The Ghost (5 page)

January, 1974

Cook burrowed through the darkness – thrashing arms, swimming legs, elbows prodding at the clinging blanket folds. His fingers brushed against bone and hair. Esther's nightgown was too short and her ankles protruded as specimen for his investigations.

“Welcome to the underwater world of Jack Coo-Stow!”

Cook's voice was throttled by the heavy undersheet. In deep winter, Esther layered her bed like lasagne – an insulating strata of thick and thin, rough and smooth.

“This rare species is a ‘Nana Leg'. It's hard to capture!”

He grappled with Esther's bony foot.

“Gerroff! C'mon, Dor! It's too bloody early.”

‘Bloody' was rare. It meant Esther was serious, that her indulgence of horseplay had slipped into irritation. Cook slept in his grandmother's bed for warmth, when the seasonal chill made his unheated bedroom inhospitable. The electric blanket was an impossible luxury. It seemed companionable and organic – a life-giving, heat-radiating network of arterial cables woven into a skin-like membrane. Cook would always wait for it to warm to its highest setting before sliding under the covers for grateful and exquisite smothering. Back in his own bed, swaddled in double pyjamas, flat on his back, entombed beneath a heavy haul of blankets and overcoats, he played a nightly game of distraction – inhale deeply, pinch lips into tiny aperture, exhale, watch breath drift and swirl, repeat until asleep. Esther had finally rescued him last February, when she had leaned in for a morning forehead-kiss and noticed a sprinkle of frost in his eyebrows.

Esther rose, stepped into her slippers and embarked on her early morning expedition to the outside toilet. With a jolt of excitement, Cook realised it was Saturday. He sprung out of bed, scurried across the landing into his room, opened the corner closet and dragged out a large, thin slab of plywood – rough on one side, smooth on the other. His Uncle Russell had ‘borrowed' the wood from a college workshop and he had helped Cook cover the smooth side with a green felt Subbuteo football pitch. But as he laid it onto the floor, Cook saw that the wood had warped and the pitch markings were now stretched taut across an alarming hump, with its arc peaking at the half-way line. He abandoned the pitch, retrieved a tatty Enid Blyton hardback from the closet and ran back to his grandmother's room, huddling back in with the baking underlay. Esther kept a torch under her side of the bed for nocturnal toilet trips, and Cook often used it to read, curled tight and safe in a den of blankets at the centre of the bed. He carved out a narrow tunnel of fabric to use as an air-hole and scanned the torch beam over the back cover of
The Adventures Of Mr Pink-Whistle.

Cook found this idea intensely exciting and resolved to achieve something similar as soon as he was old enough. He had mentioned this to Esther and been met with a gruff rebuttal.

“That's only make believe, Dor. And why would you want to make yourself invisible, anyway?”

“Because when you're invisible,” insisted Cook, “it means that no-one can see you and when no-one can see you, they can't hurt you, but you can hurt them if you really have to.”

“Yeah, but they could
hear
you.”

“Not if you're really quiet. You could wear socks.”

The front door clanged shut. There were murmurs down in the parlour, then raised, excited voices in the sitting room, then the noise of someone running up the stairs. Cook spread himself flat under the covers. Maybe no-one would notice he was there if he was perfectly still.

“Dorian, darling?”

It was his mother's sing-song voice. She saw him so infrequently, she could never seem to calibrate her mode of address with his age and awareness. Her latest guess, it seemed, was that he was around two or three years younger. Cook heard her enter his own bedroom, pause, then cross the landing. He stayed quiet, knowing it would be interpreted as a game.

Lily slipped into the room. Cook's concealment was comically obvious, but she played along, loudly wondering where-oh-where he could have got to. She held back a little, drawing out his barely stifled sniggers. Then, she pounced, digging her fingers into where she thought the boy-shaped lump's ribs might be, scrabbling and tickling and forcing Cook to clamber out of her reach, up to the top of the bed. She gathered him up, squeezing, plunging her face into his neck. He spluttered on a mouthful of brightly bleached hair and shouted for her (“Mummy!”). His tone was uncertain – excited, irritated, a little scared?

“Ooh…” She nuzzled into his cheek. “I could eat him all up!”

