by Paul Roscoe
But this is different, this isn’t a date.
Alex laughed; it was a small, humourless sound that died in the warm air.
Yes, this is different, isn’t it? This is a sighting of my recently deceased schoolmates appearing as fantastic bird creatures, slipping in and out of existence before my very eyes. What could Helen possibly say to that? Wouldn’t she say that it was just stress and grief combined with what Buddy had told me about his own vision? That I’d imagined or dreamt the whole thing?
And, more to the point, why would I want to let her know that I’m possibly losing my mind?
The question made him stop. The sounds of contented play from behind the school droned on, quieter now.
Why? Because she’s my friend, that’s why. And I love her.
Alex nodded to himself and carried on walking, his face grave and solemn. Since he could remember, he had regretted becoming such fast friends with Helen, had regretted what he considered a hurdle to his approaching her as a prospective boyfriend, but all sense of that regret had somehow dissolved.
She’s my friend, my best friend, and that’s exactly what I need right now.
Alex exited the school gates and began walking along Breakwater Lane, seeing and not-seeing the houses he had passed nearly every day of his life. He visualised an aerial view of its sweeping semi-circle, and saw himself as a tiny blip, making slow progress along its huge arc. He wondered if there was anything more to life than this small, blip-like progress, anything more to life than trudging back and forth along the same old roads.
Sure there is. For starters, there’s having visions of the recently deceased.
In the distance, a car engine worked quickly through its gears. It was a calming sound.
Maybe it is just stress and grief and an overactive imagination. I’ve been expecting something strange to happen all day, something that would send me reeling into a crazed suicidal depression, and now that I’ve finally come across it, I’m not crazed or suicidal. I’m thinking about talking it over with someone. I’m daytime TV rationality incarnate. If I’m a little jumpy, well, who wouldn’t be?
He stepped out into the road and something beside him roared.
Something big and red and here.
He turned to see a woman mouth a single word he couldn’t hear. The woman was locked behind a pane of glass; she was holding a steering wheel, her shoulders hunched, bracing herself for the impact.
Move.
MOVE.
In his panic, Alex’s legs seized up; therefore, instead of leaping out of the car’s way, he leaned forward, hoping for his legs to propel him towards safety. Had he not frozen, he might have escaped the full force of the oncoming car – at that close proximity, even a good leap would have seen him breaking a leg or fracturing his pelvis – but as it was, his body just waited for the inevitable. When his muscles below finally responded to the scream from above it was too late for them to do anything but a pathetic little hop. This pathetic little hop, however, was enough to keep Alex from going beneath the wheels. The red car slammed into the schoolboy, throwing him in the air, and Alex saw the palest blue sky ever, and twirling orange rooftops, somehow close and strange.
Alex fell on the pavement with a clump and a tiny bell rang long and high. He stared sideways at the road, watching it go black as he became dimly aware that the car had carried on without stopping to see if he was alright.
The bell rang on, fading now, fading. He considered trying to move, but somehow there seemed very little need, and, after all, he was very tired. His head ached. Perhaps he would take a quiet nap…
Alex dozed.
Hands pulled at his clothes; a voice spoke. He smelled mouthwash and sweat-spoiled deodorant. Bleary morning colours reappeared, outlining a man’s face. Alex blinked, mentally shuffling the cards of the last few moments – the journey home, the car, the panic – and then he saw the man. A medic, presumably – they’d arrived at last. Of course…the lady in the car must’ve gone to a telephone booth.
Bald. White shirt.
No uniform.
Not a medic then.
The hands pulled at him again, the man saying something; his voice was shrill with fear.
“Don’t move me,” Alex muttered through cold, dry lips; the effort required was overwhelming. “Call an ambulance.”
The hands paused, then dug into his shoulders and bore him up.
The world fell into a waiting blackness.
7
The old gang knelt beside Alex, wanting to be seen and wanting to help, but unable to do either.
He saw us as birds, Mary thought. The idea kept rolling around in her head. She’d not really given much thought to their dramatic method of arrival on Bracton Hill before, but now an idea came to her that was so obvious, she wondered why she’d never seen it before. “David was into ornithology, wasn’t he?”
Tom nodded, distracted. Buddy got up, sat on a nearby garden wall, and lit a cigarette; he tried looking across the road at the fields opposite, but his eyes kept returning to the crumpled figure on the pavement.
“And so was the guy the police said kidnapped him, Derek Ermey.”
“So?” Tom said.
“Alex saw us as birds.”
“Again. So?”
“Is that what we are?”
“What does it matter what we are? We’re dead. So what if whoever killed us has a bird obsession? Now it looks like Alex is on the way out too.”
“He didn’t commit suicide, though. He won’t be joining us on the summit. The cycle was broken.”
“What cycle? One way or the other, Alex will have died as a direct result of the dreams, just like we did. He’ll show up.”
Mary shook her head. “No, if he dies now, we’ll have killed him.”
Tom fixed her with his gaze, and Mary was surprised to see anger starting to bubble over. “And just who are we anyway? Anymore, I mean. Alex saw us, and for all we know, that’s the reason he stepped out in front of that car when he did. I think if I’d seen three ghosts, road safety would be the last thing on my mind. And anyway, even before you get to that question, here’s another one we’ve not considered: do you see anyone else haunting Bracton?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said a little too quickly.
