Ghostwalk (4 page)

“You did well to find Elizabeth. Find Elizabeth, find the seventeenth century, we always say. She has a gift.”

“You talk about her as if she’s still here.” I put my hand to the back of my neck suddenly. Something—the wind, a twig, a wind-blown leaf—had touched me there.

“Oh, but she
is
still here. I haven’t seen her yet, but she’s here all right. There are others here too. Don’t you feel them?” Now the milky eye turned upwards under the lid and I found myself looking intently at the tangle of blood vessels on either side of Dilys’s nose, broken, angry veins as if something had bled invisibly beneath. Safe to look there. Better there than anywhere else. I had started to fall.

“He’s
here. Over there, leaning against that tree. But not Mr. F. He’s not here. He knew to stay away. Oh, you mustn’t be frightened. And there’s Greswold, Cowley, and the boy.” When she laughed, I glimpsed a gold tooth at the back of her mouth. “They’ve come to pay their respects. And they’ve been waiting for you. There are several people who have been waiting for you.”

I could see nothing, nobody, among the trees where she pointed.

“You’ve taken your time, Lydia,” she said, reaching out her hand, that hand with the veins and the too long nails, and running it tenderly down my hair. “So heavy—I thought as much. Like hair running with water…like heavy copper-coloured satin. Not a kink in it.”

I was six years old again, standing in front of my bed, waiting for the green hand to reach out from under the bed and fix its grip around my bare ankles. I could feel the warm, slightly wet clasp on my ankles but I couldn’t move, couldn’t step away. Fresh sweat made me suddenly cold in the fen winds. I could feel every inch of my skin under my clothes. It was Dilys who broke the spell.

“We had better get back inside, don’t you think? Lydia. Might I call you Lydia? Listen. They’re singing ‘Rock of Ages.’ How beautiful. You go in first. You can slip in while they’re singing. I’ll be along in a few minutes. Just need to collect myself.”

The wind picked up again as I walked away from her, back to the church, so I lost her last words, but I am sure she said something like “I will seek you out.”

I looked for the old woman after the service, walked around the perimeter of the chapel twice, pushing through brambles and nettle patches, stinging myself, but she had gone. The mourners disappeared quickly too, escaping the high winds. From the hill I watched you leave, alone; a few minutes later Sarah followed with Leo and Toby, a tall woman neatly dressed with her two pretty sons (they must have been around eleven and fifteen years old then, I guessed), one who looked like you in profile; Sarah spoke kindly to one or two people, touching hands. I watched myself, too, to see what, if anything, I would feel after five years, seeing you, Sarah, the boys. Like pressing on a place where a bruise has been once.

Branches had fallen during the service; leaves and rubbish from the scrap-metal yard and landfill sites lay strewn across the thick grass.

I spoke to no one. I wonder why I took the pictures of the scrap-metal yard and the graffiti that day. Something to do? I didn’t want to cry again. I took them as a gift for Anthony, who weaves graffiti tags into his sculpture. Something to do with inscription and stone and rituals for staying time: Anthony’s sculptures are carved to look like menhirs, ancient marks on receding landscapes which have lost their meaning to us, just as graffiti tags are a kind of private code, a means of memorialisation as a way of saying: “I have passed here on my journey through time. I leave my mark.” For years I’d been photographing tags and graffitied walls in every city I visited and e-mailing the photographs to Anthony’s computer from Internet cafés in Calcutta or Berlin.

Dine and Duplo had branded their names here in this scrap-metal yard one dark night or early morning, curling their torchlit foot-high letters respectfully around another tag I’d not seen before: one word, written seven times vertically in green letters against metal: NABED. I’d not seen NABED before. I imagined boys dressed in dark clothes with balaclavas and rucksacks full of different coloured spray cans, perhaps skateboards strapped across their backs. Urban warriors. Graffiti artists. Street bombers, they called themselves, Anthony had said. Anthony had pictures of Duplo’s tags from as far away as Peterborough. I imagined Cambridge trains riding through the night carrying Duplo’s signature through fields and industrial estates and into sidings. I’d seen Duplo’s tags on a warehouse hoarding farther along the Newmarket Road and on the back of an Argos lorry. His name moved—they all moved.

