The Way Home

by Glover, Nhys

  ‘I’m sorry I’m not as attractive as I was…’ she indicated to her chest again. ‘I could have had reconstruction, but it was a lot of extra trouble if I wasn’t going to be around to benefit from it.’

  ‘Reconstruction? They can grow you new breasts? This is a miraculous world.’

  She laughed and grimaced. ‘Not re-grown. They’re fake. Silicone implants under the skin. Look sort of real but feel very different, so I’m told.’

  ‘Hmmm… very strange. Like a wooden leg. Do not worry, little Cassie, I do not care if your body is wounded. After all, I am so wounded I am dead.’

  She gave a little laugh and rubbed her head self-consciously. ‘Would you like to meet Marnie? I know she’d love to meet you.’

  ‘Little Marnie? I would very much like to see her again.’

  ‘Not so little anymore. Remember she’s an old lady now. Come on, she’ll have breakfast out and will be nagging me to eat more.’

  ‘You should eat more. Your bones are bare.’

  She laughed. ‘Not you, too. Now I know you aren’t a figment of my imagination. If you were, you’d tell me I was beautiful just the way I am.’

  ‘You are, but you could still use a bit of flesh on these bones.’

  Cassie grimaced as she threw on a light dressing gown that only came to mid-thigh. It was still outrageous to see a woman so scantily clad and yet so accepting of it. Yes, this was her home, but she was wandering around the house with so little on? What if a man came to the door? The idea of a male seeing Cassie like this made his blood boil.

  At the bedroom door, she stopped and looked back at him impishly.

  ‘What?’ He was already starting to see she had a quirky sense of humour. The mischief in her big blue eyes made them sparkle.

  ‘You first,’ she said, as a smile played on the edges of her lips.

  ‘You know I cannot.’ Was she making fun of him? That didn’t sit with the girl he felt he already knew. There didn’t seem to be a cruel bone in her body. But, what would he know? He’d only known her for half an hour. How could he make up his mind what she was or was not so quickly?

  ‘Actually, yes, you can. If your hand can go through a table then the rest of you can go through a door. Try it.’ So the sparkle was about experimenting again. Well, he certainly liked to try new things and experiment to improve old things.

  Hawk gave a little chuckle. He supposed he was an old thing now and this old dog ought to learn new tricks.

  With less confidence than he would have wanted before this delightful girl, he thrust his hand through the door. He expected to get a painful surprise but instead he felt nothing. It was as if the door weren’t there. All he felt was air.

  Determined, he brought his arm to his side, closed his eyes and took two steps forward. When he looked back, he was on the other side of the door. The shock of that had his legs wobbling under him.

  Turning around he took two steps back, this time with his eyes open. He saw the insides of the door as he passed through it. When his eyes had progressed past the door, he saw Cassie grinning at him. An answering smile lifted the corners of his lips before he realised it.

  She was contagious. After feeling dead inside for nearly four years, suddenly everything was new and exciting again. He felt alive again in a way that he couldn’t remember feeling, even in his younger years.

  He grimaced at the realisation.

  ‘What?’ she asked, her pixie shaped head tipping to the side as if studying some wonderful new discovery.

  ‘I just realised I’m a ghost and yet I feel more alive than I have for years – my years, not yours. Your years have just passed in the time it took me to smoke a cigarette. My years passed as slowly as a lifetime.’

  ‘The war was hard?’ Her eyes were brimming with compassion now and he fought the urge to deflect it. He didn’t need her compassion. There were so many others who had gone through much worse. His had been a gifted life. The most he’d ever sustained in injuries were a bullet wound to the calf during the battle at the end of ‘40 and a shoulder wound during the offensive in North Africa. Both his injuries still ached a little, but they didn’t stop him.

  Why did they still ache? He was dead! He didn’t have a body to ache. For the first time, he mentally scanned his body. No, there was no pain anymore. All the little aches and pains that had troubled him for so long were gone. It seemed miraculous.

