A painted leotard was all it took to expose the cowards in our town

When I was a kid, I lived near an old guy, Mr Lamont, a retired man who’d once been an accountant. He must have been short of dough because one year, when the Royal Agricultural Show came to town, he hired on as a skeleton. He turned up at the showgrounds where they dressed him in a bodystocking painted with luminous bones and paid him to leap from the darkness, scaring people as they rode the Ghost Train. At day’s end, I’d hang around his front gate and pester him for stories of these emaciated ambushes and their resulting panic.

He spoke of those Ghost Train adventures in low tones, like it was a secret between us that our fellow townsfolk were such suckers, so yellow, not the heroes they pretended to be. Oh, how those passengers in his stories squealed and swore and buried their heads in each other’s shirtfronts when he appeared from the dark in luminous bones. Sometimes, they sprang out of their train carriages and stampeded for cracks of daylight. If one did it, they all did it, Mr Lamont said. No one lingered. Once the first chicken made a break for reality, the carriage emptied pronto.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

I was a brave boy who would never flee from a slow-moving skeleton that smelt deliciously of licorice and Craven As. Particularly, one that I already knew to be Mr Lamont in a leotard. So I delighted in the terror of that train’s passengers. It brought them down to my size. It bigged me up to theirs. The mother abandoning her kids, shouting, “My God, it’s real. It’s bones.” The ex-mayor who had once shot a Lee Enfield .303 at Japanese Zeros hollering to his wife to, “Keep it away, keep it away.” The cop-baiting sharpie who wet himself and had to walk along sideshow alley covering his jeans crotch with a pink cloud of fairy floss. Out there at his front gate, Mr Lamont and I laughed until our stomachs hurt. “Blow accountancy,” he said one day. “Being a skeleton is really living.”

I admired and envied that radiant skeleton’s power to humble hard-nosed matriarchs unto prayer and turn moustache-twirling grandees into scalded hounds hightailing it for safety. It showed me the least of us could do mighty things given a chance. A scrawny nobody in tricked-up undies was humbling big names in the dark. It was Christ-like. What possibilities this world offered a person willing to believe in himself.

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Was Mr Lamont breaching some kind of implied client confidentiality agreement by speaking to me of the brief but telling metamorphoses occurring in the Ghost Train? Should what goes on in the Ghost Train stay in the Ghost Train? I don’t think so. I saw the ride as a kind of lie detector where the world could look inside a mayor momentarily and see his real stuff, and I’d have been happy if everyone in town was obliged to buy a ticket and take a turn on its rails. Knowing who was inside the glowing bones, I’d have been first in the queue.

Years later, when Mr Lamont was a bona fide skeleton laid among a supine assembly of late Lamonts, I was revisiting our chats about the Ghost Train in my memory. And it occurred to me that he was tickled by how intrigued I was at the town’s cowardice, amused by my amusement, making up stories to make me laugh so he could laugh at me laughing and we could laugh together. His agreeable fictions, if that’s what they were, allowed an old man and a boy to meet on an intellectual plain.

There was also an element of justice in his stories. He cast his Ghost Train anecdotes with the people he thought we should like least – the self-important, the bullies, the first in line – and he was happy to make them behave like spineless curs when his awful X-ray danced out of the darkness. He probably knew that with me being a big-mouthed kid, his slanders of these unworthy folk would get around town. How could a boy not tell his friends these astounding stories that exposed the secret feebleness of the great men and women who ran their world?

In the end, the tales from the Ghost Train were probably all fictional. (Would a sharpie piss himself at the sight of a $2-an-hour ghoul?) But the point is, the old fibber opened me to the possibility they might be real – and that was important.