Ghost Story Read online

  7

  All along I had been expecting this quest after an image or idea or ideal to end with a confrontation with myself – myself as a hare upon a steep Welsh hillside gazing toward myself as a boy, within a twenty years’ vacated farmyard. I did not foresee this journeying as a hare toward a hare’s longing; neither did I foresee companionship.

  OUR FATHER

  1

  As I was walking back from the tube station I allowed myself for the first time to think, ‘I’m going to be a father.’ It was an experimental thought – like trying on a pair of silly sunglasses when one has a longer than expected wait at the airport. Just as, then, one would have no intention of buying the glasses and having to accommodate one’s self-image to their silliness, so, now, I had no feeling of permanent personal investment in this sentence. I let it appear in my mind; I gave it a second in which to flash like a neon sign; I wanted to watch the afterimage gently fade: but I had chosen a wrong moment – I was halfway across the small side road that runs alongside the station, and although it would be making melodrama to write ‘I staggered’, I certainly felt a lurch inside of me – as if I were a small car and a suitcase full of gold bars (I was going to say bricks) had just been hefted into my boot. No-one looking on would have noticed anything in my walk more unusual than a slight extra give at the knees; the thighs and hips dropping an inch or two lower than one might have expected.

  2

  The weather the previous day, at almost exactly the same time, would have been more fitting for this burdensome moment: there had been an April shower, the sky looked orange, electric, as if shot through a filter for an apocalyptic car advertisement; the sun was low enough to shine out from beneath the cloud canopy, which was thick towards the West but thinned out to nothing and blueness towards the East – where Canary Wharf stood as a wedge of silver, looking its absolute, optimistic best. As I walked home, stopping briefly just past the chip shop to put my umbrella (my girlfriend Leigh’s, borrowed) up, I had thought: ‘There will be a rainbow here, somewhere.’ But it was only when I had reached the fourth-floor walkway outside our flat that I spotted it, to the right of Canary Wharf – which already looked duller, pewtery. Leigh was on the sofa, reading, and I called her out to come and look at the left foot of the rainbow – which was all that could be seen of it before it disappeared behind the side of our building. I told her how I had predicted it, and I felt glad to be ratified by her believing me.

  3

  On this, the following day, when I thought I’m going to be a father, the weather-moment was quite different, was sun-go-downy in a nondescript, no-season way. As soon as I was over the side road, more words came into my head – and over these ones I had far less control, they were not a neon sign, they were stray reflections of already emitted light. I thought: ‘Our father, who art…’ Which was shocking enough in itself. But very quickly, in parallel almost, I had two further thoughts; one was, ‘I’m thinking that I’m God,’ although this had been by a few instants preceded by, ‘I’m going to be God,’ which I suppressed by conversion before I’d even voiced it. The next thought was that ‘Our father’ might make a good title for something, for a story or a book. But this thought, too, had its almost-instant dismissal: Andrew O’Hagan had already I knew written a book called Our Fathers – it was a great title; it was his. Good luck to him. Bastard. I forgot this very quickly, in the turbulence of my reaction to the God-sentence; the second version of it was disturbing enough, but something of the first still echoed around. I thought. ‘Did I really think that?,’ or some self-dismissive, self-comforting version of that sentence. At the same time, I was aware that I had walked past the off-licence. Earlier in the day, during a phone conversation, Leigh had suggested that for dinner we have a curry delivered. My first instinct, drinkwise, was wine – red wine – but beer came in heavily an instant later; beer with curry, cold & gingery with throatburn, and the anticipated sensation of how quite fantastic and proper that would be. Concentrating on this – going into the shop, saying hello to whomever was behind the counter – this, too, would give me some means by which to suppress the internal fact that, a few steps back, I had thought that becoming a father would make me become God. As I pushed open the off-licence door, a few dregs of this thought trickled away; they were disturbed recapitulations, intended to make it easier for me to believe my own accustomed version of myself. ‘I meant God for someone: I didn’t mean God – I meant, that position of power.’ Behind the counter in the off-licence was a young black woman whom I’d dealt with only once before. My wonderings about how she found working there, racism in the area being fairly bad and the off-licence having been subject to armed-robbery a couple of weeks earlier – my wonderings effaced the God-sentence pretty well completely. I took the six cans of cold beer home to find Leigh sitting on the sofa, reading. ‘I bought you some beer,’ she said.

