The Visitors Book

by Sophie Hannah

  And yet, at the same time, my mind was full of memories that directly contradicted all of that: me dragging Greg into the loo on the ground floor and snarling at him, ‘These children are vile – every single one of them. First thing tomorrow I’m looking into moving Max to a different school.’ The nice helpful boy didn’t seem to be part of that memory, or, rather, my awareness and appreciation of him wasn’t. How could that be? And when I cut up the cake and considered spitting on each slice, why didn’t I think to myself, But I’d better put aside a clean piece for the helpful boy?

  I shivered. This was the weirdest feeling I’d ever had. It was as if I’d been two different women, at two different parties.

  ‘Mrs Rhodes?’ The boy’s voice pulled me out of my trance. He was staring up at me, looking worried.

  ‘Shall we go outside and look for your mummy?’ I wiped my eyes and took him by the hand. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Julia. My daddy’s name is Tony. You’ve never met him, but Max’s daddy knows him.’

  ‘Do you know your home phone number?’ As I asked the question, I heard ringing coming from the hall. ‘Aha! I bet that’s your parents,’ I said to the boy. ‘Come on. Let’s go and see.’

  Greg got to the phone before me. He looked worried as he listened. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘That’s . . . terrible.’

  Oh, no, I thought. Please not the nice boy’s parents. But . . . where was he? I couldn’t see him anywhere. Where had he gone?

  I ran out onto the street and nearly wept with relief when I saw the boy with a man and a woman. Each of them was holding one of his hands. ‘Go back inside and find Mrs Rhodes, darling,’ the woman said. ‘Don’t worry, there’s nothing to be scared of. She’s nice, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. Very,’ said the boy. God, I liked this child. He could so easily have said, ‘No, she’s an irate harpy covered in crushed crisps.’ I wasn’t so happy about the ‘go back inside’ part. Then I realised that of course the boy’s parents would insist he thanked me formally; these were people who knew how to raise a nice, non-repulsive child – the only ones in town, apparently.

  But why ‘go back inside’, when I was outside standing right next to them on the pavement?

  No, I wasn’t. I was in the hall with Greg. How could that be? And the boy, once again, was nowhere in evidence. I heard his voice say, ‘Mummy and Daddy have gone.’

  ‘Jen.’ Greg’s voice sounded funny. I turned, saw tears in his eyes. ‘That was Anne Garner on the phone. Anthony’s mother.’

  I had to think for a second. At first I thought he was talking about a mother belonging to one of our party guests, for those were the mothers I’d encountered most recently. Then I set myself straight. I’d never met Anthony Garner, but I knew the name well. He had been Greg’s best friend all the way through school. He’d had an extensive collection of Tintin books, over which the two of them had bonded.

  ‘Anthony and his wife Julia were killed two days ago. In South Africa. They’ve got a young kid Max’s age – Oliver. I’ve never even met him.’ Greg shook his head, angry suddenly. ‘He wasn’t with them, thank God. But . . . Christ, what’s going to happen to him?’

  Anthony Garner. Hadn’t the boy told me his parents were Tony and Julia?

  Oliver Garner. That was the boy’s name. I felt . . . no, it was impossible. It couldn’t be love. Whatever I felt for him, it couldn’t be that.

  ‘He must come here,’ I said.

  He’s already been, I didn’t say. He’s here now.

  Justified True Belief

  The second thing I notice about the woman waiting to cross the road is that the roots of her teeth are visible and blackened where they meet the gum. I see them clearly as she talks: dark flashes in her pink mouth. She hasn’t noticed that the green man is illuminated. Her friend has, but doesn’t want to interrupt. Both are smartly dressed, with laminated name badges on strings round their necks. I can’t read their names. The friend, the listener, is considerably more attractive. How could she not be, when the speaking woman is a ghost?

  Which was the first thing I noticed about her.

  They cross the street. The hem of the ghost’s coat touches my car as she passes. Neither woman looks at me through the windscreen; I only realise I was afraid they would – afraid she would – once it hasn’t happened. The green man gives way to the red. You can go, I tell myself, not moving.

  I’ve seen a ghost. My body has turned to cold concrete.

  Other drivers, waiting behind me, beep their horns.

