III
The sleep I had following that fright, and in fact the sleep I had for the entire two week duration of our holiday was light and fitful. My dreams were haunted. I was haunted. Is it possible, I wondered, that I had imagined the man at my back? His face so heavily lined it was as though he had been carved into the bark of one of the tall oak trees that lay behind our house. I was always scared during nights were sleep was lightest and the winds were fiercest, that one of those very trees would be uprooted from where it grew, lurching drunkenly towards the house and smashing through the window above my bed. I would be awake, frozen in terror as the large boughs shattered the glass, raining mirrors upon me.The holiday cottage was sparsely furnished; bare wooden floors cold underfoot in the mornings; simple thin curtains the colour of soiled sheets hanging limply either side of the window in my room. The window that never seemed to be properly closed, that north wind finding a way in, whistling through the window frame like (an old man with one outstretched hand) whistling through the gaps in his teeth.
I intensely disliked that cottage, and wasn't comfortable there for the entirity of our stay.
It was the first real time we had spent together as just a family of three. Except we would never be a family of three. There was always that silent and empty space, wherever we went, wherever we stayed, whenever we spoke. It was with us in the car driving up the long single track road, weaving through the blasted hills like an artery, carrying us further and further north, where the landscape was ever more hostile. Where (dead) men waited in the sand dunes for young boys to hide from their parents. Where the sea dragged it's saline claws into the sand is it was expelled from the land, only to return.
Only to return. Like they all do.
The cottage never heated properly. The floor stayed cold. The nights drew in and three days later my father grunted whilst reading the paper he had collected from the small post office come newsagents further along the single track road that our cottage shared with the rest of the small isolated community. I don't know why my mother chose that place. Perhaps to bring us closer. Perhaps to force us apart. Perhaps just to push me further away.
Could they see some of him in me? The way my hair lay? The way I spoke or smiled?
I could see him in me every time I looked in the mirror. But I had by then stopped looking in the mirror.
The grunt sprayed a fine mist of toast crumbs and tea in my direction, stopping short and covering a small section of the faded and torn plastic table cloth that covered the wooden table we breakfasted at in silence every morning. The first morning, my mother tried to put the radio on, cursing under her breath (low enough, she thought, that I wouldn't hear – or maybe just loud enough so I could) as she fought with antenna to get a reception. I don't think she cared what, perhaps even she couldn't stand the silence. Perhaps sometimes even she wanted to drown it out.
“What is it John?” She asked him, as he rustled his paper. I tried to quickly sweep the toast crumbs from the table, offended by their prescence. I liked to have the area where I ate as clean as possible, and indeed grew up to be quite fastidious about it. Mother caught me and clipped the back of my head. I winced as her wedding ring glanced off my crown. “Do you want to sweep the floor that badly Malcolm?”. I shook my head quickly and brought the crumbs closer to my plate, hoping to avoid having to act out the threat, but she was back to looking questiongly at my father.
“Not in front of the boy” he answered her, rustling the paper again and turning the page, a sound that punctuated the end of the brief breakfast conversation.
A short time later my father announced that he was going to take a walk. Said he wanted to know what was further past the post office, that he had seen a small church spire above the ash and beech trees that surrounded us, the threat in my young mind very real that they would not let us leave when it was time to. He didn't ask me if I wanted to come with him and I didn't offer. I had finally become warm in my place on the small living room rug, surrounded by my felt pens like a makeshift barricade, the colouring book I was working on open in front of my crossed legs. I had managed to colour in four pages since our arrival at the cottage, and I was sure that I would be able to finish the next page that very day. I had already made a start on the sky, doing my very best to stay inside the lines. Mrs Prentice would be really proud of me if she had seen it, and I made a mental note to show her when I was back at school.
I don't think I ever did. Mind you, I don't even recall bringing the colouring book back home with me. Mother and father didn't like to bring too much “clutter” back home they said. I wonder if I was upset at leaving it. I wonder if I noticed. Some things are clearer than others.
My father left, nodding his head towards me, the ghost of a smile on his face. I think he might have asked me then. I'm sure, in fact, that he intended to but saw how content I was with my book. Nonetheless he murmured a goodbye and took his heavy barbour coat from the stand in the hall, throwing it over his shoulder and opening the door, the cottage sucking in the wind greedily til it was abruptly cut off by a curt slamming of the door. I shivered and continued my colouring, hearing my mother in the kitchen next door. She was preparing lunch and I could hear her humming to herself, a tune I recognised that she used to play on the piano, although I think by then she had stopped playing. She would start again later, but everything she played would sound sad, as though it was intentionally played in the wrong key.
My fathers newspaper was lying sprawled over the single hard-backed tartan chair in front of me, on the other side of the small wood-burning stove. The kitchen door was closed, my mothers humming punctuated by the crackle of the gas oven igniting. I stood and stealthily moved over to the chair, not daring to touch the newspaper at first. It was as though it held an authority all of it's own, like anything of my mother and fathers, I expected them to become aware if I was so much as harbouring thoughts about touching anything.
A month or so before, I had decided to try on my fathers wellington boots, loving how they felt on my feet as they warmly enveloped my legs up to and above my knees. I took a few unsteady steps in them, the scent of autumn walks and warm plastic on my tongue. But he knew, even though I'd put them back as close as I could tell to where I had found them, he knew. He reprimanded me, but seemed almost disinterested as he did so. I remember his face, his voice lacking it's former power. That was worse than if he had shouted at me. Not that I thought I deserved a row, but I realise now he felt he had to say something, to throw a stone in the river to form the beginnings of a bridge. But it was all wrong. It came out all wrong.
I thought about his wellingtons as I stood before the newspaper, my hand gingerly turning over page after page, trying to find all on it's own what my father didn't wish to discuss in front of me. Mild curiosity, nothing more, and my right hand was the bravest part of me then.
The photograph leapt towards me from the page. Low on detail (a combination of the poor picture and large newspaper screen) yet that made it worse. It burned itself into my eyes and I took a step back, the small headline making a lesser impression but by proximity to the photograph, it carbon copied itself into my brain. I backed off from the paper, even my right limb, formerly so brave in venturing forth, couldn't summon the strength needed to close the paper. That face.
His face.
My father came back then, by sheer fortune the wind bodily inviting itself in and doing what I could not and I watched in silence as it closed the newspaper for me, obscuring that face and returning it to the way it had been when my father left. His face was ruddy with the effort of walking in the high wind and he stood there panting as he took his barbour coat off and kicked his wellingtons under the coat stand, thick as they were with dark mud and something else, something I just caught sight of before he shut the door as he entered the living room.
I understood some of the headline, my reading at school was doing well and I was enjoying it, I would just need to ask mother or father what the word vagrant meant. The rest was clear enough, and after looking at my fathers wellingtons, I wondererd if he'd been along the road like he said, or if he'd crossed the peat towards the beach.
LOCAL MAN TURNED VAGRANT. BODY FOUND ON EAST BEACH.
That tide mark on his wellingtons. The thick black peat muck and above, the faint remainder of a notion.
A thin line of sand.
It's time I told you about this ghost.
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