Laying a Ghost (18 page)
“Oh, yeah. She was all excited about it. She thought it was neat.” At the time, Nick hadn’t understood why, although in retrospect he did. “For like the first year after she found out, every time I heard or saw something that might not have been there, I was supposed to ask her if she’d heard it or seen it.” The garage door was open, and they stepped inside into the dim light, the edges of the keys biting into Nick’s skin.
John held out his hand for the keys, his face troubled. “I don’t know what to say. I keep getting angry with people for the way they’ve treated you, and it turns out you don’t mind so much, or maybe they had their reasons, but for the life of me I can’t see how a mother could be glad her son was going to be burdened the way you are. Neat? It didn’t look neat to me when you were curled up and shaking, trying to make them go away. I’m glad she trusted you, mind, but --” He broke off and closed his hand over the keys. “If you could, would you make it stop?”
It took some effort to force himself to let go of the keys, but no matter what he did, Nick couldn’t find an answer to the question. “I don’t know.” He tried not to think of how he must look, during. Once, Matthew had borrowed a video camera and taped a session, and that had been more than enough for Nick. Five minutes into viewing the tape, he’d told Matthew to shut it off, and when Matthew hadn’t, he’d left the room, trying to erase the mental image of himself as a crazy person.
Even knowing that it had been real hadn’t helped.
“I think she was crazy.” What was that, transference? Talking about someone else instead of yourself? “When she killed the baby, I mean. Some kind of postpartum depression. Psychosis.”
A furrow appeared in John’s forehead. “Talking to you is like skipping a stone over the water,” he said plaintively. “Kirsty, you’re meaning? Aye. And back then, they’d not have seen the signs. Poor lady.” He cleared his throat. “She -- people sort of guessed, you know, but they didn’t -- they never said anything. They maybe kept a close eye on her when your uncle was born though.” He looked at Nick. “It’s one of the stories on the island, but apart from idiots like Geordie, I can’t see people mentioning it to you. And if they do, it won’t matter now, will it? She’s at rest. Both of them are.”
“She didn’t mean to do it. I mean, she did, but she wasn’t in her right mind. She still wasn’t, when I was talking to her. I think she’s okay now, though.” It was usually complicated, but in this case, once Nick had understood, it had been simple.
“She said God wanted the baby back,” John told him, shuddering slightly. “I think she’d have to have been mad to believe that.” He met Nick’s eyes. “You think afterwards they go somewhere? Heaven or hell? Or just fade away?”
Nick looked away, down at the rough dirt floor of the garage. “I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I can’t think about it.” If he did ... but he couldn’t. It was hard enough seeing the big picture and knowing that you were one of not all that many people who could. Knowing that there might be other pictures that you couldn’t even see ... that was too much.
John made a frustrated sound. “With me, it’s different. I want to know. It’s bothering me that I don’t know. Last week, before I met you --” He paused and his hand came up to cup Nick’s face for an instant in a brief caress. “God, I feel as if I should’ve known you were coming, which makes no sense at all.
I’m
not the psychic one.”
“No, but you’re something. I mean, there’s something there.” Nick felt sure of that. “We’ll figure out what it is.”
John’s face was a mixture of trepidation and interest for a moment as he considered that, but then he shrugged. “I think it’s just whatever you have spilling over onto me because I’m close. Because
we’re
close. If you weren’t near me I doubt I’d see anything. Won’t stop me damn near levitating when I’m on my own in the dark and something goes bump, but I’ll get used to it. No; it’s just -- last week I was certain about things, and now I’m not. And I don’t know whether to thank you or thump you for that, but as it’s not your fault I’ll probably do neither.”
“If it’s not my fault I don’t know whose it is.” Not that Nick actually felt all that guilty. Maybe his guilt was too busy lingering on Matthew’s death. At that thought, he glanced nervously at the car.
“It’s not your fault that you can see ghosts and it seems to be catching.” John’s gaze followed Nick’s, his forehead crinkling up again. “That’s not something I’m inclined to blame you for. Making me realize every other man I’ve been with was about as exciting as cold porridge is another thing entirely.” John smiled at him. “Distracting, didn’t I say? Aye, that’ll be right.”
