Chapter Twelve
Memory Lane
29th October 2016
IT WAS FOUR o’clock; that gave Alice two or three hours to prepare. After some hesitation she went to a hotel just off Deansgate and booked a room for the night.
No, she had no intention of rekindling any romance with John Revell (Single); not ever, but certainly not now. She could only deal with one person at the moment, and that was herself. And, if she was honest, she wasn’t always certain about that. But she wasn’t going back to Collarmill Road, not tonight. She couldn’t bear the idea of going back home – home! – not with what might be waiting for her there.
But hadn’t she vowed to herself not to run away? Yes – but this wasn’t running, or even a retreat; it was a tactical withdrawal. Falling back and regrouping in order to counterattack – and this time, with help.
She let herself into her room, looked out of the window. The hotel stood on the Manchester bank of the Irwell, so she could see up the river, which glinted dully in the autumn sunlight. Stone and metal bridges crossed it here and there. It was a different angle, another point of view, almost another city, and she gazed at it a while, entranced, for some minutes, before tearing herself away.
Alice studied herself in the mirror. She didn’t look too bad; still the girl next door, although if she looked more closely she could see the shadows round her eyes. Speaking of her eyes, they were bloodshot. And she looked a little pale. A slightly more detailed make-up job would take care of that; for her eyes, maybe a wet flannel or some cucumber slices...
That pulled her up short. Was she planning a makeover? Well, perhaps it wouldn’t do any harm. She checked her watch. Quarter to five. There was time, if she moved quickly. Kendal’s department store was just up the road.
It was a short walk, but she had a taxi waiting – she needed every minute she could. She browsed in Kendal’s long enough to settle on a plain, simple-looking black dress that ended just above the knee. It hid any bumps she wouldn’t want to call attention to, and accentuated any she did. Add to that an ounce or two of very expensive perfume, a brighter-red lipstick than she normally carried, a pair of diamante silver stud earrings, a silver crystal pendant and a pair of black pumps, and her bank account was wondering what had hit it.
She rang a taxi to pick her up again and was back at the hotel at – she checked her watch – ten to six. She laid her new clothes out on the bed, and looked again at the bill. “Jesus,” she muttered. She wasn’t normally one for excessive spending on clothes; her idea of retail therapy normally involved the DVD and Blu-Ray departments on Amazon.
But – she may as well be honest – she wanted to look good for John Revell. No, that wasn’t right: she didn’t want to please him. She wanted him to see her after all this time and have his breath taken away. She didn’t want pity from him: she wanted awe. If he still carried a torch for her, let it burn.
Apart from anything else, she had a favour to ask him, and after all that had happened between them it was a large one.
Alice ran the shower and stepped into it. Steam filled the narrow glass cubicle, turned the bathroom outside into a blur. Once, she thought she saw someone standing outside – a small, dark, figure – and she started, but when she rubbed the condensation away, nothing was there.
SHE WAS TEN minutes late, mostly because she’d forgotten how long it took her to properly get ready. The taxi dropped her on King Street West, outside the restaurant. She paid the driver and went inside.
The Koreana was in a basement; a flight of steps led down from the street entrance. The décor was simple enough, plain light colours, with traditional Korean costumes, musical instruments and the like on the walls. There was a huge plasma screen on the back wall, playing what appeared to be a cookery programme. And at one small table for two, she could see John Revell. As she came down the stairs, he saw her too, and stood.
A waiter met her. “Can I help you?”
She pointed in John’s direction. “I’m with him.”
She could tell as she approached that her ‘makeover’ had had the desired effect. Berry-red lipstick and nail polish; light pink blusher to put colour in her face and bring out her cheekbones; turquoise eye-shadow to bring out the blue of her eyes. Then there was silver jewellery sparkling in her ears and in the black dress’ décolletage – and, of course, the black dress itself. For a moment, he looked lost for words. “Alice,” he said at last.
“Hi, John.” Thinking, once again, I’ve still got it. Whatever comfort that was supposed to be.
He hesitated in front of her; she hesitated, too. How did you greet an ex-lover after twenty years? In the end she stepped forward, kissed his cheek and hugged him briefly. It felt strange to do so; they’d gone from total intimacy to a complete withdrawal from it all those years before, and hadn’t seen each other since.
