The Ghost

by The Ghost (epub)

  Cook sharpened his ears to the wheezing, which was now rolling in and out every few minutes, undepleted – a tidal eternity. Mr Smith was little more than a carbon chrysalis – shrivelled housing for a torment which strained to burst free and surge away. For a young boy, adults were powerful, inscrutable, fully formed. Cook could not project backwards to imagine the creature over the wall as the closing act of a life that had once been all sex and swagger, propelled by the unswerving rhino-charge of youth. But he could still feel the bottomless isolation, hear the sorrow raging through the babble and splutter. Something pitiless inside Cook made him want to silence all of this – to shut it away somewhere airless and sound-proof.

  “Hiya!”

  Downstairs, Esther was back, and there was a deeper voice, too. Cook’s delirium was now disassociative. He travelled through a ten-minute chunk of time in an instant, and then suddenly here was Dr Sherratt and his icy stethoscope and squashy hands and dazzling baldness and cat-food breath. Sherratt took out a miniature torch, leaned in close and studied Cook’s eyeballs.

  Watch! He hates this!

  Mr Smith erupted again, and Cook saw Sherratt’s focus drift a little, assessing the cough with a flicker of pity.

  “Calomine lotion will ease the discomfort,” he told Esther, closing his bag. “It tends to peak pretty quickly and then ease off over a week or so. Keep him away from school and don’t let anyone who hasn’t already had it into the house – certainly not into this room.”

  Soon, there was no Sherratt and no Esther, and Cook lay uncovered by sheets, basted in gloop, disfigured by a sprinkling of spots and blemishes. He had been dosed with (in Sherratt’s words) a ‘suspension’, and now the room squirmed like a snakepit – a freakshow of fluttering shadows and splintered echoes. The nausea reared up, splashing around the base of his throat. He lay unnaturally still, fearing the slightest movement might provoke his stomach – or bowels – into spasm.

  And then he was in the sitting room, blanket over head and shoulders, quivering before the black-and-white TV. Next door, as the retching fits tore through his neighbour’s lungs, Cook’s sheen of fever-fuzz absorbed and amplified the barrage. He turned up the TV volume and stared at the For Schools & Colleges intro graphic – a circle of pearl-like pellets surrounding the words ‘History Around You’. Syrupy muzak soundtracked a clockwise circuit as the pellets crudely self-deleted, one by one. Cook stared and slow-blinked, synchronising his eye closure with the mid-wipe point of the erasure process, as if the act of not acknowledging the pellets was the force compelling them to disappear. He fantasised about doing the same with the spots and dots that had annexed his own skin, willing them out of existence.

  The air was like broth. He could taste the salt in the sweat on his lips. His dog was there and his grandmother was there and, at one point, he even thought his mother was there – blonde and bright and white, sparkling through the browns and beiges of Esther’s textured wallpaper. And then it wasn’t his mother, it was John Ray – the shining hair, the phantom skin.

  Suddenly, it was late afternoon – dusk – and he was eating warmed-up Ambrosia creamed-rice pudding and watching Dr Who. A shingle beach glazed in low sunlight, a gang of humanoid monsters rising through the riptide and shambling ashore – reptilian features frozen in grimace, mutated bodies draped in slimy netting. Each carried some kind of beam-gun that could deliver one-zap instant death. Cook was instantly, unspeakably petrified – of their bulk, their inhumanity, their deformity, and of their reaper-like dominion over death. He imagined them (the ‘Sea Devils’) entering the house at night, executing his pet, then his grandmother, then hunting for him – climbing the stairs, finding him in his bedroom, maybe even in his bed.

  Cook shovelled in a mouthful of pudding and glanced over at the door that separated the sitting room from the parlour. He jumped – a jolt of shock – at the sight of a human head, with carrot-orange hair, peering around the edge of the frame at ankle level. The head slid slowly upwards until Cook’s mother’s brother, Russell, revealed himself by stepping to the side and bounding into the room.

  “What are you watching?”

  “Dr Who.”

  Russell laughed, too loud. “Dorian, you crackpot!”

  This was his standard irritating term of address, overused fluidly as insult or endearment. He dropped to his knees and shuffled in close to Cook.

  “Chickenpox!”

  Under his blanket, Cook glanced up, nodded.