  ‘Yes, the war was hard for everyone. Do you know I cannot feel any pain? I just realised that for the last half-hour since I’ve met you I have felt no pain. No… anything, except when I touch you.’

  She smiled and held out her hand. He took it like a lifeline.

  ‘Well, let’s go down stairs and meet Marnie. We’ll do it the old fashioned way as I’m not yet able to walk through doors.’

  He didn’t like the sound of that. She spoke of ‘not yet’ as if her time as a ghost wasn’t far away. Even though he’d assured her he’d protect her, she still believed she was about to die. That distressed him, but reassuring her again wouldn’t make any difference. She was right. What good was he to her if he couldn’t manipulate things anymore? If someone came after her, the villain would walk right through him.

  With a fierce determination, he reached for the doorknob again, focusing on it in the way he focused on an enemy plane just ahead of him. Every sense was on high alert, his reaction time more finely tuned than most others of his kind.

  He felt something and his hand hit something solid instead of passing right through. Buoyed on, he imagined what it felt like to turn a doorknob. The cold feel of metal under his palm, the pressure and then the give as it turned and unlocked the mechanism. Yes, he felt it! He pulled.

  The door opened in toward him. The elation he felt was only surpassed by Cassie’s. She literally jumped up and down and clapped her hands.

  ‘That was amazing! How did you do that?’ she demanded, as if opening a door were like designing a fuel system for a plane.

  But it did feel big. Now he knew what it required; he could truly be in this world, not just see it, and he was one step closer to being able to defend Cassie if or when she needed him.

  With both of them grinning like loons, arm in arm, they walked down to the kitchen below.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘Who are you talk…?’ Marnie started to ask as she looked up from the toaster. The old lady’s mouth dropped open.

  ‘Hey Marnie, how did you sleep?’ Cassie asked chirpily, her arm still linked with his.

  Hawk noticed the way the old lady was looking down at their linked elbows.

  ‘Good morning, dear. You look chipper. Why so cheery?’ Her gaze lifted to meet Cassie’s before returning to her extended elbow.

  ‘I am chipper. I’ve brought an old friend to meet you. I know you can’t see him but Marnie, I’d like you to say hello to Hawk. He dropped back in a little while ago.’ Cassie looked up at him and smiled impishly.

  ‘He’s here? Really here?’ Marnie’s jaw was slack with astonishment but she didn’t meet his gaze. From the way her eyes darted around it was clear she couldn’t see him at all.

  ‘Yes, right next to me. We’ve been experimenting. Do you think you could move the salt?’ She glanced from him to the salt shaker on the kitchen table.

  It was nothing like the table he had known here before. This was all smooth edges and light wood. Even the seats were cushioned in bright floral material that matched the curtains at the window. And the stove was different. Not black anymore, but bright enamel blue.

  ‘I can try,’ he said, letting go of her elbow and moving over to the table, which was neatly set out for breakfast.

  He brought his full concentration to the salt shaker, a small silver cylinder about three inches high. Carefully he reached out and closed his fingers around its sides. Yes, he could feel it, oddly solid to the touch. Then he gave his brain the command to move it across the table in the direction of the old lady.

  ‘Oh, good heavens!’ Marnie ex
claimed, both hands coming up to cover her mouth. Her eyes were as round as plates. ‘He’s really here. He’s a poltergeist!’

  ‘A poltergeist?’ He looked at Cassie for explanation. This was going to be another of those confusing explanations, he could tell.

  ‘A ghost who can move things around. Just don’t make blood run down the walls, okay?’ She gave another impish grin.

  ‘Blood d…?’ he started to ask.

  ‘Cassie, stop confusing the poor boy with pop culture. There’s nothing demonic about him. I can’t believe he’s here and I can’t see him. Hawk, do you remember me?’

  Marnie’s eyes looked over his right shoulder in the way that a blind person might. He wondered if he could touch her as he did Cassie.

  ‘Tell her that I do remember her fondly. That it is a shame her planes are not still hanging from the ceiling in her old room.’

  Cassie repeated what he said and he was gratified to see the old lady smile proudly. He reached out and stroked her cheek but he felt nothing.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Cassie asked, intrigued.

