The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (41 page)

Some people don’t believe in ghosts. They didn’t know the man who hanged himself in the toilet—a man whose eyes bulged out like giant, green marbles, swinging there by his neck from the water pipes.

And they didn’t have a sister who locked them in the cellar where it was so black they wouldn’t know if their eyes were open or closed. Nor did they count up to a thousand and say the Lord’s Prayer, rocking back and forth in that silent, breathless prison.

And they didn’t hear that girl who screams in the attic.

She painted a picture of the thing that came into her bedroom time and again and told her to kill herself. The reverend said we had to burn it. As though it were alive. But it never died.

I am glad for people who don’t believe in ghosts. The rest of us have to live with them. They are inside our heads, and they are as real as we make them.

I’m staring at the attic door again. Staring, staring, right above my head. And now I know—because the door is slowly starting to move.

Epilogue

Even though it is told through my eyes, this is
Margueretta’s
story. She wanted it told but she could never write her story herself, despite many attempts. I wish she was here to read it now, but sadly, Margueretta is no longer with us. There is another story to be told of her continuing fight against the incredible demons that invaded her sanity into adulthood. She fought valiantly with the disease of paranoid-schizophrenia and eventually it won. Now she is at peace and I forgive her with all my heart for everything.

Childhood-onset schizophrenia is thankfully very rare. It is an appalling and incurable disease, although it can be somewhat controlled with effective medication. It often manifests itself in the child hallucinating and hearing voices that seem to have an independent existence. I can only imagine the horror of living with a voice inside my head telling me to kill myself or it will kill me.

Mum
has celebrated her eightieth birthday in amazing health. She is the true survivor and I will always love her dearly for the incredible way in which she managed to hold things together. God knows that it would have been hard enough to survive being abandoned by my father to bring up three children alone in an era when a single parent was very uncommon and even despised. But to deal with the additional horror of a child suffering from schizophrenia is frankly more than most people could cope with. But my mother did cope and she did survive and because of her, we all survived.

Dad
drank himself to death. He died alone and penniless at the age of fifty-seven. I did not meet him again until I was eighteen. Bizarrely, he died on my birthday—the same birthday that I shared with my two sisters. I don’t read anything into this and before he died, I forgave him for abandoning us, but I am not sure if he ever forgave himself. I still crave his
recognition and keep his postcard with me at all times, for I am the man of the house now.

Emily
, my beautiful and lovely twin sister, has an incredible outlook on life and always seems to be happy and optimistic. She has a wonderful family and I will forever look up to her, even though I am her big brother, having been born thirty minutes before her. And now that I am a grown-up, I don’t mind holding her hand—even if she is a girl.

Nana
died in her ninety-fifth year. When I die, I will run to meet her. She will hold me tight and whisper stories of the Highlands, of chasing the golden-tailed dragonfly in the dappled dusk. She will cook me bubble-and-squeak on the old stove and sit me on her lap by the fire. For you are never cold or hungry in Heaven. And you are always loved.

A man did hang himself in the toilet. It was before I was born and Nana and Margueretta enjoyed embellishing that tale. But even so, for all of my life, someone or something has lived right behind me, just visible in the corner of my eye. Fragments of the black cloak continue to smother me in dreadful, breathless moments. I am still anxious about everything, especially the darkness that comes down from the attic and joins with the darkness of the night. I have a dark place inside my head that I stole from the cellar but I fill my life with the bright light of my wonderful wife and children.

At times, the pain of writing this book has been unbearable. As the words found their way onto the page, I realized something: every emotional detail of my childhood was still alive. The fears and horrors were still living inside my head. The ghosts of my childhood were still haunting me.

But I realized something even more profound: twenty years of my adult life were missing. I had been sleepwalking through my adult years by numbing myself from those childhood horrors. The story of my life had a beginning but it had no middle. I had surrendered my life to the banality of a meaningless job, the drudgery of monthly bills and the anesthetizing effect of the daily cocktail hour.

Someone had stolen my life. And I was the thief.

That’s when my life took on a new meaning. I could not waste another minute. For the first time, I wanted to do something that actually mattered, something I loved doing and something that might make a positive difference to other people’s lives. I had to finish writing Margueretta’s story.

There is a book inside every one of us. It is being written every day. Don’t leave any pages blank.

Make it memorable until the end.