A Private Haunting

by Tom McCulloch

  ‘You’ve been in the sun too long, you’re starting to gibber.’

  ‘You’re right.’ He stood up. ‘Who knows what I’ll say next, eh Jonas?’ And smiled, the rising awkwardness mirrored by the growing panic in Mortensen’s eyes as he waited for him to tell Mary that she was being lied to. He gave it several more strung-out moments then walked away.

  Jonas watched Fletcher go. For why, his mother used to say when he was pestering her. For why do you ask all these questions, little Jonas? He heard her voice again as the stranger disappeared inside the house. For why has this beardy man appeared in your life, little Jonas?

  Who knows? Not Jonas and not his mother, she a presence not quite as inexplicable as Fletcher’s but not far off, mostly forgotten if randomly remembered, like a synaptic twitch, caused today by alcohol, no food, and the unsettling after-trails of Fletcher’s departure.

  For why is this happening, little Jonas?

  But nothing as yet was happening, no pile of possessions on the street, nothing as yet but a stranger whose face was becoming familiar, a man sunbathing in his garden, settling in.

  He pictured Fletcher’s grinning face. He’d be back, of course, unreal as it all was, as unreal, he supposed, as Fletcher turning up at his grandfather’s house and finding a Norwegian living there.

  Meanwhile, Mary Jackson cleaned. She’d insisted. Said she wanted to avoid sitting at home staring at the news because it’s disgusting how an entertainment is being built from this.

  ‘So, I’m sorry, Jonas, it’ll have to be you.’

  It’ll have to be you. The words revolved as he glanced at her, sweat on her neck and the top buttons of her shirt undone, now and then a glimpse of her breasts. It was exciting, a bit pervy, but what was one without the other? She was staying for dinner. It was so normal, like all the other sounds of the evening, shouting children and clattering dishes, music drifting from an opened window. It almost made him forget about Fletcher, but not Lacey.

  Her parents might be sitting in their own back garden, the same chairs, the usual colours and sounds. Everything was everything apart from her. Jonas had tried, he had only tried to help, but teenage girls never listened. He smiled again and Mary smiled back, a sudden lawnmower and Lacey was shimmering, then a shriek from next door’s kids and she was gone.

  So set the table and welcome Mary’s delight at his puttanesca chicken, a rare outing for the only dish he could cook well and yes, it was a triumph, she was quite right, he accepted the compliments and basked in the glow, maintaining his self-satisfaction until midway down the second bottle of Sauvignon Blanc when he looked at her and suddenly saw another smile.

  Estrangement was an express train, still accelerating. I exist at great distances, he thought. From my wife. From this evening.

  ‘How long do you think it’ll last?’ Mary asked.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The weather.’

  ‘Careful, you’ll jinx it.’

  ‘I’d be happy with sun like this every day for the rest of my life.’

  The weather?

  Yes, the weather, they were actually talking about the weather. But so what, Jonas having decided to enter the narrative space as Eva would have said, a movie obsessive who chided Jonas for the way he scoffed at terrible films because there’s always something to see, you just have to learn how to look, leaning towards him the way Mary just had, an evening like this in another life, the two of them babbling on, probably laughing because the sentimentality of memory insisted on it, turning to see Anya waddling across the garden, the first time she’d walked, big green eyes and hands a-clapping, one, two, three steps before falling over and quick as it opened up that space was closing and what remained was only complication.

  ‘Penny for them?’ Mary asked.

  Jonas had slipped into silence but hadn’t noticed, as he only now registered Mary’s smile, which wavered the longer he didn’t smile back. ‘Do you like films?’

  A slight frown but still the smile. ‘Sure. Why?’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘O-kay!’ And looked away, perhaps wondering where he’d suddenly gone, her smile finally disappeared. In a moment she stood up from the table, crossed to the lawn and lay down.

  He watched. A moment, he decided, one of those moments. So what to do, what to do?

