Household Ghosts

by James Kennaway

  It wasn’t easy to bluff Silence. Because she had dismissed words altogether her visual sense was astonishingly acute. She could see the shadow of a shade. She could read the tiniest movement of the lines round the doctor’s eyes and mouth. She could see his hands tremble inside his coat pockets. The doctor therefore could not recover the subsequent situation. The more he protested, in order to save her feelings, the less he persuaded her.

  She had been out. She had been to the shops. She had bought herself an exotic new dress and some fantastic costume jewelry, not in order to impress the doctor, but to please him; he knew that. And she looked just awful: so bad that she came to resemble some of the hybrids in that vulgar magazine which the doctor had left on the floor by the dentist’s chair.

  The doctor had come to admire her looks when she was naked or in her jeans and pullover. He didn’t know if he desired her. Possibly he did. Does a child desire the mother? Not that she was purely mother. The circumstances were not such that he then had to answer that. Perhaps he didn’t have the courage to desire her. The doctor was a modest man and over forty years old.

  She quite broke down; collapsed like the wife in a bad domestic comedy, the one who has spent the housekeeping money on an ugly mink hat. The doctor reassured her in vain. She tugged off her earrings, hurting herself; she threw them into the corner of the mangy waiting-room.

  The doctor took off his overcoat, as if he were prepared to spend some hours convincing her that she had spent her money well.

  What a strange farce, the doctor thought; how odd is reality; does she also know that she murdered Lawrence my son?

  She moved into the surgery, carrying her parcels with her. The doctor followed. While she was a goddess she was also always a child. She tore open one paper shopping bag, tore it and threw her jeans and pullover across the linoleum floor. She had decided to change. The doctor kept saying, ‘No, don’t please,’ but nothing would stop her. She was unzipping the new dress.

  ‘Silence, don’t. Really I like it,’ the doctor said, then both, for an instant, froze. He had never used her name before. Both minds moved swiftly, in exact parallel. Both had the alibi. Both knew that the dentist had called her Silence. Both also knew that he had learnt ‘Silence’ from the press. But both had the alibi.

  The zip stuck. She wouldn’t let him help. She tore the dress. Ripped it and stepped out of it. Really, no grown-up white girl could have changed her clothes like this, not even if she were with her lover. Still angry, she paced round like a huffy ten-year-old, in pants, but for some reason without a bra. Then she hauled on her jeans and got lost in her sweater which should have been unbuttoned before she tried to pull it over her big head.

  The performance quite humanised the doctor. He laughed and at last she let him help. But she didn’t laugh herself. She was still too deeply disappointed and offended. When he tried to hold on to her, once the sweater was buttoned at the neck, she moved away. What a body it was. She could bend and pick something off the floor without even dipping her knees. It was one of the magazines she picked up. The white one, so to speak. She strutted next door. She closed the curtains against the dull day and the world that was full of their enemies. She switched on the overhead light which had a cheap shade to make it look like a Japanese lantern.

  Silence never sat in an orderly way. Now she sprawled on the floor on her stomach, and began to turn over the pages. She was looking at the lead article; of course she was. She read it as if it bored her slightly, as if it had nothing whatsoever to do with the two of them. The doctor sat on the greasy sofa, watching her. He took one of her cigarettes which she put on the floor close to his feet. Only when she turned over the page, did he say, ‘It’s not a very good photograph of you. I wouldn’t have recognised you.’

  She tipped up her head. For some reason he expected her to grin. Perhaps the very way that she lifted her head made him sure that she was glad he thought it was a lousy photograph too. But her expression was utterly different. It was blank and hostile, and yet tears were running down her cheeks. That was her confession. He could see that. It caught him unawares. He began to sway backwards and forwards, like a lean little bear; a very unhappy, cornered animal of some sort. She’d forced the moment on him. It was no longer possible to avoid the issue. He felt stuck; completely stuck. She never took her yellow eyes off him, waiting for his judgment. Even morally, the doctor thought, I am a coward and she is brave.

  ‘Shock,’ he said out loud, at last. ‘Shock. Just a state of shock.’

