by Louise Welsh
*
Marianne woke up. For a moment she thought she had had a dreadful nightmare that had been forgotten on waking but then she remembered the car crash. She ached so much she could hardly move her limbs. Liam slept on peacefully beside her. The house was quiet and Marianne wondered what time it was. Then she heard footsteps on the stairs and the bedroom door opened and Robert entered the room. Marianne couldn’t remember when she had been so pleased to see Robert, not for years certainly.
She strained into a sitting position. Her mouth was so dry and ashy that she could hardly speak. “Robert,” she croaked. “I’m all right.” Robert sat on the edge of the bed. He looked dreadful, his skin grey, his eyes bloodshot and baggy. “I’m all right,” Marianne repeated. Robert shook Liam gently awake.
“Liam,” Robert said, his face crumpling in a way that made Marianne worry for him, “Liam, something very bad has happened. To Mum. A very bad thing.”
*
Marianne thought fondly of the Little Chef on the bypass. It was the last place she had visited in the outside world. For six months now she had been housebound. Presumably, she had come back to say goodbye because that was what the newly dead did – they came back to say goodbye to their loved ones – and somehow or other she had got stuck here. Before she was dead, Marianne would never have used the term “loved ones”, but six months of watching Oprah and Trisha and Sally Jesse Raphael had softened her vocabulary.
It was only television that gave her life (if you could call it that) any structure. She was glad that Robert had installed cable after she died. Now she had a narrative thread to guide her through the long, empty days. She could watch Crossroads, The Bold and the Beautiful as well as Classic Green Acres, which was currently running episodes from twenty years ago when Veronica Steer was still married to Jackson Todd and Gig Alexander still had hair. The characters on Green Acres were almost as real as Marianne’s own family. In fact, she saw more of them than she did her own family. Robert and Liam never seemed to be home any more. Liam went somewhere after school, although she didn’t know where because he never talked about it, and as for Robert, he was always late home and when he came in he smelt of alcohol and cigarettes and guilt.
After the initial grief and despair Marianne had been shocked at how quickly her husband and her son had returned to the rhythm of their lives. Liam still cried himself to sleep sometimes – Marianne had to go and hide in the airing cupboard with her hands over her ears because she couldn’t bear it – but apart from that, they hardly ever talked about her. Sometimes Liam said, “Mum would have liked this” or “Mum used to do this”, but then he would fall silent and stare into space and she could see him thinking how strange it was that she had disappeared so completely from his life and it seemed such a dreadful shame that she couldn’t tell him that she was still there, that it was beginning to look as though she was going to be there for ever. She should have hung on to that last coin, the twenty-pence piece she’d used to phone Robert from the Little Chef – what if that had been her fare for the last ferry of all?
Marianne didn’t know if she had been buried or cremated but she had known on which day her funeral took place because Robert and Liam returned home in the middle of the afternoon looking pale and numb. Robert was wearing the black tie he brought out only for funerals, and they both carried the sickly scent of lilies on their clothes. Marianne thought it would have been nice if they had brought people back to the house. She would have especially liked to see her mother. Marianne hoped they made her look pretty in her coffin. Marianne hoped that a lot of lovely things were said about her at her funeral. She wished she could have gone but there was some kind of invisible barrier, like a force field, that prevented her leaving the house.
The existence of this force field was the only evidence that there might possibly be someone in charge (but who?) in the afterlife. Although you could hardly call it an afterlife. It was more like a greyish half-life, a kind of uninspiring limbo. Wasn’t it the Plain of Asphodel in the Underworld where people went tediously through the motions of their lives without pleasure or pain? She wished she’d paid more attention in Classical Studies. Or in Religious Studies, or indeed anything that might have provided some clues to being the living dead. She supposed she might be a zombie, but were zombies invisible? She was fairly sure she wasn’t a vampire – apart from having no desire whatsoever to drink blood (although a good rare steak would have been welcome) – because she knew a lot about vampires now, thanks to Buffy. But what was she? There were more unanswered questions now than there had been when she was alive. Had she entered into a parallel existence of some kind? Or perhaps she would eventually come back, possibly as a completely different person, like Temple Bain, daughter of Digby Craddock, the shepherd on Green Acres.
Marianne lifted her feet so that Ella could hoover beneath them. Ella had been Marianne’s cleaner, two days a week, for three years, and all Marianne’s suspicions about how little work Ella did proved to be well-founded. The kettle was on before she even took her coat off and for the first hour of the day she sat with her feet up watching Lorraine, smoking cigarette after cigarette and drinking the cheap instant coffee that Robert bought nowadays instead of the expensive Italian roast that Marianne used to get in Valvona and Crolla.
Ella finished her cursory hoovering and sagged down onto the sofa next to Marianne and lit a cigarette. No wonder the place had always reeked of air freshener on the days Ella was in. Marianne sneaked one of Ella’s cigarettes when she wasn’t looking. She felt she had every reason to take up smoking and no reason not to. The bad-for-your-health argument really didn’t apply any more.
