Burial of Ghosts

Chapter Four

I was going home. It was mid-afternoon on a grey, sleety day and the train was almost empty. Occasionally I’d conjure up that last night in Marrakech and feel a Cheshire cat grin spread across my face, but none of the other sad travellers noticed. Through the window I looked out for the familiar signs, like marker stones, which would point the way back to Jess. The red sandstone bulk of Durham Cathedral. The Angel of the North, rusted to a darker red, its wings open in an unconditional embrace of welcome. The Tyne with its bridges.

The train slowed to a crawl across the river. The tide was high. On the Quayside there were already lights in the bars and restaurants, reflected in the water. It was rush-hour busy. I saw pasty faces, hunched bodies wrapped against the weather that had nothing of the spring in it. I missed the Moroccan light, the startling colours, and had to persuade myself that I was glad to be back.

The trip from Newcastle to Newbiggin took more than an hour. The talk which eddied around the overheated bus was familiar – Newcastle United’s failure to achieve again, television soaps, the weather. There was room enough for my rucksack and me to share a double seat and no one spoke to me. Rain and dirt mixed on the windows, so I couldn’t see out. I must have dozed, and woke with a start to find the bus empty and the driver leaning out of his seat to yell at me.

‘This is it, pet. As far as we go.’

I’d missed my stop, but only by a couple of hundred yards. I stepped out and there was the smell of seaweed and mud, with a faint reek of fish in the background. The pavement was grainy from blown sand. I lifted the rucksack onto my back and walked away from the church. A gang of teenagers, skimpily dressed despite the weather, chased past me to catch the bus back into town. It revved like an old man coughing phlegm and drove off. The town was quiet.

I hadn’t told Jess when I was coming home. We weren’t family. There wasn’t that sort of obligation. I didn’t kid myself. She cared for all the dropouts and druggies who were dumped on her doorstep by social services. It was just that I’d stayed there longer, so she was used to me. And I was one of her first. I’d paid a month’s rent for my room in advance so she’d hold it for me. She had to live. I realized that in one sense the connection between us was financial, on her part at least. I liked to think that our friendship meant more to her than that, but it wasn’t something I could take for granted.

The stone house where she lived was at the end of an alley off the main street. There was a yard where the dustbins were kept and the washing line was strung, reached through a latched gate in a high wall. This was the back. The front faced the sea and you could only get there on foot along a promenade which the council had created in an attempt to tart up the town. There was a small garden at the front. It had a path of shingle and shells, a few windblown shrubs and a white bench with a view across the small harbour to the church. I’d done most of my reading for university finals there. I went in through the back, past the box of empty wine bottles ready for recycling, the piles of moulding newspapers tied up in string.

There was a light in the kitchen window. I eased the rucksack off my back and looked in. Jess was at the antique gas stove, stirring a pan. Broth, I thought, and felt hungry. She made good broth, with ham shanks and split peas and whatever vegetables she could pick up cheap at Blyth market. She was only supposed to give us a room and breakfast, but if anyone was around in the evenings she fed us, even if it was only bread and cheese or beans on toast. She was a short woman, squat, with most of the weight settled on her hips and bum. Today she was wearing jeans and a long silk tunic which I didn’t recognize. She must have been raiding the Oxfam shops again. Over it she wore a green canvas apron which I’d bought her to replace the horrible dinner-lady nylon overalls. She had her back to me but I could picture her face, crinkled now, but only round the eyes, so it looked as if she was laughing, and the biggest smile in Northumberland. Her hair was cropped short. If she was going out, she put on earrings. Today, although she was in, she was wearing long, silver fish. I’d given her those too. I wondered if she’d guessed that I was coming home.

I got closer to the window, intending to knock to surprise her, and then I saw she wasn’t alone in the kitchen. There was a man I didn’t know. He stood at the table, opening a bottle of wine. A new lodger, I thought. There was a spare room. Just before I’d gone on holiday a smack-head called Stuart had been sent down for thieving from cars. Jess had gone to court to speak up for him, but none of us were sorry. He’d been stealing from us and probably from her too. Jess had said perhaps his conviction was a good thing. It would give him a chance to get clean. Jess is still very innocent. I love that in her. We all do. We try to protect her.

