A Private Haunting

by Tom McCulloch

The stage went dark, hiding Jonas’s grin.

  A trumpet kicked in, slow and steady then fast and loose, a spotlight suddenly picking out the player on a raised platform towards the back of the stage. Danny. Zoot-suit and pork pie hat. He built up and up to a final note, slowly lifting the trumpet from stage to roof.

  All That Jazz kicked in, Danny playing along, his spotlight dimming as two others snapped on; Lacey and Carly, stage right and left in matching black bodysuits, stockings and high heels. They held their pose, left leg straight and right leg bent, top hat at a coquettish angle.

  Jonas clapped wildly as Eggers stared and tried not to stare. The girls, trying to maintain but so embarrassed, stifling the giggles but the confidence slowly building as the Chicago routine went on. Now awkward with mistimed kick-steps, now strutting and soft-shoe confident, all pouting lips and jerking hips, arms raising into the last of all that jaaaaaazz!

  And a moment of pin-drop silence before the applause detonated. Lacey flicked up her hat and winked, the girls strutting off-stage as Danny burst into another solo that he gave up halfway through, holding his trumpet by his side as the music played on. A mime all along.

  Jonas glanced at Eggers, who wouldn’t hold his eye. The man who wanted to look some more.

  Lacey and Carly won by a landslide. The girls worked the room, the boys buzzing like flies, Spencer P more and more furious with Lacey. Ah, the boys, it wouldn’t have been Jonas, zero courage to approach the pretty girls, too proud to do an Axel and hook up with anyone. He watched. The laughter would fade. They’d turn around one day and it would be all gone, their childhood.

  Fourteen

  Jonas’s melancholy lingered all weekend. On Sunday he tried to walk it away, down by the silvery glitter of the morning river. When he stopped the world stopped with him, a poise in the ticking morning heat, something unseen and long forgotten that would never again reveal itself.

  ‘Sycamore,’ he said out loud. ‘Hawthorn.’

  As if familiarity might flush away a nausea never grown out of because he had never truly grown beyond himself. He could just imagine Big Haakon’s belly laugh. A lot of crap right enough, the kind of nonsense some post-rehab celebrity says in a Sunday supplement. The most pretentious thing about Big Haakon was a Japanese yukata he’d picked up somewhere. Yet even that was so threadbare and stained, so inhabited, that it made perfect sense.

  Jonas gave a silent apology. Made a deep bow to the memory of Big Haakon, whose yukata was undoubtedly long consigned to the bin with all his other pre-conversion foibles and errors.

  Roll it all back and it was Haakon’s doing that Jonas was here today. Know the plants, he told Jonas, time and again. So it was a habit, every few weeks a walking tour, spokes on the wheel of the surrounding area, along the farm tracks or riverbanks, across the fields, studying wild flowers, trees. Today, he sought the pea family. Lilac-funnelling milk-vetch and downy black medick, the green-grasping reptile fingers of bird’s-foot. Simple, utilitarian gorse.

  It fascinated him, he sometimes saw it like a time-lapse sequence in a nature programme, the jerky movements of budding plants now a carpet of bluebells, lightening and darkening as clouds came and went and day became night became day. He didn’t mind the falling petals or the rotting back. Because all returned, no finality in this ever-turning circle.

  The melancholy began to waver. Jonas walked home, reassured that all was still happening as it should, a hesitant hope that shattered in the face of the bearded stranger he found on his couch.

  ‘What the… ’ Jonas took two steps forward and then hesitated. ‘Who the hell are you?’ He was furious more than frightened. Until he noticed the one-eyed doll sitting on the stranger’s lap.

  ‘Hello Mr Mortensen.’

  ‘Who – ’

  ‘Can I call you Jonas?’

  ‘No. Get out!’

  ‘A bit dramatic, I know. I mean, in your shoes I’d have probably shit myself. You haven’t, have you?’

  ‘Eh?’ Jonas realised he’d seen the man before, briefly, at his party.

  ‘Shit yourself?’

  ‘No.’ And an immediate wish he hadn’t said anything. Denying he’d shit himself? It was ridiculous.

