by Rhoda Baxter
Chapter Eleven
Sally tried to take the lift back up, but she couldn’t seem to press the button hard enough to get it to go anywhere. She looked hopefully out into the foyer, in case there was anyone else wanting to go up. No luck. The only person there was a security guard who was reading a book and occasionally looking at the CCTV screens. She tried the lift buttons again.
‘Aargh. What the hell is going on?’ She stamped her foot. ‘Bloody work you bloody thing. I just want to go back upstairs and talk to Peter.’ She pictured the room, with its waxy, doll like figure in the bed.
She wasn’t sure what happened. One minute she was in the lift. The next she was back in the room, next to the poor cow in the bed. She hadn’t even blinked. ‘Shit. What just—’
Peter was standing next to the bed, holding the sick woman’s hand. ‘All up and running again now, darling,’ he said, looking down at the bed. ‘It was only a short power outage. Everything is back on properly now. It’s okay.’
‘Peter.’ Sally composed herself. ‘Peter, darling. I’m so glad you’re here.’
He didn’t seem to hear her. She went up to him. ‘Peter? Can you hear me?’
Peter continued to gaze at the woman in the bed, stroking the limp hand that rested in his.
Sally put her mouth next to his ear. ‘Oi. Peter!’
Peter shuddered and looked over his shoulder. He looked right through her.
She waved a hand in front of his face. ‘What do I have to do to get you to notice me? Flash my knickers?’ She tried it. He just turned back to gaze insipidly at the plastic woman. Sally thrust her hand into his midriff. It went straight through.
Peter shivered. ‘It really is cold in here darling. Let me just check the temperature.’ He laid the lifeless hand back on the covers and crossed over to a thermostat by the door. He looked at the reading and shrugged.
Sally watched as he went back towards the bed and pulled up a chair. He took a small book out of his pocket and started to look through it. ‘Where did we get to yesterday?’ he said. ‘Did I finish the short story?’
‘Yes,’ Sally replied automatically. ‘Yes you did. He came back from the Middle East and decided to work in London.’
‘I think I stopped at the bit where he left to go to his new job,’ said Peter, frowning.
‘No, you read it.’
Peter started to read. Sally rolled her eyes. ‘You’ve already read that bit, you doofus.’ When he didn’t stop, she sat on the bed and watched him. The cadences of his voice washed over her, familiar and somehow comforting. It calmed her enough for her to be able to think about what had happened.
So, that woman, Grace, could see her. Peter couldn’t. Okay. That was weird. The poor cow with the brown hair in the bed was her … she took a quick glance across at the figure and looked away. She didn’t want to think about that. She looked back at Peter. He had aged. How long had it been since the accident? She hopped off the bed and checked the chart at the end for the date. Holy shit. Just under a year. Bloody hell. No wonder her hair had grown out. She wondered who had cut it. Letting it grow out was one thing, but cutting it so badly, that was just cruel.
She looked closely at Peter, who shivered and zipped his fleece up to his neck. There were lines on his forehead that hadn’t been there before and she was sure she could see some grey hairs at his temples. Bags under the eyes, okay, temporary, but that scar wasn’t going to fade. There was something else about him, a heaviness that she didn’t remember seeing before. It was as though her handsome, dynamic Peter had suddenly been replaced with an older, more tired version of him. She pulled herself back onto the bed and fretted about with the skirts until she realised that they would probably always look just the way she remembered them.
She muttered ‘sod it’ and sat cross-legged. Looking down, she realised she was sitting on the sleeping woman’s feet and shuffled out of the way. ‘Sorry love.’
Peter carried on reading. He didn’t do the voices or anything, which was sad in some ways, but quite nice in others. She didn’t think Peter would be that good at voices.
