Ghost MacIndoe

‘I should go home,’ said Alexander.

Mr Beckwith looked at the sky. ‘No,’ he told him with a grave shake of his head. ‘It’ll get worse before it gets better. Come with me,’ he said, and he picked up the trowel and turned back down the side path.

Ignoring the door to the kitchen, Mr Beckwith led Alexander into the garden. It was as neat as a garden in a magazine, and there were more colours in it than in any garden Alexander had ever seen. The lawn was an oval, not a rectangle like at his own house and every other house he knew, and close to its centre was an oval bed, in which only white flowers grew. In one part of the garden was a bed of yellow flowers; in another part every bloom was a shade of purple; at the end of the garden stood a wooden shed, with a row of red flowers along its wall. Every plant and bush seemed perfect in its shape, as if a smoothing hand had moulded the body of the foliage in one long caress, and there was not so much as a single stray petal to mar the darkness of the soil beneath the leaves.

Mr Beckwith opened the shed door, and they stepped into air that was warmer than the air outside and smelled of creosote and grass and newly cut wood. Their tread made the floor bend and croak. A rack of seed packets hung on one wall, above a tower of yellow newspapers. In a corner stood a stack of clay pots, next to a tool box and below a saw and a pair of shears that hung from the same nail. By the window was a high bench that was cross-hatched with blade marks, with a vice bolted to one end.

‘Look at this,’ said Mr Beckwith. He put his left hand on the bench and opened his fingers to expose the ball of wet soil that he had been carrying. ‘Blackleg,’ he stated. ‘See?’ He turned his wrist, revealing the limp stem of a flower drooping from one side of the clod. He stuck the point of the trowel into the dark stringy pulp at its base. ‘There’s nothing you can do about this. Incurable, blackleg. You have to burn it and go back to square one.’ With a foot he dragged a bucket out from under the bench. ‘Look at that,’ said Mr Beckwith. Half a dozen flowers lay on a bed of sludge in the bottom of the bucket. ‘All of them ruined with it,’ Mr Beckwith said. His teeth were as long as a dog’s, Alexander noticed, and the skin of his cheeks seemed as thin as a leaf. Mr Beckwith looked at Alexander abruptly, as if he had asked him a question. ‘Do you know what this flower is?’ he asked. Alexander shook his head. ‘No? Not to worry. It’s a geranium. They’re all geraniums.’ Mr Beckwith lowered the clod and its diseased stem into the bucket, as if it were a small sleeping animal. ‘Got a garden, have you?’ he demanded suddenly.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Nice one, is it?’

‘Yes, sir. But not as nice as this.’

Gazing out of the window, Mr Beckwith lowered his head towards Alexander. ‘Say that again,’ he said. ‘Hearing a bit dicky.’

‘Not as nice as your garden, sir.’

‘Thank you,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘I didn’t eat enough for a long time, you see. That’s what did my ears. Do you eat properly?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Look like you do.’ A sound that was like the first part of a laugh made his chest shudder, yet he did not smile. ‘So you’ve got a garden?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Don’t need the sir, lad. I’m not your teacher.’ Mr Beckwith’s face wore a vague and thoughtful look, a look that made it seem as if he were being reminded that there was something he should be doing but could not for the moment recall what it was. ‘Megan’s a good girl,’ he declared.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Don’t need the sir, lad. Any good at woodwork?’ He lifted from the bench two blocks of pale wood that had been fixed together in a mortice and tenon joint.

‘Not really, Mr Beckwith,’ replied Alexander, wondering what use the wooden object might serve.

‘Neither am I,’ said Mr Beckwith seriously. ‘What about gardening?’

‘Not really. My dad does the garden. Mum sometimes helps. I do a bit, too. Not much, though.’

Mr Beckwith raised his chin and turned his eyes to a blank portion of the wooden wall, as if allowing Alexander’s words to trickle into his mind. Gradually he turned his head to look out of the window again. ‘Rain’s easing off,’ he observed. ‘Give it a minute or two. Sit yourself down.’ He waved a hand at the pile of newspapers, and he turned his attention to cleaning the trowel and the other tools he had been using. Streaks of dark skin appeared through Mr Beckwith’s shirt as he worked, and the sinews at the back of his neck stood out like the muscles of his forearm.

