The Frequency

by Terry Kitto

  I’m not going to make it another week, came one frantic voice. Not another night.

  So what if I robbed the Londis? The big fat cats won’t notice the difference. My kids were starving.

  From the crowd walked Michael. He was barely recognisable at first, a doppelgänger of the others. When he saw Trish, he slowed. Perhaps he had given up on the idea of seeing her; perhaps he’d expected someone else. Trish didn’t rise to greet him. A guard took him to the seat opposite her, where he reclined into his chair, cuffed hands on the table between them. There was drawn out silence when neither party wanted to talk. Lips quivered and throats were cleared. It was lucky that, throughout their relationship, Trish had built up a resilience to Michael’s thoughts: his cravings for drugs, reminiscing of fights he’d been in, the girls he ogled at, or worst yet, sometimes hooked up with behind Trish’s back.

  ‘Your hair’s green,’ Michael finally commented.

  ‘It’s teal,’ Trish said.

  Michael grunted indignantly.

  ‘Weird vibes this mornin’,’ he said. ‘A Polish guy hung himself in the cell next to mine.’

  Michael tired of small talk quickly, always had, but Trish wondered whether recounting prison fables helped him ignore his own bleak reality.

  ‘No?’ She sounded far from earnest. ‘That’s rough.’

  ‘Nah, he was a kid fiddler. He knew the boys would get him, only a matter of time. If you don’t get done by someone else, you do it yourself, or you get fucked up on spice.’

  ‘There’s that in here?’

  ‘Everything gets in ’cause most of us ain’t ever getting out.’

  That’s your own fault, Trish thought, and the floodgates opened.

  ‘Guilty? Fucking guilty.’

  ‘It was Hornes’s idea,’ Michael whispered, eyes on a guard who filled a paper cup at the nearby water dispenser. ‘Get the shortest sentence possible. The odds were stacked against me – ’

  ‘The evidence was stacked against you,’ Trish hissed.

  ‘On a technicality, that her DNA was on my clothing – ’

  ‘I read the court notes.’

  She had, so many times that the visuals she’d gotten from it were branded in her mind, permeating every nightmare.

  ‘Look,’ Michael began, fists clenched. A guard flitted past their table toward commotion in the corner of the visitation room. He relaxed his posture and unclenched his fists. ‘What I said in court was the whole truth. I swore on my mother’s life. Shauna was in The Puffin and Hare after the rugby match. Said hello, gave her a hug, in-law politics, checking she was with her friends. I got thrown out, and the next thing I know, I find her lying in the alleyway, strangled – ’

  ‘I’ve read the notes.’

  A young lad behind Michael yelled. Two guards flanked him, telling to remain calm or his visitation would end early. He pleaded with his dishevelled parents on the other side of his table. ‘She’s my daughter,’ he sobbed. ‘I’ve got a right to see her.’

  He wore an Arsenal Football shirt; if a prisoner was compliant they earned back personal items. He had kept his head down and all to see his daughter again, Trish bet. Michael only had his drab granite-grey tracksuit. Trish hadn’t meant to glare at him, but he caught it all the same.

  ‘You think I did it,’ he stated.

  ‘I don’t know what I think.’

  ‘I think you do,’ Michael growled. ‘Hornes contacted you. A character reference, they said, from the victim’s sister, could have done a world of good. I wouldn’t have had to plead guilty. I could have had a chance.’

  Trish snorted and turned her head from him.

  ‘And write what? That you were faithful? Dependable? That you weren’t going to and from Birmingham for dope?’

  ‘I did what I did to keep a roof over our heads.’

  ‘You could have done that if you’d stayed put in the milking parlours,’ Trish retorted. ‘Don’t make it out that it was for me. I was the last thing on your mind. I always was.’

  She had accepted a long time ago that Michael was many things, and selfless was not one of them. Michael sat back in his chair and leered at her the way he would a stranger.

  ‘I’m bored of you now.’

  ‘I’m boring you?’

  ‘Yeah, all this talking, goin’ nowhere. Bored.’

