by Penny Thomas
The same could not be said for me and my friend. I hardly spoke to her after that. At no point did I tell her that I had wished for the dog and then changed my mind: no wonder he had disappeared. When he returned, I had my second chance. I did not doubt my luck again.
When, all these years later, she found me online, I thought: perhaps I’m meant to tell her now, because I can’t keep him for much longer; the years will take him from me; I will have to let him go.
I thought about giving her the full story on the last night of her visit but – she was drunk again. She hadn’t changed. And they do say that if you work magic, you should never speak of it. She wouldn’t understand and even after all this time I knew that something could be lost.
She narrowed her eyes and pointed a finger and said, ‘So – where do you think he is now?’
‘By the back door. I’ll let him out and then I’m off to bed.’
When she got up and stood behind me and I locked eyes with her reflection, I felt I had to quickly shut the door on him and turn the key, in case she tried to push me out and leave me on the wrong side. I could feel her jealousy: she would like to find a way to take possession of everything we had. At last, she turned and walked into the kitchen and I heard the ting of the pedal bin lid hitting the dresser, so it was safe to open the door and let him back in. As I dried his paws, I thought, what is she throwing away now?
The next day I took her to her train. On the platform she surprised me by hugging me again. Then she held me at arm’s length and looked into my eyes and said, ‘All weirdness aside – I’m worried about you.’
When I got home I called to my boy. Nothing. For a moment that horrible empty feeling again. She would never know what it was to feel that loss. Then I heard him get up out of his bed. There he was at the top of the stairs, looking down, dark eyes in a white face, tail faintly wagging.
Broad Beach
Eileen Dewhurst
The runner arrives with the sunrise. Two minutes later each morning. Yesterday it was 7.20. Today it will be 7.22. Sure enough, as 7.22 glows green on the clock beside the bed there it is, the figure, moving along the edge of the sea. The tide is a long way out this morning so there is a lot of beach between them. Andrew fiddles with the binoculars but he can’t quite get the focus and when the phone rings his hand jerks and he loses the figure completely.
‘Hello love.’ It’s Mari, his wife. ‘Were you asleep?’
‘No. Not really.’
‘Another bad night?’
‘Pretty much the same as usual.’ He doesn’t want to worry her. She wouldn’t like to hear about the sweating and the dreams. She’d think it was something to do with the medication and make him go back to the GP.
‘Oh, good. I’m just off to work now, but I’m just reminding you that Mrs Morris is coming this morning. You haven’t forgotten have you?’
He had forgotten. It takes a few moments for the name to register.
‘She’ll be there just after nine. She seemed nice on the phone. You take it easy now. And don’t overdo the walking will you?’
‘I won’t. ‘ He looks down at the binoculars hanging from their strap at his wrist. He’s missed the runner. He’ll have to wait till tomorrow morning now.
‘See you Friday then. I’ll do a shop on the way. Let me know if you think of anything you want bringing.’
‘I will.’
‘Ok. See you soon then. Love you.’
‘Love you too.’
Back at the window he looks down to the far end of the bay where there’s a parking place with picnic tables and a stream that fizzles out into the pebbles. In summer it’s packed with tourists. Not now, not in November. No one comes here much this time of year. Just the runner moving along the line of the tide, making him think of some animal, a race horse or a big cat, loping with easy grace to where the bulk of the headland marks the far side of the bay. Watching the runner is the high spot of the day.
Mrs Morris is a short, wiry woman with a grey glint in her eyes that unnerves him. She knows the story. How he ‘died’ in A & E, was clinically dead for, oh, minutes, but how they managed to get him back. How she knows, he’s not quite sure. He puts it down to the mysterious osmosis of information that goes on in small villages. Or it might just be Facebook. She makes them the kind of milky coffee that once he would have found disgusting and sits him down in an easy chair that, like the rest of the house, has seen better days.
