Waking Up Dead

by Nigel Williams

  She wasn’t in the upstairs loo. She hadn’t gone out to the Morris Minor because Beryl had looked there. She hadn’t crept into George’s bedroom for a little nap, although that would have been only too understandable, given the noise. Beryl had seen her go out into the garden and she had said she herself would not go out into the garden and Audrey had said she would be back in a minute but she hadn’t come back in a minute and it was too rainy and windy and dark for Beryl to go out there and if Audrey was in the garden why, please, hadn’t she come back? Please?

  There was only one other person whom George knew to be out in the garden and that was Mabel Dawkins. With the strong feeling that the evening was about to reveal some terrible new crime and that he, poor ghost, was already too late to do anything about it, George made his way through the glass and out into the wild night.

  Chapter Twenty

  At least half of the gathering had, at one stage or another, wandered out to, literally, drink in the item in question. At one stage Nat and Veronica Pinker had stood for a few minutes in the torrents of water, lifting their faces to the brooding sky. Esmeralda had stretched out her arms as the rain cascaded down, plastering her hair across her face, her dark eyes suddenly alive again, the water causing her black dress to cling to her shoulders and breasts, making George painfully aware of one thing he was never going to be able to do again.

  Although … It had taken him some time to learn to create a small breeze, then operate his brother’s hands and play him as if he were some kind of industrial digger, but he had got there eventually. In time it was possible he would graduate to full-on ghostly intercourse; beyond the grave, he reflected, he might even become a truly sensitive lover. At least he was not going to get complaints about his belly pinning Esmeralda to the floor.

  Maurice and Barry, both completely drunk, had been out in the rain as well, singing an impromptu song of their own devising. They both had good tenor voices. It went – as far as George could make out: ‘George … George … where are you? Who’s going to buy us Chinese meals?’

  Now the garden was empty. It was pitch black. The distant flickers of the lightning had stopped and, as George made his way on to the lawn beyond the patio, where no one had yet ventured, he could hardly make out the trellis that separated the more cultivated section of the garden from the area Esmeralda had planned as an English meadow. Its long grass, studded with poppies in the summer months, had the look in June and July of a Renoir canvas in which beautiful girls in blue dresses stand out like flowers in a sea of sunlight and delicate green.

  The grass was tangled now. There were brambles among it, drooping and wilting in the rain, and the statue of the boy with the anchor, described by Barry and Maurice as ‘Paedophiles Ahoy!’, was leaning at a drunken angle, almost obscured by giant weeds and hollyhocks that had come from nowhere and were thriving in the way of unwanted or unbidden plants. As he waded through the meadow, George once more had the eerie feeling that the wet grass was clinging to his legs and that his phantom limbs, like those of a recent amputee, were still capable of evoking the cruelly vivid sensation that they were real.

  Beyond the disorderly meadow was the long trellis of roses, white on one side and red on the other, that had wound themselves into each other, like lovers. The roses were now as dead as George was. Their heads battered by the rain, they nodded restlessly like old men in a closed ward, dreaming of a life that would not come again. Beyond them was a wide area of scrub grass, a half-hearted row of potatoes and beans, begun by Esmeralda some years ago, and beyond that, standing just before the fence on a patch of bald earth, the codicil still clutched in her hand, was Audrey Mullins, breathing in deeply, as she must have done years ago on the slopes of Scafell Pike with Jessica, Beryl and other energetic young women of the generation that had helped to take once-glorious Britain through two wars and the loss of its empire. Looking at her standing there in the rain, George was reminded of how fucking amazing the women of that time were. Christ! If Jessica had married his father a mere ten years earlier, all her property would have been his by law. There was something, he decided – a little too late as usual – rather magnificent about her.

