Schleich, the German company that mostly manufactures plastic animals—horses, goats, pigs, ostriches—also makes a ghost. It stands about three inches tall, is white-painted, besheeted, drags behind it a black-painted ball and chain. The two implied hands are raised to head level, and its mouth is open in the silent whooo of a wail.
My son, Jim, saw it in the local toy shop, wanted it and got it—I was, I'll admit, the parent who gave in.
Jim held the ghost all the way home, with me pushing him in the McLaren buggy. We went through the park. It was autumn, and the trees had circular skirts of fallen leaves.
"Whooo!" Jim called, though I couldn't remember if I'd ever taught him that's what ghosts say.
He was two-and-a-half years old. "What does a horse say?" was a question he was quite used to being asked. And pig, and goat. Not so much ostrich.
To be honest, with Jim I had avoided the subjects of death, dying, the afterlife and the lack of an afterlife. My partner Glenys and I had had quite enough of all four.
The year before Jim was born, my father came to live—and die—with us. He had pancreatic cancer. We moved him in to my top-floor study, until he couldn't manage the stairs. Then we had him in the sitting room. After that, it was hospice, hospital, graveyard.
All that time, we were trying to conceive. I wanted a grandchild to show him before he went—though his prognosis was only just longer than a full nine-month's term. But the stress of nursing him, and the fact he was in our house, made the thing impossible. I couldn't bring myself to penetrate Glenys directly above his head, even if he was so zonked on painkillers he'd never hear. Even after he had gone to the hospice, it was hard not to imagine him right beneath us.
Jim, though, was born eight months after my father passed on—two weeks past his due date. In the relief of my father being out of the sitting room, Glenys and I must have had sex—although, to be truthful, I can't remember it. We were drinking quite a lot throughout that period. My father's middle name was James.
We took the baby, two months old, to the muddy graveyard to show him to my father's headstone.
Afterwards, we both wanted as little to do with the morbid as possible. Until Jim asked what death was, which he hasn't yet, we intended to allow him his blessed ignorance.
Ignorance or innocence? I'd never really believed in the latter, but his gaiety seemed to be genuine—and to issue from some blank, blandly happy place. He uplifted us, and we were in need of uplift.
I bought him the plastic ghost because he wanted it. If I had refused him, I would have had to deal with the issue of why. Easier by far to give in, as he'd already trained me to do. There was no need to explain to him what a ghost was. He knew the word—for the moment, that would be enough.
Glenys was not happy, although she waited until Jim had fallen asleep before footnoting her disappointed frown—the one she'd given me on first seeing the small white figure in Jim's excited-sweaty fist.
"It's my ghost," he'd said.
"Couldn't you have persuaded him to want something else?" Glenys asked, over dinner.
"No," I said. "He was determined."
"I don't like it, that's all."
This conversation was the opposite of what you'd expect: I was the superstitious one. Out of the two of us, I was by far the most likely to believe in ghosts.
"He wanted it," I said. "I don't know why. Maybe because it's white."
"But what's it going to do? He only ever plays with his animals and—I mean. Is there a ghost on the farmyard?"
"We'll see," I said. "Perhaps he'll lose interest, and we can just put it away somewhere."
But, right from the next morning, it became clear that the ghost had entered into the universe of Jim's play. His most recent obsession had been the Three Billy Goats Gruff, and to begin with at least the ghost simply replaced the troll.
"Whooo-who's that trip-trappin' over my bridge?"
It was a defender of limits—a constantly defeated defender.
I looked after Jim on Tuesdays. Glenys did Mondays. For the rest of the working week, we had a nanny—though I was in the house most of the time, writing in my study. The weekends, we did together. And so I was able to follow the ghost's development quite closely.
He began by seeping out of the Billy Goat narrative and into others. Glenys's question was answered—there was a ghost in the farmyard, and in the jungle, and most particularly in the dolls' house.
Jim had never been all that interested in the dolls' house before, except as an extra barn to house the chickens. It was of course made of plastic, bright yellow, and had come with tables, chairs, bedside tables, beds—plus a nuclear family. Now the ghost began to play in the small, cramped rooms with patterned stickers for wallpaper. I noticed that the farmyard and jungle animals didn't join it. Jim seemed happy just moving it from floor to floor, saying whooo. When I came down from my study, walked in and asked him what the ghost was doing, he said, "Hauntin'."
I couldn't at all remember having told him this word. Perhaps the nanny, Eileen, had. But when I asked her if they'd ever talked about ghosts, she swore they hadn't—not before I bought him the figure.
