The Ghost (9 page)

COOK REMOVED ALFIE'S SHOES
and socks, restrained him gently by the shoulder for a brief food and drink request (“No, thank you!”) and launched him into the play-centre's sprawling fort of tunnels and ladders. When he was sure that his son was safely monkeying across the rope-netting with children equivalent to his age and build, Cook turned and surveyed the droopy parents huddled around an island of plastic-topped tables near the food counter. Here, a buffet of broadsheet supplements was occasionally inspected, but mostly there was tablet-swiping and phone-poking and, Cook noted with distaste, very little conversation or physical book-reading. His gaze was drawn to a tall, hunched man in an ugly maroon polo shirt, trudging back from the serving window, triangular sandwich-pack in one hand, plastic cup in the other. Mountford was still unmistakably Mountford – there was just more of him. Overweight, overgrown, over-burdened – a scaled-up model of the character in Cook's past life. He seemed compressed and off-centre, both familiar and unfamiliar – a cartoonish interloper in the real world. He moved across the sticky floor like an astronaut, as if each slow, steady step carried both novelty and peril.

Cook had repeatedly played out this scene in his mind – the hang-back, the shudder of clarity, the awakening, the hurried retreat through the bright blue exit barrier to sink back into the dusk. But he was surprised to find himself simply and confidently walking over, stopping a few feet away from Mountford as he was settling into his seat, back turned.

“Hello, Den.”

Mountford jumped a little but turned his head to face Cook with oddly muted interest.

“Mr Cook!” said Mountford, and then checked his ironic pomposity. “So glad you could come, Dor.”

Mountford heaved himself upright and smothered Cook in a brief and brittle man-hug. Cook gasped beneath his friend's bulk and inhaled the polo-shirt's collar – a clash of expensive cologne and cheap fabric-conditioner. As they broke their embrace and Mountford turned to sit, he almost elbowed his coffee-cup off the table, and Cook was shocked to see him deftly jab out a hand to correct its tumble. That first impression of sluggish vulnerability had been misleading – perhaps wilfully so.

They sat, stiffly, in the interview position, face to face across the Formica.

“D'you want anything?” wondered Mountford, nodding towards the food counter.

Cook forced a smile and shook his head. “Is your boy in there?”

“Jake, yes. He's six. He's amazing. I never thought I'd be any good at it, Dor – being a dad. Doing alright, though. He's the one by the swing.”

Cook scanned the play-area and saw a short, borderline plump boy waiting patiently for his turn on a rope-tyre. He was waving at his dad, smiling happily. Mountford waved back – a slow, window-wiping motion which looked more like a signal for help than a gesture of connection.

“Alfie's in there somewhere, too. He's nearly nine.”

Mountford nodded and took a slurp of coffee. “Both left it a bit late, then.”

Cook shrugged. “My wife wore me down. I never really wanted kids. Pram in the hall, and all that.”

Mountford smiled. “I suppose writing about bloody films is a sort of art.”

Cook laughed, a little defensively. “What are you up to, these days?”

“I do signs,” said Mountford. “Awnings, shop-fronts, occasional big stuff like stadiums or public buildings. It's okay. Got my own business. I did graphic design, so…”

A short silence descended, ponderous rather than uncomfortable. Mountford displaced it by unwrapping his sandwich. Cook checked on Jake, who was now sitting inside the tyre, being shoved and swung in looping circles by a group of other boys, including Alfie. All were laughing and shouting to each other.

“So,” said Cook, “what made you get back in touch?”

Mountford was lifting the sandwich to his mouth, but the question diverted him, and he slotted it back into the plastic.

“Lots of weird messages, Dor. Worrying.”

“Why do you think it's got anything to do with us?”

“I've had stuff through the post, as well.”

Mountford pulled a backpack from under the table, dug out a small envelope with his name and address typed onto the front, and skimmed it across the table. Cook took out the contents – a torn away magazine cutting. The edge of the page was missing and Cook couldn't place the design, but judging by the paper quality, slack typography, grammatical errors and inconsistent tenses, he guessed it had been taken from something cheap and specialist. A patch of awkwardly compressed copy had been highlighted, with one section encircled in red biro.

