A Private Haunting (7 page)

‘Haven't had a dream in years,' said Sam.

‘Think they mean anything?'

‘They can mean whatever you bloody well please. No point in worrying about the damn things.'

Jonas downed the last of his pint. His mother flashed across his mind;
if you keep
worrying like that your head will fall off
. Seven years old, this had, of course, worried him even more.

He ordered two more beers and leaned on the bar. Buzz Cut fixed a stare, OTT and making Jonas
giggle
, a little boy's laugh lost in the shouts from the pool table and the sudden laughter, the undulating rush of the football crowd on the TV. Meaning meant nothing in this hubbub. He liked the word hubbub. And skewed by a booze-marched goodwill, he gave in to the moment and bought a couple of brandies.
Carpe diem
and all that crap.

‘Your good health.'

‘
Skål
,' said Sam. ‘What are we toasting?'

‘The present.'

‘To the present!'

And Jonas walked again with old Sam through the streets of Bergen, arm in arm with Eva and their daughter in tow. There were boats in the harbour, modern cruisers and dark-wood yachts, the kind they promised themselves when they retired. Cruel whalers too, readying for the north Atlantic. Anya once asked about them and cried when he explained.
Why do they
do that, daddy?
Another one who sought meaning, poor thing, another who'd see whatever she wanted in a silly dream about lots of boats, whatever she damn well pleased.

‘I meant to ask, Jonas. Did you see that news story about the Norwegian who always takes a ladder to the supermarket?'

‘Can't say I did.'

‘It's because the food prices are really high.'

Jonas was confused. Then he got it. Sam was laughing, he laughed with his whole body, shoulders shunting up and down, an old locomotive picking up speed. That set Jonas off and people were looking and smiling and all was
good
. When he opened his eyes again, she was there.

It was a spur of the moment decision. Mary didn't make these too often and wouldn't be making another anytime soon. Jonas started laughing just as she reached the table and for a paranoid moment she thought he was laughing at her. She stood awkwardly, there for the world to see in her supermarket uniform with the misspelt name badge (Marie). She smiled nervously when he finally noticed her, a smile becoming a rictus as the look in his eyes veered from surprise to panic. Somebody else laughed then. And this time it probably was directed at her.

 

That morning Mary ran her standard 10k. Down the old main road to the small industrial estate by the dual carriageway, turning and retracing her steps, back through the village and out west.

She liked the quiet of the single-track, the view of rooftops and church spire when she turned again at the new housing development. Another kilometre and she upped the pace, driving the arms. She needed to properly sweat, feel it running down her neck and back, soaking her Lycra top. Again she stepped up the pace and felt like she could run all day, day into night and why not, far into the blue-black distance, smooth as a stone across a lake.

The Post Office marked the 10k. Forty-six minutes. Not too shabby but a minute off her best. She'd kicked too soon and paid the price. She stretched as she caught her breath, held the back of each foot and stretched the thighs, reading the small ads in the Post Office window.

Cleaner wanted. Call Jonas on 07871 399747.

Mary remembered and cringed.
You've got a lot of blues, Jonas
. An overt flirt if ever there was. Bad Mary, it couldn't have been more obvious if she'd stuck her bum out and peered over her shoulder, finger to her pouting mouth. She blamed the wine. And it wasn't as if she even fancied him. He was just a nice, generous man, a bit eccentric but genuinely
nice
.

These basic traits extracted, Mary had filed him away under
like
. She'd done this forever, with everyone she met, long before Facebook made a fetish out of arbitrary judgement.

The lack of consistency in her criteria didn't bother her. Facebook was right, it was a gut thing. It had been the same at the supermarket. In three months of working there she'd got to know Daisy, Meg and Debbie. Daisy and Meg she didn't like, for no particular reason, she just didn't. So they only got small-talk. Lucky Debbie, on the other hand, she did like, which meant Mary occasionally shared more personal confidences, little hints, but only hints.

She laughed and a passing group of school-kids sniggered. Over-analysing, it was a bloody illness. Mary jogged home and made an omelette (whites only) while her husband assembled his own breakfast (big and fried). He and his big belly held court, telling her that he didn't need to flap around the streets like Paula bloody Radcliffe because the doctor had told him his BP was normal, cholesterol fine and if he had his liver checked that'd be just fine too.

‘When did you go to the doctor?'

‘I had that mole.'

