Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books) Page 8

  When you are six, seven, you do not know this. I feel that I myself have been judged: that I have committed an unnamed offense: that I have been sentenced, and that some unspecified penalty will be exacted, at short notice. Sued, gas, sued, hiss, dead.

  This is the worst time in my life: days of despair. I am back on the pier at Blackpool, with the screaming gulls and the wind, looking down into the boiling sea. Words swirl over my head, words of loathing and contempt. A great hand lifts me; it is the hand of the law. And here is my punishment, coming now, coming now; I feel the rush of air against my face. The law lifts me up into the wind, the law lets me go; I fall through space, and on the rocks my head smashes open like an egg. The sea drinks my yellow blood.

  On a Saturday morning at Brosscroft I come down early and to my surprise Grandad is there. He is in the stone-shelved pantry, where the air is cold even in August. His tools are laid out there, because he’s been helping fix up the house, but now he is wiping them and slotting them away in their canvas cradles. “What are you doing, Grandad?” I say. He says, “Sweetheart, I am packing these up, and going home.”

  I walk away, my heart sinking.

  In the kitchen my mother grabs me. “What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What?” She is burning, her cheeks flushed, her hair a conflagration. “Nothing? You mean he didn’t speak to you?”

  I see some furious new row in the making. I answer, without spirit, taking refuge in the literal: like the stupid messenger, bringing the bad news twice. “He said what he was doing. He said, sweetheart, I am packing these up, and going home.”

  Grandad walks away, down to Bankbottom, his spine unyielding, his neck stiff. Somewhere in the house a door slams. Glass trembles in its frames. Cupboards creak, the new mirror in the front room rattles its chain against its nail. The stairhead is lightless, the dead center of the house. I think I see someone turning the corner, down the corridor to the bedroom where my father, Henry, now sleeps in a single bed. The walls are yellow in that room and the curtains half-drawn. What happens now? We are talked about in the street. Some rules have been broken. A darkness closes about our house. The air becomes jaundiced and clotted, and hangs in gaseous clouds over the rooms. I see them so thickly that I think I am going to bump my head on them.

  Now the two boys sleep in the main bedroom, the largest in my cream bed and the smallest in his cot. I am moved into my father’s room, which is the yellow room down the passage. There is no natural light in the passage, only an overhead bulb that, by casting shadows, seems to thicken the murk rather than disperse it. I never walk but run between the stairhead and my bed. Our two puppies cry in the night. They are frightened. The man who comes to paint the stairhead is frightened, but I am not supposed to overhear about that.

  The door key is missing. The house is turned over for it. Every surface is checked and every drawer. The floor is crawled with padding hands and sensitive knees. All visitors—but there are not many—have their brains trounced about it and their movements thoroughly interrogated. Some two days pass, and the key returns, placed on top of the china cabinet, dead center.

  My mother stops going out to the shops. Only my godmother comes and goes between our house and Bankbottom. The children at school question me about our living arrangements, who sleeps in what bed. I don’t understand why they want to know but I don’t tell them anything. I hate going to school. Often I am ill with my growing pains and the breathing I am not supposed to think about and the high fever that is the same as I had in Blackpool, and raging headaches that leave me hollow-eyed. When I go back to school after a few days nobody seems to know me and behind my own back I have gone up a class. The new teacher is called Miss Porter. I don’t understand how she writes down the arithmetic. I’ve missed something. I put up my hand and say I don’t understand. She stares at me in incredulity. Don’t understand? Don’t understand? What broil or civil mutiny is this? Why don’t I just copy from the child next to me, like all the other little sillies? “You don’t understand?” she repeats, her eyes popping with indignation. There is an outbreak of screeching giggles and adenoidal snorting.

  Miss Porter is gone very soon. My ignorance remains.