Cook broke away and propped himself against Esther's mound of pillows where he could get a good look at her and brace for what might be coming next. Lily was long and slender and, despite the cold, wore a short mini-dress patterned with psychedelic swirls. Her waist-length hair whipped and swished as she clicked open a bulky suitcase.

“Where have you been, mummy?”

The question carried an awkward ambiguity. In this case, Lily had ‘been' to Spain. Her normally dry, pale skin was glossed olive, and she was a tottering
Buckaroo
of cases, carrier-bags and oversized souvenirs, most of which were now scattered around the floor. And now she wasn't there, she was here, materialised and in motion but less familiar than in her usual state – the unpresent, the unarrived. Cook was confused by his yearning for Lily. Did he actually miss her, or was he just rebelling against his natural preference for aloneness? Could you really miss someone who was too rarely present to remind you of the things you were missing?

“It's called Lanzarote,” said Lily, fumbling inside the suitcase, “in a country called Spain. It was very hot there, Dorian. I think you'd have liked it. Cold in here!”

“Why didn't I go with you?” Cook was now sitting upright, vertically propped on a saddle of pillows.

“You're a bit too young, darling. Plenty of time for you to travel the world when you're a bigger boy.”

Cook was surprised to hear that his bigness was in doubt, but he had no real interest in travel. His world was tighly compacted – it extended only to the play-park at the top of his street and the oil-works that lay flat and wide and toxic at the bottom. And, uncomfortably close just a few doors down, there was the old butcher's shop, its front and back doors obscured by crude layerings of heavy planks. Cook always took care to rush past the lonely old house on his way to school, telling himself that he couldn't look at it because if he did, the world would explode. He knew that the world wouldn't really explode, but he could never quite bring himself to check.

“Here it is!”

Lily produced a plush toy from the suitcase. It had dog-like features but was caricatured and stretched tall, with yellowy-white fur. Cook took it suspiciously and squeaked out a thank you.

“It's a poodle, Dor! Like Snowy!”

Snowy was Esther's previous pet dog. Cook was too young to remember much about him – apart from a warm tongue lapping at his cheek and a sense that the facts about the dog's fate had been kept vague. Cook shook the toy from side to side, smiling a little at the freely suspended plastic pupils, rattling and rolling inside transparent eyeballs. The gift was another illustration of his mother's feeble grasp of her son's development.

“Why don't you live with us, mum?”

The question ambushed Lily. She took a steadying breath, pretending to fiddle with a suitcase lock.

“I wish I could, Dor. It's really hard. I live with a friend. Not that far away.”

“Is it my dad?”

Lily sidestepped this with an agility that gave Cook his answer.

“You can come and visit! That'd be nice, wouldn't it? I bet you'd love the flat. My friend has lots of comics you can read.”

Later, Cook lay next to Esther, mummified in bed-socks, mittens, double pyjamas and his late grandfather's balaclava. He gazed at the grey outline of the toy dog, propped up inside an open drawer of the dressing table. Its synthetic fur blazed absurdly white through the icy twilight, off-centre eyes sightlessly regarding the thin curtains. Esther snored loudly and frequently, in an unsettling baritone. Cook considered refuge in his own room (he was dressed for the occasion) but decided the noise wasn't bad enough to brave the stumble across the landing, remembering to resist glancing across and down into the oily blackness that seemed to gather around the base of the staircase.

He removed one of his mittens and peeked a couple of fingers outside the duvet. The cold seeped over them – frosting the tips, stiffening the knuckles. He snatched his hand back, replaced the mitten and returned to staring at the dog. Soon, despite the rasping and roaring, he sank into a dream-busy sleep.

*

Something was coming up the stairs.

Cook crouched in his closet, flattened into a corner, battling the urge to spring up and out and maybe dive through the window and take his chances with the pavement twenty feet below.

He heard the Something turn the corner at the bottom of the stairs and – slowly, always without urgency – begin its thunking ascent.

Dream-logic allowed him to simultaneously hide in the closet and watch from his window as a group of Sea Devils ambled through the shallow lake of caustic sludge that surrounded the oil-works. They slimed across the road, converging on his front door, barging into the house in ones and twos.

