The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (12 page)

I will also thank Mum for bringing me up in a good God-fearing Christian household and sending me every week to the Methodist Church Sunday School with Miss Peabody. Miss Peabody is a spinster, which means she has never been married and is now too old to find a husband and has therefore devoted her life to the Women’s Institute and saving our souls for Jesus. And Jesus wants me for a sunbeam. He also wants Emily.

Akela is prepared to overlook the incident with Nana’s hanky, as he is aware that I am a good Christian boy and go to Sunday School every week and say my prayers every night. I could teach some of the other boys a thing or two about religion and the Bible and the importance of keeping God in your heart. And the Ten Commandments.

Akela thinks the most important commandment is to honor thy mother and father. He asked me if I honor my mother and father and I said I do but
no one knows where my father is because he hasn’t been seen since Churchill’s funeral. He said I should focus on the other commandments for now.

When you are religious, it helps to memorize the Bible, as you never know when you might be in need of a scripture and you can’t always expect to have the Bible to hand. We have been learning the Twenty-third Psalm in Sunday School as Miss Peabody says it can comfort you, particularly in times of betrayal, agony, and death.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I shall fear no evil.
For Thou art with me,
Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.

We also sing it because that helps you remember the words. It lifts our joyous hearts up to Jesus to sing together. And Miss Peabody plays the piano, which she cannot do in church because she is not note perfect, and that shouldn’t be a surprise for a woman of her age and eyesight, and anyway, that old piano is out of tune.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me down to lie.
In pastures green, He leadeth me,
The quiet waters by.

Miss Peabody has memorized everything in the Bible, and she can quote from it without even opening it. She can also sing hundreds of hymns without a hymnbook.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

She is passing on her love of the scriptures to us so that we might also see the glory of the coming of the Lord. For instance, this week she told us all about the Last Supper and the Twelve Apostles and how one of them
betrayed Jesus. His name was Judas Iscariot and he betrayed Jesus to the Romans for thirty pieces of silver, which was a lot of money back in those days. And Peter, he was another apostle, denied Jesus three times as the cock crowed and that’s also a betrayal because he must have known that they would crucify Jesus and he only did it to save his own life. Betrayal is the worst thing.

“Would any of you betray Jesus for thirty pieces of silver?” Miss Peabody asked us.

“No!” we all shouted back, and Emily even jumped to her feet when she said it, so I know she meant it. Emily loves Jesus as much as I do.

Raymond Jones did not say no like the rest of us. In fact, he didn’t say anything. But I know he would have betrayed Jesus because he told me he wants a new bike. He didn’t look so sure when he heard what happened to Judas. Judas bought a field with his thirty pieces of silver and then he tripped and fell into a ditch and his guts burst and spilled out and he died. And that’s what you get for betraying Jesus. I don’t know what happened to Peter.

And it’s because they betrayed him that Jesus died on the cross. They nailed his hands and feet onto the wood instead of tying them on with rope. That is a very cruel thing to do because it’s painful enough just being crucified, especially when you haven’t even done anything wrong. King Herod made them do that to Jesus because people said he was King of the Jews and King Herod was jealous because he was the king and you can’t have two kings or there’s no point in being a king. And they crucified Jesus along with two thieves but they tied their hands and feet onto their crosses with rope and did not nail them on. They also broke their legs so that they would die quicker. I’m not sure why you die quicker if your legs are broken. And it took Jesus quite a long time to die because they did not break his legs so one of the Roman soldiers stuck a spear in his side to make him bleed to death. Now that we know all the details of how Jesus died, we should not discuss it with anyone. We should just focus on the Holy Spirit.

Once, I hit my finger with a hammer in the garden trying to put a nail in a piece of wood, not in my hand. And I screamed and cried and Nana rocked me on her lap and sang Danny Boy quietly to me.

But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow…
And I shall hear though soft you tread above me,
And then my grave shall warmer, sweeter be.
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me.
My wee Johnny boy.

