The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) (45 page)

Ruddie is gone. Another piece of your connection to Brian has disappeared. The world you three shared has vanished. And you are left here, alone.

Sunday night you lay out clothes for Monday, pop a frozen meal into the microwave – some sort of pesto-pasta thing – eat it, wash up, and think about TV or the Internet but decide not to bother. You are especially tired, for some reason, the weight of Ruddie’s death on your already heavy shoulders, and bed looks inviting. You know you sleep too much, but it is hard to fill waking hours outside of work, and very easy to curl into a ball beneath the covers.

Even before you change into your nightgown, you hear the strange, high-pitched shriek and race to the window. There! The oversized shadow of the cat again, moving along the alley wall.

Spontaneously, you slip on your shoes, coat, gloves, grab your door key and hurry out, determined to find this forlorn waif and bring him in.

No one is on the street, either on foot or in a car. The night has turned bitterly cold and windy. Yet, as you near the mouth of the alleyway, the gale-force wind suddenly dies. The stillness and silence feel unnatural and frighten you. You glance around; it is as if you have stepped into another reality, a surreal snow globe where everything has settled. But you feel very unsettled.

Cautiously, you move down the lane calling for the cat. Every step seems more difficult than the last, as if the air has thickened, and you do not understand why. An eerie feeling creeps over you, leaving you sweating. Then, suddenly, you see him. Ruddie! Turning in circles and crying, waiting for you under the alley’s dim yellow streetlight. You cannot believe it is Ruddie, and yet you do – you would know your cat anywhere! Joy surges through you, an emotion you never expected to feel again. It occurs to you that you have died. You have found Ruddie and, any second, you will be with Brian again. The three of you will be reunited!

You rush down the snow-packed laneway. “Ruddie! Baby!” He stops and his tail shoots straight up into the air and you hear a familiar meow. You reach him and scoop your beloved cat into your arms. His silky furry face brushes against your cheek – so familiar! – and his loud purring grows louder, a sound you recognize, one that is embedded in your soul, one you have lived without for a year.

“Ruddie, Ruddie, I’ve missed you!” you cry, tears spilling from your eyes. “I’m so sorry for everything. Please forgive me.”

Your tears become unstoppable and you can no longer control their gushing. Loud sobs rack your body and you can barely breathe from the pain ripping through you. Weakness comes over you and you bend in a crouch, folding in half, as if you have broken in the middle. You feel your soul crack open. You find yourself kneeling, rocking, crying, sobbing calling “Brian”, “Ruddie”, again and again. Then, strong arms surround you and Ruddie and, finally, the barrier within you gives way, flooding you with grief.

Time has ceased and you do not know how long you have been in this place, suffering a nearly unbearable agony. Only the wind returning and new snow falling bring awareness of where you are coupled with
who
you are. And with that, another realization: Ruddie is gone. Brian is gone. Forever. But you, you are still here.

And suddenly you view yourself through the clarity of returning memories: I am a person who has lost loved ones. Fate decreed that I, the driver, was not killed in the accident, but Brian, who died in my arms, was. There is no reason why I am alive, no real way of understanding why things happened the way they did. The facts stand: it was the other driver’s fault. But facts are cold comfort and have meant little. Guilt has been my tortuous anaesthetic, keeping the more painful grief of my loss at bay.

There is no guilt, only grief. Thank you, St Ruddie. Now I can mourn.

Muriel Gray

She’s not a morning person. Never has been. But lately mornings have become harder than usual. Blinking in the putty-hued square of light from her window she accepts that she has become a cliché, and she can’t bear clichés any more than she can bear the assault of the work-day alarm clock. Yet here she is, lying in a corner of her double bed, bought in a moment of optimism never fulfilled, clutching a damp, compressed pillow. What can be more clichéd than the sleeplessness of the haunted?

There is little originality, she thinks, in the troubled creature who nightly thrashes the duvet to the edge of the bed, and hers hangs tantalisingly this morning, as it has on others, waiting to slither from the edge like a linen coin push as she shifts and squirms. Her waking is not gentle, following another night of sweats and nightmares, of falling and screaming and bright lights and hard surfaces, the knowledge presenting itself in the daylight that she won’t be able to bear much more of it.