‘What to do, what to do,’ she said. She drummed her fingers on her knee. The cloth, a heavy silk, should have felt rough under her fingertips, but she could barely feel it at all. She wondered if she could feel anything else. She touched her face. She tried to pinch the coverlet on the bed. Nothing. She couldn’t feel her own fingertips against each other. Oookay. Her breathing quickened. She couldn’t touch anything around her. How was she going to eat? What if she needed the loo? What if … She put her hands to her head. ‘Don’t panic, Sally. Don’t panic. Don’t panic. There has to be a way out of this.’
There was a knock at the door and a nurse looked in. ‘I’ll just check her stats are still okay,’ she said.
Peter stopped reading and nodded. He moved out of the way while the nurse checked dials and displays. Sally had another go at trying to get him to notice her. She passed through him twice, making him shiver violently.
‘Are you sure the thermostat’s okay?’ Peter walked to the side of the room to look at it. ‘I’m freezing.’
‘It’s not cold,’ said the nurse, not looking up from the notes she was jotting down. ‘If anything, Sally’s temp is a bit high. Nothing major, but we’ll keep an eye on it.’
‘Do you think she’s caught something? A virus or something?’ There was genuine worry in Peter’s voice. Sally saw his frown lines leap into focus. Had they come just from worrying about her? Ah, that was sweet. She would have rewarded his devotion with a hug and kiss … except she couldn’t touch him.
Sally sat back down on the bed and watched as the nurse messed around with the chart and Peter stood there gazing worriedly at the bint in the bed.
‘Peter. My Peter.’ She reached up to stroke his face.
‘I must be coming down with something,’ Peter said. ‘I can’t stop shivering.’
‘Oh dear, I hope it’s nothing nasty.’ The nurse’s eyes darted from Peter back to the woman in the bed.
Peter looked shocked. ‘I hope I didn’t pass whatever it is on to her. I washed my hands on the way in and everything.’ He looked plaintively at the nurse, who gave him a sympathetic smile and said ‘Maybe you’d better get yourself to bed.’
Peter grabbed his coat and stood a small distance away from the bed. ‘I’m leaving now, darling,’ he said.
Sitting in the middle of the bed, Sally felt as though he really was talking to her. ‘Peter, babe, you’re not ill. It’s just me touching you …’
‘I’ll see if Mum will come and visit you while I’m ill,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll be back as soon as it’s safe, okay?’
‘Oh no. Not Diane. She just sits here and knits. I know you can’t visit me, but please don’t inflict your mother on me! You know she doesn’t like me.’
‘I won’t kiss you. I don’t want to give you my germs.’ He blew her a kiss and practically fled from the room.
‘Don’t leave me, Peter.’ Her voice sounded desperate, even to her.
The nurse dimmed the lights and left the room, leaving Sally alone with her own still breathing body.
It was peculiar being in the hospital at night. The machines purred and blipped quietly. Sally tried lying down and sinking back into her body. That did nothing other than make her feel slightly repulsed. Sally slumped in the chair feeling the world spin. She was a ghost. There was no getting around that. She could walk through furniture. She was a ghost, except she wasn’t dead. She looked up at the figure on the bed. The only movement was a slight rise and fall of her chest.
Peter couldn’t see her. She felt the fear rise and breathed in deeply to squash it. The hospital room was so bloody depressing. ‘I want to go home,’ she whispered into the darkness. Suddenly, she was standing in her last flat. She recognised the room and the view over next door’s
roof. She would know that skyline anywhere, she’d lived in that poky little place for six years. But she didn’t recognise the stuff in the room. She had proper curtains, for a start. There was a couple asleep on a futon on the floor. Sally looked around. A cot frame without a mattress was pushed against the wall. She’d left this flat well over a year ago. Why was she there now?
‘Home.’ She’d thought of home and ended up here. She shrugged. For the best part of her life this flat had been her home. She’d decorated it just the way she’d wanted it. She’d lived her life exactly the way she’d wanted to. She put her hands on her hips. At her feet the woman on the bed shivered and huddled into her partner.
