by J. S. Monroe
In recent months, he has seen Rosa increasingly often: at the wheel of passing cars, in the pub, on top of the Number 24 bus (front seats, where they always sat when they were in London, riding up to Camden). The appearances have their own name, according to the family GP back in Galway: ‘post-bereavement hallucinations’.
His father has other ideas, talking excitedly of the spéirbhean, the heavenly woman who used to appear in Irish visionary poems. ‘How can you be so insensitive now,’ his mother chided, but Jar doesn’t mind. He is close to his da.
He spent a lot of time at his home in Galway City in the immediate aftermath of Rosa’s death, trying to make sense of what had happened. His father owns a bar in the Latin Quarter. They would sit up late, talk through the sightings, particularly one, on the Connemara coast. (He did all the talking, Da listened.) Some he knows are false alarms, but others, the ones he can’t challenge…
‘You look like death, bro,’ Carl says, slumping down in his chair, which lets out a hiss of air. ‘Just seen a ghost?’
Jar doesn’t say anything as he logs into his computer.
‘Christ, sorry, bud,’ Carl says, shuffling through some promo CDs on his desk. ‘I thought—’
‘I bought you a coffee,’ Jar cuts in, passing him a latte. He doesn’t want to prolong his friend’s embarrassment. Carl’s a little overweight, baby faced with a mop of fair, dreadlocked hair and a cherubic smile, and has an annoying habit of abbreviating words in his emails (‘unforch’ for unfortunately) and saying things like ‘fave’, ‘bless’ and ‘fairs’, but he possesses less malice than anyone Jar knows.
‘Cheers.’ There is an awkward pause. ‘Where did it happen?’ Carl asks.
‘I’ll do today’s doodle,’ Jar says, ignoring him.
‘Are you sure?’
‘It’s Ibsen. Old pal of mine.’
They take it in turns to write stories about that day’s Google doodle. They are meant to log on to Australia’s Google page the night before, steal an eleven-hour march on the sleeping world, but they often forget. The stories are buried on the website, where no one can see them, but they’re a shot in the arm for traffic figures, as people click idly on the search engine’s embellished logo of the day.
Half an hour later, having filed far more than was necessary on Ibsen, mostly about Gina Ekdal’s character in The Wild Duck and an extraordinary student performance in Cambridge five years ago, he is down on the street, sheltering from the rain with Carl in an alleyway by the office entrance that smells of last night’s beer and worse.
‘Soft old day,’ Jar says, filling the silence. He can tell Carl is preparing himself to raise an awkward subject and looks around for a distraction. ‘Pizza eater, four o’clock.’
‘Where?’ Carl asks.
Jar nods across the road at a man walking along the pavement, talking into one end of his mobile phone, which he is holding horizontally in front of his mouth – like a slice of pizza. Carl and Jar watch, smiling. They both have a thing about people who talk into their mobile phones in funny ways: the furtive caller who whispers behind a cupped hand; the person who moves the phone back and forth between ear and mouth. The pizza eater, though, is one of their favourites.
‘I know it’s not my business,’ Carl says, drawing on a cigarette as the man disappears into a crowd. He holds the cigarette between his chubby thumb and first finger like a child writing with chalk. ‘But perhaps you should think about seeing someone, you know, about Rosa.’
Jar stares at the middle distance, hands sunk deep in his suede jacket, watching the traffic push through the rain and spray in the street beside them. He wishes he had a cigarette too, but he’s trying to give up. Again. Rosa never smoked. He’s come down to keep Carl company, let him know there are no bad feelings from earlier. And to dodge the 11 a.m. conference.
‘I think I might have found someone who could help,’ Carl continues. ‘She’s a bereavement counsellor.’
‘Been hanging out with undertakers again?’ Jar asks, recalling Carl’s recent ill-fated experiment in ‘funeral dating’. Working on the principle that pheromones tend to fly at funerals – ‘there’s a lot of grief in lust, and a lot of lust in grief’ – Carl had crashed a few wakes in the hope of finding love, not necessarily the widow, but someone foxy and confused in black.
‘She swiped right.’
