It was nice to be in his company again. Nothing more than nice – she was not here, she reminded herself again, to rekindle old flames – but it was that. His presence was warm, comforting. After the stresses of the past few days, it was a soothing balm. The sense of humour, the affection – God, the warmth of him. She’d forgotten that quality he had. He’d missed his vocation, she thought: he’d have made a great counsellor. But for all that, she mustn’t forget why she was here.
After the dessert, they ordered coffee. Now, she decided, was the time.
“John?”
“Mm?”
“There’s something...”
“What is it, love?”
Love. Oh God, she should have said this sooner. Heaven knew what he was imagining here, what hopes had taken shape in his mind.
“I need... John, I need your help.”
“Sure. I mean, anything I can do to... what is it you need?”
“The house I’ve moved into. There’s something – wrong with it.”
“Wrong? What like? Rising damp? Subsidence?”
“No.” A deep breath, and she looked him in the eyes. “The kind of thing you deal with.”
“What?” He stared. “Seriously? Are you saying...?”
“Haunted, okay?” Shit, that had been too loud. She looked around, lowered her voice. “My house. I think it’s haunted.”
He stared at her, then snorted with laughter. “Very fucking funny.”
“John –”
“No, it’s hilarious. Really. I can’t believe you wanted have a dig at me about that –”
“John, I’m not having a dig.” She leant forward across the table, spoke through gritted teeth. So much for the charm offensive. “There’s something going on in my house, and it’s not – it’s not bloody normal, I know that. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. I don’t know what it is. I thought I was going mad – and you know something? I bloody wish I was, because at least then I’d know where I am. I’d need more therapy, more medication, more... whatever. But there’s stuff that can’t just be explained by me being mental. And that scares the shit out of me. I don’t know where the line is between the real stuff and what’s just in my head. I need someone who understands this kind of thing, John, and you –”
“And I just happened to be cluttering up your Facebook feed with a friend request.”
“John –”
John kissed his teeth; his eyes darted round the restaurant. He was angry, but he didn’t want a scene. “Should have known, but I thought no, give her the benefit of the doubt. I send you a friend request, and it sits around there with nothing happening for days. I mean, I could see that you’d friended some other people from uni.”
“Oh, so you were stalking me?”
“Don’t be stupid. We’ve got mutual friends on Facebook. I could see you were friending them – everyone else, all the others, but not me. I won’t lie to you, that hurt. But then, boom. You friended me, and you wanted to meet, and I’m thinking wait a sec, this is going from cold to hot way too fast. I knew there had to be some sort of reason.” He kissed his teeth again and shook his head, settling back in the chair, the anger subsiding or at least under control. “Just didn’t want to believe it.”
“It wasn’t like that, John.”
“Really? How was it, then?”
“When I first got the friend request, I couldn’t decide. You think you’re the only one with bad memories? But then, yes, this happened, and I knew there wasn’t anyone else I could ask.”
“You know what gets me?” he said. “This shit is what you dumped me for. Remember? You’re supposed to be a scientist, John – that’s what you said to me. You spent three years getting a degree and now you’re pissing it all away. Any of that ring a bell?”
“John –”
“You finished it because of that,” he said. “And now you come back and you say John, help me, I’ve got a haunted house. All of a sudden you believe in ghosts. What the hell happened?”
And then he realised, as soon as he’d said it, and his mouth snapped shut. Too late, though. He’d said it. Alice looked down. Her eyes were prickling. No, she mustn’t cry. The make-up would run, and she’d spent time and money putting this mask in place.
“Shit. Alice...” He reached out, touched her hand.
“Leave it!” She snatched her hands clear of the tablecloth. Her voice had been louder than she’d intended. Heads turned.
