The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (16 page)

“‘Ello me darlings! My, you’re a sight for sore eyes! Don’t worry about those fucking darkies, they’re just Jamaicans. I’m only living here on a temporary basis. Jamaicans don’t have no choice on account of being black, which they cannot help, can they? Same as the Irish.”

Auntie Dot looks like a man. When she bent down to kiss me, her cheek was all bristly like my dad’s. And she is wearing a man’s uniform with trousers and a waistcoat but they look like they were made for a much smaller person. And Auntie Dot is a very, very big person.

“Well, don’t just stand there. Come in! Come in!”

I wanted to run back out and I was only one step inside the attic. Emily was blocking my way, not that she meant to. So I just threw my hand over my nose and mouth and tried not to breathe. But you have to breathe eventually or you will faint and God knows, it was like opening my nostrils and letting a thousand cats piss in them.

“You’ll get used to the smell, me luvvies! It’s the cats. I take them in. Strays mostly. Can’t see them starve or get put down. Never could. I was a stray myself once. This is my cat refuge. Can’t turn any of them away from the refuge.”

It may not be hers, but there was a shaving mug and a razor on the mantelpiece and this could mean that she is a man. I don’t know why we would call her Auntie if she was a man. I will have to look for other clues. The room does have a window but it’s taped up with brown paper and that makes things darker than they should be.

But everywhere we looked there was only one thing to see. Cat hair. Cat hair covering the sofa, the armchair, the carpet, the table and the television. Cat hair covering the cat hair. And more cat hair on top of that.

And just then, the cat hair moved and a huge black cat jumped onto the furry TV and squatted down right there to take a piss.

“Ooo, you cowson! Get the fuck off of there! Fucking Nora!” Dot shouted, hurling a shoe at it.

As we moved, cat hair floated around us, disturbed by our entrance. Emily already had a light covering. She pulled one from her mouth. It was black.

“Have you met Lassie?” Dot asked.

A large mound of cat hair broke free from the sofa and lollopped over to us.

“She’s an Alsatian. Make yourselves at home. I’ll go and make dinner. You must be starving!”

We were starving. Mum made us some Shipham’s Salmon Spread sandwiches to eat on the train but in the rush to catch the bus to the station we left them on the kitchen table.

“Sit yourselves down!”

Emily’s got a weak stomach, which is why she wanted to be sick. I know she didn’t like the smell and I told her not to look at the pile of cat turds in the corner next to the stack of Beano and Dandy comics with the open box
of nut clusters on top. I said she should just push her hand over her nose and mouth, the same as me. She said she could still smell it.

Dot came back into the room with two large plates of sausages and mash.

“Eat up! Eat up!” she said, and pushed the plates into our laps.

“But, Dot,” Emily gasped.

“What?”

“I can’t eat this!”

“What’s the problem?”

“There’s cat hair all over this plate and food.”

“So?”

“Cat hair! There’s cat hair all over the food!”

Dot looked at the plate. She brushed away one or two of the hairs. Several hundred remained. More were floating in the air, waiting to land.

“I can’t eat this,” Emily repeated.

“What’s wrong with you?”

“It’s disgusting. The food has cat hair all over it.”

“You kids don’t know how good you’ve got it. ‘What the eye don’t see, the heart don’t grieve.’ Don’t you know that mushrooms are grown in shit? Didn’t you ever eat mushrooms? Well, you’re eating shit. So a few hairs won’t hurt you.”

“And there’s something like a flea crawling across my plate,” Emily said.

Emily was absolutely right. A flea was making its way towards the shelter of a sausage. It would have jumped but its legs were glued together by the grease. Dot wiped the flea onto her finger.

“It’s a flea alright! Extra meat! Do you want HP Sauce?” she laughed. “Can you still smell the cats’ piss?”

“Yes.”

“Told you. Your nose gets used to it. Now those Jamaicans, they complain all the time about the smell. They’re fine ones to talk! They make a terrible smell with all that foreign cooking. Jamaican jerk chicken they call it. Disgusting I call it. Bloody stink. The woman underneath said they’ve got
a big brown bulge on their ceiling. She says she’s afraid she’ll be sitting down to
Z-Cars
one night and it will burst and all that cats’ piss will land on her head.”

