The Ghost (4 page)

November, 1973

A damp hand flattened across Cook's forehead as a glass thermometer slotted under his tongue.

“You
are
a bit warm.”

His skull – taut and tenderised, his throat a knotted clench. Volcanic nausea simmered in his core.

The bedroom – a haze of fever-heat.

Esther peered over her reading glasses and narrowed her eyes. “No-one'll believe this, you know. It's Monday!”

Writhing under a wisp of a bedsheet, he craved the comfort of warmth, but was too flushed to tolerate the itchy blanket laid out by his sceptical grandmother.

Esther retrieved the thermometer and gaped at the gauge. “Bloody ‘ell! You're not pretending, then.”

Cook was too wretched for protest. He watched, heavy-lidded, as Esther threw on her coat and announced she was going to ‘fetch the doctor'. She thundered down the stairs, tutting and muttering. The house flinched as she slammed the front door.

Dorian Cook had turned eight years old a few days earlier. Apart from those first few days at the Royal Infirmary, he had slept in this room every night of his life, like his young mother before him. But this was the first time he had ever been alone here. His inception had been a double-problem – he arrived both inconveniently premature and too bulky for standard delivery (8lbs, 11oz). In the bed now moulded to Cook and his malady, the twenty-year-old Lily was shaken awake by scything contractions and driven to hospital in her brother's Hillman Imp, where her abdomen was unzipped by a terse consultant obstetrician. Cook was extracted from the dark and presented to the light – before his time, just as he was getting comfy, just as he was starting to fit. And then there were two, here in this room, side by side in a single bed – one freshly baked, the other newly blooded as an adult, also before her time, forced to get busy being old just as she was getting the hang of being young.

Cook lay on his back, X-shaped, hot and bothered by the unnatural silence. He felt simultaneously dry and clammy, sensitive and numb. His shoulders were studded with tiny pink eruptions, and his open pyjama-top exposed a join-the-dots swarm across his chest. He wondered if there was something slithering around inside him, rushing from point to point, attempting to prod and poke its way out, leaving a nipple-like scar with each impact. The thought made him want to scratch and smooth out the impurities with his fingertips. In these moments, Cook pined for his mother. Esther's love was fierce and protective, but he longed for the milky yield of maternity – a rare pleasure now Lily had moved out and visited randomly. The matter of his father's identity and whereabouts remained cryptic, beyond discussion.

Cook jerked out of half-sleep. On the other side of the flimsy wall behind the headboard, their neighbour – referred to by Esther as ‘Mr Smith' – fired off a lengthy fusillade of death-rattle coughing. The tempo was familiar and near-constant – at first perilous and apparently final, then slowly settling to a single aftershock wheeze every few seconds. To Cook, Mr Smith was little more than a flutter of white hair just visible over the top of the yard wall – gliding, fin-like, out from his door to the bin and back again. Cook always dreaded the moment when the hair would stop, and, as Mr Smith raised himself on tiptoe, grow a waxy-grey forehead, then a pair of half-seeing eyes. There were never words or gesture to soften this moment – no cheery, ‘Hello, son!' or wrinkled smirk. Just a rheumy great slap of a stare – an elderly invasion of Cook's unformed little corner of the world.

Cook sharpened his ears to the wheezing, which was now rolling in and out every few minutes, undepleted – a tidal eternity. Mr Smith was little more than a carbon chrysalis – shrivelled housing for a torment which strained to burst free and surge away. For a young boy, adults were powerful, inscrutable, fully formed. Cook could not project backwards to imagine the creature over the wall as the closing act of a life that had once been all sex and swagger, propelled by the unswerving rhino-charge of youth. But he could still feel the bottomless isolation, hear the sorrow raging through the babble and splutter. Something pitiless inside Cook made him want to silence all of this – to shut it away somewhere airless and sound-proof.

“Hiya!”

Downstairs, Esther was back, and there was a deeper voice, too. Cook's delirium was now disassociative. He travelled through a ten-minute chunk of time in an instant, and then suddenly here was Dr Sherratt and his icy stethoscope and squashy hands and dazzling baldness and cat-food breath. Sherratt took out a miniature torch, leaned in close and studied Cook's eyeballs.

Watch! He hates this!

Mr Smith erupted again, and Cook saw Sherratt's focus drift a little, assessing the cough with a flicker of pity.