  4

  I should add something about the knee-dip in my walk as I had the God-thought crossing the road – that is how my father walks, though I only realised this fact in writing this. My father’s walk is magnificently ornate, it comprises so many separate micro-movements into the simple accomplishment of forwards-going: up, down, left, right, strange, charmed; lifting, swaying, swinging, lurching – I can’t possibly sort out the order in which these differences synthesize. I think my father is aware of the magnificence of his walk; I think this because sometimes, when we were children, he used to parody it for us – pretending to reel, drunk, or to be about to collapse under our huge weight whilst giving one of us a shoulder ride. It sounds ungenerous, but when you see my father walking away from you, he looks like an elephant doing a John Wayne impersonation. He looks, I’d say, like God must look, walking away from you.

  OUR TWO

  1

  I expect the text COME HOME, expect it every moment; and I know exactly what it would mean for us, for the next month, for years. So far there have been two (miscarriages, not texts) – I have names for them, nicknames: number one, November last year, is the Coil Baby and number two, January this, is the Shed Baby. Don’t worry, I will explain. But this is all they publicly qualify for – nicknames; and though it may seem an over-writery thing to say, there really is a problem expressing them – any part of them – when their existence is and was so much a matter of their failing to come to existence.

  2

  The Coil Baby we didn’t know we were having until we had already lost it. We were, in other words, bereaved before we knew we were or had been potentially parents – if that makes grammatical sense; I suspect it doesn’t, but it makes emotional sense. My girlfriend, Leigh, hadn’t had a period for longer than normal, but had been experiencing intermittent spotting. She thought there was something going on, so went to see the doctor. The consultation was on Thursday, and as part of it a routine pregnancy test was taken. Leigh’s doctor said that the non-occurrence of her period might have one of three explanations: the menopause, a pregnancy or an ectopic pregnancy. The reason for this latter was that Leigh had had a coil in for about three years. (Hence ‘Coil Baby’.) Leigh came back from the doctor’s relieved at having done something to lessen the anxiety she had been feeling. On Saturday, she began to bleed heavily: it didn’t seem like a normal period; it was painful – and the blood was not merely thick, it was substantial, clotted. Leigh was relieved that her periods had started again, assuming that’s what it was; she was also relieved that, if it had been an ectopic pregnancy, it wasn’t going to take and, possibly, cost her a Fallopian tube.

