A Private Haunting

by Tom McCulloch

Any collapse would be for Big Haakon, not his father. It would pour uncontrollably if he happened to bump into Haakon, which was why he ran to the ferry terminal after leaving his father’s house. No more traumatic an echo would there be to see Haakon in the streets of this emptied town, Haakon who would say what became of you, Jonas? Haakon the true fulcrum of his childhood, not his ever-crestfallen and long-dead mother or the semi-detached father who studied him with the indifference of a scientist to the object of a failed experiment.

  Yet Jonas expected Haakon. He watched from the stern as the ferry eased into the harbour.

  Somehow Haakon knew he was leaving and would appear, wave goodbye from the dock, there at the end of the white churning line of the ship’s wake that glowed like phosphorescence and connected present to past and Jonas watching, following the froth of time back across the black sea, back to the dock until it all broke up in the white caps of a sudden squall.

  But it wasn’t Haakon he saw in the grey vagueness but two dark figures. An adult and a child. Eva and Anya, standing but not waving, his father’s words fogging his mind like the smirr that eventually obscured them. How many times in your life are you going to be wrong?

  The words had goblin-squatted in his mind ever since, an epitaph for a grinning, clinging past.

  Always the past.

  Jonas needed and feared it. It followed him across Europe, to the building sites of Copenhagen and bunk-beds with Estonians who every night veered a drunken path through homeland stories and if Jonas never reciprocated so what, exile imposing a camaraderie but also an impatience to get back to your own tale. It followed him to the vineyards of France and intelligent, bashful men from West Africa, who kept their heads down, like Sunny D, who stood on Dakar’s terminal beach and paid the fortune to leave his wife and take the six-month journey to Morocco and north; to the strawberry fields of southern England where he slept in a fetid caravan with two hulking Romanians with photos of their children on the walls and when they asked him one evening as they demolished another bottle of vodka if he had children of his own out came a desperate but unwanted yes. So they knew not to ask any more questions and from then on it was football, football and the pretty farmer’s daughter who always wore tight jeans. It followed him to the London restaurants and dishwashers ten a penny, like Asamoah, no job for six years so he paid a gang all his money and ended up in Berlin, an abattoir, and always blood under his nails until he got across the Channel beneath a lorry to work the sinks in twelve-hour shifts but at least his hands were always clean.

  So many circling faces, constellations so bright in his private universe he had to turn from the glare. Sunny D and Kiev Dimitri, Asamoah and Wakaso, men who worked the Euro shadows and sent back the wages. Those men kept their heads down. They didn’t befriend fourteen-year-old girls. They understood that the window of self-preservation didn’t stay open long.

  Jonas left the living room and hurried up the stairs. His camping kit was in the loft, found again when he disinterred the one-eyed doll which was now gone with Fletcher to who knows where.

  Twenty minutes later his rucksack was packed. Li Po was the last to go in, rolled into a cardboard cylinder. Jonas didn’t bother with one last look around before exiting by the back door.

  He took the same route as the day before when he met Mary. Through the cypresses and over the side fence.

  Again, no one saw him. He kept his head low, hurrying through the housing estate to the woods, as if to look up would be to see whole families at their windows, staring back at him.

  It took ten minutes to find Sycamore Camp. The sky darkened, deep lavender to grey-mauve, car headlights flicker-strobing through the leaves. He slung the fly sheet over a branch and pulled it taut with pegs stuck through the brass eyes of the fabric. He swept the ground under the tent free of twigs and stones and unrolled the bivvy bag, stuffing in the thermal mat.

  Six years evaporated. Jonas lay on top of the bag, as then, head on the rucksack, looking through the open V of the tent, watching the lights, shapes, shifting shadows in quick-time.