  He noticed two other figures in this abandoned section of the garden. One was Mabel Dawkins. She was standing – but only just. As George watched, she waved her now empty bottle of Pomerol at Mullins, who looked back at her with a mixture of puzzlement and dislike; but George did not pay much attention to Mullins. He was more interested in the tall figure standing some ten or fifteen yards from the newly enriched Audrey. It was Lulu. She was talking to Mullins but Mullins was not answering.

  ‘Listen,’ Lulu was saying, ‘what you have to understand is that Stephen and I have certain rights. Stephen was Jessica’s son. I don’t have to remind you of that I’m sure and—’

  ‘She told me you’d swallowed him whole,’ said Mullins, ‘that you’d treated her with contempt. That he never called or came to see her. That she felt she had lost him. That was what she told me.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Lulu, with weary patience. ‘All I’m saying is that you do not have the right to—’

  ‘I have the right to tell you the truth,’ said Mullins. ‘I have the right to tell you that you tried to come between a son and his mother. I have a right to tell you that you have given up all your rights to any money from the Pearmain family.’

  ‘The Pearmains,’ said Lulu, with drawling, slow contempt. ‘I’m sick and bloody tired of hearing about the fucking Pearmains!’

  There was a hint of Geordie in her voice, thought George. More than a hint. A suggestion of London Geordie about her – the sort of person who likes to go on about the shipyards and the Blaydon Races and the canny lads and the Northumbrian pipes and the Jarrow march and the whole cosy package of safely dead working-class triumphs but is also clever (or canny) enough to make sure they live a few hundred miles further south. She was a fucking Geordie! Who’da thought it?

  ‘Please do not use foul language to me,’ said Mullins.

  She was, thought George, more than a match for Lulu. If she had ever sat on Lulu’s knee, on or off screen, Belhatchett would never have got up.

  ‘I will use any language I like,’ said Lulu, ‘and you had better understand you are not dealing with one of the Pearmains now. You are dealing with Lulu Belhatchett. Have you any idea of who I am? I am Lulu Belhatchett.’

  ‘Never heard of you,’ said Mullins, with a touch of playground bravado.

  George thought it possible that, at any moment, she might apply the tip of her right thumb to her nose and waggle her four fingers derisively at the former presenter of Come Sit On My Knee.

  ‘I have been on national television,’ Lulu went on. ‘I have written articles for the Radio Times. I am a fairly well-known person. And if I decide to go for you in the media, Miss Mullins, you will know about it and it will not be very pleasant.’

  Dawkins was looking very wobbly indeed. She was swaying so violently that, in George’s view, it would not be long before she collapsed. In fact, as he watched, she did just that. She pointed one index finger at Mullins and said, in a low, throaty voice, ‘You owe me two million quid,’ and fell backwards into the mud. For a moment, George took his eyes off Lulu, who continued to talk to Mullins in a voice that was all the more frightening for never being raised above her normal, beautifully elocuted, reasonable level.

  That was not the most frightening thing about her, though. The most frightening thing about her was that she had just produced, from her large and elegant handbag, a wicked-looking carving knife that she was holding, out of sight, down by her right leg, as she talked on and on and on about her many friends in the world of media, politics and sport. Mullins did not seem to have noticed it – or, if she had, she was an even cooler ninety-four-year-old than George had thought her to be.

  George recognized the knife. He had carved a few turkeys with it in his time. He had bought it for Esmeralda five years ago, at Christmas, and had often spoken of t
he sharpness of its blade, its heavy, reliable quality as he wielded it over a joint of beef or a slab of pork belly, decorated with crackling. Lulu was fingering it as she talked, moving it this way and that in the darkness. She looked as if she had more than basic knife-fighting skills.

  Mabel Dawkins was not, George saw, going to provide anything in the way of eyewitness testimony of what he was afraid was about to happen. He was going to have to do something. But what?

