Ghosting Read online

  In reality, hardly anyone visited us by chance. But in my mother's world, uncertainty was pernicious and had to be guarded against at all times. Only on Sunday evenings, therefore, when it was absolutely certain that no one would call, were we allowed a bath. This was quite a ritual and one attended by my mother's thin-lipped umbrage. She approached it in the spirit appropriate to arranging a hanging—it was something that had to be done but there was no joy to be had in it. As if to set an example, she herself never had a bath. In much the same way as she believed that washing machines didn't wash—at least not properly—and electric mixers didn't mix, so she believed that having a bath didn't get you properly clean.

  My brother and I always had the first bath since our father's dirtiness was deemed to be greater than the combined grime of two children. And during our bath the stove in the kitchen could be stoked to provide a top-up of hot water for our father. In winter the air temperature in the bathroom was so cold that getting out of the water required huge mental discipline followed by a mad dash to the kitchen where our pyjamas were warming on a rail by the stove. By then my father would be stripped down to his underpants, ready for his dash in the opposite direction. Waiting for our father to arrive back in the kitchen, goose-pimpled and raging at the world, was a time filled with fear and anticipation, at once sweet and sharp. He would burst through the kitchen door, bent like a question mark, an improbable survivor of some natural disaster, his face seeming to contain all the agony of mankind. The scene that followed, it now seems to me, was something out of the theatre of the absurd: there was an apparent absence of purpose, a lack of harmony with the surroundings, a sadness to the point of anguish, but also a kind of laconic comedy. While my father ranted and raved, fighting all the while with his towel, taming it into submission in an effort to get warm and dry, my mother performed an emotional pas-de-deux, alternately pleading and reproaching, her mouth tight and hard, waiting for him to be calm so that she could undertake the radical cleaning of the bathroom.

  For the next part of the drama, however, there was absolute quiet. The scene was sombre but curiously edifying, a kind of Victorian death-bed moment. My father, now dry, would go to a corner of the kitchen, turn his back on us, drop his towel and bend down to step into his pyjamas. This was the moment worth waiting for, the fascination and appallingness of it undiminished by its weekly repetition. For there, hanging down between my father's legs, was a sort of pouch, loose and macerated like an oven-ready bird and, to make matters worse, there was another bit, peeping out from the base of the pouch, a pink dangly thing. When my father raised first one leg, then the other, to enter his pyjamas, the pink dangly thing moved as if it had a life independent of my father's bare body. No one ever said anything. The wrinkled arrangement between his legs was clearly some unspeakable deformity, which my father to his eternal shame had to endure. I felt sorry for him, and sometimes when he was angry with me I made allowances for him because of his misfortune.

  Mostly he was not angry with me, however, and much of the time we got on well. I helped him in the garden, and he praised me when I did things exactly right. Everyone else's father was a coalminer but mine was a market gardener. Before I was born, he had been a building contractor, but he never spoke of that time. My mother mentioned it sometimes, but only during the worst rows when she would use it as a taunt. He had had his own business with two lorries, but there had been a fire in the garage and no insurance. Some of the burnt out garage still stood like a rebuke in what had been the builders’ yard and inside its shell there were the charred remains of the lorries with the words EDWARD CRAWFORD BUILDER just legible on the sides.

  My father taught me many things: how to sow brassicas, how to remove side-shoots from tomato plants without damaging the main stem, how to prick out bedding plants using a wooden template and a dibble, how to write Mesembryanthemum so neatly that it fitted onto a wooden label measuring only two and a half inches. The common name for Mesembryanthemum is Livingstone Daisy, which has exactly the same number of letters and sounds much better, but because the two words had to be separated by a space it was impossible to fit them onto the label. I also learned from my father how to drown baby mice in a rain barrel, crush a clipshear between my thumbnails, and assist in the skinning of a rabbit.

