Published 'Footsteps' 1995
"Don't you believe in ghosts any more?" asked Clement's mother, while fingering the tiny cross at her throat, as if such a tangible icon could possibly protect her from the substanceless threat of her question.
The room was a living one: crowded with members of Clement's family - a funeral gathering, with too many children under the age of ten for comfort. Clement grimaced at the thought of the ensuing hours of small talk and less than small arguments. Yet, despite the large congress, there was a death-like silence, as each constituent balanced the chinking of a tea-cup against the nibbling noise caused by an inconsequential cucumber sandwich, underlaid with the snickering log-fed flames in the grate.
The ghost query divided an otherwise unbroken length of silence into two roughly equal parts.
The children maintained an uncharacteristic modicum of good behaviour, even the boy who had dared wear a bobble hat at the ceremony earlier in the day. Twins Archie and Annabel had given up squabbling, once one of them at random had been given what Clement considered to be a rather vicious clip round the ear by their otherwise smiley mother.
Clement had attended the occasion on his own. Even his mother had arrived from the other end of town, pretending always to have been a spinster, despite the evidence of Clement as fruit of her marital loins. She had ignored her son during most of the day's proceedings, other than the initial social pleasantries between mother and son which she had a way of making quite unpleasant.
He surveyed the others. They surveyed him, too, with the usual embarrassment that people have about returning stares. Most of them were unmentionable creatures whom Clement wouldn't have even granted a second glance in the town's market. The fact that they were related in various peculiar ways with him did not make them special. He'd rather hobnob with those donkeys on the sands which he used to ride as a child, when his mother and father (when his father was still alive) took him to the seaside every Whitsun holiday.
"Ghosts, mother?" After a considered silence, he had repeated the question back to her. He fingered his cufflinks, as if to echo some action he remembered her performing earlier.
"Yes, Clement, you were always going on about ghosts. If you're so clever, Where's Auntie Rita now?" She swept the room with her heavy braceleted arm, as if to conjure up Some wraith masquerading as the remnants of the day's buried body.
Clement had found it difficult to remember who Auntie Rita had really been. Some long-lost cousin on the wrong side of some family member's blanket? One who had wanted to be called Auntie because of some perverse logic as to respectability? Or was she his mother's sister, as simple at that? Whoever she was, he laid the blame at her death's door for today's embarrassments. The corpse as scapegoat, or, for the other family members, subterfuge. Families had politics as well as nations, even more twisted and, yes, mercenary. Why else would they all be haunting the living-room? If not for the reading of the will....
So that explained the man in half-moon glasses who was sitting uncomfortably on the sofa between Archie and Annabel. The family solicitor, no doubt. The man did not have the endemic stigma in his eyes nor the caste of complexion which typified the rest of the room's crawling life. Clement winced at his own words. He hadn't chosen them. It was as if someone else had described the scene. Clement was no culprit - he was sure. Yet the family did stem from a particularly nasty form of ethnic cleansing that had transpired in Old Europe, before Clement was born. That at least, was true. It gave him no excuse, however, for racial slurs, even if himself was subject to such slurs.
"I don't believe in ghosts any more, Mother, you know that." Clement had broken another icy silence. Her accusation could not have remained unchallenged. Who knew what concertina of destinies would have been set in motion, otherwise? The supposed solicitor coughed, either because he had a frog in his throat or he genuinely wanted to let slip the dogs of war with a will. It turned out to be a frog, since the man pawed at his own chest as if he fought for his breath - or someone else's breath, Clement unaccountably thought, in a moment of light-hearted private humour.
Someone - it looked like one of the overgrown children - got the man a glass of water, his tepid tea having long been consumed. Upon recovering, he maintained that a piece of cucumber had gone down the wrong way. "Which was the right way?" contemplated Clement, as he fingered his own throat, and found the tiny crucifix he always wore, against his better judgement as well as the Adam's apple. Habits died slowly - and one instilled when a toddler by his erstwhile parents, particularly so. Not that he believed in God any more. Well, not that God in whom his mother appeared to place so much faith, in any event.
The children were becoming fractious. Who could blame them? The whole affair was being drawn out to unnecessary lengths of fitful silence. At least, their encroaching wheedles and whines relieved the heavy atmosphere. Nobody had dared broach the will, even the so-called solicitor - a man who looked remarkably like Clement's late father when he was younger. Yet, his father had been a cleric: or a lower-rank verger or sexton or, maybe, at a push, a curate or something. Certainly not a deacon. Some shame had come on the family when Clement was too young to appreciate the repercussions. A minor sexual peccadillo with the topless female creature who flaunted .herself on the seaside rocks (near the donkey-ride). Or was she bottomless? A thing best forgotten. and forgetting was the easiest thing in the world, now. Anyway, a fishbone had killed Clement's father: a vicious spiky affair with no feeling for the sensitivity of human innards. Or, so the story went. Clement had been too old to remember, but now he was old enough to forget.
Archie and Annabel were running around the room, as if mayhem was their watchword. All thoughts as to respect for the dead had gone out of the window, They trailed streamers of what looked like sea-bed foliage in their wake. It would be time, soon enough, for the barbecue, if the weather held out. Clement suddenly recalled that he was responsible for the catering after dark. Jacket potatoes roasted between Auntie Rita's unburied buttocks: and they would all be able to let their hair down. Families, like nations, had quirks as well as miscegenations, often quite outrageous ones. Where there was a will, there was a way.
He wouldn't have given his mother the time of day, let alone a single glance in normal circumstances, such as, say, when wandering the town on the market day or sharing the library's reading room with other silent thin-lipped people. So not only did he ignore her question about ghosts, but he also cold-shouldered her as a person. He couldn't believe in ghosts. He never would. He snatched the long toasting-forks from a third cousin twice removed who was shaped over the fire - and he used them to jab and spike the empty air of the dead living-room. He then tugged the bobble hat down further down his jowls, hoping it would turn into a faceless balaclava.