“Bull. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“What are you saying?” Buddy hoisted himself upon a garden wall. “Do you know why we’re the only ghosts here?”
“I have an idea. And I think Mary does too.” He stood up and turned to Buddy. “We’re ghosts, right?”
“Right,” Buddy said.
“And what do ghosts do?”
“Well so far, not very much, apart from hang about school.”
“No, I mean in ghost stories, things like that.”
“They haunt places. Haunted houses.”
Tom smiled. “But not just the houses.”
“People,” Buddy whispered. “They haunt people.”
“Without the people to haunt,” Tom said, “what use are ghosts?”
“But who are we haunting?”
“Thanks to our little experiment in collective meditation, our old friend for a start.”
The three of them fell silent, their gazes returning to Alex, to his thickening halo of blood.
“But I think there’ll be someone else yet,” Tom said.
“Whoever it is,” Mary said, joining Buddy on the wall, “all four of us need to be together for it to work.”
Tom opened his mouth – most likely to raise an objection – when a loud screech filled the air. They turned to witness the nose-down arrival of a rusty, white Citroen. A man in an untucked white shirt with large damp circles under his arms leaped out. His bald head gleamed with a thin layer of sweat.
The man was cursing to himself, creatively and profusely.
The old gang watched Mark Penney stuff Alex into his vehicle, and then, with the inarticulate telepathy that had started to work between them, they piled into
the back seat, eager to see where this stranger was taking their fourth member.
As the car sped away, Alex Turner’s missing left shoe caught on a sudden draft, tottered slightly in the middle of the road, then rolled on its side, resting beside a small, pink patch of bubblegum.
Chapter Fourteen
1
Mr Ermey opened his eyes.
He stared fixedly at the placemat and listened to the world outside. The postman, identifiable by his whistle, walked past with nothing today; somewhere down the street voices argued; a car rolled by; birds chatted in nearby trees. The thin-faced man, hair still thick and wiry despite being grey and going-on-white in places, stared through saucer eyes at the children on the placemat, the children enjoying the endless midday of an imaginary summer. Three boys and a girl played beneath the eaves of a barn, a dog curled up asleep on its straw-covered floor. Casting furtive glances right then left, not yet ready to relinquish dominion over the object before him, Mr Ermey checked the other mats.
They were identical. Three boys and a girl, barn, dog.
It was Mary’s painting, only hers wasn’t a barn, it was the old shelter.
Or maybe you just thought it was the old shelter, maybe it was this barn all along…
Don’t be ridiculous! Mary’s painting is an original. This is just an unfortunate coincidence.
But this is Mary’s painting.
No, Mary’s painting is the old shelter. Sure, there are some details of figures in it and, hell, maybe those details are of these figures; maybe the Townsends have the same placemats and she’s been inspired by them, who knows?
This is just...
Mr Ermey gripped the mat with both hands, feeling the cool smoothness beneath his thumbs and the soft, yielding cork beneath his fingertips. One boy stood astride an old-fashioned bicycle; another wore a baseball cap; and another rested his right foot on a football. The girl leant against one of the supporting beams; she wore a hooded jacket with no buttons or zips, possibly a waterproof. The dog lay at their feet, snoozing.
This is...something I’ve forgotten?
Oh yes, you can be sure of that.
He tried to remember Mary Townsend’s funeral, tried to mentally walk through the cramped living room. He saw himself edging towards the hazy, yellow light pouring through the windows of the Townsends’ living room. He saw stray hairs on suited shoulders, hairs twisted in the fine wool, fashioning fairy slipknots. He saw the as-yet-unnamed object fall from the mantel, fall from his hand, fall to the floor and shatter into nineteen tiny pieces.
The children beneath his thumbs continued their silent conversation. The boy with the cigarette asked the girl in the yellow cagoule what kind of stupid design is this anyway?
Yellow cagoule?
Mr Ermey looked at the picture; its colours were brown on beige on brown. He neatly returned the mat to its original position between the knife and fork.
2
Sometime later, Mr Ermey found himself going from room to room. A second cup of coffee was in his hand and he stood at the master bedroom’s window, sipping. This cup was stronger than his previous attempt, but it was already on its way to being lukewarm. He gazed out at Richmond Avenue, allowing his eyes to trip over the hurdles of hedgerows that curled down the street. Rabbit warrens – that was what people called these places, and he guessed they had a point; he had trouble remembering all the road names in this area, and when walking dreaded the familiar window-winding do-you-know-where? of visiting drivers. There were only a few shops and takeaways, but no real amenities – other than the park that backed onto his property. Richmond Recreation Ground was a field with vandalised playground equipment at one end, and a square patch of scrubland at the other, which had once been a bowling green. On weekends he sometimes walked that way to catch the swallows skimming the field for breakfast. They looped an endless figure eight, always returning to the same point – how they managed to avoid crashing into one another was a perpetual wonder.
