Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books) Read online

  In no. 58, Annie Connor starts a game. You go into a corner of the room. She into another. You both shout, very loud:

  The wind blows east,

  The wind blows west,

  The wind blows o’er yon cuckoo’s nest.

  Where is he

  That has to go

  Over yonder fields?

  Hi Ho!

  Then you just run about the room, screaming. So does she.

  Two things not to believe: the monkey. People who say, “I have eyes in the back of my head.”

  I sit on the stairs, which are steep, boxlike, dark. I think I am going to die. I have breathed in a housefly, I think I have. The fly was in the room and my mouth open because I was putting into it a sweet. Then the fly was nowhere to be seen. It manifests now as a tickling and scraping on the inside of my throat, the side of my throat that’s nearest to the kitchen wall. I sit with my head down and my arms on my knees. Flies are universally condemned and said to be laden with filth, crawling with germs, therefore what more sure way to die than swallow or inhale one? There is another possibility, which I turn and examine in my brain: perhaps the tickling in my throat is the sweet itself, which is a green sweet from a box of assorted candy called Weekend. Probably I shouldn’t have eaten this one, but a jelly kind or fudge, more suitable to a child, and if I had hesitated and said I want that marzipan someone would have said, “That’s bad for you,” but now I’m on the stairs not knowing whether it’s green sweet or fly. The fear of death stirs slowly within my chest cavity, like a stewpot lazily bubbling. I feel sorrow; I am going to miss seeing my grandparents and everyone else I know. I wonder whether I should mention the fact that I am dying, either from a fly or a green sweet. I decide to keep it to myself, as there won’t be anything anyone can do. It will be kinder for them if they don’t know; but I feel lonely, here on the stairs with my future shortening. I curse the moment I opened my mouth and let the fly in. There is a rasping, tickling sensation deep in my throat, which I think is the fly rubbing its hands together. I begin to wonder how long it will take to die … .

  After a while I am walking about in the room again. My resolve to die completely alone has faltered. I suppose it will take an hour or so, or I might live till evening. My head is still hanging. What’s the matter? I am asked. I don’t feel I can say. My original intention was not to raise the alarm; also, I feel there is shame in such a death. I would rather just fall over, and that would be an end of it. I feel queasy now. Something is tugging at my attention. Perhaps it is a sense of absurdity. The dry rasping in my throat persists, but now I don’t know if it is the original obstruction lodged there, or the memory of it, the imprint, which is not going to fade from my breathing flesh. For many years the word “marzipan” affects me with its deathly hiss, the buzz in its syllables, a sepulchral fizz.

  My grandad goes on to the Red Lamp to take a gill. He puts on his checked sports coat and I shout, “Grandad is wearing his beer jacket.” He puts on his suede shoes and I shout, “Grandad has put on his beer shoes.” He takes up the pitcher from the kitchen shelf and I shout, “Grandad is taking his beer jug.” However mild his habits, however temperate, I can’t be stopped from chronicling his deeds.

  The likes of a woman wouldn’t go in the Red Lamp.

  My grandfather knows about English things such as Robin Hood and Harvest Festival; I sit on his knee as he hums “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” My grandmother says, “George, teaching that child Protestant hymns!” I dip my finger in his beer to taste it. For high days I have a thimble-sized glass to drink port. My grandmother says, “George, teaching that child to drink!” Slowly, slowly, we are pulling away from hearth and home and into the real world. My grandfather is a railway man and has been to Palestine, though not on the train. The spellings he teaches me include trick far-off towns such as Worcester and Gloucester: I cannot write, but no matter. As a grandfather, he knows the wherefores of cotton production, not just the facts of working in the mill. He knows about the American slaves and the Confederacy; also of a giant, name of Gazonka, who lives on a hill outside Glossop. Grandad has ancestors, unlike us Irish people, who don’t know our correct birthdays even. One of his ancestors suppressed a riot by laying low a man called Murphy, a thug at the head of a mob who was wielding a wire whip. For this feat, his ancestor was rewarded with the post of sanitary inspector.

