Every Touch (8 page)

   He smiled at that.  He liked her too.  He wished they’d had a chance to get to know each other more. 

   Tate had two previous convictions for violent assault and was seeing a court ordered psychiatrist.  Either the shrink was incompetent or Tate was a good actor, Denny couldn’t decide which.  Not that it mattered.  The end result was the same.  His summation was right, he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Anyone could have dated Chrissy after Tate.  It just happened to have been him.  

   Tate had been caught easily.  Apparently not the brightest person in the world, he hadn’t worn gloves and they found his fingerprints on the door handle and the murder weapon in his car with Denny’s blood still on it.  His conviction was all but guaranteed. 

   The article ended with a statement Trish had given to the press.

   “My brother was a kind, generous man and a wonderful brother, uncle and friend.  Everyone who met him liked him and he will be missed greatly by all those who knew him.  But he will be especially missed by his family.  His loss is devastating.  No-one will ever replace him in our hearts.” 

   Denny sat back and wiped his eyes.  So it was over.  His killer was behind bars.  Life went on.  For everyone but him, and his suffering family. 

   He shook his head, shut down the PC and made a decision.  Tate might have killed him, but he wasn’t going to let him take his life.  Other ghosts, like Oliver, had made being dead work for them.  So could Denny.

Time passed.

   Days became weeks, weeks turned into months, months grew up to become years.  Denny learned how to live after death.  He had hobbies, he had daily routines, he had neighbours who he came to think of as friends, even though none of them knew he existed.  His yearning for his family diminished from a searing agony to a dull ache.  And when, on occasion, the isolation started to drive him a little crazy, Oliver was always there to talk him down.

   Little things that during his life would have barely meant anything, now became sources of great joy.  A new DVD to watch when someone was out, a birthday party, a tenant renting his flat he didn’t mind sharing with.  Oliver’s tales of what was going on in the outside world. 

   Some days were wonderful, some were bad, some were just routinely normal.  And normal could be good too.

***

“Yes, sir, I’m on my way right now... No, I’m in the car. There’s a hold up on Church Road...   It’s a hybrid, sir, very quiet engine...”

   Eric Sarson, the always tardy resident of flat ten, lied to his boss as he walked out his front door and pulled it shut behind him. 

   Denny waited for a few minutes to make sure he wasn’t going to come back, then smiled and sat at the electric piano in the corner of the living room, opening the lid and pressing the power button.  He picked out a music book from the small collection on a bookcase nearby and flicked through it, selecting a piece of music and placing it against the stand on the top of the piano.  Sliding the headphones on, he began to play.

   Eric had moved in two years ago.  Denny was always around when new people came into the building.  As long as they weren’t moving into
his
flat, he enjoyed it.  He liked to get to know them, who they were, what they liked to do, when they were usually out.  He had been especially excited when he’d seen that Eric had a piano. 

   Ever since he’d found himself with plenty of time to fill when he died three years earlier, Denny had been wanting to take up playing the piano again.  The trouble was, no-one else in the building felt the same way and he’d had nothing to play on.  Then, after a year of frustration, a piano had entered his little world.  And an electric piano at that, with headphones so no-one would hear him.  Plus, Eric was out all day during the week, working.  Denny couldn’t believe his luck. 

   So every day, after Eric left, Denny would play.  He loved playing and would often spend whole days doing nothing but.  When he was alive, his dedication had been sporadic as other activities competed for attention, work, family, social activities, women.  But now he had the time, he was becoming good.  Very good.  His hands flew across the keys as he played Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag.  He liked to play all styles, but he had a fondness for the speed and dexterity and fun of ragtime.  He closed his eyes, not missing a note.  He didn’t really need the music anymore, but he kept the book open for back up, just in case he got lost.  He rarely did nowadays.

   After a few hours of playing, he took a break and headed down to flat four where Enid Johnson would be making lunch and hopefully baking some of her amazing cakes and cookies.  Enid was sixty-five and had been in her flat since before Denny moved in.  She was a retired chef and now spent much of her time indulging her passion for baking sugar laden treats for the local people.  She made quite a bit of extra cash doing it.  Her delicious baked goods were very popular.  Denny had always gone to her when he needed something for a special occasion.  She had made him the most spectacular novelty cakes for Jay’s birthdays, always able to produce whatever his nephew’s current obsession was, a truck, a pair of football boots, the Incredible Hulk.  Now he just liked to watch her work.  He couldn’t eat anything, which he was still struggling to come to terms with after three years, but he could watch and dream. 

   He stepped through the door to Enid’s flat and was instantly met by the warm, mouth-watering smell of baking cake pervading the room.  He leaned back against the door and took a deep breath, closing his eyes in aromatic bliss.  A sharp yap snapped him out of his trance and he looked down as Vanilla, Enid’s white Chihuahua bounded up to him, wagging her tail in a frenzy of excitement.  He smiled and bent down to tickle her ears and she sat, her tongue hanging from her mouth and her eyes closed in doggy joy. 

   “Hello, girl,” he said. 

   He was never quite sure if Vanilla could see him.  She was the only dog in the building and she always knew he was there, but he suspected she was responding to some kind of sixth sense animals possessed rather than an actual visual cue or his smell.  He liked playing with her though, even if it did make Enid think the little dog was losing her marbles.

   “What are you doing out there, ‘Nilla?”  Enid’s voice drifted from the kitchen and Denny wandered towards it. 

   The flats on the ground and first floors all had separate kitchens, unlike his flat on the top floor where they were all open plan.

   “Hello, Enid,” he said, walking into the small but neat and scrupulously clean kitchen.  Vanilla bounced around his legs.

