by Sue Townsend
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Nine
“Thought you weren’t coming back,” said Crackle, when Christopher wheeled Stof me up to the table where he and a white-faced girl were sitting crouched over an ashtray. He unfastened the dog’s lead from the handle of the pushchair.
“What’s she wearing?” said the girl, accusingly, looking at the snowsuit.
“It’s only second-hand,” said Christopher. Storme drummed her feet in their new boots against the footrest of the pushchair. She looked up at her mother.
“The boots are new,” Christopher said.
“She’s got shoes, and a coat at home,” said Tamara defensively.
She’s done everything she can to make herself unattractive, repulsive even, thought Christopher, looking at Tamara’s spiky black crew cut. There was a ring in her left nostril, another pierced her thin upper lip. Her eyes were lined, Cleopatra-like, in black paint. She wore an outsize black baggy sweater that came down to her knees, black jeans and brown boots that looked ridiculously big for her. Like Crackle she wore a ring on each finger. Christopher noticed with distaste that Crackle and Tamara’s rings were identical.
“I’d give owt for a dog like that,” said Crackle. “What do you think, Tam?”
“Yeah, it’s nice,” said Tamara.
“I might buy you one for Christmas,” said Crackle, “play your cards right.”
“No,” said Tamara. “I want a rottie—the devil’s dog.”
Her little girl’s voice was at odds with the things she was saying.
“No, you can’t keep a rottie in a flat,” said Crackle.
She whined, “I know lots of people who’ve got them in flats.”
“Rottweilers need a lot of exercise,” said Christopher. He didn’t want them to get a Rottweiler, or any kind of dog.
Christopher crouched down in front of Storme.
“Goodbye then, Storme,” he said.
Storme pulled on the toes of her red boots.
“Boots, yes,” said Christopher. He called the dog and left the café without looking back at her. He wanted to care for Storme always. To feed her, and keep her close, and teach her things.
As he walked away from the city he pointed out to the dog that the snow was melting and that the gutters were full of water. People passed him on the pavement, but nobody seemed to think him peculiar for talking to his dog. Before he turned into the Close where he lived he told the dog that he would find a way of caring for Storme; ‘putting colour in her cheeks’, he said.
He had grown up with cinema advertisements featuring children with plump red cheeks and fitted coats with velvet Peter Pan collars. He imagined Storme aged three, running towards him wearing such a coat. The picture was so vivid that he could see the rows of stitching on the collar and the white socks and patent leather Start-Rite shoes with a silver buckle she wore. The ribbon in her hair was red, made of taffeta. He would make sure that she always wore proper-fitting shoes, and that she went to the dentist every six months. She would have ballet lessons and a library ticket, and she would live in the country where it was safe. Her toenails would be cut straight across with scissors bought especially for the task. He would read her bedtime stories, Winnie the Pooh and The Little Prince, and protect her from the violence and anxieties of the television news. She would sleep in clean sheets, in a warm room with sufficient ventilation. There would be an alphabet frieze running around her room, so that she could lie in her little bed and learn her letters in dreamy comfort. There would be a brown egg at breakfast, and yellow butter and bread cut with a knife. There would be a tablecloth and a wooden chair with a cushion so that she could reach the table. There would be hollyhocks in the garden. He would give her a small watering can. In the winter he would roast chestnuts for her on the log fire and teach her the old nursery rhymes. He would cherish her and keep her in this fictitious childhood world until she was grown, and only then would he let her go.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Ten
As Angela drove around the multi-storey carpark following the exit signs, Catherine appeared beside her. Angela told her about the extraordinary meeting she’d had at lunchtime with Christopher Moore.
“He just turned up?” Catherine was amazed. “What does he look like?”
“Well, you wouldn’t want him to come to a parents’ evening, not looking like he did today.”
Catherine asked, “Does he know about me?”
“Catherine, you are all we talked about,” said Angela. “You and his dog. He wanted to know if you were alive.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him the truth. I told him that you were dead.”
