Burial of Ghosts Read online

  ‘That’s not a dream,’ he said. ‘Tell me about the dream.’

  ‘I want to work for myself. Doing something I care about. Making a difference. I still want to live on the coast. I want a room in an attic to work in. A sloping roof and a view of the sea.’

  ‘You’ve thought about it before.’

  ‘No.’ It had just come to me. Like a vision. I thought it was time to get back to Jess. I was going loopy and she’d bring me down to earth.

  We fell asleep almost immediately, despite the noise of the amplified call to prayer from the mosque on the other side of the square, and the traffic and the people. When I woke, he’d gone. He left a note saying nice things about me, which I’ll keep for ever, but no address and not even his full name.

  Chapter Four

  I was going home. It was mid-afternoon on a grey, sleety day and the train was almost empty. Occasionally I’d conjure up that last night in Marrakech and feel a Cheshire cat grin spread across my face, but none of the other sad travellers noticed. Through the window I looked out for the familiar signs, like marker stones, which would point the way back to Jess. The red sandstone bulk of Durham Cathedral. The Angel of the North, rusted to a darker red, its wings open in an unconditional embrace of welcome. The Tyne with its bridges.

  The train slowed to a crawl across the river. The tide was high. On the Quayside there were already lights in the bars and restaurants, reflected in the water. It was rush-hour busy. I saw pasty faces, hunched bodies wrapped against the weather that had nothing of the spring in it. I missed the Moroccan light, the startling colours, and had to persuade myself that I was glad to be back.

  The trip from Newcastle to Newbiggin took more than an hour. The talk which eddied around the overheated bus was familiar – Newcastle United’s failure to achieve again, television soaps, the weather. There was room enough for my rucksack and me to share a double seat and no one spoke to me. Rain and dirt mixed on the windows, so I couldn’t see out. I must have dozed, and woke with a start to find the bus empty and the driver leaning out of his seat to yell at me.

  ‘This is it, pet. As far as we go.’

  I’d missed my stop, but only by a couple of hundred yards. I stepped out and there was the smell of seaweed and mud, with a faint reek of fish in the background. The pavement was grainy from blown sand. I lifted the rucksack onto my back and walked away from the church. A gang of teenagers, skimpily dressed despite the weather, chased past me to catch the bus back into town. It revved like an old man coughing phlegm and drove off. The town was quiet.

  I hadn’t told Jess when I was coming home. We weren’t family. There wasn’t that sort of obligation. I didn’t kid myself. She cared for all the dropouts and druggies who were dumped on her doorstep by social services. It was just that I’d stayed there longer, so she was used to me. And I was one of her first. I’d paid a month’s rent for my room in advance so she’d hold it for me. She had to live. I realized that in one sense the connection between us was financial, on her part at least. I liked to think that our friendship meant more to her than that, but it wasn’t something I could take for granted.

  The stone house where she lived was at the end of an alley off the main street. There was a yard where the dustbins were kept and the washing line was strung, reached through a latched gate in a high wall. This was the back. The front faced the sea and you could only get there on foot along a promenade which the council had created in an attempt to tart up the town. There was a small garden at the front. It had a path of shingle and shells, a few windblown shrubs and a white bench with a view across the small harbour to the church. I’d done most of my reading for university finals there. I went in through the back, past the box of empty wine bottles ready for recycling, the piles of moulding newspapers tied up in string.

  There was a light in the kitchen window. I eased the rucksack off my back and looked in. Jess was at the antique gas stove, stirring a pan. Broth, I thought, and felt hungry. She made good broth, with ham shanks and split peas and whatever vegetables she could pick up cheap at Blyth market. She was only supposed to give us a room and breakfast, but if anyone was around in the evenings she fed us, even if it was only bread and cheese or beans on toast. She was a short woman, squat, with most of the weight settled on her hips and bum. Today she was wearing jeans and a long silk tunic which I didn’t recognize. She must have been raiding the Oxfam shops again. Over it she wore a green canvas apron which I’d bought her to replace the horrible dinner-lady nylon overalls. She had her back to me but I could picture her face, crinkled now, but only round the eyes, so it looked as if she was laughing, and the biggest smile in Northumberland. Her hair was cropped short. If she was going out, she put on earrings. Today, although she was in, she was wearing long, silver fish. I’d given her those too. I wondered if she’d guessed that I was coming home.

