Ghosting (10 page)

Back on the boat everything seems smaller and darker. The walls lean in, the ceiling is too low; everything seems to occupy more space than it did before. What would Hannah have said about her walking out on Gordon? She’d be happy for her – probably say,
About bloody
time
.
But, then, what is it she wants? What will she do with what remains? Maybe a week or two at Jason’s, but then where to go? All she really knows is she needs to get away – from this life; from him. Needs to find a new way of being in the world. It’s become a compulsion she can’t repress or ignore. And it excites her as much as it unsettles her that the details of her future have yet to be formed.

She dials Linden’s number. ‘Linden?’

‘Hi, Grace, how are you feeling?’

‘Much better, thanks. Do you want to do those pictures this afternoon?’

‘Absolutely. Come by the boat and we can head to the studio together. It shouldn’t take up much of your time.’

They catch a bus to Camden, where Given’s studio is tucked down a side street, towards Kentish Town.

‘Thank you for agreeing to do this, Grace,’ Linden says, ‘I’ve still got a way to go on the one of Luke, but it’ll be good to get the photos done for yours.’

‘How’s his hand?’

‘He’ll live. He’s gone to Brighton to see his family.’

‘Oh, they live down there?’

‘His mum does, with her second husband and two children. His parents divorced years ago, when Luke was about ten. His dad lives in the Highlands. They don’t get on.’

Grace asks about the forthcoming exhibition.

‘It’s a group show,’ Linden says. ‘I’ll have four pieces in it, including the one of you, so you should come to the private view. Oddly enough it’s in Brighton too. Have you ever been?’

‘A few times, though not for a couple of years. We’ve got out of the habit of doing much.’

‘Then you should definitely come. It’s in September.’

September seems too far away to imagine, so Grace just smiles.

They get off at Camden Lock and because the sun is out the place is packed. Once inside the studio, the first thing Grace notices is a half-built house constructed entirely from used toothbrushes.

‘That’s what Given’s working on at the moment,’ Linden says, walking over to a desk covered in books and papers. She takes a laptop from her bag and puts it down on the desk. Grace spots the two portraits she’d seen on Linden’s camera, hanging next to one another on the wall, and walks over to take a closer look.

Linden shows her the portrait of Luke, which is standing on an easel. Only the face is finished: he’s made up, with false eyelashes and lipstick. The rough outline of his body reveals that he has his hands on his hips, wearing a short, tight dress. Grace looks at the photograph from which she’s painting, which is pinned to the easel above the canvas, and she sees that his dress is light blue. ‘I’m playing around with gender in these two,’ Linden says. ‘He’s a very pretty man and you’re a
very handsome woman. So I want you dressed as a man if that’s all right by you.’ She hands Grace a shirt and tie and a grey suit jacket.

She’s never worn men’s clothes before and she’s self-conscious at first; it seems wrong in some way she can’t define: almost shameful. Yet because of that there is also a transgressive thrill. She is testing the boundaries of a new self, and she likes it. Looking in the mirror as she knots the tie, she brings to mind her father, conjured in the tain of the glass as her own reflection takes on the contours of his face. She tries to imagine what it would feel like to go out dressed like this – to engage with the world as a man. How would it differ? Would she still be invisible? When she returns to the studio, Linden looks at her and says, ‘
Very
handsome!’ before walking over to her bag and removing a tin of hair wax. ‘Just one last finishing touch,’ she says, applying some to Grace’s hair with her fingertips, slicking it flat as she explains how she wants Grace to pose: shoulders back, head defiant, eyes cold and austere. ‘Look as if you own the world,’ she says. ‘Lord of fucking everything.’

She gives Grace various objects to hold: a tall, slim lime-green vase, a leatherbound book, a pipe, the smell of it conjuring her father again, or rather the absence of him – her paltry knowledge of him. After her initial awkwardness, Grace relaxes into the posing, enjoying this make-believe, this mask of masculinity.
Is this how it’s done?
she wonders.
Do they act at being men, learning from other men, from their fathers?
And
was that what she’d done: play-acted at being a woman, performing a femininity learnt from her mother and other women?

Linden hands her a cut-throat razor and says, ‘Finally, can you hold this like you’re either about to shave or slit your own throat?’

Afterwards, on the bus, Linden points to the ring on the third finger of Grace’s right hand: a small silver snake, its tail disappearing into its mouth.

‘I like your ouroboros ring,’ she says.

‘What did you call it?’

‘Ouroboros. The snake that eats its own tail.’