  Trish faltered. How could she mention the shadow imprint without sounding mad? Michael tended to hallucinate when abusing drugs, and the night Shauna died he’d had a cocktail of them. In such states, the things he envisioned were not drug-derived images, for Trish saw them too. He had a reception to the frequency, albeit limited. Were he capable of that whilst sober, he could have been a witness himself.

  ‘What were you on that night, then?’ Michael had never been one to shy away from his excursions. ‘Craig said you’d blacked out a few times that night.’

  ‘I was proper paralytic,’ Michael said. ‘A bit of Mandy, some blow. I could barely walk, let alone . . . It was a bad trip, truth be told. The shadows . . .’

  Trish nearly slipped from her chair.

  ‘The shadows?’ she asked.

  ‘Had lives of their own,’ Michael continued. ‘There were two of them.’

  ‘What did they do?’

  Michael leant back in his chair, brow wrinkled. He had Trish’s vested interest for the first time, and so he spoke slowly.

  ‘They followed me. The bar, the bog. Kept seeing them, wherever I went.’

  Trish saw it emanating from Michael’s mind. Two of the gywandras, waxen and malformed, were poised amongst the unsuspecting punters. And behind them, nailed to the bloodred wall, was a scuffed oil painting: The Vincent.

  ‘The paintings on the walls, well, they moved, some Harry Potter shit,’ Michael continued. ‘An old ship, and it was sinking – ’

  Trish scrambled from her chair, Michael’s shouts white noise as she fled the visitation room with a guard in tow.

  Sam’s comedown was a bitter last hurrah.

  Padstow’s harbour swirled and pulsated around him. Frequency energy coursed beneath each stone building, swaying boat, and lapping tide. Now the Network’s stores were inaccessible. Sam had gutted every drawer, container, and book nook of their flat – his flat, as he often reminded himself – for any remnants of alcohol and drugs. He dared not use what little money the Network’s trust gave him on so-so street drugs before he went cold turkey. For now, he decided, I’ll only be plagued by the dead.

  He’d eloped to Padstow to watch the morning sun blister the sky. His grief was relentless. Sam hadn’t slept well since the night James escorted him from the collieries and enforced compassionate leave on Sam. His cravings escalated in the absence of a hectic witnessing schedule. One half of his mind was occupied with Will. He had, in their six-year relationship, become half of Sam, it seemed. The other thought of narcotics, and he was intent on changing that.

  Sam was a rare witness: he’d never encountered death in his twenty-nine years – the dead he had, but not death. His grandfather, on his mother’s side, had passed when Sam was small. He was five then and only remembered the stories Rose told. No one had prepared him for it. Gut-punching sadness stole him in the quiet moments; he’d turn to talk to Will only to find the sofa to the left of him empty, or to check his phone to realise that Will would never text him again. Grief, a life sentence of spiralling depressive thoughts with no hope for a retrial.

  A greying council maintenance worker picked up litter on Strand Street, a permanent stoop in his posture from a long working life of manual labour. On the high street, retirees mulled to the social club for another day of liver damage. They had all experienced grief, surely, and yet their lives went on. Life went on . . . until it didn’t. Trish rarely called him nowadays, but when she did it was the same hopeful witnessing spiel: that Will wasn’t truly dead, not for them. She cried over her predicament between her loyalty for Shauna and Michael. Trish had caught Sam on the toilet, where he had been for a while; he
found himself taking longer to do most activities these days as trains of thought trundled through counties of alternate possibilities and scoured past fields of regret and towns of what-ifs.

  A cluster of imprints at the farthest edge of the harbour wall – sailors when they were alive – prepared a merchant’s boat. They passed supply crates between themselves, tightening ropes, plotting a course over a map. Enacting the day-to-day routines of lives they’d once had, invisible to the warm-bodied, the warm-bodied invisible to them. The drunkards, the maintenance worker, strung to their routines so inherently that what lay ahead of them in death, if they weren’t fortunate enough to disperse into the frequency forever, was to continue their routines unaware they were dead at all. Sam favoured death’s death itself: a dignified and absolute end. He’d hoped that for Will, deep down in his innermost thoughts, out of reach from Trish.