"He really loves that ghost," said Eileen to Glenys, debriefing at the end of the day. "He makes it fly around all through the dolls' house."
When she left, we went to join Jim in the playroom. The dolls' house was positioned on a clothes chest, in front of the French doors. That was where my father's head had been. He said he liked the cold air coming off the windowpane.
"I don't want to be hot any more," he said. He had always found hospitals intolerably stuffy.
Jim was making the ghost bounce along the roof of the dolls' house.
"We saw my silver man," he said. "In the farmyard, where we went."
I didn't like the sound of this.
"What man?" I asked.
"Silver man," Jim said, not turning round.
"In the farmyard," I repeated.
We had taken Jim to a city farm about a month before. I wondered if he meant that. But there had been no silver man.
"You mean where we had the pink ice-cream?"
"No, the-this farmyard now."
Jim turned around, the ghost in his left hand, and pointed to the farm buildings. They were on the carpet, beneath where my father's rotting abdomen had once been.
"A silver man?" Glenys asked.
"Long silver man," Jim said.
"You mean Long John Silver," Glenys said, expecting that Eileen had told him the story of Treasure Island.
"Long arms," said Jim. "Long head."
This made him really laugh hard.
"Long head!" he said. "Daddy's got a long head."
He rushed towards me with the ghost out in front.
I was sitting cross-legged on the floor.
Jim hit me on the crown with the ghost.
"Jim, no," Glenys said. "Say sorry to Daddy."
"Sorry, Daddy," said Jim, immediately. He didn't want to waste playing-time on the naughty step. Then something changed and he said, "It's a long head," and hit me again with the ghost.
Glenys grabbed his hand and pulled him to the foot of the stairs.
"Two minutes," she said. "And no bedtime story if you don't start to be good."
He was immediately reconciled to this, ready to sit it out. But then Glenys remembered our subsidiary rule: No toys on the naughty step.
She held out her hand. "Please give it to me," she said.
Jim shook his head.
"Give it to me, please."
He shoved the ghost under his armpit.
Glenys reached in, and he bit her on the arm. He'd never bitten either of us before—or he had bitten Glenys, but only accidentally, on the nipple, while breastfeeding.
I went over and together we took the ghost away from him.
"And you're not having that back until tomorrow—if you're good."
"Now say sorry to Mummy," I said.
"No," said Jim. "Give me!"
"Say sorry."
"I don't want anything!"
"Jim, please say sorry."
"Nothing!"
That night he had no story, and no song either.
***
"Don't be silly," said Glenys. "There's no way he could know that."
"Of course not," I said. "Not really. But it felt as if he did, and that's what matters."
"How you feel?" Glenys was about to become sarcastic. "Yes, that's what everything comes back to, isn't it?" She was referring to my one affair, and my desire for time apart at various points in our relationship. In her staging of our lives, I had been cast as The Selfish Man.
"It's the only thing I have to go on," I said. "It felt… Well, I hate to annoy you by using the word, but it felt uncanny, unheimlich."
"In what way exactly?"
"Him knowing something he couldn't have known."
"You've already admitted he didn't know it."
"Rationally, I believe that. But it's what I'd like to believe rather than what I really believe."
"So now there's something you really believe, is there?" As well as The Selfish Man, I was also The Callow Relativist.
I didn't sleep much.
Eileen was to be with Jim the next day. She had decided to take him, and the clutched ghost, to the zoo in Battersea Park. Before they went, I gave her some money and asked her to buy Jim whatever animal he wanted from the gift shop. Perhaps a sufficiently exciting lion or polar bear would oust the ghost; new toys supplanted favourite toys all the time.
When they returned, around teatime, Jim's second fist was clutching not an animal but a zookeeper.
"Let's have a look," I said.
"He didn't want an animal," Eileen said, getting in her rebuttal before my challenge.
Once Jim saw I didn't want to take away his ghost, he handed over the small, dungaree-wearing figure. It was my father, in miniature. Not as he had been when the cancer got going, but as a man of around my age. I even had a photograph of him, interrupted while gardening, wearing a similar outfit, and leaning on a spade.
"Who is it?" I asked.
"Elephant man," said Jim. And he was right, the spade was for shifting dung.
"Good boy," I said.
He held his non-ghost hand out for the toy; I gave it back.
"Good boy," I said again.
He went through into the playroom, and laid the man on his back in one of the downstairs rooms. The dolls' house had a very different layout to ours—it was double-fronted for a start—but he'd chosen the closest equivalent to the very place he was standing: my father's place.
"No, no," he said. "That's on the-there."
