The Extra Large Medium

by Helen Slavin

  After I made spaghetti with custard I put the place setting away and only ate in the living room, balancing a plate on my knees. I have never eaten spaghetti since.

  It was nearly two-thirty in the morning when they started to arrive. Joe, I realised, had prepared. A breeze started up. Joe pulled on a heavy wool donkey jacket, took a deep breath, said simply, ‘Here come the Night Shift.’

  He couldn’t see them, he could only feel them and hear the way they banged about the architecture. The rattling door, the books slammed from the shelves. Footsteps running up and down his spiral staircase. And the extreme of cold. The smells. Every night this happened to him at two-thirty. I think two-thirty is the optimum time. Most people, in my hemisphere at least, are asleep. The barriers are down now. We all inhabit other worlds, dream worlds, the Land of Nod, Hypnos. I seem to inhabit the Underworld. In they came in their chocolate brown clothing, bitter chocolate in the case of those who’d actually jumped into the river. Sodden. Dripping. Chilled.

  It was noisy in there. They didn’t crowd each other so much as forget anyone else existed. I looked at Joe who was ashen, his face sweating. He looked ill but he only glanced at me and shrugged. They were making him ill, their presence.

  There was an intensity in what they had to say which surprised me. You’d think that someone who decides to jump off a bridge would say all they had to say, leave a note. Write a list.

  Evidently not. Much of it is garbled.

  ‘Like ’at see? He is, in ’e? ’Xactly like that. So catch ’im and tell ’im eh?’

  ‘And he goes about. And he goes about.’

  ‘Tall. Just tall. You’ll know him. Tall. Like a tree. Tall. Thin. Bit of a pot round the middle and his hair’s parted like this…’ Strange wavy gesture over head.

  It was like being tuned to all the radio stations at once and you have no idea what anyone is talking about.

  Then there were the others. Victims of highway robbery bleeding pure chocolate sauce. The gallows men and women left to rot in the woods on Red Rob Road. They come wailing and ranting and declaring vengeance or curses or innocence.

  ‘The magistrate, Newbold, what’s become of him?’

  The sensible question sailed out of the storm of words and I spun round. A man in a swagger coat and a tricorn hat looking impatient. It was difficult to read what he wanted. Did he want the magistrate to have died of some lingering illness or had he planned on one of his confederates bumping him off? I took too long to think about it. He started haranguing me then. Others pushed forward and he grew angry. He stepped into me, a pain in my neck, a suffocated, crushing feeling in my chest as he shouted and shouted his innocence through my lips.

  I don’t know where they went after I fainted.

  In the Land of the Giant, Brian: forest

  The first time she comes to tell me Annie is looking for her father and has got into difficulty. Atalanta is very kind about this. She avoids the use of the word ‘trouble’. She mentions the police and is calm about it. She wants to know if I have any information. If I could help Annie.

  Now I wish that Maddie had told me everything. That I had more to think about, that my memory did not have limits and boundaries. I don’t try and imagine what Maddie was like before I knew her. That is just making it up. Before long I will not be able to remember the truth. I hold on tightly to what I have.

  I explain my situation to Atalanta. That it is my fault. That I did not want Maddie to relive her past history simply because it was past. I did not think about Annie.

  Annie is at the Spiritualist Church most evenings. I don’t ask Atalanta outright but somehow she guesses what I am thinking. Maddie has never come back with a message. Atalanta thinks this is a problem for Annie. That she is waiting, just as she has waited for her husband to return. We talk for a long time.

  She comes to tell me news. I know that she comes to see me and that news of Annie is simply our excuse. We don’t have to say it out loud that I look forward to her arriving. That on the mornings that I know she will be arriving I make a cup of tea and I stand in the window. I cannot sit. If I sit I might miss that first view of her head as she climbs the path. When she comes through the trees.

  I wish now that I had something to give to Annie. In return.

  Lost is found

  I WOKE UP hours later in a small curl under the donkey jacket. Aching in every muscle, most especially the ones in my neck. Other than that there was no evidence of what happened. Even Joe was whistling as he brewed more tea, toasted more cheese.

