Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘It’s nearly over,’ Megan replied.

  ‘No, it’s not. Five more victims to come.’

  A sword was passed to the matador. He pointed it at the bull as though in accusation. The bull touched its bloodied muzzle to the sand; the matador rushed forward and impaled its neck. Escorted by the matador, the bull plodded around the perimeter of the ring, its head lolling, its tongue protruding and drooling blood. The matador swung the muleta, guiding the bull along the path to its death. The bull’s head rocked; its front legs gave way; the matador turned his back, his chin jutting like a boy who thinks he has crushingly won an argument.

  Alexander looked at Megan, but she would not look away from the dying animal. ‘Well?’ he demanded.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘It’s appalling.’

  ‘It’s that all right.’

  ‘But it has to be.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be at all, Meg.’

  ‘It’s a sacrifice,’ she stated.

  ‘A sacrifice? It’s the end of the twentieth century, for God’s sake. We’re not Aztecs.’

  ‘A tragedy, then.’

  ‘I don’t think the bull’s acting, Meg.’

  ‘That’s the point. It’s really happening. It’s real death.’

  ‘Butchery is what it is. Butchery in fancy dress.’

  Then at last she looked at him and she said: ‘You don’t have to stay, Eck. I agree, it’s horrible. It’s repulsive and barbaric and horrible. I’m not enjoying it. But I’m going to see it through, right to the end. I’m staying. But you don’t have to.’ A plough-like harness for the carcass was being dragged into the ring. The crowd applauded something, and Megan joined in.

  The streets were as empty as at siesta time. Alexander went to the bridge and looked down at the old mill for a while. He took the path along the lip of the gorge to the little park with the bandstand. On the terrace of the park a drunk man in a dirty white singlet and brown corduroy trousers was stamping his feet and serenading an imaginary companion. A bugle in the bullring fizzed like a kazoo, and the drunk man flourished an imaginary cap. Alexander returned to the hotel, where a chambermaid was rinsing the steps with a liquid that reeked of ammonia. He did not go in, but continued across the square and down an alley of restaurants and into streets he did not know. Near the bus station he was overtaken by a white Mercedes taxi, with a woman passenger whose hair was the colour of Megan’s and caused his chest to tighten instantly.

  He came to a path that followed the brink of the cliff beyond the park, and where the path widened there was a bench set into the wall. Here Alexander sat, to look over the valley. A dog was barking in one of the farmhouses below. Amber clouds were massing on the farthest hills, where a mist of indigo was rising in the folds of the slopes. Four boys, all perhaps nine or ten years of age, all in hooped T-shirts, all with hair like moleskin, came running up the path and stopped at the parapet in front of Alexander. One of them rested his hands on the wall, bent backwards slowly from the waist, then threw his torso forward and yelled. The cry echoed once, weakly, from the valley, and was answered, after a few seconds’ silence, by a child’s strident voice, replying with what sounded like a single slur of vowels. The four boys slapped hands, then the one who had yelled did the same again, but the noise of cheering in the bullring flooded over his voice. He shrugged and shouted again, and the same protracted syllable was screamed in response. Alexander went over to the parapet. He scanned the valley in the direction the boys were facing, but saw nobody, nor anything that was moving except a drift of smoke that had risen from no source that he could see. ‘Donde?’ he asked the boys. One of them laughed and made a megaphone of his hands and shouted. As soon as its echo had ceased a joyous scream came up from the plain. The four boys pointed triumphantly to the valley floor. Alexander’s gaze investigated the house to which they seemed to be directing him, but could see nobody in the doorway or in the paddock around the house. Together the boys shouted and leaned out over the wall, each cupping a hand to an ear to receive the cry from the abyss. Laughing, they looked at Alexander. He smiled, and looked down on fields in which nobody stood and nothing grazed.

  Alexander would always remember the boys and the empty fields, and the fallen horse and the last minutes of the bullfight, and Megan’s clenched face as the harness was scraped across the sand. And he would remember waking in the early hours of the morning in Ronda and seeing Megan sitting on the end of the bed, facing the moonlit wall of the light well. He touched her back. ‘It’s OK, Eck,’ she said softly, but she did not turn round. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Go back to sleep.’

