all the beloved ghosts

by Alison Macleod

  It’s thirty years since he captained the gymnastics squad in Newry, and he’s lucky he didn’t snap his spine. But she turned to watch.

  Abby was born on the November day, the very day, they buried his mother. He was fifteen, lost and winded at the graveside in the hour she came keening into the world – and somehow that makes her dear to him. She’s not fooled by his charm or his black Irish eyelashes like other women, but still, she laughs easily, and her words run deep within him. He wants to tell her she should, she really should, but she doesn’t recoil from the bite of him when he goes mad on the booze and the shame of what he hasn’t become. She doesn’t turn and run from the rabid thing that curls in his gut and is turning, little by little, into the tumour they will cut from him years too late.

  ‘Liam, listen,’ she says, her head next to his now. Pillow talk. He dreams of her breast in his mouth. ‘Can you hear it? The music. Next door’s.’ It’s an instrumental, faint through the wall. He can’t quite get it, though he was once an encyclopedia of song. It’s a loop of sound: cool, restless, spooky. Then, against the odds, out of nowhere, it rises, a crescendo of something that sounds like joy.

  ‘Oscillate Wildly’. The Smiths. And Abby’s breath warm on his cheek.

  Only there are footsteps now, heavy on the stairs – she’s lifting her head off the pillow and Liam can’t hear the music any more because Eoin is speaking from the foot of the bed. His brother, his long estranged brother, his sombre sibling, is saying, ‘Abby, leave him. The girls should be at their father’s side.’ But Katie and Sonia are fine where they are, in the corner of his room, sifting old photos, content, near him but not so near that they’re frightened by the sight of his wasted body beneath the sheets.

  He can feel the strain of Abby’s hand on his. She is afraid of Eoin, of his deadly earnestness. She is afraid to argue, to disturb the calm of the room, and Eoin is speaking to her like she is a servant of the house. How dare you? Liam wants to shout but his lungs can’t find air and his lips won’t move. Then her hand is leaving his, her voice is fading, he can hear her steps receding on the stairs – Jesus, no – no, Abby—

  And he’s on his feet, running – somehow – he has no idea how he’s managed it – down the stairs – he’s breathless behind her – why doesn’t she turn? Every muscle in his legs is driving him forward as—

  Great-uncle Gaston’s cemetery flies past: the women in the slippery dresses, the houses of the dead and his mother too, a red scarf tied at her neck. The stone bollocks are heavy in his hand but he feels as if he could run for ever – Abby! – or he does until he finds himself face to face with Oscar Wilde’s angel.

  His uncle is at the grave already. The old man nods. Liam knows what he has to do. He unwraps their paperweight from the piece of chamois leather. He moves to the angel’s side. Then he bends and slides the bollocks and their stump of a penis back into place.

  The angel’s flanks shudder to life. Its feathers ripple. Liam backs away and sees the impassive eyes blink, the mouth tense. He watches, dazed, as the monumental wings quiver, then beat the air, loud as a windmill’s sails. He turns his face to an unsettled sky and stares as the angel heaves itself into flight.

  In those moments, in that dizzying commotion of shadows, air and light, Liam feels again the wild oscillations of his life: the swinging, the running, the trembling, the chucking-up, the busking, the pushing and the humping; his sperm swimming, his babies babbling, Hamlet soliloquising, his body handspringing, his eyelids blinking, the joy rising and those wings spreading, defiant and tremendous, as the train at the crossing tears past.

  Dreaming Diana: Twelve Frames

  1

  I can admit it now.

  In 1981, I had the Lady Di. I went to Wendy’s Hair Salon on the Bedford Highway and asked for the Lady Di because I didn’t know the name of any other haircut, except the Farrah Fawcett, and I didn’t have the nerve to ask for those feathery wings that were emblematic of Farrah’s pin-up glory.

  Wendy cut my hair herself, and didn’t laugh when I asked for the Lady Di, but even she, sucking hard on her cigarette, couldn’t work that magic. On my lap lay a picture of Diana at the London nursery where she worked. She had a child on each hip, and the sun was streaming through her cotton skirt. She looked melancholy. She wouldn’t smile for the photographer; I liked her for that. The article said the silhouette of her legs through her skirt was a sensation. I didn’t understand. Everyone had legs.

