Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  Suki says my name from over by the sinks.

  —What’s up, Sooks?

  —Since you’ve been in the town have you come across a feller with one arm? From your neck of the woods originally.

  —Can’t say I have, no.

  —You sure?

  —I think I’d remember a one-armed boy from Liverpool. How’d he lose it?

  —The arm? Dunno, probably infection. Didn’t ask him. Anyway we’re bringing him up from Carmarthen this evening.

  —Carmarthen?

  —Yeh. He was in Afallon ward but they shipped him down to Carmarthen when that closed.

  Anthony groans. —Was closed, Sooks, was closed. To save a few measly quid.

  —Was closed, then, aye.

  —What was he doing there? I ask.

  —Where?

  —Afallon.

  —He lost it big time. Spectacularly was the word they used. He’d been in recovery for years and was doing well but he relapsed and charged into the ward one night ranting about being hunted by gangsters or something. Said he needed locking up for his own safety. They sectioned him and he started rattling so he’s coming here tonight. He’s detoxed down in Carmarthen. Just thought you might’ve bumped into him, that’s all.

  Suki starts to scrub a pan. I blow on the soup in my spoon and as I do it turns into bubbling skag, brown fizz, the lump of spud in it like a ball of cotton wool. I close my eyes until the memory fades and then suck the soup out of the spoon and swallow it.

  Surprised I’d never met the one-armed bloke at meetings. But then he might’ve done his steps somewhere else. Unless moving here was an attempt at a geographical cure. Which never works. I thought I knew every scouser in the town, but obviously not. For a small town it’s got a fuck of a lot of secrets.

  An engine rumbles outside. Suki says: —That’ll be Ebi back with the chickens, and dries her hands. —You lot behave yourselves and play nice, she says with a smile and goes out the back door.

  Spectacularly. There was a relapse of spectacular proportions. Already lost an arm, the feller must’ve already had a bad time of it but part of him was craving that horror back in his life. I’d imagine that for him the term ‘rehab’ makes no sense; it’s ‘hab’ he needs, there’s no ‘re’ about it. He’s never known normality so there’s nothing for him to get back to. He’s not relearning, he’s learning, for the first time, like, in his life. The word ‘rehab’, it’s often meaningless, for many people. The general use of it shows how very little is understood about the ways in which people live their lives. The worlds they are born into.

  But spectacularly, Suki said, and that word sends a shiver, like an electric shock, down my spine, from the base of my skull to the top of me arse. Spectacular. Like a great big firework display, like an eagle taking off. Spectacular. That’s the way I’ll go too, when I do fall. In mad fire, like a fucking comet. The fucking planet will tremble. The entire fucking—

  Christ, what am I thinking about? When I fall? This is not a good thought, man. Not good. There was a glow in the sky and you saw it once. Pure, pure heart.

  Anthony looks around him in a kind of conspiratorial way and leans in over the table. —What’s it like, Adam? he says.

  —What’s what like?

  —Out there. He nods at one of the windows.

  —In the town, you mean?

  —No, well, in the world, y’know. It’s driving me nuts, no telly or Internet or newspapers. Need to know what’s going on. Too cut off up here.

  —Whit’s gaun oan is thit ye’ve goat yir sleeve in yir soup, the Chinwegian lady says, and Anthony kind of yelps and his arm jerks up in the air. The Major harrumphs again and Maria goes ‘Hoi!’ cos some soup spots have landed on her bread. All of this makes me laugh and then as Anthony pulls his sleeve away from his wrist I see the pink scars there and instantly I want to weep. God, I’m not kidding; at this age, and sober, my heart has become as uncontrollable and unpredictable as my dick once was. No lie. It’s like a wild animal.

  —I can’t eat this now!

  The Major holds his hand out for Maria’s plate. —I’ll make you some more.

  —He should do it.

  —It was entirely an accident. Let me.

  Maria hands her plate over and it’s like a surrender. The Major transfers her half-eaten bread onto his own plate and cuts a new slice and puts that on Maria’s plate and hands it over to her then picks up the butter dish and the jar of Sunpat and passes them over to her as well and all this is like an offering.

