The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (33 page)

That’s when Auntie Ethel lifted her bum off the sofa and started crying like a little girl who’s wet herself. I could see a big patch on the sofa, and she was standing that way you do when you’ve wet yourself or taken a shit in your pants.

“What is it, Alice?” asked Mum.

“Ignore her. Stupid ole’ cow. She’s pisshed herself. Bloody embarrasshment. You’ve pisshed yourself! Do you hear me? She can’t hear a thing.”

“Is that you, daddy? My daddy? I love you, daddy. I’ve missed you so much…” Auntie Ethel whined.

“God Almighty! She thinksh I’m her dead bloody father. You’ve had too much fucking gin! I told you! It always turns her maudling. Drank the whole bloody bottle. I am not your bloody father! He’s dead, you stupid cow!”

“What’s wrong with mummy?” the tiny boy asked.

“Shut up! I said, shut up! Jingle Bellsh, Jingle Bellsh, Jingle all the way…Have a drink, Emily. You can’t ‘ave Chrishmas without a drink. What would Chrishmas be without a good drink? We’ve got everysing. Just you name it! No expensh spared for my family. I am the man whosh got everysing. And the bill to prove it! Ha! Ha! Ha!”

“Father Christmas is coming tonight!” the tiny boy shouted.

“Aieeee! Aieeee!” Auntie Ethel howled.

Margueretta poured herself a brandy and lemonade.

“He’s coming! He’s coming! Father Christmas!” the boy squealed.

“Shutsh yer mouth!”

Uncle Jack had his hands in the pockets of our coats that were piled on a chair.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Mum shouted.

“Jusht stopping them from falling on the floor,” Uncle Jack replied.

“No you weren’t! You were going through our bloody pockets! You bloody pickpocket! Thief!”

“Oh, don’t be like that. I always had a shweet shpot for you,” he replied and grabbed Mum round the waist and pressed his groin into her hips, grinding slightly.

“Get off me! You animal!”

“Aieeee! Aieeee! Daddy, daddy!” Auntie Ethel howled.

“Shut up! Bloody old cow!”

“Father Christmas! Father Christmas! Father Christmas!” the tiny boy squealed.

“Keep your hands to yourself!” Mum shouted at Uncle Jack.

“Father Christmas! Father Christmas! Father Christmas!”

“Shush! You bloody well shush!” shouted Uncle Jack.

“Father Christmas! Father Christmas! Father Christmas!”

And in one single practiced motion, Uncle Jack had the little boy by the arm, up off the chair and feet off the floor, and the belt undone and in his other hand, as he dragged him from the room.

Thwack, thwack, thwack.

We could hear the beating. And the screams. And
Miracle on 34
^th
Street
.

His pants were still round his trembling knees when Uncle Jack dragged him back into the room.

“That’ll teach him to shut hish bloody mouth!”

But Uncle Jack wasn’t done. One by one, he threw their presents onto the tiny fire.

The doll’s blonde hair flared into a bright orange then purple, and the yellow skin turned liquid until her blue glass eyes were floating without a face, staring in different directions. Then the eyes fell into the grate. The paint on the bright red metal fire engine blistered until it was black. It lay on its side in the coals and the black rubber tires smoked like four little molten chimneys.

The tiny boy just stared at the filthy carpet—dried up tears on his cheeks, pants still half down.

There is no Father Christmas.

89

M
um has given up trying to learn Yoruba because she will not have any use for it unless she goes to Lagos. This is unlikely because you have to take a boat and she gets seasick. There is also a civil war going on there, and people are being butchered—that’s according to the BBC. So to expand her mind, she is now reading another book that had to be specially ordered:
A History of Mental Illness
.

“Listen to this,” Mum began. “Apparently, in less informed times, they used to submerge lunatics in baths of ice water until they passed out! They also gave them lobotomies.”

“What’s a lobotomy?” Emily asked.

“Well, first they gave you two electric shocks to the head. Then they stuck a metal rod the size of a pencil up behind your eyelid and moved it around to separate the frontal lobes from the rest of your brain. A bit like stirring a vanilla blancmange.”

