Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  For fifteen minutes or so they chatted about Sam’s work and his children and Liz’s new job, and then Sam said he should get back to the grindstone. ‘Good to see you, Mac. Must have a pint one night. I’ll see if I can get an evening pass from the wife.’ He stepped out into the sunlight and gave Alexander a sideways look, as though deciding between admiration and amusement. ‘Give my regards,’ Sam said, turning away.

  It was nearly five o’clock when the phone rang. A clerk from the post office was in the shop, wearing sunflower-yellow flares and a tomato-red blouse, he would remember. For a moment Alexander rested his hand on the phone. He lifted the handset and listened.

  ‘Hello, Eck?’ she said, and he heard the reverberation of the hallway around her voice.

  ‘You’re home?’ he asked.

  ‘I am. Arrived this minute.’

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m OK,’ she said. He heard the chink of the chain on her front door. ‘I’m back,’ she added, as if to be more precise.

  ‘How was the journey?’

  She told him, and then she interrupted herself. ‘Are you free tonight, Eck?’ she asked, and she said it as though she were in the habit of speaking to him every day.

  ‘Yes, nothing planned,’ Alexander told her.

  ‘I don’t want to stay in. Not tonight.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Let’s go out to eat. Do you mind?’

  ‘I’ll come over straight after work,’ he said.

  ‘You OK, Eck?’ Megan asked.

  ‘I’m fine.’ He looked at the back of the clerk’s blouse as Megan was speaking, and found its match in the colour of a skirt that Megan had worn when she was twelve or thirteen. He saw her sitting on a wall beside a friend he could no longer name, with the red skirt spread over the glossy black bricks, and her hands wedged under her legs as she listened to her friend and watched Alexander pass.

  She had let her hair grow long again, and her face was bare and tight, as if she had plunged it in icy water. ‘Calamity Jane returns,’ she sang, spreading her arms. An old blue trunk with wooden battens on its lid lay open in the hall, which now was pink. A greasy stripe marked the wall at elbow height. ‘This is nothing,’ she said, looking at what he was looking at. ‘Wait till you see what they’ve done to the rooms.’ She took his hand and towed him to the living room. A track of flattened grey pile ran between the French windows and the door. Scabs of melted fabric scarred the arms of the chairs, and a pattern of overlapping white circles covered the surface of the table. The room smelled of cigarette butts and damp newsprint and old beer. ‘Little left alive out here,’ she said, walking to the windows. The lawn was like an oval of hardboard, the flowerbeds were nothing but arrangements of naked black stems, and the door of the shed was ajar, hanging on a single hinge. ‘The best is yet to come,’ muttered Megan, and she led him upstairs. Her room was now lilac, with a zigzag of white aerosol paint across two walls. The walls of the room in which Mr and Mrs Beckwith had slept had been painted lime green, but there were bars and triangles of pale paper where the shelving had been, and grooves of white plaster where something had gouged the walls repeatedly. ‘But the pièce de résistance …’ said Megan enticingly, and she flung open the bathroom door. The bath was ringed by a dozen horizons of dirt and there was no lid on the cistern. Water dripping from the cold tap had cut a course as clean as boiled bone through the basin’s pumice-coloured grime.

  ‘Depressing, isn’t it?’ she laughed. ‘Owed two months’ rent as well.’

  ‘You going to do anything about it?’ asked Alexander. ‘I know the man to track them down.’

  ‘No, Eck. I want shot of them. Good riddance. I start again from today. Let’s get out.’

  They went for a drink in a pub that he had never been to before, and then they took a train up to town and ate in a Charlotte Street restaurant, where the pauses in their conversation grew longer as her tiredness increased and her unhappiness seemed to leak into her face. She looked at herself in the darkened window as if at a companion to whom she no longer had anything to say, and later, tipping the last of the bottle into her glass, she pointed a toe towards the neighbouring table to show him the scar on her calf. ‘He did that,’ she said. ‘Went bananas one night. Half a bottle of whisky and half a gallon of self-pity. And everyone thinks he’s Mr Nice Guy. Poor Shaun. Poor, poor, unlucky Shaun. His women done him wrong. Wife left him with the baby. Bitch from London ran away.’ They raised their glasses to the bitch from London.

