Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  The car rocked, suspended at the start of its descent. On the rim of the footplate a line of red lightbulbs bobbed like fishing floats, then came to rest. Under him something metallic clanged against another piece of metal. The wheel juddered forward an inch, another inch, another inch, and stopped again. ‘Alexander!’ his mother cried out. She ran into his sight, waving her arms; miniature black cars circled behind her, on a roundabout for small children. ‘Keep calm,’ she called. ‘Alexander. Can you hear me? They’ll get it going in a minute. Stay calm, Alexander. Stay calm,’ she kept repeating, but there was no need, for he was no longer upset, not in the slightest. He gazed over the Heath, where the blades of grass seemed to stand to attention in the headlights of the cars, and then he surveyed the fairground, carefully, as if it were an interesting picture spread out below him. Here and there stood groups of people who were looking in his direction; new groups were forming on every path, and from the farther parts of the fairground they were coming nearer. The hats and headscarves moved between the stalls like leaves flowing on water towards a drain. Over the wall of the park he could see the paths that ran under the black foliage of the trees. Wings clattered somewhere among the leaves, but no birds appeared; he imagined the grass alive with nocturnal animals, foraging on the slopes where people cycled in the day. The park was transformed into an enclave of forest, but he understood that he could only observe this forest and never be in it, because it would cease to be a forest if anybody was in it. He told himself that he would be happy to stay all night where he was, and see the sun come up over the houses, and the park become a park again.

  He realised that the steam organ had fallen silent. The horses had ceased prancing on the biggest of the merry-go-rounds, but a girl remained seated on one of them, pointing straight at him and laughing. Alexander waved to her, and leaned forward to wave to the people gathered around the booth below. His mother had one hand to her mouth and with the other was waving to him with her fingers, while his father was chatting to the woman with the hair-curlers as if he were simply talking to an acquaintance in a shop.

  ‘Sit back,’ his mother called, making the motion of pushing at a door. His father glanced up and appeared to nod commendingly to him before resuming his conversation with the woman, who turned away briefly to shout ‘Hurry it up, for God’s sake,’ to someone hidden from view by the floor of the car. ‘Sit back, Alexander,’ his mother called, and it was then he noticed that a man with a panama hat was standing to her side, watching her as she gestured. Alexander watched the man follow her line of sight upward. ‘Alexander, please sit back,’ his mother cried. The man’s eyes were trained on Alexander’s face for a few seconds, then traced the track of his mother’s gaze back down to her face. ‘Alexander! Now!’ his mother demanded, unaware that she was being watched. Alexander lay down on the bench. He regarded the stars for a while, and fell asleep in the mild summer night’s air.

  He awoke with a spasm of the machinery and found that he was slowly returning to the ground. The woman with the hair-curlers took him by the hand and passed him to his mother as though he had gone missing and she had discovered him. ‘You’ll be the death of me, young man,’ said his mother, sandwiching his head between her hands. ‘I told you it was dangerous, and then you make it worse. Messing around like that.’

  ‘I wasn’t messing around,’ he replied.

  ‘Give me patience,’ said his mother to nobody. She held him tightly against her side and sniffed. Under her arm he saw the man in the panama giving a small white card to his father.

  ‘We’ll consider it,’ his father was saying. The man raised his hat as they shook hands.

  ‘Hello, Alexander,’ said the man, bracing his hands on his knees to greet him. His eyebrows bounced up and down as he smiled. ‘You handled that situation with aplomb, I must say,’ he remarked, narrowing his eyes admiringly. With a thumb he scratched the bristles in the hollow beneath his lower lip. ‘Not to be flattered, eh? I like that in a chap,’ said the man. Obtaining no response, he straightened his back and turned down the brim of his hat. ‘Extraordinary,’ he muttered. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr MacIndoe, Mrs MacIndoe,’ said the man, making a bow to each of them. ‘An extraordinary child,’ he remarked. He wriggled his neck to settle the fit of his collar and strode away across the fairground as if he were going to greet someone, but he walked past the tombola stall and kept going, through the wall of caravans, across the road and onto the Heath.

