The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  ‘Talk about “Aw me bliddy leg”,’ I said. It was a private joke. When her other hip fractured, I had given her a fist-sized hand-painted stone. The picture showed a house at night with one light on in the top window and ‘Aw me bliddy leg’ written in a balloon coming from the lighted window.

  ‘Yes. It’s “Aw me bliddy leg” all right,’ she said, smiling before drifting off again.

  Jokes. What a rackety handrail to help us through the blizzard.

  I found Ellie’s room at the hospice rather spartan and functional although she had seemed quite satisfied with it. Two days after her broken leg was plastered she lay propped on pillows in a coma. Just before she went into the coma she had made a gargantuan effort to sit up in bed, frowning with concentration, bewilderment and determination, struggling to remain in the land of the living. Friends helped her to lie back again. Family and friends came and went and chatted round the bed. They say that hearing is the last thing to go. I worried that she could hear what people were saying about her death. There was not much noise apart from the regular rattle of the machine that automatically shot morphine into her veins.

  I watched.

  According to some groups of South American Indians, it is the manner of death, the way that you die, that determines your after-life, not the sort of life you have led, and I can see the truth in that. The real self is revealed only in death.

  In those last few days, I saw the earth gradually claiming my friend back. For Ellie and me, the last coherent exchange had been a shared joke. She was transmuting into clay. Her face was heavy and drawn down by gravity. The elasticity of the waxen skin altered and thickened like Plasticine and her features seemed to go through several different stages of being almost weighted and pulled into shapes by G-forces. Each day there was a different configuration of features. Death is related to the force of gravity.

  Eventually, and unexpectedly, a strikingly beautiful empress took up her position on the bed with an expression of relaxed and heavy disdain. A tragic sensuality emerged, the bloom of power weighted with the burdens of dictatorship. The politics, values and activities of a lifetime had nothing to do with this. This was another self come true, the self that could have been. She lay there with a magnificence that I had never seen or understood before. It belonged to the certainty of no longer dealing with exchange, interaction or give and take. Life is the mask that drops off and death protrudes from underneath as the reality – a reality which has been long hidden by disguise. The masquerade was over.

  It is never possible to pin down the moment of death with accuracy, even if the most recent atomic measuring clock were to hand. It does not take place at one instant. The event is a blurring of boundaries, a smudge, indefinable, a mystery. At what point do you measure the last exhalation, the last movement of the blood, the heart’s final tremor, which brain cell fires after all the rest. The change is gradual and extraordinary and usually imperceptible. You are never quite sure when it has happened. A little while before Ellie died her eyes opened and stared at nothing, beautiful glazed grey-blue eyes, lolling like heavy blooms on stalks.

  She died on firework night, five years to the day after I had experienced that premonition. The first sporadic rockets exploded in the night sky as I made my way home. The premonition had been misplaced, although I suppose that each individual death is in some way its own holocaust.

  Don’t Give Me Your Sad Stories

  All laughter is either triumphant or helpless and Jimmy McLeod was in need of the latter variety. That’s why he was looking for Dave. Whenever Jimmy wanted a certain sort of drinking companion he tried to track down Dave Garner. Dave would help him get rid of the tension. It was early Sunday evening. The Soho pub was half dead. Jimmy went over to the telephone by the bar and dialled the number of Dave’s ex-wife. A woman answered. Jimmy held the receiver away from his ear a bit so he didn’t have to listen to the thin voice complaining about how she’d been divorced from Dave for two years but that he still insisted on coming round for his Sunday dinner. There was a long pause, then Dave’s voice came on the line.

  ‘How’s the crack?’ Jimmy enquired.

  ‘I was sleeping, as it happens.’ The voice sounded dozy and slow like a cat purring.

  ‘I don’t know why Eileen puts up with you.’

  ‘Oh I just like to bring me laundry here on a Sunday for old time’s sake.’ The two men giggled. ‘Anyway, don’t you understand, I’m a sort of status symbol. People come round here and they see me asleep on the sofa, all bevvied, snoring, one sock on and one sock off, and they think: Christ! It must cost fifty quid a day to keep him in that state.’

  Jimmy laughed. He felt better already. The woman with untidy hair behind the bar smiled over at him.

