My Ghosts (17 page)

His paper name was Francis James Robert Sears. He remembered learning it when he first went to school, remembered how fitting it had seemed, as if he were becoming a whole new boy. The first two names were for his mother’s lost brothers, the last, she said, for his father, who’d been dead all along. Robbie didn’t know much about him, and there were times when that had mattered. He knew that he’d done something brave, and that he was an orphan as his mother was, and Edie’s parents too. He’d never really thought about that before, how rare it must have been to keep a family whole, in the old, harder times they’d come through.

He didn’t know much about his mother’s life either, though he remembered her telling a story about being chased by a bear,
and another about a ship with white sails. When he was small he’d had the idea that she’d fallen off, while the rest sailed on without her. Or that maybe there’d been a wreck and they’d been marooned, still hoping someone would find them; he’d thought about that on the ship that steamed up the St. Lawrence, realized he was looking for flickering fires all along the shore.

Every form he’d had to fill in had all his names, but in the war itself he was mostly
Sears
, and he wondered if, along with the bang on the head, it might be this business of names that had him so confused about just who he was, about his life. Janet told him more than once how lucky he was that things happened as they did. That he’d gone first to a regular hospital, the amputation done cleanly, by a good surgeon, instead of in some field hospital, seething with infection. She said she could tell him stories that would curl his hair even more.

He knew what she meant, but he also knew what
lucky
felt like, and it wasn’t this. Lucky was lying in his own bed in his own house, with his arms crossed beneath his head. It was watching Edie, with his blue shirt draped over her shoulders, as she bit hungrily into a pear. Lucky was watching Edie laughing as she cupped her hand over her chin to catch the juice falling from her lovely mouth, but that wasn’t a thing he could tell Janet. Instead he said there was another word he was thinking of, and that word was
irony
, and she rolled her mismatched eyes, and blew out a hard jet of smoke.

There were things to be sorted out, and apparently the fact that he’d been on leave, and on a civilian train, made them complicated. Not impossible, but it took time, though he didn’t care. He knew he should be chafing to get home and he
put on a show of disappointment every time the limping clerk arrived with yet another form to sign with his shaky, wrong-handed scrawl. But really he was quite content where he was, with the rhythm of the ward, the food not bad. He could close his eyes and sleep when he wanted, even without the prick of the needle, now that the pain was easier.

He was healing beautifully, they told him, and he’d found a new balance when he walked. When he shuffled, rather; he still moved carefully, as if he were carrying the most precious, delicate thing. Sometimes he made his way outside to the bench that was surrounded by roses, and the misty light made the green lawns glow where they rolled toward the sea. There was a high fence there, at the cliff’s edge, that was said to be against invasion, but he was certain it was really in case anyone had the urge to leap over.

When Janet asked he told her his son was called Robert Angus, named for his father and Edie’s, and she thought it had a nice, solid ring to it. He didn’t tell her about the photographs he had, good ones, that his mother had taken. On the back of one she had written,
He’s the spit of you at his age
, as if she knew about the crazy thoughts in his head. She’d sent other photographs, of Edie standing sideways, with her hands on the growing shelf of her stomach, but a different picture had slithered in. Edie lying with someone else, the two of them laughing at how easy he’d been to fool. He knew it wasn’t true, but the thought was hard to shake. That time Beadle tore his letter in two and went mad in the mess, throwing plates and anything that would smash, Robbie knew what that rage would feel like.

Every so often people came to look at the burned boy. Sailors and soldiers of different ranks, and wives and parents, once an elderly couple all the way from Dundee. No one recognized him, though as Janet said, they’d be lying if they said they could. The story was that he’d been plucked from the smouldering sea after a battle, though no one could explain how he’d ended up here, nor why he was lying in
Lumberjack Ward
, surrounded by screens near one of the tall windows that lined whatever grand room it had once been. There was no chance at all that he’d live, and the doctors were baffled he’d survived this long. His hair had burned away, his nose and fingers, his toes. His uniform, of course, but even if he was a Hun, if his moaning was German moaning, you couldn’t feel anything but pity.

There wasn’t really anywhere you could touch him, the nurses said, and they all hated the sound of the morphine-filled needle going in. Some of them thought it would be a kindness to give him too much, and some thought he should be moved to some far-off, private corner, to spare the rest of them, but the men all said to leave him be. Robbie wondered how many shared with him the small, mean thought, beneath the genuine, comradely sentiment, that as long as the burned boy was there, there would always be something worse.

The nurses had a lot to do, and women from the nearby town, all ages, came to read and visit and help out with the craftwork that was supposed to be good for them, grown men weaving baskets from thin, pliant strips, and clumsily poking thread through canvas. They’d been told, he was sure, to be cheerful and matter-of-fact, and he wondered if that was how it would be for the rest of his life, people speaking to him in that bright tone that forced him to answer the same way.

One of those volunteers asked what his work was, back home, and she said that once she’d broken her arm and had to do everything with her other hand, and it was strange, wasn’t it, as if you had to change your whole brain around. She got flustered, in case he thought she was saying it was anything the same, and he felt sorry for her, with her prim dress and shoes and her pale hair so carefully brushed. He told her that he’d been a schoolteacher for a little while, that maybe he could do that again, and she beamed as if he’d said the cleverest thing, and threaded his needle for him.