  —There we go, he says. —No harm done.

  —Except I’m not supposed to use any butter, am I? Suki said.

  —Yir a vegan, pet, eh no?

  Maria wrinkles her nose in a kind of scowl. Starts putting peanut butter on the bread.

  —Look at me shirt, Anthony says. —It’s soaked in soup.

  —Aye well that’s yir supper sorted oot. Just give yir shirt a good wring ovir the soup bowl, eh?

  The Chinwegian gives me a wink and I give her a smile in return. How come I can’t remember her name? I know why; cos the word ‘Chinwegian’ took over. I invented it and liked it so not only did it stick but it absorbed the knowledge of her real name. Swallowed it up.

  I scrape up the last smears of me soup then rub the bread around the bowl. Still a bit hungry. Don’t want to have another bowl tho cos I’m not a resident anymore and I’d feel, what, rude. Cheek is good but not rudeness. Manners, man; for many years I never even knew what they were. And straight after that thought comes the memory that Anthony used to be a journalist, before, like, in his Before Times, which is why he asked me that question. Which I have’t answered.

  And what the fuck can I say, anyway? What’s the world like, how do I respond to that? God almighty. I remain in this part of Wales not only to stay close to Rhos and people like Benji and Sion but because it’s stayed halfway resistant to the darkness that’s taken over much of the country yet even here I see it happening too. A cloud of enforced sameness. Should I tell these people that what is waiting for them is a widespread attitude, government-led and media-fed, that sees the treatment they are undergoing as a waste of time and money? That they’d better sort themselves out so quickly and completely that it must be miraculous because there’s no help for them out there cos all services for the damaged and the vulnerable have been cut almost to extinction, that there’s no help anywhere for the young and the sick? That what was once a welfare state now seems to see it as a duty not to give poor children enough to live on and that this attitude has come to be seen as good? Christ almighty. What can I say? I’ll tell them that this morning I read about a woman in full-time work who was overjoyed when she found a fiver in the street because then she could feed her son for the two days til her next pay cheque, and a page later in the same paper I read that sales of wine costing over twenty quid a bottle increased so that the chief executive of Majestic Wine could be quoted as saying ‘these are wines you can have a real conversation about’. Should I tell them that? These people around this table are not children and nor should they be treated as children. So I’ll tell them that out there people are killing themselves, in this isolated, inward-looking, mean country that its populace voted for it to become; that as the support they need is eroded away so they fall out of life. I’ll tell them that anyone who needs state support is now regarded as a scrounging parasite to be ostracised, and persecuted, to death if needs be. Anthony and the Chinwegian and Maria and the Major, when you all leave this centre with your selves rebuilt and the capacity for connectedness restored there will be no support for you, nothing in the world that will recognise the demons you have beaten, and with what bravery. You will have no money. Should you be lucky enough to be interviewed for a job, and you’re asked – no, ‘invited’ – to explain the gaps in your employment history, you will come up against a collective mindset utterly without empathy cos this is the age of the snoop and the bigot in which no one sees the ‘ex’, all they see is the alky and
the junkie and the never-to-be-trusted monster, the worthless piece of human waste. This is what I’ll tell these people around the table. All of this I’ll tell them. And I’ll tell them too that, to fit in, to belong, they must never forget to celebrate, when they’re instructed to do so, the particular scab of rock on which their genes happened to collide and crash land because that will make their suffering all worth it. It will give meaning to their lives. All of this I’ll tell them.

  —It’s alright, I say to their expecting faces. —Has its moments, y’know. It’s worth it, honest, that’s all I can say.

  This seems to please them, and I feel the death of something inside me. I think about Quilty the cat and glowing shapes in the sky. And I do not express the opinion that to remain here in Rhos for the rest of their lives would be the only option for these broken souls I’m eating soup with.

  Suki comes back in. —Right, you three. Need some help with the chickens and then you’ve got Group. You stopping up for the afternoon, Adam love?

  —No, I say. —Got a meeting in town at teatime. What are the new chickens like?

  —Haven’t met them yet. Ebi says they’re a bit scrawny but apparently good layers.