  A week later they began to restore the house. She bought an estate car, in which they collected chairs and tables and a new bed. Almost every Sunday and one or two evenings in the week he would bring a new album from the shop and they would put the record-player in the centre of the room, under a canopy of polythene. Often, without her noticing, he would watch her while she painted. Reaching into a corner of the ceiling, she would bite the tip of her tongue and frown as she worked, and he would be reminded of the way she used to play in the park with him and his friends, as if something more than merely the winning of the game depended on her tenacity. Afterwards they might cross the Heath for a drink, or he might cook a meal for her while she prepared her lessons for the following day, and sometimes, after the meal, she would phone Berwick and he would overhear her talking in a voice that was tinged with an accent: ‘Hello, Esmé. Hello, darling,’ she murmured. ‘Same here, pet, same here, same here,’ she repeated wistfully. And once, Alexander would remember, he heard her shouting: ‘Put her back on. Put her back on now!’ and he went out into the hall and took the dead telephone from her, and she rested her head against his shoulder.

  Alexander relaid the turf in the garden and planted bulbs from the nursery that Mr Beckwith had used. He scoured the moss from the path at the side of the house. He replaced Mr Beckwith’s rusted tools and repaired the shed door and the roof of the shed. One afternoon, standing at the workbench where Mr Beckwith had stood and explained about Tollund Man, Alexander looked across the garden, across the barren flowerbeds and the rectangles of new grass, and he saw Mr Beckwith at the kitchen window. The white shirt flashed like the sun off an opening metal door and then was gone, but Alexander saw clearly, in that portion of a second, Mr Beckwith gazing out at the garden as he did after his wife had died, and smiling as if she were there. Many times, when he was working in the garden, Alexander glimpsed Mr Beckwith at that window, and he would find himself smiling as well, and then, as if cause and effect were reversed, he would sense the hush of the breeze in the Cornish lanes, or the egg-yolk yellow of bird’s-foot trefoil, or the touch of Mr Beckwith’s hand on his. And more than once, coming into the living room from the garden, he sensed a shadow passing across the wall, as if Mrs Beckwith had risen from her chair and left the room, and he seemed to pass through an atmosphere that bore the scent of her clothes.

  It was a Sunday, and the clouds were so low that they walked into mist as they came up onto the Heath. They crossed the road at exactly the place, he reminded her, at which a gust had whisked off Mrs Beckwith’s hat when they were on their way to the Christmas service, and she had released Megan’s hand at the same moment as Alexander’s mother had released his, and the two women had gone racing up the hill like a pair of children. At All Saints church he remembered seeing a display by the Royal Horse Artillery, around the time that Megan arrived in London. Men in white vests had vaulted one-handed over an enormous vaulting horse, while a brass band played and the gun carriages were taken off the lorries. He told her about the time Mr Beckwith had turned off a programme about the Boer War because he never wanted to see another army as long as he lived.

  Megan looked at the ground while she listened, as though to picture what he was describing, and then she remarked: ‘You know, Eck, your mother really doesn’t like me at all.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ Alexander replied.

  ‘It is true, and you know it,’ she said, patting his forearm. ‘She thinks I was a bad daughter and now I’v
e got what’s been coming to me.’

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ said Alexander. He returned to the subject of Mr Beckwith, and how he used to swear at any politicians who appeared on TV.

  Megan talked about her colleagues in Berwick. ‘They knew what’d happened. They knew Dad had died. And no one said a thing.’

  ‘Doesn’t altogether astonish me,’ he remarked.

  ‘Not one single word. Nobody. It’s as if I went out to the toilet and was gone a long time. I think some of them thought I was bad luck. Not yet forty and a double orphan. But most of them simply didn’t care, I’m sure of it. Didn’t care about anything unless it was about them.’

  ‘Or they didn’t know what to say,’ said Alexander. ‘A lot of people have no idea what to say. I had no idea what to say.’

  ‘But you’re different, Eck. You don’t need to say anything. You understand.’

