And take the snow back with you where it came from on that day…
And if I could you know that I would,
Fly away with you…”
She listens to it over and over again all day. So we should buy the record when she gets out, that’s what the nurse said.
Margueretta wants to fly away. But she can’t. She’s in this cage.
And this other woman keeps tugging at my arm and asking when her mummy is going to be here. She says she’s waiting for her mummy to come in a taxi to take her home. She’s as old as Nana. I would think her mummy is dead. Now she’s crying for her mummy.
“Please find my mummy. Please find her. She’s coming for me today. She’s coming to take me home to see my papa. I want my mummy. Please tell her I’m in here. She’s coming today in a taxi to take me home. Please find my mummy…”
And I am sure that each one is waiting for her mummy to come and take her home at the end of school and whisper, “I love you,” in her ear. And tuck her up in bed at night with an orange nightlight reflecting little moons and stars on the ceiling and give her a cup of hot chocolate to drink while mummy softly reads The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck.
And her daddy would sing to her.
Here we go loopy loo,
Here we go loopy light,
Here we go droopy-doo,
All on a Saturday night!
And twirl her around so that her little skirt would fly out. And he would call her “droopy drawers” because her skirt sat so low underneath her plump little tummy.
But no mummy or daddy is coming to take any of them home. They will always be here, staring out of the windows through the iron bars. And the others will be on the outside, staring back.
No sign of Margueretta, though. But there is another girl about the same age as Margueretta. Wrists are bandaged. She looks like a ghost. It’s not nice to look like a ghost, but I don’t think she knows.
Keep walking down the corridor. Take no notice of the people who are screaming. Ignore the arms that are reaching into the air. I think that woman just peed herself. Keep walking to the bed on the end.
There are only two chairs by the bed, so I will stand. And I don’t know why we have to wait by this bed with that woman lying there under the blankets, staring at the ceiling.
“Kiss your sister. Give Margueretta a kiss. Go on.”
I’m not kissing her. She doesn’t look like Margueretta. She’s yellow and gray and old with black circles round her red, red eyes. She has a wide purple-black ring around the skin on her neck.
And her hands are shaking, as she reaches her pale thin arms out to touch me. Reaching out like a dead person wanting to touch something that’s still alive.
95
Mum bought that “Snowbird” record and, since we were in the music shop, she suggested we splash out on a new LP to listen to on Sundays. This could mean the end of “Bali Ha’i.” It was a hard choice, but she came down in favor of the soundtrack to the Sound of Music. It was either that or Merle Haggard. His girlfriend does not love him anymore, and there is a hole in his shoe. His wine is all gone, and he needs some more. But for us it will be the Mother Abbess who is climbing every bloody mountain.
They’re in it together. I know that it could not have been a coincidence that Florie Atkins gave me the piano score for the Sound of Music as an early Christmas present. So now I am learning to play “Edelweiss” while she stamps her foot and bangs her hand on the side of the piano. And since it is a musical, she is also singing along. Mum keeps asking me to play “Edelweiss” because a small white flower on a mountainside is just one way that we can see the face of God. She can’t wait for me to learn “The Lonely Goatherd.”
According to Miss Peabody, you should not listen to lively music on a Sunday, or it will distract you from your thoughts of God. Certainly not pop music, jazz, or rock ’n’ roll. Permissible genres are classical, gospel, country and western, and anything by Rodgers and Hammerstein. This is why you cannot listen to Paint Your Wagon. Also, there is a lot of wooing in that movie, and the Fandango girls are women of ill repute. If not for this, Lee Marvin’s “Wandr’in’ Star” could be listened to because it has the Sabbath cachet of being sung in a tuneless and morose style, creating a musical sense of depression and grief.
We can also listen to hymns.
“Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” remains Miss Peabody’s all-time favorite.
Stand up, stand up for Jesus, Ye soldiers of the Cross,
Hold high his royal banner,
It must not suffer loss.
From victory unto victory, his armies he shall lead,
‘Til every foe is vanquished and Christ is Lord indeed.
Don’t even think about asking or Miss Peabody will tell you everything about this hymn. It was written in memory of the Reverend Dudley Tyng, who died as a result of his silk tunic getting caught in a corn thrasher, ripping his arm from its socket. He lost a lot of blood, the wound got infected, and he died. Apparently, his last words were, “Let us all stand up for Jesus.”
I am sure that Valium use increases on Sundays.
The television is no better. Tonight we watched David Kossoff on Storytime telling the tale of Cain and Abel. Cain was jealous of Abel because God did not praise him. This was after Cain only gave God a few grains of corn as an offering whereas Abel killed an actual lamb or two. It was God’s test to see if Cain would let the evil take him over. So Cain takes his brother for a walk and murders him, and then God curses the ground so that it will never produce again. Miss Peabody says that the murder of Abel was the creation of evil after the original sin when man discovered woman. And Cain was the evil one, the origin of the Devil.
I think this answers the question about whether God created the Devil. He did.
It is permissible to laugh on Sundays but only at a religious joke. This is why the chief usher tells the same joke at the end of the sermon every week when he reads the Parish notices.
