Mischief (38 page)

I was watching
Shrek 2
with the twins at the O2 multiplex in Finchley Road when Althea came mid-performance and sat in the empty aisle seat beside me, touched me on my arm, and smiled when I turned my head. A slight whiff of alcohol came on her breath. I didn’t recognise her at first.

‘What are you doing here?’ I asked in surprise. ‘Is this your kind of film?’

‘I just came to say goodbye,’ she said, ‘I’m not staying. I have to be off now.’ And she patted me on my arm, got up and went up the aisle towards the exit.

‘See you, Althea,’ I called out after her.

‘Do shut up, Mum, you’re talking to yourself again,’ chorused the twins. They were sixteen at the time.

There seemed no difference between the level of reality offered by the film, which everyone could see, and Althea, whom I alone saw. I looked at my watch – the twins loved the film but it didn’t really absorb me, and I longed for it to be over – and it was nine-forty. The audience was singing along to
Holding Out For a Hero
, not very well.

The next day I called Ali to say I’d run into Althea at the cinema, but Ali could hardly listen. She was crying. Althea had been killed the night before in a road accident.

‘What time did she die?’ I asked.

‘What the bloody difference can that make?’ Ali was quite cross. But she told me that just after nine-thirty Althea had stepped off a kerb without looking and a motorcyclist had got her. There’d be no prosecution, there were witnesses. Althea had boyfriend trouble: she’d been upset, had had four vodkas and Red Bulls at the pub.

‘She was smiling when I saw her,’ I remember saying.

I reckon I was the first person Althea visited: perhaps she happened to be thinking of me at the time of the accident instead of concentrating on crossing the road. Or perhaps she and I were more closely connected in some way I don’t properly understand – in the way the same people turn up in our lives again and again, for no apparent reason. We live with coincidence – we are invited to a stranger’s house and it turns out to be the house where we were born: we run into a childhood friend in a small hotel in a foreign land – we remark upon the strange ways of fate and dismiss them. Synchronicity, Jung called it. Interlocking gears. I have no doubt Cynara’s ‘they’, those who want to make Hell’s foundations quiver and live forever, are number-crunching even as I speak to find out what goes on.

‘I have to be off now,’ Althea had said, and it certainly seemed to me she had somewhere to go. But where? She seemed too easy and uncomplicated to end up in the dark wood like Ted. She was less of a spell-in-purgatory than a straight-to-heaven person, though what do I know? And as for heaven, I can’t see it in terms of playing harps and sitting on clouds – that’s just a metaphor to explain the inexplicable – any more than I can see it as just more-of-the-same in some other dimension.

When Ted came back from the gallery that evening I told him about Althea’s farewell. I usually kept quiet about the occasional weird things that happened around me: the lost clothes that materialised in the wardrobe, words that vanished from a letter I’d been writing and reappeared, keys which changed places of their own accord and so forth. I hated it when Ted went into his I-married-a-witch mode, which he tended to when he was tired or cross. He looked at me in disbelief: the soft brown eyes which could look so kindly hardening just a little.

‘It didn’t happen,’ he said. ‘You’re upset. It’s called confabulation. The opposite of retrograde amnesia. Philly, you remember things that didn’t happen. Perhaps you should see someone.’ My life seems full of husbands who suggest I ‘see someone’, when all that happens is I see something others don’t.

‘I called out to Althea. The twins heard me. It was exactly when she died,’ I said.

‘The police got the time wrong. Or she’d left the party and gone to the cinema.’

‘She died in Clapham in South London. We were in the Finchley Road, in
North
London. Oh, what does it matter? She’s dead! I’m just glad she said goodbye. Forget it.’

Home life gets reported and embellished in the office. My Althea incident could have been fine grist to the gossip mill as reported to Cynara by Ted. ‘
My wife the witch
: c
an’t even go and see
a kids’ movie
without seeing a ghost!
’ And Cynara would have passed it on as small talk to her favourite customer Robbie if only in the interest of a good sale, or in pillow talk in her Mayfair bedroom – she lived well, did Cynara – and Robbie would have taken it all back to his masters, with their growing interest in the Other Side: that I was a ‘sensitive’.

At the turn of the last century it was considered that just as a few were born great artists, or dancers, or writers, a very few were born mediums, sensitives, for whom the wall between the living and the dead was thin, who slipped more easily between alternative realities than most. Like I do, I suppose.

