Jonathan Buckley - Ghost MacIndoe

‘What can you see?’ his father asked. The fire glinted on his spectacles as he bent his head back to speak to him.

‘Nothing,’ Alexander reported.

‘You must see something, Alexander,’ said his mother.

‘I can see the top of the fire,’ he replied. ‘And lots of people,’ he added, scanning the Heath. Every road was full of marching people.

‘All of England must be here,’ said his mother.

‘Not quite,’ said Mrs Beckwith.

Alexander saw his mother touch Mrs Beckwith’s shoulder. He was impatient to discover what it was they had come to see.

They came across three soldiers in berets, sitting on a settee beside a track, and drinking from a bottle which one of them jiggled at Mrs Beckwith as they passed. Alexander saw a woman he thought at first was the woman who worked in Mr Prentice’s shop; a man’s bandaged hand was resting on her waist, and she had a little trumpet in her mouth. They were near enough to the fire for him to glimpse two shrieking faces on the other side of the flames when a split appeared in the crowd and what looked for a second like a galloping bull rushed through the gap. It was two men carrying a park bench between them; on the bench was stretched a man made out of an old jumper and trousers, with newspaper hands and feet and a football for a head. The two men seized the dummy, held it up for everyone to see, then hurled it onto the fire. The people around all cheered, and they cheered again when the two men rocked the bench backwards and forwards and let it go into the flames.

They stayed by the fire for half an hour or so, then his father led them off the Heath, past the Nissen huts. It was late, but they did not go straight home. They walked down the hill with Mrs Beckwith, who held Alexander’s hand but seemed dejected. His father and mother went in front, her head resting on his shoulder as they walked. At the railway bridge they stopped. A train was at the station below the road; above the grumbling of its engine he heard Mrs Beckwith say: ‘It’ll be a time yet, Irene.’ His mother put a hand on Mrs Beckwith’s shoulder again and nodded at his father, who lifted him to look over the parapet as the train pulled out.

Inside the carriages every seat was filled. Men were standing between the seats, clinging to the racks, while women were sitting on the laps of other women, and the pale blue light in the carriages made all the faces inside look as pale as peeled potatoes. A window clacked open and a man yelled up something that Alexander could not hear. Mrs Beckwith waved at the train without looking at it.

‘They’re going up to town,’ his father told him.

‘Tough work,’ said Mrs Beckwith, ‘but someone’s got to do it.’

‘Not for the likes of us, young man,’ said his father sternly, but smiling.

‘It’s bed for us,’ his mother confirmed, and Alexander watched the red light at the back of the train disappear into the darkness of the cutting on its way into town, a place he saw as an arrangement of perfectly regular streets and buildings with thousands of windows, all undamaged because town was somewhere that was always there, outside the war. It seemed to him that the passengers he had seen on the train were on a night-time mission of some sort, a mission that was to do with making things change.

His mother was always at home now, and throughout that summer he went to the shops with her most mornings, and queued beside her patiently, while the other children larked on the pavement outside. In the afternoon he would play with Jimmy Murrell or with other boys whose names he was to lose from his memory in his twenties and thirties, or he would walk through Greenwich Park with his mother, sometimes continuing right down to the river, where they might go into the tunnel beneath the water, to see the long walls that were curved and covered in tiles like frozen milk. Often, when they walked through the park, she would take him to the statue of Wolfe and sit on the slope below the bronze general, making an armchair for him from her arms and legs, and he would lie back against her chest while she sang an American song for him under her breath. Once she pointed across the river and said something about St Paul’s, something that made him think the church had somehow fought off the bombers, a scene he pictured as the dome swivelling and sending out some sort of beam to bring the enemy down.

It was an image he would always retain, though within a few years it had slipped from its mooring in the weeks between the victory days. What Alexander would recall unerringly from that interval, throughout his life, was the sight of his mother dabbing her eyes as she made his bed one morning, and on a different day dusting the sideboard as if in a daze, her eyes fixed on the wallpaper in front of her, and another day standing in the hallway with the mop planted upright in its bucket, gazing through the open door and down the front path as if she were waiting for someone, though it was several hours before his father would finish work. Many times he would stand silently beside her when she was doing her housework, as he did when they queued in the shops. And once, he remembered more completely than anything from that period, she put the mop aside and framed his face in her hands to stare into his eyes. ‘My God, you do look like an angel,’ she said, but she said it as if it were some illness that he had. She gathered both his hands in one of hers and kissed them. ‘My black-eyed angel,’ she murmured, and looked over his shoulder through the narrow window beside the door, at the pavement along which nobody was passing.

This was a short time before a Saturday on which he went with his father to the church hall to collect a pair of trestles which they put in the garden of Mrs Darling’s house, alongside a stack of planks. Later that day he made flags with his mother, holding the scissors for her as she pulled the old sheets through the open blades, so they ripped with a thrilling squeal. They cut out triangles of material and stewed them in pots of red and blue water, then pegged them out to dry on the line, and when that was done they made letters of black card which they pasted on a placard out the front, spelling the words ‘Welcome Home George’. When Mr Evans came over with Mrs Evans to see the placard, Alexander looked down from his bedroom and saw Mrs Evans begin crying as soon as she had read the word ‘Welcome’ aloud; Mr Evans steered her back through the gate, his enormous hand spread right across her back, and his shoes made sparks on the paving stones.

At the start of the party Jimmy Murrell handed out conical paper hats and Alexander was tucked into a place at the end of the table by Mrs Beckwith, facing the stage that the men from the pub had built. The air smelled special, of marzipan and hair oil and washing powder, and the sunlight made the raspberry jelly glow so beautifully that he felt sad when one of the adults spooned a divot from it and tipped it on his plate. The owner of the pub played the piano on the stage while everyone ate, and then Mr Evans made a speech and all the adults banged their cups up and down. ‘Irene, if you will,’ said Mr Evans, holding out a hand in mid-air. Alexander watched his mother climb the steps at the side of the stage. She went over to the piano and stood beside it, with one hand resting on the top of it. He waited for her to call him. The pianist played a few notes and stopped. Alexander leaned forward to find his father, but could not see where he was. His mother was looking at her shoes. Mrs Beckwith stood up and moved a couple of steps away from him, towards the stage. The pianist played the same tune again, and this time Alexander’s mother began to sing. It was the song about the bluebirds that she sang, and she sang it in a voice that was not like the voice with which she used to sing at home. Her eyes were closed as if she were singing for herself alone, but her voice was stronger than he had ever heard it, so strong that all the people around began to sing with her one by one, and when the chorus came he could barely hear her above their shouting. The pianist took one hand off the keyboard and made a scooping motion; all the adults who had been sitting rose in front of Alexander, excluding his mother from view. Hands went threading under elbows; backs swayed against backs.