The Ghost (11 page)

“SPACE IS MORE DANGEROUS
than killer whales!” insisted Alfie. “It's even more dangerous than volcanoes.”

Cook flipped the over-fried bacon. “Volcanoes are pretty dangerous, Alfie.”

“Only if they're activated!”

Gina, dressed down for a day off work, sat beside Alfie but screened herself out of the debate with strong morning coffee and a copy of
Vogue
. This was her refined survival skill – simultaneous absence and presence. Cook's method was swagger – a studied visibility. He sang and hummed and whistled, prepared comfort snacks, sneaked up the volume on his record player. In the absence of connection, Dorian and Gina Cook had settled for collaboration, resculpting their arrangement from loving relationship to working partnership. Mostly, this was punishing emotional graft – a choreography of bluffs and feints, joshes and jostles. Mutually assured self-destruction. Breakfast, though, was usually relaxed – foggy brains blunted to conflict, the urge to refuel serving as repellent against lingering melodrama. Lunch and dinner, to a lesser degree, carried the theme – natural communion around food forcing a welcome interval from the pantomime. Like a gloomy teenager, it was a marriage that now emerged only at mealtimes.

Cook scored a ragged incision down the centre of a bread roll and pressed two rashers of bacon into the slot. He snaked a squiggle of brown sauce over the top and handed it to Alfie.

“Use a plate, darling!”

This from Gina to Alfie, not from Gina to Cook. Another survival trick – using children as conduit for confrontation avoidance. Cook slid over a side-plate without comment.

“We should go to the Adventure Playground!” announced Gina.

“The one with the Pirate Ship?” said Alfie, through a mouthful of bacon.

School was closed for training and Gina had booked the day off to do ‘outdoor things' with Alfie. She had volunteered this to Cook by text message several weeks ago but, as if to illustrate the toxicity of their recent communication, he had deleted the message without reading it, and had also taken the day as leave. Now, they faced the uncommon anxiety of double-parenting. Cook had planned to spend the morning holed up in his study with Alain Resnais' adaptation of Ayckbourn's
Private Fears In Public Places
. But he needed to bank sufficient goodwill to allow him to disappear in the evening – for his meeting with Brereton and Mountford.

“Yeah, that'd be good. I'll come, too!”

Gina paused, midway through a page-flip, and looked up at Cook. “Really? Oh! That would be nice.”

“Yay!” bounced Alfie. “Mummy
and
Daddy Day!”

They both knew that ‘nice' was a charitable forecast.

*

At the park playground, Cook and Gina deposited Alfie into the relative safety of the stress-tested rope-ladders and rubber-floored gangways. They were both quick on the draw with their phones – Cook prodding at work emails, Gina scrolling through various social media feeds. Cook spotted an unoccupied wooden bench and motioned for Gina to claim it, but she was too slow, and they were forced to hover as a nuclear family moved in and set upon a box of pizza slices.

“We can give him an hour or so,” confirmed Cook to his phone-screen, through a daze of task-juggling (answering an email, checking his bank balance, dismissing an alert, flapping at a wasp). “I've got some work to do and then there's this reunion thing later.”

Gina pocketed her phone. “Let's just wait until he gets tired or hungry. Probably not long. He didn't have much breakfast.” (Economical passive-aggression – a dismissal of her husband's lazy ‘hour or so' assessment with a side-swipe at his unloved, half-eaten bacon rolls.)

Bothered by insects, the pizza family scattered (“Let's eat on the grass like a proper picnic!”). An elderly couple loitering close to Cook and Gina were clearly considering a claim on the bench. But Gina swooped first, establishing territory with an aggressively draped overcoat. As Cook sat beside her, a distant muscle memory almost drifted her hand into his, but she disguised the impulse with a diffident pat on his knee.

“Tell me more about this ‘reunion thing'.”

Cook, still peering into his phone-screen, was immersed in a story at the top of his BBC news feed.

