Tim Lebbon
I knock on the door before opening it and entering the house. I do this every time, even though old Ronnie is almost deaf and probably won’t hear, and he leaves the front door unlocked so that his carers and visitors can gain access without him having to get up from his chair. Mostly housebound and very unsteady on his feet, Ronnie is still as sharp as they come where it matters. His mind is vastly populated with memories from his century on this planet, and though he sometimes gets confused, he’s aware when it happens. That makes a big difference. He’s a good kind man, and beneath the aged countenance and occasional muddled thoughts, I know that he cares.
It’s morning, and his living room door is still open. Ronnie is a man of habit. If I’d come after lunch the door would have been closed, and more likely than not I’d have found him asleep in his chair with some inane afternoon TV blaring. But the morning is his time for reading the newspapers and drinking his one and only coffee of the day.
I pause just outside the door, always a little afraid of what I’ll find when I enter. I’m way past my sell-by date, he often tells me, and even though I’m quite sure I was here fairly recently, I worry about the decline I might find.
My knuckles graze the living room door, and as I enter Ronnie looks up from his newspaper. His smile is open and honest and it knocks thirty years from his age.
“You again!” he says.
“Me again.”
“It’s been… not long. A month? Six?” He taps his head. “Losing it, a bit.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment, Ronnie.”
He laughs, coughs, waves a hand, then struggles upright. “I’ll get the damn kettle on, then. As you’re here I’ll have another coffee, just for today. And there’s some Victoria sponge.”
I smile and nod, and follow him out into the kitchen. He fusses at the kettle and the cake tin beside it, and asks if I want anything, but I’m never thirsty or hungry. It’s the same charade we always play. He cuts himself a small slice and makes a cool cup, then we return to the living room.
Ronnie places the cup and plate on his small table and drops into the chair with a deep sigh. He sits up straighter, then brushes his hair and straightens his shirt. On the arm of his chair is a notebook and pencil. It’s a thick book, the ribbon marker two-thirds of the way through. I think he uses it to remind himself of appointments, visits and thoughts he doesn’t want to see flitter away. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s actually a notebook just for me, and if each page is filled with a name and a location. That’s impossible, of course, though I can’t recall exactly how many times I’ve been to see Ronnie. In the hazy memories of my past I think perhaps he was a much younger, stronger man when I first whispered into his ear, but still considered old by most.
I take a seat on his sofa. He picks up the notebook.
“Maybe today’s your last visit,” he says. “That time’s got to come soon, you know. I’m not as young as I used to be.” He laughs, because it’s what he always says. I laugh also, because it’s one of the greatest truths. There’s a saying that the only certainties in life are death and taxes, but there’s also time. Most people spend their lives hardly noticing it passing by until it’s too late. Some dwell on it too much. Ronnie knows the dance of time better than most, and he’s as close to being friends with it as anyone I’ve ever known.
“I’ll be here again,” I say, and Ronnie’s smile slips.
“Oh. So not this time then.”
“Not this time. Not yet.”
“Never mind.” He actually shakes himself a little, like a dog shrugging off an itch. He sits higher in his chair, straightening his aged back. “You’ll find what you want soon.”
“Soon.” Ronnie is my ticking clock. Each time I visit I fear he might be wound down and sinking into his true old age, with the years leaching his life and dulling his sharp mind. Yet here he remains, mind as sprightly as ever. “I don’t know, Ronnie,” I say. “Maybe I’ll never find it.”
“Come on, now. Don’t talk like that. It’s not as if… well, you’ve got plenty of time to look.”
“That’s true, my friend.” I smile and nod.
“Ah,” he says. “Of course. Plenty of time, but I’m the only one who can hear the truth from you. And I’m not here for much longer.”
He has verbalised my fears. I’m glad I didn’t have to say it; thinking it is bad enough.
Ronnie grunts a little, then takes a good swig of coffee and a big bite of cake. Crumbs patter onto his shirt and he wipes them away. He dabs jam from his top lip with a napkin. Old he might be, but the man still has his pride.
“So you have something for me,” he says. It’s not a question. It never is. He knows how this works.
“Melanie Groves,” I say. He starts to write, slow and meticulous because of his twisted old hands, concentrating on the notebook in his lap. “She’s out by the old railway arch at the end of Sordon Road.”
“Uh. I know it. Used to play there with my brother.”
I keep talking, Ronnie keeps writing. I give him the details of how I found her, and the way she sang to catch my attention. The same way they always sing.
One day perhaps I will recognise my own voice.