  Somehow I manage to propel my car forward, swerving to the left, then too far to the right as I try to compensate. I turn down a side street and pull over. It’s only once the car is still that I realise I’m shaking. What ought I to do? Tell someone? Even in my strange, frozen state, I am rational enough to know that there’s no way to tell the story – and it’s hardly a story; it was a few seconds at a zebra crossing, that’s all – that will make it clear that the ghost I saw wasn’t a perfectly ordinary, living and breathing woman with some kind of gum disease. She didn’t behave in a frightening way, and she wasn’t visible only to me; her friend saw her too, and heard her. ‘How did you know she was a ghost?’ people will ask me.

  Because I did. Because of how I felt when I saw her. It wasn’t fear. I didn’t think she would harm me. Dread, horror . . . those words are more accurate. I would do anything to delete the memory of having seen her. Realising that this is impossible, I start to cry.

  I was fine before I saw her – absolutely fine. My neck hurt a bit, but that is, unfortunately, normal for me. Just before the ghost appeared, I’d been thinking that today was a good day on the neck front, the best I’d had for a while.

  The ghost’s companion, crossing the road alongside her, definitely saw her. She was listening attentively, nodding her head. They were engaged in a conversation together. I don’t believe the other woman knew that this wasn’t a regular person she was talking to. The truth that was unmissable to me – from a greater distance and through a car windscreen – was invisible to her. Why?

  I wipe the sweat from my forehead. I need to drive home, quickly, to prove to myself that I can get there. Seeing that . . . thing has left me feeling as if a windowless metal door has slammed shut, separating me from the rest of the world, the rest of my life. I’m in a sealed container and the air’s running out.

  You’re in the car. Maybe that’s the container you’re thinking of?

  I know it isn’t, but I’m willing to try anything. I open the car door to the blustery day and inhale as deeply as I can. It makes no difference.

  Will I tell anyone about this? Will I tell Rory, assuming I manage to get myself home at some point? The more people I tell, the more often I’ll have to hear the words ‘panic attack’; it’s the easy and obvious thing to say, and it’ll be said to me over and over again. No one will listen when I explain that panic doesn’t come close to describing it. It’s a heavy, slow feeling of being trapped in blankness – more like accounts I’ve read of clinical depression than anything terror-based.

  She looked exactly like an ordinary woman: dyed auburn hair, greying at the roots; a small mascara smudge at the corner of one eye; a redness around her nose, perhaps from the wind. She didn’t look like a ghost.

  No matter how many times I say these words to myself, I am unpersuaded. I know I saw a ghost.

  It’s nearly an hour before I feel able to drive home. I see Rory through the kitchen window, a wooden spoon in his hand. The smell of lamb roasting reminds me why I went out – to buy a bottle of Merlot.

  I don’t want to go inside. Not because I’ve forgotten the wine but because I don’t want to feel what I know I’ll feel: that I’m in my house, but, at the same time, not there; that I’m with Rory, but not as much as the ghost is still with me.

  The first thing I say to Rory is, ‘You know I don’t believe in ghosts.’

  ‘Where’s the wine?’ he asks.

  ‘I’ve just seen one.’ I des
cribe her as fully as I can – every detail I remember. ‘She was crossing the road with a friend. Some teenagers were crossing in the opposite direction at the same time, but . . . no one else knew she was a ghost. No one apart from me. We all saw her – her friend saw her and heard her, and the teenagers . . . one of them swerved to avoid banging into her, but I was the only one who saw her for what she was.’

  Rory grins. ‘That’s the worst excuse I’ve ever heard for forgetting to buy wine.’

  ‘I’m not joking.’

  ‘Well . . .’ The curl of his mouth suggests the first stirrings of annoyance. ‘That’s unfortunate. Better to be joking than to have turned into a halfwit, I always think. And we still have no wine.’

  I’d probably mock him if our roles were reversed. All the same, his reaction upsets me. Perhaps I ought to be more analytical: break this down into its constituent parts. ‘You’d believe me if I told you I’d seen a woman with bad teeth – if that was all I said.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ Rory says slowly. ‘Women with bad teeth – no problem at all. Give me a second and I’ll try to pin down the part of the story that . . .’

