The Word Ghost Read online

  I turned away, instantly fascinated by the wheat fields which I saw every day of my life. On a bike, it’s hard to find somewhere else to look. I stuck one hand in my blazer pocket, one hand holding the handlebars and my eyes fixed on the yellow wheat stalks blowing in the spring breeze. I believed I looked as if I didn’t have a care in the world. I certainly wasn’t thinking about the tall ginger-haired boy waiting for his bus.

  I also believed, deep in my heart, that if Dave had been given a choice, he would have flung the anorak that he always wore on his bedroom floor and sat, sartorially elegant, at the bus stop in his school shirt, shivering slightly in the balmy English spring. He’d been made to wear it, Poor Lamb, school uniforms made fools of us all. In the spring of ’73 there seemed to be a renaissance of the much-maligned shimmery shiny all-weather jacket. Like bulbs clumped around the bottoms of trees, there were anoraks popping up at every corner.

  Come, sweet Jane, honest truthful Jane, take this shiny jacket and give me your shawl. St John will never want to marry you if he sees you in this . . . Come, Jane, come, don’t run from me . . . you’ll slip and fall . . .

  My mother loved outer garments and welcomed them, all colours, all sizes, all shapes, into her life. Anything that kept the weather from the skin was accepted. My father preferred the classic beige down-to-the-mid-calf mackintosh. My mother also accepted fresh fruit, homegrown lettuces and tomatoes, Jesus Christ and Marks and Spencer’s cotton underwear. My father accepted raspberry canes, long leaf Darjeeling tea, pork sausages from Harrods and the Church of England. The Church of England accepted my father. That was why we lived in the largest house in the village, it went with the job.

  When you’re nearly sixteen the world is a weird enough place, but there are some things you know with great certainty, no questions needed, no inner doubt. When I saw Dave, something happened to the pit of my stomach, a kind of lurch that ended up as an ache in my arms and a desire to run naked down the street screaming and eating cream buns at the same time. Doubt was for everyone else.

  My parents loved the Queen of England but their love for the Queen was not quite the same as my love for Dave. Their love for the Queen was restrained and gracious, forever locked away in some restrained and gracious space. They had to wait another four whole years before they could celebrate the Silver Jubilee with the Queen of England. Four more years before the flags and street parties and my parents, like good English folk, knew they had to wait quietly. They were married in 1953, the year of the Queen’s coronation, and they had been with her in spirit ever since.

  My mother said, ‘A steady pair of hands on the throne.’

  I didn’t care about any of that. I cared about Dave. I knew he was called Dave because Maggie told me when I asked her.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘That’s Dave. He lives down the road. His brother’s in the army.’

  ‘Which road?’

  ‘Milton Close, two streets over from us. I met him the other night.’

  ‘You met Dave?’

  ‘No, I did not meet Dave, I met his brother Simon. I actually left the house and went out and met Simon, Dave’s brother. And he told me about Dave.’

  ‘Really? Like what?’

  ‘I know he hates soccer. I know he plays the guitar and thinks he’s better than he actually is. Oh yeah, I know he’s got a girlfriend and she’s really, really nice.’

  ‘A girlfriend? Is she from school? What’s her name? Has he really got a girlfriend?’

  Maggie pushed my hair out of my face. ‘He hasn’t really got a girlfriend, Abes, I only said that to wind you up.’

  ‘Get off me. I hate you.’

  ‘Invite him over. Simon said Dave checks his watch by you every morning. Call him.’

  ‘And say what?’

  ‘Ask him for help with your maths. Abes, you need help with your maths. Go on. I bet he’ll do it.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘I know more than you do.’

  Maggie always knew more than I did. She was just about to turn eighteen, and in the eyes of the law she would legally be an adult, a person whose vote counted. She could do anything she wanted to do whenever she wanted to do it. This was her permanent refrain. I can do what I want to.

  A small side street led down one side of our house away from the Bowater road and that was where I left the house on my bike each morning. If I turned left I would soon find myself in Milton Close and my stomach churned at the very thought of seeing Dave’s house. Out through the large green wooden gates, turn right, right again at the top and there was the road to school. My father’s church was opposite our house, two hundred yards along the main Bowater road.

