Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  I started to go in that direction, but, after the man of the house spoke, I stopped. I could feel the disturbed wind from the people milling about in an evil shade, in the courtyard of Margaret House. Then I changed direction, and went back towards the crowd, then out to the street, towards a life of my own.

  DINNER OF THE DEAD ALUMNI

  Adam Marek

  Adam Marek’s (b.1974) short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and in many magazines and anthologies, including Prospect, The Sunday Times Magazine and The Best British Short Stories 2011 and 2013. He has published two short story collections, The Stone Thrower and Instruction Manual for Swallowing. Marek was awarded the 2011 Arts Foundation Short Story Fellowship and was shortlisted for both the inaugural Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

  Today the streets of Cambridge are crawling with dead alumni. Their ghosts perch on punts, trailing their fingers through the green weed without raising a ripple. They fly round Trinity College’s Great Court, performing the 367m run before even the tenth of the twenty-four chimes. They cheer themselves, but their cheers reach no corporeal ears. The dead waft through the Grand Arcade, raising goosebumps on the fresh navels of girls texting outside Topshop. They hover at the doorway of the Apple store, whooping every time a fresh burst of radio waves casts them across the concourse and dashes their weightless bodies on the ground.

  Preston cannot see them, but ever since he and Yolanda arrived with their twin girls, he has been aware of something funky in the air.

  Static discharges from the ghosts of Trinity College have horripilated every hair on his body, and it is these upright antennae that have made him as sensitive as a flytrap. This hypersensitivity allows Preston to notice, for the first time, the unearthly magnetism of Kelly from all the way across the Apple store.

  Something about Kelly wakes up his belly button. It blinks and blinks as if this is the first girl it has ever seen. Preston knows her name is Kelly because that is what it says on her badge. Her job title though, two point sizes smaller, defies both his eyes and his belly button. To all seeing parts of his body, she is just Kelly, dark curls tumbling at her neck, wearing a helter-skelter of candy stripes. Preston falls all the way down her and leaves his breath at the top.

  When she puts down the iPhone and leaves the shop, Preston cannot help but follow.

  *

  Yes, Preston is married. Yes, he has twin girls. Here they all are, coming out of the Grand Arcade public toilets, stopping to watch the teenage boy with the bright orange hair run at the wall, bound up its surface, and then flip himself over. The rubber soles of his Converse boots slap the pavement with a sound that knocks olives from ciabattas. Even the ghosts stop to watch the boy. Here is an amazed Bertrand Russell with his arms folded across his chest.

  The twins, Libby and Daniela, are lively now they’ve peed. Their fingers are still wet from washing, pulling at the ties of Yolanda’s top, snapping threads, until Yolanda smacks the back of their hands and begs them to leave her alone for just one moment.

  The girls have dried ice cream around their mouths. There is something porcine in the flair of their nostrils. These are identical twins. If they were even a little different, they would not draw stares the way they do. Yolanda tries to ignore the people who are so fascinated by her uncanny younglings. She holds their hands high enough to prevent mischief and marches them through the arcade towards the Apple store.

  *

  Today, the Master of Trinity College has invoked the memory of the dead. It is 350 years since the college’s greatest alumnus, Isaac Newton, first attended the college, and it is 100 years since Ludwig Wittgenstein first came to the campus. A moment in time worthy of marking. Living alumni from around the world have come to Cambridge to celebrate, elbow to elbow with the dead.

  In the chapel, delighted tourists startle Newton’s statue with their camera flashes. One Vietnamese lady is so excited, she feels herself re-made by Trinity’s architecture. Something of its grandeur has straightened her spine. She pokes her enormous glasses hard against her face. Now Cambridge is inside her, proud and worthy. Its lawns lay down for her. This is where she will send the children she has yet to conceive, if they don’t get into Hogwarts.

  All around Cambridge, in halls and houses, blue gowns are pulled over heads. Trinity’s wizards group together where they find each other on the streets. A magical fraternity, for whom Wordsworth’s “Loquacious clock” speaks, so special even the sun has got its hat on.

