by David Almond
“I brought a priest,” I say unnecessarily.
“Did you now?” says Mrs Quinn.
She regards the man at my side, his long black gown, black sandals, crucifix, bare white calves.
“My name ish Father Kelly,” he says.
“Rosemary Quinn,” she says.
“Davie told me of your dishturbance.”
“Did he now? Can I get you a cup of tea? Or there may be a bottle or two of beer around.” She stands up. She tugs the straps of her sundress back up onto her shoulders. “So have you come to calm it?”
He shrugs.
“It was not part of my training, Mrs Quinn, but there ish maybe something that I…”
“Joe!” calls Mrs Quinn. “Joe! Davie’s here with the priest to see the poltergeist!”
A cup flies down from an open upstairs window and bounces in the grass.
“OK!” yells Joe. “I’m coming down.”
Inside the kitchen, fragments of broken crockery lie against the skirting boards. There’s a new little jagged hole in one of the windows. Strips of wallpaper are curling from the walls. Joe comes downstairs with an orange Elastoplast on his brow.
“And look at this,” he says.
He lifts up a chair and shows that one of its legs has been ripped off.
“Just came down one morning and there it was like this,” he says.
His mother stares at the priest.
“What is doing this?” she says. “What are these strange forces?”
She holds out a bottle of beer and a glass to him. He pours carefully. He drinks. She stands close, leans up to him.
“Is it God?” she whispers. She widens her eyes. “Or is it that Devil, Father?”
A knife clatters against the wall. The priest flinches. He looks at Joe, at me. He drinks. There’s a sound of something shattering upstairs.
We all stand silent, we listen and watch. A dog howls. The sun is sinking over the estate. I am poised to be terrified, to be illuminated, for the forces to work again. For a while nothing more happens. There’s just stillness, silence and the immensity within and outside us. We all sigh.
“You must be hungry, Father,” says Mrs Quinn. “I’ll put some chips on, shall I?”
“Aye,” he says, “I have had a day without much nourishment in it.”
“And you lads,” she says. “Why don’t you go outside, enjoy the last rays of the sun. And give that poor mutt a drink.”
We do. We perch on the edge of the sun lounger.
“Is it you?” I say.
“Course it’s not. In fact, according to me dad, it’s him.”
“What?”
“We went to see him in jail on Sunday. What a bliddy nightmare place. He said he’d been focusing his thoughts on the house, making things move by the power of his will.”
“What? Why?”
Joe holds out a packet of cigarettes to me. I don’t take one. He lights one for himself and blows the smoke across my face.
“I think he’s mebbe trying to harm us,” he says. “He’s coming up with all these tales of what me mother’s doing while he’s inside. I think he’s goin’ bliddy mad, Davie. You should see how wild his eyes are now. You should see how scared the officers are of him. He’s turnin’ to a bliddy monster! How’s Josephine?”
“Eh?”
“You shagged her yet?”
A clod of earth flies up from the ground and over our heads.
“That was you!” I cry.
“No, it wasn’t. Have you, eh?”
I’m about to go for him but his mother’s at the door. The chips are done. We go inside and sit at the little formica table. Father Kelly’s into the second bottle of beer. The air is golden through the broken window. The chips, the ketchup and the bread are all delicious. My mug of tea trembles as I lift it. It tilts and tea splashes down onto the table top. Mrs Quinn puts her hand over mine.
“You OK, Davie?” she says.
“Aye.”
Father Kelly smiles.
“The boy – like all boys – ish prey to great forces, great hungers, great emotionsh.”
He chews his chips. He swigs his beer. He doesn’t flinch as a plate spins from the table to the floor. He leans forward and speaks in hushed tones, as if to communicate with nobody but himself.
“In Ireland,” he says, “such things were known, before the dead hand of the Church took us in its dreadful grip.”
He laughs. He stands up and flings his plate with its last few chips against the kitchen wall.
“Forgive me, Mrs Quinn,” he says. “I will pay for the damage, of course.”