‘I never knew it had a name,’ Grace says, pleased to learn this new fact. ‘It was Hannah’s. I’ve worn it ever since she died.’

SHE WAS IN
the house on her own when the police called, preparing the evening meal before the arrival of Gordon and the boys. She’d long since stopped setting a place for Hannah, though the exclusion still pained her; but this evening she’d found herself automatically setting an extra place, and it was in that split second of awareness of what she’d done that the doorbell rang.

As soon as she saw the uniforms she knew Hannah had used up her nine lives.

She let out a loud wail when they told her. While the WPC made a cup of tea, Grace rocked and keened,
oblivious to the presence of others. A world of untold pain had claimed her. When she asked them how she had died, the male PC said, ‘Dodgy heroin,’ as if it happened all the time, which it probably did.

But not to me. Not to me.

She wanted to slap him.

‘
HOW DID
she die?’ Linden says.

Grace hadn’t wanted to talk about these things. Finds it hard to talk about these things. The nausea of the moment returns, for the body remembers things, too.

‘An overdose.’

‘Oh, Grace, how awful!’

‘She was a drug addict. Left home at sixteen and we had no idea where she was.’ She feels as if she wants to talk and never stop, tell Linden everything. Lay it all out like the bones of a dinosaur; watch them gradually assume their extinct shape.

Linden says, ‘When I was seventeen my boyfriend was hit by a train while walking home along the tracks one night. I always told him not to go that way and if we were together I made us go the long way. But he was on his own that night and pissed.’

Grace says, ‘I’m sorry,’ thinking how odd it was that custom makes us apologise for things that aren’t our fault.

‘I’ve no way of knowing if it was suicide or just a stupid accident. Because he used to get very low, used
to talk about ending his life, but I didn’t believe he’d ever do it.’

Grace says, ‘I remember taking the kids to Chester Zoo once when Hannah was about six. And she was in such a glum mood as I was getting them ready, I tried to cheer her up telling her about all the animals she would be seeing. And when I mentioned bears she said, “Good, I can chuck myself in the bear pit.”’

‘Christ!’

‘I didn’t let her out of my sight all day. She used to have these really sullen, withdrawn moods. “Putting her funny hat on”, we called it – trying to make light of it, I suppose – but she did worry me sick, always looking so tortured.’

Each word uttered seems like an insignificant fraction of what she wants to say, and yet at the same time it feels like a victory. A knowledge imparted; a poison drained.

When they get off the bus, Grace announces she isn’t going directly home and they part company. Earlier, at the studio, watching Linden use a laptop to go online and find an image she wanted to reference, an idea had formed in Grace’s head, so she makes her way to the local library to do some research of her own.

Grace is familiar with the library but she has never used the internet before, so she goes over to the help desk – which is manned, she sees from the name badge on his lapel, by Lazlo, a gaunt, bouffant-haired man of about sixty decked out in a colourful cravat and
navy blue pocket-crested blazer. His fishblue eyes are reduced to bright beads by thick tortoiseshell glasses fringed across the top with unkempt eyebrows. In his slow, mannered Slavic accent, Lazlo talks her through the whole procedure, and once he’s gone she types in the words ‘luke performance artist london’, which yields several images of him naked and/or covered in blood, plus the surname – Murphy – but nothing more.

Then she types in ‘artist given london’ and in no time at all there he is: the man she’d seen with Luke at the ponds. She’s sure of it. She takes in what had evaded her then: the fine brown features and beautiful eyes. Lashes like a girl’s.

She finds details of his exhibition,
All There Is Plus All There Is Not,
at the Looking Glass Gallery on Redchurch Street, Shoreditch. There are photographs of his work but she doesn’t pay much attention. She reads an interview with him from the
Guardian
, in which he speaks about his difficult childhood being moved around between care homes, and about his encounters with racism and how he believes that not knowing his parents has informed everything he does, ‘as though my life and my art are both some kind of search for origins, for a starting point, for a place to begin’.

On a whim she does a search on the name ‘pete robinson’, but that only generates a rogue’s gallery of strangers it would take hours to trawl through, and besides, what the hell does she think she is going to find? But then she adds the words ‘RAF 1950s 1960s’ to
the search, and before long she’s unearthed an image of him, from his days as a Boy Entrant in 1956, two years before she met him. It’s a grainy black and white group shot taken outside a billet in Bassingbourn. He’s sitting on the grass, front far left, cigarette in hand; relaxed and indifferent, unlike the more formal poses of the men with him. Some of them are named, but not him, though she knows in her blood and her bones – even though he is staring down at the ground and not at the camera – that it’s him. It unnerves her almost as much as if he’d been standing right behind her.

