all the beloved ghosts

by Alison Macleod

Your eyebrows mimic confusion. You bluff well. This, too, I understand. There are things you cannot bear to utter; thoughts you can only dedicate silently to the night air and the hallowed ministrations of November.

  St James’s Church rises over us in its stony repose. Tonight, its door is wide open and bears a simple handwritten sign: ‘For those wishing to pray for Paris’. Inside, we see three or four darkened shapes kneeling in pews, their shoulders hunched and their heads bowed. We gaze up at the dizzying, vaulted space. At the candle rack, I force a twenty-pound note through the coin slot. ‘For all the faces at the windows?’ I say.

  You don’t meet my eyes but you take the taper I offer. Together, we light every votive candle and stub on the rack, and as the flames swell into a blaze, I check Google on my phone. The nearest station is just a mile away. Paddington Green.

  Any video or sound recording of what led you to act may be helpful when it comes to explaining to the police why you have stepped into the breach.

  Your knees crack again as we genuflect and take a pew near the rear of the church. The belt at our wrists chafes. Your stomach rumbles. Your carrier bag is leaking defrosted beef. I reach for my bar of chocolate and extend it to you. The gold wrapping flashes as we open it together, one hand each, in a paltry rendition of Hopkins’s ‘shook foil’. (You know the reference. You enjoyed poetry at school.)

  We work awkwardly as a team to snap off jagged corners, then eat without speaking. The pew is cold and hard. When I huff, I can see my breath. Everything smells of candle wax, dust and incense.

  We slide towards one another, for warmth. For a time, we nod off, my head against your shoulder; your chin on your chest.

  When we awake, we are alone in the church and my phone is alive again, its ringtone echoing off every saint and martyr. I blindly thumb it, and from 4,000 miles away, Evie’s face grins up at me, her lips stained red with party drink. ‘Hi,’ she says. Then she blows hard on a party horn.

  It squeals.

  She looks pleased with herself. ‘Did it pop out in England?’

  I raise a finger to my lips. ‘Not quite. I’m in church. Did you have a fun birthday?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Any nice prezzies?’

  She points her iPad lens. I turn up the light on my display. A shiny new music keyboard with a gigantic blue bow comes into view.

  ‘Oh!’ I exclaim. ‘Fancy.’

  You lean in to see and grin. I dimly remember: you’re a father of four. You’ve been a devoted parent. You loved it all, especially when they were small. You miss it now. The house seems cavernous. Even the youngest must be almost grown.

  No wonder you brood on your legacy. He was only – what? – three when you invaded Iraq. Now you need him, above all, to know there was a world before; that you were someone else – someone different; that you haven’t only made the world a more dangerous place.

  Evie reappears. ‘Is he your new boyfriend?’

  I smile. ‘No.’

  ‘Oh.’ She sticks the blue bow to the side of her head and runs, clutching her iPad, past walls dotted with balloons. ‘Wait there!’

  ‘Wait for what?’ I call to her ceiling.

  She lines up the camera’s lens and crosses to her new keyboard. She wears a white turtleneck, blue-and-white horizontal striped leggings, and now, the blue bow. Her back is slim. Her blonde head shines in the nimbus of a lamp. Individual hairs rise from her head; she has been rubbing balloons against it for much of the day. Through the window beside her, daylight still illumines her world and, as she flips unceremoniously through the pages of a music book, we watch fat flakes of snow falling softly over the Gatineau River. Through lenses and windowpanes, I can just make out white frozen swathes of river and the darker melt-holes of November.

  On the candle rack near the altar, the flames tremble and flare, and the darkness of the church flexes. Then she jiggles her shoulders, shakes her hand and with three small fingers, punches the keys.

  ‘Ode to Joy’ rises haltingly into the vastness above us.

  You tilt your head back. I bow mine. The simple melody washes over us as if it is composed of chords of light. It moves through Evie’s small, knuckle-less hands to flood every crack and crevice in the church; every font, chalice and angel’s O of a mouth. It rings from every flagstone.

  Her face reappears at the screen. ‘That’s all I know.’

  ‘I loved it,’ I say. ‘I really loved it.’

  ‘Me too,’ you say. Your voice is raw.

  Later, when I am asked why I followed you tonight, I will resist the urge to speak of her, of who and what we leave behind.

