Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (John MacRae Books) Page 9

  But then my great-aunt would reach out and grip my hands, and we’d be jumping and singing:

  Oh I met with Napper Tandy and he took me by the hand,

  He said how is Old Ireland, and how does old Ireland stand?

  It’s the most distressful countree, that ever yet was seen,

  They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green.

  For a long time, I thought Napper Tandy was something like a great-uncle. I thought he might show his face one day, creaking up from the bus stop and wanting a sandwich.

  Once I’d got the other side of the sacraments, I found that trying to be good wore me out and frayed my temper. It involved scrupulous vigilance, over your thoughts as well as your conduct, and it went on for all the hours that you were awake, and struck in again if you woke in the night. I was spiritually ambitious: sure route to failure, but I didn’t know it then. I wanted an unspotted soul, a soul edged with light, like a clean but open window. It must be achieved, I thought, in calm, in stillness: as if the window opened over a blue lake, with white gulls gliding. It must be achieved among quiet people, whose speech was rare and thoughtful, whose every action was considered. I missed my grandad’s methodical ways, and wished he would bring them back to Brosscroft, where the phantoms flapped and churned the air. For each task—turning mattresses, making pickles, mending a shoe—he would put on the appropriate apron, black or white canvas. He hummed as he worked, a civil hiss under his breath. He had retired from the railways, got his gold watch. It was an honorable retirement, and as an amateur pursuit, he stoked the Co-op boiler; I visited him, in the shadowy underground cavern that housed it, stinking like hell’s antechamber. You reached it by turning off the ordinary street and descending surprisingly few steps; but you had to know it was there, for only his authorized assistants could find the door. I didn’t take hellfire seriously. I had some idea what would be the extent of the devil’s coal bill.

  Sometimes, of an evening, he patrolled down the road to amuse himself with the boiler at the Hadfield Conservative Club, to cast an eye over its workings. He was a man in excellent standing, and as he strolled about the streets—which, unlike the rest of the family, he did freely—he met other elderly men who, breaking their own stately pace, would tip their caps to him and say, “How dost, Judd?” Then they might cross the road, and speak of boilers they had stoked, engines that had run sweetly: machine guns that had never jammed, thanks to the oiled ministrations of Sergeant Foster. Their voices summoned the pliant squeak of leather, the click of metal peg into its greased groove, and the dense smell of alien soil.

  In a bar somewhere in the near east, Judd Foster sat down with a man called Kemal Ataturk, who told him what he meant to do for his native country. In Jerusalem, he was requested to join an ancient lodge of Freemasons: which he refused, rather shocked. He sailed into St. Paul’s Bay on a Sunday morning; peals of bells rang out over the waters, and as he looked up he saw the faithful hurrying to Mass, down the steep hills between the white houses. It is a sight, he said, I shall never forget. In the zoo at Cairo, he saw the rhinoceros.

  Now he went about the house at Bankbottom, subdued and orderly, and as he worked it was Catholic hymns he sang to himself: “Mother of Christ, star of the sea, pray for the wanderer, pray for me.” In my earlier childhood, I assisted him (as he was a convert) by carrying about a big wooden crucifix that I’d found in a bedroom cupboard. “I’m just practicing, Grandad,” I’d say, “for when I’m an altar boy and I’ve to carry this at Corpus Christi.”

  In his religion there was Harvest Festival. Someone had told me that it was pagan. Pagans and heathens were a dubious thing altogether, condemned to a state called limbo when they passed away, together with all the little babies who died before they were baptized, of pneumonia and other causes: that cold wind that blows, that blows away salvation. It was not fair but life was not fair. Life is not bloody fair: so Jack says. Jack shouts: he feels ill used by fate. When he visited us at first, he used to stand in the kitchen at Brosscroft and play his mouth organ, leg kicking in time to the beat. He didn’t regard Elvis, smirking behind him on the wall. Jack is a Protestant, or at least not a Catholic; this doesn’t seem to bother my mother. In the army, he says, you had to give your religion. You couldn’t say, none: if you did, they put you down as C of E.