Once I’d finished, I sent Kit a text: “Funeral over. Be with you in half an hour. Still OK to stay over? Tell Maria I have a present for her.” Kit would know how to be, how to put words around this terrible sadness, not my own but a borrowed sadness—one of the many circles the blackbird had flown from.

Four

F
or as long as I can remember I have dreamed a dream about a warehouse. I write “warehouse,” but it might easily be a derelict stately home. The point about this building, whatever it is, is that it has scores of rooms full of things. Old furniture and armchairs and lacquered cabinets painted with birds, glass cabinets full of little boxes. Trapdoors and secret corridors and disguised doorways and hidden staircases and no one but me in there. Me, curiosity, and the dust. In my dream, I walk around all the rooms and sometimes I find new ones, open a door I hadn’t seen before which leads to a new staircase. I touch objects piled on tables and display cases—glass, fur, metal, jewels, feathers—until I find a long mirror and racks of clothes and jewellery. Standing there, I try each piece on one by one: the chiffon dresses, the Spanish shawls, the fur coats, and I drape paste diamonds over myself, diamonds I’ve found laid out in the velvet-lined drawers of mahogany cabinets. Each time I dream my way to that place I feel I’ve come home. Sometimes I feel someone else is there in another room. I hear a noise like a chair being dragged over floorboards or the creak of a door. But I haven’t seen anyone there yet. It’s always me looking—in drawers, behind trapdoors, down corridors, me looking at myself in the mirror as various people I don’t recognise—never me
being
looked at. No,
being watched
is something new.

Maybe that’s how I found Kit Anderson. She’s run a vintage-clothes stall at the Cambridge market all the time I’ve known her, which is sixteen years or so. Back then, when she was a history student at Clare, she just had the stall on Sundays, but now it’s a proper business and she’s made money from it, enough to live on. None of us thought she could. That’s where I first met her, at the market one day just before Christmas. It was almost dark and there were Christmas lights coming on all around us, and the crinoline-shaped netted skirts attached to the metal frame of the stall were blowing in the wind. I was trying on a black velvet jacket in the dressing room she had constructed from old eiderdowns and in that half-light I found myself telling her about the carved wooden dressing-up chest in the conservatory of my father’s house which my stepmother had bought and stuffed full of old clothes donated by friends, the ladies from the conservative club in Bradford. Down in the dark corners of the chest were pieces of jewellery, beads, thick leather belts, hats, and scarves. Then Kit quoted me some lines from an American poet friend of hers who wrote about still-life paintings and the way they worked to stop time, to distill memory into a series of intensely arranged objects. Vintage clothes were like that too, she said. Even when they passed on to new bodies, they kept their old people about them.

Kit got pregnant before she finished her Ph.D., and though we’d try to guess sometimes, she never told anyone who the father was. She always said she’d go back and finish the thesis when Maria got older but she never did, and in the end she joined that subcommunity of people who live in Cambridge who’ve been finishing their Ph.D.s for decades. Like most of them she still has a room full of books and papers, even something like half a completed thesis, but the whole academic field has changed now. To finish it she’d have to start again. And the world, she says, is too crowded with academics working on Restoration theatre. Instead, Kit Anderson runs the clothes stall and does something much more interesting: she rewrites revenge tragedies
—The Duchess of Malfi, The Spanish Tragedy, Titus Andronicus
—for an experimental theatre company she’s put together called Mainspring.

Kit poured me a gin and tonic when I arrived at her house in Sturton Street after the funeral. I walked down the side passage between the terraced houses and the rosebushes and through into the garden and there she was sitting in the conservatory kitchen she’d built since I’d moved out, sitting with Maria; Kit was reading the newspaper and Maria was at the sewing machine again. Kit looked up, laughed, and stepped out into the garden to meet me.

“I never thought we’d see you back in Cambridge again, Lydia Brooke. You said you were done with Cambridge.”

“I had. But Elizabeth…”

“I know, I know. I’m just teasing. It’s great to see you. Hey, this is a sodding big bag. You planning on staying for a bit?” I couldn’t be sure from her voice whether I heard approval or disapproval.

“If that’s OK with you people,” I said. “I’ve got a bit of free time and I thought I might stay for a few days, perhaps even a week, if I won’t get in the way.”

“That’s good news,” Kit said. “Maria will make you up a bed in her room, but I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with Titus—he’s noisy at night.” Titus was Maria’s guinea pig, a ridiculous creature whose long curled hair made him look as if he’d been crossed with a Barbie doll.

