Ghost Children, Page 2

  He didn’t go to bed. He slept on the sofa and woke at six AM, wet with sweat. The artificial logs in the fake Adam fireplace blazed with even flames. He drew aside a curtain, the window was covered in condensation. He wiped a small area with his shirt sleeve and looked out on to the empty Close, transformed now and made white and lovely by overnight frost. Christopher had a sudden desperate need to immerse himself in the cold air. He felt trapped with his memories in that loathsome house behind the double glazing.

  He threw his coat on and clipped the lead to the dog’s collar. He spoke to the baby but he didn’t call her Catherine now. He knew she wasn’t his baby. He wasn’t mad. His baby had been born in June 1979. This was November and the year was 1996. He said, “We’re going out, chick, won’t be long.”

  ∨ Ghost Children ∧

  Two

  He half ran with the dog in the direction of the heath, their breath floated before them. He was aware of the smell of the dried sweat on his body! It drifted up to him as he walked through the sterile landscape. The bushes were hung with silver webs, like the doylies his grandmother had used for Sunday tea throughout his childhood. Christopher let the dog off the lead and broke off a twig from a hawthorn tree, bent it into an arch, and with great care lifted a frosted web from a bush. His grandfather had taught him how to do this. He would have liked to have demonstrated this skill to a child of his own.

  When he saw the police Land-Rover parked by the ditch, he threw the twig on to the hard ground and called to the dog. But it was already running towards the Land-Rover and cocked its leg against the back wheel, yellow urine ran in a melting stream along the frozen earth. There were three policemen inside the Land-Rover. A side window slid open and a burning cigarette stub fell to the ground. He saw the policemen notice him and he raised his hand to them. Perhaps the gesture looked foolish to them because they began to laugh. He pretended to be absorbed by the dog as it ran out of sight. Then he heard the Land-rover door open, and saw a policeman clambering out of the back.

  “Morning,” said Christopher.

  “Morning, sir,” said the policeman, who was putting on thick leather gloves. “Are you a regular at this time of the morning?”

  “I’m here most mornings,” said Christopher. “With the dog.” He was suddenly aware of how he looked: unshaven, exhausted, his hair uncombed. The policeman was looking at the sticking plaster on Christopher’s hand.

  “At this time?”

  “Bit later, usually.”

  “And were you here yesterday morning, sir?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “And your name, sir?”

  “Christopher Moore.”

  “Local, are you?”

  “Down the road, Curlew Close. Number fifteen,” he added.

  He kept his head turned away from the ditch, but when the dog barked and the policeman looked away he quickly glanced down. The bag had gone. The policeman pulled his right hand glove off with his teeth, and took out a Biro and a notebook and wrote down Christopher’s name and address.

  “You didn’t notice a green plastic bag in the ditch here yesterday morning did you, Mr Moore?”

  Christopher pretended to think. “No,” he lied. He could feel the sweat trickling down his back and chest.

  The policeman said, “Can I ask where you work, Mr Moore?”

  “For myself…I’m a bookseller.”

  This was another lie, though it was something he had always wanted to do.

  Christopher pushed his hands into the pockets of his anorak and wiped his palms on the lining. The dog came hurrying back along the frozen bed of the ditch. He shouted, “Cm here!” and to his relief the dog obeyed him and scrambled up the slope of the ditch.

  “Nice dog. Bull terrier?”

  “Staffordshire.”

  The policeman bent down and stroked the dog’s smooth head. The dog arched its head back and rolled its eyes in pleasure. A woman known only to Christopher as ‘red coat’ came in sight with two Alsatians walking obediently by her side. The policeman left Christopher saying, “So, if we need to talk to you?”

  Christopher said, “Yes, any time.”

  He put the dog oh the lead. It was afraid of the Alsatians. As Christopher passed the woman and the policeman, he heard the woman say in her hoarse voice. “Yes, it was me who reported it. Yesterday morning, eight o’clock. It was horrible. I shouldn’t have looked inside.”