“The Young Wives Club will meet at five o’clock on Thursday. All those wishing to become Young Wives, please see the reverend in his study.”
And the Sunday roast dinner was definitely invented to help people get through the day. The comfort of roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, and lashings of gravy probably helps to prevent several attempted suicides per week. We, however, had something purple and hairy for dinner that the butcher thought was for our dog. Part heart, part udder. And without a decent meal from Monday to Friday, I am in real danger of starving to death. Any advert on the old telly involving food or sweets is becoming highly hypnotic to me—even the advert for Maltesers, the chocolate with the less-fattening center that should only be eaten by girls who are watching their waistlines.
I have told Mum that this cannot continue. Obviously, I did not tell her about my risk of starvation and the lunch ticket scam, even though the purple, hairy heart-udder we were supposed to eat for dinner needed some discussion. But I did tell her that from now on I will not be going to either Sunday School or Church because there is nothing further that I can be taught about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the archangel Gabriel, the Bible in general, or specifically the concept of Original Sin.
This did not go well.
Mum has seen my demand to stay at home on Sundays as a clear sign that I have reached “that” age, and it is time that she told me a thing or two about the desperate plight of man and the need for procreation, and how, exactly, we all came into this world.
“There are things you need to know, Johnny. It’s time that you knew. Some of this may come as quite a shock. I will spare you some of the detail. But the world is full of shocks. Sit yourself down.”
Firstly, I should consider myself a servant of God, and since I have not yet reached the age of adulthood, I could not have served any worthy purpose, and therefore I owe God a great debt. Mum was right. This has come as quite a shock. I thought that my childhood double-duty of Sunday School with Miss Peabody and nightly prayers o
n my knees had been a clear sign of my belief and devotion. I had no idea I was racking up a debt to God.
Secondly, she said I must continue to attend church, as I will be tested later in life by all manner of temptations, betrayal, grief, death, and possibly by a general lack of purpose. It will be during these times that I will need to turn to God and will regret having selfishly abandoned Him before I have even reached my teenage years or repaid my debt. I will especially need Him if I do not know why I am here.
And finally, there are sins that I will encounter specifically involving the serpent and the apple but am still too young to know what these are in any detail. Adam and Eve are also involved.
“All men are the same. Mark my word. You’ll get the taste for it, and that will be that. You’re just a boy now, but, in a couple of years you’ll be a man, and you’ll be out there with Eve and the serpent. Do you understand?”
“Not really.”
“And to think that you want to abandon God at this stage in your life. I’ve never heard the like of it. The serpent hides in the branches and in the leaves. Right, laddie?”
“Not sure what you mean.”
“Once you’ve dipped your wick, you will not be able to resist it, no matter what.”
“Dipped my wick?”
“The flesh is weak! We’ll leave it at that for now.”
This is the original sin. The technical term, I think, is “wooing,” and this clearly demonstrates why I should not be listening to the soundtrack to Paint Your Wagon. Especially on a Sunday.
And there was absolutely no mention of the quim.
96
She howls like a desperate wolf in the smothering black air of the night. Then she screams the way anyone would scream who is convicted to the sentence of blind torture by faceless demons. Alone in a darkness that is too big for this world, swirling around inside her head.
And those things talk to her with their independent voices. Not pretty, adolescent conversations about boys and lipstick and babies. Just whispers of death and dying and the constant taunting to kill herself. Even sleep is no escape. They come to her in her dreams. They live inside her and outside at the same time.
But there is no dead child in the attic. No necrotic, entombed girl waiting to be released from her eternal purgatory. No half-life screeching in the emptiness for her freedom. To be released by those who cruelly abandoned her to her immurement.
After all this time, there is no child in the attic. It’s Margueretta. Mum knew it was her all along—her voice coming through the vents in the ceiling like a child in the attic. Mum knew it but she didn’t want to admit that Margueretta was screaming in the night. Mum wouldn’t admit it for fear it would frighten Emily and me—for fear that it would terrify us almost to death.
Margueretta has been screaming for years.
But I’m more frightened now. It was easier to think of a ghost in the attic, or a dead child abandoned by the gypsies who fled in the night. A ghost that might find its way home—a terrible ghoulish nightmare in the godforsaken darkness. A nightmare that I might wake up from.
Now I know it’s Margueretta, and I can hear the fear of death in those screams. She takes her pills before she goes to bed, but they never last the night. And then that thing comes to her that’s rarely seen. It whispers first, and then it cries in her ears and inside her head like a prisoner trapped in a cell when all the other inmates have been released. A friend at first—and then the vile hands of a killer reaching down inside her throat to throttle her or wrap it’s palms around her nose and mouth. Locked in the cell together.
She tells her story now. I have to listen.
Soon it will be me. Not the imagined skull smeared across the bedroom window glass like the slow motion of a hideous, haunting sludge. Or that person who always stands behind me but is never there when I turn around. Those are easy things to forget, easy to ignore.
