The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir

by John Mitchell

  “Eech! ‘I hear the sound…of distant drums.’ Eech! ‘Far away…far away…’”

  And Mum was particularly careful not to say any Yoruba in front of the Igbo because that would be inconsiderate but I knew she was excited to say something in Yoruba when Akanni’s parents arrived, especially because Akanni’s mum was wearing her full tribal costume.

  “Ek’abo! Bawo Iowa?” Mum announced.

  “Mowa dada, Ese!”

  I was very pleased with my mum because she had no one to teach her those words, except from a book, and Akanni’s parents obviously understood them because they answered her in Yoruba.

  “What a wonderful costume!” Mum said.

  “Ah, yes. It’s traditional,” Akanni’s mum replied.

  “I’ve been reading all about African traditions! What is that cloth?”

  “Well, this is a special cloth. It is hand woven…an alaari asho oke cloth. It is the traditional cloth of the Yoruba people.”

  “Och, that’s wonderful! I will get a photo of you later. Come into the kitchen and meet Ngozi’s parents. I’m sure you will like them.”

  “Peace and love,” Margueretta whispered and made a strange gesture with two fingers.

  This is when things started to go wrong.

  No one said we were not to eat all the cucumber sandwiches and Ritz Crackers and there really wasn’t enough to go round especially when Joan Housecoat ate far more than her fair share before the Yoruba even arrived. We had not started on the Swiss Roll, however.

  Mum introduced them to each other and asked wasn’t it wonderful that Akanni’s Mum had worn her tribal costume for such a special day? And they just stared at each other and the Igbo especially stared at the tribal costume. Then the music came to an end, and Joan Housecoat said it was far too quiet.

  “Ooo-er! Did you know each other when you lived back home in Nigeria?”

  “No. We lived in the Southeast. There are sixty million people in Nigeria, you know!” replied Ngozi’s father.

  And he stared at the tribal costume again and stood up and asked if there was more tea.

  “We need more music! Music soothes the savage breast,” Mum announced.

  “Make love, not war,” Margueretta added with a smirk.

  “Shut up!” Mum replied, under her breath.

  I had to move quickly. I had already hidden it behind the sofa. I had been practicing for weeks and Mum said it would be a very good idea even though Margueretta laughed at me. It was my David Nixon Junior Magic Box. Mum bought it at the Methodist Church jumble sale and the instructions were missing but I managed to work out how most of the tricks were done—a sleight of hand can deceive the eye.

  “I will now do a magic show!” I announced.

  “Oh God, how embarrassing,” Margueretta said.

  “Ooo-er! I’ve never seen a magic show!”

  I started with the special David Nixon disappearing egg trick. No one could work out where the egg went and everyone clapped. I had to do it again because Joan said she didn’t really see it the first time because she did not have her glasses on. Everyone clapped again.

  “Eech! That’s amazing. Eech!”

  Then I did the trick where you appear to be cutting a rope in half and then, as if by magic, it is joined back together again.

  I saved the collapsing stick trick to last. It’s all done with my five-in-one magic wand.

  “He only knows three tricks,” Margueretta said loudly.

  “It was seven tricks!” I protested because I had in fact done five tricks with my five-in-one magic wand.

  “Leave him alone,” said Mum.

  Everyone clapped again and Mum put South Pacific on the record player even though she said she wouldn’t. It’s a very racy record.

  “Eech! Another one of my favorites! Eech…” The midget woman sang:

  Bali Ha’i may call you, any night, any day…

  Here am I your special island…

  Come to me, come to me…

  “Eech!”

  “Gather round! Gather round! Time for a group photo!” Mum announced, holding Nana’s old Browning camera.

  “Peace and love. Well done, Mum. I think you’ve brokered peace!”

  “Watch your mouth, young lady!

  “Peace out. Make love, not war.”

  “Joan, could you take the picture, please? You don’t need to be in it. You’re not family.”