  He wanted to stay and hear more but he walked on. When he got home he crouched in front of the fire, he felt frozen through. He imagined that his bones were icicles and that his legs would shatter when he tried to get to his feet. It was snowing now. Christopher got up awkwardly and stood at the window and watched it settle. He hoped there would be enough for a snowman.

  The fantasy came into his head that his daughter Catherine was alive and was watching the snow like him. She would be seventeen he thought. Too old for a snowman, but young enough to be excited by the thrill of deep snow. He shook the thought away.

  He and Angela had never discussed exactly what had happened at the nursing home. He had not found the right words at the time, and she had volunteered nothing. Once, in the middle of the night he had woken and heard Angela crying quietly. “What’s wrong?” he’d said. “Are you crying for the baby?”

  “Baby,” she’d said. “What baby? I’ve got toothache.”

  He had got up to find some paracetamol for her.

  He had a shelf full of books on child café and development bought from second-hand bookshops. He studied them in the evenings when Angela was out. She had never said to him, in so many words, “The baby’s dead,” only, “After it was all over I asked them if it was a boy or a girl.” The abortion was very late, too late for the usual suction method to be used. Angela had gone into labour. It had taken her fourteen painful hours to expel the child from her womb. It would have been possible for the child to live; its lungs would have been formed, its heart could beat. Its brain would have been working, giving and receiving messages. Sometimes he dared to imagine that the child had been kept alive somehow, been taken away from the clinic and adopted. Perhaps he had seen her, had sat next to her on a bus? Miracles happened, he had read the headlines several times, ‘My Miracle Baby’.

  He shut the dog in the kitchen. Put his coat on and went outside to the small shed where he kept his tools. He selected a large chisel from the rack, where the tools hung in an orderly line. He found the metal coal shovel and went outside and cleared the snow away from a flagstone. He looked up to his next-door neighbour’s bedroom window, the curtains were still closed. He would have to be quiet.

  The flagstone lifted easily. The earth underneath was brown and friable. He used the chisel and the shovel to make a hole about a foot long and nine inches deep, then he went inside and picked up the baby. “Hello, chick,” he said.

  He wondered whose baby she was. It seemed wrong to lay her in the hole with nothing but a white sheet between her and the cold earth. So, he went in again, found a shoe box, and wrapped the little swaddled baby in two layers of green tissue paper, laid it inside and replaced the lid. As he lowered the box into the hole and raked the cold earth over it with his fingers, he kept his eye on his neighbour’s bedroom window. He had only five minutes before the alarm clock rang at eight AM and his neighbour opened the curtains. He strained to drop the heavy flagstone quietly into its place. Then he scuffed the snow around it. As he went back into the house he heard the neighbour’s alarm ringing through the party wall. An hour later enough snow had fallen to obliterate the small grave completely.

  He picked up several books, but found he couldn’t read. With the television, radio and sound system gone, there was nothing in the house to watch or listen to, except the gas flames and the sounds they made. He was swallowing continuously. He kept thinking about the people he had lost in his life. He examined his hands. Since he had stopped working they had become smooth, his fingernails had grown again and he needed to cut them to stop them looking
like a woman’s.

  When he was a young teenager he had worried about his sexuality. He had been afraid of the casual physicality of men. His grandfather had expected Christopher to accompany him to the Working Men’s Club on Sundays, while his grandmother was at home cooking the dinner.

  They left the house together at 12.30 PM and returned at 2.30 PM to the smell of roasting meat. In the intervening hours Christopher saw his grandfather coarsen and become boastful. Had even seen him threaten violence to a stranger who had inadvertently spilled his drink. He had had to force himself to laugh at the crudeness of the men’s jokes and conversation. He would have preferred to stay at home in the company of the women who crowded into his grandmother’s kitchen to talk about births and deaths and new scandals.

