The Ghost (8 page)

INCREASINGLY, COOK'S HOME OFFICE
reflected the junk and jumble of his thoughts – a mini-museum of the unresolved, the unattended, the unexplained. Gina called it his ‘man cave', while Alfie preferred ‘daddy's den'. Cook, pompously, insisted on ‘study'. (The only time it saw actual study was when he surrendered it to Gina and Alfie for homework help, after conspicuously resetting the computer's browser history.) Gina's sessions regularly concluded with her resolving to ‘freshen the place up', but the room had long since settled into a benign obsolescence – wheezing PC, beige Anaglypta, rarely punctured corkboard, 2003 edition of the
Writers & Artists' Yearbook,
clumps of unwatched (sometimes unwrapped) DVDs, and an enormous and ugly crystal ashtray that Cook – now a non-smoker – retained for its writerly allure. It was the Sunday morning after a late evening dinner party, hosted – by Gina and, nominally, Cook – in honour of a friend's fiftieth. Cook had drank heavily, eaten lightly and, buffered by alcoholic bravado and the comfort of acquaintances, reassured himself that his performance on
Talking Pictures
would at least lead to fewer TV gigs. All the guests were comfortably removed from Cook's work circle and were unlikely to have been watching. (Will Stone – the last to leave – had mentioned the show, naturally referring to it as
Talking Bollocks
. But, given its late transmission time, Cook was sure that Stone had only caught it by accident, beercan in hand, kebab balanced on knees.) But now, he hung his hungover head and slotted the door's internal latch into place – always quietly, as there was shame in the self-indulgence of wilful withdrawal.

A short stagger, a nudge of the mouse and, with the standard groan of middle-aged angst masquerading as joint pain, down hard onto the lumpy chair.

Cook glared at a scattering of uninvestigated bills, flinched a little at a sagging shelf over-burdened with the unopened (sterile film theory books), the unexplored (stalled script treatments) and the unloved (a DVD series on iconic directors which featured his depressingly young self wearing the same shirt in different locations). After a brief wander round a couple of news websites, he logged in to
Mogul
, a movie-studio simulator he had found oddly compulsive during a flight from Los Angeles to London a few weeks earlier. Cook usually preferred the abstract strategy of chess or backgammon, but the game's varied challenges – setting release schedules, taming greedy producers, green-lighting, budget-balancing – had locked his attention and torn a chunk out of the flight-time.

An hour or so later, as he adjusted the virtual admission price for an underpopulated public tour of his virtual studio, Cook was bothered by the sense that he was avoiding something. On cue, his email alert sounded and he cautiously accessed the inbox. To his relief, it was an informal commission from the Features Editor of the broadsheet currently sitting (unopened) on a side table by the computer desk.

Christ, thought Cook. Working on a Sunday – for something so banal. He was a militant opponent to all forms of online social ‘sharing', and his first thoughts of easy money were quickly replaced by a vision of the amount of work involved – trawling the sites, registering phantom profiles, dredging the lakes of self-regarding shit for occasional shimmers of substance. It was a job that would require him to engage with a culture he both despised and feared. He retained a pathological grip on his privacy, despite having little in his life that would be of interest to snoopers or strangers. His career path had meandered to its current position via a series of seemingly arbitrary waypoints – local newspapers (wedding photo captions as an intern, unsustainable clashes with section chiefs as a dispensable contractor), church magazines (a brief dalliance with Catholic conversion in his mid twenties), writing and subbing (and, to the amusement of colleagues, subbing his own writing) at a pipsqueak movie monthly called, naturally,
Popcorn
. Then, a rush of freelance pontificating for in-house arthouse mags, and sideline script-work at an over-ambitious film-quiz radio show, before wriggling his way up through the ranks on-staff at
Widescreen
.

In the early years of their marriage, after Gina had cautiously educated him on the pleasures of mid-priced wine, Cook had considered moving into food criticism, attracted to the job's absurd, alias-based culture of secrecy. But he was ironically surnamed, with a palate eroded by years of low-grade meat. He mocked the pretension of oysters, openly retched at offal, and generally avoided any food which required skill or practice to consume. The thirtysomething Cook had once stormed out of a Chinese restaurant after his dining companions had gently mocked his clumsy chopstick technique. (“You need to get a grip, Dorian!”)

Now, he was being drawn deeper away from centre-stage, blending and fading into the background. He had regressed from the boiler-room bustle of the news desk to the templated mediocrity of copy-fitting, fact-checking and adjectival preening. His ego offered spasms of resistance, but he knew it was all means to an ultimate end – of shadow and silence and, crucially, anonymity.

He tapped out a response, accepting the commission with an uncharacteristically affable request to discuss details ‘over coffee'. Almost immediately after sending the message, his email alert sounded again – a notification from
PastLives.com
, as if in rebuke to his buoyancy. He navigated from email subject line to website to message.

The mention of money at least gave Cook a sense of what he was now dealing with – a friend in need. He typed a formal but sympathetic reply, saying that he would love to help but didn't actually have much money himself. At worst, Cook hoped he could avoid a meeting and just transfer a token payment that would feel reasonable but final. His curiosity about Brereton – and Mountford's predicament – could probably be satisfied with a couple more messages. He would then delete his account and move on.

He scrolled the reply window and noticed that Mountford's original message was automatically quoted underneath – with an extra line Cook had missed, a few returns below the main chunk of text.

June, 1974

“Two times two is four! Three times two is six!”

This was ‘maths' – a modulated drone-through of the first twelve integers and the results of multiplying them all by each other. Cook sat with chin on desk, arms flat and sprawled, laminated number-grid propped upright.

“Sit up straight, Dorian!”