He closed the front of the dolls' house and made the wailing ghost look in at the downstairs windows.
"He ate all his lunch," said Eileen.
"Good boy," I said, and realised I was doing one of the things I'd most hated my father doing, praising me as if I were a dog.
"I'll leave you to it, then," I said, attempting a more man-to-man tone.
I didn't know exactly what it was, though.
Upstairs in my study, I found that I couldn't work. The thing I was writing was my ninth play, and it wasn't coming easily; I'd been commissioned, so had to stick close to what other people thought they wanted. With Jim wailing downstairs, I couldn't become sufficiently distracted. If my dead father really were speaking through him, then what did he want to say? The haunting—always assuming that's what it was—seemed different to classic possession, though. I had no sense of a message, more of a re-enactment; as if my father, while living with us, had been visited by one of the ghosts already resident in the house—a Victorian ghost, perhaps. And, for whatever reason, he'd kept this terror to himself. He'd had enough of the more imminent terrors to concern him; pure agony for one. He often woke us with anguished cries—to the extent that we sometimes ignored them the first or second time; never more than that. They didn't always mean he was in pain, or even awake. He often dreamed of death (he told me this, latterly), and would scream from the deeps of nightmares in which he was fully interred.
I made a final attempt to pull myself back from these kind of thoughts. Jim wasn't possessed. I was projecting everything onto him, from a guilty, adult perspective. He had wanted a new toy, and I had distorted that into something far darker. Very often he said pertinent things without knowing it. But just as often, he spoke nonsense. Only the week before, a new catchphrase had entered family legend. Jim had walked into our bedroom, first thing, and sagely announced that "crocodiles eat broken toes, and smelly cheese." What he was saying now issued from no different source to that statement of muddledness: Jim wasn't even old enough, according to Freud, to have developed a subconscious. It was more like the language itself babbling along, making combinations of words that might or might not go together. It was meaning testing meaning.
Just before six o'clock, I went down to the playroom to take over from Eileen. Glenys would be back in about half an hour. Jim had already been fed.
As I walked in, he was bouncing the ghost along the roof of the dolls' house, which was still closed—although I hoped he'd allowed the elephant-keeper out at some point in the previous two hours.
"Attic, attic, attic!" Jim was chanting, then, "Limp, limp, limp!" The ghost wobbled as it flew, although it didn't really have the feet for proper limping.
Eileen said goodbye to me and then to Jim. He blanked her.
"Say thank you for taking me to the zoo," I said.
"Thank you, attic," said Jim. "Thank you, limp."
This was funny.
I gave Eileen a frowning smile. She knew the little bastard could be like this sometimes.
"See you tomorrow," she said.
"Attic-limp," said Jim. "Attic-limp."
But when I'd closed the door on Eileen, and gone back to Jim, this chant had achieved its true and significant form: "Limp-attic, limp-attic."
It was the spread from the pancreas to the lymphatic system which finally killed my father. And that had taken place right where Jim was standing.
"Stop it," I said.
Jim kept going; the chant was his joy of the moment.
"Stop it, please."
"Got limp-attic," he said. "He got limp-attic daddy. He got limp-attic mummy. He got limp-attic sister."
I strode across, deliberately banging my heels onto the floorboards; I wanted Jim to know I was his father, was coming fast and that I was immensely angry.
I shook him, harder than I should have done—a lot harder. His head rocked on his shoulders, going in the opposite direction to the shakes.
"Shut up! Shut up!" I said. He couldn't speak—his throat was too distorted by the back-and-forth, but he could still cry; first with his eyes and then vocally; and he started to keen as soon as I let go and began to calm down. We were like the ends of a seesaw: he, rising to hysteria; me, sinking to catatonia.
"I'm sorry," I said, and held him.
I couldn't allow myself to become a danger to him.
We watched television until Glenys returned, and as soon as he was asleep I confessed. He had been subdued all evening—not himself—had not done the usual bath-splashing or towel-swirling.
"Do you think you hurt him?"
"I don't know. It was so horrible. I don't think anyone could have chosen anything worse."
Then I remembered one thing. Before he could properly speak, Jim had used to chant dad-dad-dad at me. And quite often it came out as dead-dead-dead. It had been just one of the many signs I'd had to dismiss as meaningless.
Glenys went and woke Jim.
"Does it hurt when you turn your head?" she asked, then tried to manipulate it. Jim was too bleary to understand. He didn't wince, though, or even resist.
On the landing, Glenys said, "If you ever hurt him like that again, I will leave. I will take him and leave."
"But I did tell you," I said. "I could have covered up and you'd never have known."