“Shall we?” She motioned to the table.
“Good idea,” he smiled. They sat. “You look great,” he said. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“Neither have you.”
“Black –”
“– don’t crack,” she laughed. “I remember.”
It was true, as well. There were some crow’s feet around his eyes and if she looked closely there were tiny flecks of grey in the close-cropped hair and goatee beard, but that was it. The biggest difference was how he dressed now: a red shirt under a wool sweater, tan corduroy slacks that matched the colour of the suede jacket hanging on the back of his chair. Back in the ’nineties, he’d been strictly a jeans and T-shirts man.
A waitress appeared. “You want to order drinks now?”
“Wine?” John suggested.
“I don’t drink at the moment,” Alice said. She hoped he couldn’t guess the reason; alcohol didn’t react well with antidepressants. “Just a Diet Coke, please.”
“Bottle of Hite for me, then.”
“Very good,” said the waitress, and went away.
“So,” John said, “look at you.”
“I know. Back here again.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Higher Crawbeck, near the Fall. Remember that place?”
“Remember it?” He laughed. “I remember going off the path and clambering up some slope with you because you wanted to check something out, slipping and going feet-first down it into the Irwell.”
“You didn’t end up in the river, John.”
“Too bad. That slope was pure mud. I looked like I’d been dipped in cowsh –”
“I did my best to make it up to you.”
He smiled. “I remember that too.”
The waitress came back with drinks on a tray. “Diet Coke,” she said, putting a glass in front of Alice, “and a bottle of Hite.” She poured the pale beer into John’s glass until it was two-thirds full, then stood the bottle beside it before taking a long-barrelled stove lighter from the tray. On each table, along with the cutlery and condiments, was a glass bowl containing a single tea-light. The waitress lit it. “Are you ready to order?”
“You?” Alice asked John.
“I know what I’m having.”
She glanced through it. “I’ll have the braised mussels for starters, please, and the dak gang jung for the main.”
“Boiled rice or fried?”
“Boiled, please.”
“Very good.”
“I’ll have the ribs,” said John, “and the ojingo bokum.”
“Very good.”
The waitress left. Alice grimaced. “Squid?” she said. “Don’t know how you can eat that stuff.”
“Don’t knock it –”
“– until I’ve tried it. Yeah, yeah – change the record, Revell.”
She grinned at him and he grinned back; then both of them looked away. They slipped back into the old banter so easily, as if the last twenty years hadn’t happened. But they had.
John studied her. Candlelight glimmered in his eyes. He wasn’t smiling now. “So how are you?”
She shrugged. “I’m okay.”
“I mean, I heard about what happened.”
“Yeah.”
“Sorry – ah, shit. Alice, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to –”
“John, it’s okay. I live with it every day, and it’s like the bloody elephant in the room, you know? For me as well. Anything I talk about, whatever plans I make, it’s all – touched by this. Shaped by it.”
“I was sorry to hear, anyway. Sorry’s not much of a word for it, I know.”
“No, it isn’t.” Her eyes prickled.
“Hey.” He touched her hand – light, hesitant – then withdrew. “You want to talk about what happened, I’m here and I’ll listen. You don’t? Fine, we’ll talk about something else. Whatever you like.”
“Thanks, John. What about you, anyway? How’s your family? Is your dad –?” She stopped there, afraid she’d put her foot in it.
“Oh, he’s fine. Church every Sunday, dressed to kill. I think there’ve been a few women.”
“You think? You’ve not fallen out, have you?”
“Hell, no. But he’s my dad. There are some things I really don’t want to know about.”
Alice laughed.
“No, he’s still his old self,” said John. “You should hear him. You know I went to Africa, a few years back?”
“No.”
“Yeah. The Gambia. The whole ‘Roots’ thing. You know what dad said?” John slipped into his father’s Jamaican accent. “He said, ‘What you want to go over there for? Them still eating people over there!’ You know what the old school are like.”
“The old school.” Alice smiled at him. “I’d forgotten, you always call them that.”
