by Neil Cross
I said, ‘Give me a chance.’
He said, ‘I wish I’d known your mother had a little bastard like you, the day I met her. I’d never have bothered.’
His voice was girlish with indignation. He stood there, trembling. I thought of the times I’d seen him jogging naked to the bathroom, his shrivelled little cock cupped in a hairy paw.
For some reason, Brian had always hated that I had sex with girls. When a girl telephoned me, he sat behind the Bristol Evening Post, pretending to read but humming with anger and hatred, like an electricity substation. I spoke to the girls in a code I knew Brian would understand, and it enraged him: the thought of it. When I put down the phone he gave me a dead-eyed look, over his bifocals, and I knew what he was thinking.
Eventually, he’d banned me from using the phone. I’d never been permitted to make outgoing calls. Now, people weren’t allowed to call me. Especially girls. He thought them filthy; filthy little girls. He was full of hate.
He stood there, in my bedroom doorway, trembling with rage.
He said, ‘Turn off that muck–’
I’d already turned it down. And it wasn’t muck, even though it was called Pornography. There wasn’t even any swearing on it. It was an album about paralysed rage. Perhaps Brian had simply seen the word on the cover, and it was enough to make him quiver with excited disgust.
He said, ‘Get out of my house and don’t bother coming back.’
He was still shaking. I thought he might hit me. I hoped he would, because then I could hit him back. But he didn’t hit me. He just stood there, in his vest, glaring over his bifocals.
I laughed at him, because it was the best thing to do, laughing at people who hated you. I had learned that, when I was a child.
I smiled. I said, ‘Calm down, Brian.’
I went downstairs–he stood there and made me shove past him, past his hairy shoulders and his womanly hips in his Primark jeans–and I went to the neat little kitchen with the novelty clock that was A Round Tuit and I took some carrier-bags from the drawer. I took the carrier-bags upstairs and began to stuff them with my things; my clothes and my records.
On a shelf above the bed was a bag of comics that had come from Scotland; I’d packed them myself, with great care, in the back seat of Norman the Mormon’s car. Some of them might have become valuable, if they’d been in better condition. But their condition was poor because, when I was little, I read them over and over again to ward off my fear of the dark. I didn’t care how much they might have been worth. I loved them. They still smelled of Bobby’s Bookshop; of comics and yellowing spy novels and Sven Hassel and Louis L’Amour. They were all I had of those days. But I couldn’t take them with me, because I didn’t yet know where I’d go. They were fragile and precious.
So I took a carrier-bag of clothes and a carrier-bag of records. I went down the narrow stairs and through the UPVC door, a bag in each hand. I felt Brian, in his vest, watching me from the bedroom window, behind the net curtains. And I went down the little garden path with its peculiar little fence, and I boarded the number 36 bus at the terminus and sat at the back, alone, until the driver folded away his newspaper and started the engine.
A couple of days later, Mum and Brian were clearing out my bedroom, removing the traces of me from it. Mum found the comics, still in the bag on the shelf, dog-eared and musty and old. She took the bag down from the shelf and threw it in the dustbin.
The day I left, I went to Simon Hall’s house. I knew him as Hally. Hally and I had been through more than seemed possible, at sixteen. Now I told him I’d become officially homeless. I wasn’t worried about finding somewhere to stay: there would always be somewhere. But I felt we should do something, to mark the day.
Hally said, ‘What do you want to do?’
I said, ‘I don’t know.’
He’d just bought his first car–an old Ford Anglia. And the late summer sun was setting over Bristol, so we went for a drive. We drove until it was dark. And, very late at night, when the streets were silent, we parked. We walked onto Clifton suspension bridge. We stood in the middle of it.
We looked at all the lights of Bristol. The spectacle of a city on a summer night, from a high place, erases everything.
32
It is more difficult by far to recapture lost belief than lost love. For lost love, we forgive ourselves. We were different people then. We didn’t know so much; we learned by it. But about lost beliefs, we are sheepish, evasive. Nobody is proud once to have been a fool.
