Ghostscape

by Joe Layburn

  I splashed happily across the yard towards him. Everything about him – his clothes, his wire-framed glasses, his haircut – told me what I wanted to know. I was back in 1940.

  “Good morning, Mister Milkman,” I called out breezily.

  But he paid no more attention to me than to the water. I nudged the rickety cart and the empty milk bottles clinked together. He turned his head slightly, one eye half closed, but continued to form his smoke rings as carefully and thoughtfully as any artist.

  “You can’t see me, can you Mister Milkman?” I shouted, just inches away from him now. He had a handsome face, pale and with high cheekbones. From behind the small round glasses, his forget-me-not blue eyes stared right through me.

  “I’m back!” I cried out to the milkman, to the world, to anyone who was listening. But nobody could hear me.

  My elation soon evaporated when I stepped out of the yard and into the wasteland beyond. It seemed the dairy was one of the few buildings left standing. But where exactly was I?

  I picked my way through a wilderness of bricks. Charred trees poked up at intervals, their branches draped with curtain material and ripped-up strips of wallpaper. I followed the sound of scraping shovels. Someone was shifting broken glass and rubble behind a tall bomb-damaged wall on which was painted Swan Vestas – the Smoker’s Match. A smile flickered on my lips as I thought of the milkman and his smoke rings, but it was extinguished by the anxiety growing inside me. There were no landmarks I recognized to guide me back to Trentham School. It suddenly struck me that a big disadvantage of being a ghost from the future was that I couldn’t ask anyone for directions.

  I trudged through an eerie, desolate landscape for what felt like hours. People were clearing up the damage caused by earlier bombing raids and bracing themselves for the next attacks. Many of those I passed were like ghosts themselves. I saw a nurse in a spotless white uniform crouching down beside an old man whose face was engrained with soot. A barefoot woman in a green dressing gown was pacing in front of her house carrying a dented saucepan. I saw scruffy children, some around Richard’s age, looking for souvenirs amidst the collapsed buildings. “What I really want is a bit of a German plane,” said one.

  I turned a corner and almost collided with a man so tall and thin he seemed to have been stretched. He wore a hat and a smart suit and in his lapel was a red rose that looked freshly picked. Richard would have said he was sticking up two fingers to Hitler with that flower. The man carried a case for a trumpet. Only when he was gone did I realize that he was black-skinned like me.

  All the time it was getting darker and still I was lost. Cars drove past, their headlamps almost covered by tape so that thin shafts of light were all that lit their way. I saw that the traffic lights were covered up too. In the gathering gloom I found I was able to make out a sign on the building in front of me: Rees’s Dairy.

  I was back where I’d started.

  My feet ached; my heart ached too. I was ready to sit down on the cracked pavement with my head in my hands when I saw a church looming up like a ship from a sea of rubble. Part of its roof was ripped away but outside was a handwritten notice. It read, Open as usual! It seemed such a cheerful note to strike in all this adversity. God only knows what my mum would have said, but I decided to go in.

  It was dark inside the church and getting darker because the priest was blowing out all the candles. He was a kindly-looking man with a comical haircut that he’d surely fashioned himself. There were wispy silvery bits at the back that his scissors had apparently missed.

  As he busied himself about the church I could see the crinkly laughter lines beside his eyes and it made me like him all the more. He was half humming, half singing a song about the ‘Queen of the May’, which seemed all wrong for a number of reasons – first off the Blitz had begun in September, second, the tune seemed far too happy. He paused thoughtfully before a statue of a woman dressed in a light blue robe and a white headscarf. I took her to be the Virgin Mary. The priest bent his head and said a little prayer or something under his breath then moved on to put out more candles, singing softly all the while.

  Finally, he moved towards the side aisle where I was sitting. I noticed that he had a slight limp and, in the darkness, I saw him wince as he bowed towards the altar at the front of the church. It was weird that he’d chosen the same bench as me. Instinctively, I shuffled a little further down it, but he hobbled along until he was just a foot away from me, then, gripping the pew in front for support, he lowered himself down with a deep sigh. I slouched lower in my seat. OK, so I was invisible, but I still felt uncomfortable with him that close.

  “You seem lost,” he whispered.

  I sat up with a start. It sounded like he was talking to me.

  “You can see me?” I asked, wide-eyed.

  “I have a knack for spotting people who are in pain. I’m Father Mackenzie.”

  “Aisha is my name,” I replied. “And you’re right, I am in pain. I’m worried about a friend of mine. I think he may be dead. I’ve been walking around for ages trying to find him – and a school called Trentham Primary. But I can’t.”

  “Have you tried praying?”

  I slid a few inches further along the smooth wooden pew.

  “Don’t think you’re going to convert me. I’m a Muslim. I only came in here because I was exhausted and I’d given up hope of finding my friend.”

  Father Mackenzie smiled. “There are many paths that lead to the same place. I’m not sure my boss would agree with me but I think we all pray to the same God. And it’s not just about your friend is it? I sense you carry a heavy burden of loss with you, Aisha.”

