Ghost Children

by Sue Townsend

  He struggled back into the shop and told the Chinese girl in the photography department that they had ruined his photographs, thanks to ‘their sloppy developing procedures’. The departmental manager, a Mr Crow, came from behind a door marked ‘Staff’. He introduced himself and asked how he could help Gregory. Gregory informed Mr Crow that unless he received a new disposable camera and a gift voucher as compensation for his ruined photographs, he would be taking him to the Small Claims Court, once Christmas was over.

  Mr Crow looked down at the photographs which were causing all the trouble. He couldn’t work out what the silly sod was going on about. The photographs were a family group: the lovely girl in the uniform had her mother’s hair and eyes, and her father’s mouth and slim build. The three of them were beautifully framed in the shop doorway. The quality of the film was very good. No way was he going to give the nutter in the stupid hat anything at all. Eventually, after Gregory grew louder and more insistent in his complaints, Mr Crow rang security and Gregory was escorted from the premises by a silent security guard.

  ∨ Ghost Children ∧

  Forty

  Ken locked himself in the bathroom and unfolded the instruction sheet from inside the ‘Predictor’ box, and studied it carefully. It was all simpler than he’d expected: all he needed to do was to dip the device into some of Tamara’s wee and wait eight minutes, and if a blue ring appeared it meant she’d be carrying a baby inside her; Crackle’s baby. He sat on the side of the bath and put his hands together and prayed fervently that she wasn’t pregnant, that her belly was big due to other physical causes. She didn’t know how to look after a baby, she was still a baby herself. It was him and Cath who’d looked after Storme for the first three months, before Tamara and Crackle had found a flat. Once, when he’d taken Cath on an outing to Drayton Manor Park with the church, they’d returned home to find Storme screaming with a burnt mouth: Tamara had warmed the baby’s bottle in the microwave and hadn’t checked the temperature. It was Cath and Ken who had sat up all night with Storme, spooning ice-cold sterilised water into the little scalded mouth.

  It was a terrible day when Tamara and Crackle took Storme away to live in the flat. At first Ken and Cath visited twice a week, taking food and nappies and baby clothes. They played with the baby and tried not to comment on the thick crust of yellow scurf on her head, or the rank smell of her clothes. Cath took the baby’s clothes home to wash and brought them back, sweet and clean, the next time. Sometimes Ken and Cath stood outside the front door to the flat listening to Storme crying inside. On one occasion when nobody had answered the bell, Ken had booted the door and shouted so loudly that the neighbours in the adjacent flat had come out and complained about Crackle and Tamara. They told Ken that they were sick of the noise they made: the kid was always crying, and the stereo was on so loudly that their walls vibrated. Tamara had eventually answered the door. She had sleep in her eyes, and was wearing Crackle’s denim shirt and a pair of black knickers. Ken was disgusted to see that her neck and shoulders were disfigured by liver-coloured love bites. She stood on the threshold in bare feet and took the Tood and the freshly laundered baby clothes, but she was nervous and didn’t want to let them in. They had pushed by her anyway. There was broken glass on the floor of the living room, and the television screen was shattered. Cath had said, “See to the baby, Tamara, I’ll clean this up.”

  Ken had asked if Crackle was still in bed, and Tamara had started to cry and said, “No, he’s not been home for two days.”

  In his absence Ken and Cath cleaned the flat and fed Tamara and Storme. They begged her to bring the baby and come home with them, but Tamara said repeatedly, like a mantra, “No, I’ve got to be here when he gets home.”

  At her request Ken had rung all the hospitals, secretly hoping that he would be told that Crackle was dead. Ken thought that he would volunteer to identify the body: it would give him great satisfaction to see that moronic bastard on a mortuary slab. But within four months it was Cath’s body he was looking down on, not believing, despite the evidence of his own eyes, that this woman that he loved so passionately could be dead and gone from him for ever. He was only fifty-two. How could he live the rest of his life without her?

