Eleven New Ghost Stories (22 page)

He was already cold, my poor
little boy. His eyes were closed tight, I couldn’t get them open. I
tried to resuscitate him, but his mouth was full of soil. There was
nothing I could do…

I picked him up and held him to
my chest. He was already gone. I fell to the floor in tears,
holding my beautiful boy so tight. I was in so much pain, I could
barely even see, my eyes were so flooded with tears. The pain – my
poor boy, my precious boy. Benjamin, why did it happen? What did he
ever do to deserve this? He was so young…

Peter came. He saw me on the
floor distraught, debilitated, in pain. That mother-fucker; he
screamed at me and wrenched Benjamin out of my arms. He ran back
across the lawn. I went after him but I got to the kitchen doors
and found them locked. He locked me out to get me away from my
son.

I banged on the doors, banged on
the windows. He tried to resuscitate him. He beat his chest, tried
to clear his mouth, but he could do nothing. He brought death into
my home and now he could do nothing.

He called the police and
ambulance on his mobile. He ignored me, didn’t even look in my
direction. I beat so hard on those windows that I shattered one of
the glass panes but it was too late. Too late. I fell to the floor,
onto the soaking wet doorstep.

I picked up a small piece of
glass and tried to cut my wrists. I couldn’t even do that properly.
All the big shards of glass had fallen on the inside.

He did nothing to stop me. He
just left me there. And when the police came he told them I’d done
it. The mother-fucker told them I’d murdered my own son. My own
husband told them I’d killed my own son.

They locked me up for a while.
There was a trial, an inquest. That liar told them he’d done
nothing, and when I told them it was all his fault, all his fault
because he killed that boy all those years ago he flat out fucking
denied it. Denied that he’d ever told me about Nils and that that
boy had never existed.

They wanted to pin it on me;
they all thought I was mad too. But they couldn’t prove I hurt my
boy. There were no marks on him. I’d have to have incapacitated him
to get in there, but there were no marks on him. He’d just climbed
in on his own. He just got in by himself and let himself be
buried.

I’ve never seen that
mother-fucker since. And I hope he rots in hell.

My beautiful little boy…

THE CALL OF THE SEA

When I think of her, the first
thing that comes into my head is her staring out at the sea.

Thinking back, that seemed to
always be the first place I’d see her; sat atop the high wall just
above the beach. I never found out if she meant it like that,
whether she meant for me to always find her there, or whether she
was just always there; listening and watching the waves, both
transfixed and terrified. Drawn towards the water, but petrified at
what she might see beneath the surface. Did she feel it call to
her? It’s so hard to know what’s real any more. What happened and
what didn’t…

I’ve romanticised the past; I
probably used to meet her in the dining room or at the arcade,
perhaps just around the hotel, in passing. But that’s just how I
remember her; looking out to the water, always half in this world,
half… somewhere else.

We used to take all our holidays
in Morecambe. Dad was a man of habits, that’s how we ended up going
there eight years in a row. Before then, we’d gone to South Wales
and stayed at this caravan park, but for some reason we’d stopped
going there. Dad probably fell out with the owners; he had a habit
of doing that. Morecambe was where his mum used to take him when he
was a boy, so it was still old habits again.

This was the late 80s but the
rot had not entirely set in. The era of the British seaside resort
was coming to the end, but it was not over just yet. I can track
the decay back in peeling paint and steel shutters. Each year we’d
arrive and there would be more paint peeling from the walls, more
concrete patches on the art-deco Midland Hotel; the crazy golf
course looking that little bit less crazy; more shops closed and
encased in metal. Even Dad, with his entrenched habits, was
beginning to turn against the place in those last few years. If it
wasn’t for Lily we’d probably have stopped going.

Describe her? Her hair was
black, over-long, past her shoulders – she just liked it that way.
Her eyes were a deep chestnut, large and expressive. Her skin was
white, but not pale or sickly; it had a luminous, vibrant quality.
I’d go on to talk about her lips and body, but let’s keep this
sensible. As sensible as possible.

Of course, that was later. When
I met her, she would’ve only been seven or eight. Hard to picture
her now as a child, I only remember her as I knew her in those last
few years. She always looks like that to me now, whether we’re
sneaking away to the changing rooms for a snog or building sand
castles on the beach with buckets and spades.

I don’t remember how we first
met; we just became friends with her family. My dad would’ve met
her dad in a pub or something. My dad and her dad, Steve, must’ve
enjoyed drinking together because the following year we were at his
hotel, The Bay Star. Quite a big place really, five stories, 40-ish
rooms. Not the most attractive building: a square post-war concrete
block, but painted a summery cream to fit amongst the seafront
pastels.