The stack swayed as Alexander sat on it, and when he spread his feet to steady himself his left foot slipped on a magazine. Alexander lifted his foot from a photograph that seemed to be of an old woman asleep on a mattress, with an old-fashioned night-cap on her head. He bent over the picture and realised that the person was not an old woman and was not asleep. What he had thought was a nightdress was in fact skin, which clung to the dead man’s bones like a collapsed tent of soft leather. Fleshless fingers, sickle-shaped, hung from the wrists. A shaft of bare bone ended in a strong plump foot. Alexander picked up the magazine to read the caption. ‘Who’s Tollund Man, Mr Beckwith?’ he asked.

Unwinding a length from a ball of twine, Mr Beckwith looked over his shoulder at Alexander. ‘I’m sorry, lad. What did you say?’

‘Who’s Tollund Man?’ Alexander repeated, holding the page outwards.

Mr Beckwith put his face close to the magazine. He pulled back a bit, then looked closely again. ‘Danish chap,’ he said at last. ‘Hundreds of years old. From the Iron Age. They found him in a bog. All the water in the peat kept him fresh. He was hanged. See?’ His finger touched the cord around Tollund Man’s throat.

Alexander gazed at the ancient man, curled on his platform of peat. The leathery face seemed to be wincing away from the photographer. It should be terrible, this image of a murdered man, and yet Alexander could not feel what he knew it was proper for him to feel. Waiting for an urgent emotion to seize him, he gazed at Tollund Man, at the body and the peat that seemed all of one piece, like a pouring of dark metal.

‘Fresh as a flower,’ commented Mr Beckwith. ‘Do you want it?’ To please Mr Beckwith, Alexander said that he did. With three swift passes of his rigid fingers, Mr Beckwith tore the picture cleanly out. ‘It’s stopped now,’ Mr Beckwith said, scratching a cheek that was as soft and dark as Tollund Man’s. ‘Shall we go?’

Together they walked a circuit of the garden, Mr Beckwith naming his plants as if introducing them, Alexander repeating the names and striving to embed them in his mind. Holding the picture of Tollund Man lightly in both hands, like a prayer book, he concentrated on the soft white flowerheads to which the word Viburnum belonged. The fragrant pink roses were called Penelope; the artificial-looking flowers that clung to the wall, like purple and white targets fringed with coronets of white petals, had two names, Passiflora and Passion Flower.

Clockwise Mr Beckwith and Alexander processed around the garden, then anti-clockwise they circled back. Mr Beckwith paused before a sheaf of pink flowers in a bed that was shaded by the neighbour’s house, and gestured as if offering them to Alexander.

‘Hydrangea?’ Alexander volunteered.

‘Exactly,’ said Mr Beckwith. He took a step into the sun. ‘And these?’ he asked, by some yellow button-like flowers. ‘No matter. It’s Lavender Cotton, or Santolina.’

Five minutes later the rain recommenced, and Alexander’s first conversation with Mr Beckwith was over. He would always remember how they parted. ‘Hurry home,’ said Mr Beckwith, and Alexander walked down the path at the side of the house, dodging the water that dripped from a crack in the guttering. He was by the back door when Mr Beckwith called his name.

‘Mr Beckwith?’ Alexander replied.

Standing in the slot of light between the two houses, Mr Beckwith held out a flat hand. ‘Whatever it was you were bringing back?’

Alexander placed the clip on Mr Beckwith’s muddy skin. Mr Beckwith looked at it, rocking his hand a fraction of an inch this way and that, as if playing with a drop of water, and his eyes became kindly. ‘Goodbye, Alexander,’ he said. He looked at Alexander and seemed to be contemplating whether he should tell him something. ‘Goodbye,’ he said again, and went back into his garden.

9. Praa

They were standing at the end of a gravel driveway that ran between high walls of fresh brick. ‘There’s a five-a-side pitch out the back,’ John Halloran said to Alexander, looking avariciously at the long clapboard hut that stood at the end of the driveway. ‘They play football after every session,’ he went on. ‘Sometimes they do a manhunt round the streets. You get a five-minute start and you have to make chalk marks on the walls as you go, and the rest of them come after you.’

‘It looks like an army camp,’ Alexander observed. The severed neck of a milk bottle, like a crown of jagged glass, lay on the kerbstone. This detail Alexander would always remember, and that John kicked it away to make him listen.

‘It’s not like the army at all. You’re not going to end up dead, for one thing, and you don’t have to sign up if you don’t want to. Come on, Al. Don’t be wet. If we don’t like it we won’t join.’

‘We don’t have to join right away?’

‘Definitely don’t. You can muck around for months before making your mind up. That’s what Pete did.’