‘That was years ago!'

‘Yeah, well.'

‘Well, what?'

‘Well, I'm just the
same
.'

She rolled her eyes, knew she was doing it but kept on. Her husband, in turn, rolled his.

As she stared into space, she found herself wondering what Jonas ate for breakfast. If he too had just carefully constructed a sandwich of bacon, sausage and egg, slathered in brown sauce, then any comparison with her husband edged towards one of like with like and a disappointed anti-climax. If, on the other hand, he was eating something different, like a grapefruit, or porridge, then she was looking at a different kind of comparison altogether.

That got her thinking about the advert. Her husband was wiping brown sauce from his chin.

 

And so, hours later, Mary was standing in front of Jonas in
The Black Lion
in her supermarket uniform. He seemed nervous and that made her even more self-conscious. The awkwardness continued as they silently watched Old Sam shuffle across to the toilets. Jonas invited her to sit down and for a moment she thought about asking him what he ate for breakfast.

‘Do you have any... experience,' he said.

‘Of cleaning?'

‘Yes.'

‘My own or others?'

‘Eh?'

‘Twenty-two years a wife.' She blushed when she said it.
Wife
, as if she had to make that fact clear.

‘I see. And what... attracts you to the job?'

‘Are you
serious
?'

Jonas visibly relaxed, shaking his head and smiling. ‘You're right. I don't have a clue about all this.'

Fletcher sat in the over-hot confessional. An unusual tang clung to the air, old sweat mixed with something else, sour yet floral. Is this the smell of sin? He should ask the priest on the other side of the mesh. The man was irritating him, a reedy wheedle of a voice that set his teeth on edge. But the irritation was more than offset by the thought of his aunt's abject horror at him sitting where he was. She said Catholics had
killed God
. Quite the claim, but that was his aunt.

The priest droned on, the head bowed, now and then a question, a full-face glimpse as he turned to wait for the response. The grave, over-studied demeanour jarred with the spouted inanities and Fletcher's anger was sudden, familiar. He wondered what it would be like to stab the priest in the eye, through the mesh.

‘Thank you, Father.'

‘There's no need to call me Father.'

‘Why not?'

‘There's just no need.'

Fletcher left the confessional and crossed to the main door of the church. He let it squeak open and shut but stayed inside. The confessional opened a few moments later. The priest appeared, stretching his arms and yawning, a shake of the head and a vague little smile. Then he noticed Fletcher and froze, arms still outstretched. Fletcher stared at him then left.

During one session the shrink asked about religion. If Fletcher believed, it might help, they said. A crutch they called it, emotional or spiritual. He wanted to laugh, tell them they were a bunch of fuckin dilettantes if they thought belief was auxiliary to self. He'd been on tour in Iraq and Afghanistan and had seen the astonishing absolutism of faith inhabited, not worn.

Faith was dead, he told the counsellor. It was lying in the dirt of Sangin beside the dying Afghan girl, his dead sister's doppelganger. Only morons and liars had faith, hoodwinked kids yet to realise. He'd seen them streaming into church on Sunday mornings, poor buggers. The village was full of kids, more than Fletcher remembered from his own childhood. Youths, as they were now called
. Youths hanging around. Youths with no respect
.
Not like it was in my day
.

Somewhere among all these kids was the girl in the blue jacket from Jonas's party. There had been nothing in her face. But the jacket: his sister had been wearing one just like it. He had to find her, see her again, remove these irrational anxieties about ghosts and retribution.

On cue, a group of children passed him. He watched them head down Mandeville Alley then followed. Three girls and a boy, twelve years old or so, the boy in a hooded top and baseball cap, the girls in long tops and cute leggings. They turned into the park, dawdled for a bit then sat on the grass. Only then did Fletcher come to a fuller awareness of what he was doing. But no one does oblivious quite like kids, not even a glance as he walked past and stared.

The girl in the blue jacket wasn't there. There were other options. Fletcher had seen a notice-board poster about a youth club, The Hub.

His aunt never let him go to the village youth club when he was a boy.
I don't want you hanging around with all those
uncouth boys
. But Fletcher didn't know what uncouth meant and the only activity he was allowed was Reverend Jenkins's Bible Study, Tuesday night. They held it in the church where it was always freezing. A coldness to complement the reverend's character.

