The Ghost Behind the Wall

  Around and around the apartment he went, searching for the key that wasn’t there, until everything was in complete chaos and he was utterly exhausted. He forgot all about the herring and his plans for cakes. He fed himself on a bag of currants and some walnuts he found on the floor and went to sleep without undressing, lying on a heap of clothes he’d emptied out of his drawers on top of the bed. He woke up in the middle of the night hot and sweaty and sticky, with his throat as dry as a piece of paper.

  6

  The Social Worker

  Two middle-aged women were hurrying along, rattling their shoes in the halls of Mahogany Villas. They were on business.

  “The worst thing is how distressed the poor old things get,” said Alison Grey, the social worker. “Sometimes I think it’s even worse at this stage, when they still know that something’s gone wrong.”

  “I had an old gentleman who thought he was being haunted,” said the other, an older woman called Sis Parkinson. “His name was Angel Fellman and he once sailed around the world in a tall ship. He was a deckhand. Very upright, very proud and clean, but he used to go through the rubbish in the morning, looking for something he thought he’d lost, and then forget all about it later on in the day. So he’d go out and come back in and it looked to him as if a stranger had come in and strewn rubbish all over his house. He used to say, it was like being haunted by yourself.”

  “I never know what to say to them,” said Alison Grey. “It isn’t as though you can tell them it’s going to get better. It’s not.”

  “I had a wonderful old lady called Thelma Racket who used to be a psychiatrist, and she knew exactly what was happening to her. She hated it. She used to say, ‘I never thought this would happen to me.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘who does, Mrs. Racket?’ She had a great sense of humor, but she used to forget which jokes she’d already told me. She was a cyclist when she was younger, she’d even had a unicycle, and every single time I went to care for her she said, ‘I used to be a trick cyclist and now I’m turning into a cycle path.’”

  “What?” said Alison.

  “Trick cyclist, psychiatrist. Cycle path, psychopath.”

  “Oh, yes!” Alison giggled. “Very good.”

  “Not when you’ve heard it a few hundred times,” said Sis.

  “It’s so distressing when you see their personality slowly disappearing like that!”

  “What’s Mr. Alveston like?”

  “Oh, very nice, very good. He’ll be no trouble.”

  “But what’s he like?”

  “Well, a bit crazy, really.”

  Sis tutted. Alison was a nice enough woman, but she was so vague. She’d find out for herself about Robert Alveston, though, because now they had arrived at the door and knocked. It was opened by an old gentleman with untidy white hair and no teeth in. Robert had cleaned himself up and done some tidying around the apartment, but the distress of finding his home in such a state had left him half in, half out of the crazies. He’d forgotten about Alison bringing a cleaner to meet him, but he was pleased to see them anyway. He smiled happily at them.

  “Ladies!” he exclaimed.

  “This is Mrs. Parkinson, come to clean for you,” said Alison.

  “Oh, dear.” Robert turned around to glance into his rooms. “I’m not ready for you yet.”

  “So pleased to meet you,” said Sis, grabbing his hand and shaking it.

  Courteously, the old chap bowed his head. “Delighted,” he said. “Do come in and please excuse the mess.”

  The two women stepped inside and Sis cast an expert eye over the state of the place. She’d seen worse. Someone had been at it with a vacuum recently. A bit grubby, but then, old people’s houses were often like that. They didn’t have the eyesight for the dirt. The only bad thing was a fishy smell, which she was too polite to mention.

  “This won’t take a minute; it’s already almost done,” she exclaimed.

  Mr. Alveston smiled. “Is it? I must have cleaned it up again. Will you have a cup of tea?”

  “Ooh, yes, please. Tea, biscuit, chat, then work, what do you say?”

  “He can provide the chat, all right,” said Alison. “You’ll have to watch him—he’s a bit cheeky, this one.”

  “But I’m over ninety years old!” said Mr. Alveston. And he grinned from ear to ear. He was just delighted with the idea that he was still a bit cheeky.