‘You sure?’ asked Alexander, and he took a few steps up the drive, as if a nearer view of the building might dissipate his doubts. The hut occupied its quiet yard like a boat in a backwater dock. There was something appealing about its solitariness, and about the fleur-de-lys badge that gleamed on the door like an occult symbol.

‘It’ll be a giggle,’ John urged. ‘Give it a go, Al.’

So that evening they were collected from John Halloran’s house by Peter Nichols, who was standing stiffly on the path when they opened the door, his arms straight against his sides. ‘At ease,’ John shouted, but their classmate’s punctilious expression did not change.

Placing first one foot and then the other on the doorstep, Peter Nichols corrected the garters of his thick grey socks, and then he tapped the peak of his cap, to make the point that his uniform was the token of his seniority. ‘You’d better button your shirt up,’ he told John.

‘You’re kidding,’ John replied.

‘No,’ said Peter Nichols.

‘But it’s not school.’

‘It’s not school, but if you’re not smart you won’t go far,’ Peter Nichols told them. ‘Better get used to it now,’ he said, and he escorted them to the scout hut at a quick march, barely speaking to them.

When they entered the hut Peter Nichols crossed the floor to talk to a group of uniformed boys at the back of the room. Some of the boys Alexander recognised from school, but none of them took any notice of him or John. All were behaving like Peter Nichols, as if to make it clear that this place was governed by rules that superseded mere friendship. One boy even shook hands with Peter and folded his arms across his chest to listen to him, like a middle-aged man at a business meeting.

‘Grim,’ John commented. ‘This is very grim. Not what I expected, I’ll admit.’ His doleful gaze moved down the rows of pennants and flags that were pinned to the rafters. At the end of the hall, under a large photograph of the king, one of the senior scouts was energetically buffing his shoes with a duster. ‘We’ve come to a Nuremberg rally, mate,’ said John.

The scout master, Mr Gardiner, introduced himself to them. His shorts were as wide as a skirt and his whiskerless white skin was as delicate as Mrs Beckwith’s. ‘Peter told me about you,’ he said, looking at them as though they were items in an auction room. ‘So what has kindled your interest in scouting?’ he asked, with a whimsical lilt to his voice.

‘All the things that Peter has told us, sir,’ John replied. ‘Making ourselves better members of society, helping each other, that kind of thing.’

Mr Gardiner made a concurring squint. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s what it’s about. And you think it’s the kind of thing for you, do you?’

‘We think so, sir,’ said John.

‘Jolly good. Jolly good,’ said Mr Gardiner, and he checked the time on his wristwatch. ‘You two can join Peewit patrol for now. Peter will show you what to do.’

‘Peewit patrol, eh?’ John remarked to Peter Nichols once Mr Gardiner had left them.

‘Yes. That’s my patrol,’ Peter Nichols replied.

‘That’s nice.’

‘What’s nice?’

‘Peewit patrol.’

‘What do you mean, it’s nice?’

‘It’s a nice name.’

‘It’s not meant to be nice,’ said Peter Nichols primly.

‘No, but it’s nice anyway. Nice sound to it. Peter’s Peewit patrol.’ John scowled at the floorboards and then at Alexander. ‘But what’s a peewit when it’s at home?’

‘Search me,’ said Alexander.

‘Another name for the lapwing,’ Peter Nichols interrupted.

‘Lapwing?’

‘A type of bird, obviously. Now get in line. Stand like me,’ he told them, sliding his left foot away from his right and stiffening his shoulders.

Mr Gardiner positioned himself proudly in front of the king and locked his hands in the small of his back. A thin, tall boy with a very narrow head took his place beside Mr Gardiner; with a hand placed over his heart he recited an oath, accompanied by a mumbling from the two parallel ranks of scouts.

‘Jesus,’ John groaned.

‘It’s not going well,’ Alexander agreed, though he was intrigued and amused by the proceedings. The appearance of the skinny scout, like a small boy made big by stretching, seemed to Alexander wholly appropriate to this comical ritual.

‘Sorry, Al,’ John murmured.

‘Quiet!’ ordered Mr Gardiner, so ferociously that both John and Alexander blushed. The skinny scout was saluting the picture of the king with a rake-like hand.

‘When’s the football, Pete?’ John enquired as the two ranks broke up, but Peter Nichols, drawing back the bolt on a black tin chest, ignored him.

‘A few basics,’ said Peter Nichols. ‘What’s this?’ he asked, letting a bolt of cloth drop open from his outstretched hands.

‘The Union Jack,’ Alexander replied.