“Calomine lotion will ease the discomfort,” he told Esther, closing his bag. “It tends to peak pretty quickly and then ease off over a week or so. Keep him away from school and don't let anyone who hasn't already had it into the house – certainly not into this room.”

Soon, there was no Sherratt and no Esther, and Cook lay uncovered by sheets, basted in gloop, disfigured by a sprinkling of spots and blemishes. He had been dosed with (in Sherratt's words) a ‘suspension', and now the room squirmed like a snakepit – a freakshow of fluttering shadows and splintered echoes. The nausea reared up, splashing around the base of his throat. He lay unnaturally still, fearing the slightest movement might provoke his stomach – or bowels – into spasm.

And then he was in the sitting room, blanket over head and shoulders, quivering before the black-and-white TV. Next door, as the retching fits tore through his neighbour's lungs, Cook's sheen of fever-fuzz absorbed and amplified the barrage. He turned up the TV volume and stared at the
For Schools & Colleges
intro graphic – a circle of pearl-like pellets surrounding the words ‘History Around You'. Syrupy muzak soundtracked a clockwise circuit as the pellets crudely self-deleted, one by one. Cook stared and slow-blinked, synchronising his eye closure with the mid-wipe point of the erasure process, as if the act of not acknowledging the pellets was the force compelling them to disappear. He fantasised about doing the same with the spots and dots that had annexed his own skin, willing them out of existence.

The air was like broth. He could taste the salt in the sweat on his lips. His dog was there and his grandmother was there and, at one point, he even thought his mother was there – blonde and bright and white, sparkling through the browns and beiges of Esther's textured wallpaper. And then it wasn't his mother, it was John Ray – the shining hair, the phantom skin.

Suddenly, it was late afternoon – dusk – and he was eating warmed-up Ambrosia creamed-rice pudding and watching
Dr Who.
A shingle beach glazed in low sunlight, a gang of humanoid monsters rising through the riptide and shambling ashore – reptilian features frozen in grimace, mutated bodies draped in slimy netting. Each carried some kind of beam-gun that could deliver one-zap instant death. Cook was instantly, unspeakably petrified – of their bulk, their inhumanity, their deformity, and of their reaper-like dominion over death. He imagined them (the ‘Sea Devils') entering the house at night, executing his pet, then his grandmother, then hunting for him – climbing the stairs, finding him in his bedroom, maybe even in his bed.

Cook shovelled in a mouthful of pudding and glanced over at the door that separated the sitting room from the parlour. He jumped – a jolt of shock – at the sight of a human head, with carrot-orange hair, peering around the edge of the frame at ankle level. The head slid slowly upwards until Cook's mother's brother, Russell, revealed himself by stepping to the side and bounding into the room.

“What are you watching?”

“
Dr Who
.”

Russell laughed, too loud. “Dorian, you crackpot!”

This was his standard irritating term of address, overused fluidly as insult or endearment. He dropped to his knees and shuffled in close to Cook.

“Chickenpox!”

Under his blanket, Cook glanced up, nodded.

“Don't worry, Dor!” said Russell, settling down on the floor cross-legged, zoning in to a beach-head firefight between Sea Devils and soldiers. “You'll live.”

COOK SECURED THE MORNING
off work with a cryptic text message and padded down to breakfast, bathrobed and bed-haired. Alfie had prepared him a slice of white-bread toast topped with a few smears of strawberry jam. He gnawed his way through, chasing each sickly swallow with a guzzle of instant coffee. There should have been a truant-like pleasure to be taken from unjustified time off work, but Cook felt unease at anything open-ended. He quickly slumped from the joy of unhurried freedom to anxiety at the quantum sprawl of paths and possibilities. It was no comfort to imagine colleagues frantically covering for his absence – he was barely missed.

“Frankensteins,” announced Alfie, “are made of dead body parts.”

Cook smiled. “But how do they get that way?”

Alfie searched his bowl of Coco Shreddies for an answer. “They get struck by lightning and come to life!”

Cook shifted from cheek to cheek, finding comfort on neither. In half an hour, he would be perched and tilted on a gurney at his GP's office, trousers down low, knees up high. The insistent pinching and pulsing around his anus was, he reasoned, the initial stirring of a rapacious rectal tumour – a slow-burning cellular eruption that would steadily detonate from the arsehole in, consuming and subsuming him. He had recently developed an obsession with disease after seeing the film
Biutiful
, in which the lead character irredeemably succumbs to prostate cancer. Gina had indulged him, insisting that health awareness was healthy, and it was the men who avoided doctors, usually out of misplaced bravado, who ended up dying from conditions that had progressed beyond the treatable stage. But Cook knew his anxiety was less and less about decay, and more and more about the universal dread that rose, with advancing age, of no longer being here, there or anywhere. Death was forever inbound. It could be delayed and diverted, but it
would
arrive, and there was nothing on Earth – nothing electrical in the sky – that could send it away.

