Phantoms

by Marie O'Regan

  “What is it?” he had asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “It can’t be nothing. You’re crying.”

  “You’ll think I’m being silly.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I had a dream about you,” she had replied.

  Then it was gone again. He tried to remember what that dream had been. It was relevant, somehow. Everything about that night was now relevant. Beside him, his young wife’s breathing altered as she descended into sleep. He bit his lip in frustration. What was it? What was he failing to recall?

  His left arm felt numb. He supposed that it was the position in which he was resting. He tried to move it, and numbness became pain. It extended quickly through his system, like acid injected into his bloodstream. He opened his mouth and a rush of air and spittle emerged. He groaned. There was a tightness in his chest, as though an unseen presence were now sitting astride him, constricting his breathing and somehow compressing his heart so that he saw it as a red mass grasped in a fist, the blood slowly being squeezed from it.

  “I dreamt that you were beside me, but you were in distress, and I couldn’t reach you. I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get to you.”

  He heard her voice from afar, the words returning to him as an echo. He had held her, and stroked her back, touched by the strength of her feelings yet knowing in his heart that he thought her foolish for responding to a dream in this way.

  She moved in her sleep, and now it was he who was crying, the pain forcing tears from the corners of his eyes.

  “I dreamt that you were dying, and there was nothing that I could do to save you.”

  I am dying, he thought to himself. At last, it has come.

  “Hush,” said his wife. He looked at her, and although her eyes were still closed her lips moved, and she whispered to him: “Hush, hush. I am here, and you are here.”

  She shifted in the bed, and her arms reached out and enfolded him in their embrace. His face was buried in her hair, and he smelled her and touched her in his agony, his heart exploding deep within him, all things coming to an end in a failure of artery and muscle. She clasped him tightly to herself as the last words he would ever utter emerged in a senseless tangle.

  Before the darkness took him.

  Before all was stillness and silence.

  “Hush,” she said, as he died. “I am here…”

  My god, I love you so.

  “And how you are here,” he replied.

  Hush. Hush.

  And he opened his eyes.

  MY LIFE IN POLITICS

  M. R. Carey

  Tonight, after supper, Mum tried out her speech on me and it was really good. It made me cry. She said Mr Peverill – Tom – was a great man and a great politician, and that his name will shine out like a beacon for all time to show what people can do when they’ve got vision and moral courage. I clapped when she’d finished, and said “Encore! Encore!”

  Mum didn’t like that. “Don’t be doing that tomorrow, Denise,” she said. “You’ll make an exhibition of yourself. Oh my God, I think my nerves will go.”

  Mum has trouble with her nerves. I think maybe I do, too, although we get different medicine so it’s not the exact same thing. It’s just sometimes I get anxious if people want me to do something and I don’t know what it is, and then I get confused and I don’t always follow.

  That’s how Dad says it. “Try to follow, Denise,” he says, “for Jesus Christ’s sake.” When we’re watching Days of Our Lives or General Hospital, and I ask who that one is, or what he meant when he said that, or whether she knows he loves her. And I do try to follow, but sometimes I can’t.

  It’s a big honour that they asked Mum to do the eulogy. Dad thought it should be him because he’s been the Treasurer of the Constituency Association for seventeen years, but Mum is the Chair, which is more important.

  It was thanks to Mum that I got to work for Tom, before he got to be an MP, when he was just our local candidate. And then after he won and he went to the House of Commons to represent all of Coddistone, I carried on working for him but not in the Palace of Westminster. Just here, in the constituency.

  It was a good job and I was happy, although not as happy as I was when I worked at Costella’s Café. At Costella’s, Shamin let me take home Cornish pasties that weren’t the right shape or got burned, and if I worked on Saturday I got an extra ten pounds that didn’t go into the brown envelope but Mr Costella put it in my hand.