When Fletcher said he was afraid he might kill someone and sometimes even wanted to the priest had just sighed, sighed then chuckled, a world-weary optimist in his fool's paradise.
Relax and have a
conversation with God,
he told Fletcher,
thank him for
everything in your life.
Scary Jenkins would have insisted on a very different penance, a grip on the throat and the denunciation of an evil that only prayer could banish. Fletcher wondered if the priest would have reacted the same way if he'd told him that he once killed a child. Everyone behaved differently when a child was involved, the Catholic Church could vouch for that.

He'd reached
The Black Lion.
Without thinking about it he went inside. The pub was almost deserted, just an old man on a stool at the bar whom the over-dressed barmaid called Sam.

Fletcher sat in the far corner, over by the jukebox. They'd listened to a lot of music in FOB Jackson. He'd seen hard men completely lose it. Booze-free but somehow eight-pints drunk, stripped to the waist and shouting
. Do you looove me, do you
love me, do you looove me
... Utterly lost and so very far away until the end of the song and a sudden, disorientating return.

He took out the envelope from his inside pocket and laid the contents on the table, tapping along to the rest of the silent song,
nooow
that ahhh can daaance
. He had the papers sent to him just before his discharge, read them a hundred times through eighteen months of drift, a patience that astounded him. It was time to
step it up
, as he used to say, then off to the bar for shots, usually tequila. Maybe Fletcher should line a few up for Mortensen.

Li Po stared back. What a man for staring. Jonas knew the little figure in the scroll painting would know what to do, even if he would never have got himself into this situation in the first place.

He shook his head and turned away. What the hell was it with him and Li Po
?
‘I'm ridiculous.'

The one-eyed doll sitting very primly on the floor beside the scatter of records said nothing.

‘I have no sense of my own absurdity.'

He sat down beside the doll. He had no answers to the questions it posed either. Who did it belong to? Had the same person put it in the shoebox? How long had it been in the loft?

It was frustrating. Imagine listing every question you'd ever asked and never had answered. How would the list compare to those which had been answered? Was ignorance or illumination the better measure of a life? Jonas's life sometimes felt like a series of unanswered questions, pouring down faster and faster like the aliens in an old space invader game. What if the final realisation, the heavenly bells tolling closer and louder, was that he'd been asking the wrong questions all along? Worse, he'd been
answering
the wrong ones.

Truly a conundrum, likely irresolvable but still worth pondering on the drive to the ring road, especially if it stopped him thinking about what had happened the night before, which it didn't.

Jonas had smiled at Mary. That was ok. And he'd told her that her hair smelled nice. That wasn't. Li Po would have conjured a sonnet from the depths of its auburn glow and all he could say was it smelled nice. As he sighed and closed his eyes a little voice said
the man who knows the way does
not say
, which if profound on one level was deeply irritating on another.

 

It took thirty minutes to get going. Thirty minutes in which
your hair smells nice your hair
smells nice
spun round and round like the concrete mixer and Jonas wanted to just
work
, hard labour to stun the brain like a steel-headed hammer so he didn't need to think about Mary anymore.

But Eggers had a rule: no work before three fags.
Gonna work till
we drop, no doffing to the Man
. He smoked all three while sitting in the digger, yellow high-vis vest open to the waist. He was well-muscled and liked to show it off. Only seven fifty and already a horn blast from a young woman in a passing Merc. But when he got a cat call from a topless young guy with mirrored sunglasses, leaning out of a very gay, lime-green BMW, he quickly put his t-shirt back on.

‘Primary colours!' shouted Jonas.

Eggers looked confused. He opened his mouth to say something but chose instead to raise a middle finger. A man without nuance, sometimes Jonas envied it. He suspected the only complications in the Mary situation were ones he was creating. It was simple. Mary Jackson wanted a job. He had one to offer.

 

The interview had gone well. At least Jonas thought it had. Most things probably would if they involved two bottles of red, several whiskies, Captain Beefheart, Moby Grape, Nick Cave... and cheese toasties. Yes, a sudden memory flash told him cheese toasties were also involved.

It had been so restrained to begin with, in
The Black Lion
. Over-proper, Jonas thought. He almost laughed. All this formality… for a
cleaning
job? But what if Mary Jackson heard cleaning job as
dead-end job
, why take it seriously, it's not like you're being considered for Prime Minister. This might be the range of her ambition and who was Jonas to judge? She might be limited, which was actually a judgement on you, you snob, so shut up.