“What?”

“But this was quite a slow procedure so it says here that a man called Walter J. Freeman developed the ‘Transorbital Lobotomy’ to speed things up. It says here that a third of the patients died, and another third ended up as cabbages.”

“That’s terrible, Mum!”

Unfortunately, Dr. Browning had not considered giving Margueretta an ice water bath or a transorbital lobotomy. He has instead sent her to group therapy sessions. He said it’s good for treating depression but not for patients
with personality disorders. In other words, fine if you get dark moods but not if you are a raving lunatic who hears voices. He thinks the voices could be just an adolescent phase.

“Group psychotherapy treatment was first used in England to treat troops with combat fatigue returning from World War II. It explores the group psychodynamic on multiple levels and not only gains access to the unconscious processes of group members but also to the unconscious group dynamic,” Mum said, reading another passage from her book.

What this means is that Margueretta can get together with other lunatics, and they can talk about their madness with each other in a group. I think it makes them feel better that someone is listening, even if that person is also bonkers. At least it keeps her out of the house because she still doesn’t have another job even though she’s sixteen now. She did have an interview to be a chambermaid at the Queens Hotel in Southsea, and she’s waiting to hear from them.

But she was home today, and she said she would tell Emily and me how to kill ourselves if we wanted to know. We didn’t, but she told us anyway.

“First you run a nice hot bath. Then take off all your clothes. Doesn’t matter if they find you naked. You’re dead, so you won’t be embarrassed! Climb in the bath and lie back. Then relax with a bottle of sherry. Make sure your wrists are nice and hot from the water. It numbs them. So does the sherry. Then get a nice new razor blade. Look here!”

She pointed to the scars on her wrist.

“You slit the vein, right here. You can cut across it. Or slice down the length. Like this. Down the length is more effective than across. That’s given me an idea. Maybe I will kill myself in someone’s room at the Queens Hotel. Imagine that! And they will come back from their stupid night out at the Guildhall, and I’ll be waiting for them in their bathroom. Dead in a bath of blood.”

“Stop!” Emily yelled.

Margueretta smiled.

“Slash both wrists. Then keep them under the water. The blood pumps out really fast. But you don’t really feel it because your wrists are under the water. And as you lose blood, you get light-headed and sleepy. Have one more swig of sherry while you can still lift your arms…”

“I’m not listening!” Emily shouted.

“Then it’s, ‘Good night, cruel world!’ Would you like to try that, John? Would you? Would you? Would you like to try it? I can help.”

“No!”

“Oh, don’t worry, little boy. I’m not going to hurt you right now. You’ll find out what madness means soon enough. Then you will join me in this living fucking hell we call life. This world is just one, fucking long cauchemar. Do you know what that means, little boy? No, of course you don’t. It means nightmare. Cauchemar! And do you know what I am?”

“What?”

“I am Hecate. The Great Hecate! Do you know who that is, little boy? Do you? No, you don’t. Of course you don’t. Why would you? You only know about silly magic tricks and those ridiculous floor tiles. Ha! Ha! The Great Hecate! It’s the Goddess of Hellfire!”

“What?”

“I’m the Goddess of fucking Hellfire! And I’m just two doors away from your bedroom at night. Remember that! You’re just two doors away from a living, fucking nightmare! And clenching your hand into a fist won’t help. If you ever hit me again, I will be sure that you die. I have ways. Lots of ways. You will die a painful death.”

It would have been appropriate if she had screamed at that moment. But she didn’t. She smiled at me.

Because she knew what was going to happen next.

90

M
um has decided to make a fresh start so she is cleaning out the larder and boiling up a pig’s head. I’m helping her with the larder, but I’m staying well away from that pig’s head. It’s grinning from the edge of the pot with its tongue hanging out over its yellow teeth, panting like a dog that’s been for a run. Someone’s going to have to eat that later. I’ve locked the cat in the scullery.

Mum is very pleased with the floor tiles on the kitchen floor, but she did comment on the unusual choice of colors. I don’t think she knows how hard it is to find the money to buy Dunlop Superior Self-adhesive Floor Tiles or the unacceptable way that Woolworth’s put out a different color each time there is a sale.

