Ghosts (21 page)

On a straight stretch Billy put his foot down and we fairly flew along. I sat watching the countryside rise up and rush to meet us and I drank more gin and felt faintly sick. She is a troubled sleeper, my wife, yet I always envied what seemed to me the rich drama of her nights, those fretful, laborious struggles through the dark from one shore of light to another. She would drop into sleep abruptly, often in the middle of a sentence, and lie prone on the knotted sheet with her face turned sideways and her mouth open and her limbs twitching, like a long-distance swimmer launching out flounderingly into icy black waters. She used to talk in her sleep too, in dim grumbles and sudden, sharp questionings. Sometimes she would cry out, staring sightlessly into the dark. And I would lie awake on my back beside her, stiff as a drifting spar, numb with that obscure anguish that wells up in me always when I am left alone with myself. Now I wondered if there was someone else who lay by her side at night with a dry throat and swollen heart, listening to her as she slept her restless sleep: not the prancing centaur of my inventing, but some poor solitary mortal just like me, staring sightlessly into the dark, still leaking a little, doing his gradual dying. I think I would have preferred the centaur.

‘Stop here, Billy!’ I cried. ‘Stop here.’

I
AM ALWAYS FASCINATED
by the way the things that happen happen. I mean the ordinary things, the small occurrences that keep adding themselves on to all that went before in the running total of what I call my life. I do not think of events as discrete and discontinuous; mostly there is just what seems a sort of aimless floating. I am not afloat at all, of course, it only feels like that: really I am in free fall. And I come to earth repeatedly with a bump, though I am surprised every time, sitting in a daze on the hard ground of inevitability, like Tom the cat, leaning on my knuckles with my legs flung wide and stars circling my poor sore head. When Billy stopped the van we sat and listened for a while to the engine ticking and the water gurgling in the radiator, and I was like my wife in that hotel room that I had conjured up for her imaginary tryst, looking about her in subdued astonishment at the fact of being where she was. I had not intended that we should come this way, I had left it to Billy to choose whatever road he wished; yet here we were. Was it another sign, I asked myself, in this momentous day of signs? Billy looked out calmly at the stretch of country road before us and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

‘Where’s this?’ he said.

‘Home.’ I laughed. The word boomed like a foghorn.

‘Nice,’ Billy said. ‘The trees and all.’ I marvelled anew at his lack of curiosity. Nothing, it seems, can surprise him. Or am I wrong, as I usually am about people and their ways? For all I know he may be in a ceaseless fever of amazement before the spectacle of this wholly improbable world. He twitches a lot, and sometimes he used to wake up screaming in his bunk at night; but then, we all woke up screaming in the night, sooner or later, so that proves nothing. All the same, I am probably underestimating him; underestimating people is one of my less serious besetting sins. ‘Your family still here?’ he said. ‘Your mam and dad?’

He frowned. I could see him trying to imagine them, big, bossy folk with loud voices clattering down this road astride their horses, as outlandish to him as medieval knights in armour.

‘No,’ I said. ‘All dead, thank God. My wife lives here now.’

I opened the door of the van and swung my legs out and sat for a moment with my head bowed and shoulders sagging and the gin bottle dangling between my knees. When I lifted my eyes I could see the roof of the house beyond the ragged tops of the hedge. I found myself toying with the notion that this was all there was, just a roof put up there to fool me, like something out of the
Arabian Nights
, and that if I stood up quickly enough I would glimpse under the eaves a telltale strip of silky sky and a shining scimitar of moon floating on its back.

‘Did I ever tell you, Billy,’ I said, still gazing up wearily at those familiar chimney-pots, ‘about the many worlds theory?’

Of the few scraps of science I can still recall (talk about another life!), the many worlds theory is my favourite. The universe, it says, is everywhere and at every instant splitting into a myriad versions of itself. On Pluto, say, a particle of putty collides with a lump of lead and another, smaller
particle is created in the process and goes shooting off in all directions. Every single one of those possible directions, says the many worlds theory, will produce its own universe, containing its own stars, its own solar system, its own Pluto, its own you and its own me: identical, that is, to all the other myriad universes except for this unique event, this particular particle whizzing down this particular path. In this manifold version of reality chance is an iron law. Chance. Think of it. Oh, it’s only numbers, I know, only a cunning wheeze got up to accommodate the infinities and make the equations come out, yet when I contemplate it something stirs in me, some indistinct, fallen thing that I had thought was dead lifts itself up on one smashed wing and gives a pathetic, hopeful cheep. For is it not possible that somewhere in this crystalline multiplicity of worlds, in this infinite, mirrored regression, there is a place where the dead have not died, and I am innocent?

