The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (29 page)

But something much, much worse followed us from the old cellar. And now we have a picture of it.

79

W
hat do you expect to happen if you lock your teacher in a cupboard all afternoon? That’s a long time for a spinster to be locked up who’s claustrophobic and needs to pee. So Margueretta has been expelled. Now she can be a real woman with a job and everything.

But something incredible happened. Something incredible happened last night.

Mum was out doing the foxtrot when Margueretta came into the front room with her transistor radio and switched the telly off when Emily and me were trying to watch
Steptoe and Son
. She knows that’s still our favorite program on the telly. And she sat there listening to “Windmills of Your Mind” on her radio and singing along with that stupid smirk on her face.

Like a circle in a spiral…like a wheel within a wheel…

I told her to stop and she came over and swung her arm out wide, and there was that bony hand swinging in a huge arc—about to slap my face. I could feel the sting before it struck, and then there it was, sharp and intense and as normal as ever. Normal, because that is how it is every day. Every fucking day. Always the same stinging slap and the hideous laugh.

And she went for another strike, nothing unusual there. But I caught hold of her wrist.

I could see that look, ready to beat me again, ready as she always has been to beat the little boy every godforsaken day of his pathetic life until he
ran and hid under the blankets in his room—or anywhere to get away from her. Ready to lock him in the cellar where he counted to one thousand and said the Lord’s Prayer in the utter blackness with the drip, drip, drip. “Our Father, which art in Heaven, hello be thy name,” eyes shut tight. Ready to twist his hair out by the roots and spit in his face and make him eat cat food when all he said was, “I think we are having risotto for tea.”

Ready—and no one to stop her. No one, ever, to stop her.

But I held on tight to her wrist and twisted it, and I realized something. Something incredible. Something I had never known in my life before. I was stronger than her. So I stood up and pushed her backwards, and she looked angrier than I’d ever seen. She clenched her fingers to dig her nails into my neck. But she didn’t look angry when I clenched my hand into a fist, pulled back my arm, and slammed my fist into her evil mouth with the strength of ten thousand beatings. And it wasn’t enough, I wanted more, even though blood burst from her lips. So I swung my arm again and punched her in the face a second time.

Now, she didn’t look angry. She looked terrified. A final punch to the side of the head knocked her flying, and she ran out of the room and left her transistor radio playing on the sofa.

Like a circle in a spiral,
Like a wheel within a wheel,
Never ending or beginning,
On an ever spinning reel…

So I turned it off, and we watched
Steptoe and Son
. And I could feel all the blood in my body boiling with rage and racing and pumping and making me feel alive. And it felt amazing. Really, really, totally fucking amazing.

I don’t need anyone now. There never was anyone to stop her. No Nana, no Pop, no Dad, no Mum, no God. No one. But now I am eleven, and I have myself. I will never need anyone in this world again.

Never, never, never.

80

T
he police have a little flashing blue light on a big board with a map of our street. That blue light marks The Mitchell House, and every time someone calls the police to come to our house, which they do every night because someone is obviously being murdered again, they know instantly where to dispatch the squad car with the dogs and guns. And the helicopter. I can picture it in my head.

The police are here most nights now. Well, generally it’s Constable Ferguson, and he has a cup of tea and a cigarette with Mum and asks people to please stop calling him out just because there is a lot of screaming and shouting and banging and smashing and more screaming. If this wasn’t a violent council estate, then he would understand. But there are burglaries and muggings and more important things to deal with, and he doesn’t have an hour every night to come to The Mitchell House.

Except when something really serious happens.

“So she was fucking running down the middle of the fucking road fucking naked?” Danny asked.

“No. I told you. She was in her underwear,” I replied.

“No fucking way! With her fucking little titties out, fucking bouncing around?”

“No. She was wearing her bra and knickers.”

“And her fucking panties fell down round her fucking ankles, right?”

“No.”

“She’s a fucking loony if you ask me. What the fuck was she doing?”

