That’s what his granny called it. A gift. As if it came wrapped like a parcel. Here you are, Bernard, look what I’ve got you. One of those red jumpers you’ll never wear, or that book you’ll never read, or the ability to see what few others can: ghosts. Not that he ever wanted the damn thing. He’d much rather have been given a little bit more grey matter – something to make school a little easier, something that would have helped him slip the right words into his slow mouth, or the ability to at least soak up a few pages of knowledge and not have it trickle out like treacle from his skull till there was nothing left of it, as if it had never been there in the first place. And yeah, to be able to talk to women without sounding like a gurgling fool that’s got his mouth bunged up with cotton wool. So like all the other stupid things he’d ever been given, this gift was the stupidest. What the hell do you do with it? What good is something you have to keep secretly locked away in your head? And what use is it having something that only makes you sound even dumber than they already think you are?
“It’s a gift, Bernard,” she’d said, and because he was young, because he thought her face, all screwed up like tea-stained tissue paper as it was, stood for age and age in its turn stood for wisdom, he believed his granny. Even when she said he had to rub a knob of butter into the egg that rose on his forehead when he ran it into a wall, or that a cloth soaked in vinegar would cure his fever, he believed her. He loved his granny.
Even now he couldn’t help but get choked up a little when he thought of her. He could almost feel the baby-soft touch of the back of her wrinkled hand that had been separated from babyhood by seventy years or more, holding his own, patting it reassuringly, as she’d done on countless occasions, calling him ‘Our Bernard’, pride in her voice that he belonged to them, as if he’d been the gift everyone had expected and had got, and not the gift nobody wanted, like his mum and dad never said but often implied. And he was sure she loved him right back. Sure of it. Our Bernard. My Bernard. My Special Bernard.
But in spite of all that he couldn’t bring himself to call it a gift, seeing ghosts, or whatever they were. And it sure as hell didn’t feel like a gift right now as he watched this particular apparition, that steadfastly watched him in return, standing silently and gauze-like by the toilet, as if wanting a pee but not quite sure what it’s supposed to do.
He took the flannel out of the steaming bathwater and squeezed it as dry as he could. He slapped it over his eyes and the figure was blotted out. The hot water lapped at his neck, the smell of soap and shampoo strong in his nostrils. So too the smell of his own whisky-soaked breath. Which is why he didn’t know whether the ghost was a real ghost (real?) or a by-product of a bottle of Johnnie Walker’s. A bottle and a half of Johnnie Walker’s to be exact. The thought of which caused him to lean over the side of the bath and grasp the neck of the bottle, which he drew swiftly and, he thought, with amazing accuracy, all things considered, to his lips. He glugged down another couple of searing mouthfuls. The flannel slipped down from his eyes, the light from the bathroom bulb far too bright and blasting his tired eyes, and revealed the figure, still unmoved from its station by the toilet. A huge rounded, balloon of a man, with a half coconut dangling from a piece of string in his hand.
“Leave me alone, you dumb bastard!” Bernard slurred heavily. But it didn’t leave him alone. And the coconut swung back and forth like a pendulum, or one of those things hypnotists used, he thought. Behave like a dog. Bark. Now a pig. That’s it, grunt. Squeal like a stuck pig. Laughter. Applause.
He heard voices from downstairs. And the sound of crying. So he sank his ears under the water so that he might muffle it, or even blot it out altogether, because he knew he’d caused the crying and the only thing he could think of doing was hiding from it. Now all he heard was the thub-thub-thub of his own blood pounding in his ears. He looked down at his body, distorted and white beneath the grey, sudsy water, at his wide hair-matted chest, his thick arms floating like pink, hairy logs.
It couldn’t be denied, he had looks. He had a body. Not much, but enough to fool someone until they came up close and he spoke to them. Then he’d spoil his chances good and proper when he opened his mouth. Or he’d walk, which was a dead giveaway, and no matter how he tried he couldn’t alter his shambling, heavy gait with the slumped shoulders and the dragging of legs that seemed to be too weighty for him, like he was hauling around twin tubes of lead.
