All I can think of saying is, “I don’t believe in ghosts, Oliver.” He shrugs, and I reach sideways to put a consoling hand on his shoulder. Just then a woman library assistant walks around the cabinets with an armful of newspapers for filing, and I withdraw my hand quickly as if I’ve been caught in some guilty act. Ollie and I look on without speaking as she labels, smoothes and places the papers in the appropriate drawers. When she’s finished that job she turns to the table and contemplates our scattered news pages.
“Are you still busy with these?” she asks, pleasantly enough.
“Oh no, I think we’re through, thanks,” and as she starts tidying the papers away I say, “Do you keep telephone directories in the library?”
“Just the local ones, is that what you’re after? You should find them in the Local Reference section on the other side of the reading area.”
Oliver follows me as I skirt round the library furniture to the shelves the assistant has pointed out. I pick out the city directory and start browsing through the residential pages under M. Despite what I had told Ollie about how common the name is, I only come across three entries for Malik, and only one H. Malik, which is in the Springhill district, 110 Prince Albert Road, so that correlates. The telephone number could easily be the one I rang the other night but I can’t be sure without referring back to the printout, which is still in the flat.
“Do you have a pen with you?”
Oliver dives into his carrier bag for a biro. I write the number from the directory on the back of my left hand and wink at Ollie, as I give him back his pen, to remind him of the back-of-the-hand story he told me on the bus. His face lights up and I find myself saying in the afterglow, “Come on, I’ll buy you a sandwich.”
The library is not that far away from the Eldon Arms, where I would normally go for a pie and a pint in the city centre, but I’m keen to avoid it with Ollie in tow, so we end up down a side street in one of those dingy pubs that always seem to have a couple of ex-miner-types spending the afternoon with one elbow by their drink at the bar, looking down past their feet as if maybe they’ve lost 10p or are following the progress of a very slow-moving cockroach, while a telly bracketed into a corner broadcasts horse-racing endlessly to no-one in particular. Ollie seems quite oblivious to these surroundings by the time he’s been served a run-of-the-mill sausage bap with a few oven-ready chips and three sachets of tomato ketchup. He does act mildly alarmed when I suggest buying him a beer, but settles in comfortably once he has a large Coke in front of him, served in a glass with, apparently, added slurp factor.
“Usually I’d just be getting up around now,” I say, not so much to start a conversation as to give me some sort of baffle against Ollie’s noises. He stops and considers this for a while.
“D’you have breakfast or dinner?” he says at last.
“When I get up? Oh, some variation of breakfast, depends what I can be bothered to make, really. A bacon sandwich is about my upper limit. More likely toast and marmalade, or toast without marmalade. Sometimes I just stick my mitt in a packet of Sugar Puffs and eat them dry.”
“I do that as well,” Ollie grins. For some reason I find that information deeply depressing. We lapse into (relative) silence while I get over it, then try to pick up from where we left off.
“So you live... look after yourself then, do you, Oliver?” (Please say no; I can’t take any more parallels.)
“Nnn, sort of. There’s my mam.” (Thought so.) “But she’s not very well. She’s got catsracs.”
“Cat’s rash?”
“Catsracs. In her eyes. Waiting for the operation.”
“Oh, cataracts. Right. Shame.”
“She likes listening to the radio. Likes you, Marc.”
“Tell her thanks. What’s her name? I’ll give her a dedication next time I’m on.” (If they haven’t sacked me first, that is.)
“Vera. Mrs Vera Dunn.”
“What about Mr Dunn?”
“That’s me.”
“No, I mean your dad.”
Oliver’s bottom lip juts out a touch. “No. Just me and Mam.” Whether that means his father is dead, or left home, or was never around for Ollie to get to know, I can only guess. It doesn’t seem fair to pursue the subject.
“Could be a ghost though, eh, Marc?” says Ollie, and it takes me a second to realise he means Hassan Malik, not his dad.
