No Room for Ghosts

‘It’s alright, love.’

Randolph poured more hot coffee into Leanna’s mug. She was still visibly shaking, and clung to it too tightly to let him substitute it for another. The blood that drenched her clothes and hands had faded almost as soon as I had dragged her from the intersection, but there could be no denying what had happened.

The ghost of the old barista patted her with a rough, heavy hand, so that she was wracked with forceful jolts in between sobs. It was unsurprising that Randolph doted on Leanna, but I hadn’t expected him to completely ignore me. A greeting would have been nice, but instead, he seemed to regard me as something she had trodden in. Every now and then, I even caught him aiming a resentful glare in my direction, when he thought I wasn’t looking.

I had recovered from the shock, mostly, because I needed to mobilise myself in order to bring Leanna here. It had taken her longer to accept that the little girl was really a ghost, like us.

‘It’s just the way of her haunting, love,’ Randolph explained. He had compared her to a spectre that appeared on the coast of Queensland, in a spot where he and his brothers had once fished in avoidance of school.

‘Great place for yellowtail,’ he reminisced, and seemed to slip, under the haze of memory, into a more comfortable dialect. ‘Good with a bit ‘o salt an’ butter. There used to be a spirit there, what they called the abalone diver. I know, because my oldest brother nearly died seeing him. Dan was sixteen, and he was surfing too close to the headland, when a big wave dunked him under.’

Leanna nodded silently, drinking this in along with her coffee, which she forced down in scalding gulps. Her eyes were so wide in their hollow sockets that I could almost see the breaking wave inside them, reflected in perfect blue.

‘The rest of us were sittin’ on dry land. We had rods lined up, see. At first we laughed when he fell off, but when the foam came in and he didn’t surface, we panicked. I was the next oldest. I swam out and found him tangled. It was damned lucky I got there in time, and managed to pull him out, half-drowned. We all thought he was delirious. Once he’d coughed up enough seawater, he wouldn’t stop ravin’ about this diver he said he’d seen. He reckoned the poor bloke was snagged under the rocks.’

‘Why hadn’t we saved him? He kept asking, over and over. We told him, brother, there was no diver there. Mum worried he might have swallowed too much saltwater. Then, later, we found out the truth from the old people. The abalone diver was a ghost, from maybe fifty years earlier. People used to free-dive for a living back then, without any tanks or scuba gear, just holding their breath for as long as they could. They said he got caught at the bottom, and he ran out of air. He still appears to folks that nearly drown, in that same spot. Maybe to folks that do drown, too.’

Randolph finished with an air of profoundness and a solemn, faraway look. I thought he expected somebody –Leanna– to comment, but she didn’t. Before the silence could deepen into a rift between them, he patted her some more, and continued.

‘I know it must be hard, love,’ he began. ‘You’ll see what I’m talking about, though, right enough. It’s a common occurrence, when you’ve met a few ghosts.

‘Like, with the diver, I used to think he was giving some kind of warning, yeah? Now I know better. He was a very sad spirit, and that was just his haunting. You just had to be close enough to dying yourself to see it. I’d say your girl is one as well. You probably have to be dead, or near enough, to see her.’

I made the connection, and felt a weight drop in my chest. I knew very little about the rules of our world, but I also knew that Randolph understood a lot, and if there was some way of saving the child, or of breaking the news to Leanna more optimistically, he wouldn’t have kept quiet. The child was beyond our help.

‘So, that’s it? She’s stuck like that?’ Leanna was horror-struck.

Reluctantly, having hoped to avoid the question, Randolph nodded.

‘Forever?’

‘Yes, love. I’m afraid so.’

Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks, while the rest of her face was ivory-white with the effort of producing a rose on each sharp bone. The blossoms purpled as she cried, so that she looked more wrecked and corpse-like than ever. Even her hair stood out in a frizzy mane, teased and stressed where her fingers had torn it out in clumps.

‘It’s not fair.’

I put my arm around her and pulled her in tightly, further away from Randolph. She fell limply, and he seemed to interpret the gesture, rightly, as scorn at his attempted comforting.

‘So, she just plays through an infinite loop?’ I asked, but he only grunted in reply.

His expression was stern and plain, but something behind his dark eyes glimmered with primeval hatred, like a jungle cat sighting its rival. He prowled around Leanna, asserting a kind of possessiveness. He wanted to protect her, too. He wanted to protect her from me.

Disquiet stewed inside me. I think that when I met his reproach, it must have been reciprocated in my eyes. A spark seemed to jump between the two of us, and his hatred flared up.

