The Ghost Road (9 page)

Next morning,
after they'd all gone to work, he went upstairs to Sarah's room, exhausted
after another bad night measured by the chiming of the clock. He needed to lie
in the bed where Sarah slept, to wrap himself in these stained sheets, for even
in this fanatically clean household the girls' skins sloughed off, staining the
sheets yellow, and no amount of washing would get the stains out. He didn't
mind. He would lie happily here, in the trough made by her body during the
night, smelling the faint smell of lavender and soap.

On the bedside
table was a photograph of himself, taken when he was first
commissioned.
Unformed schoolboy face.
Had he ever been as young as
that? Undressed and in bed, he squinted at the half-drawn curtains, wondering
if it was worth the effort of getting up to close them. No, he decided, he
would simply turn his back to the light.

He turned over,
and for a second closed his eyes, his brain not immediately interpreting what
in that brief glance he had seen. Then he sat up. On the dresser stood a
photograph of a young man in uniform, a private's uniform. Not Cynthia's
husband—he knew his face from wedding groups. He got out of bed and went to
look.
Johnny, of course.
Who else?
Sarah's
first fiancé.

The usual
inanely smiling face half whited out by the sun.
Behind him,
a few feet of unbombed France.
And why should he begrudge this?
Because I
thought I'd taken his place
. He hadn't even thought it, he'd just assumed it.
She'd talked only once about Johnny
and then she'd been
drunk on the port he'd been plying her with to get her knickers off.
Loos.
That was it.
Gas blown back over the
British lines.
He peered again at the unknown face. The whiting out
seemed almost to be an unintended symbol of the oblivion into which we all go.
Last night, he'd wondered what colour Sarah's skin had been under the jaundice
produced by the chemicals she worked with. This man had known. He'd known
this
Sarah—picking
up a snapshot—this happy, slightly plump, hoydenish girl struggling to keep her
skirts down on the boat-swing. What you noticed in Sarah now was the high
rounded forehead, the prominent cheekbones, the bright, cool amused gaze.
Always the sense of something being held back.
He'd been
looking all along at a face scoured out by grief, and he'd never known it till
now.

* * *

'Nice walk in
the fresh air,' Ada said, spearing black felt with a hat-pin.
'Just the thing for a headache.'

'I won't be in
the fresh air, Mam. That room gets awfully stuffy, you know.'

Ada bent down,
thrusting her face into her daughter's. 'Sarah, go and get your coat.'

Sarah looked at
Billy and shrugged slightly.

'I'll come too,'
he said, standing up.

'Are you sure?'
Ada asked. 'The spuggies aren't everybody's cup of tea.'

'Wouldn't miss
it for the world.'

They walked down
the street together, Ada leading the way, sweeping along in her black skirt,
for in the matter of skirt length she made no concessions to the present day.
She glided along as if on invisible casters.

'I suppose she
does know contacting the dead's a heresy?' Billy asked. 'The Vicar wouldn't
like it.'

'Oh, she doesn't
believe in it. She only goes for the night out.'

The meeting was
held above a shop that sold surgical appliances, a range of products whose advertising
is necessarily discreet. The window, lined with red and green crepe paper left
over from Christmas, contained nothing but a picture of a white-haired man
swinging his granddaughter above his head.

They went up a
narrow staircase into a tiny room. A piano, a table with a vase of flowers,
five or six rows of chairs, net curtains whose shadows tattooed skin. They
couldn't find four seats together and so Prior found himself sitting behind
Sarah.

'How's your
headache, Sarah?' Ada asked.

'Bit better, thank
you, Mam.'

How's your ballsache, Billy?
Bloody
awful, thank you, Ma.

A man walked up
and stood on the rostrum, looking carefully round the room. Counting the penny
contributions to tea and biscuits? Assessing the general level of credulity? Or
was he perhaps not a rogue at all but simply mad? No, not mad.
A small, self-satisfied man with brown teeth.

Prior followed
his gaze round the room, as the blinds were drawn down, shutting out the sun.
Women, mostly in black, a scattering of men, all middle aged or older, except
one, whose hands and face twitched uncontrollably.
Too many
widows.
Too many mothers looking for contact with lost sons—and this was
an area where they'd all joined up together.
Whole streets of
them, going off in a day.

And this man,
smoothing down his thin hair, announcing the number of the hymn, had known them
all—birthmarks, nicknames, funny little habits—he knew exactly what every woman
in this room wanted to hear. Fraud, Prior thought, and that he deceived himself
made it no better.

Angels of Jesus, Angels of Light

Singing to we-elcome the pilgrims of the night.

They sat down
with the usual coughs, chair scrapings, tummy rumbles, and he stood in front of
them, establishing the silence, deepening it.

At last he was
ready. Their loved ones were with them, he said, they were present in this
room. The messages started coming. First a description, then a flicker of the
eyes in the direction of the woman whose husband or son he had been describing,
then the message.
Anodyne messages.
They were having a
whale of a
time,
it seemed, on the other side, beyond
this vale of tears, singing hymns, rejoicing in the lamb, casting down their
golden crowns around the glassy sea. Ah, yes, Prior wanted to ask, but how's the
fucking?