  He went up to the bathroom intending to have a shave, then he remembered that his electric razor had been stolen. He took his clothes off and turned on the bath taps. He watched as the warm water crept slowly up the sides of the bath. A small mummified spider bobbed about on the surface of the water. Christopher lowered himself into the warm bath like a convalescing invalid. He lay still and watched the snowflakes as they passed in a diagonal pattern behind the small frosted window high up on the wall in front of him. Then he cupped his penis in his hands and fell asleep. He dreamed that everyone had died and he was the last survivor of an eternal winter.

  ∨ Ghost Children ∧

  Three

  Christopher’s mother, Audrey, was a pretty girl with a trusting nature that men exploited. Harry, Christopher’s father, had been no exception. He told Audrey that she wouldn’t get pregnant if she stood up immediately after sexual intercourse. Audrey, who had been shielded from what her mother called ‘owt like that’, leapt to her feet three times during the first week of their courtship. Christopher was conceived a few minutes after his mother lost her virginity. Harry had no choice but to marry her. When Christopher was six weeks old, Audrey left him at the house of Harry’s mother, May, saying she had an errand to run. She never came back. There were rumours that she’d been seen running along the canal bank in tears. Other people reported having seen her sitting in the front of a coal lorry, kissing the driver.

  Christopher and his father had moved in with his grandparents, sharing the small bedroom above the kitchen, where on Monday mornings the steam from the copper boiler crept up through the floorboards, dampening the air and causing the wallpaper to peel away from the wall. Two years later Harry went to Canada to look for work. A few postcards of winter scenes came during the first year he was away, then there was nothing.

  When Christopher was five he had asked his grandmother where his mother was. “She’s gone to see the world,” she said. He imagined the world to be where the film stars and the football heroes and the royal family lived. It became fixed in his head that the world and Pathe News were the same thing, and he believed that his mother must be inhabiting a Pathe News type of life. On his weekly visits to the cinema, he waited eagerly for the crowing cockerel to appear on the screen and the newsreels to begin. He scanned the faces in the crowds, even the foreign crowds, half-expecting to see his mother, but she was never there.

  When Christopher went to junior school his class teacher was astonished at his extensive knowledge of Canada. His grandparents boasted to the neighbours about his precocity.

  Once when he was a small boy, Christopher had dismantled his grandmother’s cuckoo clock. She was outside scrubbing the front-door step, and washing the window-sill and the surrounding brickwork. But in that short time Christopher had sorted out the components of the clock. When she came back in she was astonished to see that the wheels and cogs and hammers, and the cuckoo itself, were all laid out across the chenille covering the kitchen table. He was equally curious about the solar system, the earth’s core, the migration of birds, everything. The world seemed to him then to be a miraculous place. Ordered and planned on numerical systems that made sense. Everything could be explained. There were tables and charts to aid his thirst for knowledge in the ten volumes of Arthur Mee’s encyclopedia which his grandfather had bought for him by paying six old pennies a week for three years. Christopher was numerate before he went to school. His grandmother unwittingly taught him to count by encouraging him to play with the hundreds of old buttons she kept in a Bluebird toffee tin. He spent hours sorting them by colour and size. He would form grids and columns and eventually he invented a hierarchical world where the brass greatcoat buttons ruled and the numerous white shirt buttons did all the work.

  Christopher had no ambitions as a child, other than to go to work. The very word conjured up manhood and maturity. In the mornings he watched his granddad putting his work boots on. At night one of the last sounds he heard was the boots being taken off and dropped on to the wooden floor of his grandparents’ bedroom.

  He usually read until the early hours, only stopping when he could no longer see the print. Then he would close his book and switch off his bedside light and think about his mother and father. One of his favourite visions was of them dancing together, in a ballroom in Canada, to the tune of the ‘Blue Danube’, which he’d heard on the wireless.