They both laughed, and Angela took her eyes off the road for a moment to glance at her impossibly perfect, beautiful, black-haired, laughing daughter.
“I got a hundred per cent in my mock A’s, Mum,” said Catherine, smiling and showing her dazzling teeth. Angela glowed with maternal pride as she stopped at the barrier and handed her ticket to the gloomy carpark man who sat in his little cubicle, listening to a Radio One traffic report. “You’re very young, but with your IQand exam results you ought to try for Oxford next year,” Angela said to Catherine.
“Oxford?” repeated the carpark man.
“I was talking to my daughter,” said Angela. The man looked into the car. It was empty, apart from the fat woman behind the wheel.
Her talking to herself was nothing new to him; he’d seen all sorts of mad behaviour taking place in cars. Have a butchers at her now. She’s crying her eyes out! She’s had to pull over. She’s dropped her head on the steering wheel and sounded the horn. She’s looking for a tissue, can’t find one. Ugh! she’s blowing her nose on her skirt. A respectable-looking woman like her. The public never failed to amaze him. He’d often thought of writing it all down. He could fill a notebook a day.
Angela couldn’t stop the water from pouring down her face just as the amniotic fluid had trickled from her womb, before Catherine had been born. They had given her prostaglandin intravenously in a drip inserted into the back of her wrist. She had not been able to watch while it had been inserted. She had looked at the glossy white walls and the metal shelves stacked with sterile packs and stainless steel instruments. There had been a haze of fear in her eyes as she had walked into the room, and climbed on to a high trolley, and this had prevented her from seeing where she was at first.
She had not remembered the doctor’s name. She could not properly understand his heavily accented English. He grew impatient with repeating himself to her, and looked frequently at his watch, as though he had a more important appointment elsewhere.
“Why did you not have an abortion earlier?” he said to her as he straightened up after examining her cervix.
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Why not earlier?” he said, raising his voice.
“Earlier?”
“A termination, before twenty-seven weeks. That is usual.”
“My fiancé wanted the baby,” she said.
“And is he still wanting the baby?” The doctor lifted the white surgical gown she wore, and palpated her abdomen with cold brown hands. Angela imagined the baby cowering away through the layers of skin, fat muscle, and fluid, from the roughness of his touch.
“Yes, he still wants the baby.”
“So you are defying him?”
“Sorry, what did…”
“You are aborting this baby against his will?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You know you will go into labour, and that we cannot predict how long your labour will last?”
“Yes, I understand that.” She had spoken to a counsellor and this kindly woman had explained that a late-term abortion was ‘particularly upsetting’. Angela had read in a gynaecological text book that labour would be painful and was often protracted. She looked at the counsellor’s floral print dress, and tried to put a name to the flowers. Freesias? Aquilegia? She looked up and heard her
saying, “…psychological problems.”
Angela had wanted to shout at the woman. I don’t think you can properly understand how much I want to get rid of this baby. It is an alien inside me. It has filled my belly and my head. It has turned me into an animal with an animal’s responses. It is a loathsome parasite, feeding off me. Would you have me welcome a tapeworm into the world? I want all traces of it cleared out of my body. I will excavate the thing, by hook or indeed by crook. If the labour takes a year, and the pain makes me scream like an animal in a trap, I don’t care. I will face it with fortitude. When the invader has gone, I will reconvene: I will gather together the threads of my old life, and I will forgive myself and eventually forget.
The kindly woman in the floral dress said, “Do you have any questions, Angela?”
“Yes,” said Angela. “How soon can you fit me in?”
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Eleven
Gregory was waiting impatiently for Angela to come home. He’d bought a £2.99 bag of Realwood logs from the garage on his way back. When he heard her key in the door he would put a match to the kindling in the hearth. He lit a cigarette, a low-tar brand, called Ultra Low. He took the cigarette from a Zippo chromium case he’d received on his eighteenth birthday from his girlfriend at the time. “Love always, Elaine.” He rubbed the inscription with his thumb. On 30.7.76 Elaine had informed him that she had been in love with her dentist for over a year and she could ‘no longer live a lie’. The dentist, Mr Chan, was unaware that he was the object of Elaine’s love, and eventually was forced to take an injunction out to keep Elaine away from his surgery.