  The graveyard surrounding the church looked like a bright happy place to me then. I didn’t know any other graveyards. It was full of fresh flowers on tended graves, and in spring and summer my grandmother’s deep red roses bloomed, climbing up the church wall getting closer to God. Two tall fir trees stood either side of the church gates and one of them was mine. After an hour on a hard pew singing hymns and listening to the wisdom of my father, I was desperate to reach for that first spiky branch. The rough bark hurt my hands and I had to grab and swing at the same time in order to pull myself up on the branch.

  I slowly inched up the tree pressing my back against the trunk and holding the branches above my head until I felt safe to move again. No one could get me now, not that anyone was trying. I was at least fifteen feet off the ground by my reckoning, and that was about my limit. Any higher and I felt weird in the head. I was part of the tree now, high in its beautiful green branches, invisible to the world.

  I watched the parishioners traipsing slowly from the church, chatting to my father in his billowing white robes at the church door. From my great height I could also pelt Emily with small turquoise stones I filched from the tops of the graves. I was sure the buried ones wouldn’t mind. They were dead, after all.

  ‘Ouch! That hurts. I know you’re up there, Rebecca. I’m telling Mum. MUM!’

  Mum sighed and wagged a finger at me, a small gesture which contained words I knew all too well. Stop that. Set a good example for your sister. Whatever will people think of us?

  After church, Mum set off back to the house to cook the Sunday roast or do any number of the household chores that our large cold house demanded and which held our family together. I knew, without knowing how I knew, that Sunday afternoon was the time my mother missed our grandmother most of all. After lunch, when all the dishes had been washed and put away, we would find her in the sitting room in one of our threadbare chairs, reading her favourite author, turning the pages of another world.

  Closer to Milton Close

  This summer of 1973 was going to be our last summer in Wye but I didn’t know that yet. I still had to meet Dave. Dave Dave Dave Dave Dave Dave. Wye was home to about two thousand people and only one of them was Dave. The primary school, where Emily went, and which both Maggie and I had attended, was next to the church diagonally opposite our house. It took Mum literally about twenty-five seconds to walk Emily to school and she could come home for lunch and sit quietly eating her sandwich while our mother stroked her hair before taking her by the hand back to the good old noise-filled playground.

  In the middle of town there was a playing area we called the rec, where Maggie and I, as the older girls of the house, were allowed to go. We usually cycled idly about on the grey concrete. Sometimes we went on the slide, sometimes the roundabout. Maggie enjoyed seeing how quickly she could make me feel sick by holding the sides and running round and round and spinning me faster and faster while I shrieked at her to stop.

  ‘Say you’ll go round and ask him out, you moron.’ Maggie said.

  ‘Stop it, you’re making me sick!’

  ‘Say you’ll do it,’ Maggie panted, still running as hard as she could while I gripped the metal seat with my white fingers, ‘and I’ll stop.’

  ‘All right, all right, all riiiggghhhttt!’
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  Meeting Dave was going to require planning. I could not simply get off my bike, wheel it up to him, and casually start a conversation. The bus might come and then I would be left standing there with my bike while Dave stared at me from the back seat of the bus. Also, there would not be enough time for me to implement this plan as the bus might be delayed and then I’d be late and start to fret about my receding punctuality, and Dave might sense my nervousness and I would have to explain that as much as I wanted to meet him, I could not bear to be late for school.

  All right, idiot, I whispered to myself, I will march up to him and ask him out. I will ask Dave for help with my maths. That was my great plan, but before any of this could happen I needed to look studious and worthy. And tall. And smart. With it. Cool and funky. An okay type of chick. A bird. A girl he might want to get to know. There was only thing to do. Off to Bowater on the number 37 bus, meet no one, say nothing to Sue about anything, and go to every charity shop I could find with a couple of quid in my purse. I was shopping for love on a tight budget.