“Where are we sleeping?” Emily asked.

“Here. Right here. One on the sofa, one on the armchair. The telly’s not working. The fucking cats keep pissing on it. So we’ll roll Lassie over in a minute and you can help me crack the fleas on her. I’ll show you where they hide. In her armpits and around her tits, mostly.”

I know Emily was just trying to create a distraction from cracking the fleas, but it was a mistake to say she wanted to take a look around the rest of the attic. If she had stayed on the sofa, as I suggested, then she would not have seen the big bowl of cats food on the kitchen table with the pile of maggots making their way out of the bowl and across the empty sausage wrappers. She would also not have seen the colossal cats’ toilet in Dot’s bedroom or the terrapin called Jimmy who eats live maggots.

“Go on, Emily. Just pick up some maggots and feed him.”

It was entirely her own fault.

43

I
have not scratched so much since they cut my hair off to make me look like a movie star. Auntie Dot said we complain too much and it is just something we will get used to.

“Trust me, those fleas would rather be on a dog or a cat than crawling up your legs! They are not human fleas, you know. You would know it if they were human fleas because they would be sucking your blood as well as biting you. But they’re not are they?”

She also told Emily to stop being so hysterical.

I am thinking about Auntie Dot. When we get back to school, we will have to write an essay about our summer holidays called, “What I Did On My Summer Holiday,” and some of us will get to read it in front of the class. Last year I just made things up because we have never been on holiday. So since this is our very first holiday, I will have to remember every detail so that I can write it all down. So I am thinking about everything that is happening. And I will describe Auntie Dot very carefully.

I am pretty sure that she is a woman but I have to take into account that she wears men’s clothes and she shaves. But in my essay I will say she is a woman because she does wear red lipstick and she refers a lot to her massive but accommodating bosom.

She also uses some of the best swear words I have ever heard like, “Jesus fucking H. Christ what in the bleeding hell are those black cunts cooking this time?” And, “Fuck me, that stinks like a bleeding sailor’s arsehole!”

Thluuuuuump!

That’s the sound of her lifting her bum off the sofa and doing massive farts so that all the cat hair blows up into the air. But I probably will not include that in my essay. Actually, I won’t include those swear words either.

I must observe other details.

She smokes Kensitas cigarettes and sometimes she smokes more than one at once. She reads the Dandy and Beano comics because she likes the pictures. And she eats chocolate nut clusters by sucking all the chocolate off and leaving the nuts because she said nuts make her fart. She then offers the nuts to me and Emily. Obviously, we do not eat them as that would be disgusting, but she means well.

Yes, she does mean well. Take this morning, for instance. We were all sitting on the sofa together scratching and Auntie Dot said she couldn’t get any time off work so she would take us to work with her, which was a very nice thing to do or we would have been left on our own in the attic with the cat hair and fleas and the nut clusters, even if there was plenty of sausages and mash left over from last night. So that’s how we found out that Auntie Dot works for London Transport at the Stockwell underground station and those clothes she is wearing are her uniform.

When we got to the station, the first thing she did was to take us to see a secret tunnel that was even more exciting than that time I put my finger in the back of Nana’s old valve radio and touched the live terminal. We met some more Jamaicans who were hiding down in the tunnel from dangerous passengers. We had a nice cup of tea with them and they told me never to work on the underground because it’s too dangerous.

“We come all de way from a hot place in de Caribbean wid sand and banana trees. Ha, Lordy! We come here to better ourself. Ha! Praise de Lord, you is bee-you-tiful kids wid de faces like de shining sun.”

They also did not expect to be called wogs and niggers when they are British Citizens just like the rest of us. If they had known then what they know now they would have stayed in poverty because at least it was warm and there wasn’t a bunch of violent thugs trying to avoid paying their tube fares. They don’t get paid enough to get punched in the mouth for a sixpenny ride.

That’s when Auntie Dot pulled a train grab-handle out of her knickers.