  Sis went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. Alison stood with her papers wrapped in her arms, having a quick chat before she left. Sis was gorgeous. She obviously felt that her job was as much to provide a bit of company for the old things as well as help about the house, and she seemed to like her work, too.

  Robert and Sis sat down over the table with tea and chocolate biscuits and told each other about themselves.

  Sis came from a large family in which all the women turned out to be great strong things, able to talk one hind leg off a donkey and pull the other off with their bare hands. They lived like tornadoes and died before they reached seventy-five. The men who married these mighty women were all weeds who got bossed about all their lives, went completely senile in their old age, and then carried on to live to enormous ages—ninety-odd in most cases.

  Robert told her it was sheer cunning. The men were just letting the women do all the work. Sis said in that case, they paid for their laziness in the end by going crazy.

  Robert explained how he had come to end up here in an apartment in Kentish Town, and all alone. He spread his hands and smiled tiredly. “It’s like some sort of an accident,” he said. “But I can’t complain. I’ve had a wonderful life, but now, well, I’m just waiting to leave it, really.”

  “Now, don’t talk like that!” insisted Sis.

  “Oh, I suppose you think I’m feeling sorry for myself, but I’m not. I’m a very old man and there comes a time, with the best will in the world, when you get tired and you just want to stop. There’s nothing wrong with that. Everyone has their time to die, it comes to us all, and I’ve started to look forward to it, that’s all. The only problem is, I don’t know how to do it. Do you understand, Mrs. Parkinson?”

  “Call me Sis,” said Sis. She didn’t answer. She did understand, and she thought it was wonderful that Mr. Alveston thought like that. But like a lot of people, she found it very hard to talk about such things.

  “You’d feel better if you had your family and friends with you,” she said. “It sounds to me as if you moved around too much in your life.” She told him a story about her cousin who had moved around all over the place, and when her daughter got married, they only had about forty people at the wedding. “Now, me, I’ve lived here all my life and when my daughter got married, we had over THREE HUNDRED GUESTS!” she boasted. She was so pleased with herself that she got up and did a bit of excited dusting before she sat down again.

  “Well, I always planned on ending my days here in London, but it’s too fast for me now,” said Mr. Alveston. “So many people rushing about. I should have stayed in Paris.”

  “Why don’t you move back?”

  “Too old. And it’s too late. I’ve been here five years, expecting it to get better, but it hasn’t. Sad, isn’t it?”

  Yes, it was sad, agreed Sis. She looked at him over the top of her glasses. “So how are you managing? You seem very able. Do you have many lapses?”

  Robert blushed gently and admitted that yes, he did have lapses. “I came back in just yesterday and the whole place was all topsy-turvy. It looked like some naughty boy had been playing tricks on me and I have no memory at all of having done it.”

  “Does it happen often?”

  “More often lately,” he confessed miserably. “The awful thing is, you know you’re never going to get any better.”

  “But that doesn’t mean to say it’s going to get worse,” said Sis.

  “In my case, I’m afraid it is.”

  “Oh, you’ll be all right!” exclaimed Sis, but Robert sighed and shook his head.

  “Another t
hing that I hate,” he said, “is that I’m losing my memories.”

  “You mean, you’re losing your memory?”

  “I mean what I say—my memories. Oh, I’m losing my memory as well; that’s been going on for ages. I can’t remember where I put things and so on. But this is different. I do mean memories. Things that happened long ago. Listen: I can’t remember who I was when I was a boy.” And he looked at her as if he was telling her something of great importance.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” said Sis carefully.

  “I can’t remember who I was! I can’t remember my own childhood. Anything! Do you know, I used to spend ages sitting in my chair, dreaming about when I was a lad. But now all my childhood memories are gone. I can still remember what happened to me when I was grown up. I can remember it like it happened yesterday. But my childhood … swish! Gone! Kaput!”

  “And when did this happen?” asked Sis.

