The Ghost (14 page)

June, 1975

In the flat – Tom's flat – round the back of the
King's Head
, Cook sat cross-legged on the crusty PVC armchair, eating cereal,
Incredible Hulk
comic balanced across one knee. It was unnaturally early, but Tom was also up, standing topless over a tiny sink in the corner, daubing his chin and cheeks with shaving-foam. Cook finished a page and looked up. Tom's form startled him – bulge of midriff blubber hitched up by tracksuit-trouser drawstring, bare feet dusted with talcum powder in a vain attempt to obscure their persistent, sour, working-man musk. Lily had told Cook that Tom was a machine-worker at the pottery factory (‘pot bank') where she also worked. He was tall, but top-heavy and distended, propped on stubby, shambling legs – a species apart from the spindly male teachers at Bethesda School. It was an hour before Lily's usual clock-in time, but today they had planned to all go in together, taking Cook along for ‘a treat'. There was talk of driving a fork-lift, of hot meat pies and rejected plates ripe for smashing. Tom took a silver-handled razor to his cheeks. Cook winced at the shearing and scraping and tuned back in to his comic.

Then, Lily's footsteps on the stairs, a groggy good morning and soon, tea and toast at the rickety table. Tom buttered a slice and dunked it into his mug. He slurped and nibbled at the soggy corner, grinning at Cook, drawing indulgent scowls from Lily, who lit a cigarette in riposte.

If this
was
his dad, then why did it all feel so new and strange and strained?

*

The women – including Lily – were arranged along columns of adjoining tables – side by side, elbow to elbow. Each had a rigid chair, an adjustable overhead lamp and a newspaper-lined workstation of stacked ceramics and paintbrush pots. There were many hands – dipping, dabbing, scrubbing, scoring – but it was far from light work. At the core of the factory, the kiln oven was loaded with clay-moulds and fired daily, forging hard-baked batches of household crockery to be cooled and scoured and inspected and wheeled in to the women, who would call on unskilled runners to refresh their table-stacks. This was the palatable top layer of hard labour – decorative, delicate, exclusively female. Behind the veil, beyond heavy double-doors and inch-thick strips of shredded plastic sheeting, the men toiled. Young men – placers – were sent in to the barely cooled ovens to retrieve the ware, emerging with bleeding noses and baking eyeballs. (Blurred vision was the daily standard, with premature blindness common before forty.) Not-so-young men – Tom included – operated the transfer machines, locking bowls and plates into treacherous grip-clips and imprinting them with template designs. Older men prepared the ingredients – confecting the liquid clay, stirring and pouring, flooding the moulds, smearing off the excess. The women received the men's dirty work and made it clean, their skill passed down from mother to daughter. They dipped and glazed and smoothed and glossed, dabbing cobalt-blue edging onto rotating plates, adorning bowls with freehand flora.

The factory, and hundreds more like it, had been built by the Victorians, with no regard for aesthetic or environmental health. Its titanic, bottle-shaped stone ovens loomed over ranks of modular terraces, shrouding the streets in smoke – emphysema and circulatory collapse a devil's dowry for the guaranteed livelihood of mass-market ceramics.

After a squeeze goodbye from Lily at her work-table, Cook was shepherded by Tom out of the decorating room through corridors of palettes stacked ceiling-high with glinting china, and into the thud and thunder of the machine shop, where the men hocked and hissed, clattered and muttered.

“There y'go, Dor – The Beast!”

Tom slid away a grubby sheet of canvas and unveiled his printing machine – an intestinal snarl of rods and clamps and pistons, vaguely concealed behind a front-plate control panel. He turned the key and jabbed a button, stirring the contraption into a waking tremor. Tom shrugged off his jacket and shouted over to a group of men browsing tabloids in a small break area.

“Daz!”

Darren Ray – taller and broader, but oddly diminished by an ill-fitting set of dark blue overalls – strolled over.

“This is my lad, Dorian.”

Darren squeezed out a synthetic smile. “I know ‘im. My brother's in his class at school. Butcher. I had him when I was there. Nasty fucker.”

Cook expected a rebuke for the language, but Tom was busy rummaging through a set of tools. “Show him round for me, son. Stay inside, though. Not out to the yards!”

Darren's shoulders dropped slightly, but he kept his composure. Tom was a floor-worker with no formal management clout, but his alpha status was palpable.

“Alright. C'mon, Dorian.”

Darren Ray led Cook out of the machine room, down a thin corridor lined with unglazed jugs and teapots, through a pair of heavy double-doors and out into a small courtyard which faced the central bottle oven. They followed the rim of the yard, sticking close to the main building, until they came to a tall brick partition where their only observers would be the workers emerging infrequently from a storage room below the oven. Darren leaned back against a chalky wall, beneath a ‘No Smoking' sign, and lit a cigarette.

“You're not thinking of coming here after you finish school, are you?”

Cook had never considered the existence of anything after school, but, feeling the exposure of being alone with Darren, he played it cool. “Nah, don't think so.”