  The question, as ever, was where to go. London was the obvious choice and he still had Asamoah’s mobile number. He could work the restaurants through winter, put some cash aside and then over to Europe for the fruit season. The world opened out and for a brief moment Jonas felt the lightness of freedom glimpsed. But when he tried Asamoah the phone told him the number was not recognised. Six years had passed, after all. He hoped that gentle Asamoah had made it home. That’s what all the tabloid hacks couldn’t comprehend, that the West wasn’t some Shangri-La no one would ever want to leave but was full of men, women and children who only came because they desperately wanted to go home again.

  There it was, the ever-troubling problem of home. You build it with such care. You give it stories. You tell others, time passes and your story takes root. Sunny D, Dimitri, Asamoah and all those stories, the common denominator was home, the need to get home, I miss home.

  Except Jonas didn’t have a tin shack in a Dakar slum or a breadline farmstead in the Romanian mountains. He climbed into his bivvy bag. He tried to convince himself he would be able to leave.

  Thirty-five

  ‘Are you screwing him?’

  Mary turned over in bed. Tuesday morning. The alarm clock said 5.05. Her husband was looming over her. He seemed troubled. He might have been sitting there all night. Waiting for her to wake up until he couldn’t wait anymore. She made him repeat his question.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Screwing him. As well as cleaning his house.’

  ‘Who have you been talking to?’

  ‘No one. Should I be?’

  ‘Give it a rest, Andy.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ She turned back over and listened. Listened to him sitting. Sitting and looming and thinking. A few minutes later he got up. Her husband never got up this early.

  Her daughter once asked why she didn’t leave. A sunny August evening and just the two of them. They were half-drunk on the back patio, Andrea remaining true to the promise made on her eighteenth birthday to make a cocktail for them every Friday. That day it was Mojitos and they were halfway down their third when her daughter said you need to get out of here.

  It was the gravity in Andrea’s voice that upset her, something long considered that couldn’t be contained any longer. It’s about faithfulness, Mary said. Not to marriage, and it isn’t blind faith either, but faithfulness to who we were. The world moves in cycles. I want to be here when it spins round again. Her daughter was scathing. You can’t possibly believe that crap.

  Now Mary couldn’t sleep either.

  Downstairs her husband was drinking tea. He was wearing a dressing gown. A sure signal of an argument. She wished she had put on a dressing gown as well. You can’t have an argument while wearing a pink pyjama top that says my other bed is a hammock. No authority in it.

  ‘I guess you’ve heard?’ he said.

  ‘The search?’

  She made sure she was in bed when he got back the night before. He’d been away all day, some sales event. Texts and voice mails told him he was desperate to talk about the search. Then the thumping about in the bedroom trying to wake her, give him an excuse to start on about it. Mary kept her eyes shut. But she too was lying there thinking about the search.

  ‘Yeah, the search. Be a lot for you to clean up after the cops turned the place upside down.’

  ‘Give it a rest.’

  ‘Just a matter of time till they find her.’

  ‘You’re the big expert then?’

  ‘I’m just saying.’

  ‘But you don’t know a damn thing, do you?’ She paused. ‘Has he been charged?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘Well, don’t go joining the lynch-mob just yet.’

  ‘How can you be so sure? How well do you know this guy, eh?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake – ’

  ‘You are sc
rewing him. Aren’t you? How long for? Must be a real kick with all this going on. I want you to chuck that job in. Now. I don’t want you going round there again. I want –’

  ‘I want. I want. I want. You’ve not wanted anything for years and all of a sudden you’re all demands. You know what I want? Eh? Do you know what I want? Go on then, do you?’

  ‘No, I really – ’

  ‘Exactly!’

  When Mary got upstairs she was shaking. She remembered the restless wheat. Jonas’s lunging kiss. She’d slept with him and most enjoyed what she could only describe as the simplicity. She’d do it again, have sex with a man who killed his wife and child. The thought appalled her.

  Now the search. She still wanted to believe him but something was resisting, something in a black hole, pushing back as she reached in her hand, refusing to let her find what she was grasping for. She hadn’t told him about John Hackett and wondered if she could.