  He tells me a story while my mother combs out the tangles in my hair. His voice shakes, he is nervous. Like me, like the dogs, he is always listening, straining to catch a footstep overhead, a sound at the door. The whites of his eye are yellowish, round the mild caramel of his pupils; he has had jaundice, my mother says. One day, when I am standing outside the front door to have my photograph taken, in my white dress for one of the Feasts of the Church, a Protestant boy across the road points and jeers at me. Jack flies across the street as if he were launched off a springboard. He is snarling, his arm drawn back, the thick edge of his hand like a hatchet. The boy backs off, holds up his hands; he runs. Jack recrosses the road, scowling, purposive; I omit to thank him. So that, I think, is what it would be like if I were Jack’s little girl.

  Once a year, at school and church, we had Mission Sunday, when we sang about Africans and Indians. We called them Black Babies, and collected money for them. If you did well enough with fund-raising, you were allowed to own one. You could name it: I named my baby “Corinne,” a choice found perverse, and, I suspect, scrubbed out from the forms immediately I turned my back. Clare Boylan has written a novel about a Black Baby who returns in later life to look up her owner. So I won’t write another: only say that during the week before Mission Sunday we sang special hymns, their tunes undistinguished but their words thrilling. “For the infant wives and widows, Babies hurried to their graves …” How old did you need to be, to qualify as an infant wife? How did widowhood follow? And were the “babies hurried to their graves” the wives themselves, or their children?

  The fact is, I might have got the words wrong; I may be producing some travesty of what was on the hymn sheet. At eight, I give up hearing. Whenever anyone speaks to me I say, “What?” While, irritated, they are repeating themselves, I gather myself, and recall to order the scattered pieces of my attention. Words are a blur to me; a moth’s wing, flitting about the lamp of meaning. My own thoughts go at a different speed from that of human conversation, about two and a half times as fast, so I am always scrambling backward through people’s speech, to work out which bit of which question I am supposed to be answering. I continue my habit of covert looking, out of the corner of my eye, and take up the art of sensing through the tips of my fingers. The chess pieces now hop to my command. Henry and I sit by lamplight, in the front room of the house at Brosscroft. Babies upstairs are snorting in their sleep, my mother and Jack have gone—where? Gone dancing? I don’t know. My long father sits folded into his chair, pushing wearily at a pawn; till on one inspired night, I “castle” him, shuttling my king across two squares and bringing my rook into powerful, threatening play, grabbing the game’s advantage; and he leans forward, fascinated, and says, did you know you were allowed to do that? The truth is between yes and no. I am eight and not such a fool as I appear. I am hardly incapable of studying the game, studying it sneakily, to confound my own daddy; though I’d prefer he thinks the move has come to me out of the blue, and I smile with dazzled surprise, as my rook, sprung from its corner, moving like a tank across country, picks off his best defenders. It is important not to try to win; to be casual; to be easy. In the same way, carelessly, he leaves his library books for me to read: his yellow-jacketed Gollancz. I read Arthur Koestler, Reflections on Hanging. I learn from it; I incorporate it into my dreams. I dream I have murdered someone. It is better to know about the penalty, than not.

  Everybody laughs at me, because I can’t hear, because I say “What?” My mother puts money on a horse called Mr. What. It wins the Grand National.

