The Ghost (12 page)

The ghost is getting angry.

Cook leaned back, just outside Liam Sr.'s punching range. He turned and saw that the hands belonged to Alfie – red-faced and crying Alfie. (“Daddy! Stop!”)

Red-faced and crying Liam. (“Leave him alone!”)

Gina, shielding Alfie. (“Dorian! Stop this!”)

And now – rage filter lifted, natural rhythms and hues restored – Cook was calmed by concern for his son. But as he clambered away from Liam Sr., who was immediately embraced by an hysterical Liam Jr., he groped for Alfie but found him not there, shielded instead in his mother's arms.

December, 1974

On a cold, cold afternoon in the nineteen-seventies, Dorian Cook and David Brereton zipped up their fluffy-hooded parkas and hustled through the bottleneck at the school gates. As they passed by the teachers' car-park, they barged apart a huddle of older girls and broke into a top-speed run, squawks of outrage at their heels. Their improvised escape route delivered the boys to an estate of pampered semis which Cook recognised from the summer's day at John Ray's house. They slowed but, neither wanting to be the first to stop and show weakness, wrestled each other to a halt – Brereton yanking Cook's hood down over his face, Cook locking Brereton's head into the crook of his arm. Spent, they bent double, breath billowing.

“I've got a secret!” panted Brereton.

“Yeah?”

“I set fire to the shelter.”

“Liar!”

Brereton raised his head. Cook saw anger ignite in his eyes. “I did! No-one saw me but I did!”

“Why did you do that?”

Brereton shrugged. “Felt like it.”

“If you get caught, you'll get done!”

“Won't get caught.”

They bought a fistful of Refresher chews from a corner shop and meandered back through the side-streets near Cook's house, with a vague plan to listen to records and play Subbuteo.

“I heard you were going out with Beverley Leonard,” said Brereton.

“No. I might go out with Lisa.”

“What? Have you asked her?”

“Yeah. She's nicer.”

“What did she say?”

“She said yes, but only when she's stopped going out with Pecker.”

‘Pecker' was Martin Pekar, the son of Hungarian-born immigrants who lived in a bland little bungalow by the far end of the play-park. He was an odd mix of exotic and scruffy, and Cook had occasionally seen him emerging from a lunchtime remedial English class.

“He smells. Nearly as bad as Batty Battison.”

At the bottom of Cook's street, the boarded-up butcher's shop squatted, sentinel-like, challenging them both to pass. Its large shop-front window space had been rendered opaque by an overlapping stack of oblong planks, while the first-floor windows had all been sealed with grimy brickwork – apart from the one overlooking the adjoining street, which had somehow been breached from the inside. A few poked-out chunks of house-brick lay below, at ground level, in a mound of rubble, walled off inside a yard area cluttered with abandoned builder's equipment – wheelbarrow with no wheel, rusted scaffold tubes, propped steel sheeting, a skeletal wooden chair-frame. An attempt had been made to bar access to the yard by padlocking the back gate and nailing up a ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted' sign, but the wall was topped with an inviting layer of curved stone, and the gate's bottom hinge had been kicked away, leaving a gap easily accessible to the wily and wiry.

“Dare ya to go in the house and get up to the window!” announced Brereton. “You've got to wave through the gap so I can see you've gone all the way up.”

“Dares go first!” countered Cook.

Shouts came from the narrow entry alongside the butcher's shop yard, round the back of Cook's terrace.

“Leave him!”

Cook and Brereton sprinted past the padlocked gate and turned in to the entry. There were four boys – Michael Howell, two who Cook had never seen before, and Darren Ray – older, bigger, stronger. Darren was gripping the coat collar of the first unknown boy in one hand, while repeatedly punching him in the stomach with the other. The second boy watched, terrified, his exit nominally blocked by Howell's position. Brereton stopped dead at the bottom of the entry, but Cook just slowed slightly. As he approached the group, he saw that John Ray was squatted down a little further up, buried beneath an overlarge dark-green parka, bloodless face framed by the fur-lined hood. Cook's movement caught Darren's eye and he called over.

