Every Touch (3 page)

When Denny woke, it was dark.  He stretched sleepily and rolled over, wondering what time it was and how long he had until he had to get up for work.  He was working today, wasn’t he?  What day was it?

   And then everything came crashing back on him. 

   He lay very still, staring into the darkness of his bedroom.  It was a dream, it had to have been.  He was in his flat, everything was normal.  He was lying on top of his duvet instead of underneath, and he seemed to be fully dressed, but that meant nothing.  Maybe he had got drunk last night, so drunk that he had just gone to sleep on top of the bed and he’d had this terrible alcohol induced nightmare about being dead.  That would explain it.  It had felt very real, but some dreams were like that. 

   He should just get up and prove to himself it had just been a dream.  Touch something, that would do it.  Just touch something. 

   He didn’t move. 

   Staying curled up on the bed, he closed his eyes again.  After a while, he fell back to sleep.

***

When he woke again it was light outside.  In fact, the sun was blazing in through the window because the curtains were open.  Denny opened his eyes and looked at the window without moving.  He swivelled his eyes around the room.  Everything was as it should be, as he expected it to be.  He looked at the bedside cabinet.  He could reach out and touch it. Just touch the lamp, he could do that.  Then he’d be sure that it had all been a dream. 

   He lay still for a long time, staring at the lamp, not wanting the moment to end.  If he stayed still, if he did nothing, he could perpetuate the uncertainty, keep believing it had all been a dream. A nightmare.  But he couldn’t do that forever. 

   Eventually, heart pounding, he slowly reached out a trembling hand.  It reached the lamp and passed straight through.  He closed his eyes, withdrew his hand and lay quiet for a long, long time.

   Denny didn’t know how long he had been lying awake when he heard the door to his flat open and close.  He sat up and swivelled his legs off the edge of the bed, rubbing the heels of his hands against his eyelids.  Despite having slept for well over fifteen hours since the day before, he still felt exhausted.   

   Trish’s voice drifted from the living room and the bedroom door opened.  Denny watched her stand in the doorway and look around the room, John waiting behind her.

   “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” he said quietly.

   “No,” she said, “but I won’t ever be.” 

   She walked into the room, John following with some cardboard boxes which he placed on the floor.

   Denny had decided to stick with them today.  He’d been doing a lot of thinking as he lay in bed.  He couldn’t get out of the building for now, that much was clear, and he didn’t know how long that would last.  He didn’t know how long any of this was going to last.  So he knew this was his final chance, at least for a while, to see his sister and brother-in-law.  They had lost him and now he was going to lose them. 

   His chest tightened and he resolutely pushed the though aside.  If this turned out to be his last day with his family, he was going to make the most of it.  Mourning could happen later.  Today, he wanted to savour every second.

   He desperately wished he could see his nephew again.  The depth with which he loved Jay had come as a surprise to him, at first.  From the first moment he’d held his sister’s baby boy in his arms in the hospital when he was just an hour old, Denny had felt such an intense connection with him, almost as if he was his own.  He didn’t understand why that should be.  He had always thought that kind of thing only happened with the parents, but there it was.

  He had been determined to be the best uncle ever, and he thought he’d done a pretty good job.  They were incredibly close, spending a lot of time together.  He was the cool uncle Jay would go to when he was too embarrassed to go to his parents.  Denny loved that.  He had always thought he would be there for him as he grew up, to teach him everything he’d learned, about life, about women, about how to graduate from college with the least amount of effort.  But now he wouldn’t be there for him.  How much must Jay be missing him now?  Denny squeezed his eyes shut against the tears that were suddenly falling.  The thought of Jay’s pain at his loss was unbearable.  He wiped the tears away in annoyance.  He’d have plenty of time to cry tomorrow.  What else would there be for him to do?

   He watched as Trish and John stripped the bed and packed away his clothing and other personal items, trying not to think about what they were doing.  He only wanted to focus on them, and especially his sister.  He stared at her now as she worked. 

   They were undoubtedly brother and sister.  They shared the same wavy light brown with a hint of red hair, the same bright blue eyes, the same smattering of faint freckles on their cheeks and noses.  They could have been twins if not for the two years separating them in age.  He couldn’t even imagine life without her.  She’d always been there for him, whatever he did, whichever harebrained schemes he dreamed up and then messed up, however much trouble he got himself into.  She had always been there to pick up the pieces, right from when they were children.  He’d lost count of the amount of times he’d avoided a beating in school from the bullies when his smart mouth had got him into trouble and she’d been there to protect him. 

   But now he was in the worst situation he had ever encountered and she wasn’t going to be with him.  He was facing this alone.  The thought terrified him.

  They took a break for lunch, John going to the pizza place down the road and Denny watching longingly as they ate.  He still wasn’t hungry, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to eat. Seeing the glistening pepperoni and smelling the melted cheese made him want to cry.

   After the suffering of lunch was over, there was just one thing left to do. 

   “It’s time,” he heard John say solemnly.  Denny looked up from the leftover pizza, seeing him and Trish standing in front of the double doors of his large storage closet.

   Oh no, he thought, not that.  Please don’t look in there.

   John opened the doors slowly, revealing a floor to ceiling huge pile of... stuff.  That was the only word for it.  Denny shook his head in embarrassment.  Whenever he couldn’t think of what to do with something, it got thrown in the cupboard where he always intended to sort it out later.  Back when he always imagined there would be a later.

   “Wow,” Trish said, “now I know why he wouldn’t ever let me see in here.”