“Trying to get run over by a bus.”

“Fuck. That would be amazing to see! Imagine the fucking blood and guts!”

“Well, she didn’t get run over. The bus driver stopped the bus.”

“Pity.”

She’s seeing a psychiatrist now. Dr Wilmot said it’s gone beyond the scope of a family doctor, and she’s already taking the maximum prescription of Valium, and it’s obviously not working any more. Mum’s taking the Valium too, but I don’t think she’s told Dr. Wilmot.

The psychiatrist is called Dr. Browning, and he asked to see Emily and me too. He asked me what I thought about all of this palaver with my older sister, and I said nothing really because now I can beat the shit out of her if she so much as looks at me the wrong way. I never told him that. I just said I was fine, and that’s all. He said it’s nothing for me to worry about, and everything will be all right once they find out what is wrong with Margueretta.

She’s got a job at the Tampax factory. It’s just up the road. I asked Mum what they make, and she said it’s for women when they get their monthly period and bleed. Danny said that women stuff a Tampax up their fucking quim, and it gives them an orgasm. An orgasm is a feeling you get like when you climb a rope and it rubs on your cock and you get all the way to the top of the rope and nearly fall off because it feels so good. That’s what Danny says. Women don’t have a cock, of course, they have a quim; but it’s the same feeling. Anyway, she’s working on the tampon production line, and Mum says that’s a good thing because the Devil makes work for idle hands, and you can’t be too idle making tampons on the production line at the Tampax factory.

They’re going to do some tests on Margueretta, but Mum said it can’t hurt to have the reverend round so that’s why he came over.

“An exorcism is not my decision alone,” he explained.

“Oh, I don’t think we need an exorcism.”

He was sitting with Mum in the front room, holding her hand.

“We should always look first to the love of Jesus Christ, our Lord. We should take the Holy Sacraments together. The blood of Christ. The body of Christ. I have always found that works best. We will bring the love of Jesus, our savior, into this home.”

“Thank you,” Mum replied.

“The Holy Trinity is no match for the Devil! Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit will be here with you. Where is Margueretta?”

“She’s upstairs in her room. She doesn’t…”

“Doesn’t what?”

“She doesn’t believe in God. I’m sorry.”

“We all lose our way at some point in our lives. My own faith has wavered. Yes, it is true. But it passes. We all find our way home to our Lord eventually.”

“What should we do?”

“Well, if she isn’t coming down, we should pray together. The Holy Spirit will enter her body and her mind.”

We all knelt on the black floor.

Our Father, which art in Heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come,
Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in Heaven.

I could have done that. And I could have told him he’s wasting his time with that prayer. You need a Guardian Angel to whisper your prayers into the ear of God. God’s busy with famine, pestilence, war, hatred, destruction, and death. And the Devil. But if God is All Powerful, why doesn’t He just take away our desire to make war and kill people? For that matter, why doesn’t He take away evil thoughts altogether? And send rain when there’s a drought. And kill the locusts. And kill the Devil. But
then people wouldn’t pray to Him. And then we wouldn’t need God or Guardian Angels.

And since He is the Great Creator and He made everything, did He make the Devil? And if He didn’t make the Devil, who did? Is there another Creator? And that whole episode in the Garden of Eden does not make any sense at all. Everything was going really well in the Garden because God created it. Then Eve offers Adam an apple, which is really a serpent, and he eats it. And that’s the origin of all sin. So a woman tempted a man, and he couldn’t resist. The apple is a symbol of sin, even though it’s really a serpent. But God made us
and
the apple that’s really a serpent. So it’s all His fault. And all this does is prove that we are pathetic weak mortals, which is how He made us. Because He is God.

Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive them that trespass against us,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

Deliver us from evil. That’s when Margueretta burst into the front room.

“You have to save me!” she screamed.

“What from?” asked the reverend.

“Up there! In my room! You have to save me!”

“She talks nonsense like this all the time,” Mum responded.