“Dorian! Get here! Hold him for me!”

Cook turned, but – true to form – Brereton had scented trouble early, and had disappeared.

The second boy seized the moment and bolted past Howell, down the entry towards Cook.

“Stop him!”

Cook shoulder-charged the boy, but he was bulky and thundered past, propelled by momentum and panic. The glancing contact bounced Cook to the ground, where he disguised his feeble intent by staying down, feigning pain and injury.

“Y'alright, Dor?”

Michael Howell was suddenly close, helping Cook to his feet. They both began to move away from the Rays and the beaten boy, hurrying to take the corner at the bottom end of the entry.

“Hey!! Get back!”

Howell and Cook immediately turned and walked brightly back towards the group, as if the attempt to escape was just some sort of directional confusion.

“Them two got me and John,” whispered Howell. “There was another one but he ran off up the top. They threw his bag over there.” He nodded towards the butcher's shop back yard.

As they reached Darren and John, the captive boy made an attempt to break free, but Darren was too strong and held him firm. “Right. Keep him still!”

Cook and Howell took an arm each, preventing the boy from wriggling. He had taut, curly hair and his head and face seethed in the icy afternoon – cheeks scalded by hot tears, nose a swollen blob of blood. They angled him to face Darren Ray, who punched him again in the stomach. He wailed, wilting forward as much as Cook and Howell would allow. Darren gripped the boy under the chin, squeezing his cheeks until his lips formed a ragged ‘O'. Howell sniggered at the distorted features – a parody of a pout.

“Where's his bag?” Darren leaned in close to the puckered mouth.

The boy struggled to gather himself. He inhaled a few shuddering breaths, swallowed, tried to sniff away the sobs. But Darren drew back his right arm and (like father, like son) swung round his open palm, connecting hard and heavy with the side of the boy's face.

Thunk.

Cook took a faceful of blood, snot and tears. Darren Ray repeated his question – this time soft and sinister.

“Where… is his fucking bag?”

The impact's aftershock stirred a fury in the boy. He writhed free of Howell and Cook's grip, and burst forward, searching for the space and energy to break away. He fell, scurrying briefly on all fours, before hauling himself upright and running.

“I'm telling my dad on you!”

Cook dragged his sleeve across his face, smearing away the wetness. Darren made no attempt to pursue the boy. Instead, he walked over to his brother, crouched down beside him and tenderly peeled back the fur-trim hood, exposing that expressionless pallor – the cherry-red pupils, the wafting white hair.

“Where did they throw it, Johnny?”

“Over there.”

John Ray spoke from a distance – calm and clear. He raised his arm a little, offering a barely perceptible – almost arrogant – gesture towards the wall of the old butcher's shop.

“Get in there and get his bag!” barked Darren.

Howell scurried off, jumping to order. Cook complied more slowly, backing away, turning only when he had exchanged a glance of recognition with John. At the gate, Howell squatted and leaned his full bodyweight into the hingeless corner, opening a gap which Cook shuffled through. The shoulder-bag rested, with curious precision, in the tray of the wheelless wheelbarrow, on top of a dusted-over bag of cement. Cook snatched it up, posted it through the gap to Howell and lingered for a closer look at this imposing, decomposing half-world, just a few doors down from where his grandmother fried her chips. The back windows were boarded solid, but the door-frame brickwork had been partially smashed away, the hole unconvincingly blocked from the inside by a flimsy wooden panel. He pushed at the covering and peeked through the gap – into almost total darkness, dappled only by soft daylight trickling in through the gaps between boards.

“Dor! Come on!”

Cook began wriggling back through the gate as Howell held it open. He stopped, distracted by a flicker of colour in the dusty-grey clutter – John Ray's blue-and-white handkerchief, draped over the peak of a triangular pile of scaffold tubes. Cook stuffed it into his pocket and squeezed out through the gate, where Darren and John – bag over shoulder – were waiting.

