The Confusion of Karen Carpenter

by Jonathan Harvey

  Instead he just says quietly, ‘Well, it’s not the first time, you know.’

  ‘No, I don’t know. Know what?’ I ask, horror creeping into my voice. It rises like scales on a piano. Good job I didn’t say any more words or I’d have hit top C.

  He carries on, ‘Well, it goes back as far as the market.’

  ‘Garston Market?’

  ‘Yeah, she was giving the bloke off the misshapes stall the glad eye. Trevor, his name was. All tattoos and gobshite. She put on half a stone with all the freebies he was feeding her.’

  ‘Did she go off with him?’ Again my voice is rising.

  I certainly don’t remember her being absent from my life if she did.

  Dad shakes his head. ‘I gave her an ultimatum. Leave the stall or I’m leaving you.’

  I am the epitome of gobsmack. I had no idea. All this was going on under my nose as I was growing up and I didn’t have a clue.

  ‘I mean, I didn’t want to leave, love. I didn’t wanna leave you, that’s for sure.’

  I look touched and relieved, even though I’m not, but I’m sure it’s what he wants to see. I’m more fascinated by what I think is coming.

  ‘So when she became the ventriloquist, when she tried to launch her performing career . . .’

  The one that bombed, I want to add, but don’t.

  ‘. . . she was doing that to . . .’

  ‘To distance herself from that Trevor knob,’ I finish for him.

  Dad nods. ‘’Cos I told her, it’s him or me.’

  I’m quite impressed, I have to say.

  But then I wonder, How did big, butch, law-laying-down Dad go from that to this – this ‘put up and shut up’ person I see before me today, while Mum’s probably, as we speak, falling into the arms of— God, the name Jorgen’s annoying.

  Neil. From now on I will call him Neil.

  ‘’Course, she was a shite ventriloquist, so that didn’t last long. Then we found out Trevor had married a Brazilian, so I let her go back to the market.’

  I can’t help it. Whenever I hear the word ‘Brazilian’, I still clench my buttocks. Damn you, Mrs Pepper!

  ‘Have there been . . . other ones?’ I ask tentatively.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he says almost immediately. ‘And after a while I . . . stopped caring and . . . turned a blind eye.’

  He continues, and I continue to be amazed by what I am hearing. There are words. Lots of words. And names. A veritable phone book of names. (Well, three, but this is my mother we’re talking about.) Basically, the gist of what he’s saying is, ‘Your mother’s a slut.

  Tonight my dad looks like a deflated old man. The red hair of his youth has given way to a sandy-grey colour. Even his freckles have faded. The man always seen at parties in his sheepskin coat, jangling keys in his pocket and making off-colour jokes has gone, the life sucked out of him, and in his place is a crumpled mess with skin like crêpe paper. It looks so thin it might tear at the slightest touch. Surely he used to have thicker skin than that?

  ‘Why d’you stay with her?’

  He looks down to his drink, like that’s the million-dollar question.

  ‘Well, they always fizzle out. Then she comes back, tail between her legs. Ever so nice then, she is.’ He clears his throat. ‘I don’t usually get to meet them.’

  I nod. It must have been weird meeting J— Neil, then.

  ‘I had this uncontrollable desire to throttle the Danish bastard.’

  And for a second, the sheepskin jacket is back. And I feel bad. He wouldn’t have had to have met – oh, OK, I can’t help myself – Jorgen Borgen Not to Be Confused With Piers Morgan if he’d not felt the need to come down here and stage an intervention with Mum. So it’s my fault they met.

  ‘I’m so sorry you had to see him,’ I say, and I mean it.

  ‘It’s not your fault, love. It’s your mam who’s the nightmare. You’re chicken feed compared to her.’

  For some reason this makes me laugh. Well, I know the reason. The reason being that in the last week I have probably come the closest I ever will to having a nervous breakdown/going a bit mental and yet even then I’m not as much of a nightmare as my mother. Dad smiles. It’s nice when he does that. Makes me feel everything’s going to be OK.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘What, love?’

