Ghost MacIndoe. Jonathan Buckley
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as nice as your garden, sir.’
‘Thank you,’ said Mr Beckwith. ‘I didn’t eat enough for a long time, you see. That’s what did my ears. Do you eat properly?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Look like you do.’ A sound that was like the first part of a laugh made his chest shudder, yet he did not smile. ‘So you’ve got a garden?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Don’t need the sir, lad. I’m not your teacher.’ Mr Beckwith’s face wore a vague and thoughtful look, a look that made it seem as if he were being reminded that there was something he should be doing but could not for the moment recall what it was. ‘Megan’s a good girl,’ he declared.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Don’t need the sir, lad. Any good at woodwork?’ He lifted from the bench two blocks of pale wood that had been fixed together in a mortice and tenon joint.
‘Not really, Mr Beckwith,’ replied Alexander, wondering what use the wooden object might serve.
‘Neither am I,’ said Mr Beckwith seriously. ‘What about gardening?’
‘Not really. My dad does the garden. Mum sometimes helps. I do a bit, too. Not much, though.’
Mr Beckwith raised his chin and turned his eyes to a blank portion of the wooden wall, as if allowing Alexander’s words to trickle into his mind. Gradually he turned his head to look out of the window again. ‘Rain’s easing off,’ he observed. ‘Give it a minute or two. Sit yourself down.’ He waved a hand at the pile of newspapers, and he turned his attention to cleaning the trowel and the other tools he had been using. Streaks of dark skin appeared through Mr Beckwith’s shirt as he worked, and the sinews at the back of his neck stood out like the muscles of his forearm.
The stack swayed as Alexander sat on it, and when he spread his feet to steady himself his left foot slipped on a magazine. Alexander lifted his foot from a photograph that seemed to be of an old woman asleep on a mattress, with an old-fashioned night-cap on her head. He bent over the picture and realised that the person was not an old woman and was not asleep. What he had thought was a nightdress was in fact skin, which clung to the dead man’s bones like a collapsed tent of soft leather. Fleshless fingers, sickle-shaped, hung from the wrists. A shaft of bare bone ended in a strong plump foot. Alexander picked up the magazine to read the caption. ‘Who’s Tollund Man, Mr Beckwith?’ he asked.
Unwinding a length from a ball of twine, Mr Beckwith looked over his shoulder at Alexander. ‘I’m sorry, lad. What did you say?’
‘Who’s Tollund Man?’ Alexander repeated, holding the page outwards.
Mr Beckwith put his face close to the magazine. He pulled back a bit, then looked closely again. ‘Danish chap,’ he said at last. ‘Hundreds of years old. From the Iron Age. They found him in a bog. All the water in the peat kept him fresh. He was hanged. See?’ His finger touched the cord around Tollund Man’s throat.
Alexander gazed at the ancient man, curled on his platform of peat. The leathery face seemed to be wincing away from the photographer. It should be terrible, this image of a murdered man, and yet Alexander could not feel what he knew it was proper for him to feel. Waiting for an urgent emotion to seize him, he gazed at Tollund Man, at the body and the peat that seemed all of one piece, like a pouring of dark metal.
‘Fresh as a flower,’ commented Mr Beckwith. ‘Do you want it?’ To please Mr Beckwith, Alexander said that he did. With three swift passes of his rigid fingers, Mr Beckwith tore the picture cleanly out. ‘It’s stopped now,’ Mr Beckwith said, scratching a cheek that was as soft and dark as Tollund Man’s. ‘Shall we go?’
Together they walked a circuit of the garden, Mr Beckwith naming his plants as if introducing them, Alexander repeating the names and striving to embed them in his mind. Holding the picture of Tollund Man lightly in both hands, like a prayer book, he concentrated on the soft white flowerheads to which the word Viburnum belonged. The fragrant pink roses were called Penelope; the artificial-looking flowers that clung to the wall, like purple and white targets fringed with coronets of white petals, had two names, Passiflora and Passion Flower.
Clockwise Mr Beckwith and Alexander processed around the garden, then anti-clockwise they circled back. Mr Beckwith paused before a sheaf of pink flowers in a bed that was shaded by the neighbour’s house, and gestured as if offering them to Alexander.
‘Hydrangea?’ Alexander volunteered.
‘Exactly,’ said Mr Beckwith. He took a step into the sun. ‘And these?’ he asked, by some yellow button-like flowers. ‘No matter. It’s Lavender Cotton, or Santolina.’
Five minutes later the rain recommenced, and Alexander’s first conversation with Mr Beckwith was over. He would always remember how they parted. ‘Hurry home,’ said Mr Beckwith, and Alexander walked down the path at the side of the house, dodging the water that dripped from a crack in the guttering. He was by the back door when Mr Beckwith called his name.
‘Mr Beckwith?’ Alexander replied.
Standing in the slot of light between the two houses, Mr Beckwith held out a flat hand. ‘Whatever it was you were bringing back?’
Alexander placed the clip on Mr Beckwith’s muddy skin. Mr Beckwith looked at it, rocking his hand a fraction of an inch this way and that, as if playing with a drop of water, and his eyes became kindly. ‘Goodbye, Alexander,’ he said. He looked at Alexander and seemed to be contemplating whether he should tell him something. ‘Goodbye,’ he said again, and went back into his garden.
They were standing at the end of a gravel driveway that ran between high walls of fresh brick. ‘There’s a five-a-side pitch out the back,’ John Halloran said to Alexander, looking avariciously at the long clapboard hut that stood at the end of the driveway. ‘They play football after every session,’ he went on. ‘Sometimes they do a manhunt round the streets. You get a five-minute start and you have to make chalk marks on the walls as you go, and the rest of them come after you.’
‘It looks like an army camp,’ Alexander observed. The severed neck of a milk bottle, like a crown of jagged glass, lay on the kerbstone. This detail Alexander would always remember, and that John kicked it away to make him listen.
‘It’s not like the army at all. You’re not going to end up dead, for one thing, and you don’t have to sign up if you don’t want to. Come on, Al. Don’t be wet. If we don’t like it we won’t join.’
‘We don’t have to join right away?’
‘Definitely don’t. You can muck around for months before making your mind up. That’s what Pete did.’
‘You sure?’ asked Alexander, and he took a few steps up the drive, as if a nearer view of the building might dissipate his doubts. The hut occupied its quiet yard like a boat in a backwater dock. There was something appealing about its solitariness, and about the fleur-de-lys badge that gleamed on the door like an occult symbol.
‘It’ll be a giggle,’ John urged. ‘Give it a go, Al.’
So that evening they were collected from John Halloran’s house by Peter Nichols, who was standing stiffly on the path when they opened the door, his arms straight against his sides. ‘At ease,’ John shouted, but their classmate’s punctilious expression did not change.
Placing first one foot and then the other on the doorstep, Peter Nichols corrected the garters of his thick grey socks, and then he tapped the peak of his cap, to make the point that his uniform was the token of his seniority. ‘You’d better button your shirt up,’ he told John.
‘You’re kidding,’ John replied.
‘No,’ said