Thunk.

He heard the Something crash through the cheap bedroom door and thunk its way over to his hiding place.

“IT WAS ALL SO
fucking
po-faced!”

This was Jake Saloman, broadsheet critic, chairman of
Critics' Wire
, a film writers' collective which distributed screening news and hosted an annual, under-reported awards ceremony.

“But it's a serious subject matter!” barked Neville Smith, part-time reviewer, full-time gadabout. “You can't just throw in a load of irony. Sometimes you have to take things seriously.”

Next, the overlapping squawk and squabble distinctive of a group of gawky film critics masculated by watery wine.

“I thought there was a lightness of touch.”

“He just makes the same film over and over again.”

“Why do you always have to have something to say?”

“Well, it's like ‘My First Kubrick'.”

Cook would normally wade in to this subjective jetsam with arms flailing, drink sloshing. But, here in the British Film Foundation bar – a menagerie of baying indignance – he was immobilised by ennui. The contact from Dennis Mountford had taken root in a gloomy corner of his mind, and it was not something that could be shrugged back into the past or forgotten from the present. Mountford was a lifetime gone and yet right there in the room with him – across the reclaimed-wood table, perched on the burnt-orange ottoman. In this vision, his friend was still a young boy, and Cook shuddered as he realised they hadn't shared the same space in the real world for over thirty-five years. He gazed into his barely depleted pint glass and forced a scared little smile.

“Look at
Citizen Kane…”
(Saloman again). “It hasn't aged well. The sign of a true masterpiece is timelessness.”

Consternation, sneers of laughter.

“And the
Mona Lisa?”
challenged Malcolm Parker, weekend broadsheet film editor. “That's hardly ‘aged well', but it doesn't make it less of a masterpiece.”

“We're talking about two entirely different art forms,” snapped Charlie Brent, listings-mag film-section editor. “You can't say that this painting is ‘better' than that film.”

Cook, a little drunk, drew in a steadying breath.

“Is
Citizen Kane
a five-star movie?” he demanded.

General agreement.

“And is the
Mona Lisa
a five-star painting?”

“Of course!” brayed Smith, through a splutter of house Rosé.

“How about what everyone had for breakfast this morning? Five-star bowl of Shreddies, was it? Five-star fucking brioche and coffee?”

“We're talking about
art
, Dorian,” said Parker carefully, “not just general experiences. I know there's some debate over…”

“I'm talking about sensual –
sensory
– pleasures,” Cook interrupted, slurring the S's. “Has anyone here ever had a five-star bowl of soup or a five-star blow-job? It's all about the moment! You can't judge anything – art, experience, aren't they the same thing? – with hindsight. It's all about how you feel and react in the moment, when you're right there, on the ride! You can't stick a ‘rating' on everything and then compare the components of life and culture, based on those ratings!”

“It's just a convenient yardstick,” smiled Saloman. “We don't have the time or space to have lengthy conversations about…”

Cook yelped a strange little exclamation and held up his hand, palm facing out. It was a gesture of supreme arrogance, designed to cut the response short.

“But don't you think it's depressing
–
how we have to view films on this sliding, five-point scale, how we're paid to neatly package the unpackageable? It's not a fucking ‘convenient yardstick'! It's a dance with the marketing devil. We provide the poster-friendly quotes and star ratings, and the studios use them to sell the films. Why do we – why does
anyone
– even bother writing long-form reviews any more? Do you know who reads our reviews? We do! Other film reviewers! It's not fucking ‘writing', it's grandstanding. No… It's masturbating! We're basically just sitting around, wanking off in front of each other.”

He sprang up from his seat, swaying.

“And you can quote me! On the fucking poster!”

After that, Cook spent a little too long sitting in the fragranced, air-conditioned toilet cubicle, staring down at the frayed underwear stretched around his ankles. He dug out his phone and opened the email inbox. One new message.

Enlargement supplement! Did you know that we have a formula that can elongate your manhood with no side effects?

Cook did indeed know this. He seemed to be made aware of it roughly every hour, as his ironically enlarged Junk Mail folder could testify.

He signed in to
PastLives.com
, opened the message from ‘Den' and deleted it.