Jar looks at his friend in surprise.
‘OK, she didn’t. She’s helping me with a story.’
‘About Tinder?’
‘Thought I might be interested in some new research they’re doing on the beneficial effects of music in shrinks’ waiting rooms. Play a bit of old-school jungle and people open up more.’
‘Jump out the window, more like.’ Jar pauses. ‘Thing is, this morning makes me more convinced than ever that Rosa’s alive,’ he says, taking the cigarette from Carl and inhaling deeply.
‘But it wasn’t her, was it?’
‘It could have been, that’s the point.’
They stand in silence, watching the rain. Hope’s a private, fragile thing, Jar thinks, easily extinguished by others. He inhales on Carl’s cigarette again, and hands it back. He can’t blame him for being sceptical. They are about to head back up to the office when Jar’s eye is caught by a movement, a tall man taking a seat in the window of Starbucks, across the street. Black North Face jacket, collar up, unremarkable brown hair, indistinctive features. Faceless and forgettable, except that it’s the third time Jar’s seen him in two days.
‘Do you recognise that man?’ Jar says, nodding at Starbucks.
‘Can’t say I do.’
‘Swear he was in the pub last night. And on my bus yesterday.’
‘Are they following you again?’
Jar nods in mock agreement, expecting his friend’s ridicule. He’s mentioned it to Carl before, the feeling that he’s being watched.
‘D’you know, one in three people suffer from paranoia?’ Carl says.
‘That few?’
‘The other two are watching him.’
Jar wants to offer a token laugh, something to show that he’s fine, just imagining it all, but he can’t.
‘The feeling I got when I saw her on the escalator…’ He pauses, allowing himself one more glance at the man. ‘Rosa’s out there, Carl, for sure she is. Searching for a way back.’
4
Cambridge, Autumn Term, 2011
It’s two weeks since I arrived here, and I am missing Dad more than ever. I thought the change of scene, a new start, would break the cycle, but it hasn’t. Not even the fog of Freshers’ Week can mask the great hulk of my grief. We were a double act, salt and pepper, Morecambe and Wise (his favourite show), closer than any of my friends seem to be with their fathers. Thrown together by fate, no say in the matter, that’s just how it was.
I got so angry in The Pickerel last night when people started badmouthing their parents. Then the girl in the next-door room, who is also studying English, dozy Josie from Jersey, asked about me. Of course the mood changed when I explained, a missed beat in the drunken hum of the pub, no one quite sure what to say, where to look. For a moment, I saw myself from above, wondered if that’s how Dad sees things these days.
Five minutes ago, when I woke to sunlight pouring in through these cheap college curtains, he was still alive and we were going out to lunch together in Grantchester. I was planning to tell him about my first weeks at Cambridge, the clubs I’ve joined, the people I’ve met. And then I remembered.
Dad used to talk all the time about this place. We only came here once together, in the summer, a week before he died (it still feels so strange writing that). He was his usual restless self that day. Dad just had incredible enthusiasm for life, an energetic intelligence. Given the chance, he would have shown me around Cambridge on his fold-up bike (the one he cycled to work on), or we would have jogged (he had the lean physique of a fell runner). Instead, we walked, at pace, me struggling to keep up.
He began by showing me
around what he kept calling his college, which was men-only in his day. Can you imagine? It’s comforting to know that he was here before me, walking the same paths, crossing the same hallowed courts. And then he took me punting, said that’s what you did. At least he wasn’t wearing a straw boater.
Uncharacteristically, there were moments of quietness that day, and he explained that things were difficult at work. He never spoke much about his job and I usually didn’t ask. All I knew was that it had taken us to various embassies around the world, mostly in south Asia, and that he worked in the Foreign Office’s Political Unit, sending reports back to London that he joked no one ever read.
For the last two years he’d been based in London. I’m not sure if it was a promotion, but he still travelled occasionally. I was old enough to look after myself when he was away. And old enough to accompany him to work functions when he was back, including a garden party at Buckingham Palace last year. He wore the same blazer he was wearing that day on the River Cam.