  40. 27 April 1983

  On the table in the hall there were three letters for him. He opened them in the kitchen and read them there while the kettle boiled. It was shortly after five o’clock; he turned the radio on and listened to the news bulletin as he drank his tea. On the back of one of the envelopes he jotted a couple of questions about his accounts, to ask his father.

  Passing the open door of their bedroom, he saw that Megan had left the curtains drawn that morning. There was a furrow on the sheet where she had been sleeping when he left for work. The impression of her head was on the pillow.

  He went into the bathroom. He sat on the edge of the bath, removed his shirt and deposited it in the laundry basket, on top of Megan’s red silk dress. The catch on the louvred window was not fastened. A lawnmower whined in a neighbour’s garden, and someone was talking loudly. On the tiles above the bath there was a zone of barley-sugar light. The door was speckled with the shadows of leaves. In a row on the shelf above the basin stood his shaving brush, the wooden dish of shaving soap, his razor. His things seemed estranged from him as he looked at them, and then he realised that there was nothing on the shelf that was not his. Megan’s perfume was not there. Her nail file was not there. He looked at the sill at the back of the bath. All her bottles were missing.

  In the bedroom his clothes lay exactly where he had left them. His blue jacket was draped on the back of the chair, but Megan’s jeans were no longer under it. His shoes were under the chair, but her sandals were not. He slid back the wardrobe door: every one of Megan’s shirts, every skirt, her coats, her jackets – all had gone. Automatically, like a watchman testing doors he has already checked a dozen times in the course of the night, Alexander pulled open the empty drawers of the chest by the window. A rectangle of dust on the windowsill marked where her jewellery box had been.

  He crossed the landing and pushed at the door of Megan’s study, but could not bring himself to cross the threshold. It was as though Megan’s absence now occupied the house, and he was an intruder in it. He descended the stairs without making a sound, grasping the banister tightly. He stood in the centre of the living room. The books and records leaned where Megan’s possessions had been subtracted. He sat on the stairs, immobile as a fisherman watching a river’s surface. After a while he went out into the street. There was a seam of pain under his ribs, as though he had been running too fast.

  It was dark now; the faulty streetlight outside the house flashed and hummed. At the garage a man in a three-piece suit watched the traffic, smiling, as he refuelled his car. Alexander walked past the garage, past the church, past the row of shops. Soon the coolness of the air became apparent to him; he considered returning to the house; he carried on walking, taking a route of which he would have no memory. Fragments of conversation irrupted into his hearing. ‘No, Eck, that’s not it,’ she wailed, slapping the wall in her frustration. ‘I’m the one making us like this,’ she told him, jabbing a finger on her forehead. He saw her crying at the kitchen table, fists against her temples, sorrowfully regarding her half-empty plate, speaking sombrely and quietly, as though she were the only one there: ‘I don’t know, Eck. It’s as if I’ve got lost again.’ She stood on the stairs, wrapped in the green towel, her hair wet, and explained to him: ‘I want it to be different. But I can’t make it different. For me it’s gone. What can I say, Eck? It’s gone.’
He tried to summon a scene from their holiday in Paris, but his thoughts were steeped in white noise. He found himself at the bottom of the rise to Oxleas Wood, and there he turned back.

  He sat on the stairs in the artificial twilight that the streetlamps made. A triangular cobweb quivered above the door; the neighbours’ TV sent out sporadic applause; footfalls drummed on the stairs next door. Eventually he noticed a pulse of pale red light on the wall at the foot of the stairs. In the living room, the ruby bulb of the answering machine was blinking. There was a message from the garage. ‘Hello, Mr MacIndoe?’ was all he listened to. The second voice was Megan’s.

  ‘Eck? Are you there? It’s me,’ she said. Her breath came out of the machine. ‘Are you there? Pick up the phone, please, Eck.’ Something knocked the mouthpiece, as if she had dropped it; she sobbed, and there was a long silence. ‘Pick up the phone. Please, Eck.’ A door closed in the room in which she was speaking. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and paused again. ‘I’m sorry, but – I’m sorry. I don’t –’ She was crying now. ‘I’ll call you.’

