The Boy Who Lived With Ghosts: A Memoir (35 page)

She had blue knickers. And my legs started to shake like I was really scared. But I wasn’t scared, I was excited, and then my whole body started shaking, and I couldn’t believe that she agreed to my suggestion to take her knickers down in payment for the five shillings.

“A quick look! That’s all you’re getting! A quick look! And no touching!”

We were hiding in the bushes. I could hardly hear her because my ears were ringing with the excitement, and I was finding it hard to breathe as I had that same glow over my head again.

She held her dress up and then she slid her fingers into the top of her knickers and pulled them down slightly. But she stopped.

“That’s all!”

“Do it! You have to show me!” I shouted. “Or pay me the five bob!”

She dropped her shoulders and sighed, and she flicked her long black hair with the back of her hand. And then she pulled a little further at her knickers until I could see a line of dark hair. It had to be pubic hair. It had to be. I held onto a branch.

“That’s all!” she shouted.

“No way! Five shillings! You owe me! All the way!”

“God! You fucker!”

She slid them down further until I could see a triangle of hair. And then she pulled them right down to her knees.

“Go on then. Have a good look! You wanker!”

And there it was. Right in front of me. The thing Danny and I had talked about for years. We had seen the pictures. We had discussed it in every detail. That glimpse when we were getting undressed for PE. I had done everything I could to see a real one. And now here it was. Only a yard in front of me, in the fading light. And so near, I could reach out and touch it.

The quim.

An actual quim.

And it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

94

 
J
oan Housecoat has come home from her electroconvulsive therapy, which is free on the National Health. She could have come home in an ambulance but Fred has bought a car. He traded in his Vespa for a secondhand Bond 875 fiberglass three-wheeler. Some drunks turned it upside down in the road in the middle of the night, but he got Old Man Dumby to help him turn it back up the right way, and he used it to collect Joan from the nut house, after he refilled all the oil and petrol and wiped the grit off the roof.

Margueretta, however, will not be coming home as planned.

“Something terrible happened,” Mum explained to Emily and me.

“Is she alright?” Emily asked.

“Who knows? If it’s not this, it will be something else. But it’s me who suffers through it all, for the love of God.”

“What happened?”

“She stole some pills from the drug cart.”

But that wasn’t the worst thing.

They take away your shoelaces and anything else you could use to hang yourself or kill yourself within the lock-up ward. So Margueretta took the cord from a lamp and hanged herself in the toilet.

Diddle, diddle dumpling, my son John.

She isn’t dead because another patient found her, but it’s only a matter of time. She’s thrown herself in front of a bus, slashed her wrists, taken an
overdose of aspirin, and hanged herself. And I’m not counting the time when she tried to cut her throat with Nana’s bread knife or when she threatened to throw herself off the front porch. There’s no way that those were serious ways to kill yourself.

She has to stay locked up, of course, and they even had to put her in a straitjacket because she said she would find a way to kill herself or kill someone else. According to Mum’s
A History of Mental Illness
, the straitjacket was invented by a French upholsterer as an alternative to tying down the lunatics and maniacs with metal chains. This was before the enlightened age of psychoanalysis and modern psychiatric medicines. These days the doctors know a lot more about madness, but they still use straitjackets. And they have padded cells to stop the nutters from braining themselves by bashing their heads against a wall. So they put Margueretta in a straitjacket and then in a padded cell.

She cried and begged and Dr. Browning said she could come out if she could prove that she was not going to kill herself or anyone else. And she must have proved it because they let her out of the padded cell, and that’s why we have to visit her.

Akanni couldn’t come because he might find the scene too disturbing, and he’s too young to understand why my sister has a thing in her head that’s telling her to kill herself. Or why she screams at the sight of a running tap and the colors purple or red make her want to bleed. So he’s staying with Mollie Midget for the afternoon. But since Emily and I will soon be thirteen, we are old enough to visit a lunatic asylum lock-up ward. Dr. Browning thinks it might help if Margueretta can see the people around her who love her and want her back.

