Half-Sick of Shadows (13 page)

At the top of the stairs, I looked right and left for the White Lady. But she wasn’t there.

Mother wept again when I left the Manse for my second year at school. I wept again too. Sophia wept too too. Edgar wept because we wept, but mainly he looked baffled. Gregory looked bored. Father, I’m certain – at work on Farmer Barry’s farm – didn’t care one way or the other who wept, looked baffled or looked bored.

Farmer Barry left Father in charge of his farm – although I doubt that Father’s being in charge made any practical difference – while he came for me and Gregory at the Manse in his lorry.

I was too young to appreciate Farmer Barry’s kindness, or wonder what, if anything, he got in return. With a wet, purple face, I dug my fingernails into Mother’s thighs.

‘OW! That hurt! Wee bugger! Let go!’

Smiling, Farmer Barry put his big hands around my chest and would have pulled me free, but I trailed Mother’s frock in my talons and between my clenched teeth.

‘Let go, Edward!’

Not in her life!

‘Do as your mother tells you,’ said Farmer Barry.

Frock material ripped. Mother prised my fingers open. She pinched my arm. I opened my mouth, yelped, and her frock came free.

9

Miss Ballard and Satan’s Face

I waited alone on the day that classes resumed outside Miss Ballard’s classroom door. No one else stood outside, only me, too keen by far. Only Pike, it seemed, wanted to make a good impression. I arrived ten minutes early because I had yet to learn that making a good impression on a teacher is nowhere remotely as important as the avoidance of making a bad impression on other boys.

A rumour circulated that Miss Ballard used to be a beauty queen, and, although forty something, she entered beauty competitions still – scandalous behaviour to boys our age. Exciting too. Standing on toe-tips to see through the pane in the centre of the door, I saw her face when she sensed my presence and looked up. Ducking would have been silly. I knocked on the door and went in. One of Miss Ballard’s bare feet perched on the edge of her desk. She was attempting to cut her toenails with the kind of school scissors that I found too blunt to cut cardboard with. Her ferocious big toe, the nail painted purple, looked like a mutant raspberry.

‘I’m Edward Pike,’ I said, choking on my own saliva. I wondered whether toenail cutting in public was a sin.

Miss Ballard displayed an immodestly bare thigh. I considered backing out of the classroom, but her leg’s length held me in thrall. Mother’s and Sophia’s legs were the only female legs I knew. Miss
Ballard
’s extravagance in the leg department put theirs to shame.

‘Another one.’ She surveyed me shoes to hair – no vast distance.

‘Miss?’

‘Pike. Another Pike. Say Gregry isn’t your brother.’

She spoke with a funny voice. Without meaning to be cheeky or precocious or witty or anything else, I said Gregory with two syllables the same way she did: Gregry. ‘Gregry isn’t my brother.’

‘I believe you. You don’t look like him.’ She narrowed her eyes to see inside my brain and through me. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I do have a brother called Gregry, but you said to say I didn’t. So I said I didn’t. Although I do. And one called Edgar. And a mother and father and twin sister called Sophia. We’re the same age.’

She looked down at me, past her raised foot, which, when I looked closely – and the foot forced me to look closely – possessed, all beside each other with spaces between making them look like miniature headstones, six toes.

‘Gregry Pike’s example is not a good one,’ she said. ‘What’s the matter? Haven’t you seen a six-toed foot before?’

‘No, Miss.’

She removed her foot from the desk. Her thigh vanished. ‘The example set by your brother is a bad one. Follow it at your peril.’

‘I thought everybody has only five toes. Ten, if you count both feet. But only five if you lost a leg in the war.’

‘Wait outside, Pike,’ said Miss Ballard.

My effort at making a good first impression having backfired, I waited outside. While waiting outside, I concluded that Miss Ballard, judging by the cracks in her face-paint, had closer to fifty years on her clock than forty. If God sent another flood, and all her make-up washed off, she might be sixty. Could someone that old really lift their foot on to a desk? Maybe old people with six toes could.

I followed up year one’s achievement of making no friends by making none in year three either. If I’d gone to year two, I’m sure I
would
have completed a hat-trick. My peers were too boisterous and competitive for my sensibility.

Miss Ballard gave us official bible lessons daily. We also received bible lessons unofficially during arithmetic, writing and art. Miss Ballard had the sort of piety that would have qualified her to be a world champion nun.

