Ghost MacIndoe

by Jonathan Buckley

  The conversation slumped, and then Philip picked up a newspaper that had been left on the grass. ‘We should check the personals,’ he told Esa.

  ‘Why?’ Esa asked, seemingly responding to the edge of malice in Philip’s voice.

  ‘Because I happen to know that Katherine – you know Katherine? Room six?’

  ‘She is horrible,’ Esa asserted.

  ‘Philip,’ said Jane, reaching for the newspaper.

  ‘What, my love?’

  ‘Put it down.’

  ‘Katherine, I happen to know,’ Philip went on, raising his voice, ‘has placed an advertisement in today’s issue, and I was wondering if we could find it, that’s all.’

  ‘Don’t, Philip,’ said Jane. ‘It’s not kind.’

  ‘That would be a serviceable description of the fragrant Katherine,’ Philip retorted, and he began to read. ‘“Diehard romantic, bloodied but not beaten, ready for more punishment.” Could be. “Gold-digger seeks sugardaddy.” Nope. “Bored? Wanna f asterisk asterisk k? Send pic – this might be our lucky day.” Too brazen. Not our Katie.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Jane, taking the corkscrew from Alexander. ‘Claudia, could you pass that bottle?’

  Bringing the page into focus, Philip continued: ‘“Female bla 35 bla bla attractive bla bla bla fine wines, books, travel bla bla bla bla companionship bla bla bla bla bla love.” Might be, might be. By the way, Jane, did I tell you the rumour about Katie and Kennedy? Mr Kennedy, our principal,’ he explained to Sam.

  ‘We don’t want to hear.’

  ‘Yes, we do. I think we do,’ Philip responded, looking questioningly at Claudia and Matteo. ‘Everyone likes a bit of gossip.’

  ‘Not everyone,’ said Jane, inclining her head to Liz. ‘Particularly about people they don’t know.’

  ‘It’s a good story, I promise. Skulduggery, duplicity and a spice of romance.’ Grinning, he rubbed his hands together as if massaging oil into his skin. ‘We could put it to the vote. Anyone not want to hear an exemplary tale of office politics?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Philip,’ Jane objected.

  ‘For God’s sake what?’

  ‘Enough.’

  Alexander raised a hand. Liz and Sam followed, and then Rosana, shrinkingly, looking at Alexander as though for permission.

  ‘That would appear to be a clear majority,’ said Jane, receiving from Philip an affronted glare that slid onto Alexander’s face and became a hard smile.

  ‘It really was a funny story,’ Philip told him. ‘Lessons to be learned from it. Ah well. You’ll never know now,’ he said, and he smiled to himself as if he thought he had in some way defeated Alexander.

  ‘We should get going soon,’ said Liz, and Rosana looked at her watch.

  But they all stayed in the garden for another half-hour, until all the wine had gone, and then Jane called a taxi for the inebriated Esa, who was escorted up the path by Matteo, with Rosana and Claudia and Philip in single file behind them. Liz and Sam were ready to leave when Philip came back, but he insisted on making coffee for them and was tripping up the steps before they could get out of their seats. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jane dejectedly. ‘He’s worried about work. About losing his job. Half of them are going to have to go.’

  ‘No security anywhere any more,’ Sam commiserated. ‘You’re over the hill at fifty.’

  ‘Sam thought he was for the chop last year, didn’t you?’ said Liz, putting a hand on his knee.

  ‘I did. Pushed aside by a pimply youth the moment your back’s turned. But I’m a dirty fighter. More than a match for the pimples. For a few more years, anyway. You two are all right, though,’ Sam said, nodding at Jane and Alexander. ‘No whippersnappers to worry about in your line of work.’

  ‘We die in the saddle,’ Alexander agreed, and Jane looked away from the house to smile at Sam.

  A quarter of an hour later, as Philip still had not reappeared, Jane went inside. She returned straight away, to report that Philip was asleep. She offered to make them coffee, if they didn’t mind a short wait. Sam and Liz thanked her but said it was a long drive and it was getting late. They collected their coats from Alexander’s flat and he walked with them to the road.