  From Liverpool he brings jelly animals and a strange kind of balloon with faces and ears, and cardboard feet you can tie on it, to make it stand up. As no one can tell me the name for this item in God’s creation, I name it “Fluke.” If you don’t know a word for something, you can just ask me to supply one, but I can’t blow up a balloon; I have not breath. When he’s not on his shift, Grandad’s always at home, he’s always in his parish. My grandmother’s brothers come from Hollingsworth and places even farther. They give the impression, to me, of wandering the roads. They turn up unexpectedly; this is the time before telephones, or before anyone went anywhere, to be out when their relatives called. The brothers are indistinguishable elders in many woolen layers, who suck humbugs with loud slurps and sit on hard chairs with their caps still on: on hard chairs set each end of the sideboard, symmetrical, at the back of the room: as if an opera were about to burst out in front of the fireplace. My grandmother serves them a plate of ham and some Cheshire cheese. They cough long and wetly into their balled-up handkerchiefs, and even when they are not crying, their eyes seep.

  When my grandmother wants her sister, she bangs on the wall. In other houses ghosts bang but here it’s only Annie Connor, banging back.

  The household at 56 Bankbottom lives in cooperation with the household at no. 58. Here lives, besides Annie Connor, her daughter, Maggie, who is my godmother and a widow, who has a brown raincoat and a checked woolen scarf. She does errands for people and is at their beck and call. Here lives Beryl, Maggie’s daughter, my heroine: a schoolgirl, dimpled and saucy. There is only one doll for which I ever care, and that one, in tribute to her, is called Beryl. She is a doll made of grubby green satin, with satin stumps for hands and feet, features inked onto a round of calico for her face, and her pointed head of grubby green satin also.

  My grandfather has to be knight and commander to all these women. His possessions are a billy can, a notebook and pencil, his guard’s hat, and his guard’s lamp. It is my ambition to be a railway guard.

  In the desert my grandfather rode a camel. He commanded it with certain words in Egyptian, known only to camels, now imparted to me.

  I am three. I sit on my grandmother’s knee eating sponge cake warm from the oven. The cake is pale yellow and so high that I don’t know whether to bite the bottom or the top; from deep experience I understand their different textures and tastes. We are by the fireplace, but the fire is not lit. Sun is shining. Outside the window people pass on the pavement. The back door stands open.

  From hooks below the shelf hang two jugs, each of which holds one pint (though not at this moment). One is a rich cream and the other is the palest pink. They curve fatly from their lips, and the light gilds the curve: one a milk skin, one a shell. The table has fat, green, complicated legs. I go under the table to run my fingertip over their convolutions. The table’s top is scrubbed white wood. The knots are like glass. I am comforted to think that next door at no. 58, our dog, Rex, is under the table, just like me. Peas flick from their pods into a white enamel colander, which has a rim of navy blue. The scent of inner peapod rises around me. I count the peas. I tug the embryonic peas from the stalk, and count them as half, or quarter. My grandmother makes strawberry pie. A question people pose is, “How many beans make five?”

  I used to be Irish but I’m not sure now. My grandmother was born on Valentine’s Day, or so she always believed; my mother says that Annie Connor, being the eldest, gave out to her brothers and sisters the birthdays she thought they would like. Now someone has produced an official paper, and Grandma’s birthday’s got altered to the first of March. Everyone laughs a
t her. She laughs too, but she’s not happy to change. They say she used to be our Valentine, but now she’s a Mad March Hare. Her name is Kitty, sometimes Kate; before she married she was called O’Shea. Her mother—before she married—was called Catherine Ryan. She was a small illiterate lady with an upright walk. An old person who remembers her has told my mother, “While you are alive and walking, Catherine Ryan will be alive.” Or words to that effect.