“Yeah.” The smile dimmed a little. “I do envy him, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s still got his faith. No doubts, no ifs, buts or maybes. Mum’s in Heaven and when he dies he’ll be with her again. That’s how he copes. Everything else is just killing time.”
Maybe now was the time to bring it up? It was an opportunity – but no, it was too early. Later, she’d ask him. And besides, the starters had arrived.
THE REST OF the meal passed in small talk. The old days at university, the mad things they and their friends had got up to, the old ‘where are they now?’ routine.
As they pored over the dessert menu, the topic shifted back to their families. Alice talked about Mum and Dad – still together, still maddening, still loved – and John about his sister, Carol, who’d just had her fourth child.
“Four now? Jesus. And hang on, I thought she was your big sister.”
“Yup. Forty-four and a mother again. Back at work already.”
“What about you?”
“Nah.” He shrugged. “Never found the right woman, did I?” He didn’t meet her eyes when he said it. “Few girlfriends, over the years.”
“But no kids?”
“Nah.” He studied the dessert menu with an air of deep concentration. “Think I’ll have the rice cake. You?”
“Oh... chocolate ice cream, I think.”
John beckoned, and the waitress came over. He’d always had that knack, she recalled. Alice had to practically stand on chairs waving semaphore flags in order to attract attention, and not always successfully then.
It was nice to be in his company again. Nothing more than nice – she was not here, she reminded herself again, to rekindle old flames – but it was that. His presence was warm, comforting. After the stresses of the past few days, it was a soothing balm. The sense of humour, the affection – God, the warmth of him. She’d forgotten that quality he had. He’d missed his vocation, she thought: he’d have made a great counsellor. But for all that, she mustn’t forget why she was here.
After the dessert, they ordered coffee. Now, she decided, was the time.
“John?”
“Mm?”
“There’s something...”
“What is it, love?”
Love. Oh God, she should have said this sooner. Heaven knew what he was imagining here, what hopes had taken shape in his mind.
“I need... John, I need your help.”
“Sure. I mean, anything I can do to... what is it you need?”
“The house I’ve moved into. There’s something – wrong with it.”
“Wrong? What like? Rising damp? Subsidence?”
“No.” A deep breath, and she looked him in the eyes. “The kind of thing you deal with.”
“What?” He stared. “Seriously? Are you saying...?”
“Haunted, okay?” Shit, that had been too loud. She looked around, lowered her voice. “My house. I think it’s haunted.”
He stared at her, then snorted with laughter. “Very fucking funny.”
“John –”
“No, it’s hilarious. Really. I can’t believe you wanted have a dig at me about that –”
“John, I’m not having a dig.” She leant forward across the table, spoke through gritted teeth. So much for the charm offensive. “There’s something going on in my house, and it’s not – it’s not bloody normal, I know that. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. I don’t know what it is. I thought I was going mad – and you know something? I bloody wish I was, because at least then I’d know where I am. I’d need more therapy, more medication, more... whatever. But there’s stuff that can’t just be explained by me being mental. And that scares the shit out of me. I don’t know where the line is between the real stuff and what’s just in my head. I need someone who understands this kind of thing, John, and you –”
“And I just happened to be cluttering up your Facebook feed with a friend request.”
“John –”
John kissed his teeth; his eyes darted round the restaurant. He was angry, but he didn’t want a scene. “Should have known, but I thought no, give her the benefit of the doubt. I send you a friend request, and it sits around there with nothing happening for days. I mean, I could see that you’d friended some other people from uni.”
“Oh, so you were stalking me?”
“Don’t be stupid. We’ve got mutual friends on Facebook. I could see you were friending them – everyone else, all the others, but not me. I won’t lie to you, that hurt. But then, boom. You friended me, and you wanted to meet, and I’m thinking wait a sec, this is going from cold to hot way too fast. I knew there had to be some sort of reason.” He kissed his teeth again and shook his head, settling back in the chair, the anger subsiding or at least under control. “Just didn’t want to believe it.”
“It wasn’t like that, John.”
“Really? How was it, then?”
“When I first got the friend request, I couldn’t decide. You think you’re the only one with bad memories? But then, yes, this happened, and I knew there wasn’t anyone else I could ask.”