"And that makes it better?"
She didn't speak to me again until we were in bed and the lights were out.
"I know you're still grieving for your father. I know it's difficult for you. But you must never take anything out on Jim. I would prefer it if he was alone in the house for ten minutes than that you stayed here as a threat to him."
"I'm not a threat," I said, but I knew that wasn't true; I had hurt him even if I hadn't injured him.
The simplest thing seemed to be—remove the cause of the trouble.
"Right," I said, twisting out of bed. I went to the kitchen and fetched our torch from one of the drawers. Then I went into Jim's room and started to look for the ghost.
Glenys, worried, had come in after me.
I explained, in whispers.
"It was in his hand when he went to sleep," Glenys said. And I found it still there. His grip was tight. I had to bend his fingers back a little to get it out. Glenys watched. The torchlight moved around on the walls and the shadows on Jim's face made him look skeletal.
"Right, mate," I said, talking to the ghost, trying to make a joke of it. "You're history."
I carried it downstairs, out the front door and chucked it into one of the wheelie bins.
"He will miss it," said Glenys. "It'll be a big thing."
"I'll buy him something else. Take him to the toyshop. Whatever he wants."
Still, I didn't sleep. And Jim wailed for the ghost from the moment he woke up. The elephant-keeper was no consolation—and was ignored from now on. Jim seemed genuinely pained; Glenys made the connection to my roughness, and took him straight to casualty. I went, too. We left a note for Eileen, explaining we didn't know when we'd be back.
Jim hung on to Glenys and wouldn't come near me. I was terrified he'd tell one of the nurses what had happened, and end up getting himself taken into care.
We stayed an hour in the waiting room before he was seen. In the cramped blue cubicle, they asked for an explanation. I said he'd tripped over the stairgate and fallen downstairs. It had happened that morning, I said.
"Are you sure?" asked the nurse. "These are bruises."
I looked at Jim's shoulders. My thumbprints were there on either side of the double-swoosh of his collarbone, purple. I just prayed my fingers weren't there, four and four, on the back. The nurse turned him round. I realised I had to say something.
"That was different. He tried to run into the road. Yesterday. I pulled him back. I was a little rough."
The nurse looked at me. "Understandable," she said. I was pretty sure she didn't believe a word. "And you say he fell head first?"
"He was that way when we got there," I said.
She looked to Glenys, who took a moment to nod.
"Well," the nurse said, feeling Jim's neck once more. "There's nothing broken I can find. We'll send him for an X-ray, though—just to be a hundred percent sure. Alright?"
"Good boy," I said, as we went back to A&E.
We waited another hour before they could do him. There was no fracture.
"Never again," said Glenys, after strapping Jim in. We stood behind the car in the hospital car park. I had parked in a space three along from the one I'd used when I came to collect Jim as a newborn. When visiting my father, I'd parked in just about every space there. "You have no more chances," said Glenys.
I insisted we stop at the toyshop on the way home. Jim went straight for the low shelf where the ghost had been before, but it seemed to have been the last of them. If one had remained, I suppose I might have bought it for him, and things would have turned out differently; perhaps better, perhaps worse. As it was, there was no replacement ghost. Jim, despite great persuasion, wouldn't accept anything else, in fact began to cry, and so we took him home.
"You can choose something next time," said Glenys. She did not, luckily, suggest they order a ghost in specially for us.
After scrambled eggs on toast in the kitchen, Glenys went off to work and I left Jim with Eileen. I put headphones on, so I wouldn't hear what he was doing. I think I already had a shivering suspicion what it would be.
At ten to six, I came downstairs to the sound of whooo-whooo. Jim was tiptoeing around with a drying-up cloth on his head, being a ghost.
"He's been like this all afternoon," Eileen said. "Running up and down. I can't find the little figure. Do you know where it is?"
The rubbish wouldn't be collected until Monday morning. I knew exactly where it was.
"No," I said.
"Have a good weekend," Eileen said, and picked her coat off the rack. Jim gave her a very affectionate goodbye, kissing her on the lips, then went back into character after she'd left.
Whooo was all he'd say. At least it wasn't lymphatic system.
He raced along the corridor between the kitchen and the playroom, the drying cloth over his eyes. He never bumped into the doors, as I expected him to. Eventually, I gave in and went upstairs to get one of the old sheets we'd used on his cot.
"Here you go," I said. "If you're going to be a ghost, you'd better look like one."
