Mortal Ghost (37 page)

‘
Not with this.’

‘
Even with this, or you wouldn’t be alive, wouldn’t be flesh and blood but machine.’ He saw the twist of Jesse’s lips. ‘No matter what that hyperactive set of circuits may have done, you’re still a man.’

‘
Am I?’

Finn grinned. ‘Then why don’t you ask Sarah?’

Even Jesse had to smile—and blush a bit—at Finn’s words.

‘
Jesse, I’m not about to pretend that it’s going to be easy. Easy is nine-to-five, a wife and 1.7 kids, a cosy little house in the suburbs, a couple of lagers and telly after work, and a fuck on Saturdays. And even then, I doubt that it’s really
easy
.’

Jesse was quiet for a moment. ‘So you believe I can escape what’s happening to me?’

‘
I’m not sure
escape
is the right way to put it. I think you can either deny it, which means denying yourself, or embrace it. But either way, you’re not going to change the essence of who you are.’

‘
Who I am,’ Jesse said bitterly, ‘Who, I, am. I who am. I am who. Am I who. Who am I?’ His laugh abraded the air like the teeth of a cheese grater grazing a knuckle. ‘A name but no past. Memories but no history.’

‘
A person is more than his past.’

‘
A person is
only
his past. The present lasts for no time at all, and then is gone.’

‘
Nonsense. If anything, we exist only in the present. And memory is a damn tricky business. Ask me and my brothers to describe the same event in our family, and you’ll not get one identical memory between us.’

‘
There’s quite a big difference between that and what’s happened to me.’

Finn tugged his beard while he considered, then exhaled with some force. ‘Do you want me to see what I can learn about your identity? There are things we can try—fingerprints, for example, or DNA.’

‘
Waste of time.’ Jesse examined his finger. It had stopped bleeding, but he continued to study the small cut as though it were a gaping wound.

‘
Are you sure? There’s always a trail if you search hard enough.’

Jesse said nothing for a long while.

‘
Jesse?’

Jesse lifted his head. He spoke slowly, as if he had to drag his words one by one from the pit of his stomach. ‘I don’t think it matters much any more.’

Under the table, Finn clenched a fist, then punched it repeatedly into the cupped palm of his other hand.

