Heartland

by Neil Cross

  David Chapple often called round to Duff Street. He came on Christmas Day, in his uniform, to rest his big, copper’s feet.

  He tried out my toys. A big policeman, still in his hat under the tinsel, bent over my presents, asking about them with real curiosity. Then he sat on the sofa and crossed his long legs at the ankle. He drank his Barley Cup, had a mince pie and wished us all a ‘Merry Christmas’, then went back on the beat.

  For my tenth birthday, Derek gave me a book called Phenomena. It was a hardback, white, with a medieval lithograph on the cover. It was about rains of fishes, stigmata, ghosts, UFOs, spontaneous human combustion. I was tormented by it.

  When I showed the book to David Chapple, he flicked through without pausing–not even to double-take on the horrible photograph of the nun. She was looking to heaven in a state of joyous ecstasy. Black blood seeped from her eyes in rivulets. Nor was David bothered by the remains of Dr John Irving Bentley. The photograph showed a walking-frame that had toppled onto a white porcelain lavatory. On the floor was a single human leg, burned off just above the knee. The foot was still obscenely clad in an old man’s soft shoe. The rest of Dr Bentley had gone. The floor beneath him had burned through, but the rest of the room was left undamaged by the fierce heat of his weird combustion. The exact circumstances of Dr Bentley’s death still required explanation.

  David closed the book, satisfied. He said, ‘So. Are you interested in this stuff?’

  I said, ‘Aye.’

  He looked at me for a long time. He made a decision. He reached into his pocket and produced his wallet. From the wallet he withdrew a photograph. He kept its face turned away from me.

  He leaned forward. He was very tall.

  He said, ‘Now I don’t want to show you this if it’s going to scare you. Because I’m telling you, it’s pretty creepy.’

  The atmosphere in the room contracted, like flesh pricked with a pin.

  I didn’t want to see it.

  I said, ‘Can I see it?’

  He gave me a twinkling look and turned the photograph.

  It showed an old churchyard; tree-bordered, well tended. The gravestones were crumbling and spotted with lichen. Above the nearest of them floated an old man. He was a shepherd. He carried a long crozier. His hair was white, blunt and clumpy, as if he’d cut it himself. His face was lined and weathered. Below the knee, his legs faded away. He looked directly at the camera.

  I looked at the photo.

  I said, ‘How did you get this?’

  David said, ‘I took it.’

  I looked at him. ‘Really,’ I said.

  ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I took it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Corstorphine.’

  I passed the photograph back to him, and he smiled at me and tucked it back into his wallet. Although it would be many years before I learned what was meant by double exposure, I knew the photograph was a fake: it was too good. But sometimes, you just can’t help believing.

  On Tuesday afternoons, the church held a youth club. I went there to cheat at volleyball and squeeze people until they passed out. Mum walked me up there. She took the dog, who stretched out like a pointer, her ears pressed close to her auburn head. She whined and strained at the leash. Mum fought to drag her to heel, yanking back on the choke-chain. But the dog was strong. She pulled and yelped. Saliva oozed from her tongue and gathered in a froth at her lips. Behind her, Mum half-jogged in her shoes, like someone being dragged by a kite. She had pain in her elbow for years, the nagging ghost of my dog.

  The youth club didn’t involve prayers or any other form of observance. It was just Mormon children playing games while their mothers met to discuss successful home-making.

  I enjoyed playing volleyball. I was the youngest player on court and the missionaries let me serve by lobbing the ball over-arm.

  Outside, when it was sunny, the children played another game. It involved a kind of resurrection. You took twenty deep breaths, deep as you could make them. You held the twentieth breath, as if you were about to duck your head under water. Then someone came up behind you, wrapped you in a bear hug and squeezed, as hard as they could.

  When they squeezed, the world went quiet. Then everything faded out like a Polaroid developing in reverse. You woke on the grass, looking up at a ring of grinning Mormon faces. You stood up, shaky, laughing, a bit scared. Then it was your turn to squeeze someone else. You counted out their twenty breaths then embraced them, hard. Their face went purple. They went limp in your arms.