  Much later, when I’m in my teens, my godmother lets it slip that Catherine Ryan was fond of a drink. We have to revise our mental picture of this famous walk of hers, and my mother is no longer so pleased about the comparison. I defend my great-grandmother, saying that I’m not surprised if she took a drink: surely she was like the old woman who lived in a shoe, she had so many children that she didn’t know what to do? Ten, eleven, twelve? I’m always losing count; there’s Paddy and Martin and Daniel and Joe, there’s John and Joanna and Mick. And why did her husband leave her, alone with all those babies? My mother says, it wasn’t his fault; he would have come back to her, Patrick Ryan, if only she had made it possible. My mother is usually on the side of men; I’m, usually, not. Grandma says: one thing about my mammy, anyway, she may have taken a drink but she never smoked a pipe. And oh, she knew how to cook cabbage!

  My mother says: “Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go, Friday’s child works hard for a living, Saturday’s child is loving and giving, but the child that is born on the Sabbath day, is blithe and bonny, good and gay.”

  I have various thoughts about this. I think my mother must be Monday’s child. I know I am born on Sunday but it would be complacent to dwell on it. Besides, I think any parent would prefer Saturday’s child. I ask, which day is my daddy? She doesn’t miss a beat. I think it must be Thursday, she says, because he has to go into town every day.

  My father, Henry, is tall and thin, with a tweed sports jacket. His black hair is slicked back with a patent solution. He wears spectacles and looks very intelligent, in my opinion. He brings home the Manchester Evening News.

  When he comes in from work he carries on his coat the complex city smell of smog, ink, tobacco. He has a traveling chess set, its leather cover worn, which folds up and slides into a pocket. The chessmen, red and white, fit into the boards by tiny pegs. I can play with them, but not the proper game. I am not old enough, wait till I am seven. (He might as well say, wait till you’re forty-five, for all that seven means to me.) With his good pen, Henry completes the crossword puzzle in the paper. I sit on his knee while this occurs. To help him, I hold his pen, and click the ballpoint in and out, so it won’t go effete and lazy between clues. I like to get close to people who are thinking, to glue myself, to the warm, buzzy, sticky field of their concentration. Henry reads the racing page. It is horses who race. To aid him, I imagine the horses. He says their names. I picture them strenuously.

  With my mother and my father Henry I go on the green electric train, the same color as my raincoat; this coat I have picked specially, as blending in with the electric train; it has an industrial smell of rubber. When we step into the train, with its wide automatic doors, I take the hands of my mother and father and ensure that we all step in together, leading off with the same foot. I am afraid someone will get left behind, and I believe that once the doors have swooped closed you can’t open them again. Suppose one person stepped on first, and the doors closed, and that person was on the train alone, sent ahead: worst of all, suppose that person should be me?

  We go to Manchester, to Mrs. Ward, my father’s grandmother. (Alice, his mother, has gone up in the fire.) My great-grandfather is still alive and sitting in the back room by the range, but nobody seems to take much notice of him. He has white hair and a black suit and a watch chain across his meager belly; I designate him the trade of watchmaker. My Manchester great-grandmother is diminutive even by my standards, with a skull the size of an orange. She takes me upstairs and opens a chest, out of which she takes scraps of shiny, silky fabric. These are to dress my dolls, she explains. I am too polite to say I don’t dress dolls, or sew with stitches.

  When my mother sees the scraps, she assumes a look of scorn. Scorn is a beautiful word. He curls his bearded lip in scorn. Bastion is a beautiful word, as are citadel, vaunt, and joust. Anyone who hesitates near me, these days, has to read me a chapter of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I am considering adding knight errant to the profession of railway guard. Knight errant means “knight wanderer,” but I also think it means “knight who has made a mistake.” Mistakes are made all the time; it is a human thing, in a knight, to slip up once in a while.

  I am waiting to change into a boy. When I am four this will occur.

