Walking with Ghosts

by Baker, John

  It is a game, Dora. A crazy merry-go-round in which your clothes and your emotions are flung away. The chaos of your consciousness is streamed, strained to a thin red line on which you are shunted and chuffed along, relentlessly, inevitably, to orgasm.

  Your teeth ring. Your eyes spin inside your head. Your arms thresh the pillows. A furred, animal rattle leaks from the folds of your throat. Below, somewhere deep below in you, a quake turns everything placid and still into tumultuous falls, which gush relentlessly downwards. You are a river, Dora. A river rushing, a river roaring towards oblivion.

  Subsiding now, quickly, into trickles. A rushing upwards, back into your head. Smiley, smiling. His tongue hanging out like a dog. Sunlight, pale, slanting into the room. Somewhere, far, far away, a car’s horn. Liquidation. The word, liquidation, like a mantra in your brain.

  Smiley says it was ‘Super’, and you laugh a laugh you have not heard yourself laugh ever. A laugh so earthly, so erotic, that the falls begin again and you avert your face and watch your knuckles turn white gripping the whiteness of the sheets.

  Has anyone ever been so grateful? In the history of human copulation, Dora, has anyone ever been so grateful as you were that day? Dressing, you move over to Smiley and nuzzle into his neck. You tell him how wonderful it has been, that it has never been as wonderful before. That you never dreamed it could be like that. Smiley smiles in his deferential way, a smile that disclaims all responsibility for your happiness, your gratitude. He has a tutorial which begins in precisely twenty-seven minutes.

  ‘I think it would be politic to leave separately,’ he says, standing by the door. ‘We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.’

  After he leaves, you sit on the edge of the bed and count to two hundred and fifty, then you walk down the plushly carpeted staircase and out through the swing doors. It is getting late. You will have to rush to prepare food for Billy and Diana.

  14

  Diana asked him: ‘Is she OK?’

  ‘She is today,’ Sam said, his face creased into a smile. ‘When she’s like this I think she could live for ever.’

  ‘Really?’

  There was an edge to Diana’s voice. Incredulity.

  Sam turned to her and let his smile drift away. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Do I look like a dreamer to you?’

  ‘Well, yes, Sam, you do. You look like a guy who’s been raging against reality all his life.’

  ‘All right. Point taken. But I know what’s happening here, Diana. To me, to Dora, to all of us. She’s gonna die. And in some ways it’ll be a relief when she does. But at the same time, when she’s gone nothing’ll ever be the same again. I’m looking for a miracle; and even while I’m looking for it I know it’s not going to happen. But in these intervals, when she’s not in pain, when her eyes sparkle, I let myself be carried away. I let myself be happy, for myself, and for Dora. I’m not fooling myself. I know reality’ll come booling along tomorrow, or the next day, or even five minutes from now. And when it comes I’ll deal with it. That’s how I’ve come this far.’

  Whoa, boy.’ She held up her hands. ‘I was just checking. Reality’s a question for me as well. Dora’s my mother. She’s always been here. I’m not sure how life’ll feel when she’s not here any more.’

  Sam moved towards her and took her hand. They were standing by the window, looking out at the avenue. ‘It won’t be the same,’ he said quietly. ‘For either of us. But when it happens I’ll still be around, if you want me. We might need each other to get through.’ He made eye contact with her. ‘But for now she’s still alive. Today she’s free of pain. I want to enjoy that.’

  Diana thought about it briefly. It was as if you could see the thought taking root in her mind. See her accepting it. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell her a joke when she wakes up. No one appreciates a laugh more than Dora.’

  She looked down at her hand, which Sam still held enclosed with his own. ‘Can I have it back?’ she asked. ‘I mean, you do belong to Dora. And, pretty as you are, you’re not the right sex for me.’

  Sam laughed loudly. ‘When you get to my age, Diana, a woman can fool you by saying you’re smart, but she can’t fool you by saying you’re pretty.’

