your arms stretched wide, and you have to throw yourself down on the grass, and the world just carries on spinning, tilting under you. That’s when I decided to do it, stand right up on that roller, plant my feet squarely on the warm curve of it, and see how things looked then. I know it’s daft, but I wondered if it might be different up there. Perhaps I’d pick out something I’d never seen before, and seeing it would change everything.
I hauled myself up on the hot hump of stone. It was quite difficult actually, higher than you might think. I had a few attempts before I managed it. At first my back was to the playing field, and I was balancing with my arms out. It was great. Just like I’d imagined it would be. Only I couldn’t see the field, just through the wire fence and across the slope of road. I glanced back over my shoulder. I couldn’t help it, cos I wanted to see if any of the girls were watching me. Especially June Mullery. She is so pretty, June, with pale, yellow hair and soft eyes. She never teases me, and once I was sure she smiled at me. At least I think it was me. I suppose it might have been her friends behind me, but anyhow it felt as if it was for me. Her face lighting up and her eyes so sweet and kind. It made it hard for me to swallow, seeing her smile like that…At me.
So I tried to turn round but something blinded me, something like a bit of the sun glaring at me from the field. I lost my footing, and I was falling, falling back, and without thinking I made a grab for the iron handle propped up against the fence. Only it just fell away with me, like seizing a stick of bamboo in a landslide. I tumbled backwards on the field, and the metal bar chased me, the way the jeering boys had earlier.The long horizontal handle at the top of it, the thing they grip to push it about with I guess, came crashing down across the brow of my head.Then it was pitch black, with the sound of the bar striking me, tolling inside my skull, a great underwater bell clanging on and on. When my eyes opened next Mr Beecham was carrying me down the steps.
I didn’t die.The doctor came and went. Mother took me to Queen Mary’s for X-rays and that was quite fun. And the doctors there said I was going to be okay as well. That’s when the laugh came back.
‘You’re not very good doctors then, are you?’ came the cheeky voice I hear sometimes in my head, the voice that longs to speak out loud, but I know never will.
We’re back at the flat now. Mother’s fussing loads and kissing me, so that I have red marks from her lipstick on my face, and have to rub hard to get them off. I can smell her perfume as well and that’s nice, warm and comforting, like the roller before it flattened me. Then later she smells of something else, something sour, the whisky I guess, and that isn’t so nice, because then she gets a bit sloppy. She looks good. If anyone was watching they’d say, ‘There’s an excellent mother, a mother who really loves her son.The way she strokes and pets him! Oh my, and can you hear the lovely things she says to him.’ But what they wouldn’t know is that it’s not real. It’s pretend. Like acting. And you know before long the performance will be over, or the show will be cancelled because the actress doesn’t feel very well, and has to go and lie down.
As it happens Mother does have to lie down after a bit. Dad is away, or working late or something. ’Course Mum said she rang him straight away. She said he was terribly worried, but very relieved later to hear his only son was going to be fine. She’s always calling me that. ‘Only son!’ As if that makes such a big difference to how much I’m worth to them. Like, if there were more sons, if say Alice had been a boy, they couldn’t possibly have loved me as much. Who knows, if she had been, perhaps they wouldn’t have had me at all?
‘Harry, you have to know your father would have raced home if it had been serious,’ Mother says, staring straight into my face and looking all grave.
And I understand what she means. That if I’d been going to die or if I had died even, he’d have come; my father would have come then, no question.
‘He was frantic, Harry,’ she tells me, her finger stroking the side of her glass.‘You know how much he loves you.He wanted to come, darling, of course he did. He’s so busy. Important, clever men like your father always are. But I told him you were being a brave little man, our brave little man, and that there was no need.’
She puts down her drink, then gives me one of those funny hugs of hers, a bit awkward, as if she doesn’t quite know where to put me. It lasts longer than normal of course, on account of the accident. By then she’s on her second drink. Afterwards she holds me at arm’s length.
‘I’m so proud of you,’ she tells me smoothing back my hair, careful not to touch the raised purple line, where the bar struck me. ‘My precious only boy.’
‘If it had been really bad, you’re sure Father would have come?’ I want to know. I can’t meet her eyes. I might cry if I did, like with the girls at school, might make a big baby of myself. Hmm… Mother would hate that. She doesn’t like you to show feelings, not real ones in any case.
‘Of course he would have, darling!’ she says now, her eyes, that glow amber like a cat’s sometimes, wide open. ‘You know he would have, Harry.’
I want to say that it might have been too late, if I was dying or worse, already dead. If he’d come then, after I’d died, after my heart had stopped beating and I was all white and icy, well…there really wouldn’t have been much point, would there? But Mother has turned away by then and the drink is in her hands again.We’ve had supper but that doesn’t matter. I’m still hungry. I’m always hungry.
They’ve got this creepy festival here—actually they’ve got lots of weird festivals on the island, but this one is the spookiest.Yue Lan. The Festival of the Hungry Ghosts. It’s the end of May now, so I guess it’ll soon come round. Anyway, for a few weeks in July the Chinese believe that hungry ghosts, the ghosts of their dead ancestors, and people who’ve been murdered, or died at sea, or in a war and haven’t had a funeral or been buried properly, will come tearing back to earth. And these ghosts who swarm back down here at Yue Lan, they’re are not just hungry, they’re starving, ravenous even. All the stuff they didn’t get in life, like marriage and children and love, and all the money and food and houses and cars, and junk like that, for these few days you see they’ve just got to have them.You know, like nothing will stand in their way.
Sometimes at night, lying in bed watching the orange stripes of light slide across the ceiling as a car drives by on the road below, I picture them, the hungry ghosts. It’s bit like the stampedes you get in cowboy movies, the image in my mind. Hordes of ghosts charging towards you, the air thick with the dust their trailing misty feet are stirring up, and their mouths gaping wide open, like the mouths of caves. Gigantic, black, frozen, empty caves, with those gleaming icicle things hanging down and reaching up at the opening, rows of razor-sharp teeth, waiting to gobble you up, to gulp down your blood. They save your still beating heart for last, a special treat.Then crunch up your bones until all that’s left are a few splinters.
I expect they’d be delighted to find me, Piggy Harry, oink, oink; that I’d make a really tasty meal, keep them going, well…for a bit anyway. I see their eyes in my nightmares sometimes, like balls of fire, and the whites of them showing, only they’re a dirty green colour, rolling about and all wild and scary in their smoky heads. I understand their hunger, like there’s a living thing eating away at them, like they have to feed it, have to! Cos I feel it too, feel I can never cram in enough, that no matter how much I stuff into my mouth, chew and swallow and chomp and gnaw, it’ll never stop the hunger, it’ll never fill up the hole.
The Chinese do some neat stuff to frighten them away though: they make these brilliant paper models, like three-dimensional kites of all those things you need in life. Then they pile them on huge bonfires and burn them to ashes. They say you have to be careful for a whole month, but that the days in the middle are the most dangerous. They steer clear of the sea as well, stay indoors, and get the kids home early, in case