I cut eyeholes and a mouthhole, drew round them with black felt-tip, then handed the costume over. Jim was surly, without gratitude. He put the sheet on, however, and immediately became a scarier ghost. His performance started to unnerve me; it was obsessive. I began to wonder whether us indulging this was entirely psychologically healthy. Me shaking him had made things more intense, but the plastic figure was what had begun the whole episode. I should have obeyed my superstitiousness and not bought it for him.
Whooo, he said, even when I turned the television on for his favourite programme, In the Night Garden…
I sat down to watch, but a sheeted figure stood in front of the screen, holding its arms out. The picture was completely blocked by white cotton—all I could see were different colours coming through.
"What do you want?" I asked. And as I spoke, I realised that I was speaking not to Jim but to the ghost he had become. "What do you want me to do?"
"Play," said the ghost-voice. This was an answer Jim might give. "Play, now."
"Say 'Play, Daddy, please.' " I said.
The ghost wavered about for a bit. Having got a word other than whooo, I thought I'd lost Jim once more. But no—
"Play, Daddy, please," he said. That, at least, was what I heard at the time. Thinking back, the voice said it without the implied comma and capital: "Play daddy, please."
"What do you want to play?"
"Play ghost."
"What do I do?"
"You play."
I grabbed the remote and turned the television off, then stood up. The ghost, still quite substantial, pushed me through into the playroom.
"Play here!"
'Oh, no," I said, "a ghost. I am scared. Oh, help, no!"
"No," said the voice, further from Jim's. "Not that."
"I don't know what you want me to do. What do you want me to do?"
The ghost ran around me a couple of times, whoooing.
"Do you want me to lie down?" I asked.
"Lie down," the ghost said, and it was as if I hadn't spoken at all, and the command was coming freshly from him.
I lay with my head towards the dolls' house and my feet towards the off-television—in the exact position my father had lain, when his bed and his death were there.
"Now what do you want?" I asked. "You've got me here—what do you want?"
"Shhh," the voice said.
He wafted past me several times. I tried to look up beneath the sheet—I wanted to see Jim's face; I wanted to make sure Jim's face was still there. His jeans and bare feet came out from the sheet's bottom edge, but the noises in the room seemed lower than anything Jim had made before.
I closed my eyes. This was usually an invitation for Jim to jump on me, then laugh.
He didn't.
I waited.
The ghost swished back and forth; I could no longer hear the slap of feet.
"I'm dying," I said, with relief. "I'm in the worst imaginable pain, and you can't do anything about it. It doesn't matter if you're my son or a ghost or what you are, because I'm the one that's about to die—and I'm scared. I'm scared. I didn't think I would be but I'm fucking terrified. I feel like I'm looking over the edge of a cliff into the dark only there isn't a cliff or an edge there's only dark. Someone's going to come up behind me and push me off, and that someone is Death with a capital D, and there's nothing I can do about it. I can't turn round and look at it, face him down. I've tried, all I see is more dark and more dark again. All around. Lots of people I know have died, and quite a few have died like this. Of cancer. I stayed away. I didn't like to visit and then have to remember them as skeletons rather than the living, friendly people they'd been before. And now I'm here and people are avoiding seeing me, and I can understand why. I look like death—I look like something you wouldn't want anyone to see. I can't stop myself from smelling something fucking awful, too. I puke all over myself, when I'm not quick enough to make the bucket. And even when I do turn in time, I often miss. They have to clear up after me. You have to clear up after me. My breath smells and I stink of old piss, too. Like some disgusting wino. But I still get erections. Isn't that amazing? But I haven't got much longer. And it's not fair. I wasn't a heavy drinker. I never smoked. I shouldn't be dying like this. No one should die like this, but especially not me. This is a punishment for something I never did. I'm in hell. Body and soul. And it hurts like nothing you've ever known. It's just terrible. And children are meant to make everything better. You're meant to make me feel like I've passed something on to the world. Made a positive contribution. But I hate you because you're so fucking healthy and young and I want your health and I want your life and all the years of fucking living you've got left. You little jammy fucking little bastard. You little cunting little fuck. You fucking little bastard cunt."
Then it stopped, the language. I'd said it, and it had said me, and my father.
Just then, a key ground into the door and Glenys called hello from the hall.
If I'd moved quickly, I could have stood up, or at least got into a crouch—that's what I think now. I could have moved. But I lay where I'd been, eyes still closed. I must have wanted her to see.
"What's this then?" Glenys asked, coming in.
There was a pause.
I didn't want to look, but I had to.
The ghost was still there. Glenys stood with her hand on its head. I could see Jim's big eyes through the eyeholes; I could see his open mouth, through the mouthhole.
"Cunt," said the ghost.