  Summer comes: my grandparents take me on a day trip to Blackpool. Along the promenade there are glass-walled shelters, with benches; it is in these that visitors spend most of their summers, shrinking from the wind and rain. I have no sooner set my foot on the pavements of the town than I begin to shiver and burn. My eyes close against the light and I feel as if their surfaces have been scrubbed with sand. I spend the long afternoon of a rare sunny day, stretched full length on one of the benches with my head on my grandmother’s lap; my new straw basket, with its bright daisy pattern, lies useless by my side. When I get home it is discovered that I am incubating measles. A year or two later, we will go to Blackpool en famille, in Jack’s car. That evening I will return to Brosscroft semiconscious, the stars spinning over my head as they lift me, limp, from the backseat, and carry me up the steps to the house.

  We will have our days out in Southport after that, the car deep in the sand dunes, morosely cooking chips over a Primus stove.

  After Miss Porter went, a person new to the school took over the class. Let us call her Mrs. Stevens; she was a ginger creature with bristling hair and prominent shinbones. She was also a Protestant. This was a peculiar thing, a Protestant teacher. Someone else had to teach us catechism, which occupied the first hour of the day. It was a soft and sweet subject; on the blackboard you drew an M on top of a W, which made the shape of the wings of an angel, and was to remind you that an angel was a Mind and a Will.

  What came next was much cruder. At ten o’clock Mrs. Stevens charged in, bristling. She swung from her fist a big tartan shopping bag; though the tartan was, I suppose, unknown to any clan. On that first day, we were unprepared for the whirlwind that was to tear us up. Mrs. Stevens didn’t know our names. She didn’t know our provenance. She didn’t know the thing that we held in reverence, which was called Where We Are Up To. Our squared books were given out as usual. They kept our sums running carefully down the page, the faint blue lines squaring off the hundreds, the tens, and the units. But Mrs. Stevens didn’t agree with columns. We had to work the sums horizontally, just as they were printed in our textbook. At the sight of vertical jotting, however surreptitious, she shot down the aisle and slapped you.

  Mrs. Stevens wrote on the board “Problems”; and after it, a short story without a climax or moral. A man goes into a shop and buys fruit, a man fills a bucket, a man takes a train to a station to a distance of fifteen miles. A woman never did anything, you observed at once; and it wasn’t a story; it wasn’t a joke: it was—breathe it!—a sum. The knowledge penetrated the classroom in a low despairing hiss, spreading from the mites at the back to the one at the front. “No talking!” cried Mrs. Stevens. People began to cry. They began to knuckle their little heads. She didn’t even print, but did Real Writing, which is what we called it when you joined the letters: and we weren’t up to joining up! When it came to the part of the day called Reading, she expected us to follow when one child read out loud, and take up where he left off. Previously, we had thought of reading as a private activity, perhaps shared with the teacher, perhaps sweated over alone. But now it was to be communal. Communal was not much use, when some of us were up to Far & Wide Reader Green Book Four, while others were still mastering Letters up to D.

  My first opinion of Mrs. Stevens was that she was insane. My grandfather had told me that an ancestor of his had once walked the whole night, over the Derbyshire moors, with a man he later discovered to be an escaped lunatic. When I found that Mrs. Stevens, who like me went home for her dinner, was in the habit of wending down Woolley Bridge Road at ten minutes past one, I would join her and say, “Miss, can I carry your bag?” I was interested by the way she had to force herself to smile. No anatomical operations seemed mechanical to me. I was interested by the way her shinbone
s went before the rest of her legs, the calf muscle flapping behind.

  I suppose that, if there’d been anyone around to see, carrying her bag might have seemed sycophantic. So far as I was concerned, it was a diagnostic ploy. It had no bearing on the way she treated me, once we got back to the schoolroom: shouting and hitting. But on those journeys, she didn’t talk to me; I talked to her. “Oh yes?” she would say, and “Oh have you?” These minimal responses seemed correct, from her thin lips. I don’t know what I told her. My thoughts on God? How to spell Worcester? God and strange spellings were my preoccupations, around that time.