  55

  Ngozi is no longer living with us in the refuge-for-troubled-children because she will not be sharing a roof with an evil people who are guilty of genocide, even if Mum did manage to get her to talk and she is now potty trained. The Igbo came back a week after the tea party and took her away. And the Igbo do not wish to be called Nigerians anymore because they are now from the breakaway state of Biafra.

  They agreed that it was obviously not my mum’s fault that they came from warring tribes.

  “Well, it is true that the BBC Six O’clock News only started reporting the conflict when our Republic of Biafra was proclaimed by Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu, may God make him victorious. But a war is a war, and Ngozi cannot stay,” said Ngozi’s father.

  Ngozi put her fist in her mouth and started to cry.

  “You can’t stop her talking sometimes. Quite the chatterbox, she is,” Mum said and started to sob.

  “You are a gifted woman!” Ngozi’s mum replied, and then she started to cry.

  “And she’s mostly dry at night, but she does have the occasional accident. Don’t you, sweetheart?”

  Ngozi nodded and made a frightening low-pitched squeal, like the noise an animal would make just before being clubbed to death.

  It’s true that Ngozi is no longer in nappies but the other day she did an actual shit in her bed and Mum had to scoop it out with toilet paper. I had to take the sheets to the launderette and I still have to wash them in the machine for oily overalls because even if I don’t take Ngozi or Akanni with me that bloody woman knows I am washing things for black people and despite my prayers, she still does not seem to have Jesus in her heart.

  “You have worked a miracle with our little Ngozi! She is like a different child! A totally different child, I say!”

  “Take good care of her, please, please,” Mum wept.

  Ngozi held onto Mum’s arm and looked up at her, bottom lip turned up and tears streaming down her little shiny cheeks.

  “We will. We will. We will take such good care of her.”

  “She’s a good little girl. Aren’t you, sweetheart?”

  “Thank you for everything! She’s going to another foster home next week.”

  The good news is that before they left, Ngozi’s dad gave Mum five pounds for a gas fire to be fitted in our front room so that we do not have to freeze to death next winter. And if we want to foster any other children in the refuge-for-troubled-children, they will now be warm and it would be wise to ask where they come from, unless they are white, as there is a full-scale civil war going on in Nigeria.

  “God bless our soldiers!”

  Things are looking up. One less mouth to feed, and we will not freeze to death next winter.

  Mum is continuing to teach herself Yoruba and she says I would do well to learn a foreign language because I should go to live in another country one day as this country’s going to rack and ruin and the weather is terrible. And I reminded her that I have been learning French for two years with Madame Auclair.

  I did not, however, tell Mum that Madame Auclair’s knickers fell down last week. It’s her own fault because she is so fat and her knicker elastic broke when she was walking up the driveway into school. I am very happy that her knicker elastic broke because I do not like Madame Auclair and she does not like me. She says that I will never learn French and I told her that I never wanted to learn French in the first place and I hope I that I will never live in France or any other country that speaks French.

  “You doe nat know ‘ow lucky you air. I am ear az part of zis special project to g
et you all out of diz trageek poverty. Franch will become the lingua francas of ooll modern societies. Zis country is doomed. Zat ees why Monsieur de Gaulle said, ‘Non!’ It will always be, ‘Non!’ You had better zink about zat, Dominique Mitchell!”

  Madame Auclair gave us all French names. She deliberately calls me Dominique because I said it sounded like a girl’s name when she first suggested it.

  When her knickers fell down, I was playing Jerries and English with my best friend Danny, and he was a German as usual but the English were winning, and Madame Auclair screamed and shouted for all the girls to gather round. We could see her knickers lying at her ankles. This could mean only one thing: we needed to move in close and maybe see a French quim. Or at a minimum, a French arse.

  “Fuck, we could see her French arse, for fuck’s sake! We might see her fucking pubes too!”

  Danny likes to say “fuck” more than any other word and he can use the word “fuck” to mean any word he doesn’t know.