  3

  The following Thursday, Leigh returned to the doctor and was told, ‘You’re pregnant.’ ‘I don’t think so,’ Leigh said, and started to cry – when she could, she explained why. She came home and very quietly took me aside and told me (the cleaner was dusting in the living room). We went straight to St Thomas’s Hospital, and were seen by a gynaecologist within the hour. I went into the consulting room with them. Leigh answered ten or so questions, and an internal exam was
performed. Leigh lay back on the examining table; I sat by her side. The gynaecologist advised that Leigh have the coil removed – a course of action which would increase the chances of miscarriage occurring with this pregnancy (though we were in little doubt that the loss had already occurred) but would reduce the chances of one at a much later stage (if, that is, it was still viable). I held Leigh’s hand as she looked away and the gynaecologist sought inside her for the coil. Leigh had been told by a close female friend, Alex, that the removal of her coil had been the most physically painful experience of her life. Leigh had delayed having her own removed for fear this would be true in her case as well. In the event, it came out very easily and with relatively little pain. The gynaecologist placed it on a wodge of tissue paper, and placed this in turn upon an equipment trolley beside the examination table. I found myself able to look at it: ‘coil’ does not describe its appearance. Instead, it was like a stainless-steel version of some fairly elaborate bacterium: a long tight spiral for a body, a loop at one end and a spray of feelers at the other. I was reminded of the small metal whisk in our cutlery drawer; we use it mainly for vinaigrettes. Whilst the gynaecologist went off to do something, Leigh too had a close look at her coil; I didn’t ask whether she’d ever seen it before. It was bloody and slightly gooed. The gynaecologist was away for five, then ten minutes; Leigh wondered whether she had been meant to put her trousers on again. She had been wearing jeans, and didn’t want to be caught bum-naked. I locked the examining-room door while Leigh began to wiggle them on. When she was finished, I unlocked the door. Still the gynaecologist didn’t return. We were bored, and started to say things to make one another laugh. I can’t remember the jokes or even imagine what they might have been, they were I’m sure much more for the moment than the memory. I glanced round the room, fascinated as always by the Sharps’ Bin – intended for used syringes, scalpels, etc. A few months later I did an interview at the BBC, and was puzzled to see a Sharps’ Bin on the desk in the small, green cubby-hole of a studio – then I realised: some of the programme editing was still done by splicing tape, and all those razorblades had to be disposed of safely. At the time I did not, or did not allow myself to, remember the circumstances in which I’d last encountered Sharps’. The gynaecologist returned; we were free to go – Leigh would have to return to St Thomas’s for another pregnancy test, a third, the following week: to check her hormone levels were decreasing, and that there was no ectopic pregnancy, no pregnancy of any sort. We walked out of the hospital, mid-afternoon, both hungry: Waterloo offered pizza, sushi, noodles or bagels. We ate sushi.

  4

  The Shed Baby we knew we were having and therefore knew we were losing. Medical advice, after Leigh’s hormones had returned to normal, was that we should not try to conceive until a full menstrual cycle had come and gone. We waited the minimum time, having realised through our Coil Baby how much we both wanted a child. Her fertile period coincided with a holiday we had planned for a while: in Southwold, in an old fisherman’s shed called The Shed. (Hence ‘Shed Baby’.) It is a colourful place, decorated with jungle-print curtains and many many carved and painted wooden parrots and other birds of paradise. We came to conceive, and we did. When Leigh’s next period was one day, two days, three days late, we became excited, and finally on the fourth day we did the pregnancy test together. Clearblue – a horizontal blue line in the large square window and it’s a yes, nothing and it’s a no. I sat on the edge of the bath whilst Leigh peed over the absorbent end of the white plastic dipper. It looked like a novelty pen, without a nib (but not, the hateful punner in me thought, without a point). I went off to get something to time it with – 60 seconds the instructions said – but as I was coming back into the bathroom Leigh said, ‘It’s already there.’ We held it up to our eyes, disbelieving and overjoyed. Having not seen the square window in its blank state, I couldn’t be sure absolutely sure that the blue line really had appeared, hadn’t been there all along. We took photographs of ourselves gleefully holding up the white plastic stick of yes – photographs which, two months later, having forgotten they were on the start of that particular film in that particular camera, I had developed. Leigh has still to ask to see them, though I told her a few days after this that I’d got them back. Five days after the positive test, Leigh had confided in one good friend, Alex, and I’d inadvertently told the cleaner, by stupidly asking if she’d any experience of nannying.

  5

  That Friday we took the train to Sheffield, where we were to stay with some friends – M, D and their son, J. We didn’t tell them we were pregnant. On the Saturday we drove up and across the moors. We went through a village called Hope; I remembered Bill Clinton: ‘I still believe in a town called…’ There was another village the name of which I could find out but don’t want to with a castle above it. Leigh told me in the gift shop, which we had to pass through to get to the zigzag path leading up the steep grassy hillside to the castle. She was distraught but in control. ‘I’m bleeding,’ she said. Her voice thrilled with potential panic. She excused herself from the climb up to the castle, and went with M to a tea shoppe down in the village. I went through the stupidity of looking over ruined tower and walls and defences, of which I remember every detail. When I got to the tea shoppe, Leigh went again to the toilet, came back and confirmed to me what was happening. On the walk back to the car, I took M aside and explained. She phoned a doctor friend whilst Leigh and I, stepping out of the wind, did our best to comfort one another. The doctor recommended we go to the hospital, which we did. During the drive, the sun came out. This time we did not have an hour’s wait and we saw a nurse – a non-specialist. A young man, he spent most of the consultation speaking directly to the electronic multiple choice form on his computer. He wasn’t cruel or crass, merely unable to disguise how routine to him our little tragedy was. There was nothing to be done – nothing apart from ‘take it easy’ for a few days. Leigh and I went back to the house of our friends, and continued what had just become the worst, most embarrassing, most tender weekend. We had decided to stay, not take the train home. This time the pregnancy was more advanced, and the miscarriage was by that measure more physically extreme and emotionally distressing: we spent most of the afternoon in bed, and almost managed to sleep, then went out to dinner with M, D and J to celebrate D’s birthday at the best restaurant in Sheffield.

