Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  He glanced at Maggie, across from him, all sympathetic face. He could feel Roger looking at him, paused over his pudding, waiting to hear more, to find out what the trouble was. He looked at the clock. Lunch hour was almost up and he’d eaten hardly any lunch.

  Inside his mouth he could feel his tongue, rooted to him like a thick-stemmed plant. It was moving. It touched against the soft flesh of the walls of his mouth.

  *

  You can hang a work of art. You can hang a whole exhibition of works of art. You hang meat until it properly matures, and a jury or a parliament can be hung.

  You can hang on somebody, on his or her every word, and something can hang on, depend on, something or someone else. Clothes can hang well on you. Something can hang over you. There’s the other kind of hangover. There’s hang out and hang dog and get the hang of. Hang back. Hanging garden. Hang together. Hang down your head, hang fire, hanger on and hang on (as in, wait a minute). Hang in the balance. Well-hung. Hang-up (psychological), and hang up (telephone).

  I have started to make lists of these into a kind of mantra to try to interest her, even if only subconsciously, in all the other possible meanings. It is the least I can do.

  I touch my neck, apply different pressures to the cords of my muscles. It amazes me how tough and sensitive they are. I speak while I’m doing it, and hear how the pressure changes the sound that comes out.

  I carry her up the stairs. I put her down on the bathroom stool, run the water, swirl the hot and the cold together. I dry my hands and undress her, as gently as I can because she is always sore. Then I lift her up and slide her into the water and she rests her head on the side of the bath. I soap her all over. Her feet, between her toes, up her calves and thighs and between them, up her taut back and down her front, between her ungrown breasts, under her arms, round and under the rope. I squeeze the flannel out over her head and wash off anything left of the soap. Then I wrap her in the bathtowel that’s been warming on the radiator. I dry her all over. I dry between her toes and behind her knees with talcum powder. I towel her hair and comb it out. I carry her on my back into the bedroom, and then I tuck her into the bed. Until she is asleep, I lie next to her above the covers. She likes me to breathe with her. When she is asleep I slip off the bed, switch the light out and close the door over. I leave the landing light on. She is afraid of the dark.

  On the nights when she can’t sleep, I sit with her. I look into her white-charred eyes. I let her put her cold hand on my heart.

  It is the very least I can do.

  *

  Pauline jumped off the garage roof and broke her leg when she landed. The bone came right out through the skin.

  A neighbour called both the paramedics and the police for good measure. The policeman arrived first.

  I can’t help you, love, he told Pauline. I’m the reporting officer. Even if you were on fire, even if you were bleeding to death right here in front of me on the lawn, I’d not be able to do anything. It’s my duty only to report what happens here until the emergency services come.

  Pauline lay on the grass with her leg jutted up. Tears streamed across her face and she was laughing. The policeman looked at her teeth. He thought what a fine mouth she had, and how very good-looking she was. He turned his back, one foot swivelling in the flowerbed, opened his book and wrote it down. Upon my arrival the young woman was hysterical, and was quite unable to assess her own position.

  Mike was round at Maggie’s. He had been walking back and fore outside her house, and now he was sitting on her couch holding a large whisky. Maggie was saying all the right things; all the useful, surprisingly comforting things. But none of us can do anything about it, she said. We’d all like to, but we can’t. However much we’d like to, it’s just not possible. Some things are out of our control. We have to survive. She needs help, Michael, professional help, the kind of help you and I just can’t give her.

  Mike liked it that Maggie called him Michael. It somehow made things feel new, and possible.

  Where’s Dave? he said.

  Not here, Maggie said.

  Mike’s head and throat felt tight, as if he were about to cry. Maggie, I’m scared, he said.

  Don’t be, Maggie said. Don’t be scared.

  She was behind him, and she leaned forward and brushed her hand across the back of his neck, and where her hand touched him his hair stood on end.

  *

  She took me to a slightly higher place so we could see better.

