Gettin' Jacked
or, that time a couple of guttersnipes went looking for ghosts
Before my old friend John moved in to Number 40, that place was the rarest, most exciting thing in the entire kid universe: an empty house with a wild garden and an unlocked door. The perfect playground for some feral kids with nowhere else to be.
There are two unchallengeable truths about life in 1980s England. First, I will never be allowed to eat at a Happy Eater. That rule was carved using ancient tools into blocks of diamond by The First Britons and is sacrosanct. There’s no amount of pleading, no fervour with which any grownup will be moved to allow me to experience sweet pre-cooked and re-heated roadside bliss. Second, if you walk into a house—any house—you will see Franz Hals’s The Laughing Cavalier.
A huge framed print on the wall, a small print blu-tacced above a fireplace, a brooch on a cardigan. The how and the where may vary, but he’s there. Sometimes, you might think you’ve stepped into a Cavalierless home, but I promise you have not. Sooner or later your host is going to offer you a biscuit and you will of course say yes, because even though it will probably be a Rich Tea there is always the possibility of a Mint Yo Yo or a Trio, and your host will oblige and—pow—there he is with his moustached smile stretched cylindrically around the surface of the biscuit tin.
For we children of Hollis Street there was a delicious bit of Street Folklore. See, a real live ghost haunted the terraced houses of my childhood. It was to be expected really, after all there’s a great big old Catholic church right at the top of the street. And what did that church have? A graveyard. And the equation Graveyard + Kids = Ghosts has never once been disproved.
[BONUS TRIVIA: the church didn’t actually have a graveyard at all. Kids are stupid.]
Our ghost was called The Jack of Hearts.
GHOST FACT NUMBER 1
Jack travelled from house to house using the image of The Laughing Cavalier as a portal. If you had any version of that painting anywhere in your house, it was as good as leaving a door wide open for Jack. That included my house, thanks to my Mum who had The Laughing Cavalier as a small print in the dining room and also on a set of cufflinks. Cufflinks that I later wore to my school leavers’ prom, might I add.
GHOST FACT NUMBER 2
He loved to mess with people’s VCRs. Couldn’t get enough of it. More specifically, if you were watching a video, he would stop it, rewind it, fast forward it, and then eject it across the lounge where it would smash into tiny pieces against a wall. Jack was as dedicated a ruiner of light entertainment as ever so much as looked at a VHS.
The adults denied the existence of the Jack of Hearts but we knew better. I had it on excellent authority that Ettie’s son Dwayne heard it from Joel who overheard Anthony telling Father McMahon it happened to Anthony’s sister but now Anthony’s sister dunt wanna talk about it so don’t ask her.
I didn’t need to hear another word.
The last time I went into Number 40 when it was still empty, I had a run-in with Jack. I and one of my friends—most likely Power— cut our way through the overgrown garden and slipped in through the back door. We were on a mission of such magnitude it would have changed kid history; Joel had told us the last time he came in the house he’d found a large old trunk in the attic. He’d been unable to get it open so couldn’t say what was inside, but we knew. We all knew: Ghost Shit. Enough spectral paraphernalia to prove beyond a doubt the existence not just of our ghost, but of the very concept of ghosts.
So we walked down the hall, past the broken Fruit Machine that had been there forever, and headed for the stairs. As we moved past an open door to the living room, I stared inside at a gigantic framed replica of The Laughing Cavalier hanging on the facing wall and thought about those exploding videos. I was uneasy, but we had fully succumbed to treasure chest mania; no threat or promise of death could tear us away from our prize. We moved past the open door and up the stairs onto the landing, looking for access to the attic.
There are two versions of what went down that day. The first is the story as we recounted it for most of our childhood. The version we knew—just knew—to be true.
A white-cuffed hand burst up through the floor, grabbed Power’s leg at the ankle and began to pull him down through the hole. He screamed, obviously. I screamed (obviously). He somehow got loose—I could never tell you how, having already cheesed it down the stairs because, no thank you—and we tore through the house. As we pelted through the hall, the Fruit Machine started up—all lights and piercing music—and I stopped dead in my tracks at the open door to the lounge. I was looking at The Laughing Cavalier. Or rather, I wasn’t. Where previously there had been a sinister-looking man smirking at me from behind his Van Dyke painted against that grey-blue background, now there was just the background. No outline where the Cavalier used to be, just the grey-blue stretched from edge to edge.
It all seems so perfectly clear what happened: Cavalier saw we were onto him about whatever was in that trunk, stepped out of a painting, and tried to do away with us the only way he knew how: by haunting defunct 80s technology. But what he hadn’t counted on was that he was dealing with a kid who would one day grow up to win a Beep Test, once, at school. No way could a ghost catch me when I could jog reasonably fast for quite a long time. We escaped with our lives and our story.
The second version of events is one that came to us as we became more sensibly-minded adults: Power’s foot fell through a floorboard and I ran away. He came out two minutes later and called me a loser.