The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (2 page)

And because everyone else kissed her goodbye and I wouldn’t kiss her, they made me say the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer out loud. I have almost learned the Lord’s Prayer by heart. It’s God’s prayer but no one has told me what it means.

Our Father, which art in Heaven. Hello be thy name. Thy king done come.

And then we said the rest of the prayer together and held hands because Great-Auntie Maisie was dead, and they put her teeth back in her mouth because Nana says you want to look your best when you’re dead and about
to meet your Maker. They were in a jar beside the Bible. Old ladies can take their teeth out just like that. Nana can push her teeth up over her nose and she does it to scare me but I just laugh, even though it is quite frightening. Emily screams the way girls always do.

“Och, it’s the end, right enough,” Nana said. “I’ll be all alone soon. One by one, they’re leaving me. I thought Maisie would be with me long after her time. But her time has come before her end. That’s right enough. Her time has come before her end, and she has left me.”

“She’s in a happy place now,” Mum said.

“Aye. A happy land. I’ll be next. There is a happy land. Far, far away. Where they eat bread and jam three times a day. She’ll dance again, barefoot in the heather. We danced, you know. Maisie could dance! And skipped with the golden-tailed dragonflies just out of her reach.”

Nana touched the air in front of Maisie’s face like there was something there.

“I know,” Mum replied and started to cry.

“Just wee lassies. Wee lassies playing,” Nana said. “We’re all wee bairns, inside. She wore a pink dress. Pink with yellow flowers. Dancing with the dragonflies. Maisie could dance, you know! Aye, she could dance.”

And Nana cried too and Mum cried even more and that made Emily cry but I did not want to cry so I stood on one foot and stared at the floor and it was plastic and shiny with gray swirls and tiny red flecks. But I did not put my hands in my pockets.

Great-Auntie Maisie is in Heaven now. Just as soon as they are sure that she wasn’t a sinner, it will be St. Peter who meets her when she arrives in Heaven. God has quite enough to do keeping locusts away from crops and fighting the evil that’s inside all of us. But there isn’t any evil inside of me because I am just a little boy.

I’d better behave on the bus going home because it is very selfish of me not to kiss my Great-Auntie Maisie right before she died, with Nana holding her hand and whispering to her about when they were girls dancing together
in their bare feet and chasing dragonflies in the heather. And now it’s too late and there’s no point in harping on about it but I should be ashamed of myself.

So I will not make my usual fuss even though Margueretta has just flicked the back of my ear.

3

A
ll the houses on our street are falling down. Our house is very dark because it’s in the middle of a long row of houses and there aren’t many windows and the electricity keeps going off. There’s a narrow black passageway that goes all through our house and at the end are some broken stairs that go up to our bedrooms. I must not play on the stairs because the railing is mostly missing and I will fall off and break my bloody neck and die. And I can only blame myself if I get my foot caught in that hole at the top of the stairs because I’ve been told enough times to watch out for it. If my foot gets caught in that hole, I will never get it out and I will be forced to live at the top of the stairs for the rest of my life without my foot.

The best thing about our house is that there is no bathroom so we don’t have to wash until our feet are really black. But when I need to go to the toilet, it is out through the scullery door and halfway down our backyard and there is no light in there and I keep telling my mum that it’s not my fault if I pee all over the floor. And only someone really brave would go there in the middle of the night—or if you had very bad diarrhea. I had diarrhea once but I never made it to the toilet.

Pop’s son hanged himself in the toilet. Nana said he was just going for a wee but he took his shoes off and hanged himself with his tie from the pipes. I don’t know why he took his shoes off but Nana found him dead swinging from his tie. She said his eyes were popping out of his head like my marbles—the big green ones. She mostly stayed away from toilets after that. But she says you have to go eventually.

Mum said I shouldn’t listen to Nana’s tales and not to worry that Pop’s son was also called John, the same as me. And Mum says a rhyme when I am scared to go into the toilet in case his terrible ghost is in there, hanging with his eyes popping out like my green marbles. The rhyme is supposed to make me feel better.

Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John,
Went to bed with his trousers on,
One shoe off, and the other shoe on,
Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John.

I’m not going to tell my mum again but that rhyme does not make me feel at all better. If she wants me to feel better she should not make me go in the toilet on my own in the dark.

Nana says it will be a blessing when Pop goes to join her first husband on the other side, although she doesn’t know whether Pop deserves to go to Heaven because of something he did with those playing cards and my Auntie Beryl. And then after he dies, some men in black suits will bring Pop back home and they will put his coffin in the front room so we can give him a night-night kiss for all Eternity. I will be hiding under my bed.

Dad keeps his bellows organ and his piano in the front room, so he will also be able to play some sad music for Pop. Nana likes “Abide With Me.” I like “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Dad also plays funeral music in the middle of the night and it’s a very loud organ and it makes Mum scream but he’s only doing it to annoy the woman next door because she is spying on us. Dad says it’s bloody obvious that she’s spying on us because no one goes out to hang up washing after dark. She’s just trying to look through our scullery window to see what we are up to.

I used to have a bath in the sink in the scullery but now I’m too big and I have to go to the public baths, which are quite a long walk away. I tried
to hide my feet this morning but I had to agree with Nana that they were extremely black and neither of us could remember when I last had a bath. I should also know that cleanliness is next to godliness and even though Emily’s feet are not as black as mine and there are no little parcels of dirt between her toes, we will both be having a bath today because it is cheaper at the public baths to share, even though I complained that I do not want to have a bath with a girl. But Nana said it is also my birthday tomorrow and I need to look my best because I am going to be wearing a kilt.

On top of that, Nana has noticed that I have been scratching my head a lot lately which she says is nothing that a good wash with a bar of carbolic soap won’t cure. But I have stopped picking my nose because Nana said I will get very fat nostrils like an Eskimo and then I will have to go to live in the North Pole.

There’s no point in arguing with Nana because she is stronger than my dad, and she can arm wrestle with grown-up men, even though she is quite short and never eats except for an occasional pickled egg. I saw her hit a man once outside a pub and he never got back up. He didn’t see it coming because you don’t expect a very short grandmother to punch you on the chin so hard you fall over. She distracts them by swinging her left arm around so they think she is going to hit them with her left fist but then she catches them on the chin with her right.

Nana comes from the Highlands, which is a place in Scotland where the soldiers wear kilts and play bagpipes to frighten the English who always run away, screaming like little girls. I am Nana’s Scottish soldier.

“Dunnee ever admit that you’re English, wee Johnny! You should have been born in Dunfermline.”

The English are Sassenachs and are never to be trusted. I must not under any circumstances tell anyone that I was born in England.

4

I
t’s our birthday today. Emily got some lavender bath salts wrapped in Christmas paper. And Nana gave me a set of six whisky glasses. They have pictures of Scottish soldiers on them. Mum said it makes no sense for a five-year-old boy to have a set of whisky glasses so I will keep them under my bed.

“Aye. That’s right enough,” Nana said. “I have no use for them now. I’m giving away all ma worldly possessions before I meet ma Maker. Possessions imprison you! It will be easier for a needle to go through the eye of a camel than for me to enter the gates of Heaven wi’ ma possessions. That’s right enough. You mark ma words, laddie! All this talk has made me thirsty. A wee dram is what I’ll have. Och, aye.”

“For God’s sake, Mother. You’re not going anywhere!” Mum replied.

“You’ll all be fighting over ma things before I’m even cold. I’ll be lying there in ma bed, waiting for one of the archangels, hopefully Gabriel, while someone is measuring my tallboy to see if it will fit in their recess.”

And even if it is my birthday, I am still very upset that Nana has made me wear a kilt because it is obviously not a Scottish soldier’s kilt and is in fact a girl’s tartan skirt. She said you can’t find kilts in Portsmouth and it is a soldier’s choice whether or not to wear any underpants. Obviously I am wearing my underpants or Margueretta will lift up my kilt to show everyone my willy.

And so that I will look extra handsome in my kilt, Mum took me to get my hair cut really short like a movie star even though I only had it washed yesterday.