  It was easy to get a sample of urine from Tamara. He told her that the community nurse was testing for diabetes, and had left a self-testing kit. Tamara believed him. She believed everything that she was told. Ken had finally admitted to himself that she was a stupid girl. They had called it ‘learning difficulties’ at school. There had been talk about sending her to a special school, but Ken had seen the mini-bus full of special-school children as it did the rounds of the estate in the early morning, and he fought to keep her out of that bus. Cath and he had tried to teach her to read and write at home, but each kitchen table session ended in frustration and angry tears. When she was older, she got by in the world because she was pretty—until she met Crackle, who had sucked all the prettiness out of her.

  Ken added the urine to the padded device, and put it high up on top of the bathroom cabinet where Tamara wouldn’t see it. He looked at his watch and noted the time. Soon he would know if she was carrying another baby inside her. He would fill the time by preparing to visit Storme. He took his shirt off and washed and shaved. As he rinsed the shaving foam from his face he looked at himself closely in the mirror and saw that he was turning into an old man. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled.

  Ken forced himself to go downstairs and watch television. Tamara had possession of the remote control and maddened him by flicking from channel to channel. She lay full length on the sofa, her belly seemed more prominent than ever. A gathering of soft-drink cans and dirty cups stood on the floor within her reach. She’d been using a toast-crumbed plate as an ashtray. A haze of cigarette smoke drifted across the room from the slight draught he had caused by opening the door.

  “Have you phoned the hospital about Storme?” he asked.

  “I couldn’t get through,” she said, keeping her eyes on the television, but he knew by the way her finger went to her mouth that she was lying. In her slothful state she had forgotten about Storme. She was not natural, thought Ken, and he prayed once again that the ring would not have turned blue when he went back upstairs.

  ∨ Ghost Children ∧

  Forty-One

  Crackle swore when he saw the queue outside the prison visitors’ centre. He hated queuing and would normally push to the front of any queue and ignore anybody brave enough to protest. But this queue was different. There were hard men in it, men to whom violence was a daily occurrence, and some of the women had faces that spoke of fighting and confrontation.

  Crackle took his place behind a thin woman with extravagantly ringleted blonde hair, who was holding the hand of a small boy with a raw face and a shaven head. The boy was clutching a large picture he had painted at school. In Crackle’s opinion the kid had laid the paint on too thick: different coloured flakes of it kept floating to the floor. Crackle could still remember the creamy smell that drifted up to him when he mixed the paints at junior school, and the delight in assembling the thick brushes and the sugar paper, and that moment, that fucking brilliant moment, when you made the first brush stroke on the paper. He read the name on the back of the painting. It was written in a teacher’s neat italic hand. ‘Grant Lee’.

  Crackle was curious to see what kind of picture Grant had painted, but the kid kept waving it about, which irritated him. Then, as the queue moved along, Grant dropped the painting and Crackle saw that the picture was one that he himself had painted at school. A house, a path, a fence, a tree. And, at the side of the house, his real mum and his real dad and himself.

  Crackle swallowed hard, and felt the weight of those heavy tear-shaped rocks inside him again.

  After being searched by a prison officer and being sniffed at by an addicted Alsatian dog, hungry for drugs, Crackle was allowed into the visiting room. He sat down at a chipped Formica table. He kept his eye on the doo
r that the prisoners entered by. He could hear Grant talking excitedly to his mother at the next table.

  The room quickly filled up with visitors; there were defeated-looking middle-aged parents, young women who’d made a special effort to look glamorous, and other women who’d given up. There were young men who lounged back in the plastic chairs with their legs splayed defiantly, whose eyes were never still.

  Crackle felt better about everything as soon as he saw Bilko come into the room, tall and black and handsome in his white t-shirt and jeans.

  “You look good, man,” he said.

  “S’all the sleep, man,” said Bilko. “There’s fuck-all else to do, innit? You look shit,” he added, censoriously, looking at Crackle’s bluish-looking scalp and sunken face.

