Seeing Other People

by Gayle, Mike

  Keeping my eyes firmly shut I inhaled deeply through my nostrils and exhaled through my mouth, repeating the exercise over and over again until I heard Fiona’s unmistakable cackle right in my ear.

  ‘Are you seriously trying to yoga me out of your life?’

  I carried on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

  ‘Have you any idea how ridiculous a notion this is? I’m a ghost, Joe, a ghost whose job it is to save your marriage; a bit of deep breathing’s not going to get rid of me, you daft git.’

  I sighed heavily and opened my eyes to see Fiona staring right back at me, her nose less than an inch from my own.

  ‘What do you want?’ I asked.

  She smiled, knowing full well that she had won, and then returned to the sofa opposite.

  ‘I want to know how you’re doing,’ she replied.

  ‘I’m great. Wonderful. Couldn’t be better. Isn’t it obvious?’ I threw my arms open wide, encouraging Fiona to fully appreciate the glory of my mum’s interior decorating skills. Floral wallpaper, matched with floral carpet and curtains with a floral three-piece suite just to ram the I-like-flowers message home.

  ‘So what are you doing about it?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Getting home.’

  ‘You’re not going to start with that nonsense again are you? This is home . . . well not this exactly, but this is my life and I don’t care what you say, I know for a fact that I’m not lying bleeding on a pavement in East London, OK? I’m sat on a sofa in Swindon watching crap TV.’

  ‘So you don’t want to go home then?’

  ‘Look, Fiona, you know as well as I do that you’re not real. You’re a figment of my stressed-out mind and first thing in the morning I’m going to see a doctor and get myself sorted out. I don’t care what they do. They can fill me up on Diazepam, send me to the funny farm or electro-shock me until the cows come home as long as I don’t have to see you any more.’

  Fiona laughed. ‘Aww, Joe, you’re so sweet when you’re angry. I think that’s why I used to like having you around. You really feel things, don’t you?’ She swung her feet to the floor in one fluid movement, walked over to my chair and sat on the arm. ‘What if I could prove to you that this really is all a dream and that you are still lying crumpled on the pavement where I whacked you?’

  ‘And how would you do that?’

  Fiona gave me a wink. ‘Come on Joe, you know me. How did I used to get things done when we were together?’

  ‘Sheer force of will?’

  She smiled, oblivious to my tone. ‘Exactly.’

  She stood up and took me by the hand. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen, there’s something there I need to show you.’

  I couldn’t possibly imagine what she might want to show me in my mum’s kitchen but I was too tired to resist. I stood up and followed her but as we walked through the door to the hallway I suddenly felt cold and it was only when I looked back that I noticed the door we’d come through wasn’t there any more. In fact nothing was there any more. We were no longer in my mum’s house. We were in the street. The street where I’d been mugged, and I knew this because lying next to my feet was my own body, unconscious, blood pouring from a gash in my head.

  ‘That’s me.’

  Fiona nodded. ‘It sure is.’

  ‘But how do I really know that’s me?’

  Fiona shrugged. ‘How do any of us know anything, Joe? We touch, we feel, we experience.’

  I knelt down and felt the body. It was still warm.

  Across the road a young couple walked by. This was my opportunity to test this reality. ‘Over here!’ I yelled. ‘This man needs help!’

  The couple carried on walking. It was as if they hadn’t even heard me. This was a dodgy part of the city though and it was how most sane people would react to a prone figure and his shouty doppelganger.

  ‘They didn’t hear you,’ said Fiona.

  ‘But I shouted.’

  Fiona tutted. ‘Silly boy. How can you shout when you’re lying on the floor unconscious?’

  I began to panic. What if this wasn’t a hallucination? What if this was real? What if everything I’d experienced since the mugging was some kind of dream after all? A dream I was having while lying right here on this pavement. What if no one found me? What if I never woke up? Would I stay trapped in this world?

  A ringing phone.