“Eh, no, I told you, Oliver, there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Is that for definite?” Another one of those damn child-like sucker punch questions, more expectant than challenging, Oliver counting on me to have the right answer. How the fuck should I know?
“Absolutely. Science has proved it. No, we’ve got to look for other explanations. First thing I’m going to do is check this number,” turning my wrist to show him the number printed on the back of my hand, “See if it matches with the number we’ve got on record at work. I mean, it could have come from anywhere in town couldn’t it, that call, and from anybody pretending to be Hassan.”
“What for?”
Aggh, enough already with the sixty-four-thousand-dollar questions. I’m working on it, OK?
“I’m working on it. I’m going to sit down tonight and write out all the possibilities.”
“Like, make a list?”
“Exactly. Ever heard of Sherlock Holmes?”
“Yeah, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson,” he says, catching me out being patronising yet again. How can I possibly know what he knows and what he doesn’t know? Sometimes he seems to have as much of a clue about the world as a new-born chick, other times…
“Anyway, Sherlock Holmes said something like, when you have excluded the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And…” I add as Oliver gazes at me blankly, “Ghosts are impossible. Sherlock Holmes didn’t say that last bit, I did.”
Ollie waits until he’s sure I’ve finished before he beams encouragement at me then leans forward in his seat and says, “Do they have ice creams in here, Marc?”
The sky looks a bit brighter when we step outside, though that might be a trick of the eye caused by the gloominess of the pub. Back on the high street Oliver takes on the job of pathfinder to the bus stop, but he does it without moving ahead of me, rather he stays close at my side, almost with his hand under my elbow, which I guess is how he walks along with his mother on their rare trips out together. He’s in such an effervescent mood now you’d think he’d had something stronger than a couple of Cokes over lunch.
“You know what, Marc? Know the place you live? Guess how far it is from our house? Should I tell you? It’s only two stops from our house. I told Mam, I says your favourite lives just two stops away, Mam. You know what she says?”
“What?”
“She says he’s dead. I said he isn’t.”
“Why did she think I was dead?”
“She thought I meant Inspector Morse. At first she did. Then I said I mean your favourite from the radio. And she said Marc Niven. She cottoned on. Cottoned on you say, innit? Mam cottoned on when I said radio.”
As he chatters away we cut across the pedestrian precinct. There’s the usual crop of deadbeats and toe-scuffers hanging around the benches and lounging malevolently against the plinths of the civic artworks. Out the corner of my eye I notice a couple of youths watching us from under their hoodies. Not sure if they recognise me, but I’m thinking they’re more likely to mug us than ask for an autograph. As we get nearer to them one nudges his mate quite forcefully in the back and they turn to each other, sniggering. Ollie doesn’t seem to pick up on this at all - maybe he’s inured to people taking the piss out of him - and he burbles on as we pass.
“Thing is, you could even come for tea with us if you want. I mean whole tea, not just drinking tea. Or coffee we’ve got as well. Mam said that, it was her idea when I said it was just two stops. You should ask him round for tea sometime, Oliver, she says. Hot chocolate we’ve got as well, that’s not what Mam said, I’m jus
t thinking that now. Thinking aloud. Do you do that, Marc? Thinking aloud?”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“I do as well. Here’s our stop, look. See, 19, 19A, 21, 22. 19 we need, but sometimes I see 19A and I don’t know whether it’s really the same, or not, so I don’t get on if I see 19A on the front. Will it be the same, Marc, 19A?”
“I’ve no idea. Listen, Ollie…”
“Mam says best not to chance it if it’s 19A. Anyway, you don’t get them that often. You could work it out if they came a lot, but they don’t. Anyway, there’ll always be a 19 if you just wait for it. Patience is a virtue.” He takes his camera from his pocket and carefully unzips the cover. “See that man coming along? I’m going to ask him if he’ll take a picture of the both of us.”