  I don’t quite know where it all came from, but suddenly I was like that burst water pipe at the dairy, all bubbling up with tears.

  “I lost my dad,” I sobbed. “He was shot dead.”

  “In France?”

  I looked across at him confused. “No, not in this war. In Somalia,” I said.

  He looked a little puzzled but his eyes were still warm and concerned. I was about to ask him to draw me a map of how to get to Trentham School, but I realized there were other things I wanted to know too.

  “You believe in your religion that we’ll see our loved ones again, right?”

  He nodded. “Yes, we believe that.”

  “I hope it’s true. Because I can’t stand the thought that I’ll never see my dad again.”

  Hot tears were spilling out of my eyes. I could actually hear the splash of them as they hit the stone floor even though I was coughing and spluttering too.

  “But you see him every day don’t you?” Father Mackenzie said. “Every time you look in the mirror. You carry him with you and that never goes away. To be honest, I didn’t get on particularly well with my own father, but the older I get the more I see I’m turning into him. Right down to the hair that’s started sprouting out of my ears.”

  Despite myself, I laughed and the sound echoed round the empty church. “Thanks, Father Mackenzie, but I want more than that.”

  He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “That’s where faith comes in.”

  We sat in silence for a while, then I found I had to ask him something else. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  He didn’t seem at all surprised. “I believe there are more things in heaven and earth than we can even dream of let alone explain. Are you a ghost then, Aisha?”

  I turned the palms of my hands over and looked at them. “I don’t think so. I’m from the future, where I’m properly alive and people can touch me and talk to me. But here, in the past, nobody can do that. Apart from my friend Richard. And now you.”

  He chuckled. “So you’re from the future and right now you’re in the past which, of course, is my present.”

  “That’s confusing.”

  “It certainly shows how little we understand about time and how it works.”

  Suddenly I felt the strangest goose-pimply sensation. I’d seen that Bruce Willis film The Sixth Sense
, where he doesn’t realise he’s a ghost. Maybe Father Mackenzie had been killed in the Blitz that very day and was just mooching around doing his normal priestly routine, not knowing he was actually dead.

  “You’re not a ghost are you?” I stuttered. “I mean, you haven’t been killed by a bomb and you’re just hanging around your church?”

  Father Mackenzie looked a little taken aback. “I’m not dead yet thank you very much.”

  But even as he said it, he reached up a hand and touched his cheek as if to assure himself that he really did still exist.

  A woman with wavy copper-coloured hair and a heavy woollen coat had come into the church and was making her way across to where we sat.

  “Hello there, Father,” she said.

  I had to admit that, unless this woman was dead too, Father Mackenzie was still in the land of the living.

  “I’ll be with you in a minute, Anne,” he called to her.

  She wafted over to a small shrine where there were some tired-looking flowers and began to rearrange them. Father Mackenzie turned back to me.

  “Before you go, I’ll give you this.”

  He produced a pen and a piece of card. As he wrote and drew upon it, he poked the tip of his tongue out of the side of his mouth as though this work required a great effort of concentration. When he had finished, he nodded, then handed it to me.

  “This should help you find your way,” he said with a wink.

  I took the piece of card and saw that he had mapped out a route for me from his church to Trentham School.

  “How far is it?” I asked.

  “About four or five miles, I should say. You’d best get going.”

  “Thank you for this. And for your words of wisdom.”

  “Oh, I’ve got plenty of them, don’t you worry,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes. “My advice to you, Aisha, would be to keep the memory of your father and the past alive. And in the future why don’t you spend some time fixing things with your mother?”

  My mouth just gaped open. “How do you know about my mum?”

  He beamed at me. “Like I say, I have a sixth sense about people in pain.”

  How spooky is that? I thought for a second.

  But as I emerged from the darkness of the church into a world already lit by the first flares and fires of a new bombing raid, I knew there was no time for reflection. That would have to wait. For now, I had to follow the flames. I had to keep going east.

  SAVE YOURSELF!

  I gripped the piece of card the priest had given me and stumbled on through a hell on earth. The deep bass boom of the bombs was joined by the inane clanging of fire-engine bells and the banshee wail of the sirens. I saw a pub spewing orange flames through its door as if it were a raging monster. I saw a factory that throbbed and glowed as though a fireball was trapped inside.

  Everywhere firemen were climbing ladders, working pumps, running with fire hoses. I saw them silhouetted against the night sky trying to douse the blazes on every street. The choking smell of smoke and burning rubber made any currents of fresher air taste all the sweeter.

  I walked along a main road beside a group of air raid wardens who were using a door as a makeshift stretcher for an injured colleague. The man kept insisting he was all right, but the bandages on his legs were drenched in blood. As the wardens ran they shouted at anyone not in uniform who loitered in their path. “Don’t just stand there gawping. Get away from here!”

  Eyes once more on my map, I turned a corner on to a stretch of open grass and stopped. Above me was a huge lumbering barrage balloon, meant to repel the war planes. It thrashed and rolled against its moorings like a giant white elephant. I walked on a few paces until a skinny black dog made me halt once more. It tore out from behind a bush and began barking wildly. At first I thought it had seen me or at least sensed my presence, but it was simply crazed with terror.