  I got closer to the window, intending to knock to surprise her, and then I saw she wasn’t alone in the kitchen. There was a man I didn’t know. He stood at the table, opening a bottle of wine. A new lodger, I thought. There was a spare room. Just before I’d gone on holiday a smack-head called Stuart had been sent down for thieving from cars. Jess had gone to court to speak up for him, but none of us were sorry. He’d been stealing from us and probably from her too. Jess had said perhaps his conviction was a good thing. It would give him a chance to get clean. Jess is still very innocent. I love that in her. We all do. We try to protect her.

  The stranger would have been in his mid-forties, fifty perhaps. His head was almost bald, lumpy as if it had been roughly carved from wood. Usually we got kids to stay, but it wasn’t unknown to have someone older, often someone who’d done a long stretch in prison, if there was no vacancy in a probation hostel. I thought it was crazy, but Jess never asked what they’d done. I mean, we could have been sharing broth with a paedophile or a mad axe-man.

  ‘One new start,’ she’d say. ‘Everyone deserves that.’

  I wondered sometimes if she was religious, if that was why she did it, but she never said. So far as I knew she never set foot inside a church. Certainly she never tried to convert us.

  As I watched, the new man opened the bottle and put it on the table. He didn’t have that drawn, grey look of someone who’s been inside for a long time. His face seemed tough and wind-beaten, like those of the old men in the village who’d worked on boats all their lives. And he wasn’t frightened. He went up behind Jessie and put his hands on her shoulders,then slid them down past her waist to her hips. Carefully she leaned the wooden spoon against the side of the pan and turned to him, tilting her face to be kissed.

  I felt sick. I suppose it must be like if you’re a teenager in a real family and you catch your parents making love. I wasn’t ready to share her.

  I must have moved or made a noise, because she saw me. She spread her arms wide, a gesture as welcoming as the Angel of the North. I opened the door and went in, dragging the rucksack behind me. I stood there in the steamy kitchen, awkward and brittle and defensive as when I’d first arrived.

  ‘Take a seat, hinny, you’re blocking out the light.’ The same words as she’d used the first time when I’d been pushed through the door by the social worker. She winked to show she remembered that, even after all these years. So what else could I do but sit at the table and take a glass of wine and look pleased to see the new man in her life?

  His name was Ray. He was a plumber. He’d come one evening to fix the boiler and they’d got talking and realized they’d been to school together. He’d been married and divorced when he was young and stupid. No kids, thank God. Jess had offered him a bite to eat, because she thought she was some sort of mother to the world. He’d taken her to the folk club in Cramlington, because that was what he was into. Traditional folk and brewing his own beer. Sad bastard. Since then, they’d seen each other every day.

  Jess told me all this, her words spilling out so they hardly made sense. Ray didn’t say much. He was wearing a thick check shirt and brown
corduroy trousers, heavy shoes like walkers wear when they’re not on a mountain. It was hard to imagine him young or stupid, anything other than a boring anorak who liked listening to hairy musicians singing with one finger in their ear. Jess could have done better. But why would she listen to me?

  The letter came six weeks later.

  I had been thinking a lot about Philip. Memories of the night in Marrakech distracted me when I read. Occasionally I believed I saw him in the street, just his back as he disappeared round a corner, the face of a driver as a car went past. But it never was him. I liked to think that he would come to find me, but I knew he had too much to lose.

  It arrived on the last day of May. We’d had a week of hot, sunny weather. I was sitting on the bench in the front garden reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The dreamlike ramblings suited my mood. Jackie, the postman, dropped the envelope into my lap on his way to the house with the rest of the mail. I didn’t open it immediately. It was made of thick, cream paper. In embossed lettering on the back flap was printed SMITH AND HOWDON, SOLICITORS.

  Oh, Christ, I thought, the lad in Blyth has gone through with his threat of claiming damages. The idea of reliving that experience in front of men in fancy dress made me want to throw up.

