The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (36 page)

And finally, there are sins that I will encounter specifically involving the serpent and the apple but am still too young to know what these are in any detail. Adam and Eve are also involved.

“All men are the same. Mark my word. You’ll get the taste for it, and that will be that. You’re just a boy now, but, in a couple of years you’ll be a man, and you’ll be out there with Eve and the serpent. Do you understand?”

“Not really.”

“And to think that you want to abandon God at this stage in your life. I’ve never heard the like of it. The serpent hides in the branches and in the leaves. Right, laddie?”

“Not sure what you mean.”

“Once you’ve dipped your wick, you will not be able to resist it, no matter what.”

“Dipped my wick?”

“The flesh is weak! We’ll leave it at that for now.”

This is the original sin. The technical term, I think, is “wooing,” and this clearly demonstrates why I should not be listening to the soundtrack to
Paint Your Wagon
. Especially on a Sunday.

And there was absolutely no mention of the quim.

96

S
he howls like a desperate wolf in the smothering black air of the night. Then she screams the way anyone would scream who is convicted to the sentence of blind torture by faceless demons. Alone in a darkness that is too big for this world, swirling around inside her head.

And those things talk to her with their independent voices. Not pretty, adolescent conversations about boys and lipstick and babies. Just whispers of death and dying and the constant taunting to kill herself. Even sleep is no escape. They come to her in her dreams. They live inside her and outside at the same time.

But there is no dead child in the attic. No necrotic, entombed girl waiting to be released from her eternal purgatory. No half-life screeching in the emptiness for her freedom. To be released by those who cruelly abandoned her to her immurement.

After all this time, there is no child in the attic. It’s Margueretta. Mum knew it was her all along—her voice coming through the vents in the ceiling like a child in the attic. Mum knew it but she didn’t want to admit that Margueretta was screaming in the night. Mum wouldn’t admit it for fear it would frighten Emily and me—for fear that it would terrify us almost to death.

Margueretta has been screaming for years.

But I’m more frightened now. It was easier to think of a ghost in the attic, or a dead child abandoned by the gypsies who fled in the night. A ghost that might find its way home—a terrible ghoulish nightmare in the godforsaken darkness. A nightmare that I might wake up from.

Now I know it’s Margueretta, and I can hear the fear of death in those screams. She takes her pills before she goes to bed, but they never last the night. And then that thing comes to her that’s rarely seen. It whispers first, and then it cries in her ears and inside her head like a prisoner trapped in a cell when all the other inmates have been released. A friend at first—and then the vile hands of a killer reaching down inside her throat to throttle her or wrap it’s palms around her nose and mouth. Locked in the cell together.

She tells her story now. I have to listen.

Soon it will be me. Not the imagined skull smeared across the bedroom window glass like the slow motion of a hideous, haunting sludge. Or that person who always stands behind me but is never there when I turn around. Those are easy things to forget, easy to ignore.

No, she says there are embodiments of evil inside me, feeding on tiny random thoughts that don’t mean a thing. Just a thought of savage death, slicing through the purple hairy beast with the mass of blackened veins. Eating the cow’s rejected body of cancerous flesh that grew beside its udder. Or the suffocating darkness that’s too big for the space and comes down through gaps in the trapdoor to join the ancient darkness that was there before anyone or anything. And still it’s too big and wants the space that is inside me—the darkness that I stole from the cellar and keep inside my head.

I can’t forget those things when the sun shines. Not the voices she says are inside me. Not the same voices from the water streaming from the tap like a vile, immovable glass rod. Those things don’t only belong to the night.

So I am knocking on her door tonight. Some nights are worse than others, and it seems like an inevitable death will end it all. Most times I bury my head under the blanket, pull it around my ears, around my head, and pray for the screams to stop. But tonight I knock on her door, a gentle tap.

The screaming stops. Nothing.

And then the door opens with such a force that I fall back and down, away from her door. And I scuttle like a human crab, moving backwards on all-fours, headfirst, away from it all—away from the fear-wet face and the
suddenness of my sister’s violent grief. Away from the thing that comes inside her head and could so easily come inside my own.