  Ah Jonas, the master of over-projection. But each day was connected to all previous, was it not, now to then to Eva to Mary? So he got up and joined her on the lawn, warm with the day’s stored heat, both looking up to the swifts, darting and soaring as if conducting their thoughts, a scroll of detail but not too fast for Jonas to keep up, high but not too high, he could still hear the old wandering song line that hadn’t yet been lost among all the other chatter.

  ‘Fast little things,’ she said.

  Jonas turned to her. Mary’s hair had fanned onto the grass, a cascade of red on green. She was smiling again.

  ‘It’s like they’re writing something,’ she added. ‘Maybe with the right eyes we’d be able to read it.’

  ‘If we could read... bird.’

  ‘Bird?’

  ‘Bird language,’ he said. ‘I know bird.’

  ‘You know bird.’

  ‘I know bird.’ And he started making odd tweets and chirrups, noises through his teeth and little pursed lip whistles because she was trying and he would too, drawn by that smile.

  She was laughing. ‘But what does it mean, Jonas?’

  ‘It means the wine’s empty and I’m going to get some more.’

  ‘Birds drink wine?’

  ‘Yes, they drink wine. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Mal-beak, I suppose,’ and Mary rolled over on the lawn, cackling with laughter. ‘I want to hear some music,’ she said, sitting up with grass in her hair, suddenly serious. ‘Let’s get out of the village. It’s been a really awful day, I’m a bit drunk and I feel like getting plastered.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  They looked up as if choreographed into Fletcher’s beaming face. He wore shades, and had changed into black cotton trousers and a tight black t-shirt, a silver chain around the neck.

  ‘I could do with getting out of Dodge too,’ he added.

  Eighteen

  A strange and kaleidoscopic evening Mary would decide, much later, with the reassurance of hindsight.

  It was the symmetries that stuck: Fletcher in the middle of the back seat of the bus, directly in line with the aisle; Mary and Jonas six rows ahead, facing each other across the aisle; the bands of burgundy, orange and flame red, thinning on the horizon as the evening became deep blue then lavender dark; the village green that could have been arranged just so, a TV crew in a corner, floodlit dazzle and a group of watching locals, side-lined in the shadows.

  Lacey’s boyfriend added another strange kink. As they were waiting for the bus Spencer P cycled past and circled back, staring at Jonas before cycling away. When the bus stopped at the lights outside the village the kid was back, staring up at Jonas who stared back, launching into a monologue about Spencer P that was way over the top, a hostility Mary didn’t understand. It took a while to steer the conversation back to where they were going to go.

  ‘Where’s the best place for music?’ he asked.

  And sly Mary sat back in her seat and pretended to think, because she’d done her research before going round to Jonas’s. She counted down, five to zero and the eureka moment.

  ‘My daughter used to go to somewhere called The Underground. They’ve got live music every night. Fancy that?’ Jonas did and when she shouted back to Adam he gave a gleeful double thumbs-up that was both enthusiastic and sarcastic. Then he looked at Jonas and winked.

  Jonas tensed. He was about to say something then didn’t, glancing at Mary, as if remembering she was there. The tension between the two men was palpable. For a quick moment dismissed even quicker she wondered if Jonas was jealous. The Norwegian did make sure to stand in the middle as the three of them walked to The Underg
round, and seemed to flinch when Adam removed his shades inside the venue and asked do you want a drink... Mary? her name slowly emphasised, a bit creepy. All through Pierre and the Pirates’ set Jonas stared at Adam, who danced with odd spastic jerks, a scarecrow plugged into the mains.

  Jonas’s distraction made her self-conscious. She danced too, half-hearted middle-aged wiggling, hoping no one caught her eye, looking around at first dates and estrangements, glittery-eyed love and disillusion’s slow-burn. Awkward, under-age girls crowded the front, conspicuous in the effort to be inconspicuous. She wondered if Lacey came here.

  ‘They don’t seem to know much,’ Jonas shouted in her ear.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The police. About Lacey.’

  The pounding music, hearing the name, it was startling – a warp in space. ‘No. No, they don’t.’

  ‘Think they’ve interviewed Spencer P yet?’

  ‘C’mon, he’s just a kid.’

