Ghosts (22 page)

I put my face to the kitchen window and peered inside. I could see little except shadows and my own eyes reflected in the glass, fixed and hungry, like the eyes of a desperate stranger. Crouched there with my breath steaming the pane and the bilious smell of drains in my nostrils, I felt intensely the pressure of things behind me, the garden and the fields
and the far woods, like an inquisitive crowd gathering at my back, elbowing for a look. I am never really at ease in the open; I expect always some malignity of earth or air to strike me down or, worse, to whirl me up dizzyingly into the sky. I have always been a little afraid of the sky, so transparent and yet impenetrable, so deceptively harmless-looking in its bland blueness.

The back door was locked. I was turning to go, more relieved I think than anything else, when suddenly, in a sudden swoon of anger, or proprietorial resentment, or something, I don’t know what, I turned with an elbow lifted and bashed it against one of the panes of frosted glass in the door. These things are not as easy as the cinema makes them seem: it took me three good goes before I managed it. The glass gave with a muffled whop, like a grunt of laughter, guttural and cruel, and the splinters falling to the floor inside made a sinister little musical sound, a sort of elfin music. I waited, listening. What a connoisseur of silences I have become over the years! This one had astonishment in it, and warm fright, and a naughty child’s stifled glee. I took a breath. I was trembling, like a struck cymbal. How darkly thrilling it is to smash a pane of glass and reach through the jagged hole into the huge, cool emptiness of the other side. I pictured my hand pirouetting all alone in there, in that shocked space, doing its little back-to-front
pas de deux
with the key. The door swung open abruptly and I almost fell across the threshold; it was not so much the suddenness that made me totter but the vast surprise of being here. For an instant I saw myself as if lit by lightning, a stark, crouched figure, vivid and yet not entirely real, an emanation of myself, a hologram image, pop-eyed and flickering. Shakily I stepped inside, and recalled, with eerie immediacy, the tweedy and damply warm underarm of a blind man I had helped across a street somewhere, in some forgotten city, years ago.

I shut the door behind me and stood and took another
deep breath, like a diver poised on the springboard’s thrumming tip. The furniture hung about pretending not to look at me. Stillness lay like a dustsheet over everything. There was no one at home, I could sense it. I walked here and there, my footsteps falling without sound. I had a strange sensation in my ears, a sort of fullness, as if I were in a vessel fathoms deep with the weight of the ocean pressing all around me. The objects that I looked at seemed insulated, as if they had been painted with a protective coating of some invisible stuff, cool and thick and smooth as enamel, and when I touched them I could not seem to feel them. I thought of being here, a solemn little boy in a grubby jersey, crop-headed and frowning, with inky fingers and defenceless, translucent pink ears, sitting at this table hunched over my homework on a winter evening and dreaming of the future. Can I really ever have been thus? Can that child be me? Surely somewhere between that blameless past and this grim present something snapped, some break occurred without my noticing it in the line I was paying out behind me as I ran forward, reaching out an eager hand towards all the good things that I thought were waiting for me. Who was it, then, I wonder, that picked up the frayed end and fell nimbly into step behind me, chuckling softly to himself?

I went into the hall. There was the telephone she had delayed so long before answering. The machine squatted tensely on its little table like a shiny black toad, dying to speak, to tell all, to blurt out everything that had been confided to it down the years. Where had everyone gone to? Had they fled at the sound of my voice on the line, had she dropped everything and bundled the child in her arms and run out to the road and driven away with a shriek of tyres? I realised now why it was I could touch nothing, could not feel the texture of things: the house had been emptied of me; I had been exorcised from it. Would she know I had been here? Would she sense the contamination in the air? I closed
my eyes and was assailed anew by that feeling of both being and not being, of having drifted loose from myself. I have always been convinced of the existence somewhere of another me, my more solid self, more weighty and far more serious than I, intent perhaps on great and unimaginable tasks, in another reality, where things are really real; I suppose for him, out there in his one of many worlds, I would be no more than the fancy of a summer’s day, a shimmer at the edge of vision, something half-glimpsed, like the shadow of a cloud, or a gust of wind, or the hover and sudden flit of a dragonfly over reeded, sun-white shallows. And now as I stood in the midst of my own absence, in the birthplace that had rid itself of me utterly, I murmured a little prayer, and said, Oh, if you are really there, bright brother, in your more real reality, think of me, turn all your stern attentions on me, even for an instant, and make
me
real, too.