  When I opened the envelope I was shaking. I pulled out one sheet of laser-printed cream paper.

  Dear Miss Bartholomew

  I regret to inform you that Philip Samson died on 27 May following a serious illness. His funeral will be held on 3 June at midday at St Bede’s Church, Wintrylaw. As a result of your meeting in Taroudannt, Morocco, he wished me to inform you of his death. There are other matters which I would prefer to discuss in person. If it would be convenient, perhaps we could do that following the funeral.

  Yours,

  Stuart Howdon

  Solicitor

  I stared for a moment at the thick cream paper, let my eyes run over the words without taking them in. Then I began to cry. The sun and the breeze from the sea dried the tears on my cheeks, so all that was left was the taste of salt.

  Chapter Five

  Around that time the dreams returned. Not the pleasant fantasies about bumping into Philip in the street. I tried to re-create those but couldn’t bring him back to life, however hard I tried. These are different sorts of images and they have stayed with me ever since.

  It doesn’t only happen at night. They appear suddenly during the day when I’m wound up or troubled. Flashbacks, Lisa, my community nurse, calls them, but that makes you think of memory and these are more like nightmares; they have that unreal, blurry-edged feeling. I’m not sure that what I see in these flashbacks actually happened. I don’t trust them.

  If there’s a knife in the scene I focus in on it immediately. It’s like I’m filming. The knife appears in close-up. Lovingly, seductively. Sometimes I think I stabbed the lad in Blyth with a knife, but I know that’s not right. In Blyth it was scissors.

  We all have fantasies, don’t we? My first fantasies were about my mother coming to the kids’ home to find me. Then about sex. Now they’re about knives. Lisa asks if I think about cutting myself and I say no. In my dreams other people do the cutting. Or I cut them.

  So, there’s this one flashback. I’m in the secure unit where I worked when I left college. The kids are fraught and jumpy. It seems as if it’s been raining for weeks and they can’t get out. So I say suddenly, a brainwave, ‘Right, we’ll do some cooking.’ Because that’s a new activity for them, and they’re bored out of their brains locked up in that place.

  Do I ask permission? No. I’m the senior social worker on duty. Who would I ask?

  The kitchen’s empty. The cook takes a break after the lunchtime rush. It’s early afternoon but outside it’s nearly dark and the scene is lit by very white strip-lights. Everything is so clean it gleams. There’s a lot of stainless steel, throwing back blurred reflections: a big central table with a shelf underneath for pans. An oven, industrial-sized. And knives. They’re kept at the back of a drawer, away from prying eyes, though the kitchen is usually out of bounds to the children.

  Zoom in on the knives. There are four of them with yellow plastic handles. All wedge-shaped, but different sizes.

  I don’t take them from the drawer. Naïve, I might be, but I’m not that daft. I find flour in a stainless-steel drum in the larder and some sachets of dried yeast, and we make bread. Kneading the dough on the table, the kids are calmer than they’ve been for days. I congratulate myself. I really think I’m good at this job. I imagine that in a few years I could be running the unit, taking decisions, planning policy.

  I show the kids how to form the mixture into rolls, by circling it between floured palms like Jess taught me. It’s a positive decision to make rolls not loaves. They’ll be quicker to cook and these are seriously disturbed children with a low boredom threshold. But it’s also because I want the kids to taste their baking. You have to cut a loaf and there’s one boy at least I wouldn’t trust around a bread knife. So I wasn’t thoughtless or reckless. That charge was laid against me, but I tell myself it’s not true.

  Zoom in on the drawer again. There are only three knives left.

  Ray gave me a lift to Wintrylaw. Jess organized it.

  ‘He’s got a job towards there anyway,’ she said, though I didn’t believe her. ‘Just give him a call on his mobile when you need to get back.’

  He had a creased Ordnance Survey map, but we got lost. The church was next to a big house, a couple of miles out of the village. I could tell that much by the map, but not how to get there. I was supposed to be navigating, but the wiggly lines didn’t make much sense. I couldn’t tell the footpaths from the unadopted roads. In the end Ray pulled over into the side of a lane.

