by Sue Townsend
Tamara couldn’t imagine what her mother would have said or done if she had seen what had happened to Storme’s body. Tamara hoped that her mother wasn’t looking down from heaven at herself and Storme sitting on the sofa. She closed her eyes at the thought and kissed the top of the baby’s head, softly so as not to wake her. It would be awful if she started to cry and woke Crackle. He was one of those people who needed his sleep. She would just have to sit quietly with the baby until he woke and shouted through for his coffee. She hoped it wouldn’t be long. She was a bit worried about the baby—she was breathing funny. Tamara stretched out her hand and grasped the cigarettes and matches from the armrest on the opposite end of the sofa. She lit a cigarette and kissed the baby’s head again. Smoke drifted across Storme’s face, making her cough, which Tamara took to be a good sign. It was the baby’s normal cough. The one she’d had for months.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Fifteen
It was November 25th, and at 9 AM Christopher was meant to attend a Job Club. This appointment had been made on his behalf by the Department of Employment, who had said in a letter that they were ‘concerned about his long period of unemployment’. Christopher didn’t share their concern. He had long ago reconciled himself to never working again, not in electronics.
After his grandma had died, a ridiculous thing had happened to him. He’d gone to work one day, a week after the funeral, and had started to cry. A song playing on the radio in the workshop had triggered it off. A Buddy Holly song that had held no significance for him, or for his grandma. He’d gone into the tiny room where he did his paperwork, and had tried to control himself, but it was as though a dam had burst and the waters were washing him away He saw the embarrassed faces of his employees watching him through the interior windows. Douglas, the foreman, had come into the room and patted him on the shoulder and had made him a cup of tea and offered to drive him home. But Christopher had sat there ignoring the ringing phone, letting the tea go cold. The heating had switched itself off at 7 PM, and he was aware that the temperature had fallen, and that he was very cold, but he couldn’t move out of his chair. He was pinned down by a sadness so profound that he thought it would suffocate him.
In the morning Douglas had come in early and found Christopher asleep with his head on his desk. He had woken him up gently, and Christopher had started crying again. Douglas had not known what to do, apart from offering Christopher his handkerchief. The other employees had turned up and were dismayed to find their boss, usually so confident and fearless, whimpering like a small child, afraid of the telephone and hanging on to Douglas’s hand. It was Douglas’s wife, Anne, who had diagnosed a nervous breakdown, later to be confirmed by Christopher’s GP. Tranquillisers had reduced the misery, but when he returned to the workshop three months later, he found a chaos of unpaid bills, unpresented invoices and unfilled orders. His business, of which he was now sole owner, so painfully built up over fifteen years, had unravelled like a badly knitted cardigan. In the short time he had been absent, he felt that he’d been left behind by the electronics industry. After the business was wound up he joined a large firm in the city. He’d got it into his head that he wouldn’t live for much longer. He knew there was no rational reason for these morbid thoughts: he was in good health, it was more a feeling that he had already run the full span and was coming to the end of his life.
♦
He took the dog for a walk on the heath. The police had gone, leaving deep tyre tracks in the muddy ground and a litter of cigarette stubs. He looked down into the ditch where the bag had been. It was half full of melting snow water. When he was a boy he would have delighted in playing in such a place, wading in his Wellingtons, building a small dam, sailing tiny ships made of acorn shells with a dried leaf for a sail.
The dog jumped into the ditch and ran along its length, churning the mud at the bottom. Christopher walked away quickly. He was anxious to be as far away as possible when the dog climbed out of the ditch and shook itself. He was wearing his best suit and his only decent overcoat. He waited at the side of the dual carriageway for the dog. The traffic was heavy now with people on their way to work. A car passed him, pipped its hooter, pulled in and parked a hundred or so yards ahead. It was a Volvo estate, its hazard lights were flashing. The driver’s door opened and Angela got out and started to walk towards him. He walked to meet her.
“I thought it was you,” she said. “Can I give you a lift?”
