Читать книгу: «Ghost MacIndoe»

1. Our Lady of Fatima

The postman was sitting on the doorstep of a shop halfway down the hill, with his empty bag like a cat on his lap, but he stood up when Alexander MacIndoe and his mother stopped, as if he had been waiting for them. There was dust all over his moustache, Alexander noticed, and on his eyelashes. The postman tipped his helmet to Alexander’s mother. ‘Morning, Mrs Mac,’ he smiled, showing teeth that were the colour of pencil wood. ‘Very elegant today, I must say.’

‘Too kind, Mr Durrant,’ she replied, with a serious face. She adjusted Alexander’s cap and tucked the trailing end of his scarf into the breast of his coat.

Mr Durrant knocked the cap skew-whiff again, then straightened it. ‘Hello, Master Mac, how are we this morning?’ he asked.

Alexander said nothing. He looked from the postman’s grey jacket to the clouds behind him, which were a different grey, and then to the balloons that wagged above him, which were another different grey and were bent like sad old dogs on their long, long leads. And when, in his fifty-eighth year, Alexander MacIndoe came to assemble the chronology of his life, this would be the oldest memory of which he could be certain. He would see a postman in a grey jacket, with grey barrage balloons above him, on a cold yellow morning in February, in 1944.

‘A bad night, Mrs Mac,’ said Mr Durrant.

‘It was that,’ she agreed, shifting the canvas bag that she had put in the seat of Alexander’s pushchair.

‘A grim one,’ mused Mr Durrant. ‘Your place come through all right?’

‘Thank you, yes. All’s well.’

‘Count our blessings, eh?’

‘Indeed we must.’

Alexander turned for a moment to watch a dray-horse haul a van out of Wemyss Road, and Mr Durrant moved a step closer to his mother. ‘Copped it down there they did,’ the postman told her, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder. He smiled sympathetically at Alexander, who saw that his eyes had tears in them. ‘Would the wee man like something?’ asked Mr Durrant. And here Alexander MacIndoe’s earliest true memory would recommence, with a postcard sliding upwards from a flap and a picture of the Virgin Mary, her white-shrouded head at the centre of the swirling rays of an orange sun, against a sky that was bluer than any he had ever seen. Mr Durrant turned the card and traced the words he then displayed with a finger that was creased like a worn sock. ‘The Thompson Family, 13 Shooters Hill Road, London, England.’ He worked the card between Alexander’s fingers and left it in the boy’s grip.

‘He can’t take that,’ said his mother.

‘Well, I can’t deliver it, Mrs MacIndoe,’ Mr Durrant replied. ‘Nobody of that name at that address for as long as I’ve been around.’ Gently he extracted the postcard from the boy’s grip and turned its reverse to her. ‘No message anyhow, see? People, eh? Forget their own names, some of them would.’ He posted the card back into Alexander’s hands and patted him on the head.

‘Say thank you, Alexander,’ Irene MacIndoe instructed her son. Without a sound he mouthed the words.

‘We’ll meet again, young fellow-me-lad,’ said Mr Durrant, pinching a cheek. ‘Take care, Mrs Mac. Take care, tiny man.’

Alexander’s mother took him along a street that was not the way to Mrs Kiernan’s. Her curls bobbed quickly as she hurried, steering the pushchair with her fingertips; Alexander, holding the cold steel handle, had to skip along to keep up. She began to sing to him the song she sang every morning on the way to Mrs Kiernan’s house. ‘She’s the girl that makes the thing that drills the hole that holds the spring, that drives the rod that turns the knob, that works the thingumebob,’ she sang, stroking his nose with a fingertip at the end of the verse. The pavement became gritty, and soon there was water running down the road, water that was plaited like his father’s belt. He saw Mrs Murrell, Mrs Beckwith, Mrs Darling and Mrs Evans, standing side by side in the middle of the street, looking away from them. The women glanced back and parted to allow Alexander and his mother into the line. There were branches all over the ground and an ambulance parked by a stump of a tree, and behind it was a hill of bricks and broken boards, over which some men were walking. To the side of the hill was a wall with a chimney on it, and pink-striped wallpaper on the upper part, above patches of blue stripes. On one blue-striped patch hung a mirror on a thin chain.

‘Terrible business, Irene,’ said Mrs Evans, the first of the women to speak.

‘It is, it is,’ said Alexander’s mother. ‘There but for the grace,’ she added, a phrase her son would often, in the following weeks, repeat silently to himself, reassured of his mother’s wisdom by his inability to understand what she had meant.

‘The Fitchies,’ said Mrs Darling. She sniffed loudly, jerking her head back as though she had been struck on the forehead. The doors of the ambulance opened and two men stepped out of it, carrying two long poles between them, with a sling of canvas between the poles.