(Of course, at times I think of that other self not as my better half but my worse; if he is the bad one, the evil, lost twin, what does that make me? That is an avenue down which I do not care to venture.)

I climbed the stairs. I felt oddly, shakily buoyant, as if there were springs attached to the soles of my shoes and I must keep treading down heavily to prevent them from bouncing me over the banisters. On the first landing I stopped and turned from side to side, poor baffled minotaur, my head swinging ponderously on its thick tendons, a bullish weight, my humid, blood-dark glower groping stubbornly for something, for some smallest trace of my past selves lurking here, like the hidden faces in a comic-book puzzle. As a child I loved to be alone in the house; it was like being held loosely in the friendly clutches of a preoccupied, mute and melancholy giant. Something now had happened to the light, some sort of gloom had fallen. It was not raining. Perhaps it was fog; in these parts fog has a way of settling
without warning and as quickly lifting again. At any rate I recall a clammy and crepuscular glow. I walked down the corridor. It was like walking in a dream, a sort of slow stumbling, weightless and yet encumbered. At the end of the corridor there was an arched window with a claret-coloured pane that had always made me think of cold churches and the word
litany.
The door to one of the bedrooms was ajar; I imagined someone standing behind it, breathless and listening, just like me. I hesitated, and then with one finger pushed the door open and stepped in sideways and stood listening in the softly thudding silence. The room was empty, a large, high, white chamber with a vaulted ceiling and one big window looking out into the umbrage of tall trees. There was no furniture, there were no pictures on the walls, there was nothing. The floorboards were bare. Whose room had this been? I did not remember it; that elaborate ceiling, for instance, domed and scooped like the inner crown of a priest’s biretta: there must have been a false ceiling under it in my time that now had been removed. I looked up into the soft shadows and felt everything fall away from me like water. How cool and calm all was, how still the air. I thought how it would be to live here in this bone-white cell, in all this emptiness, watching the days ascend and fall again to darkness, hearing faintly the wind blow, seeing the light edge its way across the floor and die. And then to float away, to be gone, like dust, dispersed into the vast air. Not to be. Not to be at all. Deep down, deep beyond dreaming, have I ever desired anything other than that consummation? Sometimes I think that satyr, what’s-his-name, was right: better not to have been born, and once born to have done with the whole business as quick as you can.

A bird like a black bolt came flying straight out of the trees and dashed itself with a bang against the window-pane.

Something jogged my memory then, the bird, perhaps, or
the look of those trees, or that strange, misty light in the glass: once, when I was sick, they had moved me here from my own room, I cannot think why – for the view, maybe, or the elevation, I don’t know. I saw again the bed at the window, the tall, fluted half-columns of the curtains rising above me, the tops of the autumnal trees outside, and the child that I was then, lying quietly with bandaged throat, grey-browed and wan, my hands resting on the turned-down sheet, like a miniature warrior on his tomb. How strangely pleasurable were the illnesses of those days. Afloat there in febrile languor, with aching eyes and leaden limbs and the blood booming in my ears, I used to dream myself into sky-bound worlds where metallic birds soared aloft on shining loops of wire and great clouded glass shapes sailed ringingly through the cool, pellucid air. Perhaps this is how children die; perhaps still pining somehow for that oblivion out of which they have so lately come they just forget themselves and quietly float away.

A faint reflection moved on the glass before me and I turned to find my son standing in the doorway, watching me with a placid and enquiring smile. I thought,
I met Death upon the road.
I sat down on the window-sill. I felt feeble suddenly.

‘Van!’ I said and laughed breathlessly. ‘How you’ve grown!’

