Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books) Page 6

  Everyone is disappointed. Them, because they thought I was too mature for the shooting range; and it was true, I was. And me, because I can’t get to grips with this cottage set at all. They must have bought it for someone else. Some ideal daughter that they don’t have. It hangs about the house though; the teapot, unused, sits in the china cabinet, looking silly, but my mother keeps hair grips in the doll’s cottage that is meant to be a sugar basin. Years pass. A dozen sets of crockery are smashed, but the cottage survives. The edges of its tiny windowpanes accrete a rim of grime. And grimly, night after night, my mother studs the grips, into my hair, trying to impart a curl. In time my shorn hair grows again: gray-blond, straight, down to my waist and as flimsy as a veil. “The weight pulls the curl out,” my mother protests. But the curl isn’t ever there, nor is the weight.

  I am only playing, inside the Indian’s tepee, and I know it. I have lost the warrior’s body I had before the fever. My bulletlike presence, my solidity, has vanished. Ambiguity has thinned my bones, made me light and washed me out, made me speechless and made me blond. I realize—and carry the dull knowledge inside me, heavy in my chest—that I am never going to be a boy now. I don’t exactly know why. I sense that things have slid too far, from some ideal starting point.

  Later, when I am six, I am given a black doll. My mother wants to bring me up to mother all races. The doll is huge, half as big as me. She cries “mama” when you rock her: if you bother. Her tiny lips are scarlet, and they are parted to show the tip of her scarlet tongue. Her hair is close-cropped wool. She wears a white frilly dress. I know that, if I tow her about, I will make it grubby; this is a peril I have no intention of entering into. I recognize the probable expense of the doll, and that—in some way—she belongs to my mother who has procured her. Her pottery forehead is hard against my lips.

  My mother and father sit together in the front room of 56 Bankbottom. It is afternoon, summer, perhaps four o‘clock; I am stupidly slow about telling the time. Certain hours bring their charged, unmistakable light, the low rays slanting through the glass. They are sitting with a chess board between them; not the traveling set, for no one is going anywhere today. Black men and white: neither makes a move. The house is quiet. Where are the others? I don’t know. I am intimate with the chess pieces, the knight being still my favorite: his prancing curved neck, his flaring equine muzzle. The silence draws itself out, a long note in music; the light glitters with dust motes. No one moves, neither man nor woman; their hands are still, their eyes cast down. The pieces quiver, waiting to be touched: the black and the white, the smooth-skulled bishop, tall and powerful queen: the pawns, babyish and faceless. And so many of the latter: toddling across the board, so quickly nudged out of line and ventured, so easily picked off by snipers, and dropped back to coffined oblivion in the wooden box with its sliding lid. I understand the game, almost. The groove in the bishop’s head fits the nail of my little finger, and the white pieces are of pale wood, grain swirling around their curves: the heads of the pawns, imagined beneath my fingertips, roll like shelled peas. Light, dust, silence; four o’clock.

  A noise rips open the air. My parents raise their heads. It is a motorcycle, unsilenced, tearing open the afternoon, snarling down the street: 60 miles an hour. It rattles the windows; it is loud enough to wake babies, to frighten dogs. Then in an instant it has passed us, the noise fading to a snarl; changing and dying, in no time at all, to a long and melancholy drone, to a sigh. No one has spoken. But we have heard. Someone clears their throat: not me. They shift in their chairs. Their heads droop again. The racket, the roar, lasted for seconds, but the inner ear replays it and cannot help: winding away, with an afternote like vapor on the breeze, down the long and winding road.

  I think, I shall remember this. I shall remember this forever; this dying note, the slanting light, their bent heads. It is a moment of pure self-consciousness, the foretaste of what is to come. I know, besides, that they are not looking at the chess board; they are looking, covertly, at each other’s faces.

  I went to school, taking my knights—small, gray, plastic knights, in a bag. They were for a rainy day. My mother said this would be all right.