Neither she nor John spoke for a while. Then she put a hand to her face, cupped to hide her expression from others’ prying eyes, and said, “Don’t start thinking it’s that. This is not about Emily. I didn’t believe before she died, and I didn’t start believing after. I’ve got a brain – I’ve got reason and logic and intelligence, and I use what I’ve got and I’m proud of it. Okay? I work off logic and evidence, not wishful thinking, not emotion.”
“Yeah,” he said at last. “That’s true. You always did.”
They were silent for a while, not looking at one another.
“Do you want to go and get a drink?” he asked at last.
“Okay,” she said.
“All right,” said John, and raised a hand. “Can we have the bill, please?”
AFTERWARDS, THEY WALKED onto New Bailey Street and dawdled across the Prince’s Bridge.
“It’s pretty.” Alice leant against the bridge-work and studied the light glimmering on the darkened Irwell. Along the banks, brightly-lit buildings reared, and shone, reflected in the waters.
“Yeah, it is. I keep forgetting you haven’t seen it in a while.”
“Too long. I was happy here.”
“So was I. We both were.”
She didn’t answer at first; at last she acknowledged that much – were – with a nod.
A long sigh, and John leaned on the bridge beside her. “So come on, then. Tell me. What happened?”
She started, and once she had she couldn’t stop. Once or twice Alice heard her voice hitch and felt John stir beside her, reaching out, and had to wave him away. She wasn’t after comfort, and couldn’t let him get the idea there could be anything between them again.
At last she was done. “I really want to think I dreamt, or hallucinated it,” she said. “I’m not scared of saying mental illness, because I’ve been there and it’s not so bad. Just different. But the thing is there are these bruises and I don’t know how I got them. There’s this stone in my garden and it was in a – dream, hallucination, whatever it was – that I had before I found it. And most of all there’s this bloody Bronze Age spearhead lying in my hallway one morning that Chris Fry’s going bonkers over. Now, I couldn’t have imagined that. And it didn’t just get posted through my letterbox, did it?”
John sighed, watching the river flow.
“Look, John – you want me to eat humble pie? I’ll eat humble pie. Yes, this is the kind of thing I always laughed at when we were together. If you’d told me a story like this, yes, I would have said it was bullshit, or that whoever it happened to was mad. But I can’t do that, I’m living it, and I can’t write it all off or rationalise it no matter what I do. So, yes – you are the only person I know, that I’ve ever known, who might understand this, believe it, have dealt with something like it. I need help, John, but I don’t know what kind or how much, okay? That’s why I’m asking you.”
John Revell bowed his head, hands clasped as though in prayer. Finally he nodded, sighed and straightened up. “Come with me,” he said.
JUST OVER THE bridge was the entrance to the Mark Addy; from it, a staircase wound down to the pub itself, a converted former landing stage on the banks of the Irwell, a relic of the days when the river was used for shipping. There was a river terrace, but at this time of night, and this time of year, the doors to it were locked.
The floor was carpeted; John went over to the bar while Alice found a table by one of the floor-length windows, with a comfy-looking armch
air and a chaise-longue, which she perched on.
John came back with three glasses. “Two double brandies and a Diet Coke,” he said. “Thought you might want a stiff one.”
She raised her eyebrows. “In your dreams, Revell.”
He laughed. “I only meant a drink. I swear to God. Anyway, then I remembered you were on the wagon, so I got you the Diet Coke.”
He sipped his brandy; she studied the two glasses and thought fuck it. “I’ll risk it for a biscuit,” she sighed, and took a sip.
“Okay,” said John. He was looking down again, the brandy glass cradled in his hands. “Look, Alice...”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” He sighed. “See, the thing is – Christ, I should have updated that Facebook page months ago. The paranormal stuff? I don’t do that any more.”
“Oh.”
“And more than that – see, you know how it started. You were there.”
“Yes, I was. And, you know, I still kick myself sometimes.”
“About dumping me?”
“Get over yourself. No, I mean... I don’t know if we’d have lasted anyway – we were both pretty young, weren’t we? Still had a lot of growing up to do. But bloody hell, I could have shown you a bit more understanding. You’d just lost your mum.”