  “You can’t go wrong with ten pounds in your hand, now can you?” he always said. And I used to keep it tight in my hand all the way home, pretending it was magic. And once a boy who was skateboarding on the pavement really fast stopped dead right before he hit me, as if he’d hit a wall I couldn’t see, but I don’t know if that was the ten pounds or not.

  After Tom – Mr Peverill – went to the House of Commons, I didn’t see him as much, even though I was still working for him. He was writing his bill and then he was getting people to vote on it and that took up most of his time so he didn’t come back to Coddistone very much.

  Until that last day when he came back to make his speech on the Town Hall steps. I wish that hadn’t happened. Any of it. I wish he hadn’t come. I wish Mum hadn’t made him a briefing pack. And I wish she hadn’t told me to drop the briefing pack off at his house. Whenever I remember it, I think my nerves will go.

  The only time I saw Tom before I went to work for him was when I was still in school. I was in year eleven and he came to Bishop Laud on prize day. He gave the science prize to Angela Brereton, but before he gave it to her he made a speech about moral courage. He said moral courage was about doing what was right even when everyone was telling you it was wrong. He said if you lived right and followed your own vision, no man or woman could reproach you.

  It was a very inspiring speech. I wrote an article about it for the school newspaper and Miss Charles said it could go into my coursework folder. “You need something else besides your weird little fantasy pieces, Denise,” she said. “This looks like it will do very nicely.”

  I got an A in English, in the end – nearly an A star – and I think that article was the reason. It was the best thing I ever wrote. I used FOLLOW YOUR VISION as the headline, and I put a photo of Tom next to it, looking up towards the ceiling and off to the right. It was a photo that Mum took for his campaign posters.

  English was my only A. I got Cs in Art, Religious Studies and Geography, and the rest were Ds. My mum went into school to talk to Mr Nuttall. She said I should be allowed to stay on and do A-levels because an A that’s nearly an A star is outstanding. I’d shown what I could do if I got the chance.

  I dream, sometimes, what I could do. Like fly in places that aren’t even places, and scoop up the shiny stuff that makes the stars and press it all against me until I’m shiny too. Sometimes I used to write the dreams down, and that was what Miss Charles called my fantasy pieces, but in the dreams it felt real and anyway I only put down the parts I could find the words for. Some of it was just feelings.

  Mum got her way, like she usually does. Mr Nuttall said I could do English and Geography A-levels and retake my Maths. But then I got sick with my appendix and I missed a lot of time. My mum said, “You’ve just got to apply yourself, Denise, that’s all.” And she got the school to send homework packages for me every day I was in hospital, but I was very tired and very sore after the operation and I couldn’t apply myself all the time even though I really tried.

  Part of that was because I just hated being in the hospital. My room was small and dark, and sometimes when I was there by myself it got smaller and darker. I heard one of the nurses say they were scared to come in there. She said she thought the ward was haunted. It wasn’t though. I never saw any ghosts there.

  I got Ds in the Christmas exams and they weren’t even good Ds. Mr Nuttall suggested I should take the rest of the year off and start the course again in September. “A clean slate,” he said. My mum and dad said no; I didn’t need
a clean slate. I could make up the lost time in the spring. And I promised I would, and I did try to, but for a lot of reasons it didn’t happen. So I left at the end of year twelve and got a job at Greggs in the High Street and then at Costella’s Café.

  My mum didn’t like that. She thought working in a café was beneath me, and that I was shaming the family. She talked about it with my dad a lot, late at night when they both thought I was asleep. Some of the talk was about which side of the family I took after and whose fault I was, but some of it was about finding a better job for me to do that wouldn’t shame anyone.

  Then one day my mum went to a Constituency Association meeting and came back very happy and excited. She said Tom Peverill had got the party’s nomination to stand for Coddistone in the next general election. A local man! Mum was especially proud because she went to school with Tom Peverill’s wife, Violet, who I had to call Auntie Vi when she came to visit, so Tom was almost one of the family. “And that’s good news for you, my lass,” she said to me. “I had a word with Vi and she had a word with Tom, and what do you think? You’re going to work in his office!”