  Alexander helped Jane carry the glasses and bottles and plates up into the kitchen. Philip lay on the settee, on his back, with his arms thrown upwards, his right leg bent on the cushions and his left heel dug into the folds of the rug. He looked, Jane said, as if he were pretending to have been gunned down. Alexander ran the water into the bowl. In the garden, the light of the guttering candles gave the white plastic chairs the sheen of alabaster. ‘Guess what I came across the other day?’ said Jane, standing behind him. ‘That picture of us in Edinburgh. By the castle. We looked good.’ She took a plate from him. ‘The clothes are shocking though,’ she said after a silence, and then there was another pause. ‘Worst thing is,’ she continued, ‘I look at the picture and then I look at myself in the mirror, and what I think I should see is the face in the picture. But the face in the mirror isn’t me. It’s like I’m looking through my face. You wouldn’t know what that’s like.’

  ‘I would,’ he said.

  Slowly she gave the plate a last wipe. ‘No, Alexander. You wouldn’t,’ she said, incontrovertibly, and he did not contradict her. Neither of them spoke again for several minutes, until Jane asked: ‘What did you think of the film?’

  ‘A bit impractical, I’d say.’

  ‘A bit nonsensical,’ she said.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do it, would you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Making a fool of yourself with a gang of students.’

  ‘Exactly. It won’t happen.’

  Jane looked out at the empty chairs. ‘They’ve always been happy, haven’t they?’ she asked after an extended silence, as if a realisation had surfaced in her mind.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sam and Liz.’

  ‘I think they probably have.’

  ‘They’re nice,’ said Jane. ‘I always liked them.’ She went into the living room to put a cushion underneath Philip’s head. She sat down in an armchair, and closed her eyes. Alexander ran another bowl of water to wash the glasses. When that job was done he went out into the garden to blow out the candles.

  53. Creeping Jesus

  Early in the morning Alexander walked along the seafront to the marina, as he often did on a Saturday. The tide had been high the previous night, leaving a belt of pebbles and seaweed rags and plastic bottles on the path below the cliff, and shallow pools that shone like sheets of aluminium foil in the cold sunlight. At the harbour he sat on a wall for a while, as was his habit. He listened to the thuds of the hulls and the chittering of the cables against the masts, sounds that reminded him of mornings on holiday when he was a boy, when he would go outside before his parents were awake to stand in the lane, listening to the sounds of the animals and machinery in the surrounding farms. A man in a yellow jacket emerged onto the deck of a boat and knelt beside a spool of rope; the engine coughed and a roll of smoke appeared over the lane of oily water between the wharves. Alexander watched the boat move out to the harbour mouth, and then he walked back. The newsagents’ shops were opening as he passed through the centre of town.

  He did some paperwork on the patio outside his kitchen. Late in the morning an old RAF plane with fresh roundels and crisp green camouflage flew low overhead, and the noise brought Jane out onto the terrace. Turning to follow the plane over the rooftops, she noticed Alexander at his table. ‘Thought it was an earthquake,’ she commented, and she went indoors without saying anything more. Half an hour later she reappeared, to invite him upstairs for some lunch. Philip was at a conference for the day, she said, so he could come up whenever he liked.

  There was a shower of rain around midday, and when it was over Jane put two chairs on the terrace, facing the garden. They ate from trays, watching the droplets glinting within the rhododendron bushes as they fell from
leaf to leaf and made them bob. She asked him, as if she were addressing an uncle, if he could remember the bombers in the war, and he told her about the plates shaking on the sideboard, and putting his hand on a steel bar in the cellar of his house to feel it vibrate like a pipe through which water was running.