“All things have a purpose,” his granny said the time he broke down and wept in front of her, and she didn’t bat an eyelid, took it as if it was the most natural thing in the world that a grown man of twenty-five might sob his eyes out like a blubbering kid, all snotty-nosed and flushed cheeks. Because he loved his granny and she loved him and it was OK to cry, to be who you were and how you felt. “There is a purpose for everyone in this world,” she said. “You just haven’t found yours yet, that’s all, Bernard. And don’t forget your gift…”
The first time he saw a ghost he was aged about ten. It was a dog, at the foot of his bed, all shaggy and gold and friendly-like. He woke from his sleep and there it was. At first he thought it might have been a present, because he’d desperately wanted a dog, but realisation soon dawned that it was neither his birthday nor Christmas – the only two annual occasions such a rare thing might be forthcoming. And the worst thing he could have done was rub his eyes, because it disappeared as soon as his fist was withdrawn from his lids. But he told his mum and dad, and they just looked at each other with that conspiratorial look that tells you they’re in on something you’re not. “We had a dog once, when you were young,” his mum said. “A golden retriever.” He looked to his dad for confirmation. “Must be a ghost,” his dad said, grinning from behind his mug of tea, like it was meant to scare him. But it didn’t. Not in the least. He waited for it again, the golden dog, but it never came back. His granny told him a few in the family had the Gift, and that he might be one of them. She didn’t mock him. “That makes you special,” she’d said, and Bernard had grinned.
When he was young he saw them when he awoke, at night. His granddad. His aunty. The old man who owned the sweetshop at the corner of High Street. And then his granny, six weeks after she’d died. But he saw her in the middle of the day, on a Sunday after he’d had a skinfull of ale; she was crossing over the road in front of his house with a carrier bag full of shopping. Mostly, these days, he’d see ghosts when he was drunk
He’d been good with his hands. These hands that stick ungainly from the white stumps of his thick arms. Fixed his dad’s petrol lawnmower when he was about eight or nine. Took it apart, put it back together and the thing sparked into life. “Well I nivver!” his dad said, brushing back his cap and scratching his forehead. “Well I nivver!” And he gave him a full penny to spend at the sweet shop on High Street as a reward. So he’d take anything apart that he could lay his eager hands on, even if they didn’t need repairing – a clock, a watch, a tin toy, a hairdryer – and sometimes they’d work and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes he’d get a penny and sometimes he’d get a clout round the ear. “Perhaps that’s your purpose, Bernard,” his granny had said. “Every man has a purpose in life.” And Bernard grinned.
Eventually he found a job working on tractors in a factory, and he’d thought he’d discovered his mechanical heaven. “Getting arms like fence posts, he is. A real man. Made my old lawnmower burst into life,” his dad had said to a friend at the factory, a drinking mate, and the job was more or less secured there and then over the swigging of a pint of bitter. But machines don’t give love or are soft to the touch or tell you you’re special in any way, and Bernard was lonely. And he asked his granny why people didn’t like him. Women people. “You’re kind and you’re honest,” she’d said. “One day she’ll come along. The right woman.” And she put her arm around his broad shoulder and patted him like he was a kid, and he let his tears soak into her perfumed cardigan like he was a kid.
But she was right all along. He met beautiful, beautifu
l, beautiful Connie Stone. She’d talked to him like he was a friend, and they’d laughed together like friends, and he’d asked her if she’d like to go out somewhere and she’d said yes. Then she’d kissed him, which was the first real kiss he’d ever had, a proper kiss soaked with affection and promise, and not many kisses later he’d asked her to marry him and she’d said yes as if she’d been waiting all along for him to ask it. And all things came together for him, and Bernard was the happiest man alive. He grinned more than he’d ever grinned before just so as people would know exactly how happy he was.