  ‘Are you coming up or what?’ Jimmy was frowning now, anxious in case Dave couldn’t make it.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘The Three Grapes.’

  ‘Fucking hell. I can’t come there. The other night I sold some of the prostitutes a whole lot of nylon stockings with no feet. There was a little altercation. My popularity rating has slumped in that hostelry and you know how sensitive I am.’ Jimmy relaxed at the sound of Dave’s chuckle. ‘Go over to The Tin Pan Alley and I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘I can’t stand that place,’ said Jimmy fiercely. ‘It’s full of depressing fucking drinkers. I like happy drinkers.’

  ‘Go to The Bells then, Quasimodo. And you will soon be joined by Davido Garneroni, ice-cream millionaire and laughter merchant. If anyone comes near us with a long face, we’ll batter them. Give me an hour. I want to go home and change first.’

  Jimmy had forgotten how fastidious Dave was about his cheap clothes. ‘Get a move on then.’

  Jimmy put the phone back on the hook. He felt easier now that he knew Dave would be joining him. Sunday evenings always made him edgy, lonely but without wanting to talk to anybody. The pubs were always flat at this hour on a Sunday. He ordered a pint of house ale and took it over to the table by the door. He sat facing the door. He never drank with his back to the door. His mouth was still dry from last night. He sipped the beer. The door banged to and fro letting in warm air as the evening’s custom built up. Two blonde prostitutes sauntered in for a drink before work. Both wore short skirts and leather jackets, one had lipstick the colour of pig’s liver. They perched on bar stools. A minute later the doorman from the clip-joint next door joined them.

  ‘It’s a fact, though. They always like blondes on a Saturday, for some reason,’ he was saying.

  ‘Yeah, well, it’s fucking Sunday, remember?’ hissed one of the girls.

  Jimmy wondered if Danny Kennedy would show up. He was one of the few people Jimmy could tolerate when he was in this sort of a mood. Danny was a seaman. He used this pub when he was on shore leave. He had a quiet sense of humour. Last time they had drunk together, Danny had missed his ship. Dave Garner was altogether different. Dave had the tongue of an angel. He could spin a tale out of anything. That was Dave’s gift – seduction by story.

  The warm beer did not do much for the nervous churning of Jimmy’s stomach. He lit a cigarette. Something had happened last night. Small scraps of skin were missing from his knuckles. He must have punched something. A door, maybe. He couldn’t remember. He had woken up at half-past four in the morning in a pedestrian precinct, not knowing where he was. It had all looked less familiar than anywhere he had ever seen. He was lying on a cold paved concourse. He’d got up and shaken himself down, then started to walk. In the grey light of early morning, he recognised nothing. The wide street was deserted, the imposing buildings totally unfamiliar. He was in a foreign city. He walked all the way down the Strand convinced that he was in Sydney, Australia. Jesus Christ, how in hell’s name did I get here, he thought in horror. It was not until Trafalgar Square came into sight ten minutes later that he understood, breaking into a sweat of relief, that he was still in London.

  That was Dave’s other gift. He could keep up with Jimmy’s d
rinking.

  ‘Do you think we have a drink problem?’ Dave asked once. ‘I’d join Alcoholics Anonymous but I can’t stand the anonymity.’ They both fell around laughing.

  The last time he had actually seen Dave was two years ago. Jimmy had gone up to Liverpool with Scotch Eddy and Dave for Dave’s uncle’s funeral. They had all known Dave’s uncle as ‘The Windswept Rabbit’ because he wore a fake-fur-collar coat and his eyes protruded a little due to a thyroid condition. He had acquired the nickname on a cold, windy day which he had spent stuffing towels down pub toilets, so that they overflowed, and then offering his services as a plumber to the publican. One of the publicans had discovered the trick and pulled a gun on him. It was the way he had hopped out of the pub, darting from side to side in case of bullets, that got him his nickname. The Windswept Rabbit always drank with them whenever he passed through London.

  ‘All right, Mary? Sorry about the Rabbit’n that,’ said Jimmy awkwardly when they arrived. Jimmy was wearing a grey suit. What he called his ‘suit of no smiles’. The suit for a no-smile situation.