  Evie picks up the party horn again and blows till it pokes out, sharp and hard as a tongue.

  ‘Did it pop into England that time?’ she asks.

  I shake my head. ‘Blow harder.’

  ‘No,’ she sighs. ‘That not what I need to do.’ She huffs her fringe out of her eyes and presses her fingertips to what, on my screen, looks like its bright underside.

  You lean in as the coin of darkness appears in the bright display. Together we watch it slowly, slowly widen and spread until it covers the place where Evie’s mouth should be. We see her dimpled hands reposition her hair bow on the side of her head, but her mouth and chin are gone. Within moments, her entire face is lost from view, but the horn squeals again, and this time its pink-and-blue tip darts into the darkness of the church. We flinch as it coils back into her world.

  ‘Did it reach that time?’ she calls.

  ‘Yes,’ I say through the trance of the moment. ‘Yes, it did.’

  She fingers the screen again, plying the small patch of on-screen darkness, as if she is working a piece of black plasticine, stretching it ever outward. I watch her white turtleneck disappear beneath it. ‘Evie,’ I say. ‘Stop doing that. ‘Stop. I can’t see you.’ The back of my neck has gone cold.

  Beside me, you squeeze my hand, and I am grateful.

  She is a blur of pink fingertips, pushing and swiping.

  ‘Evie!’ I call sternly.

  ‘Wait!’ she bosses.

  The puddle of darkness becomes a rectangle. The rectangle outgrows the dimensions of my screen and phone. The light from the candle rack swells, the nave is illumined, our pew gleams suddenly and, as we stare, a melt-hole opens up in the dark air before us.

  A party horn falls between our feet. I hear you inhale sharply. A snowflake lands on my cheek. Then a blue bow flutters into the footwell, and Evie drops, red-cheeked and breathing hard.

  ‘Since when can you do that?’ I say.

  She shrugs, picks up the party horn and sticks the bow back on her head. ‘I figured it out.’

  She smells of fresh winter air and Tide detergent.

  ‘I wanted to see your boyfriend.’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend.’

  ‘Did he like my song?’

  Your eyes are bright for the first time tonight. Somehow, Evie, the force of her, has returned you, us, from the gloom into life.

  ‘I thought it was very’ – you stutter with a humility that is not feigned – ‘beautiful. It must have been hard to learn in just one day.’

  ‘“Joy” is easy actually. For me it is, I mean.’ She frowns. ‘But not for everyone.’

  ‘I appreciate that. What I meant was—’

  She puts her finger to her lips and looks up high to the unseeable. She hears it before we do. Overhead, a helicopter has found its coordinates over the church tower. Her spell is broken.

  ‘At last,’ you breathe. ‘May I?’ You snatch my phone. Evie climbs into my lap and plugs her ears against a thrum of blades and propellers that grows louder and louder. You sign into Twitter one-handed. It doesn’t take you long to show me the shot of us walking in Seymour Street. You find another shot, dark and grainy, of the two of us asleep in the pew; you show me, as if to say, it was always going to end like this. Didn’t you try to tell me?

  ‘I don’t want you to worry unduly,’ you say. ‘They’ll have
to question you. It won’t be altogether pleasant. But I give you my word: I won’t press charges. And I’ll ask someone to make appropriate arrangements for your niece.’

  Evie locks her arms around my neck. ‘I don’t like him, Aunt Ali. Why did you let him hear “Joy”?’

  I lower her to the floor and help her straighten her stripy leggings. Then we rise from the pew as three and turn. From the dense shadow of the church’s porch, the broad shapes of two policemen materialise.

  Before I have time to explain, Evie drops to the floor and covers her head with her arms.

  I crouch down beside her, quickly, to reassure, and, beside me, still tied to me, you stagger.

  ‘Suicide bombers,’ she whispers. ‘Get down, Aunt Ali! Play dead.’

  ‘No, I promise, sweetheart. They’re—’

  She nods fiercely, tears in her eyes – yes, yes – and mimes the bulk of their vests.

  ‘Police,’ I mouth. ‘Police . . .’

  She’s trembling.

  Behind me, you try. ‘Don’t be frightened, Evie.I know these men. Now be a good girl and—’

  But she won’t get up. I suspect she can’t.