  Shortly after Alexander returned to his flat he heard music from upstairs. The orchestra continued for a while and then stopped, in a manner that did not sound like an ending. For several minutes he waited for the music to start again, but it did not. He put down the book he had been reading and went into the bedroom. Through the window he saw Jane. She was standing at the end of the garden, staring at the ground underneath a rhododendron. Folding her arms, she seemed to contemplate the thing she saw. She turned a quarter-circle, but then the impulse to act appeared to leave her, and she lowered her head. Ticks of rain were accumulating on the window, yet she stayed where she was, staring at the ground. Alexander went out into the garden. She looked up at him as he approached, and smiled wanly. When he asked her what was wrong she did not answer, but bowed her head once more, directing her gaze at a patch of soil. Alexander spoke her name, and she raised a hand towards him and blindly her fingers brushed his arm. ‘Jane?’ he repeated. She raised her face into the drizzle, and then she led him into the house.

  She took him into the living room, where the television was on, but with the sound turned off. A horse race was in progress. ‘Sit down,’ she requested, patting the seat of the leather armchair, beside which, on a folded newspaper, sat a cold cup of coffee. ‘Here’s something,’ Jane said, lifting a video cassette from the top of the television. Expressionless, she held the cassette between her fingertips and twirled it. She held it towards Alexander, showing the label, on which a word was written in turquoise ink.

  ‘I can’t read it,’ said Alexander.

  ‘Neither can I,’ she replied. ‘It was in there,’ she said, pointing to a sports bag that lay open near the door. ‘The bag wasn’t there. The bag was under the stairs. I had to read the meter, and there it was,’ she explained. ‘A few things in there could do with a wash, I thought, so I dragged the bag out, and found this.’ She grasped the cassette and shook it at him. ‘A strange place to file a video, I thought. Strange handwriting. It aroused my curiosity. And I found myself watching it, like an idiot.’ She posted the cassette into the player and sat on the settee to watch it.

  The racehorses vanished and were replaced by the figure of Alexander, pushing an empty wheelbarrow across the lawn. He watched himself cross the grass, moving into and out of focus. The door of the shed opened and he stepped forward into blackness. Instantly the image flared and then settled, like the surface of a pond becoming calm after the impact of a stone. Now he was stooping to inspect the blue asters, which in the film were purple.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he told her.

  ‘You will,’ said Jane. ‘Give it a bit longer.’

  By the Zebra carnations he stopped and gazed upwards. The camera tracked his gaze to the sky, found nothing of interest, and returned to Alexander’s face.

  ‘I look like a half-wit,’ he commented. A wry smile, directed at the screen, was Jane’s only reply. He concentrated on the television, wondering what was the intended object of his concentration. ‘When was this?’ he asked.

  ‘I have no idea, Alex,’ she replied, raising a finger discreetly to the eye he could not see. ‘Some time last year.’

  Alexander’s face, swelling to fill the picture, blurred and ceased to be a face. Then he was back at the door of the shed, oiling the blades of the shears. ‘I still don’t get it,’ he said again.

  ‘Oh, Alex,’ she rebuked him tearfully. ‘Think for a second. Look. It’s obvious.’ She took aim with the remote control and pressed the pause button. Marooned mid-stride on a lawn of luminescent grass, the figure of Alexander shuddered in a deluge of white needles. ‘Ask yourself: where was the camera?’ She set the figure walking again, then froze it. ‘Couldn’t have been on this floor, could it? The angle’s not right. Couldn’t have been from here,’ she said. ‘Now, who do you think was pointing a camera at you, from upstairs? Why would they be upstairs, do you imagine?’ she asked, and now there was vindictiveness in her voice. ‘Wouldn’t be Philip, would it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alexander, bemused.

  ‘You don’t know? Why, for God’s sake, would he want to do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why would –’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t Philip, Alex. It wasn’t Philip,’ she repeated, and listlessly she sat back.

