Ghosted, p.13
Ghosted, page 13
I hoist my bag on to my back. It’s just my schoolbag, but I’ve packed a few things from home in it. They’re nonsense things: I don’t need food, but I put in a multipack of Club biscuits because there was something poignant in the fact that they’re always in the cupboard today. I have my Discman, which only ever has Different Class in it, and I have a book with me, by Margaret Atwood, recommended by Ariel. The one she wanted me to read (Oryx and Crake) hasn’t been written yet, so I bought The Handmaid’s Tale instead. I’d never have chosen it myself, but I like it.
The morning is cold and the platform’s busy. I look at a man standing near me. He’s wearing a work suit and carrying a work bag. I guess he’s about thirty-five. Me too, I want to say. I’m thirty-five like you. The man is frowning and staring across the train track at nothing in particular. I see his breath huffing out around him in the cold air. I look for my own breath.
My breath isn’t huffing.
The nearly empty train comes along and everyone starts doing polite shoving to be sure of getting a seat, because it only has two carriages and there are loads of people waiting.
I pause at the back of the little huddle around the door. Am I doing this? Catching a commuter train on a school day?
I don’t have a ticket and I have very little money, but I don’t really care because what’s the worst that can happen? They take me to prison? Brilliant. More realistically, they give me a penalty fare and I don’t have to pay it because I’m dead.
I find a seat by the window and stare out, listening to ‘Common People’. I can see the grey line of the sea horizon in the distance, beyond the roofs of the houses. The man with the huffing breath sits next to me, and gives me a little nod, but I can tell that he doesn’t want to speak. He gets out a book, and that reminds me, so I get mine out too. He’s reading Bridget Jones’s Diary: he laughs from time to time and tries to pretend he’s not.
Twenty minutes later we’re in Exeter, and everyone disperses. I join the crowd that masses over to platform four, to wait for the London train. If I see a ticket inspector I’ll go and hide in the loo. If it comes to it I probably have enough money to buy a ticket from wherever the last station was.
I don’t know why I’m worrying.
Actually why am I? I’ve never worried about not buying a ticket before, and I’ve talked my way out of a penalty fare loads of times. You just make them laugh and they let you off. The trouble is, I can’t imagine being able to do that any more. I used to be funny and now I’m not.
I find an aisle seat at the end of a carriage, within easy reach of the loo in case I have to hide. I’m next to a woman who’s knitting a pale pink thing. She looks maybe about fifty, and has a nice face, a white fluffy jumper and expensive-looking hair. When I sit down, she gives me a little smile, but mainly we ignore each other, like you do.
The train starts moving and just like that I’m on my way to London, with no plan except to be as far from home as I can get by four o’clock, and specifically to be nowhere near Beachview at quarter past five. We pass through Tiverton Parkway and more people get on, but quite a lot of them have to stand. I look at them, ready to give up my seat if there’s anyone who particularly needs it, but everyone I can see is a young-enough man in a suit, and I can’t be arsed to get up for them.
In a minute we’ll be out of Devon.
Soon after we leave Tiverton the woman beside me says, ‘Excuse me a moment, darling,’ and I get up to let her out. I’m not looking, but I see what happens next out of the corner of my eye. There’s a flurry in a clear part of the aisle and when I look properly I see that she’s doing a cartwheel there. Just turning a perfect cartwheel in the aisle of the train, her feet briefly stretching up to the ceiling, her toes pointed, the standing commuters edging out of range of her socked feet. I look down. There are her boots, on the floor of the train.
Of course. Of course I end up next to the nutter.
I look at her knitting on the flap-down table. It’s so soft. I wonder if it’s going to be something for a baby, and that makes me think of Ariel, and of Gus’s girls. Then I turn back to her. She’s walking towards me, laughing.
There’s something odd about this woman. A look in her eyes.
A few people are saying, ‘Well!’ and ‘Did you see that?’ but the overwhelming majority are ignoring her because they’re train commuters and I guess that’s what they do.
I stand up again to let her back to her window seat.
