Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  Judith had gone, running after the relic hunters through the swerving spotlights. When I caught up with them, the last fires of the explosion were dying among the gantries. The capsule had landed near the old Atlas launching pads, forming a shallow crater fifty yards in diameter. The slopes were scattered with glowing particles, sparkling like fading eyes. Judith ran distraughtly up and down, searching the fragments of smouldering metal.

  Someone struck my shoulder. Quinton and his men, hot ash on their scarred hands, ran past like a troop of madmen, eyes wild in the crazed night. As we darted away through the flaring spotlights, I looked back at the beach. The gantries were enveloped in a pale-silver sheen that hovered there, and then moved away like a dying wraith over the sea.

  *

  At dawn, as the engines growled among the dunes, we collected the last remains of Robert Hamilton. The old man came into our cabin. As Judith watched from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel, he gave me a cardboard shoe-box.

  I held the box in my hands. “Is this all you could get?”

  “It’s all there was. Look at them, if you want.”

  “That’s all right. We’ll be leaving in half an hour.”

  He shook his head. “Not now. They’re all around. If you move, they’ll find us.”

  He waited for me to open the shoe-box, then grimaced and went out into the pale light.

  *

  We stayed for another four days, as the Army patrols searched the surrounding dunes. Day and night, the half-tracks lumbered among the wrecked cars and cabins. Once, as I watched with Quinton from a fallen water tower, a half-track and two jeeps came within four hundred yards of the basin, held back only by the stench from the settling beds and the cracked concrete causeways.

  During this time, Judith sat in the cabin, the shoe-box on her lap. She said nothing to me, as if she had lost all interest in me and the salvage-filled hollow at Cape Kennedy. Mechanically, she combed her hair, making and remaking her face.

  On the second day, I came in after helping Quinton bury the cabins to their windows in the sand. Judith was standing by the table.

  The shoe-box was open. In the centre of the table lay a pile of charred sticks, as if she had tried to light a small fire. Then I realized what was there. As she stirred the ash with her fingers, grey flakes fell from the joints, revealing the bony points of a clutch of ribs, a right hand and shoulder blade.

  She looked at me with puzzled eyes. “They’re black,” she said.

  Holding her in my arms, I lay with her on the bed. A loudspeaker reverberated among the dunes, fragments of the amplified commands drumming at the panes.

  When they moved away, Judith said: “We can go now.”

  “In a little while, when it’s clear. What about these?”

  “Bury them. Anywhere, it doesn’t matter.” She seemed calm at last, giving me a brief smile, as if to agree that this grim charade was at last over.

  Yet, when I had packed the bones into the shoe-box, scraping up Robert Hamilton’s ash with a dessert spoon, she kept it with her, carrying it into the kitchen while she prepared our meals.

  *

  It was on the third day that we fell ill.

  After a long, noise-filled night, I found Judith sitting in front of the mirror, combing thick clumps of hair from her scalp. Her mouth was open, as if her lips were stained with acid. As she dusted the loose hair from her lap, I was struck by the leprous whiteness of her face.

  Standing up with an effort, I walked listlessly into the kitchen and stared at the saucepan of cold coffee. A sense of indefinable exhaustion had come over me, as if the bones in my body had softened and lost their rigidity. On the lapels of my jacket, loose hair lay like spinning waste.

  “Philip…” Judith swayed towards me. “Do you feel – What is it?”

  “The water.” I poured the coffee into the sink and massaged my throat. “It must be fouled.”

  “Can we leave?” She put a hand up to her forehead. Her brittle nails brought down a handful of frayed ash hair. “Philip, for God’s sake – I’m losing all my hair!”

  Neither of us was able to eat. After forcing myself through a few slices of cold meat, I went out and vomited behind the cabin.

  Quinton and his men were crouched by the wall of the settling tank. As I walked towards them, steadying myself against the hull of the weather satellite, Quinton came down. When I told him that the water supplies were contaminated, he stared at me with his hard bird’s eyes.

  Half an hour later, they were gone.