  Thirty-six

  On Tuesday morning Jonas almost went out. He made it to the front door. Out he would go, no problem, for a walk, nothing as normal as a walk, a jaunty step and click, click, click go the cameras but I’m only walking, I’m only walking. Hand on the door handle, he heard two things. First a ripple of laughter, the journos with their morning coffee. Then a metallic clanking, the pipes in the upstairs airing cupboard again. Then once more the laughter and again the pipes. There could be a problem with the pipes. He would have to stay in, see to it, see to the pipes before something burst, flooded the house and can you imagine the poor plumber who had to turn up, run the media gauntlet to fix his pipes? It was unfair, he couldn’t ask the plumber to do that. So he got the tool box from under the kitchen sink and went upstairs to the airing cupboard to consider the decrepit heating system, the mysterious pipe-work leading from the giant boiler that looked like one of Saturn 5’s fuel tanks. In his hand was a ratchet. That’s what you needed, surely, to fix pipes. He peered for a long time, reached behind the water boiler, stood back with his arms folded and patted the ratchet against his palm, frowning and considering. In the silence he could still hear the laughter.

  He stayed in all day. Made lentil and bacon soup and bread. Five loaves from the bags of flour he had in the cupboards. Then an over-hot bath and to bed, the boiling seas of the fever-dreams.

  The rabbit came back. Tonight it was man-sized, like the one in that creepy film he couldn’t remember. It walked right up to him, slow steps closer and closer until he was forced to shut his eyes, and then somehow through him, a crossing of dimensions he felt as coloured vibrations across his body. When Jonas opened his eyes again it was over by the window. A vaguely visible darkness on darkness but looking back at him, he knew. He saw that he was hanging out of bed and reaching towards it, a deep and permanent sadness in his chest.

  As Jonas watched, the slow transformation began once more, the rabbit becoming smaller and smaller, morphing into that familiar child’s shape. He had to get out of this occult darkness.

  He came to at the window. A confused sense of time. Two seconds he may have been there. Two years.

  His arms were wide and he was gripping each flung-open curtain. He stared at the dead flies on the windowsill, gaze moving up to the dusty window panes then outwards, beyond the glass, the houses across the street he may have been seeing for the first time. Then movement below, two figures under a streetlight, looking up. He realised he was naked.

  Naked with his arms wide.

  Like Jesus.

  He laughed out loud as he stepped back from the window, pulling the curtains closed again. The dream was gone, the rabbit vanished and no Anya to see, lying at his feet, bleeding.

  In the darkness, the fluorescent arms of the alarm clock said 3.33. He doubled it to 666 and started laughing again. Halfway to the Beast. Normality had floated free. Just a speck now.

  You can lose it in a thousand different ways. It’s all dependent on the individual. To some extent you can even rationally lose it, like one part of you is watching another with curious detachment yet lacks the power to intervene, to say, really, Jonas? He wondered which one of him was the more real, the one rummaging in the garden shed or the one watching the rummaging?

  He was still naked. The Petzl strapped to his forehead cast a thin and powerful beam, straight from the Third Eye of one of those two Jonases. It didn’t matter which, all that mattered was the head-torch found his bow-drill kit on a shelf, the sycamore hearth board, and the bag of hay.

  When Jonas finished there were five scorch patches on the lawn, like the five on a giant dice. Pink and yellow streaks had appeared behind the roofs to the east. One or two windows were lit. He felt dazed but better. His shoulder might ache and the tips of his fingers may be singed from the heat of the spindle turning in the bearing block but he felt better.

  People had seen his firelighting frenzy. He’d heard their windows open, wakened by the screech of willow on sycamore. No one had shouted at him to shut up. They just watched from a silent, appraising distance, letting the maniac work through whatever he had to.

  A third coffee told him to go back to work. Work meant normality. Meant nothing had changed. Hogg would be pleased. He was bound to need the labour. Jonas. He was here to help.

  He phoned Eggers, who didn’t answer, leaving a message to pick him up at the usual time. On his way for a shower, he checked the spare room. Fletcher still hadn’t reappeared after the search and Jonas indulged the little part of him that wanted to believe he’d gone for good.