Irene MacIndoe took hold of Alexander’s hand. Where the two men walked he could make out a bread tin among the bricks, and a whole glass bottle between the legs of a chair with a snapped back. A mauve eiderdown, speared on a broken windowframe, was the only thing on the hill that was not the colour of cement. At the back of a gully in the rubble, an empty doorway stood upright still, and Mr Nesbit, from the ironmonger’s shop, stood in its frame, looking at something he had placed in the bowl of a white tin helmet. Alexander watched Mrs Murrell fold a handkerchief then drop it into her handbag, which fastened with a click of the two brass berries on the clasp.

The women talked in whispers to his mother. ‘They found Moira. Donald’s in there as well, almost definitely,’ he heard Mrs Murrell say, a moment before Mr Nesbit lost his footing and tumbled out of sight.

‘Mind how you go, Douggie,’ said Mrs Darling, not loudly.

All the women, even Alexander’s mother, made a brief laughing sound, but none of them smiled.

‘All right your way, Irene?’ asked Mrs Beckwith.

His mother nodded, watching Mr Nesbit as he clambered back up towards the doorway.

‘Ruby’s son-in-law, too. Out on patrol in East India Docks,’ said Mrs Murrell. ‘Couldn’t have seen the parachute. God knows how he missed it. Lovely lad,’ she said, and shook her head. ‘Shame it is. Bloody shame.’

‘Rita,’ said Mrs Evans.

‘Siemens caught it and all, I heard,’ said Mrs Darling.

‘Not what I heard,’ Mrs Murrell told her. ‘And a bloody shame is what it is. A bloody damned shame.’

‘Rita,’ insisted Mrs Evans. ‘The boy.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Mrs Beckwith winced. ‘Irene,’ she said, and then his mother’s hands closed over his face. He could not breathe properly, so he pulled at her hands. She turned his face into her coat, but Alexander strained his eyes to peer through a gap in her fingers, and what he saw was the two men coming down off the ruins of the house, and a pair of feet sticking up from the sling, one with a brown sock on it and the other bare and yellowish, like a pig’s trotter in the butcher’s. One of the men opened the ambulance door and climbed in. The feet waggled like ducks on a pond.

‘We’re not doing any good here, girls,’ said Mrs Darling, which made Mrs Murrell, Mrs Beckwith and Mrs Evans turn and form a circle around Alexander and the pushchair. Alexander put out a hand to bat a coat aside; the ambulance doors were closed.

Mrs Evans stooped down to Alexander and touched the postcard. ‘What have you got there, Allie?’ she asked him, squeezing his chin lightly.

He bowed his head and with the nose of a shoe scuffed a circle in the rough powder that lay over the pavement.

‘Be polite, Alexander,’ said his mother.

Mrs Murrell crouched beside Mrs Evans. There were grains like sugar, but finer, amid the fine pale hairs of her cheeks, and in her hat was a pin in the shape of a swan, with wings of red stones.

Alexander raised the postcard to hide himself behind it.

‘Same colour as I’m wearing,’ said Mrs Murrell, holding her overcoat open to reveal a pleat of her radiant blue dress.

Mrs Darling hitched up her coat and came down so her face was level with Alexander’s. Her lips glistened with wet red lipstick; her breath had a smell he would later know was the smell of cherries. ‘That’s nice. Where did you get that?’ she asked him. Alexander MacIndoe shrugged and looked to his mother. ‘Who is it?’ coaxed Mrs Darling.

‘The bomb lady,’ said Alexander.

Mrs Murrell laughed and touched his cheek as if to wipe a bit of dirt away. All together the three women stood up straight. Mrs Evans tapped the arm of his mother and spoke to her in a voice that sounded like gas flowing into a mantle. He felt something settle on his head; it was Mrs Beckwith’s hand. She teased his hair as his mother sometimes did at night when he could not sleep.

Mr Nesbit, raising a plank upright, called out and waved his hands. The other men all went towards him, kicking half-bricks down the hill.

‘Must get his highness delivered,’ his mother said, swivelling the pushchair around.

‘We’ll all be late at this rate,’ answered Mrs Murrell. ‘See you in the slave quarters, Irene.’

Mrs Evans squeezed his hand before he could reach the handle of the pushchair. ‘You’re a funny little mite,’ she said to him with a smile up at his mother, and she pressed his fingers softly in her soft, cool palm.

Alexander would remember clutching his postcard on a corner where the smell of burned paint was strong, and the clanging of a fire engine as his mother said goodbye, then being put on the draining board of the kitchen sink for his evening wash. He was there when his father returned.

His mother slapped the wrung flannel onto the sink between the taps before kissing his father, who flipped back the shiny steel bar of his briefcase and took out a thing that was like a dirty handkerchief stiffened with frost. He placed it on the table and gave it a nudge; it rattled on the wood. ‘Look at that,’ he said to them. ‘You know what they are?’ Alexander shook his head. ‘Letters, that’s what. Written on stuff called vellum, which is an old kind of paper. A fire shrivelled them up. Nobody will be reading those again, will they?’ he said to Alexander. His coat had brought the atmosphere of the street indoors; the perfume of smoke rose from his collar in a draught of coolness.