Amazingly, Mary passed up her first chance to flee, on the grand tour of End Point. Jonas had a fine boozy buzz, taking the edge off his embarrassment at showing a stranger the messy devastation of his rooms. His
rooms
, he even called them that.
I'll show you my rooms
, as if he was some deluded aristocrat. As he showed her round he wondered, in passing, what the mystery bather had also made of his messy rooms, not that it had put the fucker off.

‘I see why you need some help.'

‘I know. Totally understand if you're not interested.'

‘I'll take it.'

‘Well, ok then!'

‘What about the rate?'

‘Ten pounds an hour, six hours a week. Cash in hand.'

‘Then I accept your offer.'

She smiled and Jonas smiled and he thought of Eva. He escaped by saying he was going to get a bottle of Pinot Noir to toast the deal, embarrassed as soon as he said it. Pinot Noir, what a tool, why didn't he just say wine? It all got a bit skewed after that. He blamed Beefheart.

‘I saw this at your party,' she said. ‘
Trout Mask Replica
. Never heard it before.'

‘Fast and bulbous!'

‘Eh?'

‘Fast and bulbous!'

In fact, he repeated the surreal Beefheart line five times, victim to a sudden, panicky Tourette's. And Mary missed her second chance to flee. She smiled vaguely, considering this babbling oddity, then prowled the living room, glass in hand, picking things up and putting them down: a pebble from the mantelpiece; a soapstone knight from his replica Lewis chess-set; the elegantly tapered, rune-carved wooden spoon that Haakon made him as a going-away present.

All very deliberate, Jonas decided, a space being established. He watched her circle back to the record shelves and sit down cross-legged beside him, hands cupped round her glass.

‘How about this one,' she asked. ‘
Clear Spot
?'

‘One of my favourites. I was playing it last night.'

‘Then play it again!'

By the time the needle hit
Golden Birdies
, Red One was dead and they were kneeling at the records, heads angled, peering at the titles. Jonas could smell her hair, it smelled
nice
, which was when he decided to tell her, unable to stop himself, already appalled by the potential aftermath, Mary recoiling from the weirdo sniffing her hair, who was now reaching out to touch…

‘Your hairs smells nice.'

‘Hairs?'

‘I mean hair.'

‘Thanks.' The smile was quick, gone.

‘What I meant – '

‘What else have you got?'

And as the lights in his gibbering mind fused one by one, Jonas started pulling out records, anything to talk about other than Mary's
nice-
smelling
hair,
and so embarked on a long, near-frenzied explanation about how he didn't employ a standard A-Z listing system for the 200-odd albums, oh no, not Jonas, he arranged them thematically, an idiosyncrasy instigated at university which drove everyone he knew crazy because they couldn't find anything or if they did it took far too long because the themes themselves are not alphabetic, you see, there's French chansons beside post-punk and electronica beside that and –

‘Is there any logic at all?' she asked, holding up
Pebbles, Volume 4
with a quizzical look.

‘Surf rock, I keep that with '60s Garage. There's an internal logic. I like to think of it as organic.'

‘You mean annoying.'

‘Some have said that.'

Eva, for one.

He tried not to think of his wife as he took the album from Mary. This was also the first time he touched her, a light brush of the fingers,
soft warm fingers
, which he also tried not to think about as he put on
Pebbles
and a trebly Rickenbacker jangle jumped out of the speakers.

Was that when Mary started dancing? Or did that come later, after the whisky? The fragmentation of time and image usually followed the unleashing of the Big Spirit but who knows, he was drunk, drunk with a pretty woman he'd dreamed about, nothing dirty in the slightest but a dream is still a dream because it meant she was in there, in his
head
, and now dancing in his living room, a quite alluring sashay to boot, regardless of the supermarket uniform (complete with misspelled name tag) and the cheese and ham toastie in her left hand.

They made the toasties after she'd told him her favourite soup was pea and ham, and while he couldn't remember how they'd veered on to soup he did remember that the conversation had made them hungry. Cue a kitchen diversion, where she opened every cupboard and drawer and he tried not to slice his fingers off with the knife, listening to her saying something that his hung-over mind interpreted as
I
must impose order or he must pass muster...

At 6 am he stood with a pounding head beside the record player, praying that Eggers would be late again and trying to establish when the night had ended from the scatter of twenty-odd LPs.