  ‘Lacey was just a kid too.’

  And then it didn’t seem right to Mary, this entertainment. She stared at the too-skinny lead guitarist with the milk-white skin and an image flashed: a dead body, a teenage girl in a field. The lump in her throat was sudden but still she swayed her hips, the image revolving.

  When the song ended she was crying. Jonas put a hand on her arm and looked at her carefully, as if for the first time, then back to Adam, twisting and jerking and no music, oblivious to the amused onlookers, furious moves with his eyes shut, mouth opening and closing.

  * * *

  Jonas was first off the bus. The real-time screen told him it was 01.21. They stepped into soft-focus streetlights and a purple sky, walking in silence past the green, the TV vans. He had a sudden image flash, the three of them with linked arms, skipping along the street like the Yellow Brick Road. No singing, though, just the scuff of their feet and three perplexed frowns.

  At the cross-roads, he and Mary said a gawky goodbye, a hug thought about but avoided. She walked down the street to the left, Jonas watching. Fletcher stood beside him, also watching.

  When Mary disappeared he headed right. Jonas looked left, right, and went straight on. Anywhere apart from End Point, Fletcher’s face a half-lit cipher, a smirk and a frown, what he knows and doesn’t know but no one knows anything, all these houses Jonas was walking past, cottages to outskirt new-builds, all these sleeping people and their untold stories.

  So bury the one-eyed doll in the loft, cram the genie back in the lamp and lock it in the garage until the laughing ghost of your past taps you on the shoulder and would you look at that, he’s got a black beard. Jonas made sure he hadn’t left Fletcher alone with Mary long enough to tell her about this lying Norwegian. The problem was the stream of days yet to come.

  He stopped, realising he was on Panama Lane. The hole in the fence midway along the lane was still there. He squeezed through, into the woods. The sound of the dual carriageway was startling, still busy even now, the road twenty metres away through the trees and how could he have ever put up with noise like this?

  The clearing and the windblown tree took a while to find. Sycamore Camp, his first home in the village. Picking strawberries in Kent for a pittance a punnet had finally sickened him. Three months was three months was too long so leave, Jonas, seek the promise of the western lands…

  It was almost unreal now, that urge to keep moving. When you stop you put down roots. But to stop you have to want to. This village was the first place in a long time he’d felt that. End Point was the final proof, the obviously abandoned house a sign and God-dammit Jonas sure liked a sign, even more he liked an open door, and if End Point’s door had actually been locked then the locked door of an empty, run-down house was also an invitation.

  He sat on the trunk and watched the passing cars. He remembered the compulsion, back then, counting the headlamp beams that crossed his face. Tonight they strobed like searchlights, an unsettling. He thought of Mary but Eva insisted, as overwhelmingly present now as then.

  So he let it all stream, a mashed-up cine-reel of dream-memory and reflection, tropical evenings, lonely campsites under Fannaraken’s ancient glare, teeming festival Lisbon, barrio alto hip hop and the heavy fug of sex, the stars in the sky here for all those yesterdays but maybe gone tomorrow, gone already, like the conceit that his eyes were the only ones to have looked at someone this way, to have been looked at this way, Eva laughing at their reflections on the window, Caribbean palms twisting like secrets in the dusk and the light of day become a purpling sky and the silhouettes now too dim to be certain about.

  A twig snapped. It might be Eva. He waited for the hands over his eyes, the voice saying guess who? Or Lacey. He sat in the dark for a long time, picturing the fear in her pretty face.

  Nineteen

  Jonas endured another day of circlings. He’d stayed up all night, watching the sun rise into blue scarred by wisped whorls, like the after-trails of air-show stunt planes. The stranger appeared soon after, a wordless walk onto the lawn to again go through his stylised exercise ritual, a staccato formality to the choreography that made Jonas wonder if it was less a morning habit than a psychic necessity. As he glanced at Fletcher so the stranger looked at Jonas.

