The Word Ghost

by Christine Paice

  His mother sighed. ‘Don’t know where he gets it from. None of us lot play anything.’

  Studying Dave

  It was a warm day in May. I stood in my father’s study curling my toes into the cheap threadbare carpet supplied by the Church of England at no great expense. Socks and shoes weren’t required. Everything was heating up, spring rapidly turning to summer and Captain Ahab (Father) and his first mate (Mother) knew something alluring glistened in their daughter’s sight. Father and I were having a chat in the study.

  ‘Rebecca, you and Dave have been studying together for one month now. Are you covering the right type of thing? Because, quite frankly, your mother and I are disappointed in your exam results.’

  It was true, my maths mock O-level results had been dismal.

  ‘Well, we have been studying matrices.’ Come to me, demons, come, o poltergeist, and save me from this interrogation.

  ‘Matrices? What about calculus, what about quadratic equations, all in the exam paper which you haven’t bothered to show me?’

  ‘How do you know what’s in there then?’

  ‘You have a sister who attends the same school as you.’

  ‘Well why don’t you ask her about my exams?’

  ‘Because, Rebecca, I am asking you.’

  ‘Everything that I hate and don’t understand is what Dave helps me with.’

  ‘Venn diagrams?’

  ‘Yes, yes, particularly those, yes.’ I thought of Dave sticking his tongue in my ear. I wondered if my father could see what I was thinking. I stood in his study searching for distractions. A stone through the window, an evil demon making faces through the window—look, Papa, a demon, it has horns and a terrible face, and now, Father, look, a poltergeist, and it’s knocking your books off the shelf. Anything to throw him off the scent. But my father was very good at following the trail.

  ‘What about my English results? Dad, I am coming second in my year.’

  ‘Yes, and we are very pleased with that, but we never doubted that you would do well with English. The question is, Rebecca, are your lessons with Dave helping or not? Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t seem like it.’

  ‘I’ve had one month with Dave, four piddly little weeks, and suddenly you expect me to be Albert Einstein. Am I doing well at school? Yes I am.’

  My father stared at me.

  ‘Apart from maths. Which is why I am getting help from Dave in the first place.’

  Saying his name out loud to my father made a silly smile appear on my face. Guilty as charged, Yer Honour, Me Lud, guilty as charged.

  Dad never called me Abraham when he was cross. He had a particular way of looking at me that made me wonder if he could see straight through me, his blue Celtic eyes boring into the white of my bones, the red beating muscle of my heart. If you looked closely at my father’s beard (and there were few who were game enough to do that, especially me now), you could see flecks of grey just starting to appear. Usually I tried to keep my distance. Not because I didn’t love him, but because there was a certain amount of distance a girl had to keep from her father, especially when boys called Dave appeared on the horizon.

  ‘Well perhaps Mr David Fletcher should come and have dinner with us this week. Go and ask your mother if that’s possible.’

  Every Wednesday after school I trotted round to 23 Milton Close and spread my hopeful books out on the coffee table. Mrs Dave put the kettle on and clanged around in the kitchen, occasionally asking us things like, ‘How are you getting on?’ or, ‘Things starting to make sense now, Rebecca?’ or, ‘You’ll be able to write a book yourself after you’ve learned all this, Dave.’ If only Mrs Dave knew how little sense things were making to me now.

  Dave soon discovered I found some equations more obvious than others. I hardly heard a word Dave said. I was too busy watching the corners of his mouth crease up into a smile. I nodded at the coordinates of P and the possible value of R. I pretended to understand everything he said about acute angled triangles and ten squared multiplied by minus ten, but what the hell did that mean? The random patterning of freckles on his nose made much more sense to me. I knew less than nothing. Dave said he wanted to be an engineer or a vet or a pilot or some fine upstanding thing whereas I sat there in my flared denim jeans just wanting to snog him.

  He nudged me with his knee. His mum had left the room. He leaned against my shoulder and whispered, ‘The question is, Rebecca Budde, may I call you Budde, Budde?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘So, Budde, how does this work then? How does Jane Austen characterise her characters with seemingly inconsequential events? A brief account, five hundred words.’

