The Ghost

by The Ghost (epub)

  October, 1974

  ‘Playtime’ at Bethesda Scool – a tangled uproar of doctors, nurses, cowboys, indians, cops, robbers, good guys, bad guys, killers and killed, kissers and kissed. Despite the mild autumn air, Cook had been aggressively padded, by Esther, in three tiers of unyielding polyester. Jammed sideways into a narrow passage behind the utility shed, he gulped down jagged, lung-scarring breaths. He was the chased, the yet-to-be-kissed – and a notorious ‘naughty’ girl called Beverley Leonard had made him her prey.

  Beverley had repeatedly faced Mr Austin for such degeneracy as standing on a chair and lifting her skirt, usually to reveal underwear. She had recently escalated her victims from pupils to teachers, and was only allowed outside for one playtime a week. Cook’s hiding place, in the cramped and under-visited upper school yard, was dark and sheltered and difficult to spot in passing, but it was well known as a refuge for smokers and skivers. He compressed himself deep into a cluster of nettles and weeds, listening to Beverley’s flat-footed stomp as she searched around the front of the shed. She rattled at the padlocked door – for effect – and then pounced, peering round into the hidey-hole (“Dorian Cook!”). But instead of dragging her target out into the daylight, Beverley wriggled in next to him. He could smell the Vosene in her dark curly hair.

  “I’ll kiss you if you show me your widgie.”

  In a panic, Cook turned to the opposite end of the passage, but it was blocked by an impenetrable tangle of weed coiled around a rusted bicycle frame.

  “I know you’re Lisa’s boyfriend,” reasoned Beverley, “but it’s okay. I’ve kissed loads of boys with girlfriends.”

  Cook squirmed and tried to hustle past her, but she was bulky enough to hold him back.

  “I’ll tell your mum!” said Cook.

  Beverley laughed. “She already knows!”

  Cook cowered down lower still. A nettle barb prodded the back of his neck. He yelped and sprang upright, giving Beverley her opportunity. She leaned over, closed her eyes, and pressed her lips onto his. Cook tasted authentic sweat and synthetic fruit – her chewing-gum. He endured the ‘kiss’ and, as Beverley disengaged with an exaggerated puckering squeak, he reached up to frantically scrub a sleeve across his polluted mouth. Ordeal over, Cook motioned to squeeze past, but, instead of shuffling backwards to allow him a clear exit, Beverley wedged in closer and tighter.

  “Let’s see, then!”

  Cook immediately covered his crotch area with both hands, clenching at the starchy corduroy. Beverley laughed again. “I won’t do anything, don’t worry! But you’ve got to show me! That’s how it works!”

  “I didn’t say that!” bleated Cook. “You made me!”

  “If you don’t show me,” said Beverley, “then I’ll say you pulled down my pants.”

  This was no empty threat – the accessibility of Beverley’s pants being widely recognised.

  Miserably, Cook unzipped his trousers and slid them down to thigh height, revealing saggy red briefs with a white ‘Y’ lining. He tucked both thumbs into the elasticated hem and pulled down, exposing his shrivelled shame. Beverley studied the curl of skin and tissue.

  “Oh! You’ve got a really little one! But I like your sticky-out belly-button!”

  Cook felt his forehead and cheeks flush with anger and embarrassment. He quickly re-covered himself and shouldered into Beverley, who at last stepped outside of the gap and gave him room to pass. Their emergence went unnoticed, due to a commotion which was drawing pupils to the central playground. Cook stumbled towards the teacher voices, zipping up his trousers. Beverley sprinted ahead, skirt swishing.

  The playground was overloaded – with all the pupils in both upper and lower schools. Mr Butcher jostled the children into parallel lines according to form, while Mrs Mellor scurried up and down the groups, counting heads. As Cook joined his classmates, he saw a thick, dark cloud drifting up the connecting staircase. David Brereton, two lines up, shouted across.

  “Dor! Someone’s set fire to the shelter. It’s brilliant!”

  “It is not ‘brilliant’, Mr Brereton!” roared Butcher. “It is very serious and you need to keep in your line while Mrs Mellor makes sure everyone is safe!”

