Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  She’d been half expecting her belongings to be stacked on the pavement outside her house but that hasn’t happened and she’s surprised to feel relief: rather a bit more than half, then. But other things are as she imagined; the yellow-and-black police tape that bars entry to the bridge, the brackish indifference of the river, and the knoll of mail that means she must put her shoulder to the front door and shove. She enters and tramples the envelopes under her cork platforms. This is some other woman’s house. It is not familiar to her. Somewhere in it is the phantom of her and a smaller acompanying one. She bends, scoops the post up into her arms, carries it like a baby into the kitchen and dumps it onto the table. Do not open. Like the tape outside says: DO NOT CROSS. Disobey and soon you’ll be bloated on a beach, picked over by crustacea and carrion birds.

  There are things she must do: shower, change. Just, what, refamiliarise herself with the place where she is supposed to live. She reaches out and flicks the switch on the wall and makes light; not disconnected yet, then. She flicks the switch off again and picks the phone out of its cradle and puts it to her ear; a dialling tone, broken with no doubt many stored voicemails. Minor fucking miracles. She can hear herself breathing.

  Men with eyes that change colour, according to their moods, and can even, in certain types of light, be golden. Men whose smiles are abrupt and joyless. One, recently – how many days ago – who screamed at her when she accidentally knocked over the wine. The last bottle, and at 3 a.m. She’d mopped it up with a sock and he’d wrung it out into his glass and drank it. An episode in which no one covered themselves in glory, including the sock. Sometimes the stubble seems to change colour, too, octopus-like with mood; fiery red, the white of age or concealment from sunlight like an axolotl, in the facial folds. Where no lights ever probe.

  She moves to the window. A few dead flies on the sill. The houseplants withered and under dust. A spider in her web in the corner; Emma blows, very gently, towards her and she spins and scurries into the safety of her crevice. Out there, two swans drift upriver; Emma gets their feet, beating, beneath the stately grace. Sea-pinks out there, thrifts. A large log on the central spine of silt, a kind of neck and head it has like Nessie. The hole in the bridge. He drowned. The poor old man. The police tape brightly coloured like a venomous snake. Upstairs, directly above where Emma’s now standing, she would read stories aloud every night about an I Love You Bear. The How Do You Do books. No alpha in that little boy; he told her once that trophies can be quite heavy so he’d prefer not to win any. And on his first day back from school: it was okay, but I don’t think I’ll be going again. And yet each night there’d be a different dinosaur, a new thing to haunt, happily, his hypnogogia: pronunciation gore-go-SAW-russ meaning ‘monster lizard’. Carnosaur type. Upper Cretaceous 90 million years ago over 4.2 metres long and 4.5 metres high. Bigger than this house. Food: meat. Found in North America and western Asia but never in Wales, no. And it would take a very very very long time to count to 90 million.

  Her hand crawls up beneath her top, her sexy, white, tie-across-the-tits top. One tie is half ripped away, now, hanging loose, because that one in the baseball cap, him with the teardrop tattoo, just would not fucking wait, would he? But it was less out of impatience and more out of control – that she knows. And it is her body; hers, and the quest she carries within it, even criss-crossed with scratches as it is, now, on the neck and back and hips and belly, as if something has tried to erase her as a mistake. Her limbs; her organs. The wildest fucking woman. You tug the cloth down over the hips and it all tumbles out and boings upwards and God the variety spins the head and to know that it could never all be experienced exhaustively unless that head be shattered like a shot vase. All to know of immortality. Short ones, long ones. Hairy, hairless. And oh the colours! No tropical reef could know such a rainbow. She remembers once, in her unwellness, talking to a therapist about cognitive behavioural therapy and then going home and googling CBT with the safe search off. God almighty: nailed to blocks of wood, they were. Foreskins stitched shut. Blowtorches, for Christ’s sake. The variety without end.