  Dave nuzzled his big gingery face into my hair. He started to repeat the question. ‘How does Jane Austen . . .

  ‘Never write anything I want to read?’

  ‘Haven’t you read Emma?’

  I shook my head. He slid his tongue into my mouth. With a huge effort I pushed him away. ‘Your mum will be back soon.’

  ‘So?’ he said, and slid his tongue further and further down into the rest of me. Ten minutes later Mrs Dave was back in the kitchen.

  ‘My mum loves Jane Austen,’ I said, leaning my head on his shoulder and subtly wiping my mouth, rearranging the disarray.

  ‘I’m not asking her,’ said Dave, almost blushing at the thought.

  Crossing the Line

  Dave was coming for dinner. He was calling for me and he was standing on our front doorstep and ringing the bell. I could see his shape through the thick frosted-glass panes. The earth was spinning wildly on its axis. I could see his wide shoulders, hands in his pockets, his jacket and thick ginger hair. Twenty-eight years after the end of the Second World War, we English liked solid doors, but we also liked doors that offered the chance to see who dared to come knocking at the castle gates. After the one and only Norman invasion in 1066, there was always the possibility of someone hell-bent on another invasion walking up the garden path and now there he stood.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi!’

  What wild thing was happening to me? I’d never said hi to anyone before in my life. I always said hello. He bent forward and kissed me on the cheek, a simple peck, bearing in mind that Captain Ahab was in the study and his first mate was in the galley making dinner. I don’t know what happened—an awkward turn of my head and there we were, hearts racing, tongues diving into mouths, lips pressing wide against lips, tongues up into any part of the mouth they could reach and my face bright red and burning.

  Any minute now my father would walk down the hallway and see us. My heart flew up to the ceiling and lodged in the cracks by the light. I had risen about three feet off the ground and was actually floating down the hallway. I was full of light, bathed in teenage love. I was Henry the Eighth and all of his wives. I was everyone who had ever lived and nothing in my whole life had ever been more exciting.

  ‘Rebecca, can you lay the table, please?’

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘Because I’ve asked you to.’

  ‘You always ask me.’

  ‘Abes, what do you understand by the term the Iron Curtain?’ asked Maggie.

  Emily piped up, ‘It’s a curtain made from iron.’

  ‘Ever seen one of those, Emily Budde? Have you?’

  Emily stuck her tongue out at Maggie and danced up the hallway to the dining room. She stopped short as she saw Dave standing next to me helping me with forks and knives and spoons.

  ‘Hello, Dave, bet you don’t know what’s for pudding?’ She grinned from me to Dave and carried on dancing.

  ‘Chocolate ice cream?’ Dave said.

  ‘Nope,’ said Emily.

  ‘Democracy,’ said my father, shaking hands with Dave, and talking to Maggie at the same time and sort of nudging Emily out of his way. ‘It’s what you don’t have with the Iron Curtain.’

  ‘But wasn’t the revolution all about giving ordinary people some say in things so all that power and wealth wasn
’t just for the Tsar and his family? They had so much—it wasn’t right, was it, Dad?’

  ‘No, but they didn’t all have to be shot in that brutal way.’

  ‘It was anger, Dad. For so long, life was so hard for so many people.’

  ‘Well, Maggie, life has always been hard for a lot of people but we don’t go around shooting others who have slightly more than us, do we?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m not saying that we should, am I?’

  ‘Dinner’s ready!’

  ‘Democracy, Maggie, is a very good thing. As you will discover when you cast your vote. Use it wisely.’

  ‘Dad, I will not be voting for anyone you vote for.’

  ‘I said Dinner Is Ready!’ yelled Mum from the kitchen.

  Emily and I trooped back in to help carry plates to the table. Dad was ushering Dave to the guest’s chair.

  ‘Call me Bob, Dave.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Thank you, Bob.’

  ‘Let’s say grace.’