“You shall have a crew cut for your birthday. You will look just like Tony Curtis.”

I do not ever want to look like Tony Curtis, whoever the bloody hell he is, because now there is a white patch on my forehead where my fringe used to be and my ears stick out like they aren’t part of my head. I do not look like a movie star. All my hair is gone.

So Nana gave me a sherbet lemon to cheer me up. And I was only halfway through sucking it when I swallowed it by mistake and it stuck in my throat. It was a good thing that Nana was there because she could see I was about to faint because you always faint if you can’t breathe. So she thumped me really hard on my back and the sherbet lemon shot across the room and landed in some dirt by the fireplace so I left it there, even though I was only halfway through it. Nana said she saved my life. But she was the one who gave me that sherbet lemon in the first place.

Margueretta thinks it’s very funny that I have no hair and I’m wearing a girl’s tartan skirt and she said I had fleas and that’s why they cut off all my hair. My mum lied. I am not going to forget that she lied to me about looking like a movie star. I know what a lie is. A lie is saying I have a tummy ache so that I don’t have to go to Sunday School and can stay at home to watch
Bill and Ben the Flower Pot Men
. But
Bill and Ben
only comes on during the week. And Mum said that was God’s punishment for lying.

Mum says that all boys tell lies.

“Oh, yes, m’laddo! You can’t believe a word your father says. Your father told me he was a pilot in the air force during the war. But you know what? He was nothing more than a NAFFI cook in the army kitchen. A pilot, indeed! The only action he saw was peeling potatoes. And brussels sprouts.”

I do not like brussels sprouts. And I’m sure Mum is wrong because Dad showed me a picture of himself in his uniform with a cap and everything. I’m sure it was his air force uniform but when I told Mum she said that he got his first job working on the buses in London and when I asked Dad for
another look at that picture, I saw there was a bus in the background and not a bomber plane. So it is possible that Dad is lying.

But I don’t think Margueretta was lying about the fleas because I have been scratching my head like a dog for weeks. Now you can see the scratches because all my hair is gone.

There are nine candles on the birthday cake but Emily and me are only five. We are sharing the cake with Margueretta, who is nine. And anyone can see it’s not a birthday cake. It’s bread pudding.

“I will mend that bicycle for your birthday!”

Well, Dad’s not going to mend it right now because he has to go and see a man about a dog. He was going to mend it for me for Christmas but he had to see a man about a dog. He always has to see a man about a dog. I think it’s in a brown room. I don’t know that for sure because when I go with him to see a man about a dog, he makes me wait by the door outside the pub. And when he comes out to go home, I have to hold his hand to make sure he doesn’t fall over. It’s easy to fall over after you’ve been to see a man about a dog. Especially in the dark.

I don’t like the dark. And Margueretta knows that I don’t like the dark and it’s completely dark in the cellar with the door closed. That’s why she has locked me in the cellar. She waited until the grown-ups went out to the pub for a birthday drink and left us with Pop. And Pop is useless because he just makes noises like a train and then stands in the corner and wets himself and screams. So he doesn’t care if she’s locking me in the cellar.

I’m curling up into a ball. I’m biting my lip. Now I’m counting to a thousand. It’s so dark down here that I don’t even know if my eyes are open or closed. But I’ve screwed them up tight because I don’t want to see the thing that lives in the corner. I’m sure it has eyes that bulge like my big green marbles. It makes a sound that goes drip, drip, drip.

Drip, drip, drip.

I’m holding my hands over my ears so I can’t hear it. And I’m curling tighter and tighter into a ball. One day, that thing in the corner is going to
come out of the cellar in the night and come into my bedroom. And it will hide under my bed and reach its arms up under the blanket and strangle me until I am dead.

Now I’m whispering the Lord’s Prayer.

Our Father, which art in Heaven. Hello be thy name. Thy king done come.

Now I’m crying. But no one can hear me.

5

S
he let me out when she heard them coming. Dad was the first one to come into the kitchen so I held onto his leg with both arms, which I do quite a lot, and it made him fall over and Mum shouted at him even though he only fell over because I was holding onto his leg.