Nick glanced at the car again. It was small, gray, and looked older than any car he’d ever driven in. Considering his mother’s lack of income when he’d been a kid, that was saying a lot. “Maybe it won’t start.”
“Obviously not a skill I have,” John muttered under his breath. “No, it probably won’t. The battery might be flat, and I can see from here that the tires are low. But that’s only to be expected.” He walked past Nick, unlocked the car, and got in, turning the key and listening carefully. The engine made a strangled, coughing sound and nothing else. John tightened his lips and tried again, this time with better results, making Nick step backward as the engine almost caught. The third time it did turn over and John pressed down on the gas pedal -- the accelerator here, Nick supposed -- and the engine roared to life.
John turned it off after a minute that lasted much longer than that, it seemed to Nick, and stepped out into a fume-filled garage.
“Aye. Well there you go,” he said quietly. “I think it’ll make it to the garage in town and we can fill the tires and maybe get some supplies to change the oil.” He tilted his head and stared at Nick. “You’ll be needing to get it taxed and tested though, and I suppose you’ll not have any insurance --” Nick nodded, feeling reprieved. “-- but that doesn’t matter because you’re not planning to even sit behind the wheel, are you?” John finished calmly.
“No.” Nick’s voice and his chest felt tight. “I’m not.”
He couldn’t say anything else, so he walked to the doorway and stood there with his back to the car, looking out across all the green, with the pale blue above it. It was like some giant hand had come down and wiped out almost all signs of civilization, leaving nothing behind but grass and sky. He took a breath, letting the clean air fill his lungs and take away some of his tension on the exhale.
“I climbed that mountain over there when I was thirteen.” John came to stand beside him, pointing towards the mountain that dominated the scenery to the north. “Ben Dearg, it’s called. 2,300 feet above sea level. Set off in the morning with Michael, the two of us swearing we’d not come back until we’d reached the summit.”
“And did you?”
“We said we did in school on the Monday,” John said dryly. “But the truth of it is that a mist came down, our food was all gone, and we got no more than half way up before we turned back.” He moved away from the garage with Nick beside him. “It was another seven years before I reached the top, and that time I went alone.” John shoved his hands into his pockets, staring over at the mountain before rolling his eyes and looking away. “Michael and Sheila had got engaged and I was needing to get away. Spent the night up there, soaked through and miserable, but loving it too, the way you do when you’re that age. It’s all extremes and I was extremely heartbroken.” He bit down on his lip and then grinned, shaking his head. “It passed.”
Nick let that sink in, looking at John now instead of the scenery. At the line of John’s shoulder, deceptively narrow for the strength underneath it, and the way his hand was tucked into his pocket. “It wasn’t Sheila who you were in love with.”
He watched the corner of John’s mouth curl up in a small smile. “Well, of course it wasn’t. I told you that already.”
“Did Michael know?” Nick asked it gently, not sure how sore a subject it might still be even after a number of years.
John lifted one shoulder. “How could he not?” He turned his head to look at Nick, his eyes troubled now. “Look, I can tell you what happened if you like, but it’s not that interesting, and we’ve done nothing this morning. I’m supposed to be helping you.”
“It’s interesting to me, but if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s okay. Maybe you will some other time.” Nick tilted his head to the side and looked at John. “Or we could go for a walk. Down to the beach?”
“Distracting and persistent.” John sounded resigned. “Fine. We’ll walk to the beach, I’ll tell you the story of my life up to Monday when we met, and you can do your best to stay awake for the fifteen minutes or so it’ll take to bring you up to speed.” He set off down the driveway, with Nick falling into step beside him, both of them walking in a companionable silence as they crossed the road and started along the narrow track leading down to the beach.
Chapter Nine
The grass beneath Nick’s feet was thin and heather grew amongst it. The air was scented faintly with an aromatic, bitter smell that gradually gave way to the salt-tang of the sea. Above them, gulls soared and dipped, their hoarse cries echoing against the heavy crash of the waves. It wasn’t like anywhere he’d ever been, and it still didn’t feel like home, but the muted colors and smooth, weathered land around him were restful, which was just what he wanted right then.
