Jonathan Buckley - Ghost MacIndoe

‘Suppose,’ responded Alexander. He stepped out under the awning and saw his mother go straight across the road at which she would have turned right had she been going home. From a distance he pursued her, dashing from doorway to doorway, watching for a few seconds before following, excited by the adventure but agitated by a sense of his own deceitfulness. When he saw a man stop to look at her as, waiting on a kerb, she glanced at a window and altered the angle of her hat, Alexander’s anxiety became so strong that he almost turned back. He saw his mother pull at her cuff to check her watch, then quicken her stride; he followed again, his heartbeat seeming to increase with the speed of her footsteps. She crossed another road and then, beyond her, a bus drew out from its stop, uncovering The Winslow Boy in white boxy letters, and his limbs became hollow with the relief of knowing where his mother was going.

From behind a lamppost he watched her slide a coin under the grille of the booth and receive her ticket. She smiled at the woman in the booth, and she was smiling as she pushed at the curving brass door-handle and crossed the deep red carpet of the foyer. A commissionaire with golden bands around his cuffs held open the inner door, and eased it shut once she had passed through, as if it were the heavy steel door of a strongroom.

Alexander sat on the pavement, his back against the lamppost, and waited for a while. When three men arrived and bought tickets he stood up to watch the commissionaire open his door, thinking that perhaps she would come out as they went in. He walked around the block, stopped to watch the commissionaire’s fingers drumming on the ashtray on the wall, and walked around the block again. He crossed the street. In a padlocked glass cabinet to the side of the outer doors there were advertisements for the new films: a photograph of Orson Welles in a shadowy doorway, and a picture of Alec Guinness in a dress and one of John Wayne on a horse. It was when he noticed that the woman in the ticket booth was watching him out of the corner of her eye that Alexander was spurred into making up his mind.

Two buildings along from the cinema there was a blind alley which Eric Mullins had once taken him down. The alley made a right-angled turn twenty yards from the street, and on this angle there was a flat, handleless door which led, Eric said, to the cinema. ‘It’s not locked,’ he said. ‘They can’t lock it, because then it wouldn’t be an escape, would it? You can get it open with a knife.’ Alexander inserted a penny into the crack of the door and levered it out a quarter-inch. He grappled his fingers onto the strip of door and worked it open far enough to slip through.

On the other side was a corridor of bare brick with a floor of rough, ridged concrete; a single bare lightbulb burned in a socket above a door at the far end, through which came the sound of indistinct voices talking loudly. Another door, halfway down the corridor, opened with a judder and a woman came out, fiddling with a button on her blouse. She smiled and looked at him as if she were trying to work out who he was. ‘Hello, mischief,’ she said. The light from the bulb made her hair gauzy. She opened the door and pushed aside a velvet curtain. ‘You coming or aren’t you?’ she whispered.

He went inside. The cinema was so large and dark it seemed to have no boundary. Like a drift of scum on a river, a stream of smoke flowed upwards through the beam of light, which swelled and shrank and twitched incessantly. Dozens of faces tilted upwards underneath the beam, all of them with the same expression of expectation, or so it appeared initially. Alexander wrapped himself in the folds of the curtain, which smelt like curtains in Mr Mullins’s pub. Unable to understand what the people on the screen were doing, he looked again at the people who were watching them. A few sat open-mouthed, as if waiting to be fed. Some were chewing, while some sucked on cigarettes, making scarlet bugs appear in the darkness. One woman seemed to be joining in with the words that the actors were speaking. Under the lip of the balcony, a man kissed the woman in the seat beside him; in front of them a man had his eyes closed, next to a woman who was frowning as if she disagreed with everything she was hearing.

Alexander’s gaze travelled to the end of the row in which the frowning woman sat, and travelled gradually back, to halt at a face he had already passed over once, and realised now was his mother’s. It went dark for a moment and then the light flashed on her skin, but she remained motionless, like a woman balancing a book on her head. Voices were raised in the film. The frowning woman shook her head and the sleeping man woke up, and then his mother’s eyes widened in amazement, though nothing had happened, that Alexander could see, to make her react in this way, and her lips formed an expression as if someone he could not see was in the seat beside her and telling her something she could scarcely believe. She smiled to herself, curling a strand of hair around her finger.

Alexander smiled too, yet her lonely pleasure made him sorrowful. He was ashamed, and he told himself that he should not have left Mr Prentice’s shop. He picked a cancelled ticket from the carpet and turned it repeatedly in his fingers to keep his eyes from his mother.

‘This is where we came in,’ said a man somewhere in the shadows under the balcony. Three men and a woman came down the slope, making the floor boom under their tread. Alexander rolled under the curtain and reached the end of the corridor before the door behind him opened. He returned to his post at the end of the side street, and waited. Half an hour passed, and still his mother did not come out. He counted the buses that drove by. Ten buses passed, and in that time he saw many people leave, but not his mother. The sun was resting on the roofs when he decided to go home.

Alexander would remember the pursuit of his mother, and the apparition of her face amid the other shadowed faces. And from the evening of that day he would remember his father putting his elbows on the dinner table and drawing on his pipe so strongly the liquid rattled in its stem, and saying to him: ‘Anything wrong?’

Alexander stirred his spoon around the empty soup bowl as his mother gathered the rest of the cutlery and crockery. ‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘There is, I think,’ his mother teased.

‘Come on, what’s up?’ asked his father, taking off his glasses.

‘No, nothing,’ he repeated. ‘There’s nothing wrong with me,’ he grinned, holding his spoon upright like a sceptre. ‘Dr Levine said so.’

‘Comedian,’ said his mother. She stacked the plates and went off to the kitchen.

‘Come on,’ his father said. ‘Let’s go and help your mother in the galley.’

Alexander followed his father down the hall, twisting the ticket in his pocket as he walked.

In the kitchen his mother was reading a newspaper she had spread out on the draining board. Her head was posed like one of the women in the glass cabinet at the cinema, but she was even prettier. Alexander stood in the doorway and looked at her in the way the man in the street had looked at her, with his head angled slightly to one side and both hands in his pockets.

‘Can I have a picture of you?’ he asked her.

His mother looked sideways at him. ‘What do you need a picture for?’ she asked.

‘For my room.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she told him. ‘You’ve got the real thing. You don’t need a picture.’

‘Please.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re being silly.’

‘Please.’

‘Alexander, stop it,’ she said, and he ran out of the kitchen because he felt he might cry.

The afternoon was so hot that Alexander’s father took a chair from the kitchen and carried it out into the garden, where Alexander, propped on his elbows in the middle of the lawn, was turning the pages of the old atlas.