  ‘Who was that?’ Alexander asked.

  ‘Nobody in particular,’ replied his father, interrupting his mother before she could utter anything more than the first syllable of his name. ‘Someone who fancied a yatter, that’s all.’

  The following Friday evening, at bedtime, Alexander’s mother told him that the next day they were going up to town, just the two of them. ‘A sort of adventure,’ she said. Tantalisingly she flourished the small white card, which had something written on the side that was not printed. ‘We’ll have a bit of a laugh.’ In the morning she made him wash his hair, and she washed her own as soon as he was out of the bathroom. When she came downstairs her lips were made up the way Mrs Darling did hers. They were going to see the man in the panama hat, Alexander knew, and this made him feel uneasy and vaguely ashamed of his mother. On the platform of the Underground station he noticed her surreptitiously checking the handwritten words on the card. ‘Where are we going?’ he shouted over the roar of the arriving train.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she replied, wincing at the noise and the gritty air. ‘It’ll be fun,’ she assured him, but she fussed at his hair as if she were taking him to an examination.

  They came back above ground in a place that was not like the streets around his house. There were more cars here, and fewer shops. The paving stones were perfectly level, and the houses were taller and had rows of bell-pushes beside the entrance. Some of the houses were made of bricks that were dark red and smooth.

  ‘Which way’s the river from here?’ Alexander asked, and he would remember the way his mother put her hand on the pillar of the Belisha beacon as she looked one way up the street and then the other way, like an explorer taking her bearings in a jungle clearing.

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she said. ‘Which way is it to Timbuktu?’ she asked him.

  It was as though she had known what he had been thinking as she stood beside the beacon, and instantly Alexander was cheerful for the first time that morning. ‘I’d really like it if you’d tell me where we’re going,’ he said, sensing that this time she would tell him.

  ‘We’re going to have our picture taken,’ she replied, and the next moment she stopped walking. They were at an open door, beside a clothes shop. She consulted the card again. ‘We’re here,’ she announced, reaching for a hand.

  At the end of a corridor that smelled of paste there was a flight of stairs, and at the top of the stairs there was a door of ribbed glass through which Alexander could see something pink and conical. ‘Please enter’ he read from a card that was attached to a sucker on the wall. His mother let him turn the handle, and as the door opened he saw a fat little girl in a pink frilly dress, holding the hand of a woman with a fierce fat face. A very short man with wide braces over his dirty white shirt was writing something in one of the squares of a calendar that hung above a filing cabinet. That he was not the man in the panama hat both relieved and confused Alexander.

  ‘Goodbye, Elizabeth. Mrs Gordon,’ said the short man.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Stevens,’ replied the woman rapidly, and she pushed past Alexander without acknowledging him or his mother.

  ‘Mrs MacIndoe and Alexander,’ said the man, looking at them appreciatively, with his hands on his hips. ‘Ha ha,’ he exclaimed. ‘Sounds like a music-hall act, doesn’t it?’ His eyes were perfectly circular and his brow wrinkled, which made him look as if he’d just heard something that had surprised him pleasantly. Flakes of white skin, like the fraying skin of a mushroom, stuck to the sides of his nose. ‘Harold St
evens,’ he said, and smiled widely. Not one of his teeth was at the same angle as any other. ‘Alexander?’ he enquired, with the look of a delivery man estimating a parcel’s weight. ‘Who else could it be?’ Mr Stevens answered himself. ‘This won’t take much of your time, Mrs MacIndoe. All has been arranged, has it not? The quid pro quo, as it were?’

  ‘It has,’ said Alexander’s mother.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Mr Stevens. ‘Follow me, if you’d be so good.’

  Sunlight sparkled on the floor of the inner room, most intensely in front of the platform that was built against the wall on their right. On the platform, in front of a placard of plain black paper, there was a brand new stove with a smooth yellow door that looked like a huge half-melted slab of butter and had the word ‘Bovis’ in sloping silver letters above the handle. At the far end of the room stood a big black camera on a tripod, its concertina lens pointing towards a young man who was hurling plump blue cushions onto a settee. ‘Colin, my assistant,’ said Mr Stevens, gesturing at the young man. Like a cymbals player Colin banged two cushions together, raising a smoulder of dust from each. Mr Stevens aimed his hand at a door beyond the platform. ‘Colin will get you ready, Alexander. Colin, if you’d be so good? I am grateful. Mrs MacIndoe, if you’d follow Colin too?’