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘What are you doing – ’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. What are you doing here, who are you, all the rest. Should I not be asking you the same thing?’

  ‘This is my house.’

  ‘Is it now?’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘Do you know anything about relativity?’

  ‘What? Now look, you just – ’

  ‘I know, I can’t be coming in here like this, breaking in, sitting here on your couch. It’s a comfy couch by the way. But I can just be doing that. And yes I did have a bath but that doesn’t matter. I needed a wash. I was talking about relativity. Quantum physics. Far as I can see it’s a question of perspective. The reality of a situation is determined by the perspective of the observer in relation to it. Yeah?’

  ‘ – ’

  ‘No?’

  ‘ – ’

  ‘Fair enough, takes a bit of thinking about. Take your time. Where did you find this doll by the way?’

  ‘In the loft.’ And no idea again why he said this, why he was even having this conversation.

  ‘You don’t seem the sort.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘To play with dolls.’

  ‘I’m going to call the police.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘You’re trespassing. This is my house.’

  ‘No it isn’t.’

  Jonas felt suddenly lightheaded. ‘Is that right?’ He noticed a brown envelope on the couch.

  ‘That’s right. People probably think you bought this house. Why wouldn’t they? It’s that perspective thing again. If you’ve never come across a squatter, why would the idea cross your mind? Know what I mean?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you do.’

  ‘I’m going to ask you one more time.’

  ‘To leave?’

  ‘Yes. Leave.’

  ‘But you haven’t asked me once. How can you ask again?’

  ‘For crying out – ’

  ‘Go on then. Ask me.’

  ‘Get the fuck out of here!’

  The stranger picked up the envelope and tossed it across the floor. ‘Have a read of that.’

  Jonas stared at him. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘Read it.’

  Jonas picked up the envelope and hurried to the kitchen, trying to leave the stranger behind. But he followed, watching him read. Halfway through the last will and testament of Archibald Hackett, just after the section leaving the property known as End Point to my grandson, Adam Fletcher, Jonas sat down at the table. The name on the title deed was the same.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘Well, Jonas. Now you leave.’

  On the table, his mobile began to ring. Jonas looked from Fletcher to the phone, staring dumbly, as if trying to remember what it was. When he picked it up the caller began gabbling. He told the voice to slow down and realised that it was Eggers. Eggers never phoned. He was asking if Jonas had seen the news, if he’d switched on his TV, because she’s disappeared.

  ‘I don’t have a TV. Who’s disappeared?’

  When he put the phone down Fletcher had turned to face him. His gaze was intent, interested.

  Jonas had to speak. It was what you did in situations like this, even with a stranger appeared in your home. ‘A girl from the youth club has disappeared. Lacey. Hasn’t been seen since Friday.’

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘What does that matter?’

  ‘It matters.’

  This wasn’t happening. This was another day, a better day, any day before a crumpled Saab in the pouring rain. Jonas thought of Lacey, the end of another world, feeling vertigo in a place he’d come to call home. He was the dream-man, falling into a beautiful morning from which everything had
vanished but this inevitable, silent stranger and all that he brought.

  ‘How old is she?’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  The stranger blinked a few times. A troubling in the eyes that looked away before Jonas’s imagination could spark, a swift exit from the kitchen that just held back from a hurrying.

  She as old as you were. Perhaps you had similar toys. A doll, a one-eyed doll as she had, left behind that day you stained Sangin red. Splayed like an x, a cliché of death, bang, bang you’re dead, fifty bullets in your head. Except it wasn’t fifty bullets, just five, a short burst before my trigger finger lifted into the death both yours and mine, the death that will be called collateral damage, of course. I lie beside you in the dust while the firefight goes on and bullets nick my helmet, my left boot, your eyes locked on mine, a horizontal gaze along the ground, your throat bobbing once, twice and then you are gone and there will be no more memories of childhood and no woman to be, no more winks from that older boy in the bazaar, your mother’s hand instinctively tighter on your shoulder even though she has not seen him. Because somehow she knows, as mothers always do, as your mother will grow old with the despair of this perfect morning and the perfection of your death as all deaths are. In dreams I search for you, as I search for my little sister in another landscape untouched by war, a rural arcadia of scudding cloud and drowsy summer so perfect and so empty, no one in it but me, searching hedgerow and cool riverside and not even the sound of an animal, just the selfless wind and a world that is ever empty without you and now without her, who was at least gathered up, who was at least carried that blue morning with arm dangling and her father’s distraught face, a man become suddenly old, old as the dark woods where I still look for you.

