Walking with Ghosts (17 page)

Arthur was not posing. He appeared to be staring into space, unconscious, and the photographer, probably Dora, had caught him in profile. Someone else might have made something of the photograph, taken hints from the way Arthur was holding his body, diagnosed character and personality. Sam couldn’t do that. He saw a guy who’d been dead for seventeen years. Someone who’d made a final decision, decided not to pass on any more replicas of his forehead and his eyes.

He let both photographs lie where they fell on the desk. He felt in his inside pocket for another one, and looked at that for several minutes. It was a copy of a photograph Marie had given him of India Blake. She was a truly beautiful woman. A stylish coat over a black lace blouse and a knee-length skirt. She was gazing past the photographer, at the future, wondering what it might hold, and not guessing the truth. His eyes were always drawn back to her face. The symmetry of her features. Flawless. Completely beautiful and completely dead.

21

William threw off the covers and stretched himself out on the bed. He slept with the window open and the morning air was sharp. Glancing down along his pale body he watched the goose pimples raising themselves up to defend his borders. Mindless, the struggle for survival, cellular, molecular.

As the dawn took its course and light slowly filtered through the curtains he felt his body temperature dropping. He didn’t move, that would be cheating. If he moved his heart would respond and send a warm rush of blood to all those peripheral regions. What William wanted was the opposite; he wanted his heart to slow down, his blood to run cold.

There were people in the world who could slow their heart rate to a fraction of its normal activity. Some of the Brahmin holy men could wind it right down to a few beats a minute. William’s heart, at rest, was normally sixty-four beats a minute, but in his morning sessions he could get it down to under forty. He could control it.

He could begin to feel how his father had felt.

William had first experienced the cold, real cold, when he had touched his father that day they took him down from the tree. His mother had taken them upstairs, William and his big sister, left them in the large front bedroom while she went to a neighbour’s house for help. His sister had said they must stay there, but William wanted to be with his father. ‘You can’t make me stay,’ he’d told her. ‘You’re only ten, and you’re a girl.’

‘Daddy’s dead,’ his sister had said. ‘We’ll never see him again.’

William shook her off and went down to the garden Daddy was there, swinging on the tree, gently, back and forth, swaying. He didn’t answer when William spoke to him. Daddy didn’t say anything, but he knew William was there, and he was glad they’d come back. He was much fatter than William remembered. It was as if he was full of air, like a huge tyre that had been blown up too much. He was still William’s father, but a person with all that air inside them might burst.

What it was, he was stuck up there in the tree. The rope around his neck was keeping him from speaking. A person with a rope around their neck, they wouldn’t be able to speak, even if they wanted to. And the rope was what was keeping all the air inside. Like with a balloon, you tied string around it to keep the air in, didn’t you? Yes, or you tied a knot in it.

And if the rope was very tight, then a person wouldn’t be able to undo it all by themself. Of course they wouldn’t. They’d need help.

William knew if it was him up in the tree, William up there with a rope around his neck so tight he couldn’t speak, then Daddy would get a ladder or a chair or something and climb up and help him get the rope off his neck. There was a chair on the grass. One of the new chairs out of the kitchen, which wasn’t supposed to be outside. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to be kicked over in the grass. William righted it and climbed up on to the seat, but even when he stood on tiptoe he couldn’t reach higher than his father’s knees.

He ran down to the garden shed and pushed at the door. Locked. He went back to the house and got his mother’s stepladder from the laundry, set it up under the swaying feet of his father. The stepladder wasn’t firm on the lawn under the pear tree, it wobbled as he got higher. The top step of the ladder brought William’s head level with his father’s waist. Even if he stretched to his full height he couldn’t reach the rope. He would have to climb the tree itself, crawl out on the branch above his father’s head. Or, and a new bought came into his mind, he could climb up his father’s body. Sit on his shoulders like he used to before they went away- That was one of the things he missed when his mother took them away. Sitting on his daddy’s shoulders while his daddy pranced around on the grass. It felt like you could fall off any minute and really hurt yourself, but you knew that Daddy would never let you fall. So it was dangerous and safe all at the same time, made you squeal and laugh at the top of your voice.

