“Come on, Dor. Get yerself out of bed!”
The voice was furry with Rothman’s phlegm. A good half-hour after his double-belled alarm-clock had been silenced by a flapping palm, this was the reassuring slosh and rattle that marshalled Cook every school morning.
“Come on, now. Up to middle-school today!”
Cook’s grandmother, Esther, scraped open his frayed bedroom curtains and admitted the grey autumn light. Early sixties and already stooped, Esther listed from room to room in billowing, crinkle-folded A-line skirt and prehistoric slippers. All the weight she’d hefted through three wartime pregnancies had slumped and settled, leaving her bottom-heavy. She had compensated by staying top-nimble, keeping her synapses sparking with violent knitting and The People’s Friend.
Cook staggered over to a chest of drawers, shedding his pyjamas. Esther wrestled him into a hug and butted a kiss onto his cheek. He was always shocked by her brutality of gesture – despite her age, it was oddly coltish, as though she had developed the dynamics of physical affection via hearsay. Esther hadn’t yet installed her false teeth and Cook recoiled at the gummy yield of her jaw with its sheen of bristle.
He hopped into his socks and pants, tugged on saggy polyester trousers and layered a thinning vest under something scratchy and woollen. The school had no dress-code, but his wardrobe – browns and beiges and dark oranges – seemed to obey one anyway. There was no bathrobe – no midway point between pyjamas and full clothing. This was a morning survival ritual, whatever the weather. The house carried an unholy chill that flowed deep through its foundations, swelling up around the brickwork and swirling out of the pores of the walls – a vaporous spectre of cold that first stirred in late August and had the place comprehensively haunted by December. Installed heating amounted to a couple of tame electric-bar ‘fires’ and, outside of spring and summer, Cook was forced to dress as soon as he pushed back the bedsheets, before creaking down the narrow staircase, out of the bolted back-door and into the concreted yard for trembling communion with the outside toilet.
This morning, the yard’s dividing wall was a scribble of glinting slime. Slug-trails criss-crossed the smooth top layer, flickering in the sunlight as Cook scampered past. The wall’s gravel roots had been savaged by mining subsidence, and it slanted at an alarming 30-degree angle. His home, wedged into the middle of a terraced concertina on the edge of an industrial oil-works, was technically a slum – a slow-motion write-off, doomed to condemnation or collapse.
The loosely hung door scraped across the stone floor as Cook barged into the toilet. He emptied his bladder quickly, staring straight down into the bowl. This was no place for silent contemplation. In the daytime, it was a biological waste-bin – a functional space designed for briskly executed functions. By night, for a seven-year-old boy, it was a smelly and lightless pit of despair – a Petri dish for the imagination, infected with multi-limbed gutters and slitters and suffocators. The white plastic potty under his bed had recently been removed by Esther, who claimed that Cook was now a ‘big boy’ and therefore too old for it. But he had rescued the curved, cold mould from under the sink and still used it occasionally, sneaking it outside for emptying when he was sure his grandmother was busy.
Back inside, Cook stood on a crate and washed his hands over the kitchen sink, while Esther made him toast and milky tea. Their mongrel collie Rusty watched, as Cook tip-toed up to reach the top cupboard, sliding out a Weetabix packet crudely daubed in Letraset Doctor Who characters.
“Can I have warm milk, nana?”
“Haven’t got time, son. You’re supposed to be out in five minutes.”
Cook ate the butter-soggy toast (always ‘best butter’ for mornings) and drank half of his tea in a single guzzle, belching hard. Esther chuckled and Cook laughed along – a squeaky staccato. The two shared a relaxed attitude to body noises, sometimes to the point of mutual admiration. A few days earlier, they had been watching a TV wildlife programme, when Cook was alarmed by a hollow tearing sound, slowly rising in volume. At first, he had thought the noise was coming from one of the animals on-screen, but then he looked over to Esther’s chair, to see her leaning to one side, breaking wind with such gusto that it triggered a barking frenzy from Rusty.
Cook ran back to the sink and pinched a blob of toothpaste onto the ragged bristles of his favourite, irreplaceable red brush. Esther swiped at his bowl-cut with a comb as he scrubbed.