  ‘Yeah, well, I don’ know where he’s gone but wherever it is I hope there’s a letter box for his giro,’ said Mary, wife of the deceased. She stood in the parlour in a leopard-skin, wrap-around top and a black skirt, her scalp and hair hennaed red. The parlour had thin brown carpet on the floor and was bare but for the sofa, the television set and a formica-topped metal table surrounded by four plastic chairs. She handed out cans of lager to the dozen odd mourners who had assembled.

  ‘He was dead choked, the day before he died,’ continued Mary, ‘because some dwarf won the Best First-comers singing competition in the pub. He thought he should have won. I don’t know why, because with that hole in his throat he could hardly speak, never mind sing. But he’d been practising for ages.’

  The Windswept Rabbit had been suffering from cancer of the throat. Whenever the nurse came to change the dressing, she found a note pinned on the front door telling her to come and change the bandages at Yates’s Wine Lodge.

  ‘Was it the cancer that killed him like?’ asked Scotch Eddy nervously. None of them knew much funeral etiquette.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mary. ‘He went to the lavvy and pulled the chain and the cistern fell down on his head.’

  The room gradually filled with cigarette smoke, chatter and the subdued spurting of cans of lager being opened. There was a discussion as to whether it was legal to cash the Rabbit’s latest giro.

  ‘You can cash it,’ wheezed one of the mourners. ‘Giros are a week in hand. So he’s still owed it even if he’s dead.’

  ‘Ah well,’ said the Rabbit’s brother, after an hour or so, ‘I might as well be off. Gotta get back to work and anyway, none of his suits fit me.’ Everybody laughed. He downed his lager, paid his respects once more and left. His departure started the exodus. Feeling that it was OK to leave for jollier premises, Jimmy, Scotch Eddy and Dave said their goodbyes and went drinking in the centre of town.

  Jimmy had told Dave not to do it.

  ‘You’re too drunk,’ he’d said. ‘I’m not going with you. You won’t make it. We’re all too pissed.’

  ‘Watch me. I’m magic,’ crowed Dave. They were standing on the pavement outside Yates’s Wine Lodge. A light drizzle had wet Dave’s wavy black hair, making a strand of it fall across his eyes which were alight with excitement.

  From the other side of the road they winced as they watched him, drunk as a skunk, weave his way through the traffic and into the ground-floor jewellery department of a large store. Three minutes later, he emerged through the swing doors, smiling beatifically, carrying a tray of diamond rings, with one glittering necklace over his left ear and two shop assistants hanging on to his arms. Almost simultaneously, the police van drew up. There was a small but unseemly scuffle. The assistants retrieved their gems and two policemen grabbed Dave, one by each arm, running him towards the van. Dave tripped. The two police tripped with him. They all bowed forward. The three of them, arms linked, dipped and recovered their balance in perfect formation and Dave, skipping forward with his two partners, began to sing in an encouraging, tuneful voice, ‘We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz.’

  Jimmy and Scotch Eddy watched him dancing into the van.

  ‘No point in us all getting done for conspiracy,’ Scotch Eddy muttered, and they’d caught the train back to London.

  Jimmy heard from Dave once in the two years. They had sent him to an open jail somewhere in Cumbria. The letter was neatly written and complained at length about a Mr Edwards in the welfare department. Apparently, Mr Edwards had asked Dave whether his wife was in need of extra blankets. ‘Who does he fucking think we are,’ fumed Dave. ‘Let him stick his own wife under grotty welfare blankets. We are a DUVET family.’ Once in a misplaced fit of idealism, Mr Edwards had tried to engage Dave in a rehabilitative conversation. Acknowledging his undoubted intelligence, Mr Edwards had spoken to Dave about Edmund Burke and the idea of the social contract. ‘Ah, but I never fucking signed it,’ Dave had replied, grinning. There was more in his letter about how he had been thrown off the carpentry course after a minor ruck with a man called Oil-Can Harry. It seemed that Oil-Can Harry was definitely up for the slash-cut-and-run treatment if Dave encountered him again on the outside.

  The clock on the pub wall pointed to half-past seven. Another twenty minutes and Jimmy would go and meet Dave. He flexed his right hand. It was painful and stiff after smashing into whatever it had smashed into the night before. He might not be able to go to work in the morning. The thought pleased him and troubled him at the same time. He liked to work and then … sometimes he liked to let it all go. When he did work it was as a steeplejack. Steeplejacking was about the only work he could tolerate in London. That way he could get up and out of the city. He had no fears of the great heights. He could walk along bouncing narrow planks hundreds of feet up and not feel even a shiver of apprehension. He loved the freedom and detachment he experienced seeing the city spread out far beneath him. It was only up there that he felt truly relaxed.