“Come and sit here,” the reverend suggested.

“Can you help me?” Margueretta pleaded.

“God can help you, Margueretta. Will you take God into your heart?”

“You have to help me!”

“I will, child, I will. Hold my hand. We will pray together…”

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside still waters…

The reverend never finished the Twenty-third Psalm. He was just at the part about “
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death”
when she jumped up and screamed.

“What is it, my child?”

She never answered. She ran out of the house, slamming the front door.

“She thinks there’s something in this house that wants to kill her,” Mum said.

“This is the Devil’s work.”

“She painted it,” said Mum.

“What?”

“She painted a picture of the thing that comes into her room. The thing that wants to kill her.”

“Really? Do you have the picture? It is important that I see it. I must see it now.”

81

T
he reverend said we should burn that picture immediately.

“Take the Devil from this house and burn it. Burn it! I smell the brimstone. Forty days in the wilderness could not tempt our Savior. Destroy the Devil! Out, I say! Out with this evil incarnation of Lucifer! Get behind me, vile being! God deliver us from this power of darkness!”

Out! Out! Out!

I knew he should have done an exorcism.

And the other picture, the picture of good, is in fact a portrait of Margueretta’s headmaster with whom she is now in love. He is fifty, and she is fifteen; that is disgusting, immoral, and illegal, even if she does look very grown up for her age. And she wants to run away with him even though he is married with four kids. She is sure that he is also in love with her because he stared at her legs when he was telling her she was expelled. And she was staring at his crotch because he is a real man. She has written a poem about him, but we are not allowed to read it.

Lots of men stare at my sister because she is very pretty, wears really high heels, and extremely short miniskirts so that you can see her knickers—especially when you are walking up the stairs behind her as she swings her bum from side to side. I have not told Danny about this.

She’s been fired from her job on the Tampax production line. You cannot drink cider and make tampons. Unfortunately, this means that she is at home all day long, with one eye on the Valium bottle and the other on Mum’s
bottle of Crabbie’s Green Ginger Wine. I knew Mum should have taken the fruit basket for a prize at the summer fête.

Margueretta doesn’t care about getting fired for being intoxicated, and she spends all the money she made at Tampax on cider. She even gives me a glass to drink. She doesn’t care about mixing Valium and alcohol because it’s the only way she can sleep and stop the voices in her head that are telling her to kill herself. It’s a shame that up to this point she has ignored them.

Dr. Browning is very concerned about the voices in her head. He asked us all to come and see him again, which is very annoying because we have to take a forty-five minute bus ride to St. James’s Hospital, which is the local loony bin where Great-Auntie Maisie died. And it stinks of carbolic soap and boiled cabbage. Even though they try to keep the place quiet, there are lots of people hollering and screaming, which is enough to give you bloody nightmares.

“It’s good that you are here,” he said, looking at Emily and me.

Emily smiled. I tried to look intense.

“I told the twins that this was important,” Mum replied.

“How are you coping with all of this, John?”

“He’s fine,” Mum interrupted. “It’s me who’s losing my mind! Ha! Ha! I mean, how could anyone cope with all of this, for the love of God? How am I going to cope? That’s what I want to know. How? How?”

“Well. Let’s see. Why don’t we let John answer for himself? Eh, John?”

“I’m fine,” I replied.

He knew I was lying.

“Your sister is not well. She has been having a difficult time with bad thoughts in her head. Do you ever have bad thoughts in your head, John?”

“No.”

Lying again. I have thoughts about killing my sister by pouring paraffin over her bed and setting light to it while she is in it.

“Well, we all have bad thoughts. We call them
intrusive thoughts
. They come from somewhere within us, but they are not really
our
thoughts. Not
conscious thoughts. Sometimes they’re violent or sexual or inappropriate in other ways. But they’re just thoughts. Your sister thinks the thoughts are coming from someone else, someone or something that exists outside of her. And sometimes she talks to that person or thing. Does that make sense?”