“Oh, no need, Father.”
He laughs again, loudly. He picks up his glass and flings that against the wall too.
“Another beer, perhaps?” says Mrs Quinn. “You boys…”
Joe takes my arm and leads me out. He shuts the door. We start fighting straight away. We punch each other, grab each other’s throats, shove each other’s heads onto the ground. We struggle and kick and roll and grunt. At last I get him properly down and I straddle him. Blood from my nose drips down onto him.
“I’ll effing kill you, Quinn,” I say.
“Why’s that, then?” he snarls.
“Because you don’t know bliddy why, that’s why!”
“What a load of bliddy crap! Go on, then. Do it! Ha!” His face twists into a sneer. “You haven’t got the bliddy guts.”
I spit on him. He spits upwards at me. Saliva and snot and blood dangle and drop in the air between us. We struggle on, but in the end it all disgusts me and I roll away, groaning and cursing at the sky.
Joe gets up onto the sun lounger. He lights a cigarette.
A full moon’s already shining in the sky. There are moths already flying. Bats already flicker in the white late light. We say nowt for ages.
“It drives you mad,” I say at last.
“What does?” answers Joe.
“The bliddy moon.”
“Bliddy thing!” He shakes his fist at it. “Bliddy stupid round thing shining in the sky!”
I watch it shining down on him.
“You ever want to kill everything?” he says.
“Aye.”
“Really?”
“Aye. Every bliddy thing that lives and that has ever lived.”
“And God?”
“Aye, him. Pummel him to bliddy dust.”
“Aye! Ha! Aye!”
I look at him through the moonlight. His eyes are glittering like mine must be. His face is shining. His heart is bursting like mine, and his mind is yearning and his soul is soaring. We know we’re just the same. And in the weird mix of silver light and dark between us, things begin to rise. Just little things – broken stems of weeds, tiny twigs, fallen flowers, scraps of paper, fragments of dust and bits of stone. They rise and hang there, shining where the moonlight touches them, as if it is the light that holds them suspended. They shift and slowly spin as the air moves past them. It only lasts a few short seconds then they fall again and there’s only emptiness where they once were, and the possibility that things like them might rise again.
Joe breathes smoke into the moonlight.
“Was that you?” he says.
But there’s no way to answer, we both know that.
The darkness darkens and the moonlight brightens. I know it’s time to move but I don’t, not until the priest comes out again.
“Still here, Davie?” he asks.
“Aye, Father.”
“So let’s go off together, eh?”
“Aye, Father.”
He laughs.
“You have a splendid poltergeist, Joe Quinn,” he says.
Joe laughs too. Upstairs, beyond the open window, something breaks.
“Thanks, Father,” says Joe.
Inside, Mrs Quinn is singing.
I walk with the priest out of Leam Lane. We take the road between the dark fields and the town. We hear laughter, sudden cries, the hooting of an owl, the beati
ng of the engines at the heart of everything.
“There is no God,” says Father Kelly.
“I know that, Father.”
“There is no Heaven to go to. And no Hell.”
“I know that, Father.”
“There’s only us, and this.”
“I know that, Father.”
“But what an usness, and a thisness.” He laughs at himself. “I couldn’t have said such words an hour or two ago.”
We separate at The Drive and go our different ways. I walk beneath dense trees. Nervous birds flutter in the nests above my head. I feel the thinness of me, the littleness of me, and the vastness and the weirdness of me. I become the darkness all around, I become the night. Tomorrow I will be a different Davie, and I will be the day. Suddenly I know the poltergeist is me. It is in me. It is me in fury at Joe Quinn, me in love with Josephine, me in hatred of the non-existent God; it is me in dread and bliddy grief, it is me in wonder at this place, this earth, this moon, this night. I know the poltergeist is all of us, raging and wanting to scream and to fight and to start flinging stuff; to smash and to break. It is all of us wanting to be still, to be quiet, to be in love, to be at peace.
I walk onward, begin to disappear, to truly be the dark.