*

The doctor's office had recently installed a touch-screen arrival system, with appointments confirmed by sex and date of birth. Cook dabbed in his details, wondering if this was the wisest method of processing patients – a shared surface for them to soil with contagious DNA. The waiting room was fully stocked with the sitting wounded. Cook slumped into the only spare seat, beside a modest children's play table, and braced for the familiar limbo of irritation and alarm – later arrivals being called first, random gap between appointment time and consultation, the infernal bickering between inner defeatist and pragmatist. He shifted a buttock to one side, shuffling the painful patch away from the wooden seat base, which creaked loudly. This provoked a beat of collective curiosity – a break in the chorus of coughing and sneezing and despairing and diseasing. At the very least, there would surely be ointment – a week or two of reaching down and around and blending chemistry with biology. When young, Cook pondered, we use drugs to entertain; when old, to sustain.

A speaker drilled into the ceiling wafted out an instrumental saxophone version of Simply Red's ‘Holding Back The Years'. Cook read this as an ironic comment on the uncertain longevity of the audience. He imagined a waggish orderly in an elderly care-home cueing it up as the theme for medication time.

His phone jangled, announcing an email which offered ‘herbal penis enlargement' – a treatment which would apparently transform any man into ‘the Pied Piper of Hot Chicks'. Cook doubted this. He had never been much of a leader, and he wasn't convinced that an arbitrary extension to the length of his penis was going to change that – not at his life stage, at least. The newsletter from the redesigned
PastLives.com
squatted conspicuously in his inbox. He thought of the message – the invitation to ‘catch up' – and realised that he could never reply.

“Dorian Cook. Doctor Escott. Room 4.”

*

Escott's domain was a schizoid shrine to Christian piety and science-fiction – desktop Dalek, rosary draped over computer monitor,
Serenity
mouse-mat, photo of waterfall with motivational slogan (‘Beauty – an act of God!'). As Cook entered, Escott – fiftyish, crinkled polo shirt, lavishly bellied – leapt from his desk and closed in for a double-pump handshake with an odd little bonus – a shoulder-pat from his free hand. It felt calculated rather than caring, and Cook prickled.

“Dorian Cook?” he wondered. No eye contact.

“I am!” said Cook, weirdly.

Escott waddled backwards, muscle memory guiding him down into his chair.

“And how are you? What seems to be the trouble?”

Cook sat down – too hard – on another firm chair. He shuddered with pain.

“I, uh, have a sore spot. On my…”

Anus? Arsehole? Asshole?

“…bottom.”

The word burst into the room and hovered there, unwanted. Escott regarded it silently. He nodded and began clattering away at the keyboard of his decade-old PC. “Okay. And how long have you had this? Is there any discharge? Any blood?”

Cook looked up at the poster on the wall above Escott's examination bench – an enormous, scowling lion's face on a stark, black background. ‘The Lion of Judah…' announced an ugly-fonted caption across the brow of the mane. ‘Jesus Christ!' shrieked a larger legend over the lion's jutting jaw.

“A week or so. Bit of blood, yeah.”

Escott looked up and raised his eyebrows. “How much? Roughly. Is it bright red or quite dark?”

Cook saw himself from the perspective of the poster – a beast's-eye view of a clenched and clucking nebbish. He was a critic, criticiser, professional pontificator, opinion-former (not any more), supplier of promotional quotes (rarely) – a middling, middle-brow, middle-aged middle-man charged with composing too many words for too few readers. The Lion-Jesus glared down – at a creature clinging to the illusion that people cared about what came out of its mouth, when there was more concern over what was escaping from its rear-end.

“It's bright red.”

Escott was standing and nodding more vigorously, groping his way into a pair of surgical gloves. “Fresh. Hmm…” He muttered, eyes closed, visualising his symptom-prognosis flowchart.

“Let's have a quick look, then. I don't think there's anything to worry about.”