“I’ve got the dog with me,” he said. At that moment the dog emerged from the scrubland wagging its tail and bounded towards him. Angela was taken aback by how different Christopher looked from yesterday. He had shaved and brushed his hair. He looked good in the masculine clothes he was wearing.
“I dreamt about you last night,” Angela lied.
“We don’t see each other for seventeen years, and then twice in two days,” said Christopher. He bent down to click the lead on to the dog’s collar so that she couldn’t see from his face how happy he was.
“It is a strange coincidence,” she said. It was her second lie to him that day. The day before he had told her where he walked the dog in the morning. She had already driven around the perimeter of the heath seven times, in the hope that she would see him. Though she hadn’t intended to stop the car, or to approach him directly.
“I’m going into town, but I’ll have to take the dog home first,” he said. She was willing to put the wet and muddy-pawed dog in the back of the car. But the car was immaculate inside and Christopher insisted on walking the dog home. He gave her his address and she was sitting in the car brushing her hair outside his house when he and the dog turned the corner of the street.
“I love her,” he said to the dog. “I still love her.”
The dog looked up at the sound of his voice. Then carried on sniffing excitedly at the pavement. It was always happy to return home after a walk.
She got out of the car, and smoothed her long overcoat down over her massive hips. She was wearing black suede ankle boots with delicate high heels. A black suede bag was slung over one shoulder. Her hair shone in the feeble morning sunlight. She had made up her face very carefully that morning, and had taken the cellophane wrapper off the Coco perfume she had bought in the duty-free on the Calais ferry a year ago. The nozzle was faulty and the perfume had poured down her neck in a stream, but she was glad now as she watched Christopher walk towards her. She wanted him to be intoxicated by her. To be enveloped and seduced by the smell of her.
Christopher hadn’t wanted to show her around the house. He was ashamed of its masculine sparsity. He explained about the burglary and she sympathised. Her office had been burgled twice in the last year. They talked about insurance companies in his monastic bedroom. Christopher sat down on the double bed to change his shoes, and Angela caught a glimpse of herself in the wardrobe mirror. This was always a shock to her. She turned away quickly and went out on to the small landing. She looked into the other two bedrooms and was surprised to find that the walls were entirely lined with books. The shelves reached almost to the ceiling. Other books were stacked into cardboard boxes. One was full of Rupert annuals. She read the title of the top book through its polythene dust cover: Rupert and the Snowman. Christopher joined her at the threshold of the larger bedroom. “So many books,” she said. She took a book out of its box. “The History of Great Yarmouth,” she laughed. “It’s what I do now. I read them and collect them.” Both of them felt weak with desire. However, they were careful not to touch each other, and made subtle and deliberate manoeuvres to keep a space between them as they looked around the rest of the house.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Sixteen
The Job Club was held in a Portakabin situated in a carpark in the grounds of a defunct Victorian school, now converted into a skills training centre. The Portakabin next door was occupied by the Samaritans. Their tall radio mast swayed in the wind. Christopher watched it through the smeared window as he waited for other members o
f the Job Club to arrive. He had forgotten how to speak to people about unimportant things, so he kept his back to them.
At five past nine he heard a man’s voice asking them to take a seat, and he turned around to see Barry Dearman standing beside a flow chart, with a black marker pen in his hand. Barry was smiling, showing his white crooked teeth. He told the assembled unemployed men and women that they almost certainly ‘by now’ suffered from low self-esteem, and that today’s session would concentrate on getting their confidence back. He wrote ‘SeLf-eSTeem’ and ‘COnFiDenCe’ on the flow chart, in a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters, which irritated Christopher. A bald man sitting next to Christopher carefully copied ‘self-esteem’ and ‘confidence’ on the first page of a notebook which he took out of a W.H. Smith paper bag.