“I was going to tell you, Ollie, I’ve just remembered, I’ve got a thing to do in town. So I’ll catch you later, OK?”
Ollie, camera in hand, looks momentarily perplexed, but he quickly brightens up, “I’ll come with you if you like, nothing spoiling for me, Marc. Nothing that’s spoiling. We can get the bus back later.”
“No, really. It’s a work thing. Quite an important meeting actually, I nearly forgot it, so I’m going to have to dash. Listen, I’ll give you a ring as soon as I find anything about, you know…”
His deflation is so obvious as I turn away that I nearly change my mind, but that doesn’t stop me being irritated when I hear him come panting up behind me.
“Marc?”
“What!” through my teeth as I look back over my shoulder. He is holding a bus ticket out to me like a relay baton.
“Don’t forget your ticket, or you’ll have to pay again. I got returns.”
“Thanks, Ollie,” I say, hating myself as I’m taking the ticket from him. “That’s really good of you. Give my love to your mam, eh?”
Five minutes later I’m at a taxi rank well out of sight from the bus stop, giving my address to the first driver in the queue.
Halfway through the taxi journey I’m wishing I’d stuck with the option of having Ollie for company on the way home. Or that I’d stayed quiet in the back instead of coming out with the old taxi-cab favourite, “Busy today?”
“Busy? I’m never busy these days, pal. Know why?”
“Not enough fares?”
“Too many flamin’ Poles. And bastard - pardon my French - Lithuanians.”
“Ah, right.” I slink down in my seat and hope that my lack of positive feedback will be enough of a hint to persuade him to shut up, but he’s already into his flow and subtle body language sure ain’t gonna stop him.
“Makes no difference whether you’re on days or on nights, they’re always there like a rash. Like a flamin’ rash. And it’s not just mini-cabs. What gets me is the Council handing out licences to every Tom, Dick and Slobachops so they’re on the ranks an’ all. They’ve already put them first in the queue for houses, now they’ve given them our jobs as well. That’s not right, is it?”
If this guy had been a caller on my show, I’d have made mincemeat of him. But that would be him in my territory; right now I’m in his and I’m not about to risk getting clubbed.
“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a racist,” he continues, half turning round to reassure me of his liberal credentials. “Far from it. Some of my best friends… it’s just they’re letting that many in, man. And I know they say it’s a free country, or European thingy, freedom of labour and that and we could go and work in their countries, but who would want to go there, eh? You know, seriously? Why do you think they want to get out? And if there was any flamin’ jobs in their country they wouldn’t be over here nicking ours, would they? I mean, they wouldn’t would they?”
He pauses as if expecting an answer. I just purse my lips and shrug in a non-committal sort of way, then look sideways out of the window, so he continues the argument on his own.
“And the fact of the matter is they don’t even know how many’s coming in. Cos you can guarantee that for every one that comes in on a passport there’s ten more comes in the back of a lorry, know what I mean? And that’s not even counting the asylum seekers, never mind the blacks and the A-rabs an’ that, don’t get me started on them.”
I try not to, but he does anyway. “I mean what gets me about these Muslims, these terrorists, is they’ll take all the benefits and the education we give ‘em and that, then what do they do, they go and stick a few bombs in the London Underground, what’s that about? And half o’ them that does that was born here. Supposed to be British. Till it suits them to be Muslims instead and they’ll say fuck you, mate, I hate your country, bang. Only good thing, at least there’s one more of them gone an’ all, know what I mean? Plenty more where they came from, like.” And on that tender note he draws up gracefully behind my parked TT and rolls his window down, his winning smile already auditioning in expectation of a tip.
I’m carefully counting out the exact fare to hand through the open window when I have to press close to the body of the cab to avoid being swept off my feet by a passing bus. It halts briefly at the stop a few yards along the road for an old woman to get off, then carries on, but not before I’ve clocked the number 19 on the display at the rear and either caught or imagined a glimpse of yellow material among the passengers seated nearest the pavement. There’s no doubt that he would have seen me if it was Ollie. “Shit!” I say under my breath as I dive back into my pocket for an extra pound or two for the taxi driver. The last thing I want to do now is make another enemy.