  Crackle told Bilko his latest problem. How he had social services and the police on his back now because Storme had fallen out of her cot.

  Bilko frowned. He liked children. He had four of his own. “That’s bad,” he said.

  When Crackle told him that Storme had a fractured skull and that her spleen had been ruptured he said, “Fuck, man. How’d you let that happen? She gonna be all right?”

  “I dunno, the bastard doctor won’t let me or Tam see her.”

  Bilko thought about the time his eldest kid, Zachary, had drunk bleach. He hadn’t left the kid’s bedside for two days. He didn’t remember even going for a piss.

  “So they’re saying you done it?” checked Bilko.

  “Yeah, the bastards”

  Crackle’s indignation was genuine. He hadn’t meant to do her any damage. It was just that he wouldn’t stand for her crying in the night. She had to learn that she couldn’t get her own way.

  “Do you swear to me that you din’t do it, man?”

  “Would I do that to my own kid?”

  “You’re too hard on her, man.” Bilko was troubled. “I’ve seen how you give her big, big licks.”

  “She gets out of hand sometimes,” said Crackle. “She’s not good like your kids are.”

  “I don’t give my kids no licks never, and neither does their mothers. It ain’t right, Crackle. We’re big and they’re little, y’know?”

  Crackle shifted uncomfortably on his plastic chair. He hadn’t come here to be lectured.

  “She was all right when she was a little baby, but as soon as she started walking she was a fucking nightmare. Always touching things. She did my head in!”

  “Then you shouldn’t have never had her!” shouted Bilko. The prison officers who were placed around the room looked across to where Crackle and Bilko were sitting. Bilko lowered his voice. “All kids fuck about with things, Crackle. You gotta give ‘em something else to do. I never saw you play with Storme, not once, ‘an she was always shit up, y’know. If my kids was ever dirty like she was I’d give their mothers serious grief, y’know.”

  Crackle said, “Tamara’s an idle cunt. She don’t clean up or nothing, and anyroad we ain’t got your money, Bilko.”

  Bilko raised his voice again. “How much is a fucking bar of soap?”

  Heads turned.

  Crackle answered, “I dunno.” He had never bought a bar of soap. Soap was either there or not there.

  “It’s fucking nothing? shouted Bilko ‘And why have I got money? Because I go out and I hustle for it! I work a fourteen-hour day, seven fucking days a week!”

  A prison officer strolled over to the table where Crackle and Bilko were sitting turned away from each other.

  “You got a problem here, Bilko?” he said.

  “No,” said Bilko, turning and smiling up at the prison officer. “Nothink I can’t handle, Dave.”

  “Yeah, well keep it down, will you?”

  The prison officer patted Bilko on the shoulder and walked over to the refreshment stall where elderly ladies in green overalls were selling junk food and watery beverages to the prison visitors.

  “Do you want anything?” asked Crackle, who wanted a change of conversation.

  “Yeah, I want my kids,” said Bilko. He longed to hold them to him and listen to the strange funny things they said to him. They made him laugh more than any comedian ever did. Bilko looked away and watched Grant Lee talking to Craig, his dad. Craig was serving seventeen years for slicing a love rival’s nose open with a beer glass, before setting fire to the man’s flat. Bilko looked at Grant’s shaved head and earrings in disgust. His own children attended a Church of England school and wore a uniform and polished shoes. You would never have known from looking at them (and Bilko prayed that they would never find out) that their father, he, Bilko, had a gun hidden inside the front passenger seat of his black BMW. None of them knew he was in prison. He phoned them every afternoon after school, and when they asked him why he didn’t come home, he told them that he was in another country, which was almost true.

  Bilko said, “Crackle, don’t come and see me no more, man.”

  “Why, what I done?”

  “You know what you done.”

  And Bilko got up and gestured to Dave, the prison officer, that he wanted to go back to his cell. Bilko preferred solitude to keeping company with a man he knew for sure had harmed a child.