  At Wendy’s Hair Salon, locks of dark hair fell across my knees to the floor. I emerged from the salon looking like a boy. A pageboy. A pageboy without long legs.

  Still, that summer, aged sixteen, three years younger than Diana, nothing was impossible. I’d fallen in love with Stephen Murray. He was tall. He had a dry wit. He spelled his name with a ‘ph’ instead of a ‘v’. It made him complicated.

  On midsummer’s eve, the final dance of the school year was held, not in the gym, but at the Harbour Boat Club in the city. Gone was the smell of rubber crash-mats and adolescent sweat; gone, the generalised threat of gym ropes and foul lines. Instead we stepped on to a sunken dance floor with parquet tiles. We bloomed against crêpe-paper streamers and bright Chinese lanterns. Outside, on the long, low veranda, boys threatened to let the girls in their arms drop into the tide below while, above us all, the Northern Lights shook the night sky.

  I can’t remember the song. I only remember that as Stephen Murray and I started to dance, he turned me on my heels and my pale yellow skirt took life, floating wide as a water lily on the air.

  We walked through the night together. He took my hand in his. We tried to remember what caused the Northern Lights and couldn’t. We skimmed stones across the ebbing waves. Friends discovered us on the shore and, within moments, everyone was peeling off shoes and socks, and wading into the surf. Mighty splashes of water fanned high into the night. We girls screamed and ran laughing from the shallows up the beach, cold water dripping down our breastbones, arms and legs, marking our dresses and skirts. But when I looked back over my shoulder to find Stephen in the night, he was nowhere. I walked down the beach and called his name. Finally, I gathered up my shoes and spotted him striding up the hill towards the Club, where the paper-lantern light trembled in the dark.

  Back inside no one knew where he was. I thought, I’ll find him on Monday in English class. Or I’ll pretend to discover him in the library. Ah! You’re working in here too? He’ll forgive my joining in with the others on the shore, and he’ll smile at me across the examinations hall.

  Moments before the last dance, Stephen reappeared. I spotted the dim outline of him beyond the entrance, and I stood from the table where I’d been seated, marooned with friends. Behind my back, my hands were clasped, and my pulse raced in my thumb. As he crossed the threshold, I couldn’t help myself; I walked towards him. His eyes were adjusting to the light. Could he see me?

  Then, as he approached the dance floor, something extraordinary happened. A girl materialised at his side: a girl I had never seen, a girl no one had ever seen, a girl from out of town who seemed in that moment more conjured than real. The magic of the night forked. I watched him introduce her to his friends. She was tall, elegant. ‘This is Diana,’ I heard him say.

  In that moment I envied her her name, her height and her mystery, but even more than these things, I envied her her hair. She had a perfect Lady Di, a cloud of gold dipping over one eye.

  Like everyone that summer, I watched the Royal Wedding and cried.

  2

  Two years later, I couldn’t explain to myself why I was waiting to see Diana. The lobby of the Hotel Nova Scotian was empty. A British photographer was asleep on his feet against a pillar. My sister Ellen wanted to go home. She was too blasé for royalty. Privately, I wished I was as well. I rooted in my bag and pulled out the Kodak camera our parents had given me for graduating so successfully that year.

  Bear in mind I was too proud to pin any pop poster to my bedroom wall. Instead I’d Blu-tack
ed into place a Bruegel print of dancing peasants. I had standards. Yet here I was, following the crowd. Or rather, I would have been following the crowd had we not arrived two-and-a-half hours before any crowd.

  Ellen looked at my camera and rolled her eyes. ‘Tell me you’re not going to take pictures.’

  I played with the Instamatic shutter. I stared at the ceiling of the lobby, avoiding her stare, for I could already imagine Diana’s foot stepping on to the red carpet the two bellboys were unfurling before us. She would move. Smile. Extend her hand. Perhaps she would say a few words in passing. All in three dimensions.