It is possible that Emily loves Margueretta and wants her back. I will ask her later. I, on the other hand, do not.

There’s an old lady clucking like a chicken. Her dressing gown is loose because she doesn’t have a cord, of course. And I don’t want to see her wrinkled old breast, even though it’s hanging there for anyone to see. And
another woman is making a low-pitched groaning sound like a fire engine whose siren is winding down. Then there is a woman hiding under her bed with black eyes, and she’s looking at me like I am the one who is mad, not her.

It smells of vomit and diarrhea and boiled meat and cabbages with a bigger smell of disinfectant. The nurse said Margueretta likes to listen to Anne Murray singing “Snow Bird.”

Spread your tiny wings and fly away,
And take the snow back with you where it came from on that day…
And if I could you know that I would,
Fly away with you…”

She listens to it over and over again all day. So we should buy the record when she gets out, that’s what the nurse said.

Margueretta wants to fly away. But she can’t. She’s in this cage.

And this other woman keeps tugging at my arm and asking when her mummy is going to be here. She says she’s waiting for her mummy to come in a taxi to take her home. She’s as old as Nana. I would think her mummy is dead. Now she’s crying for her mummy.

“Please find my mummy. Please find her. She’s coming for me today. She’s coming to take me home to see my papa. I want my mummy. Please tell her I’m in here. She’s coming today in a taxi to take me home. Please find my mummy…”

And I am sure that each one is waiting for her mummy to come and take her home at the end of school and whisper, “I love you,” in her ear. And tuck her up in bed at night with an orange nightlight reflecting little moons and stars on the ceiling and give her a cup of hot chocolate to drink while mummy softly reads
The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck
.

And her daddy would sing to her.

Here we go loopy loo,
Here we go loopy light,
Here we go droopy-doo,
All on a Saturday night!

And twirl her around so that her little skirt would fly out. And he would call her “droopy drawers” because her skirt sat so low underneath her plump little tummy.

But no mummy or daddy is coming to take any of them home. They will always be here, staring out of the windows through the iron bars. And the others will be on the outside, staring back.

No sign of Margueretta, though. But there is another girl about the same age as Margueretta. Wrists are bandaged. She looks like a ghost. It’s not nice to look like a ghost, but I don’t think she knows.

Keep walking down the corridor. Take no notice of the people who are screaming. Ignore the arms that are reaching into the air. I think that woman just peed herself. Keep walking to the bed on the end.

There are only two chairs by the bed, so I will stand. And I don’t know why we have to wait by this bed with that woman lying there under the blankets, staring at the ceiling.

“Kiss your sister. Give Margueretta a kiss. Go on.”

I’m not kissing her. She doesn’t look like Margueretta. She’s yellow and gray and old with black circles round her red, red eyes. She has a wide purple-black ring around the skin on her neck.

And her hands are shaking, as she reaches her pale thin arms out to touch me. Reaching out like a dead person wanting to touch something that’s still alive.

95

M
um bought that “Snowbird” record and, since we were in the music shop, she suggested we splash out on a new LP to listen to on Sundays. This could mean the end of “Bali Ha’i.” It was a hard choice, but she came down in favor of the soundtrack to the
Sound of Music
. It was either that or Merle Haggard. His girlfriend does not love him anymore, and there is a hole in his shoe. His wine is all gone, and he needs some more. But for us it will be the Mother Abbess who is climbing every bloody mountain.

They’re in it together. I know that it could not have been a coincidence that Florie Atkins gave me the piano score for the
Sound of Music
as an early Christmas present. So now I am learning to play “Edelweiss” while she stamps her foot and bangs her hand on the side of the piano. And since it is a musical, she is also singing along. Mum keeps asking me to play “Edelweiss” because a small white flower on a mountainside is just one way that we can see the face of God. She can’t wait for me to learn “The Lonely Goatherd.”

