A Private Haunting

by Tom McCulloch

  During one session the shrink asked about religion. If Fletcher believed, it might help, they said. A crutch they called it, emotional or spiritual. He wanted to laugh, tell them they were a bunch of fuckin dilettantes if they thought belief was auxiliary to self. He’d been on tour in Iraq and Afghanistan and had seen the astonishing absolutism of faith inhabited, not worn.

  Faith was dead, he told the counsellor. It was lying in the dirt of Sangin beside the dying Afghan girl, his dead sister’s doppelganger. Only morons and liars had faith, hoodwinked kids yet to realise. He’d seen them streaming into church on Sunday mornings, poor buggers. The village was full of kids, more than Fletcher remembered from his own childhood. Youths, as they were now called. Youths hanging around. Youths with no respect. Not like it was in my day.

  Somewhere among all these kids was the girl in the blue jacket from Jonas’s party. There had been nothing in her face. But the jacket: his sister had been wearing one just like it. He had to find her, see her again, remove these irrational anxieties about ghosts and retribution.

  On cue, a group of children passed him. He watched them head down Mandeville Alley then followed. Three girls and a boy, twelve years old or so, the boy in a hooded top and baseball cap, the girls in long tops and cute leggings. They turned into the park, dawdled for a bit then sat on the grass. Only then did Fletcher come to a fuller awareness of what he was doing. But no one does oblivious quite like kids, not even a glance as he walked past and stared.

  The girl in the blue jacket wasn’t there. There were other options. Fletcher had seen a notice-board poster about a youth club, The Hub.

  His aunt never let him go to the village youth club when he was a boy. I don’t want you hanging around with all those uncouth boys. But Fletcher didn’t know what uncouth meant and the only activity he was allowed was Reverend Jenkins’s Bible Study, Tuesday night. They held it in the church where it was always freezing. A coldness to complement the reverend’s character.

  When Fletcher said he was afraid he might kill someone and sometimes even wanted to the priest had just sighed, sighed then chuckled, a world-weary optimist in his fool’s paradise. Relax and have a conversation with God, he told Fletcher, thank him for everything in your life. Scary Jenkins would have insisted on a very different penance, a grip on the throat and the denunciation of an evil that only prayer could banish. Fletcher wondered if the priest would have reacted the same way if he’d told him that he once killed a child. Everyone behaved differently when a child was involved, the Catholic Church could vouch for that.

  He’d reached The Black Lion. Without thinking about it he went inside. The pub was almost deserted, just an old man on a stool at the bar whom the over-dressed barmaid called Sam.

  Fletcher sat in the far corner, over by the jukebox. They’d listened to a lot of music in FOB Jackson. He’d seen hard men completely lose it. Booze-free but somehow eight-pints drunk, stripped to the waist and shouting. Do you looove me, do you love me, do you looove me... Utterly lost and so very far away until the end of the song and a sudden, disorientating return.

  He took out the envelope from his inside pocket and laid the contents on the table, tapping along to the rest of the silent song, nooow that ahhh can daaance. He had the papers sent to him just before his discharge, read them a hundred times through eighteen months of drift, a patience that astounded him. It was time to step it up, as he used to say, then off to the bar for shots, usually tequila. Maybe Fletcher should line a few up for Mortensen.

  Thirteen

  Li Po stared back. What a man for staring. Jonas knew the little figure in the scroll painting would know what to do, even if he would never have got himself into this situation in the first place.

  He shook his head and turned away. What the hell was it with him and Li Po? ‘I’m ridiculous.’

  The one-eyed doll sitting very primly on the floor beside the scatter of records said nothing.

  ‘I have no sense of my own absurdity.’

  He sat down beside the doll. He had no answers to the questions it posed either. Who did it belong to? Had the same person put it in the shoebox? How long had it been in the loft?

  It was frustrating. Imagine listing every question you’d ever asked and never had answered. How would the list compare to those which had been answered? Was ignorance or illumination the better measure of a life? Jonas’s life sometimes felt like a series of unanswered questions, pouring down faster and faster like the aliens in an old space invader game. What if the final realisation, the heavenly bells tolling closer and louder, was that he’d been asking the wrong questions all along? Worse, he’d been answering the wrong ones.