Ella was wearing a pair of Marianne’s trousers – black Warehouse – far too good for doing housework in. Marianne had been taking a nap in the conservatory the day they got rid of her clothes, and by the time she realized her entire wardrobe was leaving the house in black bin liners, Robert and Ella had already loaded up the boot of the car and left her with nothing but the jeans and sweater she’d been wearing. Robert must have offered Ella the pick of Marianne’s wardrobe as every time she appeared now she was wearing something that had once belonged to Marianne (and still did as far as Marianne was concerned). And it wasn’t just her clothes that had been disposed of, everything had gone – makeup, perfume, every last hair-clip, as if Robert couldn’t wait to eliminate her from the house.
It was just as well that on the day they disposed of her worldly goods Marianne had been wearing all her jewellery (there was undoubtedly a certain freedom in being dead), including the good pieces her father had given her over the years. Now, of course, she had to keep on wearing them in case they were got rid of. It was easy to feel overdressed when you were slumped in front of Countdown in a garnet choker and diamond earrings, not to mention her bridal tiara, which her father had had specially commissioned out of blue topazes and fresh-water pearls. She’d noticed her first grey hairs when she put the tiara on. She was sure they hadn’t been there before. It seemed particularly unfair that she was both dead and getting older.
If she combed her hair forward and positioned the tiara just right she could almost hide the ugly scar on her forehead. She had stitched up all her wounds with the only thread she could find in the house (she had never been a needlewoman), which unfortunately was black, so that now she gave the impression of being hand-made.
Where was her mother? Why hadn’t she been the one who had sorted out her clothes and why did she never come to the house to see Liam? What if something had happened to her as well? What if she had fallen down dead from shock when she heard about Marianne’s death? She wished she could speak to her mother about all the puzzling ontological questions raised on a daily basis when you were dead. She wished she could speak to anyone about anything.
*
On Star Trek: Voyager things weren’t going well (they rarely did). The shields were down, the plasma manifolds were malfunctioning and the warp drive was offline. Voyager was lost in space, s
eventy thousand light years from home. Marianne knew the feeling. She worked her way through a bag of Monster Munch and a can of Fanta. This was the best time of day because soon Liam would come home and flop down on the sofa and surf mindlessly through every channel. Sometimes Marianne managed to arrange her body so that he unwittingly put his head on her shoulder or lap and those moments almost made her feel alive.
Captain Kathryn Janeway was trying to stop Voyager being pulled into some kind of rift in the space–time continuum, “a quantum singularity”. Marianne wondered if there was such a thing or if the writers had made it up. Real or not, she knew what would happen to the crew of Voyager if they couldn’t avoid the rift – they would find themselves in a temporal anomaly. They always did. It happened to Buffy a lot as well. Once you were in a temporal anomaly everything was topsy-turvy – you would find yourself moving backwards (or forwards or sidewards) in time, or there would be a parallel universe where two of you existed, or you might even be dead and come back to life. Did the people who made television programmes know something about the physics of time that other people hadn’t noticed? Marianne had a suspicion that if she studied television carefully she might find the key to her own dilemma – only last week, for example, Captain Janeway had watched her own funeral (which on a starship, of course, meant that you floated off into endless, soundless space). And poor Buffy was two months in her grave before she came back from the dead. Marianne had been dead six months now but there might still be hope for her.
She discovered half a pomegranate that Liam had left lying on the coffee table and picked at the seeds with a pin. She hadn’t started decomposing – the grey hairs hardly counted. It would be easy enough for her to start again where she had left off. Indeed, recently, she had begun to feel quite cheerful again, as if the greyness of her existence was lightening, as if winter was finally turning into spring.
Voyager had escaped the temporal anomaly and Captain Janeway ordered Lieutenant Paris to set a course for home. Marianne heard the front door open and bang shut carelessly. Liam burst into the room, discarding his school bag and jacket on the floor. He flung himself on the sofa and turned to Marianne and said, “Hi, Mum, what’s for tea?” and – just like that, no reason, no explanation – she had her life back, day after day as precious and as delicate as a rope of pearls.
*
Marianne was on her way to see her mother. She still didn’t understand where her mother had been while she was dead and her mother was reluctant to discuss it saying it was better to let sleeping dogs lie, which seemed almost wilfully enigmatic to Marianne. Marianne had been back in the land of the living for six months, six months of summer. On the telephone lines she could see swallows gathered like musical notes. The summer was over, but there would be more. There were always more summers, even when you were no longer there to see them. That was a thought you had to hold on to.
And today they would sit in her mother’s garden, which was a miracle for this dreich part of the hemisphere – a cornucopia of lettuce and beetroot and onions, of sweet peas and honeysuckle and roses, strawberries and raspberries and blackcurrants, pears and plums and apples. Marianne wondered what had happened to her Amalfi lemons in the fridge – she had never come across them during the time she was dead – but just then the sky darkened and Marianne heard the sound of horses’ hooves and she looked in the rearview mirror and thought, “Oh no, not again.”
THE MIRROR
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami (b.1949) was born in Kyoto, Japan. He studied theatre arts at Waseda University. In 1974 he opened a jazz bar, Peter Cat, which he ran until the publication of his first novel enabled him to become a full-time writer. His books have been translated into fifty languages. Nine novels, four short story collections and two works of non-fiction are currently available in English translation. He has translated several American writers, including Truman Capote and Tim O’Brien, into Japanese.
