Broken Ghost

by Niall Griffiths

  —So you’re all set?

  He waves a hand at me. —You go on, Emma fach. Don’t worry about me.

  I get a strong urge to kiss him on the cheek, give him a hug, but you’ve got to maintain a professional distance, so I don’t. I just say tara to him and leave his house with me shopping. Head home. Text the office to let them know that Mr Humphreys has been looked after for the morning and go back towards the old stone bridge and turn right onto my road. The postman’s been; just one brown envelope. Looks ominous. There’s never good news in a plain brown envelope.

  I put the shopping away. Eat a bowl of cereal at the window, looking out at the river and that new bridge. People are crossing it as if they trust it. I imagine heads sticking out of the water, shouting for help and arms waving as the current carries them out to sea. I imagine Mr Humphreys in the ocean again, the burning ship and the icebergs all lit up. A cramp cripples me stomach and I suck air in over me teeth.

  I finish me Cheerios and turn me computer on and check me emails and the air goes from me lungs. Then I check my blog and my Twitter and the air seems to leave the room; he wasn’t kidding, Bas. The hits. The thousands of retweets. The links and the comments, my God, look at this, this is more viral than bubonic fucking plague.

  What the fuck?

  I can’t sit still. This needs movement. Wash the dishes, God, wash them again. It feels as if the room is whirling around me. What the fuck have I started? Me belly’s all churning and not only because of the period pains. What was it I wrote, a single paragraph? And I didn’t even say much in it cos I didn’t even know what to say, I didn’t know what I’d seen or heard and now I’m starting to think that all I saw anyway was something to do with the light of the sun and all I heard was the wind in the reeds and Christ I hadn’t slept all night and I’d dropped that crap pill which I don’t even know what it was, I just know that it wasn’t the fuckin MDMA it was sold to me as, and now look, now look. What the fuck is going on? Is this what it feels like, to be, what, to be at the centre of something big? Something important? Love to hear your thoughts, that’s what I wrote in the blog. But Jesus Christ I didn’t expect this.

  Got to move. Or keep moving. Everything around me feels different in a way I can’t describe and it’s not completely pleasant, I mean it feels as if an anxiety attack is coming on, I start to sweat and me pulse starts to race so I leg it upstairs and down a diazepam. Gulp it. Feel it thud in the stomach. I go and sit on the edge of Tom’s bed, breathing in, breathing out, trying to focus on that, just the breathing … I can smell Tomos in here, my boy, the smell of him rising up out of the bedsheets … my wonderful boy … my little wild thing …

  I lie back on the bed. I put my face into Tom’s pillow. It has a dinosaur on it, one with a spikey tail and a row of plates down its back. I can smell Tom’s hair. I think of phoning my folks but decide not to. Maybe later.

  Just breathe. In and out.

  Dig. Wild. Bridge.

  Fall asleep.

  When I wake up the diazepam has done its lovely dopey stuff and it’s nearly time to pick T up from the school. I wash me face and go downstairs. It’s steady again. Calm. Nothing to worry about, aye. As I’m leaving the house I see the brown envelope on the table and I open it and skim the letter. Words:

  ‘Under-occupancy’. ‘Sanctions’. ‘Possible legal action’.

  And:

  ‘Fraudulent’. ‘Undeclared income’.

  Oh, right, yes. This is the real world. This is what it’s about. How could I have ever forgotten this?

  The letter tells me that I must report to the job centre for a meeting on a certain date and in the meantime my benefits have been arrested. I put it back on the table and leave the house.

  There was no floating woman and she said nothing. Everything that the world has and that is available to me can be contained in a plain brown envelope. There is nothing more than that, aye. Except for Tomos.

  Long queue at the school gates, as there always is. The dads are off to one side and I am in no mood to talk to the mums about fucking washing powder. Her with the bob and the hefty muck-spreader at the back of her is giving me daggers as usual; it’s the single-mum thing. It seems to wind some of the other mothers up. That, and she’s jealous of my arse and body; well, get yourself to a Zumba class, porker.