‘Different, huh?’ she says, and I nod. ‘I do it every morning. They never tell me not to because they’re so uptight and British. It’s fun. Sometimes I stand on a table and recite poems, to mix it up. You should do something.’
‘I can do this,’ I say, and I pull the shoelace out of my trainer and eat it. She nods, unsurprised.
‘I’m Lara,’ she says.
I take her hand. We look at each other.
I see it in her face.
It’s the same thing I see in the mirror. It’s a weariness, a simulacrum of life. A resignation. You can run down a train carriage, turning cartwheels all you like, but if you know that you’re going to die, that you’ve already died, that every day will go blank at the same point, and you’ll have to wake up and do it all over again forever, then a train cartwheel doesn’t count for anything. Neither does eating a shoelace.
I fill my head with the blue of the sky and look at Lara again. There it is. The blue is pouring out of her.
‘Do you and I have something in common, darling?’ she says quietly.
‘I think maybe we do.’ I look again at her knitting. I wonder why she does it. I can’t imagine that any baby is ever going to wear that jumper.
‘Where did you spring from? It’s a delight to meet you. I haven’t seen a new ghost for … well, for a long time. It’s hard to keep track, isn’t it? It took me ages to work out what was going on.’
My brain is trying to catch up. For a second I’m surprised at her casual use of the word ghost, but I can hardly argue with it. So I got on a train and sat beside another … ghost. It doesn’t seem possible, but neither does anything.
‘I don’t think I’d ever have worked it out,’ I say.
‘But you did. March the eleventh 1999, right?’
I stare at her. ‘You die today too?’
She sighs. ‘I do indeed, my dear. I stay on this train to London, get off it at Paddington, and walk up that ramp where everyone smokes, and then it all goes blank, but I’m pretty sure I get knocked down by a taxi or maybe a bus. Not sure. I liked my job in London, but I never get to do it any more.’
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Oh my fucking God, I have so many questions.’
She leans back and nods. She’s grinning. ‘Good. Fire away. Tell me your story.’
I start talking. When I get to Ariel, I see her face change.
‘Back up,’ she says when I move on to Gus. ‘Back to Ariel. Holy shit. You’re saying that your friend Ariel is a live girl, living in the future, but that you can speak to her?’ She shifts forward in her seat and leans right in towards me. ‘You speak to a real girl? Are you actually saying that?’
‘Yep.’ I see from her reaction that this isn’t normal for ghosts. ‘We meet in the room where I guess I’m going to die. She was upset because … well, she has family stuff. We see each other there every day. Almost every day. She can’t come when it’s Sunday for her because the shopping centre’s closed.’
‘Right,’ says Lara, almost to herself. ‘Holy, holy, holy shit. So we can talk to real people. You lucky bastard. And she’s in 2019!’ She leans back in her seat. She turns her face to the window and stares out at the fields outside, and then turns back to me, and so many of my feelings are on her face that I want to stay at her side forever. ‘Oh my God – 2019. We’ve been doing this for twenty years? Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. What’s it like in the future?’
I tell her. Millennium bug, World Trade Center, climate change, the internet, Brexit, Trump. I see her confidence in me beginning to waver. Her expression becomes a bit horrified, a bit sceptical.
‘Anyway,’ I say, wanting to move on, ‘can we only meet other ghosts with the same death day as us?’
‘Yes, I believe so,’ Lara says. ‘I’ve done some work on this over the years. About fifty million people in the world die every day. Only about fifty of them will be within range of Exeter and, of those, only a few will be unresolved, and this seems to be the key thing. We’re here because our deaths are left hanging in some way. Other people die and don’t get stuck here. As far as I can tell – and I’m not the expert, but I’ve spoken to him a few times – you “glitch” if there’s something that’s not known about how you died. God knows what that is with me: I’ve been working on it for twenty years apparently, but I still have no idea. And, with you, it does sound like you might be about to be murdered, honey. Sorry.’
‘If I can make it to London, though,’ I say, ‘it might be different.’
‘Yeah,’ she says in a flat voice. ‘Sounds good, but it won’t work. Trust me. There’s nothing you can do to stop it. I pushed that to its limit and jumped in front of a train. It took me ages to overcome the bullshit instincts. You know: But I might die! Yeah, that ship has sailed. So anyway in the end I did it.’