Then, without
warning, the twitching man stood up and started to speak. Not words.
A gurgling rush of sound like
the overflow of a drainpipe,
and yet with inflections, pauses, emphases, everything that speech contains
except meaning. People turned towards him, watching the sounds jerk out of him,
as he stood with thrown-back head and glazed eyes. The man on the rostrum was
wearing a forced, sickly smile. One hysteric upstaged by another. I'd take the
pair of you on, Prior thought.

He touched Sarah's
shoulder. 'I can't stand any
more of this. I'll wait
outside.'

He ran
downstairs, then crossed the street and slipped into the alley opposite,
positioning himself midway between two stinking midden holes. He lit a
cigarette and thought
glossolalia.
'A spiritual gift of no intrinsic significance,
unless the man possessing it can interpret what he receives in a way that tends
to the edification of the faithful.'
Father Mackenzie,
preparing him for Confirmation, when he was... eleven years old?
Twelve?
What a teacher the man was—in or out of his cassock.

From his vantage
point, watching like a stranger, he saw Sarah come out and look up and down the
empty road.

'Sarah.'

She ran across,
face pale beneath the munitions-factory yellow. 'What happened?'

'Nothing.
I couldn't
stand it, that's all.'
A pause.
'We have to
die,
we don't have to worship it.'

They stood
together, looking up and down the street, which was dotted here and there with
puddles of recent rain. Fitful gleams of sunlight.

'I'm not going
back in.'

'No.'

She waited,
still worried.

'We could go
back home,' she said.

'Have you got a
key?'

'Yes.'

They stared at
each other.

'Come on,' he
said, grabbing her arm.

They ran along
the shining street, splashing through puddles, Sarah's hair coming loose in a
cascade of pins, then down an alley where white sheets bellied and snapped,
shirt-sleeves caught them,
wet
cotton stung their
faces and necks. They
arrived at the door red-faced,
Sarah's hair hanging in rat's-tails down her back.

She rattled the
key in the lock, while he stood looking back the way they'd come, half
expecting to see Ada hurtling towards them on her Widow-of-Windsor casters.
They half fell into the passage, and he ran towards the stairs. 'No,' she said.
No,
he thought.
The front room, then.
He made to pull the curtains across.
'No, don't do that, they'll think somebody's dead.
Behind the
sofa.'
He was already on his knees in front of her, his hands under her
skirt, groping for the waistband of her drawers, pulling them down, casting
them aside, he didn't care where they fell. At the last moment he thought,
This
isn't going to work. They'd had to leave the front door
open—it would be impossible to explain why it was locked—but the thought of Ada
Lumb looking down at your bare arse was enough to give a brass monkey the
wilts.

'Careful,' Sarah
said, as he went in.

But he's always
careful, always prepared—though never prepared for the surge of joy he feels
now. He's like some aquatic animal, an otter, returning to its burrow, greeting
its mate nose to nose, curling up, safe, warm, dark, wet. His mind shrinks to a
point that listens for footsteps, but his cock swells, huge and blind, filling
the world. His thrusts deepen and quicken, but then he forces himself to pull
back, to keep them shallow, a butterfly fluttering that he knows she likes. Her
hands come up and grasp his buttocks—always a moment of danger—and for a while
he has to stop altogether, hanging there, mouth open. Then, cautiously, he
starts again. Cords stand out in her neck, her belly tightens,
the
fingers clutching his arse are claws now. She groans,
and he feels the movement of muscles in her belly. Another groan, a cry, and
now
it's
impossible to stop, every thrust as
irresistible as the next breath to a drowning man. She raises her legs higher,
inviting him deeper, and he tries not to hear the desperation in her gasps, the
disappointment in her final cry, as he spills himself into her.

'Yes?' he gasps,
as soon as he can speak.

'No.'

Oh God. He
drives himself on, thrusting away in a frictionless frenzy, his knob a point of
fire, feeling her teeter teeter on the brink, and then at last tip over, fall,
clutching and throbbing round his shrinking cock till he cries out in pain. Oh,
but she's there, she's laughing, he hears her laughter deep in his chest.

Only his groin's
wet, too wet. He lifted himself off her and looked down. Spunk, beaten stiff as
egg-white, streaked their hair, flecks of foam on a horse's muzzle, spume blown
back from the breaking wave, but to him it meant one thing. The johnny—
unfortunate word in the circumstances—was still inside Sarah. He hooked it out,
and they stared at it.

Sarah felt
inside. 'I think I'm all right,' she said. 'It's all outside.'

No oiled
casters, but a firm tread approached the house. He flung the rubber into the
fire, a million or so Billies and Sarahs perishing in a gasp of flame. Small
bloody comfort if another million were still inside her. She pulled her skirts
down and sat, sweating and desperate, in her mother's chair. He was about to
sit down himself when he caught sight of her drawers thrown across the family
Bible, one raised leg drawing a decent veil over Job and his boils. He snatched
them up and stuffed them down the neck of his tunic, which left him no time for
his flies. He picked up the Bible and sat with it in his lap.

'Well,' Ada
said. 'What happened to you?'

Sarah said,
'Billy started thinking about a friend of his, Mam.'

Prior sat with
his head on one hand, a passable imitation of David mourning Jonathan.

Ada sniffed. 'I
see you've not thought to put the kettle on, our Sarah. It's a true saying in
this life, if you want anything doing do it yourself.'