Sally had moved out of this place to move in with Peter. ‘Home,’ she said, scornfully. ‘Not this.’ She pictured her hallway in the house she’d so memorably persuaded Peter to buy. And, somehow, she was there. It was as though she could move from one place to another, just by picturing it. She tried out a few other places – her work, the hospital, a pub and back to her house again. Amazing.
‘I could get used to this way of travelling.’ If she’d been able to zap herself about like this, there would never have been a car accident. Again, she wondered what happened to the lottery ticket. Peter probably didn’t bother checking it. Sally clicked her tongue.
The hall was dark, save for a little light coming in through the glass panels on the front door. Sally tried to switch on a light and swore as her hand went through the switch without flicking it. Never mind. She could walk in the dark. It’s not like she was going to bump into anything. She checked out the living room, as much as she could see in that light, anyway. It looked pretty much the way she’d left it. Good.
The kitchen was tidy. There was a single plate, a fork and a mug, upside down on the draining board. Sally wished she could open the cupboards and look inside. She tried sticking her head in through the door and saw nothing but dark inside. She stalked around the table, noticing things that were in the wrong place. Finally, she psyched herself up and went upstairs.
Light from the streetlamp outside illuminated the master bedroom. The curtains were wide open and the bed was empty. Sally did a double take. ‘Where is he?’
Looking around the room, she saw all her stuff still on the dressing table. Her iPad was still plugged in next to her side of the bed. All good, so far, but where was Peter? Could it be that he hadn’t come home yet? It had been several hours since he left the hospital …
Sally frowned. Could it be that he was sleeping somewhere else? With someone else? That Grace creature …
There was a sound from one of the other rooms. Sally jumped before she remembered that SHE was the ghost. ‘I AM the thing that goes bump in the night,’ she said out loud. The idea made her laugh. Her voice seemed to echo in the dark house.
There was a mumble from another room. Stepping back onto the landing Sally tracked the noise to the spare room. It was dark in there and it took a few minutes for her to be able to see. Someone groaned and rolled over in the bed. Sally tiptoed forward and peered at the sleeping man.
‘Peter?’ She stood straight and frowned. ‘Why are you in the spare room?’
Peter mumbled something. Leaning closer, she caught a few words. ‘Won’t do it again’ was repeated among the jumble. ‘Won’t do what again?’ she demanded. There was no response. Not one that made sense anyway.
She wondered if he would be able to hear her in his sleep. She leaned forward and spoke in his ear.
‘Peter. It’s me. Sally. I’m alive. I can hear you when you talk to me. Please. Come and find me.’
But all Peter did was shiver violently and curl up into a ball, bunching the duvet around him.
Sally ended up back in the hospital room. There was nothing she could do in her house and it was too strange being there, watching Peter in an almost delirious sleep. This was all wrong. She looked miserably at the body on the bed. ‘This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. I’m supposed to be married and living happily ever after. Maybe even have won the lottery. I can’t be lying in a hospital bed with bloody awful hair. I just can’t.’ She wanted to cry, but there were no tears. Maybe ghosts couldn’t do tears. She pulled up her knees, not caring about what it did to the dress, and hugged herself tight. ‘This is all wrong,’ she said. ‘All wrong.’
It took a while for her to finish feeling sorry for herself. She had never been one to hang around worrying about what couldn’t be changed. Soon, she was back on her feet. Ready for another fight.
‘Come on Sally,’ she told herself. ‘Don’t get sad. Get mad.’ She’d handled worse than this before. Finding her father, hanging from the bannisters, for one. She remembered the horror and the screaming. She had run away from the grotesque, distorted face and gone next door. The neighbour had calmed her down and called the police. By the time Glenda came home, the body had been taken down and Sally had subsided from hysterical to distressed. Sally, only fourteen years old, then watched her mum take in the news and saw her crumble.