  In the days when I was still seven, after the first Confession, the first Communion, I walked to school
down Woolley Bridge Road, with the sooty hedgerow on my left and the wall on my right, and beyond that wall the canning factory, where the slurries of unimaginable meats were processed into tins. My Guardian Angel followed, half a step behind, always and invisibly at my left shoulder. And God walked with me, I thought he did. You would imagine that I asked Him to show Himself and put an end to the events at Brosscroft: the slammings of doors in the night, the great gusts of wind that roared through the rooms. But my idea of God was different. He was not a magician and should not be treated in that way; should not be asked to alter things and fix things, like some plumber or carpenter, like my grandad with his tools rolled in their canvas cradles. I had come to my own understanding of grace, the seeping channel between persons and God: the slow, green, and silted canal, between a person and the god inside them. Every sense is graceful, an agent of grace: touch, smell, taste. The grace of music is not for a child who says, “What?” My mother never plays the piano now, my father seldom; Jack is never seen to sit down to it, no doubt because he’s C of E. And I can’t carry a tune; I’m told brutally about this. I can’t sing fa sol la ti do without singing flat. You can pray for grace, but it is a thing that creeps in unexpectedly, like a draft. It is a thing you can’t plan for. By not asking for it, you get it. For one year, I carried this knowledge, and carried a simple space for God inside me: a jagged space surrounded by light, a waiting space cut out of my solar plexus. I subsisted in this watchful waiting, a readiness. But what came wasn’t God at all.

  Sometimes you come to a thing you can’t write. You’ve written everything you can think of, to stop the story getting here. You know that, technically, your prose isn’t up to it. You say then, very well: at least I know my limitations. So choose simple words; go slowly. But then you are aware that readers—any kind readers who’ve stayed with you—are bracing themselves for some revelation of sexual abuse. That’s the usual horror. Mine is more diffuse. It wrapped a strangling hand around my life, and I don’t know how to name it, I don’t know what it was.

  I am seven, seven going on eight. It is mid-morning of an ordinary day. I am in the yard at Brosscroft; I am playing near the house, near the back door. Something makes me look up: some shift of the light. My eyes are drawn to a spot beyond the yard, beyond its gate, a spot in the long garden. It is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds, and bracken. I can’t see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies; but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense—at the periphery, the limit of all my senses—the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking; as if pinned to the moment, I cannot wrench my gaze away. I am looking at a space occupied by nothing. It has no edges, no mass, no dimension, no shape except the formless; it moves. I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.

  I pluck my eyes away. It is like plucking them out of my head. Grace runs away from me, runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse. I move from the spot. My body weighs heavy, my feet have to be hauled up from the ground as if they were sticking in gore. I walk out of the sunlight, through the Glass Place, into the enclosed dimness of the cold kitchen. I say, Mum, I want to come in now, can I do some drawing?

  I see myself through her eyes: sweat running from me, my cheeks fallen in, my chest heaving to control the thick taste of blood and sick that’s in my mouth.

  I pray, Let her not look at me.

  Yes, she says, sweetly, her back turned. Of course you can.

  It is the best yes I have ever heard. It is the best yes I have ever heard in the course of my life. If I had been sent out again, into the secret garden, think I would have died: I think my heart would have stopped.

  This is the beginning of shame. I can feel it beginning in my life, tick-tick-tick, shame the timekeeper; a sick, oscillation in the blood. My first thought is that I have seen the devil, that he did not wholly intend to show himself, and that I have only seen him because of a careless mistake on his part. I know that if you observe other people’s mistakes—and they know you have observed them—they will make you suffer for it.

  For I imagine the devil, when he goes to walk in the world, spruces himself in his dressing room, where the fire burns blue in its grate and the mirrors are draped with black. I imagine how he sleeks his rough fur with babies’ fat, polishes his teeth with ground bones, and swills his mouth with blood; then taking from its peg his tall shiny hat, he sets it upon his head to hide his horns. Its riband is trimmed with plucked feathers from the wings of screaming angels that he chuckles over each day, moribund cherubs who he tickles with a scaly finger as he inspects his toothed steel traps. He pauses on the threshold, patting for his wallet, checking his pockets for his whips and stings. Anxious for respectability, he pulls kid gloves over his claws, but the claws split them. He squints up at God’s sky, shakes out his umbrella of skin, and closes behind him the doors of hell: trapping in its sulfur reek. Almost instantly he is transported to where he wishes to be. He stands on the moorland looking down at Hadfield, his split hooves gleaming, his bestial profile blurred and smirking by the wet hazy light of the moon.