The stranger would have been in his mid-forties, fifty perhaps. His head was almost bald, lumpy as if it had been roughly carved from wood. Usually we got kids to stay, but it wasn’t unknown to have someone older, often someone who’d done a long stretch in prison, if there was no vacancy in a probation hostel. I thought it was crazy, but Jess never asked what they’d done. I mean, we could have been sharing broth with a paedophile or a mad axe-man.

‘One new start,’ she’d say. ‘Everyone deserves that.’

I wondered sometimes if she was religious, if that was why she did it, but she never said. So far as I knew she never set foot inside a church. Certainly she never tried to convert us.

As I watched, the new man opened the bottle and put it on the table. He didn’t have that drawn, grey look of someone who’s been inside for a long time. His face seemed tough and wind-beaten, like those of the old men in the village who’d worked on boats all their lives. And he wasn’t frightened. He went up behind Jessie and put his hands on her shoulders,then slid them down past her waist to her hips. Carefully she leaned the wooden spoon against the side of the pan and turned to him, tilting her face to be kissed.

I felt sick. I suppose it must be like if you’re a teenager in a real family and you catch your parents making love. I wasn’t ready to share her.

I must have moved or made a noise, because she saw me. She spread her arms wide, a gesture as welcoming as the Angel of the North. I opened the door and went in, dragging the rucksack behind me. I stood there in the steamy kitchen, awkward and brittle and defensive as when I’d first arrived.

‘Take a seat, hinny, you’re blocking out the light.’ The same words as she’d used the first time when I’d been pushed through the door by the social worker. She winked to show she remembered that, even after all these years. So what else could I do but sit at the table and take a glass of wine and look pleased to see the new man in her life?

His name was Ray. He was a plumber. He’d come one evening to fix the boiler and they’d got talking and realized they’d been to school together. He’d been married and divorced when he was young and stupid. No kids, thank God. Jess had offered him a bite to eat, because she thought she was some sort of mother to the world. He’d taken her to the folk club in Cramlington, because that was what he was into. Traditional folk and brewing his own beer. Sad bastard. Since then, they’d seen each other every day.

Jess told me all this, her words spilling out so they hardly made sense. Ray didn’t say much. He was wearing a thick check shirt and brown corduroy trousers, heavy shoes like walkers wear when they’re not on a mountain. It was hard to imagine him young or stupid, anything other than a boring anorak who liked listening to hairy musicians singing with one finger in their ear. Jess could have done better. But why would she listen to me?

The letter came six weeks later.

I had been thinking a lot about Philip. Memories of the night in Marrakech distracted me when I read. Occasionally I believed I saw him in the street, just his back as he disappeared round a corner, the face of a driver as a car went past. But it never was him. I liked to think that he would come to find me, but I knew he had too much to lose.

It arrived on the last day of May. We’d had a week of hot, sunny weather. I was sitting on the bench in the front garden reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The dreamlike ramblings suited my mood. Jackie, the postman, dropped the envelope into my lap on his way to the house with the rest of the mail. I didn’t open it immediately. It was made of thick, cream paper. In embossed lettering on the back flap was printed SMITH AND HOWDON, SOLICITORS.

Oh, Christ, I thought, the lad in Blyth has gone through with his threat of claiming damages. The idea of reliving that experience in front of men in fancy dress made me want to throw up.

When I opened the envelope I was shaking. I pulled out one sheet of laser-printed cream paper.

Dear Miss Bartholomew

I regret to inform you that Philip Samson died on 27 May following a serious illness. His funeral will be held on 3 June at midday at St Bede’s Church, Wintrylaw. As a result of your meeting in Taroudannt, Morocco, he wished me to inform you of his death. There are other matters which I would prefer to discuss in person. If it would be convenient, perhaps we could do that following the funeral.

Yours,

Stuart Howdon

Solicitor

I stared for a moment at the thick cream paper, let my eyes run over the words without taking them in. Then I began to cry. The sun and the breeze from the sea dried the tears on my cheeks, so all that was left was the taste of salt.