  ‘I dunno that I was trying to fool you,’ she said. She cocked her head to one side, the better to see him. ‘But it’s not a bad face. I like older faces. There’s more to go at.’

  ‘Wrinkles?’

  ‘Yeah. And lines. Drama, really. I’m not impressed by the smooth countenance of youth.’

  Sam shook his head. ‘I know what you mean,’ he said. ‘But their teeth are better.’

  A silver Toyota space wagon crept along the street, the driver leaning out of the window looking at the house numbers.

  ‘What was Dora like when she was young?’

  Diana frowned. ‘Difficult to say,’ she said. ‘She was the boss, the one in charge. She was the one who always got us wherever we were going. An organizer. She was a benchmark for me, something I should aspire to. In a way, she still is. If I live to be a hundred I’ll still feel inferior to her. I’ll never be able to muster the same amount of energy, of will-power.’

  ‘That’s because she’s your mother,’ Sam said. ‘She provided all your needs. That’s what mothers do.’

  ‘You mean if I was a mother I’d suddenly get more energy?’

  ‘Yeah. You’d have to. It’s a tough job, so they say.’

  Diana shook her head. ‘I don’t feel maternal. I look at women with kids, even some of my friends, and I say a prayer, thank God it’s not me.’

  Sam let her words hang there for a moment, then he said, ‘Talking about kids, Dora wants me to find Billy.’

  ‘Yeah, it comes up from time to time. The question is: does Billy want to be found?’

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘As far as I know he’s in York. Or somewhere in the area. But he’s disowned us. He doesn’t want anything to do with us.’

  ‘Dora gave me the impression he was somewhere else. I thought he might be in London.’

  ‘He was at one time,’ Diana said. ‘When he first left home he went south. I heard reports every now and then, not from Billy himself, but from people who knew him. He was at RADA, financed himself through the course. He worked at a club in Soho, some kind of bouncer. I couldn’t believe it at first. Billy, a bouncer. When people say “bouncer” you imagine some huge bruiser. And Billy was always smart. If you look at him you could imagine him being a jockey, even a dancer, but not a bouncer.

  ‘Could have inherited some of Dora’s will-power, I suppose. Maybe he got my share. He was not only a bouncer, he was the one the punters feared more than the big guys. With the big guys you got some kind of warning. You could walk away from them. But with Billy, apparently, if you were causing trouble, or if he thought you were causing trouble, he’d just wade straight in. A girlfriend of mine said she watched Billy put some guy out of action, and he was more worried about his shirt than anything else. His shirt got ruffled in the fight. There was some dirt on his collar, Billy’s collar, and the young guy was sat on the bottom step with blood coming from his nose, and Billy was screaming at him for ruining his shirt.’

  ‘Dora didn’t say anything about him being a bouncer,’ said Sam. ‘Does she know?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Diana said. ‘I never told her. She knew he was at RADA, and she must have wondered how he financed it. She grieved for him when he disappeared. She knew he didn’t want anything to do with her, and she blamed herself. I’ve always taken the line that he’s a shit, and we’re better off without him.’

  ‘Isn’t that simplistic?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said defensively. ‘Our father killed himself because Dora took us away. Some people would say Dora did the right thing, and others would say she got it wrong. But when Dad killed himself that was enough of a punishment for her. At least that’s what I thought. But Billy wanted to punish her more. He withdrew his love. He disowned her. And he’s
still doing it now.

  ‘I don’t want to rub that in. I didn’t want to tell her that he’d thrown out all her values, that he’d become a vicious little thug. That he was living at least on the edge of criminal society, if not up to his neck in it.’

  ‘Have you ever seen him, since he went away?’

  ‘Yes, once. It was on York station. Three years ago. It was summer. I was going to stay with some friends in Birmingham, and I was drinking coffee, waiting for the train. I saw Billy get off a train on the adjoining platform. Don’t know where he was coming from. He had a bag. He came in the cafe, but he didn’t notice me. He didn’t look around, it was as if he was alone in there. He got a drink and sat at a table.

