The Green Man

by Lee Mather

  The Green Man

  By

  Lee Mather

  Damnation Books, LLC.

  P.O. Box 3931

  Santa Rosa, CA 95402-9998

  www.damnationbooks.com

  The Green Man

  by Lee Mather

  Digital ISBN: 978-1-61572-259-4

  Cover art by: Matt Truiano

  Edited by: Stephanie Parent

  Copyright 2010 Lee Mather

  Printed in the United States of America

  Worldwide Electronic & Digital Rights

  1st North American and UK Print Rights

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned or distributed in any form, including digital and electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the Publisher, except for brief quotes for use in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For my Dad, the brightest star.

  For Jen, For Mum. For Scott, For being there.

  The Green Man

  This is not a story I have told easily; in fact, I have never spoken about it to anyone before tonight. It’s late, midnight almost, and I’ve been sitting here for over an hour, poised in the dark of my study, without a clue where to start. My heart beats quickly, my hands tremble. I knew this wasn’t going to be easy. Too much happened that day, and even the eight years that have passed have not been enough to heal me.

  I sigh and reach past the clutter of my desk: a sleeping laptop, a charging phone, a mix of papers ranging from VAT receipts to Evie’s latest report card. I pick up the chewed pen I’ve spied trapped beneath the debris and hesitate. Maybe this story should be told face-to-face, but I’m still not ready to look someone in the eye and speak what’s on my mind. That is why I’ve chosen to write it down the old-fashioned way. This is the most human form of expression I can cope with.

  There is further method in this madness. Hannah bought me this notebook, some years ago, after Doctor Adams told me that it might help me to start a journal. I never did. In fact, I ended my sessions with him not long after, so it remained blank save for a private message handwritten by my wife on the inside cover. These thoughts don’t belong alongside anything else. I gently rub my fingers across the neat curves of her handwriting in search of the strength to begin. Without her knowing it, her connection to these pages helps me. She is my crutch. I breathe a heavy sigh, and the sound is exaggerated against the eerie quiet of the house. Pen touches paper.

  Some context will help you before I continue. Faith had never been something that came easily to me. I grew up in the eighties, part of the cynical MTV generation that questions and derides. I believed in nothing for a long time, no God, no Heaven. Those who did, I thought, were naïve. When you die, that’s the end, was my philosophy. This was no way to live. In times of grief I was hopeless. I wished I could lose myself in the comfort of knowing there would be something better waiting for me and my loved ones someday. But I couldn’t. Scepticism was ingrained in my nature, and I suspect I was like many people of a similar age, a product of the time.

  Why now, you might ask? To answer simply, my daughter Evie has prompted me to sit here in the gloom. My tumult, buried deep over the years, has started to surface. It began two days ago when she came home from school and questioned me about Heaven.

  “How do we really know it exists, Daddy?”

  “Will we be in Heaven together when we die, you, Mummy and me?”

  “If you’re already there, how will you know it’s me, I mean when I die? What if you don’t recognize me? Will I be alone?”

  She is getting older, too quickly for my liking, and it seems that with every day she loses another piece of her innocence. Her ever-sharpening mind is quite capable of forming opinions these days, and my word alone no longer seems to satisfy her.

  “What do you mean, Daddy? How do you know?”

  That is my quandary. How do I explain faith to a child old enough to see through me when I’m not sure of the truth? That’s why I am here. I need to make enough sense of my thoughts so that I can look my daughter in the eye and reassure her about life and death. My problem is that my journey is not something a rational man can easily explain, even to himself.

  Strangely, as I think back, the pen tight in my hand, the last remnants of steam drifting from the top of my quickly cooling coffee, it is the ending I remember clearest. Blue is the color I see, not green. It is the flashing blue lights on top of the police car that mesmerize me. The tangle of pain and confusion I feel is like nothing I have ever previously experienced, and I feel hopelessly alone. In that frozen moment in time, I am lost.

  A policeman approaches me, grim faced. His jacket collar is pulled up as high as it will go to keep the rain out. I stand motionless in front of him, my saturated T-shirt clinging to my flesh.

  “Mr. Jones, can I ask you a couple of questions?” he says dourly.

  I stare through him with so many unanswered questions of my own. The stretcher passes me and I cannot bear to look at it. For the first time in my life I am certain that my mother’s premonition was true.

  I believe in the Green Man.

  At that time, belief should have given me faith, but my grief was too fresh, my nerves too raw. It came later, as time helped to soften the edges. Earlier that day, things had been different. The plane crash changed everything.

  * * * *

  That morning I was more nervous than usual, and I remember blaming this on my mother. I’d barely slept the night before, and the trip to Manchester Airport and the check-in had felt like a bad dream. My tiredness had made me irritable, and by the time I took my seat on board my anxiety was spiking. I secured the safety harness prematurely; something I had a habit of doing on flights, even when takeoff was not in sight. At that time the flight to Glasgow was stationary on the runway, and most people were still shuffling onto the plane or cramming baggage into the compartments overhead. The engines weren’t even growling yet. This period is stark in my memory because this is when I went over my mother’s phone call over and over again in my mind. She had scared me, spooked me, and at that stage it wasn’t just the fact she had mentioned the Green Man that caused my distress; it was more the tone of her voice, the long fractured pauses and what had seemed like genuine fear. It was probably my tenth flight of the year, though to be honest I was never the best flier even in my twenties. Yet never before that day had I flown with a premonition of impending death ringing in my ears.

