by Alan Warner
‘I saw a picture of it in a book. It’s shaped like a plough.’
‘It’s not at all,’ said Daial. ‘It’s not shaped like a plough at all. You never saw a plough like that in your life.’
They were gradually leaving the village now, had in fact passed the last house, and Iain in spite of his earlier protestations was getting a little frightened, for he had heard stories of ghosts at the Corner before. There was one about a sailor home from the Merchant Navy who was supposed to have seen a ghost and after he had rejoined his ship he had fallen from a mast to the deck and had died instantly. People in the village mostly believed in ghosts. They believed that some people had the second sight and could see in advance the body of someone who was about to die though at that particular time he might be walking among them, looking perfectly healthy.
Daial and Iain walked on through the ghostly whiteness of the frost and it seemed to them that the night had turned much colder and also more threatening. There was no noise even of flowing water, for all the streams were locked in frost.
‘It’s here they see the ghosts,’ said Daial in a whisper, his voice trembling a little, perhaps partly with the cold. ‘If we had a horse we might see one.’
‘Yes,’ said Iain still trying to joke, though at the same time he also found himself whispering. ‘You could ride the horse and look between its ears.’
The whole earth was a frosty globe, creaking and spectral, and the shine from it was eerie and faint.
‘Can you hear anything?’ said Daial who was keeping close to Iain.
‘No,’ said Iain. ‘I can’t hear anything. There’s nothing. We should go back.’
‘No,’ Daial replied, his teeth chattering. ‘W–w–e w–w–on’t go back. We have to stay for a while.’
‘What would you do if you saw a ghost?’ said Iain.
‘I would run,’ said Daial, ‘I would run like hell.’
‘I don’t know what I would do,’ said Iain, and his words seemed to echo through the silent night. ‘I might drop dead. Or I might . . . ’ He suddenly had a terrible thought. Perhaps they were ghosts themselves and the ghost who looked like a ghost to them might be a human being after all. What if a ghost came towards them and then walked through them smiling, and then they suddenly realised that they themselves were ghosts.
‘Hey, Daial,’ he said, ‘what if we are . . . ’ And then he stopped, for it seemed to him that Daial had turned all white in the frost, that his head and the rest of his body were white, and his legs and shoes were also a shining white. Daial was coming towards him with his mouth open, and where there had been a head there was only a bony skull, its interstices filled with snow. Daial was walking towards him, his hands outstretched, and they were bony without any skin on them. Daial was his enemy, he was a ghost who wished to destroy him, and that was why he had led him out to the Corner to the territory of the ghosts. Daial was not Daial at all, the real Daial was back in the house, and this was a ghost that had taken over Daial’s body in order to entice Iain to the place where he was now. Daial was a devil, a corpse.
And suddenly Iain began to run and Daial was running after him. Iain ran crazily with frantic speed but Daial was close on his heels. He was running after him and his white body was blazing with the frost and it seemed to Iain that he was stretching his bony arms towards him. They raced along the cold white road which was so hard that their shoes left no prints on it, and Iain’s heart was beating like a hammer, and then they were in the village among the ordinary lights and now they were at Daial’s door.
‘What happened?’ said Daial panting, leaning against the door, his breath coming in huge gasps.
And Iain knew at that moment that this really was Daial, whatever had happened to the other one, and that this one would think of him as a coward for the rest of his life and tell his pals how Iain had run away. And he was even more frightened than he had been before, till he knew what he had to do.
‘I saw it,’ he said.
‘What?’ said Daial, his eyes growing round with excitement.
‘I saw it,’ said Iain again. ‘Didn’t you see it?’
‘What?’ said Daial. ‘What did you see?’
‘I saw it,’ said Iain, ‘but maybe you don’t believe me.’
‘What did you see?’ said Daial. ‘I believe you.’
‘It was a coffin,’ said Iain. ‘I saw a funeral.’
‘A funeral?’
‘I saw a funeral,’ said Iain, ‘and there were people in black hats and black coats. You know?’
Daial nodded eagerly.