POLICE WIDEN SEARCH

FOR MISSING WOMAN

“Uh?”

“Your meeting later – with the old school-friends!”

Cook re-read the opening paragraphs of the story. He looked at the woman's name, then up at her age, then back down at the name again.

“Just a quick drink. We were all at school together.”

“When did you last see them?”

“I saw one recently – Dennis. It was his idea to get together. I hadn't seen him since we were at school.”

“God, that will be so weird.”

“It's strange, yeah. He didn't seem like the same person at all. But then I've never met him as an adult.”

“Well then he isn't the same person. Really.”

“I suppose not.”

They shared a few seconds of nothingness, to the sound of shouting and laughing children. Gina slid her hand back to Cook's knee. There was comfort – rather than affection – in the gesture.

“Dorian – I don't mind who you meet, you know.”

Cook clicked his phone to stand-by – if only to wrench himself away from the news article – and tilted his head to catch Gina, eye to eye.

“What?”

“You don't need to give me stories about meeting old school friends.”

“Stories?”

“MUMMY!”

The moment was ruptured by Alfie, red-faced and bawling, lurching into his mother's arms.

“Darling! What's wrong?”

After the comfort, the call for justice.

“Daddy! An older boy is being horrible. He's bullying the other children and he pushed me over!”

Alfie's features were warped and defaced – smeared with mud and sweat and torrential tears. Cook knew that the reality would be milder than the report, but there was something in his son's devastation – in the jagged sobbing and retching, in the despair and fury – that threw a switch. He sprang to his feet and squeezed Alfie by the hand, urging – almost yanking – him away from Gina, across the grass, past the pizza family and into the playground area. Alfie's ‘Pirate Ship' was a vaguely galley-shaped framework of wooden oars and braces tethered by a network of ropes and netting. A central ladder led up from the sandpit base onto a broad ‘deck'. This entrance was currently impassible, due to a stocky boy – a couple of years older than Alfie – blocking the path and demanding ‘treasure' from other children.

“He's there, daddy! That one!”

“Okay, son. You stay here.”

And now, on wings of outrage, Cook glided over to the boy, to the bully.

And there was the side entry and John Ray.

Watch! He hates this!

And there was the gates and John Ray.

Come on! You can go!

And there was Uncle Russell.

I'd stay out of it, Dor.

“What the fuck do you think you're doing?”

The boy – the bully, in a grubby green polo shirt – turned to Cook, standing a few feet away, within striking distance, tremoring with confrontation anxiety.

“What? I'm playing! Are you police?”

“No!” snapped Cook, a wobble in his voice. “I am not ‘police' and you are not ‘playing'. You are frightening younger children. You aren't playing with them. You are
bullying
them.”

“What's the problem, mate?”

A tall, angular man with a shiny shaven head stepped forward from a crowd of adults at the edge of the play area. Cook briefly caught his eye before redirecting his glare back at the boy. “He's the problem! He's been bullying the other kids. He made my son cry.” Cook was alert to the man's threat, but continued to build his case. “I've just seen him demanding money.”

“
What?
Who's been demanding money?”

This was clearly a redundant question, but Cook assumed that the man hadn't fully understood.
“He
has!” said Cook, pointing to the boy.

And now, with curtain raised and audience enchanted with fear and fascination, Cook felt the urge to improvise, to season the drama.

“Is this your boy?”

“Yes, mate,” said the man, immediately – confidently.
“This
is my boy.
My
son.”

The man shuffled from stage-right to centre, towards the main ladder, towards Cook and the boy, the bully. Cook pivoted – to receive him, braced for something ugly. If it was to come, he would be prepared – and that would be unexpected. But the man, head sparkling in the sunshine, walked past Cook and gripped his son, the bully, by his forearm.

“Liam! What have I
fucking
told you? Don't mess about with other kids!”

“I wasn't doing anything!”