  ∨ Ghost Children ∧

  Four

  Angela Lowood stood at the bus stop and watched in impotent fury as her husband drove by without seeing her. The handles of the two plastic carrier bags she was holding cut into the palms of her hands. She turned to watch the car progress down the High Street. It was the evening rush hour but he would still be home within fifteen minutes. She almost moaned aloud with impatience, anticipating the long bus journey that lay ahead of her. But it was her own fault, she thought. She had urged him to borrow her car today, while his own was in the garage having the computer display on the dashboard looked at: it kept insisting that the driver’s door was open when, to his rage, it obviously was not. It was her own fault that she had no gloves with her; her own fault that she had bought five pounds of Marks and Spencer’s potatoes and two bottles of Chardonnay, the combined weight of which was threatening to snap the straining plastic handles.

  She had watched the weather girl forecast snow on breakfast television, but had still left the house in the high-heeled bootees and Burberry raincoat she always wore to work in winter. “Why didn’t I put the quilted lining inside the raincoat? I’m inadequate and incompetent,” she said to herself; and warm tears of self-pity filled her eyes so that the bus appeared to her like a shimmering red mirage when it finally approached. When it was her turn to pay she couldn’t find her purse. The driver stared straight ahead, blanking out her apologies. Women and their purses, it was an occupational hazard. The posh ones were the worst, he thought.

  The other passengers queuing in the snow behind her shuffled impatiently. Angela moved aside to let them pass while she fumbled for her purse. Sweat drenched her hair and she felt a wave of heat suffuse her face. She searched frantically through her large black crocodile-skin handbag. It had to be there. She lowered the carrier bags on to the floor of the bus and tried to jam them securely between her feet, still searching. But when the bus started up, the contents fell out and slid along the floor. Angela gave a cry of distress. She looked into the faces of the other passengers and imagined what they saw: a clumsy, fat, menopausal woman with a red face.

  “Sorry, sorry,” she said, as she bent to pick up the potatoes and the bottles of wine from between their snow-wet shoes and boots. An old woman picked up a packet of Marks and Spencer’s frozen Yorkshire puddings. Angela saw her glancing disapprovingly at the price on the box before she handed it over.

  When at last she had found her purse, paid the driver and struggled to a seat, she turned her head fixedly towards the window. Her blurred reflection stared back at her. A woman with a discontented mouth, tired eyes and long dark hair that she couldn’t bring herself to have cut, although for many years there had been nobody to stroke it and tell her it was lovely.

  Her husband had warned her before they married that he was an undemonstrative
man. He had not allowed himself to smile for their wedding photographs, despite the entreaties of the hired photographer and the instructions of Angela’s mother. His name was Gregory. He was seven years younger than her and one inch shorter and she had never called him ‘Greg’.

  When she got home he was in the hall, frowning at the thermostat. She dumped the bags on to the kitchen floor and kicked her bootees off. She didn’t tell him that he’d passed her at the bus stop, or that as the bus had approached the top of their road she had finally admitted to herself that she no longer loved him. She put the groceries away and began to cook dinner. He went into the sitting room with the evening paper. As she put four lamb chops under the grill, she wondered how she would be able to live with him for the rest of her life.

  When she went to tell him that dinner was on the table in the dining area, Gregory was sitting in his customary armchair, beneath the standard lamp under the yellow pool of light. He had removed one of the nest of spindle-legged tables and on it rested the local paper, turned to the obituary column. He pushed himself to his feet with a sigh and followed her into the kitchen. When she asked him why he was sighing, he said he didn’t know. At five past seven he switched on ‘The Archers’. There was drama in Ambridge when a pan of milk boiled over on the Aga. Angela looked at the place under the chimney where their own Aga used to be before Gregory took against its lumbering inefficiency. He had known somebody who was moving into a country cottage and had sold him the Aga and replaced it with a French cooker which had a deep-fat frier and rotisserie. He had bought the French cooker from somebody else he knew. His relationships with other people always seemed to consist of buying things from them, and selling things to them. He had once offered to buy Tampax, ‘from a bloke in the trade’, at a massive discount, but Angela had put her foot down and continued to buy her own from Boots. She was glad when her periods stopped, and she no longer had to endure his exaggerated intake of breath whenever he looked at the price sticker on the packet.