“What's it like in there?” demanded Darren.

“Dirty. Boarded up. Pretty dangerous.”

Darren snorted. Cook and Howell stood upright and joined the brothers, completing an awkward little circle of solidarity. The light was dimming, and with no adrenaline insulation, Cook was reminded of the chill. Coat-hood still down, John Ray sniffed and rubbed at his nose.

“I found this, John,” said Cook, producing the handkerchief from his pocket and handing it over.

“Thank you,” said John Ray.

WILLIAM STONE TAPPED DORIAN
Cook's number into his phone and passed the few seconds between connection and reply with a sip from a glass of rich red wine. It was 7pm on Friday evening and the alcohol had been beckoning since mid-afternoon – a singular craving which gripped him gradually. (First, a faint essence, then an odour, then something moist and tangible – a tingle on the tongue.) At that point – usually around 5pm – Stone's actions became almost remote, cellular. Far deeper than a struggle between wills, it transformed into a groping
for
will – a battle to retain his autonomy.

“Hi, mate. How are you?” Cook sounded distracted and duty-bound.

“Bad time?”

“No, no. Just busy.”

“What are you up to? You out?”

“On a bus. Bit noisy. I'm okay, yeah. What's up?”

Cook knew that a call from Will was never purely social. There was usually subtext – to be established via a serpentine pantomime of banter, until the inevitable, “Listen, Dor…”. This time, though, the voice was strained and shaded. Stone cleared his throat and coughed up his business without delay.

“Community fucking order! That's what's up. Three months. Common assault, mate. Common assault!”

Cook felt nothing at this. His friend's troubles seemed shrivelled and disproportionate next to his own. The bus was approaching the stop suggested by Mountford – the stop near to Brereton's flat. He rose up, shimmied past the bony legs of his seat companion, and, phone-hand occupied, staggered forward to the exit-door, steadying himself with a lunge for every pole.

“Ah. Sorry to hear that, Will. Can't you appeal?”

“Doesn't work that way. Suspended as soon as there's an allegation – and this isn't the end of it. I've got an internal misconduct enquiry still going on. Plus, I've got to pay the bitch – who attacked me first! – compensation, and attend an ‘alcohol treatment' course.”

The bus juddered to a halt and Cook was almost delivered into the lap of an elderly man who smelt of something acrid and carbolic.

“Sorry. Excuse me!”

The man tutted obligingly, but didn't avert his window-stare. As the doors opened, the squash of people outside parted to form a sardonic guard of honour. Cook wriggled through and swerved into a side-street.

“Well. You can go back to work, right?”

“Yeah. But I can forget about any promotion.”

Cook pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket – directions dictated by Mountford. “Will, I'm so sorry. That's harsh.”

“Too fucking right it's harsh! Could have been even worse, as well. They wanted to put an electronic tag on me! The judge said he felt that my case didn't warrant it because I wasn't an ‘ongoing threat'. Since when have I been a fucking
threat,
Dor?”

“I suppose you can think of it as something you've learned,” suggested Cook, scanning the house numbers.

“Mate, the only thing I've ‘learned' is that seventeen years' service means nothing next to the word of a fucking little
thug
with…”

“Sorry, Will. I've got to go. I'm already late. Can I call you back later?”

“Yeah. I might be out, though. Got sorrows that need drowning!” He laughed – too long, too deperately. “Listen, Dor… Before you go, can you sub me for 2K? I'll make it 3K in three weeks. I've just got to get myself together.”

Cook was standing at the door of a town-house flat-block, squinting at the handwritten name-cards above the intercom – ‘R. Saltwell, M. Dutton, J. Mortlock…'

“Uh, of course. I saw the other money had gone into my account. I'll get that sorted.”

“Thanks, mate,” said Stone, relaxing. “I owe you one!”

“You owe me three, Will. Three thousand!”

Again, the overbaked laugh. Then, he was gone – no goodbye – and Cook reached up and pressed the button next to the card which said ‘D. Brereton'.

