Ghosting Read Online Free Page B

As if to set an example, she herself never had a bath. In much the same way as she believed that washing machines didn't wash—at least not
properly
—and electricmixers didn't mix, so she believed that having a bath didn't get you properly clean.
    My brother and I always had the first bath since our father's dirtiness was deemed to be greater than the combined grime of two children. And during our bath the stove in the kitchen could be stoked to provide a top-up of hot water for our father. In winter the air temperature in the bathroom was so cold that getting out of the water required huge mental discipline followed by a mad dash to the kitchen where our pyjamas were warming on a rail by the stove. By then my father would be stripped down to his underpants, ready for his dash in the opposite direction. Waiting for our father to arrive back in the kitchen, goose-pimpled and raging at the world, was a time filled with fear and anticipation, at once sweet and sharp. He would burst through the kitchen door, bent like a question mark, an improbable survivor of some natural disaster, his face seeming to contain all the agony of mankind. The scene that followed, it now seems to me, was something out of the theatre of the absurd: there was an apparent absence of purpose, a lack of harmony with the surroundings, a sadness to the point of anguish, but also a kind of laconic comedy. While my father ranted and raved, fighting all the while with his towel, taming it into submission in an effort to get warm and dry, my mother performed an emotional
pas-de-deux,
alternately pleading and reproaching, her mouth tight and hard, waiting for him to be calm so that she could undertake the radical cleaning of the bathroom.
    For the next part of the drama, however, there was absolute quiet. The scene was sombre but curiously edifying, a kind of Victorian death-bed moment. My father, now dry, would go to a corner of the kitchen, turn his back on us, drop his towel and bend down to step into his pyjamas. This was the moment worth waitingfor, the fascination and appallingness of it undiminished by its weekly repetition. For there, hanging down between my father's legs, was a sort of pouch, loose and macerated like an oven-ready bird and, to make matters worse, there was another bit, peeping out from the base of the pouch, a pink dangly thing. When my father raised first one leg, then the other, to enter his pyjamas, the pink dangly thing moved as if it had a life independent of my father's bare body. No one ever said anything. The wrinkled arrangement between his legs was clearly some unspeakable deformity, which my father to his eternal shame had to endure. I felt sorry for him, and sometimes when he was angry with me I made allowances for him because of his misfortune.
    Mostly he was not angry with me, however, and much of the time we got on well. I helped him in the garden, and he praised me when I did things exactly right. Everyone else's father was a coalminer but mine was a market gardener. Before I was born, he had been a building contractor, but he never spoke of that time. My mother mentioned it sometimes, but only during the worst rows when she would use it as a taunt. He had had his own business with two lorries, but there had been a fire in the garage and no insurance. Some of the burnt out garage still stood like a rebuke in what had been the builders’ yard and inside its shell there were the charred remains of the lorries with the words EDWARD CRAWFORD BUILDER just legible on the sides.
    My father taught me many things: how to sow brassicas, how to remove side-shoots from tomato plants without damaging the main stem, how to prick out bedding plants using a wooden template and a dibble, how to write
Mesembryanthemum
so neatly that it fitted onto a wooden label measuring only two and a half inches. The common name for
Mesembryanthemum
is
Livingstone Daisy,
which has exactly the same number of letters and sounds much better, but