  The teacher at the gates calls out T’s name and I step out of the queue. See him coming towards me with his brilliant smile. A pang twists through me again and I remember him, so tiny, silent on my belly and looking around at everything, taking it all in through them blue eyes. He’s been here before the midwife said and now I remember that and now I think to meself: God, how tiring that would be. How fucking tiring, to have to go through all this, over and over again, the same old shit with no end to it ever. Then I’m squatting down and holding my boy and I’m thinking of nothing at all except how lovely he is.

  MESSAGES

  #FLOATINGWOMAN @EMMAMUMI anyone seen what’s happening up at #llynsyfydrin? What’s going on?

  #floatingwoman can’t you tell? Don’t you know? It’s arrived. It’s here #llynsyfydrin #itishere

  RT Repent. Repent. The time has come #llynsyfydrin#floatingwoman#itishere #repent

  RT you are wrong #repent. Rejoice. Judgment day #Madonna#BVM

  From Pobl Annwyl, bilingual blogspot, Emyr Gwenallt Roberts, AKA Llewellyn Nesa, version saesneg.

  Knock. Fatima. Lourdes. Now we can add to that list: Llyn Syfydrin, Ceredigion.

  It’s been a long time to wait. Since 1904, to be exact, when the sun danced in the sky. They saw that in Fatima too in 1917 but I’m talking about Wales, now. Three peasant children in both places. And the message: dig and bridge and wild (@EmmaMum1). These things are common to all such experiences and stretch all the way back to AD 40, to the Apostle James in Saragossa. I can give you more examples but one will suffice: 1981, Kibeho in Rwanda, and She warned of mass slaughter and we all know what happened there. Don’t we, dear people?

  We’ve been ignoring this, haven’t we? And this is the most sacred of countries in ways most people will never understand. The very soil of this land is sacred. Nevern churchyard has a yew that bleeds which will cease to bleed only when all evil is expunged from the world (and yes, I know the sap is infected, but that in itself is a metaphor). On our maps are Bethesda, Bethlehem, Pisgah, Moriah. Get googling, dear people.

  So tell me because I’m intrigued; what are you going to do now? All your certainties have fallen away. The man comes around. You have been kissing the feet of Mammon. Well, no longer, dear people. The time has come. The choice between repent or rejoice has come at last but if you want my advice (and you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t) – do both. But repent first. And hurry up about it.

  TAGS: Llewellyn Nesa, Llyn Syfydrin, sacred, Mammon, Wales, repent, rejoice

  @ListenToDawkins #llewellynnesa shit. Utter shit. Why would an all-loving God make an imperfect world #evidence #llynsyfydrin #BVMshit

  #ListenToDawkins because there’d be no fucking point to you otherwise #llewellynnesa #paradisebuiltinhell

  @ListenToDawkins primitive taffs this is 21st century bet you don’t have broadband over offas dyke #llewellynnesa #poblannwyl what does that even mean? #BVMshit

  @Enlightened #llewellynnesa get a life, a modern life. Proof. Evidence. Grow the fuck up #MadonnaBollocks #BVMshite #trigger50now #hurryupandLeave