*

“How many messages have you had?”

This from Dorian Cook to David Brereton – the boy so watchful and slippery, now a man eroded by friction. The three old friends (if that was what they were) convened in a council of shame, gathered around a dirty-white plastic kitchen table: Dennis Mountford – lumpen and malformed in an offensive maroon sweater, chain-chewing stick after stick after stick of gum, never discarding an old lump, just refreshing it with a new strip; Dorian Cook – unstylishly nearly-bald, palms cupped around a mug of tepid tea, still bruised by the playground confrontation, less and less convinced that he was only here out of curiosity; and a taller, tauter, scruffier David Brereton, who appeared to have provided most of the bodyweight now being carried by Mountford. Brereton had retained his hair and those backlit eyes still sparkled with mischief, but his skin was callow and gauzy, stretched cellophane-tight against a jutting skeleton, as if eager to shear off and slide away.

“Five or six…” Eerily, the timbre of Brereton's voice tallied precisely with the version in Cook's memory, barely shifted in pitch. “It's some weirdo who thinks he knows what happened. Winding us up.”

Finally out of gum, Mountford was now dismantling the cardboard casing of the packet. He looked from Brereton to Cook, transferring the dismissal, inviting it to be exposed as false confidence. “I don't think so.”

“What
is
it then, Den?” snapped Brereton. “Who exactly is going to bother with this shit after so long?”

Cook fixed his gaze on Mountford. “Maybe that's all it is – a reminder. Someone making sure it isn't forgotten. I can't see what they can do about it all now, though.”

“Dorian…” Mountford was twisting panels of cardboard into gnarled little rods and then coiling them together. “I've had messages signed with a ‘D'.”

Brereton laughed – constricted, asthmatic. “It isn't
you,
is it, Dor?”

“You know who it fucking is!” Mountford seemed close to collapse. Cook was shocked at the contrast between the younger, bolder child-man and the cowed animal now before him. Brereton rose to his feet and shuffled to the far side of the kitchen, lighting a cigarette to break up the journey. “Beer?”

Cook and Mountford shook their heads. Brereton slid a can of something out of a squat little fridge and settled back at the table. He slurped at the drink and drew elaborately on his cigarette, piping smoke out through his nostrils.

“Dave, I've got to ask…” said Cook, cautiously. “What have you been up to?”

Brereton flashed him a look, and for a moment, Cook caught something familiar – an ambiguity between anger and suspicion.

“I work in a hotel kitchen, Dor. Sous-chef. I'm not the boss but I sometimes get to be the boss. It's the best way – you don't get blamed when things go wrong, but you can claim a bit of glory when they go right.”

He grinned and gulped back a lungful of smoke. With every toke, he tapped off non-existent ash into the air and rolled the filter side to side between thumb and forefinger. Cook wondered if Mountford could also sense the confected bravado in these tics and twitches.

“You're both married, aren't ya? I had a couple of goes at that.”

Mountford scooped up the chewing-gum sculpture and plunged it into an overflowing pedal-bin. “Look. Never mind what we've been ‘up to' in the past. What are we going to do
now?”

“We should report it,” insisted Cook. “No need for all the details on who we think it might be or why or whatever. Just make it clear that we've been receiving threatening messages and we'd like to know what our options are.”

Brereton shook his head. “What are they going to do about it? Shut down the fucking internet?”

“We need to make an official complaint!” insisted Mountford.

Brereton mashed his cigarette into an ashtray and posted it into the empty beer-can. “Thank fuck we've got a legal expert on the case!”

“Well, what do
you
suggest?” The corners of Mountford's eyes were glinting with tears. “Solve it with sarcasm? I've got
kids,
David! So does Dorian! These messages aren't some ‘weirdo' trying to wind us up. Someone wants to hurt us!”

Brereton crushed the can, tossed it towards a small recycle bin, missed. He smiled, raised both hands – palms out – up in front of his face, and extended all the fingers, wiggling them around for mock-spooky effect.

“Someone. Or some-
thing!”