Glenda’s inability to deal with the news had been Sally’s salvation. There was only room for one emotional wreck in the family. Sally had to save the day. She did this by replacing her grief with anger. She got angry, then she got organised. She would never, ever let herself be so poor that she would be driven to hang herself from the bannisters so that her teenage daughter would find her. No way. She had a plan. When her mother started drinking, the plan wobbled off track. So Sally, who was sixteen by then, packed her bags one night and walked out. Easy as.
If she could deal with that, she could deal with this crock of weirdness now. She just needed a plan. She jumped to her feet. ‘Okay. What have we got …’ She paced around the bed, talking to the person in the bed. ‘I’m a ghost. I’m married to Peter.’ She stopped to allow herself a little smile of satisfaction. That part of the plan had worked. She was married to Peter, which meant that she was now rich. ‘Not much use if I can’t get near it to spend it. I need to get back to being properly alive for that.’ She resumed her pacing. ‘So I’ve been married to Peter for a while. The accident happened when I was still in The Dress. Peter’s put me in this hospital type place and he visits me every day … and reads to me. He can’t hear me.’
She looked at the waxy woman with the travesty of a haircut, who was lying on the bed. ‘He still comes to see you,’ she corrected herself. ‘And he still loves you. I can hear it in his voice. He still loves you, even when you look like that.’ She remembered the way he used to look at her. Did he still look at her like that? She doubted it. But that look would be back again soon. She was sure.
‘Focus, Sally, focus. You’ve been in a coma for nearly a year. His attention is starting to wander. Understandable, in some ways. So the first thing to do is to get Peter’s attention.’ She paused at the window and tried to drum her fingers on the windowsill. They didn’t make a sound. She gave an annoyed ‘tsch’. ‘But Peter can’t see me,’ she continued. ‘So I can’t work on him.’
‘The only one who can see me, is that husband tempter, Grace. At least she’s not in my house.’ Sally frowned. Something pinged in her memory. She knew Grace from somewhere before. Where did she know her from?
Chapter Twelve
Sally sat in her own kitchen, with her feet up on the table. She’d watched Peter shuffle around making himself toast. She took a chance to examine the rest of him while he had a shower. Not much change there, thank goodness. He was still hot, even if he did keep yawning all the time. He had started shivering violently and turned the heat up in the shower, so she’d ducked out before he boiled himself alive.
She decided not to sit with him in the car when he went to work. She didn’t want him to have another accident trying to heat the car up. Instead she hung around the house, checking everything out in the daylight. As far as she could tell, Peter had changed very little, but everything was spotlessly clean. She wonder
ed if he’d hired a cleaner. It was something they hadn’t got around to doing after they moved. It wasn’t like he could clean the place himself. He spent all his time at work.
There was the sound of a key in the lock. Sally took her feet off the table, wondering if Peter had forgotten something. The door slammed and Diane came in, carrying a heavy looking cool bag. Why did his mother have a key? Sally cursed Peter. She would have to have a word with him about that.
Diane stopped and surveyed the scene, as though looking for something. She put the bags on the table, rubbed her arms and turned the thermostat controller up.
‘You seem to know your way around my house,’ said Sally.
Diane, of course, didn’t hear her. She opened the fridge and started pulling out Tupperware containers. For the first time, Sally noticed the neat stack of containers, washed and dried, that were next to the fridge. Diane shook her head and removed a few tubs. Opening the cool bag, she took out fresh boxes and restocked the fridge. Sally took the opportunity to examine the boxes she was getting rid of.
Each was neatly labelled with the meal description and the date it had to be eaten by. It seemed that Diane was bringing Peter’s meals. Hmmm. That was strange. Peter hadn’t been so dependent on his mother when Sally married him. But maybe that was just a front he put on for the girlfriend. Or maybe his mother was taking back the opportunity to care for her boy. In Sally’s experience, no man refused free meals. Least of all meals that were cooked by his mother. This was interesting to know before she woke up. She added Diane to her list of things she needed to tackle.
Diane stacked the containers she was throwing away and spent a moment staring at them. She pulled out her phone and called someone.