They Came From SW19 (30 page)

He did not, I fear, seem to be prepared to experience the phenomenon in a truly objective, scientific way. He was kind of staggering, with one hand held to his temple, and from time to time making a noise like water running out of a bath.

Dad, warming to his role, moved a couple of steps forward, his arm still flung out in front of him. He looked, I thought, a touch over the top. ‘Quigley,’ he said in a spectral voice, ‘repent!’

There was another growl of thunder. Behind Quigley, Danzig appeared at the entrance to the garden. He lowered his head and, whimpering, sidled towards his master. Quigley looked ready to repent. He looked ready to tear his clothes apart. He looked rather less rational than his dog. ‘Oh!’ he said finally. ‘Oh! Oh! Ohhhhh!’

He gave me a quick look to check that I was really there, and an even quicker look round the garden to see if there were any other responsible local citizens around to witness this triumphant affirmation of an afterlife. But the drinkers at the far end of the garden were gone. There was only me and this spirit in the gloom of the garden.

‘Oh!’ said Quigley, again. ‘Oh! Oh! Ohhhhhh!’

‘Quigley,’ said my dad, moving into the shadows away from me, ‘I am in hell! And you will join me here!’

Quigley stared at me. It was weird. Once my dad had got started, I had started to believe him. To believe his act. You know? When I think about it now, he
was
an actor. He was a guy who could
be
something for a brief period of time, and then he vanished like the spirit he was impersonating. When I looked at him in the darkness, I began to wonder if all of what he had told me earlier could be some trick on me, played by the spirits who had sent him.

‘How can you sit there?’ said Quigley. ‘How can you
sit
there?’

I opened my eyes and gave him a puzzled look. ‘What do you mean, Mr Quigley?’ I said. ‘What are you staring at?’

‘
That
!’ said Quigley, ‘That . . . that
thing
!’

Quigley gestured feebly towards my old man. Then he turned to face him. Dad was flaring his nostrils and giving him a wild stare. I thought he was going well over the top, actually. But Quigley was not in a mood to ask why my dad had returned to earth. He was not in the mood to ask rational questions. I don’t think he’d have noticed if someone had dropped a set of kitchen units on his head from 30,000 feet.

Dad took a couple more steps towards him. Quigley started to whimper. ‘No,’ he moaned, ‘no!’

‘Yes, Quigley,’ said my dad. ‘Yes, Quigley! Yes! Yes!’ He looked as if he was all set to strangle the forty-four-year-old assistant bank manager.

My dad always was something of a ham. The sensible thing to do, having made the initial impact, was to walk off in a slow and menacing way, leaving Quigley to gibber. But Norman was determined to give full value for money.

‘Do you know what hell is like, Quigley?’

‘No,’ whispered Quigley.

‘Hell is being blown across vast empty spaces with the wind at your back and dust in your eyes. Hell is the taste of your own vileness, Quigley. The sour smell of your own wickedness and wrongdoing.’

If this was the kind of stuff he had put in his novel, it wasn’t surprising that he hadn’t found any takers for it. But it was still kosher as far as Albert Roger Quigley was concerned.

‘Who are you talking to, Mr Quigley?’ I said, in what I hoped was an awestruck tone. ‘Who is it that you can see in the garden?’

‘O Jesus!’ said Quigley, suddenly remembering who was supposed to be in charge around here. ‘O Jesus Christ, help me! O Jesus Jesus Jesus! Jesus Christ!’

‘There is no Jesus Christ,’ said my dad, in solemn tones. ‘There is no God of the Christians. There are no prophets in your world, Albert Quigley.’

I hoped he wasn’t going to start rubbishing the Koran. You never know when those Muslims might be listening.

Quigley dropped to his knees, his face white and shaking. ‘Oh Lord,’ he whimpered to himself. ‘Oh dear Jesus Christ!’

‘There is no Jesus Christ, Quigley,’ said my dad, in a very authoritative way.

Quigley looked up at him, dog-like. ‘Who is there?’ he asked, pleadingly.

‘There is no one!’ said my dad. ‘There is no one beyond this life. Those who return, return as themselves, condemned to live out the circle of their lives again and again!’