‘You’re lucky to get this place,’ she informs him, ‘It’s booked up all summer and most of autumn usually. Being so close to the sea. That’s what the visitors want. Sea views.’ She eyes his collection of inhalers lined up on the kitchen table. ‘Good for you too. Sea air.’ Among her many nephews, she tells him, she has two who suffer badly from asthma. ‘They’ll grow out of it.’ She says with confidence. ‘People usually do.’ She doesn’t actually say, ‘Why haven’t you?’ But he somehow feels himself accused.
Mrs Morris doesn’t only have nephews. She has aunts too.
‘It must have been quite a thing,’ she says, pausing while opening the cupboard under the sink, ‘I had an aunt who had one. You know, what happened to you. There was light, she said, and a tunnel.’ She holds the pose, eyes glazing, imagining, he supposes, the tunnel.
‘Really?’ He sighs. Now he has a choice. Embellishment or truth. That she requires embellishment is obvious from the increased level of glitter in the grey eyes. Reassure me. There are tunnels. There is light. Tell me what I want to hear.
‘Can’t say I had that sort of experience,’ he says. She selects a bottle from the cupboard, inspects the label, gives it a little shake, as if it is now of more interest to her than him.
‘But I did hear a voice.’
‘A voice?’ Now he has her full attention.
When he was a child, his mother who was Scottish called him Ondrew. It’s just the way Andrew came out. Wee Ondrew, that was him. He tells Mrs Morris about his Scottish mother and the way she had of standing on the top step and yelling ‘Wee Ondrew’ down the street at the top of her voice. Mrs Morris nods in a way that indicates she approves of the fact that he had a Scottish mother if nothing else.
‘It was as if,’ he says, sitting up slightly, ‘I was on my way somewhere and I had to stop. I could hear my mother calling me back.’
‘Ah ha!’ Mrs Morris glitters.
What had happened was that one of the nurses had the same sort of accent as his mother. She kept on saying things like, come on Ondrew, you can do it Ondrew, in an encouraging way. But then Mrs Morris frowns.
‘You’d think she’d be telling you to go back though wouldn’t you? Go back! Not yet! Something like that?’
Andrew shrugs and leans back into the chair. There you are; the truth is never quite what’s required. But Mrs Morris isn’t finished with him yet. She tidies the room, goes upstairs to make his bed, comes down, declares it a war zone, and makes another cup of coffee. Then she tells him about the dog.
‘It was a nice dog,’ she says, ‘but it bit the postman and that was that. In those days it was gas, not injections like they have now.’ She tells him her aunt, a different aunt, not the one who came back from the dead, left it at the vets and then, overtaken by grief and remorse because it was a good dog really, ran back and made the vet rescue it from the sealed kennel. She dragged it back home, half stupefied, where it lived for many years, a gentle and placid thing snoring on the hearth. Lucky, she said, to be alive.
Yes indeed. Andrew agrees. Lucky to be alive.
At 7.24 the following morning, Andrew is back at the window. The bed behind him resembles a war zone again thanks to the dreams. He takes the binoculars out of their case. Looks at them, passes them from hand to hand. They are solid. They are black. They can be touched, weighed. They don’t smell of anything much but they are real. They allow him to see way out to the far end of the beach. The tide is further in today. He can see all this. This is real. Nonetheless, he shuffles from foot to foot and glances o
ver his shoulder to the bed where not five minutes ago, in the fog of waking, he had been convinced that a half-doped dog had been asleep, curled up against his right leg, breathing deeply and sonorously as dogs do. He could have sworn he’d put out his hand and stroked the top of a soft and velvety head. It was real. There was warmth; he’d felt it. He knows for sure he had an intense and urgent feeling he should be taking this dog for a walk.
From the window, apart from a couple of seagulls circling for pickings, he can see no other movement with or without the binoculars. According to the laws of nature, the sun must be rising, but it’s doing so in private somewhere behind a bank of low, thick cloud. The incoming tide has submerged the broad sweep of sand and is further in this morning. It’s lapping at the scattered boulders and rocky outcrops, replenishing the rock pools, washing out the dead things. Maybe the runner has stayed at home. That would be sensible. He can see no sign of anyone moving along the shore. Maybe the runner only runs when the tide is out, when it’s possible to get round the headland and into the next bay.
