by Helen Slavin
‘I’m not in Keswick,’ she said as she clipped the chocolate brown lead onto the dog and I fetched my coat to put on over my pyjamas.
At the police station, I realised I had made two mistakes. Pyjamas and police station. I did not make a third, I turned around and headed homewards, where I read in the morning paper that Mrs Bannister was missing and had turned up before in a b & b in Keswick. She had said very clearly that this was where she was not, and I was so frustrated I could have screamed.
Instead, I found myself back at the police station, still in my pyjamas, only this time I was glad to see that the desk staff seemed to have abandoned their post. Instead, Sergeant Laidlaw came to my aid.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked. I had to be careful, because I could see the CCTV monitor noseying at me. I made certain I had my back to the camera and that I looked as if I was terribly interested in the Crime: Together We’ll Crack It leaflets on the desk. The camera would not pick up Sergeant Laidlaw. And I told him straight that Mrs Bannister was not in Keswick. Indeed, Mrs Bannister herself turned up with her little dog, who Sergeant Laidlaw was very taken with and chucked under the chin, and told him straight too. ‘I’m not in Keswick.’
‘Leave it with me,’ said Laidlaw and took custody of Mrs Bannister. I left the police station. Hopeful. Helpful.
Later that week the evening paper declared that Mrs Bannister was found on a ledge at Long Way Crop. A scar in the stonework showed where she lost her footing and a scree bank gave way beneath her stumbling feet. Sliding her, slithering her down to land heavily on the outcrop, cracking her skull on a jutting piece of the crags. Her glasses were splintered. A small piece of flesh and hair identified the rock that killed her. Her dog was strangled by the leash, caught round her wrist like a snake. A birdwatcher following an owl spotted the dog dangling from the outcrop.
Long Way Crop. Where Evan is captured in time. His face, in that moment, looking out at the view. Beyond me.
The Jims
I DECIDED TO catch up with the Jims. I had never yet attended a meeting at the Spiritualist Church where there were not one or two stray Jims knocking about. And yet if you check the data for years gone by you will struggle to find Jim as a top-ranking name. It is not there amongst the Timothys and the Daniels, the Johns and the Davids. Lazarus has ranked higher. Although I suppose since James is up there that’s probably how it happens. Even in the fifties, despite Lucky Jim, it didn’t enjoy a surge of popularity. But, it remains, there is a stack of Jims in the airspace above Heaven.
At the LookOut I started straight away with a catalogue constructed entirely for the Jims. Word got out telepathically quickly. My brainwave washed up in the Waiting Room of Heaven and presented me with five men and two women. All called Jim.
There is Jim Brewer who was always known as Jim but whose real name was Gerald. His misnomer began with what he described as ‘a bright spark in the clerks’ department’ who had a habit of giving everyone a nickname. Until the Bright Spark’s arrival Gerald had always been Gerald or, more formally, Mr Brewer. The young clerk arrived and for inexplicable reasons started to refer to Gerald, Mr Brewer, as Jim. He was politely corrected on several hundred occasions but continued with the Jim.
Finally, one overheated July afternoon when Mr Brewer had discovered that his wife had been carrying on with Lionel from the golf club and was discomfited by the runnels of sweat trickling down his back and in streams and rivulets from his armpits he exploded at the Bright Spark. Why did he persist with this Jim business?
The Bright Spark’s comment was that he looked like a Jim. Gerald Brewer raised his voice in the office. Raised it enough for people to look up from pencil sharpenings and account books.
And it was all utterly bloody pointless because the Bright Spark still called him Jim. Just as he persisted in calling Muriel on the switchboard Gloria.
When I asked Gerald/Jim what the Bright Spark’s name was he said that was the problem. He couldn’t remember. All he could remember was that when the Bright Spark had got himself a new job, a promotion, Gerald had signed the leaving card ‘Best wishes, Jim’.
Gerald’s wife left him and a new woman arrived in the department. Vanessa. She shook his hand with a firm grip and smelt of vanilla and freesia. She was formal and polite and addressed him as Mr Brewer. Before he knew what he was saying he was smiling and informing her, ‘Everyone calls me Jim.’