  I bought a pair of gold-rimmed aviator glasses still in their case. Absolute Bargain. They were Robert Redford. They were Paul Newman. They were Ali MacGraw. They were mine. I carefully prised one lens out of the thin metal frame. Then the other lens. I did not want to bend the frame. These glasses had cost me fifty pence. I also bought three scarves and a long-sleeved white satin scooped-neck wedding dress. The dress—full length and no frills, which suited me, as I hated frills of any kind—actually cost one pound and fifty pence, but I believed you could never quite tell when one would come in handy.

  Jane, Jane, come here, my love. I don’t mean to rub it in after the wedding disaster and all that awful excitement, but you never know, do you, when you might need one? Forgive me, Jane? Jane? Don’t run from me, you’ll slip and fall . . .

  I also bought a pair of long gold evening gloves with small pearl fastenings at the wrists. I wasn’t quite sure when I would wear them, they were optional extras, but for now the glasses would do.

  Once home, I set about changing my look. I would become the girl for the boy I did not know, the girl for Dave, my (as-yet-un)beloved. I attempted to do something with my hair but there wasn’t much I could do. I blamed my grandmother for the hair, but in a loving after-you’re-dead-and-can’t-defend-yourself kind of way. My grandmother always wore her hair in a long thick plait which, when unleashed, sprang about all over the place in wild unrestrainable curls. My mother’s hair was the same, but sort of shortened and tamed, a bit like a caged ocelot; you knew it was still wild but couldn’t quite find the evidence, you just heard a low distant growl from some far-off jungle reverberate through the house every now and then.

  My hair sprang in curls and spirals from the top of my head. I tried out a bobby pin or two, two either side, then three, then begone with you, bobby pins, to hell with you, and none. I tried winding a scarf around my head, but it felt wrong, all wrong, and Emily stuck her head round the door and laughed at me. I threw the scarf onto the bed. I put on my lens-less aviator glasses and did nothing at all with my hair. I chucked the bent and deranged bobby pins in the bin and studied myself in the mirror.

  I still looked like a fuzzy-headed thin-legged schoolgirl. But with the glasses was there a hint of something more? A twenty-three-year-old intellectual, perhaps. A bright, witty thing, both worthy and studious. A poet living on the rive gauche of Paris and rioting when politics demanded it of me, even though I had never set foot in France and knew nothing of French politics. The gold evening gloves and wedding dress would be overdoing it now, I knew that. They would have to wait.

  I tightened the belt of my long brown coat, felt the swish of my denim flares over my shoes, pushed my lens-less glasses high on the bridge of my nose, and began the walk of uncertainty to the house of Dave. There are some things in life you can look back on with great certainty and say, I wish I hadn’t done that, but this wasn’t one of them. This was one of the best things. This was my first-ever attempt at asking a boy out.

  I wished desperately I had another pair of shoes to wear. Not these hideous shiny black platform shoes that Mum had bought for me, at (I shuddered to think of it) my own insistence, to wear to school. They were a bit bouncy and I’d liked them at first but now I thought they looked ridiculous. A wild sexy girl walking with a space hopper on each foot. With a bit of luck Dave wouldn’t be looking at my feet.

  Closer and Closer

  Each step took me nearer to the door of Dave, which was a very unprepossessing door, a plain piece of wood with the number twenty-three on it in solid brass figures. I stood there for a few seconds and then my hand acted independently of my thoughts—which had me running home and chucking my glasses in the bin—and knocked. I was still wondering whether or not to run when I heard someone coming.

  ‘Who is it?’ said a voice through the door.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Erm, it’s Rebecca Budde.’

  ‘Who?’

  I was about to scarper off home when an arm in a pink flowery blouse opened the door and Mrs Dave looked at me in surprise. Her eyebrows shot up when she saw me standing there in my new aviator glasses. She was probably thinking she had never met the Wye on Thames version of Ali MacGraw.

  ‘And what can I do for you, young lady?’

  I cleared my throat again; for some reason it felt hard to say the words.

  ‘Er, I wondered if Dave was home.’

  ‘Dave?’ As if she was uncertain whether or not Dave lived here. ‘What do you want with Dave?’ At the same time she sort of leaned backwards and yelled out, Dave! Dave! Someone’s here to see you! Then she turned back to me and gave me a long hard up-and-down and through-and-round type of look.