And as I move through the black shadows cast by the dense overhanging shrubs of Sycamore Grove, I know that this should be the moment when I feel the gentle touch on my shoulder, and hear the longed-for whisper in my ear.
Of course they do not come.
Her touch will only come in dreams.
The whisper will be heard in stories that I’ll come to tell.
She will be given endless life in memories and in words.
I walk on below the streetlights towards the square, towards my home.
Tomorrow I’ll play football with Geordie and the lads on the high fields.
Soon I will kiss Josephine Minto beneath the cherry tree in Holly Hill Park.
Father Kelly will return to Ireland, where he will be unfrocked.
Mr Quinn will kill a cellmate and will stay in jail.
Joe Quinn’s poltergeist will disappear.
And there will be other occurrences, an immensity of them, and the world and all that’s in it will continue to hum and sing, to shake and shine, to hold us in its darkness and its light.
“By the time I was nineteen, I was at university. I’d grown my hair, I wore jeans and cheesecloth shirts, I listened to Pink Floyd and Leonard Cohen, and read Ginsberg and Dostoyevsky. I lived on a student grant – a very generous one, because my mother was a widow raising the family on her own. At the end of my first year I got a summer job in Swan Hunter’s shipyard on the Tyne, and used the money from that to hitchhike away for a month in Greece with my girlfriend, Rhona. We met hundreds of others like ourselves: young, free, educated Western Europeans who roamed across the continent, who believed in love and peace. We slept on beaches, drank retsina, ate souvlaki, lay in the sun, swam in the warm Mediterranean sea.
When my dad had been nineteen, in 1942, the Second World War had already been going for three years. Both his education and his working life stopped. He was enlisted into the signals corp, taken away from the streets of Tyneside for military training in Glasgow. Then he was sent to the jungles of Burma to fight the Japanese. He wouldn’t get home again until 1946. He married in 1948, and then we children began to come into the world.
He didn’t talk much about his experiences of war and I don’t remember asking him much about it. Maybe he encouraged me to think that as the days of war were gone, and it had all happened in a different age, I should keep on looking forward, moving forward. He believed in education, in progress. Like most men of his generation my father wanted his children to create a new and better world.
When I was growing up, the evidence of war was all around. There were ration books in Grandma’s cupboard, and stifling gas masks that we used to wear to pretend we were monsters. I had a pair of trousers made from the blackout curtains that had once hung at my grandmother’s window as the German bombers droned overhead. There was an abandoned gun emplacement beyond the playing fields, where mighty cannon had pointed towards the North Sea. On beautiful Northumbrian beaches, rows of huge concrete cubes stood below the dunes, designed to impede invasion from the sea. They’re still there, all these years later, sinking inch by inch into the earth. So are the little pillboxes with horizontal slits for machine gunners. We used all these sites for our childhood games, and they infected our play. We played “Die the Best”, shrieking with pain, flinging ourselves across the dunes, tottering in death agonies as the invaders came in. In the gardens, streets and fields we played “Bomb Berlin”, Germans versus English, English versus Japanese. We yelled out, Achtung! Schnell! Banzai! and Die, you rat! and ran with our arms spread wide like spitfire’s wings, calling out “Ratatatatat!”
In the adult world, deadlier games were played. Nuclear arsenals multiplied. Bombs were tested. Nervous and paranoid fingers hovered close to the button that could bring destruction to us all. The Iron Curtain was up. Bombs were raining down on Vietnam. Many thought that war had not really ended: that the peace in which we grew up was just a breathing space; that the worst was yet to come.
This is a story about the post-war world. The traumas of Eastern Europe are brought to Felling in the person of an East German boy, Klaus Vogel. The heroes of the story are the outsiders, Klaus Vogel and Mr Eustace. I never knew any East German kids, but there were quite a number of Poles growing up among us – their families had escaped the invading Nazis just before the war. It was only later that I began to understand the deadly perils these families had lived through.