  An influx of locals amassed in the harbour. Dressed in white clothing, their outfits were licked with red or blue from handkerchiefs and headscarves. A drum roll rumbled, and accordions wheezed. The swarm amassed along the high street: the ’Obby ’Oss festival. Since Will’s death to that very moment, Sam had somehow exchanged a week of his life. He’d stared at walls and ogled at perfectly average people and found himself on the first of May. Not so dissimilar to imprints, after all. Sam slunk from the bench and wandered to the outskirts of the raucous.

  The crowd converged outside of the Golden Lion Inn, and a song rose.

  ‘Unite and unite and let us all unite,

  For summer is acome unto day,

  And whither we are going we will all unite,

  In the merry morning of May . . .’

  The Teaser – a gangly man in black rags – lumbered forward and knocked on the door of the inn. A man burst from it, wearing a garish black-and-red cape strung to a wide hoop around his shoulders: the ’Obby ’Oss. He manoeuvred to the centre of the crowd, swirling between the merrymakers and the teasers, and swooped and glided in pretence of capturing one of the maids in blue.

  ‘And bright is your bride that lies by your side,

  In the merry morning of May.’

  The lyrics brimmed with hope and wonderment, and they excluded Sam. The tossing ’Obby ’Oss, with its insatiable appetite, mocked the hunger for life that he suppressed, or maybe his grief did; he couldn’t be sure. It celebrated life, it welcomed change, summer’s fast approach, and Sam could no longer stand being isolated in suspended existence –

  Buzzing erupted in Sam’s pocket. He withdrew his phone to see that Trish called him. Her foresight was impeccable. He raced to the edge of the crowd and answered.

  ‘Sam, we have to – where the hell are you?’ Her voice wavered.

  ‘I’m Attenborough-ing a right old piss up,’ Sam replied.

  The gleeful May Day celebrations registered with Trish.

  ‘Christ. Don’t cause trouble. I’m coming to get you, and we’re going to Marge’s house.’

  ‘Marge’s house,’ Sam repeated with distaste.

  ‘It’s all connected, Sam. I don’t know how, but it is.’

  Trish pulled up outside the band barriers on Quay Street ten minutes later. Sam noticed a cracked side-view mirror and a fresh dent in the passenger wing before he climbed into the Reliant; her mind had been on many things on the drive over, but it hadn’t been on the road.

  He gave her a pinch-punch-first-of-the-month-no-returning as they sped away, knowing it was childish in light of everything. Luckily, he said no more and listened to Trish recount the last three days without him.

  ‘Percy Shilson called it the gywandras,’ Trish concluded. ‘Shauna, Rose, Will, and Rasha. It’s all connected.’

  ‘And you think the Network knows about this?’

  ‘It’s in the archives. Buried, but it’s there.’

  ‘You realise you’re saying,’ Sam grumbled, ‘that it’s been around for fourteen years. Maybe longer.’

  ‘I know, I know. We might learn something at Will’s house. We’ll have to be careful. Keep our stories straight about work.’

  The trio had spun an intricate web of lies about a start-up company, Shore Utilities. Will and Trish were both in HR, and Sam was an engineer. Margaret and Phil believed them, to their surprise; Will’s mind would be wasted chasing employees for time sheets, whilst Sam could barely change a fuse in their Ikea floor lamp. A start-up company that struggled to find its feet. Like many things, Sam thought with distaste.

  ‘How much time do you think we can get?’ Trish asked.

  ‘We need to get through the door first.’ Trish blasted him a foul look. ‘Eyes on the road, Teagues. He went to stay with them because of me. He would have told them. Marge would have coaxed it out of him.’

  Over a cream tea, no doubt. Her scones were black magic.

  ‘Plus the day you forced your way into their house,’ Trish snapped. Old Phil, struggling on his bad hip, had to wrench Sam out of the cottage. Margaret cried in hysterics at them both. A shed-load of ketamine had been needed that night. As if she’d read Sam’s mind, Trish said, ‘And if they mention drugs? I’m not Scarlet Johansson-ing with your Hulk in there, not in front of his parents, not at the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Scene of the crime,’ Sam echoed through pursed lips. Trish prodded him hard in the ribs. ‘Yes, all right, I will behave, I promise. Crime? You think someone did it?’

