A Private Haunting (5 page)

Fletcher's mind was a dilapidated place. He thought of it like a ruined old house, ill-lit and full of randomly ripped-up floorboards to fall through. But if you knew you were going to plunge into a hole then you were always braced for the fall. You became skilled at climbing out again.

And you got better, as he had, at managing anomalies. Like this Norwegian, Jonas Mortensen.

Among the theories of the counsellors, their favourite was cognitive dissonance. They went on and on about it.
It's the discomfort experienced when simultaneously
holding two or more conflicting ideas or emotions
. He'd dumbly nodded, squirming in the leather chair in the hot consulting room. Later that day he looked the theory up on
Wikipedia
and read the same phrase almost word for word. That was when he stopped taking the counsellors seriously and started giving some extremely dissonant answers to some of their questions.

This morning's anomaly chittered in with a helicopter. It was too high for him to be sure but possibly a Merlin, heading to the nearby RAF base. Even before his heartbeat quickened and the sweat prickled he was back there, hanging out of a Lynx, sweeping low over the plains.

Helmand, when the sunset flared it was red as Mars, so devoid of life that the farmers and mud huts flashing beneath the chopper might be a mirage. Other times the sudden and vivid swathes of colour were breathtaking, as if a painter had tired of grey-browns and slipped in some trees and fields, poppies of course, the Lynx causing waves in the chest-high blooms of white and pink, the stream of Marines moving cautiously, SA80s drawn.

The images faded as the rotor-noise passed. Helmand grew fainter and Fletcher heard again the river boats, the crickets. Afghanistan could not be more insanely different than this ruined crazy golf course. The near absolute contrast briefly threatened to overwhelm him, the ripped green Astroturf of the fairways, the paint-peeling windmills and the mini medieval castle so disconcerting that Fletcher had to close his eyes and start the count-back.

He held his equilibrium, as he had been told.
Work on your equilibrium
, the same patient voice that told him his free sessions were over and he would now have to pay for anymore.

A few moments later Fletcher returned fully to the present. He was sitting inside the big fibreglass Skull. Through an eye socket he could see the beer-can-strewn fairway. Hole thirteen was a challenge. You had to navigate the ball between the tombstones of a mini cemetery then up a steep incline into the mouth of The Skull. Inside, there was room for his bed roll.

In some ways Fletcher liked it here. There was no chance of some drunken bastard waking him up by pissing on his face. Still, he'd come home to sleep in a bed, not a bizarre, giant skull in an abandoned crazy golf course. He remembered it being built just before he had to leave, part of the grand stoner folly of some Home Counties trustafarian to create a seaside-type attraction by the river. There would be camping and kayaking, slot machines and burgers, as well as
Britain's biggest, FUNNEST Crazy Golf Course!
Fletcher had found the sign lying face down in the dried-up moat around hole six, as the entire project had fallen flat.

Beyond the sagging security fence thirty metres away someone walked a dog along the river path. It was just after seven, the kids wouldn't be streaming past to the river pools for hours. When the dog walker disappeared from sight Fletcher slipped out of The Skull. The Norwegian would be away from End Point from seven thirty until four thirty. Fletcher knew this from the shift rota on the fridge which he'd read at Mortensen's party the other night.

The Norwegian was clearly the welcoming sort. It was inevitable that the side gate to the back garden would be unlocked. Fletcher walked through. He was wearing a high-vis jacket and high-vis jackets made people invisible. He was slightly surprised that the sun room was locked. This wasn't a problem. It took less than a minute to pick the lock. Inside, he made a coffee and a cheese sandwich, wandering the rooms with a reaction that swiftly replaced any maudlin sentiment about
the return
with the purely functional: how to get the Norwegian out of this fuckin house. He flicked through Mortensen's books and records then sat on the sun room steps, looking out on the lawn, the bonfire scar that reminded him of ordnance scorch.

Later, he decided to have a bath. As it was running he looked in the bathroom cabinet and found some little bottles of oils. Never in his life had he used bath oils. The idea amused him. He chose one at random, sprinkled a few drops and lay in the water sniffing, trying to decide if he liked the smell. Later, stepping out the back door as Jonas stepped in the front, he decided he didn't.

‘Darling, I'm home!'

The one-eyed doll looked up at Jonas from the hallway table and said nothing. It looked quite serene. Yesterday so angry and today so calm. The doll was clearly a bit high-maintenance.

‘Had a good day then, my –?'

Jasmine?