‘Wrong. It’s the Union Flag. The Union Jack is flown from a ship. On land it’s the Union Flag.’

‘What’s the difference?’ asked John.

‘I told you the difference. The Union Jack is flown from a ship. On land it’s the Union Flag.’

‘But it’s the same flag?’

‘Yes. But it’s wrong to call this the Union Jack, and there’s a right and a wrong way to fly it.’ Peter Nichols demonstrated the right way, and then they studied a chart of national flags and signalling flags, and then the skinny scout stood by the door to send semaphore messages to Mr Gardiner, who flapped his two small flags in reply, from in front of the king.

‘SOS!’ Mr Gardiner cried, and his rigid arms flew up and down in a sequence of electrocuted spasms. ‘Once again!’ cried Mr Gardiner, and the flags went up and down with a cracking sound.

‘Why do they need the flags when they can holler at each other?’ John asked Peter Nichols.

‘That wouldn’t do any good, would it?’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s obvious.’

‘Not to me.’

‘You couldn’t be heard in a storm, could you? It’s obvious,’ said Peter Nichols, with a contemptuous look. ‘Use your head.’

‘Ah,’ said John, relieved to have at last been given access to understanding. ‘This’ll be handy, I’m sure. One day. Lost in a storm on the Thames, miles from dry land.’

‘If you’re going to be flippant, Halloran,’ said Peter Nichols angrily, ‘there’s little point in your being here.’

‘Quite true, mein kapitan,’ John replied, but he and Alexander did return the following week and for several weeks after that. Under the tutelage of Peter Nichols they learned how to make a fire without matches, clean their teeth without a toothbrush, identify badger tracks and the tracks of foxes, otters, goats and sheep. They learned never to shelter under an oak tree in a thunderstorm, because the rainwater coursing through the grooved bark would conduct the lethal lightning bolt. They were required to memorise nonsense syllables that were said to represent the songs of birds they would never find in London. Doggedly Peter Nichols tied and untied knots of pointless complexity, until Alexander could form them unaided.

By then it required effort for John Halloran to dissemble his discontent. ‘Only deer we’re going to see are in the zoo,’ he grumbled, as Peter Nichols, his hand obscuring the captions, held up a page of hoofprints. ‘What about doing makes of cars instead?’ he suggested, when presented with the silhouettes of various wings. ‘Any chance of football, Pete?’ he would ask at some point in every evening, and ‘Not until you’ve got this right,’ became Peter Nichols’ customary reply. But only once did they go out to the yard for a game, and that was for no more than ten minutes, and then one evening Alexander called at John Halloran’s house and was told that he would have to go on his own.

‘Kicked out before I could walk out,’ John explained. ‘Himmler put in a call to the ma. It’ll be your turn next if you don’t put your name on the dotted line. Why don’t you tell them to stuff it?’

‘I think I will,’ said Alexander. ‘Soon.’

‘It’s so boring,’ said John. ‘Making a bivouac out of lettuce leaves and all that.’

Alexander did soon leave, but not because he was bored by the peculiar skills he was being taught. He was never bored, though he could rarely think of any use for what he was learning. He enjoyed making cross-sections from contoured maps of London, plotting the altitudes on a graph and bringing out the shape of the land beneath the houses and roads of his neighbourhood. There was pleasure in becoming able to shorten a length of rope with a sheepshank without looking at what his hands were doing, and to read the coming weather from the clouds. Had it not been for Mr Gardiner, he would have stayed longer. ‘You have an enthusiasm,’ said Mr Gardiner, but in a way that made enthusiasm sound like something Alexander did not want to have. The blue skin under his eyes, Alexander noticed, was like the skin that covered the bulging eyes of the dead fledgling he had found one evening below the gutter of the scouts’ hall. Mr Gardiner sat so close that his feet jammed against Alexander’s underneath the bench. ‘Johnny was a disruptive influence. You have the makings of a good scout,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep my eye on you,’ Mr Gardiner smiled, and an odour of sour milk escaped from his mouth. It was that evening, in the week that the last London tram broke down on its final journey to New Cross, that Alexander told his parents he did not want to go back.

‘Why on earth not?’ asked his father, folding the map that had been spread open on his lap.

‘It’s dull,’ said Alexander.

‘Dull,’ echoed his father dully.

‘Really dull.’

‘It’ll do you good if you stick at it.’

‘But it’s so boring.’

‘Any training’s boring sometimes.’

‘This isn’t training for anything, and it’s boring all the time.’

