She smiled weakly. Talking about the haemorrhage was hard; she felt tears in her eyes and had to swallow heavily a few times. She heard herself saying it was one of those things and that life must go on, but she did not really believe it. It sounded good, so she said it. She brushed over John leaving her, saying it was a difficult time, and debated shaving a couple of years off her age when asked.
Rachel then recounted the day at the castle. She started off by sketching over the main facts, but, as she went on, she began to feel more and more compelled to say what she had seen. When finished, she sat back and looked at Luke. He was just sitting there, looking back at her. She must appear completely mad.
Finally, he spoke: “So, the men you saw and the battle… You think you kind of travelled back in time and saw what really took place hundreds of years ago?”
“I don’t know. I think so. I mean, I thought I had made it up in my head or dreamt it up, but I don’t think so now,” she clarified.
“Why not?”
“It’s not how I would have done it… If I had imagined this, well, it wouldn’t have been what I saw. I always thought the armies of important men in the past would have all been like knights – in armour, well dressed, etc. – but these men were not. They were like a ragtag of dirty everyday people, fighting for whoever paid them. They seemed to have no allegiance… Do you know what I mean? Also, how else would I have known about the theory that one brother killed another?”
“A lucky guess? Maybe you had overheard it somewhere. Being a teacher, you must have researched a lot of things, yourself.”
“I don’t think so. Also, I have seen others. One man with half his legs missing, just last week.”
“Legs missing? Like he had been in an accident?” Luke was scribbling now.
“No, more like he was walking at a level lower than the street; do you know what I mean? I don’t understand it.” She had a thought. “Also there is a doctor who has spoken to me; I think he might be Victorian. I don’t know his name. He keeps trying to speak to me, as he thinks I can help… them.” She looked down. Her hands tensed again.
“Them?”
“The ghosts… but I don’t think I can.” She looked up. “I don’t understand this myself, Luke; I am only just getting used to it, but I am starting to believe that I am not hallucinating. This is… something else…”
“You are psychic?”
“No. Well at least I don’t feel that I am. I have been thinking about it, and, somehow, I wonder if the brain bleed has allowed me to see things differently. The dead are all around us, and not everyone can see them, but I can. I mean, there may be others in the world who can do this. I am sure I am not the only one.”
“Ghosts… are they all around us?”
“Yes… you just can’t see them usually, and it seems that they are not only in old castles and dark tunnels. They can be in the street in bright sunshine, in a park, an office or even in a toilet. Tell me, have you ever been in a bathroom where they have those automatic hand washers where you put your hand under the tap to turn the water on and off with a sensor?”
“Er… yes…” Luke had no idea where this was going.
“Have you ever been there alone, even in a cubicle perhaps, and the tap just came on, then went off, as if someone was there but no one actually was?”
“Yes.”
“Ghosts do that.” She sat back with a satisfied look on her face. “The spirit gets too close to the tap, and if the presence is strong, it turns the taps on… It makes them jump sometimes; I have seen it… Funny, isn’t it?”
Luke put down his pen. “If you really can see them and communicate with them, if this is true, you do realise that you are going to get a lot of them coming to you and asking you to help with issues they had when they were alive, to settle scores of the past?”
Rachel felt a tear prick at her eye, then she spread her hands. “I am very aware of this Luke. I am just hoping they are not all aware that I can see them, or that word doesn’t spread about me, or they are all going to come to me, aren’t they? Imagine being dead and knowing someone can see and hear you. It would open up all kinds of reasons for you to track down this person.”
Imagine indeed. Luke raised one eyebrow, then looked down and carried on writing.
They spoke for nearly two hours, although it felt like less. By the time Luke left, Rachel felt like she had run a marathon, and her mouth was so dry that she could hardly speak. Before he left, he took a photo of her and said it would be used with the story.
Rachel went to bed, resolving that, the next day, she would check he had credited her bank account with the £800. She imagined for a moment selling more stories like this; people liked the paranormal, didn’t they? She had heard of so-called psychics touring the circuit and making a mint, so maybe she could do that? Now the head pains were getting more predictable and painful, she worried if she could ever work a nine-to-five, permanent job again; this might be the answer.
Who was she kidding? The story may not even be published, and if it were, she would just be dismissed as a nutcase for a week or so, then, like yesterday’s chip paper, her story would end up in local recycling bins everywhere. That was her fate. What a downfall.
She fell asleep. Her dreams were again bothered by the ‘shadow people’ as she called them, but this time it was a little different: she was off the bridge now and walking amongst these dark people in shadow. A little distance from her, she saw something amongst the people in her dreams, like a kind of animal; it looked a little like an ape, a chimpanzee, but a large one, sitting on its hind quarters in a clearing, just away from the others. As she looked its way, its mouth opened slightly, revealing rows of razor-sharp, pointed teeth. Then its eyes opened, but only to a slit, and were blood red. What on earth was it? Maybe it was an imp. Her friend, Sally, had told her about them; they were supposed to be mischievous, but harmless.
The dream then faded to black, and the rest of her night remained undisturbed.