  It was hard to believe they weren’t joking. Their eyes rolled back, showing white. They became semi-liquid and twice as heavy. You stumbled to catch your balance and half dumped, half-lay them in the grass. You looked at them. Their eyes were closed.

  We gathered in a circle, sniggering. We were scared that whoever lay on the grass was dead. When their eyes opened, I was one of the grinning Mormon faces they saw. I was grinning because I was pleased to see them alive. I was pleased because I was relieved. I was relieved because I didn’t want to be in trouble. It was a popular game.

  Then, under the dappled shade of a tree that overhung the church’s perimeter, a girl lay unconscious for much too long. She just lay there, like an uncurled fern. Somebody poked her with their toe. She didn’t move.

  A younger girl kneeled and reached out. She touched the silent girl’s hair. Abruptly, the girl sat upright. She looked around. She did it like a robot. Then she began to scream.

  The circle around her widened as we backed away. Our smiles flickered like old lightbulbs and died.

  The girl sat there, in the lilac shadows on the summer grass, screaming. Then she scrambled to her feet and ran away. We followed. The girl looked over her shoulder and saw us, following. She screamed even more and ran even faster.

  So we kept chasing her. But not too fast: nobody wanted to actually catch her. We drove her round the perimeter of the church. It was like the closing scene from Benny Hill. When an Elder came out to investigate the screaming, its pitch shifting like a siren as the girl ran round the church, he found her in a state of berserk hysteria.

  It took three or four missionaries to calm her down. She shrieked and struggled in their gentle grip. She scratched at their faces and pulled at their shirts and ties. She kicked and spat.

  It was hard for the rest of us to look innocent, but we tried.

  An ambulance took the girl away. She had stopped screaming by then. The ambulance men wrapped her in a grey blanket and guided her into the ambulance.

  She had run because she feared for her soul: when she woke on the grass, she’d seen the blue sky and a circle of demons, grinning maliciously down on her. When she ran, the demons followed, capering at her heels. They chased her round and round the church.

  That was the last time we played the game.

  But it was not necessary to play it in order to see demons. Demons were everywhere. The Devil squatted in the corners and the cracks, keeping counsel with the scuttling mice in their million hordes. He owned the air and the waters–Mormons, whose spiritual heartland was a desert, did not like to swim–and he dogged my footsteps. I sensed him leering in the shadows behind me.

  On my way home from school, I found an interesting scrap of jewellery. It was gold paste, set with red and blue gems. It looked like a piece of Tutankhamen’s headpiece. It was lying in the gutter. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, and when I got home I showed it to Mum.

  She frowned. She took it from me and examined it under the window. She twisted it this way and that. The light shattered into lozenges of gold and red and green that shimmered on the wall. Her brow knit even deeper. Her mouth pursed and twisted.

  She said, ‘I don’t like it. Get rid of it.’

  I said, ‘No way.’

  But Mum had sensed a powerful evil radiating from it. She threw it out the window. I watched it spinning through the air, catching the light, then falling from sight.

  On my way to school the next day, I looked for i
t. It couldn’t have fallen far from the window. But, if the Devil had put the golden paste fragment in my path, he also saw fit to remove it.

  But it wasn’t the Devil: I knew the Devil. I knew him because Derek had acquainted us. Derek told me about the terrible things people did to each other. He told me about brutality and venality and rape and mutilation. He made me watch the news when it was bad, just so I would understand what an evil place the world could be.

  To be in the dominion of the Devil was to be subjugated by terror and humiliation. It was to have stripped from you everything that was yours: your house, your family, your body, your mind.

  Evil was intelligent, but not wise. It was inventive, but not clever. It could not construct; it could only desolate. Evil was shit and blood and torn limbs and eyes rent from sockets. It was starving children suckling at the breasts of raped and murdered mothers. Evil was cannibalism and it was zombies raised from cold graves by dark gods. It was a thrashing sacrament of chicken blood and menstrual fluid. Evil was the loss of all control, all wit, all humanity. Evil was a beast.

