all the beloved ghosts Read online

  ‘’Fraid so. Just before we left Alabama. At a speakeasy in our town. Leonard was hired to wash glasses. But a fight broke out over something or another that had gone missing. The manager was drunk. Went mad as a hornet. Broke a glass – on purpose like – and cut Leonard’s throat.’

  The shape of her brother Murray rises in Marjorie’s mind’s eye. Blood still seeps from his ear.

  ‘Did they get the man, Walter, or did he get away?’

  He swallows hard. ‘Neither, Miss. They didn’t get the man – and he didn’t get away . . . That laid us low, my mamma especially.’

  Marjorie nods. Her mother. In the ice house. Her feet bare.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she notices that several of the men from the Knights of Columbus have risen from their chairs and now stand watching, their arms folded across their ties. They’re wondering if Walter has offended her; if that’s why she’s having words. So she smiles at her partner, as if to say she is ready to dance again, and Walter waltzes her back into the music.

  Couple after couple leave the dance floor. On stage, the MC stares through wide eyes and tries, without success, to catch the eye of the conductor. But ‘Wistful and Blue’ floats on into the wintery night – one, two, three – while the MC fiddles anxiously with his cuffs, and the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel empties. The KoC men, Marjorie notices, haven’t returned to their tables, and Walter’s hand has gone cold in hers.

  The shadow of a tall man appears at the edge of the spotlight. Walter stops short. Marjorie squeezes her eyes shut. The air is about to break.

  ‘May I?’

  She opens her eyes to find Charlie Thompson standing before them. He has tapped Walter’s shoulder.

  Walter nods, then smiles, blinking too much, before he thanks Marjorie for the dance. She only has time to press his forearm before he separates himself and makes for the safety of the stage.

  Most of the crowd watch as Charlie Thompson takes her hand in his. She feels his other hand, light against her shoulder blade. His face tenses as he strains to pick out the beat. Then they step into the mercy of darkness, his bad leg stammering out of time.

  When he returns her to her table, Eleanor is talking to Jimmy Monaghan and she doesn’t turn to acknowledge Marjorie.

  Charlie Thompson hovers, his head bowed. ‘Thank you for the dance, Marjorie. It was kind of you to put up with my two left feet.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Thompson!’ She has to look away so the tears don’t come.

  He glances sternly at the rigid backs of Eleanor and Jimmy. ‘I’m driving back to North Sydney now, in case you need a lift.’

  She turns to the table and tries again. ‘Eleanor?’

  But Eleanor pretends not to hear, so Marjorie finds her clutch on the floor and tries to smile. ‘Thank you. It is very late.’

  Outside, the snow that was falling earlier has turned to sleet. As she waits on the sidewalk for Mr Thompson and his Buick, she watches two men approach, their unbuttoned coats flapping. Even in the wind, she can smell the liquor on them. When one slips on a patch of ice and almost hits the ground, she turns her face away. She pretends not to hear his friend mutter that the roads everywhere are ‘as slick as a buttered-up bride’. But everything’s fine because Mr Thompson’s pulling up to the curb now. He’s stepping outside to open her door, and as she bundles herself and her coat into the passenger seat, she surprises even herself. ‘Cokeville.’ She stares into her lap. ‘Before we go back, Mr Thompson, would you show me Cokeville?’

  His hand hovers over the gearbox. He has to clear his throat. ‘Sure. Why the hell not?’

  She smells it before she sees it: a stink of slag and human sewage. Under the angry candle of the steelworks tower, rows of dark bunkhouses and shacks materialise in the night.

  Charlie Thompson turns off the engine, lights a cigarette and blows a plume of smoke into the night.

  Something tightened in her chest. ‘But Bill at the Foundry said these men are skilled labourers. I thought that’s why they were asked to come all this way.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought all the steelworkers and their families lived in the Ashby area.’

  He offers her his cigarette. ‘Not all.’

  She shakes her head and pulls her coat tight. She suspects her hand will shake if she tries to smoke. Even here, now, she cares enough not to want to appear childish. Or hopeful. She doesn’t want Mr Thompson to worry that she has misunderstood. He has only been kind and decent, and besides, what would she want with him? He’s almost twice her age. Yet, here at the edge of Cokeville, a strange familiarity settles into the silence between them until Charlie finally rubs the windshield clear of the mist of their breath. ‘It’s after midnight, Marjorie.’