  He looked at her to ascertain what she had meant, he would remember, and he noticed the pearls of water on the fibres of her scarlet mittens. Her breathing changed, though they were walking slowly.

  ‘Eck. There’s something I must ask you,’ said Megan gravely.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Something personal.’

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘Very well. The question is this: do you find me attractive?’ With her hands on her hips she stood in his way.

  ‘Of course you’re attractive.’

  ‘Not in the abstract, Eck. I’m not asking you if you can conceive how someone might possibly find me attractive. What I’m asking is whether you yourself have an interest in me.’

  Alexander said nothing. The grass appeared to become darker; the cars seemed louder than they had been a moment before.

  ‘At this point I had imagined you might say: “Yes, Megan, I do. I have found you attractive for a considerable period of time. I have been battling against myself to suppress certain emotions that your presence provokes, but now that you have raised the subject I must confess that I have feelings for you that are not without an element of sexual desire.” Something along those lines.’

  ‘You know what I think.’

  ‘I do not know what you think. If I knew what you thought I wouldn’t be asking you.’ She glanced upwards, as though a bird had caught her attention, and then she was glaring at him. ‘In the interests of absolute candour, allow me to say that I have feelings for you that are not without an element of sexual desire, and that these feelings are not of very recent origin, although they have, I admit, become somewhat stronger of late.’

  ‘You do know what I think,’ he told her.

  ‘Damn it, Eck!’ she yelled. ‘Are you ever in your entire fucking life going to act? What are you? A fucking Buddhist or something?’

  He placed a hand on her cheek, and her eyes closed and her lips opened in a smile, and he kissed her.

  Her arms closed on his back. ‘Well, well,’ she marvelled. ‘Aren’t we the master?’ she said, but her eyes were searching his, for assurance that he understood what they might be about to do. He kissed her again.

  34. Nafplio

  His mother was pleased for them, she said, but occasionally there was now a suspiciousness to her manner, as though it had been revealed that he and Megan had been conspiring against her for years. When she at last came round to the house she stood in the hall and looked about her as if to enumerate all the alterations that had been made. They all followed Megan into the living room, where none of Mr Beckwith’s furniture remained. ‘Very bold,’ his mother observed, having scrutinised systematically each wall, the ceiling and the carpet she stood on. ‘Isn’t it, Graham? Very striking.’

  Holding his glasses behind his back, Alexander’s father was looking at Mitchell’s painting of Megan, which hung where the ship’s-wheel clock had been. ‘Yes. Very,’ he replied, closely reading the stencilled name and date on the pavement underneath Megan’s feet. ‘Interesting,’ he remarked to Alexander, seemingly engrossed by the way Megan’s hair had been painted around her face like the rays of a child’s sun.

  ‘Who’s that?’ asked Alexander’s mother, coming over to the picture.

  His father stepped aside, and Megan took his arm to lead him away to see the rest of the house, while Alexander made tea for his mother, who stood by the French windows, looking out at the garden. ‘You haven’t changed everything, then,’ she remarked, taking her cup. When she sat in one of the armchairs she sat forward, balancing the saucer on her palm, as if preparing to rise and leave.

  ‘How’s the hip?’ he asked her, ending a silence.

  ‘Good days, bad days,’ she replied.

  ‘And today?’

  ‘It’s been worse,’ she said, and she gave the room another look. She asked him how the shop was faring. He told her that Sid Dixon had mentioned that he was considering selling it some time in the next few years, and had once asked him if he might be interested in taking it over. At the first lull, when they were eating, his mother repeated to his father what Alexander had said about the shop, and his father took up the subject with such energy that his mother began a separate conversation with Megan, as she used to do with the wives of his father’s clients and colleagues, whenever the discussion at the table turned to finance. Alexander heard her asking Megan how her work was going. She nodded politely as she listened, and politely asked more questions, but she barely glanced at Megan while they talked.

  After his parents had gone they cleared up and drank the last of the second bottle of wine. He went to bed before Megan, leaving her to read downstairs. A couple of hours later he woke up. Her bedside light was on, and she was lying close to him, her back curled into his belly. A sprig of hair was bent over her neck and bobbed with the pulse of her throat. Alexander slid a hand over her waist. ‘It’s all right, Eck,’ she said. She kissed his hand, and he felt the tears on her skin.

