Ghosts in the Morning

Copy
right © Will Thurmann

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resembl
ance to real persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental

Will Thurmann is a pseudonym

For my Dad. Don’t ever stop dreaming.

Prologue

I felt myself shaking, I saw blood soaking my towel, but the throbbing in my hand
h
ad disappeared, endorphins and adrenaline numbing the pain. My mind raced and blood rushed in my ears, like a brutal, incoming tide. A clock began to tick in my head.

‘Please press one to replay this message, two to save this message, three to delete this message...’

I pressed three, my fingers growing steadier, as my brain tugged and pulled at strands, trying to make sense of them, to bring order...shit, there wasn’t much time.

The door slammed. That bloody door would never be fixed now, I knew that. I put Graham’s mobile phone down and grabbed some toilet paper from the bathroom. I wound it tightly around my hand to stem the bleeding. I put my dressing gown on and scooped up the bath towel with its coppery-red stains and thrust it quickly into the washing basket.

Graham appeared at the doorway. His face was red. ‘Alright,’ he grunted.

My mind kept churning, knitting fronds.
Tick tock tick tock
.

‘Alright,’ I replied. I nodded towards his wind-burned cheeks and the unkempt wisps of his hair. ‘It must have been very blustery and cold up at the cemetery. You look like you’re freezing.’

The clock was inexorably ticking, it was screaming in my head.
Tick tock
went the second hand, but it was getting faster.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock
.

‘Yes, I am a bit, yes, it’s a bit parky out there. I wouldn’t want to be on a boat in those gales, that’s for sure.’

The clock was gaining more speed, its second hand was whizzing in my mind.
Tick to
ck tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock.
I tried to focus on it, to will it to stop its incessant spinning. Round and round, as my mind furiously continued to play with little cat’s cradles of feathery string, desperately trying to form a pattern. I needed clarity, tried to force it from beneath the swirls of fog around the string.

Tick tock tick tock
, the clock had got louder too, it was pounding in my head, I could feel the pendulum crashing against the inside of my forehead.

I took a deep breath and willed my mind to calm and then slowly, gradually, I felt my heart begin to slow its hammering at my chest, and I felt the storm in the waters of my brain begin to abate. Images flitted across my inner vision, options...I could get away from here, get away from this house, this island, I could run and not stop running. Perhaps I could make a new life for myself on the mainland, I’d often thought about it. I could change my name, start afresh, I could put all the bad stuff behind me. People did that sometimes, they re-invented themselves, there was that movie once...yes, maybe that’s what I should do.  A new life, a new me, I liked the sound of that.

‘Are you okay?’ Graham asked. ‘You look like you’re in a dream.’ 

‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I murmured, as the idea of running began to dissipate. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t just go, it wouldn’t work, I had the boys to think about. And I would never be able to relax, I would be looking over my shoulder every five minutes. No, I didn’t want to live like that.

Tick tock tick tock
.

My head started to ache again, then suddenly through the chiming mist, new patterns began to emerge.
A shimm
ering embroidery of thoughts, ideas...
sol
utions
. And the throbbing in my head subsided as the mist cleared completely.

‘Yes, right!’ I shouted, and I saw Graham jump.

‘What the –’

‘Sorry, Graham, sorry, I just...er...look, I was just thinking...oh nothing, nothing. Anyway, look, I’ve just had a bath, the water’s still nice and hot. Why don’t you jump in, it’ll warm you up?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, I’ll maybe have a quick shower later. I was just going to sit down, watch a film, maybe.’

‘Oh right.’
Think, Andrea, keep going
. ‘Look, I tell you what, I’ll get you a nice big glass of cold wine, while you have a hot bath – you don’t want to catch a chill, do you? Then you can sit down in front of the TV, put your feet up. I’ve got a few bits to do in the kitchen, and the boys are out, so you can have some peace, you can watch what you want with another nice glass of wine in your hand.’

‘Why are you suddenly being so nice?’ Graham’s tone was sharp, tinged with curiosity and a hint of suspicion..
.

I forced a soft calmness into my voice. ‘Oh, it’s um, well, it’s Christmas, I’m trying to show a bit of Christmas spirit. Look, it’s been really rough lately - for both of us – I just thought we could try and take a step back for a bit. Get on an even keel. So, let’s just try and have a relaxing day, we both need it, don’t you think?’

Graham sighed and his shoulders dropped, sloughing off some of the weary tension he was holding there. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll have a bath, and a drop of wine. And maybe, as you say, in the spirit of things, after that we can try and find a film that we
both
want to watch.’