  ‘I cannot feel her like I feel you. I am going to focus on her like I did the salt shaker.’

  And he did just that, imagining what it felt like to touch the paper-thin, soft skin of her cheek.

  Marnie gave a little gasp and brought her hand up to her cheek. ‘Did he just touch me?’

  ‘Yes. He stroked your cheek. You felt it?’

  ‘I did. Like the softest touch of a feather, but I felt it. This is so exciting. Ask him what it’s like on the other side.’

  ‘He can hear you, Marnie. You just can’t hear him.’ Cassie looked at him for an answer.

  How did he know what it was like on the other side? He didn’t even remember dying. All he knew was standing under a tree smoking a cigarette and seeing faces at the windows. He could have spent eternity smoking like that, if Cassie hadn’t shocked him back into existence.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said after the longest pause. ‘Like one dreamlike moment in time? I felt content, I felt peaceful. It felt like I was between one activity and another. You know, when you take a little break before starting on the next thing.’

  When Cassie repeated this word for word, Marnie’s expression became soft and took on a faraway look. ‘That sounds nice. But why my garden?’

  ‘Cassie told me you think it is because I was waiting for her. That feels right to me. But I have not come to take her to this side. But then again, when I saw the others, I never got a sense that I was there to announce their coming death either. I barely registered them, to be honest. I do remember your grandmother’s shock when she saw me. I wondered why, since I assumed she had invited me back for a visit. I thought it was still March 1944. That is my last memory.’

  After Cassie had passed on his words, Marnie frowned. ‘Even though no one ever said as much, I think we all thought you were beckoning them to come to you. It is rather unsettling to know they were no more than a glimpse to you as you were to them, but March 1944 doesn’t sound right. I’m sure Gran said you were killed over France in the summer of ‘44.’

  ‘We can Google him,’ Cassie suggested.

  ‘We could do just that, if you want to know about your death, Hawk?’ Marnie looked in his general direction again without meeting his gaze.

  ‘Google me?’ He was starting to feel as if he had an entire new language to learn.

  Cassie gave a little laugh and touched his shoulder. The delight he felt at the contact was far beyond what such a casual gesture should have elicited.

  ‘We have a thing called the Internet now. It is a machine that works like a brain…’

  ‘No, Cassie dear, it’s the computer that does that. The Internet is a method of communication between brain-like machines. It connects knowledge and information in one place with everywhere else.’

  Hawk tried to get his mind around this. In his head, he saw a huge factory with machines linked together with electrical wire. He couldn’t imagine how that translated into something he could use to find out about his past.

  ‘Okay, see that’s why I didn’t go into IT. I don’t have a clue how it all works. Anyway, Google is a search engine. It can search all the information stored everywhere and present it to you. Like a phone book, I guess. Anyway, don’t get too caught up in all that. You’ll fry your brain. Let’s just say that Google can tell us about you if you want.’

  ‘Yes, I would very much like this searcher to do that. Will it cost much? I have no money on me.’ He pulled out his empty pockets to show her, grimacing at his penury.

  ‘Googling doesn’t cost anything. It’s a free service that’s paid for by advertising. Do you want to do it now?’

  ‘Oh no you don’t. Sit yourself down, young lady, and eat breakfast. I have scrambled eggs and toast. You are not going to avoid eating any longer. You need to get your strength back.’

  ‘She is right, Cassie. Google will wait, as will I. Eat. I would like to experiment with the food. I can’t eat it, but I’d like to know if I can taste or smell it.’

  After Cassie ate and he experimented – the results of which were disappointing, he could smell and taste nothing except Cassie – they adjourned to the parlour where a small machine the size of a folio sat on a small desk under the window.

  With Marnie crowding them, Cassie opened the strange book she called a laptop and he saw typewriter keys and a small screen that came to life when she touched the keys. Colours and sound poured out of the machine and he was hard pressed not to jump back in surprise.