Thunder broke again, and this time there were two or three brief flashes of lightning. The chestnut-trees opposite me were suddenly vivid green and, as suddenly, dark again. The brick wall round the garden broke into focus and faded to black. Once again I had the feeling that what my father had said to me in the garden could all be some horrible trick. That he really had died, and that what he was telling Quigley was the truth. Not what he had told me.

Quiggers was gibbering. ‘What . . . There must be . . . What is . . .’ It was almost as if he’d stopped seeing Dad at all. That made it all scarier. Because I started to believe that I wasn’t seeing him. That the familiar switchback nose and scraps of grey hair were going to melt
away
into the darkness. ‘There must be . . .
something
!’ Quigley said. ‘There must . . . God . . .’

My dad came back well. He raised his hands above his head and then stretched them both out at the unfortunate First Spiritualist. He was now doing quite a lot of acting tormented. His head was wobbling violently, and there was dribble down his chin. Whatever he did would have gone down well with Quigley. The presentation was right. Albert Roger was very involved with the performance. He had suspended disbelief completely.

‘There is nothing,’ said my dad. ‘There is nothing. No faith. No light in the darkness, Albert Roger Quigley! Nothing but the smell of your own loneliness and guilt!’

This was very much the kind of stuff that Quigley was used to dishing out. But it didn’t look as if he was capable of taking it. He hunched up his shoulders. He looked as if he was about to cry.

‘What’s the matter, Mr Quigley?’ I said again. ‘Who are you talking to?’

There was no stopping my dad. I wanted to say to him:
Get off! Quit while you’re ahead!
And a bit of me wanted him to stop the way you want an actor in a film to stop. Because he is so damned real that you think this pain and suffering is
really
him. You know?

‘Death,’ said my dad, ‘is not a journey to some pleasant place. Death is simply the stopping of your heart. The end of sensation. The not being able to smell or taste or screw. Death is death. And there are no spirits. There are things. Fleshly, heavy things that come back to mock and torment you!’

‘Argol,’ cried Quigley, who was, rather gamely I thought, trying to make some radical alterations to his cosmological system. ‘Argol of Tellenor!’

Dad laughed. The laugh was really horrid. It was low and cracked to begin with, then it rose up the scale, eerily, and shook out its top notes across the damp, half-lit glade until I really did think that my father had come not from the hospital but from some horribly cold, empty region that lies in wait for us instead of all the heavens we have dreamed up to make things bearable.

‘I am not he of Tellenor,’ said my dad, who was always good at bluffing. ‘I am he that was Norman Britton when on the earth, now returned to haunt you, Albert Roger Quigley, and to tell you that you are an evil man and that you will fall as I have fallen! Down and down, until you can fall no further!’

There was another roll of thunder, and once again the lightning lit up the garden and the surrounding trees.

As the sky’s noise faded, my father moved into exit mode. He walked, slowly and stiffly, towards the ramp that led from the garden to the street. As he approached Quigley, Quigley started to sob. Then my dad paused.

‘What must I do?’ asked Quigley – always a man anxious for instructions.

My dad gave him the sort of look that only someone declared clinically dead can manage. ‘I will come again, Quigley,’ he said, ‘when you least expect me! I will haunt your dreams and yea, your waking moments!’

‘What must I
do
?’ said Quigley, understandably keen to get on the right side of this spirit.

‘Touch not my son, Quigley,’ said the old man. ‘Leave him be!’

I found myself wondering who we could haunt next. There were a few members of staff who could do with a visit from beyond the tomb.

Dad did a bit of sneering, then he said, ‘Farewell, Albert Roger Quigley!’

‘Farewell,’ said Quigley, clearly anxious to keep up the tone necessary for spirit dialogue.

My dad started off again towards the street. From the back he looked even better. He kept the shoulders stiff and he rolled a little, like a sailor back from a long voyage.

Quigley ran towards me like a kid let out of primary school. ‘Can’t you see him? Can’t you
see
him?’

‘See who, Mr Quigley?’ I said, widening my eyes just a touch. ‘See who?’

My dad was almost out into the street. I had the strong impression he might be tempted to come back and give us a bit more front-line colour from the other side of the grave. I leaned closer to Quigley, who, in a kind of transport of enthusiasm, grabbed me by both ears and squeezed my head hard. ‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘Oh Jesus! Oh God!’