There was the stomping of feet on the stairs. Feet heavy with emotion, weighty with distress and hurt and all the bad things Bernard never thought he was capable of. But things had changed and his world had caved in on itself like a beach ball snagged on sharp rocks, just crumpled up all wrinkled, lying there, and no matter how he kicked at it the thing just wouldn’t go back to how it was before, complete, round, a thing of purpose.
“Bernard, look here, old man, I’ve got some news…” said his manager. His eyes looking away at the calendar on the wall where Miss June flashed her bare breasts over a knickerbocker glory. “Fact is, Bernard, some of us have got to go.” Some of us. Some of you, more like. Never us. “If we stay as we are then the entire ship will go down, you do understand, Bernard?” And Bernard simply bit at his lip with the vision of a ship being torpedoed and men flailing about in a heaving blue ocean while the sharks circled hungrily, patiently. “Fact is, you’re one of those we have to let go.” At first he didn’t comprehend. He’d been at the factory since leaving school. The spot on the shop floor had become an extension of him.
“What about my purpose?” Bernard blurted when it finally sank in, while the manager had looked blankly at him.
“You’ll get a tidy lump of redundancy, Bernard,” he said, and that was that. That was all there was to it.
So, finally cast adrift Bernard went to his granny’s grave, and he tugged out a couple of dandelions and smoothed over the wound with his tender fingers. He asked her silently what he should do now. She didn’t say anything. He lingered nearby on one of the benches, near a stinking bin overflowing with once beautiful flowers, but now all mushy and brown and dead. He waited for her to appear, because he had the Gift. But the Gift had abandoned him, for she refused to show herself.
He wanted to talk his redundancy over with Connie, yet somehow he could never find the strength to do it, to let her know how his head ached with it all. Because part of his purpose was to be a man, and Connie did so want a man, and a man had to work at the tractors otherwise he wasn’t a man no more. And what was a man when they took away from him what a man is? It was more than his tired brain could manage.
“A real man holds his drink,” his dad had said, laughing at him because he choked on a neat gin. Through tear-blurred eyes Bernard had laughed back, and then took what remained in the glass in one swift gulp. His dad had clapped loudly and patted him on the back. “He’s a real young man now!” he said to his cronies with a queer kind of pride ringing in his voice that made Bernard elated, and Bernard suddenly felt unique, the epicentre of a tepid and fuggy universe.
So he drank, because when they take away one thing that makes a man a man, he reaches instinctively for another thing that makes a man a man. And when that doesn’t work anymore, because through the swirling haze that ordinarily clouds and numbs the mind you can still see yourself for what you are, then a man resorts to what he has left, and he strikes out with the strength that makes him a man.
He struck out at Connie. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Connie. And how his heart was crushed by it. But that didn’t stop him striking out at her again, and again, when the blackness overwhelmed him.
And what’s more he didn’t like that Philip Calder kid – that Collie – hanging around like he did all the time. Didn’t like him at all. Came sniffing around Connie like a dog on heat, he did. Didn’t like him one little bit. There was something going on there, something he didn’t quite understand, something that nagged him, snagged his thoughts like briars.
The other night she gave him a parcel, a large one. Went into a cupboard and pulled it out, all wrapped up in brown paper like a present. Except it wasn’t a present, it was a sort of secret, because their voices had been hushed. Max hadn’t said anything, because Max never did. Dumb bastard. So when he’d gone with his parcel, he’d gone right in there and challenged her. But she put up a wall, like she does sometimes, and that made him all the angrier because he couldn’t broach it, so in a stupor flecked red with rage he’d done the next best thing and tried to smash bodily through it. She’d screamed. How that pained him. Yet he couldn’t stop once he started, not till he fell over exhausted and disorientated onto the sofa where he’d fallen fast asleep, the mystery parcel remaining just that.
He hated that Calder kid.
“You should never hate, Bernard, because to hate is the Devil inside you. You should accept them all for what they are and live and let live,” his granny said. “A real man knows how to hold himself back, not go flapping around in a rage like a ragged old chicken.”