  I opened my eyes, which was odd because I’d been absolutely sure that I hadn’t closed them. I’d been dreaming. I must have nodded off in front of the TV. The phone continued to ring. I looked down to see that it was my own. I answered the call. It was Penny.

  ‘I’ve booked us in to see a counsellor,’ she said. ‘It’s at six thirty on Monday evening in Clapham. Is that OK?’

  I thought about the dream. It had all seemed so real. And for a brief moment I wondered if it might actually be true. After all my life as it stood right now seemed pretty surreal. This time last year I couldn’t have imagined any of this happening and yet here I was, estranged from my wife, away from my kids, watching OAP TV in my pyjamas at my mum’s.

  ‘Joe, can you hear me?’ Penny’s voice was more insistent now. I’d been so lost in thought I’d forgotten I was talking to her. ‘I was asking you if six thirty on Monday is OK for the appointment with the counsellor?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied, coming to my senses. ‘Six thirty sounds fine.’

  16

  Countdown2Counselling was based in a grandly named double-fronted retail unit called the Majestic Centre just around the corner from a Sri Lankan takeaway. Despite its name the outside of the premises brought to mind a down-at-heel suburban dental practice whose owner had been locked in a decade-long battle with his professional body not to be struck off. It didn’t look like any work had been done to maintain the place in the last twenty years. The paint around the windows had long since flaked away, the presumably once-cream Venetian blinds had faded to a sickly yellow as had the leaflets advertising the centre’s various businesses (Reiki healing, one-to-one yoga sessions, lunchtime meditation classes and an osteopathy clinic). It seemed like every man and his dog could hire rooms here at £28.00 per hour (plus VAT) and set themselves up as whatever they wanted and no one would bat an eye.

  I reached out and touched one of the windows. The glass felt cool and smooth just like glass was supposed to. I knelt down and thumped the pavement with my fist, not so hard that I would break my hand but hard enough to scrape my knuckles. Odd as it might sound, with the memory of the dream I’d had at my mum’s still very fresh in my mind and unable to shake the shocking image of my own body lying unconscious on the pavement, I’d tentatively felt the need to test reality somehow. Had I been dreaming then or could it be that I really was dreaming now? The thing I couldn’t get over was the question of the mugging. I remembered it all too clearly. The feel of my phone in my hand, my surprise at the youth’s request for a light and then finally the blow across the head. It was so vivid it couldn’t have been a dream, could it? In contrast to this was my night with Bella. I couldn’t remember any of it. Not the journey to Soho, anything we’d talked about that night or even the details of how we’d ended up in bed. It was as though none of it had happened. It just didn’t make any sense.

  I opened the door to the premises and stepped inside. Penny was sitting on one of the plastic chairs in the tiny waiting room. She’d been in bed when I got back from Swindon the night before and that morning with Rosie needing to go into school early to rehearse a play and Jack unable to decide if he felt sick or not we hadn’t had the chance to talk at all.

  ‘Hey you,’ I said, sitting down next to her.

  ‘So you found it OK?’

  ‘Yeah, your directions were great. You?’

  She nodded. ‘No problems.’

  Penny picked up her phone and started checking her messages as though to signal that this was the end of the conversation. Was this something the real Penny would’ve done or was it what I imagined she�
�d do in this situation? It was impossible to tell. I hadn’t the faintest idea how she would react in a situation like this. Perhaps she wanted to save her energy for the counselling and didn’t want the cosiness of a domestic conversation to dissipate the resentment she was preparing to release. Maybe she just couldn’t stand the sight of me.

  I attempted to distract myself by reading the community noticeboard on the wall opposite. Maybe I could find a flaw in the items pinned there, a clue or some detail that would prove that this was just a long and unusually involved nightmare. But if these posters advertising mother and toddler groups, drop-in cafés for the over fifty-fives and art therapy classes were made up by my subconscious then I couldn’t tell. They seemed completely authentic to me right down to the occasional spelling mistake and overenthusiastic use of commas.

  ‘Mr Hanley is ready to see you now.’