‘
I’ll do what I can to put Ayen’s lot off,’ he said.

~~~

‘
Are you going to tell me how the window broke?’ Sarah asked as she swept the broken glass into the middle of the patio.

‘
I lost my temper,’ Jesse said.

‘
Is that so? With what? A howitzer?’

In yet another routine attempt to do battle with the neighbour’s cat, Nubi raced past them, barking frantically.

‘
You should have named him
Sisyphus,
’ Sarah said.

Normally that would have brought an appreciative smile, but Jesse’s cigarette had left him queasy, and he could feel the sun tolling overhead like a great fiery bell, peal after peal jarring his body to the marrow.

Sarah resumed sweeping while she tried another approach.

‘
Finn brought you a skateboard.’

Jesse sat back on his heels and peered up at Sarah. He was picking shards of glass out of the grass and herbs.

‘
Yeah. Was it your idea?’ he asked.

‘
No. All I did was mention once that you could skate really well.’

‘
I’m sure it wasn’t cheap.’

‘
Probably not.’

‘
Another thing I owe him.’

Sarah filled the dustpan and emptied it into the bin liner with a deft gesture of irritation. Jesse was beginning to send her up this morning. What was the matter with him?

‘
Rubbish,’ she said. ‘You don’t owe him for a gift.’

Jesse went back to picking up pieces of glass. It was easier than talking, easier than trying to sort out the clapper and jostle in his head.

The shards were small and hard to find. Jesse squinted at the herb bed. He should have been able to see the sparkle of glass in the bright sunshine, but there seemed to be a film across his eyes. He blinked several times, wiped his brow with the back of a forearm. The grass was high, each blade a relentless green sword, sharp as a scythe, bloodthirsty as a guillotine. He’d better get out the lawnmower in the evening. A telephone rang in the distance. Don’t pick it up, he thought, it’s always bad news. He bent over and parted the foliage with his fingers, first in one place and then in another, like a mother chimp grooming her infant, searching for fleas. For some reason it was important for him to find every last bit of glass, though he could no longer remember why.

The mingled scents were bewildering. He crumbled a furry greygreen leaf between his fingers and raised it to his nostrils. Sage, a robust survivor. Tears pricked his eyes. He dropped his head to his chest, arms dangling, unaware that the curve of his spine rendered its own perfume to the morning.

‘
Jesse?’

Sarah was standing at his side. She knelt, angling her body so that her knees just grazed his jeans. She was reluctant to intrude on his silence. Then she saw the tears sliding off his face and dripping onto his thighs. He was making no effort to wipe them away; she wasn’t even certain he was aware of them. Very gently she brushed her fingers along the nape of his neck. Without a word, without raising his head, Jesse reached out blindly and pulled her close. She wrapped her arms around him. She could feel his body trembling against hers.

When they broke apart, Sarah plucked a spear of lavender, then one of sage. She held them in the palm of her hand, staring at them for a few minutes, before crushing them together and releasing their pure cruel notes. She raised her eyes to Jesse.

‘
Don’t leave,’ she whispered.

He let her wipe away his tears while she remembered how Finn had wept openly for Peter.

‘
Jesse—’

‘
No, don’t say it.’ He laid two fingers over her lips. ‘Leaving makes coming home possible.’

She searched his face. What she found there reassured her. Across her own, a smile: first tentative, then a ringing crescendo—coming home,
coming home
,
coming home
—from a clay mould, a bell now cast in gold.

‘
Let’s try out your skateboard tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ll borrow one for me.’

They finished the clear-up with the sun on their shoulders, Nubi dancing between them, and the sky a jubilant shout of blue overhead.

Chapter 29

About two in the morning Jesse abandoned the attempt to sleep. The voice in his head was quiescent, undoubtedly aware of the human need for nightly oblivion. There was no reason to think that Red would invade his dreams, yet whenever Jesse felt himself drifting away, a sly reddish tint dispersed across the glassy surface of his mind, a carmine shot through with gold, uncomfortably reminiscent of the lake at sunset. ‘Look, Jesse, the water’s burning again,’ Emmy used to say, and he would tease her, threaten to pick her up and dip her toes into the flames. ‘Noo . . .’ she’d squeal, half terrified, half entranced; half believing. ‘They’d melt, wouldn’t they?’ And he, ‘Like toasted cheesy toes. Welsh
rabbit
toes,’ swinging her up, nibbling, tickling.

In the kitchen he drank a glass of milk while feeding Nubi a fistful of dog biscuits, then removed a block of cheddar from the fridge and weighed it in his hand, warily peeled back the wrapper; he hadn’t been able to eat cheese since the park. This time he got as far as bringing a morsel to his lips before a wave of nausea overtook him. With a sigh of exasperation he tossed it to Nubi and shoved the rest of the cheese back into the fridge.

In the entrance hall Nubi regarded Jesse expectantly as he slipped into his trainers. ‘Not tonight,’ Jesse said. ‘I need to do this on my own.’ He was astonished when Nubi growled low in his throat, so astonished in fact that he swung round to check the passage then opened the front door to peer out, fully expecting to find an intruder on the threshold. Nubi tore through the breach, and was away.

‘
Bugger,’ Jesse muttered. After calling and whistling as loudly as he dared, all to no avail, he unhooked Nubi’s lead, stepped outside, and shut the door behind him. The blasted creature was sitting under the next streetlamp, an expression of doggy innocence on his face. But when Jesse snapped the lead to his collar and tried to drag Nubi back towards the house, it quickly became obvious who would win this particular argument. Together, if not altogether amiably, they headed in the direction of the park.

At the main gate Jesse tied Nubi to some iron scrollwork, which resulted in such a frenzy of barking that it wouldn’t be long before the police were notified, along with the RSPCA.

‘
What’s got into you tonight?’

With bad grace Jesse released Nubi, who seized the moment of slackened grip to spring away. Trailing his lead, he disappeared into the depths of the park while Jesse stared after him, confounded and not a little perturbed.

Though it was a warm night the temperature seemed to drop as soon as Jesse passed the stone pillars. The lights from the city were obscured by high trees, which swayed and rustled and creaked in a rising wind. Jesse was surprised by how enormous the trunks seemed, how many fronting the gates. It felt as if he were facing a tribunal of tribal chieftains, wildhaired and bearded, come to settle a blood feud, deliver summary justice, negotiate an uneasy truce. Surely there had been more bushes and shrubs near the main entrance, the towering giants set further back? Any country boy knows that night does strange things to its landscapes, but an air of sentience pervaded this park, sentience and
cunning
. Jesse could imagine Yggdrasil growing here, and Loki scampering beneath its arms. Jesse hadn’t brought a torch; artificial light, he was certain, would not be welcome.

On the bottom step he halted to let his eyes adjust to starlight, then once again by the fountain to scrutinise the statue of the sphinx, which returned his regard with stony impassivity; as much as he could see of the inky surroundings. This time his mind conjured shapes coalescing amid the sentinel trees, voices surfacing from layers of ossified and compacted lives beneath his feet. But he was committed now; and impossible to abandon Nubi.

The cold was intensifying and it wasn’t enough to rub his hands over his arms, he needed to move. He circled the fountain and followed the main path, finally persuading himself to proclaim his intent upon drawing near a stand of ash.

‘
Dad,’ he whispered, then cleared his throat. ‘Dad, are you here?’

The only answer was the windy breath of the trees; even Red remained silent.

‘
Dad,’ he called loudly, repeatedly. Then, ‘Nubi!’

Again there was no reply. He resumed walking, faster than before, then soon broke into a jog. His footsteps thudded like the sound of a blunt axe on wood. It took an effort to breathe. The air resisted, as if the trees had thrown out whippy shoots and branches and foliage, groping and stubborn, a serried, tangled, jungled mass through which he was fighting and which only parted at the machete stroke of his will.

Something close to panic seized Jesse. He began to run, racing forwards, zigzagging, lurching from dark shadow to darker so that he lost all sense of direction and
towards
became
away
became
any way
he could flee, not listening for pursuit, not thinking until he tripped over a protruding root, careened into a tree trunk, and fell heavily to the ground. Winded, he lay still while his heartbeat gradually returned to normal. This was stupid. He wouldn’t find his father by haphazard blundering, by a rabbiting flight. He struggled to his feet.

One last time Jesse tried to shout for his dad, then for Nubi. The sound of his voice was muffled by the trees, and he doubted that it would carry more than a few metres, if that. Almost, the park seemed to be deliberately swallowing his words. He listened intently for a response but heard nothing except his own breathing and the thrumming of the blood in his ears. He shivered. The sense of isolation, of having left a word-schooled world for the place where language failed, or had yet to be mustered, was very strong. Where there were only soundings. He had to goad himself to move on.

After a few steps Jesse turned to look back the way he’d come, wondering if he ought to retrace, or attempt to retrace, some of his route. Uncertainly he backtracked several paces before coming to a standstill under a tall ash. Was that barking he heard?