“Can I take one of my annuals?”
“Be quick!”
He scrambled up the stairs on all fours, crashed back into his bedroom and opened the door of the closet in the corner – a built-in wardrobe that Esther used as storage for toys, board games and books. Cook stuffed a Beezer Summer Special (12p) into his shoulder-bag, dashed back down through the front room (or ‘parlour’ as Esther called it) and out of the main door which spilled him directly onto the pavement.
*
The school walk was hardly life-affirming. Esther was not a walker – she was barely a stander – and so Cook had to make his own way. Today, he planned to pass by the house of Lisa Goldstraw, a slightly older girl he had played with in the local park. Lisa lived in a palatial semi in one of the moneyed back-roads that branched off from Cook’s direct route to school. He was, of course, still beyond the grip of anything resembling sexual longing, but his stomach somersaulted in Lisa’s presence and so, like a flower facing the sun, he tilted towards her. With bright, yielding face and caramel-brown eyes, she embodied emergent friendship, primal connection, a proxy sister (Cook was a single child) and he pined for her life and world. While his domestic realm was shrivelled and austere, Lisa was blessed with a curious abundance of room, food, heat and love. What could she possibly do with it all?
Lisa’s mother saw Cook fumble his way through the garden gate and greeted him at the door.
“Hiya, Dor. She’s already gone, darling.”
Baby Rebecca squealed happily at the sight of Cook. She wriggled in her mother’s arms and reached down to him. Cook smiled and lifted his hand. Rebecca coiled her tiny fingers around his thumb, flexing and unflexing.
“I’ll tell her you called, though. Maybe try a bit earlier tomorrow. Be careful now. Watch the road!”
Cook speed-walked back down Lisa’s street and re-merged into the flow of school foot traffic. He rode the current of dufflecoats and parkas, weaving through the rickety prams and skittering scooters. He passed the immense iron gates of the oil-works, where the factory walls, smeared with pitch, formed an S-bend as the pavement swooped and gathered into a steep incline that levelled off at the zebra crossing below Bethesda First & Middle. Cook’s friend Michael Howell panted past on his Tomahawk. Cook had asked – begged – Esther for his own bicycle this coming Christmas. “We’ll see…” she said, as always.
*
The children were greeted at the school gate by Deputy Head Mrs Mellor, a podgy matriarch in neutral cardie and lumpy tights. Her all-seeing eyes swam behind red-framed bottle-bottoms.
“Dorian! Mr Butcher. First room on the left.”
Cook nodded and turned into the double-doors. Bethesda was built on two levels – nursery (‘first’) school below and primary (‘middle’) up top, separated by a covered stone staircase. Each school had its own playground, but both tiers came together to eat in a lower-level hall, where the tables were grouped by age and the air tingled with the tang of cheap mince. As the children merged with their trays in the serving queue, Cook always felt a twinge of threat from the older boys – they seemed impossibly quick and loud and large, bloated with impending violence.
He hung his coat on one of the pegs opposite Mr Butcher’s room, summoned a surge of mock confidence and walked in. Back at nursery, the placings were informal, with flat plastic table-tops and comfortingly stacked chairs. Here, the traditional wooden desks (pen-grooves, inkwells, hinged worktops) were arranged in a formal grid pattern. Little-school primaries and plasticine had been replaced with big-school browns and chalk. There was an un
welcoming smell of burnished timber. Butcher – short, skinny, untidy black beard, leather-elbowed brown jacket – seemed less than elated with his new intake. As Cook entered, he was at his blackboard, double-underlining the word ‘REGISTRATION’.
“And you are?”
He consulted a clipboard and cupped his ear, not bothering to look up.
“Dorian Cook.”
Butcher hoisted his eyes from the clipboard and glowered into space. “Dorian Cook, what?”
“Dorian Cook, sir.”
“Better! Sit yourself down and put your things in the desk. Wherever you sit, you’ll stay there for the year.”
All the window seats had been taken. Cook selected a desk towards the back, near the door. Most of the other children had bunched into mini peer groups and were chatting happily, apart from one girl at the back who was isolated by at least two desks in every direction. Michael Howell entered and raised his eyebrows at Cook. Butcher ticked him off the list and, to Cook’s relief, Howell came over to claim the desk in front.