  “Five weeks on Thursday,” said the old man, with great certainty.

  Sis smiled. Mr. Alveston was lovely! He was batty, of course—people didn’t lose their memories like that—but it was a strange and beautiful battiness and she loved him for it.

  “Your memories will come home,” she said, “bringing their tails behind them.”

  Robert smiled at her. He wasn’t being batty. He was telling her the exact and perfect truth. He had lost all his memories of his childhood on the same day and hour and second that he had woken up and seen that strange boy on the floor, who had leapt up into the ventilation grille like a cat. He was only batty enough not to realize how odd it all was.

  Sis got up and began to clean the apartment easily with great swooping motions of her muscular arms, while Robert sat on the sofa and watched her, admiring her youth, beauty, and strength. In fact, Sis was neither young nor beautiful, unless you were over ninety years old. But she was certainly strong. She could lift up her husband with one arm and toss pancakes with the other without even sweating.

  “Oh, I do like watching people work,” teased Mr. Alveston, sitting comfortably in a chair and watching her.

  “So long as it’s just the work you’re watching,” said Sis.

  “But I’m more than ninety years old!” he said again. He pretended to try and peer up her skirt and Sis said, “It’s a good job I put clean underpants on this morning, you old goat.”

  And Mr. Alveston said, “Yes, red ones, I see.” Which made Sis blush, and that made him blush and think he’d overstepped the mark. He went to sit in the bedroom while she finished.

  As she’d said, Sis didn’t take long. The only unpleasant thing she had to deal with was an old herring that had fallen down the back of the settee, which explained the funny smell. That was nothing. Some of the other places she had to clean had to be seen to be believed.

  Afterward Sis asked Robert if he wanted anything from the shops, but he said he liked to go for himself.

  “It’s on my way to my other old gentleman, if it’s the supermarket you’re going to. We could go together,” she offered. So he got his coat while Sis had a wash and then the two of them, arm in arm and both of them chattering away like squirrels in a tree, left the apartment and made their way downstairs.

  * * *

  For a few minutes, the apartment was quiet. Then there was a slight scratching noise. The noise got louder, louder. It seemed to be coming from behind the wall. Then quite suddenly a grubby face appeared at the ventilation grille over the armchair.

  David had heard everything. He’d been hiding around the corner in the shafts, listening. Now he knew what it meant when his father said that the poor old man was a bit senile. He felt bad about having messed up his place so badly. Poor old man! David had been stupid and cruel, and now he regretted it.

  But David shouldn’t have come so close to the apartment if he wanted to keep it safe from harm. His presence in the ducts had woken up something else that wasn’t at all sorry. As he lay there on his stomach, peering out from behind the grille, he heard something rattling in the kitchen. Quickly David began to creep backward, but it was already too late.

  The noise stopped. David felt, rather than heard, a voice in his head. He couldn’t quite make it out, so he stopped to listen, and then he heard it, out loud this time. It was as clear as a bell. It was coming from the kitchen.

  “Come on!” it said. “Let’s wreck it!”

  It was the ghost. David froze. He was scared now—not of what it would do to him, but of what it would do to Mr. Alveston’s apartment. In the kitchen the rattling began again, louder this time. Things began to fall and break. Then, before his eyes, as he stared at the square of the room framed by the grille, another picture fell off the wall in front of him.

  “Don’t—stop it!” cried David. He didn’t want this to happen! He crawled forward up to the vent, but as he got close a wind of destruction swept around the walls. Pictures fell off one after the other—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. They cracked as they hit the ground, and a couple of them cracked again as a ghostly foot stamped down on them.

  “Stop!” David cried again. He pushed the grille sideways and began to climb down. The breaking stopped as he stood up on the floor and he caught sight of the ghost boy in a corner. The boy’s face was twisted with rage; his hands were clenched into fists.

  “Let’s wreck it!” he screamed.

