Ghosts in the Morning (24 page)

Vague memories of the
times I had argued with Anita, or felt angry at her for some silly reason, they
all
melted like
summer
snow,
and then
something broke inside me and I began to sob.
Anita squeezed me tighter, my face mashing into her ample bosom, I could feel the bridge of my sunglasses cutting into the top of my nose. She patted my head tenderly, as my shoulders shook and the tears streamed, and I felt my arms encircling her, squeezing her back
. I
didn’t want to move, I just wanted to be held
, nobody had ever held me like she did at that moment, not even Graham
. We stayed like that for what seemed an eternity, until eventually my racking sobs eased, and the tears began to dry. The top of my nose began to throb.

Anita finally pulled away and we stood looking at each other for an awkward moment. ‘Did you borrow those sunglasses from Jackie Onassis?’ Anita said, and we both laughed. ‘Now look, Andy,
I’m not going to bother saying all the bullshit that one usually does at these things. You know I’m there for you whenever
you
need me, Andy, and all that stuff, I’m not going to say any more. Right, now, I’m just going to see how your boys are doing, and then I’m coming back to yours for a drink.
’

The boys weren’t doing too well. They had taken the news very hard, they couldn’t understand why their father had taken his life. He seemed happy enough, it didn’t make sense,
how could their Dad do this to them?

Surprisingly, Simon had been the strongest,
he had been a
rock for his brothers. Daniel was in pieces, he had hardly come out of his bedroom for a week
. T
hat morning both Ian and Daniel had said they weren’t sure if they were going to come to the funeral, they didn’t think they could handle it. But I had heard Simon gently cajoling and encouraging them
,
telling them how important it was that they went to the funeral, they would regret it for the rest of their lives if they didn’t. In the church too, Simon had stood between his brothers, every now and again
resting a reassuring hand on their shoulders.

We ha
dn
’t discussed what happened yet
, we hadn’t talked about the police investigation, and I hadn’t told them about the note.
Daniel ha
d
tried, ha
d
pushed me with questions, and at times I
had
wondered if his questioning seemed a bit...well,  searching,
as if he’s unsure about something,
but I’ve put that down to paranoia on my part. I’ve told him –
I’ve
told all of my boys – that the time for all of that talk is not now. Now,
it’
s the time for grieving
, it’s the natural order of things.

The questions
would
come later,
but I knew
how to handle that.

Epilogue

2
YEARS LATER

‘I’ll probably be late back tonight, Andrea, I’ve got
a load of
papers to mark
after school
,
I’ll
see you later,’ Tony shouted as he dashed out of the front door.

I sighed. I didn’t think he had any papers to mark.

Tony was a teacher. We had been married for a year now. I had met him when I moved to the mainland, six months after Graham’s death. I had bought a lovely little cottage on the outskirts of Southampton; I had wanted to get away from Jersey, to start afresh
. It’s strange, really, as I sometimes thought of
Jersey
as an island that had imprisoned me for too long
,
yet
I ha
d
n’t wanted to move too far away. It was nice to be able to go back now and again, just a short hop on the plane.
             
The boys had made a fuss when I first decided to move away, they didn’t want me to leave. But they got over it soon enough
; amazing what the receipt of a large endowment can do. I knew they missed their father, they all loved him so much, but they were gradually getting back on with their lives.

Ian had gone travelling again – he was in Asia at the moment - and in our last face-to-face call over the internet, he told me that he was thinking of buying a bar on one of the islands off the coast of Thailand.

Daniel had set up his own plumbing firm, but it seems work is getting harder to come by in Jersey, the recession has
hit
late and hard there,
and Daniel says there’s not as much work around as he’d hoped. H
e said he is toying with the idea of relocating to Australia. He tells me he’s still single, though whenever I phone him it’s always a woman’s voice that picks up the phone. Most times, it doesn’t sound like the same woman.

Simon quit university. He met a
kitchen-fitter
– fell madly in lust by the sounds of it -
and
together they have set up a
business,
mixing the kitchen-fitting with Simon’s new-found love for interior design
. I told him to be careful,
it wasn’t wise to
mix
business
with pleasure
, but they
do
seem
to be
blissfully happy together. They’re talking about getting married soon.

I lost a lot of weight after Graham’s death,
I managed to
regain some of the youthful good looks I once had. I
got myself
a personal trainer,
a lovely guy called Craig who helped me shed the pounds, encouraged me to change
my diet
and join a gym.
That’s how I met Tony
-
at the gym.
Tony
spends a lot of time at the gym, he
is a
very fit,
active
guy
; he is always one of the first to volunteer when they’re looking for teachers to accompany the kids on ski-trips or mountaineering expeditions.