Cook finished reading and looked up at Mountford, who had turned away from the table, cowering in the presence of the envelope and paper.

“Have you seen the other side?” said Mountford, still with his back turned.

For a moment, Cook misinterpreted the question as some kind of paranormal or philosophical challenge.

“The other side? Of what?”

Mountford turned back to face Cook. “The paper!”

Cook flipped over the cutting. A section of tightly packed classifieds had been defaced with a message written in red biro.

DO YOU BELIEVE?

The letters were neatly arranged and uniformly spaced. The question-mark was a strange mirror-image ‘S' above a deeply prodded point. Cook examined the words, admiring the presentation.

“Looks like some kind of viral-marketing campaign for a horror film or something. It's too well designed.”

“The online messages are directly to me, Dor. You can't find people on that website without searching.”

Cook re-folded the paper and slid it back across the table. Mountford stared down, keeping his hands out of sight. Now, the silence was localised vacuum – it cloaked over them, amplifying their unrest. They were alone together, marooned in a crossfire of drumming bare-feet and jagged Tannoy. Back at Bethesda, Cook and Mountford had been part of the primary palette – yellow-cardiganned, bowl-haircutted, bell-bottomed birds of paradise, strutting and fluttering against a backwash of tweed and torpor. Then, they thrived; now, they subsisted, in the negative alternative, where all was colour while they were grey. The two men had both, to different degrees, accepted impending obscurity, and now here was this – rekindled significance.

“I don't know. Go to the police, Den. I'm not sure how I can help.”

Mountford scooped the paper and envelope into his backpack. “I've already spoken to them. They can't do anything until there's a specific threat – and even then…”

“What are the website messages like?”

“Just strange. Rambling.”

Cook fiddled with his wedding ring, rotating it around the finger. He glanced over at Alfie and Jake – they were now both barrelling up the chute of a slide, arching their legs as other children squeezed through.

“Den, it's thirty-odd years ago.”

“No, it's not! It's now. Look – can't we just swap numbers?”

Without waiting for agreement, he took out a pen and, like a bashful bet, nudged it into the centre of the table. Cook wrote his number on the back of the food receipt, and Mountford snatched it up, packed away the uneaten sandwich and carefully climbed to his feet. He was slow and creaky again – back in character.

“It's been really good to see you again, Dor.”

“You, too.”

Neither men sounded convinced or convincing. They shared a brief, transactive handshake and Mountford plodded off to collect his son. Cook watched them wriggle out through the narrow exit barrier, ready with a wave – but his friend didn't look back. He bought a coffee and browsed the film sections. Around half an hour after Mountford had left, Cook received a text-message.

Cook scowled at the text-speak and fussy sign-off. He typed a reply.

The ellipsis, rather than question-mark, confirmed closure – to the text conversation, to the meeting, to the reason for the meeting and, for Cook, to the relationship. He considered adding Mountford's number to his address book, but instead he deleted the message and slotted the phone back into his pocket, where it immediately sounded an email alert. He took it back out and opened his inbox.

Cook smiled, deleted the mail and, feeling cleansed, returned to his reading.

July, 1974

On Saturdays, Esther worked a part-time cleaning job at a local insurance company and Cook was usually home alone until early afternoon. This morning, at 8am, the day was already floodlit – pre-baked in mid-summer shimmer. He tumbled out of bed, ran to the landing, sat on the top stair and shuffled, step by step, down to the bottom. Rusty was curled in a tight bundle on the hearth-rug and raised his ears as Cook hurdled him, paused, and tried to do a standing jump from the back edge of Esther's armchair to the kitchen step. He made it in three attempts (his record was two). In the kitchen, Cook dropped two Shredded Wheat into a bowl and slathered them in sterilised milk. Bowl in hand, wearing nothing but Y-fronts, he opened the back door and stepped outside.