  Without thinking he ran at her, hoping for the same kind of reaction he had got when he tried the trick on his brother, but instead of landing in her body he seemed to skid through her and come out the other side, yards away, in the rain and the darkness and the wind. Perhaps his earlier trick only worked with blood relatives. With a mounting sense of panic he ran at her again, this time waving his arms, letting out the kind of noise that would have generated near panic even among hardened members of the Psychical Research Society, but Lulu paid no attention whatsoever. She went on talking in the same quiet, deadly, reasonable voice, all the time moving closer and closer to Mullins, who still, as far as George could see, had no idea of what was about to happen to her.

  He tried blowing. He tried making faces. He tried visualizing himself appearing to her as a skeleton. He tried calling her name in a deep and thoroughly spooky voice. Nothing. He was the only witness to what he was now sure was going to be another murder, and there was nothing he could do about it. Who would be able to hear what he had to say? He was gone. He was dead, burned to ashes and scattered. He was a person completely without influence.

  Lulu moved forward again. It was then that George remembered the video camera. He had bought it for the holiday he and Esmeralda, Barry, Maurice and their families had taken last year. They had used it only six months ago, when they took Bella Ella and Ella Bella to Peppa Pig World in some God-forsaken theme park off the M27. It worked. George had learned how to use it in order to get a shot of Bella Ella and Ella Bella trying to stroke a more than life-size sculpture of Peppa Pig, and later, an image of him eating a ham sandwich and making his abattoir face.

  Not only did he know how to use it. He knew how to adapt it for night shooting. Maurice and Barry had been amazed by his skill and persistence. The only trouble was that, so far, he had not shown any skill whatsoever in the reliable standby of the departed: trying to make themselves noticed by moving of solid objects. He was not, almost certainly, he felt, a poltergeist.

  He might, however, have poltergeist potential. You didn’t know until you’d tried.

  George turned away from Lulu and Mullins and thought, very, very hard, about the camera. It was in the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk. He could see the desk. His Apple Mac – switched off – stood in a sea of papers. A letter from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. A mortgage leaflet from some company he had used to help Barry and Maurice with their houses, in which a boy of about fourteen, flanked by a woman who was obviously supposed to be his mother, gazed with adoration at a man, who was, perhaps, supposed to be his father but emerged, in George’s twisted imagination, as a sexual predator from the building society. His desk diary still open at the week he had died. He had been meant to have lunch with Dave Macready on the very day he’d bowed out of membership of the human race. The top left-hand drawer was open. He had kept his medicines in there and a packet of twenty-eight Atorvastatin tablets was clearly visible. A little late to be worrying about his cholesterol.

  He saw all these familiar objects very, very clearly and, miraculously, as he summoned them to mind he found he was himself – at least the poor fragmented pieces of nothing that was himself, these days – sitting in his familiar black-leather chair. He had travelled to his study in less than a second. That was good because there was not much longer than seconds before Lulu got to work on Audrey Mullins with the carving knife.

  The bottom right-hand drawer of his desk was closed.

  George tried to concentrate on the idea of it being open. He concentrated very hard. He visualized it sliding back just far enough to show him where the camera was lying and then he visualized the camera rising of its own accord and floating round the room. In the films he had seen about poltergeists this sort of thing happened with alarming frequency. In fact, he was slightly worried that he might not see other things flying round the room. The picture of his father, for example, on the mantelpiece. His HP Laserjet printer. The chair in the corner that Esmeralda – bless her – had bought him in case he needed to talk to people about his poetry. He had never needed to talk to anyone about his poetry. And now he seemed incapable of getting the fucking thing to rise even a quarter of an inch off his polished wooden floor. If he was a poltergeist he was a very low-grade one.

  ‘Why,’ he heard himself say, in a voice he could not believe was inaudible to any living person, ‘can I not just reach out and get my fingers round that little brass handle and pull it and … Jesus Christ!’

  He was pulling open the drawer. It was opening. There, below him, was the small black Panasonic with which he had achieved that memorable handheld tracking shot round the massive statue of Peppa Pig. Without even thinking George reached down and picked up the camera – just as he realized someone was in the room with him.