  “Shut up! We’ll be heard!” hissed David. He ran through into the kitchen. The fridge door hung open with a wreckage of food tumbling out of it—milk, butter, a little gravy boat with hard white sauce inside, saucers of leftovers, bits of cheese, everything. As he stood and watched, a trickle of milk began to pour itself onto the floor.

  David began to put everything back upright, but behind him he heard the tornado start up again. He ran through into the other room in time to see objects flying off the mantelpiece and smashing on the floor.

  “Stop it!” he shouted. “What’s wrong? Stop it, please stop it!” he yelled.

  He couldn’t see much of the boy, who seemed to emerge like a blur out of the air here and there around the room, but he caught a couple of good looks at his face. He had a long face, pale as paper. His mouth was open. His body seemed to be made out of a furious, tearing wind. His expression was poisonous.

  “I hate him!” cried the boy. “I hate him!” His face dissolved into tears, and a flurry of destruction whirled around the apartment, breaking out in several places at the same time. David stared in horror at the ornaments breaking and books flying off the walls. The music box cracked down one side and he could see the mechanism glinting dully within. It began to play a horrible, cracked tune.

  “Stop it! Just stop!” he shrieked once more. But there was nothing he could do. In tears now, David climbed back into the ducts and crawled back home as fast as he could. Behind him, the ghost screamed at him to come back and play.

  “Don’t go, don’t go!” it screamed. “If you go, I’ll get you!” David clenched his teeth and banged forward as fast as he could. A wind began to blow toward him up the ducts, a blast of hot, angry air. Suddenly he was caught in a flurry of papers and photographs that had blown out of the old man’s apartment after him. They batted in his face, flicked against his eye—and then he felt a cold, hard hand grab him by the ankle and squeeze until he thought his bones would snap or that the skin would just peel off. With a great push, David fell forward into the duct down toward his own floor. His foot was torn out of the icy grip and he hit the board like a brick. Straightaway he could hear the ghost crashing down right behind him, screaming like a baby and banging like a huge fierce dog in the ducts.

  “Don’t you leave me! Don’t you leave me! I’ll get you for this!” it howled. David fell out of the wall into his own apartment, jumped straight back up, and fitted the grille back onto the wall with fumbling fingers. For one dreadful second he saw the face of the ghost boy behind it, twisted with rage like a ball of crumpled paper, its teeth like rows of little shining tusks biting at the grille, b
efore it disappeared like dust before his eyes.

  * * *

  When he got home an hour or so later on, Mr. Alveston was amazed and disgusted. Sis had cleaned up his flat! He’d been there with her when she’d done it! And now look! He’d never seen such a mess.

  He must have had another one of his lapses. But when? There hadn’t been time. He’d been out, for heaven’s sake! Was it possible that he’d gone shopping, come home, done all this, and then gone out again just so he could come back and disgust himself like this? It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As soon as everything was all cleaned and polished, he’d crept around behind his own back and broken everything he could lay his hands on. He could tell it was he who’d done it because he’d picked on all his most precious things—his photographs of Tulip and his wife Greta from Germany and his children—everything that held the fondest memories. No one else would know which things to go for to hurt him the most.

  Was he turning into a horrible, stupid old man who didn’t care about anything? It was just as if he was being haunted by his own mind. What on earth would Sis say if she knew?

  He went to the kitchen and saw the fridge, the mess tumbling out of it as if it had been sick. It was horrible, but another odd thing about it was that he’d started to tidy up again. There were wipe marks on the floor and some of the spilled things had been stood back up the right way. He must be mad!

  Mr. Alveston got a cloth, got down to the floor, and started to wipe up the mess. Halfway through he suddenly got up on his knees and exclaimed, “But I was out!”

  But if not him, who? Even though he knew that you shouldn’t start believing your own fantasies, he got up and started wandering around the apartment, looking for clues to prove that someone else was doing these awful things. But, of course, he found nothing.

  7

  A Conversation with the Ghost