William grasped hold of Daddy’s belt and kicked off. The stepladder clattered over on to the grass. The two of them swung from side to side together, and William wrapped his legs around Daddy’s waist. He pulled himself higher by grasping his father’s lapel, and eventually he got his foot onto the buckle of Daddy’s belt, and from there it was easy enough to get up to his shoulders. And easy to sit there as well, because he could hold the rope as well as his father’s head.

But he couldn’t loosen the rope. He couldn’t unpick the knots. Once William had managed to unpick a knot in his shoelaces, and that had been difficult, had taken him nearly an hour. But the knots on the rope around Daddy’s neck were much tighter than shoelace knots. It was going to be terribly difficult to untie knots like these. If shoelace knots took a whole hour, then knots like the ones around Daddy’s neck might take years and years and years.

It was then that he felt the cold. His father’s forehead was sticky and cold. Squashy on the surface and slabby like rubber underneath, and much colder than anyone William had ever touched before. And there was something else, that he’d noticed earlier, but that now he was sat on his father’s shoulders was nearly unbearable. And that was the smell.

William had never smelled something before that got inside your mouth as well as your nose. It was a vile and rank odour that clung to his tongue, crept down inside his throat so that he thought he might suffocate. He retched and his stomach moved inside him, his mouth filled with bile, and he spat it out, over his father’s head. The stench remained. The nearest he could get to it, it was like the time the freezer broke down and all the ice cream and meat melted, and when they came back from holiday the floor was covered in blood and maggots.

He was sitting on Daddy’s shoulder, hanging on to the rope, smelling the smell and trying to work it out in his mind when the men arrived in their uniforms. At first there was just one of them. He came through the house and out of the back door. He was dressed in black, with boots and a leather jacket, an enormous crash helmet, so you couldn’t see his face. He looked up at William, his hands on his hips, and he said, ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ and he shook his head and walked back towards the house.

Then there was another man, and another two with a stretcher. And the new man came over and took hold of Daddy’s legs to stop them swinging, and he reached up towards William and said, ‘Come down, son. It’ll be all right. I’ll catch you.’

And William might have come down then, only the original man came back, the one in black with the crash helmet, and he said it again, ‘Jesus fucking Christ, d’you believe this?’ He picked up the stepladder and set it up, stood on the bottom rung. William was suddenly frightened and he stood on Daddy’s shoulders and caught hold of the upper branch of the tree and climbed up on to it.

‘No, not that way,’ the crash helmet said. Then to the other man: ‘For fuck sake, it’s bad enough without the kid. Stink’s worse than the wife’s breath.’

William kept climbing. He climbed to the very top of the tree, where the branches became thin, so that if he’d gone further they wouldn’t hold his weight. They tried to coax him down for a long time, but he wasn’t going to move, not as long as the one with the crash helmet was there. You couldn’t see his eyes under that thing.

William watched as the photographer arrived, and while he took photographs of Daddy. And then there was a much older man with a white beard and a briefcase who had one of those things they stick in their ears so they can listen to your heart. Crash helmet held the stepladder for him and the bearded man climbed up and listened to Daddy’s heart. ‘This is ludicrous,’ he said as he was climbing back down.

Eventually they concentrated on getting his father down. But they didn’t undo the knot, like William expected. They cut him down. One of them did the cutting and the other one tried to catch Daddy. He had him by the legs, and the first one said, ‘You right?’

‘Yeah. I’ve got him.’

So the first one cut the rope and William’s father plunged down on top of the second one. The stepladder slid away and it ended with Daddy and both of the policemen in a heap on the grass. The other two men with the stretcher laughed, but William didn’t think it was funny.