  Regardless, I feel your strength, raising me to my feet, propelling me past her, forward and down the aisle. Your hand grips mine. There is no confetti. No rice for luck. We pass under the archway and into the porch. You clear your throat and find your public voice.

  This is how you begin.

  ‘Gosh. I must say, I’m rather relieved to see you two.’ You have to shout over the noise of the helicopters that hover now above the treetops. A drone zips, already collecting footage. Outside, beyond the deep chill of the porch, people gather – passers-by, your Twitter followers, stray members of the press. You cannot suppress a smile of relief.

  You hold up our bound wrists. You make a comical face to your Security chaps. Your meaning is clear: we’ve got a live one here.

  You say: ‘I thought it best simply to wait it out till you turned up. No real harm done.’ You appear magnanimous, unflustered. You draw us into the night air and breathe deeply.

  One of the officers unties the belt.

  ‘Evie?’ I call over my shoulder.

  But nothing.

  Your Security Unit instruct me to remain where I am. I rub my wrist. ‘Evie!’

  Overhead, the drone’s camera registers the red thermographic surge of my heart.

  In the first instance, it is important to be clear and concise.

  The shorter of the two officers asks my name and notes my address. I wait for him to look up from the screen where he scratches with a stylus. The radio on his belt crackles with fragments of voices. Next to it, a can of CS spray glints. The yellow pistol-shaped thing on his belt is, I hope, a taser only. I rehearse my words inwardly. Composure is important. A squad car’s light spins in the darkness beyond us.

  I realise that my eyes are closed and my lips are moving faintly. The man pauses in his questions to permit me to utter what he mistakes for a prayer.

  I look up. I breathe from my diaphragm. (Be advised that the government does not publish a complete list of offences.) What are the words?

  This is how I begin.

  ‘It is my duty to report’ – I see you turn slowly, your eyes huge – ‘that I’ve arrested this man for a breach of the peace.’

  Deer.

  Headlights.

  Bambi.

  Why do I, in spite of myself, worry for you?

  Somewhere behind us, on the floor, Evie is still shaking.

  We Are Methodists

  Toby – he tells me he’s called Toby – heaves his toolbox and himself up the spiral of my staircase. Toby is a plumber. A heating engineer. I am a client. A new homeowner.

  We know our parts.

  At the top of the staircase, he stands and stares. Above us, the old chapel window rises twenty-five feet to a vast pine arch. Once, this window was a Methodist view on Creation, on the hills of East Brighton and its glittering sea.

  ‘That’s something,’ he says, and is slow to turn away. Through the clear panes, to the north-east, the green flanks of the Downs rear up with spring. To the south, the sea is silvered in the midday light. Above the chimney pots, the gulls are ecstatic.

  He counts the panes with his eyes. From floor to ceiling, eight bright stems of glass rise up, five panes high, until they burst, high overhead, into four golden arches. The arches, in turn, bloom into three circular windows. What is it about circles? I don’t know. I suspect Toby doesn’t know. Heads back, chins up, we’re moved to silence. At the top of my staircase, suspended in a moment we will soon disregard, we’re strangers.

  ‘Coffee?’ I ask.

  I move into the organ loft that is now my kitchen.

  He blinks. ‘Thank you. Yes. Milk, one sugar.’

  I dig in the boxes marked ‘Kitchen Cupboards, 3 of 6’. My things seem unfamiliar. I find cups but no saucers. Toby opens the boiler cupboard and prises off the casing. He is stocky with a low belly. Early forties, I estimate. An oversized tattoo runs up his forearm through the curling dark hair: ‘MADISON’, it reads in cursive lettering.

  It’s Day One of our four-day works schedule. Toby tells me, haltingly, that, this morning, he’ll do the full boiler service. The boiler is old, so he’ll check the controls and clear away dirt and debris; he’ll do a gas analysis to monitor carbon monoxide; he’ll confirm there are no weeping joints; he’ll test the circuitry, the fan pressure and the inlet pressure. He’ll inspect the heat exchanger and the burner. He’ll clean out the condensate trap.

  Toby’s mouth has seen better days. His front teeth are missing, along with the cuspids and miscellaneous others. I hear the soft nasal sing-song of a Birmingham accent. I imagine backstreet punch-ups in his youth.