According to Miss Peabody, you should not listen to lively music on a Sunday, or it will distract you from your thoughts of God. Certainly not pop music, jazz, or rock ’n’ roll. Permissible genres are classical, gospel, country and western, and anything by Rodgers and Hammerstein. This is why you cannot listen to
Paint Your Wagon
. Also, there is a lot of wooing in that movie, and the Fandango girls are women of ill repute. If not for this, Lee Marvin’s “Wandr’in’ Star” could be listened to because it has the Sabbath cachet of being sung in a tuneless and morose style, creating a musical sense of depression and grief.

We can also listen to hymns.

“Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” remains Miss Peabody’s all-time favorite.

Stand up, stand up for Jesus, Ye soldiers of the Cross,
Hold high his royal banner,
It must not suffer loss.
From victory unto victory, his armies he shall lead,
‘Til every foe is vanquished and Christ is Lord indeed.

Don’t even think about asking or Miss Peabody will tell you everything about this hymn. It was written in memory of the Reverend Dudley Tyng, who died as a result of his silk tunic getting caught in a corn thrasher, ripping his arm from its socket. He lost a lot of blood, the wound got infected, and he died. Apparently, his last words were, “Let us all stand up for Jesus.”

I am sure that Valium use increases on Sundays.

The television is no better. Tonight we watched David Kossoff on
Storytime
telling the tale of Cain and Abel. Cain was jealous of Abel because God did not praise him. This was after Cain only gave God a few grains of corn as an offering whereas Abel killed an actual lamb or two. It was God’s test to see if Cain would let the evil take him over. So Cain takes his brother for a walk and murders him, and then God curses the ground so that it will never produce again. Miss Peabody says that the murder of Abel was the creation of evil after the original sin when man discovered woman. And Cain was the evil one, the origin of the Devil.

I think this answers the question about whether God created the Devil. He did.

It is permissible to laugh on Sundays but only at a religious joke. This is why the chief usher tells the same joke at the end of the sermon every week when he reads the Parish notices.

“The Young Wives Club will meet at five o’clock on Thursday. All those wishing to become Young Wives, please see the reverend in his study.”

And the Sunday roast dinner was definitely invented to help people get through the day. The comfort of roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes, and lashings of gravy probably helps to prevent several attempted suicides per week. We, however, had something purple and hairy for dinner that the butcher thought was for our dog. Part heart, part udder. And without a decent meal from Monday to Friday, I am in real danger of starving to death. Any advert on the old telly involving food or sweets is becoming highly hypnotic to me—even the advert for Maltesers, the chocolate with the less-fattening center that should only be eaten by girls who are watching their waistlines.

I have told Mum that this cannot continue. Obviously, I did not tell her about my risk of starvation and the lunch ticket scam, even though the purple, hairy heart-udder we were supposed to eat for dinner needed some discussion. But I did tell her that from now on I will not be going to either Sunday School or Church because there is nothing further that I can be taught about God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the archangel Gabriel, the Bible in general, or specifically the concept of Original Sin.

This did not go well.

Mum has seen my demand to stay at home on Sundays as a clear sign that I have reached “that” age, and it is time that she told me a thing or two about the desperate plight of man and the need for procreation, and how,
exactly
, we all came into this world.

“There are things you need to know, Johnny. It’s time that you knew. Some of this may come as quite a shock. I will spare you some of the detail. But the world is full of shocks. Sit yourself down.”

Firstly, I should consider myself a servant of God, and since I have not yet reached the age of adulthood, I could not have served any worthy purpose, and therefore I owe God a great debt. Mum was right. This has come as quite a shock. I thought that my childhood double-duty of Sunday School with Miss Peabody and nightly prayers on my knees had been a clear sign of my belief and devotion. I had no idea I was racking up a debt to God.

Secondly, she said I must continue to attend church, as I will be tested later in life by all manner of temptations, betrayal, grief, death, and possibly by a general lack of purpose. It will be during these times that I will need to turn to God and will regret having selfishly abandoned Him before I have even reached my teenage years or repaid my debt. I will especially need Him if I do not know why I am here.