After they’d loaded Daddy on to the stretcher and taken him away, the policeman with the crash helmet left and the nice one asked William to come down from the tree. When he got down the policeman said he’d been very brave and he could cry now if he wanted to.

But he didn’t feel like crying.

Later, when he pushed his plate away, his mother said he should eat something. But he didn’t feel like eating.

And the next day, when Diana said she was going to the shop for some sweets and he could go with her, he didn’t feel like moving.

*

Seventeen years later, he remained inert, naked on the bed for an hour and a half, his mind working, his other bodily systems flickering uncertainly. He didn’t shiver once, though he gritted his teeth for the last twenty minutes as the morning air chilled him to the bone.

22

You gag with pain as an iron bar leaps through your body. Diana spins from the window and comes forward, fear in her eyes, and in her shaking hands. ‘Dora. What is it?’

‘Aghhhhh.’ The bar is cold and hot, with all the compassion of the industrial revolution. It drags your eyes from their sockets; sends a line of spittle dribbling along your jaw. It sticks, lodges in a thick crevice of muscle and nerve from the pit of your left arm to the dead inside of your right hip. It is an old axle, rusted and heavy, as taut as Arthur’s rope.

‘Hang on, Dora. I’ll get Sam.’

‘Dear God.’ Outside, a squall of wind whips the leaves along the avenue. A car speeds past, too fast. Ignore the pain. Try to ignore it. Short breaths. That’s better. Short, fast, tiny breaths. In out, in out, in out. There are still leaves on the tree.

Sam crosses the room in two strides, wiping his hands on the front of his T-shirt. His face is drawn. Your eyes leap towards him. ‘I’m going to carry you over to the bed,’ he

says.

In out, in out, in out. ‘No. Don’t touch me.’ Keep the breathing going. ‘It’s an iron bar, Sam. Right through me.’

He puts his arms under you. ‘You’ll rest better in the bed,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle.’

You are flying, Dora. Flying through the air. You look back at the window, the leaves in the street, the solitary trees. A quick, last glimpse before you are lowered to the bed. The bar shifts inside you, settles, pushes your jaw and neck to the left, hard against the pillow.

‘How’s that?’

‘No.’ You shake your head.

Sam moves you over on your side and the bar passes out of focus. The bar does not go away, it lies with a degree of acceptable discomfort inside you.

In out, in out, in out. ‘OK.’ It’s OK if you don’t move. Keep up the breathing. ‘Get her out of here.’ Diana is hovering in the doorway. She shouldn’t see this. Sam should get her out of here.

‘No, Dora. I’m staying.’ She comes forward, places a hand on the quilt. ‘I’m not a baby. I
want
to be here.’

You try a deeper breath and let it whistle out through your teeth. There’s no point arguing with Diana. She’s going to stay.

Dear God, Dora. You have no strength now. Your eyes close. The room is silent. Sam and Diana recede. Smiling Smiley scowls down at you from the past. He has found another woman.

A woman? He has found a girl, one of his students, twenty years old. You are forty-one. No contest. Experience counts for nothing. Smiley is on a quest for innocence. He discards his cravats; buys a pair of suede shoes, slip-ons, without laces.

His girl is called Sally Bowles. She has never heard of Isherwood. She is a kid. She watches you with sharpened teeth. She smiles every minute of the day, maliciously. She has caught a big fat Smiley fly in her silken web. She is the happiest, the hungriest, the most popular girl on campus. A witch-woman, sick with her own power. Smiley tells you she carries contraceptives in her saddle bag. And you, Dora? You don’t even have a bike.

Smiley lasted for ever. He was always there. Part of the fixtures, until he was gone. And then there was you, Dora. You and Diana and Billy. And no one else.

Diana rampaged through the house like a wild thing. It was your fault, Dora. It was all your fault. You had lost him- Lost him for yourself, and lost him for Diana. It was the Arthur story all over again. You were not grasping enough. You should have pinned him down when you had the chance. Now it is too late. He has gone to Sally Bowles.