  ‘Your things are behind there, Mrs MacIndoe,’ said Colin when they were in the other room, indicating a folding cloth screen with willows painted on it. ‘And this is your kit,’ he told Alexander, lifting a towel from a pile of school clothes that lay folded on the seat of a chair. The uniform had never been worn before: the cuffs of the shirt were as hard as tea cups, and the toe caps of the shoes had not a single dent in them. Colin aligned the knot of Alexander’s tie then slung an empty leather satchel over his shoulder.

  ‘The model schoolboy,’ his mother remarked as she came out from behind the screen. ‘Perhaps Colin should get you ready every day.’ She had a different dress on, and a starched white apron over it.

  ‘You’ll be needing this,’ said Colin, and he thrust a wooden spoon into her hand. ‘The master awaits,’ he told them, in a voice that dragged with the dreariness of his duties. He held the door open and waved them through like a traffic policeman.

  In the main room Mr Stevens was straightening the skirt of black material that hung from the back of the camera, and another man was entering from the office, combing his hair as he walked.

  ‘This is Mr Darby,’ said Mr Stevens. ‘Mr Darby will be completing our – ensemble.’

  Mr Darby had a face as smooth and symmetrical as a shopwindow dummy’s, and like a dummy’s outfit his white shirt and grey suit had no creases. He combed back his oily forelock, so it stood up like a little grille, and said ‘Hi,’ instead of ‘Hello’.

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Darby,’ said Alexander’s mother.

  ‘Call me Geoff,’ he replied with a smile that went up as if pulled by wires. ‘Irene, right?’

  ‘And Alexander,’ said his mother.

  Mr Darby peered at Alexander over his mother’s shoulder; he might have been looking over a wall at a guard dog. ‘Hi, kid. Things OK?’ he asked, turning straight away to Mr Stevens. ‘Come on, Harry, let’s go. Tempus fugit.’ Mr Darby leaped onto the podium and took up a position behind the stove, jerking the sleeves of his jacket and then his cuffs.

  Mr Stevens manoeuvred Alexander and his mother into their places around the stove, on which Colin set a big copper pot and a snow-white saucepan. Mr Darby put his hand on Irene MacIndoe’s shoulder and looked into the copper pot. ‘Yum yum,’ he said heavily, ‘that does look so good. Get that spoon in there, girl, and give it a stir.’

  A muffled voice came out of the head of the one-eyed, five-legged creature that was watching Alexander and his mother and Mr Darby. ‘Mrs MacIndoe, could you raise your right hand a bit, and keep your left by your side? That’s good. And look as if you’ve found fifty pounds in among the carrots. The imaginary carrots. That’s good, Mrs MacIndoe.’ Like a monstrous spider a hand crept out from the pleats of the cloth and advanced to the front of the camera, where it writhed around the lens and then retreated. ‘Come on, Geoff, look keen,’ said the voice. ‘This blasted stove is the best thing that’s happened to you since I don’t know what.’

  ‘The weekend?’ suggested Mr Darby. He made a movement with his lips as if dislodging something from between his teeth.

  The skirt of the camera bulged and out slipped Mr Stevens’ head. ‘Alexander, could you move in a bit closer?’ he requested. ‘And look at the pot, not the camera. Try to forget I’m here.’ He raised the cloth, drew a deep breath like a diver, and ducked under. ‘Nearly there, Alexander, nearly there. Left foot forward a bit. Perhaps tiptoes? And not quite so glum?’

  ‘Smile at me, Alexander,’ said his mother, and this was the moment of the day that he would remember most clearly: her damp red lips smiling into the vacant copper pot, while the fingers of her left hand shook against her thigh.