  Hits: 1,479,832

  MIST

  OVERNIGHT, A VAST muffler of fog forms out on the Celtic Deeps and drifts eastwards. Pre-dawn it breaks silently over the sea-town and tendrils through the mostly sleeping streets, a twist of it curling like the tentacle of a phantom kraken around the pier and the twenty-four-hour bar there, the yellow lights of its windows aglow above the beach, a million sleeping starlings roosting on the struts rough with barnacles and crusted guano. Soon, people will wake to this, the town made dreamlike behind the fallen grey veil. It will enter the sleeping heads of some, the tang of it, its brine
, and there will be broken dreams of drifting unmanned galleons and the teeth of sharks flashing in black fathoms. The fog rolls into the high backlands, into the hinter regions, through the scattered small settlements and even beyond them into further rises; blind grey worms probe at the windows of the cottages in the folds and gullies of these hills, places never touched by sun and so sodden, even in this stun of a summer, that it seems the wet lick of the sea-fret fronds must result in sudden damp collapse. Birds start to sing. Somewhere a rooster hollers. A light breeze lifts the mist further up, through the ranked pines which sway lightly, left to right, together, as if listening to the same sad song. Over Rhoserchan, its fevered sleeps and higher still as if drawn to the lakes on top of the mountain in elemental fraternity, the mist wisping apart now to disclose the landscape as more birds begin to wake and in all likelihood sing this high world into being. Under circling satellites whose lights like that of the stars wink out with the returning day yet whose clicks and pulses continue to relay data through airless wastes at last it is noiselessly broken into nothing at the eastern shore of Llyn Syfydrin where, in the reeds, a sign of slat on slat has been erected and which on the cross-beam reads:

  llyn y weledigaeth

  croeso pawb

  This sign hammered into a quaggy splat in which simple proteins split and link, base pair to base pair. A spike of turquoise neon that is a dragonfly finds a spider in a petal-curl of an ox-eye daisy and takes it up into the middle of a carved O and bundles it into a ball and eats it and in full loud bloom, these flowers are, a bright rim of them linking the eastern lake-shore to the western, a thousand yellow eyes all turned toward the marten-warrened dirt-bank behind which the sun is rising and which will soon shake the sleepers on the shingle, some in tents and others simply bivvied on the bare pebbles. A slumbering lacustrine tribe around smouldering firepits and crude crosses hammered into the earth and lambeg drums awaiting a drummer and citronella candles balanced on flat rocks to deter midges and mosquitoes. Offerings, here and there: locks of hair, the clothes and relics of dead or sickening kin, prayer words chalked onto stone.

  Something might be poised to happen here. An early hawk circles on a thermal out over the lake then returns again to wheel above the peopled shore as if in interest, as if drawn.

  And there is one who has not slept. Or for no longer than a couple of hours, whimpering and twitching beneath a blanket in a sheep-scrape isolated from the main group, but he has been fully alert since long before daybreak and has located himself back onto the ridge from where he can watch the sun reappear and on where a weak but useable phone signal can be accessed. Which is not why this man is here, where he has sited himself every sunrise since he first trudged up from his bolthole in the town, this ridge where he clipped the collar around his neck for the first time in years, this ridge where he shudders and prays and sometimes grips the rocky ground beneath his knees so hard that buds of blood burst under his fingernails. This ridge that he read about online and which commanded him to come to as loudly as the jostling crowd of no-see-ums nearby commands the collared dove to come and feed. Delicate dove, resting atop a knee-high cairn built yesterday and topped with a baby’s bib, still stained with something red.

  MAN OF THE CLOTH

  IT FEELS TIGHT and choking and the symbol of that is not lost on me; not the collar itself but the constricting way it feels. Underneath it is mere flesh. Mere flesh always called weak but the demands it makes are so very strong, screaming for attention. It needs to eat and it never rests.

  I was excused. The height of my calling justified the depth of my transgressions. What I did. In the shrieking demands of my flesh. Touched by a world fallen so far how could I not fold, how could I resist; my connection to a world so fallen, that was the reason why. Surrounded by the corruption of innocence and so connected to that how could I not be infected. Polluted. Corrupt and corrupting too, in need. I mean I saw them in Calais. I saw them sodden and without life on beaches. I saw them sold and used.

  Yes but my crimes came earlier and under them all was doubt. Desperation. The things we do to distance ourselves from the terror of the absence of God and in what I did was my prayer: Look how much I am offending You, observe the cruelties of which I am, in your absconding, capable and if there is no intercession to prevent then that is proof of Your abandonment. If You will not heed even the crying out of children then surely You are nowhere at all.