  There are plenty of teachers, I am sure, who pretend to like children and don’t. Mrs. Stevens didn’t even pretend. My mother, who was interested in my progress, took a periodical called Child Education. Sometimes, for my benefit, she pinned up dull little pictures out of it, monochrome beside the flagrant bronze of Elvis. Mrs. Stevens also had access to this magazine, and while we sat dumbfounded she read us articles out of it, about tadpoles and caterpillars. This was called Nature Study. It was good enough for grubs like us; outside, the rain hissed down on moorland and street, and small drenched things scuttled for cover, on two legs or four.

  In those days—which to people born after the 1950s must seem impossibly deprived and frightening, like the days of the Holy Inquisition—children were forbidden from speaking for most of the hours of the school day, unless they were asked a direct question, and thus required and indeed commanded to speak. Mrs. Stevens introduced a further disability: if our hands were not employed in some specific, authorized activity, we were to sit with our arms folded behind our backs. This posture—which is as near as you can get to a natural straitjacket—drove me to an extreme of tearful frustration. It shackled my brain and bound my hands, separated my Mind from my Will. I came home and said, she ought not to be able to do it. But no one can have been listening; they were listening to something else, at the time.

  Soon I no longer carried her bag or walked with her down the road to school. Instead I followed her, a shadow, watching her faded ginger head bob above the collar of her coat that pretended to be fur: like a head on a platter. At first we children had talked about her, in amazed and pitiful tones; then we stopped talking. We were drawn, as a group, as a class, into a shamed secrecy, observing how she liked to drag up the boys’ short trousers to slap the tops of their thighs, and pull up the girls’ skirts; there was a buzz in the air which was not innocent. She would threaten us with a “twankey,” which I thought must be some Protestant word; I understood what she meant, though. Once she shouted at a child to “bend over,” in front of the class, and I noted how his spine became wood, and he was incapable of obeying or not obeying. She shouted the command again, then slapped him anyway.

  Children were beaten, in our village, sometimes grotesquely. I was hardly out of the babies’ class when on a Monday morning a little girl with a face the color of paper whispered to me, “On Sat’day our dad beat our Ann till she bled.” And I knew our Ann, who was like her younger sister a child so pallid and frail that you wouldn’t think there was any blood inside her. I felt my man’s spirit aroused, my ardor clenching inside my chest like a fist within a mailed glove. Saddle my charger: I’ll canter up their street and decapitate him. My sword arm twitched, and I pictured one lazy, scything stroke, myself hardly breaking sweat; then the head, bouncing downhill over the cobbles. I sat shivering, my eyes closed, behind my table; I was six and the lesson was sums, the day sunny. In Hadfield, as everywhere in the history of the world, violence without justification or apology was meted out by big people to small. But there were rules. Strangers didn’t hit you, only your family. Protestants didn’t hit you, they had no authority over you; that was (in my mind) an established fact of life. I saw that the situation was impossible, and that if necessary Mrs. Stevens would have to be slain.

  As soon as I thought this, my fear became extreme. I trembled when she spoke to me; but what made me even more queasy than my own fear was the fear she inspired in others. I don’t know if there is a case on record of a child of seven murdering a schoolteacher, but I think there ought to be, and in a way I would respect myself much more if I had done the deed; I was determined, already, to distinguish myself in my generation. But picture my situation. I am seven and becoming realistic. I know I cannot act alone. As long as a year ago, I had given up the possibility of forming a band of gallant knights, or even mustering a company of men-at-arms, to lie in wait behind the hedgerows, to swoop down between the black trees above the church.

  I am seven, only seven. Fever hits me again, knocking me out of the saddle. I rise from bed each time more etiolated, my eyes paler. My hair is growing again, but I know it is always under threat when the thermometer begins to creep up the scale. To console me for being an invalid, I get “Alice” to read. I read both her adventures but I prefer the Looking Glass. It is easy to imagine myself passing through a mirror, every cell of my body thinning, stretching, becoming transparent, forming and reforming in some other dimension.