  Cabbage-infused steam rose over the table as my father, perhaps dreaming of fish, bowed his head in prayer. Dave had clearly never said grace before. He looked bemused, holding Emily’s hand in one of his and Dad’s in the other. Dave and Dad holding hands. I imagined myself floating high over the table, up to the ceiling like a pale balloon, away from all these embarrassing people. Three huge rolls of stuffed cabbage sat on my beloved’s plate, winking at him. Dad said grace and Emily tried not to giggle out loud. Maggie rolled her eyes to heaven. I closed one eye and kept the other firmly on Dave. He was still at the table, not yet running for the front door. Things were going well so far.

  My father’s favourite meal was fish and chips and peas, but this was 1973, and England was at war with Iceland. It wasn’t the kind of war we studied at school as it really wasn’t that interesting, despite that fact that it had been going on almost since the year I was born. British trawlers were fishing for cod in disputed waters and Icelandic boats were trying to stop them. It wasn’t a war over which either parent had an especially emotional view, but my mother was concerned about British fishermen losing their jobs. My father too, but he was more upset if my mother hadn’t bought a nice piece of flaky white fish for tea.

  ‘Ruth, we support the fishermen by buying fish.’

  ‘Yes and we do, but sometimes it’s nice to cook something else. Unless you’d like to cook dinner on Friday, Bob. Bob?’

  The Friday Dave arrived hot and panting on our front doorstep for dinner was not the Friday of the fish, but the Friday of the stuffed cabbage. I didn’t know what Dave ate at home apart from custard cream biscuits. We all sat upright, trying not to stare at Dave, who tried not to stare at us all as he sat sandwiched between Emily and my father.

  Dave was bewitched by the cabbage, enticed and tempted by the rice pudding and entranced and breathless by the time cups of tea and little fancies were passed round. His pale freckly cheeks were tinged with pink. He would soon find out that we never had chocolate ice cream. Always plain vanilla or raspberry ripple but nothing as wicked as chocolate, thank you very much.

  ‘Mrs Budde, that was simply splendid. Thank you so much.’

  ‘That’s a pleasure, Dave, glad you liked it.’ She threw him a tea towel. ‘Here.’ she said. ‘You’re the guest so you can help with the drying up.’

  And so Dave, along with the salt and pepper, became a regular feature at our dinner table. Most Friday nights there was a stuffed vegetable of some sort, sometimes stuffed capsicum or, more often, stuffed cabbage, and sometimes, some brilliant times, there was fish and chips followed by sponge puddings, ice cream, fruit and plenty of biscuits. Whatever food my mother placed on the table was eaten gratefully by Dave. He became adept at saying grace. My father even invited Dave to say grace.

  ‘Erm, we, er, thank you for this lovely food.’

  ‘Nicely said, thank you, Dave.’

  Emily giggled and I went red in the face. Afterwards, Dave and I were allowed to go up to my room to listen to music. Deep Purple or David Bowie on the old turntable that Maggie and I shared upstairs, balanced on an old wooden table.

  ‘No you can’t come into my room, Emily. Mum! Muum! Tell Emily she can’t come in.’

  Oh the delight of the gentle placing of the stylus on the groove. The scratchy rasps of sound before the song started. Of course we had to keep the door open, unless my father went out visiting, and from the bedroom windows we could see the Hillman driving past the bus stop down the road. Then we shut the door and kept the world out. Maggie lent us her beloved new copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

  As we listened to this dreamy other-world music, Dave perfected his tongue-down-the-throat kissing technique that left me gasping for breath and floating over the moon in my mind. Really, it didn’t matter what music we played—Deep Purple, Status Quo, Pink Floyd, David Bowie—I was in a permanent lather of excitement whenever Dave was around.

  Dave’s love song to me was to sing along with the Pink Fairies’ cover of ‘When I Saw Her Standing There’. He looked at me with his pale English skin and blue eyes when he sang as if he had written the song just for me. Ohhoooooohhhhh. He could eat many biscuits quickly all at once, he was my own personal custard-cream-biscuit-eating champion. When he walked his stride was much longer than mine so I almost had to run to keep up with him. I adored every minute I was with him.

  At school, Sue complained to me that I never bothered to spend time with her anymore.