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  He thinks. I like this about him. He doesn’t have a knee-jerk response to anything. He thinks, considers, then gives his opinion.

  ‘Dunno.’

  I like this less about him now.

  Then he elaborates, ‘I’ve never seen one, like. Your auntie Margaret has.’

  Auntie Margaret’s done everything. She’s like Gina from science. If you’ve got a cough, she’s got secondary cancer. I remember being very excited as a child because on the way to the baths, in my dad’s car, we had to slow down to let someone cross the road and it was the woman who played Nellie Boswell in the sitcom Bread. Dad had beeped his horn and she had waved and that was it, but I couldn’t wait to tell anyone who crossed my path after that. And everyone was of course impressed and envious and made me tell them the story again and again and again in case I’d missed anything out.

  Apart from Auntie Margaret.

  We were in her kitchenette at the time. She always called it her ‘kitchenette’ even though it was anything but small. She was dragging on a menthol cigarette (‘Like smoking a Polo, Karen. Wait till you’re old enough to try it,’ she used to say) and she looked down at me from the high stool next to her breakfast bar and said, ‘Nellie from Bread?’

  ‘Uh-huh. We actually saw her.’

  ‘Nellie from Bread, you say?’

  ‘Yeah. On the zebra crossing by the Abbey Cinema.’

  ‘Nellie Boswell, yeah? The actress who plays her?’

  Oh God. Even I knew she was gearing up for something.

  ‘Yes.’ The impatience in my voice rang out like a bell.

  Auntie Margaret nodded her head and stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Don’t talk to me about Nellie from friggin’ Bread,’ she said. ‘I only know her bloody mother.’

  ‘Go’way. Do you?’ chimed in Mum as she wandered in rubbing Atrixo into her hands. Her and Auntie Margaret were always doing things to their bodies, beauty-wise, when they got together.

  ‘Oh yeah. Her real name’s Jean Boht, and her mother’s called Shona, and she’s always coming on my book bus.’

  Then she went on and on about what Shona Boht was like. She was very put out when I dared to ask, ‘Does anyone call her Show Boat?’

  Auntie Margaret looked at me and continued to go on about Shona Boht and her dicky hip, and how she only had the one hand, and that hand had six fingers on it.

  ‘Still, saves her a fortune on nail varnish, eh, Val?’

  And Mum had nodded sagely from the other side of the breakfast bar.

  It was only when I was a teenager that I saw an interview with the actress from Bread and she talked about her upbringing in Liverpool, and about her mum. I forget now what her name was, but:

  1. She wasn’t called Shona, and

  2. She was a recital pianist. With two hands.

  I was quick to point this out to Auntie Margaret next time I went round. At first she called me a liar. Then after a while she came up with the excuse that Jean Boht was disablist and embarrassed of having a one-handed mother and so was lying. Mum bought the story. I didn’t. I took everything Auntie Margaret said from then on in with a huge dose of salt.

  ‘Yeah,’ Dad was going on, ‘she reckons she used to see a ghost when she was a volunteer at Speke Hall. Said she seen a white lady in the tapestry room.’

  ‘That’s racist,’ I say, and we both giggle.

  ‘Why d’you ask?’ Dad probes.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Have you ever seen one?’

  Should I? Should I tell him about Michael?

  ‘Sometimes I think I see Michael.’

  Dad thinks about this. I ca
n tell he’s trying to work out the best thing to say without upsetting me. I hate putting him in this position, so I backtrack quietly. ‘But it’s not him.’

  And he looks so relieved.

  So, the only person I know who claims to have seen a ghost is the one member of my family who tells tall tales. This doesn’t bode well. Am I the only person in my family to have experienced this phenomenon? Or am I, as I am beginning to suspect, just a bit crazy? Did Michael really come and see me, or did I just conjure him up in my mind’s eye to further my pretence that he hadn’t really died? At the moment I just don’t know. If he was there, though, and I’m not going mad, then maybe I need to find him again somehow.

  But how do you go about finding a ghost? I never sought him out before; he always came to me. I have no idea how I am going to do this.