  Something had changed for me. I asked Joe for pen and paper and wrote down whatever details I could remember. Names. Places. I knew exactly how these people felt. I had felt the same as I stood outside Oliver Howard’s house. Desperate and isolated. I think the phrase My Mother would use is ‘all at sea’. Rolling around on an uncertain flooring, liable to vomit at a given moment.

  I asked Joe a simple question.

  ‘Why do you stay here, in this job? Why put up with it every night?’

  Joe shrugged.

  ‘It’s my responsibility to be here. I can’t help that it’s haunted.’

  Sidney was right. There was no getting away from this and as far as I could see the person who needed help here was Joe and the only person who could help him was me.

  I visited the library and asked Miss Chatham for assistance. She was far too busy and put me onto her assistant Lara Crouch. An expert it turned out. My second friend. Lara. Who spent part of her lifetime travelling in the wills and deeds and documents of the town archive.

  I began with the magistrate, Newbold. I described the clothes the man had been wearing so Lara could find a proper timescale. I did not tell her straight off, look I’ve had this experience with a dead man with some heavyweight unfinished business. Instead I made out it was a project for the magistrates’ court. That I was a researcher.

  It turned out that the widow of the hanged man had married Newbold the magistrate. I blurted out, frustrated, ‘I can’t tell him that.’

  Lara looked at me for a long moment. Actually ‘look’ is utterly inadequate. What she did was consider me for a good while. I had had little sleep the night before. I was edgy. Tearful even. What was the point in being able to talk to people like this if I was stymied at every opportunity to help them? To sort their deaths out. Where was my easy answer? Where was my way out? Way forward.

  ‘You’re Annie Colville.’ She sounded relieved, said it in such a quiet, het-up sort of voice. I nodded, expecting to be turfed out of the library.

  She took me to another basement. The basement basement. She walked me along a very narrow corridor to a wall of Dewey catalogue drawers. They’d been stored there after the computers had been installed. Partly because Miss Chatham had thought they should have a paper back-up to the cybernetic nonsense. Partly because she couldn’t bear to see the beautiful oak cabinets destroyed.

  They were beautiful. They had history. They had a ghost.

  Lara explained that every day something came to the Dewey catalogue and sorted through, looking for something. Each day there would be drawers left open or cards taken out and left to one side. On other occasions Lara thought she’d seen someone walking along the corridor. Other times she simply felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. Doors opened and closed.

  ‘What do you do? You put the cards back?’ I asked.

  Lara nodded.

  ‘Has it happened today?’

  Lara nodded.

  ‘What was on the cards?’

  Lara did not nod. Again, she considered. Seemed to me even the least curious person might glance at the cards to see what was written on them. What books were listed.

  The books were ones that had been long sold. Old volumes from the twenties. A little research told us of Mr Cambridge, who had worked at the library throughout the twenties after returning home from the Great War shellshocked. I thought then that we couldn’t do anything about Mr Cambridge. He was a Mrs Berry—the scho
ol of perpetual unfinished business. I told Lara it was most likely that he’d just hang around forever filing and unfiling long-defunct books. This was his loop and if he wasn’t doing any harm could she learn to live with him?

  Lara didn’t know. And then, of course, I met him.

  Sometimes you do not want to go. You do not want to meet up again with friends who will find out that you lived to be an old man. That you lived to see another war. Sometimes you are afraid because in your sight you failed others, you weren’t strong. You punish yourself. You hide. You are safe and that is enough.

  I struggled to the surface. Down the long narrow corridor with Lara hurrying behind me. ‘What did he say? What did he say?’ I pushed out through the revolving doors into the daylight. Car fumes and music playing in the shop across the road. At the church opposite there was a wedding, people dressed up, a filmy veil and flowers. They stood amongst the gravestones and they could not see the crowd of chocolate-brown-clothed people watching the wedding.