  Either way, she had gotten under my skin.

  “Don’t get on the plane, Peter,” she had said, her voice surprisingly steady. “He visited me yesterday.” She left the words out there with no explanation. I knew instantly whom she was referring to. Anger bubbled inside me, and I searched for something suitably dismissive to say.

  “Something bad is going to happen,” she continued without waiting for me to speak.

  My answer was to swear at her.

  She didn’t respond, and I started to hurl abuse in her direction. I called her crazy. I tried to drag her down to my level but she wouldn’t bite, she wouldn’t fight back. She kept calmly insisting that this was real, that I was in danger. That she loved me. Eventually I’d put the phone down, tearful with rage. Hence my sleepless night.

  I stared out of the plane’s window wishing that I was somewhere else.

  “Looking good, Jonesy,” a mocking voice said beside me.

  Seb was in the next seat, and I can still clearly see that smug, shit-eating grin
on his face. He was a decent guy, one of the few positives about my job in those days as a clothing buyer. I had no passion for my work back then, and at times Seb and his constant mischief kept me sane. But not on that day, on that particular day, I would have strangled him just to shut him up. In my mind’s eye he stares at me, trying to catch my attention, trying to get me to acknowledge his smirk. The image is a painful one.

  I cracked eventually, my response to casually flash him the bird. Seb had laughed loudly, unconcerned by anyone else on the plane.

  I think I relaxed a bit after that. Long enough for people to take their seats and for both stewardesses to walk along the aisle, closing each of the overhead compartments. They were brisk, businesslike in their manner, and when the older of the pair glanced at me, I suspect that she sensed my fear. She offered me half a smile of reassurance as she passed. As we approached takeoff Seb was still grinning, and I was still doing my best to ignore him.

  The engines of the plane, a Jet as opposed to the Dash-style propeller planes we sometimes got when we flew to Scotland, kicked in with a thunderous rumble, and I recall that my stomach reacted with what felt like a sneeze. Seb was never a fan of the Jet on the smaller, domestic flights.

  “Listen to that. The engines feel too big for the plane. I can feel it shaking. We’ll be lucky if we don’t get pulled in two when we take off,” he said with a sly chuckle.

  I ignored him, aware of his juvenile intention to wind me up. My thoughts returned to my mother. It felt like a chill had settled over my seat.

  The younger stewardess, Samantha, a platinum blonde with hair long enough to have reached the nametag on her chest had it not been tied back, began her safety presentation just four rows from where I sat stewing. She was awarded the mild attention of a few around her. I, on the other hand, focused hard on her. It felt like I was the only person hanging on her every word.

  “You look worse than normal today,” Seb said loudly, not waiting for the stewardess to finish. She glanced in his direction but he ignored her.

  I shrugged at him and forced an unconvincing smile. I could not possibly tell him about my mother.

  Samantha finished her drill and people routinely snapped on their belts. Each sound was magnified to me; somehow, even the smallest detail scratched my surface. Something stirred within the bowels of the Jet, and the noise trebled in volume. I must have flinched because Seb laughed loudly again. Finally I looked at him, incapable of hiding my emotions.

  “You’re a child,” I snapped.

  He grinned gleefully. “You make me laugh, Pete,” he said. “Every little noise and you poke your head about like a scared rabbit. Look at the size of you, for Christ’s sake. How can this scare you?”

  I managed a rueful smile. He was right of course, but unbeknownst to him, irrationality ruled me that day. Maybe if I’d spoken up then, maybe if I’d trusted my mother, things might have been different.

  “Watch this,” Seb said mischievously.

  The next bit I remember well because it typified Seb. He moved forward as Samantha passed to complete her final checks. He wore that shit-eating grin again, and I recall blushing because I had an idea of what he was about to say before he opened his big mouth.

  “Excuse me, miss?” he said innocently.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, leaning closer. Her perfume smelled fresh and clean, and I am amazed that this detail leaves my memory for the page.

  “How big do you reckon my friend is?” he said, expertly stifling his laugh.

  She glanced at me brightly. My legs were pretty much folded up to my chest to fit the space behind the seat in front, and my long frame meant that I had chosen the aisle seat because it at least allowed me to stretch out one of my legs once the flight got going.

  “Oh…six four, maybe?” she offered with a good-humored smile. Maybe she thought Seb was trying to set me up with her. Not likely, because at that very moment my wife and my baby girl were at home sleeping off another restless night of teething trouble.

