Giving up the Ghost: A memoir. Hilary Mantel
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as if some tiny animal has nibbled it. I am fond of the pianos, their two different voices and smells: the deep, disdainful, private aroma of their wood. Nobody has told me yet that I am disastrously unmusical and had better leave the pianos alone. If someone will play I will stand at the side with my fingers on the wood and feel the resonance, the piano breathing and purring like a cat. I do not know a cat. Tibby is Mrs Clayton’s cat. He lives at no. 60, and flees along the wall. I do not know him. He is a Protestant cat. George Clayton is the first in the yard to rise in the morning, winter and summer long before dawn, treading from his house to the lavatory. I see him in the afternoon, coming home in broad day: a bulky figure in blue overalls, with a bulky blinkered head. One day he dies. Mrs Clayton, people say, is ‘taken to Macclesfield’: that is to say, she is mad. When she returns, the cat Tibby still flees along the wall. Instead of George, Mrs Clayton gets a blunt-headed dog called Shula. The dog’s kennel name, she tells me, is Shula Ballerina. It snaps and snarls and hurtles about the backyard. This does not prevent her going mad again.
In no. 58, Annie Connor starts a game. You go into a corner of the room. She into another. You both shout, very loud:
The wind blows east,
The wind blows west,
The wind blows o’er yon cuckoo’s nest.
Where is he
That has to go
Over yonder fields?
Hi Ho!
Then you just run about the room, screaming. So does she.
Two things not to believe: the monkey. People who say, ‘I have eyes in the back of my head.’
I sit on the stairs, which are steep, box-like, dark. I think I am going to die. I have breathed in a housefly, I think I have. The fly was in the room and my mouth open because I was putting into it a sweet. Then the fly was nowhere to be seen. It manifests now as a tickling and scraping on the inside of my throat, the side of my throat that’s nearest to the kitchen wall. I sit with my head down and my arms on my knees. Flies are universally condemned and said to be laden with filth, crawling with germs, therefore what more sure way to die than swallow or inhale one? There is another possibility, which I turn and examine in my brain: perhaps the tickling in my throat is the sweet itself, which is a green sweet from a box of assorted candy called Weekend. Probably I shouldn’t have eaten this one, but a jelly kind or fudge, more suitable to a child, and if I had hesitated and said I want that marzipan someone would have said ‘That’s bad for you,’ but now I’m on the stairs not knowing whether it’s green sweet or fly. The fear of death stirs slowly within my chest cavity, like a stewpot lazily bubbling. I feel sorrow; I am going to miss seeing my grandparents and everyone else I know. I wonder whether I should mention the fact that I am dying, either from a fly or a green sweet. I decide to keep it to myself, as there won’t be anything anyone can do. It will be kinder for them if they don’t know; but I feel lonely, here on the stairs with my future shortening. I curse the moment I opened my mouth, and let the fly in. There is a rasping, tickling sensation deep in my throat, which I think is the fly rubbing its hands together. I begin to wonder how long it will take to die…
After a while I am walking about in the room again. My resolve to die completely alone has faltered. I suppose it will take an hour or so, or I might live till evening. My head is still hanging. What’s the matter? I am asked. I don’t feel I can say. My original intention was not to raise the alarm; also, I feel there is shame in such a death. I would rather just fall over, and that would be an end of it. I feel queasy now. Something is tugging at my attention. Perhaps it is a sense of absurdity. The dry rasping in my throat persists, but now I don’t know if it is the original obstruction lodged there, or the memory of it, the imprint, which is not going to fade from my breathing flesh. For many years the word ‘marzipan’ affects me with its deathly hiss, the buzz in its syllables, a sepulchral fizz.
My grandad goes on to the Red Lamp to take a gill. He puts on his checked sports coat and I shout, ‘Grandad is wearing his beer jacket.’ He puts on his suede shoes and I shout, ‘Grandad has put on his beer shoes.’ He takes up the pitcher from the kitchen shelf and I shout, ‘Grandad is taking his beer jug.’ However mild his habits, however temperate, I can’t be stopped from chronicling his deeds.