The yard was long and thin, with a choppy topography of fractured paving. Subsidence had failed in its effort to topple the dividing wall and was now redirecting its energies towards the foundations. Barefoot, Cook tiptoe-surfed the undulating stonework and hitched himself up onto the rubber lid of the dustbin propped against the gate. Here, in one of the planet's least salubrious sun-traps, Cook raised his face to the mild morning beams, eyes closed, gnawing through the cereal. As the sun's position shifted, casting him in the chilly shadow of the outside-toilet roof, he abandoned his bowl and crouched down to investigate the surrounding mound of heavy house-bricks which Uncle Russell used to hold the bin in place. He heaved up the largest rock and flipped it over, scattering a crowd of woodlice. Most of the creatures made it into the safety of the paving cracks, but one had been tipped onto its back and was scurrying and thrashing its legs in an attempt to correct itself. Cook captured it with a gentle pinch, slowly lifted himself upright, and studied the brickwork of the leaning wall. He found a recently re-spun spider-web, hung horizontally like a hammock, spanning the interior of a crevice. He reached in and precisely – almost tenderly – positioned the woodlouse in the sagging centre of the structure, where it immediately intensified its wriggling. The movement only ensnared it more deeply, and it gradually mummified itself inside a ball of gummy webbing which restricted its struggle to sporadic spasms.

Cook turned his head to the side – he knew his breathing could cause unnatural vibration. And then –
there!
– in the web's darkest corner, four sharp and spindly protrusions appeared instantly
,
as if by materialisation. Within seconds, a burly spider emerged, gripping the woodlouse and biting it into submission. Next door, Mr Smith launched into a deathly-dry coughing fit, but Cook could not be distracted. He gaped as the spider detached its prey – his offering – from the surface of the web and dragged it deep into its lightless lair.

Mr Smith coughed and coughed and coughed, and Cook heard him stumble into the kitchen, run a tap and, after a pause, burst into a more lubricated splutter which quickly degraded back to its arid origin. He grabbed the cereal bowl and skimmed across the jagged ground, back into the house, through the kitchen and into the living room. Rusty twitched at the commotion, but stayed low and bundled, greeting him with a limp tail-flap. Cook lunged at the TV and cranked the volume on an episode of the cartoon serial
Arabian Knights
. Still, Mr Smith coughed and coughed, but now his distress was at least dampened by cheap incidental music and regular waves of canned laughter.

“Size of a buffalo!”

Cook was breathing heavily. He thought of the spider, deep in the dilapidated wall – undisturbed, enjoying his breakfast in the dark, injecting liquidising venom, feasting on the nutritious mush.

Later that morning, Cook dragged his kick-scooter through the parlour and out of the front door onto the hot pavement. As he fiddled with the door-lock, the scooter slowly keeled over, as if wilting in the staring sun. He snatched it up and clattered off to Lisa Goldstraw's house. Esther had still not yielded to his regular bicycle request, and he felt conspicuous and overgrown on the rusty red device – particularly in the solar spotlight.

He trundled past the abandoned butcher's shop (still not looking) with both legs on the scooter platform, side-on. He turned the corner and scraped his way up the steeper, scrub-lined lower avenue which peeled off to the right, up to Lowther Street – Brereton's road – and beyond, to the forbidden jumble of industrial waste known as the marl-hole. He veered left, up past the newsagent at the corner of Denbigh Street, hiding his scooter shame by clattering up the cobbled entries that separated the brown and grey terraces. He soon emerged at the edge of the play-park and into Lisa Goldstraw's neighbourhood, with its deep driveways and stone-clad semis, and children who didn't know him well enough to risk any catcalls. Cook's heart quickened at the thought of Lisa, and his lungs greedily inhaled the oxygen of anonymity.