Chapter 12
The benefits office was not one of Andy’s favourite places. Every two weeks, he was summoned and told to prove he had applied for numerous jobs, so that he could carry on receiving benefits. Since being made redundant from his IT job two years ago, he had viewed getting the maximum amount of benefits as his new full-time job. Every week, he would apply online to a lot of vacancies, giving glib and superficial answers to any questions. Once, despite his best efforts, he had been called to an interview, but he soon scuppered that by turning up wearing Mrs Braithwaite’s make-up, appearing as some kind of goth, and uttering monosyllabic responses to the interviewer. When he was asked his name, he even paused and grinned vacuously into thin air. He didn’t get the job, which was fantastic; it ticked a box and ensured he got his full benefits the next week. It was good, this benefits gig; he could live with Mrs Braithwaite, do his ghost hunting and also get paid by the government. Sweet!
He had been warned this interview might not be so easy. Sitting at a desk opposite a grumpy-looking youth, he simply remained expressionless, trying to play it deadpan. This man looked too young to be an employee of the jobcentre, but, anyway, Andy remained resigned to having to listen to more nonsense. To Andy, it was like being strapped into a not-too-pleasant roller-coaster ride he had ridden many times before.
“Mr Horton…” The young man looked up from his computer screen and narrowed his eyes. “Despite applying for nearly 400 jobs and having one interview in the last five months, not one has been successful; why would you think this would be?”
Jobs? It was a laugh calling half of them jobs. Many paid the minimum wage but were miles away from where he lived. One, in a warehouse, demanded a 4am start, yet, as he was without a car, he had no idea how he was meant to get there on time. Another one, he recalled, had a five-hour travelling time to the job and back, and no help was offered with the train fare. Why had he not got
these ‘non-jobs’ indeed? Because he didn’t bloody want them, being as they were slave labour.
“I don’t know,” he heard himself replying. “I fill in the forms as best I can but nuffink comes of it.” At these jobcentre interviews, he deliberately tried to come across as being a bit dense. It was this part of it that he found hardest; ‘kidding he was daft’, as Mrs Braithwaite put it.
“Well, as you know, it is our job to get people like you into employment…” droned on the young man.
People ‘like him’? Andy made a mental note to ask what that meant.
“So, in order for us to do this, we are arranging a compulsory work placement for you, starting in two weeks’ time,” the young man confirmed.
A compulsory work placement; what the hell? “What’s that?” Andy asked.
“That is where we arrange for you to attend a place of work, so that you can learn a skill. You work for benefits, if you like; the placement is over a thirty-hour week, Monday to Friday, 9.30am till approximately 5.00pm, in a retail environment.”
Andy’s mind raced. Monday to Friday, all day? Every week? How on earth would he run his ghost-hunting business? And, what’s more, he relied on the benefit payments topped up by the cash he received from the ghost hunting; if he didn’t get both lots of money in, he was going to be in the shit. OK, he had the weekends, but a lot of the wealthy spinster types who called him in wanted him during the weekdays; also, checking out hauntings in churches and so on was going to be impossible at weekends.
“What is this job, anyway?” Andy asked, again trying to sound as non-committal as he could.
“A produce-replenishment manager,” stated the young man.
This sounded better than the usual fare Andy was offered at these interviews. “What does it entail?” He leant forwards.
“It’s basically a shelf stacker in the local supermarket; think yourself lucky that you are not on the night shift.” The jobcentre employee smiled.
“Right, so you want me shelf stacking to ‘learn a trade’, as you put it, but I don’t get any more money for doing this?”
“That’s right, but if you don’t do it, you may well lose your benefits.”
Andy’s mind started clicking everything into place. OK, so this was basically about getting him off the dole queue, getting the stats down, with – let’s be honest – no real chance of any job at the end of it, and he still got his benefits, so it didn’t seem to save the taxpayer any money. “How much do these big supermarket chains pay you to get slave labour in for them?” he asked. As soon as the remark had left his lips, he regretted it; his observation pointed towards him not being as stupid as his earlier employment forms had made out.
“What do you mean, Mr Horton? This is a chance to learn valuable skills and get you signing up to a work ethic.”
Work ethic? That was a bloody joke. His ghost-hunting business required that he keep detailed records of all his clients, payments, the details of the ghosts (real and fake) and how he got rid of them. He cross-checked these records weekly to see if any of the patterns tallied; in other words, if a ghost he had got rid of from one house reappeared in another. His ‘job’ needed excellent customer-services skills and utmost discretion. He had even got rid of a poltergeist for a famous soprano who lived locally last month; totally by accident, mind, but he had got rid of it, nonetheless. They didn’t think this was more likely to instil a work ethic? But then, of course, they didn’t know about this ‘career’ of his.
“Fine, when do I start?” Andy queried.
“On Monday 5th, 9am start, report here…” The youth handed over a slip of paper. “And, remember, if you fail to turn up to any of the days you are scheduled to work, without a doctor’s certificate or valid reason, the benefits will stop.”