She coughs, out of habit rather than necessity, tugging back the escapee duvet, trying to find solace in its softness, its familiar insulation. Feeling nothing, she huddles and crouches, making a ball of her body like an armadillo expecting trouble.

No part of her even wonders any more. She simply accepts it will happen. Time ticking, days counting, something inevitable approaching. On a good day she asks herself if it might be the same for everyone. Death approaching. The sands running down. Then her heart tells her it’s not the same. She won’t die an ordinary death in a hospital bed; fixed-smile, grown children at her side, framed by wilting petrol station-bought chrysanthemums. She writhes at the vision she has just conjured. Is that ordinary? Is that desirable? She coughs again, turns, and questions for a moment why she forged an image so dismal.

No matter. She feels certain she will never die a picturesque death. Her future is a blur and not a Norman Rockwell tableau. She has no children, no lover, no life that can be filed under satisfactory. She blinks at the ceiling. Recently painted it offers little Rorschach relief, mocking her with its absence of distraction in peeling patches or dampening blooms. A bland, plain, desert of magnolia, leaving her alone with reality.

She closes her eyes, sighs deeply and gives herself over to the day’s simmering fear. She frames the thought by saying the words. Says them in her head and faces the day.

Is he here?

If he isn’t here already, then when will he be here? It’s the same thought. Every day. On waking. Sometimes the dread cools as the day wears on and she dares to hope. Maybe he isn’t here at all. Maybe he’s busy somewhere else. Where would that be? Is her haunting unique, personalized, bespoke? Why should it be? What’s so special about her? Maybe it’s a chain-store haunting. Why shouldn’t it be happening at the same time to an Amazonian monkey hunter, a Korean care worker, or an Icelandic property developer? Are they afraid to look people in the eye? Fearful of reflections and shadows? Terrified they will see the face in the crowd, that person who shouldn’t be there, who has no right to be there, but who is always, unfailingly, reliably there? What vanity says a ghost is for you alone?

But such musings bring little comfort. The hope of a day without him is always dashed. He will come. Early, late. Day or night. Sooner or later. He will come. She realizes her breath is coming fast, her heart beating too hard. She closes her eyes and composes herself. She can do this. It’s a new day and she reminds herself that in this indifferent, enigmatic, ineffable universe, she is lucky to be here.

Without knowing how, she is already at the breakfast table. She stirs her tasteless, colourless cereal, mechanically, without joy. She is at work, staring into the depth of a computer screen, her colleagues moving around her like choreographed dancers. She is in a café, the fat proprietor watching the evening news on the wall-mounted TV, arms crossed over his ample belly. Summer bluebottles drone and bump against the glass. Her coffee and half-eaten of plate of food sit cold in front of her.

The temperature drops. She bows her head in despair. Here it comes. As always, she feels him approaching before she sees him. Many times she’s tried not to look. Tried closing her eyes, or reading a book. But like floating gutter leaves sucked down a drain, her gaze is helplessly pulled towards the point of his appearance. So now, against her will, she looks up, a fearful glance from half-closed lids, her breath blowing vapour into cold air that has no right to exist in this summer heat. The café owner shudders and rubs his arm against the sudden icy chill. She waits, heart thumping, but doesn’t have to wait long. This time it’s fast. He walks swiftly past the grimy café window, left to right, adjusting a jumper knotted round his neck, a bundle of newspapers held beneath his bare arm. That’s all. It’s over. The room regains its steamy warmth. That brief, tiny glimpse, she knows, was all there will be for the day. Just once. Just enough to drain her, tire her, chill her. Defeated, she heads home.

Each night, before she tumbles into scorched sleep, she tries to relive it, to work out what she did wrong, and each night she knows the answer. She turns over on the pillow, draws her knees to her chest. Face it, she thinks. Face the thing that she dreads, the error she made, the turning in life she took that led to this limbo of low-level terror that hums in the background of her life like an electric fence penning her in.

She shouldn’t have bought the photo.