She types in ‘Singapore 1967’ and spends a good two hours or so revisiting the past in photographs and stories from other people’s time there in the Forces. She can almost smell the monsoon drains; feel the cool of the tiles underfoot; see Ayu’s kind face. Memories she had folded up and hidden away come back to her vividly, till she’s back in that heat with its rattling ceiling fans and chit-chattering geckos.

FREED FROM
Pete’s tyranny, she felt a kind of freedom she hadn’t dared to hope for. Like a dream come true, in many ways, it seemed to her at the time. And the children thrived in the warmth and the sunshine, getting used to the chit-chats, even giving them names and treating them like pets.

She explained to the children as best she could what had happened to their father, that he wasn’t coming
back, but she had no way of knowing how much they understood.
At what age does death start making sense?
she wondered.
Do we move from ignorance to knowledge in one tragic instant when the full impact hits?

She allowed life to slide into a calm routine, never thinking about Pete at all, though almost every night would find her locked inside vivid and intense sexual dreams of him which left her missing his body on her body, in her body, a loss only accentuated by the incessant heat surrounding her.

WHEN THE LIBRARY
closes, she makes her way home, feeling as though she’s returning from a long trip away. Back on the boat she sits down in front of her make-up mirror, wishing she could claw her skin off; dig deep into her flesh and excavate the young woman buried there.

The evening gapes empty ahead of her, a nest of hours like open mouths waiting to be fed. Halfway through her second glass of wine she starts searching the phone book for the number of a local hair salon. She calls and makes an appointment for the following morning. Just in time for the private view.

‘So, you’re going, then?’ she says to the mirror.

Or did the mirror say it to her?

THE NEXT MORNING
Grace wakes early, feeling more refreshed than she has for a long time. On the bus on the way to the salon she wonders what hairstyle to ask for. She hasn’t been to the hairdresser’s in years; since moving on to the boat she’s cut it herself to save money, keeping it short and manageable. Her only certainty is a pressing need for change. Linden’s comment about her looking androgynous has made her self-conscious; her attraction to Luke has made her vain. The combination of the two has brought her here.

After seating her with a coffee, Dylan, her stylist, suggests strawberry blonde might suit her.

‘I don’t want to look like mutton dressed as lamb,’ she says.

‘Don’t worry, it’s a very soft blonde. Very flattering. Here, have a look.’ And he hands her a magazine. ‘See? I think it’ll really suit you.’

‘OK, but not too much taken off. I’m growing it.’

‘No worries,’ Dylan says, ‘I’ll just chop it up a bit.’

As a junior washes her hair, she finds herself enjoying the pampering and the welcome distraction from her
anxieties about the private view. When she’s back in the chair, Dylan sets to work. Above the crisp snip of the blades he says, ‘Is it for a special occasion?’ She tells him all about the private view, and about modelling for Linden, and then, worried she is doing what her mother would call ‘showing off’, she clams up, feeling at the mercy of her oscillating moods more than ever before.

She treats herself to a facial –
no pockets in a shroud
– and two hours later she walks out feeling, and looking, years younger. She can’t seem to stop seeking out her reflection in shop windows, beguiled by the wild-eyed woman staring back from the glass. Can she trust her? If she follows this person, where will she take her?

In the window of a Cancer Research shop a dress catches her eye. Its pattern – a storm of purple, orange, white and blue swirls – reminds her of one she once made centuries ago. She goes inside and tries it on. It fits her perfectly, as do the pair of shoes – blue, with a moderate heel, hardly worn – that she also buys.

She is back on the boat just after 1.30pm. She packs a small case to take to Jason’s tomorrow morning. The remainder of the restless afternoon is spent pacing the corridors of that dead time before having something to do. She tries reading a book, but the words play truant. She gives in and pours a glass of wine to take the edge off her nerves. No word from Gordon, thankfully.

As she showers and changes into the new dress, her mood becomes more buoyant. She pulls on a black jersey cardigan and selects a maroon pashmina scarf purchased
at Camden Market on Jason’s last visit. As she puts on some make-up she feels a giddy twist in her stomach thinking about Luke.

Daft cow,
the mirror says, and the wine glass agrees.

Just before five o’clock, she heads over to their boat, and it gives her heart a lift to see him as she approaches. He looks up from his book and says, ‘My God, Grace, you look amazing. I love your hair,’ standing up and making her heart light up with a kiss on both cheeks.