  Truly a conundrum, likely irresolvable but still worth pondering on the drive to the ring road, especially if it stopped him thinking about what had happened the night before, which it didn’t.

  Jonas had smiled at Mary. That was ok. And he’d told her that her hair smelled nice. That wasn’t. Li Po would have conjured a sonnet from the depths of its auburn glow and all he could say was it smelled nice. As he sighed and closed his eyes a little voice said the man who knows the way does not say, which if profound on one level was deeply irritating on another.

  It took thirty minutes to get going. Thirty minutes in which your hair smells nice your hair smells nice spun round and round like the concrete mixer and Jonas wanted to just work, hard labour to stun the brain like a steel-headed hammer so he didn’t need to think about Mary anymore.

  But Eggers had a rule: no work before three fags. Gonna work till we drop, no doffing to the Man. He smoked all three while sitting in the digger, yellow high-vis vest open to the waist. He was well-muscled and liked to show it off. Only seven fifty and already a horn blast from a young woman in a passing Merc. But when he got a cat call from a topless young guy with mirrored sunglasses, leaning out of a very gay, lime-green BMW, he quickly put his t-shirt back on.

  ‘Primary colours!’ shouted Jonas.

  Eggers looked confused. He opened his mouth to say something but chose instead to raise a middle finger. A man without nuance, sometimes Jonas envied it. He suspected the only complications in the Mary situation were ones he was creating. It was simple. Mary Jackson wanted a job. He had one to offer.

  The interview had gone well. At least Jonas thought it had. Most things probably would if they involved two bottles of red, several whiskies, Captain Beefheart, Moby Grape, Nick Cave... and cheese toasties. Yes, a sudden memory flash told him cheese toasties were also involved.

  It had been so restrained to begin with, in The Black Lion. Over-proper, Jonas thought. He almost laughed. All this formality… for a cleaning job? But what if Mary Jackson heard cleaning job as dead-end job, why take it seriously, it’s not like you’re being considered for Prime Minister. This might be the range of her ambition and who was Jonas to judge? She might be limited, which was actually a judgement on you, you snob, so shut up.

  Amazingly, Mary passed up her first chance to flee, on the grand tour of End Point. Jonas had a fine boozy buzz, taking the edge off his embarrassment at showing a stranger the messy devastation of his rooms. His rooms, he even called them that. I’ll show you my rooms, as if he was some deluded aristocrat. As he showed her round he wondered, in passing, what the mystery bather had also made of his messy rooms, not that it had put the fucker off.

  ‘I see why you need some help.’

  ‘I know. Totally understand if you’re not interested.’

  ‘I’ll take it.’

  ‘Well, ok then!’

  ‘What about the rate?’

  ‘Ten pounds an hour, six hours a week. Cash in hand.’

  ‘Then I accept your offer.’

  She smiled and Jonas smiled and he thought of Eva. He escaped by saying he was going to get a bottle of Pinot Noir to toast the deal, embarrassed as soon as he said it. Pinot Noir, what a tool, why didn’t he just say wine? It all got a bit skewed after that. He blamed Beefheart.

  ‘I saw this at your party,’ s
he said. ‘Trout Mask Replica. Never heard it before.’

  ‘Fast and bulbous!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Fast and bulbous!’

  In fact, he repeated the surreal Beefheart line five times, victim to a sudden, panicky Tourette’s. And Mary missed her second chance to flee. She smiled vaguely, considering this babbling oddity, then prowled the living room, glass in hand, picking things up and putting them down: a pebble from the mantelpiece; a soapstone knight from his replica Lewis chess-set; the elegantly tapered, rune-carved wooden spoon that Haakon made him as a going-away present.

  All very deliberate, Jonas decided, a space being established. He watched her circle back to the record shelves and sit down cross-legged beside him, hands cupped round her glass.

  ‘How about this one,’ she asked. ‘Clear Spot?’

  ‘One of my favourites. I was playing it last night.’

