Ghost MacIndoe

He could not think what to say. He rested one foot on the fringe of floor that stuck out from the wall and held out a hand, though she was a long way below him. ‘Look from up here,’ he said.

‘Don’t be stupid, Eck,’ Megan told him. ‘It’s dangerous. I’m going.’ She licked a finger and turned her attention to a mark on her dress.

Despondent and resentful, he followed her away from the Doodlebug House. ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ he pleaded, when they were back in the park.

‘Of course not,’ she said.

‘Promise?’ he persisted.

‘God, Eck,’ she snapped. ‘Don’t be so boring. Why would I tell anyone? There’s nothing to tell.’

Alexander returned to the Doodlebug House many times afterwards, and the echo of Megan’s voice was always there. He could no more rid the atmosphere of her irritation than he could get rid of the smell of cats. With his arms crossed he would sit on the lip of the bath and scan the shell of the building, as if waiting with diminishing hope for a friend to answer an accusation. ‘A pile of rubbish,’ he heard her say, and he could no longer bring himself to see it differently. Finally there came the day on which he found that he was in a place that felt like a copy of the Doodlebug House, and he resolved that he would never visit it again.

He would always remember something of the evening of the day on which he left the Doodlebug House. Sitting on the grass in the garden, he closed his eyes and brought to mind the things that he had abandoned. He could see the slivers of grime between the rods of the washboard and the lustrous disc of white porcelain on top of the bath’s single tap. He could see the rake of shadows on the wall above the upstairs fireplace and the stiff blisters of paint on the back door. He could even taste the bitter air of the Doodlebug House. It was as if he were lying on his cradle of boards, and the Doodlebug House was again a place that belonged only to him.

When Alexander came out of his daydream a red admiral was closing its wings on a dandelion beside him. He remembered this, and his father looking at him from the kitchen door. The light through the branches of the tree in next door’s garden made his father’s face vanish under a pattern of brilliant ovals. His mother’s voice came from very far away inside the house, saying something he could not hear, and his father went to her.

One morning towards the end of 1951, not long after Churchill’s election, Alexander heard that the Doodlebug House was being demolished. In the afternoon he watched the wrecking ball sink into the wall below his lookout window. The wall gave way like a hand making a catch, he would always remember.

6. The Winslow Boy (#ulink_d8221191-8e5f-50cc-9a0b-2e9583fa0fbc)

Alexander was sitting in the corner of the garden where the bindweed came over the fence and the fat tongues of dock leaves stuck out from under the nettles. Holding the stalk as he had seen his mother hold the stem of a glass, Alexander turned the white trumpet of a flower half a circle one way, half a circle back.

‘He’s a contented wee soul,’ he heard Mrs Beckwith remark. ‘If you ask me, he’s got a real talent for calmness.’

‘You think so?’ asked his mother, standing alongside her.

‘I don’t see what you’re fussing about, Irene. I’d be grateful if I were you. Not a minute’s peace with Megan.’

‘Nothing but peace with this one,’ said his mother, and she looked at him as if he were a mystifying but precious-looking object they had unearthed from the lawn. ‘Not like the others, are we, my love?’ With the toe of her sandals she dug gently at his ribs, he would remember. ‘Not a boisterous boy, are we?’ She threaded a hand under Mrs Beckwith’s elbow. ‘You wouldn’t credit how long this one can go without moving a muscle,’ she said. ‘Meditating MacIndoe we should have called him.’

‘A genius at hide and seek, I’ll bet,’ said Mrs Beckwith, and she kissed him on the top of his head.

A week later he was taken to see Dr Levine, in a room that he would remember for its smell of cold rubber and for its chairs, which were made of metal pipes and had red seats that glued to his skin. Dr Levine was a short, stout man with silver hair and a silver moustache that was striped with two yellow stains below his nostrils. His eyes were small and pale brown, and he looked at Alexander over the lenses of his half-moon glasses.

‘What exactly is the difficulty, Mrs MacIndoe?’ he asked.

‘It’s not a difficulty, as such,’ she replied.

‘Not a difficulty, as such,’ the doctor responded, as though repeating a sentence in a foreign language.

‘No.’

‘Then what precisely would it be?’

‘A feeling that something’s not quite right,’ she tentatively explained.