  Later, when he came home and sank a beer, head buzzing from traffic, tar fumes and Eggers’s gaudy true-crime speculations, Fletcher was still in the garden, star-splayed on the sun lounger. He was unmoving, as if asleep although Jonas knew he was awake, as aware of Jonas as he was of him. When Jonas finished the beer he didn’t care anymore, going upstairs to crash out fully clothed. The last images before sleep were stunt planes, looping the loop, over and over again.

  He forgot to close the curtains and woke with a new day pouring in. A dead man’s slumber, no dreams. For a moment all was clear, understandable. A passing car. Birdsong. Then Mary, her face quick-rising. He’d barely thought about her since the gig but as he grabbed his mobile to send a text her face was suddenly replaced by Fletcher’s leer. He put the phone down.

  There were no more passing cars or birdsong, just a Niagara of thoughts. A blast of ECT was needed. What was it the docs said? Four hundred volts a day keeps the world at bay.

  Outside the bedroom the landing creaked. Jonas was up, the J-Man was superhero fast, opening the door but no one there. Downstairs, Fletcher sneezed and Jonas immediately felt as if he was falling, such a long, long way but if you don’t hit bottom then you can’t shatter into a million pieces. The stranger, would he be looking up, waiting for impact?

  He was. Jonas made green tea in his little cast-iron Japanese kettle and sat on the other side of the kitchen table. Fletcher looked back and they stayed that way for a long time, like a stand-off in a crappy Western. Fletcher broke first and looked away with a shrug. This annoyed Jonas, especially the shrug. Because it wasn’t as if he’d won, it was more like Fletcher had given up. Jonas wanted to say something but didn’t know what, something that made clear that he too knew that this whole staring thing was ridiculous. But to bring attention to it was to show his annoyance at having to explain himself, which annoyed him even more.

  When the doorbell rang they looked at each other again. It’s your house, Jonas wanted to say, you answer it. But he didn’t because it wasn’t. It was Jonas’s house so he got up, opening the front door to the two detectives from the briefing in the village hall. When he showed them into the kitchen Fletcher had disappeared. You’d think he would have stayed, a gleeful witness to the squatter bust, a finger-pointing ‘fuck you Mortensen, get thee gone’.

  But the way they scrutinised him as they sat down, before they spoke. They were the Lacey cops, after all, they were here about her, nothing else. He had known as soon as he opened the door.

  The sad-eyed detective told him three copies of a pornographic magazine called Barely Legal had been found in a locked desk drawer in the office where Jonas did administration for The Hub.

  A phone number was written on one of the covers, which they had called. It turned out to be a
n outdoor activity centre in north Wales called Black Raven Adventures. A booking had been made by Jonas Mortensen for the weekend of October 25th. The centre hadn’t spoken to anyone else from The Hub and the presumption could only be, don’t you agree, Mr Mortensen? that he had written the phone number himself and the magazines were his.

  Jonas answered. The detectives looked at him the same way he’d been looked at in Bergen years back, a shifting mix of suspicion, pity and contempt. He wondered if it was something they practised in the bathroom mirror, channelling all those American cop shows.

  He wasn’t a suspect, they stressed. It was unnecessary to take him to the police station. Too many media. Like Doberman dogs, said Sad Eyes. Chasing bones. We try to be discreet.

  But when Jonas let them out he saw Gladstone emerge from his café across the street. He stared at the two detectives as they got in their car then back at Jonas, who waved a hello he hoped wasn’t too friendly, exaggerated, because that wouldn’t be normal at all.

  * * *

  Eggers was four coffees down. Wired. Full of the same speculation and bullshit as the day before. He babbled about motives, suspects and then, later on, discovered the word perpetrators, they’re always using it in those Scandy crime dramas, you should know about them, Jonas. He kept repeating it, perpetrator, savouring the sound as he libelled a range of people whose possible guilt was shaped by how much and for how long Eggers had disliked them.

  No sign of Jonas on that list. He wondered how long it would take for word to get round.

  ‘I knew this day would come,’ Eggers insisted.

  ‘Did you really?’

  ‘Did you see the reconstruction on the telly?’

  ‘What reconstruction?’

  ‘Lacey. Her last movements.’