  Cassie’s hands flew over the keys and in seconds, the word ‘Google’ appeared in the middle of the screen. At least now he knew how the word was spelt.

  ‘Spell your name for me,’ she asked him.

  ‘Why do you… oh, sorry, I thought you were talking to me,’ Marnie said with a giggle. ‘It’s hard to remember there’s a third party present.’

  Hawk spelled his name to her slowly and he saw the letters appear on the screen. She made a mistake, noticed it, and went back and corrected it so that it was as if the mistake had never been there. This machine was miraculous.

  Once his name was in the little box under the word Google, Cassie pressed something else and the picture changed again. Now there was a series of written entries down the screen. At the top, it said ‘20 of 105,000 entries found’. That couldn’t be right. How could there be so many?

  Before he had a chance to ask about that, Cassie pressed more buttons and the third entry was highlighted.

  ‘We don’t want these Facebook pages. They’re for people with your name living now. This is the best place to start. It’s a Wiki entry. Wikipedia is a user-generated encyclopaedia. If you know something about a subject, you can write an entry for it on Wiki. Sometimes the info isn’t accurate, but more times than not, it is.’

  In the next moment, the screen had his name and a picture of him on it. The sight of the photo gave him a shock. He remembered that picture being taken. A reporter from one of the papers had come to see them after their successes over the Bay of Tunis in April ‘43. He’d made his five confirmed kills by then and was labelled an ‘ace’. It was not something he’d been chasing, as many of the other men pursued that illusive award. And having the reporter making a fuss of him in front of the other pilots and ground crew had embarrassed him. However, he’d posed for the picture next to his Spitfire and tried to smile a little. Smiling, by that point, had become a chore.

  ‘You look very dashing,’ Marnie commented.

  Cassie turned to him and grinned. ‘You look very serious and dangerous to me. Not like you at all.’

  He met her gaze, unsure of what to say to that. He was certainly serious back then. Who wouldn’t be when so many of his friends and comrades were dropping like flies around him? He’d lost his closest friend only two days before that picture was taken. He still felt Mika’s loss.

  But dangerous? He’d never considered himself dangerous. Even though he’d seen many
men take a step back from him when he’s lost his temper, he’d posed no real threat to anyone.

  ‘Sorry. I forget it’s all still fresh to you. Of course you were serious. You were risking your life every day.’

  ‘I was losing friends every day.’

  Cassie’s face showed her chagrin and after Marnie asked what he’d said, the old lady put a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘Cassie, you can’t possibly know what it was like. Don’t expect to understand. Hawk won’t expect you to I’m sure.

  ‘Unless you’ve lived through a war, nobody describing it to you can really capture the sense of it. I was a little girl and only lived on the edge of it all, but even I couldn’t explain to you what it was like. The planes were overhead every day. Being near an airbase, as we were here, meant that bombs found us often. You lived life not knowing whether you’d see another sunrise or your family’s faces again. It became the norm. The knot in your chest was always there. It wasn’t until years afterwards when it started to ease off that you realised what you’d lived with. When Nicky died, that feeling came back… I’d almost forgotten what it felt like by then.’

  ‘Nicky was Marnie’s son. He died suddenly when he was six,’ Cassie explained to Hawk.

  Could this be the little boy he’d seen in the window?

  Hawk looked at Marnie gratefully. The old lady had put into words what he couldn’t, and it felt good to know that knot would dissipate one day.

  ‘I’ve been very lucky, haven’t I?’ Cassie said. ‘I think my generation takes our freedom and safety for granted. Even terrorist threats don’t really seem quite real. It must have been terrible living with that kind of fear and loss all the time.’

  ‘You’ve had your share of fear and loss, Cassie dear. If anyone can understand, you can, losing your parents and brother so young, and then Fran. Then facing your own mortality… give yourself some credit, girl.’

  Cassie dropped her head and Hawk felt the uncontrollable need to comfort her. He didn’t know anything about her. Had no idea what she had been through, but he saw the ravages of the disease and the look in her eyes that told him what she had barely survived. His hand rested on her shoulder without him realising it.