  He’d got Dave a job with him once. Dave lasted a day. He spent the whole time on the ground giving the foreman a load of flannel about a slipped disc. Heights didn’t suit Dave. He belonged on the ground or under it – trotting in and out of the dark warren of dive-bars and underground drinking holes like a pit pony. Dave’s preferred exercise was swinging the lead. Jimmy needed to be able to see horizons – any horizon, an ocean, a desert, distant mountains. He preferred landscapes without people.

  Someone put Nat King Cole’s ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ on the juke-box and the pub shook into a languid sort of life. Jimmy stubbed out his cigarette. As he looked up, an unwelcome sight hove into view. Fat Roger, belly flying at half-mast, bustled towards him, clutching a half-pint of beer that slopped over his hand as he walked. He looked more than somewhat frantic.

  ‘That pillock of a magistrate. Did you hear what he did? He bound us all over to keep the peace.’ Roger sat, uninvited, opposite Jimmy. He smelt of stale biscuits and his moist lips quivered like those of a gerbil.

  ‘He binds the Grants over. Fair enough. They started it. Then he binds me over and the wife and the kids, all of us, the whole family! That’s out of order.’

  Apparently, there has been some fracas in the street involving Fat Roger and his neighbours. Fat Roger launched into a long saga of music being played too loud; washing disappearing from the line; stones being thrown at the dog; exchanges of insults; overthrown dustbins and finally, a flurry of fisticuffs on the pavement. Jimmy listens to the whining voice with mounting distaste. Nat King Cole turns into the Bee Gees who gotta getta letta to somebody and Fat Roger spots that Jimmy is about to try and leave and changes tack. He pulls out a roll of cartridge paper from under his arm.

  ‘Do you like this? I’ve taken up painting.’ He unfurls a picture of something that might be a railway siding.

  ‘That’s terrific, Roger.’ Jimmy lifts his jacket from the bac
k of the chair and stands up.

  ‘Paddy Lennon’s in hospital.’ Fat Roger makes a last-ditch attempt to detain him.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Jimmy pauses a second too long and misses his exit. Fat Roger’s eyes gleam with triumph.

  ‘You remember Rosemary, his bird, the one with the poppy-out eyes who swallows pills the whole time? Well, they’re in bed one night and she’s depressed. So she sits up and starts moaning on and on and Paddy’s trying to sleep so he takes no notice. And then she starts to scratch at her wrists with a razor. So she pokes him in the back and tells him she’s cut her wrists. Well, he still takes no notice. So she cuts his wrists. Hahahahahahaha.’ The story seems to cheer Fat Roger up.

  ‘I’m off to try and find Dave Garner,’ says Jimmy gruffly.

  ‘Where is he? He owes me a tenner. Where will you be?’ The whining voice follows Jimmy to the door.

  ‘If I knew where I’d be, I wouldn’t go there.’ Jimmy is about to go through the door when a heavily built man with a face like an eighteen-pound hammer comes in. He walks in slowly, like a sleepwalker, hardly aware of his surroundings. He’s wearing a collarless shirt and a raincoat.

  Fat Roger’s eyes light up at the thought of company: ‘Hello there, Frank.’

  The man looks up, registers Fat Roger and moves sombrely towards the table.

  Jimmy makes his escape. The pub doors bang to and fro behind him.

  Outside, it is still light. A blue silk sky runs into the jagged rooftops. Jimmy clenches his teeth. From Luigi’s bakery, the smell of Monday’s freshly baked bread is already hitting the street reminding him that he hasn’t eaten. Whisky will cure him of his appetite. The restless feeling still has hold of him and there is a tension at the back of his head. He passes Harry’s Rehearsal Bar and crosses over past the dive bar at the end of Gerrard Street and into The Bells.

  Dave is already there, standing with his back to the bar. His is the smile of a dissolute priest. He has captured a dupe, a gullible-looking man with spectacles and a mackintosh. Catching sight of Jimmy, he winks.