IV
Of course the first thing I do once I’ve let myself into the flat is to check the number I’d written on my hand in the library against Hassan’s number on the printout from the Call Log. The numbers match. Even though my general recollection of the number sequence had led me to expect this, I’m surprised at how much the confirmation of it spooks me. I find myself gazing through the window down at the bus stop as if I might see the ghost of Hassan (pictured in my mind like a son of Osama bin Laden complete with white robes) looking up at the apartment from the spot where Oliver was a few hours ago.
In need of a soother, I prise myself away from the window to seek out an opener for the first of only two bottles of San Miguel I have left in the fridge. For the best part of the next hour I’m propped up on the sofa, all but lost in reflection, with a bottle tilted just enough now and again to keep my lips moist with lager.
The same arguments and counter-arguments keep running through my brain. Hassan Malik could not have made that call since he was already good and dead. The possibility of it being mistaken identity - that the caller was another Hassan Malik altogether – is more or less eliminated by the fact that the call was made from the home of the Hassan Malik who had died in the car crash, and his widow Amina Begum Khan. The caller referred to his wife as my widow, casting himself as the ghost of Hassan, but even allowing for the existence of ghosts the idea of one choosing to communicate from the grave to his partner using a BT landline and a commercial radio station is just too ludicrous to contemplate – but then again, no more ludicrous than the notion of a dead person talking platitudes through a medium in a trance or on the stage of a spiritualist church.
The strongest possibility seems to be that someone made the call as a cruel joke, but over the years I’ve got to be pretty adept at sussing hoax calls. Yes, I was distracted when it was broadcast live, but having heard the recording two or three times I’d swear that whoever this Hassan might be he was serious in his purpose, whatever that purpose was. Besides, what hoaxer could be making the call from the widow’s own home? I’m beginning to discover the flaw in Sherlock’s method; once I’ve eliminated the impossible there doesn’t seem to be any possible left to latch onto.
A large part of me wants to leave this alone. Let it rest in peace. From my point of view it doesn’t look as if I was in any way responsible, directly or indirectly, for somebody taking their own life, or failing to do my best to stop them taking their own life. I’ve also managed to
avoid any awkward questions about that peculiar phone call on my shift, or at least I’ve been able to fob off those who were both awake enough to notice it and could be arsed to follow it up. Whatever the truth behind the call it’s hardly likely to make any positive difference to my life or anyone else’s in the future; in fact trying to investigate it is more likely than not to cause hurt, especially for the widow, which is why I’m avoiding trying her telephone number again. All in all, best to forget it.
Then there’s another voice nagging at me not to let this go. Partly it’s to do with feeling some sense of responsibility to Oliver to get to the bottom of the mystery. Mainly though, it’s my own ghost. I don’t even know what I mean by that except that I have this strong sense of a self inside of me (maybe not so much a ghost as some imagined superhero, somebody who doesn’t have my terrible habits and wicked, selfish thoughts) who’s telling me that I’ll let myself down badly if I give up now, and that I’ll never forgive myself for not having the strength to see through something worthwhile. Which is weird because at the same time this ego-ideal of mine can’t define what would be worthwhile about any outcome it/I/we could possibly imagine. But it’s the voice that’s compelling.
So, what am I supposed to do now? I’ve no plan of action, but whatever I do I can’t risk upsetting Amina or her child. On a selfish note (same old Marc), I’ve got to keep a low profile. Meg has already made it obvious I’m in the firing-line at work and I’m bound to be shot at if I’m seen to put my head above the parapet. On the plus side she’s obviously not expecting me to rush back for the sake of the programme (just the opposite by the sound of it), so I’ll have a little free time to see what I can find out, on the quiet.
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