“You know what gets me?” he said. “This shit is what you dumped me for. Remember? You’re supposed to be a scientist, John – that’s what you said to me. You spent three years getting a degree and now you’re pissing it all away. Any of that ring a bell?”
“John –”
“You finished it because of that,” he said. “And now you come back and you say John, help me, I’ve got a haunted house. All of a sudden you believe in ghosts. What the hell happened?”
And then he realised, as soon as he’d said it, and his mouth snapped shut. Too late, though. He’d said it. Alice looked down. Her eyes were prickling. No, she mustn’t cry. The make-up would run, and she’d spent time and money putting this mask in place.
“Shit. Alice...” He reached out, touched her hand.
“Leave it!” She snatched her hands clear of the tablecloth. Her voice had been louder than she’d intended. Heads turned.
Neither she nor John spoke for a while. Then she put a hand to her face, cupped to hide her expression from others’ prying eyes, and said, “Don’t start thinking it’s that. This is not about Emily. I didn’t believe before she died, and I didn’t start believing after. I’ve got a brain – I’ve got reason and logic and intelligence, and I use what I’ve got and I’m proud of it. Okay? I work off logic and evidence, not wishful thinking, not emotion.”
“Yeah,” he said at last. “That’s true. You always did.”
They were silent for a while, not looking at one another.
“Do you want to go and get a drink?” he asked at last.
“Okay,” she said.
“All right,” said John, and raised a hand. “Can we have the bill, please?”
AFTERWARDS, THEY WALKED onto New Bailey Street and dawdled across the Prince’s Bridge.
“It’s pretty.” Alice leant against the bridge-work and studied the light glimmering on the darkened Irwell. Along the banks, brightly-lit buildings reared, and shone, reflected in the waters.
“Yeah, it is. I keep forgetting you haven’t seen it in a while.”
“Too long. I was happy here.”
“So was I. We both were.”
She didn’t answer at first; at last she acknowledged that much – were – with a nod.
A long sigh, and John leaned on the bridge beside her. “So come on, then. Tell me. What happened?”
She started, and once she had she couldn’t stop. Once or twice Alice heard her voice hitch and felt John stir beside her, reaching out, and had to wave him away. She wasn’t after comfort, and couldn’t let him get the idea there could be anything between them again.
At last she was done. “I really want to think I dreamt, or hallucinated it,” she said. “I’m not scared of saying mental illness, because I’ve been there and it’s not so bad. Just different. But the thing is there are these bruises and I don’t know how I got them. There’s this stone in my garden and it was in a – dream, hallucination, whatever it was – that I had before I found it. And most of all there’s this bloody Bronze Age spearhead lying in my hallway one morning that Chris Fry’s going bonkers over. Now, I couldn’t have imagined that. And it didn’t just get posted through my letterbox, did it?”
John sighed, watching the river flow.
“Look, John – you want me to eat humble pie? I’ll eat humble pie. Yes, this is the kind of thing I always laughed at when we were together. If you’d told me a story like this, yes, I would have said it was bullshit, or that whoever it happened to was mad. But I can’t do that, I’m living it, and I can’t write it all off or rationalise it no matter what I do. So, yes – you are the only person I know, that I’ve ever known, who might understand this, believe it, have dealt with something like it. I need help, John, but I don’t know what kind or how much, okay? That’s why I’m asking you.”
John Revell bowed his head, hands clasped as though in prayer. Finally he nodded, sighed and straightened up. “Come with me,” he said.
JUST OVER THE bridge was the entrance to the Mark Addy; from it, a staircase wound down to the pub itself, a converted former landing stage on the banks of the Irwell, a relic of the days when the river was used for shipping. There was a river terrace, but at this time of night, and this time of year, the doors to it were locked.
The floor was carpeted; John went over to the bar while Alice found a table by one of the floor-length windows, with a comfy-looking armchair and a chaise-longue, which she perched on.
John came back with three glasses. “Two double brandies and a Diet Coke,” he said. “Thought you might want a stiff one.”
She raised her eyebrows. “In your dreams, Revell.”