  *

  The next day, our last there, we were worse. Judith lay on the bed, shivering in her jacket, the shoe-box held in one hand. I spent hours searching for fresh water in the cabins. Exhausted, I could barely cross the sandy basin. The Army patrols were closer. By now, I could hear the hard gear-changes of the half-tracks. The sounds from the loudspeakers drummed like fists on my head.

  Then, as I looked down at Judith from the cabin doorway, a few words stuck for a moment in my mind.

  “…contaminated area… evacuate… radioactive…”

  I walked forward and pulled the box from Judith’s hands.

  “Philip…” She looked up at me weakly. “Give it back to me.”

  Her face was a puffy mask. On her wrists, white flecks were forming. Her left hand reached towards me like the claw of a cadaver.

  I shook the box with blunted anger. The bones rattled inside. “For God’s sake, it’s this! Don’t you see – why we’re ill?”

  “Philip – where are the others? The old man. Get them to help you.”

  “They’ve gone. They went yesterday, I told you.” I let the box fall on to the table. The lid broke off, spilling the ribs tied together like a bundle of firewood. “Quinton knew what was happening – why the Army is here. They’re trying to warn us.”

  “What do you mean?” Judith sat up, the focus of her eyes sustained only by a continuous effort. “Don’t let them take Robert. Bury him here somewhere. We’ll come back later.”

  “Judith!” I bent over the bed and shouted hoarsely at her. “Don’t you realize – there was a bomb on board! Robert Hamilton was carrying an atomic weapon!” I pulled back the curtains from the window. “My God, what a joke. For twenty years, I put up with him because I couldn’t ever be really sure…”

  “Philip…”

  “Don’t worry, I used him – thinking about him was the only thing that kept us going. And all the time, he was waiting up there to pay us back!”

  There was a rumble of exhaust outside. A half-track with red crosses on its doors and hood had reached the edge of the basin. Two men in vinyl suits jumped down, counters raised in front of them.

  “Judith, before we go, tell me… I never asked you –…”

  Judith was sitting up, touching the hair on her pillow. One half of her scalp was almost bald. She stared at her weak hands with their silvering skin. On her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of betrayal.

  As she looked at me, and at the bones scattered across the table, I knew my answer.

  RANDAL

  Robert…

  Robert Nye (b.1939) left school at the age of sixteen. He continued to educate himself in English literature while working various jobs including reporter, milkman and market gardener. Nye was poetry critic at The Times from 1971 to 1976, after which he became head book reviewer at The Scotsman. A poet and novelist, his awards include the Guardian Fiction Prize (1976) and the Cholmondeley Award (2007). Robert Nye lives near Cork in Ireland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  She didn’t blame Randal for leaving his. Day in, day out, boiled bacon. Sundays should be different. Sundays should be butcher’s meat. But the world wasn’t like that any more.

  “I’m cold,” she said.

  The clocks in the cottage were striking two. There was a grandfather clock in the front parlour and a marble clock on the mantelpiece in the kitchen where they sat eating. The grandfather clock
had a strong steady tick, while the marble clock sounded fussy and overwound. Striking the hour, the grandfather clock sounded a stroke before the marble clock, so that the effect was of a slightly hysterical echo. It was as if the marble clock was repeating what the grandfather clock had just said, but distorting it in the process.

  “Cold, cold,” said Madge.

  Her sister Iseabal was staring at her. Her sister Iseabal had picked up the china teapot and was silently holding it out. She sat straightbacked in her straightbacked chair.

  Madge coughed, then had to push her spectacles back to rest on the thin bridge of her nose. She lifted up her cup and saucer. Iseabal poured her a cup of tea. Madge did not take milk or sugar. She sipped the hot tea, but it scarcely warmed her.

  “Those clocks are fast again,” said Iseabal.

  Madge bit her lip. “I put them right with my own hand,” she said.

  “They’re old,” said Iseabal. “Listen to this one. It’s got a hiccup in it.” She stirred three spoons of sugar into her tea. “As for the grandfather,” she said, “I think it’s in its second childhood.”