The man squeezed his son the bully's other forearm and he pushed and pulled with both hands – forward and back – causing Liam's head to jerk against the motion. With this, Liam Sr. shook out the payback for Alfie, as Liam Jr. wailed and sprayed mucus and tears, the fluids atomised by violence.

“Steady on!”

This from an elderly man hoisting a young girl down from one of the climbing frame's high beams.

Liam Sr., now the bully, turned and snarled and released his son, the victim, who collapsed to the floor, clenched and shuddering, sobbing with shock and hurt.

“Don't tell me to steady on! I'll discipline my child the way I fucking want!”

“Is that what that was?” said Cook.

The bald man turned back to the balding man. “You what?”

Gina, crouched down beside Alfie.

The elderly man carrying the young girl.

Two rigid vertical furrows between Liam Sr.'s eyes.

Three horizontal grooves in Liam Sr.'s forehead.

Liam the victim unfurling, standing, shuffling towards Alfie, saying I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

“Pretty fucked-up kind of ‘discipline'.”

The elderly man setting the young girl down by an elderly woman, keeping his eyes on Cook and Liam Sr.

“Dorian…” (Gina).

“You think he's learned his lesson, do you? Now you've shaken him half to death?”

Gina comforting Liam as well as Alfie.

Liam Sr. mouth open.

Grooves, furrows.

“Fuck off! You're the one that made this a big thing!”

“Maybe if you stopped your kids extorting money off other kids, it wouldn't have happened in the first place.”

This felt desperate and off-target, but Cook, the bully, was marshalling his
Critics' Wire
debating composure.

“What do you think you're teaching your kids – doing that to them in public? You're teaching them that it's okay to make something physical, as a knee-jerk. You're teaching them that the natural progression from anger is abuse.”

Gina comforting Liam and Alfie.

Gina staring at the ground.

Grooves, furrows.

“I do not abuse my kids!”

Cook, smiling. “Oh, yeah. We can all see that!”

And now, Liam Sr., pointing at the air, prodding at the space a few inches from Cook's face.

“You've got a fucking big mouth!”

And there was Mr Butcher.

You have a problem – it's called a mouth.

Cook drew back his right shoulder and swiped his fist up and around and into the side of Liam Sr.'s smooth, shiny head. The connection was barely a glance, but Cook immediately recoiled and snapped out another punch. This one landed – more out of luck than precision – on the edge of an eye socket, with an unsatisfying, near-silent clunk. It jerked back Liam Sr.'s head, forcing him to stumble down onto one knee. Cook shuffled backwards, braced for retaliation, but Liam Sr. stayed down – there on the dank grass, on one knee, hand over his eye. It looked like a surreal proposal of marriage.

“You
cunt!”

“Dorian!” (Gina).

Liam Sr. – still not fully upright – scrambled towards Cook, head down, his skull now a polished cannonball. Cook almost managed to sidestep the charge, but Liam Sr. half-connected with enough force to send the two men tumbling onto a honeycombed safety mat beneath a toddler climbing frame. In the initial wrestle for dominance, Cook was surprised to find himself the strongest. He dug his boot-heels into the rubber and shoved Liam Sr. to the side, wrestling his way into an absurdly sexual straddling position – Cook on top, Liam Sr. face down on the matting. Cook aimed a couple of uncharitable swipes to the back of Liam Sr.'s head, his fists clunking onto bony dome, squishing into leathered nape. Liam Sr. wriggled onto his back, flailing his arms up at Cook, slapping not punching. He rocked from side to side, trying to force his attacker off-balance, but there was too much bulk to shift.

And now, Cook appeared paralysed. He held his position, keeping Liam Sr. pinned, but only offering defensive flaps at incoming blows.

“Get off me!!”

Hands on Cook's back, prising him away.

A crying child.

“Daddy! Stop!”

“Leave him alone!”

“Dorian! Stop this!”

John Ray screaming, John Ray howling.

What's he ever done to you?