The ghosts come to him, at night, appearing in the room that was darker than the darkest mine shaft, as black as the top of Widow Owen’s recently blackened fuel stove where she makes the griddle cakes with the dried fruit that Wesley Warboy, bachelor, border, lodger, likes to eat. He did not fear the ghosts and they had become as familiar to him as Widow Owen’s black cat, Sooty, who spent his days sleeping wherever he saw fit, favouring in winter, Wesley’s bed where it caught the morning sun and where the old cat could warm up his puss-cat bones, all chilled from the nights mousing in the woodshed.
The first ghost that came as an uninvited nocturnal guest, was his old father who Wesley saw in the darkness of Widow Owen’s second-best room, staring down at him with fierce eyes underneath his big bushy eyebrows, as Wesley tries to pull up the counterpane to his chin.
‘You were a great disappointment to your mother’ his ghostly father would say, slowly and sadly shaking his head and then fading into the corner of the room near the washbasin on its stand with the folded towel and sunlight soap.
Wesley Warboy was a disappointment to himself. He was only thirty years old and moved into the room at the Widow Owen’s after his mother, who was by then herself a widow, had died of something that nobody would talk about, that his old neighbour, Mr Jeffries, described as ‘women’s problems that we needn’t bother ourselves with.’ When Mr Jeffries had said this, the day before the funeral, Wesley just nodded as if he understood, but he had no idea what Mr Jeffries was on about. Before his mother died, Wesley thought that ‘women’s problems’, a phrase he had occasionally heard his mother and her friend use, amounted to making sure that the house was kept tidy and that there was food in the pantry and, he thought, those things shouldn’t have been enough to kill somebody.
With his father, death was straightforward and a death that was unremarkable on the Coalfields. A fall of coal had done for Arthur Warboy years earlier when Wesley was just seventeen and had recently started working himself at the Monkton pit. Some lazy good for nothing bastard hadn’t done their job properly somebody said, and somebody would pay ‘mark my words’ the pit manager said, and the pit manager ‘would pay’ the union said and, in the end, nobody paid very much, a pittance of compensation from the pit to Mrs Warboy and a strong message saying that if the timbering of the mine roof wasn’t done properly then people would be sacked and the union said that the time for proper timbering had to be taken into consideration when working out the miners’ earnings because each team of miners was paid on the tonnage of coal that they cut and when things were tough at home, sometimes somebody, and nobody would admit that it was them, would cut corners so that they could get more skips of coal to the surface weighbridge per shift.
Wesley worked on the top of the pit, hooking up the skips to a little tractor that would tow them to the weighbridge and then to the screens where the coal would be emptied on to a conveyor belt and sent to be graded for size. Wesley received the same base pay each week with a bonus based on the overall tonnage hauled out of the earth.
It wasn’t just his father whose ghostly likeness came to visit Wesley at night. There was his friend, Davey Muckle who had died when they were both thirteen in nineteen thirty-three. On hot nights when he has trouble sleeping, Wesley sometimes hears Davey but does not see him and Davey always says the same thing ‘let’s go for a swim Wes’. Davey drowned in the colliery dam; his foot caught in the junction of two branches of a submerged tree. Davey always went out further that Wesley who stayed close to the edge where his feet could touch the bottom. Wesley couldn’t swim, just do a sort of stroke that Davey said was ‘dog paddling’ while Davey himself would windmill his arms and kick his leg in a fashion that he told Wesley was called ‘the Australian Crawl’ and was invented by somebody called Dick Cavill, who Davey said was his hero.
A month or two before Davey died, Wesley went to the beach with the Muckle family; Davey, his sister Maureen who was a year younger and Mr and Mrs Muckle. Mr Muckle paid for Wesley’s fare on the train from the Hebburn Station all the way to Newcastle. Wesley had never been to Newcastle before and had only been to Maitland twice that he could remember. Sitting in the rail carriage, Wesley didn’t know what to look at as everything out of the window was so new and he was particularly impressed when the train got to Hexham and he saw the river for the first time and sitting alongside one of the wharves near the punt was what Wesley thought was a very big ship but Mr Muckle said that that when they got to Newcastle, Wesley would see even bigger ships and the ones at Hexham were just little ships that Mr Muckle called ‘sixty milers’ because they just travelled sixty miles taking coal to the power stations in Sydney.
‘Let’s go for a swim’ Davey Muckle called at night.
‘It’s dark’ Wesley said in a whisper.
‘It is dark forever’ Davey Muckle would say, and Wesley would hear no more for a night or two and then it would start again.