  ‘Then play it again!’

  By the time the needle hit Golden Birdies, Red One was dead and they were kneeling at the records, heads angled, peering at the titles. Jonas could smell her hair, it smelled nice, which was when he decided to tell her, unable to stop himself, already appalled by the potential aftermath, Mary recoiling from the weirdo sniffing her hair, who was now reaching out to touch…

  ‘Your hairs smells nice.’

  ‘Hairs?’

  ‘I mean hair.’

  ‘Thanks.’ The smile was quick, gone.

  ‘What I meant – ’

  ‘What else have you got?’

  And as the lights in his gibbering mind fused one by one, Jonas started pulling out records, anything to talk about other than Mary’s nice-smelling hair, and so embarked on a long, near-frenzied explanation about how he didn’t employ a standard A-Z listing system for the 200-odd albums, oh no, not Jonas, he arranged them thematically, an idiosyncrasy instigated at university which drove everyone he knew crazy because they couldn’t find anything or if they did it took far too long because the themes themselves are not alphabetic, you see, there’s French chansons beside post-punk and electronica beside that and –

  ‘Is there any logic at all?’ she asked, holding up Pebbles, Volume 4 with a quizzical look.

  ‘Surf rock, I keep that with ’60s Garage. There’s an internal logic. I like to think of it as organic.’

  ‘You mean annoying.’

  ‘Some have said that.’

  Eva, for one.

  He tried not to think of his wife as he took the album from Mary. This was also the first time he touched her, a light brush of the fingers, soft warm fingers, which he also tried not to think about as he put on Pebbles and a trebly Rickenbacker jangle jumped out of the speakers.

  Was that when Mary started dancing? Or did that come later, after the whisky? The fragmentation of time and image usually followed the unleashing of the Big Spirit but who knows, he was drunk, drunk with a pretty woman he’d dreamed about, nothing dirty in the slightest but a dream is still a dream because it meant she was in there, in his head, and now dancing in his living room, a quite alluring sashay to boot, regardless of the supermarket uniform (complete with misspelled name tag) and the cheese and ham toastie in her left hand.

  They made the toasties after she’d told him her favourite soup was pea and ham, and while he couldn’t remember how they’d veered on to soup he did remember that the conversation had made them hungry. Cue a kitchen diversion, where she opened every cupboard and drawer and he tried not to slice his fingers off with the knife, listening to her saying something that his hung-over mind interpreted as I must impose order or he must pass muster...

  At 6 am he stood with a pounding head beside the record player, praying that Eggers would be late again and trying to establish when the night had ended from the scatter of twenty-odd LPs.

  If they’d played three songs from each record that would make about 300 minutes of music, or five hours. They hadn’t got in from the pub until ten thirty. Had she really stayed until three in the morning? On top of Rubber Soul the one-eyed doll was looking at him. A vague memory surfaced of Mary asking about it. Please no, he hadn’t started on about the doll, had he?

  ‘Hey, Thor. You doin any work today?’

  Boss Hogg at his shoulder.

  And back Jonas went to scooping the hot tar, breathing the fumes that ever evoked childhood, those ancient steamrollers and hard men in caps. In the river distance the same sun glinted off the same boats under same shifting skies, marking time and all that had passed, all that was yet to come. Like Mary, perhaps, his thoughts still revolving like a stop-go lollipop.

  * * *

  If anything it got hotter. Came in waves, edging the mercury up and down but always over thirty. Jonas’s speed of work slowed to an Italian crawl, a buzzing in his head like a fretting generator.

  He felt jumpy. A press of nervous energy. They should write him into the parish emergency plan. In the event of power outage, plug in the Viking. To charge him up just place him in front of Mary. Three days would do it, the three days that had passed since the ‘interview’. Jonas walked into the village hall for the talent show like a dry-mouthed teenager.

  But no sign of Mary front of house. So just chill, enjoy yourself, and surely Jonas did enjoy The Hub’s Got Talent. He liked it because he made sure he had nothing to do with it. Helping out meant taking part and taking part meant the enjoyment just drained away. It was the same when he was a teacher in Bergen. He had to be crafty to have nothing to do with organising the end of year show. But Front Row Jo was always there when the curtain went up.