  One had simply never seen so many children. It took me a few days to establish their complete ignorance. Evelyn I had got trained, to a degree, but no one here understood anything of the arts of war. Giant Gazonka? They didn’t know him. Machine gunning? They simply looked blank. Suppose a camel came in, and they had to command him? They went around with their mouths hanging open and their noses running, with silver trails from nostril to top lip: with their cardigans bagging and sagging, their toes coming out of their socks, their hair matted and their bleary eyes revolving anywhere but where they should look. When they came back after dinnertime, they stood in their places, beside their infant chairs, and gawped at the blackboard. Thereon was the chalked word “Writing.” The children chorused, “Wri-i-i-ting.” After a few days of this, I thought it would be a mercy if I varied the performance by clapping my hands and singing it, to a syncopated rhythm: writing wri-tingg! Mrs. Simpson said, “Do you want me to hit you with this ruler?” I made no answer to this. Obviously I didn’t, but I didn’t either know why she proposed it.

  I kept my bounce for a week or two, my cheerful preschool resilience; I was a small pale girl, post-Blackpool, but I had a head stuffed full of chivalric epigrams, and the self-confidence that comes from a thorough knowledge of horsemanship and swordplay. I knew, also, so many people who were old, so many people who were dead: I belonged to their company and lineage, not to this, and I began to want to rejoin them, without the interruptions now imposed. I couldn’t read, but neither could any of the other children, and it was a wearisome uphill trail in the company of Dick and Dora, Dick and Dora’s dog and cat, who were called Nip and Fluff, Dick and Dora’s Mummy, and Dick and Dora’s gar-den. Sometimes Dad-dy put in an appearance, and if my memory serves he was balding and tweedy. It was dull stuff, all of it, and as my head was already full of words, whole sagas which I knew by heart, I was not convinced that it was necessary. Before I was entrusted with paper I was given chalk and a slate, but the slate was so old and thick and shiny that the letters slipped off as I tried to chalk them. At the end of the morning I could only show letters up to D. Mrs. Simpson expressed surprise and disappointment. She didn’t threaten violence. I was given plasticine to work the letters in. Instead of making them flat on the table I wanted to make them stand up, so by the time the bell rang I was, once again, only up to D. I was giving a fair impression of a child who was slow and stupid. I was both too old and too young for the place I had arrived at. My best days were behind me.

  One of my difficulties was that I had not understood school was compulsory. I thought that you could just give it a try and that if you didn’t like it you were free to revert to your former habits. To me, it was getting in the way of the vital assistance I gave my grandad, and wasting hours of my time every day. But then it was broken to me that you had to go; there was no option. Not to go, my mother said, was against the law. But what if I didn’t, I asked: what would occur? She supposed, said my mother, we would be summonsed. I said, is that like sued? I had heard the word “sued.” It sounded to me like the long, stinking hiss emitted when a tap was turned on the gas cooker, before the match was applied. Sued, gas: the words had a lower hiss than “marzipan,” and long after they were spoken their trail lingered on the air, invisible, pernicious.

  So there was no choice about going to St. Charles Borromeo; somehow I confused its compulsory nature with its permanent nature. One day, I thought, my mother would fail to collect me. She would “forget” and, tactfully, no one would remind her. I would be left at school and have to live there. My grandad would want to get me but a grandad is not in charge; he never comes to school. Even if my mother was on her way to retrieve me, she would be prevented by some accident, some stroke of fate. Thinking of this, my eyes began to leak tears which blurred my vision. Sometimes I yelled out with
exasperation and fear of abandonment. Mrs. Simpson took off her tiny gold watch, and showed it to me. When the big hand, she said, and when the little hand, your mother will be here. She put her watch on her teacher’s desk. The big girls and boys, who were already five, were allowed to bring me up and show it to me. so hated their hands, their arms weighing down my neck, that I tried to cry silently, but a boy called Harry, who had blazing red hair, would call out, “She is crying, she is crying,” whenever he saw tears dripping from my closed lids.

  I thought I should be abandoned forever, in the Palace of Silly Questions. Do you want me to hit you with this ruler?

  The children’s favorite game was called Water. At the close of each afternoon, games were given out—paper, paints, crayons—and the most favored child of the day was called forward to the washbasin, which stood in the corner of the classroom. The pleasure of Water consisted of filling the basin and floating plastic ducks on it.