‘Wow,’ says Linden, appearing from inside, ‘it’s taken years off you.’

‘A change is as good as a rest,’ Grace says.

Linden pours her a drink as Luke tells them about the trip he just made to Brighton for his sister’s sixteenth birthday party.
Hannah’s age when I last saw her alive,
Grace thinks with the flinch of a quick, sharp sorrow.

She asks Linden how the painting is coming along.

‘The photos we did all look great, and I think I know which one I’m going to use, but I just haven’t had any time to finish the one of Luke. I’ve been too busy helping Given hang his show.’

‘So, he’s well hung!’ Luke says with a laugh.

‘I decided to use the one with the pipe. It looks very Radclyffe Hall.’

Who?
Grace thinks, but says nothing.

Just after six they take a taxi to Shoreditch, a part of London Grace has never been before. As Linden and Luke discuss people she doesn’t know, she sinks back in the seat and tries to relax, looks out at the unfurling
streets, full of life, excited to be out tapping the city’s energy. There’d been a spate of going to places during their first two years in London – shows in the West End, galleries and museums, the odd concert. She had loved it, but it was expensive and they’d had to cut back. She realises now how much she misses it.

A text message from Gordon arrives:
I’m coming home.
The thought of him returning makes her panic. She replies:
Please don’t,
before switching her phone off and resolving to get an early train tomorrow. The last thing she wants is him getting back before she’s left.

Outside the gallery people are gathered on the pavement, talking and drinking. A motley crew, she thinks, though she’s relieved to see a few older faces; one of her biggest worries had been that she’d be the oldest person there by a couple of decades. As Luke pays the cab driver, Linden goes inside to get drinks. Grace lights a cigarette and pushes Gordon to the back of her mind.

She asks Luke about the cut on his hand.

‘On the mend. I’ll take the plaster off for the performance. If it starts to bleed, all the better.’

He seems distracted, scanning the crowd.

‘What time are you performing?’

‘Eight.’

She notices his eyes change, as if a light has just come on behind them, and when she turns and follows his gaze the penny drops: it’s Given. He’s in love with Given. Of course he is. Just then, Linden appears with three glasses of wine, and the world imperceptibly turns.
Given comes over and kisses them, thanking them for coming. As he starts to roll a cigarette and chat about who’s there, Grace studies him. He looks no better than he should, as her maternal grandmother would have said. Good-looking and knows it. She steps inside the gallery to see what all the fuss is about.

Each wall in the room is decorated entirely, floor to ceiling, with different strips of wallpaper: no two patterns are the same. Each strip is emblazoned with a phrase or sentence, each in a different typeface, some florid, others simple. One or two are in black marker pen. Grace walks around the space slowly, reading each one.

Like voices from inside her own head, these words unpack their wares. Some she reads more than once, trying to extract meaning, or just explore how they make her think and feel.

She has no idea if the words are original or appropriated. Some mean nothing to her at all, and some move her profoundly.

Linden appears beside her, holding out a bottle of wine.

‘So what do you think?’ she says, refilling both their glasses.

‘It’s just wallpaper.’

Linden laughs and says, ‘I meant about Given.’

Grace thinks he seems a bit full of himself, but she doesn’t like to say.
Handsome is as handsome does
.

‘He seems nice enough,’ she says.

‘I think Luke’s got a bit of a crush on him. Have you noticed the way he looks at him?’

‘No, I can’t say I have,’ she says, looking away, over Linden’s shoulder, to where she can see the two young men outside, standing close and deep in conversation. Given’s back is to her, but she can see Luke’s face, aglow with attentive love. She hopes her own infatuation isn’t so apparent.

‘I fucking hate all this secrecy,’ Linden says.

‘What a tangled web we weave,’ Grace says, spotting Given break away from Luke and enter the gallery, making his way towards them. Her gaze lingers on Luke’s crestfallen face. ‘Speak of the devil,’ she says, and takes a sip of wine.

‘So, Grace,’ Given says, ‘what do you think of the work?’

‘She thinks it’s just wallpaper,’ Linden says.

‘Well, it is, isn’t it?’ Grace says.

‘It is, Grace,’ he says with a smile. ‘But imagine if walls could talk. What might they say about what they’ve observed?’ Turning to Linden, he asks if he can have a word in private.

‘Don’t fish for compliments in polluted waters,’
she says, as he leads Linden away, and through a door in the back wall. ‘I like that one.’