I’ve put a few of those lost pounds back on in recent months. It coincided with the end of our honeymoon period
. It’s probably my own fault, we shouldn’t have got married so quickly, but neither of us seemed to think hard enough
at the time, just rushed headlong into it. I think Tony was just looking for some stability at the time, perhaps I was a rebound thing, as he’d not long received his final
divorce papers.
Decree absolute
.
For me, I was just pleased that someone seemed to fancy me, and he’s very good-looking so...perhaps I should have waited...

It was
about a month ago
when
I noticed
that
Tony’s eye
had started
to roam.
Although, i
t’s not just his eye, now
, I think
.
It se
ems
that he has grown clo
se to the French teacher
at the school where he works. Too close.
Miss Haze
, her name is, I don’t know her first name yet
.
I
am
sure he doesn’t have any papers to mark
tonight
.

Our cottage – or rather,
my
cottage for
I bought it and
it’s in my name –
has a lot of charm, it’s
very rustic.
It has a lovely large fireplace and
exposed wooden beams in the living-room. A cottage of real character and history, the estate agent told me. He told me that it was owned many, many years ago by a wealthy merchant, who had made his fortune
from shipping wine through Southampton’s docks. ‘
The
current
owners have spent a small fortune lovingly restoring it to its glory of earlier years
’, the estate agent had added. He was a typical salesman, all grease and bullshit, but I bought
the cottage
anyway. I had liked it from the moment I had laid eyes on it. 

Tony has a ritual before bedtime; every night, before he goes to bed, he turns the television off
–
assuming
it’s on
, because sometimes he just sits and reads a book in there
– and then he flicks on the tall lamp in the corner of the living-room. The body of the lamp is a silver mermaid, her curling tail forming the base of the lamp
. H
er upstretched hands
with their slender fingers
clasp the frosted glass shade.
I’m sure that some would say
i
t’s a bit tacky, a bit kitsch, but I like it.
With the dull glow from the lamp casting a cosy illumination
, like the moon in thin fog. Tony then
turns off the main lights and
reaches into the small drawer beneath the oak coffee table that sits in the middle of the living-room, and takes out a packet of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter. Finally, he sinks down into
the large, overstuffed armchair in front of the fireplace.
He lights a cigarette
, takes a deep breath and then
smoke
s the cigarette
in the semi-darkness. Just one cigarette, that’s all he ever has. Every day
, just one
.
He says that he used to smoke a lot,
it scared him that he’d never be able to give up, and his Mum died of lung cancer. He says that he
found it really hard to
quit
, but
he had hit upon this ritual of
allowing himself just this one each day,
this small, guilty pleasure. He says by doing this, he is convinced that
he won’t start
smoking properly
again.

I don’t much like the smell of smoke,
and, at first, I thought about stopping him smoking in my house. But I realised that, once we were married, this was supposed to be
our
house, so I decided that I wouldn’t
begrudge him this little
nightly
routine.
I mean, i
t’s not
really
doing me any harm.

But the thing is, I
have
warned him that he needs to be careful. There has been the odd occasion where he has fallen asleep during the cigarette. I’ve come into the living-room and found him in the chair with the cigarette butt smouldering in the ashtray.
That overstuffed armchair is old and highly flammable, they
didn’t worry so much about health and safety when they made that chair.
And, of course, the floors are all made of wood, and with those wooden beams as well...

He should be very careful. I wouldn’t want him falling asleep in that chair with a burning cigarette in his lap, now, would I?

THE END

If you liked this book, why not try the following by the same author, available to download at www.amazon.co.uk:

“
HOW TO GET BEHIND IN BANKING
” by Will Thurmann
– 
‘A riotous comic romp set in the world of the modern workplace environment ... brilliantly captures the farce within the office politics of today ... a real treat’

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to email me at the following address:-
[email protected]

Author Information

Will Thurmann was born sometime in the 1960s in Jersey, Channel Islands. He has worked (sometimes quite hard) in the finance industry in Jersey for over twenty years, and has travelled extensively in Asia and Central America.
Will Thurmann is a pseudonym, used mainly because that's what authors do, and partly so that Will can protect his anonymity - as he stil
l works in the finance industry (in which his 1
st
novel “
How to Get Behind in Banking
” is based)
he thought it best.

“Ghosts in the Morning” is Will Thurmann’s 2
nd
novel.