  It seems a long time ago to think of Evie and the problems she’d had with her milk teeth, and it fleetingly rescues me from these dreadful memories. It is a welcome release. I stretch for a moment, my back stiff where I have been tensely positioned for the hour it has taken me to write this much. The desk lamp flickers, and I am briefly consumed by the night until the yellow light returns.

  Seb grinned at Samantha the stewardess. “Six six,” he said with a chuckle. “Would you believe he’s scared of flying?”

  It finally clicked into place that he was teasing me, and mock-scolding, she shook her head at him.

  “Don’t be so mean,” she said, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder, which I didn’t feel. “Don’t worry, sir, it’s not a long flight and I assure you we’ll be perfectly safe.”

  How can you know? How can you really know? was what I wanted to scream at her, but instead I kept my fear locked up inside me.

  “Once we’re in the air I’ll fix you a special drink to help your nerves,” she said with a wink before disappearing along the aisle to check more seatbelts.

  “Safest way to travel,” Seb muttered smugly as he took out his Filofax.

  We sat in silence after that as we waited for takeoff, and my mother’s words still spun around my head. She knows I hate flying. How could she do this to me?

  The Green Man had been a myth in my family for as long as I could remember, and in my youth it had been a big joke to me, a way of poking fun at my mother’s spirituality. This worsened as I grew older, and it became a source of impatience and irritation when my mother refused to fit neatly into my rational world. It wasn’t just the normal embarrassment of a teenager struggling to cope with the journey into adulthood. This was a fundamental clash of worlds.

  I think what had rattled me so much on the eve of the flight was that the phone call had been the first time I’d spoken with my mother in six months, and the first time she had mentioned the Green Man since my father’s death.

  I was eighteen when he died, a heart attack taking him before he was fifty. It very nearly finished me. I was devastated, angry, terrified. It was after his funeral, when the final guests had cleared, that my mother took me to one side and spoke about the Green Man’s visit. She told me that she had seen him the day before the heart attack, that he had been there to warn her about my father’s passing. If only there had been something she could have done. I reacted badly, the simmering rage of a boy changing into a man fueled by grief, incomprehension and of course that lack of a coping strategy. There was no reason or comfort to be found in my father’s death, and my mother put a firecracker into this vat of acid when she brought up her ridiculous premonition. We didn’t recover from that day, my mother and I, at least not until the flight I am writing about.

  I’m ashamed to say it, but for months after the funeral we could not speak without arguing violently. I moved out soon after and rented a flat that I could ill afford. It was in the student area on the outskirts of Manchester, sandwiched between an aging drug dealer and a single mother with three kids from different fathers. Not that the impoverished area or the poor repair of the building mattered. I had to get out. My mother would not concede that she had invented her story, and I would not entertain that it could be true. Worse, I could not even accept it as her way of coping with the tragedy, of making sense of my father’s abrupt passing. It was easier for us both to scream our pain away. We had become each other’s emotional punching bags.

  Eventually the arguments stopped, but the feeling of corruption worsened between us, and sometimes we went months without speaking. When we did it was cordial but distant.

  My father’s death was the third time my mother had seen the Green Man.

  She first encountered him was when she was a small child, five or maybe six years old. She always described it as a perfect summer’s day; she was busy having a tea party in the garden by herself with just her dolls and stuffed animals for guests. Her mother was not too far away folding
laundry in the kitchen. Without knowing exactly why, my mother used to say, she had placed down her Raggedy Ann doll and looked to the willow tree at the rear of the yard. He was standing a few feet away, shimmering green in the sunlight, and although she couldn’t quite make out his features beyond the dazzling color, she insists that she knew the strange glow was a man. The funny thing was that at no point had she been scared by his presence.

  She always believed that it was William, her grandfather who had never returned from the Second World War, and that he had come back to her as a guardian angel. Without ever explaining why, she claimed she knew he was there to offer her some comfort. Although she had never met him, her grandmother had talked about William often enough, and my mother was adamant that he was the Green Man. “I just know,” was what she’d infuriatingly said when I was old enough to question her.

  They embraced, that summer’s afternoon, and she was so comfortable and it was such a unique feeling, even under the glare of the sun, that she would never forget it. He stayed with her for a while until her father called her from the kitchen for supper. My mother blinked and the Green Man was gone. She was alone at her tea party.

  The next day her grandmother died.

  Throughout the years this story has brought many reactions from me, but as I waited for takeoff that day, I could not shake the thought that I was about to fall from the sky, my world devoured in an inferno of flaming metal. The recollection turns my blood to ice. My skin crawls and wriggles beneath my shirt, and fear returns to me as pungent and as nauseating as it was that day. Now I pause again and sip my coffee, which has become cold as a Frappuccino. My pulse softens a little, and I remind myself that I am safe here in my cluttered study facing a double bookcase, filled not with books but with DVDs. I shake my head in the gloom. Before that flight, every mention of the Green Man had been after some tragic event, and even as a child I had never really given it a moment’s credence. That day was different. Before the flight nobody died, and it felt very much like a genuine warning. Her claim alone was enough for me to doubt my rational world, and in many ways that had angered me. What if? had been a crippling notion.