  He smoked half the cigarette, but she still stared. Still she wouldn’t let him off the hook. She was frowning now, deeply, as if she were afraid that he would disappoint her. How little we need words, the doctor thought.

  ‘Shocked by the terrible truth,’ he said very quietly. ‘Shocked by how little I care that my own son is dead.’

  He looked up as if to ask her reassurance and help. Her reaction was neutral. It was as if she could not quite accept what he said. She was staring at him, her eyes less wide open than usual.

  ‘He seemed very separate once he was grown up,’ the doctor said flatly. ‘But I didn’t know how separate.’ Still she looked dissatisfied. The doctor was beginning to tremble badly. To tremble unexpectedly and very violently. To tremble as it were, at the foundations, which is to say in those ditches of life where we find the meetings of mothers and daughters, of fathers and sons.

  She sat. She laid her big hand on his knee. He continued to smoke and shake like a leaf. He looked only at her hand and touched a finger of it, saying, ‘God knows why you paint one nail red.’ Then almost without a break he continued, ‘Why did you take such a vow, who tortured you, or am I wrong? Can’t you speak? Is it your throat? I know you have a tongue. What terrible event moved you to take such a desperate protest? If you can talk, talk now.’

  He looked up and saw only the top of her head. The black hair grew beneath the dry brown. She was lighting herself a cigarette. He said, ‘I didn’t feel at all. When I knew about the boy I didn’t feel anything. That was the shock. Maybe I guessed ten days ago. I can’t see why you’ve saved me. You’ve only seen the worst in me. The coward in me. You’ve seen nothing in me. I wish we’d never left that ghastly hovel. I didn’t feel anything for him. I couldn’t find Absalom. That is why I shake.’

  He heard her say, ‘Shsh.’ Say, ‘Shsh,’ again. But she wouldn’t speak. They waited like that for a moment or two, both smoking again.

  He asked, ‘Did you say out loud to somebody – did you say to some Court? Did you say “I’ll never speak again”?’ He turned her face up and she smiled quite mildly and he saw her beauty as he had never recognised it before. It was sculptured and strong and not aggressive at all. He asked, ‘Or did you say it two hundred years ago?’

  She turned away, but he insisted, as if it helped him to stop trembling. He said, ‘We can’t get away from slavery,’ and bent and kissed her hand which she then withdrew. She was beginning to grow very restless. He used her name in a strange way. He said, ‘In Silence’s company, slavery was yesterday. If I get through, I’ll tell them only that. But I can’t show you how strongly I feel it. I see you often on some African coast, herded on board a crowded ship amongst the shouting and wailing and noise of despair. There is a staggering strength in your silence. Believe me, the most magnificent pathetic protest of them all.’

  She began to sway as if caged. To pull away. But he held on to her wrist very hard. He spoke in a most unusually animated way as if it had to be said. ‘You decided on this silence, complete, utter, unbroken. Alone, standing alone on board this terrible ship as it pulled away from the quay. Give me one word. Say “yes”. Say, “Yes, you’re right, that’s when I decided not to speak.”’

  She broke away. Began to hum some unrecognisable tune. She moved like an animal, swiftly and smoothly. She had taken off her boots. She went to the surgery and brought back one of her parcels. She grinned and spun round as if to say ‘Party, party!’ She had bought Coca Co
la and rum.

  And the doctor thought, How strange it is, but if you know that you’re not going to get any answer you begin to stop asking about the future. There was no point in his asking, ‘What happened to the dentist?’ No point in saying, ‘You were in there while he talked to you for half an hour, so what did he say? I heard you moan.’ No point in inquiring, ‘Where do we go from here?’ For she lived in the present, she lived for now as if she alone understood the immediacy and magnitude of the war.

  The spirit steadied the doctor considerably. How quickly moods change in crisis. Not hers, but his. The liquor went straight to his head. The doctor soon could envisage a moment in which his behaviour could be called something like heroic. The doctor thought, Half the battle is won if you see yourself being brave.

  She got drunk, too. Drunk enough to show him suddenly a big gap in her front teeth. Then only did he begin to understand their present circumstances. All the gold had gone, and that was a lot of gold. Several teeth had been capped that way. The gold must have paid for more than rum and Coke.