  Fifteen

  Mary switched on her mobile just after 8 am. The phone immediately started buzzing and vibrating, the screen an insistent blue-blinking of texts and voicemail reminders from her husband.

  As Mary had avoided all thoughts of him since yesterday, so she avoided the messages. But as she laced her Asics she decided she wasn’t avoiding him. Avoiding was too deliberate, you had to make an active choice to avoid something. She had simply forgotten about him.

  Sunday night was poker night. She waited all week for it. Her husband’s best friend Baz started them when he moved into a tiny flat after his divorce. He was frightened, forty-five years old and scared of his own company. So he started a poker night. Get the boys round. Not that they knew much about poker, but American movies told them that’s what men did.

  Her husband always spent the night on Baz’s white leather couch, took his hangover straight to work on Monday. That suited Mary just fine. She’d switch off the phone and have a long bath. Sometimes she’d indulge herself with a little silver toy she called The Bullet and feel a bit melancholy afterwards. Last night she’d thought about Jonas and hadn’t felt sad at all.

  The talent show was the first time she’d seen him since ‘the interview’. Yet she hadn’t been apprehensive about seeing him. Maybe it was because Jonas Mortensen was her boss now, a functional relationship that put the kibosh on anything else. She blushed a bit as she tied her hair back, spending the next few minutes choosing the most suitable soundtrack for the morning’s run. Her iPod playlist was mostly Andrea’s. It pleased her no end that she actually liked some of her daughter’s albums. She settled on Florence and the Machine.

  And ran, eyes moving from road to sky to field. She thought of seasons, which one she’d choose if she could only have one for evermore. Summer seemed an indulgence today, morning pinks edging the tops of the full-leafed hawthorns lining the single-track. Her happiness was immediate but also intangible, a childhood memory that couldn’t quite be placed. Her pace had slackened. She was daydreaming. On another day she would have upped the pace, re-set the discipline of the run. Today she’d chill, maybe even take a little detour.

  Mary knew what she was doing, but you can know and not admit it. This was one of those situations where she was deliberately ignoring something. But she decided it was a freedom in the morning air that led her on a happy-go-lucky wander off the usual route. And if her route was random then she may, of course, just happen to run down Jonas’s street.

  Crossing back over the road bridge, she didn’t really think about the Sky TV van stuck at red. When she saw the BBC outside broadcast van a few vehicles along she wondered about it a bit more. As the vans passed when the lights changed she expected them to take a right at the roundabout, towards town. Instead, they took the second exit, to the village. She caught up with them by the village green that was never this busy, the vans edging into a swarm of people that a policeman in a Day-Glo bib was failing to control. Other outlets were already there, ITV and Channel 4, techno-roadies unravelling cables, a man with a TV camera filming teenage girls tying bouquets of flowers to the railings outside the church.

  A child had disappeared, she knew it, the media descent instantly familiar from TV coverage of other places. These things didn’t happen here, that was the cliché. She felt a quickening sensation, a deep, alienated strangeness, wondering if others did too, all those clustered on the green, adults baffled as kids and even the colours warped, the sky and the trees too vibrant. Everyone looked over-dressed, as if they’d made an effort, watched with tired interest by men with cameras eating bacon rolls from a fast food van parked by the war memorial.

  She thought of her daughter, a sudden dread churning her guts hollow. But Andrea was hundreds of miles away. Some other poor mother would be catatonic on a morning couch.

  A few people were staring. Looking her up and down. The running kit seemed wildly inappropriate and Mary wished she’d read her husband’s texts before now. She started running again, legs gone to jelly and Florence in her ears, building to a spectacular crescendo.