* * *
I walked along the same road that I’d walked countless times before. It was a mile outside of town, a narrow lane curving around the base of a low hill and leading eventually to the small wharf on the canal that took our town’s name. I was neither too warm, nor too cold. The air around me felt still and stale. I’d come to recognise the lack of any real stimulation for my senses as just another side-effect of being dead.
As I neared the canal I heard the first whisper of a strange voice. I paused, a lonely wraith frozen in surroundings I could barely feel or experience, and tilted my head to one side. The voice was so distant that I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it. I often heard such mutterings from beyond, sometimes in languages or dialects I did not know. But this was closer, and more immediate.
I left the road and headed across a field, wading through tall damp grass that I barely felt. A butterfly was startled aloft at my approach. It fluttered around and settled on my arm. As I neared the far corner of the field where a rough farm track passed beneath a railway line, a small herd of cows stopped munching on grass and raised their heads to look at me. They didn’t seem unsettled. Still chewing, they watched as one as I passed them by.
The voice was louder now, and it ebbed and flowed like a gentle summer breeze. It was a woman, and she was singing. For a moment I paused, feeling guilty about intruding on a living person’s private time. She wouldn’t see me – Ronnie was the only person I’d ever found who I knew for sure could see me, perhaps because he was closer to death than most – but I’d still feel bad. Watching the living often felt like spying. That was partly why I wandered in quieter places and sought out the dead.
Her voice rose and fell in a song I did not recognise, and then I sensed something different about it, something that made me continue on into the short tunnel beneath the railway arch. Though she sang, there was a flatness to her tone that I recognised, and none of the words quite made sense.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice echoing from the arched brickwork above.
The singing stopped. It was as if I had never heard it at all. I looked around, knowing what I was going to find because I’d discovered places like this before. I couldn’t help but come across them as I searched for the resting place of my own earthly remains. I walked further beneath the bridge and through the gate on the other side, and the landscape opened out into a large field, given over to wild fallow growth and scattered with the remains of several old tumbled sheds and storage barns.
“Keep singing,” I said.
No reply.
“Keep singing and I’ll find you.”
She started singing again, this time with something resembling hope in her voice. And I found her.
* * *
“Do you recognise the name?” I ask.
“Melanie Groves.” Ronnie shakes his head. He puts down the notebook and nods at the phone he keeps on a small table beside his chair. “You want me to…?” he asks, and I know what he means. He could search for the name Melanie Groves on the internet, discover where and when she disappeared, but I don’t want to know. There would be grief and misery attached, and I’ve come to learn – as has Ronnie – that what I do sometimes reignites both.
But it also gives closure, not only to those I find in shallow graves or buried in silt on remote river banks, but for loved ones who have struggled to continue with their lives even though something is missing. Love always invites grief eventually, and everyone I’ve ever found has been loved.
I was also loved, though my past is so distant and hazy that I only have vague memories of the man who used to smile at me, kiss me, hold my hand. And I have yet to be found.
“Maybe do it after I’m gone,” I say. Ronnie’s eyes betray his sadness that I won’t be staying with him for long. He has plenty of company – his carers every day, his children and their children from time to time – but I’m different, and something quite special. A man his age has few secrets, and I am one that he treasures.
“Do you have to leave so soon?” he asks. “You’ve only just got here.”
I want to leave. I don’t like being with the living, and speaking with Ronnie… it doesn’t quite hurt, but it’s uncomfortable. I’m intruding into the world I left a long time ago, and breaking rules comes with consequences.
I relent. “I’ll wait while you make the call, if you like,” I say, and Ronnie smiles. He’s grateful. That makes me feel good.
As Ronnie calls the police and gives them Melanie’s name and the location where she’s buried, I imagine him typing my own name into his phone as he searches for my story.
I’ve been missing for a long time, and none of this is fair.
* * *
I wait outside Ronnie’s house until the police arrive. They’re wearing plain clothes and come in an unmarked car. The history of police finding missing remains with the help of psychics or others is not a flattering one. I once asked him what he tells them about the information I relay, and he said that he tells them he sees these places in dreams. They suspected him at first, of course – old murders, given up by a man close to the end of his life – and he took that on the chin. But then more recent disappearances were solved through Ronnie’s ‘dreams’, and they slowly drifted from suspecting him to… well, he says he thinks that they fear him, just a little.
It’s hardly surprising.
But they’re solving crimes, and bringing closure, and in three cases the discovery of buried remains has led to them capturing and convicting killers. Ronnie and I are providing a good service, and however the police are managing and processing the arcane nature of the knowledge Ronnie provides, they must accept that.