  It was Nat Pinker. He was, George thought, as drunk as he had ever seen him. Just behind him was Dave Macready.

  There was no time to lose. There was a tripod next to the camera. He would need that as well. George lifted them both, walked over to the window with them and, using the same time-honoured technique as before – the stretching out of the hand, the thoughtless application of finger to object, the grip for God’s sake! – he pulled up the sash. Then, camera and tripod in hand, he swung one ghostly foot over the sill and sat astride it for a moment. Lulu and Mullins seemed to be in the same position as they had been when he left them.

  ‘I think,’ he heard Nat say to Dave, as he flew down through the rainy night, ‘I’ve drunk too much. I’m seeing things.’

  ‘What things?’ said Dave.

  ‘I think I saw George’s video camera fly through the air of its own accord,’ said Nat, in a thick, slurred voice, ‘and the window over there slide open as if some – some hand was … I…’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Dave, in the confidential tones of the very, very drunk, ‘it’s George. Maybe he’s come back to film his own wake.’

  ‘Maybe he has,’ said Nat. ‘He was always keen on home movies, wasn’t he? Some of his work in that area was brilliant. That one of them peeing off that cliff in Sardinia was astonishing. Professional standard.’

  George landed by the party wall between his and the next-door property. Lulu was still talking, in that low, reasonable voice.

  ‘You do not seem to grasp who I am, Miss Mullins. I have written for Highlife magazine. I am a Notable Person of Great Britain. There has been talk of my being awarded an OBE. And you have the nerve to spout the ridiculous opinion of some half-baked little piano teacher – I mean, ask yourself, Mullins, my dear, what was Jessica? What was she really? What did she amount to? Really? Her and her darling fatty Georgy Porgy pudding and pie, my God!’

  The camera was almost in place. George, whose hypothetical fingers seemed to be working with the practised assurance of real ones, had fixed it on the tripod at about his eye level.

  ‘You are a disgusting person, Lulu,’ Mullins was saying. ‘You are an example of all that is wrong with Great Britain. Celebrity culture! My God! Reality television! In my day we went to bed with a good book after a nice walk in the fresh air!’

  Lulu’s fingers twitched on the handle of the carving knife. George remembered something Esmeralda had said about the instrument in the year when they’d got hold of a rather disappointing turkey. ‘It makes slicing through the toughest of old birds remarkably easy.’ He worked hard at the controls as Lulu, who was now up close to Mullins, with the knife held behind her back, hissed at the old woman, in an accent that was now as heavily folk Geordie as that of the man who sang that appalling song
about having a fishy on a little dishy. ‘You’re a southern snob, you are. Like all the fucking Pearmains. You have no idea what it is to fight for every penny you can get your hands on. You’re a fucking lezzer into the bargain, aren’t you? You’re a muff-diver, you old twat, aren’t you? Eh?’

  Was it too dark to film? Just as George was thinking this, the moon came out from behind the clouds and there, as he pressed PLAY and the red recording light came on, through the viewfinder he saw, in mid to long shot, Lulu lift out the carving knife, hold it above her head in triumph then bring it down hard into Mullins’s neck. The old woman did not see the blade before it bit into her flesh. Then, with a savagery that astonished George, his ex-sister-in-law cut, again and again, into Mullins’s body. In her gut. Through her ribs. Finally, as she pulled the knife clear there was a slashing blow across the throat and the ninety-four-year-old lesbian staggered backwards into the muddy earth, falling, as Mabel Dawkins had just fallen, as the rain fell, regardless. George had thought the blood would spurt out of her neck in a fountain but Lulu must have missed the artery. Even the last blow across her neck left no more than a thin line across Mullins’s elaborately wrinkled skin, as pouched and loose as a tortoise’s.

  Perhaps there was not much blood in the old woman. As she lay there in the wet earth George thought he saw her chest heave once or twice, but then the moon went behind the clouds and it was dark once more and Mullins was as still as the earth on which she lay.