  ‘I can do without your sarcasm, Rory.’

  ‘Hang on, I think I’ve got it. Yep, that’s it: a dead woman with bad teeth strolling across the street – that’s the part I have trouble with.’

  ‘I have trouble with it, too. That doesn’t change the fact that I knew she was a ghost the second I saw her.’

  Arguing helps. Annoyance and frustration have started, slowly, to push the dread out of the way.

  Rory shakes his head. ‘This is crazier than your Healing Hands idea.’

  ‘If by crazy you mean inexplicable, I agree. And Healing Hands wasn’t crazy,’ I can’t resist adding. ‘I might still contact them. There’s no way their researchers aren’t better diagnosticians than my GP. I know you lost interest in my bad neck when it lasted longer than a week . . .’ I cut myself off with a sigh. This is an old argument. ‘You haven’t asked how I knew she was a ghost,’ I say quietly. This conversation needs to be had, however much of an ordeal it might be.

  ‘You can’t know something that isn’t the case, darling.’ Still holding the spoon, Rory opens the oven with his other hand to check the lamb. ‘You need to read up on the Gettier problem.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A famous philosophical conundrum. Is justified true belief an adequate definition of knowledge? If it is, then we can say that S knows that G is true – S for Suzie, G for ghost – if and only if G is true, S believes G is true, and S is justified in her belief. Which . . .’ – Rory slams the oven door shut with a smug smile – ‘... she ain’t.’

  ‘I don’t know how I knew,’ I tell him, ignoring his grandstanding. ‘That’s what scares me. Normally when someone asks you how you know something, you don’t have to think about it. You know how you know, effortlessly.’ I follow Rory around the kitchen as I speak, hovering behind him, not caring that I’m making him impatient. ‘How do I know you’re cooking lamb? I can smell it. How do I know you’re finding me irritating? Your body language, your expression . . .’

  ‘. . . the fact that you’re being irritating,’ Rory mutters. He sighs, turns to face me and says, ‘Can you keep an eye on the lamb while I nip out to the off-licence for wine?’

  Five weeks later, after I have allowed Rory, the philosopher Edmund Gettier and common sense to convince me that I was wrong, I see another ghost. This time it’s a young man with a ponytail, in front of me in the queue at the post office. He’s holding a rigid A4 envelope, the words ‘Handle With Care’ printed on it in red.

  I have no idea how I know he is a ghost, but there is no doubt in my mind, even though I cannot see his face. Once again, fear freezes me. This time it’s more convenient, because I’m in a queue that’s not moving. I remind myself that I don’t believe in the supernatural, but it has no effect. That opinion, one I’ve expressed so often and with such certainty, now feels like a discarded fancy-dress costume – silly and irrelevant.

  Ask him. ‘Excuse me – you’re not dead, are you, by any chance?’ I know what Rory would say, once he’d stopped mocking and/or shouting at me not to be stupid: anxiety about the trapped nerve in my neck, or whatever it is, has made me more susceptible to morbid thoughts, and the constant pain isn’t helping.

  I tap the young man on the shoulder. When he turns, I say, ‘Look, this is going to sound odd, but . . . can you tell me something about yourself? Anything. What’s your name? What do you do?’

  He seems taken aback, keen to put as much distance as he can between himself and me. Has no woman ever spoken to him unprompted before? How strange. He looks like a frightened mouse.

  I don’t care if he thinks I’m a lunatic. Whatever he says, even if it’s ‘Get lost, freak’, I will feel better. I need him to demonstrate that he’s firmly anchored in the real world.

  He says nothing. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘Please answer.’

  ‘Why?’ He stumbles over the word, though it’s a simple one. ‘Do you recognise me from somewhere’?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I lie.

  ‘My name’s Dermot. I’m twenty-seven, I’m a welder. I have a girlfriend. We . . . we live together.’

  Does he think I’m trying to pick him up? He’s saying all the wrong things.

  ‘Tell me the most important thing,’ I whisper, my heart hammering. How did I know to say that? How do I know there’s something more important than what he’s told me already? I don’t have justified true belief. All the same, I believe Dermot has something crucial to tell me.