‘I’ve got to go to India,’ he said, ducking unnecessarily as we passed under Clare Bridge.
‘Lucky you.’
I regretted my tone. I knew he didn’t like being absent for long stretches.
‘Ladakh,’ he added, smiling.
He hoped that this would somehow soften the blow. We had a happy trip together there once, to Leh, where we hung out in hippy cafés on the Changspa Road, watching young Israelis drive into town on Enfield Bullets as they tried to seek some solace in the mountains after national service. It’s possibly my favourite place in the whole world. I want to have a job one day that allows me to travel like Dad.
I watched him nod at a punt passing us in the other direction. Two proud parents sitting in the front, prodigal son steering them down the Backs. I’m sure that my father’s career was hampered by his insistence on being there for his only child. He pretty much brought me up himself, with the help of an ayah or two along the way.
‘Promise me you’ll try everything when you get here,’ he said.
I remember not liking his tone, the suggestion that he might still be away when I went ‘up’ to Cambridge, as he insisted on saying, but maybe hindsight is skewing my memory. That sunny afternoon, however, he was not himself; more reserved, fewer jokes.
‘Sign up for all the clubs and societies,’ he continued, a false levity in his voice. ‘Give everything a go, the whole damn life here. I remember joining Labour, the SDP and the Conservatives all in the same night.’
‘Is that why you’re so good at this? Because you joined a punting club?’
‘I learnt how to punt to impress your mother. First time I took her out, the pole stuck in the mud – easy thing to do. I just shouldn’t have clung on to it when the boat drifted away.’
‘Dad!’ I said, with mock exasperation. I could see the memory made him happy rather than sad, a smile creasing the corner of his mouth, the side he always used to whisper silly things out of when we were meant to be being serious. ‘It’s pronounced “Ma’am” as in “spam”, and remember to curtsy,’ he’d said moments before I bobbed in front of the Queen in heels that sank into the Buckingham Palace turf.
I find it hard to imagine being able to do that: smile at the thought of him. Right now it just makes me want to curl up in this narrow college bed and die.
5
Jar knows that there’s something wrong the moment he steps out of the lift. The door to his flat is open, a sharp triangle of light slicing the darkness of the landing. His breath shortens.
‘Wait here,’ he says to Yolande, whom he was kissing in the lift seconds earlier. They had met in a pub at the top of Brick Lane, where he often stops off after work. A pattern has emerged in recent months. After a ‘post-bereavement hallucination’, as he now knows he must call this morning’s sighting of Rosa, he seeks the comfort of a stranger. A misguided attempt to move on with his life: strangers somehow making him feel less unfaithful to her memory.
He pushes the door further open, but it catches against something. Forcing it, he steps inside, blood pulsing at his temples. The flat – one big room, a kitchenette at the far end, bed at the other – has been ransacked, the floor littered with books pulled from the bookshelves that line every inch of the walls. Some of the shelves have been wrenched and are leaning limply into the room like storm-torn trees. He closes his eyes, trying to rationalise what’s happened.
Burglary is not uncommon in his towerblock, the most recent series of break-ins blamed on crackheads north of the Hackney Road. Nic Farah, a photographer one floor down, had his computer lifted last week. And a TV and sound system were stolen from a flat on the sixteenth, four floors below him, a few days earlier. As a half-hearted precaution, Jar has taken to hiding his twelve-string guitar under the bed.
He steps through the snowfall of books on the floor, snatching at his father’s copy of More Than a Game by Con Houlihan. Instinctively, he knows that none are missing. It’s not what they – whoever ‘they’ are – came here for. He bends down beside the bed. His guitar case is still there. He is about to stand up but decides to pull the battered case out. Anything to distract himself, stop the thoughts chasing each other around his head. Reassured by the case’s heaviness, he opens it beside him on the bed. The guitar is safe, undamaged, further confirmation that this isn’t a regulation burglary. Good guitars like his are easy enough to sell for cash.
‘I’m guessing it’s not normally like this,’ Yolande says, standing in the doorway. Her voice is polished. Jar is shocked by how easily he has forgotten her. ‘Shall I call the police?’
