Nobody True (45 page)

“Hello, Jimmy,” he said in a pleasantly gruff but quiet voice.

The sun was behind him, his white hair a halo round his head; it was difficult to see his features.

“It’s you—Dad,” I said for some reason. Of course it was my dad.

“Yes, it’s me. Can I sit with you for a little while?”

I shuffled my butt towards the arm at the end of the wooden bench, making room for him. The past times we’d met had been traumatic, the last one particularly horrendous. But today, in this morbid but tranquil setting, I felt completely at ease with him.

“This time I can hear you,” I said, only now appreciating the fact. “You can speak directly to me.”

“You’re closer to us.”

I didn’t ask him to elucidate. Instead, I thanked him for helping me when Moker had attacked my family.

“We were weak,” he replied regretfully, shaking his head. Looking at him in the clear light of day (his image wavered only occasionally) I could see our resemblance. Perhaps he was how I would have looked eventually if I hadn’t died.

“I brought many souls with me,” he went on, “in the belief that our collective force would defeat the poor beast.” He sighed unhappily. “Unfortunately, when we stormed into the body, the soul there was so foul, so malign, we couldn’t stay. It was too overwhelming, too frightening—too corruptive. I’m sorry I fled with the others, but we were combined, there could be no separation from them.”

“You bought us time, that’s the point. Enough time for Andrea to recover and take her best shot with the poker.”

My father smiled again. “We were still there, although our usefulness was spent. We tried to give your wife strength.” His expression became serious. “But you know, what you did afterwards was very foolish.”

“You mean taking over Moker’s dead body?”

“You could have been tainted by the evil left inside him.”

“If there was any, it helped my anger at my ex-friend. Maybe it enforced the hatred I felt for the friend I thought I had.”

“Murder is never a solution.”

“D’you understand what Oliver Guinane did to me?”

The ghost nodded. “To want revenge is still wrong.”

“Huh! Seems to me I was deceived most of my life. His betrayal with my wife tipped me over the edge. I’d reached breaking point. And let’s be frank here—you were the one who started the ball rolling as far as betrayal was concerned. You walked out on me and Mother when I was just a kid.”

“I explained everything in the letters I wrote to you, letters your mother never let you see.”

We were interrupted by an old lady we hadn’t noticed coming along the path. She was slightly crooked and somewhere in her late seventies drawing towards eighty, and wearing an old coat with a scraggy synthetic fur collar that drowned her meagre frame (probably it fitted her well before she started to shrink). Held tight against her shapeless chest was a potted plant. As she drew level with the bench, she gave my father a cheery smile that revealed perfect porcelain teeth above bare lower gums.

“Nice day,” she greeted him in a croaky voice that was as cheerful as her incomplete grin.

My father smiled back and gave a small acknowledgement with his hand. She trundled on her way, perhaps to visit and chat to a late husband, or maybe a dearly missed friend. Perhaps she wanted to tell them she wouldn’t be long.

But I was puzzled. She could see my father, but she couldn’t see me. How’s that for irony? He was more dead than I was, surely? I mean—what was the expression they used? Oh yeah—he had “passed over” whereas I was still earthbound, so didn’t that mean he was more dead than me? Shouldn’t there be some kind of priority? I shrugged it off.

My father seemed to have enjoyed the brief encounter with the old lady, but the half-smile left his face when he turned back to me.

“Son, you saw the letters your mother kept from you for years when you were growing up. I wrote to you regularly after I left even though I never received replies. I never gave up, but eventually I died.”

“You still deserted me—us,” I reminded him.

“No, I didn’t, I didn’t desert you. Your mother made me leave.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe that.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s true. You must have realized over the years that she wasn’t… well, she wasn’t quite right in the head.”

I thought of the evening I’d found Mother ripping up photographs of me and destroying letters from my father that I’d never been allowed to see, let alone read. And that was because I, too, had left her by dying. No rational person would ever react in that way, and especially not with such venom, such loathing.

“She could be a bit cranky, sure,” I said.

“Perhaps you’re in denial. Sons should love and respect their mothers, no matter what. Before you were born she was already making my life impossible with demands and strictures. I had a decent job, but she was never happy with what we’d got, she always felt she’d lowered her own high standards by taking me on as a husband—high standards that had never existed, incidentally. She was from a very humble background, her mother and father good plain people, her father a postman, her mother a part-time cleaning lady. It was only when they died within months of each other that your mother started to take on those grand airs. I suppose there was no longer anyone around to remind her of her working-class beginnings.”

He sighed, lost in memories for a little while. “At one time she was courting a reasonably wealthy young man, an assistant manager at a big chain store, his family quite well to do. But he broke off with her after a year or so, found someone else apparently. But it was that year with him and all its possibilities that aroused those airs and graces in her. She took me on the rebound and regretted it almost immediately. I won’t embarrass you about the physical side of our marriage; I’d only comment that her pregnancy with you was a surprise to us both.”

I remained silent. Truth is, I had nothing to say.

“When you came along I’m afraid she became even more difficult to live with. Now nothing was ever good enough for either of you. She disliked the house we lived in, felt the area was too working class, and she wanted to make plans for you eventually to be taught at a private school. I did my best, Jimmy, but it was never good enough.”

His image faded briefly as though regret had weakened whatever power it took to maintain a visible presence. Then it returned like a developing Polaroid image.