Nana said you have to have the Gaelic melancholia to appreciate the sadness of that song. Mum said a four-year-old should not have been given a hammer and nails to play with in the garden. Nana said I was just trying to build a wee hoose for her. Mum said I’m lucky I didn’t lose a finger or worse.

We are too young to have known betrayal. You can’t really know betrayal until you are a grown-up and have first experienced what is called loyalty. You have to be loyal first and then you can betray someone because if you weren’t loyal to them in the first place and you say bad things about them behind their back then you’re just being nasty to someone and not betraying them. We are too young to understand loyalty and therefore cannot have known betrayal.

Miss Peabody, on the other hand, says she knows betrayal all too well, and that is why she has never found Mr. Right.

31

T
he first thing we saw was that black Hillman Minx coming up the road to our house. We didn’t know who the two men were inside it, but Joan had already met them while we were at the Co-op. She asked them why they were knocking on our door because she saw them from her front room window. But they never told her, and they laughed and said they would come back soon enough. And Joan said it wouldn’t be long because we’ve only gone up the road to the Co-op to get a tin of baked beans and a bag of sugar. Joan knows everything we do. I’m beginning to think she is spying on us and not just nosy.

And we had just finished our beans on toast for tea when I was looking out the front room window and I saw the car coming back like Joan said it would. And the two men got out and they were laughing and they had their arms around each other’s shoulders like they were trying to hold each other up.

Mum sent us to our rooms at first. And then she called for us to come downstairs when she let the men into our house. She called my name, over and over, and I grabbed my postcard from under my pillow and I ran down the stairs, two at a time. I took my postcard with me to show to Uncle Jack. But mostly I took it with me to show my dad, even though he knew about it because he wrote it.

Uncle Jack and Dad were both really happy and laughing and making jokes to each other and Dad rubbed my hair and asked me if he could have some of it because he is losing his. He always says that. And he bent down and kissed me and his moustache is very prickly and I thought it might even
have cut my lip but it didn’t. And he had tears in his eyes when he said he loved me and missed me and did I miss him? Yes! He knew I did.

Mum said he’s a fine one to talk, leaving his children like that, without a word. But he ignored her and lifted Emily up in his arms and hugged her and she cried and she held on to him and wouldn’t let go. And Margueretta seemed shy, like she didn’t even know him, but she still kissed him. And then she cried too.

Dad suggested we should all go out together because this is supposed to be a happy time and we shouldn’t be crying like that when we should be so happy, together again. But Mum said no at first and certainly she wasn’t going to let Dad take us out on our own in that Hillman Minx, wherever he might take us, and maybe never see us again. And especially not when he’s been drinking with Uncle Jack and can hardly say his words or stand up. Then Mum agreed to go with us.

So we all went to the pub together in the black Hillman Minx, but we didn’t pretend we were in a police car.

I played on the swings in the pub garden with Emily and God knows you have to be careful where you step because the landlord’s got a bloody big dog and it shits like an elephant all over that garden. And Dad brought us each a bottle of hubbly-bubbly and some cheese and onion crisps. He even brought Margueretta a shandy, which is made from beer and lemonade, because she is almost twelve and one of these days she will be a teenager and before you know it she will be a woman with her long blonde hair and pretty green eyes and it’s amazing how quickly they grow up. So she could have a shandy. But I just had a bottle of lemon-lime hubbly-bubbly, the same as Emily, even though I am the man of the house.

Margueretta wouldn’t let me have a sip of her shandy. When I am almost a teenager, I will drink shandy. And when I’m a grown-up, I will drink beer and whisky like my dad. And I will go to see a man about a dog and never come back.

We stayed out in the garden until all the hubbly-bubbly was gone and it was dark and freezing cold and there was one light in the garden on the
back of the pub—just a single light bulb, making long, thin shadows across the garden.

Margueretta always gets angry when she has to be a babysitter because we’re not her bloody brats. And that’s always dangerous because she already flicked the back of my ear four times and pulled the side of my hair and said I was a pig. She also said she was going to get some dog shit on a stick and wipe it on me.