An unmistakeable hint. Jonas put the mail down on the table and listened intently. Then he walked through to the kitchen and saw a half-eaten cheese sandwich on a plate beside the kettle. And an empty mug. Coffee. The mug was still warm. Wake up and smell the coffee.

He hesitated at the foot of the stairs then took them at a run. A second towel was draped over the landing banister, the airing cupboard door open. The jasmine smell was stronger in the bathroom. Water spray in the bath. He backed out, hesitating again as he considered his bedroom door before cutting off the cascade of possibilities by flinging it open. But there was no one sleeping in his bed. And no one hiding under it either. Jonas checked.

 

Insidious. Jonas rolled the word round his tongue
. In
-sid-ee-us
. He sat on a deckchair in the back garden, facing the house. The drink in his hand was hefty, a big Highland Park. End Point gawked back and a crow scrawked. He looked around but couldn't see it, suddenly wondering if anyone was watching him from all these black-eyed windows overlooking the garden.

Maybe just one of The Hub boys, messing with him. Jonas had done it himself. He and Axel once broke into Siggi's house when he was on holiday. Siggi claimed his father had a great collection of girly mags but they turned that house upside down looking for them and found nada, settling for a video of
National Lampoon's Animal
House
and handfuls of corn flakes thrown around the living room, their contribution to the food fight started by John Belushi.

Or maybe Spencer P, Lacey's boyfriend. Jonas didn't like the way that little shit looked at him. He could have put Lacey up to it, she and her friend Carly, messing about all soapy and bubbly. It was cheeky but almost proprietorial; you break in, make a snack and have a bath.

The whisky did its job. The second had him laughing, the third leaping behind every door and opening every cupboard with a Miss-Piggy-like
high-YAH
, chopping his hand down like Inspector Clouseau going after Cato.
I am a very philosophical man
, he told the one-eyed doll. Just one of those things, a kink in the space-time fabric, as if some poor bugger in a parallel universe made himself a sandwich, walked out of his kitchen and found himself in End Point.

It was a possibility, certainly, however unlikely and infinitesimally small. Quantum scientists would back him up. In an infinity of universes everything possible was happening. Somewhere light years away, right at this very moment, Jonas wasn't sitting down in the back garden with a bag of foraged elderflowers and beginning the job of separating them from their stems but was instead watching a hamster in a top hat and tails do a merry little dance.

Jasmine, though. Why out of all the oils did the mystery bather have to choose that one?

* * *

‘What would
you
do about it?'

Eggers narrowed his eyes. ‘You're serious?'

‘Yes!'

‘You haven't been drinking?'

‘Well, I have been drinking but I wasn't been drinking then.'

‘Hadn't been.'

‘What?'

‘You
hadn't
been drinking.'

‘I know.'

‘I mean the sentence, you don't say it like... oh never – '

‘Gentlemen,
would
you be so kind?'

Jonas raised a placatory hand. No one did sanctimony like Granny Hawthorne. She chaired the Village Hall Committee like a Nuremberg judge. Jonas and Eggers had been at the meeting for half an hour, waiting to present the annual reports of the Sports Club and The Hub.

‘She should crack her face, make her arse jealous,' whispered Eggers. ‘You better change the locks?'

‘Too expensive.'

‘Get a baseball bat then. You don't want to wake up and find some psycho in a hockey mask standing over you. You don't read the papers but I do. Bad shit has to happen to someone.'

‘Would a maniac put jasmine oil in his bath?'

‘Jasmine?'

‘Jasmine.'

‘You some kind of bufty?'

‘A what?'

‘Never mind. Hey, maybe it was a
woman
.'

‘Gentlemen!' Mrs Hawthorne peered over her glasses. ‘Given that the two of you have something terribly important to discuss, shall I suggest we move your items up the agenda?'

Eggers galloped through his report. A quick clap on Jonas's shoulder and
I'll see
you in The Lion.

Then Jonas. He reported on auto-pilot. The whisky had left his mouth dry. The committee made him think of zombies and he tried not to look at them, wondering if any of them had recently bathed. He watched himself, his hands with a life of their own, oddly flailing, thoughts taking him here, there and finally settling on the first time he smelled jasmine. Eva's perfume.
Some people don't like it
, she said. Jonas did. It was a scent that would tell him she was here and tell him she had gone: a wet Bergen night, the sharp smell of petrol, and jasmine.

‘Any questions for Mr Mortensen?'