It had been a Sunday afternoon. She’d cooked a roast – leg of lamb with all the trimmings, (including Yorkshire pudding, which she was pretty sure wasn’t supposed to go with lamb but John was addicted to.) They’d just finished that and she’d come back from the kitchen with the apple crumble – she really had been working on being the perfect little housewife – when the phone had rung.
I’ll get it, John had said. Sit yourself down.
He’d gone into the kitchen. She’d served up portions of the dessert. They were never eaten.
Hi, Dad, John had said. You okay?
After that there’d been a silence. Then John had whispered, What?
Another very long silence, followed by the odd mumble from John. Finally he’d said, Okay, Dad. We’ll be right over. Yeah. Right away. Yeah. The click of the phone returned to its cradle had been so soft she’d barely heard it; wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been listening.
John? she’d called, but there’d been no answer. Then a single sob; the first of a torrent.
She’d found him sitting on the kitchen floor, face buried in his hands. He’d clung to her, finally managed to stop. He’d wiped his face with kitchen towels while he told her what had happened.
Dorothea and Elijah had gone to church, as they did every Sunday. She’d been dressed in her best, as she always was; sang louder than anyone else, as she always did. They’d gone home, eaten Sunday dinner, and, afterward, lazed in their chairs. Everything was as it was meant to be. Then Dorothea had got up to go to the toilet. Elijah, dozing in the summer afternoon’s warmth, only realised something was wrong when he looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and saw that half an hour had gone by.
When she didn’t answer, Elijah went upstairs. He found one of his wife’s shoes halfway down the staircase. Dorothea herself was lying on the landing a few feet from the bathroom door. She’d wet herself on collapsing; that detail had haunted Elijah Revell for months afterward. She would have hated that, he’d kept saying. She always liked to keep everything so clean.
A blood vessel had burst; it was as simple and as brutal as that. A massive haemorrhage. There was no need for Elijah to torment himself with guilt at not noticing in time – although of course he did for months and years afterwards, probably continued to do so on some level even today – because there’d been no time. Dorothea Revell, née Stoneham, daughter of Nathaniel and Victoria, wife to Elijah, mother to Carol and John, had been unconscious in less than a minute and dead within five. The best medical attention in the world would have made no difference.
Elijah had called the ambulance and sat, stunned and weeping, on the stairs with his wife until they arrived. His world had fallen apart and refused to make sense; even his children had been forgotten. Only when they had taken Dorothea away did he stumble to the telephone and call first John, then Carol.
Alice had driven John over. Carol Revell had already been there, and was already handling her grief by organising furiously: notifying friends and neighbours, speaking to undertakers and the pastor of their church, finally getting into a furious argument with the hospital her mother’s body had been taken to before the whirlwind of fury driving her had ebbed and she’d allowed herself to cry.
John breathed out, long and heavy. “Well, if we’re blaming ourselves,” he said, “you were right, in a way. I’d spent three years getting a Physics degree, after all. I was wasting it – I mean, I did. I let the grief just... take over completely, and for years as well.” He took a large swallow of brandy.
“I could have been a bit more patient, though, couldn’t I?” said Alice. “I mean, I look back on how I was and I flipping well cringe.”
John chuckled. “I think that’s pretty standard at our age.”
Alice smiled back. “Yeah, maybe. Even so, though. You were grieving.”
“You grieve for months, years maybe. Well, I don’t think it ever goes away –”
“No, neither do I. Not now.”
It had been a terrible time – for Alice too, who’d come to love Elijah and Dorothea. But the Revell family had dealt with the loss and gone on with their lives as before. All except John.