So I was really glad when Dad came out of the back door into the garden with Mum right there, running after him.

“Don’t talk to me about responsibility!” Mum shouted at him.

“Och, don’t be like that Emily,” said Dad.

“Don’t tell me what to do!” Mum replied.

And Uncle Jack came over and looked at me.

“John. Do yoush want your father back home?” he said.

But I just stared down at my empty hubbly-bubbly bottle.

“Of course he want’sh me back, don’t you Johnny?”

“Don’t bring the children into this argument!” Mum shouted.

“But Johnny need shis daddy, don’t you Johnny?”

“A real man wouldn’t beg to come home,” said Uncle Jack.

“Whatsh that? And whatsh d’you know about being a real man?” Dad shouted back.

“You kilty! Don’t tell me sh’about being a real man! Fucking bagpipes, that’s what shou are!”

“Ha! You cockney piece of shite!” Dad yelled.

That’s when Uncle Jack broke his beer bottle on the wooden trestle table and held the ragged end up in the air.

“Come on! Come on! I’ll put this in yer Scottish face!”

Emily grabbed my arm, and then she bit off the rim of her glass. And she gripped that piece of glass between her top teeth and her tongue.

“Oh, for the love of God!” Mum screamed. “Now look what you’ve made her do!”

Dad said he was sorry and Uncle Jack put the broken bottle down and said he didn’t mean to frighten the children and he was sorry too. So we all looked at Emily and she still had the broken glass in her mouth and little bubbles of purple blood seeped out of the corners of her lips and ran down her chin.

And I noticed the smell and I looked down at my shoes—all covered in dog shit.

That’s why the black Hillman Minx has gone, and I’m back in my room. I’ve left my shoes at the back door. I will have to use a stick in the morning to get the shit off. But I can still smell the dog shit because I think it is on my socks.

At least Emily didn’t swallow any glass.

32

I
heard the screams again last night—just as I was falling asleep. Mum says it’s just a dream but I know when I am awake and I am awake when I hear the screams. And I know where the screams are coming from. Anyone would know if they had to sleep right under the attic door. I still can’t stop myself from staring at it. Something is trying to get out.

Mum says I tell too many stories, just like my dad. She says I will grow up exactly like him. Well, I don’t want to grow up like my mum because she is losing her mind. She says it’s the black floors but I think there’s something else that she’s not telling any of us. I’ve seen someone standing behind me—someone who should not be there. I don’t know who he is and when I turn around he’s always gone. Maybe he stands behind my mum too. And maybe Mum has told Margueretta what it is but no one would just sit on the sofa and cry for no reason the way Mum does. And I don’t know why black floors would make her cry even if they are very black and we don’t have money to cover them up.

That’s why Mum has to get out of the house. Mum leaves me and Emily to be looked after by Margueretta. It makes her so angry. When people get angry their faces go all red and sometimes they hit people. Margueretta hits me. She throws me down on the floor and sits on me and she digs her long nails into my neck and screws up bunches of my hair in her fists and pulls until it comes out by the roots. Her favorite thing to do when she is angry is to slap my face because that’s how girls fight and she says I am a girl.

She also likes to give me Chinese burns, which you can do by twisting the skin on someone’s wrist in opposite directions until they scream for you
to stop. And even if they scream for you to stop, you don’t have to. That’s the thing with Chinese burns. You can twist and twist while they scream and scream and you don’t stop because you’re having so much fun.

Twist, twist, twist.

Sometimes she holds her hand over my nose and mouth because when you do that the person can’t breathe and it makes their eyes pop out like marbles. You have to take your hand away eventually or the person will die from suffocation and you will be a murderer. So she always takes her hand away just in time and that means I can gulp in the air but then she puts her hand back just when I’m starting to breathe because that is not expected and just when I think I can breathe again, I can’t. That makes her laugh. It makes me feel like there is boiling water in my stomach.