“Do your mam and dad know?” I asked Cathleen.
She shook her head.
“Dad’s at work,” she said. “Mam’s doing some Christmas shopping.”
“Does he talk?” I said.
“We don’t know.”
God smiled. He picked a stone up from the edge of the pond. He showed it in his hand, closed his hand then opened it again and the stone had gone. Then he took the same stone out of his left ear and put it back by the pond again. Margaret clapped. God reached into the snow, found a stick, snapped it and put it back together again. He took another stick as long as his arm and opened his mouth and swallowed it and drew it out again.
He smiled and giggled, and the girls clapped.
I saw tears in Cathleen’s eyes.
She clasped her hands tight and leant right towards God.
“Please, Lord,” she said.
He turned his face towards her. She chewed her lips.
“I see your powers, Lord,” she whispered. “Please, Lord, could you possibly bring Jasper back to us?”
God smiled. He reached up, plucked something from the empty air, then showed a handful of tiny silver coins to us. He dropped them into Margaret’s hands.
“Please,” Cathleen begged. “Please. I know you can.”
He formed a little creature from a handful of snow, tossed it up into the air and off it flew, a silver bird. He smiled at Cathleen. He stretched and yawned. He rested his hands on his pot belly and turned his face towards the sun.
Everything was still. There were streaks of pink in the blue sky. The air shimmered, the snow and ice glowed. I heard the trumpet again, high-pitched and far away. God heard it too. He tilted his head, listened and smiled. There was a gate at the back of Cathleen’s garden that led to a park and then to the playing fields. Kids were yelling out there. There were mad cries from the lads as a goal was scored.
“Yes! It’s in! Yeeeees!”
I looked at God and knew he wasn’t God. His clothes were faded and patched. His boots were held together with string. His face was filthy. He looked like he’d walked miles. He was just some weird bloke that’d wandered in from the park for a nap in the shade.
I felt so stupid. I should have gone and played football. I should have gone to Newcastle on my own.
“We should tell somebody about him,” I said.
“But who?” said Mary.
“Father O’Mahoney?” said Margaret. “Or the Pope, maybe?”
“No!” said Cathleen. “He came to my garden. He came just for us. Can you, Lord? Please, Lord. Please bring Jasper back.”
I was stuck. I couldn’t just clear off and leave them here with him.
“When’s your mam coming back?” I said to Cathleen.
She just kept on staring at God.
God brushed the snow away from the ice at the edges of the pond. We saw goldfish shining in the depths. He broke the ice and dipped his hand in and let water trickle from his hand across his brow. Then he held his hand towards us. Cathleen reached out. She caught some drops and touched them to her own brow. God smiled at her. He opened his mouth, took three goldfish out of it, showed them to us and slid them gently down into the water, where they flickered and flashed.
“Will you sign my book?” I said.
God raised his eyebrows.
“They’re all footballers in here,” I said. “They play for Newcastle. But there’s an empty page you could use.”
I knelt down beside him. He smelt spicy and sweet, like the stuff Mam puts into the Christmas pudding.
I opened the book and God’s eyes widened.
“They’re footballers,” I said.
God laughed softly and pointed to Alan.
“That’s Alan Suddick, God,” I said. “He’s brilliant! And so’s Dave Hilley. Look, that’s him scoring the winner against Swansea.”
God ran his fingers over Alan’s face, over Dave’s face. He smiled, as if he knew them well.
I showed him where it said To Davie. Best wishes, Dave Hilley.
“That’s how the footballers do it,” I said. “Will you write that? And will you sign it from God.”
I handed him the new biro. He smiled as he clicked the point in and out and in and out. He held it to his ear to listen to the clicks. He ran his fingers across the page in the book as if he loved the feel of it. He listened to the distant trumpet for a moment. Then he licked his lips and started to copy: To Davie. Best wishes. He concentrated hard, but he couldn’t hold the pen properly, and his writing was all uneven and clumsy. He looked at what he’d written. It looked like:
He shrugged, as if to say he was sorry but it was the best he could do.