  In Trinity College Hall, high up in the rafters, a wooden mallard listens to the sounds of cutlery being placed far below, and to the percussion of crockery rolling like spun pennies at each of the guests’ places.

  Distracted like this, the duck does not notice AA Milne and Jawaharlal Nehru behind it whispering to each other and giggling, wondering if, between them, they can conjure enough solidity in their fingertips to break this bird’s inertia.

  We must feel sorry for this mallard, who has been moved from rafter to rafter by ingenious pranksters for decades. Who has watched bread broken by England’s best minds from vertiginous heights, while not one crumb has ever been cast in its direction.

  *

  Kelly moves fast in heels, even over cobbles. Preston weaves around the tourists, keeping her candy stripes in sight. To understand why he chases her vapour trail like this, you must know about a girlfriend Preston had when he was sixteen. She told him something that would haunt him for ever.

  Her name was Annabel, and she was a violent kisser who left his lips swollen and tender and tasting of cherry Chapstick. He cannot think about her without hearing the sound of incisors clashing. She told him that for every person, there is a partner so perfect that if you touch them, you’ll both orgasm immediately.

  Preston had many questions about Annabel’s myth, such as, would orgasm occur every time these two people touched each other? If, say, the magic happened in a train carriage where the two people were standing, and the rocking of the train was knocking them together again and again, would they come repeatedly? Was the effect expendable? Annabel had only a surface knowledge of this phenomenon and was unable to answer his questions.

  He and Annabel did not share this magical property. They worked each other sore to reach such climaxes. But this idea stayed with him, fascinated him, throughout his life. The assessment of girls for this property was simple and discreet and he conducted it frequently. Obsessively. He did it in pubs, in queues at the cinema, at the supermarket, never finding her.

  His relationships were always short. To him, they could only be temporary because despite their individual merits, what was the point in being with anyone but his absolute perfect match?

  It sounded to Preston like a most inconvenient gift, and yet he yearned for it. An orgasm that one did not have to work for, that came unsolicited at some unsuspecting moment, would surely be the most wondrous of all.

  *

  Throughout Preston’s thirty-two years, he had sloughed the beliefs of his youth, leaving the most outrageous first. He skipped over Santa and crunched fairies and were-wolves beneath his boots when he was still wearing size 4s. He stomped on people who could move objects with their minds and did not look back.

  But this one belief, in the spontaneous orgasm of two people perfectly attuned to each other, stayed with him. It had been so appealing to his 16-year-old mind, and it was so impossible to disprove by scientific study, that he clung to it. The last piece of magic on Earth. And today, the day that Trinity’s dead walk the streets of Cambridge, he feels more certainly than ever before that he has found his orgasmic twin.

  Already the blood has rushed from his head into the divining rod which he follows through the market square crowds, past stalls of ostrich meat and novelty Obama tshirts and Jamaican patties, so enchanted that he ignores the rational part of his mind that reminds him about Yolanda.

  *

  Yolanda arrives at the Apple shop. She scans the top of people
’s heads, because Preston is taller than most men, but he is not there. She moves around the big tables, and pulls the twins’ hands away from the laptops, and tells the sales assistants with their weird hair and their informality that she needs no help. Maybe Preston has stooped to look at goodies he cannot afford. She moves through the whole shop twice, and then scans heads again, but he is not there.

  Outside the shop, while she takes out her phone and dials Preston’s number, Libby and Daniela point amazedly at the ghosts, who are leaning into the wind of radio-waves pouring from the shop. The ghosts stretch their arms wide, their eyes closed with delight.

  *

  Galumphing down Trinity Street comes the ghost of Aleister Crowley, class of 1898, horny as a dunnock. How desperately he needs something, anything, to make naked magic with. But everywhere he looks, every phantasmic face to which he raises a cheeky eyebrow turns away. Where are all the lady-ghosts? And where are all the adventurous men? These ghosts are shameful in their conventionality.