‘Your name isn’t Harvey, is it?’ he growled, feeding my paranoia.

‘Yes,’ I said, defiantly. I tensed, anticipating a fight, but he only sighed. Turning out the pockets of his dirty apron, he produced an expression of deepest heartbreak.

Although it hadn’t been there a moment before, his full age showed in his face. His hair was not simply grey, as seemed to fit the rest of his appearance, but bleached and desiccated. The whites of his eyes were watery. The rings underneath them were like the dark hollows in oyster shells when all the flesh is scooped out and eaten. The wealth of lines that creased his waxy face, from the rivulets around his mouth up to tundra by his nose and the vast, rippling dunes of his forehead, were a map of the places his lifetime had taken him.

It struck me then that he must have been at least sixty years old. Maybe seventy.

‘Love,’ rebuffing me, he addressed Leanna again. ‘There’s something else I meant to show you. I found this yesterday, but I thought… You were in such a state already.’

He was deeply apologetic, and for a moment, he seemed at war with himself. His calloused hand strayed inside his pants pocket, having already searched through his apron. Briefly, it paused there, as though unwilling to hand over what it found.

‘Here, take this, love.’ He withdrew the paper quickly, passing it to Leanna before he could change his mind.

I tried to edge closer, but this time his rebuke was physical. A rough hand struck me in the shoulder, propelling me backwards into my seat.

‘Not you.’

The fire darted in his eyes again, suggesting that he could hit me harder, if he wanted to. Clearly, it had taken him more effort to rebuff the snarl that lay coiled in the back his throat.

I gaped, but I did not protest. I would get Leanna out of here as soon as possible, and then I knew that she would show me whatever he’d given her… Wouldn’t she?

Randolph had his huge arms folded across his chest. He was no longer concerned with looking at me at all. Evidently, whatever was printed on the paper conclusively proved his point, securing the outcome he wanted to achieve.

Doubt squirmed in my chest as I watched Leanna read, and saw her expression transform. Her eyes scanned the newspaper article –silently, I cursed newspapers– and sank before falling abruptly off the bottom of the page.

From the abyss, she looked up, and I saw that the fall had shattered her. She shot me a seething, wounded look that didn’t belong. I could deal with it when it was coming from Randolph, but not from her. I couldn’t even tell whether I was shaking out of anger or fear.

It wasn’t fair, what they were doing to me! I almost hated him, but I couldn’t be mad at her. The hotness in my head had to abate because she was hurting. I had no right to any emotion while she was in need.

Leanna was upset, but I couldn’t have upset her. The very idea stood my world on its head, so that I existed in a state of free fall, grappling with the nothing all around me. I searched in every direction, but only found denial. Leanna couldn’t look at me that way, biting her lip so that it threatened to bleed.

The only meaning in my prolonged existence derived from her. There was nothing she could say, and nothing she could accuse me of, that would make me want to do anything other than care for her. The thought of something driving us apart, especially when it was me, was sickening. It was absurd. It was beyond unjust. What had I done to deserve this?

‘Harvey!’

It wasn’t even my name, the way she spat it out, letting her tongue curl around the syllables like they were both a missile and something distasteful.

Fury shook her. She was as certain of her anger as she had been helpless to the fear that rocked her before. I searched frantically for those wide, familiar eyes, but found only narrow, cat-like slits in their place. Worst of all, they wouldn’t even look at me.

Like an insult, she slid the page across the table, daring me to pick it up. Its contents must have been damning indeed.

I took it, feeling its unnatural weight in my hands. Irrationally, I thought of divorce papers, sterile forms that severed people. These ones required me to sign by reading, so that in a cruel twist I was required to deliver the finishing blow to myself. I was required to read, and so I did.

I read the full story.

I read about how the gunman, 24-year-old Harvey Porter, an unemployed schizophrenic, had brought a rifle to the bus station on the afternoon of Thursday the 10th of February. The police speculated that the gun had come from his family property. Questioned relatives said that he had left after an argument five years ago, but that they had never noticed it missing until then.

I read about how I had fired wantonly into the crowd, apparently aiming for the 21-year-old woman, a promising university student, who was eventually killed. She hadn’t died of a gunshot, the article explained. It was unfortunate that she had been so frail at the time, and so she suffered a heart attack from shock when the bullet missed. She had toppled over a railing, suffering broken bones and other, minor injuries, and had died in hospital that evening.
No.

It couldn’t be. I stared harder at the page, as if, by sheer willpower, I could force the words to correct themselves. When I was done reading the article for a second time, my memory came flooding back.

I read it, and I ran.