She can watch that day in fast forward now. Picking it apart used to take longer. These nights it lays itself out chronologically like a storyboard. This night, it feels different. The story feels alive. She gets out of bed and walks to the darkened sitting room. Pressing back into the hard, worn sofa, a single table light burning low in the bedroom she left behind, she lets her chin fall to her chest and the playback commences.

Jill talking. You’re only forty once. Travelling. A package to Orlando, Florida. All four of them. Just the girls. A theme park birthday. Disney, Universal, Seaworld; the greatest roller-coaster rides on earth.

Forty and fat. Forty and a smoker. Forty and making drinking alone a habit. Forty and never having taken a risk, or climbed a mountain, or run a marathon. Forty and never having been properly in love. At least never loved back. Never ridden upside down in a chair on rails at forty miles an hour. Shorthand. Forty. Never really lived.

The girls gabbling. Shouting advice. Make it change. Make it happen. Turn your life around time. Do those things. Stop watching time tick by. Start living, why don’t you, gal?

Details of the holiday, now just fragments of memory in a blender. Laughing, drinking, neon lights and the faux-antique wooden booths of cheap themed restaurants. The girls cackling, ruby-red lips open in constant shrieking mirth in their tireless quest to catch the attention of incurious Americans while she cowers in embarrassment. Look at us. Look at the time we’re having. Highways crawling with slowly moving oversized cars. Outsized people, outsized food. You must feel like a super model here, laughs Jill. She laughs too, but wants to cry. “Jesus Loves You” sky-written in vapour from a tiny plane, the disintegrating words floating against an azure Floridian sky. She photographs it. Wishes it were true.

All leading towards the moment. The decision.

Her heart couldn’t beat any faster in the queue. The Hulk. The fastest, hardest ride in the park.

Libby makes them stand in line for the front row. Keeps barking statistics. World’s tallest cobra roll: 110 feet. Launch lift that shoots you from zero to forty miles per hour in under two seconds. Stop it, she thinks. Stop it, stop it, stop it. Front row seats have a bigger queue. Worth the wait, says Jill. Forty-five, maybe fifty minutes. Every one a hundred hammering heartbeats of panic. She sweats. She trembles. And then . . . the bitches! The rotten, lousy bitches see a gap for three people, two rows back, and dive for it. Squealing with delight. Waving to her as they strand her in that front-row line. Shouting and guffawing. Roaring that they’ll see her at the bottom. She’s alone. Made to wait for the next ride. Takes a thousand years to come by, arriving, clunking into place like a mechanized abattoir. A couple of sullen Americans behind push her roughly forward on to the row, the seat at the far side already filled by a young man, staring ahead, calm, like he’s waiting in a doctor’s surgery. Must have boarded from the fast-pass queue on the other side.

It’s him.

Alone and waiting.

Ahead, a mountain of rails. A metal serpent waiting to receive its sacrifice.

She hugs her knees tighter. It’s time to play the next frame again in her head. Again. Again. She plays it until she knows it by heart, because she knows this matters. Somehow it does.

She’s shaking. Nearly crying. She’s tried speaking to the American couple, her voice too high, too hysterical to sound casual. But Americans don’t make small talk. They tell you to have a nice day if you pay them to, but to those without a name badge on their shirt you might as well be invisible. The big man grunts when she giggles the truth that she’s scared. The girl stares ahead, chewing gum like it’s a chore.

The coaster car jerks up and then down, bouncing as the automatic harnesses lower, pinning her to the back of the seat. She starts to cry. Silently. More alone than she could ever remember.

She can see his face now, still clear, remembering every detail as he turns slowly to look at her, savouring the memory of his irresistibly sympathetic gaze that follows the fat tear coursing down her cheek until it lands on the restraining bar of the seat. She can see that wide, friendly face, a shadow of stubble around the jaw, round hazel eyes, and a head of thick brown hair cut tight to tame curls. Of course she looks at this face every day in the photo by her bed, but the memory, the real sweet memory, is more vivid than the picture. He was English. She thinks she knows that now. She swallows, climbs back into the moment.