‘And I saw them carrying a coffin,’ said Iain, ‘and it was all yellow, and it was coming straight for you. You didn’t see it. I know you didn’t see it. And I saw the coffin open and I saw the face in the coffin.’
‘The face?’ said Daial and his eyes were fixed on Iain’s face, and Iain could hardly hear what he was saying.
‘And do you know whose face it was?’
‘No,’ said Daial breathlessly. ‘Whose face was it? Tell me, tell me.’
‘It was your face,’ said Iain in a high voice. ‘It was your face.’
Daial paled.
‘But it’s all right,’ said Iain. ‘I saved you. If the coffin doesn’t touch you you’re all right. I read that in a book. That’s why I ran. I knew that you would run after me. And you did. And I saved you. For the coffin would have touched you if I hadn’t run.’
‘Are you sure,’ said Daial, in a frightened trembling voice. ‘Are you sure that I’m saved?’
‘Yes,’ said Iain. ‘I saw the edge of the coffin and it was almost touching the patch on your trousers and then I ran.’
‘Gosh,’ said Daial, ‘that’s something. You must have the second sight. It almost touched me. Gosh. Wait till I tell the boys tomorrow. You wait.’ And then as if it had just occurred to him he said, ‘You believe in ghosts now, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I believe,’ said Iain.
‘There you are then,’ said Daial. ‘Gosh. Are you sure if they don’t touch you you’re all right?’
‘Cross my heart,’ said Iain.
A Day in the Life of . . .
She paid off the taxi she had taken from the railway station and went into the hotel. She felt sweaty and the palm of her right hand slid along the handle of the red case. She put the case down and waited for the girl at the reception desk to stop phoning. She had been in the hotel three or four times before in the past two years but she didn’t expect that anyone would recognise her, and this girl seemed new as if she were a schoolgirl working there during holiday time. As she waited she looked around her. There were some chairs with olive green covers at one side of the lobby and on one an old man lying asleep, his mouth open, his feet stretched out, and what looked like a guidebook fallen open on the floor beside him. Her eyes traversed him, following the wall upward to the high ceiling with its white edgings like wedding cake. She turned back to the girl who was looking at her enquiringly. She was a very pretty girl with dark pigtails and bare tanned arms.
‘A single room,’ she said. ‘Have you a single room?’
‘I think we can manage that,’ said the girl brightly, turning to a plan of the hotel hung up on a sheet on the wall. ‘Room 5,’ she said, ‘or would you like one with a bath? There’s 31.’
‘I’ll take 5.’
‘Righto. If you would please sign?’
She signed ‘Miriam Hetherington’, hesitating as she always did whether to put ‘Scottish’ or ‘British’ and finally deciding as she always did to put ‘British’. She took the key attached to the large blue block and went to the room which was on the ground floor. She opened the door and entered.
It was like all the other hotel rooms in which she had stayed. There was a dressing table, a wardrobe, a wash basin with towels, a phone, a card with a list of hotel charges, a large notice about what to do in the event of fire, a Gideon Bible, a bed with electric blanket, a large glass ashtray and a small gold-coloured box of match
es stamped with the name of the hotel. She lay down on the bed and fell asleep.
When she woke she found by a glance at her small silver wrist watch that she had slept two hours and that it was five o’clock in the afternoon. She got off the bed, looking down vaguely at her red shoes which matched the case. Then she opened the latter and took out her clothes – two dresses, a hat, four pairs of stockings, a pair of shoes, three sets of undergarments, two pairs of pyjamas, shoe brushes and shoe polish and various other odds and ends including a sewing kit and a number of paperbacks. She packed them neatly into her wardrobe and dressing chest. When she had done this she took off her blouse and began to wash her face and neck, rubbing the cold water briskly into her eyes.
