Burial of Ghosts Read online

  ‘But?’

  ‘No buts. It was just tough. I needed a break. Morocco seemed a good idea.’

  He could tell there was more to it than that, but he didn’t push it, not even when I started shaking. It must have been close to 100 degrees in that bus, but suddenly I was trembling. Philip put his arm around me and pulled me towards him. The woman in the seat in front of us turned and peered out through the slit in her veil. Her eyes were sparkling with interest and amusement.

  Chapter Two

  That morning in the bus Philip got my take on the story, the authorized version of the life and times of Lizzie Bartholomew. I didn’t tell him everything. For example, I didn’t describe the antics which really got up the noses of the authorities while I was a kid, the court appearances, the thieving. Because, despite his sympathy, he’d be on the same side as them. I could tell the sort of man he was. He’d pay his taxes at the first demand. He’d vote. Write to the papers about crime figures, litter in the street, dog shite. He was decent and respectable.

  Lizzie Bartholomew is a fiction, not created by me but for me. I wouldn’t exist except for the imagination and prompt action of two middle-aged ladies who stumbled upon me. Stumbled literally. They were walking their dog along the headland at Newbiggin. It was 30 November, six in the evening, already dark. Fog blanked out the buoys in the bay, and they took the path through the churchyard because it was safer.

  The dog went ahead of them, so when I said before that they tripped over me, I was fibbing for effect. A bad habit of mine. The story’s always more important than the truth. It wasn’t the ladies who tripped over me but the mongrel collie bitch.

  I was in the church porch, which was open to the elements on the seaward side, wrapped in a plaid blanket. Not newly born, they were told later, but not more than a week old.

  There were appeals for my mother to come forward, but no one was surprised when there was no response. I was a very dark baby, with black hair and olive skin made more sallow by jaundice. Not a pretty child. It was assumed immediately that I belonged to the travellers who camped with their scraggy ponies and their clapped-out vans up the coast at Lynemouth. They were a law unto themselves, the gypsies. Local people had no difficulty in believing that they ate babies. Not surprising, then, that they should leave one in the porch of a church. Later apparently, the police went with a district nurse to talk to the group. You can imagine the scene, the animals, the raggle-taggle children, a fire in an oil drum kept alight with driftwood and sea coal. Of course they wouldn’t talk to strangers. Why should they? In their position I’d keep quiet too. If there was a young woman among them who had been pregnant, but was no longer, or someone who’d drifted away, no one was telling. The group changed all the time. It wasn’t a permanent site.

  I’m not sure much else was done to trace my mother. There was an article in the local paper. I’ve seen that. But the assumption was that I’d been left by the gypsies and that I was better off without a family than belonging to a family of that kind. I’d had a narrow escape. So I was taken off to the hospital in Ashington and became the responsibility of the social services.

  They had to give me a name. Bartholomew came after St Bartholomew’s, the church. I never minded that. It sounded solid and impressive, like the building itself. And Lizzie. Not Elizabeth, even on the birth certificate. I would have liked Elizabeth. Lizzie after the mongrel bitch.

  I should have been adopted. That was the plan. A short-term foster placement, then, if my parents couldn’t be found, adoption. But it never worked out that way and later, when I asked why, no one could tell me, even when I stormed into the office and demanded to see my file. I suspect it was a mixture of lethargy, prejudice and incompetence. None of the social workers cared enough to make it happen. Prospective parents were put off by my wild looks – I still looked foreign as I grew older – and my history. Perhaps they thought a child with gypsy blood would be uncontrollable. Did they imagine me cursing their cats and selling sprigs of heather at the neighbours’ doors?