Gregory thought that he should stop using the cigarette case. For twenty years it had been a constant reminder to him that before Angela he had always seemed to end up with difficult, neurotic women. The type who cried easily and wore unflattering clothes that were five years behind in fashion. These women had looked unfashionable even without their clothes. He wondered why even their naked bodies had looked second-hand. He wasn’t what women called ‘a catch’. He knew that. But he was a damned sight better-looking than most of the husbands and partners he saw about. And better educated (two A levels) and he’d almost completed a degree at Loughborough University in Leisure Management. In a moment of uncertainty he’d once done a quiz in the Sunday Times and had scored just enough points, forty-five, to categorise himself as middle-middle–class. He’d got five of those points because as a young man he’d played rugby and tennis at club level, before persistent cartilage problems had forced him to stop.
Sometimes he wondered if he was performing the sex act correctly. None of them had complained, but he had to admit that not one of them had shown the wild abandonment that women on the cinema screen went in for. He had tried to arouse them by showing them drawings from The Joy of Sex but he couldn’t recall a single ex-girlfriend who had bitten a pillow or thrashed her head from side to side. He was always scrupulous about their mutual sexual hygiene but, after having sex with him, few of them ever wanted to see him again.
It was so unfair. He’d go to enormous trouble: he could only bring them to the house on Tuesday nights when his mother went to rehearsals at the local dramatic society. After she’d gone he would pick the girl up from her home and drive her back to his mother’s house, light the gas fire in the lounge, adjust the lighting, lay a towel on the hearth rug, and put ‘Bolero’ on the record player. Making love by firelight should have been a magical experience, but most of the girls had been unable to relax; some had been frightened; some had cried and had wanted to go home.
Angela had broken this unhappy pattern. She was a looker. She was interested in world affairs. Their fathers had both been members of the Lions Club of Great Britain. She was an older woman. She was sexually experienced. He’d asked her to marry him in the carpark of a country pub on their third date. They’d been standing watching the sun setting between two tall conifers and Angela’s face was suffused by the fading pink light. He had driven them back to town without once exceeding the speed limit. A queue of cars had built up behind them. Angela’s right hand had stroked his left thigh. This was the most physically intimate they had been so far. They had gone back to Angela’s bedsit for sex. She seemed to be desperate for him. He had phoned his mother to tell her that he wouldn’t be home that night, he was staying with a friend from the rugby club. His mother had laughed indulgently down the phone.
“You men?” she’d said. Though it was only eleven o’clock at night. Gregory had meant to remind his mother to lock the front door, but he had been unable to speak. Something had been put into his mouth; it was one of Angela’s nipples.
Gregory hadn’t wanted to spend his working life surrounded by napery, but when his father, sole proprietor of Lowood’s Linens, had dropped dead at work at the age of fifty-three, the family business had settled itself on his reluctant twenty-one-year-old shoulders, He had never succeeded in shrugging it off. Initially he’d agreed to it to please his mother, who had been hysterical at the graveside, and had implored him in the funeral car to carry on where his father had so suddenly broken off. He would have agreed to anything during that terrible journey. Anything to shut her up, to stop that embarrassing wet-mouthed grief, and those awful unfeminine out-of-control grunting noises she was making in the back of her throat. His mother had always been such a quiet woman. The drive back from the churchyard to the family house became a fifteen-miles-an-hour nightmare. As the black car passed Lowood’s Linens his mother began screaming, “How ean I live without him?” He had wanted to slide the glass panel aside and ask the driver of the car to put his foot down, but Lydia, his older sister, had restrained him.