All the stories you’ve been telling tonight seem to fall into two categories. There’s the type where you have the world of the living on one side, the world of death on the other, and some force that allows a crossing-over from one side to the other. This would include ghosts and the like. The second type involves paranormal abilities, premonitions, the ability to predict the future. All of your stories belong to one of these two groups.
In fact, your experiences tend to fall almost totally under one of these categories or the other. What I mean is, people who see ghosts just see ghosts and never have premonitions. And those who have premonitions don’t see ghosts. I don’t know why, but there would appear to be some individual predilection for one or the other. At least that’s the impression I get.
Of course some people don’t fall into either category. Me, for instance. In my thirty-odd years I’ve never once seen a ghost, never once had a premonition or prophetic dream. There was one time I was in a lift with a couple of friends and they swore they saw a ghost riding with us, but I didn’t see a thing. They claimed there was a woman in a grey suit standing right next to me, but there wasn’t any woman with us, at least not as far as I could make out. The three of us were the only ones in the lift. No kidding. And these two friends weren’t the type to play tricks on me. The whole thing was really weird, but the fact remains that I’ve still never seen a ghost.
But there was one time – just the one time – when I had an experience that scared me out of my wits. This happened more than ten years ago, and I’ve never told anybody about it. I was afraid to even talk about it. I felt that if I did, it might happen all over again, so I’ve never brought it up. But tonight each of you has related his own frightening experience, and as the host I can’t very well call it a night without contributing something of my own. So I’ve decided to come right out and tell you the story. Here goes.
*
I graduated from high school at the end of the 1960s, just as the student movement was in full swing. I was part of the hippie generation, and refused to go to university. Instead, I wandered all over Japan working at various manual labouring jobs. I was convinced that was the most righteous way to live. Young and impetuous, I suppose you’d call me. Looking back on it now, though, I think I had a pretty amusing life back then. Whether that was the right choice or not, if I had it to do over again, I’m pretty sure I would.
In the autumn of my second year of roaming all over the country, I got a job for a couple of months as a nightwatchman at a high school. This was a school in a tiny town in Niigata Prefecture. I’d got pretty worn out working over the summer and wanted to take it easy for a while. Being a nightwatchman isn’t exactly rocket science. During the day I slept in the caretaker’s office, and at night all I had to do was go twice around the whole school making sure everything was OK. The rest of the time I listened to records in the music room, read books in the library, played basketball by myself in the gym. Being alone all night in a school isn’t so bad, really. Was I afraid? Not at all. When you’re eighteen or nineteen, nothing gets to you.
I don’t imagine any of you have ever worked as a nightwatchman, so maybe I should explain the duties. You’re supposed to make two rounds each night, at 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. That’s the schedule. The school was a fairly new three-storey concrete building, with eighteen to twenty classrooms. Not an especially large school as these things go. In addition to the classrooms you had a music room, a home economics room, an art studio, a science lab, a staff office and the headmaster’s office. Plus a separate cafeteria; swimming pool, gym and theatre. My job was to make a quick check of all of these.
As I made my rounds, I worked through a twenty-point checklist. I’d make a tick next to each one – staff office, tick, science lab, tick… I suppose I could have just stayed in bed in the caretaker’s room, where I slept, and ticked these off without going to the trouble of actually walking around. But I wasn’t such a casual sort of fellow. It didn’t take much time to make the rounds, and besides, if someone broke in while I was sleeping, I’d be
the one who’d get attacked.
Anyway, there I was each night at nine and three, making my rounds, a torch in my left hand, a wooden kendo sword in my right. I’d practised kendo in school and felt pretty confident of my ability to fend off anyone. If an attacker was an amateur, and even if he had a real sword with him, that wouldn’t have frightened me. I was young, remember. If it happened now, I’d run like hell.
Anyhow, this took place on a windy night at the beginning of October. Actually it was rather steamy for the time of year. A swarm of mosquitoes buzzed around in the evening, and I remember burning a couple of mosquito-repellent coils to keep the little buggers at bay. The wind was noisy. The gate to the swimming pool was broken and the wind made the gate slap open and shut. I thought of fixing it, but it was too dark out, so it kept banging all night.
My 9 p.m. round went by fine, all twenty items on my list neatly ticked off. All the doors were locked, everything in its proper place. Nothing out of the ordinary. I went back to the caretaker’s room, set my alarm for three, and fell fast asleep.
When the alarm went off at three, though, I woke up feeling strange. I can’t explain it, but I just felt different. I didn’t feel like getting up – it was as though something was suppressing my will to get out of bed. I’m the type who usually leaps right out of bed, so I couldn’t understand it. I had to force myself to get out of bed and prepare to make my rounds. The gate to the pool was still making its rhythmic banging, but it sounded different from before. Something’s definitely weird, I thought, reluctant to get going. But I made up my mind I had to do my job, no matter what. If you duck doing your duty once, you’ll duck out again and again, and I didn’t want to fall into that. So I picked up my torch and wooden sword and off I went.