Getting to sleep and staying asleep have been a problem for a while. He’s never mastered the art of sleeping sitting up, he wakes often with a start, perhaps he’s swallowed his tongue, perhaps he has sleep apnoea. He knows he snores from twenty years of being nudged awake by Mari. Has he always been a nuisance then? It’s the dreams that are new. Full on Technicolor dreams, full of sensory intensity, complete with voices, smells, textures. The first one arrived on the night after being discharged from hospital. He’d woken up, or believed he’d woken up, and gone down the stairs holding onto the smooth wooden banister, he could smell the polish, to where his mother was making breakfast in their kitchen. Porridge, with a sprinkle of salt, the Scottish way.
‘Come along now Ondrew,’ she’d said in her usual brisk way, tying on her pinny. He could hear the kettle boiling away, rattling on the stove; could taste the salt on his lips.
When he woke, the sleep still gumming up his eyes, he’d gone down the stairs amazed that the banister was painted not polished, and peered into the kitchen expecting her to be there. He looked for her. He even opened the back door and called her name.
‘Excessive dreaming can sometime happen with a bit of low mood,’ the GP says writing out his next prescription. Mari has signed him up with the local GP surgery as a temporary resident. Andrew has casually asked about dreams, just in passing. Low mood? What does that mean?
‘Do you think I’m depressed?’
‘Well, lots of people are.’ The waiting room outside is full of old people coughing and babies crying. He’s sorry he mentioned the dreams.
‘It’s not uncommon though, especially after what you’ve been through. Is there anything else bothering you?’
‘No, of course not.’ He has Mari his lovely wife who is coming at the weekend. He has a delightful daughter who has a wonderful husband. They’re both employed and are expecting their first baby. He has an excellent health insurance policy and his pension pot is doing fine. There’s an office desk waiting for him just as soon as he feels himself to be fit and well. What could possibly be wrong?
Back at the house, it’s clear Mrs Morris has been in. She must have been colluding with Mari because the fridge appears to be full of food. The telephone answer machine is flashing.
Hi darling. I might have to be a bit later on Friday. Or it might even have to be Saturday. Something’s come up at work. You know how it is. I’ve asked Mrs Morris to get the shopping in so I won’t have to stop off on the way. How’s it going? Mrs Morris said you’d gone to the GP. Hope they’ve sorted you out OK. Don’t go overdoing it now. Look after yourself. See you soon. Love you.
She sounds as if she’s reading from a script, is in a hurry to be off. There’s a note in her voice he hasn’t heard before.
Once, a long time ago, when he was still Ondrew, he’d run for the school in the cross-country team. He tries to remember what it was like, the heart pound, the rush of blood, his lungs, efficient and full of life. He’s brought a vest, shorts and a pair of running shoes with him even though running is against instructions. Walking is the thing. He must build up the distance slowly, being careful to use the inhalers as directed. His walk is scheduled for around two in the afternoon, before the air gets too cold and makes his lungs constrict. At 2 p.m. he walks in his running shoes over the shingle beach at the front of the house, clambers over the rocky outcrops with the rock pools and their hidden residents of crabs and starfish; it’s easy to slip on the treacherous green seaweed, but he keeps his balance and continues on to where the tide line is edging slowly back in.
There’s a set of footprints about to be obliterated by the incoming tide. A runner? His runner? The prints have clearly been made by running feet; the depth is at the front, where the ball of the foot pushes off. The shoe size is the same as his. He steps into the prints. Lifts off from the right foot, propels himself forward. Run. Don’t walk. Run. Come on Ondrew. After a few yards, he feels his ribs like an iron cage. He slows back to a walk. The footprints move on without him towards the headland. He has to stand still, just for a moment. He looks down at his feet, ridiculous he thinks, shod in techno-silver, with bright white flashes. Pegasus. If he had the breath, he would laugh.