  The old air-raid shelter was used by the lower school mostly as bicycle storage. It was a long, shallow concrete enclosure with a flat, stone-cladded roof and a padlocked wooden door at either end. The roof could be reached via a short leap from the middle of the staircase, but children were barred from playing either on the roof or inside the shelter. Stray footballs had to be retrieved by a teacher using stepladders, and the school caretaker, convinced that children were intentionally aiming objects up there, regularly lobbied for the roof to be surrounded by netting – or, ideally, barbed wire.

  The form groups were herded out of the main gate and reassembled in the teachers’ car-park. Butcher led the operation, funnelling the children, line by line, through the narrow entrance yard, muting any chatter with disproportionate threats. As Cook’s class shuffled through the gate, a fire engine parked up and two firefighters in breathing masks unravelled a scorched hose, threading it in through the gate and down the staircase, which was now obscured by a rising swirl of black smoke. At the far end of the car-park, Cook could see Beverley Leonard at the head of her form group, crouched in a scrum with two other girls. As Cook lined up, Beverley turned and caught his eye. She whispered something to her companions and they sneaked a glance over before cackling and re-huddling.

  “Dor!!! It was brilliant!”

  Brereton had snuck in next to Cook, unseen by Butcher. He was hopping on the spot, trembling with pleasure, perhaps even pride.

  “You should have seen it burning! We were in the dinner hall and we went up the stairs and all the fire was coming out of the shelter and you could feel the heat.”

  19. Meaningful Dialogue

  “SPACE IS MORE DANGEROUS than killer whales!” insisted Alfie. “It’s even more dangerous than volcanoes.”

  Cook flipped the over-fried bacon. “Volcanoes are pretty dangerous, Alfie.”

  “Only if they’re activated!”

  Gina, dressed down for a day off work, sat beside Alfie but screened herself out of the debate with strong morning coffee and a copy of Vogue. This was her refined survival skill – simultaneous absence and presence. Cook’s method was swagger – a studied visibility. He sang and hummed and whistled, prepared comfort snacks, sneaked up the volume on his record player. In the absence of connection, Dorian and Gina Cook had settled for collaboration, resculpting their arrangement from loving relationship to working partnership. Mostly, this was punishing emotional graft – a choreography of bluffs and feints, joshes and jostles. Mutually assured self-destruction. Breakfast, though, was usually relaxed – foggy brains blunted to conflict, the urge to refuel serving as repellent against lingering melodrama. Lunch and dinner, to a lesser degree, carried the theme – natural communion around food forcing a welcome interval from the pantomime. Like a gloomy teenager, it was a marriage that now emerged only at mealtimes.

  Cook scored a ragged incision down the centre of a bread roll and pressed two rashers of bacon into the slot. He snaked a squiggle of brown sauce over the top and handed it to Alfie.

  “Use a plate, darling!”

  This from Gina to Alfie, not from Gina to Cook. Another survival trick – using children as conduit for confrontation avoidance. Cook slid over a side-plate without comment.

  “We should go to the Adventure Playground!” announced Gina.

  “The one with the Pirate Ship?” said Alfie, through a mouthful of bacon.

  School was closed for training and Gina had booked the day off to do ‘outdoor things’ with Alfie. She had volunteered this to Cook by text message several weeks ago but, as if to illustrate the toxicity of their recent communication, he had deleted the message without reading it, and had also taken the day as leave. Now, they faced the uncommon anxiety of double-parenting. Cook had planned to spend the morning holed up i
n his study with Alain Resnais’ adaptation of Ayckbourn’s Private Fears In Public Places. But he needed to bank sufficient goodwill to allow him to disappear in the evening – for his meeting with Brereton and Mountford.

  “Yeah, that’d be good. I’ll come, too!”

  Gina paused, midway through a page-flip, and looked up at Cook. “Really? Oh! That would be nice.”

  “Yay!” bounced Alfie. “Mummy and Daddy Day!”

  They both knew that ‘nice’ was a charitable forecast.

  *

  At the park playground, Cook and Gina deposited Alfie into the relative safety of the stress-tested rope-ladders and rubber-floored gangways. They were both quick on the draw with their phones – Cook prodding at work emails, Gina scrolling through various social media feeds. Cook spotted an unoccupied wooden bench and motioned for Gina to claim it, but she was too slow, and they were forced to hover as a nuclear family moved in and set upon a box of pizza slices.