  ‘Of course. I’m keeping you, and my mother will be waiting up.’

  ‘Not to mention the fact that you’ll get an earful from your big sister when she hears.’ In the narrow space of the two-door Buick, he turns to her for the first time – and winks. ‘I see her very . . . patient husband up at the track.’

  She lets herself laugh.

  ‘We’ll take the harbour, shall we?’ he says cheerfully. ‘Make up a bit of lost time?’

  She straightens in her seat, surfacing from the depths of her coat. ‘Stan, Eleanor’s brother, said the harbour is risky now.’

  Charlie casts his cigarette into the night. ‘I came that way. The ice was rock solid.’ He grins. ‘You don’t think I’d play fast and loose with this baby, do you?’ He thumps the steering wheel, then releases the handbrake.

  A gambler, said Eleanor. ‘Apparently, he’s a gambler.’ Of course, he’d have to be to offer her – a young, unmarried woman – a late-night lift home in the first place. Not that she had to accept. Not that she had to ask him to detour to Cokeville. Not that he had to agree.

  Maybe that makes them two of a kind, her and Charlie Thompson. She only knows that it’s past midnight, the roads are bad – it will be a slow crawl back to North Sydney – and May will shame her come morning. She has no idea how she’ll explain: about Walter, the lateness of the hour, about Mr Thompson, married and Protestant.

  At Muggah’s Creek, the new 1926 Buick Roadster glides on to the ice.

  But even now, there’s time. Will she say it?

  Shall we turn back? Everyone says you shouldn’t cross after the first of March.

  No.

  Because what’s five days to twenty inches of ice, and hasn’t it been snowing most of the night? Besides, it’s just eight miles across. In a quarter of an hour, they’ll be landing on the sandbar at Indian Beach.

  She has never crossed by night before. The swollen sky bears down. In the wide, dark limbo of Sydney Harbour, the Buick’s headlamps seem no brighter than a pair of jack-o’-lanterns.

  Every year the Council says it will provide range lights and a few bush-marked courses, but the owners of the icebreakers protest. How will they clear the harbour’s shipping lane with lights, markers and more traffic to circumnavigate?

  As the car moves out across the frozen estuary, Charlie Thompson’s hands are rigid on the wheel. Now and again, the car fantails, but he pulls it back into line and on they go.

  She’ll laugh on the other side. Perhaps she’ll even have one of Mr Thompson’s cigarettes or a swig from his flask to steady her nerves.

  She would lay her head back and close her eyes – she’s so tired now – but cold air blasts through the windows. Mr Thompson says they have to stay open so the windshield doesn’t fog up.

  And suddenly, for no reason, she remembers the old Micmac woman who came to the door selling baskets. Her black hair was shot through with silver, and she wore it loose on her shoulders. It dripped with snow and the woman’s cheeks were wet. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said solemnly, taking Marjorie’s mother’s thin hand in her own. ‘I am sorry about your three daughters.’

  How did she know?

  But ‘No,’ said Marjorie, rushing to her mother’s aid, clarifying, taking back her m
other’s hand: ‘My mother has lost two daughters and the son of the house. Two daughters. Three children. But thank you for your condolences.’

  How sick she’d felt once the door was shut. The woman had done nothing wrong, and they should have bought her baskets.

  Marjorie shakes herself. They are almost clear of the estuary. Another ten minutes and they’ll be on terra firma. She tries to brighten. ‘All things considered,’ she says, turning to Charlie Thompson, ‘I enjoyed myself tonight.’

  He laughs, relieved to have conversation. ‘I haven’t danced so much in years!’

  ‘You danced half of one dance!’

  ‘Exactly. My wife will never believe it.’

  She doesn’t look at him as she says it. ‘You’ll tell your wife then?’

  He leans forward, mopping the windshield with his sleeve. ‘Haven’t decided yet. I have a policy, you might say. Why worry today about that which you can put off till tomorrow?’

  She nods, as if his answer is of no consequence to her.

  ‘Which means,’ he says, winking again, ‘I’ll think about it tomorrow when I’m sitting in church.’