  The cottage kitchen was very small. There were three chairs at the kitchen table. Sitting there, you could reach out in any direction and almost touch a wall. All the walls were covered with the same rose-patterned wallpaper.

  Madge reached out now and touched the marble clock affectionately. “Remember Gregor MacGregor?” she said.

  Iseabal sighed. “What should I want to remember him for?”

  “Gregor MacGregor was wicked,” Madge said, stroking the face of the marble clock. “He carried hay on a Sunday. Drunk as a faucet he was, most of the time. And when he wasn’t drunk he was hogging.” Her plump round cheeks dimpled above a sentimental smile. “He’d promise you anything,” she went on, “but you’d never get it. He’d promise you the sea, he would; he’d promise you the sea, and the mountain. Anything that wasn’t his to give. His promise was like the froth on the water. And cunning. ‘The fox knows well, where the geese dwell!’ He wouldn’t just steal your eggs. Or your hen. Not Gregor MacGregor. Ambitious, he was. Steal your eggs and your hen. That was Gregor.”

  Her sister Iseabal was making her fingers crack by clasping her bony hands together. Madge acknowledged by the merest pause the unease which this noise betokened. Then she went on:

  “Steal eggs and hen and tip his cap and tell you he was doing you a favour. What good it ever did him I don’t know. If you ask me he was more than half-daft. Never satisfied, Gregor MacGregor. In winter it was August, August, August he’d be talking of. In summer he was all for Christmas. You never know where you are with a man like that.”

  Iseabal sniffed, and brushed back a wisp of her iron-grey hair. “A pity he never used his teeth to stop his tongue,” she said.

  There were three plates on the kitchen table. Two of the plates on the kitchen table were empty. Madge shivered and coughed and pushed her empty plate aside with a trembling thumb. Then she stood up and went to the little window over the sink.

  “Remember when Parlan caught him out over the white goat?” she said. “He was that angry, Parlan, he hit him with a big stick, and Gregor fell in the cesspit.” She chuckled to herself at the memory. “So Gregor takes a chicken in a sack,” she murmured, watching her breath cloud the cold window pane, “and he climbs up on Parlan’s roof and drops that chicken down the chimney just when Parlan’s daughter had the plum jam stewing on the fire. A chicken squawking round the kitchen all covered in hot plum jam! It took them weeks to scrub it off the ceiling. And, as if that wasn’t sufficient, Gregor went and wrote a poem about Parlan and every verse ending with ‘I trust he finds thorns in his porridge’, and the funny thing was, when Parlan read the poem –…”

  “That’s enough,” said Iseabal sharply. “I don’t want to hear another word about Gregor MacGregor. He’s dead.”

  The word hung in the thin air of the kitchen like an icicle.

  “Quick to the feast,” said Madge, “quick to the grave.”

  Iseabal was making her fingers crack again. “He was dead before he died,” she said. “Dead, who is not in God. Dead then. Dead now.”

  Madge pressed her lips lightly to the cold glass. “He was so small,” she said.

  Iseabal stood up from the table and pushed back her chair. “We’ll have that nice bath after we’ve washed up,” Iseabal said. “A proper Sunday bath.”

  “I’m cold,” said Madge. She coughed. “Remember the bad winter?” she said. “When all the swedes and mangolds got frozen and Randal ran out of hay after the summer being so wet, and the sheep were dying and their fleeces all stiff and stuck to the ground, and some of them with their legs broken, coming into the house for a bit of potato peelings, anything, and then the snow so deep it was high over the hedge there.”

  Iseabal leaned on her outspread fingers. The nails showed purple with the weight, but the tips were white. “That bath,” she said. “Do you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Madge said. She did not turn away from the window. Her forehead was resting against the pane. “I was here in the kitchen washing up,” she said, “and the egg wouldn’t come off the eggcups no matter how hot the water, and me scratching away with the scourer, it just wouldn’t come off, and I heard this bleating, and I had to scrape the ice off the catch before I could get the window open, and the glass itself all over coated with frost so you couldn’t see through it. And when I got the window open, there was this lamb by the drain, and the drain frozen solid, and the lamb bleating and bleating, just born, not long born, the night before perhaps it was, and it was all red and wet and smudgy one side of its head.” She turned away from the window and faced her sister Iseabal. “A crow had picked its eye out,” she said.