  ‘What else?’ Trish said. ‘You’re not thinking . . . ? But that’s absurd.’

  Get out of my head, Teagues, he thought bitterly, then continued vocally, ‘He was stressed. Our relationship was basically extinct – buried, excavated, and put into a museum. I drove him from our home.’

  ‘He wouldn’t!’ Trish demanded it to be true. It wasn’t just Sam she tried to persuade. ‘He just wouldn’t.’

  They skirted around a word one considered blasphemy amongst witnesses: suicide. A majority of them – Trish included – had close brushes with death’s illicit companion. As witnesses, the odds they would come back as imprints were invariably in their favour. The concept of suicide lost any appeal to the desperate when their woes would follow them into death, just an unruly extension of a life so sour.

  ‘Abidemi’s signature was there.’

  ‘She might have been there for a number of reasons. To warn him. To help him. As Will would have said, a closed mind – ’

  ‘Isn’t open to answers,’ Trish concluded. ‘I miss him.’

  ‘Me too.’

  Will’s parents ambled out of their front door as the Reliant pulled into their drive. Their Maldivian holidays, excess drinking, and sports had caught up with them; skin ashen and eyes tired, both swayed on their feet.

  Sam rose from the Reliant’s passenger door. He was surprised to find they looked relieved, and as Phil limped forward, Sam learnt why.

  ‘We thought you were police again,’ Phil said, and Sam was reminded how Will sounded like him. Sam’s stomach fell. ‘They’ve been coming and going, all this talkin’ but not sayin’ anythin’.’

  ‘Good to know our tax is being put to good use,’ Sam retorted, taking Phil’s hand. His could-have-been-father-in-law smiled. There was yearning in his eyes too, in the way that someone desperately wanted to talk a person but their situation did not allow for it. In that case, Margaret didn’t.

  ‘We exist, then,’ she hissed.

  ‘Marge,’ Phil cautioned.

  ‘No Philip, no, goddamn it. You barge in on the day it happened, we have to throw you out. No calls, no texts. You wouldn’t have thought Will had a partner.’ Partner, far more ambiguous than boyfriend. ‘I mean, were you even together in the end? He didn’t say either way when he came home.’

  Margaret’s opening itinerary for Sam’s recent visits. She implied he was a lousy boyfriend – correction, partner. Check. Lied that Will hadn’t divulged all about their relationship over some proper home cooking. Check.

  Margaret was a hopeless cause, so Sam sought for solidarity with Phil.

  ‘I cou
ldn’t talk to you both over the phone. I wanted to come here, but coming back to where . . .’

  Phil nodded but Margaret replied, ‘That’s not bloody good enough. We have to live here, day and night, sleeping down the hallway from it. We can’t escape. We can’t just bury our heads in the sand.’

  An invite to go inside may not have appeared if it hadn’t started to rain. Phil took Trish by the shoulder and led her in first. Trish gave her apologies for their loss, which softened Margaret a little. Having no daughters herself, she had always been fond of Trish.

  Sam took up the rear. Will’s parents lumbered into the kitchen. Phil’s limp was worse; his left hip needed a replacement. Margaret was unsteady too, her busybody pace gone, inching across the kitchen tiles to tend to the kettle. Maybe they’d aged in the months he’d rarely visited. Maybe Will’s death had gotten to their cores, rotting them from the inside out.

  Phil settled into a chair padded out with cushions and invited Sam and Trish to the table.

  ‘No parent should have to bury their child,’ Phil said. Behind him, Margaret slammed cups and chinked teaspoons to drown out the noise. Sam wondered how many times she’d heard Philip repeat himself. ‘You don’t realise what a rigmarole it is. It’s not the money I mind; can’t take that with you, can you? They haven’t released him yet. Coroner said something doesn’t add up. Then you need certificates and have to send them everywhere. There’s the funeral itself, of course – ’

  ‘I’ll help,’ Sam said. ‘I can pay for everything.’