It’s a man and a woman this time. I’ve seen them once before, and as they step from the car they stand at Ronnie’s front gate for a while, facing each other, heads close as they talk. I can see their trepidation. They’re about to confront something that neither of them can explain, and yet they’re driven to go through with it because they know that there’s a good result on the other side. They look confused but determined. Afraid, but set on the course they know is right.
Huh. Welcome to my death.
* * *
The passage of time is strange for me, like a river that sometimes flows upstream. I remember this from when I was alive – time exists to stop everything happening all at once, I read somewhere – but it ceased meaning so much to me when I had passed away. This strange post-death existence feels like it’s happening all at once. I leave Ronnie’s house and drift from here to there, and I have just found Melanie’s sad resting place, and I am with Ronnie for the first time, and there is a fog of memory and emotion and anger at whatever happened to me so many years ago. Everything has already occurred and is still happening.
I’ve been like this for quite some time – I can judge that by how much Ronnie has aged since I first visited him – and I’ve come to understand that my own eventual fate must be bound up in the remains of those I sometimes find.
I have seen or met no one else like me. I am dead and yet I wander, and perhaps I am as unique as Ronnie. He is the only one who can see me and hear my voice. The idea that we are both special is pleasing to me.
I don’t know where my own remains are buried, only that they are undiscovered. There must be loved ones who miss me and want to know what happened to me, but my living past is vague at best. Shadows and hints; that face, that smile. I wish it was not this way.
In finding others, I seek to find myself, and lay myself to rest.
* * *
The valley and the town it nurtured was often too busy for me, too bustling with life, so more and more I found myself heading into the hills. Every time I crossed the canal and started up the slope towards the low mountain bordering the valley to the east, a song echoed inside and drew me on. I thought it was the memory of something I might have once sung. It made me feel good and free. I thought perhaps I liked coming up here when I was alive.
I always followed the song but eventually lost it, and never found anything of note.
I had no reason to believe that today would be different.
Perhaps the change came from finding the sad remains of Melanie Groves. Each time I found one of these missing unfortunates, they seemed to mutter in my memory before I revealed their location to Ronnie and they were discovered, excavated and taken away. They were words I didn’t know, little more than mere suggestions. Perhaps they had been building a picture in my discorporated mind. A map of whispers.
Today I followed that map, and it was up on the hillside, higher than I usually went, and so close to the trig point that marked the summit, that I heard three people starting to sing. Two of those voices were strange, and I already recognised them as remnants from long, long ago, from a time before the town huddled in the valley ever came into being. The words were in languages I did not recognise and they were so, so faint, a mere memory of sound and cadence. Wherever I trod there was deep history, and the remains of those gone into the ground many hundreds or even thousands of years before I walked these roads and hillsides. They never acknowledged my presence. I’m not even sure they were aware of themselves anymore. I could do nothing for them, and I hoped that over time they might have found some sort of peace.
The third voice I recognised.
Little fly upon the wall
Ain’t you got no clothes at all?
Ain’t you got no shimmy shirt?
Ain’t you got no blouse or skirt?
Poor fly.
Ain’t you cold?
I paused on the hillside, listening to that song again and again, until I remembered someone singing it to me a long time ago.
Mother, I thought. She used that song to nurse me to sleep. The memory brought a rush of images and emotions. But the voice I heard reciting this old beloved song now was my own.
I scampered across rocks and heather and through tall ferns, leaving the well-trodden paths and climbing a steep slope until I reached the old railway track. Open-cast mines hauled thousands of tonnes of coal from these mountains a century before, and the tracks used to transport it down to the canal far below were long gone. But the stone sleepers remained, and I followed them as the voice grew louder.
The old track passed around the top of the mountain, and I had flashes of a strange déjà vu that is only experienced by the dead – I remembered my life, and walking here with the sun on my face and a cool, wintery breath on my skin.
The track eventually disappeared into a stone structure that marked the beginnings of a tunnel through a shoulder of land, and I felt the curious sensation of a heart beating in my chest as the singing ceased and an old memory came.
* * *
I was here on my own, hiking these hills I loved so much. I’d come this way a score of times before, always passing by the old stone tunnel. I’d looked inside once or twice, but I had never ventured in. I was too careful for that. This place was close to the town, but it still had its dangers, and I was aware enough of mountain craft to know I should avoid such dangers at all costs. I had my phone, and my partner knew where I was. But it would have been irresponsible to risk hurting myself, and causing all the worry and trouble that rescue from the mountainside would cause.