  The children’s homes were much as I described them to Philip. They merge in my mind into a blur. There was one dreadful place run by nuns, but on the whole they were comfortable enough, just unimaginably dull. The workers seemed to fall into two camps – either they were earnest young professionals who sat in the office writing reports and waiting to be promoted, or idle middle-aged women who watched hours of television while claiming to be overworked. Perhaps that’s unjust and my memory’s selective, but I don’t recall any of them spending time with us. When I came in from school, for example, there was no one to listen to my petty grievances, and I always had plenty of those. On the television, I saw families eating together, playing board games, laughing. I thought everyone else in the world had that except us. Now, of course, I know better. What I’m trying to say is that there were adults in the building, but they were always doing other things. More important things. They didn’t enjoy our company. We were deprived of their attention.

  That’s my explanation for my behaviour anyway. My excuse. At least it was at the time. They called my aggression attention-seeking. And so it was. Recently everything has seemed much more complicated.

  The driver stopped at the top of the Tizn Test pass, at a roadside café, for the driver to eat lunch. We got out to stretch our legs and marvel at the view. It was dizzying. We were looking down at snow and soaring vultures. Philip walked away from the road up a narrow path. He squatted on his heels to look more closely at the scrubby bushes, then called me to join him.

  ‘This is caper,’ he said. ‘You know, we use the fruit in cooking.’

  That is the only identification I remember, but he would have named them all for me, all the plants and the trees, if I’d given him the chance. Shown any interest at all. He could have been engrossed there for hours, but he sensed my attention wandering.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.

  ‘Mmm.’ In this mood I was always hungry.

  As we walked back to the café, the peace was broken by a car screaming past. It seemed there was a Spanish motor rally taking place. A time trial, I think, not a race. Occasionally a car would flash by and men with stop-watches would wave their arms and yell at each other. I found the speed and the noise exciting, but Philip was furious.

  ‘It’s completely ruined. Our last stop in the mountains. How dare they?’

  If he’d been alone, I think he would have confronted the loud Spaniards, made a scene. I thought he was used to getting his own way.

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ I said. ‘You’ll come back. There are other places.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  He wandered inside and came back with a tray. There was a plate with an omelette, a loaf of flat, sweet bread, a bowl of salad and two cans of Coke. He put the plate in front of me on the wooden picnic table, wiping the knife and fork with a paper napkin. Then he opened one of the Cokes and took a swig.

  ‘Aren’t you eating?’

  He shook his head. ‘Too hot.’

  He took a pair of binoculars from his bag and looked down the valley at the vultures, wincing occasionally when a car went past. He pointed out a family of wild boars, a mother and four piglets, skittering through the shrub below. As I handed back the binoculars and returned to my food, he said, ‘What plans do you have for Marrakech, Lizzie Bartholomew?’

  I looked up from the meal, expecting him to be grinning again, but it was almost as if he were holding his breath, waiting for an answer.

  ‘That depends,’ I said.

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On you.’

  He nodded, satisfied. I insisted on giving him the cash for my lunch. It was a matter of pride that I’d never been paid for sex.

  Chapter Three

  There was other stuff I hadn’t told Philip, and that I wasn’t so proud of. I didn’t talk about the stealing and the court appearance. He would probably have understood. He was a kind man. He’d have made allowances. It might even have made him laugh.
I would have liked to make him laugh. But he got the story everyone else got. The expurgated version. We own our own past, don’t we? We can do what we like with it. I didn’t risk telling him about the time in Blyth. I don’t like to think about that tale and certainly there weren’t many jokes in it. Nothing to entertain even a kind man like Philip.

  I started running away from kids’ homes when I was fourteen. I would go to stay with Katie Bell. She’d left care a year before, but she couldn’t really cope on her own. She’d never been much of a fighter. She made a bit of a fuss when I turned up on her doorstep, but only because she didn’t want trouble with the social. She soon let me in and I slept on her floor.

  It was all right in the flat. Katie could have done more with it, but she didn’t care about anything except a lad called Danny and the gear he brought with him. Danny didn’t like me being there. He said I was crazy, a moody cow. When he was around I kept out of the way, moving to other people’s places, from floor to floor. Then he got sent down for dealing and Katie was only too glad to have me back for company.