Andy got up and walked slowly to the door that should have been signed ‘EXIT’, only someone had graffitied over it so it read ‘EX-SHIT’; was that supposed to be funny? Andy walked down the stairs, out of the building and into the cold air outside. He sat down heavily on a nearby stone wall and watched the cars pass by on the high street.
“Bugger me,” he muttered to himself. Now what was he going to do? His work had already taken a hit due to all the new, supposed ghost-hunting groups that had popped up recently; usually an assembly of attractive younger people, all wearing matching uniforms and boasting loads of technology. They always guaranteed they would find any ghost or spirit haunting a house. But Andy knew it wasn’t like that, and it didn’t work that way; you didn’t really need a load of expensive equipment to find a ghost. Sometimes, he would walk into a house and find nothing, but people didn’t like that – they wanted results, like Miss Simpkin – so he did what he could to provide a result for them, even if it was a bit faked. But now what? He would be sticking cans of bloody beans on shelves.
He put his head in his hands and actually felt a large wave of despair wash over him. He must not get depressed – that wasn’t going to help – and he doubted Mrs Braithwaite would kick him out. But she was elderly. He loved her, but she wasn’t going to be around all his life; if she died, he would be out of there in a flash, and then what?
A strong wind gusted up the street and hit him hard; he shivered. Now what was he going to bloody do?
“Crap.” He had forgotten to ask the jobcentre employee what he had meant by saying ‘people like you’. He would write it down when he got home so he didn’t forget to mention it on his next visit.
Chapter 13
The van sped around, delivering the Burwood Echo to newsagents, government offices, supermarkets and shops. Gentle, flapping noises were heard all over town as the free local newspaper for the borough of Burwood dropped through letterboxes.
Flap. Rachel opened her eyes. She was lying in bed; she did a lot of that now, thinking about how there was only one month left before she had to return to school, to hear what Mr Andrews had to say. She thought he was going to get rid of her; then what? Her mind began to whirl. A teacher with a brain condition? As if work wasn’t hard enough to come by if you were in perfect health.
Oh, yes, the letterbox… It might be the paper, she thought. She got up from the bed, pulled on her dressing gown, and then walked to the front door.
The paper, the Burwood Echo, was lying, slightly rumpled, on her doormat, next to three flyers that had probably been inside it; one she saw was advertising how to plan a funeral.
She picked up the paper and began to thumb through it; the headline was something about exam results being fiddled at a local school. Her eyes skimmed the text; it wasn’t her school, so that didn’t matter. On turning the page, her eyes flashed over pages two and three, but there was nothing about her. Slowly, she turned to page five, and there it was: a half-page piece with her photo, slightly discoloured with ink, and the headline ‘I SEE THE DEAD – LOCAL WOMAN BECOMES PSYCHIC AFTER ACCIDENT’.
She heard the words, “Oh God!” come out of her mouth. She had told the reporter that she wasn’t psychic, and it wasn’t an accident, but more of an incident. Rachel sat on the stairs, staring at her photo, which was looking forlornly back at her. He had told her not to smile when he took it, explaining that the piece was meant to endear people to her. She thought she looked unhinged.
She placed the paper on the table by the front door, closed so she couldn’t see the article.
The rest of the day was spent watching TV, only broken by a text message from Sally, asking ‘Have u seen the local paper? U are in it!’ which Rachel didn’t reply to. Even though she never looked at the article again that day, she felt its presence in the flat. All she could wish for was that not many people read the local paper, and, hopefully, this would all be forgotten by next week.
*
The next day, Rachel got up and found herself feeling better about everything. She had forgotten, at least momentarily, about the newspaper article, and she was debating about ma
ybe getting her life more in order, setting her flat straight and visiting the doctor to admit to the amount of pills she was taking (even today she had a muzzy head).
The silence was broken by a phone call from the school: Mr Andrews had asked Rachel to come in to discuss her working situation.
She felt hopeful. It was possibly the case that he had realised what a contribution Rachel made to the school and that he wanted her back quicker. This was fantastic news. For the first time since the incident, she really believed her life was shifting back on track.
*
Alice walked along the road with her usual assortment of children behind her. In her arms was a tiny baby, which remained silent and still. Wearing her long, black coat, small-heeled boots and dark pillbox hat, she made for a dour figure. The children behind her, ranging in ages from three years and up, were in various standards of clothing: some in rags and barefoot, and others in finest silk, rubbing their noses into lace handkerchiefs. She heard muttering from the back; no doubt it was Henry again, who was the oldest child and from the most privileged background.
“Henry, be silent,” she said, whilst struggling with the baby and with her free hand tugging a three-year-old behind her.
“I am of an age when I no longer need the services of a nanny,” Henry moaned. “I am almost a man, and as such should be free to make my own way in the world.”
Her brow furrowed, but she walked on, throwing her voice back. “But you are not going to be a man, are you, Henry? You, as we all, must remain this age.”
“But my knowledge grows, Nanny.” He waved a lace handkerchief in a foppish manner about his face. “I wish to be free of having to follow children around. You choose to do this, Nanny, not me. I have things to do and see.”
Seeing Things Page 7