No Room for Ghosts

I had the strangest feeling, like time had stopped. For a moment, I was a surfer, riding on the sea of emotion that had been welling up inside me for a week, without anywhere to go. As the pieces fell together, a dam wall collapsed, and the tide swelled, surging forward to swallow me whole.

I knew I wouldn’t survive. The crest of this wave would curl too high, and would roll over and through me, dunking me into lightless, silt-filled depths. I anticipated pain, or crushing pressure as the tsunami broke. As my body stood petrified, my heart raced in rhythm with the million roaring, foaming beasts that charged towards me.

Then, the wave hit, and I was buffeted slightly, suspended without gravity while it passed by, leaving me unharmed. I felt only disappointment in its wake. I was a surfer, and I had missed my cue. I had missed my ride, just like Leanna had once wanted to. The water had swept through me like I was simply mist, mingling with the salt it had tossed in abandon.

Inwardly, I turned and watched as the broken wave rippled out and flattened itself against some distant beach. Its gurgling subsided. Finally, it was just a ringing in my ears.

The circles in Leanna’s coffee cup, which had been trembling in her hands, also calmed and dissipated.

There was nothing left to do but say it.

‘I don’t think we lived that day.’ I let the syllables drop into the air, as though I were just an agent for the truth.

‘Neither do I.’

I turned sharply, apprehending the voice, which had come from an unexpected direction. It was deep and male, coarse and throaty, but it was not sombre. Its owner looked up at me with a twinkling in his eyes, which were like dark opals set in the wrinkled, lumpy clay of his face.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded.

‘Randolph McInnis,’ replied the old barista. ‘Not that it matters to you. You just want to know why I’ve been hanging around.’

I let my silence pass for an answer. I was too annoyed, wary, and perhaps a little too afraid to take any action. Since the shooting, it felt like I had been following a road, some marked path that intuition was pulling me along. Now I had been thrown from it, or it had run out. I was pretty positive that I wasn’t alive anymore, and I wasn’t sure what the protocol for that was.

The old man grinned. ‘Of course,’ he said, as though in response to a perfectly polite prompt from either Leanna or myself.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her purse her thin lips, fixing the barista, who had returned to the counter, with a panicked look. The woman, however, either wasn’t paying attention or was ignoring her.

‘She can’t see you,’ Randolph said, matter-of-factly.

‘She noticed us on the way in,’ I objected, clinging to this fact more to dissuade myself from my own theories than to start or win an argument.

‘The living are like that,’ he assured me. ‘They’ll notice you sometimes and forget later, if they’re in the path of your haunting.’

‘My what?’ Leanna had ceased her hopeful staring and caught the tune of the conversation. An expression of revulsion contorted her face in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible.

‘Your haunting, love. That’s the place you stay in, like limbo, just after you’re dead. You see the world as you knew it when you were alive. Like I was saying, they won’t know you from one of them, as long as they don’t recognise you, while you stay on that path. If you move off it –and I’d say you have now you know you’ve figured out what you are– you might as well be a spirits to them. Maybe you are,’ he paused thoughtfully.

‘What do you mean “the living”? Who are “the living”?’ Leanna was frantic, stuck at an earlier point in the conversation. Cold dregs spilled all over the table, splattering it with violent, brown streaks. Nobody else noticed. I supposed to them, it wasn’t real.

‘They are,’ the ghost jabbed a sausage finger at the female barista, leaning apathetically against the counter, and at several passers-by as they strode past the window in turn.

‘So what am I?’ Leanna shrieked, as though to disarm a truth she refused to hear, or to create some white-noise that might drown it out. ‘What am I?’ Tears splashed down her cheeks in fat blobs as she repeated her mantra, coupling the fierceness of her demand with a persistence that made it impossible for him to reply.

Randolph was not thrown. He exuded a patience that could only have come from experience. ‘There, there,’ he said. ‘You’re dead, love.’

I expected her to wail harder than ever, but Leanna only sniffled once, and was silent. Her sobriety was almost harrowing.