  She brought her friends. They crowded in to see, all their grey forms in a mass upon the lawn, they overfilled the garden and the other back gardens and crammed into the lanes, spilling across the road and down the road. Some of them sitting for a better view up on top of parked cars and sheds and other roofs, all of them spreading down the streets and drives and round the cul de sacs, pushing into the waste lots and the fields and the outskirts, lining the roads and the motorway further than the eye, a great greyed carpet studded with lost things, and there was only one thing left for me to do. The silence like a cheer going up, roaring round my head when, flung into the air, diving like a bad swimmer into it, I went over the edge.

  For a moment she held me, lightened, delighted. Then she hovered above me like a piece of litter caught up in a crosswind.

  For a moment, it’s true, I was falling free, suspended by nothing.

  Christ but something’s really aching somewhere.

  God, though, what a beautiful day.

  TEMPORAL ANOMALY

  Kate Atkinson

  Kate Atkinson (b.1951) was born in York and lives in Edinburgh. She studied English at the University of Dundee and later taught in the city. Atkinson’s novels include Life After Life, Started Early, Took My Dog and Case Histories. Her books often explore the difficult stuff of life; incest, murder, divorce and betrayal. They are also characterised by humour and a belief in the essential goodness of humanity. Atkinson was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s 2011 Birthday Honours, for services to literature.

  Marianne was thinking about lemons when she died. More specifically, she was thinking about the lemons she had brought back from the Amalfi coast many weeks ago and which were now quietly decaying at the bottom of her fridge. It was raining, hard Scottish rain, and everyone was driving too fast, including Marianne, because no one wanted to be on the M9 in the rain, in the gloaming light.

  Marianne wondered if the lemons were still good enough to cook with. Perhaps she could make a lemon meringue pie. She’d never made one but that didn’t mean she couldn’t. Marianne imagined how surprised her husband and son would be if she presented them with a lemon meringue pie for supper. She imagined herself walking into the dining room, bearing the pie aloft like a smiling, old-fashioned wife, like her own mother.

  She had bought the lemons from a stall by the side of the road, when they were driving back to their hotel in Ravello. That was the day they had taken the boat trip to Capri. It had been very hot and all three of them had been irritable because Capri had turned out not to be what they had expected. It was full of expensive designer boutiques and rude Italians and all the cafés were busy. When Marianne saw the stall with the lemons she made Robert stop the car and he cursed her because he said it was too dangerous to stop and she said he was too cautious and he said that she was irresponsible and she said that was unfair and all the time Liam had played Donkey Kong on his Game Boy in the back of their rented Fiat Brava and said nothing.

  The old woman in charge of the stall filled a plastic carrier bag with the lemons without saying a word and gave Marianne a scornful look as if she had nothing but contempt for tourists, especially the ones who wanted her lemons.

  Marianne took the plastic bag on the plane home as hand-luggage, stuffing the lemons into the overhead locker on their scheduled flight out of Naples, and when she opened the locker again on the runway at Edinburgh airport she was hit by their lemony fragrance – sharp and sweet at the same time – which reminded her of the lemon soaps she used to
get in her Christmas stocking. When Robert saw the plastic bag he said, “You’ll never do anything with them,” and he had been right. But now she could surprise him, and it would remind him of the sunshine, like a gift. Or, of course, it might remind him of the road between Positano and Ravello and the heat and her crankiness and the arguments which hadn’t gone away but were only waiting for the right time to resurface.

  The car was buffeted by wind and the weather report on Forth FM said that the road bridge was closed to high-sided vehicles. Marianne wondered if she had a recipe for lemon meringue pie. She could phone her mother and ask her to read one out to her from one of her many cookery books. She fumbled for her mobile in her handbag on the back seat of her car – Robert always yelled at her if he saw her do that – and speed-dialled her mother’s number. Her mother sounded distracted when she answered, as if she’d already put Marianne out of her thoughts even though it was less than an hour since they’d kissed goodbye.