  With her fingertips she traces the place where she knows the tattooed legend is and she touches the thin crimp of stretch marks that in some lights look pink and in others seem silver. Signs of life. Out there is the world. In here is her. And the way things wrongly echo, as if she’s a traveller through time returned to alter a calamitous present that here is future and needing to wrestle against some powerful and reactionary and preventative cosmological force: do not open the envelopes. This wildest woman smoulders in her skin and then a very, very interesting thing happens, lovely in its way, a startling coincidence of events; she rubs the inside of her right forearm against that of her left, probably to rid herself of an itch, and at the very instant she does so the landline rings and it is like stridulation, as if she has coaxed the trilling from her own needy skin. The caller ID reads MUM and Emma moves away from the phone quickly as if it might pounce. Up the stairs she goes, towards hot water and things that smell nice. Get clean to get dirty. This body is hers. Things speed up.

  He waits a while in the betting-shop doorway; the length of three cigarettes. No neck-growth on this one, just a corpse in ghostly blue light. The minds that thought up these things – the opposite: always do that. They preach frugality, you waste every penny. Self-discipline? Shed every shred. Temperance and moderation – well, watch what happens now. They come and go in groups, to the cashpoint over the road, some of them studenty, others workmates on a night out, some right fucking ’roidy-boys because Carmarthen are in town to play Aber FC. 3–1 to Aber so the pill-heads will be out for revenge. Cowley stares at them from the little cave of his hoodie and remembers Carmarthen and the judder in his shoulder and he wills them to make eye contact but they don’t seem to see him, half hidden as he is inside the shit-brown hoodie in the doorway.

  There, now: a guy on his own, youngish, rucksack. Cowley is over the road in four bounds and very close at his back:

  —Do not turn around, mun. Stay looking at the screen I SAID DO NOT FUCKIN TURN AROUND! Yew don’t need-a see what I look like, twat. A balance. Get a fuckin balance on-a screen. Feel that? That’s a fuckin blade. Go right in yewer fuckn kidney it will. Ba-lance, I said. Rich cunts, yew stew-dents, these days I SAID DON’T FUCKIN LOOK AT ME! Hurry-a fuck up! Maximum. Three ton, I know what it fuckin is. Do not fuck about …. I am gunner walk away backwards an if I see yew try an look at me I’m gunner blind yew in both eyes.

  Cowley snatches the flap of money out of the machine and legs it around the nearby corner and down onto the hanging steps, that pissy dank passage down which men and women were once marched to the gibbet on the shore and there he removes the hoodie and drops it in a corner and then he leaves the passage and goes onto the promenade at an amble, nothing suspicious here, just a bloke taking the air. There is a bouncy castle and the smell of onions and some bikers standing around next to their machines. In the heat there is much skin bared and Cowley watches the legs of the girls and their midriffs too and their cleavages where and when possible. And he eyes the male torsos, sees either the puniness or the overdevelopment shielding the internal timidity that, Cowley knows, would not take much effort to reveal, to drag dribbling out into the light. And that there is in such men with the urge to dominate the equivalent counter-urge to submit, to roll over when the real alpha comes along, Cowley has always known this; even in the sacristy, behind and within the shrieking in his held-down head, he had that knowledge. Maybe that’s where it began, in fact – where it was actually born.

  He takes a left up Pier Street, at the top end of which the robbed guy is talking to two coppers by the town clock. Botherless, Cowley walks past them and heads down Bridge Street and turns left at the end of it. There is a small weight in his pocket which causes him to list away from the Trefechan Bridge on which, if he looked upriver, he’d be able to see the new bridge under which he once swung so weightless. He has a couple of pints in the Mill. Quie
t; just a couple of old guys at the bar and a large woman watching the telly. No Carmarthen fans. Down, then, to the bus stops, where Cowley stares at the timetables for a minute and then turns to a woman with two kids licking ice lollies.

  —D’yew understand these things, love?

  —Where is it you’re wanting to go?

  —I’m needing the time of the next Traws. Down to Cardiff, like.

  The two children look up at Cowley. Sticky pinkness all over their chins.