‘Could you be more specific, Mrs MacIndoe?’ asked the doctor. ‘Could we pin this something down?’

‘He doesn’t seem to have much energy, for a boy,’ she stated.

‘For a boy?’ smiled Dr Levine, putting down the gold-hooped black pen with which he had been toying.

‘For a child.’

‘He eats well? Sleeps well?’ asked Dr Levine.

‘Yes. I think so.’

Dr Levine rose from his chair and leaned on the edge of his desk, gazing down at Alexander. ‘Do you eat well, Alexander?’ he asked, and narrowed his eyes as if there was some trick to the question. ‘Do you sleep well?’ he added, before Alexander could speak.

‘Perfectly,’ said Alexander.

‘Perfectly,’ repeated Dr Levine, and he smiled at the floor as he placed a hand on Alexander’s brow. His skin was cold and very soft, like a balloon that has lost some air. ‘Give me your hands,’ he said. He put the tips of his fingers under the boy’s and bent forward to inspect the fingernails. ‘Look up,’ he said. He prodded the flesh around Alexander’s eyes, then took hold of his lashes and tugged at his eyelids. ‘Nothing to worry ourselves about so far,’ commented Dr Levine, reaching behind his back and lifting a small, flat stick.

‘I’m not worried.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ replied Dr Levine, and he pressed his lips together, making his moustache bulge outwards. He placed the smooth dry wood on Alexander’s tongue and peered along it; the whites of the doctor’s eyes, Alexander noted, were the colour of the wax of his nightlight in the morning.

‘There’s nothing wrong with him that I can see,’ declared Dr Levine eventually. ‘Do you feel there’s anything wrong with you, Master MacIndoe?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Well, neither do I.’ Dr Levine yawned, removed his glasses and bent his fingers to grind at his eyes with his knuckles.

‘He looked like a big squirrel,’ Alexander told Megan that afternoon, and he copied the way the doctor’s mouth had grimaced and his cheeks puffed out as he rubbed his eyes. ‘Nothing wrong with him,’ he repeated with a superior sniff, twiddling his thumbs pompously on his stomach. ‘Are you a fool, Mrs MacIndoe?’

It was not the first time he had heard Megan laugh, but that is how he was to recall it, with Megan standing on the opposite side of the road from Mrs Beckwith’s house, and stamping her foot as though the shock of her laughter had travelled right through her body. ‘So you’re not ill then?’ she asked.

‘No, I’m not ill.’

‘You’re just odd. That’s all there is to it,’ she said, walking backwards across the street.

‘That’s all there is to it,’ he parroted.

‘Odd Eck,’ said Megan as a goodbye.

‘Odd Eck, odd Eck; odd Eck, odd Eck,’ he repeated for her, to the tune of two chiming bells.

There was a place at the turn of the stairs where the grain of the wood had come through the varnish to form sand-coloured terraces that he would magnify in his imagination to the dimensions of the cliffs and bays that Jimmy Murrell had described. At the foot of the banister that rose from this step he had found a globule of varnish that was not absolutely hard, from which his thumbnail could detach a black sliver that had an aroma that was something like the tobacco that was left in the bowl when his father’s pipe went out. The morning after the visit to Dr Levine, he was sitting at the turn of the stairs, his face against the cool wood of the banister. His mother came up, carrying the laundry basket, and as she sidled past him he asked her: ‘Do you think I’m odd?’ The smile that he saw, immediately before she put her arms around him and kissed him, convinced him that she did.

‘You do, don’t you?’ he called up to her.

‘I don’t at all,’ she said, and she dropped over the banister a handkerchief that fell over his face.

She was as worried after the visit to the doctor as she had been before. He would be sitting on the threshold of the house, watching the traffic or the sky, and she would rush to him and urge him out into the street to play. ‘Come on, Alexander, look lively,’ she would almost shout, clapping her hands to recruit him for some chore about the house. ‘Watching the grass grow?’ she would ask, or ‘Saving shoe leather?’ or ‘Holding the floor down?’ And once, when he was in the garden, he heard her say to his father, ‘Our son’s turning into a tree, Graham.’

One afternoon in April she strode down the hall, lifted him up, and said: ‘What would you say if I said we were going up to town? To see the lights come on.’