Despite that, this time… this time something lured me closer. The darkness inside, warm and rich. The thought of old times buried there in that tunnel, unknown secrets hiding away from me and smiling from the shadows. I tested the stone, and it seemed solid. I hesitated for several minutes, taking a drink, nibbling on one of the sandwiches I’d brought with me, telling myself again and again that of course I’m not going to crawl in there, of course I’m not that foolish.
I crawled in there. A shimmer, a shake, a rumble, pressure from above, a moment of shock and pain.
And I never crawled back out.
* * *
Here I am, I thought, I’ve found myself at last.
The memories swished around me on the tides of time. I approached the tunnel and pushed my way inside, startling a small lizard which skittered away, froze, and then looked back at me. It seemed to realise that there was nothing to fear, because I was barely there. It watched as I squeezed through the fallen entrance, drawn by the echo of my own voice. I clawed at the moist ground buried beneath a fall of rocks, and though I had very little sense of touch, it moved beneath my fleeting fingers, rucking up and rolling aside until the first faint yellow smear of a bone was revealed.
Found me. I’ve found me.
I sat back against the curving stone wall. I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d visited Ronnie, but time pressed in and surrounded me, and I knew that discovering where my remains were buried had also started a ticking clock.
I rushed back down the hillside.
* * *
There is an ambulance outside Ronnie’s house. Its back doors are open, but there’s no movement. His front door is ajar, and I move closer. As I approach, it opens fully.
They don’t see me as they slowly, carefully, wheel the stretcher out, lifting it over the door’s sill. The shape on the stretcher is covered with a sheet, its edges tucked in beneath the body. There are two paramedics, a man and a woman. I’m touched by their reverence as they pass me by and push Ronnie’s mortal remains towards the waiting vehicle.
“Oh no,” I say, but they don’t hear me. “I’m too late.” I feel a rush of grief and loss, partly for Ronnie but also for myself. I’ve been looking for so long, but even though I’ve only ever known Ronnie here at home, sitting in the chair or pottering in his garden as he follows his old man’s rituals, he has been with me from the beginning of my search.
Right up to now, when he has gone and left me behind.
Who can I tell? Who will listen? Who can?
I walk into his house. There are two people in Ronnie’s living room, sitting on his sofa and filling out forms. They talk softly, and one of them laughs. It’s respectful. The items of a man’s life surrounds them. Medical paraphenalia is scattered on the floor, but I don’t think any of it has been used, and I hope Ronnie passed away in his armchair, quiet and asleep.
“I’m here,” I say, but they don’t hear me.
I move through to the kitchen, and there are several half-drunk cups of tea and coffee by the sink. I remember Ronnie fussing around out here, offering to make me a drink even though he knew I could not touch it. He’d always been quite accepting of the fact that he could see me, hear me, and speak with me, but sometimes he’d conducted his own familiar routines, perhaps to make himself comfortable with the idea that he was talking with someone who had died long ago. Neither of us tried to understand, and I think that was why it worked between us.
I miss him. Though I always found it hard being so close to the living, Ronnie was different. He was my friend.
I see something moving in the back garden and there’s a flicker within me. Maybe it’s a spark of hope. I step through the open back door and there’s a man sitting on the garden bench. Ronnie! I think, and I wonder what he will be like as a ghost. I hope he’ll retain that same sense of worldly-wise humour. In truth, I have no idea.
But this is not Ronnie. The man is younger, and as he turns and leans back against the bench, looking across the garden with a heavy sigh, I recognise some of his features – the heavy hooded eyes; the slightly hooked nose; the wide mouth and strong jaw. I’d always told Ronnie that he was handsome, and he’d laughed almost until he couldn’t breathe.
As I watch, a tear escapes the man’s eye and runs down beside his nose. He does not wipe it away. Ben’s a good boy, Ronnie once said to me when he was telling me about his son. I liked that he called him a boy, even though Ben was retired and edging into his seventies.
As if he can hear me thinking his name, Ronnie’s son turns and looks at me. He frowns for a long few seconds, and his eyes seem to flicker a little to the left and right as if he’s trying to bring me into focus.
I hesitate, thinking of stepping back into the house. I don’t want to frighten him.
Then Ben offers me a sad smile.
“Are you here for my dad?” he asks.
He really can see me! I think. I nod. “I saw what… I’m sorry.”
Though he frowns at my voice, Ben is still smiling. I think perhaps it’s a common expression for him. Just like his dad. “He was asleep when I arrived. I could hear him snoring. So I made myself a cuppa, made one for him too, and when I took them into the living room he wasn’t snoring anymore. He wasn’t…”
“It was peaceful,” I say, to myself as well as him.
“Yeah, peaceful,” he says. “So who are you?”
“I’m an old friend of your dad’s. And I’ve got something to tell you.”