“So how old were you when you knew you were gay?” John asked him finally when they reached the dunes. “When it all fell into place for you? Or did it just happen gradually?”
“Fourteen? Fifteen? Somewhere around there.” Nick didn’t really remember how old he’d been. “I guess it happened gradually, but I know one morning I woke up -- I was lying in bed looking at the ceiling -- and I just knew.” The sand here, still far from the water, was soft, shifting under their feet as they walked.
John nodded. “Took me a while to match up the way I was feeling with a label, if you see what I mean. I’d grown up hearing all about the sin of it, along with whatever else the minister thought would have us on the edge of our seats on a Sunday, but it didn’t seem relevant.” He scuffed at the sand with his boot, uncovering a shell, the perfect curve existing only in the exposed portion, rough-edged and fretted underneath. “Relevant was going swimming at the loch, getting an eyeful of Michael’s bare arse, and being awful glad there was a lot of cold, deep water around.”
“You’d never felt that way about girls?” Nick shot John a look. “You’ll tell me if I’m asking too many questions, right?”
“I don’t mind talking to you. It’s not like you’re going to tell me I’m a blight on God’s green earth, is it? And I’ve asked you enough about yourself.”
The beach was deserted, which Nick was starting to take for granted. He supposed if you’d lived here all your life the urge to get a shovel and pail and make sand castles wasn’t all that strong. Maybe it would change once the schools closed for summer, but for now they had the curve of white sand to themselves, flat wet sand giving way to a band of shingle and then the rise and hollows of the dunes.
“Girls.” John smiled wryly. “Aye.” He bent to pick up a stone, weighed it in his hand, and then threw it out to sea with enough force to send it flying high before it fell and was lost in the rushing waves. “I kissed Sheila long before Michael did. Kissed her and didn’t hate it, but it wasn’t doing much for me or her. But we kept at it for long enough that folks got used to us being together, and it took me a while to realize that she was hanging around me because she wanted Michael, and we were fair inseparable back then.”
“So people didn’t just get the wrong idea about you and Sheila because they see what they want to see.” Nick crouched down and traced a finger around a large stone that was half-embedded in the sand, drawing a shallow circle in the sand and then spiraling it out into an almost Egyptian-looking symbol. “I take it you and Michael never ...” He let the question fade away unasked, knowing that John would understand.
“Michael is not gay.” John separated out the words with a careful precision. “He’s also not someone I ever should have fallen in love with, but God help me, I did.” He sat down, drawing up his knees and resting his arms on top of them, the sleeves of his sweater sliding back up so that his bony, strong wrists were bared. “So, no. We never.” He turned his head and met Nick’s eyes. “I kissed him. Once. And that’s not something anyone knows but him and me, and maybe Sheila, just so we’re clear.” There was a warning in his voice, almost an edge of panic, but when Nick did no more than nod reassuringly, he carried on. “I don’t know how old you were, your first time, but I was eighteen and it felt like -- God, I don’t know how I stood it, waiting that long, but it wasn’t like I’d had any choice.”
“I was sixteen.” Nick kept his voice low and soothing. “It was with Matthew.” It was always with Matthew, even the handful of times it hadn’t been. “I don’t think we even meant to. I mean, we’d been jerking off together for months ...”
It occurred to him that he’d never talked to anyone like this before; like sex was just something normal. He and Matthew had never really talked about it at all, and there’d never been anyone else that he’d been comfortable enough with. It wasn’t like you’d talk to your
mother
about the sex -- the gay sex -- that you were having. Or weren’t having but wanted.
“He had this lube,” Nick continued. “You know, for masturbating. And we put it on each other, and then we were rubbing against each other, and then he was on top of me and ...” They’d looked at each other, and then Matthew had pushed inside him slowly, and it had hurt, but he’d
wanted
it.
“It sounds like you were lucky. Both of you. You were friends and you stayed that way.” John grinned unexpectedly. “And over here, all we use is a hand, but fair enough.” He scooped up a handful of sand, letting it pour from his tilted palm, grains of it caught by the breeze and taken away. “I didn’t even know his last name, but I suppose I was lucky, too. Michael and I, we’d gone off the island, you see. There was a friend of ours, bright lad, who’d ended up at university over in