‘So it wasn’t boring when John Halloran was with you, but now it’s boring all the time?’

‘Yes.’

‘Sounds to me as if you weren’t there for the right reason in the first place.’

‘And we’ll have to get him the uniform soon, if he keeps going,’ said Alexander’s mother. ‘The uniform’s expensive, Graham.’

‘We’ve discovered that today, have we?’ his father rejoined.

‘No. Alexander has discovered that it’s not for him. That’s what we’ve discovered.’

‘There would seem to be little purpose in continuing this discussion,’ said his father, raising the map. He was still reading it, as if it were a device to preserve his annoyance, when Alexander came downstairs to say goodnight.

‘What’s the map for, Mum?’ Alexander asked.

‘A graphic representation of the land, for the purposes of comprehension and navigation,’ replied his father. His left hand let go of the map, stirred the spoon in his mug of cocoa, and took hold of the map again.

‘Graham,’ said his mother. She closed the fashion magazine in her lap and stared at the map, waiting for it to be lowered. ‘Graham,’ she said again, and his father made busy humming noises. His mother made a loudhailer from the magazine and directed it at Alexander. ‘He’s planning our holiday,’ she whispered loudly. ‘A proper holiday.’ ‘Possibly,’ responded his father.

‘Two whole weeks,’ said his mother, making delighted eyes.

‘Possibly. If the piggy bank has put on enough weight.’

‘In sunny Cornwall.’

‘Don’t count your chickens.’

‘Next month.’ ‘Possibly,’ his father repeated, but there was now a sardonic inflection to his gruffness.

‘Graham,’ said his mother. ‘Come on, Graham. Don’t be a grump.’

‘A grump?’ said his father, feigning bafflement. ‘A grump? Come,’ he called, and when Alexander came around to the side of his chair his father reached out to fold down the collars of his dressing gown and pyjamas, feigning displeasure at Alexander’s disarray. ‘X marks the spot,’ he said, scribbling with the mouthpiece of his pipe on a long stroke of yellow ink. ‘Praa,’ he read. ‘Possibly Praa.’

Alexander looked at the bite-shaped bays and the roads that ended short of the coast, like wires that had been cut. ‘Next month?’ he asked his father.

‘I should think so,’ his father said. ‘Let’s see.’

Every night until the day they left Alexander lay in bed at night, recalling the enormous dunes that Jimmy Murrell had seen, and the glowing sea, and repeating the strange bleat of a word, ‘Praa, Praa.’ He tacked the map to the back of his door, and drew a bull’s eye around the beach. He would always remember staring at the pencilled ring, as if into the entrance to a tunnel that led to a place that was unlike any he had seen before, and he would remember standing at the window of the train carriage and asking his father to name a distant town that came into view as the trees fell away from the railway line, and being pleased that his father could not name it, because this meant they had reached a region that was mysterious to all of them. He would remember the trees becoming stunted and the fields bigger, and his expectation that every vague, flat vista would come into focus as the sea, and his disappointment when one far-off field did indeed become the ocean, making its appearance as though by subterfuge. He would remember that the windows of the bus they boarded in Penzance were greasy with sea-spray, and that when his father asked for three tickets to Germoe, the conductor said something that his father could not understand, which made his mother hold Alexander so tightly he could feel her ribs vibrating with pent-up laughter. And he would remember the bus doors smacking open, and there were the houses of Germoe, all low and white, as if salt had caked every one of them.

In Mrs Pardoe’s dining room they ate mackerel that Mrs Pardoe’s son had caught, and then they walked down to the beach in the last minutes of dusk. They passed a castle and a lorry carrying steel churns as big as pillar boxes. Flowers of a sort that Alexander had never seen before overflowed from a barrel. The vinegary smell of the beach grew stronger, and the road began to go under a skim of sand that had cigarette butts and lollipop sticks in it. Taking one hand each, his parents swung him over a long bolster of sand and he sprinted away, down to the water. Though the dunes were smaller than he had imagined they would be, he was thrilled by what he saw. This was not a sea like the sea near London: here was the ocean, a wilderness of immeasurable dark water. Looking towards the black horizon, he imagined that the night was not falling but was rising from the sea. Low in the sky a single yellow star could be seen, above a boat that seemed to dissolve into the clouds as he watched. All he could hear was the ceaseless gasping of the surf, and when he breathed deeply the air from the sea made a column he could feel in his throat. In his exhilaration he gathered a handful of soft dry sand and threw it onto the breeze.