  Evil could manifest as the Devil, who in turn could manifest as a gentleman. One day, I might even meet him, disguised as such. But, beneath his good smell and his smile there would be a faint stink, like perishing fruit and human shit. And when Satan knew you’d smelled him, he’d reveal himself; he’d show you all his boiling rage and his furious hate and his aching lust, the leaking pus and the flies and the creeping maggots of his face. His compulsion to annihilate, disfigure, putrefy.

  I knew the Devil, and I understood him, and one day on the radio I heard his voice. It was on a radio programme.

  Between August 1977 and September 1978, Peggy Harper and her four children, who lived in a council house in Enfield, were afflicted by every poltergeist phenomena ever recorded. There were unexplained sounds. Strange objects materialized. There was knocking on walls. Something unseen wrenched Peggy Harper’s daughters from their beds. It threw them across the room. Pressed them to the ceiling.

  Peggy Harper called in the Society for Psychical Research, which in turn contacted an investigator called Maurice Grosse. Soon the newspapers learned of the story. The other media were close behind.

  Maurice Grosse had made recordings of a harsh, male voice that emanated from the throat of a girl called Janet. Janet was twelve years old, the same age as the girl in The Exorcist. It claimed several identities. It discoursed in obscenities. One of its personalities claimed to be called Bill. Bill said he’d died in the house, an old man. It was this I heard on the radio, during a programme about the Enfield Poltergeist.

  A BBC journalist was interviewing Janet, who was in a trance. He asked to whom he was speaking. An abominable, guttural voice replied: ‘Bill.’

  It was the voice of an evil, unsexed, malicious old man. It was the kind of voice that belonged to men who hung around stinking public lavatories, waiting for boys my age to wander inside. The kind of man who might slit my belly with a fish knife and wolf on my insides.

  That was enough. I turned off the radio. I didn’t even want to touch it, as if it might in some way be contaminated; as if Bill might leap into the wires and travel at the speed of light, through my fingertips and into my body. I imagined his terrible, cracked voice emerging from my throat.

  At night, I tried to concentrate on Jesus, on his white robes and his soft beard and his smiling eyes. I thought about the white-teethed missionaries who let me cheat at volleyball, clapping whenever I scored an unearned point. But my mind always returned to the stinking, shivering darkness where Bill and The Exorcist lurked, like cold currents just beneath the surface of a sun-warmed river.

  I couldn’t discuss my fear of the devil, my terror of possession. I feared even to give voice to it, because to give it words would make it real. Even to think of it sent me into panic. It swelled inside me like a balloon. It swelled and I readied myself. If it should burst I’d go mad. But it always deflated and left me exhausted, like someone shipwrecked and washed up on a dirty shore. It happened at home, at school, in the street: a mushroom cloud of madness, growing inside me. Then receding. The blast wave sucking backwards.

  Alone in the darkness, I tallied it. Our block of flats was, say, 150 years old. There were four floors. One flat on the ground floor, three flats on each of the others. So, how many people had died in this building since it was built? How many had died in this flat? How many had died in my bedroom? And how many of their shades gathered to scrutinize me while I slept, crowding the square window that overlooked the hallway?

  I thought of them, purblind, wandering the cold stone floors. Jesus was barely with me then. His glow faded like a torch whose batteries are old. And I feared to pray, because to pray would admit my helplessness. The ghosts–perhaps just one of them, the most ravenous, the one with teeth and hate and a screech–would latch onto it like a radar signal and would race through the walls and into my body and it would throw me and shake me and it would milk obscenities from my mouth like turds, and Mum and Derek would find me, jammed against the ceiling, white-eyed and growling.

  There was an exorcism rite. It was one of the secrets imparted to Derek during a priesthood meeting. He told me about it. Any Mormon who sensed an evil presence should raise his right arm, bent square at the elbow, just as Elder Follett had held his arm, the evening he baptized me. He should then demand in the name of Jesus Christ that Lucifer be gone from the room.

  But the thought of Derek rushing in, throwing the door aside, and seeing me being whipped this way and that by a nameless malevolence only served to acknowledge the possibility of it.