‘What do you think of that, Billy?’ I said. ‘That’s the many worlds theory. Isn’t that something, now?’

‘Weird,’ he answered, shaking his head slowly from side to side, humouring me.

Spring is strange. This day looked more like early winter, all metallic glitters and smooth, silver sky. The air was cool and bright and smelled of wet clay. An odd, unsteady sort of cheerfulness was gradually taking hold of me – the gin, I suppose.

‘What’s the first thing you noticed when you got out, Billy?’ I said.

He hardly had to think at all.

‘The quiet,’ he said. ‘People not shouting all the time.’

The quiet, yes. And the breadth of things, the far vistas on every side and the sense of farther and still farther spaces beyond. It made me giddy to think of it.

I got myself up at last, feet squelching in the boggy verge, and walked a little way along the road. I had nothing
particular in mind. I had no intention as yet of going near the house – the gate was in the other direction – for in my heart I knew my wife was right, that I should stay away. All the same, now that I was here, by accident, I could not resist looking over the old place one more time, trying my feet in the old footprints, as it were, to see if they still fitted. Yet I could not feel the way one is supposed to feel amid the suddenly rediscovered surroundings of one’s past, all swoony and tearful, in a transport of ecstatic remembrance, clasping it all to one’s breast with a stifled cry and a sudden, sweet ache in the heart, that kind of thing. No; what I felt was a sort of glazed numbness, as if I were suspended in some thin, transparent stuff, like one of those eggs my mother used to preserve in waterglass when I was a child. This is what happens to you in prison, you lose your past, it is confiscated from you, along with your bootlaces and your belt, when you enter through that strait gate. It was all still here, of course, the ancient, enduring world, suave and detailed, standing years-deep in its own silence, only beyond my touching, as if shut away behind glass. There were even certain trees I seemed to recognise; I would not have been surprised if they had come alive and spoken to me, lifting their drooping limbs and sighing, as in a children’s storybook. At that moment, as though indeed this were the enchanted forest, there materialised before me on the road, like a wood-sprite, a little old brown man in big hobnailed boots and a cap, carrying, of all things, a sickle. He had long arms and a bent back and bandy legs, and progressed with a rolling gait, as if he were bowling himself along like a hoop. As we approached each other he watched me keenly, with a crafty, sidewise, leering look. When we had drawn level he touched a finger to his cap and croaked an incomprehensible greeting, peering up at me out of clouded, half-blind eyes. I stopped. He took in my white suit with a mixture of
misgiving and scornful amusement; he probably thought I was someone of consequence.

‘Grand day,’ I said, in a loud voice hollow with false heartiness.

‘But hardy, though,’ he answered smartly and looked pleased with himself, as if he had caught me out in some small, deceitful strategem.

‘Yes,’ I said, abashed, ‘hardy indeed.’

He stood bowed before me, bobbing gently from the waist as if his spine were fitted with some sort of spring attachment at its base. The sickle dangled at the end of his long arm like a prosthesis. We were silent briefly. I considered the sky while he studied the roadway at my feet. I was never one for exchanging banter with the peasantry, yet I was loth to pass on, I do not know why. Perhaps I took him for another of this day’s mysterious messengers.

‘And are you from these parts yourself, sir?’ he said, in that wheedling tone they reserve for tourists and well-heeled strangers in general.

For answer I made a broad, evasive gesture.

‘Do you know that house?’ I asked, pointing over the hedge.

He passed a hard brown hand over his jaw, making a sandpapery noise, and gave me a quick, sly look. His eyes were like shards from some large, broken, antique thing, a funerary jar, perhaps.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I know it well.’

Then he launched into a long rigmarole about my family and its history. I listened in awed astonishment as if to a tale of the old gods. It was all invention, of course; even the few facts he had were upside-down or twisted out of shape. ‘I knew the young master, too,’ he said. (
The young master
?) ‘I seen him one day kill a rabbit. Broke its neck: like that. A pet thing, it was. Took it up in his hands and – ’ he made a crunching noise out of the side of his mouth ‘ – kilt it. He
was only a lad at the time, mind, a curly-headed little fellow you wouldn’t think would say boo to a goose. Oh, a nice knave. I wasn’t a bit surprised when I heard about what he done.’