  That night at the Tollbooth tower I told Newbold’s story to the man in the tricorn hat. Newbold had married his widow not too long after the hanging. They had stayed married for twenty years or more, until Newbold died. They had had seven children, all of whom survived to adulthood.

  I had expected him not to be pleased at this, to rant about the unfaithfulness of his wife. But instead it satisfied him. His wife had been taken care of. Newbold had made good on the injustice. He tipped his hat and departed.

  Which left me with several others ranting and agitated. I checked down the list of facts and figures that I had researched with Lara at the library. Newspaper stories, obituaries, probate records.

  I told everyone to shut up. I wanted to send a message back this time, and I was going to do it. They were all to go back and request that someone send friends to collect Mr Cambridge. If they didn’t do this, I wouldn’t help them.

  But they shouted and they ranted and they wouldn’t listen. I sat, in true customer-service-desk style, weary of the complaints at last. I sat there unsmiling and nodded at the information, however piecemeal and cryptic it was.

  Tell them to send someone.

  They did.

  Dig Deep with Arthur: with a soft brush

  Evan Bees spent the night in the bike shed.

  He looked like the bike shed was actually five-star accommodation compared to what he’d recently been used to. He was wasted, skinny by nature, made more so by having to forage in bins. There are scientists who have proved now that bears out in Alaska who forage for junk food and our leftovers produce bigger, healthier cubs who survive more easily and grow into bigger, healthier adult bears. They do it on a diet of Budweiser and KFC. It is a scientific fact.

  Evan Bees wasn’t an Alaskan bear. Although the way Bridget looked at him the next morning when he claimed his spot in the trench you’d have thought he was. His hair was greasy and very long. He looked as if he’d just let it grow like a weed. She gave him the job because she was desperate for the help. She stuck him in the furthest trench on the dig so we couldn’t smell him. No one spoke to him.

  He didn’t travel back with us in the minibus either. One minute he was there. The next he was gone and Bridget was heaving a sigh of relief.

  But he hadn’t done a runner. He had gone into town to the barber’s and had a scalper. He’d also invested in a wet shave. The barber was chuffed to bits, a chance to show off one of his skills. No one asked for a wet shave anymore on account of Gillette and that man who bought the company.

  So Evan Bees comes back for dinner looking very clean and tidy but even skinnier. He’s bought clothes at the charity shop, two carrier bags full. He’s struggled to find the right sizes, jeans and pants that bit too short, sweaters that bit too big.

  He burns his other clothes. When he thinks no one is looking. I am having a smoke sitting on the recycled wood garden chairs behind the old coal shed. I watch Evan. I watch his ritual burning. I watch him cry.

  He feels comfortable in someone else’s clothes. He likes the feel of his shorn hair, running his hand across the stubbled wasteland of his hairline, relaxed, enjoying the sensation. Bridget tries him out, runs her hand across his cropped scalp. He doesn’t pull away. But he doesn’t like it.

  In the first few evenings he is distant, settling himself with a few volumes from the shelves, flicking through a botanical dictionary and My First Book of Harrier Jump Jets. Bridget offers him wine which he accepts, although she doesn’t get any conversation in return. And she tries.

  She sees someone shy and intellectual. I see someone hiding.

  On the second morning he takes himself off to the furthest trench again and stays there all day. At lunch he takes his sandwiches and he distances himself again. He is intent. Concentrated. His work is meticulous and he comes up with some good finds. I look over the beads and the buckles as he catalogues them at the end of the day. He has taken a lot of good notes. Mapped everything to the last millimetre.

  What I see when I look in the trench is a man digging himself out.

  He isn’t into cards but he likes wine. He has his ritual glass in the evening. He makes a friend for life, a sexual favour just waiting to be called in, when he buys Bridget a bottle of wine at the end of the first week. She thinks she’s on a winner for the weekend.

  No. He drinks his single glass with the spaghetti carbonara that Andy has cooked for us all. Then he heads out.