  “We can give him an hour or so,” confirmed Cook to his phone-screen, through a daze of task-juggling (answering an email, checking his bank balance, dismissing an alert, flapping at a wasp). “I’ve got some work to do and then there’s this reunion thing later.”

  Gina pocketed her phone. “Let’s just wait until he gets tired or hungry. Probably not long. He didn’t have much breakfast.” (Economical passive-aggression – a dismissal of her husband’s lazy ‘hour or so’ assessment with a side-swipe at his unloved, half-eaten bacon rolls.)

  Bothered by insects, the pizza family scattered (“Let’s eat on the grass like a proper picnic!”). An elderly couple loitering close to Cook and Gina were clearly considering a claim on the bench. But Gina swooped first, establishing territory with an aggressively draped overcoat. As Cook sat beside her, a distant muscle memory almost drifted her hand into his, but she disguised the impulse with a diffident pat on his knee.

  “Tell me more about this ‘reunion thing’.”

  Cook, still peering into his phone-screen, was immersed in a story at the top of his BBC news feed.

  POLICE WIDEN SEARCH

  FOR MISSING WOMAN

  Detectives hunting for a 38-year-old woman who vanished from her home are studying several reports of sightings.

  Police, who believe Eleanor Finch could be with people she knows, made a direct appeal to the woman on Sunday afternoon, calling on her to return to her ‘distraught’ family.

  Eleanor was last seen leaving her home at around 4pm last Monday. Police have been conducting house-to-house enquiries nearby, and have now expanded their search.

  “Uh?”

  “Your meeting later – with the old school-friends!”

  Cook re-read the opening paragraphs of the story. He looked at the woman’s name, then up at her age, then back down at the name again.

  “Just a quick drink. We were all at school together.”

  “When did you last see them?”

  “I saw one recently – Dennis. It was his idea to get together. I hadn’t seen him since we were at school.”

  “God, that will be so weird.”

  “It’s strange, yeah. He didn’t seem like the same person at all. But then I’ve never met him as an adult.”

  “Well then he isn’t the same person. Really.”

  “I suppose not.”

  They shared a few seconds of nothingness, to the sound of shouting and laughing children. Gina slid her hand back to Cook’s knee. There was comfort – rather than affection – in the gesture.

  “Dorian – I don’t mind who you meet, you know.”

  Cook clicked his phone to stand-by – if only to wrench himself away from the news article – and tilted his head to catch Gina, eye to eye.

  “What?”

  “You don’t need to give me stories about meeting old school friends.”

  “Stories?”

  “MUMMY!”

  The moment was ruptured by Alfie, red-faced and bawling, lurching into his mother’s arms.

  “Darling! What’s wrong?”

  After the comfort, the call for justice.

  “Daddy! An older boy is being horrible. He’s bullying the other children and he pushed me over!”

  Alfie’s features were warped and defaced – smeared with mud and sweat and torrential tears. Cook knew that the reality would be milder than the report, but there was something in his son’s devastation – in the jagged sobbing and retching, in the despair and fury – that threw a switch. He sprang to his feet and squeezed Alfie by the hand, urging – almost yanking – him away from Gina, across the grass, past the pizza family and into the playground area. Alfie’s ‘Pirate Ship’ was a vaguely galley-shaped framework of wooden oars and braces tethered by a network of ropes and netting. A central ladder led up from the sandpit base onto a broad ‘deck’. This entrance was currently impassible, due to a stocky boy – a couple of years older than Alfie – blocking the path and demanding ‘treasure’ from other children.

  “He’s there, daddy! That one!”

  “Okay, son. You stay here.”

  And now, on wings of outrage, Cook glided over to the boy, to the bully.

  And there was the side entry and John Ray.

  Watch! He hates this!

  And there was the gates and John Ray.

  Come on! You can go!

  And there was Uncle Russell.

  I’d stay out of it, Dor.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  The boy – the bully, in a grubby green polo shirt – turned to Cook, standing a few feet away, within striking distance, tremoring with confrontation anxiety.