  Aleister bites at the air, bites ineffectually at the necks of the living, until, finally, a pair of luminous eyes meets his – another dead alumnus who has awoken from his sleep engorged, causing Aleister’s ectoplasm to bubble.

  These ghosts have no need for propriety. The last time either of them loved another like this it was illegal, but watch them now set upon each other’s mouths with ravenous joy. Fingers groping through layers of refracted light. They drop to the ground, and there, at five-thirty on a Saturday afternoon in June, being walked through by students and tourists and terriers, they satiate each other.

  *

  Preston is startled by the vibration of his phone in his pocket, and then a second later, the ring begins – the opening beats of Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”. He takes the phone out, and on the screen is a photo of Yolanda he took last Christmas. She is poking her tongue out.

  He lets the phone ring until his voicemail answers, and then he puts it back in his pocket. He will call her in a few minutes once he has decided how to explain that he has to catch up with this girl, lay his hand upon her, to test whether his instincts are correct, that this is the one person on the planet for whom he is specifically made. Surely a demonstration of two people enjoying simultaneous orgasm from one touch alone would negate the need for explanations and excuses? No one bound by mere marital and coincidental attachment could argue with something as miraculous as that.

  But now… where is she? From the mouth of Rose Crescent, a tour group in matching purple jumpers has poured into Trinity Street, closing the gaps between bodies through which he was navigating, and despite his height, he has lost her.

  Preston tries to push through the people like he is a ghost, like he will not bounce off them, but bounce off them he does, and soon, alerted by the angry grunts of people knocked aside, the crowd moves to let him through. To Preston, this almost biblical division of shoppers is another clear sign. The path is so clear that he is able to run, staring into every shop window for a second to see if she has gone inside. Every moment that he does not find her makes it more likely that he will never see her again.

  *

  Behind the college, on the river, a raft of punts nods into the weed as each of the students steps upon it. They take hands and help each other onto this buoyant stage, excited because this is the first time they have ever done it. On the banks, students and fellows and parents sit on tartan blankets popping corks and gouging stalks from the hearts of strawberries.

  And here too there are ghosts, the angle of the sun turning their blue to gold. They watch the students and ache to feel once more the giddy thrill of an unsteady platform beneath their feet, the simple joy of something that confounds the senses.

  Guys in gowns thrust poles deep into the Cam and guide the raft out to the middle. The singers arrange themselves by voice and height as they have rehearsed, and grin because these sensations are still novel.

  When they are in position, they wait for a certain stillness that is imperceptible from the bank, and then they open their mouths.

  The pink bellows that cradle their lungs push out something so sweet it causes champagne pourers to overfill their glasses, and even the dead to weep.

  *

  This sound is trampled in the marketplace, where Yolanda kneels before her girls. They have been fighting over Libby’s Sea Monkeys keyring – a mini-aquarium the size of a child’s fist filled with overfed brine shrimp.

  Yolanda holds Daniela’s forearm out to show Libby the deep red crescents which fit Libby’s fingernails like a glass slipper.

  It terrifies Yolanda that they fight like this. When the girls first became aware of each other, before they could even sit up, they would use their chubby little arms like clubs against each other, they would kick with their sticky feet, and they bit before they even had teeth. On their third birthday, Yolanda found Daniela crouched over Libby pressing a cushion onto her face.

  Yolanda had suggested to Preston that they take the girls somewhere, to see someone, but he had been adamant that this is how kids behave. Every time the twins fight, Yolanda thinks about the barn owl chicks she saw on Springwatch, all hatched a week apart, of different sizes, like Matryoshka dolls, and how they did fit inside one another, because the largest chick ate the others alive. It tipped its head all the way back, shuddering with the effort of swallowing something only one size smaller than itself.

  Yolanda calls Preston again, and again gets no answer. Behind her lips, her vitriol is rehearsing.