Jim. Jim. Under the crisp clean bedsheets of their first Friday night together. And he felt like a new man, casting off the husk that had been Gerald Brewer to become Jim and Vanessa.
There was Jim/James Crowthorne who was looking for his estranged twin brother Jonathon and having no luck. There was Jim Tennant and his motorcycle accident. Jim Match worrying about his accounts and the trouble he had caused his widow that he wanted to set right. Cousin Jim and his whisky chasers.
Of the two women, one had spent her youth disguised as Jim and travelled out of Liverpool on the big steamers to America and Australia. The other had always been known as Jim because she hated the name Jemima.
Part of the problem with the Spiritualist Church at Hackett Lane was Alan Carney. Because basically he couldn’t hear or see any chocolate-brown-clad people he caused problems. Standing on the platform trying to use ‘Jim’ as a starting point is all very well unless you happen to be one of the Jims. I remembered Jim the butcher and Jim the security guard that night I had met Sidney Colville. I remembered how I had sorted things out. I had stepped up to the platform and made myself useful. To promise messages and not deliver them was frustrating. It began unfinished business, all the Jims loitering in perpetuity.
This became my mission for the month. November. Heading inevitably towards December. Business at the LookOut was quite slow that month, not because people were not vanishing on a daily basis, popping out for a newspaper and being found, months later, lapdancing in Tenerife. No.
Chiefly because Terry Adam had stopped sending them on to me. He did not believe I was a medium. He had his flag planted firmly in the Sam Cartwright camp. I was mentally ill and shouldn’t be encouraged. All this talk of being a medium was simply my cry for help, or whatever the current psychobabble term for it was.
There was a clock on it, an alarm that would go off on the fifth of December when Evan Bees’ legally-dead paperwork was stamped and made official. Stamped with a huge skull and cross-bones. Solicitors would exchange brown manila files and cash cheques for services rendered. Possibly there would be a fanfare of bugles playing the Last Post in the town square and somewhere a flag would fly at half mast.
More likely Evan Bees would have his file consigned to the oblivion of some public records office. He’d be catalogued at the back of some grey tin filing cabinet and later transferred to microfiche.
I wanted a flaming arrow to be shot from the park. Set light to a rowing boat on the lake at Goatmill, cut it adrift to sputter and burn.
Whatever might mark the day, it was the day I was scheduled to ‘get over it, get on with life, get a job, get a house’. Stop this nonsense. See sense.
It made me edgy. I had my reality, however different it might be from the reality of others. This underworld was where I lived. I had come to terms with it. Sort of. It was the ‘sort of’ that threw me. I knew I couldn’t not do this. It would be like making a left-handed person write with their right hand. I could see that. I could feel what wasn’t right. I was here. Living inside my head. With my demons.
Is that what they are? I have spent time thinking back over the people who’ve spoken to me. I’ve gone over and over the conversations and the messages, the anxieties. I’ve filtered and sifted and searched. They seem ordinary enough. Even Hal and the Fisherman’s wife. They weren’t evil. They did not intend harm. They were just more intense. As if in dying, in letting go, they let go of more than simply breathing, beating their hearts. For them, everything was brought up short, there is no longer time for good manners. There’s just now to get it done.
; I sat in my old spoonback saloon chair in the basement. I watched the housemaid come down the stairs and hang up her shabby, thin, chocolate brown coat and make her way through the bricked-up door to the scullery. I could hear her now start to sing.
She sang every day, despite being late, despite her inadequate coat and the cold November weather. She sang ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’. I listened. I realised that what I had was an added extra.
I tried to find her in the electoral records for the house. It was cold in the library, Lara was in a cocoon of homeknit jumpers because the boiler was on the fritz again. I scoured all the records with Lara. We looked up when ‘Tea for Two’ and ‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ were written and recorded and used that as our start date. But I’d forgotten that she wasn’t old enough to be included. Women’s suffrage began with the over thirties and clearly she was not eighteen yet. For sixty years she had been not eighteen yet.