  We rationed the Smarties Ellen had in her school bag. We found two pens and played tic-tac-toe on her bare, restless legs. For a long time, we watched the British photographer not wake up.

  Time passed reluctantly. Bystanders turned into a crowd, and the crowd into a throng. We held our ground. The lobby grew hot, airless. The floral top I’d made in Home Economics that year was sticking to my armpits, and my camera was sweating like old money in my hands.

  When the moment was at last upon us, I hesitated. Prime Minister Trudeau walked through the door in his white dinner jacket and black bow-tie.

  Diana was just moments behind. Charles was – I was relieved to see – already working the other side of the red carpet.

  Was it better, I asked myself, to watch her ‘live’ – perhaps to shake her hand – or to get a picture? A picture of a picture coming to life.

  She was wearing a pale-yellow chiffon ball gown and a tiara. Her hair was longer than I’d seen in any of the photos, and she was very slim. Her face was lowered in her trademark way, but now and again as she walked, she peered out from beneath her golden bangs.

  How strange for her, I thought. She can only be thinking, Where am I? Why did I never do a geography O level? She would have looked fragile were it not for the strength of that wide, generous smile.

  She was shaking hands, smiling, saying hello, asking the occasional question. I remember the novelty of hearing her speak as I watched her through my camera’s viewfinder. She stopped and said a few words to the hotel receptionist next to Ellen. I raised my camera. I felt self-conscious – rude – as I pointed it at her. I faltered, lowered my arm. Then I took the picture.

  Or four, to be precise.

  Later, everyone marvelled that I’d been so close, that I’d managed to get such good shots. ‘She looks beautiful,’ they said.

  ‘She’s more so in real life,’ I heard myself say.

  I sounded absurd to myself. What did it actually matter to any of us what she looked like?

  They waited for a spree of adjectives, for my youthful eyewitness account, but I didn’t have the words. Not because I’d had any pang of conscience, but because I couldn’t describe the surprising light of her. It wasn’t flashbulbs. Or the glamour of a blonde. Or the radiance of a new bride. It wasn’t any of those things.

  Afterwards, I stuck the snaps in a new album. I took care to avoid ripples as I pressed them under the transparent sheet. But you can’t get a picture of a picture coming to life. Reality collapses. It’s simply another picture.

  3

  Faster now. Time is rushing on.

  It’s July ’97. My marriage to Jon is just six years old. To all outward appearances, we are a lovely young couple, perfectly suited. Everyone tells us so. Yet there’s a mystery I can’t unravel; a problem that hovers just out of reach, indecipherable as Jon’s face when I ask him what the matter is.

  We are not, I know, like other couples in their twenties. I ask my young, handsome husband why he loves me and does not love me. But each time I do, his words reassure me, though his eyes – all strain and kindness – do not, and the mystery of our marriage refuses to leave our little whitewashed cottage with the vegetable patch in the back garden and our bikes at the door. It will declare squatter’s rights. On weekends, it will read the Sunday papers alongside us and huff its stale breath across our table. It will lie between us at night, a strange third life in our big pine bed.

  Days before our wedding, Jon’s brother asked him if he was sure he was doing the right thing. When Jon told me of the question – giving it sudden weight in the world with its repetition – my heart stammered. I could only say, ‘Really? Why would he ask that?’

  Our date was set. At the altar, Jon’s eyes filled as he looked into mine and said his vows. Later, he clasped me to him as the camera flashes went off in the nave. ‘Look,’ my smile told my husband’s brother. ‘How wrong you were.’

  But something was not right. The mystery hovered even there in our country church as the bells pealed. Jon’s right arm did not hold mine fast as we walked down the aisle; it did not bend to link with mine or to receive my hand as my father’s had. That night, in a wide four-poster, he told me we were both tired after the full day. Given our year of cohabitation, it was fine for us simply to sleep.

  His mother adored her two sons. She declared often and with ease that she was delighted she had never had girls; that girls were trouble; that her boys, husband and father were the joy of her life.