Barry then wrote ‘Biography’ on to the flow chart, then launched into an explanation of the word. He then handed out a sheet of thin A4 lined paper, so thin that Christopher could see his fingers through it when he took it from Barry’s hand. “When you’ve finished writing your biography, we’re going to turn it into a CV,” said Barry; “and some of you will get a chance to get on the computer and type it out, professional, like.” Thirty heads turned towards the lone computer which stood on a Formica table, trailing wires. The man next to Christopher wrote ‘Computer’ in his notebook. Christopher wrote:
My name is Christopher Moore. I was born on July 20th, 1947. My parents were called Audrey and Harry. My father was a knitting machine engineer, and my mother worked in the hosiery making children’s socks. However, due to circumstances, I lived with my grandparents from an early age. I attended Dovecote infant and junior schools and Ladymount Green Secondary School. My favourite subjects were English and History. In my last year I was in charge of the school library. I represented the school at table tennis. I left school when I was fifteen. I went to work in an electrical appliances shop, where I stayed for six years. During that time I learned to mend electrical appliances, including televisions, which not many people had then.
This was how I first met Angela. Her father came into the shop and asked if somebody would call at their house and have a look at their television, which had very poor picture quality. It took two buses to get there, they lived at Willoughby Harcourt, a small village. There was no such thing as the firm’s van then, and anyway, I couldn’t drive. The Carrs lived in a big house with a drive. I had to carry my toolbox all the way, and by the time I rang the bell I was glad to have arrived. Mrs Garr answered the door and showed me into a room she called the lounge. There were two bookcases, one on either side of the fireplace. The shelves were full of English classics: Dickens, Shakespeare, Waugh, Hardy: I’d heard of most of them. Televisions were big then, and this one (it was a Ferguson I think) stood in the corner, towering over all the other furniture. I’d taken the back off and was checking the wiring inside when Angela came in with a tray which held a cup of tea, a sugar bowl, and two digestives on a plate. Her first words to me were, “My mother sent this.” She had a posh accent. My first words to her were, “Thank you.” I think she was anxious to prove that she was intelligent, because she asked me a lot of questions about the science of television.
She had just taken an exam in physics, so I had to think very carefully before I answered her questions. She was eighteen, I was twenty-one. She was wearing a straight short dress. Her legs looked bright orange because of the stockings she was wearing and she wore white square-toed shoes. But it was her hair I liked. It was so black. I used to go bird-watching when I was a kid, and it was the same colour as a blackbird’s wing. The tea went cold on the tray. I didn’t dare risk making a slurping noise when I drank it. I asked her to turn the horizontal hold knob while I adjusted a few wires at the back, and after about fifteen minutes we got a perfect picture.
She was waiting to go to Leeds University. I have never loved anybody else. She didn’t go. Her mother died after a long illness (cancer of the liver). She had to listen to her mother screaming with the pain. Then she had to stay at home and look after her father, who suffered from depression until he died, two years later. There was no money and Angela got a job in a travel agent’s: her other A levels were in Spanish and German.
I next saw her in a jazz club. She was with a thin man with a beard. I hated him on sight. We were all on the dance floor. I asked her to dance. The bloke with the beard objected. I hated him so much that I hit him and he fell down.
Here Christopher asked for another piece of paper. Barry handed it to him begrudgingly, as if it were a sheet of gold leaf. Everyone else had long since finished writing.
It was the first time in my life that I had hit anybody before they hit me. Angela bent over her bearded friend and I was thrown out of the jazz club and told not to come back.
She came out with the bearded bloke. He tried to put his arm around her, but she threw it off. I knew that she had lost respect for him. I crossed the street and I said, “Angela I love you.” I wasn’t drunk. She started to cry. The bearded bloke hit me hard on the shoulder. I hit him back. Blood dripped from his nostrils.
“Don’t, he’s a poet!” Angela shouted. Her black hair fell across her face. I told her again that I loved her. She cried harder. The poet ran down the wet street and turned the corner. In those days there was nothing open in the town after 11 PM at night, so we sat in the bus station and talked until it got light. She told me about the deaths of her parents, and I told her that I loved her, repeatedly. I didn’t touch her, though I wanted to. We had breakfast in the bus station café. It was two years before I saw her again at night school. Then another three before we lived together. I knew we would one day. Right from the moment we got the perfect picture together in the lounge at Willoughby Harcourt.