  I got home and my handkerchief was damp. “Did you drop it down the toilet?” my mother said. She wasn’t angry, which was a relief; these days I seemed to magnetize wrath. “No,” I said. My voice was faint. “I had Water.” How could she know the stultifying horror of those two yellow plastic ducks? Of thirty minutes in the company of said ducks? And that this was supposed to be a prize, a favor, an honor that made the children fume with envy, the unseen children at your back? Never turn your back on the enemy: any knight knows it. Worse, how could my mother think, how could she ever imagine, that I would use the school lavatories? A near approach had been enough for me, to those stinking closets under the shadow of a high wall, the ground running from the pipes that burst every winter, the wood of their doors rotting as if a giant rat had gnawed them from the ground up. We had an outside one at home, shared with no. 54: but excuse me, this? I had to go to what was called “the babies’ lavatory,” which was half-size. The trouble with the babies was, they were so very approximate in their arrangements; they didn’t know the lavatory bowl from the floor.

  So did she not know everything, my mother? I thought that was the setup, between mother and child. I understood a fair percentage of other people’s thoughts, or at least the thoughts of the people to whom I was related, the people with whom I lived on Bankbottom; I understood outlying uncles who wheezed in, and could predict with a fair degree of success what they would say next. I assumed that comprehension was reciprocal. I understood my mother to understand me. I was devastated that the mere fact of being a mile up the road meant she didn’t know what was going on in the infants’ classroom.

  I can’t say I learned nothing, at St. Charles Borromeo. I learned bladder control; which is good for women, useful in later life. The second thing I learned was that I had got almost everything terribly wrong.

  “Missus Simpson,” Harry called out. “Ilary is crying again!”

  A strange thing occurred. My mother’s hair changed color. Once the tint of ashes, it was now a beautiful shade unknown in nature. The nearest you would come to it would be if—rid—ing out one day in your blazoned surcoat, sword at your side, reins loose in your hands, the air mild—you observed from afar a slow fire within an autumn wood.

  I may have taken some time to notice the change. Months, perhaps: functioning, as I did, on the level of the tabletop, and with my eyes turned inward. So peculiar was the occurrence, so estranging—so much what I would learn to call unheimlich—that I doubted the evidence of my senses and didn’t trust my memory. When I plucked up courage, my voice faltered—“do you, have you … please, was your hair always that color?” With crushing certainty, my mother answered that I should never say such a thing. My memory was at fault! I wish I hadn’t made her angry, standing in the kitchen at 56 Bankbottom. It wasn’t my wish to make her angry, in fact it was far from my mind. I just needed to know whether I could trust myself, my perceptions of things, the evidence of my senses. The answer, obviously, was no.

  I had a brother. I had completely failed to notice my mother’s pregnancy, though I had been besotted by her loose satin gown of peacock blue: its iridescence, its deep square neck which showed to perfection her skin’s ivory glow. I went to the maternity home with my father, Henry, in the shiny black car that was the Hadfield taxi, to bring the baby home. “Wait,” Henry said: and then my mother appeared. She stood on the steps, poised, as if hovering for a photographer. She carried the shawled marvel as if it were a bag of eggs, her face tenderly downturned: on the way home to Bankbottom, I don’t remember that anyone spoke. I thought it was rapture. I could have been wrong.

  On a fine hot day in summer the new baby was christened. For the occasion I had a new dress, white and pale yellow, crisp as a wafer. We went up the carriage drive, beneath the grim and dripping trees, and emerged, on level ground, by the convent and the church. “Go in,” said my mother, indicating the convent door. “Go in, and ask Sister Joseph if she would like to come and see your brother, Ian.”

  I did it. It was the only time I ever entered that building, ever crossed the threshold, and my eyes must have been so busy that they stripped the varnish from the chairs, stripped the paint from the walls: because later I would write a novel largely set in that convent. I found no one at first, no inhabited room, so I kept moving, into the innards of the place, until I found sundry nuns, perched—as it seemed to me—at high desks, in a room painted pale green. They were gray seamy nuns, with the complexions of creatures kept under stones. I thought that I must provide—in my sudden appearance, my wafer-crisp dress, and my important request—the highlight of their whiskery week, like an unlooked-for ray of grace. I said only what I had been told to say: “Would you like to come and see my brother, Ian?”