  He speaks quickly, mistrustful of his mouth, but finally, he nods, relieved to have got through the speech. Later I’ll be sent an electronic survey from his company; it will ask me to confirm that, prior to the given job, Toby explained the full nature of it.

  ‘Thank you.’ I pass him a steaming coffee. ‘You’ve made everything clear.’

  He nods. His head is small and neat, almost feral; his hair is shorn close to his scalp. The dark stubble along his jawline is flecked with grey, and his eyelashes are thick like a child’s. He lowers them often.

  When his phone starts to vibrate, he sighs. ‘Hi, love. Can’t. On a job. I’ll call you later, right?’ He slides the phone into a pocket. ‘My girlfriend,’ he explains. ‘She’s a lot younger.’ He smiles apologetically. ‘She does my head in.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I hear myself say. I make no sense.

  Toby reaches, quickly, for a pair of pliers.

  I blush and lift the vase of nearly dead tulips from the kitchen table. At the sink, I turn away and let the water run and run. I cannot say what I actually meant: that I hope his broken mouth will kiss and be kissed. I cannot say it because what could it possibly matter to me?

  In recent days, the tulips drooped, drowsy as narcoleptics. Now, their yellow heads are full-blown, too weighty for their slender stems and leaves. Since yesterday, they’ve been resting only millimetres above the tabletop, a lost cause. I fill the vase anyway.

  Toby keeps his eyes, front and centre, on the boiler’s innards. I switch on Radio 4, waiting for its calm to neutralise the atmosphere; to cover the odd sense of domesticity into which we’ve been cast. The proximity of strangers is a peculiar thing, and the open-plan design means there is nowhere to hide. I unpack dishes, pots, canisters, oven mitts, a stray pair of socks and bra. I stuff the latter in a kitchen drawer.

  Even so, when it happens, it seems wrong not to risk it, wrong not to say, ‘Look. Toby, look at the tulips.’ He turns, I point and, together, we watch the oversized heads rise, infinitesimally higher and higher, in an act of blind, magnificent will.

  ‘You wouldn’t think,’ he murmurs.

  ‘No,’ I breathe.

  I fold tea towels and behold the resurrection
. He tinkers again in the boiler cupboard, glancing back to watch it over his shoulder. Before long, the tulips are half their natural height and still rising.

  ‘Life,’ he says. ‘Bloody stubborn, isn’t it.’

  We find our equilibrium.

  ‘Biscuit?’ I venture.

  He shakes his head and adjusts a pressure valve. ‘Never eat in the day.’

  ‘No breakfast?’

  ‘Coffee only – till dinner time.’

  There’s something fight-or-flight-like in his bearing, a potential clenched in his shoulders. Yet his movements are slow, wary. ‘See this dial?’

  I walk to his side.

  ‘The needle should hover around the one mark. When it’s too low, just top it up, with this black knob.’

  ‘Right.’ I nod. ‘Yes.’

  He picks up his coffee. We look to the sea. Half a dozen sailboats navigate the dazzle, white sails tipping on the breeze.

  ‘That’s a view,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  At home in Portslade, if he crooks his head a certain way in his toddler’s room, he can just see a skinny ‘V’ of sea. He has a fishing boat which he hasn’t had out since his youngest – Madison – was born. It’s moored at Newhaven, waiting to be scraped and sanded. He says: ‘I know I should say “she”, like all the marina types do, but I always feel daft saying that.’

  ‘I do too,’ I say. I fold another tea towel. ‘Maybe the “she” of me resists.’

  ‘Feminist,’ he says. ‘That explains it.’

  I look up. ‘Explains what?’

  ‘Being good looking and on your own.’ He carries on tinkering in the cupboard. ‘Me, I’m ugly and surrounded. Ex-wife always on the blower. Our son up in Stoke getting himself into trouble. My girlfriend. Her mates in our kitchen most nights of the week. I used to wonder why they behaved like teenagers till I realised they are teenagers, or not far off. Then there’s her mother tutting and painting her toenails on the Radio Times. Not to mention our three kiddies. Each night when I get home, the two older boys are either on the PlayStation or torturing the cat. Forgot to mention the cat. One old, incontinent cat.’ He looks up. ‘It’s a madhouse basically.’