  Still awake, I chewed on mathematics. I was ten years old. I could expect to live until I was seventy. That meant I’d already lived more than ten per cent of my entire life. I was at least ten per cent of the way to becoming a white-eyed revenant.

  At the thought of the numbers, I lurched with vertigo, as if the bed tumbled beneath me.

  Eventually, I confided to Derek that I was scared of dying. That I lay in bed, unable to sleep for thinking about it.

  He looked tender and ruminative.

  He said, ‘Perhaps Bishop Steele will guide you.’

  He took tremendous pride in this counsel. I could see it in his face. He beamed with satisfaction. But neither I nor my anxiety was the point of it. I was incidental: I had simply provided him with an opportunity to prove himself a first-rate family man, a fine Mormon, a virtuous patriarch. I saw it in his changing face. His new faith had given him another shape to adopt. And here he was, contorting himself into it. Beneath his skin, bones were easing from their joints, making new connections, new configurations.

  I didn’t go to see Bishop Steele, because I didn’t want his counsel. I wanted Derek’s. And when Mrs Elmsley in the flat below died, she became another of the ghosts who wandered the corridor outside my room, tarrying until the day came when they could return to warm child flesh.

  In bed, I read comics. The words, familiar and memorized, were like a mantra, a protective rune. By then, Mum and Derek were asleep. I could feel the darkness all around, full of hate, inhabited.

  18

  Mum became friends with a young woman called Sister Dixon. She wore a blonde pageboy, wedged at the back; men’s shirts, jumbo cords. She was from Glasgow, but she was working in Edinburgh as a school secretary.

  Mum invited her to Sunday lunch, then to Family Home Evening. Sister Dixon was lonely. Her family and friends were in Glasgow. There was some tension with her mother, some unhappiness.

  Soon, she was coming round several times a week. She brought her guitar, a six-string acoustic, resting it on her knees in the bus. She played ‘The Old Rugged Cross’.

  She was always cold. She wore big, woolly sweaters, scarves, bobble hats. She got chillblains on her thin, blue hands and feet. She wrote comical poems, one of which ended: ‘Why do I wear six pairs of socks?/It’s freezin’, that’s the reason.’

  As she and Mum grew close, it felt awkward to keep c
alling her Sister Dixon. So we just called her Yvonne.

  She was a fan of Star Wars. Her favourite character was Princess Leia, but she liked Han Solo too. (I didn’t believe that people whose favourite character was Luke Skywalker really liked Star Wars.) We went to see Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

  For Grease, we queued for hours, eating sweets and talking. That weekend, she bought me the Grease photonovel: a paperback book of film stills, captioned like a comic. And she lent me her copy of the Grease double album.

  I played it on Derek’s record player. I pretended that my favourite song was ‘Greased Lightnin”, but really it was ‘Sandy’, especially the bit when Danny Zuko wonders what they will say, on Monday at school.

  One morning, we found tatters of the album cover–Danny Zuko’s eye and quiff, the black, capped-sleeve of his T-shirt, Sandy’s virginal smile–distributed like confetti all over the room. The records were scratched and bitten and chewed. Even to me, it looked like an act of calculated malice, or perhaps suicidal self-hatred. But I still wept when Derek beat the dog for it.

  She showed her teeth. He slapped her in the snout, open-handed, for her insolence. Her head whipped to the side and he slapped it back straight, so she was looking at him while he hit her. The dog had caused him to be embarrassed: had destroyed someone else’s property, forcing him to apologize. More than anything, Derek hated to be embarrassed. It made the power go out of him.

  Yvonne took me to the Science Fiction Bookshop. She bought me a book called Doc Savage: Man of Bronze. We went to see Airplane!, and The Empire Strikes Back. At some point, the half-joke about being my sister stopped being a joke at all.

  She began to call my mother ‘Ma’. Although Mum had not been with her own at their weddings or the birth of their children, she accepted Yvonne as a daughter.

  And so we became a bigger, wholly fictitious family. I had a sister who was not my sister, and a dad who was not my dad. My sister was in no way related to the woman she called Ma, and she called the man I knew as Dad by his first name.