I mean, I already knew this really. I did. But all the same I feel as if Lara’s picked up my last piece of hope and flung it into the flames. It burns brightly and is gone. I’m a shell, a husk, a pile of burnt twigs. I’m a glitch.
‘And?’ I manage to say.
‘I woke up, and it was morning, and I just got up and went to work.’
I don’t want to cry, but it’s too late. I’m crying. If I can’t hold on to the hope that I’ll be able to change the course of my day I don’t know what I’m going to do.
Lara’s tone changes. She starts to jolly me along like Mum used to. ‘Hey, you’ve got a detective on the outside! Can you get her to look me up? I love the idea of a ghost detective.’ She puts an arm round my shoulders. I lean into her. Weirdly, she’s the most solid person I’ve met in twenty years.
‘Of course!’
‘That would be magical. I’m Lara Billingham. I live in Exeter and work in London. I’m fifty-two and my son Josh is about to become a dad. Hence the eternal knitting. It’s for my grandbaby.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’
‘Can you see if you can find out about the baby? Maybe if I give you Josh’s old address?’
‘Josh Billingham?’ She nods. ‘Does he live in Exeter too?’ She nods again. ‘That should do it. Ariel does it on her phone. It’s like magic. You just put in someone’s name and it brings up everything about them. Their favourite photos and everything. It’s weird.’
‘I’m glad you got on my train, sweetie.’
‘Me too.’
‘I wonder how they’ll get you back to your shopping mall in time. The universe, or whoever it is that does it. Something will happen.’
As she says that the ticket inspector appears. I look at Lara.
‘One adult and one child to London, please,’ she says.
‘How old is he?’ says the ticket guy. Oldish, grumpy.
‘Fifteen,’ I say.
‘Any ID?’ he says.
‘Nope.’
‘Convenient for you to be the oldest possible child age,’ he says.
‘You got me,’ I say. ‘I’m thirty-five.’
He rolls his eyes, huffs and gives me a child ticket. Lara pays for them both. We look at each other.
‘What if I do make it, though?’ I say. ‘What then?’
At some point around Reading I look at my mobile phone. There are a million calls from Dad, and school, and Troy and Gus. I don’t listen to the answerphone messages. I switch the phone off and put it away. They can’t get me like that. I talk to Lara. She tells me about how she came to realize that she was reliving the same day.
‘God knows how many times I did it before I worked it out,’ she says. ‘Though I could hazard a guess now that you say it’s 2019 out there. It started as a sense of déjà vu, and then I realized that it wasn’t that I felt like it had happened before: it was because it completely had happened before. Everything came gradually into focus, and then, when you piece it all together, it’s devastating, isn’t it? So we don’t have long before we get to London. Listen to this bit: there’s a guy in Cornwall. Leo. I decided to get up earlier and catch a train in the wrong direction once. I was so sure it would work, and it did for a bit, but the train broke down at Bodmin Parkway and I ended up on the fast train to Paddington. Anyway, there was a lovely old-fashioned station cafe at Bodmin, and I got a cup of tea just for the comfort of something warm to hold. There was a guy in there dancing around and being weird, and after a while we realized we were the same.’
‘How did you know?’
‘The same way I did about you. You did about me. The blue thing that you only see when you start looking for it. The blue light that shines out of someone.’ She looks at me, questioning. ‘At least that’s what I see.’
‘Yeah. Me too. Ariel does as well.’
‘It’s always there, but it’s never the first thing you see. So Leo thinks he dies on the train, or maybe falls in front of it, and he tends just to wait at Bodmin station or in the woods round there, if you ever want to find him. He’s the one who calls it a glitch. His theory is that if your death is unsolved you can’t rest. Or go on to whatever else is out there, or anything.’ She gives me a big grin. ‘And that’s something, isn’t it? I take a huge amount of comfort from it: the fact that there’s life after death. I was brought up Catholic, then I was an atheist for years and years, but we are actual walking, talking proof of an afterlife, right?’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And you think we’ll go on to something else, when we sort this out?’