The room quickly filled. Cook knew about half the other children by sight and could count six or seven as friends. A boy he hadn’t seen before was delivered directly to the classroom door by his worried-looking mother. He had bright, white hair and pale, near transluscent skin. As his mother coaxed him into the room, the boy’s eyes glazed with tears and he clung to the door frame. The sideshow quieted the class, who looked on with predatory pity. Eventually, the boy slumped into one of the only few seats available, directly in front of Butcher’s desk. He folded his arms into a tight huddle on the worktop and buried his face. Butcher approached the boy and carefully confirmed his name – John Ray. He gave Ray’s hair a perfunctory ruffle.
“Come on, son. It isn’t that bad.”
Ray shuffled upright and pulled a blue-and-white handkerchief out of his back pocket. He mopped his eyes, blew his nose and re-pocketed the hankie – seamlessly, as if the three motions were well practiced. Butcher broke away to take the formal register and Ray glanced nervously over his shoulder, catching Cook’s eye. His face was flour-white, the eyebrows a downy camouflage. If the flesh around his eye sockets hadn’t been reddened by rubbing, he would have had no discernible contrast to his features. Ray’s irises were clear as cut-glass, his lips hypothermic. He wore his hair collar-length, with a wispy, swept-over fringe. Some might have found his purity strangely beautiful, but here, among the lumpen textures of state-funded learning (remoulded textbooks, splintered chair-legs, colour-clashed students and Brylcreemed teachers), his ethereal edge was otherworldly and unsettling.
Butcher, needlessly, took the register. Cook was second, after a girl named Battison.
“Dorian Cook?”
There were sniggers. Cook had first awoken to the oddness of his forename at nursery class, with its Daves and Garys and Steves. His mother had once told him it was something to do with an ‘actor’ she’d met after a teenage theatre trip. He wondered if the actor was his father.
*
At playtime, Cook fell into a game of football with a group of older boys. They were indulgent – slowly passing him the ball, holding off and giving him time to compose and pass back – until one, frustrated at his poor timing, kicked the ball, full strength, straight at his face. Cook fell to the floor, grazing his palms. The kicker retrieved the ball and led a round of howling laughter, but the tallest in the group marched over and slapped the ball out of his hands.
“Sorry, Den. It was an accident.”
‘Den’ helped Cook to his feet. “You alright?”
Cook said nothing. He leapt up and hurried away, nose throbbing from the impact. In the toilet-block at the playground’s far corner, he splashed water on his face, gulping back the urge to cry. Outside, Mrs Mellor sounded an extended note on a tin whistle. This was new to Cook, but the message was clear – end of playtime. He left the toilets, dragging a sleeve across his nose. The tall boy was waiting outside.
“You okay, then?”
“Yeah!” said Cook, embarrassed.
“I’m Dennis. Will you help me put the football stuff away?” It sounded like a command rather than a request.
“Okay.”
Cook was sceptical, but thought this might at least give him time to recover for the next round of lessons.
Dennis Mountford was two years older than Cook – a lifetime in their accelerated time-zone. He was remarkably clean and neat but somehow eluded the sense – common to all the other children – that he had been dressed by someone else. Mountford’s clothes all looked new, his hair was styled rather than hastily tamed, his shoes unscuffed. He walked with jagged, measured steps, as though he could disengage his legs and break into a glide at any moment. The other boys regarded Mountford with suspicious respect. He had never followed up on any physical threat, but no-one had yet summoned the confidence to test him. He was officer material – the soul of a teacher in a pupil’s body.
Mountford unlocked a shed by the girls’ toilets and Cook helped him drag four concrete-base goalposts into a line against the wall.
“Dorian, yeah?” said Mountford, lobbing the football into a hanging pouch. “My mum knows your nan.”
Cook nodded but didn’t look up. He lingered a little in the cool darkness, nosing through a crate of swimming gear.
“You have to head the ball with your forehead, mate,” chuckled Mountford, “not your nose.”
“I wasn’t trying to head it! He kicked it at me!”