  It was OK. Like we were playing house. When I went thieving, I brought out quilt sets and cushion covers besides the food and the booze. I had no money at that time, but I never did drugs and I never sold myself. There was this dream I’d had since I was small. My mother would come out of the blue to claim me. She’d just knock at the door and she’d be standing there. I’d know her at once. She’d look like me, except her face would be rounder and softer. I didn’t want her to find me on the game. Perhaps that was an excuse. Perhaps I was just scared. That’s what Katie said, but she’d never been the sharpest tool in the box and I didn’t take any notice of her.

  I wasn’t on the run. Not really. The authorities could have taken me back at any time they wanted. It wouldn’t have been difficult to find out where I was sleeping. If they weren’t bright enough to guess, any of the kids left in the home would have told them. I even went to school most days. It was somewhere to go when Katie was getting on my nerves and there was a free dinner. I’d never admit it, but I liked school. I liked waking up in the morning knowing there was something to do. I suppose I needed the structure. I thrived on the routine. Of course I’d been institutionalized. I’ve got A-level psychology and a social work diploma. I know about these things.

  They would have let me drift along at Katie’s until I was sixteen if I hadn’t turned up in court. It was my fault. I’d gone back to an Asda I’d already done before and they must have recognized me and sent someone outside to wait. It was supposed to work like this. You’d put a load of stuff in your trolley but only half the amount you could get rid of. You’d take it through to the till and pay for it, then push it outside. Katie would be waiting for me there. She’d take over the trolley and disappear – in a mini-cab if we were buying booze for other people and they were willing to pay. I’d keep the receipt, go back into the shop and buy exactly the same stuff. Then I’d bypass the till – Asda’s good for that, loads of space – and go to the coffee shop for a cup of tea. Dead leisurely and laid back. I’d pack some of the stuff into the spare bags I’d picked up on the first way through, as if I was just rearrranging the load. If anyone stopped me, which they only did once, I’d have a receipt to prove that I’d paid for my trolley load. Of course, all the receipts are date- and time-stamped, but I could explain the difference in time by the tea. That day, though, they got Katie just as she was getting into the cab. The muppet cracked up at once and told them everything. I ended up in court. First offence, so I only got a conditional discharge. I had to eat, didn’t I? But social services had to take me back to the home and promise to keep a closer eye on me.

  You’d have thought the dreams might have started then. But they didn’t. I always slept like a baby at Katie’s and in the home. So the dreams can’t have been in my blood, can they? I wasn’t born with them.

  We arrived in Marrakech in the late afternoon. It was busier and noisier than Taroudannt. The sound hit us as we climbed down from the bus, blaring horns and shouting people, everyone on the hustle. We booked a room in a hotel from the Rough Guide again. I think Philip had somewhere else planned – I’d guess one of the big American chains, the Hilton or the Sheraton, a halfway house between North Africa and home, somewhere to make the adjustment before flying back to his wife. He didn’t say. I suggested this place and he agreed.

  Inside it was cool. The lobby was tiled on the walls and the floor, so it was like walking into a swimming pool. There were the same strange shadows and reflections. The air felt as thick as water, moved by a slow fan on the ceiling. We drank black, bitter coffee at a low table, while the man on the desk went to get our room ready.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ I asked. Suddenly I was certain that he’d never been unfaithful to his wife before. I didn’t like to think of myself as a corrupter of married men. I still had an idealized view of family life taken from the TV sitcoms I’d watched in the children’s homes.

  ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Another dream fulfilled.’

  ‘What dream would that be?’

  ‘Being seduced by a young and beautiful stranger.’ He was quite serious and I loved it. Apart from when he had put his arm around me in the bus, we still hadn’t touched, but I felt swept along by the adventure. It seemed an extension of the experience at the palmery: exotic, unreal.

  The room was on the ground floor. A door led into a courtyard, surrounded on all sides by high walls covered with vines. There were latticed shutters and more terracotta tiles, a bathroom with a huge old-fashioned tub which had probably been there since the days of the French. A low double bed covered with a cotton quilt stood in the middle of the room.