  My father believed that skinning a rabbit was a dying art and he took trouble to pass on his skill to me in scrupulous detail. First he would place the rabbit upside down between his knees and make a cut with his army knife at the hind feet, moving from one thigh to the other in a perfect arc. My job was to hold the feet—“Steady as a rock now”—while my father pulled the skin off the legs, gently at first, then tugging firmly to separate it from the whole body, like removing a tight vest from a baby. If all went well the flesh would be perfectly pink and unblemished—there would be no knife mark or bloodstain. I loved the shared intimacy of skinning a rabbit. It made me feel we knew things that other people didn't.

  Before long, however, skinned rabbits became part of the impenetrable mystery that was the world. One Saturday morning when I was about ten years old, I was sent off shopping—doing the messages we called it. I normally took the bus up the hill to the shops and walked back. As I waited for the bus a man wandered up and stood a few yards away on the other side of the bus stop. My parents had warned me about talking to strangers but this man was smartly dressed in a suit and wore a soft hat, so I could tell that he didn't come from the housing scheme. From time to time he looked over in my direction and gave me a friendly smile. Then, just as I noticed the bus coming in the distance, he delved into a gap at the top of his trousers and produced a skinned rabbit. Amazing. He was grinning now, and so was I, then just before the bus pulled up he quickly pushed the rabbit back into his trousers again. But for some reason he didn't get on the bus and just waved it on.

  I could hardly wait to get home to tell my parents. I thought they would be delighted and interested, as I had been, but instead they went white with an inexplicable anger and started firing furious questions at me. Who was the man? What did he look like? Had I seen him before? Had he touched me? I could not remember seeing them so angry. When two policemen arrived and asked me even more questions, I started to cry. One of the policemen wanted to know if the man had made me hold the rabbit and if he had hurt me with it—such a stupid idea that I wept even more. How could you hurt anyone with a rabbit, especially a dead one which was skinned every bit as well as my father could have done? The man was a bad man, they said, he should be locked up. But what did they know? I wished I had kept quiet. From now on I would be careful not to tell my parents anything they didn't need to hear.

  It is often said that children are accepting of everything because they know no different, or they have nothing to compare it with. Where did this untruth originate? Just because you have no life beyond the one you know, it doesn't stop you thinking that there might be a different kind of life possible. Children hop and skip rather than walk, not just because they have an abundance of energy, but also because they have a sense of possibility, of marvel. This is in the nature of being a child. Of course, the child is generally seen as “belonging” to its parents, being the repository of parental beliefs and attitudes, an offshoot in the literal sense and others. This is undoubtedly true, but only up to a point. Only up to a point. The child is also its own person.

  At the same time, most children do their best to meet the puzzling requirements placed upon them by adults, and I was no exception. I spent a great deal of time listening at doors and looking through keyholes, trying to find out how not to disappoint, how to be loved. There was a lot to remember, what to say, what to do, what not to say, what not to do. Why? I sometimes asked, or more often, why not? The answer invariably invoked the rules.

  Learning the rules was a misery without parallel in adult life. There were no evident principles at work; something was just as likely to be against the rules as not. The rules governing the use of language were especially puzzling. Languag
e can often give the impression of order and harmony, but in our house it could be a chaotic and discordant thing. Looking back—though I think I also knew it at the time—my parents seemed inordinately confident in the way they spoke and the words they used. They both had fresh and crisp Scottish voices, my father's slightly gritty, like sand in ice cream. My memory tells me that for a while at least I shared their confidence. But I soon learned that it was risky to import words I had heard elsewhere, in the playground or in the houses of my friends, for example. Or even to repeat things I'd heard my teachers say. That could lead to accusations of sounding like Lady Muck or putting on my pan loaf. Far safer simply to follow my parents’ lead, repeating and imitating the structures and shapes of their sentences. If ever I strayed from the clear road-markings into the central reservation of bad words or, worse, dirty words, there was a terrible price to pay. It must always be bottom, never bum, I always had to say bust, never bosom, pants, never knickers. Dirty words, according to my mother, could inflame men, something that had to be avoided at all costs. Whenever my friends used the wrong words I would feel agitated on their behalf in spite of, perhaps even because of, their insouciance. I was afraid my father might knock them into the middle of next week.