“Help me…help me. For God’s sake, help me. I’m going to die!” she screams.

She wants God now. She would renounce the Devil and let God back. She would say her passionate prayers like any sinner wanting redemption. Wanting to be released from the fiery lakes of Hell. Declaring with her mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believing in her heart that God raised him from the dead. She will be saved.

For my sister has not sinned, save the offense towards God of trying to take her own life.

She is afraid for her life.

And when the silence returns, as it always does, I hear the rattle of the piss running through Akanni’s thin mattress and bouncing on the floorboards below. Then he groans the groan of the first boy, turns over in his restless, box-bed sleep, and returns to his boyish dreams of heroic adventures.

97

S
omething wonderful has happened that means I can eat again. Emily and I have found jobs at the local greengrocers. Strictly speaking, it is illegal for us to be working at age thirteen. But Mrs. McWilliams, the proprietor, sees us as her “widow’s mites,” and she has taken pity on us. She will pay us in cash, no paperwork.

When she asked what our father does, I replied that we do not have a father, and for some reason she jumped to the conclusion he was killed in a terrible accident. I did not tell her that he went out to see a man about a dog just after Winston Churchill’s funeral and has not been seen since, except for an episode in a pub involving a broken bottle, which we do not talk about. I did not correct her, and I may have encouraged her by looking like a sad and distressed little boy whose father was tragically killed in a terrible accident.

“A sudden accident?”

I just stared down at the floor.

Mrs. McWilliams knows all about death, having survived the Allied blitz of Hamburg in 1943. And that’s where she met her husband, who is Scottish, when he was serving in the British Second Army after the war. So she speaks English with a German-Scottish accent. Unless she is angry, and then she just speaks German.

I am therefore learning some important phrases such as, “Vas ist zat, Scotch Mist?” or, “Bringen sie pastinak,” which means, “fetch the parsnips.”

I carry sacks of potatoes and crates of cabbages up two flights of stairs and restock all the shelves of fruit and vegetables, and I make enough money
to buy three whole packets of Dunlop floor tiles per week. I have therefore picked out a mock-oak plastic design for the hall, which I shall lay in a parquet style, alternating the grain. I have decided to leave the front room for last just to see if Woolworth’s pulls the same sale trick with the mock-oak. I do not want to introduce a color to go with the oak parquet.

I am also able to afford a packet of Camel unfiltered cigarettes to smoke with Carl. Carl is the permanent lad who works in the shop all week. He is almost sixteen and knows all about quims. His girlfriend is a slut, which means that she drops her knickers at a moment’s notice for just about anyone, and if I want to do it with a real-life quim, he will bring her round one afternoon. I suggested next Saturday.

And Carl is much stronger than me because he lifts those crates and sacks all week. He says he is going to make something of himself one day but in the meantime he is trying to throw a potato over the next row of shops.

“If you throw it hard enough, you can get it over the building there!”

I cannot throw a potato further than the parking bays at the back of our shop. But Carl has a huge swing, and he can launch a potato with such a force that it flies over the opposite three-story building. We can’t see beyond the building, but we know there is another street of shops over there.

He does practice throws with brussels sprouts, and when he’s got a good aim, he throws a Maris Piper. It feels really good to drag on an unfiltered Camel and watch that Maris Piper potato rocket over the rooftops into the next street. It’s a shame we can’t see it explode when it lands. Maris Pipers are really good for baking because they are quite large.

We don’t just sell fruit and vegetables. We sell Coca-Cola, flowers, fresh farm eggs, pickled onions, and Lucozade. But we’ve had to discount the fresh farm eggs by 80 percent because they have been on the shelf for over three months, and Mrs. McWilliams doesn’t know exactly when they were laid. Actually, they were not even fresh farm eggs. She got them from the wholesaler. We are therefore selling them on a no-return basis and have had to put a limit of only one dozen per customer.

“Zis floor is nicht clean! Vash it again!”

We were washing the floor this afternoon for a second time, Carl and me, when a short fat lady in a faux-fur coat came into the shop.