He should have made his excuses at the bar and left, not brought her back here. She isn’t even technically a stranger. She had caught his eye the last time he went in to see his publisher, walking past him with a box of books to be signed by an author more in favour than he would ever be. And then there she was in the bar tonight. It would have been rude not to go over and talk to her.
‘No,’ Jar says. He strums an impatient chord on the guitar before putting it away. ‘Nothing’s been taken.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because there’s nothing to take now.’ Jar snaps the guitar case shut and paces around the room.
‘So many books,’ she says, watching him. And two more coming tomorrow, Jar thinks: Young Skins, by Colin Barrett, to compensate for this week’s Jennifer Lawrence story, and Anne Enright’s The Green Road for a One Direction quiz. Futile attempts to maintain some sort of cultural equilibrium in his life. He’s running out of room.
‘Let me help you clear up,’ Yolande says, at his side now, a hand on his shoulder.
Jar flinches at the contact. She is too good to be involved in his life. As he watches her retrieve a book, something catches his eye in all the mess. It’s a photo of Rosa. And it shouldn’t be here. He doesn’t keep any reminders of her in the flat, no trace at all. It’s a rule of his. Did someone leave it, like a calling card? And then he remembers that he’d used the photo as a bookmark when he was at Cambridge. It must have fallen out of a book.
He bends down to retrieve it, staring at her face. Rosa always did know how to get his attention. He loves her studiousness in this one: at her desk, not looking at the camera, chewing on a pen. He’s seen so many images over the past five years that he worries he can no longer remember what she was really like, his memory of her shaped by photos.
‘I ought to be heading home,’ Yolande says, looking over his shoulder. Her voice startles him. How long has he been staring at the photo?
He knows she is owed an apology, an explanation at least, but he doesn’t know where to begin.
‘OK,’ he says, turning away from Rosa’s accusatory gaze: another one-night stand you’ve treated shabbily.
Jar looks at Yolande for a moment. A different night, another life, they would be making drunken, languid love by now, falling into bed after he had wooed her with an Irish ballad on the guitar, one of the songs that he used to hear so often in his old bedroom, h
is father’s voice floating up through the floorboards of the family-owned bar in Galway.
‘I’m sorry. Will I come down with you, hail a cab?’
‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘Really.’
But he insists and they descend in the lift together in silence.
‘You loved her very much, didn’t you,’ she says as the lift shakes itself to a halt on the ground floor. ‘She was lucky to have known that.’
Outside on the street, she hails her own cab, but he waits until she is inside and heading into the night – to Mile End, he thinks she said – before walking back to his block of flats with new purpose, or is it fear? What happened in his flat tonight means that someone – who, he is still not sure – is starting to take him seriously. Someone who wants to know how much he’s found out about Rosa. And possibly try to stop him, too. A van door closes in the distance. He presses the button for the twentieth floor and steps back outside the lift as the doors slide shut. Not waiting for the empty lift to rattle up into the night, he heads out the back entrance of the block of flats and cuts across another estate to a row of lock-up garages.
He’s learnt over the years that paranoia is a corrosive disease, eating away like acid at the edges of his rational mind, but he allows himself one certainty this evening: his flat wasn’t visited by burglars. The chaos was too choreographed, too methodical for crackheads. In recent days he has had the feeling of being watched, followed home from work, observed from coffee shops, a sensation that he has so far managed to dismiss. Tonight changes everything.
He unbolts the locked side door of the garage and steps inside, turning on the fluorescent strip light. His actions feel more valid now. He isn’t expecting this place to have been burgled too, but it’s still a relief to find it exactly as he left it yesterday. He sits down at the computer, switching it on as he looks around the small, cold space. Rosa always feels closer here.
Three nautical charts of the north Norfolk coastline, taped together, dominate one breeze-block wall. Red-marker-pen arrows have been drawn on to the charts, indicating the direction of currents; beaches as far west as Burnham Deepdale and Hunstanton have been circled. Next to the charts is an Ordnance Survey map of Cromer. Green-coloured pen lines lead out to photographs and CCTV stills neatly stuck to an adjacent pinboard.