‘Look.’ Randolph muttered, rubbing an apparently aching back as he straightened up. He withdrew something from the pocket of his apron. ‘There’s a reason I stay in this shop. We’re right on the main street, so we often get your kind wandering in here. She just thinks it’s draughty.’ He smirked knowingly at the barista, who had been hugging herself and scrutinising the doormat since Leanna had exploded. ‘I don’t know how many times they’re tried to reseal underneath that door… Anyway.’ He shrugged it off. ‘I’ve taken to keeping all the obituaries I can get. I cut them out of the paper, or out of its spirit, like, after it’s thrown out.’

I shot him a puzzled look. ‘This isn’t part of your haunting, then? You can’t touch actual objects?’

‘Nothing much is my haunting anymore, mate,’ he answered. ‘When your haunting’s up, it’s up, and you can only linger in real time if you want to. Or, you can move on. Sometimes you don’t get the choice to stay, if you’re a restless kind of ghost. Things are like that.’

‘And when is your haunting up?’ I wondered if it was just a set amount of time that had to expire, or whether there was something more, some further condition that had to be met.

Randolph shook his head, as though reading my mind. ‘It’s up when you find out about it, whether you like it or not,’ he said. ‘For some folks, that’s soon. For others, it’s never. Especially children,’ his wide mouth hardened, and he sounded resentful. ‘Most kids don’t know what hit ‘em.’

Leanna nodded comprehendingly along with this, but her attention lingered on the thin scrap of paper that waved in the man’s hand.

‘What have you got for us? Is it our obituaries?’ The eagerness in her voice didn’t quite match the rest of her demeanour. She seemed conflicted about whether she really wanted to know.

Unexpectedly, he addressed his reply to me. ‘It’s half of that,’ he said regretfully. ‘Mate, I don’t have anything on you, I’m afraid. Love,’ he turned back to Leanna, and handed her the scrap, ‘this is yours.’

Her round eyes scanned rapidly as she absorbed the contents of the newspaper clipping, much as it had apparently absorbed a great deal of grease.

‘It’s a funeral notice,’ she mumbled, her voice stiff and choked with grief. ‘My funeral was yesterday, it says here. Look.’

She thrust the paper at me, apparently unable to speak further. Then, she put a fist to her mouth, biting her lip and averting her gaze while she waited for my response. It was a very simple blurb, I saw, only one paragraph long. It contained the basic facts– Leanna was, or had been, twenty-one, and she would be buried here in Sydney, following a service in the late afternoon. Anyone who knew her was invited to attend.

There was nothing else, nothing about the shooting or police investigations, no clue as to whether they had found her killer. My memory of events was still so clouded that I couldn’t be sure whether he had escaped the scene. I knew I had attacked him. Had he killed me, then, too? Or was there no article because Leanna and I were both already dead by then? My head swam.

I turned quizzically towards our new acquaintance, but he only shrugged, absolving himself with a, ‘Who, me?’ kind of gesture.

‘That’s all I’ve got.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what else might have been in the paper. I only get to it after it’s mostly been used up for chips. They leave the back pages, on a good day, but the front is gone first.’

I nodded slowly, but I was actually slightly relieved. I felt like I had enough to be going on with for the time being. ‘Thank you,’ I said, sincerely. ‘You’ve been really helpful. Really.’

‘No problem.’

With a final patting of Leanna on the back which seemed to rock her whole, bony frame, he loped back off into the kitchen. I stared vaguely after him, trying to imagine what others saw where he had been, if they saw anything at all.

I thought about being the surfer again, and wondered if I had been wrong about evading the wave. I was definitely submerged, so that it was impossible to tell through the swirling brine what was daylight lancing in and what was the hard, packed bottom of the ocean, looming up to meet me. I was weightless and helpless, and accomplishing anything in this alien world meant taking giant leaps of faith or logic.

I could hardly believe that I had just thanked a ghost for telling me that I was dead.