She worked for the Rothwells. Mr Henry Rothwell and his wife Ginny who owned all of this house and another, more country-mansion-style house, near the coast. If you want to you can trace their history in the local archives. Big Wig. Bigger Cheese. Top Dog. The Rothwells cut a dash through our small town society. There are sepia tinted photographs in the drawers showing their wedding, where Mrs Rothwell looks as if a net curtain has fallen on her head as she was leaving the house.
It was a good marriage for Henry Rothwell. He had money, self-made timber merchant. She had no money but impeccable table manners and that priceless commodity—class.
Open-top cars, garden parties, tennis trophies. They took up where the Whitworths left off. But these photographs tell you nothing about their inner life. And this little housemaid is forgotten. She isn’t anywhere in any archive. Yet I suppose the Rothwells couldn’t function without her. I don’t see Ginny Rothwell as the kind of woman who would polish her own silverware or iron her own chemise.
I had never spoken with her. I confess that as she came and went I’d been a little afraid of her, of what she might tell me, the things I would have to share with her. Then I thought: I have no one to share anything with, and that is what I need. Maybe that is what she needs. Someone. Me. Customer Service. Translator. Messenger Girl. She won’t think I’m a freak. She will think I am a connection.
I was very careful not to frighten her. She was wedged carefully into her routine. Indeed as I spoke up she looked anxious. Here was someone who was going to make her even later.
‘If you’re after Mrs Rothwell you’ll need to go to the front door. Down here you’ll just get Mrs Willis, the housekeeper.’ She was pushing through the brick, into the scullery.
‘What’s your name?’ I asked, reaching out to touch her arm, not thinking that my arm would go straight through hers. She did not notice. She did not realise that she was even later than she thought. The Late Housemaid.
Another voice then, in the distance, yelled for her. ‘Florrie? You late again?’ and she pushed on through the wall. On her way into the blackness that had once been a scullery.
I sat back in the chair, stayed there until it grew dark.
I think Jim Night became a part of clearing my decks, moving forward.
I decided that I would hire the Whitworth Plain Speaking Hall for one evening. I would advertise the event and in the same way that people came to the Spiritualist Church so they would be able to turn up here and we could take a crack at the Jims.
I felt a little guilty since the seven Jims who had been sitting in the Waiting Room watching Mrs Berry crochet antimacassars had been getting along famously. They played cards, talking long into the night about their lives and loves. They were relaxed and at ease. And yet I wanted rid of them. They needed to be elsewhere. They needed to move on.
I called in at the Whitworth Plain Speaking Hall to enquire about prices and availability. The hall has two tiers, stalls and a circle all in a tight horseshoe, anyone sitting in the circle can just about lean down and touch the people on the stage. At the back are rows of wooden chairs with racks in the back for hymn sheets and music. There are the ranked and decorated pipes for the pipe organ which is being restored.
The hall used to be always busy with church choirs and religious meetings, beetle drives and, of course, plain speaking. It had gone through a decline and some dry rot but when the local councillor and architect, Brett Andrews, put forward the motion of demolishing it to build our very own Millennium Hall there was nearly a riot. Funds flooded in to restore the place, a local timber merchant (no longer a Rothwell) provided the joists and rafters that were needed free of charge and then threw in the materials for the restoration of the oak panelling. All sorts of events were planned and the Whitworth Plain Speaking Hall is really busy again. Strippers, gospel choirs, opera nights. Jim Night.
Brett Andrews has a firm of architects in town. He’s responsible for a lot of new building projects in the area, county-wide, not just in town. His ideas are very futuristic involving lots of glass and suspension cables. The out-of-town retail park where Sam’s dealership is was revamped by Brett Andrews’ company recently. There is new office space, it is like a group of jellyfish around a Japanese garden. No one has yet rented the office space.