The face that looked back at her from the mirror was the face of a woman of about thirty-five whose skin at the corner of the eyes was beginning to wrinkle. The eyes themselves had a questioning look as if, confronted with the world, they had found it rather puzzling, not to say unintelligible. The nose was rather long, the upper lip narrow and severe, the lower lip full and red. Her teeth were still her own and fairly white. The forehead was narrow and high and lightly veined and the hair cut into a boyish crop. In short she had the appearance of someone who might have been passionate but whose passion had been mastered by a relentless severity. Her colourful red blouse and red shoes seemed like a late desperate blossoming of her buried personality. But she wasn’t ugly and, given rouge and lipstick and relaxation of mind, she would in certain circumstances appear pretty.
When she had washed herself and used rouge and lipstick she thought for a moment and then going out of the room and leaving the key at the desk she went out into the dazzling sunlight.
The streets were crowded with people – men in shirt sleeves, women bare-armed in blouses – all strolling along in an easy, relaxed manner. The road was dense with traffic and it took her some time to cross, but she waited till the sign ‘Cross’ appeared and then half ran across the street. On the opposite side was a restaurant which she entered. She sat down at a table in the shade and when the waitress came she ordered fruit juice and a gammon steak. At a table beside her there was a boy and a girl holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes. At another table there was a large man with a moustache eating fish and squeezing juice from a lemon on to his plate. He had a newspaper propped against the tea-pot.
She drank her juice and waited for her gammon steak. She didn’t feel at all hungry but decided that she ought to eat something since that was what people did at that time of day. Since her parents had died and she had started living on her own she sometimes skipped meals but on holiday one ought to eat, she told herself. She remembered that her mother used always to be very keen on her eating a lot, and would pile her plate high with meat and vegetables which weren’t really very well cooked. Her father of course ate steadily and gravely, not seeming to mind what was set in front of him, but as if he were filling himself with necessary fuel. He reminded her of a large squat car which was being pumped full of petrol. Of course he had been a large man and he needed the food. Her mother on the other hand was thin and stringy.
She ate the gammon, carefully putting aside the chips. The man with the newspaper was chewing rapidly and reading at the same time. The young couple were preparing to leave. They had eaten, she noted, some of the cheapest stuff, sausage and egg, but had wiped their plates clean. It took her a long time to eat the gammon but she succeeded and got up. She didn’t want any sweet as it might fatten her too much. The waitress hoped that the gammon had suited her and she said yes. The waitress said that if she cared to come back tomorrow they would have something special on the menu. She didn’t reply. Again she went out into the sunshine.
For a while she walked along the streets looking in the shop windows. It was a good area of the town with a large number of jewellers’ shops, good food shops, and furniture shops. She looked at the rings in the windows and noted that they were very expensive. There were also some quite splendid Russian watches. She remembered giving away her father’s watch to her uncle but she had kept her mother’s watch and was still wearing it. Her father’s watch had been a large golden one, of the kind that men used to carry in their waistcoat pockets. She still had his Masonic ring in a box in the house.
She went into a supermarket and walked around for a bit. There was nothing there that she wanted to buy except possibly two large red footballs which she might take to the neighbours’ boys who were mad keen on football. It was always a good idea to take something home to them: one never knew when one might need help from a neighbour, for example if one was ill with ’flu and couldn’t get out, especially in the winter time. There were various perfumes which she was tempted to buy but didn’t. Later on she went into a large bookshop and studied the books. She read a lot but not as much as she used to. Her mother had always told her that she read too much. ‘Too much reading is a weariness to the flesh,’ she would say, quoting from the Bible, or what she thought was the Bible. Her mother had hardly read a book in her life except the Bible and the People’s Friend, and couldn’t understand why people should want to read books at all: it seemed such a waste of time when they could be doing something useful. She herself thought she might buy a book called Emerging Africa to help her with her geography but decided against it. Holiday time wasn’t the right time to read serious books. One read detective stories or thrillers. Half ashamedly she looked at a book on horoscopes and found that she ought to keep a tight grip on financial matters that week and not mix very much with strangers. She put the book down and went out again into the sun.
