Three Things About Elsie(64)

HANDY SIMON


Handy Simon had never been big on ghosts. He couldn’t understand the point of them. His parents had been firm believers, ever since they’d gone to see a medium in the town hall one Saturday afternoon, and she told them someone called John was trying to speak to them from the other side.

‘It must be your granddad’s cousin,’ said his mother.

‘Once removed,’ said his father, and no matter how much Simon tried to reason with them, they wouldn’t be persuaded on the matter. The medium told them dead people are so keen on making contact, they insist on leaving things for you to find all over the place. Feathers, leaves, very small pebbles.

‘They make you hear noises too. Bells ring and music plays,’ his mother said, ‘and sometimes, you can even smell them.’

Simon sighed. ‘Why do they bother?’

‘It’s their way of communicating.’ His mother breathed in very deeply. She had taken to sniffing the air several times a day, just in case there was anyone around who had something to say to her.

‘Why?’ Simon asked her. ‘Why didn’t they just communicate when they were alive?’

‘It’s not that straightforward, Simon. You think you’ve got all the time in the world to speak up. It’s only when you’re dead you realise there was something you forgot to mention.’

‘Could it really be that important?’ he said.

‘To the person left behind it could,’ she said. ‘It could make all the difference in the world.’

After his mother died, his father saw an empty crisp packet in Sainsbury’s car park.

‘Cheese and onion,’ he said. ‘Your mother’s favourite.’ He pointed to the packet. ‘That’ll be Barbara, telling us to move on with our lives.’

Simon looked up at the church spire. Barry was saying something about a witch and several people were fanning themselves with their itineraries. Miss Ambrose was looking up too, and biting into her bottom lip.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ he said to her.

She didn’t answer, and then after a while she said, ‘I’m not entirely sure.’

He told her about the feathers and the pebbles, and the crisp packet.

‘It would be nice to think so, wouldn’t it?’ she said. ‘It would be nice to think you could affect things, even from the grave. That your roll of the dice went on for a little longer than you imagined.’

‘I suppose.’ Simon stopped looking up at the church tower. It was making him light-headed. ‘Although I don’t think I’m important enough to affect anything when I’m alive, let alone when I’m dead and buried.’

‘Are any of us, when you think about it?’ They watched a crowd emerge from one of the pubs, and the street filled with a spill of lager and shouting. ‘Most of us are just secondary characters. We take up all the space between the few people who manage to make a mark.’

‘Like who?’

‘I don’t know.’ The men disappeared into another pub doorway, and for a moment, Simon felt the warmth of a Friday-night bar. ‘Politicians? World leaders? The Pope?’

‘If we’re going to start judging ourselves by the Pope, everyone’s going to fall a bit short, aren’t they?’

‘Your dad, then,’ said Miss Ambrose. ‘Look at all the lives he saved. He’s made a difference.’

‘Except he only ever thinks about the life he let go. The one he missed.’

‘But that’s human nature.’ Miss Ambrose tightened the belt on her coat. ‘We only ever think about the differences we didn’t make, the chances we allowed to drift past, until you start asking yourself, what was the bloody point of it all in the first place?’

And Simon realised she had stopped talking to him and had begun having a conversation with herself. Barry lifted his cane and started to walk up the hill to a set of park gates, where he told them they would be hearing a ghost story so terrifying, no one would be able to sleep that night. He was right, as it happened, but the reason they all lost sleep would be nothing to do with the afterlife.

‘Perhaps that’s why we like to believe in spirits,’ said Miss Ambrose, as she started walking. ‘Perhaps it reassures us to think we’ll have a second chance at being somebody significant.’

‘Or at least send everyone a crisp packet to let them know we’re still thinking of them.’

Miss Ambrose turned to him. ‘What would you send?’ she said.

‘How do you mean?’

‘What would you send to make someone know absolutely without doubt it was you who was trying to speak to them?’

Handy Simon thought about it all evening. He thought about it for the rest of the ghost walk, and all the way through the drama that unfolded afterwards, and he was even thinking about it as he went to sleep that night, yet he still couldn’t come up with a single thing.





FLORENCE


We walked in, and a little bell above the door signalled our arrival. It was the only noise. For a room filled with the sound of a thousand waiting notes, it was peculiarly silent. I took a breath. The counter was polished, and all around us cabinets shone and glass sparkled, but the shop was still heavy with the scent of dust. It must have been held within the pages of the music and trapped against the frets of the violins, because it smelled as if the past had found a hiding place, safe and sheltered, where no one could be rid of it ever again.