  ‘Meg?’ he said, touching her hair.

  She kissed his hand again. ‘It’s all right, Eck. I’m a bit agitated. Made me think of Dad, your parents being here. But it’s all right. Go to sleep.’

  This was one of many nights on which he would wake to find that she had not yet slept. ‘I keep thinking of him,’ she would reply, gazing at the door in the darkness. He would put an arm around her, and she would take his hand and clutch it to her face, as though she had the proof of something in her grasp. Once he woke up to see Megan bent double on the end of the bed. ‘It’s getting worse,’ she said, shaking her head to rid it of its thoughts. Once she was sitting upright and staring with such alarm that for an instant it seemed possible that she had glimpsed Mr Beckwith, as Alexander had often glimpsed him, in the corner of his eye, as he came into a room that was empty. And then there was the night he was awoken by a click and saw her standing in the doorway. ‘Eck,’ she gasped, as if horrified, and he went over to her, thinking that she might be sleepwalking. She let herself be led back to the bed, and she told him how she used to listen to her father walking around the house at night, padding for hours from room to room ceaselessly. ‘He’s gone,’ she grieved, holding his arm tightly. ‘I keep expecting to see him, but he’s gone,’ she said, as if repeating something she could not comprehend. They lay in the dark for an hour or more, and then Megan reached back and touched his face and tentatively asked him: ‘Eck, do you really like this place?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve always liked it,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t, now. Not much.’

  ‘I thought you did.’

  ‘I did. But I’m going to miss him too much as long as we’re here.’

  ‘You think it’ll be better if we move?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it doesn’t feel right, not for us. It doesn’t feel like it’s ours,’ she said, and she turned the light on. They talked until it was time to get up, and by then the decision had been made. She would sell the house and they would rent somewhere for a while. They would do something with the money, have a holiday or two. ‘What do you think, Eck?’ she urged, kneeling t
o face him. ‘I’ll take you away for a fortnight in the sun. I’ll pay. Let me pay. Your reward for putting up with a madwoman. Let’s go, Eck,’ she said, jumping off the bed as though she meant to leave that day.

  Two months later the house was sold and Alexander left the Beckwiths’ house as easily as he had left the flat above the shop. They rented a two-storey flat, which they intended to leave within the year, but never did leave. A week after moving, as soon as everything had been unpacked, they flew to Athens on their first holiday together.

  While waiting for their luggage to appear on the airport carousel they decided that they would go to Nafplio the following day. There, after trying every hotel in the town, they found a room to rent above a clothes shop, on a slope above the main square. The owner led them up a brick staircase at the back of the building, to a whitewashed room that was a couple of feet longer than the bed it contained, and was a perfect cube. ‘Please,’ the man said to Alexander, gesturing eagerly at the single square window. Alexander pushed open the window and put his head out. In the yard a lemon tree cast its shade on a dismantled motorbike; over the roofs he could see a portion of a ship in the harbour. Unlatching the inner door, the owner presented another whitewashed room of identical dimensions, with a rusted shower head protruding from the centre of the ceiling. Megan gave him payment for a week, and when he had gone she tucked their bags under the bed and lay down.

  Alexander was still by the window, looking at a broad tin disc that was nailed to the wall above the door of the grocer’s shop across the street. A bicycle with lumpy tyres and a frame like a triangle of logs was painted on the disc, as he would remember, and its profusely moustachioed rider wore a scarlet and white hooped bathing costume that covered his arms and legs, which tapered evenly to dainty hands and feet that resembled tiny squid. Enjoying the sight of the capering Edwardian gentleman, and the whine of the mopeds on the harbourside road, and the street’s smell of warm tarmac and engine smoke and the sea, Alexander stayed at the window until Megan said his name. She raised one hand to him, and she closed her eyes as though to relish the breeze. The mattress curved like the hull of a canoe when he lay down beside her. They lay together, her head resting on his chest, until it was dark.