  “What? I’m playing! Are you police?”

  “No!” snapped Cook, a wobble in his voice. “I am not ‘police’ and you are not ‘playing’. You are frightening younger children. You aren’t playing with them. You are bullying them.”

  “What’s the problem, mate?”

  A tall, angular man with a shiny shaven head stepped forward from a crowd of adults at the edge of the play area. Cook briefly caught his eye before redirecting his glare back at the boy. “He’s the problem! He’s been bullying the other kids. He made my son cry.” Cook was alert to the man’s threat, but continued to build his case. “I’ve just seen him demanding money.”

  “What? Who’s been demanding money?”

  This was clearly a redundant question, but Cook assumed that the man hadn’t fully understood. “He has!” said Cook, pointing to the boy.

  And now, with curtain raised and audience enchanted with fear and fascination, Cook felt the urge to improvise, to season the drama.

  “Is this your boy?”

  “Yes, mate,” said the man, immediately – confidently. “This is my boy. My son.”

  The man shuffled from stage-right to centre, towards the main ladder, towards Cook and the boy, the bully. Cook pivoted – to receive him, braced for something ugly. If it was to come, he would be prepared – and that would be unexpected. But the man, head sparkling in the sunshine, walked past Cook and gripped his son, the bully, by his forearm.

  “Liam! What have I fucking told you? Don’t mess about with other kids!”

  “I wasn’t doing anything!”

  The man squeezed his son the bully’s other forearm and he pushed and pulled with both hands – forward and back – causing Liam’s head to jerk against the motion. With this, Liam Sr. shook out the payback for Alfie, as Liam Jr. wailed and sprayed mucus and tears, the fluids atomised by violence.

  “Steady on!”

  This from an elderly man hoisting a young girl down from one of the climbing frame’s high beams.

  Liam Sr., now the bully, turned and snarled and released his son, the victim, who collapsed to the floor, clenched and shuddering, sobbing with shock and hurt.

  “Don’t tell me to steady on! I’ll discipline my child the way I fucking want!”

  “Is that what that was?” said Cook.

  The bald man turned back to the balding man. “You wh
at?”

  Gina, crouched down beside Alfie.

  The elderly man carrying the young girl.

  Two rigid vertical furrows between Liam Sr.’s eyes.

  Three horizontal grooves in Liam Sr.’s forehead.

  Liam the victim unfurling, standing, shuffling towards Alfie, saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  “Pretty fucked-up kind of ‘discipline’.”

  The elderly man setting the young girl down by an elderly woman, keeping his eyes on Cook and Liam Sr.

  “Dorian…” (Gina).

  “You think he’s learned his lesson, do you? Now you’ve shaken him half to death?”

  Gina comforting Liam as well as Alfie.

  Liam Sr. mouth open.

  Grooves, furrows.

  “Fuck off! You’re the one that made this a big thing!”

  “Maybe if you stopped your kids extorting money off other kids, it wouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

  This felt desperate and off-target, but Cook, the bully, was marshalling his Critics’ Wire debating composure.

  “What do you think you’re teaching your kids – doing that to them in public? You’re teaching them that it’s okay to make something physical, as a knee-jerk. You’re teaching them that the natural progression from anger is abuse.”

  Gina comforting Liam and Alfie.

  Gina staring at the ground.

  Grooves, furrows.

  “I do not abuse my kids!”

  Cook, smiling. “Oh, yeah. We can all see that!”

  And now, Liam Sr., pointing at the air, prodding at the space a few inches from Cook’s face.

  “You’ve got a fucking big mouth!”

  And there was Mr Butcher.

  You have a problem – it’s called a mouth.

  Cook drew back his right shoulder and swiped his fist up and around and into the side of Liam Sr.’s smooth, shiny head. The connection was barely a glance, but Cook immediately recoiled and snapped out another punch. This one landed – more out of luck than precision – on the edge of an eye socket, with an unsatisfying, near-silent clunk. It jerked back Liam Sr.’s head, forcing him to stumble down onto one knee. Cook shuffled backwards, braced for retaliation, but Liam Sr. stayed down – there on the dank grass, on one knee, hand over his eye. It looked like a surreal proposal of marriage.