Touching the baked object, his mother shivered. ‘Like having someone’s shinbone on the table.’

‘Something odd to amuse our child,’ his father said. ‘It’s going back tomorrow anyway. If you knew the risks I’ve taken to bring it here.’ He turned up the collar of his coat and squinted shiftily at his son. ‘Mr MacIndoe, Undercover Operations Man,’ he croaked.

‘Mr MacIndoe, daft man,’ Alexander’s mother sighed. She raised the jug above the boy’s head to trickle the lukewarm water over him.

Alexander watched his father squirm free of his coat, then settle in his chair and close his eyes. A moment later his father yawned, took off his spectacles, placed them on the round table, and lifted the newspaper so close to his face that Alexander could see nothing of him except his hands and legs. Over the top of the paper was the top of the door, which had been on the tilt, his mother said, since the day after he was born, when the Thousand Pounder fell in the next street. The crockery had flown across the room and scratched a shape like the letter A in the table, which is why he had been called Alexander.

Briskly his mother rubbed his chest with the thick green towel, humming as she buffed his skin. His cheek rested on the flesh of her upper arm, which was smooth as soap and smelled of lavender. Wrapped in the towel, he was carried to the fireplace and into his mother’s lap, on the chair beside the round table. She scoured his hair and combed it and parted it, then placed him on her knee and held him towards her husband.

‘We are beautiful, aren’t we?’ she asked and then pressed her open lips to Alexander’s ear.

The newspaper came down a few inches. Slowly his father put on his spectacles again, and peeped over the edge of the drooping page. ‘We are,’ he said.

‘We both?’ replied his mother.

His father flapped the newspaper open wide. ‘Fish, fish, fish,’ he said, and turned a page.

‘Daddy will take you to bed,’ his mother told him, slicking his hair with her hand.

‘In a minute,’ said his father from behind the page. ‘The home front can wait a minute longer.’

Pursing her lips, Alexander’s mother looked towards the window. Underneath the reflection of the ceiling moved a cloud that was the colour of tea. ‘Where’s Mr Fitchie?’ Alexander asked.

She turned him to face her and regarded him as if she were not certain that it had been Alexander who had spoken. ‘Where’s who?’ she said.

‘Mr Fitchie. Where’s he gone?’

She tucked the towel more tightly around his shoulders. ‘He’s not here any more,’ she said.

‘I saw him.’

‘Saw who?’ his mother asked. He would remember the shape of her eyes as she asked him this, narrowed as if straining to see in the dark.

‘Mr Fitchie.’

‘When did you see him?’

‘Today. I saw him. Where’s he gone?’

‘Away, Alexander.’

‘Where to?’

His mother smoothed his hair again. ‘Graham,’ she pleaded.

‘I like Mr Fitchie,’ he told his mother.

‘So did I,’ said his mother.

‘He’s nice.’

‘Graham,’ she repeated.

‘Where’s he gone?’ asked Alexander.

‘He’s with Jesus, Alexander. Mr Fitchie’s gone to live with Jesus.’

‘Might have,’ his father joined in. ‘But then again –’

‘Graham. Please.’

Alexander closed his eyes once more, and in his head he saw the ambulance door and waggling feet. His father picked him up and carried him to his bed in the shelter.

From this night and from other nights Alexander would remember the top of the cellar steps, where the mud-coloured boards of the hallway ended at two shallow troughs of pale, splintery wood. The material of his father’s jacket scratched at his face when his father hunched over to duck through the gate of the cage in the cellar. He would recall his mattress in the corner of the cage, and the toy truck that was wedged into the folds of the blankets. He recalled gripping the wires in a span of his hand as his father climbed back up the steps, and testing his tongue against the metal, getting a taste that was tart.

Unequivocally from this February night he remembered waking in the darkness to hear first the grinding in the sky, and then his mother’s breathing. Her hand touched his forehead and its dampness made him shudder. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘They’ll soon be gone. We’ll be all right.’ He pressed his face against his mother’s arms, waiting for the ack-acks on the Heath and the woof of the big guns. Upstairs someone knocked on the door and he heard the clang of his father’s helmet against the wall as he left.

‘You were born on a night like this,’ his mother told him. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen to you, or to any of us.’ She sang to him quietly. ‘The cats and dogs will dance in the heather,’ she sang, and soon he could not hear the planes, but only his mother’s voice and her heartbeat, and Alexander slid into sleep, imagining tiny aeroplanes flying out from under a big blue gown like the flies around the bins at the end of the road, and the men on Shooters Hill firing their guns while the big balloons grazed in the clouds above them, and a factory full of seamen, and Mr Fitchie. Mr Fitchie was in a black suit that shone like a crow’s feathers and he was staring across a road at Alexander as if Alexander was floating past in a boat. Mr Fitchie was not happy but he was not sad either. He looked across the road with his head at an angle, and his hands in his pockets. His eyes blinked quickly three or four times, in the shadow of the brim of his hat, the way the geese blink at you through the railings around the lake in the park.