  Penny and I both looked up at the receptionist and followed her along a dimly lit corridor through to a tiny consultation room. In the far corner against the wall was a desk. The majority of the floor space however was taken up by two blue upholstered chairs positioned side by side and a brown armchair facing them. Standing in front of the brown armchair and smiling beatifically was a tall, bespectacled bearded man who looked to be in his mid-sixties. My stomach flipped over. This man looked a lot like my dad. Not an exact carbon copy but more like a relative of some kind. He had similar-shaped eyes and exactly the same prominent nose although this guy’s face was longer and thinner.

  ‘Joe, Penny, I’m so glad to meet you. Please, take a seat.’

  Now that really was weird. He didn’t just look like my dad. He sounded like him too. Or at least the way I remembered him sounding – he’d been dead for years. Was it possible? Could this really all be an elaborate dream? I was already seeing visions of my dead ex-girlfriend, wasn’t it a bit much to be seeing my dead father too?

  While Mr Hanley checked our details I gave him the once-over. He was sporting a cream linen jacket and button-down white shirt, dark brown linen trousers and sandals. He wasn’t wearing socks and his toes were so long and hairy that I really wished he had been. I looked over at Penny to see if she saw the resemblance because she’d passed by the framed photo of my old man in the hallway at home enough times to know what he looked like but she was too busy staring straight ahead as if this was the first day of school and she was keen to impress the teacher.

  The man who looked like my dad started off the session by telling us to call him Rob and that he liked to keep things as positive and informal as possible. To this end he laid out some ground rules for this and any future sessions. ‘Firstly,’ he began, ‘I think it’s really important you understand that I’m not here as a referee or to take sides. I think the best way for you to think of me is as a facilitator. I’m here to help you guys get the results you’re looking for. Secondly, it’s important that we don’t play the blame game because believe you me there can never be any winners in that scenario. What we do here is communicate with each other about how we feel and our understanding of certain situations. There is no right and no wrong here. And finally, and I think most importantly, we listen, to each other, to ourselves, with the aim of trying to understand what the core of the issue really is.’ Rob/Dad stopped and looked at us both. ‘How does that sound?’

  Penny and I nodded in silent agreement.

  ‘Good,’ he said, rubbing his hands together as though he was looking forward to getting stuck into our session. It was a gesture I remembered my dad using countless times. ‘Now, which one of you would like to tell me why you felt the need to come here today?’

  I stared at Rob/Dad. Surely this was too much of a coincidence. The resemblance was uncanny and Penny didn’t seem to see it at all. Was I having another episode? Was this yet another hallucination and if so why did it have the face of my father? To the best of my knowledge my parents’ marriage broke up because they didn’t like each other very much, not because he’d played the field. Of course there was an alternative explanation: I was dreaming after all.

  A polite cough. I looked up to see Rob/Dad and Penny looking at me expectantly. They were waiting for a response from me to the big question.

  ‘I had an affair,’ I replied. ‘I was unfaithful.’

  Rob/Dad nodded sagely. ‘I see. And how did you find out about this, Penny?’

  ‘Joe told me,’ replied Penny. ‘But only because I’d incorrectly accused him of sleeping with someone else.’ She looked at me with real hurt in her eyes and then back at Rob/Dad. ‘That’s not me playing the blame game. That’s exactly how it happened.’ She turned back to me. ‘You must have thought me such an idiot, tossing your phone to me like that, hoping I’d call that woman just so you could hide what you’d done.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I replied, feeling sick at the thought of having to return to that moment. ‘It wasn’t like that at all.’

  Penny shrugged. ‘So what was it like? You had me doubting myself, Joe. I knew there was something wrong with you at that lunch. Your whole demeanour changed the moment those two women came over to our table. But you had me thinking I was mad, you had me thinking I’d got it all wrong. And after everything that Mum went through with Dad too.’

  Rob/Dad raised an eyebrow. ‘With your father?’

  ‘He was a serial cheater. Nearly broke Mum’s heart with his behaviour. The day he left was the best day of our lives.’