“Vee are closed! Kannst du nicht read?

“Who the fucking hell did this!”

And that’s when things went badly downhill. I can keep my job, but I will not be getting next Saturday’s introduction to the full details of the quim. Carl was fired. And I was forced to agree that in no way did that woman’s husband deserve to get hit on the head by a flying Maris Piper. It also broke his glasses.

“And before he was so cruelly struck, it was raining brussels sprouts like the fucking Plagues of Egypt!”

Mrs. McWilliams handled the situation very well, I thought. She gave the fat lady two-dozen, fresh farm eggs and a small bunch of freesias.

“Here,” said Mrs. McWilliams, handing her the eggs. “You get zwei-dozen. Datz gut. Zehr gut, eh? Everyone else only got one! Ein!”

“Not fucking good enough! I’m getting the police!”

The fat lady wouldn’t leave until she had claimed two pounds of Granny Smith apples, a pound of first-class Jersey tomatoes, half a pound of button mushrooms, six cans of Coke, and a bag of unshelled peanuts.

“I’ll make him a mushroom and tomato omelet for his dinner tonight,” she said, leading her husband out of the store. “Come on, Cyril. Let’s go. You’ve had a difficult evening.”

“Look vat zat cost me, Carl! You blithering dum-kopf! You’re fired!”

Still, it’s Friday night, and maybe Mrs. McWilliams will forgive him tomorrow. He says she’s fired him before for pissing in the corner of the storeroom even though she couldn’t prove it was him. He said a dog must have got in there. But she always hires him back in the morning when the potatoes need to be brought up from the store. I hope she does hire him back because I was really looking forward to doing it with a real-life quim.

Hopefully, next Saturday.

98

T
he police brought her back tonight. She was at her group therapy session this afternoon, and then she didn’t come home—but that’s nothing new. They found her trying to jump out of the ninth floor window of a block of flats. She was sitting on the window ledge.

“Do you know what happened?” Constable Ferguson asked.

Constable Ferguson is here again with a policewoman called Theresa. Margueretta just screamed and ran up to her bedroom.

“Nothing would surprise me,” Mum replied.

She went drinking with her group therapy friends and they suggested she drink Tia Maria because she said she likes coffee and wanted to try something different to Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry. She’s not under arrest because it’s not illegal to dangle your legs out of a ninth-floor window and attempting suicide is no longer a crime.

“Did you know she was missing?” Constable Ferguson asked.

“She’s not missing. It’s only nine o’clock at night.”

“Well, did you know where she was?”

“Yes, she went to her group therapy session.”

“We found her trying to climb out of a window.”

“Really? Huh.”

“On the ninth floor. She said she was going to jump. We’ve spent most of the last hour talking her off the ledge of the window, Mrs. Mitchell.”

“She won’t jump,” said Mum.

“Why? How do you know that?”

“Because if she was going to jump, she would just do it. She wouldn’t wait for someone to call the police and then spend an hour talking to you, would she? She would just jump.”

“I don’t like the way this conversation is going, Mrs. Mitchell. Is Mr. Mitchell at home?” asked Theresa.

“Ha! If he was at home I would like a word with him first. He’s been missing for six years! In fact, you should be out looking for him instead of messing around with her. He owes me six years back maintenance for these children. He hasn’t paid a damned penny towards their upbringing!”

“This is serious.”

“Oh, I’m deadly serious. How am I supposed to survive bringing up three kids on my own in this day and age?”

“We’re not here for that. You need to have tighter control over your daughter. This isn’t the first time. We’ve got a file an inch thick on her.”

“Tighter control? And, tell me, do—how exactly do I do that? Ask Constable Ferguson. He knows.”

“She should have a curfew,” Theresa replied.

“A curfew? Oh, don’t make me laugh, young lady. Try putting a curfew on a cat!”

“It may not be such a good outcome next time!”

“Well, why don’t you give me those handcuffs?”

“What?”

“I will take them upstairs and handcuff her to her bed. Will that satisfy you?”

“But you’re her mother!”