‘God only knows what. I doubt it’s going to be a glittering heaven or a flaming hell. I guess the whole point is that we can’t imagine it. So, according to the Bodmin guy, you glitch if the official story of your death and the thing that really happened don’t match up. You can’t move on without an ending: it’s about your life making sense.’ She grimaced a bit. ‘He also reckons we’re all in a simulation, that we’re not so much at the mercy of God as some kind of technology programmer in the future, but you know. Whatever. Maybe they’ll fix their computer? Or God will notice us. Or perhaps those are the same thing.’
I try to take it all in. I know I’ll be coming to visit Lara on this train a lot. I feel warm inside, better and less alone than I have for ages.
‘But what happens if they don’t?’ I say. ‘Can we move on?’
I notice how quickly I’ve abandoned any kind of hope that I might be alive and thirty-five. I think I knew, really, that I’ve been dead for many years.
‘I’m guessing here,’ she says. ‘There’s not exactly a textbook on the subject. But there was a woman I used to see at Paddington. We spoke a couple of times. She was definitely glitching. We compared notes, and then she stopped being there. I haven’t seen her for years. My theory – well, Leo’s really – is that if the “mystery” gets “solved”,’ she adds, making air quotes with her fingers, ‘then you can go on to … whatever’s next.’
‘So I really, really need Ariel,’ I say. ‘If I want to stop all this.’
‘You do,’ Lara says. ‘And I need an Ariel of my own. Shit. You know, I never thought to try to find someone from the future to help. It’s weird, yes? Because we’re living outside of time. Your Ariel is in 2019. Which must mean that in some way it’s 2019 now, but we can only live in 1999?’ She stares down at her knitting. ‘Is this baby nearly twenty? Fuck. I’m going to need a bigger jumper. Or is time different? Is it no year at all? And have you two just collided for whatever reason?’ She looks at me with narrowed eyes. ‘Do you fancy each other? Is it that? A love story outside of space and time?’
I laugh. ‘Lara,’ I say, ‘of course I fancy her.’
I stop and listen to what I’ve just said. It sounds so straightforward and I know that it’s true. I haven’t properly admitted it until now.
‘She’s beautiful, and funny, and alive, and until I met you I thought she was my only friend in the universe.’
‘Can you …? OK, pretend this doesn’t sound creepy. Can you touch her?’
‘No!’ I laugh because finally someone understands. I laugh because otherwise I’d cry. ‘That’s how we found out. I was pissing her off and she was standing in the doorway and I wanted to leave so I tried to push past. She said it felt really strange for her, when my hand went right through her. Kind of fizzy and cold. I didn’t feel anything, but I don’t quite like to tell her that.’
‘Mmm. That would be annoying for a girl to hear. You make me feel … nothing.’
‘Can I be your boyfriend?’ I say in a stupid voice. ‘I’m dead, and if I was alive I’d be inappropriately old for you, and also when I touch you I feel absolutely nothing.’
We laugh and laugh. I’m annoyed when the train slows down and I realize we’re coming into Paddington. I don’t want to be there, not yet. I’m not ready for Lara to die. I’m not ready to be carted back to Devon, but I know those things are both about to happen.
The police are standing at the ticket barriers.
‘Joseph Simpson?’ says one.
‘No,’ says Lara, stepping in front of me. ‘That’s not his name. This is my son, Kevin.’ I snigger a bit at being called Kevin, then stop because what if this works? What if it actually works? ‘So please leave him alone.’
She’s using a kind of teacher voice now, and she sounds scary. I’d leave me alone if I was them, but that’s maybe why I would never have been in the police.
‘I’m sorry, madam,’ says a woman, who’s very small but hard as nails. ‘We can clear this up quickly. I just need to see his ID.’
I wonder whether this glitch could possibly allow me to pause time, write some ‘Kevin’ ID and then start it again, but of course it doesn’t.
I pretend to fumble through my bag. I take out the Club biscuits, the book I haven’t read, my Discman, my switched-off phone.