  Mummy, Libby says, where are all those blue people going?

  What blue people? Yolanda says.

  And then Libby bolts, her greasy little fingers slipping easily out of Yolanda’s hand.

  Yolanda yells her name and runs after her as fast as Daniela’s feet can keep up, but Libby whips round the knees of people in the market. Yolanda unpacks the voice she only uses at home when the curtains are closed, a full-force roar that reconfigures her face and terrifies the shoppers around her. When this sound hits one old dear, she falls into a display of honeydew melons, and they tumble together, bashed knees, bruised melons and a broken wrist. Yolanda picks up Daniela and runs after Libby whose white dress appears only every few seconds as gaps open up between people. Squeezed tight against Yolanda’s chest as she runs, Daniela’s feet jiggle above the street, whizzing past paper bags and wristwatches. Her chin is knocked by her mother’s shoulder and her teeth slam together on her lip. As blood wells up through the split, she starts to howl.

  *

  Preston’s ankle is throbbing. Weakened by a tennis injury, it cannot cope with these cobbles, but he pushes on. He would run on bloodied stumps if he had to.

  Every one of his senses is tuned to the wavelength of red and white candy stripes and he scans the windows of Strada and Heffers and the Royal Bank of Scotland as he charges past. His body flushes with pleasure chemicals as he sees the briefest flash of candy-stripe fabric going through the Great Gate of Trinity College.

  *

  On the river, the choir has reached crescendo, their voices threaded together and cast over the bank-side audience, captivating them so deeply that even their breath needs permission.

  The sound draws the dead from all over Cambridge. It awakens late risers from their beds – beds which have collapsed around their sleepers, so long have they slept.

  The porters wearing their practised faces do not stop porting, but lift up the edges of their bowler hats to trap inside some of the music for later, when they can enjoy it in bare feet, patrolling their rooms with their belts unbuckled.

  In the kitchens, the singing is barely audible amongst the sound of wooden spoons in pans, knives on chopping boards, bubbles struggling against glass lids. But it causes the crystal glasses to ring most eerily. It drives the ghost of Byron’s bear crazy. Watch it gambol through the dining room, shaking its blue-bloodied muzzle, loping through the completed silver service. Not even the flames atop the candelabra notice it pass.

 
On the river, the last note pulls behind it a silence so deep and terrifying that every hand feels compelled to fill this void with the most reassuring applause it can muster.

  *

  At the Great Gate, Preston queues among the gowned fellows, his extraordinary height allowing him to see over the top of their heads into the Great Court, but his candy-striped girl has vanished.

  He lets his phone ring until it tires in his pocket. He still does not have an explanation for Yolanda.

  When he looks at his watch, he causes everyone around him to look at their watches, and this need to know the time flows out from him in a great concentric wave, compelling everyone at that very moment to know the time. As if in answer, the clock above the Great Court chimes the hour twice over. It is six o’clock.

  At the mouth of the Great Gate, beneath Henry VIII brandishing his wooden chair-leg, Preston notices for the first time that he is the only one in the queue not wearing a gown and the only one not carrying an invitation card.

  *

  On King’s Parade, everyone stops to look at their watches together, and in this moment of stillness, they stare at Yolanda running. She is an impressive sight, her plaited ponytail slapping at her back. The cords in her neck come out to amplify her voice as she yells Libby’s name. Her flip-flops slap the paving, ticking out the double chimes of Trinity’s clock. And over her shoulder, Daniela, hypnotised by shaking, clings to her mother’s chest, watching the amazed faces recede behind her.

  Ahead of them, Libby chases the ghosts.

  *

  Now they have all arrived at the college, the living and the dead. The ghosts need no invitation, and melt through the queue like it’s not there, melt through Preston, who is shuffling forward in the procession. He watches each person in front showing their invite to the porter. This porter looks like he is immune to bargaining. He has a big-chested solidity and eyes that have no whites. His mouth does not reciprocate smiles.