“That’s great, Lord,” I said. “Thank you. Will you put your name now, please?”
He put the pen on the page again. I held his cold, smooth hand this time. I guided him as he wrote, God.
I read the words out loud. God giggled. I giggled with him.
“Now you’re there in the book with Alan and Dave,” I said.
Cathleen was furious. She glared at Mary and Margaret.
“I hope you two aren’t going to ask for something now!” she whispered. “This is my garden!”
Mary and Margaret shook their heads.
“Good,” said Cathleen. “Please, God. Please!”
I sighed. She might as well ask Alan or Dave to bring her dog back. I looked at a photo of Alan leaping over a clumsy defender. I looked at Dave balancing the ball on his knee. I closed my eyes and imagined kneeling before them on the training ground. Please, Alan. Please, Dave. Please bring Jasper back again.
I thought of Jasper. He was an ordinary little black-and-white dog. A jumpy, yappy, happy thing, part spaniel, part poodle, part something else. He’d come from a big litter from somewhere on Brettanby Road. He was just a few years old, but some disease got into him and there was no saving him. Mr Watkinson, the vet in Felling Square, had put him down. I’d seen Cathleen and her mam bringing him back in a brown shopping bag. Mary and Margaret had seen Cathleen’s dad digging his grave. Sometimes at night I thought of him lying there, his little body turning, like all bodies, to dust, to earth.
God smiled at Cathleen. There was great kindness in his eyes. He stood up and rubbed his knees and his back as if they were aching. He picked up his blanket and put it over his shoulder. He stretched and yawned. He stroked his beard, like he was wondering about something, then put his hand deep into his robes and took out a little box. There was a picture of a beautiful faraway mountainous place on it. He opened it, and there were sweets inside. He held them out to us. They were delicious, soft and mysteriously sweet, and dusted with the finest sugar.
We licked our lips at their deliciousness.
“They’re lovely, God!” said Mary.
He put the whole box into her hands. Then he raised his hand as if in farewell.
“But where are you going?” asked Cathleen.
“Aaaaah,” said God.
It was the first thing we’d heard him say.
“And what about Jasper?” said Cathleen.
“Aaaaah,” he said again, but much more sadly.
She jabbed her finger towards the earth.
“He’s down there in the hard cold ground!” she said. “And I’ve been praying to you and praying to you and praying to you!”
God looked down at the earth beside the pond. He spread his hands and closed his eyes. He squeezed Cathleen gently on the shoulder, then he just turned and walked through the gate into the park.
He walked slowly and easily, rocking gently from side to side. He walked across the playing fields. Children ran to him across the ice and snow. He kept reaching into his robes, taking things out, giving them to the children.
Cathleen stamped her foot.
“See? Every single person gets something!” she said. “You get silver coins, you get sweets, you get his autograph, they get what he’s giving them. And what do I get? Absolutely nothing!”
She
yelled after God.
“What about Jasper? What about my dog?”
God didn’t turn.
“You don’t care!” she yelled. “I don’t believe in you!”
He hesitated, but he didn’t turn.
Cathleen stamped again then realized she was stamping right on top of Jasper. It just made her cry some more.
“Oh!” she yelled. “Why don’t all you silly people just go home?”
But we didn’t. We shared the sweets. I wished I had a picture of God to go with his autograph.
Someone thumped the far-off drum.
After a while I said, “It wasn’t really God, you know.”
Cathleen stamped her feet again. She raised her fists in the air.
“I know that!” she said. “Do you think I don’t know that?”
I kept thinking I should go, but I didn’t. I bet Tex has had a miraculous recovery, I thought. I bet he’s out playing football right now.
“Was it not God, Mary?” whispered Margaret.
Mary shook her head.
“No. Of course not. Shh.”