  I suppose the trips to Manchester occupied a span of years; first the three of us went, then just myself and Henry. I had a dread of the streets and roofscapes, which were like a trap. I was used to looking up and seeing hills. The bay-windowed redbrick houses seemed to me squalid, though they were larger and better appointed than the stone-built millworkers’ cottages in Hadfield. My cousin Geoffrey, a large boy, was told off to take me to the park. It was a gritty walk on the endless pavements, under the secondhand sky, and when you arrived there was only a rabbit of limited interest, twitching its nose through wire. I do not remember Geoffrey’s face at all, only his huge legs in flapping flannel shorts, the blunt bony bulk of his knees. He was my adopted cousin, I was told; I wonder why, out of all the things that weren’t explained, this one thing was explained to me. Back at the house Geoffrey would trap me between items of furniture, sticking out one of those huge legs to prevent me toddling the way I meant to go, then when I turned back barring me with an outstretched arm, so that I revolved about and about in a tearful muddle. He was teasing, he meant me no harm. I saw myself through his eyes, silly, frilly, too tiny to outwit him or hit him, baby fists clenched in exasperation. And this picture dismayed me, so far was it at odds with my own image of myself. In my own mind, I was already at least middle-aged. My judgment of Geoffrey was that only the accident of my small size concealed my great superiority to him in every way. And this made it doubly galling, that I was stuck in an alley between armchairs, and would be rotating there until somebody noticed and said, “Now Geoffrey don’t torment her …”

  Sitting up at the big table with a white cloth, we ate ham and tongue. The white plates were icy to the touch. Once I asked my mother, “Why do we always have ham and tongue?” She snapped, “Because you said you liked it.” I am amazed; I don’t expect my likes to have any sway in the world, and clearly, neither does she.

  The journeys home I don’t remember. I expect I was poleaxed with fatigue, what between Geoffrey and the rabbit and the watchmaker and the strain on my mother’s face. I left us to herd onto the train any way we could.

  “Ward” means watch, it can be a place of surveillance, it can be the name for a defensible segment within a castle: a place for sentinels.

  I have a friend! It is Evelyn, a Protestant. I have to go down the yard to play with her; go on, Grandma says, smiling on the doorstep, and I turn my face around and say, why? She says, Evelyn, you know Evelyn, you want to play with Evelyn, don’t you? She’s your friend.

  Oh, is she? I have some vague idea about the girl. I seem to think that before this we were carried like rival sultans to view each other, our retainers bearing us to the rendezvous in their arms; or bounced down Bankbottom in our big springing perambulators, to wave our woolly mittens at each other, and acknowledge each other with dips of our bonnets; like commanders from rival galleons bobbing on the sea.

  But now I can go on on my own legs; Grandma lifts me over the step, and sets me down carefully, with my face pointing to Evelyn’s house. My mother—who must, in her simplicity of heart, have intended no more breeding—had by this date sold my pram to another family. When I saw it in the street I disgraced her by chasing it, bawling as if they had driven it aw
ay without authority. But she broke it to me that the pram would never come back; I nodded, and promised not to embarrass her again, or at least not in quite that way. For long distances, at this stage, I have a minor conveyance called a trolley, low-slung with wheels and a hood that folds back on itself like wrinkling tar; but generally I get about under pedestrian power, my fat legs goose-stepping in their green-and.-white gingham, my feet in sandals slapping each paving stone as I pass, my sunsuit—for this is summer—hung about with my impedimenta: my small arms, my notebook and pencil for making scribble, my lamp or torch shining out into the broad daylight: my flopping white sunhat on my head. Two doors down lives my uncle Martin and his wife, Harriet; both are dead. I am told Harriet died before I was born; I do not think things can have happened before I was born, and I hope to defeat the notion by seeing Harriet emerge, wearing the large, petaled hat she sports in her photographs. From under the rim of my own hat I peep upward at their closed back door; and pass it. I totter down to see what, by way of heathen excitement, the Aldouses have got prepared.