‘Oh darling, you’ve no idea, have you,
just how important you are,’ Cynara had said over our fish and no chips for her at the Caprice. It’s all very well for her. But I need food to weigh me down, to keep my physical presence strongly based. Most mediums are overweight. I’m a size twelve
.

Yes, it figured. ‘They’ might be gathering samples like me from here, there and everywhere. Big Data could locate us, the few amongst millions. And how long had Cynara been part of it? Why did Cynara buy me out of the gallery after Ted died? Simple greed on her part, perhaps? Within the month I’d accepted a miserable offer from her solicitors. I should have asked for three times as much and probably I’d have got it. Or if I’d stayed a sleeping partner I’d be rich by now. She’s branched out from old master fakes into works of art ‘by’ celebrities, but ghosted by notable ‘named’ artists. The gallery is no longer becalmed but steaming ahead. Cynara has friends in high places.
‘I’m with the NSA too’,
while I was choking and gasping over our dry martinis.

In retrospect I can see that Cynara timed her offer well: I was in no position to argue. Ted had left me inadequately provided for, which she knew. Her call to me days after Ted’s death to say he had appeared to her in a dream thoroughly unsettled me, and had perhaps been intended so to do. Though I can also see that if she was sleeping with Robbie and he was on Doxies, she too was likely to have powerful dreams.

Until Robbie came to live with me the Ted dreams were erratic, and with nothing like the intensity of the first vision – when I was left poised in sunlight while Ted was whisked on in dark shadow to a gloomy shore
.
After that I’d just see Ted from a distance, stumbling amongst gnarled roots, held back by brambles and thickets like Snow White in the Disney film, but with the feeling that if only he got through the wood there would be something better on the other side. Now I must remind myself that Ted’s revenant, his visible ghost, his returning corpse, is coming from my mind, not his, and not through some malicious external force. This is not a curse, this is not black magic.

My dreams: I wake from them, even if they became more difficult to forget. There is a difference between a dream (defined as a series of thoughts, visions, or feelings that happen during sleep, from which one is said to ‘wake’) and a hallucination (defined as an image, sound, or smell that seems real but does not really exist, from which you don’t ‘wake’, but is simply here one minute, gone the next). More, hallucinations are usually caused by mental illness or the effect of a drug, or so the dictionary tells me. But I suppose you could have a hallucination of a dream, which if there is any truth in Cynara’s wild assertions about Robbie taking Doxies, might well be the case. What I am having is both. His declarations of love for me might be as hallucinatory and as drug-fabricated as mine for him. Ted’s
‘for God’s sake leave me alone’
at least had a ring of familiarity.

Two days after Robbie and I had met at Ali’s and I spent the night with him he turned up at my house with roses and quantities of smoked salmon. He was doing some serious wooing – that much was obvious. Then he said, ‘You won’t believe this, but your Ted appeared to me in a dream, and asked me to make a decent woman of you.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ I’d said. I wasn’t too pleased. He was linking my present with a past I wanted to put behind me.

‘I can’t help that though,’ said Robbie. ‘What happened, happened.’ He pulled me to him and we resumed our kissings and clutchings and the one trying to be part of the other, like teenagers. It was wonderful after the months of celibacy.

Robbie did quite a lot of kissing with his perfect, shiny north-American teeth, so well set back behind well-shaped George Clooney lips. He favoured suit fabrics that were good to bury one’s head into – nothing cheap or man-made. He also ponged delicately of something called Homme de Chasse No 1, which he said Portal Inc always gave away as their annual Thanksgiving staff gift. ‘We guys can choose a twenty-pound turkey instead. I’ve always gone for the man-scent but come next Thanksgiving, when we’re married, I’ll take the turkey.’

‘Married? It’s only been two days,’ I said. ‘You may change your mind. And the twins are vegetarian.’

‘Dammit,’ he said. ‘Nothing’s perfect.’ I loved him.

Robbie was so new to me, so un-Ted-like. Ted just smelt as he smelt, dressed as he dressed, was happy enough to buy his clothes from the charity shop, kissed little, fucked much. I’d have hesitated to nuzzle my nose into an old leather jacket that in all likelihood had been handed in by the initial wearer’s widow. And Ted would not have dreamed of wearing scent – last week’s bonfire was good enough for him. Ted’s bonfires smelt of wood; Robbie’s of paper and plastic.

