My Brother's Ghost

by Allan Ahlberg

  I saw Tom. I did see Tom. He was there in the water with me. And shouting (in the water, under it).

  ‘Swim, Fran, swim!’

  But Tom must know I couldn't swim, even without this… heaviness.

  ‘Fran!’

  Tom's gravelly voice was a shock in my ear. My drifting foot grazed the bottom or, more likely, some submerged pram or other bit of rubbish. I tensed my leg, kicked and rose again. One final effort. My head broke the surface.

  ‘Yell, Frances!’ Tom shouted. ‘Yell, yell, YELL!’

  I rolled upon my back for a second and glimpsed the blue-black sky. And yelled.

  The Hospital

  I WAS RESCUED FROM the waters of the Tipton canal by thirty-seven-year-old Mr Arthur Finch, a self-employed carpenter of 109 Brass House Lane, West Bromwich. (I have confidence in these details. I still have the newspaper cutting.) Apparently Harry had raced back up onto the bridge seeking help. Meanwhile Mr Finch had come along the towpath on his bike, heard my cries and dived in fully clothed. His wife, Mrs Muriel Finch, was reported as being unsurprised by her husband's behaviour. He was always a hero in her eyes, she said.

  One other thing, while I remember: Mr Finch, having got me onto the towpath, dived in again, convinced as he was that someone else was in there. He had heard two voices, you see.

  I experienced nothing of the rescue itself, being unconscious even before my saviour reached me. (Those yells were literally my last gasp.) When I came round some hours later, I was in a hospital bed. The ward was dark, with pools and patches of light, green and yellow walls, two rows of beds along its length.

  I lay quite still, staring up at the ceiling. After a time I noticed a huddled figure at the side of the bed. It was Marge, fast asleep with her glasses askew and her handbag in her lap. The bed felt cool, the sheets stretched taut like the sails of a ship, the pillow thin and hard. A baby was crying somewhere. There was the sharp sour smell of disinfectant. I drifted off.

  Dreaming. And in my dream I was drowning again, only this time in the sea. And Dad and Harry were looking for me, up and down the beach. And I was there. There! But they never saw me.

  I woke again. Streaks of grey and pinkish light at the windows. Marge's seat was vacant. A nurse passed down the centre aisle carrying a tray. Tom was watching me from the end of the bed.

  Tom, my other rescuer (no place for him, though, in the Warley Weekly News). He moved and stood beside me. Smiled, leant over, and put his hand on mine.

  I felt it – did I? I did, though half asleep and woozy from the medicine they'd given me. It wasn't much of a touch, hardly ‘substantial’, more like the flimsiest, frailest piece of cloth falling on you; a feeling of graininess, texture. Not much, but something, surely, more than mere empty air.

  The nurse came back and approached the bed. She stood where Tom was standing, took my pulse. Tom moved aside. He watched the nurse, waiting for her to leave. He gazed out of one of the rapidly brightening windows. He turned his collar down.

  Getting Better

  I WAS EXTREMELY ILL for a while, detained in the hospital for nearly three weeks. The swallowed water was responsible. I caught some kind of fever from it. That Tipton canal almost did for me twice over, you might say. But then I began to get well. Marge and Stan, and Harry too, came every evening to see me. Mrs Harris came with a basket of fruit. Later on she came again with a copy of Black Beauty that all the children in the school, she said, had clubbed together to buy. I seem to remember she brought two or three children with her. (I still have the book.)

  Then what? Out of the hospital, back to home and school. Before I knew it, it was the summer holidays. Marge and Stan took us on a train to Weston-super-Mare. We stayed in a caravan. I'm not sure where they got the money from; Stan was still out of a job.

  Speaking of money, those sixpences, the ones I took for running away with, were never mentioned. I've always wondered, did Marge most likely find them in my pocket, or had they disappeared into the canal? Are they there still, sunken treasure? Who knows.

  Something else that was never mentioned was Canada. Odd letters still arrived but otherwise it just fell out of the conversation. I never knew why. Then in the autumn Stan got a job.

  I guess we couldn't know it at the time, but all that business with the canal, the fever and so on was to prove the lowest point not just for me but for the others too. The curve of all our lives after that more or less went up.

  So Stan got a job, and a good one, at Guest, Keen and Nettlefolds. A month or so later, with Christmas approaching, we moved into a new house, a council semi, with a garden all to itself backing onto the park. Spring came. Stan acquired a small greenhouse, Harry and I had our own little plots and Rufus took great delight in the prospect of the park, his absolutely favourite place for a walk.

  In the summer it was Marge's turn for a new job. She gave up cleaning and went to work in a shop. Marge. I suspect I may have been too hard on Marge. Anyway, she improved. Her temper was still uncertain. She yelled at us at times but never hit us again. We became less afraid of her. Once she threw a teacup straight through the (closed) kitchen window for some reason or other – not at us, not at anybody. After which, appalled by her own action, she looked at me and both of us burst out laughing. (I could hardly ever remember Marge laughing before.)

  As for Tom, he was his usual unusual self. He found his way to our new house, spent time with me and Harry in our now separate rooms, accompanied us to school. He disappeared too, sometimes for a whole week. On one occasion he found himself in the Plaza cinema in Brierley Hill watching a war movie. On another he spent the entire day at a cricket match, Warwickshire versus Surrey. Tom was not even interested in cricket.