What was this nonsense? I had never wrung the neck of any rabbit. I was the most innocuous of children, a poor, shivering mite afraid of its own shadow. Why had he invented this grotesque version of me? I felt confusion and a sort of angry shame, as if I had been jostled aside in the street by some ludicrously implausible imposter claiming to be me. The old man was squinting up at me with a slack-mouthed grin, a solitary, long yellow tooth dangling from his upper gums. ‘I suppose you’re looking for him too, are you?’ he said.

A cold hand clutched my heart.

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Who else was looking for him?’

His grin turned slyly knowing. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘there’s always fellows like that going around, after people.’

He winked and touched a finger to his cap again, with the smug, self-satisfied air of a man who has properly settled someone’s hash, and bowled himself off on his way. I looked after him but saw myself, a big, ragged, ravaged person, flabby as a porpoise, standing there in distress on the windy road, dangling from an invisible gibbet in my incongruous white suit, arms limp, with my mouth open and my bell-bottoms flapping and the neck of the gin bottle sticking out of my pocket. I do not know why I was so upset. There came over me then that sense of dislocation I experience with increasing frequency these days, and which frightens me. It is as if mind and body had pulled loose from each other, or as if the absolute, essential
I
had shrunk to the size of a dot, leaving the rest of me hanging in enormous suspension, massive and yet weightless, like a sawn tree before it topples. I wonder if it is incipient epilepsy, or some other insinuating cerebral malady? But I do not think the effect is physical.
Perhaps this is how I shall go mad in the end, perhaps I shall just fly apart like this finally and be lost to myself forever. The attack, if that is not too strong a word for it, the attack passed, as it always does, with a dropping sensation, a sort of general lurch, as if I had been struck a great, soft, padded punch and somehow had fallen out of myself even as I stood there, clenched in fright. I looked about warily, blinking; I might have just landed from somewhere entirely different. Everything was in its place, the roof beyond the hedge and the old man hobbling away and the back of Billy’s seal-dark head motionless in the van, as though nothing had happened, as though that fissure had not opened up in the deceptively smooth surface of things. But I know that look of innocence the world puts on; I know it for what it is.

I found a gap in the hedge and pulled myself through it, my shoes sinking to the brim in startlingly cold mud. Twigs slapped my face and thorns clutched at my coat. I had forgotten what the countryside is like, the blank-faced, stolid malevolence of bush and briar. When I got to the other side I was panting. I had the feeling, as so often, that all this had happened before. The house was there in front of me now, quite solid and substantial after all and firmly tethered to its roof. Yet it seemed changed, seemed smaller and nearer to the road than it should be, and for a panicky moment I wondered if my memory had deceived me and this was not my house at all. (
My
house? Ah.) Mother’s rose bushes were still flourishing under the big window at the gable end. They were in bud already. Poor ma, dead and gone and her roses still there, clinging on in their slow, tenacious, secret way. I started across the lawn, the soaked turf giving spongily under my tread. The past was gathering ever more thickly around me, I waded through it numbly like a greased swimmer, waiting to feel the chill and the treacherous undertow. I veered away from the front door – I do not naturally go in at front doors any more – and skirted round
by the rose bushes, squinting up at the windows for a sign of life. How frowningly do empty windows look out at the world, full of blank sky and oddly arranged greenery. At the back of the house I skulked about for a while in the clayey dampness of the vegetable garden, feeling like poor Magwitch on the run. A few big stalks of last year’s cabbages, knobbed like backbones, leaned this way and that, and there were hens that high-stepped worriedly away from me in slow motion, or stood canted over on one leg with their heads inclined, shaking their wattles and uttering mournful croaks of alarm. (What strange, baroque creatures they are, hens; there is something Persian about them, I always feel.) I was not thinking of anything. I was just feeling around blindly, like a doctor feeling for the place that pains. I would have welcomed pain. Dreamily I advanced, admiring the sea-green moss on the door of the disused privy, the lilac tumbling over its rusted tin roof. A breeze swooped down and a thrush whistled its brief, thick song. I paused, lightheaded and blinking. At last the luminous air, the bird’s song, that particular shade of green, all combined to succeed in transporting me back for a moment to the far, lost past, to some rain-washed, silver-grey morning like this one, forgotten but still somehow felt, and I stood for a moment in inexplicable rapture, my face lifted to the light, and felt a sort of breathlessness, an inward staggering, as if an enormous, airy weight had been dropped into my arms. But it did not last; that tender burden I had been given to hold, whatever it was, evaporated at once, and the rapture faded and I was numb again, as before.