Did he know me, I wonder? He must be seventeen now, or eighteen – in my confusion I could not remember his birthday, or even what month it falls in. I had not seen him for ten years. Would it upset him to come upon me suddenly here like this? Who knows what upsets him. Maybe nothing does, maybe he is perfectly at peace, locked away inside himself. I picture a far, white country, everything blurred and flat under a bleached sky, and, off on the horizon, a bird, perhaps, tiny as a toy in all that distance, flying steadily away. But how huge he was! – I could do nothing at first except sit leaning forward with my hands on my knees,
gaping at him. He was a good half head taller than I, with a barrel chest and enormous shoulders and a great, broad brow, incongruously noble, like that of a prehistoric stone statue standing at an angle on a hillside above the shore of some remote, forgotten island. The blond curls that I remembered had grown thick and had turned a rusty shade of red; that is from me. He had his mother’s dark colouring, though, and her dark, solemn eyes. His gaze, even at its steadiest, kept pulling away distractedly to one side, which created a curious, flickering effect, as if within that giant frame a smaller, frailer version of him, the one that I remembered, were minutely atremble. In my imagination I got up out of myself, like a swimmer clambering out of water, and took a staggering step towards him, my arms outstretched, and pressed him to my breast and sobbed. Poor boy, my poor boy. This is awful. In reality I am still sitting on the window-sill, with my hands with their whitened knuckles clamped on my knees, looking up at him and inanely, helplessly smiling; I never was one for embraces. He made a noise deep in his throat that might have been a chuckle and walked forward with a sort of teetering and unexpectedly light, almost dancing step, and peered at the stunned blackbird perched outside on the sill, glazed and motionless and all puffed up around its puzzlement and pain. It kept heaving shuddery little sighs and slowly blinking. There was blood on its beak. What a shock the poor thing must have had when what looked like shining air turned suddenly to solid glass and the world snapped shut. Is that how it is for my boy all the time, a sort of helpless blundering against darkly gleaming, impenetrable surfaces? He pointed to the bird and glanced at me almost shyly and did that chuckle again. He had a musty, faintly sweet smell that made me think of wheelchairs and those old-fashioned, cloth-padded wooden crutches. He was always fascinated by birds. I remembered, years ago, when
he was a child, walking with him one blustery autumn day through the grounds of a great house we had paid a shilling to see. There was a peacock somewhere, we could hear its uncanny, desolate cry above the box hedges and the ornamental lawns. Van was beside himself and kept running agitatedly back and forth with his head lifted in that peculiar, angled way that he had when he was excited, looking to see what could be making such extravagant sounds. But we never did find the peacock, and now the day came back to me weighted with that little absence, that missed, marvellous bird, and I felt the pang of it, distant and piercing, like the bird’s cry itself.

‘Are you all right?’ I said to him. That curious, dense light was in the trees and pressing like gauze against the window-panes. ‘Are you happy?’

What else could I say? His only response was a puzzled, fleeting frown, as if what he had heard was not my voice but only a familiar and yet as always incomprehensible, distant noise, another of the squeaks and chirrups thronging the air of his white world. I have never been able to rid myself of the notion that his condition was my fault, that even before he was born I damaged him somehow with my expectations, that my high hopes made him hang back inside himself until it was too late for him to come out properly and be one with the rest of us. And no matter what I may tell myself, I did have hopes. Of what? Of being saved through him, as if the son by his mere existence might absorb and absolve the sins of the father? Even that grandiloquent name I insisted on hanging around his neck – Vanderveld! for God’s sake, after my mother’s people – even that was a weight that must have helped to drag him down. When he was still an infant I used to picture us someday in the far future strolling together down a dappled street in the south somewhere, he a grown man and I still miraculously youthful, both of us in white, my hand lightly on his shoulder and him smiling: father and
son. But while I had my face turned away, dreaming of that or some other, equally fatuous idyll, the Erl King got him.

Suddenly, as if nothing at all had happened, the blackbird with a sort of clockwork jerk rose up and flexed its wings and flew off swiftly into the cottony white light. Van made a little disappointed mewling noise and pressed his face to the glass, craning to see the last of the bird, and for a second, as he stood with his face turned like that, I saw my mother in him. Dear Jesus, all my ghosts are gathering here.