  When she kissed each adult son, and especially her firstborn, the duration of her kisses surprised me. When she was tired, she would rest her body against Jon’s chest, lay her head on his shoulder, smile dreamily and close her eyes. He neither yielded to her nor resisted, but tolerated her need with love, and with an inborn understanding of human frailty.

  Only years later did I learn that Jon had discussed his heart’s confusion with his mother. She had counselled him, explaining gently and lovingly that the best thing one could do in life was to marry one’s best friend. Not to choose a lover who might in time become a best friend, but rather to marry a girl who would, from the outset, be his reliable friend. Nothing mattered more. Perhaps even she did not fully realise that a half-marriage for her son was the most she could bear. In the months leading up to our wedding, she was often mysteriously unwell.

  It would be several years before I would learn that my marriage had been arranged around me; before I would understand that, although I had married for love, I was not beloved.

  Five years of friendship passed. The third thing in our bed grew restive. It got bigger, heavier. Jon grew thin. He could hardly eat, no matter how busily I cooked and baked; no matter how wifely I became.

  Then, during a trip to Paris in which we tried to divert ourselves from our unhappiness, I found myself standing at a news kiosk and staring at front-page tabloid snaps of Diana in profile. She was walking barefoot on a sandy beach in the Med, holidaying with her boys and her new ‘companion’, Dodi Fayed. Here she was, emerging from the broken spell of the wedding 750 million had witnessed. Even Diana, it seemed, had never truly been wanted.

  In the photos, she was wearing a one-piece swimsuit, an animal print. Her head was down. She was refusing to look the way of the offshore boats. Her arms were folded over her front.

  Perhaps her posture was, at that moment, poor. Perhaps she had a tummy that day.

  ‘DIANA ENCEINTE?’ the tabloids speculated.

  She was a vessel for us to fill.

  4

  Slide the transparent strip through your fingers. Hold it by the edges only, at the sprocket holes. Avoid fingerprints. (My own are already all over them.) Now lift it to the lamplight.

  Frame 4. That’s the one.

  Grainy, yes.

  They say, you wouldn’t have known to look at her; her face was unchanged except for the bruising under one eye.

  At the private mortuary in Fulham, the post-mortem was conducted in the middle of the night. Her body was guarded throughout by officers from Special Branch. An official photographer was brought in to document the minutiae of the proceedings. Such intimacies.

  He was escorted to the lavatory, twice. He was searched upon entering the premises, and again when leaving. For what? A stashed film?

  Too obvious.

  They frisked him for a bit of hair. For a sample of body fluid. For a sacred scraping of
DNA. They couldn’t risk a tabloid relic. A black-market dream. A national security crisis.

  When I eventually moved out of our little cottage, my old Kodak negatives of the long-ago day at the Hotel Nova Scotian fell out of an album, and I lifted them to the light of our bedroom window, peering.

  5

  Picture it.

  ‘In my dream she’d been cremated,’ said Patricia Garland of Manchester, after the news. ‘And I had the urn, you know the safekeeping of the ashes, and the whole country knew. But my daughter Susannah spilled them all over the floor. I scooped them back into the urn as well as I could – I had to fool people – but I knew there were bits of stair carpet in there. It was awful. I woke myself up choking on the ash.’

  6

  The column inches were endless. I know because I bought every paper.

  They killed her because she was dabbling in politics. Because she was turning to the Left. Because she had loose lips. Because she was about to marry an Arab. Because she was going to convert to Islam, like her friend Jemima Khan. Because she was carrying an illegitimate, Muslim baby. Because Charles could never otherwise have Camilla. Because he wanted Diana gone. Because she’d had the temerity to say he wanted her gone. Because Philip deemed it necessary. For the Monarchy, for the Firm. Because she was part of a psychic task-force and knew what They were up to.

  Perhaps she wasn’t the only one. Not long before her death, BBC journalists had practised in private a ‘sudden and violent death scenario’ – intended to cover travel accident, assassination or suicide – involving Diana, Princess of Wales.

  On the BBC 1, she was Our Lady of Sorrows. On ITV, Diana the Martyred. On Sky TV, Diana the Goddess, spectacularly sacrificed.