  Sixteen

  Again, Jonas looked down at his basket as the queue shuffled along. A loaf of brown bread, half a dozen free-range eggs and a packet of breaded ham. And three bags of beef Space Raiders.

  The Space Raiders jarred. He wondered if people were staring at his corn snacks. They might be disgusted, I mean, Space Raiders? And was beef a more appropriate flavour than pickled onion? Then again, it was the Space Raiders themselves that were the issue. This was a time for gravity and they were too whimsical a crisp. They didn’t know he didn’t even have a TV, they just saw happy-go-lucky snack-munching as he watched the 24 hour news.

  There was a commotion behind him. A tubby woman in a blue jumpsuit with a large sunflower motif had knocked over a display of chocolate digestives. She tittered and very loudly said no use crying over broken biscuits! People turned away again but all were listening. She started a conversation with the old man behind her, saying it was such a beautiful day, a good day for the race. When the old man asked what race she said the human race.

  The queue collectively tensed. No one was interested in Jonas’s Space Raiders anymore. Someone tutted and the woman in front of him turned and looked back at Jumpsuit Joker.

  ‘Have a bit of respect.’

  The smile froze on the woman’s face. ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘For Lacey.’

  ‘I’m sorry but I don’t – ’

  ‘The girl that’s disappeared.’ She held up a copy of The Sun, a front-page picture of a smiling Lacey.

  ‘Oh. Oh no. I didn’t know!’

  The old man beside her looked dumbfounded, did you not see the TV appeal yesterday? Lacey Lewis. Her poor mum was in pieces, no sign of the dad but what do you expect? As Jumpsuit Joker apologised profusely the floodgates opened. You just never, never know, said someone. I moved from London to get away from all this, said another. Jonas listened, caught a couple of eyes and mumbled something for the sake of taking part, in case they turned on him too. He was unsettled by a gleam in the eyes, like a restrained thrill at being in the centre of a sensation. When he left the shop the queue was still speculating, refreshed by new arrivals. Her mother was a mess to begin with… Did
you hear about the police briefing… I hope they string the bastard up… they found her purse in the park, it looks bad…

  That was the one that stuck. They found her purse in the park… Jonas saw her. Running in the darkness. Dropping her purse. He closed the door and leaned back, eyes closed. Upstairs he could hear the shower. The mail dropping through the letter box made him jump.

  Just the mail.

  Nothing unusual was happening in the world.

  Just a stranger having a shower.

  After a while the shower stopped. Jonas tensed, remembering Fletcher’s hands on his throat that morning. He took a few steps towards the stairs, listening intently, like the night before.

  It was way past midnight. Jonas had been standing outside the door of the spare room for a long time, sure that the stranger was on the other side in mirrored pose, listening to Jonas listening to him.

  It was ludicrous. To be crouched in his boxers in the pitch dark with his ear to a closed door. He crept back to bed with the same uncertainty as when he first stood in End Point, a tense waiting for something that faded with each day it never came. Except now it had.

  After one, the stranger began to snore, belly-deep snores of the contented sleeper. It took a long time but Jonas managed to force him away. As soon as he did Lacey came. He lay in the darkness, thinking of the tabloids about to explode, all that read between the lines voyeurism. What had gone through her mind? Maybe, somehow, it had all been quite peaceful.

  He realised the stranger had stopped snoring and sat up quickly, braced for bedroom invasion. Or maybe he’d left the house and gone to the police. But Lacey was priority one, they’d just ignore the guy babbling on about a squatter. Fletcher would have to give up and leave.

  Lacey put her hands on her hips, she wasn’t happy with this switch of the subject. Jonas made himself think of her mother. Susan, he remembered, or maybe Sue: sad eyes, hair dried to straw by too much peroxide. He pictured the TV appeal. Susan overly made-up or completely plain, stripped to her blackheads. Either way, she’d have got it wrong, judgement following, the viewers scouring her words and behaviour for explanation, as if culpability could be gleaned from an ill-considered decision to wear red lipstick for the cameras.