He laughed. “I only meant a drink. I swear to God. Anyway, then I remembered you were on the wagon, so I got you the Diet Coke.”
He sipped his brandy; she studied the two glasses and thought fuck it. “I’ll risk it for a biscuit,” she sighed, and took a sip.
“Okay,” said John. He was looking down again, the brandy glass cradled in his hands. “Look, Alice...”
“I’m not going to like this, am I?”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” He sighed. “See, the thing is – Christ, I should have updated that Facebook page months ago. The paranormal stuff? I don’t do that any more.”
“Oh.”
“And more than that – see, you know how it started. You were there.”
“Yes, I was. And, you know, I still kick myself sometimes.”
“About dumping me?”
“Get over yourself. No, I mean... I don’t know if we’d have lasted anyway – we were both pretty young, weren’t we? Still had a lot of growing up to do. But bloody hell, I could have shown you a bit more understanding. You’d just lost your mum.”
It had been a Sunday afternoon. She’d cooked a roast – leg of lamb with all the trimmings, (including Yorkshire pudding, which she was pretty sure wasn’t supposed to go with lamb but John was addicted to.) They’d just finished that and she’d come back from the kitchen with the apple crumble – she really had been working on being the perfect little housewife – when the phone had rung.
I’ll get it, John had said. Sit yourself down.
He’d gone into the kitchen. She’d served up portions of the dessert. They were never eaten.
Hi, Dad, John had said. You okay?
After that there’d been a silence. Then John had whispered, What?
Another very long silence, followed by the odd mumble from John. Finally he’d said, Okay, Dad. We’ll be right over. Yeah. Right away. Yeah. The click of the phone returned to its cradle had been so soft she’d barely heard it; wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been listening.
John? she’d called, but there’d been no answer. Then a single sob; the first of a torrent.
She’d found him sitting on the kitchen floor, face buried in his hands. He’d clung to her, finally managed to stop. He’d wiped his face with kitchen towels while he told her what had happened.
Dorothea and Elijah had gone to church, as they did every Sunday. She’d been dressed in her best, as she always was; sang louder than anyone else, as she always did. They’d gone home, eaten Sunday dinner, and, afterward, lazed in their chairs. Everything was as it was meant to be. Then Dorothea had got up to go to the toilet. Elijah, dozing in the summer afternoon’s warmth, only realised something was wrong when he looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and saw that half an hour had gone by.
When she didn’t answer, Elijah went upstairs. He found one of his wife’s shoes halfway down the staircase. Dorothea herself was lying on the landing a few feet from the bathroom door. She’d wet herself on collapsing; that detail had haunted Elijah Revell for months afterward. She would have hated that, he’d kept saying. She always liked to keep everything so clean.
A blood vessel had burst; it was as simple and as brutal as that. A massive haemorrhage. There was no need for Elijah to torment himself with guilt at not noticing in time – although of course he did for months and years afterwards, probably continued to do so on some level even today – because there’d been no time. Dorothea Revell, née Stoneham, daughter of Nathaniel and Victoria, wife to Elijah, mother to Carol and John, had been unconscious in less than a minute and dead within five. The best medical attention in the world would have made no difference.
Elijah had called the ambulance and sat, stunned and weeping, on the stairs with his wife until they arrived. His world had fallen apart and refused to make sense; even his children had been forgotten. Only when they had taken Dorothea away did he stumble to the telephone and call first John, then Carol.
Alice had driven John over. Carol Revell had already been there, and was already handling her grief by organising furiously: notifying friends and neighbours, speaking to undertakers and the pastor of their church, finally getting into a furious argument with the hospital her mother’s body had been taken to before the whirlwind of fury driving her had ebbed and she’d allowed herself to cry.
John breathed out, long and heavy. “Well, if we’re blaming ourselves,” he said, “you were right, in a way. I’d spent three years getting a Physics degree, after all. I was wasting it – I mean, I did. I let the grief just... take over completely, and for years as well.” He took a large swallow of brandy.
“I could have been a bit more patient, though, couldn’t I?” said Alice. “I mean, I look back on how I was and I flipping well cringe.”