Darren combined an exhale of smoke with a dismissive snigger. “What else y'going to do?”

“Dunno. I like telly. And films.”

“No telly and film jobs down the dole office.”

“I read books, as well.”

Darren laughed. “Only place you'll be reading books is on the shitter between your shifts – probably labouring for your dad.”

Cook dragged a stone across the wall, scouring through a layer of smoky slime. As the factory glazed its product, so the process glazed the factory.

“Remember the day with the dogs?” said Darren, with a half-smile, as if wistfully recalling a moment of great joy.

“Yeah. That wasn't very nice.”

Darren looked down at Cook, his smile broadening. “Some things aren't nice, Dorian. But they have to be done. Fuckers over there, placing the ware in that boiling-hot kiln room. That's definitely not nice, but they get it done.”

They gazed across the courtyard. A tall placer in white apron and elbow-length asbestos gloves was leaning into an overloaded trolley of unfired plates, wrestling it closer to the entrance.

“Your dad isn't nice,” said Cook, cautiously.

Darren drew on his cigarette, tilted back his head and, with venom, spat out a geyser of vertical smoke. “No. He's a cunt. Drinks too much. He knocks my mum about, as well.”

Surprised – and relieved – at the complicity, Cook pushed a little harder.

“I'm never going to drink.”

Darren chuckled at this, but then darkened and turned to look down at Cook directly. “Johnny's alright. I think he likes you. No-one fucking likes him, though!”

“I helped him with some bullies.”

Darren nodded. “I know. Plenty more where they came from.”

Later, Cook joined Tom, Darren and the other machine workers for pies, Tizer and off-colour banter about ‘wenches'. An obese, neckless foreman called Phil led Cook out to the seconds room, where he was allowed to hurl misshapen plates at the wall like frisbees. Tom joined them with cricket bat and safety goggles, and Cook swung at crockery ‘bowled' by Phil, pulverising jugs in mid-air and edging the heftier dishes, sending them tailspinning, intact, to shatter across the floor. As they rested, Tom and Phil drank tea from their flasks and Cook ate lemon-curd sandwiches prepared by Esther.

“Can I have a go on the trucks?”

Phil and Tom glanced at each other. Phil, who Tom had cheerfully called his ‘boss-man', clarified. “Not until you're a bit older, mate. Fork-lifts aren't like Tonkas. They're hard to drive.”

“Can I see the kiln room, then?”

“There was an accident, Dorian,” said Tom. “A few weeks ago. We're not allowed.”

Cook separated the slices of his sandwich and peeked in at the thickly spread butter and syrupy curd.

“What happened?”

“They fired up when one of the younger placers was still in there,” said Phil. “He must have been stuck or fainted or something.”

“Might have been hit by a brick,” said Tom, staring into his tea. They're falling apart, them things.”

Phil shook his head. “It's happened before, son.”

Cook thought of the man waking up to his own cremation. He hoped the heat had killed him before he knew anything or felt any pain.

Darren Ray and a couple of other younger workers from the machine shop wandered in. Darren, annoyed at the lack of fresh seconds to smash, had overheard the conversation and offered a petulant aside.

“He'd been in there for a while, they're saying.”

“Daz…”

“Yeah. It was a morning firing – after the Bank Holiday. Fuck me! Imagine that – stuck in there for days, total darkness, nothing to eat. Then you get baked alive.”

*

At the weekend, Cook was picked up at Esther's by his great aunt and uncle, and driven to a local National Trust park in a dark brown Triumph Toledo. In the back seat, he was allowed to have the window open a little while his great grandparents chainsmoked and chattered about the grouse and the heather. As usual, halfway through the journey, he was given tablets for car-sickness, washed down with bottled orange-juice.

To Cook, the ‘park' was suspiciously similar to a ragged sweep of fields and trees – no swings or seesaw or roundabout or Witch's Hat. Once the Toledo had been fussily wedged into a muddy verge, Cook was first to escape, stumbling free of his carcinogenic car-arrest to guzzle on the zesty air.

They swished through grass as tall as Cook himself, tottered down into a wooded valley and joined a path by a trout stream which tinkled out of sight. Cook hopped in and out of cow hoof-prints and secretly picked red berries, pocketing them to present to Esther later. An endless hour or so into the walk, Cook's uncle triumphantly raised his hiking stick.

“Look there, Dorian! That's Odin's Cave!”

At the peak of the tallest crag, a symmetrical archway framed the entrance to a natural cavern, large enough to be seen from the valley floor. A log-lined staircase had been etched into the path leading up to the cave, and Cook, craving any kind of thrill, bolted for it.

“There used to be a railway line here, you know – when I was your age.”

But Cook was already out of range of his uncle's words and quickly climbing.

“Don't rush off too far ahead, Dorian!”

He scampered up the narrow steps, shoving past elderly ramblers. At the top, the cave entrance – thirty-feet high – swallowed him, and he scaled the angled, rain-glossy rock-base on all fours. He rested by a crack in the seam – a slitted window on the surrounding peaks and farms – before pushing deeper through the darkness and settling into a dank but warm chamber unsoiled by leaking light.