  The three households are still divided, 56 and 58 Bankbottom against 20 Brosscroft. I come and go, eating my morning toast at Brosscroft, having my midday dinner at Bankbottom with Grandma, and at the end of the school day, swaying and fatigued, climbing the hill to have my tea in the Brosscroft kitchen, listening out for the front door, for the sound of my father, Henry, sliding in, for the squeak of the handbrake as Jack’s car pulls up on the hill outside. No one quarrels, no one cries—only me; no words are exchanged; the situation remains unspoken, indefinite. My godmother brings the meat and the loaves, because my mother no longer goes to the butcher or the baker; she makes do with the Brosscroft corner shop, where the proprietor is kind. She no longer goes to Mass on Sunday, or indeed anywhere at all. In the evening she and Jack occupy the big kitchen, my father the front room; but mostly the men seem to time their comings and goings to miss each other. At the weekend Jack goes out and hacks savagely at the undergrowth of the garden, till he has hacked it down and the view is plain, from the Glass Place at the back of the kitchen to the crumbling back fence, to the fields beyond, and beyond the fields the rising ground of the moors. When the weather is wet, he strips off wallpaper and burns away layers of paint. He works in a fury, his sallow muscular body dripping with sweat.

  But the spirits gather thickly in the half-finished house, falling from their places in the glass-fronted cupboards to the right of the fireplace, waking and stretching from their sooty slumbers behind the demolished range. They discharge from the burnt walls in puffs, they are scraped into slivers as the old wallpaper peels away, and lie curled on the floors, mocking the bristle brush. Our daily life is hushed, driven into corners. We move in a rush between the house’s safe areas, and the ones less safe, where, as you enter a room, you get the impression that someone is waiting for you. The dogs, who are no longer puppies, squeal with fear in the night. My mother comes down to them, shivering in her nightdress, and sees their hackles raised, their thin forms shrinking against the dawn light. One night, I hear my mother and Jack, discussing. I am lurking in the cold Glass Place, coming in from the lavatory. “Well,” she says, “so? So what do you think it is?” Her voice rises, in an equal blend of challenge, fear, and scorn. “What do you think it is? Ghosts?”

  She has spoken my thoughts: which I thought were unspeakable. The hairs rise on the back of my neck. I do not know the word “horripilation.” But imagine how pleased I would be, if I did.

  Outside the house, what passes for life goes on. I am seven, I have reached the age of reason. Like every other little Catholic body, I must take the sacraments, Penance and Holy Communion. No problem! I am great in theology.

  I had begun practicing as a parish priest at five years old. I used to walk with measured tread the length of the backyard, my eyes cast down, my hands folded over my heart, and I would tap sadly at Annie Connor’s back door, and say, Mrs. Connor, now, I’ve come for your Confession. I believe there’s something you
’re very sorry for, and I’m just here now to forgive you.

  “Oh come in, Father,” she would say. “Would you like a chocolate biscuit?” Then, rolling her eyes in penitence, “Oh, Father, I have been swearing!”

  “Now that’s very well, Mrs. Connor,” I would say, “but didn’t you say the same last month?”

  “I did, I did,” she would admit. “But Father, don’t be too hard, for I’ve a lot to make me swear.”

  The doctrine of transubstantiation caused me no headache. I was not surprised to find that a round wafer was the body of Jesus Christ. I’d been saying for years that things like this occurred, if people would only notice. Spaniel and cow fused their nature, so did man and plant: look at Mr. Aldous, his milky stalks for arms. Girl could change to boy: though this had not happened to me, and I knew now it never would.

  When the day of Holy Communion came, I was amazed at how the body of Christ pasted itself to my front teeth and furred my hard palate. It was like eating smog. Saint Catherine of Siena said that when she took the host into her mouth she could feel the bones of Jesus crunching between her teeth. She must have been a very imaginative sort of nun.

  It was a good thing I’d been studying for the priesthood. Otherwise, it was a great deal to take in at one go: the knowledge of the black soul wiped clean at Confession, but then dirtying itself, by the mere accident of thought, by the time you were five minutes down the road from church. “Mrs. Connor,” I’d say, “can you think of another sin?”