  ‘I see,’ said Rob/Dad. ‘And you feel this informs your relationship with Joe?’

  ‘Fidelity is everything to me,’ she said.

  ‘I know it is,’ I replied. ‘And I’ve never regretted anything more than what I did. It was terrible of me. There’s no defence at all.’

  Rob/Dad jotted something down on a pad by his side and turned to Penny. ‘Perhaps you should continue from where you were before we spoke about your father. You were talking about how you felt when you found out.’

  ‘I felt stupid. And belittled. Especially as I’d actually met the woman.’ Penny looked at me. ‘Was your little girlfriend in on the big joke? Was she laughing at me behind my back as I tried to be nice to her?’

  ‘Of course not! That day was the first time I’d seen her in months. It happened just the once and then I cut off all contact with her. I wanted her out of my life.’

  Penny shook her head with disgust. ‘Ever the gentleman.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I said again, even though it was exactly like that. ‘I just let myself get carried away, that’s all. I didn’t love her. I didn’t care for her. I didn’t even really know her. I just let myself get carried away.’

  Penny laughed. ‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better, is it? Am I meant to take solace from the fact that the kids and I weren’t even a consideration? You’ve ruined absolutely everything, Joe. We had the best thing ever and you ruined it with one selfish act. Don’t you think I’ve had offers? I’ve had plenty if you want to know. Only last week an old boyfriend of mine messaged me to see if I’d like to meet up when he’s in London for business.’

  I bristled. ‘Which old boyfriend?’

  ‘You’re missing the point! He’s not important. That I didn’t even reply to his message is. That’s what you do when you’re married. You don’t dip your toe in to test the water. You don’t put yourself in harm’s way. You don’t do anything at all that could hurt the thing you love the most. But you did, Joe. You just jumped in there with both feet and you didn’t give a damn about the consequences.’

  Rob/Dad, sensing that our discussion was in danger of getting out of control, took the opportunity to intervene. ‘Right, there’s certainly a lot of food for thought in what’s been said. But I think going forward we probably need to unpack some of it and see what we can tease out.’ He looked over at me. ‘Joe, why don’t you go first? What I’m hearing from Penny is that the affair has caused her a great deal of heartache and – correct me if I’m wrong – that she feels let down by the explanation you’ve offered
for your actions. As Penny was speaking I found myself jotting down the following question: “Why does Joe think he chose to have an affair?” ’

  It was a good question. One that got to the very heart of the matter. And if it hadn’t been asked by a man who bore such an uncanny resemblance to my deceased father maybe I would’ve bought it, but this along with everything that had been going on of late was just one step too far. This really was a dream. I wasn’t losing my mind after all. I was coming to my senses. I’d been mugged and was unconscious and had created a whole nightmare landscape populated by people from my past. There was nothing real about this world. Not a single thing. So it stood to reason that if I challenged it directly it would disappear and I’d wake up where I’d fallen after the mugging.

  I took a deep breath. I had to do something drastic if this was going to work. I looked at Rob/Dad.

  ‘Do you really want to know why I did what I did?’

  Rob/Dad smiled. ‘That’s why I asked the question.’

  ‘And you want me to tell the truth? I mean, there’s no point in any of this if I just make it up is there?’

  ‘No,’ said Rob/Dad. ‘There would be no point at all.’

  ‘OK,’ I replied. ‘Well here it is.’ I turned to Penny and took a deep breath. ‘I know that what I told you the other day must have really hurt and I’m more sorry about that than you’ll ever know but when I said I’d had an affair I wasn’t telling you the truth, I was telling you what I thought was the truth. I know it’s going to sound weird but hear me out. That night – the night that y’know – well, I was attacked by – and I know this is going to sound really mad – Fiona Briggs, my dead ex-girlfriend. She knocked me out with a cricket bat but she did it to save me . . . to save us, and right now I’m lying unconscious on a pavement in a dodgy part of town and I’m hoping that telling you all this will help me to wake up.’