The house is the end one of a row of three separated from the beach by a low stone wall. The bedroom he is occupying is at the top corner and has two windows so that it looks both south and west at the same time. Walking back, in slow time, he looks towards it, casually noticing that it could do with a coat of paint and then he stops. Looks more closely. He could swear there’s a face at the western-facing window. The face is pressed close up to the glass. He can’t tell, it’s just a little too far away, but he thinks the face is looking out through binoculars. Mrs Morris of course. She’ll have forgotten some errand for Mari and will be wondering where he is.
‘You don’t have to come you know, not if it’s too difficult.’
Mari has phoned again from a hotel somewhere in Yorkshire. She works for a small executive travel company which in spite of the recession is doing well. There are always winners, always losers. She’s on the winning side and loving every minute.
‘I’m so sorry. I was really looking forward to a lovely quiet weekend with you. Next weekend should be fine. We’ve got the house for a few weeks yet. You enjoy it. What will you do?’
‘I’ve got some films. And a couple of books. Sleep I suppose. I’ll be fine.’
‘Well, don’t let that food go to waste!’
‘I won’t.’ Andrew puts the receiver back in its holster. It has weight, not much, but some; it has a couple of lights that flash indicating battery life. It’s real. Her words, although disembodied are real. He can tell himself this but he somehow doesn’t feel it to be true.
When he wakes after his early night, it feels like the middle of the night. Something has disturbed him. Was it a sound? There’s an echo of something that sounds like his name but that can’t be because there’s no one else here. No, his own breathing probably, his mouth is dry as dust and the side of his tongue is sore, as if he’s bitten down on it with one of the sharp canine teeth. Although the luminous clock by the bed shows 4.45 a.m. there’s a soft glow on the other side of the curtains. He pulls them apart and there’s the beach, lit up in the softest of light shining down from the full moon hanging above the bay. He knows this is beautiful. He knows this is the sort of scene poets write about, lovers dream about. Mari would love this. Once she would have slid her arm around his waist and leaned her head on his shoulder. He stares out at it unmoved. It’s not that it isn’t beautiful. It’s not that he wishes there was someone here to share it with him. It is all just somehow unimportant. None of this has anything to do with him.
And then, from the eastern side of the beach, the runner appears. Why not? The light is almost as bright as on a normal November day and the tide is way, way out, leaving the way to the bay clear and easy. He presses his face up against the window. Such move
ment, the stretch of legs, the upright body, he can imagine, almost feel the wind pushing at his face, rushing into nostrils, down into the lungs, breathing, in and out, feet light on wet sand, almost flying, so alive. He reaches for the binoculars, searches quickly along the shingle, the rocks with their pools and out onto the wet stretch of sand and manages to fix on the runner. But only because the runner has stopped, is stationary, is standing just ahead of where low foamy waves are breaking, and is looking back at him. Startled, Andrew lowers the binoculars. When he lifts them again, the runner has gone.
It’s clear now, what it is he needs to do. Oblivious of the sharp cold air, Andrew sheds his pyjamas. He puts on the clothes he has brought for running, a vest and shorts. He ties up the laces of his running shoes. Outside the wind is bitter. He feels its bite immediately and gasps, amazed that it’s possible to be this cold. He starts to run. He’ll warm up soon. He can see where the moon is making a path of light around the headland. He catches up with the footprints and this time he can keep up. He is so full of running he feels his heart will burst.
Making Ghosts
Sue Moules
‘Do you believe in ghosts Mair?’ Sarah asks me, as we sew the sheets into ghost costumes. I usually give yes or no answers, but for this I have to prevaricate.
‘Maybe,’ I say.
I didn’t like to say that I’d never seen a ghost, especially as Sarah believes in the supernatural. The village school is old, and was supposed to be full of ghosts. Full of damp and dust more like, but we are lucky still to have the village school.
Once there had been three shops and a post office. Now the shop is also the post office, and the general store. There had been Dilly’s Wool Shop and the Sweet Shop, but both had closed due to lack of custom. Everyone went to the superstore in town or shopped online, which meant that the quiet village became busy with supermarket delivery vans. I’m old enough to remember when the shop had a delivery boy on a bike with a basket full of boxed orders.