She is also interested to know why the tiles currently form a large cross in the center of the kitchen. The cross will not form part of the completed pattern. You have to start in the middle or you will not have a true line to work from. That’s what the instructions said. So, first it is important to accurately measure the distance from each wall and form a cross with chalk in the middle of the floor as a starting point. Because I do not have enough tiles to complete the room, we will have to live with the blue, green and white cross for now. She also has no idea how hard it is to get those self-adhesive floor tiles to stick unless you clean off all the hardened dirt and shit from the floor. I have wasted several tiles finding that out—especially under the kitchen table where the cat takes a shit every day.

Mum is very focused on cleaning out the larder. Most of the things in our larder used to belong to Nana. I think they have been passed down for
generations. Mum knows the entire history of our larder. We have a bottle of red food dye that is made from the blood of the crushed bodies of cochineal insects that are farmed in South America. You use it to color things blood-red. There’s that pre-war tin of Coleman’s Mustard Powder that Mum remembers from when she was a girl and some silver balls that Nana bought to decorate a cake for the queen’s coronation in 1953. Then there’s the tin of Tate and Lyle’s treacle that we’ve never been able to get the lid off and a packet of dried peas for keeping salt from getting damp. You use one pea per year in the salt pot. There are twenty-three peas left, so we will have to replace the packet when I am thirty-five.

Mum’s done with the larder. The contents are spread across the kitchen table where they will stay until another time.

This is a fresh start. Soon we will start with the burning.

I hope the first thing on the fire will be that picture. Yes, I hope it will be that picture. We should have burned it a long time ago. But Mum wants to start with the love letter to her headmaster. The flames are growing now with the paraffin Mum put on the fire in the back garden.

“Burn this filth!” Mum shouted.

I threw the love letter on the fire. Then we went back for more things. Shoes, clothes, more love letters, poems, trinkets. And the painting of her headmaster. And a new painting, one we hadn’t seen before. It was a painting of Dr. Browning that was hidden under her bed.

The last thing we took out into the garden was that other painting. It seemed like Mum was afraid to touch it.

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!

Mum kept the paintings to one side. She piled the clothes and shoes and papers and oil paints into a neat heap and poured paraffin on. Esso Blue. It burns without smell.

Everything roasted in vermillion flames. The picture of Dr. Browning was first to burn. His face shriveled and warped, and he was grinning in the fire. It was an insane grin that stretched his mouth and teeth, and they molded around the broken shoe beneath, the shoe from the kitchen. His cheeks burst and popped, and he disappeared in the powerful heat.

And then the headmaster’s turn. And his balding head was burning, his facial features were melting, and strange, silent expressions spread across his eyes. His lips and nose were blistering until the oils bubbled and whistled and melted back into their original form before turning into black tar.

The thick pile of letters and poems released scraps of charred paper that were caught by the breeze and floated into the dark night and were lost to the black, silent sky.

Then at last—that thing. We should have burned it long ago. Back when Margueretta first showed it to us. Then, perhaps the terrible madness would not have come.

Now it is rightfully condemned to the vilest death for all it has done. Mum laid it face up on the pyre so that we could see it suffer. It stared up at me. I knew it had to die in the fire, but it looked right back, defiantly. Looking back through the flames with live eyes, following me.

But the fire curled around the edges of the canvas. It held on for the longest time before it gasped a molten breath and committed its evil fuel to the flaming inferno. And the fire burst through its eyeballs, and for a moment, made it even more sinister than when we started.

And now it is gone, roasted in the fiery lake of Hell.

An immolation to exorcise the evil demon.

And we are saved.

91

I
t was Mum who found her. She heard a scream and a bang or a thump or something in the night. She could have ignored it. God knows, there are enough screams and bangs and thumps in this house that we all try to ignore. But she didn’t ignore it. And then Mum cried out for me because I am the man of the house, and that’s the way it is I suppose. It’s up to Mum and me to try to save her.