  ‘You might just as well get out here,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can get much further. This is it, according to the map, like.’

  He was anxious, apologetic, knowing he’d get knacked by Jess for not delivering me all the way. But I was glad to escape.

  The ditches were full and the hawthorn hedges grown into crazy shapes and covered with blossom. There were two pillars smeared with lichen, the edges of each stone worn smooth by the wind, like boulders on a beach. No gate. A grass track leading through the trees, the leaves Granny Smith green, shimmering silver occasionally when turned by the breeze. On the floor white, star-shaped flowers and overblown bluebells, the vivid colours of a Moroccan rug. The sun was behind me and threw my shadow, lengthened slightly, onto the track. I took a breath and stepped between the pillars.

  Of course I knew this couldn’t be the right way into the Wintrylaw estate. No cars had ever gone down this track. Perhaps once there had been phaetons, strangers on dark horses, children in donkey carts, but no cars. The track turned and below me I saw the house. The crumbling stone gleamed in the morning sunshine. I was looking down on the roof, could see the moss growing in the gutters and the grass between the slates. For a moment I believed I could see into the great chimneys to the hearths and the stoves below. I imagined high ceilings and ornate furniture.

  Beyond the house the main drive swept away into the distance, and there was a little grey church. From this perspective all I could see was a squat tower; the nave was hidden by a plantation of Scots pine. Beyond that, a line of light. The sea. Standing on the grass I thought I could smell it and the tang of pine.

  I walked on, heading for the church, not shy any more, not worried about meeting strangers or bumping into Philip’s family, confident that I could do him proud. I was wearing the white dress from Marrakech. Jess had been put out when I appeared in it: ‘Really pet, I don’t think that’s quite the thing. What about that nice suit we got for court?’

  I knew already that a boring business suit wouldn’t have done. Not for this place. I had to walk past the house to reach the church, and as I approached it from the back I realized a crowd had gathered. I heard voices first, at least the sound of voices without being able to hear what was said, as you hear the sou
nd of soft foreign sibilants in a market in Africa. Then I turned a corner and saw them, very English in all their eccentricities. Still the tones were muted. They weren’t those loud braying voices that I’d heard when I’d gone with Jess to the county show. Voices bred to be heard above the hounds.

  There were lots of them, standing around with glasses in their hands, so again I was made to think of the hunt, of the followers waiting outside a pub for the spectacle of the master, all dressed up in his costume of red and black. Here, it is true, there was more black than red. They stood in small groups chatting. I supposed they were neighbours from the village come to say goodbye. Rural Northumberland is very feudal.

  I could tell at once which of them was Philip’s widow. She was standing apart from the others, surrounded by her family and a couple of friends. She had a striking face. Very thin and gaunt, asymmetrical, with a strangely twisted nose. If that makes her sound ugly then I’m giving the wrong impression. It was a strong face which demanded to be watched. The eyes were thin and long, like a cat’s, and very dark. She wore a sleeveless black dress which almost reached to her ankles and over that a tight chiffon jacket. Her shoes were pointed, Victorian in style. It all gave an impression of fancy dress. She didn’t wear gloves, though I thought she had probably wanted to. Black, lacy gloves, reaching to her elbows. Someone had told her they wouldn’t be quite the thing, just as Jess had objected to my white frock. Her hair was platinum blonde and waved like a 1930s film star’s.

  Her daughter was blonde too. Her hair lay in a sheet down her back. She had a blue straw hat with a velvet ribbon, held on with thin elastic under her chin, a navy-blue dress with little puffed sleeves and white tights. I didn’t notice the shoes because she turned suddenly and noticed me, then pointed to her mother, who stared in my direction too. With hostility I thought. Perhaps Philip had confessed about his fling in Marrakech. Perhaps she needed someone to blame for his death and had brought me here to make a scene. But she frowned as if she had no idea who I was. She asked the small boy who was kicking pebbles on the drive, staring very hard at his feet in an attempt not to cry. He looked up, glad of the distraction, but obviously he didn’t recognize me either. I stood, hovering on the edge of the terrace, feeling as insubstantial as a ghost.