  ‘Where you can calmly postpone the question till another day!’

  ‘Bullseye.’

  She settles back into her seat, laughing. She recalls again the easy sway of her hips as she danced, and Walter’s firm arm leading, and Mr Thompson bending over her, tall, close and protective. There’s a tune stuck in her head, one of the big jazz numbers of the night. What was it called? The windshield wipers are going, they’re lulling her to sleep, and it’s only when Charlie Thompson looks over and catches her eye that she realises she’s been humming the tune aloud. Her throat and cheeks go hot, but there’s no need for blushes. He’s singing. Mr Thompson is singing. Eleanor would never believe it. He’s stringing together one line after the other, and it’s all coming back: the deep, from-the-belly rhythm, the spell of the words, the stream in the moonlight, the honey who’ll be gone by dawn. ‘Tonight You Belong to Me’. That’s the one. Charlie Thompson has a fine voice, she thinks to herself, when the car goes through the ice.

  Her stomach drops; her spine goes rigid. The hole in the harbour opens like a black mouth. The Buick tips – her hands can’t find the handle – and suddenly, unfathomably, the car is gripped in jaws of ice.

  The headlamps are out, and she can’t tell if the space above her is the window that faces up or down. His or hers. There’s no top, no bottom, no floor, no roof, no ocean bed, no blind hole above. Mr Thompson? Through the open window, water and ice are rushing across her lap – My coat, my new coat – and her mind can’t catch up.

  I tell myself this.

  She feels his hand grabbing at her shoulder – Thank God, she thinks, thank God. He’s hauling her up by the wide collar of her coat. She’s pushing off from the passenger door with her feet, gulping air. He’s going ahead, showing her the way to the surface. She’s grabbing hold of the hollow block of his shoe. Or is that the window frame? And is that his voice calling or the groaning of steel against ice?

  The car shifts again, a wave churns through, the world rolls and—

  No.

  The car falls, juddering through ice. Down and down. Mr Thompson!

  But he’s nowhere.

  Such darkness. Such cold. Like she has never known.

  Her coat clings, sodden. Heavy. Unimaginably heavy.

  A dead animal weight.

  And the Micmac woman is beside her in the footwell – Sssh now, quiet – as the car sinks to the bottom of the estuary.

  In the article in the Herald entitled ‘Saturday Night’s Tragedy’, she will remain nameless. A ‘young lady’. It is a kindness perhaps.

  There will be no obituary. No public wake. No stews, loaves or cakes delivered to the door. No crowd of mourners, warm and close in the kitchen.

  Only talk.

  Her funeral will be attended by just four, her sisters May, Laura, Alice and Ignace. As the mass is said, her mother will close herself in ‘Ethel’s room’ and draw the drapes.

  In the years and generations to come, children will be named for her siblings, Ethel, Kathleen and Murray.

  As for Charlie Thompson, he will never be able to get a song out of his head, and in the black waters of sleep, it will slow into a dirge and boom between his ears. ‘Tonight you belong to me.’

  Sometimes, I tell people about my great-aunt who went under the ice.

  Solo, A Cappella

  Everywhere in Tottenham that evening, you could smell summer: mown grass from the football ground, the stink of hot tarmac, rubbish baking in the bins and the whiff off the WD-40 cans our yutes was huffing on the estates. But up at the Pond, man, the air smelled good: all watery green and sweet with long grass. The dragonflies were zupping, and high above them, the bats were zigzagging in and out of the bat-boxes. Me and Valentine, we sat there, listenin’ to the males singing for mates – whistlin’ and wantin’ – as the sun dropped from the sky.

  Valentine said they was ‘pipistrelles’. She’d been on a nature walk with her class along ditches that used to be river. I said, pipistrelles, lah-dee-dah, and pulled her close, so close I could smell the bubble-gum taste of her lip gloss and the warmth of her skin.

  She said a certain kind up there at the Pond was rare, a soprano pipistrelle, which was different than the common pipistrelle. I said, well, if bats was human, she’d be the soprano and I’d be the common, and she said that if I’d shut my mouth she might even be able to hear the pips what bats bounce off everything. So I went quiet and she went still, and her face lit up. Then she nodded like an old African wise woman, and I said, ‘I can’t hear nothing,’ and she said that’s because mostly only teenaged girls can hear those pips.