   They began to sort through the mountain of things and Denny stood and walked over to them. Realising this was the last time he’d see all this stuff, he mused on how funny it was that he never looked at any of it when he was alive, but now he was losing everything it was all suddenly so important to him.  Everything became a treasured possession as it was taken out and placed in a box.  Old clothes, obsolete electrical equipment, a large box of leads he had no use for but kept
just in case
, video games, dvds, Christmas decorations, and a multitude of other assorted items, some of which he’d forgotten were in there.

   “Why on earth did he have this?” Trish said after a while of sorting.

   Denny turned from the box of old videos he was studying and peered over her shoulder.  She was holding a kitchen utensil.  He struggled to remember what it was for. 

   John shrugged.  “Beats me.”

   “You don’t know what it is, do you?” she said.

   He smiled.  “No, and Denny probably didn’t either.”

   Denny chuckled. 

   “It’s a garlic press,” Trish said.

   And then he remembered.  It had been Natalia’s.  She left it behind when they split up.  Natalia was a great cook.  She’d tried to teach him to be able to prepare things more exciting than eggs on toast, during the year they dated when he was twenty-eight.  The problem was, Denny had always found her so sexy when she cooked that they never got very far into the lessons before they ended up in the bedroom. 

   His smile vanished.  Sex.  He was never going to have sex again.  His head dropped onto his chest and he closed his eyes.  How much worse could being dead possibly get?

   As if on cue, John cleared his throat, holding up a handful of magazines.  Denny looked up and his mouth dropped open.  He had forgotten about those.  He wondered if ghosts could blush because, if they could, he was turning bright red.

   Trish giggled.  “I guess he had those for his frequent bouts of singleness,” she said.  “What should we do with them?”

   “Well, I could find a use for them,” he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  Trish raised her eyebrows. 

   “Or we could just throw them out,” he said rapidly.

   “Or you could leave them here,” Denny said plaintively.  “I’m never going to touch a woman again, at least give me a break and leave me the porn.”

   Trish shook her head, smiling, and returned her attention to the shelves at the side of the closet she was clearing.  She gasped.

   “Oh, John,” she said, her voice breaking.

   Denny watched as she lifted a small wooden box from the shelf and his chest constricted. 

   “What is it?” John said, not missing his wife’s emotional reaction to her discovery.

   She carried the box with her to the bed and sat, John settling on one side of her and Denny on the other. 

   “I didn’t know he’d kept this,” she said, opening the box.  “When we were kids, one year, before Christmas, our mother gave us both one of these boxes and told us to buy a toy we thought the other one would like, then put it in the box along with a letter telling each other how we felt about them, then we gave them to each other at Christmas.”

   Denny remembered it well.  He had been ten and Trish twelve and for some reason he couldn’t recall they had been arguing more than usual for months.  He’d been thoroughly embarrassed by what she had written in her letter, but secretly pleased.  And he had always kept it.  He wondered if Trish still had hers. 

   He watched her take out the toy car she had given him all that time ago, then pulled out a folded piece of pink writing paper and opened it slowly.

   “Dear Denny,” she read from the letter from her twelve year old self, “I know I give you a hard time sometimes, but that doesn’t mean I don’t like you.  I think you’re fun to hang around with and you make me laugh.  I love you and I would miss you if you weren’t here...” 

   She stopped abruptly, her hand covering her mouth, the tears beginning to roll down her cheeks.  John took the box and wrapped his arms around her as she broke down.

   “What am I going to do?” she sobbed, clinging to him.  “How am I supposed to live the rest of my life without my baby brother?”

   Denny buried his face in his hands and did exactly what he didn’t want to, crying until his head throbbed and his eyes burned and his nose ran. 

   He couldn’t do this, he just couldn’t.  Why wasn’t he in heaven?  Or hell?  Maybe this was hell, seeing his sister in so much pain over his death.  It was the worst thing he’d ever had to endure.  He remembered the devastating loss he’d felt when each of their parents had died, but then they had still had each other.  Seeing Trish go through this agony without him, because of him, was even worse.  He wondered if their parents had been there after they had died, watching him and Trish mourning.  He hoped not.

   It took Trish some time to stop crying and recover enough to continue packing.  It took Denny even longer.  He drew his legs up and sat cross legged on the bed, not taking his eyes from his sister in these last hours he had with her, missing her already, even before she’d gone. 

   She didn’t pack the wooden box with everything else, simply replaced the letter and the toy car and left the box separate, with their coats in the living room.

   By mid-afternoon everything was packed up, the boxes left by the door.  A truck arrived from a removals firm and all his personal furniture was taken out and loaded up, along with all the boxes. 

   He watched his electric piano go with sadness.  He could play the guitar too, but it was the piano he’d always wanted to master, always intending to practise more. Just like many things when he had been alive, he was always going to do it tomorrow.

   Finally, all that was left was the furniture that came with the flat, a bed, a large chest of drawers and wardrobe, sofa and armchairs, dining table and chairs and a large, chunky wooden coffee table.  It looked the way it had when he’d moved in.  Bare, soulless and not his. 

   John did one last check to make sure they’d got everything while Trish put on her coat, picked up the little wooden Christmas box then stood and looked around while Denny stood beside her. 

   He could see her tears threatening again.  His own were already falling.  Not caring how it felt, just knowing he wanted this last contact with his sister, he reached out and brushed his hand slowly through hers.  She gasped and looked at it, holding it with her other hand then looking around as if searching for something.