And then about a week after we’d met Robbie told me he’d dreamed of Ted too.

‘You’re making that up,’ I said.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t have made it up. It was too detailed. Ted was wearing a black-leather biker jacket with a brown fur collar and striped yellow socks. He was looking at a painting of the
Mona Lisa
and she was smiling. He waved at me and said, “Look after her”.’

I admit this gave me a shiver. Ted
had
bought such a jacket at a charity shop, and it was dear to his heart. I’d sent it back to the shop it came from, a couple of weeks after his death, when the clearing up had started. And how could Robbie know about the striped socks? Ted wore them in the garden, never to the gallery. Too gaudy.

‘I bet the
Mona Lisa
was a fake,’ I said.

‘She was sure as shit really smiling,’ he said. ‘Not just a simper. She was wishing us well.’

And that dream, genuine or not, was the end of any doubts I had about the matter of marriage. Ted had given permission. Neither he nor I wanted the other to get away, that was the truth of it. Robbie never mentioned his own relatives. Ted’s family were horrified at the speed of events. You didn’t need to read their minds to know what others were thinking. A raise of the eyebrows, a sniff and a snigger said it all.
‘Out of one bed and into another!’ ‘It’s indecent! Those poor twins – what they must feel!’ ‘What on earth can he see in her?’
and so on.

But in the here and now sleep was beginning to overcome me. The wake-up pills were wearing off. I wouldn’t wait up for Robbie. I’d go to bed alone in the confidence I wouldn’t dream if I didn’t have sex with him. Ted wouldn’t be able to come walking out of his world into mine. In the morning Robbie would be there, and he would sit on the bed and stroke my cheek, and his declarations of love and concern for me would ring as true to me as mine did for him:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds, Admit impediments
… Forget Cynara and her improbable impediments… I slept.

I awoke from a dreamless sleep around nine a.m. feeling alert and rational. That is to say I couldn’t remember having any dreams, and my own view of myself was that I was alert and rational; but that too may have been illusion. There was no sign of Robbie, but I felt no pang of loss, no withdrawal symptoms resulting from the absence of his attentions. My conversation with Cynara had been the bad dream: lunch with an anorexic maniac. The room was full of light: the sun had been up for hours; I pulled the blind up and got the full blast of its brilliance in my eyes. I was dazzled and couldn’t see properly at first, then my eyes adjusted.

On the floor between the bathroom and the chest of drawers, seeming to grow out of our new fitted pale green carpet (John Lewis, wool-rich woven celery velvet, £52 the square metre) which now replaced Ted’s and my pale pink one (John Lewis, wool and nylon mauve twisted pile, £19 the square metre) was a little sapling. It was about six inches high, with a brown stem hardly thick enough to call a trunk. It had branching arms hung with bright green clusters of something between leaves and fronds, and with black roots descending like tentacles and digging into the velvety pile of the carpet. It was a miniature version of one of the Arthur Rackham trees Ted wrestled with in my dreams of the great forest. It looked as though it had every intention of growing.

I hadn’t had a dream and I hadn’t seen Ted, I’d just been asleep. No, I thought, this is a hallucination. This is not something that’s grown, sprung up overnight like an evil mushroom; this is some horror I have produced myself, out of my addled imagination.

I tiptoed round the little tree carefully and went through to the bathroom; brushed my hair, my teeth, put on lipstick. If I ignored it perhaps it would go away. When I went down to the kitchen there was a strong smell of coffee and frying bacon, and there was Robbie, limber and fully dressed and perfectly lively. He smiled at me. His perfect teeth gleamed; his glasses caught the sun and glinted back at me. Everything glittered. It was a beautiful spring morning. Robbie was like a man on a Calvin Klein poster, all clean-cut and pent-up vigour, not a crumple anywhere. I didn’t run to him and clasp and wriggle: I pecked him affectionately on the cheek. I felt affectionate. A woman who hallucinates – but whose twins are housed by her husband, whose dream kitchen is paid for by him, whose Dualit toaster cost £195, and whose sexual needs are more than matched, does well to show affection even if their husband has been out all night, even if his jealous ‘ex-bed-buddy’ has had nasty things to say.