   His neighbour was carefully mixing some kind of white mixture in a bowl, her long, dark hair pinned into a bun on top of her head and a frilly blue apron covering her jeans and black t-shirt.  A Metallica song blasted from a mini hi-fi on top of the upright freezer in the corner of the room.  Enid was a study in contrasts.

   He settled himself onto a tall stool, periodically reaching down to stroke the perpetually excited Vanilla as he watched Enid fill a piping bag with the white icing and pipe it onto the tops of twelve cupcakes which were sitting on a large wire cooling rack.  She added silver star-shaped sprinkles and loaded them into a pink cardboard cake box.  Denny was no stranger to Enid’s cupcakes.  He’d tried to restrict himself to a maximum of one box per month when he was alive, but when he did get them, they rarely lasted more than a couple of days.  They were one of the most delicious things he’d ever put in his mouth.  He hopped off the stool to take a closer look at them before she closed the lid of the box.

   “Ah, Enid, you’re killing me here,” he said.  Vanilla barked up at him and wagged her tail.

   After hanging around in Enid’s wonderful smelling kitchen for an hour or so, Denny went back to Eric’s piano and played until it was time for the kids to come home from school.  He wanted to be there when Alfie got home.  He’d be bringing his end of the school year exam results back today and Denny wanted to know how he’d done.  He’d been studying hard this year and Denny hoped he’d got the marks he deserved.

   He reached the Pierce’s flat on the ground floor just as Alfie was coming in the front door of the building.  In the three years since Denny had known Sarah Pierce’s son, he’d grown more than a foot and at thirteen was closing in on Denny’s height.  And, being a teenager, his constant enthused rush to get everywhere had morphed into a head down trudge with his thumbs glued to the screen of his phone.  Denny had to step quickly to one side to avoid being walked through.

   Once through the door to his flat, with Denny on his heels, Alfie headed towards his bedroom.

   “Alfie!”  A voice came from the kitchen.

   “Hey, mum,” he said, not altering his course.

   “Stop right there.”  Sarah appeared in the kitchen doorway and Alfie turned to look at her.  “Didn’t you get your exam results today?”

   He nodded, slipping off his backpack and rummaging for a few seconds, eventually pulling out a crumpled piece of paper and handing it to her.  Denny looked over her shoulder as she scanned the list of subjects and awarded grades.  He noted the list of Bs and even a couple of As.

   “Way to go, kid,” he said, grinning.

   Sarah squealed and threw her arms around her son.  “I’m so proud of you,” she smiled.

   “Mum,” he protested as she hugged him.  But he was smiling.

   “Was Mae on the bus with you?” she said.

   Alfie shook his head.  “She said she was going to study with Glen and she’d be home by dinner.”

   Glen was Alfie’s sister’s current boyfriend.  Mae had inherited her mother’s classic beauty and at seventeen she was very popular with the boys.  It drove Denny crazy and he didn’t know how Sarah managed to be so calm about it.  All he wanted to do was lock her in her room, preferably until she was thirty.  Glen seemed okay, the couple of times he’d seen him, and Mae was a smart girl, but he remembered well what it was like to be an eighteen year old boy with raging hormones.  He imagined how horrified the parents of his girlfriends would have been if they’d known what he and their darling daughters used to get up to under the pretext of “studying”.  He didn’t know how any fathers with daughters kept their sanity.  He wasn’t even Mae’s father and he wanted to punch any boy who looked at her.  If he’d ever had his own children...

   He stopped his train of thought.  That wasn’t something he needed to speculate on.  Whatever his future held, it wasn’t children and there was no point thinking about it.  He didn’t regret never having had any when he was alive however.  He wouldn’t have wanted any child of his to have had to grow up after his death without a father.

   He decided to stick around with the Pierces for a while.  Just until Mae got home safe.

Denny stood outside the door to flat seven and sighed. 

   Every day Mr Duncan had been getting worse and worse.  Denny had taken to checking on him several times each day for the past week and it was hard for him to watch a man he’d known and respected for almost ten years going downhill like this.  But Mr Duncan, and Mrs Duncan when she’d been alive, had been good to him and he wasn’t going to leave him alone.  He had been there when the doctor had tried, and failed, to persuade him to go to hospital.  He had no children, insisting that if these were his last days he was going to spend them in the place he’d spent the last thirty years, the place where he had grown old with his beloved wife.

   Sighing again, Denny walked through the door.  The curtains were drawn making the room gloomy.  Mr Duncan’s living room was a comfort over style affair, the general clutter which often happened in a home with no woman around making it seem smaller than it actually was.  There was a three piece suite, although Denny had only ever seen Mr Duncan use the one chair which was aimed squarely at the medium sized old CRT television set.  Bookcases lined the walls. It had been Mrs Duncan who was the avid reader.  Despite her death almost six years ago, Mr Duncan hadn’t removed a single one of her books.  Denny would often come and read at night, sprawling comfortably on the sofa while Mr Duncan was asleep in the bedroom.  It was like having his own library.  He had even developed a liking for Mrs Duncan’s extensive collection of romance novels, although there was no way he would ever admit it to anyone.  He would miss it when Mr Duncan was gone. 

   He would miss Mr Duncan when Mr Duncan was gone.

   Soft snores emanated from the old man was sitting in his usual armchair, his head drooping onto his chest as he slept.  Denny watched him sadly.  He looked pale and had lost a significant amount of weight, his clothes all but hanging off his frame now.  He looked so different to the robust man Denny had known when he was alive.  He walked over to him and crouched next to the chair, gently pressing his fingers to his wrist to check the strength of his pulse.

   When he twitched and raised his head, opening his eyes, Denny let go immediately. 

   Mr Duncan’s eyes widened in horror.  He screamed.