You see how hard it is to get people to adapt? If he thought about it rationally, on the basis of the evidence presented to him, he had no basis for trusting Jesus Christ any further than he could throw him. But there he was, reaching for familiar things, as we all tend to do when scared out of our brains.

After a while he let go of my head and started to cross himself furiously. He was doing quite a lot of this, I noted. And it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing endorsed by the First Spiritualist Church. Perhaps all this was going to push Quigley towards Catholicism – often, so my dad used to say, a good port of call for those on the way to a nervous breakdown.

‘I have been a bad person,’ he said.

This was no more or less than the truth. I had been telling him so for the last few weeks. But would he listen to me? Would he hell!

‘I have done awful, awful things . . .’

Yes, Quigley. I know.

‘. . . To you, li’l Simey, and to the church I love.’

He pushed his face close to me. He smelt of garlic.

‘I have embezzled church funds!’ he said.

Sure. We gathered. What we really wanted here was a tape recorder. I mean, where did he think I thought he
got
his new car and his loft extension and his fridge-freezer?

‘I masturbate,’ he said, in thrilling tones.

I did not want to know this. Not at nearly seven o’clock, in the garden of the Ferret and Firkin. Not anywhere, actually. I mean, we all do it, Quiggers. We get down in the darkness and from time to time we pull the wire. But we don’t boast about it.

‘Your father,’ he said to me in a kind of sob, ‘has just appeared to me in this garden!’

I tried to look impressed.

‘He has told me some very important things.’

‘Are you feeling OK, Mr Quigley?’ I said.

‘Oh Simey!’ he gasped.

Then he did something really vile. He flung his arms around me and pushed his beard in my face. Something soft and dry touched my face. I realized, with some alarm, that these were the Quigley lips. The bastard was kissing me!

‘I think’, I said, trying to duck, ‘that you should go and lie down.’

Preferably not on top of me!
I knew nothing of Quigley’s sexual life, but it was entirely possible that Marjorie and Emily were not enough for him. He was a red-blooded assistant bank manager. Up at the pub window I could see Mr Mclvory, the owner. He’s a tolerant man, but I just wasn’t sure how he’d take me being frenched by a middle-aged man in the garden of his public house.

‘Look,’ I said eventually, ‘fuck off and leave me alone. OK?’

‘Fuck off and leave you alone!’ echoed Quigley, as if I had just taken pi to sixteen decimal places off the top of my head.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Quigley.

And then do you know what he did? He started to back away, just as he had when he saw my dad. He wound his way back over the leaf-strewn grass like a toy duck. His mouth gaped and his hands flapped. I held up my hand very much in the manner of Salvius the tribune greeting Glabriolix the slave and giving him news of the Emperor’s dog, Pertinax.

‘Quigley,’ I said, ‘wait!’

He waited. He was in a suggestible mood.

‘Oh Simon!’ he said, looking at my face as if he was trying to memorize it for some exam. ‘Oh Jesus, young shaver! Oh me deario!’

He put his hand to his mouth. ‘I must tell the world!’ he said.

This might work better for me than his lying in a darkened room, which was what he really needed to do. We had to get him telling his story as soon as possible. Preferably to a tough-minded clinical psychiatrist.

He turned on the balls of his feet and spread his arms wide. He was keen to tell everyone the Great News about my dad coming back to life to expose Christianity. With a man of Quigley’s energy and commitment behind him, I decided, it would not be long before Norman had a cult all of his own in south-west London.

‘Tell the world!’ he almost shouted, and ran, swiftly, out towards the street.

After he had gone, I sat back at the pub table. My dad’s glass of beer, half-empty, was still there. But Quigley, if he’d noticed it, would have seen nothing unusual in a spirit getting outside of a pint of Young’s Special. If you were a ghost and you could choose who you could appear to, Quigley would be a good bet.

I don’t know how long I was sitting there, but eventually my dad came back and sat down in his chair opposite me. He looked the way he looked when he had been telling jokes and there were no more jokes to tell. His face looked old and crumpled and sad, and, as he picked up his glass again, I had the strong sensation he was about to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

‘I’m in love with somebody else.’

I didn’t say anything.

‘There’s another woman in my life. Has been for six years. I love her, you see? I just can’t . . .’

He paused. I didn’t help him out.