Another day a different woman told him about an article she’d read, the amazing work they were doing on artificial limbs, and he just nodded. Everyone said the legs were not bad but the arms were shite, and if he’d still had doubts, watching Kirkwood’s struggles would have convinced him. He’d tried so hard, Kirkwood had, but developed a ring of sores from the straps, a bad infection on the stump from all the chafing, and the arm was put in store with the rest of his things. Elizabeth carried it away, trying to work out how to hold it. In the end she braced it on her shoulder, the way you might carry a rifle, or a baby that wanted to look around, and the hand bobbed along the length of the ward, waving goodbye.

Kirkwood had been a bus driver before, and he grinned with the others when they ribbed him. When they said, “What did you think? Did you think you could stick a glove on it and no one would notice?”
Irony
was the word, all right; it was everywhere. The best was Gillis, when he wheeled himself into the lounge, where the man from the Ministry was asking his questions. “Step dancer,” Gillis said, and everyone laughed till it hurt.

Janet asked, quite hesitantly for her, if he wanted to give away the banjo, but he said no. Remembering how he’d imagined himself, on their little front porch back home, the dark, soft air and the sound of summer insects. He’d be holding that battered banjo, having magically learned to play it. Edie somewhere in the house behind him, maybe rocking his son to sleep and he was helping, plucking out a slow, restful tune. His son could hear it and it soothed him, the sound threading through his dreams, and in some way he would remember it, and would always feel safe, and cared for. Robbie tried to make that a reason, a pure and important reason for why he’d wanted the banjo and the way he had set about getting it, the sneaky shuffle, the tricks.

Duggan had been someone who’d got to him from the start. Got to many of them, for some reason, the butt of all jokes, a foot stuck out or a stool moved at the last second, grown men laughing like bullies in a schoolyard. He seemed like someone who’d grown up in a sack, so little did he know about the world around him, even the names of the countries that were fighting this war. Straw hair and bucked-out teeth and a snorting laugh. But something wondrous happened when he took out the banjo he toted wherever he could. The way his fingers flew over those strings, over the frets with the mother-of-pearl glinting between them, and no one could keep from clapping along, from stamping their feet and whooping. Sometimes he looked up with his quick goof’s grin, but mostly he was lost, transported, hunching over and rocking back, and he didn’t sing but sometimes he gave a little
yip
, and sometimes an eerie, low crooning, as if just for a moment the voice of whatever was possessing him had burst out. Until he stopped playing, and then he was Duggan again,
with his hideous teeth and his big, clown’s feet; just Duggan, stupid as mud.

Robbie knew that Janet had the wrong idea about what kind of reminder the banjo was, and before he’d realized that her confidences were spread all over the ward he might have tried to explain. His new, lopsided self understood that his war had released something ravenous in him, something he didn’t recognize, but didn’t resist. There were things he wanted, all kinds of things, and no reason why he shouldn’t have them.
I want that
, he’d thought in the pub in Liverpool, when he saw Caroline sit down on a drunken man’s lap. And on the ship, when Duggan played and the men stomped and whistled, he thought,
I deserve it more
.

Eventually the proper papers were signed in the proper places, and he said his goodbyes. Janet came to share a last cigarette and told him she’d decided to marry that butcher’s son. The one with thick glasses that she’d joked about, who’d been asking for years. “Is that irony too?” she said, and he supposed it was something close.

He’d thought he’d have trouble on the train and he did, a little. His heart beating faster, his palms and forehead damp, but he closed his eyes and imagined himself in a boat in the middle of a lake, no land in sight. Not the
Erebus
, nothing like that, but a small boat, rocking gently. The sun picking out bands of colour in the water, and just enough breeze. He might have slept; when he opened his eyes they were still rocketing through the countryside, but he was calm, removed. That feeling stayed with him all the way to the docks, to his berth on the ship that would carry him back across the ocean; that feeling stayed.

On board he kept to himself, as most of them did. There was none of the bravado and hijinks that had marked the voyage over. He thought of the distance unfurling behind him like something that was slipping through his fingers, becoming as hazy as what was ahead, though it had seemed so real at the time. He remembered how it was at first, teaching his left hand to take over. How aware he was of his brain saying
squeeze
, saying
lift
, saying
move this way
or
that
. And he thought that maybe that scrambled feeling had nothing to do with the knock on his head. Maybe it was just a snarled phase before things untangled, reordered, and he really was coming home with a different mind too.

The ship docked and there were trains and more trains, but that calm feeling stayed. There was so much bustle in the stations that he couldn’t hear his own footsteps, and he always seemed to be moving against a flow of young faces, fresh uniforms; he thought how much easier it was to get into the war, swept along on a wave of cheers and brass bands, and fluttering handkerchiefs. The journey felt as though it could go on forever, but finally he was on the last, shorter train, and the people getting on and off at its frequent stops were familiar, although he didn’t actually know any of them. He must have looked very fierce or sad because no one sat with him or tried to start a conversation, though a few times someone asked if he was getting off, if he needed help with his bags. “No, thank you,” he said. “I sent them on ahead.”