No, she says there are embodiments of evil inside me, feeding on tiny random thoughts that don’t mean a thing. Just a thought of savage death, slicing through the purple hairy beast with the mass of blackened veins. Eating the cow’s rejected body of cancerous flesh that grew beside its udder. Or the suffocating darkness that’s too big for the space and comes down through gaps in the trapdoor to join the ancient darkness that was there before anyone or anything. And still it’s too big and wants the space that is inside me—the darkness that I stole from the cellar and keep inside my head.
I can’t forget those things when the sun shines. Not the voices she says are inside me. Not the same voices from the water streaming from the tap like a vile, immovable glass rod. Those things don’t only belong to the night.
So I am knocking on her door tonight. Some nights are worse than others, and it seems like an inevitable death will end it all. Most times I bury my head under the blanket, pull it around my ears, around my head, and pray for the screams to stop. But tonight I knock on her door, a gentle tap.
The screaming stops. Nothing.
And then the door opens with such a force that I fall back and down, away from her door. And I scuttle like a human crab, moving backwards on all-fours, headfirst, away from it all—away from the fear-wet face and the suddenness of my sister’s violent grief. Away from the thing that comes inside her head and could so easily come inside my own.
“Help me…help me. For God’s sake, help me. I’m going to die!” she screams.
She wants God now. She would renounce the Devil and let God back. She would say her passionate prayers like any sinner wanting redemption. Wanting to be released from the fiery lakes of Hell. Declaring with her mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believing in her heart that God raised him from the dead. She will be saved.
For my sister has not sinned, save the offense towards God of trying to take her own life.
She is afraid for her life.
And when the silence returns, as it always does, I hear the rattle of the piss running through Akanni’s thin mattress and bouncing on the floorboards below. Then he groans the groan of the first boy, turns over in his restless, box-bed sleep, and returns to his boyish dreams of heroic adventures.
97
Something wonderful has happened that means I can eat again. Emily and I have found jobs at the local greengrocers. Strictly speaking, it is illegal for us to be working at age thirteen. But Mrs. McWilliams, the proprietor, sees us as her “widow’s mites,” and she has taken pity on us. She will pay us in cash, no paperwork.
When she asked what our father does, I replied that we do not have a father, and for some reason she jumped to the conclusion he was killed in a terrible accident. I did not tell her that he went out to see a man about a dog just after Winston Churchill’s funeral and has not been seen since, except for an episode in a pub involving a broken bottle, which we do not talk about. I did not correct her, and I may have encouraged her by looking like a sad and distressed little boy whose father was tragically killed in a terrible accident.
“A sudden accident?”
I just stared down at the floor.
Mrs. McWilliams knows all about death, having survived the Allied blitz of Hamburg in 1943. And that’s where she met her husband, who is Scottish, when he was serving in the British Second Army after the war. So she speaks English with a German-Scottish accent. Unless she is angry, and then she just speaks German.
I am therefore learning some important phrases such as, “Vas ist zat, Scotch Mist?” or, “Bringen sie pastinak,” which means, “fetch the parsnips.”
I carry sacks of potatoes and crates of cabbages up two flights of stairs and restock all the shelves of fruit and vegetables, and I make enough money to buy three whole packets of Dunlop floor tiles per week. I have therefore picked out a mock-oak plastic design for the hall, which I shall lay in a parquet style, alternating the grain. I have decided to leave the front room for last just to see if Woolworth’s pulls the same sale trick with the mock-oak. I do not want to introduce a color to go with the oak parquet.
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I am also able to afford a packet of Camel unfiltered cigarettes to smoke with Carl. Carl is the permanent lad who works in the shop all week. He is almost sixteen and knows all about quims. His girlfriend is a slut, which means that she drops her knickers at a moment’s notice for just about anyone, and if I want to do it with a real-life quim, he will bring her round one afternoon. I suggested next Saturday.
And Carl is much stronger than me because he lifts those crates and sacks all week. He says he is going to make something of himself one day but in the meantime he is trying to throw a potato over the next row of shops.
“If you throw it hard enough, you can get it over the building there!”
I cannot throw a potato further than the parking bays at the back of our shop. But Carl has a huge swing, and he can launch a potato with such a force that it flies over the opposite three-story building. We can’t see beyond the building, but we know there is another street of shops over there.
He does practice throws with brussels sprouts, and when he’s got a good aim, he throws a Maris Piper. It feels really good to drag on an unfiltered Camel and watch that Maris Piper potato rocket over the rooftops into the next street. It’s a shame we can’t see it explode when it lands. Maris Pipers are really good for baking because they are quite large.
We don’t just sell fruit and vegetables. We sell Coca-Cola, flowers, fresh farm eggs, pickled onions, and Lucozade. But we’ve had to discount the fresh farm eggs by 80 percent because they have been on the shelf for over three months, and Mrs. McWilliams doesn’t know exactly when they were laid. Actually, they were not even fresh farm eggs. She got them from the wholesaler. We are therefore selling them on a no-return basis and have had to put a limit of only one dozen per customer.
“Zis floor is nicht clean! Vash it again!”
We were washing the floor this afternoon for a second time, Carl and me, when a short fat lady in a faux-fur coat came into the shop.
“Vee are closed! Kannst du nicht read?
“Who the fucking hell did this!”
The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir Page 28