t such a complete bastard he’d be a great guy. But, say what you like about him, he was probably the perfect bridge between us and a being from another world, especially when that being proved to be as mean and nasty as Argol looked to be.

‘Argol,’ he said, ‘please let go of my head! OK?’

‘All right,’ said Pike.

Then the breath seemed to go out of him, like air out of a lilo. He fell forward on Quigley’s chest. But, just as he did so, he gave us one more burst of the mechanical voice: ‘Andrew Logan Manningtree Marr, born Glasgow 1946, died Wimbledon 1990. Marr knew too much. Andrew Logan . . . Manningtree. Manningtree Marr. Operation Majestic. Operation Majestic
UK
8.’

There was a clicking at the back of his throat. I stepped away from him towards the wall. What he had just said, if that was what he
had
said, was as frightening as anything else that had happened since my dad died.

He went on: ‘Operation Majestic
UK
8. Marr knew too much!’

Then Pike, or Pike’s body anyway, flopped all over Quigley as if the two of them had just been exchanging bodily fluids.

Pike did not move. After some time, Quigley said curtly, ‘Get him off me!’

Mrs Danby, Mrs Quigley, Hannah Dooley, Roger Beeding and my mum rolled Pike off him. Pike curled up on the floor. He seemed, as far as I could tell, to be fast asleep.

‘Let us pray,’ said Quigley.

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Danby.

What a man! He has just been pulverized by a being from the other side of the galaxy, and what does he do? He is right on the line to Jesus. He didn’t even get up. He just rolled neatly over on his side and commenced talking to the Big Man.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, as if he was an experienced soldier talking to a rather dumb general, ‘there are many impostors in Thy world, and many of Us have failed to Grasp the . . . er . . . Meaning of these Things.’

He stopped. When he has those upper-case problems, you know he is running out of steam. Then he said, in a thick voice, ‘Is he all right?’

‘I think so,’ said my mum.

I looked at her. It was weird. Since my dad died she had got smaller and smaller. If she went on this way, you’d be able to pick her up soon.

Everyone has their moment, right? And hers was the day he croaked. It was like he hadn’t done anything really interesting until he kicked off. He couldn’t surprise her. Maybe dying is the only honest thing we do. As I looked at her, I thought of her shrinking, like someone in a fairytale, and how one day I might hold her in the palm of my hand with her little voice squeaking commands at me as if she was a mouse I’d picked up in the garden. I didn’t like that idea. I figured I ought to be the person to make her grow, but I just didn’t know how.

‘He was in the grip of some Force,’ said Mum. ‘I was reminded of that poltergeist in West Germany!’

Quigley shot her a glance. ‘Let us pray,’ he said again. ‘Let us pray that Our Church, which We have built up through Thy Faith and trust, will . . . hold together . . . and that . . . although there are Beings that . . .’

There was a pause. Then a thin, hopeless little noise came out of him, like a half-hearted fart. To my horror, I realized Quigley was crying.

We were getting to him. We were getting to him. Me and the aliens were finally getting to him.

No one moved. We had seen a lot of people cry in our time, but this was the first time that Quigley had done us the honour. We let him finish. He did make a pretty thorough job of it. He started with a series of gulping sobs, went through to a noise like a drain emptying out and finished up with a sort of throaty sob.

Mrs Danby went to him and put her arms on him. ‘Albert,’ she said, ‘I want to help you. I want to help. I promised the money to the church, and I want to give it. But I must see the boy’s faith, do you see?’

‘My dear . . .’ began Quigley. But she was having none of it.

‘We all know how I led Norman astray. How I led him out of the garden and into a rough and stony place where naught but thistles and brambles grow! How I made him betray what he
believed
!’

This whole thing was about what you believed. My dad and I had talked about these things so rarely. We just never seemed to get round to them. It was always the joke or the next argument or the next meal at La Paesana with my dad. And yet he must have believed in something.

He said to me once, when he was driving me to school, that there was nothing left to believe in these days. I said to him, ‘But you believe in . . . well, in . . . in what Mum believes, don’t you?’

He gave me a kind of bleak look. ‘I’m not sure, old son. I’m not sure what I believe in any more. I thought I knew, but it’s . . . it’s so hard . . .’

I looked out at the school. The school he’d wanted me to go to so that I could be as clever as he had once been, and go to Oxford the way he’d done and not waste it as he had been foolish enough to do. I leaned across to kiss him goodbye and I said, ‘Believe in me, Dad!’ As a joke, right?

But he put a hand on my shoulder and said, in that philosophical, gravelly voice he had, ‘All we have to believe in is our children. And yet we betray them!’

He said things like that, my dad. But not usually in the early morning. Usually when he’d had a few. Betray? I mean, be serious! Who said we trusted each other in the first place? It is nearly the year 2000, my friends.