  And the more worrying thing is, if I just imagined him, I must be going mad. Because he was so real. It’s not like I begged and begged for him to come and see me, and so magicked him up. I didn’t really want him there half the time.

  I have a few more days off before I return to school, so decide I will spend them wisely, looking for Michael. If he won’t come to me, I’ll go to him. And if I can’t find him, then it’s clear I am losing it, or was losing it, or have lost it. Whatever ‘it’ is. It is probably my sanity.

  I go to all the places I feel were special to him, and where he might be likely to be hanging out. Not that I’m sure ghosts hang out. Even thinking it makes me feel demented, so of course I don’t tell anyone this is what I’m doing. I just say I’m going for long walks, as exercise is bound to help me at the moment. No one argues. Well, Dad doesn’t argue, and he’s the only one who seems to be hanging around (not in a ghosty way) at the moment. Mum’s forever rushing round to Jorgen/Sharon Horgan after each hideous tea, and Meredith has decided to go and stay with a friend while Dad’s here. I’m a bit perturbed by this. If she fancies me that much, why isn’t she hanging around (not in a ghosty way) to check I’m doing all right?

  Wendy drops by unannounced one evening just as we’re clearing the dinner plates away (breaded turkey steaks with fresh asparagus) and is full of apologies for being a ‘crap friend’ and tells me she’s ‘back now’ and she’s ‘going to be there’ for me ‘every step of the way’. Then in the next breath she’s whipping her iPad out and showing me photos of all her recent trips with Jake. Jake doesn’t look too bad for his advancing years, it has to be said, but there’s no denying the pictures of them together look like she was on holiday with her DILF of a dad. Not that I want to do any rudies with him; it’d be like cosying up with an inappropriate uncle. Jake dresses well, from what I can tell by the designer trunks he’s sporting around the pool, and he’s very at home with an orange juice.

  I, of course, rave on about how hot he is as if she’s showing me pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal or something, and she doesn’t read my insincerity at all, which is a relief. But I can’t help but feel slightly antagonistic towards her. I love her – of course I love her; she has been my closest friend for aeons – but each time I look at her sun-kissed forehead I can’t help but see the word ‘Grass’ written across it in peach lipstick. Why did I tell her I’d seen Michael? Why did I have to open my big bloody mouth? If I’d not told her in that email, she would never have become concerned and spoken to Mum or whoever about it. And then I wouldn’t have been found out. And then I could still be floating along atop my cloud of denial. I liked it up there. It made more sense than the hole I find myself in now, questioning my own sanity, wondering what the hell actually happened each time Michael showed his face. Believing he is dead stings like nettles, all over, like I’m walking through a field of them, but knowing I spoke with him, was held by him . . . and not being able to work out how that happened . . . well . . . I could do without that. And I blame no one else but Wendy here.

  She can see I’m distracted. She can see I’m not really listening as she gabbles on, glass of Merlot in her hand in the lean-to, and when she finishes a sentence and I say, ‘Watch your language,’ she looks hurt.

  She lets silence fill the room, then leans in to me. ‘Have you had any more . . . sightings?’

  I freeze. I can’t tell her the truth, surely. Maybe if I was honest with her, though, she might be able to help me.

  ‘Of Michael,’ she adds, in case I’m too stupid to work it out.

  Slowly I shake my head. A smile creeps across her face, like she is completely relieved her best mate isn’t b-b-b-bonkers.

  ‘I’m sure part of the problem . . .’ she carries on. Oh God, she’s going to analyse me. Why do people think they’ve got carte blanche to analyse me? I have Roberta Flack for that, thank you very much,‘. . . is that you didn’t go to the funeral.’

  ‘I did go to the funeral!’ I spit back. She looks unnerved by my vehemence. ‘I just didn’t go inside.’

  I ask her to leave. She fears she’s done something wrong, but I pretend I am tired and emotional and need to sleep, so she says she’ll get a cab on the street and eventually wends her merry way, saying she’s going to Jake’s in Hampstead and he’ll foot the taxi bill. Bully for her.