  ‘You’re the vicar’s daughter, aren’t you? I’ve met your sister Margaret. She seems a really nice girl.’

  She said nice in such a way that implied she didn’t think this would be true of me.

  ‘I’ve seen you lot playing in the street. Screeching and carrying on. How’s your mum? I’ve had a couple of nice chats with your mum.’

  My mum? Chatting to Mrs Dave?

  ‘Mum’s fine.’ All this way and I was talking about my mother.

  Again she sort of leaned back and yelled out, Dave! Someone’s here to see you!

  ‘He’s deaf up there.’ She nodded in the direction of the stairs. ‘Only hears what he wants to hear.’

  ‘I was wondering if Dave could help me with my maths homework.’

  ‘You’ll have to ask him that yourself, love. He’s studying for his exams.’

  She pulled herself up to her full height which was still a way bit shorter than me. She folded her arms and gave a final yell—Dave! Dave!—and I was able to examine the flowers on her shirtsleeves in very great detail while I stood at the door of Dave’s house. She was also looking at me, probably thinking how smart my glasses looked.

  ‘Who is it?’ yelled a distinctive voice that caused my stomach to lurch. Any minute now I’d be taking off my clothes and screaming for a cream bun.

  Mrs Dave glanced over her shoulder. ‘It’s Rebecca Budde, the vicar’s daughter.’ She gave a great long sigh as if the effort of saying my name was too much. Or maybe she knew where this was going before it had even started. Two long legs bounded down the stairs and all six foot of delicious Dave stood at the front door trying to push his way past his mother.

  ‘Took your time,’ she said in a half-scolding, half-loving kind of way.

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that—didn’t know it was you.’

  My stomach lurched and lurched again. He recognised me.

  ‘Didn’t know you wore glasses,’ he said, staring hard at the lens-less glasses perched on my nose, his voice as smooth as butter.

  I took a step back and pushed the glasses frames back up against my nose. ‘Just for reading, I’m terribly short-sighted.’ My cheeks were burning.

  Mrs Dave, who was still holding the front door open, said, ‘Well, you’d better come in, I su
ppose. But only for five minutes. He’s got a lot of studying to do, haven’t you, love?

  Watch the step.’

  I was in. I was actually in Dave’s house. As I sat down the flares of my trousers rose over my feet and exposed my shoes. I tried to pull my trousers back down over them but there they were, shining and black and hideous. Dave saw them. He looked down at them then smiled back up at me. He was feeling sorry for me now, exhibiting such poor taste in shoes. It was all over before anything had begun. His mum set two glasses of lemon cordial on the coffee table and filled up a plate with custard cream biscuits. I nibbled the corner of a biscuit and had never eaten anything so dry in my life. I was desperate for a drink but could hardly sip the lemon cordial without the glasses sliding back down my nose.

  Dave said nothing about the shoes and munched biscuits and slurped cordial quite happily while I stammered through my carefully rehearsed routine. Desperately needed help with my maths revision, I was a total dunce, and perhaps if he could spare the time, everyone knew how good he was at maths, and I’d be very grateful.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sounds good. You come here or I’ll come to you?’ He looked over at his mother.

  ‘Here’s fine,’ said Mrs Dave, with a tone in her voice telling me it actually wasn’t really fine at all. ‘As long as it doesn’t get in the way of your own study.’

  ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘All my books are here, so if you come to me that would be okay.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ said Mrs Dave. ‘You’re the middle one, aren’t you? So you could help Dave with his English. Your mum says you’ve always got your nose buried in a book.’

  I nodded. I wasn’t here to talk about my nose. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Want to hear me play “Smoke on the Water”?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s my favourite song.’ Shut up, Rebecca. Shut up.

  ‘Not too loud, Dave,’ said Mrs Dave. She knew what was coming.

  He picked up a guitar that was standing in the corner of the room. ‘It’s not plugged in,’ he said, but I didn’t know about plugs. I was looking at a rock god, lead singer of my own personal band. I was silently screaming and filling my plate with cream buns.