Barry walked around and gathered up the A4 sheets. He read them sitting on a chair by the computer. The unemployed adults watched him. “Mr Moore,” he said, eventually. “Could I have a word?”
Christopher had to stand in front of him. There was not a handy unoccupied chair. Barry craned his head and looked up into Christopher’s face.
“Look, chap,” he said. “I haven’t got the time to play silly buggers. I’m not here to read about Angela, or fucking liver cancer. I’m here to help you find a job!”
Christopher said, “Don’t say fucking in the same sentence you say Angela.” in a voice that reminded Barry of a British gangster film he’d seen in which softly spoken men did unspeakably cruel things to those who had offended them. Christopher realised that he didn’t want to have any contact whatsoever with this man Barry. He knew he would never return to the Portakabin with the undulating floor. Or ever meet again the other job seekers. He decided to forfeit his job-seeker’s allowance. He would live independently of the government and he would win Angela back. He slowed down as he passed the Samaritans’ Portakabin, then decided that he didn’t need them either. He walked in the direction of the city centre, increasing his pace as he neared the travel agency.
∨ Ghost Children ∧
Seventeen
Tamara laid Storme down carefully on the sofa. She went into the bathroom to do her make-up. She examined her face in the magnifying mirror that was on the ledge propped up against the window. She wished that she looked older, like a woman instead of a girl, and that her face wasn’t so thin. She would ask Crackle if she could grow her hair. It didn’t suit her so short. She looked like those Bosnians she’d seen on the television. The hole in her nose where the ring had been inserted was sore. Yellow pus came out when she poked at it with a piece of tissue. She wetted the corner of a towel and dabbed it on to a sliver of soap that was stuck to the recess on the washbasin; then she wiped the towel under her eyes, removing the evidence of last night’s mascara-stained tears. She opened the bottle of liquid eye-liner and, using a brush, drew two thick black lines around each eye. Then, using the little finger of her right hand, she dabbed the purple eye-shadow to the lids, mauve to the sockets, and pink to the expanse of shaven flesh under
the eyebrows. She then spotted dots of pale liquid foundation over her face, and rubbed it in. Finally, she covered her lips with lipstick so dark that at first glance it appeared to be black.
The bath was full of dirty clothing. She sorted through it, looking for something to wear. She pulled out a pair of knickers that weren’t too bad, but rejected the black jeans that no longer met round her waist. She found the red bra with the padded inserts that made her small breasts wobble slightly. In the past this effect had excited Crackle, but not lately. He’d gone off sex since he’d been on crack.
She tiptoed into the bedroom where Crackle was sleeping with one hand curled around his mouth. He looked so beautiful when he was sleeping; like a little boy. She drew the stained duvet over his thin back, covering the Satan tattoo and causing him to moan in his sleep, and move his head on the greasy pillow. She gazed down at him, enchanted by his long black eyelashes and his face that was prettier than hers when he smiled. She picked up from the floor some leggings and the baggy black sweater she’d been wearing since the weather turned cold, and put them on. As she crept back out, she saw the little red boots in a tangle of blankets at the foot of the cot. She searched through various piles of dirty clothing for something decent for Storme to wear. Something was telling her to take Storme to the doctor’s. She looked at her watch, it was eleven—too late for morning surgery. She would have to wait now until four.
She found a pink stretch babygrow. It had been in the washing pile for a week, but after she’d scraped a patch of sick from around the neck with a long black varnished fingernail it didn’t look too bad. She took a disposable nappy from the packet and began to dress Storme for her visit to the doctor. The baby slept throughout, which worried Tamara. When she was dressed, Tamara brought the towel with the wet corner from the bathroom and washed her daughter’s face and hands. She noticed that the child’s fingernails were rimmed with black, so she bit the end of a matchstick into a point, and used it to ease the greasy dirt from beneath each small nail. The fan heater stopped and the overhead light went out, which meant the electricity had gone. She hadn’t got a card to insert into the meter. The room quickly grew cold, so Tamara covered herself and Storme with her red cloth coat that she wouldn’t be seen dead in now, and they waited for Crackle, provider of money and electricity, to wake up.