As she walked down the street she came to a cinema which was showing a film called The Cowboys starring John Wayne. She decided to go in and bought a ticket for the balcony. When she sat down it disturbed her to find that she was the only person in the whole cinema. Not only was there no one in the balcony seats, there was no one – not even children – in the stalls. She felt rather frightened and wished that she had not come in till later but after all she had paid her money and couldn’t go out again. The red curtains were still drawn and for a long time there was nothing but music to which she listened impatiently, now and again looking behind her as if expecting that someone would come in and attack her. Eventually the music stopped and there were some advertisements, one of which showed a young girl riding a horse through a mountain stream and which after all turned out to be an advertisement for cigarettes. ‘Cool as a mountain stream,’ breathed the sexy voice of the sponsor. She herself didn’t smoke. Her mother hadn’t believed in girls smoking: her father however smoked a pipe. When he was finished working for the day in the distillery he would read the paper for a while and smoke his pipe and then fall asleep. She herself was the only child and had perhaps loved her father more than her mother who had often told him that he ought to have a better job with his abilities though as a matter of fact his abilities weren’t all that extraordinary except that he was good with his hands. He could make or repair anything. He had made a chair for her when she was a child and later he would make toys for her, wooden animals of all kinds. Her favourite was a squirrel which would climb the chair on its clockwork machinery.
The credits came on the screen for the big picture and she realised that she had read a review of the film in the Observer which she bought every Sunday. She also bought the Sunday Times. Her father and mother used to get the Sunday Post and they would spend the whole week reading it, not missing a single story. In her own job as a teacher she would use the Sunday Supplements for projects. One of her projects was on the Motor Car, though she couldn’t drive.
The film turned out to be rather a good one, at least at the beginning. The title The Cowboys had to be taken literally for it was about boys, not about men. John Wayne, a rancher whose cowhands abandoned him in order to join a gold rush, was a stern man who had lost two sons partly because he had been too strict with them. The film showed him becoming attached to the boys and learning how to handle them in a human manner w
ith the help of a coloured cook. On the drive too the boys learned to become men. They were attacked by some ex-jailbirds who killed the unarmed Wayne after he had refused to kow-tow to them and had then driven off his cattle. The last part of the film she wasn’t sure of. It showed the boys setting off grim-faced after the killers and one by one detaching them and murdering them and finally manoeuvring the survivors into a trap where they shot them all. The leader of the killers had got his legs entangled in his horse’s stirrups and pleaded to be freed but one of the boys fired a shot into the air which so frightened the horse that it dragged its rider along through a river till he was drowned. She wasn’t sure about this last part. Nothing surely could condone violence and if there had been someone with her she would have argued about it. But there was no one there.
Many years before while her parents were still alive she had fallen in love with a man who owned a shop at the time. He was very handsome and very glib but what she took for cleverness her parents took for falsity. He used to take her out a lot especially to the cinema but most of the time she had to pay for their outings. She didn’t mind this as she thought that he was making his way in the business. The first time he had tried to seduce her she had been very cold, so cold that she had managed to put him off. It had been in a wood where he had taken her in his new car: she could remember the brown autumnal leaves, and the river flowing through the glen with a desolate sound. He had been very persuasive using all the common arguments such as that it was good for one to have sex. He had been very handsome with his fair hair and fine blue eyes but she had not succumbed. She thought that innocence was important and felt that if she had given in she would have carried for a long time a load of guilt. In fact the sequence which showed the girl riding through the mountain stream had reminded her of the episode. He had been very passionate and also persuasive. He used to take her to parties and she had been so much in love or so infatuated that she had defied her parents and come into the house in the early hours of the morning, still remembering the dancing round the record player in the grey streamers of cigarette smoke. Once she had come in at four o’clock in the morning, only to find her mother, toothless, still awake and waiting for her. ‘After all we have done for you,’ hissed her mother through a mouth without dentures, ‘and you are just a common prostitute.’ As a matter of fact it hadn’t been like that at all. The party had been exciting and they had all danced to the music of the latest pop songs. She could still remember them with a certain bitterness. Not that she was the kind of person who was very interested in pop songs; she was more interested in classical music and conversation. But coming back in the whiteness of the morning under the million stars had been an experience, for during most of her life she had gone to bed at eleven at the latest, drawing the curtains carefully before removing her clothes.