  ‘The quid pro quo,’ Alexander repeated quietly to himself, and the comical words made his face adjust itself to Mr Stevens’ satisfaction.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Mr Stevens. ‘Excellent. Don’t move.’ There was a flash into which everything vanished, and then the room seemed to assemble itself quickly out of the white air, wobbling for a second before standing firm. Alexander blinked. He saw a room that was colourless and stood like a ghost in front of the real room. He blinked again and the phantom room was fainter, and smaller, as if it were retreating. ‘One more, everyone,’ Mr Stevens called. Again everything disappeared and rushed back, and Alexander blinked to see the ghostly room.

  ‘Thank you, Alexander. Very professional,’ said Mr Stevens, satisfied at last, and then he dropped a spent flashbulb into Alexander’s hand. Waiting for his mother to change out of the borrowed clothes, Alexander rolled the warm bulb on his palm. In the pock-marked glass he saw the grey of railway lines in the rain, the grey of the silted riverbank below the power station in Greenwich, the grey of the ash in the Doodlebug House. This he would remember too, and he would remember looking up to see his mother in the doorway to the back room, where Mr Darby stood in her way and said something to her. She lowered her eyes, then after ten seconds or so she smiled at Mr Darby as if he had said something amusing, though it appeared he had said nothing. She reached into Mr Darby’s pocket, drew out his comb, snapped it in half and dropped the halves on the floor. Having wiped her fingers on the door jamb, she hurried across the shining floor, her heels hammering on the tiles.

  ‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr Stevens,’ she said, and snatched Alexander’s hand in passing.

  ‘And vice versa,’ replied Mr Stevens to her back. ‘Goodbye, Alexander.’

  As the door to the office closed, Alexander turned to see Mr Stevens laughing with Mr Darby, who was fanning his hand in front of his mouth, miming an endless yawn.

  ‘What happened?’ Alexander asked his mother on the stairs.

  ‘A very rude man,’ she said, placing the back of a hand on her reddened cheeks. ‘A very disagreeable person.’

  ‘I didn’t like him,’ said Alexander.

  ‘Quite right,’ she told him.

  ‘Smarmy.’

  ‘Smarmy,’ she agreed, but she was making them walk so fast they could not talk, and on the train she sat in silence, glaring at the window as if her reflected face were Mr Darby’s.

  The advertisement appeared in Every Woman magazine near the end of the year, next to a knitting pattern and opposite an advertisement in which a boy of Alexander’s age was striding along a road in a countryside of wheat fields and sheep and thatched cottages, with a spiral of steam rising from a mug in the foreground, above the slogan ‘It’s The Only Way To Start The Day!’ The road and fields and cottages were painted, not real, and the vista of cupboards and shelves behind his mother and Mr Darby was unreal as well, like a pencil tracing rather than a photograph.

  His father leaned back in his chair and brought the page close to his
face. ‘A peculiar scene all right, son,’ he said. ‘Looks like no kitchen I’ve ever been in. And as for Mr Handsome, the cuckoo in the nest.’ He shook his head in histrionic sorrow.

  ‘Your idea as well as mine,’ said Alexander’s mother, turning her embroidery frame. ‘We got a good deal.’

  ‘Imagine, son. Your poor old dad not wanted on voyage. Insufficient juttiness of jaw. The humiliation of it.’ He put down the magazine and picked up his newspaper, but as soon as they were left alone he turned to Alexander and whispered behind his hand, like a classmate playing a prank: ‘Borrow your pencil?’

  Alexander sat on the arm of the chair and watched his father draw a goatee moustache and glasses on the man, and then a speech bubble from Alexander’s mouth. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he wrote in the bubble.

  Their laughter brought Alexander’s mother back. ‘What’s funny?’ she asked, drying her hands on a tea-towel, and Alexander displayed the advertisement. ‘Which one of you two infants did that, then?’ she demanded, not smiling.

  ‘He did,’ said Alexander’s father, handcuffing his son with his fingers.

  ‘Idiot.’

  ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity,’ his father replied, for which he received a swat on the back of the head with the newspaper. ‘I’ll get you another one,’ he laughed.

  ‘You will indeed,’ said Alexander’s mother.