“You OK?” I asked, as Maria left the room.

“Tired, a bit hungover. We had a party here last night, as you can see.” She gestured towards the kitchen and a sink full of unwashed glasses. “The last garden party of the summer.” She twisted her hair into a knot, pulled a couple of chopsticks from a drawer, and stuck them through the knot of hair. Maria’s face had brightened by the time she reentered the room, Titus on her shoulder.

“Good party?” I asked.

“Brilliant. Mum bought those red paper lanterns from the Chinese supermarket on Mill Road, so when it got dark they were all lit up all the way down the garden to the pear tree.”

“It was too cold, really,” Kit said, “but we just wanted to squeeze one more party out of the autumn, didn’t we, rabbit?” Maria blushed. She was thirteen and her mother had begun to embarrass her. So, Kit was still squeezing parties from the summer like blood from a stone. Kit was afraid of the dark; she hated the winter. Dreaded it creeping up on her. Maybe that’s why she worked on revenge tragedy—those sudden bloody stabs in the dark, a violent death in an alleyway, meaningless and cruel. She’d been dancing the night before, pushing back the dark.

Maria moved her sewing to one side to clear a space among the sequins and buttons on the conservatory table to make room for the plate of Moroccan lamb Kit pulled out of the microwave. I ate and drank my gin and tonic looking down over the darkening garden, while Maria and Kit talked about funerals they’d been to, exams, mobile phones, the garden, and the party. I wasn’t really listening till Anthony’s name came up.

“Anthony stayed over,” Maria said, eyes wide. “In Mum’s bed.”

“Maria!” Kit exclaimed with mock outrage. “You make it sound like we’re lovers or something.”

“Well, you are in a way, aren’t you? I know, I know. He’s always here and he brings you flowers and presents and sometimes he stays over. You can never be really, really sure that someone’s gay, can you? People fall in love.”

“If Anthony was going to fall in love with me he’d have done so fifteen years ago.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “You’re more interesting
and
more beautiful now.”

“Bugger off,” she said. “That’s a hollow compliment if I’ve ever heard one.”

“But she’s right,” Maria said, scanning her mother’s face. “You
are
more beautiful now. Well, a bit.”

Kit raised her eyebrows at me. “I can just see it all now. You can just drive back home to your fancy Brighton flat, Lydia Brooke. I’m not having you stay here to shift all the alliances in my house. This daughter of mine is supposed to be on my side. Look at the pair of you ganging up on me. You were always trouble.” The pupils of her eyes narrowed. She meant it. She was still angry with me from before. I would have to be careful.

“I’ve got some pictures for Anthony,” I said. “And some flowers for you and a case of pinot noir in the back of the car.”

“More graffiti pictures? You were always his main supplier. Does he know you’re back? What have you got? Show me.”

“Oh, the usual,” I said, passing her the camera so she could scroll through the tiny pictures illuminated on the screen. “I picked up some great tags from Amsterdam earlier this year, and there’s new tagged walls from the skater park in Brighton. I took some pictures this afternoon too in Cambridge—the scrap-metal yard next to the Leper Chapel. There’s a tag I’d not seen before: NABED. Green letters, black shadow. Does he have that one?”

“Christ. Yes. Trust you to find that one on your first afternoon. NABED. It’s not really a tag. It’s political. An animal-rights group. They target the animal-lab people and leave their tag after an attack, like a signature.”

“What does NABED stand for?”

“No one really knows. They’re completely silent.”

“No Web site? No manifesto?”

Maria left the room—pointedly. Kit watched her go.

“No, just the tags—so far at least.” She changed the subject.

That night, as I lay listening to Maria’s breathing and the interminable wheel of Titus’s cage turning and turning in the dark, I thought of Dilys Kite and all the questions I hadn’t asked her and I thought of the blackbird and the edges of circles.
I will seek you out,
the old woman had said.

I found Kit in the kitchen around midnight, making tea. She was wearing my favourite kimono from her collection of 1920s silk dressing gowns, the one with a blue background and gold water lilies, and her thick black hair was still piled on the top of her head. I’d thrown on a black silk robe from the back of the bathroom door. They were everywhere in Kit’s house. Even her dusters were made of scraps of old velvet—and she doesn’t dust.