  I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, but I felt excited as well as afraid now. The going was much easier on the scrubland and I was getting closer all the while. I could feel it.

  Then I saw the sweep of a railway embankment ahead of me, and my heart leapt into my throat. Once I’d climbed that slope, I’d be able to see the school, if it was still standing. What if I reached the summit of the hill and there was no three-storey castle on the horizon? What if the old Trentham School was in flames or had been bombed flat already? I realised that the longer it took me to scale the embankment, the longer I could keep the dream of Richard alive.

  I slipped on some loose earth and suddenly I was flat on my back. I lay there for a few seconds, panting and glaring up at the sky which had rained so much destruction. Richard didn’t deserve to die. He was just a young boy, a kind boy, a boy who’d seen the best in me. He’d told me that I was worth something, that there was a place for me in this world once the bombing stopped.

  I felt overcome with anger for the people who start wars: the powerful people whose thirst for still more power is never satisfied; the man with the dirty baseball cap and the crescent-shaped scar who’d enjoyed his little bit of power when he gunned down my father. As I lay there, I realized I couldn’t conjure up the gunman’s face any more, but I remembered my father’s face. I would keep my father’s memory alive and Richard’s memory too if it came to that.

  I staggered to my feet. The sky above the embankment was red like a sunset. Just ahead of me was a wire fence behind which curved the railway track. As I reached the summit, I grabbed the fence in both hands, paused, then shrieked with delight. There in front of me stood Richard’s school, looking more like a castle than ever. The bombs falling on the docks beyond it were suddenly a glorious firework display. Richard still lived.

  It was easy now. I would have walked barefoot across shards of glass to get to that school. I scampered along streets that looked weirdly familiar even though they were missing the off-licenses and convenience stores I knew.

  Nothing could stop me now. Once I’d explained how much danger he was in, Richard would leave the school, go back to his railway arch and be saved.

  As I reached the playground, I saw a huge bomb crater that extended from just inside the gate to the wall of the school. It was filled with muddy water. A near miss.

  The building itself was dark, with boards and black curtains up at the windows, but I knew there were people inside. I heard babies crying and mothers singing softly. A man’s drunken voice was shouting, apparently at the Nazi bombers. “Why don’t you come down here? I’ll fight the lot of you.” Despite myself, I laughed.

  I walked down an empty, echoing corridor, feeling my way in the darkness along the smooth, cold wall. The classroom doors I passed were closed but I could hear snatches of conversation. From one room came the sound of a dreadful snoring. “For God’s sake shut him up, can’t you?” someone was complaining. I just knew that snore could belong to one person only: Richard’s grandad. And if he was there, Richard must be close by. I gripped the small gold-coloured doorknob and twisted it. The decibel level of the snoring increased to that of a road drill.

  “If I wake him up, you’ll have to listen to him talking. And that’d be even worse. Trust me.”

  It was a boy’s voice, a sweet voice.

  I watched his silhouette pick its way carefully over the sleeping forms on the floor. Finally he was standing in front of me with a lopsided grin and that mass of hair all curled up on itself.

  “You came back then?”

  There was so much I wanted to say to him, but I knew the bomb, the direct hit, might come that very night. I had to convince him to leave the school now before it was blown to smithereens.

  “Richard, you’re in terrible danger. You’ve got to leave.”

  “Leave?” he said, his eyes smiling reassuringly. “We’ve barely just got here.”

  I didn’t know how to explain it all to him. “The thing is…” I started, then stopped, then started again. “The thing is, I know that this school is going to be hit by a massive bomb and maybe
hundreds of people are going to be killed.”

  “What do you mean, maybe hundreds will be killed?”

  “Well they don’t know how many, cos they called off the search. But lots of people will die and you’ll be one of them if we don’t go now.”

  Richard looked troubled, but he wasn’t freaking out or anything. “How do you know this, Aisha?”

  “Because I’m from the future. I know everything that’s going to happen.”

  He rolled his lower lip thoughtfully. “So who wins the war?”

  “We do,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said. But he seemed distracted. “And will West Ham ever win the league?”

  I was getting angry with him now. I was trying to save his life and all he could think about was football.

  “Will they, Aisha?” he persisted. “It’s important to me.”

  “I don’t know Richard. I don’t really follow football. I think they’ve won some things, but even people who support them are always moaning about them.”

  He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re funny, Aisha.”

  “I’m serious. You’ve got to leave here now. And you’ve got to convince as many people as possible to leave with you.”

  Richard shrugged wearily. “How can I convince them to do that? They’ve been bombed out of their homes. I know this place isn’t really any safer, but to them it feels like it is. It’s like a castle. It doesn’t look like you could knock it down.”

  “Richard, please. It will be knocked down. It will be a tomb for these people, your grandad included. You said you wanted to keep an eye on him. If no one else will go, at least wake him up and take him with you.”