  Gradually I became aware of the power of language, not just in the sense of having energy and vitality and strength, but also as a means of exerting control and authority. It was clear that there were right ways of speaking, and just as clear that there were wrong ways, which could explode in your face as randomly as any land mine.

  My mother had an impressive range of voices, a sliding scale of airs and graces and altered vowels. There was her telephone voice, her doctor's surgery voice and, poshest of all, a diningroom voice which accompanied the gammon and pineapple we served twice a year to the minister and his wife and the church elder who did not have a wife but who delivered tiny envelopes once a month to our house. The point of the envelopes, which had CHURCH OF SCOTLAND on them in bold letters and the name of our parish beneath THE REVEREND FREDERICK MUSK BD in slightly smaller print, was to allow church members to make a discreet donation and drop it into the collection plate at the Sunday service. Our envelope always contained a ten shilling note so that it would float lightly, but conspicuously, into the collection plate while other envelopes containing mere coins landed with a thud and a jangle.

  My father had left school aged fourteen to become a brickie, a builder's labourer. My mother stayed on at school for an extra year and evidently showed great academic promise until she was forced to leave to look after her mother who was dying of cancer, and to manage the household, which included her grandparents. My father lacked formal education, but my mother had begun it and aspired to more, and for the rest of her life she felt the bitterness of having been denied it. She appreciated school and had a taste for learning, sometimes speaking wistfully of French and Latin lessons, which she loved above all and wished she could have continued. At some point before I was born, she must have understood that she was never going to be the woman she might have been, the person she desperately wanted to be before circumstances had conspired against her. Only when I was much older did I understand that she had been crushed by this, weighed down by the thought of how different her life could have been. This surely was the real well-spring of her disappointment. At the time, however, and in the thick of it, I never wondered about its causes; I was conscious only of its effects.

  Besides, I actually felt quite at home with disappointment, my mother's in herself and the more general kind that pervaded our family life. At least you knew where you were with disappointment; whereas with its opposite number, cheerfulness, anything could happen. Evidence of good spirits in my mother called for the greatest circumspection. They could easily come about as a result of others’ misfortune, particularly if it involved our Catholic neighbours; or worse, it could mean she had uncovered some dreadful wrongdoing—my father's or mine—and was waiting for her moment to pounce. My mother's cheerfulness was never a laughing matter.

  In 1962 when I was eleven years old, three things happened more or less at the same time. First, a small plaque, measuring about three inches by two, suddenly appeared on the wall by our front door just above the doorbell. Second, a succession of complete strangers began to call at the door, and after being welcomed in polished tones, they were taken upstairs by my mother to her bedroom. And third, there was a spring in my mother's step. What could it all mean? Naturally, I asked what was going on, but that got me nowhere.

  The plaque at the front door had my mother's full name on it and written beneath in italics were the words SPIRELLA AGENT.

  “What's an agent?” I asked my father as we weeded the bed of dahlias together.

  “Don't go bothering me with your silly questions,” he said, “and watch what you're doing with that hoe.”

  I weighed up the risk of asking another.

  “What's a Spirella then?”

  My father jabbed his hoe bad-temperedly into the earth.

  “Now, that's enough! Don't get me started! There are some things that don't concern you, and that's one of them.”

  I had learned how to use a dictionary at school so I looked up Spirella. It wasn't there. But I found agent quite easily, and it turned out there were two meanings: (i) a person who acts for another in business, politics etc. and (ii) a spy. Since it was self-evident that my mother had nothing to do with business or politics, that left only one possibility. My mother was a spy. My mother was a spy.