Cook was unfamiliar with this concept. He sat up on Escott's bench, unhooked his belt and compressed into a compromising position. He coveted his doctor's world of relative certainty, in contrast to his own realm of bluff and bluster – the eternal tyrannies of, ‘In my view…' and, ‘For me…' and, ‘Everyone is entitled to their opinion…' and, ‘I hear what you're saying, but…'. Cook's worries amounted to a lot more than ‘nothing', and he was both their cause and effect, architect and architecture – the sole engineer of a caffeine-bolstered contraption of obsolete biomechanics.

Escott, for one, was done with him.

“Pop your trousers back up! Yes… You've got a couple of fairly small haemorrhoids – probably caused by straining. Do you move your bowels every day?”

“Erm, I think so. Usually.”

Escott chuckled. “Well, it's not really the kind of thing one keeps a record of, I know. Although there seems to be a ‘blog' for everything, these days.”

Fully dressed and no longer cowed by the spectre of colon cancer, Cook discovered his sense of humour.

“A log blog?”

Escott laughed a little too heartily. “Yes! Exactly. I'm just writing you a prescription for a lactulose drink – that will help keep your stools softened. And you might want to pick up a tube of Anusol to ease the discomfort a little. No need for a suppository.”

*

Cook hurried back through the waiting room, where The Beatles' ‘Something' was now being sax-murdered.

“Dor!”

William Stone – an ex-neighbour – had taken Cook's place by the play table. They had first become acquainted back when Gina was pregnant and taking an afternoon nap. Stone had shooed away a gaggle of noisy estate kids, after Cook had failed to persuade them to ‘make a bit less noise'. They had smelt his fear, and he felt emasculated and hopelessly middle-class in the face of their reptilian contempt. In contrast, Stone – a short but stocky police officer – succeeded in convincing the kids that there were better things to do than vandalise a mound of abandoned builder's tools. They had slouched away, lobbing a few profanities over their pointy shoulders. Cook was grateful, but had the impression that Stone was trading on reputation rather than status.

“Hey, Will. How are you?”

Cook swaggered over, unconvincingly. He sat down – with care – next to Stone, wisely resisting the urge to slap him on his burly back.

“I'm alright, mate, yeah! What's the story here, then? Having the snip or something?”

“Ha. No! I've, er…” Cook winced and switched his weight from right to left buttock.

“Oh, I see…” said Stone, whispering. “Arse boil?”

“Sort of.”

Stone considered this as he fiddled with the gummed-up wheels of a wooden toy train. “Fucking hell! Bum-grapes?”

Cook nodded. Stone leaned in close. It was early morning, but Cook could smell alcohol on his breath. “You know why, don't ya? Because you talk so much shit!”

Stone bellowed with laughter. Cook politely guffawed, despite seeing no sense in the remark.

“Well,” he offered, “that's my job.”

Stone smiled at that.

“I'm having a cholesterol check, mate. Weight's all over the fucking place!”

A white-haired old woman sitting opposite tutted and sent over a sharp look. Cook was suddenly keen to get away and so employed his standard method of bringing a chance encounter to a premature close.

“Listen. We should have a catch-up sometime.”

Lately, Cook seemed to be in a permanent state of ‘catch-up'. He could feel his grip loosening on the matters of culture he would have obsessively monitored only a couple of years ago. He was still prone to faintly teenage fixations with certain music, adrenalised hectoring on pop-culture issues, and even the odd cautious engagement with sport and politics. But he was befuddled by science, bored with art and borderline anhedonic over nature. He drank more from habit than for effect and, despite his name, had little interest in anything but basic food. His sense of the sheer absurdity of sex was now so developed that he could barely do it without sniggering and, while he used to set aside time for lengthy sessions of masturbation, he had gradually adopted the swift and functional approach – more soporific than pornographic. For Cook, the sensual world was another country. They did things differently there.

“Yeah,” said Stone, “let's have a pint. I'm on nights this week but I'll text you. Maybe next Thursday?”

Cook agreed. Like the other aspects of his life, he was long overdue an update on Stone's typically colourful emotional wranglings.

On the way out, he opened his calendar app and checked next week's schedule. On Thursday, he was due to attend a screening of
Struisvogel
, a post-war Austrian political thriller about a young woman's attempt to track down her father, an ex-concentration-camp guard, also wanted by Nazi hunters. Cook mulled the inevitably 120-minute-plus meditation on Holocaust guilt and father-daughter redemption. He deleted the screening entry and tapped out a replacement – ‘Drinks with Will'.