‘Okay, yes, good, good, I’d like that,’ I said. Graham began to undress for the bath as the clock continued its circuits.

The police would be here soon.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock
.

Chapter 1

I killed a man tonight. Not intentionally. Well...I’m
fairly
sure I didn’t mean to, but
then
I haven’t really been feeling
quite right
lately.
Been a little bit out of sorts.
But
anyway
I think it was an accident
...
yes,
it’s true,
it
was
an accident.
One thing is
for sure, though, he’s definitely dead.
Brown bread
, that’s what we used to say at the
Garter Home
when someone had died. We thought it sounded cool, I guess, as if death was something we
should
be cool and nonchalant about.
We probably thought it made us sound tough.

Recently I have come to realise that
I
am
invisible.
It’s been like this for a while, I think, but it’s only recently that I’ve become fully aware of
it. Invisibility, it’s a strange thing.
The man at the petrol station who takes my credit card
without raising his head
and
waits
for me to enter my PIN doesn’t see me. The supermarket cashier
who
swipes my shopping with a series of monotonous beeps doesn’t see me. The shopkeepers, the cashiers at the bank, the
people who push past me in the street, the retired grey people who smash their trollies through mine in the supermarket, the man who fills the heating oil tank, the man who reads the electric meter,
my husband
, my children
;
none of them
see me.
The man I killed tonight certainly didn’t see me.
Because
I am invisible.

Okay,
okay,
I don’t have an invisibility cloak, I know that I’m not
truly
invisible
.
I do still have my marbles,
I’m not some crazy fruit loop, I
’m not some delusional Harry Potter  fan. Though I have read some of the books.

My name is Andrea Halston. I am forty-
four
years old,
but I feel older.
I am a...well...I’m not sure what the modern term
for it
is
,
but I am what used to be called a housewife. I don’t
go to
work, I haven’t
had a job for quite some time
. I had a part-time job for a few years, when Simon, my youngest
child
, was at secondary school – I was a book-keeper at a building firm, but the firm went bust.
Not surprising really, the boss spent more time on holiday than at work, and not with his wife. When she divorced him, he drank too much and worked too little, so the building firm went belly-up. I saw him in town once, a few years later, he looked like a shell that had been hollowed out, like a walking skin.

I don’t need to work, we don’t need the money, Graham’s salary is more than enough. Graham, my husband, is
five
years older than me and he is having an affair with his secretary. Or P
ersonal Assistant
, as she likes to call herself. It’s a cliché, I know, for
someone in his position
– Graham is an audit partner – to be sleeping with his secretary, but I suppose she’s attracted to
what she sees as his
power. 
Or his Porsche.
I
very much
doubt
that
she
is
attracted to him on a physical level; his
ever-expanding
pot belly makes him look a little like a bowling ball with legs, rather than cuddly, and he
is
balding in a bad way. She
- the PA -
is twenty-something, and I think she is quite pretty, although it is difficult to tell under all the makeup.

He doesn’t know that I know about the affair.
I also know that
it
is
hurting him more than it’s hurting me. I can see it on his
wretched
face every evening, when he drinks a bottle of wine
, or more, in
an attempt to drown out his
pitiful
guilt
. He won’t
tell me about the affair,
of course. And
he won’t
leave me
, or ask for a divorce
. I’m sure he’s considered it,
desired it probably,
but even though he’s caught in some sort of mid-life crisis
that only appears to afflict men
, he’s not that daft. It would cost him too much,
he knows that. He would be too scared that I would take him to the cleaners.
I’m sure he’s worried that the affair with Nikki the secretary won’t last
too, and deep down he’s probably terrified of ending up on his o
wn in some crummy bedsit, cuddling a bottle of vodka.
Rightly so...
the affair will
fizzle out when
she gets bored and
he gets too needy, or when she meets a younger, more powerful man.

I was annoyed at first. In twenty-four years of marriage, I haven’t cheated on him once. Unless you count a drunken half-snog with a gorgeous surfer when I was on
one of Anita’s hen do
. And I don’t.
Twenty-four years
. The old joke says you get less for murder, which seems pretty ironic considering I killed a man tonight. In twenty four years I have given birth and reared three children, I have
cleaned the house, made the lunches, cooked the dinners, washed
the
clothes,
ironed the shirts
and generally sacrificed most of my life, and
then Graham
goes and shags his secretary.
So it’s only natural for me to be annoyed.