  TELLING

  Yesterday Alex guessed and Leigh confessed. It was a short-storyish detail which had given Alex her clue: at a friend’s thirtieth birthday party, as Leigh and I were getting up to leave Alex saw me put my hand on her tummy. So it wasn’t what we’d been worried about: that someone would notice Leigh wasn’t drinking. This afternoon, we spoke on the phone; Leigh in her office at work, me working at home. Leigh is going out this evening with some of her other female friends; we have decided she can tell them, too. She is sure they will ask; she is fairly sure some of them have guessed already. ‘I’m not very good at lying,’ she said. ‘How is it,’ I asked, ‘that other people are able to keep it secret until three months?’ I had become superstitious about three months: conventionality was there for a reason, I illogically reasoned – if we followed it, it would keep us safe. ‘I suppose,’ said Leigh, ‘because they haven’t gone round telling everyone how much they want to get pregnant for a year beforehand.’ I tell her that telling everybody is more her way of doing things than mine, and that she shouldn’t blame me if I am slower in telling my friends than she in telling hers. When she asks me for a reason why she shouldn’t, the only thing I can find – apart from superstition – is a wish that she keep as emotionally level as possible. ‘What,’ she said, ‘do you think it’s going to communicate to the baby?’ ‘It’s just,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t want you going on a real trampoline – I’m not sure about you going on an emotional one, either.’ What we have decided, in essence, is that this is going to be a public pregnancy (we are at seven weeks); if it is a miscarriage, too, it is going to be a public miscarriage. I put dow
n the phone and went back to writing. We had also decided, whilst on the phone, not to tell our parents yet. It is the Antiques Fair at Battersea this week and weekend; we could go and tell my parents (who have a stall of French provincial furniture). But it was at the last fair that I told my father of our first miscarriage, even though we’d already done a test and knew Leigh was pregnant for a second time. Within a week she wasn’t, and there was more telling to be done. A very small part of the time – or perhaps, put better, in a small sick part of me – I hope something does go wrong. Firstly, that appeals to the rational side of me: miscarriage is not treated as repeat miscarriage until the third occurrence. If this pregnancy terminated, there would be hospital visits, tests, explanations, recommendations – possibly, or possibly we would just be told to go away and try again in loving hope. My rôle in all this would be simple, definite. Instead it feels as if I have been asked to keep my fingers crossed for nine months. My fingers are already starting to hurt: I’m worried they won’t ever go back into shape again. Secondly, it appeals to the irrational side of me: conforming to my worst fears. I think bad things, I write them, and sometimes after I’ve written them they happen. I am terrified not only of a baby carried to term but of a baby born deformed. During pregnancy, one attracts horror stories; tragedies seem to have occurred just to be brought to your attention. I heard recently of a woman who at six or seven months learnt that her foetus had died, and yet there was nothing for her to do at such a late stage but carry it dead to full term. This woman went to work, all her colleagues knew. How must it have been for her, chatting during coffee break? How must it have been for them, to share in a work situation something that tragic? Perhaps this didn’t happen, was just an urban myth. I think about Down’s Syndrome and about the character in Finding Myself, Fleur, who has a foetus aborted because the test for Down’s comes up positive. What else am I left with but superstition? Which is why the protection of three months before telling has become so important: it’s all that I could do.