Wesley sometimes saw Mr and Mrs Muckle up the street, going to Harden the butcher for some mince or chops. Mrs Muckle would go into the shop while Mr Muckle sat outside in his shined and polished Holden 48-215, the only one in a town where very few people owned a car of any description, let alone a brand new one. Both Mr and Mrs Muckle seemed to Wesley to have aged a hundred years in the months after Davey drowned and yet they hardly have seemed to age any more in the last fifteen years. Mrs Muckle was always a tiny woman and was, in Wesley’s eyes, even tinier and was probable even shorter than his landlady, Widow Owens, who stood four foot eight in her stockinged feet.
Wesley wondered if Davey came to Mr and Mrs Muckle late at night, disturbing their dreams if, indeed, they had any, because Wesley could not imagine what it was that old people dreamed about other than things that happened a long time ago when they were young.
With her lined face and the skin on the back of her hands all wrinkled with blue veins showing and the way she walked with a stoop and complained about her aches and pains, Wesley always thought, when he was growing up, that his grandmother was ancient, but she was not much more than sixty years old when she died, the year that Wesley turned twelve.
His grandmother got the cancer, as she called it, and then Wesley’s own mother followed her a couple of years later. And now, his mother and grandmother would come on the occasional nights and never on the same night as his father, as if they didn’t want to bump into each other in the dark room. He saw his ma and his nan less frequently than he saw his father or Davey Muckle but they did look on him from time to time, standing just near the doorway, both of them in their widow’s black and their grey hair, heads together, clucking away and Wesley could not make out the words but knew that they were talking about him and, if he turned in his bed to get a better look at them, they vanished. Just the echo of their little clucking tongues was left in the dark room.
Wesley began to feel a sense of confusion about which was the real world, the world of the living and, there were moments that he suspected that his mother and father and his grandmother and Davey Muckle all existed in the real world and that he, Wesley Warboy, existed in a world that was not real and was, in fact, some form of purgatory.
Wesley tried to remember what old Mr Talbot, the minister at chapel, would say about life after death and heaven and hades and all the various states of being and how he Mr Talbot would get angry and thump the lectern when he denounced the Catholics as being the tools of Satan with their belief in things such as Purgatory and how his mother would say amen and how his grandmother would say amen and how his father would say nothing because he never went to chapel and how his mother and Mr Talbot would say that Wesley’s dad had nothing to look forward to other than eternal damnation. Wesley wondered how it could be that his father was damned to hell and his mother was in heaven and yet they both came at night to his bedroom.
He asked the Widow Owen if she ever saw Mr Owen at night and she laughed. Widow Owen was a practical woman who immediately dismissed Wesley when he spoke of ghosts and how they visited him.
It was just after his attempted conversation with the Widow Owen that a new ghost came to Wesley on a cold frosty morning. She was a young woman about Wesley’s age, and she was beautifully dressed and wore white gloves in which she carried a posy of bright and colourful flowers whose name Wesley did not know.
‘Do you remember me, Wesley?’ the ghost lady asked, and Wesley said that he did not know who she was, and she laughed.
‘I’m Peggy Flanagan’ she said and then immediately faded away into the darkness.
Peggy Flanagan was a girl that Wesley had a crush on when they were both in the sixth class at Hebburn Primary and Peggy would have been eleven or twelve. She died in the May school holidays from diphtheria. Wesley had seen Peggy on the last day of term and had decided that when school came back, he would ask her to be his girlfriend. He did not really know what that being a boyfriend and girlfriend entailed but a couple of boys in his class had girlfriends and they would sit together in the pictures on Saturday afternoon and hold hands and Ray Hogan said that Myrtle Makepeace let him kiss her on the lips and put his hand up her skirt when the lights went down although the other boys said that he was telling lies.
Wesley spent the May holidays daydreaming about what it would be like to be a boy who had a girlfriend and then, no sooner than they had begun, the holidays were over, and he was back at school and, on the first day, wondered why Peggy wasn’t in the playground, sitting with the other girls under the trees next to the weather shed.
Mr Trugoen, the headmaster, came into the classroom straight after prayers and stood looking uncomfortable in his moth eaten black academic gown with the dusting of dandruff on the shoulders. He coughed once or twice and then announced to the class that Peggy had passed away two days previously and that she had been sick for most of the holidays and that her funeral would be held the following day but not in Hebburn as most of her family still lived around Wallsend, thirty miles away near Newcastle. Some of the girls started crying and Wesley also wanted to cry but didn’t want the likes of Ray Hogan and his mates calling him a sissy.
Wesley could not work out what it meant for Peggy to come to him as a ghost at night but at the same age she would be had she lived when all the other ghosts were the ages they were when they died, and it made no sense for Davey Muckle to be thirteen as a ghost when Peggy was just a year younger when she died. Besides that, Peggy, or her ghost, had nearly eighteen years in which to make an appearance and, sure enough, there had been some big distractions in that time, the end of the Depression, the war, the big strike the year before but none of that should have been any impediment to a ghost, or so Wesley thought.