  It was a crystalline moment. Everything fell into place—the name-plate at the front door, the strangers calling, always alone, and being led upstairs for confidential discussions. I was never allowed to meet them but I peered at them through a crack in the door at the end of our hallway and could follow them with one eye up the first three steps before the staircase curved round on itself. After that I could hear the footfalls overhead coming through the ceiling from my mother's bedroom. The strangers were always women—evidently female spies stuck together. And there was the smart brown leather suitcase with hard corners which my mother had suddenly acquired and which she took to the bedroom whenever another agent called. The case was very heavy—I could only just lift it— and I longed to know what it contained. Of course, I tried to find out, more than once, but it was always kept locked. On the back cover of the book my father had borrowed from the barber's, I read: The Spangled Mob hire undercover agent James Bond to smuggle diamonds into America … Could the case contain diamonds, I wondered? Diamonds would almost certainly account for the weight of the thing. Was my mother a criminal as well as a spy?

  It was always possible to tell the days when my mother expected a visitor. She made thorough preparations, and I would watch her carefully to try to discover her secret. First she would strip down to her underwear to wash at the kitchen sink—face, neck and under her arms. Then, with one deft movement, she would remove her pants and sit in a red plastic basin on the kitchen floor where she washed what she called her in-between bits, before drying herself and dressing in her smart red skirt and matching twin set. Next she would pluck the stray hairs from her eyebrows before carefully applying makeup—putting on her war paint, my father called it. When she was completely ready she would sit down, brushing away imaginary bits of fluff from her cardigan, watching the kitchen clock till the doorbell rang. There was a sort of excitement in her manner, a slight dampness on her upper lip, an air of preoccupation too. She hardly noticed me at all at these times.

  From time to time when my mother was hanging out washing I would creep into her bedroom to look for clues. But I had no idea what I was looking for. In any case, everything seemed just the same—the red candlewick bedspread, the two soft armchairs with embroidered antimacassars, the dressing table with a three-piece vanity set, something else that was strictly just for show. It became clear to me that one way or another I would have to find out what was in the suitcase. Nothing else would do.

  My opportunity came one day whe
n my mother was seeing off one of the visitors at the front door. She was a large woman, and I remembered she had been shown to the bedroom once before. She had the jowls of a basset hound and her elegant clothes struggled bravely to contain all the flesh. From the crack in the door at the end of the hallway I could tell that she and my mother were embarking on a lengthy chat. It was now or never. I opened the hall door a few inches, lay down flat on my front like a commando and pulled myself by my elbows along the hallway till I reached the safety of the stairs. The blood was thumping in my head. I scampered up on all fours to the first landing and my mother's bedroom. The door was ajar. The large woman's scent lingered in the air. I felt a thudding in my bust.

  There is a Spanish proverb to the effect that the shock that does not kill you makes you. I cannot claim that what I saw that day “made” me, but at the time the shock seemed to threaten my whole being and I felt lucky to survive it. Certainly nothing had prepared me for it. Most of us can identify those moments in life when you trip on the frayed edge of the carpet. It's been curled up for years waiting to catch you, and you've somehow always known that one day it would, but everything has held together wonderfully till that moment when you trip and, as you fall, you can see all the structures of your life coming apart, and you think, if I could just go back to that moment before I took the tumble. Only there's no going back.

  What I saw in my mother's bedroom was much worse than a cache of diamonds, more terrible even than guns. Spread out on the candlewick bedspread was a huge poster-size photograph of near-naked women. The women all had a look of astonishment, as if they had been captured without warning. They were evidently prisoners, confined in some strange constraining garments. The caption on the poster read: You'll like the way you feel—they'll like the way you look, and the writing under the photographs was in a strange language I didn't understand: heavy duty girdles, long line brassières, thigh controllers, spiral steel stays, reinforced gussets. Beside the poster there was a measuring tape, a pencil and a large printed pad with lots of columns and figures and diagrams. The suitcase lay open on the floor, disgorging its hideous contents— whalebones, metal suspenders, steel clamps, as well as several long narrow boxes containing the unthinkable garments from the photographs. Each had a label with one of the inflaming words I wasn t allowed to use: SPIRELLA WEAR MUST BE TRIED ON OVER THE CLIENT'S INTERLOCK KNICKERS.