“You not sleeping either?” she said. “Titus needs shooting. I swear he’s got more energetic as he’s got older. But guinea pigs don’t live long. By my calculation he’s only got four months to go. I could put him out in the shed while you’re here—might speed up the process. Chamomile tea?”

“Maria would have a fit if you turned him out for me. No, it’s not Titus. I’m just overtired, I think. I’ve been writing late for a couple of weeks and now that I’ve stopped I’m dead tired, but I can’t seem to switch off. I’m like Titus on that bloody wheel.”

We sat in the back sitting room in the dark, where Kit lit some of the candles in the red Chinese lanterns that she’d strung across the fireplace. The two armchairs had lost their springs years ago so you sunk down deep into them, almost to the floor. Kit had slung fleece rugs over them, and in the warmth of wool and the wood fire I suddenly felt I could fall asleep looking at Kit’s feet curled under the blue silk of her kimono. She had silver nail varnish on her toes.

“Funny seeing you in that robe,” she said. “It’s the one Anthony wears when he’s here.”

“Yes, I thought I could smell him. Where is he? Christ, I’ve missed you all. Funny how it all seems to stay the same. This house. The smell.”

“Just looks that way to you. It isn’t the same, though. I’ve fixed all sorts of things since you were here last…the bathroom light switches work, the back door doesn’t stick anymore. I bought a DIY book.”

“So if this is now Anthony’s robe, it’s not the first time he’s stayed?”

“God, you’re as bad as Maria. No, it wasn’t the first time, though Maria thinks it was. When Anthony stays I sleep better. He’s been very good to me.”

“He’s always adored you. He’s never sold that white marble head you sat for, has he?”

“No, he hasn’t. He’s had some important commissions lately; he’s working on an enormous bronze for a shopping centre in Gateshead. Another menhir. You must see it.”

“You’re not lovers, then?” I didn’t look at her.

“No, we’re not lovers—though…it’s complicated. What about you? How’s that dreadful man of yours?”

“Peter?” I said and she brought her heavy eyebrows together into an exaggerated frown. She never called him by name. “He’s OK,” I said. “I’ve asked him to move back into his flat, though. I need a bit of a break. Living together isn’t working out.”

“Bet he hasn’t gone yet.”

“No. He hasn’t.”

“Surprise, surprise. You shouldn’t have let him move in in the first place.”

“It was good to start with.”

“What, for two weeks?”

“Yes, about that.” I’d brought Peter to one of Kit’s parties once and he’d offered to mend her broken gate—he had a tool kit in the back of his car, he said. I should have warned him. She hates people pointing out the broken things in her house and she won’t be helped, especially by a man with a toolbox, though in those days she’d never got round to mending all those things herself. I felt oddly defensive. “He’s good company. He’s a great cook. It’s nice to have him there when I get home. We get on.”

“Not enough reasons to have him live in your house, though. You don’t need a housekeeper or a handyman. Not you.”

“I know, I know. I made a mistake. But that’s boring. I don’t want to talk about Peter or even think about him. You know, I don’t think I’m going to go back till he’s moved out again. Elizabeth’s funeral yesterday changed some things, like a switch had been thrown in my head. It’s a cliché, I know, but I suddenly saw it, in black and white: life’s too bloody short. I’ve had enough of all that wadding—you know, the day-to-day stuff, the habits, the routines. I want something else. Want to go back on the road for a bit. Somewhere a bit wilder.”

“
Again?
Jesus, Lydia. You should hear yourself.”

“So you’d have me settle down, would you? A little house in the suburbs and some children? I can’t do that.”

“There’s other ways of doing it.” Kit hesitated, ran her finger over her bottom lip and pulled her gown around her feet. “You stayed put for Cameron. Long enough for him to mess up your head.”

“Now, that’s complicated. I gave up trying to understand that years ago. But you’re right, I did stay put—in a way. Have you seen him?”

“I bump into him at parties from time to time. Anthony sees him when he’s in Cambridge.”

“He’s not around much?”

“Cameron Brown’s a big shot now. He travels a lot. Anthony says he’s working on some major neuroscience project. Top secret. He’s up for some big European science prize. Can’t remember which one. He looks older these days. Works very long hours at the lab, apparently. And he has to be very careful who he sees and who he talks to. Security levels have been stepped up in Cambridge because of the NABED group. Cameron’s right in the firing line, doing what he does.”