If they'd played three songs from each record that would make about 300 minutes of music, or five hours. They hadn't got in from the pub until ten thirty. Had she really stayed until three in the morning? On top of
Rubber Soul
the one-eyed doll was looking at him. A vague memory surfaced of Mary asking about it. Please no, he hadn't started on about the
doll
, had he?

 

‘Hey, Thor. You doin any work today?'

Boss Hogg at his shoulder.

And back Jonas went to scooping the hot tar, breathing the fumes that ever evoked childhood, those ancient steamrollers and hard men in caps. In the river distance the same sun glinted off the same boats under same shifting skies, marking time and all that had passed, all that was yet to come. Like Mary, perhaps, his thoughts still revolving like a stop-go lollipop.

* * *

If anything it got hotter. Came in waves, edging the mercury up and down but always over thirty. Jonas's speed of work slowed to an Italian crawl, a buzzing in his head like a fretting generator.

He felt jumpy. A press of nervous energy. They should write him into the parish emergency plan.
In the event of power outage, plug in the
Viking.
To charge him up just place him in front of Mary. Three days would do it, the three days that had passed since the ‘interview'. Jonas walked into the village hall for the talent show like a dry-mouthed teenager.

But no sign of Mary front of house. So just chill,
enjoy
yourself, and surely Jonas did enjoy
The
Hub's Got Talent
. He liked it because he made sure he had nothing to do with it. Helping out meant taking part and taking part meant the enjoyment just drained away. It was the same when he was a teacher in Bergen. He had to be crafty to have nothing to do with organising the end of year show. But Front Row Jo was always there when the curtain went up.

The kids were wary of HGT to begin with. It took a while, one or two voices becoming three and four and more until critical mass was finally reached, that enigmatic process whereby the cheesy became cool. Tonight was HGT III and the hall was buzzing.

Black curtains had been draped across the walls, hiding the vaguely threatening, dauby paintings created by the Golden Oldies Lunch Club and the wooden boards listing the darts, snooker and draughts champions from decade to decade and maybe century to century. Multicolour spotlights shifted randomly across the lines of chairs, catching several glitter-balls hanging low from the roof beams. The R&B was loud, keeping time with the slow flashing Orwellian messages on the 20x20 projection screen pulled down across the stage.

The Hub is YOUR Hub

It's YOUR
Time to SHINE

The Hub's Got Talent III

What
about YOU?

 

Half an hour until showtime. Jonas lingered stage-front, watching the auditorium fill. And then Lacey, running up in a black bodysuit, black tights and high heels. She jabbed a hand over her shoulder, the other clutching the bodysuit at her chest, Jonas bemused until she spun round.

‘Right, wardrobe malfunction.'

He pinched the fabric together above her bra strap and pulled the zip up. A little smile as she walked away. He wanted to touch her again. There was so much he missed, so much no one knew and so many who thought they
did
, like the men exchanging glances in the second row. They reminded him of the Three Amigos, Spaniards on the Copenhagen building site whose macho discussions of women were inversely proportionate to any ability to talk to one.

 

Backstage, he saw Mary. Three days of nervous energy evaporated like tropical rain, her wave and smile cautious proof that nothing too excruciating skulked behind the blank patches in his memory.

The Cheerios
were down to open the show and Mary was putting them through a last rehearsal.

Ten nine-year-olds in two lines of four, two stars out front, busting moves to
One Way Street
. The concentration was intense, this was serious! Star Two burst into tears, couldn't get a step right, a simple left foot over right that Mary showed her again and again. Star One was Star One for a reason, displaying a hands-on-hips mix of concern and contempt.

‘Divas,' Mary said.

‘I know how they feel.'

‘Oh you do, do you?'

‘I once had to mime along to that Sinitta song
So Macho
at a school show. There were four of us, thirteen years old, stripped to our Speedos, oiled up and prancing around, flexing our muscles.'

‘Oiled up?'

‘I tell no lie.'

‘Wow. Can you imagine the reaction if we started oiling up young boys these days?'

‘Outrage.'

‘
Daily Mail
style.'

‘How was your hangover anyway?'

‘Nothing that a few hours in bed wouldn't have fixed,' she said.

Jonas blushed. Like an ambush. He watched Mary's eyes catch up with his thoughts. The suggestion hung there in space and neither knew what to say, drawing only more attention to it.