  Twice more he played her message, holding the speaker to his ear. It was the sound of the door, closing in a room he could not imagine, that he could not bear. He removed the cassette from the machine and placed it on the floor. He lay on the floor, with a hand clenched on the cassette, hearing her breathing in the room that was not the room he was in. Later he went out into the street again and walked until the lights began to come on in the houses, as the day commenced.

  41. Bank

  They arranged it so that she would have taken the rest of her things by the time Alexander finished work, but when he looked down the street he saw a van behind his car, with its back doors open, and Mary Garthside, one of Megan’s colleagues, standing on the pavement, holding a crate. She turned sharply towards the house and said something, and then she carried the crate to the open doors and shoved it across the floor of the van. Part of the pewter lamp was visible between two plastic sacks, as he would remember. Alexander turned back and went on to the park, where he walked a circuit of the outer path. He sat on a bench in front of the Ranger’s House. Everything he saw was tedious to him, and yet he could feel the pulse, quick and irregular, punching at his chest.

  Alexander left the flat a month later, in June. Sam helped him, and together they emptied the rooms briskly, as though they were moving the belongings of a third person. As they were about to drive off, Sam stooped forward in the driver’s seat and looked sideways through the windscreen. ‘Forgot the curtains,’ he said, pointing up at the bedroom window. Alexander regarded the curtains. Beyond them, a bare lightbulb hung on a kinked flex. ‘Forget it?’ Sam suggested and Alexander gave the dashboard a smack, and they drove to the agent’s office to give up the key, and then to Alexander’s new flat. By the middle of the afternoon they had unloaded everything. When Sam had gone, Alexander moved the armchair to the window and there he sat until seven, watching indifferently the street in which he now lived, and then he went out to meet Sam again. Though they stayed in the pub until closing time, Megan’s name was never mentioned.

  Not until August did he see her again. He would remember waiting by the exit from Leicester Square station and seeing her at the turn of the steps, and he would remember that the tiredness vanished from her face, momentarily, when she noticed him.

  With her hands jammed in her pockets, she stood an arm’s length from him and hunched her shoulders as she looked at him. ‘Hello, Eck,’ she said uncertainly. The skin beneath her eyes was clammy and in the inner corners was as dark as the underside of a mushroom. ‘Where shall we go?’ she asked, looking up and down the road. He led her down the alley beside the theatre, and they went into the first pub they came across, where the only place to stand was beside the cigarette machine. ‘So how’s the flat?’ she asked. Listening to him, she glanced from his face to the carpet to the mirror opposite, from which she turned away, as if her reflection were an eavesdropper.

  After one drink they left, and wandered along St Martin’s Lane and down to the Strand, and ended up at the boat at the Victoria Embankment. It was not yet dark, so they sat outside, on the upper deck. Sitting beside him on the slatted bench, she cradled her glass as if it were a fragile object that someone had asked her to hold for a few minutes. She told him she’d spent a weekend in Yorkshire, with Mary Garthside. Her flat was OK, but the neighbours weren’t exactly welcoming. She was thinking about moving to another school, she said. Their conversation sagged, and was silenced by the rising noise of the groups around them. For a while they regarded the river, and then she put her half-full glass on the seat beside him. ‘Eck, I have to go,’ she said, though it was not late. When she had pushed her way through the drinkers, Alexander poured her drink into his glass. He spent some time watching the figures that moved in the windows of the Festival Hall across the water. It was almost midnight when he arrived home. He looked at his bedroom by the light from the hall and felt as if he were coming back to a hotel room.