I knew about conchies – conscientious objectors – and how they were treated with contempt. Sometimes my friends and I wondered, what if war came back again? Would we join up? Would we fight, or would we be conchies? Would we be different from our fathers?
My dad died when I was fifteen and he was just forty-three. As a nineteen-year-old hitchhiking across Europe, I started to understand what he and men like him had gone through, what the whole world had gone through. I started to understand how privileged I was to grow up in a world without war, to be able to go to university, to grow my hair, to swim in the Med.
I set this story in the autumn, in what always seemed to be one of the darkest parts of Felling, beyond Watermill Lane, not too far from the graveyard at Heworth. There, trees hung heavy and dark over the pavements and verges. We often walked under them to play football on the broad playing field by Swards Road. It was best at dusk, as the stars came out above and frost began to glitter on the grass.
We’d been together for years. We called ourselves the Bad Lads, but it was just a joke. We were mischief-makers, pests and scamps. We never caused proper trouble – not till that autumn, anyway; round about the time we were turning thirteen; round about the time Klaus Vogel came.
The regulars were me; Tonto McKenna from Stivvey Court; Dan Digby; and the Spark twins, Fred and Frank. We all came from Felling and we all went to St John’s. Then there was Joe Gillespie. He was a year or so older than the rest of us, and kept himself a bit aloof, but he was the leader, and he was great. His hair was long and curled over his collar. He wore faded Levi’s, Chelsea boots, Ben Sherman shirts. He had a girlfriend, Teresa Doyle. He used to walk hand in hand with her through Holly Hill Park. I used to dream about being just like Joe – flicking my hair back with my hand, winking at girls, putting my arm round one of the lads after a specially good stunt, saying, “We done really good, didn’t we? We’re really bad, aren’t we? Ha ha ha!”
All of us, not just me, wanted to be a bit like Joe in those days.
Most days, after school, we took a ball onto the playing field at Swards Road and put two jumpers down for a goal. We played keep-up and penalties, practised diving headers, swerves and traps. We played matches with tiny teams and a single goal, but we still got carried away by it all, just like when we were eight or nine. We called each othe
r Bestie, Pelé, Yashin, and commentated on the moves: “He’s beaten one man; he’s beaten two! Can he do it? Yeees! Oh no! Oh, what a save by the black-clad Russian!” We punched the air when we scored a goal and waved at the invisible roaring crowd. Our voices echoed across the playing field and over the rooftops. Our breath rose in plumes as the air chilled and the evening came on.
We felt ecstatic, transfigured. Then after a while one of us would see Joe coming out from among the houses, and we’d come back down to the real world.
Joe usually had a trick or two of his own lined up, but he always made a point of asking what we fancied doing next.
Tonto might say, “We could play knocky nine door in Balaclava Street.”
Or Frank might go, “Jump through the hedges in Coldwell Park Drive?”
But we’d all just groan at things like that. They were little kids’ tricks, and we’d done them tons of times before. Sometimes there were new ideas, like the night we howled like ghosts through Mrs Minto’s letter box, or when we phoned the police and said an escaped lunatic was chopping up Miss O’Sullivan in her front garden, or when we tied a length of string at head height right across Dunelm Terrace. But usually the best plans turned out to be Joe’s. It was his idea, for instance, to put the broken bottles under Mr Tatlock’s car tyres, and to dig up the leeks in Albert Finch’s allotment. We went along with Joe, but by the time that autumn came, some of his plans were starting to trouble us all.
One evening, when the sky was glowing red over St Patrick’s steeple, and when it was obvious that none of us had anything new to suggest, Joe rubbed his hands together and grinned. He had a rolled-up newspaper stuck into his jeans pocket.
“It’s a cold night, lads,” he said. “How about a bit of a blaze to warm us up?”
“A blaze?” said Tonto.
“Aye.” Joe winked. He rattled a box of matches. “Follow me.”
He led us up Swards Road and across The Drive and into the narrow lane behind Sycamore Grove. We stopped in the near darkness under a great overgrown privet hedge. Joe told us to be quiet and to gather close.