  —Let me see. Cowley looks at the woman looking at the marks, the numbers and the codes which might as well, to him, be animal-tracks, swirls in the sand or mud. One of the children, the boy, points at Cowley’s neck and says:

  —Dragon.

  Cowley smiles. —That’s right, bach. Big red dragon.

  —Looks like you’re in luck, the woman says. —This says that the next one leaves in half an hour.

  —Where from?

  —Here. Thirty minutes. The TX to Bristol.

  —Diolch.

  And he’s away, at a jog, down towards Wetherspoon’s. Half an hour. Better work fast, faster.

  They look cool and attractive, Reservoir Dogsy – white men in a group in black suits and shades. She squeezes in next to one of them at the end of the bar.

  —You all in a band?

  —A band? DuwDuw no. Funeral.

  —Ah who died?

  —Friend. Doubt you’d know him.

  —I might do. It’s a small town.

  —Owen Lambert. Ring any bells?

  Emma pretends to think. —No. How’d he go?

  —What?

  —How’d he die? If you don’t mind me asking.

  —Suicide. Hanging.

  And the man takes a bite at his pint.

  —Ah. That’s awful.

  The man doesn’t answer. Doesn’t look at Emma, either. She orders a large gin and tonic and drinks half of it back, hoists herself up onto a bar stool and arranges herself so that the man is kind of wedged between her legs, her right knee a blind behind which she can squeeze his thigh.

  —Ey now. Enough of that. I’ve just come from a funeral.

  —Take your mind off it, then. Life goes on.

  —And I’m happily married. Got two kids I have.

  Emma almost splutters. —Does that matter?

  —To me it does, aye. A lot. And he slides out from between her knees and takes his pint off to join the other mourners, wherever they might be, probably at the buffet that’s been laid on, in the back room; there are smells coming from that direction, sausage roll and quichey.

  Emma puts one leg over the other. Her toenails, chipped; she’d neglected to touch them up, or remove the last flecks. Looks a bit skanky, if truth be told. She starts to pick at her big toe with a thumbnail and kind of loses herself in that before she catches herself on and sits straight, back upright, with both feet in their cork platforms on the rung of the barstool. Gets a faint whiff from down below but thinks that might just be in her mind; she’d showered, after all, but did she feminise? Douche? She puts her chin on her chest and takes a big sniff.

  —You okay, love?

  —What?

  —Not crying, are you?

  Emma smiles at the barman. —No. Just having a sniff.

  —Thought you might’ve been with the mourners. Not that you look like you’re in mourning, I mean.

  He lifts and lowers a big hand above the bar top to indicate what he can see of Emma, the white top with the snapped tie and the valley of flesh behind it: no widow’s weeds, here, on her. She smiles at him. He smiles back, and is then called away by a feller waving a tenner at the other end of the bar. Emma appraises – not a bad arse on him. Christ this never-ending fucking noise. She finishes her drink and crunches ice. Thoughts of crustiness crowd in, of stepping so far outside of something that there could never be any way back, not even when you realised that the place you’d stepped into was desirous of your wreckage and, even, before the final cremation, intent on making you regret every moment of your life hitherto, from birth, from conception, if this is what it leads to. Such horrors crowd in. Her tonsils burn in the ice-freeze.

  And she re-enters herself with a jolt. Small jolt, and all she can smell now is juniper. And the scruffy toenails, well, who’s going to be looking down at her feet? Although there was that Bristolian recently, wasn’t there, on his hands and knees, kissing them … kind of worshipping. Grunting as he was down there. She could see the double-crown of him, the red backs of his ears, the doughy rolls of his nape, when she looked impassively down.

  The barman returns. —Sorry about that. What can I get you? She asks for the same again and raises her empty glass.

  He gets off all of a sweat and a thirst but train-ness remains within him – the unstoppable forward motion, the slamming clatter, the occasional warning wail and sideways lurch. Such noise. A pint in the station’s Wetherspoon’s to reignite his buzz, there to look up at the blueness above through the glass roof, beyond the anti-pigeon mesh.