To Cook's consistent astonishment and envy, Lisa's house had a back-garden veranda bursting with toys and books and board-games. Baby Rebecca had transformed into Toddler Rebecca, and she teetered and stumbled from one primary-coloured object to the next, yelling with delight. Lisa showed Cook her latest acquisition – a plastic ‘barber-shop' chair with a crank-handle which oozed Play-Doh through the perforated skulls of grinning models, like a benign meat mincer. Rebecca held a pair of blunt orange scissors in both hands, cropping the coloured strands while Lisa styled them neat with a broad-tooth comb. As ever, though, Rebecca was more interested in Cook himself – cuddling him, gaining his attention for babbling announcements, stroking the claggy comb through his hair.

The midday heat, which had been brooding all morning, was now fuming – up in the low 80s. Lisa's mother had thrown open all the veranda windows, inviting a weedy breeze which drifted around to little effect. As she lifted Rebecca away for a nap, Cook noticed a small, slitted scar underneath the toddler's chin, scored across the width of its tip.

“Come on, Trouble! Let's get you down for an hour.”

They listened as Mrs Goldstraw settled Rebecca in an upstairs room before returning with two glasses of blackcurrant squash, a single ice-cube bobbing in each.

“Little Becky fell out of her pram last week. Didn't she, mum?”

“She did, darling, yes. It was a really nasty cut. She's okay, though.”

“And she now calls Dorian ‘Dor-Dor'.”

Mrs Goldstraw chuckled and stole a sip from her daughter's glass.

*

Cook scootered home through the afternoon haze. At the forking point to Lowther Street, he was surprised to see David Brereton, Michael Howell – and John Ray, all on Tomahawk bicycles, pedalling uphill towards the park. They shouted and waved but didn't stop. Cook span round his scooter and followed them, along the perimeter cycle path and, eventually, into an upscale estate where the houses hid behind tall double-gates and pruned hedges. He tracked the cyclists to the back of a mid-sized house with a dark blue facade. By the time he emerged from a corridor of topiary, tracing the edge of a lawn as green and pristine as snooker baize, all three bikes had been laid flat on a panel of decking outside open French windows. Cook hopped off his scooter and wandered inside – to a broad and tidy dining room adjoining a kitchen that was laboratory-clean and lavishly equipped. Brereton and Howell stood before the wardrobe-sized fridge, guzzling fizzy pop and cooling their faces in front of the open freezer door. Ray was crouched down, face hidden inside a cupboard, searching for something.

“Hey, Dor!” said Brereton. “Where did you get your scooter from?”

“Yeah!” spluttered Howell, through a mouthful of Tizer. “Really want one of them!”

“Shut up…” muttered Cook, too focused on his surroundings to compose a comeback. Having previously visited both Brereton and Howell's houses, he assumed – correctly – that this was where John Ray began his journey to school each morning. The opulence enthralled him. Everything – layout, surface materials, colour choices – blazed with the gloss of good taste empowered by ample income. Esther's walls were bare, her shelves loaded with Toby jugs, cadaverous imps and awkwardly posed porcelain figures. Here, the pattern was reversed, with shelves free of ornamentation and walls displaying what could confidently be called art – abstracts, landscapes, photography. And it
smelled
good – light and sweet and fresh. Cook was used to interiors fouled by the essence of reconstituted lard and harsh detergent.

“It must be upstairs!”

John backed out of the cupboard. His face looked oddly reddened, as if he'd been dabbing it with blusher. He dashed out of the kitchen and clambered loudly up the stairs.

“He's got a thing,” said Howell. “He has to put cream on when he's out in the sun.”

“Yeah,” smirked Brereton, draining his bottle. “Or he dies – like Drac-lee-a.”

“It's Drac-
yew
-la,” insisted Cook. “And anyway, vampires aren't real.”

“Yeah, they are,” said Brereton, “and you can only kill them by setting fire to their hearts.”

“I need a pee!” bleated Cook, jigging from leg to leg.

“So do I,” said Howell, “but John says we're not allowed, because his dad will go mad.”

“Do it down the grid!” smiled Brereton.

Around the corner from the open kitchen door, a metal drainage grid swallowed the house's waste water. To use it, Cook would have to step out into the garden and risk being seen by neighbours. There was no plausible threat of consequence, but the exposure would be unbearable.