  ‘Something told me not to approach him. I knew he would reject me. If I’d said something to him he’d have ignored me. He might’ve got up and walked away. Whatever, it was one of those situations where you have a sense of certainty. So I sat and watched him.

  ‘He was not one of us any more. He wasn’t my brother or Dora’s son. He’d set out to reinvent himself, and he’d gone away and done it. He’d changed. It was obvious from the first moment I set eyes on him, when he stepped down from the train. He still had that broad forehead, and his eyebrows met in the middle, but there was only a vestige of the Billy I’d grown up with. Like a ghost that clung to him something invisible. He’d actually changed physically, filled out and got a couple of inches taller. His features had changed as well, his nose was smaller and broader, and his eyes seemed closer together and darker. His hair was a shade lighter than I remembered.

  ‘He’d gone away to change, and he’d come back changed almost beyond recognition.’ She looked at Sam. ‘Do you think I’m exaggerating this?’

  He shook his head but didn’t speak.

  ‘I’m not exaggerating it in the least,’ she said. ‘He’d transformed himself. I thought about that saying, you know, when people say, “His own mother wouldn’t recognize him.” And I thought it was true, if he’d passed Dora on the street, she might have walked on by. Not even known he was there.

  ‘Except for the ghost, the aura around him. He’d probably changed the way he thought, but the thing that hadn’t changed about him was the core of disappointment. That was still there. Confusion and disappointment. He was steeped in it. He’d been like that as a child, ever since Dad killed himself, maybe even before that. Maybe he’d been born like it. I don’t know, I was too young to’ve noticed things like that. But when I was old enough to notice it, it was already embedded in his soul, and it’s not something he’ll ever be able to shake off.’

  ‘D’you have a photograph of him?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Yes, there’ll be some in Dora’s album. I’ll look one out. But he doesn’t look like that any more.’

  ‘And, something else,’ Sam said. ‘Why d’you think he came back to York, if he is here? I mean, if you’re right bout him not wanting anything to do with you. Is there something else here for him? A woman? Some friends? Why did he come back?’

  ‘He was friendly with a girl for a while before he went away. Pam. Pammy. Can’t remember her surname, it’ll come to me later. She was very keen on him, and he went along with it for a while. But he doesn’t make deep attachments. He could’ve come back for her, but I doubt it. I don’t really know why he came back. I’ve thought about it and I can’t come up with a satisfactory answer. But I think he watches us.

  15

  The rat had been scraping and tapping at his door all evening. But when William got to his feet and opened the door it had disappeared. It left no droppings, not a single hair. There was no scrambling on the stairs as it scuttled back to its lair. Twice William had opened the door to the landing and discovered nothing. He had stood at the threshold, listening, watching. But there was no rat.

  Until he sniffed.

  His features were stolid. A keen observer might have detected apathy around the eyes, the line of his mouth. His body language was that of a young man who had encountered disappointment. He turned and closed the door quietly, leaning back against it.

  Rats! They were cunning. They were quick, savage and ferocious. Too fast for the eye, but not for the nose. William had smelt a rat.

  He tasted bile at the back of his throat.

  Rats had spread the bubonic plague.

  Anything like the sound of a rat

  Makes my heart go pit-a-pat!

  He turned his breathing down, adopted the listening pose. At first all was silent, but after some moments there was a small thud and the shuffling of its feet as it returned to his door. William couldn’t tell from the sounds if the animal was scratching with its front feet or gnawing with its pointed teeth.

  The door did not move, but it was easy to imagine that it was moving. Easier still to imagine the rat was unstoppable, that it would gnaw its way through the door. Then begin on William himself. Gnawing its way into his brain.

  He took his knife from the sheath and lightly ran his thumb along the blade. Then he threw the door open again, smashing it back with force against its hinges. He caught a glimpse of the scaly tail as it disappeared down the stairs. With the blade of the knife flashing in his hand, he gave a shriek that strained his lungs and plunged down the stairs after the predatory monster. Leaping five or six steps at a time, yelling at the top of his voice, William strove to narrow the gap between himself and his prey. He followed it through the doorway of the ground-floor front room of the house.