  ‘Rebecca, let’s play tennis at the Bowater courts on Saturday? Come on—it’ll be fun.’

  I hesitated.

  ‘You’re going to say no, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sue, it’s just that . . .’

  ‘It’s just that what? It’s just that you don’t care about me now you’ve got him.’

  She was right.

  ‘Sorry, Sue.’

  ‘Stuff you, Rebecca, we’re meant to be friends.’

  I thought she was going to whack me with her tennis racquet.

  Jane, Jane, we don’t love friends in the same way that we love Mr Rochester, do we? Do we, Jane? Mr Rochester’s more important, isn’t he, isn’t he? Don’t run from me, Jane, you’ll slip and fall . . .

  I still saw Sue and my other friends every day, up and down those dull brown corridors at school. I had to be there with them, but with Dave everything was different, everything was exciting. One afternoon, I arrived at his place earlier than usual. His mum was out, and we had the whole house to ourselves. It was such a brilliant feeling. No sisters, no parents, there were so many possibilities without an adult around. Air molecules danced with excitement. We sat on his bed, books spread everywhere.

  No wonder everyone made such a fuss about getting married. I could not even begin to imagine how exciting it would be to be completely naked with someone. When you were married you could get naked with them every night. Marriage started to make a lot of sense. It was such a popular thing to do and I was beginning to understand why. Every inch of uncovered skin was beckoning.

  I knew every freckle on his face, the curl of his gingery eyelashes, the blue of his eyes, the pale hairs that covered his arms and hands. I loved his voice, the way he spoke, how when he laughed he threw his head back and his hair flashed over his shoulders. I loved kissing him until I could barely breathe and I knew my face would be one big red mess but that was all I wanted to do. We slid off his bed onto the floor.

  ‘Budde, look what I’ve got.’

  In the middle of his hand sat a small square packet.

  ‘What’s that?’ Although I thought I knew.

  ‘A condom.’

  ‘Where’d you get it?’

  ‘A mate at school gave it to me.’

  He kissed me again. Very, very slowly.

  We had no idea that Mrs Dave, his very often florally clad mother, was making her way back down the street. She’d been shopping, bought herself a nice coral cardigan from Marks and Spencer, some food from Sainsbury’s and had caught the bus hom
e to the stop at the top of the street. She was swinging her shopping bags as she walked.

  I had no idea what she liked cooking, but she was possibly thinking of variations on a chicken-casserole theme for the dinner, and really all she wanted to do was sit down and have a nice cup of tea. Maybe a biscuit. She definitely did not want to find the vicar’s daughter upstairs half naked in her son’s bedroom. Well, heart thumping wildly behind the bedroom door and both legs into my jeans by the time Mrs Dave arrived at the top of the stairs.

  Up to God Knows What

  Dave and I and Mrs Dave, a most unholy trinity, stood awkwardly on our front doorstep. I longed to run out the front gate and down the path through the wheat fields to the river. Dave shoved his hands deep into his jean pockets. I didn’t dare catch his eye. This was a serious moment and all I wanted to do was laugh. What was wrong with me? My whole body was trembling with suppressed laughter.

  My mother was asking Mrs Dave to come in but Dave’s mother was too upset. She stood on our doorstep hardly able to look at me. She spoke to me from one corner of her mouth. ‘I thought better of you, young lady, brought up in a Christian way. You should be ashamed of yourself. Behaving like that. You knew what you were doing was wrong.’ Mrs Dave swung round and fixed her angry eyes on me and then Dave. ‘You too.’

  She had to apportion some blame to her darling boy but it was my fault, I knew that, she blamed me for leading her boy on into the dark. Over the line. The terrible uncrossable line. He nodded. I nodded. She was right. How could I behave like that? Why did the wrong thing feel so right? I could feel the badness bursting in my veins, whispering in my head.

  Do it. Be bad. It’s better for you. Jane, Jane, we’ll be like Mr Rochester, we’ll keep our secrets in the empty rooms.

  She turned to Dave and said, ‘I’ve brought you up better than that, David.’ That was the only time I ever heard Mrs Dave call her son David.