  Maria makes a gagging sound. —Aborted birds. Don’t know how anyone could eat aborted birds.

  —They’re unfertilised, hen, Chinwegian says, then repeats the last word and laughs. Anthony joins in. The Major, all deadpan, says: —What an eggstraordinarily bad yolk.

  —You can sit the job out, Maria, Suki says.

  —No thanks. I like the chickens. Wanna see them. Just don’t want to eat them, that’s all, or their unborn babies.

  —Fine then. We’ll be seeing you soon, Ad, yeh?

  I tell Suki I’ll be back up in a few days and give her another hug and say goodbye to the others and leave. Sunshine and breeze again. Hot. I hear Suki’s voice through the open window:

  —Get some gloves on, everyone. Ebi says they’re all peckers.

  That makes me smile, the image of them four, the odd crew, chasing chickens around. The Major harrumphing, Chinwegian cackling her little doll-face off, the hens running frantic and bawking all mad. Funny image.

  I walk away from Rhos, up into the trees again. It’s a steep track up onto the Pendam road but after that it’s all downhill into Penrhyncoch where I can catch a bus into town. I look up at the mountain crest, imagine the lake up there. Day like today there’ll no doubt be some people up there, fishing, basking on the pebble beach, whatever. None of them will have the first clue of what I saw that morning. None of them will know. And in fact nor do I; what the fuck did I see? I can hear what sounds like drums again, from up there. Maybe the trees are being harvested.

  A little bit above the buildings I stand on the path and look down on them. There’s the wooden bridge that leads to the main building, the bridge you cross only twice as a resident, once to check in, and once to leave, freed. You don’t have to be able to understand the symbolism to appreciate it. Like the Twelve Steps themselves; all you have to know is that they work. Most times. It’s like baking a cake; into the oven goes a gloopy mess of eggs and butter and flour and sugar and stuff and half an hour or so later out comes a lovely fluffy sponge. You’d have to be a physicist, or Heston friggin Blumenthal, to explain how that works. Same with the system up here. Don’t question, don’t wonder – just accept. Like magic. It’s the total opposite to jail; Fazakerly nick was like a turned-off oven. In went the gloopy mess and out came the same gloopy mess, with a manky little crust on top.

  I follow the flight of a kite down the valley. He circles over the First Stage house then catches a thermal and rises then catches a high wind and is carried down the valley. Beautiful fucking birds, astonishing things. Stunning even in their savagery; aye this is a wonderful place, the hills and the animals and the birds and the plants, everything, but it’s a place completely drenched in death. At night sometimes, in my room, I’d lie awake and listen to the night sounds, hear the owls call and screech, hear the squealings of small animals as they became food for bigger ones. I’d find corpses out on the hills when I was collecting the sheep shit, bones, ragged severed wings, skulls. I’d see sheep with their arse ends caked in cack and boiling with maggots. Sometimes their front legs would’ve rotted away to stumps. Horrible, aye, but I realised that the Reality Therapy was working when I stopped seeing all of this stuff as repellent and scary and just began to accept it as the way things are and, even, realise that I was a part of it, that the wildness of it all was in me and that I came from it and that I’d return to it when I die. At the root of my addiction was a fear of dying; inviting it on me each day, and cheating it, was a way, I once thought, of beating it. Accept the things you cannot change, is right, is right.

  The Three Rs, that’s what they said: realism, responsibility, and right-and-wrong. Not symptoms of a mental disorder, Reality Therapy maintains – and these words with their rhythm will be in my head forever – ‘that the individual is suffering from a socially universal human condition rather than a mental illness’. Like a little song or poem. ‘It is in the unsuccessful attainment of basic needs that a person’s behaviour moves away from the norm.’ A person’s past has no relevance to Reality Therapy, it’s all here and now, and an understanding of how what you do now will affect your future. Glasser, that was the name of the feller who developed it, William Glasser; he pointed out that it was too easy to label people as mentally sick and that problems of behaviour had a deep social component. Involvement, that was one of the key words, and control, and focus on the present, and planning. And like a mantra: no excuses no punishment never give up. The core of it was a need to understand that we must live in a world full of other people and that we must learn to satisy our own needs in a way that does not encroach upon anyone else’s needs. In other words: be nice and don’t act the cunt.