Just before eight o’clock, people begin to move inside for Luke’s performance, gathering around a white enamel bath in the centre of the room, half-filled with water.
From a winch in the ceiling hang two metal chains, ending about a foot above the water. A slow, deep pulse of electronic noise starts, and Luke appears from a door at the back of the gallery, wearing nothing but a black leather harness. Down each arm and each leg run a row of horizontal white feathers piercing the skin, with two on either side of his forehead. With measured steps he walks towards the bath, and as he gets closer Grace can make out the full scarlet red of his painted mouth. His eyes are intense, his face more serious than she has ever seen it. She avoids looking directly at his genitals for as long as curiosity and desire allow.

Stepping into the bath, he grabs the two chains and attaches them to the harness. The chains begin to winch him up slowly until he is suspended above the bath, his toes just clearing the surface of the water. He starts removing one of the feathers from his forehead, dropping it into the bathwater below. One by one he removes each feathered needle, and blood begins to run down his face, his chest, his arms, his legs, dripping into the bathwater, where it blossoms into scarlet plumes; and all the while the room is filled with a slow metallic music, like a sleeper’s heartbeat. As the feathers collect on the water’s crimson meniscus, all Grace can see is a five-year-old Hannah sitting there, razor in hand, with Jason by her side, covered in blood.

The sound of applause snaps Grace back to the present. Luke is now back on the ground, walking slowly towards the door from which he’d appeared, Icarus
partially visible between the straps of the harness. Time has passed, of which she has no memory; a cigarette burn in the fabric of her consciousness.

And her eyes are wet with tears.

Please, not here.

What is she doing here? What is she hoping to find?

Making her way outside, she reads a strip of wallpaper by the door:
MY BODY IS A CEMETERY PACKED WITH WEEPING GHOSTS.

She lights a cigarette, unable to rid herself of the image of Hannah with a razor in her hand; her defiant face. She considers whether she shouldn’t just go home; but the thought of being alone terrifies her. As she’s grinding out her cigarette butt, she sees Luke walking towards her, changed back into his clothes. She asks him where the toilet is and he says, ‘Come with me,’ leading her back into the gallery into a small office with a desk and a computer, shelves filled with books and ring binders. He points to a white door. ‘Through there,’ he says.

She returns to find him pulling open the desk drawers in search of something. He says, ‘I know there’s some booze in here somewhere – ah!’ And he holds up a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam and plants a kiss on it.

He picks up the leather harness from the sofa and places it on the desk, so she can sit down. He sits next to her, and she stares at the marks on his forehead where the feathers punctured the skin, wondering if it had hurt. He pours them both some bourbon and asks what
she thought of the performance. She still finds it hard to look at him, impossible to hold his gaze – though in truth that’s all she wants to do. She looks down at the carpet as she tells him what Hannah did to Jason.

‘I’ve no idea why she did it. I only left them for a minute to answer the phone. Luckily they were only minor cuts. He didn’t need stitches and there were no lasting scars. Thank God. So, I found the performance a bit harrowing.’

‘Does Jason remember it?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘How old was he?’

‘Just over a year, so young enough not to remember, I hope.’

‘My earliest memory is from around three years old. I can remember moving into a new house.’

‘I can remember being in a pram, which is very young, but only vaguely. I hope he doesn’t remember, but I’m scared to ask him. If he’s forgotten, I’d rather he didn’t know she did that.’

Luke says, ‘And what do you think of Given?’

‘All right if you like that kind of thing,’ she says.

‘I
do
like that kind of thing!’ He moves in closer. ‘Oh, fuck, Grace, I’m so in love!’ he says, letting out a hopeless laugh and beaming with joy. ‘Don’t you think he’s the most beautiful man you’ve ever laid eyes on?’

She feels a pang for something lost: the man she thought was a dream come true, once upon a time; her prince, her knight in shining bloody armour.

‘And he’s hung like a fucking canal barge,’ he says, and she looks at his mouth as he speaks, at those lips she used to love kissing.

‘But you mustn’t tell anyone,’ he says.

She suddenly feels protective towards him, wondering whether or not to tell him. A fleeting cruelty makes her want him to suffer, to see his heartbreak, his tears; reveal to him the truth about his wonderful God’s gift.

‘Why don’t you want anyone to know?’ she says.

‘It’s not me, it’s him,’ he says. ‘
I
wanna tell the whole fucking world, shout it from the fucking rooftops, but Mr Closet Case out there is worried about people knowing. God knows why! It’s not as if anyone would give a shit.’ He takes an angry glug of bourbon and looks at her. ‘Anyway, I’ve decided: tonight I’m gonna force his hand. If he won’t tell
Linden
, at least, I will.’