  “Don’t worry, Dor!” said Russell, settling down on the floor cross-legged, zoning in to a beach-head firefight between Sea Devils and soldiers. “You’ll live.”

  5. Motion Capture

  COOK SECURED THE MORNING off work with a cryptic text message and padded down to breakfast, bathrobed and bed-haired. Alfie had prepared him a slice of white-bread toast topped with a few smears of strawberry jam. He gnawed his way through, chasing each sickly swallow with a guzzle of instant coffee. There should have been a truant-like pleasure to be taken from unjustified time off work, but Cook felt unease at anything open-ended. He quickly slumped from the joy of unhurried freedom to anxiety at the quantum sprawl of paths and possibilities. It was no comfort to imagine colleagues frantically covering for his absence – he was barely missed.

  “Frankensteins,” announced Alfie, “are made of dead body parts.”

  Cook smiled. “But how do they get that way?”

  Alfie searched his bowl of Coco Shreddies for an answer. “They get struck by lightning and come to life!”

  Cook shifted from cheek to cheek, finding comfort on neither. In half an hour, he would be perched and tilted on a gurney at his GP’s office, trousers down low, knees up high. The insistent pinching and pulsing around his anus was, he reasoned, the initial stirring of a rapacious rectal tumour – a slow-burning cellular eruption that would steadily detonate from the arsehole in, consuming and subsuming him. He had recently developed an obsession with disease after seeing the film Biutiful, in which the lead character irredeemably succumbs to prostate cancer. Gina had indulged him, insisting that health awareness was healthy, and it was the men who avoided doctors, usually out of misplaced bravado, who ended up dying from conditions that had progressed beyond the treatable stage. But Cook knew his anxiety was less and less about decay, and more and more about the universal dread that rose, with advancing age, of no longer being here, there or anywhere. Death was forever inbound. It could be delayed and diverted, but it would arrive, and there was nothing on Earth – nothing electrical in the sky – that could send it away.

  *

  The doctor’s office had recently installed a touch-screen arrival system, with appointments confirmed by sex and date of birth. Cook dabbed in his details, wondering if this was the wisest method of processing patients – a shared surface for them to soil with contagious DNA. The waiting room was fully stocked with the sitting wounded. Cook slumped into the only spare seat, beside a modest children’s play table, and braced for the familiar limbo of irritation and alarm – later arrivals being called first, random gap between appointment time and consultation, the infernal bickering between inner defeatist and pragmatist. He shifted a buttock to one side, shuffling the painful patch away from the wooden seat base, which creaked loudly. This provoked a beat of collective curiosity – a break in the chorus of coughing and sneezing and despairing and diseasing. At the very least, there would surely be ointment – a week or two of reaching down and around and blending chemistry with biology. When young, Cook pondered, we use drugs to entertain; when old, to sustain.

  A speaker drilled into the ceiling wafted out an instrumental saxophone version of Simply Red’s ‘Holding Back The Years’. Cook read this as an ironic comment on the uncertain longevity of the audience. He imagined a waggish orderly in an elderly care-home cueing it up as the theme for medication time.

  His phone jangled, announcing an email which offered ‘herbal penis enlargement’ – a treatment which would apparently transform any man into ‘
the Pied Piper of Hot Chicks’. Cook doubted this. He had never been much of a leader, and he wasn’t convinced that an arbitrary extension to the length of his penis was going to change that – not at his life stage, at least. The newsletter from the redesigned PastLives.com squatted conspicuously in his inbox. He thought of the message – the invitation to ‘catch up’ – and realised that he could never reply.

  “Dorian Cook. Doctor Escott. Room 4.”

  *

  Escott’s domain was a schizoid shrine to Christian piety and science-fiction – desktop Dalek, rosary draped over computer monitor, Serenity mouse-mat, photo of waterfall with motivational slogan (‘Beauty – an act of God!’). As Cook entered, Escott – fiftyish, crinkled polo shirt, lavishly bellied – leapt from his desk and closed in for a double-pump handshake with an odd little bonus – a shoulder-pat from his free hand. It felt calculated rather than caring, and Cook prickled.

  “Dorian Cook?” he wondered. No eye contact.

  “I am!” said Cook, weirdly.

  Escott waddled backwards, muscle memory guiding him down into his chair.

  “And how are you? What seems to be the trouble?”

  Cook sat down – too hard – on another firm chair. He shuddered with pain.