  They met in the afternoon next time, and on every subsequent occasion. For an hour or two they would stroll together and talk, but their talk was circumspect and trivial, and they stayed constantly a hand’s span or more apart, as though it were imperative for Megan that they should not touch. They might stop for a drink, and when they did it was always at a place to which they had never been as a couple. Only once, during this time, did their past intrude openly into the present. In a café in Old Compton Street she called for the bill and opened her wallet, and he saw, alongside the photo of Mr and Mrs Beckwith, a picture of himself and Megan, peeping around the flap of the tent that his father had pitched in the garden. ‘Let’s have a look,’ he cajoled. Reluctantly she held the wallet open on the table. In the background of the picture, above the tent, there was the window of Mrs Caton’s bathroom, with the sill that had crumbled over the years and had come to look like a slab of cod’s roe. The shrub above the wall was forsythia, and as Alexander perused its blurry flowers the picture imparted to him something of the pleasure that the jubilant yellow blooms used to give him, and he seemed to taste the March breeze. In his fingertips he could sense the texture of the stiff green canvas; he heard the muted crunch the tent’s fabric made when his father folded it into the grey cardboard box with the fat brass staples at its corners. Staring at the wooden barrier around the building site on the other side of the street, he saw the rectangle of sapless grass that was revealed when the groundsheet was lifted. He looked at Megan, who was looking at him wonderingly, ruefully, and slipping the wallet back into her bag. She went to visit a friend in Camden and he went to the cinema, as he often did after seeing her. Sometimes the sense of her presence was so strong that he would feel the touch of her head as she rested against his shoulder.

  Months went by, and every month they met for a few hours, and nothing changed until an afternoon in February. They met in Bow Street, outside the opera house. ‘Three hours shopping, and this is all I get,’ she said, showing him the new gloves on an outstretched hand.

  ‘Want to do three hours more?’ he asked.

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘You don’t want to slog around the girls’ shops,’ she replied.

  ‘Not the worst job in the world,’ said Alexander.

  ‘No more shopping,’ said Megan. ‘Let’s just walk. Away from here,’ she said, and she swung her bag to get them moving.

  They walked down to Aldwych. On Fleet Street they decided to go up the dome of St Paul’s, but halfway up Ludgate Hill she pointed to the gallery at the top of the dome. ‘Bit busy for my liking,’ she said, and Alexander knew from her eyes that this was an excuse, and that Megan felt there was no longer any reason to do such things together. ‘How about you?’ she asked.

  ‘Walking’s fine with me,’ he said, and so they continued up Ludgate Hill and around St Paul’s, talking about what each had bought, or thought about buying, or failed to find in the winter sales. They walked into the wide, empty streets of the City, along Watling
Street and Bread Street and Cheapside, past rows of dark and shuttered shops.

  They were near the Guildhall when Megan made a sound as if something had startled her. ‘Eck,’ she began.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say,’ he interrupted. ‘You’re going to say it would be best if we didn’t do this.’

  She stopped and looked at him. ‘I was,’ she admitted.

  ‘Those bloody gloves,’ he said, and he tried to smile. ‘I could tell by the way you showed them to me.’

  ‘And you agree that it’s best?’

  ‘I can’t, Meg. It’s not what I want.’

  Forlornly she gazed along the street. Traffic lights changed for traffic that was not there. ‘Look at us, Eck,’ she said, gesturing at the abject man and woman who faced them from the window of the bank. ‘We used to be such friends. Now we’re a miserable couple, same as the other miserable couples. I went and wrecked it.’

  ‘It’s not wrecked, Meg. And it wasn’t you.’

  ‘It was me,’ she insisted. ‘You wouldn’t have done anything.’

  ‘Sooner or later I would have.’

  ‘I doubt it, Eck,’ she said tenderly, and she started walking again.

  ‘Anyway, it was what we both wanted.’

  ‘We should have known, Eck.’

  ‘Known what? That we’d be happy for years?’

  ‘And then we’d be utterly miserable.’

  ‘We’re not utterly miserable. We’re not happy, and that’ll change.’

  ‘But we can’t go back,’ she protested. ‘Not to what we were like before.’

  ‘No, we can’t. But it’s not going to remain like this. Be patient.’

  ‘It’s not a question of being patient,’ she lamented. ‘We’re not friends who’ve fallen out with each other. We’re ex-lovers. We failed, Eck. All we can do now is talk about things that are beside the point, and there’s nothing else to talk about.’