  I was sad to leave Costella’s. Mr Costella said there would always be a job there for me if I changed my mind. Shamin told me don’t look back, just do it. “There’s more things in life than taking meat pies out of a sodding oven.” And she hugged me, which was a bit of a surprise but very nice. Mum doesn’t do hugs. She says she’s never been one to get all touchy-feely and she doesn’t trust people who do.

  So I went to work at Tom’s office, which was in Holland House behind the Co-op, in the same building as the Constituency Association. In fact, it was a room they rented as a storeroom, and everyone’s first job was taking all the boxes out of it and putting them on the landing where they stacked up all the way to the ceiling.

  After that I did stuffing envelopes, and printing out fliers and putting them through doors. There were seven different fliers, depending on which part of town we were going to. They all said Tom Peverill will protect local interests and keep Britain for the British, but then there was a list of other things he would do that were different. If you lived in the centre then it said he would get tough on noise and drunks when the clubs let out. If you lived in the flats by Wilding Park it said he would repair the footpath and the bridge. I forget the others, but they always said things that were about where you lived. And they always had Tom’s face, looking up and to the right, and a Union Jack, which is actually a Union Flag unless it’s flown at sea.

  Some of the people who worked in the office also did what my mum called doorstepping, which was talking to people about what a great man Tom was and what he would do for Coddistone, but they didn’t make me do that. I was glad, because I’m not good with people. What I did do, sometimes, was carry extra boxes of fliers out to the doorstepping teams if they ran out, and once I was in a van with loudspeakers on the roof, handing out fliers while my mum said, “Turn out tomorrow and vote! Vote For Peverill! A vote for Peverill is a vote for security!”

  Sometimes Tom came into the office, which was always quite exciting. Everyone stopped work to cheer and clap their hands whenever he came into the room, and he would clap his hands too, pointing at us to say that we were the ones who deserved it.

  Tom gave speeches and held meetings, too, and when he did those things I went with him and did stuff outside the speech or the meeting. Sometimes I took people’s coats and gave them tickets with numbers on, and sometimes I gave out fliers to people when they came into the room.

  I wasn’t usually inside the room when the speech or the meeting happened, but one time I was. That one was a candidates’ debate, and Tom won it hands down. Especially the part where the audience got to ask the candidates questions. This was when Africa was getting too hot to live in, and all the boats were coming, and the question from the audience was: what should we do with the boats. Tom said the Royal Navy should blockade the English Channel so no boats could get in. One of the other candidates, I think the green one, said that was inhumane, and Tom said hands up everyone if you would want to have a refugee from Africa living in your house. Only a few hands went up.

  “Congratulations on playing to the lowest common denominator,” the green lady said.

  “You have contempt for your constituents,” Tom said. “And that is why you can’t represent them in the House of Commons.” I don’t remember the exact right words, but it was something like that. And my mum punched the air and whispered, “Yes!”

  Then it was election night, which was the most exciting night of my life. My mum and dad had a party for the people from the Constituency Association, and the food was Marks & Spencers. It was really lovely. My dad said at least the Jews were good for something.

  Coddistone was one of the last seats to report, so I got to stay up really late. I was eighteen by this time, so really I could go to bed whenever I wanted, but I was living in Mum and Dad’s house so mostly I couldn’t. At ten o’clock, or half past, Mum would say “Denise” and look at the clock, and that would mean I had to go to bed. Only that night she didn’t say it. I don’t think she remembered to. She was sitting on the sofa from midnight to two o’clock, hardly saying anything, just watching. We knew the party was going to win, because they were fifteen points ahead in the polls, but Mum desperately wanted Tom to win too. And when the returning officer said, “Thomas Peverill, eighteen thousand seven hundred and six,” she screamed. But it was a happy scream, not a scared one. My dad got a bottle of champagne out of the fridge and popped it, and we toasted Tom and the party and the next five years. I had lemonade to toast with, of course, not champagne. “We don’t want to set you off, do we?” Dad said.