The likes of a woman wouldn’t go in the Red Lamp.
My grandfather knows about English things such as Robin Hood. I sit on his knee as he hums ‘All things bright and beautiful’. My grandmother says, ‘George, teaching that child Protestant hymns!’ I dip my finger in his beer to taste it. For high days I have a thimble-sized glass to drink port. My grandmother says,‘George,teaching that child to drink!’ Slowly, slowly, we are pulling away from hearth and home and into the real world. My grandfather is a railway man and has been to Palestine, though not on the train. The spellings he teaches me include trick far-off towns such as Worcester and Gloucester: I cannot write, but no matter. As a grandfather, he knows the wherefores of cotton production, not just the facts of working in the mill. He knows about the American slaves and the Confederacy; also of a giant, name of Gazonka, lives on a hill outside Glossop. Grandad has ancestors, unlike us Irish people, who don’t know our correct birthdays even. One of his ancestors suppressed a riot by laying low a man called Murphy, a thug at the head of a mob who was wielding a wire whip. For this feat, his ancestor was rewarded with the post of sanitary inspector.
From Liverpool he brings jelly animals and a strange kind of balloon with faces and ears, and cardboard feet you can tie on it, to make it stand up. As no one can tell me the name for this item in God’s creation, I name it ‘Fluke’. If you don’t know a word for something, you can just ask me to supply one, but I can’t blow up a balloon; I have not breath. When he’s not on his shift, Grandad’s always at home, he’s always in his parish. My grandmother’s brothers come from Hollingsworth and places even further. They give the impression, to me, of wandering the roads. They turn up unexpectedly; this is the time before telephones, or before anyone went anywhere, to be out when their relatives called. The brothers are indistinguishable elders in many woollen layers, who suck humbugs with loud slurps and sit on hard chairs with their caps still on: on hard chairs set each end of the sideboard, symmetrical, at the back of the room: as if an opera were about to burst out in front of the fireplace. My grandmother serves them a plate of ham and some Cheshire cheese. They cough long and wetly into their balled-up handkerchiefs, and even when they are not crying, their eyes seep.
When my grandmother wants her sister, she bangs on the wall. In other houses ghosts bang but here it’s only Annie Connor, banging back.
The household at 56 Bankbottom lives in co-operation with the household at no. 58. Here lives, besides Annie Connor, her daughter Maggie, who is my godmother and a widow, who has a brown raincoat and a checked woollen scarf. She does errands for people and is at their beck and call. Here lives Beryl, Maggie’s daughter, my heroine: a schoolgirl, dimpled and saucy. There is only one doll for which I ever care, and that one, in tribute to her, is called Beryl. She is a doll made of grubby green satin, with satin stumps for hands and feet, features inked on to a round of calico for her face, and her pointed head of grubby green satin also.
My grandfather has to be knight and commander to all these women. His possessions are a billycan, a notebook and pencil, his guard’s hat and his guard’s lamp. It is my ambition to be a railway guard.
In the desert my grandfather rode a camel. He commanded it with certain words in Egyptian, known only to camels, now imparted to me.
I am three. I sit on my grandmother’s knee eating sponge cake warm from the oven. The cake is pale yellow and so high that I don’t know whether to bite the bottom or the top; from deep experience I understand their different tastes. We are by the fireplace, but the fire is not lit. Sun is shining. Outside the window people pass on the pavement. The back door stands open.
From hooks below the shelf hang two jugs, each of which holds one pint (though not at this moment). One is a rich cream and the other is the palest pink. They curve fatly from their lips, and the light gilds the curve: one a milk skin, one a shell. The table has fat, green, complicated legs. I go under the table to run my fingertip over their convolutions. The table’s top is