  I bathed and changed into a white dress. It occurred to me for a moment, as I slipped it over my head, that I was being incredibly foolish. I knew nothing about this man. He could be a rapist or a serial killer. If he chose to slit my throat in an anonymous hotel room in Marrakech, he would get away with it without a doubt. Perhaps the dress was white for sacrifice, for innocence and naïvety. But there’s no pleasure without risk and anyway I trusted my first instinct about him.

  We ate early, in the courtyard, where tables had been set and covered by starched sheets like altar cloths. Brightly coloured birds shouted from the vines. I had thought Philip would be hungry – he’d eaten nothing all day – but he picked at the food, moving it round the plate with his fork like a fussy child. He must be a meat and two-veg sort of man, I thought, disappointed. He hadn’t struck me as that type. Afterwards we lingered, ordering more coffee. I think we were both shy then. We wanted to put off the time when we would be alone together in the room, but this deferment of gratification increased the excitement too. It became almost a sexy game. I waited for him to make the first move. For him it was a big deal, not really a game at all. It had to happen at his pace.

  At last he pushed back his chair and stood up.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  I followed him and saw that he’d left an extravagantly large tip for the waiter. Guilt perhaps. He couldn’t pay me, so he left his money to a bald Moroccan who spoke English with an absurd American accent.

  In the room he pulled the shutters closed. Light and the noise of the other diners and the city beyond filtered through the slats, but very faintly. He sat on the bed and carefully took off his shoes and his socks. They had been clean on after the bath – I had seen him take them from the rucksack and they had looked then almost as if they had been ironed. Had his wife done his packing for him? I stood in front of him, so when he looked up he couldn’t ignore me. He looked into my face, took my hands and pulled me onto the bed beside him.

  He touched me like a blind man whose only understanding comes through the fingertips. A chaste and delicate exploration of my face and neck and arms. But with the heightened sensibility that had stayed with me since the ride in the palmery, I felt every movement over my skin in my gut. It was as if I was tasting it through my pores. Each touch an explosion, like s
herbet in the mouth. He lifted me to my feet and pulled the dress over my head. He was patient, as I’d expected him to be, careful, but there was a desperation I’d not expected. He tried to control it but in the end he let rip, like a lad who’s been inside for years on his first night out with a woman. In the end it was a glorious, noisy, unsophisticated shag, which left us breathless and close to laughter. I thought his wife must be one of those frigid, overworked, exhausted women who’d do it once a month, and then only if the wind was in the right direction. We lay panting and sweaty, our arms around each other.

  ‘Well?’ I asked, fishing for compliments. ‘Did it live up to expectations, being seduced by a strange young woman?’

  ‘Absolutely. Now I can die happy.’ He turned so he was lying on his back, looking up at the ceiling. He seemed content, a sleek cat purring on a sunny windowsill. ‘What about you? Was it a terrible chore? An errand of mercy for an old man?’

  ‘Dreadful. Couldn’t you tell?’ I had to joke. I was on the verge of asking if we’d be able to meet again and that would spoil it. Even if he agreed, sneaky lunchtime meetings, evenings when he was supposed to be working, all that would become squalid and shabby. Better to live with this memory.

  He rolled lazily onto his side and stroked my hair away from my face.

  ‘What about your dreams, Lizzie Bartholomew? What will you do next?’

  ‘Go back north again I suppose. I can always stay with Jess until I sort myself out. Get a job.’

  ‘With social services?’

  ‘It’s what I’m trained for.’ But I knew I’d never work with kids again, certainly not in a residential home. After what happened in Blyth I’d be given the boring stuff, if they let me loose on the public at all. I pictured myself in an area office with a caseload a mile long, dipping in and out of people’s lives, arranging a home help here, a stair lift there. Sticking-plaster solutions, never having the time or the resources to do anything well. The office would be open plan, with Snoopy posters fading on the walls and plants dying on the desks. The people would be frantic and frazzled and they’d expect me to be grateful for my one last chance . . .