But tonight had been different. Tonight he had been a chicken and not a man at all. Downstairs the television set was broken, and a bowl of fruit had been thrown against a wall; and when Max had risen to defend his mother Bernard had set about him, first with his fists, but then with an oak chair that had once belonged to his granny, and he broke that against the helpless dumb bastard. That’s when the screaming really began, like those sirens you hear in the movies when the German bombers were coming over to London during the war. It filled his head, filled the room, filled his miserable little beach ball of a world till his entire being was just one long shriek. He finally put his hands to his ears to blot it out and went upstairs and turned on the bath taps.
“You gonna stand there all night?” he said to the ghost. But the ghost wasn’t there anymore, and in its place was the steam-frosted mirror. He took another drink from the bottle and continued to sip away at it till he was sucking on air. He dropped it into the bathtub and watched it fill with water, the neck rising briefly like the bow of a stricken ship before the weight of it dragged it under completely and all that remained was the drifting away of a few soap bubbles on the scummy surface that plopped, one by one, out of existence.
His mind was being taken over by that welcome creeping blackness again, the colours of the real world merging into a thick, dark impasto. And in amongst this swirling, eddying other world he perceived a shadow deeper than its background. It hovered in his vision; only he didn’t see it, not see it in the real sense, he felt it the way one feels someone is looking at you.
At first he thought it might be the ghost, but then he had the feeling that it might be granny, because he could smell her perfume. So he held out his hands and felt her soft hands grip his like silk handcuffs. He grinned.
He didn’t mind the pain that flashed across his wrists. It was no more than the pain that flashed across his soul day in day out. The world continued its progress towards a dark sludge and the sound of his heart galloped like a sluggish farm horse in his ears. Just as everything turned completely black he saw his granny for real.
“Hello, Bernard,” she said.
Bernard grinned.
* * * *
32
Saturday
I have been writing so much about the past that it came as a sort of surprise to find I have now almost reached the present. Reached the point where I am sitting here writing this in my room. In my prison.
But it’s strange how recent events can seem foggier than those of the distant past, which come to me crystal clear like a sharp cloudless dawn. I find I am struggling to dredge up the most recent recollections. I think this is because of what happened to Ruby. Most certainly it’s because of that.
The memories have been partially blacked out by pain…
I stood long into the night staring out of the window, the room behind me in darknes
s.
I tried to sleep, but I guess it was natural that in spite of my eyes searing their sockets as if they were hot rocks, sleep would be difficult to find that night. And the wind continued to howl, teasing a loose pane of glass that made an uncanny whirring sound in its frame as the wind played constantly over it. Though I touched each in turn I could not discover which was the offending piece of glass, and so gave it up and stared instead, hoping sleep would eventually force me back into my bed.
It didn’t. Annoyingly my mind became all the more active.
I felt small puffs of cool air beating at my hand from an unseen gap in the window, as if a pair of invisible elfin lips were determined to keep me awake as well. Once or twice I had the feeling that someone else was indeed present, lurking behind, beyond and within the shadows, watching me every bit as intently as I was watching the elements rage about the island. I even turned quickly to catch it out, whatever ‘it’ was, and shook my head at my own stupidity when my gaze landed on the same gloomy stretch of blackness interspersed with even deeper pools of black.
Through narrowed eyes I thought I saw the moonlight flicker over the distant ocean like a cold white fire, and at the same time that feeling of another presence in the room. I resisted the urge to turn, but a faint scuffing on the carpet caused my head to spin around and my heart to go up a beat.
“Ruby!” I said in a whisper.
She closed the door softly behind her and her bare feet made hardly a sound as she floated spectre-like towards me through the charcoal fug. I caught the smell of her perfume. No, not perfume. It was her I could smell; that familiar, heady, musky scent that she’d always carried with her. It intoxicated me. She wore a flimsy satin dressing gown loosely fastened over a flowing nightdress, and the impression as she glided towards me was one of someone sporting a cape beneath which the wind had taken hold. The next second her finger was on my lips stemming any further enquiry.
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