Ghost Wall(22)

Dad looked at him a moment, at me, and went back to weaving his ghost fence. I could feel already my skin shrinking and tightening, the hand across my face, the belt on my legs, the shame, and I saw Mum’s hands shake as she stirred the bones in the pan. Rabbit magic, said Dan, shaking his head, and I flinched.



I found some cress. I thought it might placate Dad. Molly sat on a stone and trailed her feet in the water, though it wasn’t really hot enough for that to seem much fun. Her toenails were painted sparkly gold now, and you could see the outline of her moccasins in the suntan on her feet. Any more of that business, she said, and I’m off to Morbury on the bus for a pie and chips, he’s a right chauvinist pig, he seems to think we all have to do what he says, he’s not the professor here. She leant forward to pick a quartz pebble from the bed of the stream and one of her plaits dipped into the water. He’s just taking it seriously, I said, he drives buses all year, he’s not like the Prof, this is his one chance to do what he’s really interested in. What about your mum, said Molly, when does she get to do what she’s interested in? I shrugged and went on nipping off stalks of cress with my fingernails. Obviously Mum was not interested in things, never had been, you only had to look at her to see that. Does he ever even ask her what she thinks, Moll went on. Why, I said, what about your mum, what does she do, what is she interested in. If you’ve got all the answers, I didn’t say, if you know how people ought to live. I ate a leaf of cress, more peppery than I was expecting. My eyes watered. She’s a teacher, said Moll, she teaches Physics, and yes she has interests, she does stuff. Aerobics. Gardening, she grows vegetables. Weird ones, mostly, says there’s no point growing stuff you can buy at the supermarket though some of us might think there are reasons the shops don’t stock what she grows. She’d like your cress. I’ll tell her about the burdocks. Keep fit and gardening, I thought, down south, in Hertfordshire wherever that is, bet they’ve got a huge house and garden, bet it’s the first time she’s sat down to eat with a bus driver and a supermarket cashier. She squeezed water out of the paintbrush-end of her plait. My dad left us, she said, when I was five. Mum’s coped on her own since then, he doesn’t even pay anything. She looked up. I’m proud of her. Yeah, I said, she sounds great. She didn’t understand, I thought, she couldn’t see what it was like for us. Try some of the cress, I said.



The guys were more interested in building the Ghost Wall, the Rabbit Palisade, than in eating, even once Mum had done her best with a sort of thyme dumpling. Molly stood with her arms folded, watching Dad and the Prof and now Dan and Pete weaving the willow lattice and trying to fasten the drumskins tight to their willow hoops. The wall was going to be big, and unless Molly and I went out foraging again, there was not going to be much by way of dinner. Mum had fished the rabbits’ skulls out of the cooking pot and lined them up in the sun to dry, like the heads of Tudor criminals. Memento mori. Poor bloody rabbits. The Prof had got the other skulls out of his car and they gazed eyeless from the rock where Mum often sat, their whiteness still shiny and tinged with blue, indecently exposed not weathered. The human skulls, I supposed, the ghost skulls, would have been leaf-brown, polished by long handling and by the smoke of decades of cooking fires, artefacts as much as body parts. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, said Molly, it kind of reminds me of Swallows and Amazons but they’re grown men. Those little drums and a willow fence with rabbits’ heads on top, for what, to keep out the Romans? I’m off, she said, Jim, I’ll be back later. Oh, said the Prof, yes, OK. Dad knelt up and watched as she walked off, shook his head. Spoilt little bitch. Silvie, go help your mum, she’s the dinner to get yet.





THEY SET UP the ghost wall towards sunset. The shadows of trees and grass leant long through air hazy with slanting gold light. Molly hadn’t come back and I was beginning to worry; I couldn’t think what she could find to do for all this time, or how she would get back after dark. Mum saw us beginning to carry the panels up the hill and said she was going to bed, but I hung around, wanting to see what happened, not wanting to spend longer than I had to in the dark hut. It was getting colder and Mum came back out with the blanket from my bed and folded it around my shoulders. There, she said, no need to go catching your death of cold, I’m sure they had the sense to keep warm, back in the day, what about your feet. I’m fine, Mum, I said, thanks, you get some rest. Well, she said, don’t stay up all night.

Silvie, bring the skulls now, said Dad.

I approached the cow’s head, its white bright against the softening colours of stones and grass. There were still shreds of dried flesh around the eye-sockets and it still, more or less, had ears. I didn’t want to touch it, felt as if I should do some reverence, ward off something, before picking it up. Its teeth grinned. I reached out and touched it between the eye-sockets. It wasn’t cold, nor quite dry. I would need to carry it in both hands, under the jaw. I would need to hold it tight against me. Silvie, called Dad, did you hear me, I said bring the skulls. I turned to the line of rabbits, to the sheep’s heads, more familiar from the dry bones encountered sometimes at the feet of crags and the edges of mountain streams. When I was little Dad had to lead me past them with my eyes closed, holding my hand. It’s just bones, Silvie, we all have them, you wouldn’t be out here walking, else. I didn’t then like the thought of my own bones, waiting inside me for their own eventual exposure. I went round behind the stone and picked up the cow’s skull, carried it facing forwards up the dimming hill.