  The doctor was beginning to cope again, beginning to be able to connect ideas, to build the chains which alone keep us sane; to link cause and effect. The dentist had extracted the gold, then she had gone out shopping. Maybe she had also paid the dentist for the apartment. He could have needed cash. He certainly didn’t have many customers. Then, Maybe it’s Sunday, the doctor thought. For a second his mind flitted home to Sunday and church and boredom and belief: to telling the children the right things, how to behave …

  Lawrence Junior dead.

  She grew hopelessly, helplessly drunk. She laughed and hummed and danced about. She slipped, fell, knocked things over and invited the doctor to jive or twist or whatever it was. She had no head for liquor at all. She must have known that.

  She also was sick in the surgery basin, but that didn’t hold her back for too long. It simply revealed what he knew, namely that she wasn’t happy at all. Revealed what they both knew, namely that neither of them felt any joy. He helped her back into the waiting-room and put a cushion under her head. It wasn’t exactly a cushion, but the back pad of the only easy-chair. One of the springs was piercing through. She indicated that the world was going round and round, then began to look very green.

  When she closed her eyes the doctor returned to the surgery and put an inch of water in a tumbler full of rum. He vowed he’d never again go to Angel’s club without first drinking a full tumbler of rum.

  The telephone rang. Thinking she was still incapably drunk, the doctor tried to prevent her from removing the receiver from the rest. She gave him one of those blows with the inside of the wrist. She caught him very hard, just over the right eye, and, rum-logged, he still felt the pain.

  It was the dentist on the line. It wasn’t the voice but the phoney smooth phrases, the ‘honeys’ and ‘babies’ that made the doctor sure.

  The instrument was attached to the surgery wall. Silence stood cross-legged as if she were listening to some idle gossip and she never opened her mouth. At the end she simply hung up. The doctor wondered how the dentist could have been confident that he was speaking to her in the first place. Yet if I’d rung Silence, the doctor thought, I’d have known. Which sounds ridiculous but still was true: he’d have felt Silence at the end of the phone.

  The message was perfectly simple. A price had been accepted. The dentist had handed over a pack of dollars to some intermediary character and it was up to the doctor to complete payment when he arrived safely in Whitesville; uptown. The dentist referred to the doctor as ‘the passenger’, which had style. The driver was to come to the house after dark, at exactly ten.

  She’d bought some food; some awful Chinese food, this time, in foil-lined cartons. The doctor obligingly ate in the surgery, but he never could bluff her. Seeing that he was not enjoying the food she soon moved away and lay down in the waiting-room again.

  He didn’t ask her to come close this last hour. He sat on the sofa and soon she went back to him. She laid her head on his lap not just because she felt tired and a little sick. The only thing he said in that long, long hour of no war was, ‘Even lose your front teeth, for God’s sake. You silly big bitch.’ She smiled at the tone, not the words.

  She was still asleep when the taxi drew up outside and the man came up the steps. But as he pressed the bell, a split instant before it rang, there were eyes – yellow eyes, blazing, unblinking, awake, aware, taking in the shadowy red room.

  The bell rang.

  She moved swiftly into the surgery. She grabbed a white coat, a dirty white cotton coat which was hanging behind the door. She insisted that he wear it and carry his own. She shoved notes, a hundred dollar notes into his hand.

  ‘Aren’t you coming?’

  Yellow eyes.

  ‘Not even to the door?’

  There was no war at that given moment, no colour at all; just the mutual danger and alarm as the bell rang once more.

  She dropped her head. He put his hand out and touched her face. Her cheeks were quite dry. She didn’t raise her head again. She was standing by the dentist’s chair: that’s where he saw her, standing immediately beside the hydraulic chair.

  The doctor said, ‘Take care.’

  He left the surgery, the waiting-room, the hall. There was nobody on the doorstep but the taxi double-parked in the street below. Some other car had filled the dentist’s place. The taxi-driver leant back and opened the back door. It wasn’t too light which helped and the doctor kept his head bent low. His courage had been at a lower ebb. Perhaps the dollars in his pocket helped: they often do.