  Danny is my best friend because we want exactly the same things. We want money and we want to see girls naked. But we can never agree on which one we want the most.

  We have not seen a girl completely naked as yet but we are getting close to seeing the quim because Danny has persuaded Cindy and Mandy to do handstands with us over by the bushes. We hold their legs for them so that they can stand on their hands for as long as possible with their dresses over their heads while we stare closely at their knickers, looking from different angles to see if we can see the quim. We try to do this most playtimes but we still haven’t seen anything beyond a gusset.

  So this was our big opportunity. We moved in for a closer look at Madame Auclair’s knickers.

  “Aieeee! Mon Dieu! Aieeee! Come close! Girls! Come close! Zut alors, mes enfants!”

  We watched her closely because Danny said she would have to pull her knickers up and that always means you will get to see at least an arse. There was a small gap in the circle of girls and we made our move.

  We could see Madame Auclair wriggling her ankles.

  Wriggle, wriggle, wriggle.

  But she stepped out of her knickers and never even took her stiletto shoes off.

  “I don’t fucking believe it! Fuck that! She’s fucking stepped out of those fucking great knickers. Fuck!” Danny moaned.

  “You have such a très jolie robe, Madame Auclair.”

  “Merci, Maxine. Merci très beaucoup.”

  Maxine was not Tracy’s real name.

  And Danny was waiting for a really big gust of wind.

  56

  Danny dropped his pencil on the floor seven times in our French lesson. He kept saying, “Zut alors!” That is what you say in French and not, “Fuck me, I’ve dropped my fucking pencil on the floor again,” if you’ve accidentally dropped your pencil on the floor right under Madame Auclair’s desk.

  “Did you see anything? Anything?” I asked.

  “Not a fucking pube. The desk is in the fucking way,” he whispered to me.

  “She might have her knickers back on.”

  “No fucking way! Those knickers were fucked. Didn’t you see them? She’s naked under that dress. I know it. Her quim is completely fucking naked.”

  “She might have a spare pair.”

  “Fuck me, that’s funny! No one has a spare pair of knickers, you idiot! She’s only got two pairs. One on and one in the fucking wash. Just like the rest of us!”

  Danny was lying. We have to get changed for physical education in our classroom, girls and boys together, and that’s how we all know that Danny has no underpants at all. The first time we all got changed together he took down his trousers and his willy was there for all the girls to see. Of course, the girls all crowded round for a closer look while I tried to shield him.

  “Go on, have a fucking look! I don’t care if you see my fucking cock!” he said and wiggled it at them.

  Some of the girls gasped.

  Danny says his plan is to let the girls see his cock and then he can ask to see their quim. It is a simple trade.

  “You’ve fucking seen mine so now let me see yours!”

  So far this has not worked. But he keeps trying. He has even offered Mandy a private viewing.

  Danny says it’s better to have no underpants at all because then you know you are never wearing any and you therefore know you are naked under your trousers. If you have only one pair then you might be wearing underpants and you might not and then the girls will not know whether they are going to see your cock or not. Although Danny did accept that this could create quite a bit of anticipation from the girls at PE time. Two pairs, however, is ideal because then you’ve got one pair on and one in the wash but that can also be a problem because one wet fart early in the week and you will have to sit on it for days.

  That’s what happened to Gary Gibly today. We were getting ready for our swimming lesson and luckily we have actual changing rooms at the swimming pool or the girls would have seen what we saw. When he hung his underpants on the hook we could all see that huge thing poking out like a ferret. It was dried up, of course. He said he did it on Monday when he thought it was just a fart and now it’s Thursday and he is going to have to live with it until the weekend or not wear any pants at all. I’ve never heard of someone farting an entire turd. It will be quite a shock for his mum when she comes to do the weekly wash.