  My grandmother had told me that if I made faces at myself in the mirror of her sideboard the devil would arise and stand behind my shoulder. I had tested this many times and found it not to be true. So what had occurred seemed to me a sort of slippage of diabolic etiquette; I had caught the devil betwixt and between. In our nightmares the devil is almost solid, his gaseous potbelly jutting, his opera cloak rippling behind him into the murk. Then he dissolves, fading into our flesh as we wake, just as the Communion Host fades into our teeth and tongue; Lucifer becomes a murmur, a heart murmur, a bubble in the blood. He tempts us to disobedience, to talking back and contradicting, to showing a will of our own; also to those violent and hateful sins found at the back of the catechism, such as murder, sodomy, oppression of the poor, and depriving laborers of their wages. Worse than these, more proximate to me, are the vices of blasphemy and inflicting brain damage. Brain damage would occur for sure if you were to drop a baby, or permit any injury to his skull. You are careful not to do this, you place your curving palm always over the fluffy crown of hair, over the place where the bones are closing. But what if the devil came behind you and whistled sharply, if he startled you and made you lose your grip, so the shocked baby shot from your arms like a greased pig, so he plummeted to the stone flags? You think about it, and push the thought away, thrusting it into a mental drawer and banging the drawer shut. But next the devil tempts you to blasphemy, he lurks on a Sunday morning in the shape of the Protestant child next door; he offers you to eat chewing gum before taking Communion, so God’s body will be entangled in its strings.

  You have not done these things. You have held tight the baby and declined the chewing gum. So far you are morally in the clear. But now you have committed a vice not mentioned in any catechism you know. You have managed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so you have seen what no human person was meant to see.

  I asked myself, was it an excuse, that you were too scared to move? I answered myself: there was no excuse. This creature didn’t live—I reasoned it slowly—in the world of excuses. It was no use to say, I couldn’t help seeing it. The fact was, I should not have been looking. Good children up and down the street—let’s say stout Bernadette, let’s say the two Margarets, one stout and blond and good at sums, one stoop-shouldered and blushing—they weren’t messed around by this sort of apparition—only me, me in my family, me in my family when I’m seven going on eight, me in my family when I have reached the age of reason. There is a dis
cipline enjoined on nuns, called “custody of the eyes.” It means, for God’s sake don’t gawp about you. Look where you need to look, and nowhere else. But I had failed to keep my gaze under command. By a careless act I had gawped down the garden. Then hadn’t I stared, fascinated, hypnotized, at what was happening; given it credence, before I’d even given it a name?

  I was aware of this: to look for one second condemns you. There was some space of time—a tenth, twentieth, thirtieth of a second—in which you should have pulled your head away. You can bleach your eyeballs now or blind yourself, but you can’t wipe out what you’ve seen. I imagine the iris scrubbed away, blue running into white, so that when you look into my eyes they are blank, gray-white and blind, like the canvas in a boxing ring.

  In the days afterward I walked over the site of the disaster. The garden was still half-wild like a field, the grass rough and growing in tussocks. There was no mark on the ground, no scorched or bare patch; I did not think there would be, though I was aware that, if I were younger or medieval, I might have expected it. There was nothing to distinguish that undistinguished place, and yet I could put my hand on your arm and take you there; come with me, say your prayers now, I will take you to that very place. Was I afraid when I walked the ground? Not really; or, no more than usual. Outside was inside, now. Wherever I was, home or school, night or day and in bed or abroad, what I’d seen accompanied me. When sick old people wheeze, you might think there’s a cat in the room, purring under the bedclothes; but the noise is generated in the cavity of the chest. In the same way, I cannot separate myself from what I have seen. I can’t say, “There’s it and there’s me”: it is me. It is part of me, like the innocent whorls of my fingerprints, or my ignorant hair growing from its roots; it is a body inside my body, an amphibian shape, budding and malign.