Caroline Graham - A Ghost in the Machine

If you’d asked Roy Priest where he lived at the moment he’d have had his work cut out to tell you. He was cool with this, mind. No worries. Mrs. Crudge had worked out a system and he was happily mucking in. Her plan covered every eventuality. If Roy was on nights Karen slept at Dunroamin’ and he’d go there straight from work (Doris and Ernest didn’t like the idea of him going back to an empty house). Other days, he would see Karen safely on the school bus and one or the other of the Crudges would see her safely off at teatime. Weekends, Roy and Karen floated. Sunday lunch at the bungalow for sure. The rest of the time, fifty-fifty.

Rainbow Lodge, now Roy had finished painting and decorating, was a picture. On his day off some part of the time was always spent cleaning it and sorting out the back. Ernest was a great help in this respect. His own garden being pretty much taken up with a wooden shed, a small but pretty summerhouse and the aviary, he welcomed the chance to, as he put it, “get a bit o’ dirt under me fingernails.” He brought his Reader’s Digest Year Book round and he and Roy pored over it, checking out what could be planted now and what should wait until the spring. They might order a few raspberry canes, suggested Ernest. And some daffy down dillies. After they’d dug and cleared a section they’d clean up and walk over to the Horse and Hounds to wet their whistles.

Roy felt awkward the first few times. He’d stand, clutching his half, on the fringe, as it were, speaking only when spoken to. Then, gradually, he began to join in. Wary of even the mildest confrontation he would agree first with this person, then that. When the football was on he did let rip a bit but so did everyone else so that was all right. Last Wednesday he’d thrown a few darts.

He continued to pay the rent on Rainbow Lodge, in cash, at Causton Council Offices, reckoning that if someone in the Crescent was going to shop him they’d have done it by now. And the longer he lived there, never in arrears, keeping the place smart, the better chance he’d have of staying should the penny eventually drop. If it did and they made him go, well – that would be pretty bad but not, as he had believed only a little while ago, the end of the world.

Because Roy had a family now. He told himself that every time he lay down to rest in what was now unrecognisable as Ava’s room. “I’ve got a family,” he would murmur, over and over again, and sometimes even in his sleep. More and more he was believing it until gradually, over the years, he came to know that it was true.

In the fullness of time Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother departed this earth. Esmeralda Footscray, informed simultaneously of the event by her spirit guide gave a great cry: “A million beams of light attend Your Majesty!” jumped on to a passing beam herself and hurtled after.

George, lowering a crenellated macramé fort into a bath of glue, a special order for a child’s birthday, heard the cry but paid it little mind. She was always calling out for something or other. A cinnamon stick to burn, brandy to pour on aching gums, sausages to roast over the electric fire. All activities primed for disaster. Only the other day she had set alight a bowl of feathers and he’d had to clean up the mess.

To tell the truth, George was discovering a certain steeliness within himself and the discovery was not unpleasant. He didn’t run quite so fast to her every beckoning and calling. In fact, he no longer ran at all. Occasionally he sauntered. More often he affected not to hear.

It wasn’t difficult to recall the first apprehension of this harsher version of his previous self. It had surfaced during the memorial meeting for Ava Garret. Recalling her cruel and insulting dismissal barely a week earlier he could hardly get through the address without spitting. But by the end of the service malice had been transformed to satisfaction at the dark immediacy of her comeuppance. George, finding it hard to keep a straight face, had had to hide in the gents’, where he muffled joyful yelps of laughter by stuffing a handkerchief into his mouth.

Now both of the women who had contrived, one way or the other, to make his life a misery, had gone. Untethered, George felt very strange. So that he would not float away entirely he continued to structure his days in the usual manner, looking after the house, himself and the Church of the Near at Hand. This last proved to be a mixed blessing.

Sympathy there was in abundance, which was no more than he expected. What he wasn’t prepared for were stiflingly genteel romantic overtures. These took many forms. Gifts of food, invariably described as being more than enough for two would arrive, often with an offer to pop round and heat everything up for him. Secretarial help was also proposed, and here George was briefly tempted. After his mother’s death was reported in the Psychic News he had received an escalation of cards and letters. They contained mostly straightforward expressions of sympathy but a fair proportion also included messages or more often instructions purporting to come from Esmeralda herself. George began to get a feel for these missives. They were longer, for a start, and one or two correspondents did him the favour of delivering the extraterrestrial stuff in differently coloured ink. He binned them all, unread. Other members of the Near at Hand kept asking how he was coping with the shopping, as if he hadn’t already spent half his adult life hurtling round the aisles of Asda.

Ladies – George always thought of women as ladies – who did not want to do something for him wanted him to do something for them. Dripping taps, sagging shelves, sticking doors, blocked pipes. What, George couldn’t help wondering, had they done all the years up until now? He was also asked if he could mow a lawn, run someone to the chiropodist and take a pensioner’s elderly dog, Elaine, on a final visit to the vet. The reason for this last, explained the distressed owner, was that if she herself did the deed the spaniel might feel betrayed. George, feeling that calling a male animal Elaine was more than enough betrayal already, did agree, on this one occasion, to oblige.

There had also been several offers to help sort through his mother’s things. These came mainly from the Buckinghamshire section of the Worshipful Bowes Lyon Society, (hermaj/bolyon@co.uk). Esmeralda was not a member, though when the news of her collection got out the secretary had written urging her to join. It was, the missive seemed to imply, no more than her duty. When she declined, invitations to view the treasure were angled for and once even demanded, but also without success. So it was not entirely a surprise to George when, a few days after the funeral, a fierce rapping at the front door introduced the chairman of the group, Fabian Endgoose.

Surprisingly young, with cropped fair hair, Mr. Endgoose wore Himmler glasses and a floor-length black leather coat. A silk scarf showing the QM’s racing colours was twisted tightly round his neck. He had hardly opened his mouth before George attempted to close the door. Mr. Endgoose wedged a heavily studded boot in the gap. George threatened to call the police. It had all been most unpleasant.

Later, sitting in his mother’s armchair beside the now extinguished milky globe, he struggled to decide how best to handle matters. First, to ease the immediate pressure, he wrote to the society fibbing that his mother’s collection would be shortly going in its entirety to Sotheby’s. However, after posting the letter, it struck him that an auction might actually be quite a good idea and he spent the next few days writing to all the main houses to suggest this. Awaiting their response he locked the door of her room and was immediately overcome by such feelings of relief and happiness that he didn’t open it again until the day the archives were finally handed over.