The disappearing farmer, David Lang, never existed. The tale was a hoax cooked up by a travelling salesman called Joseph Mulholland: he borrowed it from a story called The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, by Ambrose Bierce. The nun with the bleeding eyes, like most stigmatics, almost certainly suffered from something similar to Münchhausen’s syndrome; she inflicted the wounds on herself, in secret. Dr John Irving Bentley, who burned so horribly and so mysteriously, was ninety years old and in the habit of dropping burning matches and hot ashes from his pipe. He also kept a box of matches in each pocket of his day robe. The evidence suggests that Dr Bentley woke to find himself on fire and made his way to the bathroom, using his walking frame, where he tried to extinguish the flames. But in his efforts to do so, he fell down, igniting the linoleum. Beneath it was a wooden floor. Cool air was drawn from the basement, to intensify and localize the heat of his combustion. It’s called the chimney effect.
I’m not sure that I ever believed in God, at least not God as Joe Smith would have him. I did believe in Jesus, though. For many years, he crept back into my mind. I missed him. Sometimes I missed him so much it was a physical pain, a knot in my belly. I hungered to believe in him; I yearned to. But I never quite could. And now he too is gone, and I do not expect or desire his return.
I don’t believe in those things any more. But I do believe in ghosts. I am compelled to, because one day I saw one.
In the days when Mum and I lived with her, Caroline’s boyfriend Garry came round two or three evenings a week. He’d have a beer, watch some TV. Then I’d go upstairs to my room, to leave them alone.
When it was dark and quiet, Caroline would creep silently upstairs. She’d sit outside my bedroom door, singing. It was never a song I recognized; I could never quite catch the tune, because she hummed it very quietly. It was barely a melody at all. I ignored it for as long as I could. But the half-tune insinuated into my consciousness, and it was a bit creepy: this singing from behind my bedroom door.
I always cracked. I put down my book and went to the door and opened it. But Caroline had heard my approach and hurried silently downstairs in the dark. I followed her. I knocked on the living-room door and walked in before she and Garry had the chance to tell me to go away or to properly rearrange their clothing.
I stood in the doorway. I said, ‘Stop it.’
‘Stop what?’
‘The singing.’
‘What singing?’
‘Don’t wind me up. It’s really creepy.’
‘I’m not singing.’
‘Yes, you are.’
‘I’m not doing anything!’
‘Just stop it,’ I said, and slammed the door and stomped upstairs.
Usually, when everything was quiet, the singing came back. Caroline stood outside my bedroom door and hummed beneath her breath. Eventually I fell asleep and the singing stopped. I didn’t know which came first.
It was years later that Caroline saw the ghost that had always shared her house. She woke alone in the night. A woman stood at the foot of her bed, furiously nodding.
In the morning, Caroline phoned me. She was still distressed. I went round and we had cups of tea and cigarettes. We talked. After some time, she’d convinced herself that the nodding woman had been a dream.
Caroline’s children, Marc and Nathan, had been spending the night at their father’s. Having calmed down, Caroline insisted that, whatever she had or hadn’t seen, nobody must ever mention it to them. They were still v
ery young.
But, that Christmas, Marc and Nathan saw her, too. The nodding woman stood in the centre of their shared bedroom. They screamed. By the time Caroline rushed in, the nodding woman was gone.
Nobody ever saw her again, and nobody heard her singing.
The nodding woman is not the ghost I saw.
A couple of years before I turned thirty, my boss and I flew to Edinburgh. We were to attend a formal dinner marking the retirement of a well-loved man. My boss was called Chris. He was my friend, too. The dinner ran late, there was dancing, and Chris and I drank a lot of wine. Eventually, we stepped into the early hours of a winter morning. It was freezing.
It was my first return to Edinburgh. I hadn’t really thought about it. Our working day had been busy. Meetings overran, because they always did. The taxi-ride to the airport had been slow and fraught. Our flight had arrived late; there was a rush at the airport to get to the party on time.