Jonas sank into the silence of the unasked questions. As if he was actually melting, the day's sun having super-heated the hall. This is what it would feel like to be baked alive, swelling fingers, a rising whine in your ears as the blood boils, your face reddening,
reddening
, eyes popping out one by one, plop, plop. His watch said eight twenty. Only agenda item eleven out of twenty-four. The meeting would go on for at least another hour. He could stay.

Killing time.

He didn't fancy a night in
The
Black Lion's
beer garden and didn't want to go back to the scent of jasmine. The five whiskies had finally counted back to zero and the outriders of his hangover were closing fast, a sickly promise of desolation that Jonas refused. He'd face the house. Maybe drag his bed across to block the bedroom door. Buy a couple of bolts in the morning.

The chair scraped as he got up to leave. Mrs Hawthorne scowled. If she said anything he might just burst into tears. But despondency made no sense on an evening like this, the summer air too soft and scent-heady with honeysuckle, primrose, gardenia... There may be someone in the village who was a lover of jasmine, whose eyes would light up if Jonas happened to mention it, perhaps the woman who had just turned the corner at the bottom of Faraday Street and was walking slowly towards him. For a moment Jonas thought he recognised Mary, she of the auburn hair, the LPs and the
blues
. But it wasn't her. He felt a quick rising disappointment and closed his eyes, briefly, to the sad, enigmatic smile of his dead wife.

Mary leaned against the door, drinking coffee and watching her husband. He'd given her the mug.
Keep
Calm and
Conquer
On
. Of the billions of
Keep Calm
messages out there he chose that one. In the utility room directly underneath, the terminally ill washing machine moved up a gear.

She wondered if the choice of mug had been a random choice, or if her husband was making some obliquely sarcastic point. There was something about that underline, something to fret about as he lay naked on the bed like a broken starfish, arc-lit by the morning sun.

But he was as straightforward as he was naked. She relaxed the longer she stared, the belly heaving, slowly up and down. Straining, even, like it might suddenly burst. She imagined what it would be like to watch him explode. Right in front of her. Right now. Her feelings were mixed, she decided. Not that she wished her husband any harm. That would be going too far.

He was still ok to look at. The belly might have got him and the bugle long-sounded the hairline retreat but enough remained of the man she'd married. And hallelujah, the cock was still holding up. When the flames died down a big cock was the log that kept on burning. Briefly, she considered going over there and waking it up. But waking it meant waking him.

All of this begged the question of what she was doing staring at him. This was WMT, Weekend Mary Time, she actually called it that, even if it sounded like a coping mechanism you'd read about in one of those lifestyle magazines.
Whatever you do, always find... time... for... YOU.

She liked WMT. Saturday and Sunday, six till about ten, when her husband got up, a quiet space she'd filled over time with things he knew nothing about. The space was quite full now. She saw it as a cluttered old attic, dust angling through sunlight. Not so much physical entities as thoughts and considerations, dialogues she had only with herself. While he would understand some things, most he wouldn't, like her decision to volunteer at The Hub.

He rolled over and revealed a big hairy arse. Mary took the cue to leave and, as so often, found herself in her daughter Andrea's old bedroom. These visits were something else he laughed at, although an amused impatience was closer to the mark.
She's not gonna appear out of
thin air!
Mary knew that, of course she did. But that was what daydreams were for.

The dressing gown fell open as she walked down the stairs. She did yoga twice a week and started running three years ago, when Andrea was competing in schools' championships. It was a decent body, she reckoned, not bad at all. The challenge would be maintaining what she could for as long as she could. She wondered what her husband would think if he could see her, standing in front of the hallway mirror, stroking her breasts, her pussy.

Pussy
. She hated the word and pulled the dressing gown tightly back round her. In any case, she was getting old. There were a few grey hairs down there.
Look at that saggy old minge
, that's what her husband would say. Her irritation was sudden and physical, a prickle down the back, tightness in the stomach. She hurried back up to Andrea's room and sat on the bed. He wouldn't say another word if their daughter
did
suddenly appear, rising from the whine of the washing machine and the dazzling sun: nine years old, mousy blonde hair down to her waist, those delicate few months when she hovered so perfectly between innocence and precocious sophistication.

Then came the banging on the wall from next door. Old Mrs Cole with her walking stick. Mary fell back, eyes tight shut and fists gripping the duvet. If half her life was steeped in cliché then the other half seemed lost to irrelevance. She listened to the decrepit washing machine get louder and louder until she could be screaming and screaming but no one listening.