  Of course, Wendy is right. It was a crystal-clear day. It was cold, I remember, because standing outside the church, my breath turned to vapour in front of my face when I breathed out. Wendy stood with me by the open door as we listened in. I’d refused to go in. I said it would be too traumatic and I’d sit at the back in case I wanted to flee. No one was happy about it. His mum said it was disrespectful. I remember screaming at her, ‘Well, it was disrespectful of him to bloody well kill himself, Rita!’ The memory of it now fills me with shame, but I knew why I was doing it. By not being there . . . well, by being there and not being there at the same time, listening to it like a radio play, a thought was forming in my mind: This is so much easier to deal with if I just tell myself he left me. This is someone else’s funeral. This is some other Michael. The details of his life are strangely familiar, but they’ve made a mistake. This is not him.

  And so it continued, the thought pattern in my head. I didn’t care if his workmates thought I was mad – Wendy insisted they didn’t. Wendy insisted they understood. I don’t know, maybe they did, but this was the easiest way of coping for me. He didn’t die; he just left.

  I wait till she has been gone twenty minutes – can’t risk bumping into her in the street when I’ve said I’m off to bed – then put a coat on and quietly leave the house, shutting the door softly so Dad, from his bed, won’t hear. It’s night-time; it’s dark; ghosts are always coming out in the dark.

  I walk to the park. I find the tree where it happened. He’s not there. I take a taxi to the Thames Barrier Park and tell it to wait, but then discover the park is closed. I peer through the railings to see if I can see him. He’s not there either. I spend a fortune getting the cab to take me to Whitechapel. Then I scour the streets looking for the entrance to the disused Tube station. I can’t find it anywhere. I ask a few homeless people if they know where it is. They seem quite keen to know themselves – sounds just the place for them to spend the night, underground and warm. They help me look, but really I have no idea what we’re looking for. In my head the door is a magical, mystical thing in luminous paint with roses growing round it and someone who is half human, half goat playing the pan pipes outside it, bewitchingly Amazingly there is no one fitting this description in Whitechapel tonight. And by the time I give up the ghost – oh, the irony! So that’s what that phrase means! – my homeless friends are really pissed off with me. I dangled a carrot and then stole it away from under their noses. I’m half inclined to invite them back to stay at mine the night, but I’m just not sure how I’d explain it to Dad.

  When I’m home, I do some research online and discover that where the original entrance was is now a garage. I feel I am on to something because in one of the Google searches the station is listed as one of the ‘ghost stations of London’. Of course a ghost would live there! And he’d probably ha
ve company with people who died in the Second World War in some air raid or something! It makes complete sense!

  I head to the garage the next day. My plan is to pass myself off as someone inspecting the cars for sale, pretending I’m interested, but all the time be scouring the showroom and forecourt for my magical, secret door. Salesmen will harangue me to see if they can sell me anything and I will make noncommittal noises about ‘just looking’ and ‘not sure yet’. Then I will see the door and will ram-raid it with one of the cars and leg it down the stairs. Oh yes, this is perfect.

  Except when I get there, I can’t even find a garage. Was that webpage out of date? I see many shops. I see this is exactly where I was looking last night. There is a takeaway place specializing in chicken (I dread to think what sort of chicken), a mobile phone shop, a cheap clothes shop, but no garage. And no magicky door. I want to see a magicky door!

  Were these shops here all those years ago when Michael brought me here? The buildings look too old to be new. I don’t want to ask anyone, though. I’m worried that even by asking about the disused Tube station, they’ll know I’m looking for a ghost and send for the men in white coats. I trudge down the road in a foul mood. It’s starting to rain. Great. And I didn’t even bring an umbrella. Cue frizzy hair, no doubt. What is it with this year? Is it the wettest on record? It’s almost March. I thought April was meant to be the showery month. Or did Bambi make that up?

  Some flats over the road have scaffolding round them and green netting all across. The scaffolding has made a tunnel over the pavement. I dart through the traffic and take refuge in the tunnel for a bit.