  ‘Special feelers,’ she said, wiggling the ear lobe I longed to kiss.

  But maybe that’s where she was wrong, cos later on, she didn’t feel no trouble coming. Or maybe she did, but she did what she did anyway.

  Back in April, I was eighteen and she was still fifteen when I sidled into her booth at the McDonald’s on the High Road, nervous behind my smile. She was with her friend Cherelle, but neither told me to bounce. Valentine only corrected me, saying her name was ‘Valenteen’, because it was French, and not Valenteyene. Just the fact that she wanted me to know how to say her name made me high with hope. It didn’t matter that she hardly looked up from her McNuggets. So I was mannerly to Cherelle, but I talked and whistled and wanted for Valentine. My thoughts zupped all over my head as I looked at her eyes – downturned and fluted – and the bright heart of her face.

  Her family were Congolese, which meant she sounded French and African both when she spoke English. Maybe that’s why she didn’t open her mouth much, except when she had to, like at Community Choir practice on Tuesday nights. Mostly it was white old people in the choir but she said she didn’t mind, and I knew she didn’t mind because of that voice on her. Pure like summer rain. Once she sang for me up at the Pond – from a religious song called ‘Gloria’ – and I said, ‘You nailed that,’ but I knew my words weren’t good enough for that voice of hers rising high over the Pond, making even the bats go still. She said she’d been practising for months and was going to sing solo, a cappella. Her piece was called the ‘Domine Deus’ which meant, she said, ‘Lord God’.

  ‘Lord God!’ I shouted to the sky, and we both grinned.

  She was opposite like that: shy but with a big voice when she was brave enough to use it. Mostly, it was good I could talk for two. I think she liked my talking. Talking was how I survived the jungle that is the shop floor of H&M where I work three days a week – or maybe never again if the CCTV was eyeballing me as I ducked out of Superdrug on Saturday night.

  My father was once the driver for a big politician in Ghana. But when things started to go wrong for the Big-Wig, most of his men were stuffed into barrels that had been shot through till they were more like sieves. Then they was put to sea. Now my dad drives buses by day and works at Pizza Hut
by night. When I’m on his bus and see gangs of boys as young as twelve flickin’ the knives and vexin’ and callin’ him ‘old man’, my heart jams. Once I strode to the front of the bus to take on the little evils, but through the glass my father said, John, don’t be an idiot, and he nodded at me hard to sit down. What he meant was, Isn’t one loss in the family enough for you? My mother lasted two years after her stroke. She was forty-five, too young to die, everyone says in England, but old enough in Ghana.

  I told Valentine all this one night at the Pond, but she never gabbed about her own fam. I only know they’d been on The Farm two years – that’s the Broadwater Farm Estate to you and the people at the Council. I got the vibe they was illegal; that Valentine worried that if she said the wrong thing to the wrong person, they’d be sent back to the Congo in a puff of smoke.

  Maybe she was right. Maybe they was. Or maybe her family decided fast to move on, out of Tottenham, after Saturday night.

  All I know is, she’s nowhere, and now, I’m not the only one wondering. Cos there’s a video, supposedly of a ‘sixteen-year-old African girl’, posted on YouTube on Saturday night where you can’t hardly see nothing, but, man, it went viral. There was an old woman eyewitness and a man watching from a church where he’d run for cover. And there are reporters trying to find this girl. And community folk scratching their heads. And the police hoping to hell she never was real.

  But Valentine was real in my arms that night as the sun set and the smog turned orange over Tottenham. I found a stone in the grass that was pinkish and sort of in the shape of a heart, so I gave it to her, like it was a gift from the Pond and me both, and she turned it over in her hands while the bats whooshed above us. Then I smiled, waggling my eyebrows. I was well switched, but she said, ‘Nuh-uh, not without a condom,’ and I remembered my mother. She was laughing through that stroke-slumped smile of hers, passing me my first box of Durex and slurring, ‘Don’t you dare forget.’

  We had a plan. I said I’d get myself to Superdrug. Valentine said she’d go home, chat with her parents, then slip out her window; it was the only advantage to a ground-floor apartment on The Farm. Valentine was good at popping the grille.