“Is there a bottle or something?” Cook searched through a couple of cupboards underneath the sink, but they were crowded with dishcloths and cleaning fluids.

“Finished with this!” announced Brereton, handing over his almost-empty bottle of apple juice. Cook removed the cap and unzipped his trousers. He turned his back to Howell and Brereton, poked out his penis and slotted it into the top of the bottle.

“Errrr! He's not even emptied it!” shouted Howell. Brereton shushed him.

Cook held the bottle steady and, after a short pause, warm urine trickled out and blended with the cold juice, raising a little steam. Brereton nudged Cook in the back, but he kept steady, spilling nothing. After a few seconds, the bottle was almost full. Cook zipped up and tipped half of the liquid down the sink.

“Give us that!”

He took Howell's half-full juice carton and diluted his potion until the bottle was two-thirds full of something yellowy-greeny and convincingly chilled. Howell snatched back his almost-empty carton and Cook replaced the cap on his bottle. Howell and Brereton looked at him, confused, until Cook's half-smile inspired a shudder of sniggers from Howell, and soon all three were giggling in sordid solidarity.

John Ray re-appeared with shining skin. “I have to use a really high factor!” he explained, in that precocious cadence, every vowel rich and ripe. “My skin doesn't have enough melanin. It used to be worse than this but I can go out now.”

“Do you want a drink, John?”

Cook offered the bottle. Ray regarded it suspiciously – the liquid's colour seemed strange and the brand label had been almost completely scratched off. But if this was a trick, it didn't match the mood.

“It's really nice,” offered Howell.

“Yeah,” encouraged Cook, “it's a new lime drink. It's called Jungle Juice.”

Ray studied Cook's gaze for a few seconds, then took the bottle, opened it and, without sniffing the content, drank deeply. The sun-blushed skin on his forehead furrowed into a frown and he pursed his waxy lips. Cook and Howell caught each other's gaze, and their poker faces flickered. Brereton was openly laughing.

“It's warm!”

Ray wiped his mouth and, for a second, his tainted cheeks were chalk-white again. He looked from Howell to Brereton, who both instantly shifted their eyelines down into the kitchen floor, suppressing their sniggers. He turned to Cook – who didn't look away – and the two boys stood there, still and silent in the burning air. As Ray's eyes reddened, Cook's gaze calcified into a stare, then a glare, and then – with the faintest twitch of one eyebrow – transformed into a challenge.

The front door clanged shut.

“Hello?”

Ray tipped the ‘Jungle Juice' into the sink and dropped the bottle into a bin.

“Johnny?”

Ray's half-brother, Darren, hustled his way through the door from the sitting room, struggling with a large cardboard box. He was a few years older than John, but carried none of his sibling's frailty or whiteness of complexion. He had dark, darting eyes and a commanding tone, reinforced by his pre-adolescent height and heft.

“Boiling fucking hot! Hope you've used your cream, Johnny! Help us get these outside.”

John Ray took one edge of the box and side-stepped past the others out into the garden. Cook, Howell and Brereton watched as they hobbled past the kitchen window and set the box down, behind a tall bush, out of sight of the street. Brereton and Howell instantly followed them outside, but Cook was uneasy and joined them only when he heard a burst of helium barks and whimpers. In the garden shade, Cook peeked over the top of the cardboard box and saw a squirming huddle of around ten light-brown Labrador puppies.

“Aaawww,” cooed Brereton, “can I hold one?”

The dogs trembled and squeaked. Cook squatted down and carefully reached his hand into the box, where it was immediately smothered in a delirium of nipping and licking.

“They're hungry!” said Howell.

“Course they fucking are!” snapped Darren. “They ain't been fed.”

“Can we give ‘em some dog-food?” Brereton directed his question to John – which seemed to anger Darren.

“Can't give ‘em cat-food, you little twat!”

“DARREN!”

All five jumped in unison at the shout – a deep, dark voice from somewhere at the front of the house.