“Some fucking drunk tried to punch me in the mouth because he hadn’t paid his fare so I whacked him on the fucking head with this,” Dot said, holding her weapon in the air.

“Dat is de right ting to do, ole Dot. De right ting.”

“Well, he sued me, the fucker. But the London Transport Workers Union defended me, and I won the case. I love the Union. But they said it was a dangerous weapon, and I was not to keep it down my knickers.”

“Lordy! No way should dat ting be down a woman’s knickers. But dat has not stopped you, Dot!”

“No fucking way! It’s staying down my fucking knickers as long as I want!”

“You are de example to us all, Dot. A wonder to be beholdin’.”

Dot put her weapon back in her knickers. We couldn’t spend all day chitchatting with the Jamaicans so Dot took us to see a stain on the tracks where a woman killed herself last week by jumping in front of a train. Dot said it was very thoughtless.

“No one would jump in front of a train if they saw the fucking mess it makes!”

She has to clean it all up along with the fire brigade and the head always gets chopped off so someone’s got to pick it up by the hair.

“God forbid some fucking bald man doesn’t jump! We’d have to pick up his head by the ears! We have to make sure we’ve got all the main body parts in the bag. They get caught in the wheels. We count them. Two arms and two legs. Feet and hands. The last thing you need is to put someone in their coffin and find that a foot is missing. Or a hand.”

We can’t go back tomorrow because the Station Manager said it was not appropriate for two small children to collect tickets and sweep the station platforms while Auntie Dot was having a cup of tea with the Jamaicans. We were only trying to help. He said we could fall in front of a train or get kidnapped. I think he was just jealous because people were giving us money to help our poor, widowed mother.

But the really amazing thing about today was when we were walking back home to Dot’s attic after eating our fish and chips, we saw a dead man lying in the road. He’d crashed his scooter into a lamppost. Auntie Dot said not to look but we did look and so did lots of other people. Purple blood was oozing out of his head and nose and it made a puddle round his head and he looked like a saint on a stained glass window in church with a halo and I told Auntie Dot about that and she said it was a very nice thing to say and she rubbed my hair. And she said to try not to think about the dead man but that’s all I can see when I close my eyes. His face was really white and that made the purple blood seem darker and the black of the road seem blacker.

People say that blood is red but it’s closer to purple. And it turns brown when it dries.

Auntie Dot says he had a white face because his soul had left him. Your soul is a part of you that lives forever and that’s why it’s alright for your body to be buried when you are dead. You don’t need your body in Heaven but it’s best to imagine someone inside their body or else they will just be a bright light and that’s not an easy way to remember someone when they are dead. It’s also best not to think about someone being dead inside their coffin, especially if he killed himself by jumping in front of a train.

I have been thinking a lot about Auntie Dot and all the things that we have seen already on our holiday. I am going to write all the little details about our Auntie Dot but also the dead man with the purple blood lying on the black road who will become a bright light in Heaven. That was the most interesting thing and I will say I thought he looked like a saint with a purple halo around his head, lying on the black road.

I wish Mum was here because this is the best holiday anyone could have and I am sure that no one could ever have a day as exciting as this one.

44

I
was completely wrong. There are much more exciting things than seeing a dead man. We couldn’t stop scratching so Auntie Dot dropped us round to Nana’s flat for a break. And that’s where we met Auntie Dee who had a holiday surprise for us.

Auntie Dee is another woman who is not our real auntie. She also wears a uniform but her uniform is from the Salvation Army because she is saving souls for the Stockwell Citadel. She is a very brave Apostle of Christ because she takes her tambourine into the public bar at The Castle every Saturday night and promises eternal happiness for the righteous or endless punishment for the wicked. Nana says that most people settle for endless punishment and order another drink. It’s very dangerous being an Apostle of Christ in the public bar of The Castle because a man smashed her tambourine right over her head, which was not easy to do because she was wearing her Salvation Army hat at the time.

The sun has got his hat on, hip, hip, hip, hooray.
The sun has got his hat on, and he’s coming out to play.
Stand up, stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross!
Hold high his royal banner, it must not suffer loss!