John chuckled. “I think that’s pretty standard at our age.”
Alice smiled back. “Yeah, maybe. Even so, though. You were grieving.”
“You grieve for months, years maybe. Well, I don’t think it ever goes away –”
“No, neither do I. Not now.”
It had been a terrible time – for Alice too, who’d come to love Elijah and Dorothea. But the Revell family had dealt with the loss and gone on with their lives as before. All except John.
Everyone grieves in their own way. Elijah and Carol both had their faith to sustain them; Elijah had been raised with it and he and Dorothea had raised both children the same way. None of the Revells had ever questioned that faith; to them – to Dorothea most of all – the existence of God, Heaven and Hell, the divinity of Christ and His love for humankind, in general and in each particular case were facts of life, as self-evident and inarguable as the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
None of the Revells, except for John. He’d spent too long watching science crowd God out of the spaces He’d existed in before, and he couldn’t simply believe any longer. But nor could he give himself wholly over to cold logic and rationality. And out of that had come his fascination with the paranormal. Parapsychology: quite literally chasing phantoms – ghosts, rumours, tall stories – and trying to pin a scientific label on them. Trying to broker some sort of deal between his childhood faith and mature learning, to find some scientific principle that would let him say his mother wasn’t gone – not wholly, not irrevocably.
He’d been trying to square one of the oldest circles there was: all logic said that the death of the body was the end. No persistence, no survival of consciousness, no soul. No future reunion with lost loved ones, no afterlife, only oblivion. But however certain it seemed in the face of logic, it was intolerable in the face of the death of your loved ones.
But Alice, back then, had been a militant atheist before the term was even coined. There was only science and reason. Religious belief could never be anything other than stupidity or madness, born from weakness of mind. At first, she’d tolerated John’s burgeoning interest, albeit grudgingly, but her patience had run out. There’d been rows – and finally, the split.
It seemed so stupid now. Isaac Newton had believed in magic, hadn’t he? There were other scientists, great scientists, who also professed a belief in a deity. None of that diminished their greatness, their stature. To have thought John’s beliefs, born out of loss, to be an issue, now seemed so stupid. And besides, she’d suffered no loss by then: her parents were still alive and unharmed, despite the ups and downs her father’s ways had brought in the past. Now, with Emily gone, she could imagine what John had gone through, and looked back at herself with incomprehension and shame.
“It’s like a bad physical wound,” John said. “It heals up, but it leaves a scar. You end up being able to carry on as before, but there’s always a mark, or a numb spot, or a weak point. Shit, Alice, you know that.”
“Just a little.”
“Thing is, I’ve been doing it for how long? Fifteen years? That’s way too long. And I don’t know how much of that was me not wanting to admit I was wasting my time. You know how it is – the more something’s cost you, the less willing you are to give it up.”
“Yeah, I know what that’s like. So when did you give up?”
“Oh, I finally decided to make the break at the start of the year. New Year’s Resolution, yeah? It’d all been bubbling under for a while before I finally let myself admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“Admit that... well, when I started out I was determined I was gonna be the one, you know? Catch lightning in a bottle, get a ghost, a real ghost, on film. Prove it, once and for all. I was gonna be the one to do that. They all believed Troy was a myth until Schliemann dug it up, or that the Earth was six thousand years old until Darwin came along. You get the idea. I mean – you know, prove there was a life after death?” He smiled, swirled brandy in his glass. “Just for a second, imagine how it would be if I did that – if anyone did that.”
“It would be something,” Alice admitted. Sod it, she thought, and took a sip of her own brandy. She remembered the old arguments. You couldn’t prove a negative; you couldn’t prove there was no God, no afterlife, no such thing as a ghost. Just as you couldn’t prove the non-existence of invisible pink unicorns or a small teapot orbiting the planet; you couldn’t disprove them, but logic and probability made them pretty unlikely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof; what is claimed without proof can be dismissed without evidence. But to some people, that just meant the proof hadn’t yet been found.