  “I, uh, have a sore spot. On my…”

  Anus? Arsehole? Asshole?

  “…bottom.”

  The word burst into the room and hovered there, unwanted. Escott regarded it silently. He nodded and began clattering away at the keyboard of his decade-old PC. “Okay. And how long have you had this? Is there any discharge? Any blood?”

  Cook looked up at the poster on the wall above Escott’s examination bench – an enormous, scowling lion’s face on a stark, black background. ‘The Lion of Judah…’ announced an ugly-fonted caption across the brow of the mane. ‘Jesus Christ!’ shrieked a larger legend over the lion’s jutting jaw.

  “A week or so. Bit of blood, yeah.”

  Escott looked up and raised his eyebrows. “How much? Roughly. Is it bright red or quite dark?”

  Cook saw himself from the perspective of the poster – a beast’s-eye view of a clenched and clucking nebbish. He was a critic, criticiser, professional pontificator, opinion-former (not any more), supplier of promotional quotes (rarely) – a middling, middle-brow, middle-aged middle-man charged with composing too many words for too few readers. The Lion-Jesus glared down – at a creature clinging to the illusion that people cared about what came out of its mouth, when there was more concern over what was escaping from its rear-end.

  “It’s bright red.”

  Escott was standing and nodding more vigorously, groping his way into a pair of surgical gloves. “Fresh. Hmm…” He muttered, eyes closed, visualising his symptom-prognosis flowchart.

  “Let’s have a quick look, then. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”

  Cook was unfamiliar with this concept. He sat up on Escott’s bench, unhooked his belt and compressed into a compromising position. He coveted his doctor’s world of relative certainty, in contrast to his own realm of bluff and bluster – the eternal tyrannies of, ‘In my view…’ and, ‘For me…’ and, ‘Everyone is entitled to their opinion…’ and, ‘I hear what you’re saying, but…’. Cook’s worries amounted to a lot more than ‘nothing’, and he was both their cause and effect, architect and architecture – the sole engineer of a caffeine-bolstered contraption of obsolete biomechanics.

  Escott, for one, was done with him.

  “Pop your trousers back up! Yes… You’ve got a couple of fairly small haemorrhoids – probably caused by straining. Do you move your bowels every day?”

  “Erm, I think so. Usually.”

  Escott chuckled. “Well, it’s not really the kind of thing one keeps a record of, I know. Although there seems to be a ‘blog’ for everything, these days.”

  Fully dressed and no longer cowed by the spectre of colon cancer, Cook discovered his sense of humour.

  “A log blog?”

  Escott laughed a little too heartily. “Yes! Exactly. I’m just writing you a prescription for a lactulose drink – that will help keep your stools softened. And you might want to pick up a tube of Anusol to ease the discomfort a little. No need for a suppository.”

  *

  Cook hurried back through the waiting room, where The Beatles’ ‘Something’ was now being sax-murdered.

  “Dor!”

  William Stone – an ex-neighbour – had taken Cook’s place by the play table. They had first become acquainted back when Gina was pregnant and taking an afternoon nap. Stone had shooed away a gaggle of noisy estate kids, after Cook had failed to persuade them to ‘make a bit less noise’. They had smelt his fear, and he felt emasculated and hopelessly middle-class in the face of their reptilian contempt. In contrast, Stone – a short but stocky police officer – succeeded in convincing the kids that there were better things to do than vandalise a mound of abandoned builder’s tools. They had slouched away, lobbing a few profanities over their pointy shoulders. Cook was grateful, but had the impression that Stone was trading on reputation rather than status.

  “Hey, Will. How are you?”

  Cook swaggered over, unconvincingly. He sat down – with care – next to Stone, wisely resisting the urge to slap him on his burly back.

  “I’m alright, mate, yeah! What’s the story here, then? Having the snip or something?”

  “Ha. No! I’ve, er…” Cook winced and switched his weight from right to left buttock.

  “Oh, I see…” said Stone, whispering. “Arse boil?”

  “Sort of.”

  Stone considered this as he fiddled with the gummed-up wheels of a wooden toy train. “Fucking hell! Bum-grapes?”

  Cook nodded. Stone leaned in close. It was early morning, but Cook could smell alcohol on his breath. “You know why, don’t ya? Because you talk so much shit!”

  Stone bellowed with laughter. Cook politely guffawed, despite seeing no sense in the remark.