  He looks angry. Trapped. ‘I’ve got a brain aneurysm,’ he says eventually. ‘There’s a good chance it’s going to kill me. How did you know?’

  Later, I explain to Rory how the puzzle fits together. The welder, Dermot, has a life-threatening condition. The woman at the zebra crossing looked unhealthy; her black tooth situation might be the result of gum disease, or even something more serious. My neck’s been plaguing me for two months – of course I’m going to be sensitive to other people’s pain. There’s nothing supernatural about it. When Rory goes to bed, I’ll do some research on the internet.

  One of the more interesting results that comes up when I type ‘sore neck’ into the search box is a website called Spirit Harmony. It’s the online home of a guru based in Bloomington, Indiana. There’s a page on her site that matches common physical ailments to their correct spiritual diagnoses. For sore neck she’s got: ‘Sometimes, pain in the shoulders and especially in the neck is a sign that you are ready to embark upon a period of significant spiritual growth. Do not deny the message your body is sending you. Instead, allow yourself to step into your own abundant spiritual potential, and inhabit it fully.’

  I have no idea what this means. It’s made my neck hurt more. I wish there were a way of leaving a comment on the website. Didn’t the guru stop to think that some people reading her advice might be married to men like Rory? If I told him I wanted to find a way to inhabit my own abundant spiritual potential, he’d probably say something like, ‘Yes, but can we get the new kitchen sorted out first?’

  I type ‘brain aneurysm’ into the search box. It’s the only solid lead I have. As the results fill my computer screen, I wonder if I’m going about this the wrong way. Solid leads, traditionally, help people to catch flesh-and-blood criminals, not ghosts.

  Dr Caroline Simm is the UK’s leading brain aneurysm expert. I’m lucky to get an appointment with her at such short notice. She is running nearly two hours late. I sit in her waiting room with three other people, one of whom – an elderly man – is a ghost. I can’t stop staring at him, though the sight of him fills me with dread.

  I should turn away. He’s shooting nervous glances in my direction every few seconds; each time he looks, he finds me staring at him. He shudders as he catches my eye, as if afraid I might be about to pounce on him. I am trying to be subtle, to watch him without him noticing; clearly it’s not working.

 
He’s not a ghost, I tell myself firmly. He has a brain aneurysm, like Dermot – that’s why he’s here to see Dr Simm.

  My little pep talk makes no difference to how I feel. I still know the man is a ghost. I don’t know how I know.

  Ten minutes later, I am telling Dr Simm about my neck. ‘My GP insists it’s a trapped nerve that’ll come free at some point, but I’ve had trapped nerves before – it’s a different kind of pain. I’ve seen locums, been to A&E – no one could come up with anything else it might be. I got so desperate, I nearly contacted Healing Hands.’ I laugh as if embarrassed, pretending to think my good idea is a bad idea.

  Dr Simm looks puzzled.

  ‘You know, the TV drama?’

  She plainly doesn’t know.

  ‘Every episode, someone’s got some bizarre combination of symptoms, and these brilliant doctors work out what’s wrong just in time to save their life.’

  Why am I telling her this?

  ‘Look, I know what’s wrong with me, and I need you to save me. Nuchal rigidity.’ I sound like someone who’s been Googling. ‘I have a brain aneurysm. Scan me. You’ll see I’m right.’

  Dr Simm smiles indulgently. ‘A trapped nerve is far more likely in a healthy young woman like you.’

  I tell her she’s wrong. Then I take a deep breath and tell her that I’ve been seeing ghosts or, rather, seeing people with brain aneurysms and perceiving them as ghosts. Three fellow sufferers, so far. Gum disease with blackened tooth roots isn’t a symptom of brain aneurysm; the woman I saw at the zebra crossing must have had both. It happens often on Healing Hands: a patient presents with two unrelated symptoms. One is caused by something lethal but curable if caught in time; the dramatic function of the other is to impede correct diagnosis until precisely fifty minutes into the programme, leaving ten minutes at the end for life-saving.

  ‘Dr Simm, there’s no doubt in my mind that I’ve been . . . led to this awareness of what’s wrong with me. Whenever I see someone with a brain aneurysm – a living person – I see them and perceive them, as a ghost. Even though they’re not dead!’