  And it’s bollox, really. I mean, get an army of RT counsellors into the Houses of fucking Parliament, then. Cos them cunts could do with a course of it. Or, or, maybe just build great big fucking walls around Eton and Westminster and Chipping bastard Norton, keep them isolated where they can do no harm to others. Sacrifice the odd fox or pheasant – old and ill ones – to them every now and again so that they can satisy their psychopathologies. Let the rest of us get on with the insane fucking job of just being alive.

  ‘Social component’, aye. It made me laugh when I heard the name ‘Glasser’ cos it made me think of that balloon-head on the estate where I was brought up, also called Glasser, Glasser Thompson, so called cos that was his favourite hobby; glassing people in the face. Man or woman, it didn’t really matter, if Glasser had a gripe with them, and it must be said that the insults were usually imaginary ones, that’d be it; smash, ram, twist, screams, sirens and stitches. It was like a compulsion with him. Went to do it to me dad once but missed and got him in the neck, just missing the artery. Me old man made a few phone calls and that was it, no more Glasser Thompson, except in legend. Someone told me that they found one of his legs in the bin by the seesaw in the school playground but I don’t know whether that’s true.

  But that’s Reality: Glasser Thompson. And the soaring birds and the Brummie bloke trying to rebuild himself from fragments. Sally in her polytunnel, the feral mountain cats. This is all Reality and this is all Therapy. The abscess scars on me legs, the shadowy memories of what I’ve done. Ebi. Suki. Rhoserchan itself. All of this can be touched. It is all Real.

  So where the fuck does a floating woman fit into this? A floating, glowing woman? Is she, or it, whatever, part of the Real? I could not touch or smell but I could see, and so, evidently, could the other two. And the way the sight of her put a lift inside me, bounced the heart out of me chest and put a buzz of, of what – joy? – at the base of me skull that hasn’t yet gone away, and that, despite everything, is there when I fall asleep and is waiting for me when I wake up but might vanish for a moment when I read a paper or watch the news, is this Reality? I could not touch or smell or hea
r. A waking hallucination, said Sal. But where does this fit in?

  God, God. Being alive. It’s so fucking strange. More every sober day.

  At the top of the Rhos track where it joins the Pendam road I stop to catch me breath and I see a big car coming towards me up the hill. Sunlight off its windows. I stand and watch it get bigger. It’s a huge Merc or something, with tinted windows and dried mud-splashes up the sides. It stops by me and the back window slides down and the feller in the back seat looks out at me. He’s sitting in the cool air con, I feel the fridgey wave, and he’s got a curly white quiff and shades that cover half his face and a load of bling around his neck and he’s wearing a blue Hawaiian shirt, flowers and boats on it, beneath a smart black suit jacket. He doesn’t say anything, just looks out at me with the big black eyes of an insect.

  —Help yeh, mate?

  He shakes his head. —I don’t know, he says in a deep and growly voice like he’s been gargling with ground glass. So deep I feel it in me ribcage. —I certainly hope so, brother. Have you just come from the place?

  —Where, Rhoserchan?

  He nods. —Yeah.

  —I have, aye.

  —You a resident?

  —Not any more. I was, tho. Just up here helping out, like. Clean and sober, now, me.

  I can’t see anything behind his shades. Might not have eyes at all for all I know. The idling engine stinks, sharp and sour in me nose. Should be low emission, a big posh car like this.

  —Does it work?

  —Does what work, feller?

  —The, the treatment up here.

  —Well it did for me. Nearly four years clean I am now.

  Christ; it’s not the car that pongs, it’s this bloke’s breath. A blast of booze both old and new, all kinds of booze, the main whiff being, if I’m remembering rightly, rum. Bloody hell. It’s like a cloud. He’s been giving it some, this geezer. —Think you need an appointment, tho, I say. —Not sure you can just turn up, like. Need to make arrangements first.