“Dorian?”

His uncle's voice was a whisper from another world. In here, he was sealed and concealed, safe and unreachable – untouchable, unhurtable, invisible. He could remove himself from existence, opt out of the present, freeze the future, deny the past. He tuned in to the surrounding sounds – rattling rainwater, squealing dogs, snarling engines. It was both a thrill and a chill to discover that the world continued to turn without him at its centre.

“Dorian! Come on, son! You can't hide forever.”

“MUMMIES,” DECLARED ALFIE, “HAVE
got bandages instead of skin and vampires can't come out when it's sunny!”

Gina, whisking something. “They should get some mummy bandages, then!”

Alfie, after a few seconds' thought and a nibble at the edge of his cheese toastie. “They can't, because they are in different worlds!”

Cook clunked a teaspoon into the peak of his boiled egg, marvelling at the complexity of the fracture. Outside, June simmered, in contrast to the domestic frost. Earlier, in bed, at one of their increasingly regular morning summits, Gina had again insisted that they needed ‘a break'. Cook, keen to emphasise the temporary aspect, rebranded it a ‘trial separation'.

“It's not a trial,” snapped Gina. “We're talking about a real separation.”

“Yes,” sighed Cook, always too eager to tinker with semantics. “For a trial
period
. It's not to see if we want to stay separated, it's to get a sense of how it feels to be separated, to get things into perspective.”

Gina nodded, muting her scepticism with a sip of tea. Cook held the moment. He flipped onto his front, head in pillow, then onto his back, covering his face with the duvet – always the comfort and calm of the indifferent dark.

“Do you still love me, Gina?”

Quickly. “Of course, I do. I always will. I just can't
live
with you. Not at the moment.”

To her surprise, he absorbed this with relative grace. “I'm hoping I can live with myself.”

She spluttered on the tea. “Where's that from?”

“Hmm?”

“It sounds like a line from a film.”

They laughed – a tactical solidarity.

“I dunno. Just my head.”

Tension unblocked, the plan emerged quickly, lubricated by fifteen years of finely evolved inter-dependency. As with all long-standing couples, they carried an instinct for each other's phoney-tough defences – the tics and tactics, sulks and blusters. At the best of times, this bond was empowering – a hardy symbiosis. But it could also be used as ammunition. Before he met Gina, Cook had fluttered from partner to partner, always alighting at the point where familiarity threatened to mutate into contempt. He suspected that most relationships, if left to endure, simply drifted into a state of mutually assured destruction, where the focus switched from desire and support to the careful cultivation of a status quo, with each partner equally convinced they had the most to lose from a break-up. Now, here, this was confirmed – the shift of imbalance was complete, and Cook could no longer convince his wife of the benefits of his company.

For the sake of Alfie's stability, Cook would move out and live, relatively close, at the recently vacated flat of a university friend who was on an overseas work placement. Cook's usual improvised approach to planning always seemed to improve when his own well-being was at risk. As the marriage had deflated over the last year, he had secured his friend's flat as a housesitting gig, with a vague intention of using it as a bolt-hole (“Shag-shed!” – Will Stone). Now, it was to be his pre-furnished point of exile – for six months. He would be welcome at home, but was expected to give Gina notice of visits, in order to ‘manage Alfie's expectations'. Cook had declined the offer of Alfie staying with him at weekends, claiming that he didn't want to confuse things. Secretly, he objected to what was clearly the core of this idea – a rehearsal for permanence.

Alfie finished his toastie, dragged his finger through a swirl of ketchup at the side of the plate and sucked away the sauce.

“Can I take my scooter to school?”

Gina looked over to Cook. He silently signed off the request with a grin.

“Okay, darling. Go and get it from the shed – and brush your teeth!”

As his son scampered past, Cook grabbed him for a squeeze. But Alfie stiffened and strained and wrestled away, dashing out to the garden without looking back.

“He's just a bit excited,” said Gina. “I wouldn't get anything, either.”

On cue, Cook approached her with arms wide. She abandoned the whisk and edged into an uneasy embrace, nuzzling in close and speaking into his shoulder – as ever, displacing emotional discomfort with practicality.

“Alfie's got a sleepover tonight. Maybe you shouldn't go until the weekend. I have to work. It means you won't have to pick him up, drop him off and then leave.”

Cook was startled at her acceleration of thought, how she already seemed comfortable with the new emphasis on logistics over emotion. He gave her a parting squeeze and looked down into her eyes, ornate with sadness. She turned her head to the side, avoiding his gaze, but he mirrored the movement and lightly cupped her chin with both hands, tilting it up to make eye contact unavoidable.

“It's not forever. Don't worry.”

Cook's phone bleeped, puncturing the moment.

Gina offered a broad, forced smile and shook her head – to confirm or deny? She ducked away from the deathly cuddle and followed Alfie outside.

Cook took out his phone and navigated to the
PastLives.com
inbox. There was one message, with no subject header. He tapped it.