I looked up. Mrs Danby was staring across the darkened room at me. Upstairs, the hammering and shouting seemed to have stopped. Her voice sounded shaky.

‘You know . . . Simon was to be . . . was to . . .’ She looked at me sort of pleadingly. ‘And now he has
changed
us all! Hasn’t he? He has made us think!’

You can say that again
, was what I read on Quiggers’ face.

‘You know . . .’ Mrs Danby went on, ‘are there beings from other worlds? Here? In Wimbledon? It’s perfectly possible, isn’t it?’

She laid a hand on Quigley’s shoulder. ‘I cannot give the money until my doubts are resolved. I am deeply confused.’

She spoke for all of us here.

She shook her head wildly. ‘Too much, Albert! Too many things that cannot yield their secrets!’ And, with these stirring words, she went outside to her Rolls-Royce. Although why anyone with a Silver Cloud needs to worry about things yielding up their secrets is still a mystery to me.

Whatever they were talking about had had a very bad effect on the Quigleys. Mrs Quigley was hyperventilating and giving me some very dirty looks indeed.

My mum dabbed her eyes with her handkerchief and said, ‘Arnold Bottomley had a seizure when he was on a canal boat and it took four of us to hold him, although he had been so easy-going on other trips, especially the Greek one that I didn’t go on. He did quite well at Sussex University!’

Nobody responded to this. Nobody knew whether the seance was over. Were we still talking to Jesus?

Very slowly Pike got up. He shook his head. Touched his face. Realized he hadn’t got his glasses. Then he said, ‘Where am I?’

‘32 Strathclyde Road,’ said my mum.

‘At the moment . . .’ said Quigley ominously.

‘You what?’ said Pike.

Quigley too sat up now. The two men looked at each other in silence. Somehow or other Pikey found his glasses and, in the course of getting them hung on his ears, discovered his rug was missing.

‘Oh my
God
!’ said Pike softly.

‘Yes,’ said Quigley, ‘Oh my
God
!’

Pike, on all fours, started to pad around the floor in search of the missing toupee. I could see it over by the wooden boards that had been nailed across Quigley’s windows. It looked like a sleeping dog on the white sheet. I didn’t like to point it out to him. I just wanted to get out of there.

‘Spacemen . . .’ said Quigley, with a sniff. ‘Spacemen . . .’

‘You what?’ said Pike.

‘Spacemen!’

Pike’s bum was in the air as he groped his way forward. Suddenly Quiggers was on his feet and, before anyone could say anything, he was taking a brisk run-up at the Pike bottom. Moving like a man who has played more squash than he need, he spun round, drew back his right and booted his wigless ex-sidekick right up his grey-flannelled arse.

‘Argol from the planet Tellenor,’ he said. ‘Argol from the
fucking
planet Tellenor!’

‘Who?’ said Pike, as he fell face forward into his rug.

But Quigley was not to be stopped. He was raining kicks into all the softer bits of the body chosen by the being who was to bring death to our world. If Argol had any bollocks at all, I thought to myself, this could well be the end of Albert Roger Quigley.

Rog did not, however, disappear in a white sheet of flame. He just kept right on kicking Pikey, and Pikey kept right on taking it. Their relationship was right back on course. There was absolutely no sign of Argol. Maybe he had zoomed off into another body. You know? Maybe he
was
in the body but he just liked getting kicked by earthlings. Maybe they were into S & M on the planet Tellenor.

Pike was curled up into a ball, like a hedgehog, clutching his wig to him the way a kid might hold on to its teddy before going to sleep. Rog just kept on putting the boot into him. Each time the toecap went into his stomach, Pike moaned quietly, his knuckles tightening round his toupee.

In the end, Quigley put his hand on his hip and stepped back a pace. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘what was all that about,
please
! Argol from the planet Tellenor! And as for Mr Marr – did you ever see him more than twice in your life? Eh, “Argol”?’

‘Who is Argol?’ said Pike, evenly. ‘And where is the planet Tellenor?’

If this was an act, it was a good one. It certainly threw Quigley, because he turned his attentions to me. Breathing heavily, he reached for my shoulder and pulled me towards him.

‘We are going to bring you to heel, boy. You hear? We are going to stop your troublemaking. You hear? We are going to draw the reins in very, very, very tight!’

‘Albert . . .’ began my mum tentatively.

Quigley turned on her. ‘There’s something bad got into your son, Sarah, and Mrs Quigley and I are going to have to do something very serious about it. He is going to
have
to be Confirmed in Faith. You hear me? He
must
be. You hear?’ Here he grabbed my arm and squeezed it, hard. ‘Even if we have to drag him kicking and screaming before the Lord. Our Church needs funds. You understand, boy? Our Church needs you!’