  As soon as he was in the car the driver started away. He just seemed like a rude, impatient boy.

  They’d gone about three blocks. Then this boy, the driver said, ‘Move over to the left.’

  The doctor didn’t catch it. In truth his mind had remained beside the dentist’s chair. He was as calm or as silly as that. So many moods in peril.

  ‘Move over the seat.’

  The boy’s voice was hostile but most city cabmen’s voices seemed to the doctor unfriendly like that. He still did not grasp the danger he was in. He thought that the boy wanted him to move over because he was obstructing the view from the driver’s mirror. He therefore said, ‘Sorry’, as he shifted across.

  The boy then reached in the pocket of the car and the doctor’s blood froze. Again his instinct seemed to leap ahead of reason. His spine knew that the boy had reached for a gun.

  He met the boy’s eye in the driving mirror. The boy had big whites to his eyes. As the car drew up at a crossing the boy said, ‘You’re no fucking dentist.’

  The doctor was still coping. He was scared but he was still making those necessary links. He thought, If I show him the dollar notes at this point, he’ll only take them. He thought, Say nothing, doctor, if there’s nothing to say.

  The lights changed. The boy drove forward again.

  They were on the lakeside, the doctor was sure of that, on the lakeside driving north, which was the direction in which he wanted to travel, but there was still a long long way to go. The roads were icy but the sky seemed to be clear.

  The boy was driving very fast, as if he wanted to confuse his passenger. Left. Right and right again. Yet they never reached the lakeside highway. They didn’t get as far as that. The boy evidently knew that the doctor was due to pay him a hundred, uptown. And maybe he had worked out what the doctor was thinking about. Suddenly he spoke.

  ‘I don’t want your money,’ he said.

  He never added, ‘Whitey’ or ‘scum’ or whatever. He had put on driving glasses now, which were tinted blue. They acted as a mask. But he kept watching the doctor in the mirror.

  ‘Don’t piss yourself in my cab,’ he said, and so gave the doctor an important link.

  The doctor’s wound, for some reason, had begun to throb. Maybe the rush of adrenalin had some strange indirect influence on the pulses there. Not that the doctor cared about that. He found the throbbi
ng reassuring. He’d been hurt before and was still living to tell the tale. Boy, he thought, if you think I look frightened, you should have seen me earlier on. The doctor was coping better. He was observing well. The streets were much emptier now. The boy despised him. ‘At the next crossing, you start running,’ he said.

  The doctor thought to himself, What a sporting boy. Not going to shoot a sitting white bird?

  The car came very suddenly to a halt. But the doctor was getting a lot, lot better. He did not crumple forward as the boy had hoped. He already had his hand on the door handle. As the car stopped he therefore catapulted straight on to the road. He somersaulted more or less, and began running almost before he found his feet. Fortunately there was no traffic coming the other way. He reached the opposite sidewalk before a truck came by.

  He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to know if the boy was cruising after him. He ran, turned right, and ran. At the next corner he was pretty sure that he was not being followed. He had turned up a one-way lane and the boy would have had to speed round another block or else leave his car and chase on foot. There was so sign of him.

  The doctor was doing better. He ran back up the block and at the next corner took the decision of his life. He turned right again. His body had seemed to take the decision for him. In moments of courage as in moments of fear, we’re no longer controlled by our heads. The doctor slackened his pace. He walked. He wasn’t running away.

  He reckoned he should now be approaching the crossing at which the boy had dumped him. The white coat, by the way, was a stroke of genius. It was possible to walk and run in it without arousing suspicion. At the worst, the doctor thought, I can say, ‘Baby’, or ‘Accident’, or, ‘I’m a doctor pretending to be a doctor, get out of my road!’

  He wondered if maybe he should always drink rum. But then he had to stop for a second. He had something more than a stitch. As he bent to regain his breath he saw a little mark on the coat. The wound must have burst open somehow. It was wet and red again. Still he didn’t lose his nerve. He kept thinking of these strange, almost witty things. He said to himself as he started to run again, ‘Why doctor, you’re a doctor running to your own emergency.’