  So he smiled as he showered and dressed and waited for Eggers to blast the horn. He felt better, remember? He would not be Jonas of the Cross. He would remember goodness where Big Haakon had forgotten. This was his home. This was where he’d met beautiful young Lacey. This was where he’d continue to smile, no matter the media camped outside his door.

  Eggers didn’t come.

  Jonas paced the living room and peered through the gap in the curtain. He shrugged at Li Po, wondered what to do and decided. He strode into the hallway and there was the front door.

  In Bergen, there had only been two or three journalists waiting for him when he returned to the house on Christinegård after being charged and released on bail. Outside End Point there were almost a dozen. Plus two TV cameras. All of them asked different questions at the same time, about Lacey, Eva and his daughter, fires in the night. But they wanted reaction, not answers, a spat-out no comment, a look of panic or a very public meltdown. So Jonas settled a beatific smile and pushed a way through the throng. He even managed a wave at the green-haired teenage hairdresser opening up another empty day in her salon. She lifted an automatic hand and dropped it like a stone but that was ok, at least she’d tried.

  Two journalists got on the bus with him. One sat directly behind him and continued to jabber questions. The other sat a few seats back, trying to convince himself Jonas hadn’t seen him. Both got off when he did, the last stop before the pedestrianised zone in the town centre.

  He shook off the first in the market. In one door of the fishmonger and out another. He lost the second by joining a group of Spanish tourists crowding along the High Street. When they reached St. Francis’ church he ducked down Finstock Lane and didn’t stop running until the park.

  It took half an hour to walk to the ring road. Half an hour of faces on buses, cars, pavements. Quick looks, held looks, recognition flashes. He pulled his 49ers cap lower but felt more conspicuous than ever. Just needed to pull his collar up to complete the effect. So he did.

  Because it was all a game. An unbelievable game. Two streets later he flung the cap in a bin.

  It was just after 8 am. They were creating a new hamburger roundabout and the traffic was nose to tail, four lanes of dual-carriageway reduced to one each way as they built a relief lane through the centre of the old roundabout. A six- to eight-month job to relieve the traffic that would build exponentially until three years from now they’d have to think again.

  He crossed the lanes to the work site
, the ground where they’d scraped off the vegetation dry and rutted. Men in yellow bibs and red machines, like animals at a dried up watering hole, milling and shouting as a thousand engines revved. He headed for the Portakabins.

  ‘Jonas?’ Boss Hogg looked up with a classic double-take. He was sitting at his desk reading a newspaper.

  ‘Hogg.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be on leave.’

  ‘I guessed you might need me.’

  ‘Did you now?’

  ‘The team’s a man down.’

  ‘Not today. You guessed wrong, Jonas. Go home.’

  ‘Come on Hogg, I – ’

  ‘The boys don’t want you here, Jonas.’

  ‘They might not want me here but it’s my job.’

  Hogg tapped his fingers on the desk. Thinking about something. Holding Jonas’s gaze. ‘Not for long.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  He picked up the two-way radio on the desk. ‘Eggers. You there? Eggers.’

  The radio buzzed a few moments later. ‘Boss man. What’s up?’

  ‘Get yourself in here.’

  ‘Gimme ten, I’m on a break.’

  ‘Just do it!’

  Jonas looked down at the newspaper on the desk. The Sun, a double-page spread. He saw the word Lacey. Bold black letters. ‘If this has got anything to do with her you’re way off the line.’

  ‘Off the mark. It’s got nothing to do with that. There’s a process there and there’s a process here.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  The door handle turned and they both looked round. Eggers saw Jonas and stopped dead.

  ‘Jackie,’ said Hogg. ‘What was that you were telling me this morning? Jonas using the work van for personal use.’

  Eggers stared at him. ‘You what?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Jonas, ‘this is – ’

  ‘This morning. Remember? You said it was out of line how Jonas kept taking the van for personal use.’