The sun fell lower and the sky above Felling began to glow red and gold.
Soon, Cathleen’s mam came home, loaded down with shopping bags.
“Hello, everybody,” she said. “And Davie as well! Hello, stranger.”
She handed custard creams around and took a leaflet from her handbag.
“Town’s full of funny folk giving these out,” she said. “Look what’s on its way.”
A circus. There were pictures of a big top, a pony, a tiger, a girl swinging on a trapeze.
And on the back there it was, a picture of God in his orange robes and boots and with his great white beard.
Margaret gasped. Cathleen put her tongue out at me. She flicked some crumbs from her lips. I was already imagining the picture stuck in my book close to the pictures of Dave and Alan. Maybe I could find Swami again and get him to sign it with his real name.
“Is everything all right, love?” said Mrs Kelly to Cathleen.
“Yes!” snapped Cathleen.
Mrs Kelly smiled. She put her arm around Cathleen. The trumpet and drum echoed through the late afternoon air.
“Oh, love,” she said softly. “Jasper loved you very much, you know.”
Mrs Kelly looked me in the eye and I knew she wanted us to leave.
“Come on,” I said to my sisters, and we all got up.
We were heading down by the side of the house when the barking started.
“What’s that?” said Mary.
“It’s Jasper!” gasped Margaret.
“Don’t be silly,” I said.
But we all looked back. The barking came from the other side of the gate into the park. We could hear paws scratching and scratching there. We could hear the dog flinging itself against the gate. We stepped back into the garden.
“Somebody sounds very excited,” said Mrs Kelly.
The dog barked and yapped and yelped.
“Go away!” she said, but it barked and barked.
“Do we dare to let it in?” she said.
Margaret clasped her hands together. She closed her eyes tight and tilted her face towards the sky.
“I’ll go,” said Cathleen at last. “I’m the one that’s good with dogs, aren’t I?”
She wiped the tears from her eyes with her sleeve. She went to the gate. She stood on tiptoes and looked over it.
“Oh!” she cried.
She looked back at us with amazement in her eyes. Then turned to the dog again.
“Oh, welcome home!” she cried.
And she opened the gate and the little yappy black-and-white dog raced in.
“Ididn’t think this would turn out to be a ghost story. I knew it’d be a tale about an outsider, a boy separated from other kids by his appearance, by his background, by what others took to be his stupidity. I knew he’d be nicknamed ‘The Missing Link’ and he’d go through a lot of trouble. Once the story got going, it developed its own momentum and the ending seemed inevitable.
Back then, everyone took the 11-plus exam. If you passed, you went to grammar school. If you didn’t, you were classed as a failure and you went to secondary modern. I had lots of friends and relatives who didn’t pass – good, decent, bright boys and girls who at the age of eleven were already classed as failures, whose whole lives would be affected by this. And for some of them it was family circumstances, deprivation, poverty or illness that robbed them of this chance.
I passed and went to a Catholic grammar school in Hebburn, three miles downriver from Felling.
The boys in the story know they’re supposed to feel clever, but they often don’t. They try to adopt a pose of superiority, but it isn’t tempered by compassion. Their toughness is a sham. As the narrator says, bullying was commonplace back then. Kids who were bullied were expected to toughen up, to laugh it off, or to just put up with it. The ones who showed signs of weakness were bullied even more.
There was always a tension between education and religion. The more you learned and the more you read and the more you matured, the more you started to question and to doubt. You began to doubt both the scary things (dominated by Satan, his devils and Hell) and the comforting things (dominated by Jesus, his angels and Heaven). This was scary indeed, because you were told that doubt was a dangerous thing. It might lead you from the one true path. It was scary even to admit to doubt. It was strange. We were learning about the universe, evolution, the human mind. How did such things tie in with what we were told in church or in our RE lessons? What did the Hail Mary mean to us, modern adolescents in a modern world?