Within three years his mother had died, leaving Gregory the large Edwardian house in the comfortable suburbs to the south of the city and rooms full of Jacobean-style dark furniture. Lydia had wanted the dining table and eight chairs. There had been a quarrel which turned into a feud, he hadn’t seen her for sixteen years. Gregory was now thirty-nine and was still surrounded by tablecloths and napkins, in the tiny shop, opposite the noisy market place. After a lot of agonised indecision, he had diversified into bed linen, and expanded into the shop next door, but napery was still his speciality. There was nothing Gregory didn’t know about the trade. The shelves of the shop were stacked to the ceiling with every conceivable fabric and pattern of tablecloth and napkin.
His father had been a character, he had been well known in the town for his wit and bonhomie, and his capacity for strong drink. A glamorous woman, a stranger, had turned up, uninvited, to his funeral. Gregory also wanted to be thought of as a character. He tried to make himself more interesting by wearing a three–piece suit and a bow tie to work. There was always a fresh flower in the buttonhole of his coat. For a time he had taken to buying the Daily Telegraph. He had enjoyed sitting on his high stool next to the till, flapping and cracking the large broadsheet pages into order; but he had eventually tired of what he called, ‘the smart-alecky’ writing, and had gone back to the Daily Mail, which was more manageable, on many levels.
On Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays he employed a young woman, to help in the shop. She was black, had three school-age children and was called Lynda. Gregory chose her because she was black. He thought it would make him seem advanced and daring. Lynda had not turned out to be as exotic as he had expected. She didn’t laugh as easily as he would have liked or wear bright colours. She was efficient and honest and polite to the customers and within a few weeks she knew her way around the stock.
“But I could have had all that from a white woman,” he had once grumbled to Angela.
His regular customers now were mainly old women, to whom a tablecloth was still a household necessity, but Christmas brought all types. He could move a hundred tablecloths a day in the week before Christmas. His best line was a red cloth bordered with a Santa and reindeer design. He imported these from Portugal. He could fill in the customs and excise forms with his eyes closed.
Over th
e years, he had taken up many hobbies and pastimes. He had collected early English teaspoons. He had then become interested in genealogy, and had traced his Lowood ancestors back to the eighteenth century. Disappointingly, they had been tanners—the pariahs of a village in Norfolk, forbidden even to go to church because of the ‘noxious odure’ of their clothing. Gregory had also experimented constantly with his facial hair; a handlebar moustache, mutton-chop whiskers, a goatee, a bushy and a half-face beard, but somehow or other his quest for the public label, that of being a ‘character’, continued to be fruitless.
He fancied himself as a bit of a scribbler and had once embarked on writing a heavily researched science fiction story about a crew of women astronauts attempting to land on Saturn, but by the nineteenth page they’d already reached Saturn and he hadn’t known what to do with them after that, so he’d abandoned the book.
What he wanted was to walk into a country pub and hear a shout go up: “What’s your poison, old boy?” He wanted to be part of a VAT-grumbling, joke-cracking, heavy-drinking crowd of small businessmen like himself. He wanted to be a man. He had no real interest in football, except on the rare occasions when his local team did well, but recently he had started to read the sports pages in the newspapers and to study the football league tables.
He’d often thought about selling the shops and buying a country pub. He would supply faggots and peas after the darts matches, and encourage his regulars, his friends, to keep their personal tankards hanging up over the bar. He’d mentioned this idea to Angela, but she’d said, “Quite honestly Gregory, I’d sooner sell my body in Wolver-hampton, than run a country pub.”
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Twelve
Angela fumbled at the bottom of her handbag for her keys. Her fingers touched a clothes peg, then a tampon. She could have rung the doorbell. Gregory’s car was parked in the driveway, but she had grown to hate the way he opened the door to her when she’d forgotten her key on these occasions; as though she were not his wife, but a stranger who had interrupted him in some important task. He never mislaid his keys, he kept them on a long key-chain which he attached to a belt loop on his trousers. There were seventeen keys on Gregory’s bunch. They bulged in his right-hand trouser pocket.