“Damn right it would. Whole world would change, somebody could prove that. Mum would’ve said that’s why you can’t prove it; we’re not ready to be changed like that. I don’t know about that. All I know is that when I started looking, it was still as a scientist. I was after evidence, real evidence – and if this case turned out to be a fake, or that one turned out to have a natural explanation – well, then, there were always others. The real deal was something rare, you know? Elusive. I’d find it and I’d show the world.” He lowered his eyes. “And, yeah – after you left, that was just one more reason to keep on. I wanted to show you too.”
“But you never found anything?”
Lips pursed, John shook his head. “Nothing. Not in all those years. Not one damned thing that couldn’t be explained away. And then a couple of years ago I started using some of the gadgets the other ‘ghost hunters’ used – EVP recorders, that kind of shit. You know – the stuff that sounds scientific, but isn’t?”
Alice chuckled. “Yeah. I seem to remember bending your ear a few times about what bollocks that was.”
John laughed. “That you did.”
Alice sipped more brandy. It made her feel warm, comfortable, for the first time in a while. Or was that John’s presence? Maybe it was both. She slipped off her shoes and stretched out on the chaise-longue.
“Anyway – I was just trying to get a result. Something, anything. I started to think that maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe you couldn’t find what you were looking for with the scientific method. I was trying to work out some sort of equation to show maybe you did need faith... and then, well – you know how alcoholics talk about having a moment of clarity?”
“Yeah.”
“I had mine. Saw myself. Christmas was coming up and it looked like I’d be spending it same way I usually did, with the family. Dad, Carol, and her husband and kids – and me, on my own. I’ve been teaching at a sixth form college the last eight years. Oh, I’ve applied for other jobs once or twice, but my heart wasn’t in it, and I’m pretty sure my little hobby didn’t help. Forty-plus, no wife, no kids, not much of a job, not much money – and, you know, what for?”
“And that was it?”
“Not quite. I suddenly saw my house as well. Total fucking mess, the state I’d let it get into – pots in the sink, carpets hadn’t been hoovered in months, all of that. And the spare room – that was my study. Walls covered in notes, pictures, this and that – I looked at it and it was like the diary of a fucking madman. And there was nothing scientific about it any more, nothing that wouldn’t be laughed out of court in five seconds. I wasn’t going to show anybody, not with what I had. I carried on a little longer, but I already knew, deep down. So, come New Year’s, I took my website down. Oh yeah, I had one of those. John Revell, Ghost Hunter. Took the link off my Facebook page. The only reason it still says paranormal researcher is because I’d been dusting off my CV and started looking for something new. Wanted to put something better than what I had for a day job. Right now?” He shrugged. “I’m still there, but I’m saving up to go back to college. Get my Ph.D, then try and start again.”
“I’m glad.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Why do you think I was so pissed off at you? Well, one of the reasons, anyway. You had all that potential, and...”
“I know. Shit, I’ve forgotten half the stuff we learned at uni. Quantum physics, shit like that? I had enough trouble getting my head around it back then.”
“Tell me about it. It’s worth the effort, though.”
“So I heard. You did pretty well, didn’t you?”
“I did okay, yeah. Financially, anyway.”
“Right.” John opened his mouth to speak again. He was going to ask about Emily, about Andrew; about the death, about the divorce. Alice didn’t want that, not now, not with the brandy soothing the rough edges away.
“John?”
“Yeah?”
“How long do you think it’ll be before you can do that Ph.D?”
“Couple of years, probably. If I’m lucky.”
“What if you could go this year?”
“Say what?”
“Well, next year. The new academic year. What if you did one more paranormal investigation? A paid one? So well paid you could go back on the next course that’s open, and not have to worry about student debt?”
“You any idea how much money that would cost?”
“Yeah. I can afford it, John. I was very well-paid. And I got half the proceeds of the sale on my old house. Homes in Sussex are a lot more pricey than they are in Manchester. Believe me.”
“I do. Well, about the house prices. But this? You’re talking five figures, Alice.”
“I know. But I want to know what’s happening, John. I want a rational explanation, I want something where I can go well, that was a load of old bollocks. And I think I can trust you to do that.”
John chewed his bottom lip, frowning.
“Well? You going to help me, John?”
He looked at her long and hard, then finally nodded. “Okay,” he said at last.