Mr Ermey finished his now cold coffee, placed it on a windowsill that needed dusting six months ago, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He gazed around the walls covered with framed photographs. A few – panoramic shots of swallows – he’d taken in the park, but most were of the back garden; and most of those were of his bird table, taken from the kitchen window. At one point he had thought to organise the photographs in terms of seasons, dedicating a wall to each one; at another point he had thought to group them according to bird type; but in all the many points that lay between and since, he was mostly happy to let the collection build in its own organic and cumulative way. There was no real sense to the display, no pattern, and Mr Ermey had found that that, for once, made the most sense of all.
He followed the pictures around the bedroom. Here was a swallow, a robin, a blackbird, a magpie, a blue tit, a thrush, a chaffinch, two robins, another swallow, one blackbird descending, and another blackbird alighting. And more, and more, and more. Above the headboard was a solitary photograph of an eagle, his only bird of prey; he took it down and sat with his legs stretched out on the duvet, the photograph resting on his thighs. It was a print of a professional bust shot taken against a perfect blue sky. The bird looked magnificent, its eyes stony, its shoulders broad and full of muscle. The print itself, however, looked tired. Over the years, sunlight had faded it considerably and given it a yellow cast, but the real damage was from previous makeshift display methods. Golden Sellotape still clung to the corners, now preserved under glass with the photograph for fear that removal might tear the paper or strip the ink. These tape triangles bore several holes the thickness of a pencil lead where drawing pins had been placed and replaced.
Mr Ermey ignored all this, though, and saw the eagle, alone in that endless, unknown sky; and although many rooms and years lay between the boy with the drawing pins and the man with the wooden frame, it was almost as if he could feel what it was like to be seven years old again, if only for a moment.
In that moment, he was begging his mother for the money to buy the photograph. The man from the Ornithological Society had visited school that day, leaving a folio of shots for sale. They were housed in a large fake-leather folder on a small desk at the front of the class, and he’d stared at that folder all day, unable to concentrate on his schoolwork. The next day, leafing through those huge, glossy pages that crinkled beneath his fingers, his mother’s blessing in the shape of a coin in his back pocket, he had happened upon the eagle, and had been hooked on birds ever since. The print arrived at school a week later in a waxy, white envelope inscribed with tiny green lettering, and that night, within three minutes of walking through the front door, the envelope was tossed and the eagle was mounted above his bed, where it could soar forever through his dreams.
Mr Ermey balanced the eagle print on the busy nightstand, rubbed his chin, and decided to have a shave.
3
His face stung. It was bleeding in places. Mr Ermey rinsed the remaining shaving cream from his chin and patted his face dry with the blue hand towel from the hoop by the sink. Swishing the foamy water, he pulled the plug. As the water thudded its way through the house’s arteries, he quick-footed back into his bedroom for a spy down at his front door. As he always did after a shave, Mr Ermey peered down at the small square of concrete that led off the drive. He remained like that for some time, a loop playing in his head:
There are no heads, no shoulders bobbing there, no owner of said head and shoulders shifting from foot to foot. There are no heads, no shoulders bobbing…
He considered closing his eyes to see again, to start again, but instead he pressed through, forcing the loop to end. Mr Ermey stared at the empty space below and spread his right fingers on the windowpane.
“One.” Three raps ending on the index finger. No heads.
“Two.” Two and a half, then the middle. No shoulders.
“Three.” Two, then ring. No owner.
“One-two, one-two, one, two, three.” A complete rap for each wo
rd.
He pushed himself away. The window, hazy with dust and grime, had a vaguely circular clean spot where his hand had rapped that same sequence a thousand times before. Still unsatisfied that no one was actually at the front door, but today feeling too tired to be bothered actually walking downstairs and opening it (which, he knew, would involve checking around the side of the house, up the drive, across the lawn, and around the tiny perimeter of the front step itself), he returned to the bathroom mirror.
Besides, he thought, I heard the postman go past before. He always whistles the theme from Winnie The Pooh, just the jolly part, not the introduction.
He stared at his reflection. His forehead was quite broad – something he considered suggestive of intellect, even though in his early thirties a series of deep, horizontal lines decided to take up permanent residence there, lending him an air of one constantly in surprise. He looked surprised today, but it was a weary sort of surprise. He looked into his father’s eyes, blue-grey, wide, and prone to watering, and at his mother’s thin nose, which he hated. His entire face was too thin, he thought. And his hair was a mess. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually given consideration to its style, or given the barber more than the standard ‘short back and sides’ direction. He ran a hand through the bristly clumps of grey – one small, one large, the world’s most angular side-parting – and placed a little more pressure on than usual. The clump sprang back into place. Mr Ermey decided to leave it, and returned his hands to the side of the sink.
He considered his face as a whole. It was unremarkable, neither grotesque, nor handsome.
It could be anyone’s. The faces on my placemats have more life in them. And the faces on Mary’s painting, the faces that she suggested but aren’t even there. The characters she painted.
He stood, gripping the sink with white thumbs, trying to untangle this daisy chain of ideas. He visualised the placemat in his dining room, saw himself sat there poring over it; he remembered the salt grains as they slid across the smooth, cool surface. He had been convinced that it had been Mary’s painting, hadn’t he?