  Crackle left the prison in a daze. As he walked towards Veronica’s Cafe, he saw a blue illuminated sign on a church. “Jesus Loves You,” it said.

  Crackle stopped, and read the sign over and over again. He didn’t know where to go after he’d been to Veronica’s; he didn’t want to go back to the flat. He didn’t like it there without Tamara and Storme, and he didn’t feel safe in the city no more, not without Bilko’s protection. He’d got too many enemies and he was sick of waiting for a signal from Satan. He read the sign one last time before turning away. “Jesus Loves You.”

  “I’m glad some fucker does,” he said out loud. He looked around to see if anybody had heard him, but, as usual, there was nobody near to him.

  ∨ Ghost Children ∧

  Forty-Two

  When Gregory got back to the shop he rang Heavenly Holidays and was told that Angela had rung in to say that she wouldn’t be back at work in the afternoon. He spoke to Lisa, who acted as Angela’s deputy in her absence. “She’s not been herself, lately,” said Gregory, defensively, after listening to Lisa’s catalogue of complaints against his wife. Apparently, the worst of these was that Angela had booked a family of twelve on to a charter flight to Tenerife that had been taken off the timetable a year ago. Lisa had been forced to ring Head Office for authorisation to book the irate family into an airport hotel until seats on scheduled flights could be arranged for them.

  “Will she be in tomorrow?” said Lisa. “She’s got three dirty mugs on the draining board in the staff kitchen.”

  Gregory admitted that he didn’t know what Angela’s movements were tomorrow. He could hear telephones ringing in the background and a masculine voice raised in argument. Lisa said, “I’ve got to go. Tell her to ring me.”

  During the short time Gregory had been on the telephone a queue of women had built up at the cash till. His own Christmas rush had begun. The first woman in the queue had brought back a tablecloth she’d bought the day before, complaining that there was a design fault all over it. She pointed at the reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh, which ran as a continuous pattern around the edge of the cloth.

  “Look, their antlers are faulty,” she said.

  Gregory looked closely and saw that each right-hand antler was missing some brown thread, giving the reindeer a peculiar lop-sided appearance. The woman prodded a slim finger at the cloth. “It’s an authentic design,” said Gregory. “In the wild you would never see a reindeer with identical matching antlers.”

  “What utter nonsense,” she said.

  He recognised from the woman’s accent and self-confident manner that nothing but a full refund would satisfy her. He took £9.99 from the till and handed it to her with a smile, saying, “And a Merry Christmas, madam.”

  When she’d left the shop he went through the huge stock of reindeer
‘and Santa tablecloths and found, to his profound horror, that each one had exactly the same design fault. He was on the telephone to his Portuguese supplier at once, but the person in the office who spoke English was out. He slammed the telephone down angrily, and, as was customary for him on occasions like this, practised telling Angela about his frustrating afternoon. Then he remembered that he couldn’t be sure if Angela would be there when he got home, or if she would want to listen to him if she was.

  He hoped that this stupid fling she was having was caused by the menopause. He’d read that some women changed their personalities for a while until their hormones calmed down.

  Angela had once left him for two days and gone to stay in a hotel in Cromer. They’d had a quarrel about the correct way to stack the dishwasher, which had quickly escalated into a screaming row about money.

  He still remembered the desolate atmosphere in the house after she’d gone. He hadn’t known what to do with himself. Without her he felt incomplete.

  ∨ Ghost Children ∧

  Forty-Three

  The rain had stopped. It grew dark on the journey back to the city. The moon and the sun were in the sky at the same time. Then the sun disappeared and it was only the moonlight that was reflected in the flooded fields. Christopher had closed the sliding glass window which divided the driver from them. They could tell by the way his shoulders slumped as he drove away from the nursing home that this gesture of separation had offended him. Christopher and Angela clung to each other on the back seat of the taxi, sliding along the shiny seat whenever the driver took a sharp corner on the country roads.