  The church was dark, at any season; dark on a blazing August day. As the christening party gathered by the font, the only reflection came from the priest’s shining pate and the startling white of his robe. The infant, huge in frills, was there to abjure the devil, but his bulk was lost in his godmother’s rocking arms.

  My mother approached the priest, who put into her hand a lighted candle. A look of understanding, I thought, passed between them. It was a secret look, and superior to anything I could comprehend. Her demeanor was demure, smiling, yet penitential. She held up the taper and turned away from the christening party. She turned her back and walked slowly into the body of the church, away from the light. I was alarmed, baffled. I didn’t know why she should be going alone, without me by her side, her protector and knight. I wanted to run after her. But only my eyes followed the candle’s flicker, and followed the upright figure, enveloped by darkness, kneeling at last by the center aisle: where she made, far from me, her own diffuse, particular light.

  It was midwinter when my second and final brother was born. I have no memories of his christening. It is a whiteout; it is as if his first days are hidden from me, as if his first months of life are frozen in the deepest frost, inside a Russian doll with her fists sealed in her sleeves. I remember the summer that followed, when he convulsed in his pram, his tiny face blue under a blue, stormy August sky: how I put my hands on the pram’s handle, rocking him, rocking him: but how he screamed, nevertheless, nevertheless, inconsolable, while the flies and bees buzzed and the storshions blowing their trumpets climbed the bamboo frames on the wall: but it was a different wall, a different house now, a different backdrop and enough to make anybody scream.

  It was temper, people said, fanning their faces as his yells wound down to a whimper; it was only temper that made him howl. I thought it was being second, second boy. Or it was sleeping in our new upstairs, with its shady inhabitants: perhaps waking in the night and not knowing who was there, seeing a strange shape pass against the curtains and the street lamp. I thought it was being sent to earth in the depth of winter, and brought home swaddled to the strange house, which he had not known before he was born. God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb; this saying did not hold good, in Hadfield, Glossop, Near Manchester. By now, our lives had taken an interesting turn.

 
; The Secret Garden

  When I was a child we used to play with toys called Magic Slates. There was a colored cardboard frame, like a picture frame, which held a rectangle of carbon paper covered by a sheet of clear plastic. You had a writing implement like a short knitting needle, with which you inscribed the plastic sheet. Behind the clear panel, your secret writing appeared; then you pulled up a cardboard tab, swished up the “slate,” and the marks vanished.

  The magic slate was a favorite toy of mine. I could write anything I liked, but if someone loomed into view I could disappear it in an instant. I wrote many thoughts and observations, and letters from an imaginary me to an imaginary someone. I believed I was doing it in perfect safety. But one day the light caught the surface at a certain angle, and when I held the slate away from me and turned it I saw that the pen left marks in the plastic sheet, like the tracks of writing on water. It would have been possible, with some labor and diligence, to discover the words even after they had been erased. After that I left aside the Magic Slate. I didn’t dare to risk it. Even now I have a horror of someone standing behind my desk and looking over my shoulder as the words appear on the screen. There is a place, a gap, a hiatus, between the hatching words, flinching and raw, and those that are ready to take their place in the world, words that are ready to stand up and fight.

  If people ask my advice about writing I say, don’t show your work before you’re ready. They understand this, and are glad to be given permission to be cautious. I should add, don’t do your work before you’re ready. Just because you have an idea for a story doesn’t mean you’re ready to write it. You may have to creep toward it, dwell with it, grow up with it: perhaps for half your lifetime. That piece of advice—to delay, hold off—is harder to accept. The obvious question is this: how can you tell when the moment has come? I have hesitated for such a long time before beginning this narrative. For a long time I felt as if someone else were writing my life. I seemed able to create or interpret characters in fiction, but not able to create or interpret myself. About the time I reached midlife, I began to understand why this was. The book of me was indeed being written by other people: by my parents, by the child I once was, and by my own unborn children, stretching out their ghost fingers to grab the pen. I began this writing in an attempt to seize the copyright in myself.