  Then, in the spring of 1958, surprising news: I'd passed the Eleven Plus (the entrance exam for the local grammar school). I was, it turned out, cleverer than we knew. Mrs Harris was flabbergasted. Rosalind likewise, although she also passed. Marge went mad… with delight. She it was who first read the letter and yelled to Stan about it and hurtled (yelling) up the stairs to me. Marge, I never thought to see the day, was proud of me.

  That morning I went to school with a glow on my cheeks and my Eleven Plus letter in my hand. Tom walked beside me. It was then that for the very first time I noticed it: I was taller than him.

  Tom's Compass

  HE WAS TEN WHEN it happened, and I was nine and Harry was three. Now I was eleven and Harry was five and Tom was still ten. (Keep going: at the time of writing, I am fifty-two – good grief! – Harry is forty-six and Tom, wherever he is, is ten.)

  That's how it was. That's what being a ghost, Tom discovered, was all about, or partly about. (He of course had noticed what was happening long before we did.)

  So the years passed and we moved on and Tom stayed where he was, marooned. His appearance never changed, not one unruly hair on his head. His voice, though, modulated somewhat in time to a lighter, more normal pitch, either that or I just got used to it. His conversation became even quirkier, like random bits of a jigsaw puzzle or peculiar crossword clues. He would disappear now, often for weeks on end, and then show up looking dazed. He rarely spoke of his ghost life. Questions about it appeared unsettling to him. We gave up asking them.

  I worried about him. He seemed so much smaller with the years, frailer, sadder. I wanted to help but never found the means. There again, how hard it is sometimes to capture the truth. For Tom was also funny and relaxed. It amused him to have this huge and hulking little sister, this giant of a baby brother. And he watched out for us still, charted his course to intersect our lives. He had no map perhaps, but he had a compass.

  When I was thirteen, I had my caliper removed and replaced by a special shoe (a thicker sole and heel). Marge became manageress of the shop she worked in. At fourteen I started going out with Roger Horsfield, my first boyfriend. Harry, now nine and soon to be the tallest of us all, was playing football every evening in the park. He was a prodigy already and later was to play for West Bromwich
Albion reserves.

  Rufus was by this time an elderly dog. He stumbled around, not seeing very well. The furniture was safe with him.

  When I was fifteen, Rufus died.

  Leaving

  SO HERE I SIT forty years on writing all this down. It's late afternoon, October, a sudden sharpness in the air, red-golden leaves out on the lawn, my dear cat, Muggs, prowling the shrubbery.

  And I begin to wonder, did these things happen? Did I see them, hear them, smell them? Have I remembered it, all of it, truly, as it really was? Is nothing made up?

  I don't know. Harry, I mentioned earlier, has been reading what I've written and he confirms the gist of it. (But he was only three when it began.) Memories of course are insubstantial (like ghosts!). There again, things are real, and I still have my box. It's here beside me on the table as I write: the bracelet, the newspaper cutting, Tom's cigarette cards. And when I hold these items in my hand and spread them out… and smell them, I feel a rush of pure conviction. My doubts dissolve.

  We buried Rufus in the garden, Harry and I. It was quite early in the morning. We agreed a spot with Stan and dug the hole. Rufus's little body was stiff already. (Rufus was a mongrel terrier, I don't believe I ever mentioned that.) He looked so normal, lying on his side, his stubby tail, the grey hair round his muzzle, his one brown-circled eye. We covered him over, patted the soil into place.

  Rufus's ghost showed up in the garden on the following afternoon. I saw him from the kitchen window. There was only me in the house. I ran outside. It was midsummer, a hot and cloudless day. Rufus staggered towards me. I knelt and held out a hand. It was of course no use. Rufus blundered on and through me. His water bowl was still in its place outside the kitchen door. Poor Rufus reached the bowl, butted his head down into it and lapped vainly at the puddle of water it contained. After a while he gave up. Moments later, with a terrible slowed-down grinding sort of sound, Rufus barked.

  For two days Rufus continued to appear before us (Harry and me), almost always in the garden. He was a pitiful sight: slow, stumbling, bewildered. He could not fathom his new relationship to people and things. He kept trying to make contact. On the evening of the third day, Tom arrived.

  Rufus was lying on the little patch of slabs outside the kitchen door. Tom came up to him, knelt down and ruffled his fur. I saw the fur move. Rufus rolled over and almost managed a leap. He collided joyfully with Tom. I saw the impact. He licked Tom's hand. I saw the shine of his saliva on Tom's skin.

  Tom took Rufus's lead out of his pocket; a ghostly lead for a ghostly dog. (Had it been there all those years?) Rufus quivered as he'd always done at the prospect of a walk. Tom gave me a smile and a wave. He led Rufus away, across the garden, through the fence and into the trees. A kite was dipping and swinging above them in the sky; distant children shouting in the park.

  We never saw Tom again (or Rufus), though we looked for him on and off for years. My brother's ghost is gone and it's all for the best. He's somewhere (that's the most you can say), has Rufus with him, and is working it out.