Peggy came to him again the next night following her first appearance, and she seemed to have the same red hair, but her freckled face was white like the porcelain on the inside of Widow Owen’s best China cups. Her voice was not that of a girl but was that of a woman and without the harshness of accent that the local women and girls had, and Wesley thought that she sounded a bit like Lana Turner.
During the day after the second visit, Wesley wondered whether he had been a disappointment to Peggy Flanagan the same way it appeared he had been to his mother and father.
Nearly all the boys in his class had gone to work at one of the pits, usually the same pit as their father. They were all married with children of their own, all except for Ray Hogan. Ray signed up at nineteen, all set he said, ‘to kill some fuckin’ Krauts and Eyties’ but, he died in North Africa and not by the Krauts or Eyties, but by some tropical disease, or so Ray’s dad said and he was angry that the local RSL wouldn’t count Ray amongst the fallen and put his name on the cenotaph in the little park next to the butcher shop. Eoin Davy reckoned that Ray had picked up some virulent dose of the syph off some gypo sheila in some brothel in Alexandria.
Wesley wondered if Peggy would have been proud of him if he had joined the army and if he would have done so if Peggy had still been alive when the war started.
Maybe, he thought, there was another world where things were different. He suspected that if he had been a disappointment to Peggy that she would have said so in one of her nightly visits.
On the third night straight, Peggy came to Wesley and told him that she was in a good place and that she lived in the world of memories and the world of forgetting and that she had forgotten the pain of dying but remembered the joy of being loved and that the world that she now inhabited was a world of love.
Wesley wanted to live in a world of love and not the world of the Widow Owen, mince and turnips.
He couldn’t sleep on the fourth night but knew that he had to because the visitors wouldn’t come if he was awake, and it was their presence that would wake him from the darkness of sleep. He hoped that Peggy wouldn’t be scared off by his parents or his grandmother and he was not convinced that the ghostly world they inhabited was the same world as Peggy and perhaps they lived in the world of purgatory that he had heard the Tykes talk about, the limbo between heaven and hell that Mr Talbot, Methodist minister in town was so certain did not exist but Wesley doubted that the Minister ever had the same nightly visitations as he had.
Since Peggy had started to visit Wesley, he noticed that the other visitors had ceased, and he had not seen his father or mother or grandmother or even Davey Muckle in over a week and he had also noticed that the Widow Owen’s cat Sooty had stopped coming into his room and would leave the kitchen when Wesley came in of an afternoon for his mince. Wesley didn’t have friends at work – his workmates were all pleasant to him and nobody on the shift had a bad word to say about anybody else, but he didn’t socialise with any of them after work and he didn’t go to the pub and on Saturday he didn’t go down to fields to watch the Hebburn Magpies play in the district football league. There had been a subtle change in the way that people reacted to Wesley, whether it be at work or at the shops, and that was to Wesley a sense of being ignored, but not in a rude or offensive way, but rather in a way like they couldn’t see him, didn’t notice that he was there.
Wesley eventually fell asleep around three in the morning and it seemed to him that he hadn’t been to sleep all that long when he woke up again. In the distance he could hear the whistle of a steam locomotive lifting the coal from one of the pits to the coal loader down on the river. There was no other sound to be heard and then he thought he could hear some faint singing but he didn’t know the song. Peggy slowly appeared like a cloud forming, indistinct at first and then slowly forming a human shape and then becoming a person. She wasn’t carrying the flowers but was wearing a simple white shift and had bare feet and she had a kind smile.
‘It’s time’ Peggy said.
‘For what?’ Wesley asked and Peggy just smiled and held out her hand as if she wanted him to place his hand in hers. Wesley had never held hands with a woman before.
Peggy said nothing. She just waited.
After a moment, Peggy turned her back on Wesley and opened the door silently. Wesley could hear the snores of Mrs Owen in the front bedroom, and he knew that Sooty would be outside somewhere chasing mice.
Wesley threw back the covers of his bed and reached down for his carpet slippers and then slipped his checked dressing gown on over his flannelette pyjamas. He had a sense that he didn’t need to dress for wherever it was that Peggy was taking him.
Peggy walked quietly down the hall and out the front door, not turning to see if Wesley was following her. She stepped off the veranda and onto the frosty path and stood under the streetlight, turned and smiled and then walked into the darkness and, as he followed her, Wesley felt the darkness slowly envelope him and there seemed to no lights anywhere else in the town and soon he could not feel the cold earth and then he got the sense of Peggy, just in front of him getting bigger and bigger until all he could sense was the sensation of light and emptiness until he could sense nothing at all.
The End