At first, I thought Miss Ballard’s odd accent a speech impediment. She came from up north where their words were the same as ours but with fewer syllables. All her sentences, no matter how short or long they were, rose at the end from normal to high-pitched. Everything she said sounded like an attack because it came with a small dog’s yap to finish with. The high-pitched ending made statements of fact sound like questions: ‘You got tin correct spillings out of tin? I’m awarding you a silver star?’

Miss Ballard also tended to use big words without telling us what they meant. The Lord God is omnipotent and omniscient? He sent His son Jesus to redeem us from our transgressions?’

No more pious woman could exist than Miss Ballard. Alas, she could never be a nun because nuns, like priests, were from a false religion – according to her. They were Cathlics. Cathlics called themselves Christians, but they were not true Christians; they were Aunty Christians and their leader, the Pope, was the Aunty Christ. The crosses of Aunty Christians still had Jesus on them. But Jesus should never be on crosses. He rose from the dead, after all; he wasn’t still crucified. Proper Christian crosses were empty. Jesus went to Heaven on a cloud, not a cross.

Miss Ballard frightened religion into those boys who were not infected by it already. As if Christ-bearing crosses were not bad enough, Catholics worshipped the Virgin Mary, Jesus’s mother – which I had trouble getting my young head around, although I could not put my finger on why.

According to Miss Ballard with the odd accent and extra toe,
worship
of the Virgin Mary counted as a posty sea and blast fanny – whatever they were; I dared not ask.

During bible lessons, Miss Ballard encouraged us to ask questions. There were forty of us, but only four or five, including me, spoke. Questions such as ‘Is the Dead Sea really dead?’ could set her running for fifteen uninterrupted minutes about loaves and fishes or walking on water. Peter McCrew enraged her by asking – perfectly sensibly in my view – if Lazarus was a zombie.

One day, I asked Miss Ballard what Satan looked like. She said no one really knew because he could look like whatever he wanted to? He appeared to Eve in the Garden of Eden as a snake?

During the Christmas break, after I’d been home nearly long enough to go back, I woke, swimming in shards of ice. A dream of sums hurt my head. Miss Ballard, at the blackboard, kept teaching the class that four into seventeen won’t go. I kept arguing yes it will! Yes it will! Miss Ballard, pointing her cane at chalk sums, said that four into sixteen goes four times. ‘Four fours are sixteen? Everybody?’ The class, in one voice, said that four fours were sixteen. Said Miss Ballard, ‘But four into seventeen won’t go?’ I tore handfuls of hair from my head. ‘Four into seventeen?’ said Miss Ballard. ‘Pike! Four into seventeen?’

I replied, although I knew it was the wrong answer, ‘Won’t go.’ ‘Wrong!’ said Ballard. ‘Four into seventeen goes four times, and one over?’ Aggghhh! Then, in my dream, I looked from the window of my room and saw Sophia outside. She looked up at me. No matter how tight shut I kept my mouth, I could still breathe. As I looked at Sophia’s face, I saw her skull underneath. I saw her skull underneath!

I told Sophia all about Miss Ballard. The woman left an impression on me like a yellow bruise that turned grey but never fully went away.

Sophia was most receptive concerning my ballads of Miss Ballard. She knew no opinion other than Father’s in matters of our creator
and
His enemy, who in turn was ours. Sophia listened with parted lips.

In her pious ranting about the Devil Miss Ballard mentioned spud blights not once! She told us a story of how Satan with the many names had once been God’s most beautiful angel. This shocked me, and riveted me to the tale at the time. One day Satan dared to sit on God’s throne. As a punishment, God cast him out of Heaven and into Hell. A bit heavy-handed of God, I thought. If Father caught me sitting on his chair he would probably just thumb me off it.

‘Hell has mountains made of ice that its fires never melt’ … that’s what Father said.

I never knew whether I would be hot or cold in Hell when I went there, and spent long spells wondering how people in Hell knew whether to take a coat when they went out to get their punishments.

Father described Hell as a place of chaos and eternal suffering – which I had trouble seeing in my mind’s eye. I reasoned that it had something to do with the unpredictable weather.

That I would end up in Hell seemed likely. Father said you went to Hell for sinning in all kinds of ways: being cheeky to Mother; bearing false witness – whatever that meant; murder; adultery – which for years I mistook for idolatry; killing yourself … that was a strange one.