  I wondered as I sipped my lemonade whether we would all go to London and work for Tom there. That would be amazing! We didn’t, though. He had a London office, but it had London people in it and we stayed where we were.

  Nothing much changed in the office apart from Tom not coming in there anymore. I still printed fliers and delivered them. Sometimes I got to write them, too, although it wasn’t really writing. It was cutting and pasting text from the party’s website and then dropping in quotes from Tom, taken from our database of his speeches and interviews.

  We saw him on the news sometimes. Almost always he was talking about the refugee situation. Most European countries were taking some refugees by then, because Africa had suffered what they called a complete ecological meltdown. At least the bit in the middle had, and all the people there were going north and when they got to the coast they got into boats and sailed across the sea.

  Tom said they shouldn’t do it, and we shouldn’t encourage them to do it. He was drafting a bill that was about not having to let the refugees in when they got here. It kept him very busy, so he didn’t get to come up to the constituency very much at all, and when he did he mostly didn’t come into the office. Mum said constituency business was still really important to him, he just had to prioritise right now.

  There were people in the Association who weren’t happy, though. They said Tom was still working for Coddistone and how could he do that if he never came to any Association meetings or even talked to the committee?

  That was when Mum had the idea of the briefing packs. Every time we heard that Tom was coming back to Coddistone, someone would go to his house first and drop off a briefing pack, which was all the minutes of all the meetings he’d missed and all the important news from around the constituency. Mum would stay up late typing everything out and then it was usually me or Lucy who took them over.

  “It’s okay if he’s not there,” Lucy said to me once. “I wouldn’t want to be alone in the house with him, would you?”

  “Why not?” I asked her.

  She raised both her hands and wiggled her fingers. “You know,” she said. “Wandering hands. Wandering everything, Eileen Franklin told me.” She winked, and I laughed, but I was only pretending to understand. I knew that Eileen Franklin had gotten expelled from the Association
for inappropriate behaviour. I didn’t know what wandering everything meant.

  Tom’s house was really nice. It had three floors and six bedrooms, and the living room was so big it took me twenty-three steps to walk from one end of it to the other. It had a chandelier, too, with all these glass leaves hanging down that tinkled when you opened the door or when there was a gust of wind.

  There was also a statue at the front next to the driveway of a man with goat legs playing a pipe. I used to pretend the goat man could talk, and I would ask him on my way into the house to play some music for me. I would say, “Play it, Sam,” like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, and point my finger at the goat man on my way into the house. And sometimes I would hear the sound of pipes playing when I was inside, but it was just one of my fantasies or maybe the radio in the house next door.

  One time Tom came back to the constituency because a ship, the Wayfarer, had gone down in the English Channel and it was full of refugees. “The bloody media are all over him,” my mum said. “As if it was his fault they piled two thousand people on a ship that could only hold five hundred! He can’t get a moment’s peace down there.”

  She gave me a briefing pack to take over to Tom’s house, and also a fruit loaf that she had baked for my dad, with a card saying Best Wishes from All in the Association. I took them over and left them on the kitchen table the way I usually did. And then I went into the living room and walked from one end of it to the other, listening to the sad sound of the goat man’s pipes.

  It was such a big house! And Tom lived in it all on his own ever since Auntie Vi left him and took the kids away with her (I wasn’t allowed to talk about her after that). It seemed sad to me, and a waste, that most of the time that lovely house was empty.

  I pretended I was talking to the refugees who drowned when the Wayfarer sank. They had two thousand voices, so when they talked it was more like music than it was like ordinary talking. They said it was sad that they had got so close to a new country and then hadn’t made it to shore. “That is sad,” I agreed.