  “Have you got a good recipe for lemon meringue pie?” Marianne asked but then she never caught her mother’s answer because a darkness, like a great pair of black wings, covered her car and she could no longer hear her mother or the car engine or the rain or Forth FM on the radio, only the deafening sound of Hades’ chariot wheels as he overtook her on the inside lane, so close that she could smell the rank sweat on the flanks of his horses and the stench of his breath like rotten mushrooms. And then Hades leant out of his chariot and punched a hole in the windscreen of her Audi and Marianne thought, “This is really going to hurt.”

  *

  Marianne could see a fire engine making its way along the hard shoulder of the motorway, its blue lights sparkling in the dark. She had never noticed before that the blue lights on emergency vehicles were the colour of sapphires. Good Indian sapphires. Her father had been a jeweller and when she visited his shop he would take out the little drawers from the mahogany cabinet in which he kept his cut gems, graded and sorted by size and type, and show her the jewels, like tiny stars, resting on velvet cushions that were blacker than the night. Blacker than Hades’ horses.

  The traffic was tailed back on the eastbound carriageway for as far as Marianne could see – which was quite a long way, because she was suspended some twenty feet in the air. The Audi was slewed across the road, surrounded by more flashing sapphire lights. Broken glass glistened around it like carelessly scattered diamonds. An ambulance was parked with its doors open while the paramedics knelt on the road, treating the accident victim. A traffic police car and two big police Honda 1100s formed a barricade around the paramedics. The police themselves stood around, looking on, like a reluctant audience. The fluorescent yellow of their jackets, slick with rain, was brighter than a million lemons in the darkness.

  A gust of wind caught Marianne and she drifted closer to the accident. She wasn’t surprised to see herself down there, broken and crazed with blood, as the paramedics stuck tubes and needles into her and spoke in low professional tones to each other. Marianne supposed she was hovering (literally, it seemed) between life and death, her soul waiting to fly away while her body clung to the earth. You heard about it all the time. Near-death experiences. One of the paramedics was attaching defibrillator pads to Marianne’s chest. She wondered if she would feel it when they shocked her. She wished she could tell the paramedics and the police how grateful she was for what they were doing for her, how kind they were. Especially as she looked like such a hopeless case from up here.

  There was no sign, she noticed, of a tunnel or of a white light, no glimpse of the Elysian Fields. Her father didn’t appear to be waiting for her on the other side, nor was Buster, the little Westie she had loved so much as a child. Marianne thought that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad leaving this life behind if she could have Buster back in the next.

  On the opposite carriageway of the M9, the cars crawled past, their brake lights forming a slow-moving chain of glittering rubies. Marianne could see the pale now, although her watch still said ten past five. Marianne was sure that every single last cell in her body was bruised. A petrol tanker sped by, oblivious to her, followed by the M9 Express bus. She wondered if she should try to flag a vehicle down, or would it cause another accident? One was surely enough for a lifetime. A huge articulated lorry with “Tesco” written on the side caused a wake of diesel-scented air that made her feel sick. Marianne wondered if it was on its way to the Tesco in Colinton where she did her shopping. She had always hated shopping, but now she would have very much liked to be wandering along the brightly lit aisles, choosing between iceberg and cos, Persil Non-Bio and Fairy.

  Now that she had been brought back to life, nothing would be hateful any more, not now that she understood about the days being precious. She had heard about that too, those people who had come back from the shores of Acheron and found their attitude to life transformed so that they cherished even the wind and the rain and each and every painful, stumbling step made along the hard shoulder of the M9. The neon oasis of the Little Chef on the bypass, ablaze with lights in the dark, was as beautiful as a newly found constellation in the night sky.

  *

  Inside the Little Chef it was warm and smelt of old fat and cheap coffee and Marianne would never have believed how comforting those scents could be. Before. Before she died.

  The Little Chef’s other customers ignored her – a whey-faced teenage motorcyclist, two tired truckers, an argumentative couple and two young girls who didn’t look old enough to drive. Out of everyone in the place, it was Marianne who looked least likely to be the person involved in a car crash.