“Eventually, your mother became impossible to live with and I was forced to give her an ultimatum: accept what we had, appreciate what we had, or I would leave and take you with me.” He gave a small, dry laugh. “It was as if I’d lifted the lid off her madness. Oh, I don’t mean she became certifiably insane, but her hysteria was terrifying. She screamed at me to leave immediately, she never wanted to see me again, that I would never see my son again. She threw herself around, deliberately fell against furniture so that she was bruised and cut. It was our next-door neighbours, people she felt were her inferiors and not worthy of speaking to, who called the police. They thought she was being murdered. They were concerned for you also. You were just a toddler and you were frightened; you all but screeched the house down.”

He told me this with a bitter smile that disturbed his pleasant features and I tried to remember but couldn’t, even though the incident must have had a traumatic effect on me at the time. Maybe it was so upsetting for me that it was stowed away somewhere deep in my subconscious and maybe I thought my father was to blame so that it tainted my feelings towards him for evermore. Mother had certainly poisoned my mind against him over the years and perhaps that terrible day was when the foundation of resentment was laid. I’d been much too young to understand the situation; all I knew was that Daddy had upset Mummy and I must have hated him for that. Hadn’t he, himself, just told me that every son should love and respect his mother?

“The police came and, naturally, I was the villain of the piece. I had hoped that eventually things would settle down, we’d continue in the same unsatisfactory but steady way. Far from it. Your mother’s attitude grew worse day by day and, in the end, I did exactly what she’d constantly told me to do: I left.”

He gave another sigh, his head was turned towards me again and in his face I saw not just misery, but deep grief. “I had no choice. She would never have let you go, and I knew that by staying myself, her condition would only grow worse. In the end, I left for the sake of you both. Life had become impossible. I’m sorry, though, Jimmy. I did try to keep in touch, but eventually I was worn down by it all. All I could do was write you letters.”

I was quiet, absorbing everything he had told me. All those wasted years, for many of them despising a father I thought had abandoned me, and that followed by disdain, then finally by cold detachment—he had ceased to exist as far as I was concerned, and that was before I’d learned of his death.

“Can you forgive me, son?” Grief had been replaced by pleading in those faded blue eyes. “After I died I tried to stay connected with you, but that’s almost impossible once a person has passed over.”

I suddenly recalled a certain face among a crowd of onlookers, all of whom wore expressions of alarm and concern for the young man who had just been knocked from his motorbike, his leg cruelly twisted, blood seeping from beneath his crash helmet to run along the gutter where he lay. There was no fear on my father’s face that day, only compassion.

Here we were now, two ghosts sitting in a graveyard, one a veteran, the other a novice (I didn’t understand the difference between us, but I didn’t feel like a proper ghost). Father and son. Reunited. Together again, but only in death. I was grateful at least for that, and I think if we’d both had substance I would have hugged him; or I’d have asked my father to hug me.

Instead, and perhaps to cover that childlike yearning, I said: “But why didn’t you try to see me away from home? Why didn’t you find me when I grew older?”

He shook his head remorsefully. “I did that once. I went to your school and waited for you to come out. Unfortunately, your mother saw me first and threatened to call the police. She said she would hurt herself like before and blame me. She told me it would make her very happy to see me locked up in jail.”

Jesus Christ, I thought. I’d always known Mother could be a bitch, but I had no idea of how wicked she was.

“In my letters to you,” my father went on, “I was always suggesting times and places where you and I could meet but, of course, you never received them. The years went by and then, one day, I decided to hell with the consequences, I would come to your home, just knock on the door and introduce myself to you. She might rant and rave, call the police, but at least you would know I hadn’t forgotten you. I was determined it would happen, no matter what. Unfortunately, I died of a stroke before I had the chance.”

I took it all in, no longer confused; a certain emptiness never acknowledged but always with me nonetheless, had suddenly been appeased. If it hadn’t been for more recent revelations, I might even have felt whole again.

“I think I’m beginning to understand,” I said, then added, “Dad.”

His smile was different from before. It was as if he’d finally found something he had sought for a long, long time, both in life and in death. His smile was pure, untainted by anguishes of the past.

“You know, there have been other deceptions in my life,” I told him, unable to return his smile. “Knowing the truth of our situation means a lot to me, but these other… these other…”

“Deceptions, you said.”

“Yeah, I guess it’s the right word. My mother, my wife, my best friend, my business partner—even the person who means everything in the whole world to me, the little girl I thought was my daughter.”

I slumped forward, elbows on my knees, hands covering part of my face. “I just can’t get it right in my head,” I said. “I can’t seem to take it all in.” I’m sure my expression was a mixture of sorrow and anger when I raised my head and looked sideways at him. “Was nobody true to me?” I asked as if he might have the answer, or at least make sense of all that had happened.

He spoke softly. “By all means blame your mother for her cruelty to us both, but temper your anger with pity.”

Yeah, I thought. I can do pity nowadays. Hadn’t I felt pity for Moker? Christ, Moker! Even the cold-blooded killer wasn’t as he—she—seemed!

“She isn’t responsible for her mental problems. In her mind, I had left her. She hadn’t forced me to go. After that, she was always afraid of losing you too, and that’s why she turned your mind against me. But, of course, eventually you did leave her—you got married. And then you died. That has shattered her, she feels she has nothing left.”

“But Andrea and I didn’t want to cut her out of our lives, she made the choice herself.”

“For her, in her fragile mental state, it was the right choice to cut you out, or at least begin the process. I’m sorry to say this, but it was the right choice for you both. She would have tried to destroy your marriage.”

I gave a little shake of my head in frustration, then leaned back on the bench.

“You have to accept what she is, son. With acceptance comes forgiveness, and forgiveness is important to you right now.”

I didn’t follow up this last remark: my mind was still busy with other deceits.