  “Well,” he offered, “that’s my job.”

  Stone smiled at that.

  “I’m having a cholesterol check, mate. Weight’s all over the fucking place!”

  A white-haired old woman sitting opposite tutted and sent over a sharp look. Cook was suddenly keen to get away and so employed his standard method of bringing a chance encounter to a premature close.

  “Listen. We should have a catch-up sometime.”

  Lately, Cook seemed to be in a permanent state of ‘catch-up’. He could feel his grip loosening on the matters of culture he would have obsessively monitored only a couple of years ago. He was still prone to faintly teenage fixations with certain music, adrenalised hectoring on pop-culture issues, and even the odd cautious engagement with sport and politics. But he was befuddled by science, bored with art and borderline anhedonic over nature. He drank more from habit than for effect and, despite his name, had little interest in anything but basic food. His sense of the sheer absurdity of sex was now so developed that he could barely do it without sniggering and, while he used to set aside time for lengthy sessions of masturbation, he had gradually adopted the swift and functional approach – more soporific than pornographic. For Cook, the sensual world was another country. They did things differently there.

  “Yeah,” said Stone, “let’s have a pint. I’m on nights this week but I’ll text you. Maybe next Thursday?”

  Cook agreed. Like the other aspects of his life, he was long overdue an update on Stone’s typically colourful emotional wranglings.

  On the way out, he opened his calendar app and checked next week’s schedule. On Thursday, he was due to attend a screening of Struisvogel, a post-war Austrian political thriller about a young woman’s attempt to track down her father, an ex-concentration-camp guard, also wanted by Nazi hunters. Cook mulled the inevitably 120-minute-plus meditation on Holocaust guilt and father-daughter redemption. He deleted the screening entry and tapped out a replacement – ‘Drinks with Will’.

 
6. Mum & Dad

  January, 1974

  Cook burrowed through the darkness – thrashing arms, swimming legs, elbows prodding at the clinging blanket folds. His fingers brushed against bone and hair. Esther’s nightgown was too short and her ankles protruded as specimen for his investigations.

  “Welcome to the underwater world of Jack Coo-Stow!”

  Cook’s voice was throttled by the heavy undersheet. In deep winter, Esther layered her bed like lasagne – an insulating strata of thick and thin, rough and smooth.

  “This rare species is a ‘Nana Leg’. It’s hard to capture!”

  He grappled with Esther’s bony foot.

  “Gerroff! C’mon, Dor! It’s too bloody early.”

  ‘Bloody’ was rare. It meant Esther was serious, that her indulgence of horseplay had slipped into irritation. Cook slept in his grandmother’s bed for warmth, when the seasonal chill made his unheated bedroom inhospitable. The electric blanket was an impossible luxury. It seemed companionable and organic – a life-giving, heat-radiating network of arterial cables woven into a skin-like membrane. Cook would always wait for it to warm to its highest setting before sliding under the covers for grateful and exquisite smothering. Back in his own bed, swaddled in double pyjamas, flat on his back, entombed beneath a heavy haul of blankets and overcoats, he played a nightly game of distraction – inhale deeply, pinch lips into tiny aperture, exhale, watch breath drift and swirl, repeat until asleep. Esther had finally rescued him last February, when she had leaned in for a morning forehead-kiss and noticed a sprinkle of frost in his eyebrows.

  Esther rose, stepped into her slippers and embarked on her early morning expedition to the outside toilet. With a jolt of excitement, Cook realised it was Saturday. He sprung out of bed, scurried across the landing into his room, opened the corner closet and dragged out a large, thin slab of plywood – rough on one side, smooth on the other. His Uncle Russell had ‘borrowed’ the wood from a college workshop and he had helped Cook cover the smooth side with a green felt Subbuteo football pitch. But as he laid it onto the floor, Cook saw that the wood had warped and the pitch markings were now stretched taut across an alarming hump, with its arc peaking at the half-way line. He abandoned the pitch, retrieved a tatty Enid Blyton hardback from the closet and ran back to his grandmother’s room, huddling back in with the baking underlay. Esther kept a torch under her side of the bed for nocturnal toilet trips, and Cook often used it to read, curled tight and safe in a den of blankets at the centre of the bed. He carved out a narrow tunnel of fabric to use as an air-hole and scanned the torch beam over the back cover of The Adventures Of Mr Pink-Whistle.