  A sullen-looking girl with bad skin was guarding the food under the heat lamps. She was eating a Mars Bar and reading a celebrity magazine that had Romney Wright pouting on the cover. According to her name badge, the girl was called Faith. Was she really called Faith or was it some kind of metaphysical statement? In Marianne’s avant-garde hairdresser’s, they had words sandblasted on the mirrors – “Serenity”, “Confidence”, “Compassion” – as if they were promoting Zen Buddhism instead of ridiculously overpriced cut-and-blow-drys. Marianne wondered if Faith’s badge was a sign of some kind. She wondered if now that she had been saved from death she would see signs everywhere.

  “Excuse me,” Marianne said. Faith ignored her. “Excuse me, Faith?” Faith finished her Mars Bar and yawned. Marianne leant over the metal troughs of chips and beans and fried fish and tugged at the sleeve of Faith’s nylon uniform. She pulled Faith’s hair, she pinched her skin, but Marianne may as well have been a breath on the air for all the notice Faith took of her. Marianne tried to accost the other customers, with much the same effect – no one could see her.

  She went into the ladies’ toilets to check her reflection in the mirror – to check if she had a reflection in the mirror – and was relieved to find that she had. What she saw wasn’t good. Her clothes were torn and filthy, she was covered in oil and bruises, her hair was matted with blood and what she very much hoped wasn’t brain matter (it was going to take more than serenity and compassion to fix that), and she had a tremendous gash across her forehead which was in urgent need of stitches. Marianne was mortified. It was no wonder no one wanted to speak to her. She picked a piece of road out of her chin and rearranged her hair to cover some of the skull fracture.

  Was she dead? She didn’t look dead. She didn’t feel dead. She felt fucking awful but she didn’t feel dead. And if she was dead then she would be a ghost but she couldn’t do any of the things ghosts were supposed to be able to do – she couldn’t float, she couldn’t pass through doors and walls, she was cold and hungry and tired (so tired), and still seemed to be subject to all the same rules of the phenomenal world as before. If she was dead then it seemed a lot like being alive, although worse, admittedly. And surely the astral plane wasn’t going to turn out to be a Little Chef?

  Marianne went to look for a phone. She didn’t have her handbag any more but she had a twenty-pence piece in her coat pocket. She dropped the coin in the
slot and dialled home. Robert answered, “Hello?” sounding abrupt and tired. Marianne thought he must be going mad with worry. “It’s me, Robert,” she said, surprised at how much her voice was trembling, “it’s Marianne,” and she waited for the relief and the tears but all he kept saying was “Hello? Hello? Is someone there?” then she heard that funny little noise he made when he was annoyed and the line went dead. Marianne tried to get her coin back but she couldn’t. This really wasn’t good at all.

  Apart from a little speeding – and how she regretted that now – Marianne had previously been a law-abiding person, certainly the most law-abiding lawyer that she knew, but given her current invisibility and her dreadful hunger, she thought she was more than justified in stealing food from under Faith’s blackhead-encumbered nose, loading up a plate with chips, beans and sausages – she couldn’t remember the last time she ate sausages – and washing them down with a can of Irn-Bru. She liked the Irn-Bru a lot and wondered why she’d never allowed Liam to drink it. She would in future. If there was a future.

  Marianne walked the four miles home from the Little Chef. When she got in the house she crawled up the stairs on her hands and knees and went straight to Liam’s room. She turned on the lamp by his bed and looked at her son. His eyelids were blue in sleep and his skin had a faint opalescent sheen of perspiration. He was in the last days of his childhood, she could smell it like a sour trace on his breath. She kissed him softly on his cheek and then she turned off the lamp, lay down on the bed and curled herself like an overcoat around her son. It turned out that love was everything, after all.

  In the morning she would wake up and everything would be all right. (How many times in her life had she told herself that?) She would wake and hear Robert moving about the house. His morning routine never changed – there would be the sound of running water, the kettle banging onto the hob, Radio Scotland’s “Good Morning, Scotland” suddenly blaring in the kitchen and, just as she did every morning, Marianne would say to her son, “Good morning, sleepyhead.” And life would go on.