Everyone grieves in their own way. Elijah and Carol both had their faith to sustain them; Elijah had been raised with it and he and Dorothea had raised both children the same way. None of the Revells had ever questioned that faith; to them – to Dorothea most of all – the existence of God, Heaven and Hell, the divinity of Christ and His love for humankind, in general and in each particular case were facts of life, as self-evident and inarguable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
None of the Revells, except for John. He’d spent too long watching science crowd God out of the spaces He’d existed in before, and he couldn’t simply believe any longer. But nor could he give himself wholly over to cold logic and rationality. And out of that had come his fascination with the paranormal. Parapsychology: quite literally chasing phantoms – ghosts, rumours, tall stories – and trying to pin a scientific label on them. Trying to broker some sort of deal between his childhood faith and mature learning, to find some scientific principle that would let him say his mother wasn’t gone – not wholly, not irrevocably.
He’d been trying to square one of the oldest circles there was: all logic said that the death of the body was the end. No persistence, no survival of consciousness, no soul. No future reunion with lost loved ones, no afterlife, only oblivion. But however certain it seemed in the face of logic, it was intolerable in the face of the death of your loved ones.
But Alice, back then, had been a militant atheist before the term was even coined. There was only science and reason. Religious belief could never be anything other than stupidity or madness, born from weakness of mind. At first, she’d tolerated John’s burgeoning interest, albeit grudgingly, but her patience had run out. There’d been rows – and finally, the split.
It seemed so stupid now. Isaac Newton had believed in magic, hadn’t he? There were other scientists, great scientists, who also professed a belief in a deity. None of that diminished their greatness, their stature. To have thought John’s beliefs, born out of loss, to be an issue, now seemed so stupid. And besides, she’d suffered no loss by then: her parents were still alive and unharmed, despite the ups and downs her father’s ways had brought in the past. Now, with Emily gone, she could imagine what John had gone through, and looked back at herself with incomprehension and shame.
“It’s like a bad physical wound,” John said. “It heals up, but it leaves a scar. You end up being able to carry on as before, but there’s always a mark, or a numb spot, or a weak point. Shit, Alice, you know that.”
“Thing is, I’ve been doing it for how long? Fifteen years? That’s way too long. And I don’t know how much of that was me not wanting to admit I was wasting my time. You know how it is – the more something’s cost you, the less willing you are to give it up.”
“Yeah, I know what that’s like. So when did you give up?”
“Oh, I finally decided to make the break at the start of the year. New Year’s Resolution, yeah? It’d all been bubbling under for a while before I finally let myself admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“Admit that... well, when I started out I was determined I was gonna be the one, you know? Catch lightning in a bottle, get a ghost, a real ghost, on film. Prove it, once and for all. I was gonna be the one to do that. They all believed Troy was a myth until Schliemann dug it up, or that the Earth was six thousand years old until Darwin came along. You get the idea. I mean – you know, prove there was a life after death?” He smiled, swirled brandy in his glass. “Just for a second, imagine how it would be if I did that – if anyone did that.”
“It would be something,” Alice admitted. Sod it, she thought, and took a sip of her own brandy. She remembered the old arguments. You couldn’t prove a negative; you couldn’t prove there was no God, no afterlife, no such thing as a ghost. Just as you couldn’t prove the non-existence of invisible pink unicorns or a small teapot orbiting the planet; you couldn’t disprove them, but logic and probability made them pretty unlikely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof; what is claimed without proof can be dismissed without evidence. But to some people, that just meant the proof hadn’t yet been found.
“Damn right it would. Whole world would change, somebody could prove that. Mum would’ve said that’s why you can’t prove it; we’re not ready to be changed like that. I don’t know about that. All I know is that when I started looking, it was still as a scientist. I was after evidence, real evidence – and if this case turned out to be a fake, or that one turned out to have a natural explanation – well, then, there were always others. The real deal was something rare, you know? Elusive. I’d find it and I’d show the world.” He lowered his eyes. “And, yeah – after you left, that was just one more reason to keep on. I wanted to show you too.”
The Feast of All Souls Page 13