But the faith still held us. We went to Mass and communion and confession. We went along to services (like the novena services in the story) that promised to save our souls. Yes, we were tempted to say it was all a lot of nonsense, but we didn’t dare. As the boys in the story know, and as the Hail Mary emphasizes, the hour of death is mightily important. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death… Will you be in a state of grace? Will you be prepared for Final Judgment? Will a priest be near by to hear your last confession? Our childhoods and adolescence were laced with such questions.
In that world, bullying and tormenting a boy like Christopher McNally was a far lesser sin than, say, missing Sunday Mass or taking God’s name in vain. Our duties to retain the faith and to please and obey God were much more important than our duty to love and to care for our fellow creatures.
I wrote this story for an evening of ghost story readings at the Lit & Phil in Newcastle. (Its full name is the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne.) This is a wonderful Georgian library near the middle of town, with high, bright book-filled rooms on the ground floor and appropriately spooky rooms below. It is democratic and open to everyone, founded on the belief that every single one of us is a worthwhile citizen, that each of us can read, learn, flourish and play an active part in our amazing world. It’s where I often go to write. It’s where I’ve just written this.
It started when they came to town. There were just two of them, McNally and his mother. They seemed to come from nowhere, but it turned out they harked from West Ham, West Bromwich, somewhere like that. The story was, there’d been some trouble – nobody was sure what – and they were looking for a fresh start.
They came to Jonadab. It was a half-abandoned place down by the Tyne: all knocked-down streets and shuttered shops and boarded houses. It was the time of the slum clearances, families getting shifted from the old Victorian terraces and into the new pebbledashed estates further up the hill. Jonadab was almost gone. There were just a few families waiting to get re-housed. The McNallys would have to wait their turn. They’d be the last in line.
The mother was a little hunch-shouldered, weary-looking woman with the scar of some old wound on her face. She got work at Swan Hunter’s shipyard: a cleaner, the lowest of the low, sweeping out the ships after the caulkers and welders and burners, mo
pping out the bogs.
There must’ve been a dad at one time, but there was no sign of him.
“He must have upped and offed,” said my mate Nixon. “Or slit his wrists more likely. And who could bliddy blame him? A woman like that. A son like that. Bliddy Hell. Just imagine it.”
We couldn’t believe it when the lad arrived at school. The school was St Aidan’s, a grammar school. We’d all passed the 11-plus. We were the bright ones, we were the chosen few. And now here came this ugly, stupid-looking thing. He was big and lumpy. Bulbous eyes. There was always dribble on his chin. He’d got a uniform from somewhere: crumpled trousers, worn-down shoes, a tight and tatty, worn-out blazer with the school badge peeling from the pocket. He stank, of course. And that voice! It was so weird and ugly he hardly dared to use it: stupid-sounding, thick and wet, half a grunt and half a whine, whistly and wobbly.
“Jesus bliddy Christ,” said Nixon in disgust. “How the hell did a thing like that get let into a place like this?”
We’d started doing science, of course. We’d already found out about evolution. We loved the idea that we were all descended from apes, that everything had led to us, to clever Homo sapiens; that we were striding forward together into a bright new world. And now here was Christopher McNally. We took one look at him and pretty soon we were hooting and grunting. We were dangling our fists down to the ground and pretending to be throwbacks or thick.
I was the one who came up with his name. It was during English. We were writing about Shakespeare or somebody like that. I looked across and saw McNally dribbling, saw the way he clutched the pen with his clumsy fingers, the way his head rocked as he wrote. He was hardly human. I gagged, and nearly retched.
I nudged Nixon.
“It’s him,” I whispered.
“Who?” said McNally.
I stifled my sniggers. I nodded towards McNally.
“The Missing Link,” I said. “We’ve found the Missing Link at last.”
From then on, we were poking him with sticks, chucking bananas at him. The size of him, he could’ve taken any of us, but he never lifted a finger, and never said a word.
“It’s like he thinks he deserves it,” Nixon said.