The children knew that Mr Butcher had plenty of potential bite behind his bark, and so, as Cook jerked himself upright, most of the others instantly mirrored – a conditioned pulse that, for Butcher, vindicated his hive-mind regime. The class resumed its synchronised chant.

Cook felt something brush against his shoe. He glanced down and saw a small, multicoloured rubber ball that David Brereton had kicked along the floor. Brereton was smirking and nodding towards the front of the class, where John Ray sat, within ear-cuff distance of Butcher. Ray was in a reverie of recital, gossamer hair bobbing and wafting as his bloodless lips launched the words up into the air above Butcher's desk.

“Six times two is twelve! Seven times two is fourteen! Eight times two is sixteen!”

This enthusiasm wasn't just for Teacher's benefit. Ray had a head for figures to go with the body for bullies. Numbers, for him, had rules and form and structure, while people were volatile and amorphous. For his classmates, the times-table repetition was numbing and medicinal – an educational analgesic. To Ray, the effect was ecstatic, psychotropic.

“Ten times two is twenty! Eleven times two is twenty-two!”

Cook scuffed at the rubber ball with his shoe, sending it rolling towards Ray's desk. It bounced off a chair-leg, skittered up and landed in Ray's empty inkwell, where it settled with pleasing snugness. Butcher looked up from his text-book. A movement had flashed across the edge of his vision – had something been thrown? The ball's pink and blue swirls alerted him to Ray's usually unadorned desk-top.

“John Ray! What is
that?”

At the sound of his name, Ray startled with such violence that his desk tilted, dislodging the ball. It dropped to the floor and ricocheted around – to the childrens' delight, and Butcher's fury.

“Pick it up!” he bellowed. “Pick it up and bring it out to the front!”

Ray sprang from his seat and broke into a strange, cowering stoop, scurrying from desk to desk, flailing and lunging. The ball finally settled in a corner under a radiator. Ray retrieved it and approached Butcher. After a beat of calculated tension, Butcher nodded and Ray raised a trembling hand, revealing the ball in his open palm. Butcher immediately swiped it away and, gaze fixed on Ray, dropped it into his desk-side bin.

Ray began to lower his arm, but Butcher reached over with his right hand and slowly closed his spindly fingers around the boy's wrist. The gesture was sinister and well practiced – a massage with a message. He reached into a desk drawer with his free hand.

“Mr Ray,” said Butcher, retrieving a thick wooden ruler, “you seem a bit confused.”

“No, sir!” Ray spluttered, not understanding the point but anxious to soften Butcher's intent.

“Playtime is not for another twenty minutes, son.”

Butcher placed the wooden ruler onto his desktop. The whole class – clenched and mute – winced at the weighty thunk. Ray started to cry.

“I know, sir. I'm sorry, sir!”

Still holding Ray firmly by the wrist, Butcher pivoted him around to face the class and peeled open his fingers one by one. And so, this frail specimen – snared by circumstance, barely eight years in the wild – was presented to his classmates with arm outstretched, palm up but empty-handed, offering nothing. Butcher took up the ruler. He grasped Ray's arm just below the elbow and stroked the wood across the boy's fingers, extending and flattening them to prepare for the first strike.

“Sir…” sobbed Ray. “Please. I don't want to!”

Butcher turned to face his audience and offered a mirror-cracking smile to the front row.

“Perhaps you would rather sit next to Angela?”

Angela Battison was a short, silent girl who had been quarantined at the far-left back corner, behind an exclusion zone of two adjacent empty desks. She suffered from a recurring infection which formed pustular abscesses on her arms, legs and face. The condition could be eased, but it was fickle and restless and slathered her skin with a permanent glaze of decay. At their peak, the scarrings were large and painful and exuded a necrotic odour.

John Ray looked over at Angela, who was pretend-busy doodling. She had expected Butcher's offer and didn't want to catch anyone's eye. Ray took out the blue-and-white handkerchief and dabbed at his nose and eyes. His silence was enough of an answer for Butcher.

“Sit down at the back! Next time, there will not be a choice.”

Ray trudged to the desk beside Angela, stepping inside her fetid ecosystem. He dragged out the chair and sat down, coughing a stifled retch into his handkerchief. The children all watched his shuffle of shame in impotent silence – except Cook.

“Sir, don't be so tight on him!”

Butcher's head jerked up. He skewered Cook with a stare of startled amusement. Then, slowly, enquiringly…

“Bring yourself to the front, Dorian.”

Cook instantly stood and strode over to Butcher's desk with a vigour that seemed suicidal to his classmates. Butcher looked back down into his textbook and let Cook stand before him in silence for a few awkward seconds.

“Mr Cook,” said Butcher, finally lifting his head and locking eyes. “You have a problem – it's called a mouth.”

Cook's response was rapier improv – a thrust for the gallery of brutalist bowl-cuts and chequered knitwear.

“You've
got a problem!” he sneered. “It's called a face!”

The mockery was witless, but Butcher absorbed it with strained respect. He lifted his pitcher's mitt of a hand and whipped it, palm open, into Cook's head, striking him so squarely the noise could have been mistaken for the slamming of a desk-lid. Cook yelped in shock and tilted over, touching his fingertips to the dusty floor.

“Mr Austin's office. Now!”

Eyes streaming, ears buzzing from the blow, Cook pivoted away and stumbled out of the door. He climbed the steep rack of uncarpeted wooden stairs to the headmaster's office and rapped twice on the door.

“Come!”

Inside this pompous, oaken lair, with its broad window nosing down on the classrooms, Cook was given no counsel or airtime. Austin favoured discipline over detail, and he slid a thin wooden cane from an umbrella rack and brought it down hard, three times, on Cook's palm, before returning to his marking, and waiting until the boy could no longer suppress his sobs before telling him to go.