  Woodsmoke. On the beach below some small fires have been lit; I see the visitors awake now, tending them. All have come; the tattooed ones, those who have lost, those who are fearful of losing, the crippled, the old, the young … a liver-spotted scalp next to another thick with adolescent curls and both of them bent over the same blackened pot. Rumours of a vision; nothing concrete, and yet here they are, the clans, gathered together as one next to the dark lake on top of this mountain. As I watch, some of them go in to bathe. Some plunge under. One woman carries a naked child into the water and I see the small white feet dangling over the crooked elbow and I hear and feel a crack inside me somewhere in the sternum region and I have to look away.

  I recognise none of them, as yet. Not one from my gone flock. But in the long years of my isolation they will have changed as I have changed and I may not recognise them now nor they me. Perhaps I would know the pains of Christ if they did.

  A hawk circles in the blue sky. I hear it squealing. A smaller bird, a dove I think, alights on a cairn nearby, a knee-high mound of shore pebbles topped with a baby’s bib. A child lost or ailing. I watch this bird and it watches me. If this symbol of peace is a part of You then so too is that hunting hawk and the small lives it will soon destroy. In its claws. In the torn-apart animal. In each of the people on the shore below me or cleaning themselves in the dark water.

  The coming day promises to be hot, again. I should, like the others, cleanse my morning body in the water of the lake but I feel like I have grown roots on this ridge. Was it from here that She was seen? Not much detail given on the blog post but this ridge alone of all the others seems likely. I don’t know why.

  And what if everything I was told is entirely and completely true? Then a broken and contrite heart will not be despised. But maybe I must flagellate, scar. Take barbed wire as a cilice. Never stop bleeding.

  There is laughter from below. Some have gathered around a large pot and are dipping receptacles into whatever it contains. Two others, men, take toilet rolls into the trees where the latrine pit has been dug. The woman leads her child back onto the shore, the wet skin gleaming and sleek in the sun, so bright and unblemished. I have to look away.

  All changed utterly. The very mountain I sit on has been moved in its foundations which reach into the core of the entire planet where the fire is and I can feel its heat in the rock. In the air itself. Inside me and unbearable there. The worst punishment that could ever be visited upon me is not to have been shown Her face. To not have been allowed to hear Her words.

  But the flesh. The immense power of it. And why make it so weak in its resistance yet so mighty in its demands. Milton called You ‘the Great Tempter’ and I remember the names of two of them, the two most beautiful ones, and their names were Cowley and Lambert and if that is not temptation then what is? There they were in their innocence, the lamb and the cow, passive and gentle and there only for your sustenance. Do with them what you will. Enough. Never enough.

  —Good morning, Father. A shadow falls over me. It is a young woman, flesh and bone, with a bowl. —I’ve brought you some breakfast.

  The long red hair and the pale tones of the Irish. Her accent is local but her forebears no doubt came from over the Celtic Deeps.

  —Thank you.

  —I thought you looked hungry.

  —Thank you.

  Porridge. The people of these mountains sustained for millennia on not much more than what is in this bowl.

  The woman moves past me, to the highest part of the ridge. She gathers her skirts beneath her and sits and studies her
phone. Taps at it.

  Utterly changed. The world yawns open.

  And I must be like a god to them; when they close their eyes they still see only me. They’ll be middle-aged now but in them there must still be the frightened little choirboy. There is nothing that does not remind them somehow of me. And that memory judges their lives. I judge their lives; what they have done with their lives since Me is mine to monitor and assess, so deeply and utterly have they been altered and affected by what I did to them. I am them. I am everywhere. I have read about cycles of abuse and about suicide and addictions and great psychic agonies. I fill worlds.

  So weak, so weak. Tell me what to do.

  —Ah Christ. That’s really sad.

  I look up from my bowl at the woman.

  —Sorry, Father, she says, and comes down the slope in her long skirts and blazing hair towards me. —I’ve just checked out the local news. Something’s happened in the town.

  —Something’s always happening in the town, I am surprised to hear myself say.

  —I know, she says, and squats down next to me. She smells of woodsmoke and sweat. —But look at this. It’s really sad, it is.

  She tilts the handset away from the sun so that I can read the screen. The first word that appears to me out of the glare is BRIDGE.