When it is dark in town by mid-afternoon and the wintry lights flick on in the shops and the hideous concrete sixties office blocks, I like to walk out to the retail park and see the winter light through Brett Andrews’ buildings. It is a longer day by those office spaces. Then I walk up to the Crags, as I did all those years ago with My Mother, and the Brett Andrews jellyfish buildings begin to glimmer, transforming it into an ocean dotted and spangled with streetlights and the scudding flashes of headlights. It feels like my place up there on the hillside with the darkness and the stars.
I advertised carefully. I used posters and placed adverts in the paper, for town and also the next town and a couple of the outlying villages. I had an odd plan, really. I wanted to do this and yet I didn’t want to draw undue attention to the event. I didn’t want a circus. It wasn’t intended to be a show. I was wearing my customer service hat again.
Jim Night was my way of putting myself back on track. Few people had understood. Most people were scared of me or considered me a freak; even, I believed, My own Mother. Now I realised that I didn’t care what they thought. Get on with it. Remember?
Marcia was good enough to provide refreshments with help from Atalanta and some of her Glade girls. As I had thought, she was a custodian, keeping up My Mother’s tradition of rescuing girls and giving them the space to find out that they were heading the wrong way, but it wasn’t too late to check out the map and change direction.
One of her most recent protégées was Aileen. Whilst at The Glade at Goatmill Aileen had discovered a hidden talent for carpentry and was now enrolled in a course at the college studying cabinetmaking. Atalanta was convinced Aileen was going to be the next Chippendale. Lara was there too with her notebook computer ready to take down any details that might need to be researched. We were going all out for the Jims.
We prepared for the evening, small notebooks and pencils on each seat for things that people might want to write down rather than say. Marcia was at the back of the hall opening the wooden hatch to the kitchen; inside the urn was starting to steam and there was the comforting cluckle of cups and saucers being set out. Vanilla and almond aromas mingled with a century of floor polish and Pledge as Atalanta unloaded trays of buns and cakes, cut into slabs of fruit loaf. It snowed icing sugar.
Lara was at the side of the stage setting up her database with a log book people could sign if they were alive, and another log book for the Dead who checked in.
It occurred to me that I had friends. Real friends who cared enough to do this. People who accepted me and my open frequency.
There was a flashing moment. Golden. Trumpets. Golden trumpets even. And I considered that what I needed was love. I had fear and anger, sorrow, grief, confusion. If I could just have love, it would complete the set.
>
Into this crept hope. There’s another one. Pauline Dart had bags of that she carried around. It staved off grief and shored up her love.
I don’t think there is happiness. I think that is something cheap and plastic that they sell from cereal boxes. I think the real McCoy is made from pieces of all the other items, the grief, the fear, the anger. There are moments, possibly months at a time, when everything we are fuses and we are there. We are real and it is so much we haven’t the words for it. Certainly not happiness. You can’t bottle this.
I was catching philosophy.
Yeah. Right. Wait around for the cure. See, I’d caught cynicism too.
The Jims, my seven plus many others, began to arrive, filtering through the walls, down from the ceiling, up through the platform, moving first into the periphery of my vision and then into focus. I began to take notes with Lara’s help, relaying the messages to her, and we were engaged in doing this as Marcia and Atalanta let in the crowd. Lara’s hands were shaking and she smiled up at me once.
The seats filled. I filled with apprehension. The sight of the relatives they had come to see started a ripple of anxiety amongst the Jims. They started to shove forward at me now, all talking at once in a tense, excited gabble. It mixed with the humming chat from the crowd and I felt a sudden surge of panic.
It was a free event. I wondered how many people had come here to laugh or to make trouble. How many to shelter from the rain. I told the Jims, one at a time please. I asked them in a calm voice and they reacted. They calmed, and the first Jim pointed out his daughter, at the back.
‘Tell her, Shortbread, there she is…The tall one in the blue shirt. Tell her if he hasn’t asked by now, he’s never bloody going to.’
I stood on the platform, no music, no introduction and I pointed at the tall woman in the blue shirt.
‘Excuse me…Shortbread?’
She reacted, stiffened visibly and stayed with her back half to me. I realised that it was quite hard to be the first, to have attention drawn to you this way. It didn’t improve with the message.