  Without looking at the screen she pressed another button. The film wound forward rapidly. Four or five people hurried with puppet-like steps along a path; like puppets they collapsed onto a pair of benches below a tree, and then they were gone, and heads were jerking up and down in a room that had a blackboard in it. ‘Got it now?’ Jane asked. In the background a door opened and all the people in the room were drawn out through it, as if by suction. A sloping roofline appeared and what seemed to be an enormous angel, against a clear sky. Looking at Alexander, Jane waved the remote control and the film slowed down. He looked at the striped façade of an old church, with a portico in deep shadow. ‘I don’t know where this is, exactly,’ commented Jane, ‘but I can guess the country.’ The camera focused on a young man who was sitting on the ground outside the portico, removing a shoe. ‘Here we are,’ sighed Jane. The camera moved closer; the young man looked up and reached towards it, laughing. The picture went dark, and then an expanse of pink material appeared, above a triangle of dark skin, and then Claudia’s face slipped into the picture. She puckered her lips at the lens. ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ asked Jane, freezing the film. Claudia’s mouth vibrated on the screen; Jane put her face close to it and smiled admiringly. ‘No, but she is beautiful,’ she remarked, and she punched the player with a single knuckle. The machine screeched and ejected the cassette. She clasped it to her chest like a prayer book, and closed her eyes in an attitude of mourning. ‘This is disappointing,’ was all she said. ‘This is very, very, very disappointing.’

  Alexander helped her to her feet and sat beside her and took the cassette from her hand. Only then did she open her eyes. She looked at the wall in front of them as if it were a window through which something of little interest could be seen. ‘Did you suspect? That evening she was here?’ she asked him casually, after a prolonged silence.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ she said. ‘Neither did I.’ She put a hand lightly on his arm and peered again at the wall. ‘You never can tell, can you? Can’t trust anyone,’ she said, as though recalling some advice that she had forgotten. ‘Except you, of course. I shouldn’t have given up so easily,’ she said, but in the same disengaged voice.

  ‘What will you do?’ he asked.

  She picked up his hand and kissed the back of it. ‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘I suppose, past fifty, it’s sensible to forgive. It’s the pragmatic thing to do, isn’t it, at our age? If you haven’t got the nerve to be on your own. I’m not as tough as you. I don’t want to be on my own. But you’d forgive, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I doubt it.’

  ‘I think you would. I know you would. But my instinct is not to,’ she stated, and she seemed to be cheered by her own words. ‘My instinct is to cut his kidneys out.’ She kissed Alexander’s hand again, stood up and strode into the kitchen. She returned with a pair of scissors held dagger-like at chest height. ‘Pass me that,’ she said, holding out a hand to receive the cassette. With the scissors she hooked a loop of tape, and then she pulled at it and continued to pull until the entire length of film lay coiled in her lap. ‘I’ll fall to bits soon,’ she said, as if informing him of an unimportant decision she had taken. ‘I’ll come and see you then, if I may?’ She fed the tape into the jaws of the scissors.

  Alexander was watching the nine o’clock news when he became aware of Philip’s voice, monotonous like the noise of a grinding machine in
the distance. Jane’s replies, if there were replies, were inaudible, until footsteps crossed the room quickly and heavily, making the ceiling shake. ‘Yes,’ Philip shouted. ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he protested, and then Jane was talking over him. There was the sound of what might have been an overturned chair hitting the floor, and a cry from Jane. Stealthily Alexander opened the back door and crept across the broad corridor of light that traversed the grass. From behind a screen of leaves he saw Philip fling his arms wide, as though to invite a blow to the chest, then turn his hands inwards at his heart, in self-accusation or denial. Listening to Jane, Philip chewed at a thumbnail. He threw his arms up again, shouted, and took a stand at the window, with his fists on his hips. He turned his head to speak back into the room, and as he did so he pushed the French windows violently, as if he intended to break the hinges. ‘Can you hear everything?’ he yelled into the garden. ‘Getting it all, I hope? I’ll keep the door open. Wouldn’t want you to miss anything.’ He scraped a flowerpot across the terrace to pin the French windows back. ‘Creeping fucking Jesus,’ Alexander heard him mutter as he went back inside.

  Two days later, in the evening, Jane came down to Alexander’s flat. ‘The battle continues,’ she reported, as though she were keeping a promise to tell him what had happened. ‘We’re in separate rooms,’ she said, blowing the steam from the coffee he handed to her. ‘Separate rooms, separate meals, separate schedules.’