Jonathan Buckley - Ghost MacIndoe

He realised that the steam organ had fallen silent. The horses had ceased prancing on the biggest of the merry-go-rounds, but a girl remained seated on one of them, pointing straight at him and laughing. Alexander waved to her, and leaned forward to wave to the people gathered around the booth below. His mother had one hand to her mouth and with the other was waving to him with her fingers, while his father was chatting to the woman with the hair-curlers as if he were simply talking to an acquaintance in a shop.

‘Sit back,’ his mother called, making the motion of pushing at a door. His father glanced up and appeared to nod commendingly to him before resuming his conversation with the woman, who turned away briefly to shout ‘Hurry it up, for God’s sake,’ to someone hidden from view by the floor of the car. ‘Sit back, Alexander,’ his mother called, and it was then he noticed that a man with a panama hat was standing to her side, watching her as she gestured. Alexander watched the man follow her line of sight upward. ‘Alexander, please sit back,’ his mother cried. The man’s eyes were trained on Alexander’s face for a few seconds, then traced the track of his mother’s gaze back down to her face. ‘Alexander! Now!’ his mother demanded, unaware that she was being watched. Alexander lay down on the bench. He regarded the stars for a while, and fell asleep in the mild summer night’s air.

He awoke with a spasm of the machinery and found that he was slowly returning to the ground. The woman with the hair-curlers took him by the hand and passed him to his mother as though he had gone missing and she had discovered him. ‘You’ll be the death of me, young man,’ said his mother, sandwiching his head between her hands. ‘I told you it was dangerous, and then you make it worse. Messing around like that.’

‘I wasn’t messing around,’ he replied.

‘Give me patience,’ said his mother to nobody. She held him tightly against her side and sniffed. Under her arm he saw the man in the panama giving a small white card to his father.

‘We’ll consider it,’ his father was saying. The man raised his hat as they shook hands.

‘Hello, Alexander,’ said the man, bracing his hands on his knees to greet him. His eyebrows bounced up and down as he smiled. ‘You handled that situation with aplomb, I must say,’ he remarked, narrowing his eyes admiringly. With a thumb he scratched the bristles in the hollow beneath his lower lip. ‘Not to be flattered, eh? I like that in a chap,’ said the man. Obtaining no response, he straightened his back and turned down the brim of his hat. ‘Extraordinary,’ he muttered. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr MacIndoe, Mrs MacIndoe,’ said the man, making a bow to each of them. ‘An extraordinary child,’ he remarked. He wriggled his neck to settle the fit of his collar and strode away across the fairground as if he were going to greet someone, but he walked past the tombola stall and kept going, through the wall of caravans, across the road and onto the Heath.

‘Who was that?’ Alexander asked.

‘Nobody in particular,’ replied his father, interrupting his mother before she could utter anything more than the first syllable of his name. ‘Someone who fancied a yatter, that’s all.’

The following Friday evening, at bedtime, Alexander’s mother told him that the next day they were going up to town, just the two of them. ‘A sort of adventure,’ she said. Tantalisingly she flourished the small white card, which had something written on the side that was not printed. ‘We’ll have a bit of a laugh.’ In the morning she made him wash his hair, and she washed her own as soon as he was out of the bathroom. When she came downstairs her lips were made up the way Mrs Darling did hers. They were going to see the man in the panama hat, Alexander knew, and this made him feel uneasy and vaguely ashamed of his mother. On the platform of the Underground station he noticed her surreptitiously checking the handwritten words on the card. ‘Where are we going?’ he shouted over the roar of the arriving train.

‘You’ll see,’ she replied, wincing at the noise and the gritty air. ‘It’ll be fun,’ she assured him, but she fussed at his hair as if she were taking him to an examination.

They came back above ground in a place that was not like the streets around his house. There were more cars here, and fewer shops. The paving stones were perfectly level, and the houses were taller and had rows of bell-pushes beside the entrance. Some of the houses were made of bricks that were dark red and smooth.

‘Which way’s the river from here?’ Alexander asked, and he would remember the way his mother put her hand on the pillar of the Belisha beacon as she looked one way up the street and then the other way, like an explorer taking her bearings in a jungle clearing.

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ she said. ‘Which way is it to Timbuktu?’ she asked him.

It was as though she had known what he had been thinking as she stood beside the beacon, and instantly Alexander was cheerful for the first time that morning. ‘I’d really like it if you’d tell me where we’re going,’ he said, sensing that this time she would tell him.

‘We’re going to have our picture taken,’ she replied, and the next moment she stopped walking. They were at an open door, beside a clothes shop. She consulted the card again. ‘We’re here,’ she announced, reaching for a hand.

At the end of a corridor that smelled of paste there was a flight of stairs, and at the top of the stairs there was a door of ribbed glass through which Alexander could see something pink and conical. ‘Please enter’ he read from a card that was attached to a sucker on the wall. His mother let him turn the handle, and as the door opened he saw a fat little girl in a pink frilly dress, holding the hand of a woman with a fierce fat face. A very short man with wide braces over his dirty white shirt was writing something in one of the squares of a calendar that hung above a filing cabinet. That he was not the man in the panama hat both relieved and confused Alexander.

‘Goodbye, Elizabeth. Mrs Gordon,’ said the short man.

‘Thank you, Mr Stevens,’ replied the woman rapidly, and she pushed past Alexander without acknowledging him or his mother.

‘Mrs MacIndoe and Alexander,’ said the man, looking at them appreciatively, with his hands on his hips. ‘Ha ha,’ he exclaimed. ‘Sounds like a music-hall act, doesn’t it?’ His eyes were perfectly circular and his brow wrinkled, which made him look as if he’d just heard something that had surprised him pleasantly. Flakes of white skin, like the fraying skin of a mushroom, stuck to the sides of his nose. ‘Harold Stevens,’ he said, and smiled widely. Not one of his teeth was at the same angle as any other. ‘Alexander?’ he enquired, with the look of a delivery man estimating a parcel’s weight. ‘Who else could it be?’ Mr Stevens answered himself. ‘This won’t take much of your time, Mrs MacIndoe. All has been arranged, has it not? The quid pro quo, as it were?’

‘It has,’ said Alexander’s mother.

‘Excellent,’ said Mr Stevens. ‘Follow me, if you’d be so good.’

Sunlight sparkled on the floor of the inner room, most intensely in front of the platform that was built against the wall on their right. On the platform, in front of a placard of plain black paper, there was a brand new stove with a smooth yellow door that looked like a huge half-melted slab of butter and had the word ‘Bovis’ in sloping silver letters above the handle. At the far end of the room stood a big black camera on a tripod, its concertina lens pointing towards a young man who was hurling plump blue cushions onto a settee. ‘Colin, my assistant,’ said Mr Stevens, gesturing at the young man. Like a cymbals player Colin banged two cushions together, raising a smoulder of dust from each. Mr Stevens aimed his hand at a door beyond the platform. ‘Colin will get you ready, Alexander. Colin, if you’d be so good? I am grateful. Mrs MacIndoe, if you’d follow Colin too?’