  Danny loves swimming lessons and so do I because it means we don’t have to have a bath that week. The only thing we hate about swimming is Mr. Hudson. He’s our class teacher and he slaps us for no reason at all and everyone knows that a slap on a wet leg really stings.

  Mr. Hudson likes to supervise the girls getting undressed in their changing room because he is an old pervert and likes to help them with their knickers. Danny says he wishes he could help the girls with their knickers because then he could see all the quims he wants. That’s why Mr. Hudson spends so much time in the girls changing room.

  “He doesn’t fucking get any you know what from Mrs. Hudson.”

  “Any what?”

  “Shagging. No shagging. Fucking old pervert. I’m desperate for a fucking shag, I am.”

  “Yeh. Me too.”

  I am not sure what a shag is.

  We’ve also tried standing behind the girls in the swimming pool when they are practicing their leg movements for the breaststroke but we haven’t seen anything worthwhile because the water gets all frothed up. And recently, I have been paying particular attention to Viola Pinkerton because she has got actual breasts. But Danny says they are not real breasts and the only reason she’s got them is because she is so fat. Her mum works in a cake shop.

  It would be a lot better if I could actually swim because then I could show off and the girls would be amazed and want to watch me. They are not amazed by my three strokes of doggy paddle in the shallow end. I therefore decided it was time to make my move. I would push away from the side and do the breaststroke. This was a huge mistake.

  I sank immediately and swallowed a lot of water. And that’s when I realized something terrible. Gary Gibly was practicing his leg strokes right beside me.

  His stinky bum was being washed clean by the water I had just swallowed.

  I could die.

  57

  I don’t know if it was Gary Gibly’s shitty bum or the sardines on toast for tea that made me throw up. Mum said I needed to go and lie down and stop being so dramatic. That’s easy for her to say. She’s not the one who has swallowed Gibly’s crusty turd. I really could die.

  The room is spinning round and round and I’ve noticed that if I open my eyes in the pitch black in the middle of the night I can see tiny creatures floating in the air. They only come out at night. I don’t think they can harm you but it’s best to keep your eyes shut tight and keep the blanket over your head.

  Sometimes a week passes without a single sound and it’s easy to believe that the screaming has stopped forever but then it starts again and a nasty pain shoots down through
my stomach. Tonight it is making we want to throw up again.

  It’s not quite so scary, because Akanni sleeps in my room now. He sleeps in a box bed that folds out of a wooden cupboard. It has a really thin mattress and when he pisses himself, which happens a lot, it runs straight through the mattress and bounces off the floorboards with a sound like a machine gun. He left some Lego under his bed last week. I’m not playing Lego anymore.

  Akanni never wakes up when the screaming starts in the attic. Sometimes it starts like a howl, like someone who is pretending to be a ghost. And then I know it’s not someone pretending to be a ghost because it turns into the sound you would make if you were being murdered and it’s hard to pretend you are being murdered. But still, Akanni never wakes up.

  There is something really bad in our house. I think it is going to get worse. Much, much worse. Margueretta says that the thing from the cellar in our old house has finally found its way back to us and is living in the attic. She also says that it speaks to her in the night and tells her to kill herself. Or kill someone else.

  And if she doesn’t, that thing will kill her.

  She said there are other things I should know. The water must never be allowed to run from a tap when she is in the room. Under no circumstances can it be allowed to look like a glass tube. And there are voices in her head that are not hers and they wait for her and they say very bad things. She hasn’t told me all the details but they are voices of evil. One of them is the Devil.

  I need to be sick one more time.

  58

  Auntie Dot is so much fatter than I remember. She was only supposed to be visiting for a day but she is going to stay for a week. That’s why she didn’t bring a change of clothes but it doesn’t matter because she never changes her clothes anyway. And as for washing or having a bath, I overheard her telling Mum that she was on her “monthly” and a woman should not wash during her cycle for fear of infection. I asked Mum about this and she said it was not important for me to know and Emily would know when her time comes because it is the blight all women were born for.