Mountford smiled and ushered Cook back outside. He slid a chunky padlock through the door’s bolt.
“Listen. If anyone tries to mess you about, come and tell me. Right?”
Cook studied him, uncertain about the idea of a protector – it felt like taking on a debt he knew he couldn’t repay.
And then, a louder, deeper voice.
“Will you two get inside? The whistle went five minutes ago!”
This was the headmaster, Mr Austin – monolithic and walrus-faced – on the top step outside the school’s back entrance. He tapped at the face of his watch.
“Coming, sir!” said Mountford.
Austin shifted to one side. Mountford scaled the steps and squeezed through the deliberately ungenerous space. Cook followed.
*
Cook was first out of the classroom door as the hometime bell rang. He took down his coat, ran across to the class opposite (Mrs Mellor’s) and waited as the door opened and the children lined up to be released, alphabetically, according to surname. Lisa Goldstraw was the fifth to leave. She smiled as she saw Cook.
“Hiya, Dorian! Are you going home?”
“Uh, yeah…” said Cook.
To avoid the end-of-day crush around the pegs, Mrs Mellor insisted that her class retrieve their coats at afternoon break, and so Lisa was already wearing her dark blue quilted overcoat with detachable hood. Cook was annoyed at this – he had recognised the coat earlier and planned to bring it to the door himself.
“Y’alright?” said Lisa, as they passed through the huddle of parents at the main gate.
“Yeah. Got hit by a ball at playtime.”
Lisa giggled. “That’s daft.”
“Couldn’t get out of the way!”
She looked at him, doubtfully. “Shoulda been quicker, then!”
“I am quick!”
Lisa laughed and flicked up her hood.
At the crossing, the lollipop lady chatted to Lisa about a borrowed cooking dish she wanted her to pass on to her mother. Cook maintained a respectful distance throughout the exchange, hovering close enough to confirm himself as Lisa’s companion.
They headed down past the oil-works and turned off onto the road that led to Lisa’s street.
“Coming with me?” she said, as if only just noticing.
Cook was about to answer when she suddenly lurched forward, shouting, “Leave him alone!”
Half-way down a sloping side alley, almost out of sight of the main road, a group of four boys were standing in a semicircle.
They faced a smaller figure who was squatting down with his back against a high wall, as two of the bigger boys aimed kicks at his legs and body.
“What’s he ever done to you?” shouted Lisa.
One of the boys looked up briefly and then got back to business. Their target was foetal, hands covering his face. As Cook caught up with Lisa at the entrance to the alley, he saw a whip of white hair and realised it was John Ray.
“They’re all so horrible to him!” shouted Lisa, dashing past the alley. Cook was not so phoney-brave as to plan an intervention, but he was shocked to hear Ray droning out piteous little wails of pain and protest, each punctuated by a pause as he inhaled enough breath to deliver the next. One of his assailants imitated the noise as he kicked, while the others sneered and sniggered. After each impact, Ray fell briefly silent and then resumed wailing, until the next blow interrupted him again.
And then, Cook felt himself stop and turn and run, carried by a surge of misplaced outrage. He pelted around the corner into the alley and saw that Ray had now coiled into a tight ball at the boys’ feet.
“We could roll him down the hill like that!”
Cook was still running. In a few seconds, he would be within striking distance of the boys, although there was no question of making any kind of contact. So, what exactly was the plan? If he was supposed to be a bull – head down, horns cocked, hoof grinding – then his enemies entirely failed to cower before his uncastrated menace. They laughed – loud and cruel – as he slowed and shouted.
“Stop hitting him!”
The group turned away from Ray and faced Cook. A heavy-looking lad with greasy hair stepped forward.
“Why?”
Not, ‘who says?’ or, ‘make us!’ or, ‘what are you gonna do about it?’ Just, ‘why?’
Cook had no answer. He stood there, in the glare of his audience, paralysed by intrigue and indecision – more watchful kitten than wild beast.
“Dorian!” Lisa was calling from the road junction at the alley entrance. “Come on! I’ll get my dad.”
The greasy-haired boy sniggered. “Is that your girlfriend, Doreen?”
The Ghost Page 2