  Drink drunk, buzz back, into the town. A notion in him that he should return to his flat, just to make sure his stuff isn’t piled up on the pavement outside. And maybe Quilty … Quilty, that wondrous animal, who once licked his eyeball and sent a ferocious shudder through his whole body that was not entirely unsexual. But, well, he’s a survivor, now. He’s returned from his quest still whole, un-holed, and he will not think of where Browne might be now, in that skunk-fumed terrace and in awful pain and fear or maybe even shoved into an adjacent actuality, no, he will not think of that, only that there’s cause for celebration – his continuing-in-the-airness. Plus there is this mad momentum in the noise, Christ, the endless noise.

  Only a pub. The downstairs room of a pub empty, nearly, because upstairs is an open-mic night and the drinking is soundtracked by muffled declamatory voices from above which are in turn punctuated by bursts of applause, diluted: a thunderclap with an L-plate. Adam drinks away the recall of the scoop-eared man in the kitchen and whatever details there may be of him in some secret niche of the mind. Just luck, that’s all. Drown everything else in alcohol.

  People troop downstairs. The poets, their audience. Adam is a hunched and drunken man at a large table which is soon occupied as are all other seats and indeed much standing room too. Two tiers at the bar and Adam has just an inch left in his glass and he is snarling. Needs a refill but fuck just look at the bar. It’d take ages. Sion and Benji. Are they wondering where he is. Browne. In what state is he. All organs unanchored in Adam’s body, it feels like – unbecalmed. Under and in the crackling sun and the storms go on raging, registering on no gauge or map.

  The guy on Adam’s left; beardy bastard. And on his right; beardy bastard too, and in some kind of stupid smock. Between them is an overweight girl in glasses and another man, older, in a waistcoat of self-aware flamboyance. Also bloody beardy. Boiling amongst is Adam and his extreme weathers. They know nothing of the day he’s had, of the charred things he’s seen, nor to even for one instant think about shapes in the sky that hover and bring messages and other things, things that cannot be named but which leave devastation behind, snapped trees and seared earths.

  Blurdle blurdle. That’s the sound they make. Their talk. Then Beardy Left wipes beer foam from his whiskers with the back of his hand and says: – Well, I’ll be famous when I’m dead.

  Adam barks. A leapt laugh. And now they notice him, in wary regard.

  —You okay, man?

  —Aye, sound. Adam feels the tip of his tongue slicing the inside of his cheeks. —Famous when you’re dead. Another one. World’s fuckin fuller yiz.

  The overweight girl stands and is absorbed by the pub.

  —I mean, right, this is what I mean. Adam leans in. —So d’yeh think your, your poetry will benefit the world, then? Heal wounds? Think it’ll make the world a better place? Well, a writer of any worth knows full fuckin well that the words are more important than the person who wrote them. Right? So why don’t you fu
ckin top yerself? Cos, cos, I mean, you’ve obviously got all this brilliant stuff lying around that will benefit, fuck, might even save the world when you’re dead. That’s what you’re saying, innit? So huury up and die. Let the world have its cure. Tell yeh what, I’ll even supply the means; wait here for a bit and I’ll go and score a load of temazzies, enough to kill a fuckin bull. Sit with yeh when you take em. Sing you a lullaby as you die. Alright? And then we can all read your poetry and be saved. Go on, lad, you can be a hero, here. This is your chance. Kill yerself and save the world. Be, be Jesus.

  Beardy Right laughs. Beardy Waistcoat shakes his head and Beardy Left hisses and says: – God almighty. What a cock.

  Adam leaves the bar. Wants gone. His is a clumsy, un-grand departure, with the need to stand up and kind of sidle around the table and the Three Beards, but it is achieved without too much stumbling and staggering and sniggering and then he is outside, on the pavement, one hip against a car as he rolls a cigarette. The sun has slid down behind a roof yet with the warmth in the air it seems as if shadows should be cast but when Adam looks down at the ground he sees none, not even his own, and he feels as if it has been robbed from him and he wonders, with some small sadness, where it has gone and what has become of it. Probably nothing good.