  The sisters looked at each other calmly for a moment. Then:

  “That’s enough,” said Iseabal. “We’ll wash up first.”

  Madge nodded and went back to the table and put her cup and saucer on her plate. She reached across and gathered up the others. She said, “Can’t say I blame Randal for leaving that boiled bacon. Too salty.”

  “A matter of taste,” said Iseabal.

  Carrying the cups and plates towards the sink, Madge stopped to look out of the window again. “It’s snowing,” she said, in a cheerful voice.

  Her sister was just behind her. “Nice,” her sister was saying. “Like those streaks in Randal’s hair.”

  Madge watched the snow stream and make brief flowers on the pane. She coughed. “It was red as fire once,” she said. She put the plates and cups and knives and forks into the low sink. Her sister had taken the black pan of water from the grate and now it was being held out towards her with the long handle wrapped in Iseabal’s apron. Madge poured the water into the sink and rolled the sleeves of her dress and started washing up.

  “Did you say red?” said Iseabal.

  “No,” Madge said.

  “Did you say Randal’s hair was red?”

  “No,” Madge said.

  “You did,” said her sister.

  “I didn’t,” Madge said. “Are you going to dry?”

  “Red, you said.”

  “Black,” Madge said, looking at her hands working in the water. “Black.”

  “Yes, but you said red,” said Iseabal. “You said it was red.”

  Madge scrubbed at the bacon marks with a piece of wire wool. “Look,” she said, “what are we arguing for? I know the colour of my brother’s hair.”

  “I should think so,” said Iseabal. “Black.”

  “As the crow,” Madge said.

  The cat purred on the hearth.

  Iseabal polished the plates fiercely with a thin cloth. “A streak of white about the temples makes a man distinguished,” Iseabal said. “But it wouldn’t if his hair was red.”

  “No,” said Madge.

  “Never trust a man with red hair,” her sister said. “Black hair is straightforward hair. Randal’s hair is good black.”

  “I know it,” sa
id Madge wearily. “Didn’t I say so? Don’t I keep on saying so?”

  Iseabal smiled at her own reflection in a spoon. Then she turned aside to hang up their cups on the hooks in the dresser.

  “What can Randal be thinking of you?” Iseabal said softly.

  Madge did not look at her. Instead, she turned right round and said in a bold voice, “What do you think of me, Randal?”

  Iseabal reached out her finger and made a cup swing. The marble clock ticked fussily. Iseabal nodded her head.

  “What did he say?” Madge asked at last.

  Iseabal smiled. “You heard him,” she said.

  “I didn’t quite catch it.”

  “What’s the matter with you,” said Iseabal, “that you don’t hear your own flesh and blood when he speaks to you?”

  Madge pushed her glasses up her nose. She said nothing. She returned her attention to the sink.

  “Ashamed of her?” said Iseabal. “Yes, I am too.”

  Madge poked at the crockery in the water. “He didn’t say that,” she said. Her voice was a whisper.

  “That’s what he said,” said Iseabal.

  “I don’t believe it,” Madge muttered.

  Iseabal shrugged, putting away the knives. “You have little faith,” she said.

  “No,” said Madge savagely. “He didn’t say that. He didn’t.” Iseabal wiped her fingers on the towel that hung from a nail beside the sink. “He speaks his mind straight,” she said, and sniffed.

  Madge pulled out the plug. The water ran away with a choking sound.

  “I’ll get the bath in from the outhouse,” Madge said, in a voice that sought to please two people.

  “Fine,” her sister said. “You go ahead, dear.”

  Madge slipped on her coat and went out of the door. The snow was flying up the hill. The sky looked like a bad egg, full of it. She pulled up her collar and hurried across the yard. The tin bath made a jagged black mark, revealing the gravel under the snow, as she dragged it back to the cottage from the outhouse.