On the floor, in front of the hearth, almost on fire, I told Sophia more about school. She had asked me to tell her about school every day since I came home. This time, I told her about Miss Ballard, who said that Satan looked like a snake. My parents must have been listening, but they kept quiet until I took the opportunity to get a second opinion on what Satan looked like from Father.

Much later, with Christmas holidays past, Easter gone, and summer on the way, in my hunt for Satan’s face I came across a painting of him by William Blake in an encyclopedia in the school library – a muscular, naked young man with wings.

Look behind you! Squint into dark corners! Glance left and right! He may be on the steep, slanted slates and behind the chimney pots, red-brick obelisks that exhaled crematorium clouds. He may lurk in the dark, bare-cold corridors with polished wooden floors. He may be round corners and under creaking beds with lumpy mattresses. You might see him flapping across the playing field at dusk, or rising in flight over the criss-crossed fence that kept two hundred boys from escaping. He might appear, hunched over steaming cauldrons, in the kitchen. I watched warily for him: ugly, not quite human, with wings. I watched for Satan – because God had cast Satan into Hell, and Hell on earth was Whitehead House.

‘What does Satan look like?’ I asked. And it occurred to me, as I looked up at the grizzled, bearded man on his chair, that I already knew.

Animated by my interest in a subject close to his heart, Father cleared his throat, closed his bible, sat up straight, made a false start and disappeared upstairs for half an hour. When he came down, with a copy of
Pilgrim’s Progress
, abridged and reworked for children, I had forgotten that I had asked the question.

‘Listen,’ he said, with a forefinger. And we did. Father opened the book. Mother’s needles stopped clicking. The log on the fire crackled more quietly.

‘As I went through the wild waste of this world …’ He only read four pages of it – thank heavens – and not in sequence. He turned a handful of pages at a time from, say, page one to page seven, then to page fourteen, without losing the narrative thread. Granted, one page had a large illustration, but it still contained more words than the ten or twelve he read. Next turn, he talked more text than could have possibly been on the page.

No doubt Father supplemented the text with bits and bobs of his own invention – which is perfectly legitimate when you consider that ‘getting the message across’ is more important than adhering to
the
truth; after all, that is how whoever did it compiled the bible. I doubt that Bunyan presented Christian, at any point on his pilgrimage, knee-deep in the spud fields. I doubt that Bunyan made God, at that very moment in history, blight all the spuds because the population of the land took to strong drink and fornication – which I assumed to be the strongest drink of all: tea stewed for hours and hours that you have to drink black because the milk is sour.

Satan, Father said, confirming Miss Ballard’s opinion, could look like whoever or whatever he wanted to look like. He hid his true identity behind many faces, and he wore as many faces as names. Satan, thought I. Devil! ‘Lucifer,’ said Father. ‘Beelzebub! Beast!’ Cow, thought I. A cow is a beast.

‘That’s one good reason why you can’t trust him,’ said Father. ‘He can make himself invisible too, if that suits his purpose, and most of the time it does. He could be here. Right here. In this very room. Waiting to tempt any of us to do evil.’

Father snapped Bunyan shut. I thought of Gregory in the barn with his filterless singles and box of matches. Luckily, there was no hay in the barn or we might have experienced the fires of Hell at first hand.

We went to our separate bedrooms, me and Sophia. Mother tucked us in, closed our doors and went downstairs. We opened our doors, tee-hee-heed in the corridor, and picked our old room, Sophia’s room now.

‘What’s Satan’s name when he’s invisible?’ asked Sophia.

I guessed. ‘The Invisible Man.’

Father and Miss Ballard made a good match. They parted, down the middle, black or white without any shades of grey, everything that crossed their minds. There were good things and bad things; nothing sat in the middle and avoided judgement. God received credit for the good, and Satan took the blame for the bad. Obviously, sickness belonged on Satan’s side. Miss Ballard taught us to believe that
sickness
, of whichever shape or size or degree of malignancy, came from the hand of Satan. When I personified sickness – Sickness – I imagined that Sickness looked waxy and blue, like a corpse. She, or possibly he, would have short, flat hair and eyes that failed to focus on anything. Sickness must be unhealthy in mind and body. Whether the blue, waxy Sickness in my mind might have been Satan himself, or one of the demons cast from Heaven with him, I couldn’t say. Satan could change his appearance and demons could turn themselves invisible too. Identities and images mingled. The whole thing became messy and merged like butter melting into a pan of boiling water into my nightmares.