Besides which, I never thought about Edinburgh. A lot had happened since then, and my life was very different. I felt no connection to the child who had lived there. I was embarrassed by him. I had no wish to admit he had ever existed.
But as we stood there, huddled in our overcoats, I realized that we were only a short walk from Dalry Road. It was 2 a.m., and we were a little drunk. I told Chris that I’d gone to school, very nearby. It was his idea to go and take a look. So we buried our hands in our pockets, and in our suits and good coats and shoes, we walked through the night.
At the Haymarket end of Dalry Road lingered an assortment of mostly teenage prostitutes. They wore skimpy vest-tops and short skirts and no tights. They looked very cold. We walked past them.
We walked down Dalry Road. And as we came closer to the school, I ran out of things to say. Chris knew, and understood my silence.
Then we reached the school. I stood by the gates and looked at it. It had not changed. It was close to a hundred and twenty-five years old. It had seen many generations of children pass through its doors: it had seen them leave, grow up, grow old and die. It was not wholly impervious to my presence; it knew I was there. I just didn’t mean a great deal to it.
I looked at its blank windows. Inside the classrooms, children’s paintings were pinned to the walls. You could see them as paler smudges in the darkness.
I felt something pass through me. It was the ghost of the boy I had been. For a few moments, I allowed him to possess me. I saw the school through his eyes and my eyes, simultaneously. And I saw that the boy and I were somehow the same person.
Chris put his big hand on my shoulder because I was crying a little bit. Then we turned and left and went back to our hotel. We ordered more drinks, and in the morning we flew back to London.
But that is not the ghost I saw.
When I was twelve years old, living in the village called Tarbrax, I had a dream from which I awoke in stark terror. The dream took place in the bedroom I shared with Yvonne. In the dream, I sat up in bed. At the foot of it stood a blond child. He wore red shorts and a red-and yellow-striped T-shirt. He stood divided by light and shadow, so that only half of him was visible. He looked at me solemnly, his face bifurcated by darkness.
I didn’t understand exactly what about the dream had been so frightening. But it always haunted me.
More than twenty years later, I caught a glimpse of my first child as the sunlight streaked down on him through a Velux window. It was set into the sloping ceiling of an attic flat in Finsbury Park, North London. I saw that my son was the child in the dream. He wore red shorts and a red-and yellow-striped T-shirt. He had blond hair. The way the light fell on him, he stood half in light, half in shadow. He looked at me with the absolute gravity of his love.
End Notes
chapter 9
1 Ezekiel 1:4 through 1:24.
chapter 14
1 The Pearl of Great Price, Joseph Smith–History, 1:17.
2 Ibid., 1:17.
3 Ibid., 1:19.
4 Ibid., 1:34.
5 Joseph Smith, Times and Seasons (Periodical of the Mormon), 1 March 1842.
6 Joseph Smith, History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, vol. 4, p. 461.
7 Nephi, Book 2, 5:21.
chapter 20
1 From Temple Mormonism: Its Evolution and Meaning, W. M. Pagden (New York, 1930). Quoted from on-line sources.
2 Ibid.
chapter 22
1 The full text can be viewed at www.2think.org/hundredsheep/voh/voh_main.shtml
2 History of Joseph Smith by his mother, p. 83, 1954.
3 For an extensive discussion of Joe’s First Vision disparities see Mormonism, Shadow or Reality?, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1987, chapter 8.
4 It was eventually published as ‘New Light on the Historical Setting of the First Vision’, in BYU Studies, vol 9, spring 1969, p. 278ff. Also included in The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, Dean C. Jessee. How the ‘Strange Account’ came to be published is documented in Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? (as above).
5 Personal Writings of Joseph Smith, p. 5.
chapter 26
1 Deseret News, 19 May 1858, quoted from Under the Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer, Macmillan 2003, p. 118.
2 Main source is Under the Banner of Heaven, John Krakauer, chapter 11, ‘The Principle’, pp. 15–33.
3 Under the Banner of Heaven, p. 125.
4 In a speech given to the citizens of Nauvoo, ibid, p. 122.