  He has not gone to the pub. We all arrive there later and he is not to be found. He comes back too late, the doors are locked up, and spends another night in the bike shed. On Saturday he is gone all day, comes home very tired but invigorated. He takes his boots off in the boot room. The scent of his socks permeates every room. It is moments like that that you wish you’d read more Conan Doyle and could work out just how far a man has walked by the smell of his feet.

  He is allocated a room with me and Andy. He has to have the lower bunk because the first night he falls out of the top bunk. It’s fortunate that Andy is a slob and has left an open suitcase of clothes in the path of his fall. Evan Bees does not have a suitcase. He just has his carrier bags. He folds the clothes neatly and stores them under his bed in a cardboard fruit box he found in the kitchen.

  It is like I said. Who needs television when you have a real-life mystery like Evan Bees unfolding before your eyes? And the joy of Evan Bees is that you have to work at the story because he is telling you nothing.

  It is five days before we get his name. He tells us he is Mike Harsfeld. At least he does the first time Andy asks outright. Mike Harsfeld. But later when he doesn’t answer to Mike he covers over his blunder by telling us he is in fact, Mark. Bridget and Andy and the others don’t bat an eyelid. They assume they misheard his name. That is in fact what he tells them, says it several times over as a joke, trying to hypnotise them into believing him. Succeeding.

  Not me. I know that he is not Mike. He is not Mark. He is not Harsfeld. Harsfeld is the name on the label of his charity-shop sweater. Some cheapo Swedish brand. It is hanging out of his collar and I can read it clearly.

  He settles on Mark Harsfeld. The next day he has cut the label from his sweater.

  I am the only person who sees that for the first three weeks he is in the hostel Evan Bees/Mark/Mike/Whoever, sleeps under the bed. Andy who sleeps above him never notices. He simply slithers out of his own bunk and into the shower rooms each morning. Andy does not officially wake up until he gets out into the fresh air.

  At first glance you’d think the bunk was just empty, recently vacated by someone eager for their early morning pee. I see Evan under the bed. I take my time getting my washbag and my towel and I leave and give Evan the time to scuttle out. To get his washbag. To pretend to the world that he sleeps in a bed like the rest of us.

  I miss the catalyst that allows him to sleep in the bed. I just wake up one morning early. It is one of those moments when you are simply wide awake even though it is only half past five in the morning. I can�
�t really move about since there are two other blokes in here to disturb. Although I am lying there thinking that Andy sleeps like the dead and Evan is under the bed and shielded.

  I am just reaching for my smokes and making a move towards the kitchen when I hear Evan mumbling. I look round and there he is at last, on the mattress instead of on the floor underneath. He is twisted into the envelope sheets they give you. I have long since been out and bought my own sheets. Evan is knotted into his, trussed in sleep.

  What I hear him mumble is, ‘Catalogue it for me, Annie. Annie?’ I watch him for a moment as his sleeping legs struggle against the sheeting and then I move to the kitchen for a solitary pot of tea. Solitary is not something you can do well in a hostel with a group of archaeologists. I have always been solitary. Now I simply snatch the moments and they are the more savoury to me because I have to work at them.

  In this solitary moment I look out through the barrack-room-style metal windows, overpainted and overpainted through the years. I see a skylark in the topmost branch of a tall tree just beyond our huts. I can see that Martin is standing having his solitary moment outside the kitchen. He is eating a bread roll and looking at the skylark through his binoculars. So I stop looking out and intruding on his solitary time. I head out to the recycled garden furniture with my pot of tea and a couple of reheated pastries from yesterday. The microwave pings like a ruddy church bell at this time in the morning.

  Outside it is fresh and sunny and I sit and I wonder who Annie is.

  Look out

  I WAS PERSONA non grata at the Spiritualist Church. It had deteriorated beyond simply not knowing how to tell me to go. They didn’t bar the doors or hang garlic from the windowpanes, but they did not put the kettle on. They requested that I cut my sessions to Thursdays only. And then only alternate Thursdays. As I stepped up to the platform several people stepped out. I was scary again. A Midwich Cuckoo once more.