  The rat slipped greasily through a blackened hole in the floorboards.

  William threw himself full-length on the floor and pushed the knife through the hole, stabbing wildly at the blackness within. When he connected with nothing, he forced his arm deeper into the hole, until he had it in up to his shoulder. The knife sparked against the foundation wall beneath the floorboards and spun away, out of his grip. William retrieved his arm and pushed his face up close to the hole. He looked and listened. Although he could see nothing, he could hear small cries down there. And his nostrils and lungs were filled with the stench of the rat’s domain.

  His right hand was cut and bleeding, and he peremptorily wiped it on the leg of his trousers. He could feel adrenalin rushing through his veins. This animal may be crafty and fierce, but it would soon discover that it had met its match. Rats and men had been pitted against each other through the ages, and would continue the fight until the end of the world. But the battle, for this particular rat, was almost over.

  In the kitchen William found an old axe with a rusted head and brought it back to the front room. Working close to the black hole into which the rodent had vanished, William smashed his way through the floorboards. The timbers fractured and split as he pulled them away from the cross-beams. The cut on his hand widened and deepened and beads of blood splashed along the floor. William sucked at the wound and sprayed the blood and dirt in an arc behind him.

  He collected the splintered floorboards and threw them to the side of the room. Now he could step down into the foundations, among the mess of paper and household rubbish that had accumulated there. He carefully poked amongst it until he retrieved his knife.

  The nest was located in a corner, beneath one of the cross-beams. It was a loose construction of chewed crisp packet, what appeared to be a shredded newspaper, and some dried vegetable matter - grass? leaves? - perhaps a mixture of the two. The litter consisted of ten blind and naked young, each intent on fulfilling its genetic destiny, crawling over each other in an instinctive panic to escape annihilation.

  Go... and get long poles.

  Poke out the nests and block up the holes!

  William sensed a movement over to his left, and he gazed in that direction until his eyes adjusted enough to see her. Mother rat. Crouched on a split board, her body, together with the tail, took up a space of almost eighteen inches. Omnivorous. Fecund. Her long snout twitched. Her red eyes processed information, but she did not move. She waited for William to do that.

  He deliberately pushed the ti
p of his knife through the head of one of the litter. He held out the tiny body to mother rat, made sure that she saw what he had done. Then he dropped the carcass to the floor and crushed it under the heel of his boot.

  William smiled in the direction of the mother as he skewered another of her offspring, this time through the eye. He took them one at a time, varying the procedure slightly with each kill. The fifth suckling he sliced like a sausage, the sixth he decapitated. The seventh he disembowelled, scraping out the tiny contents with his thumb and throwing them fiercely at the mother. She moved fractionally to one side, so the innards of her nestling flew past, missing her by an inch and a half.

  Only when William moved to take the last of the litter did the mother rat attack.

  And folks who put me in a passion

  May find me pipe after another fashion!

  It was as if she had grown wings. She rose up from her perch with a shriek that sounded almost human. She hovered briefly on her hind legs and flew forward with a velocity that defied the eye. William realized instinctively that the target of her leap was his throat, and he brought up his hands to ward her away. He was fast, he had anticipated such an attack, and was confident that he would be capable of dealing with it. But mother rat was faster still.

  As William brought up his hands, she flew between them and he caught her fetid scent as her jaws closed over the fold of skin below his larynx. He was pushed backwards by the force of her landing, but somehow managed to remain standing. All four of her feet scrabbled for a grip of his shirt and his chest. In a flash William saw his own death approaching like an express train, but his mind remained calm and collected, his will absolutely focused.

  The rat needed a couple of seconds, perhaps only a few fractions of a second to consolidate its position. Once it had established a secure base with its feet and tail, it would commence ripping and tearing at William’s throat. The soft skin would offer no resistance, and in moments the larynx and trachea would be shredded, cutting off the oxygen supply to his lungs. At that point the battle would be over William vanquished, and mother rat victorious.