  The kids were wary of HGT to begin with. It took a while, one or two voices becoming three and four and more until critical mass was finally reached, that enigmatic process whereby the cheesy became cool. Tonight was HGT III and the hall was buzzing.

  Black curtains had been draped across the walls, hiding the vaguely threatening, dauby paintings created by the Golden Oldies Lunch Club and the wooden boards listing the darts, snooker and draughts champions from decade to decade and maybe century to century. Multicolour spotlights shifted randomly across the lines of chairs, catching several glitter-balls hanging low from the roof beams. The R&B was loud, keeping time with the slow flashing Orwellian messages on the 20x20 projection screen pulled down across the stage.

  The Hub is YOUR Hub

  It’s YOUR Time to SHINE

  The Hub’s Got Talent III

  What about YOU?

  Half an hour until showtime. Jonas lingered stage-front, watching the auditorium fill. And then Lacey, running up in a black bodysuit, black tights and high heels. She jabbed a hand over her shoulder, the other clutching the bodysuit at her chest, Jonas bemused until she spun round.

  ‘Right, wardrobe malfunction.’

  He pinched the fabric together above her bra strap and pulled the zip up. A little smile as she walked away. He wanted to touch her again. There was so much he missed, so much no one knew and so many who thought they did, like the men exchanging glances in the second row. They reminded him of the Three Amigos, Spaniards on the Copenhagen building site whose macho discussions of women were inversely proportionate to any ability to talk to one.

  Backstage, he saw Mary. Three days of nervous energy evaporated like tropical rain, her wave and smile cautious proof that nothing too excruciating skulked behind the blank patches in his memory.

  The Cheerios were down to open the show and Mary was putting them through a last rehearsal.

  Ten nine-year-olds in two lines of four, two stars out front, busting moves to One Way Street. The concentration was intense, this was serious! Star Two burst into tears, couldn’t get a step right, a simple left foot over right that Mary showed her again and again. Star One was Star One for a reason, displaying a hands-on-hips mix of concern and contempt.

  ‘Divas,’ Mary said.

  ‘I know how they feel.’

  ‘Oh you do, do you?’

  ‘I once had to mime along to that Sinitta song So Macho at a school show. There
were four of us, thirteen years old, stripped to our Speedos, oiled up and prancing around, flexing our muscles.’

  ‘Oiled up?’

  ‘I tell no lie.’

  ‘Wow. Can you imagine the reaction if we started oiling up young boys these days?’

  ‘Outrage.’

  ‘Daily Mail style.’

  ‘How was your hangover anyway?’

  ‘Nothing that a few hours in bed wouldn’t have fixed,’ she said.

  Jonas blushed. Like an ambush. He watched Mary’s eyes catch up with his thoughts. The suggestion hung there in space and neither knew what to say, drawing only more attention to it.

  The audience spilled over the hundred. A light, buzzy mood and Jonas jumped in, honest in his sheer delight and who cares about the heat and the sweat. He circulated with glasses of lemonade, greeting people who greeted him. Smiles just happening, both his and theirs. Spontaneity. He forced the thought away. Soon as you think you’re being spontaneous you’re not.

  The Cheerios nailed it, leaving the stage to rapturous applause. Star One’s eyes glittered, arena gig vistas opening up, as if her life had just made a significant key change and why not.

  After the interval he sat beside Eggers in the front row. His nine-year-old daughter Eloise was next up in a quartet doing a Girl Power (!) Song and Dance Medley. The first car crash of the evening.

  Each of the girls got their solo moment, outdoing the others in enthusiasm and woefulness. Eggers stiffened, Jonas could hear his tension humming, Eloise reaching for a high note and falling horribly short. He avoided Jonas’s eyes and clapped enthusiastically as the girls sashayed off. They loved it, beaming and waving, totally oblivious to these cheers of relief.

  ‘Well you’ve got to give them – ’

  ‘Piss off, Jonas.’