My mum always used to tell me
that whenever we went anywhere on holiday I was always guaranteed
to come back with a friend. It’s always puzzled me how this could
be; I hardly had any friends at school. Yet vaguely it seems to be
true, I have scattered memories of companions on camping sites and
in playgrounds and in amusement arcades. And sure enough, I was
quickly friends with Lily.

Hard to know when or how. There
was a games room for kids at the hotel and there were sometimes
other children around to play with. But we’d come up for potter’s
fortnight, which would be earlier in the summer before most schools
broke up, so it was usually just me and her at the hotel. And I
think her father offered to have me looked after so my parents
could spend time together.

She was a bit spoilt at that
time I seem to remember; prone to throwing strops when she didn’t
get what she wanted. I suppose it’s natural she might be that way;
her mother had died a few years before and her father was pretty
protective of her. And he ran the place with her grandmother, and
you know what grandparents are like…

Even then she always seemed to
have her head in the clouds. Always so deep in her own world.
That’s when she was really bad tempered, when you disrupted her
from one of her little dreams. She’d get really aggravated. But
that would change as the years went by. She’d mellow, or sort of
keep the dream going while you were around. Singing and humming to
herself while you were talking to her or out walking with her, as
if she wasn’t really paying attention to you.

And I’d ask her, what are you
thinking about? And she’d say something like, “I don’t know” or
“Nothing in particular.” And if I really pressed her, she might say
“It was just a feeling” or “It was just a moment.” It was like she
could tune in to a different wave-length to the rest of the world,
and just feel it, live in it.

As the years went by, we got on
better and I started to look forward to seeing her. It was what I
looked forward to about going on holiday. My parents seemed
perfectly happy to have me looked after, and by the third year we
were going off on excursions to the beach accompanied by members of
the hotel staff who weren’t needed for an hour or two.

We’d play down by the beach,
build sand castles, play beach ball, fish amongst the rocks – but
we’d never go in the sea. Never go near to the sea…

She was terrified of water. The
rock pools were fine, but she refused to go even close to the sea,
or the swimming pool at the hotel. I loved the hotel swimming pool,
because at that age that was my idea of class – we were at a classy
hotel because they had a swimming pool. But Lily didn’t like it;
she wouldn’t even come poolside.

It was so strange because she
always seemed so fearless. You know what little girls can be like,
screaming and crying at anything. But not her; I never saw her
afraid. Not when climbing the rocks, not when riding her bike down
the hill. Me, I could get terrified. I was putting on the brakes
all the time, but she’d zoom along like nobody’s business. She used
to terrify the staff at the hotel with her climbing. They’d go blue
in the face at her as she scaled the heights of the rocks or the
trees.

Never afraid of talking to
people either. I suppose you just get used to that living at a
hotel. I was shy about talking to strangers, but not her; she’d
happily talk to anyone, although she was half in her own world
anyway, so she probably didn’t really hear them.

By the time we entered our teens
we had free-reign to roam where we pleased. The summer we turned
thirteen I remember quite well; I ran down to her from the hotel,
she was there, sitting on the stone wall, looking out over the sea
as usual. We went that evening to the arcades, with a tenner from
our parents, which seemed like riches in those days. We had chips
down by the pier, or what was left of it after the great fire. A
seagull came down and lifted a chip right out of her hand – we were
so shocked. I went around swinging my coat at the seagulls to
frighten them off. I felt so heroic, protecting her from the
feathery menace.

Yes, by that time we were
growing up and starting to feel like more than just friends. But it
was all quite innocent. We were allowed out unsupervised; we hired
bicycles to roam up and down the promenade and beyond; spent an
afternoon building dams down on the beach – she didn’t seem to mind
the shallow water running down to the sea, as long as we never went
near the wash.

We spent an afternoon at
Frontierland – Britain’s most decrepit theme park. Nothing ever
changed there; same rides, same shows, only more tired and
old-looking each year. They used to have this runaway mine train
ride; it was done so all the carts made really sharp jolting turns,
designed to make you feel like you might tip off the tracks.
Looking back, perhaps that wasn’t intentional; maybe there really
was a risk of someone going over the edge! It’s a shopping centre
now I think. No great loss to the world.

I never said it, but by then I
was really starting to think of her as being like my girlfriend.
There was always so much unsaid between us. We’d have these late
night walks along the seafront: she, always in her world, humming
along to her own inner-song; and me, desperate to say to her how I
really felt…

My parents had already detected
that we were becoming more than just friends, and I started to get
some very knowing looks from Mum and Dad that made me embarrassed.
But it could’ve been worse. They were very hands-off parents; I was
never smothered growing up. Lily’s gran, however, was a little more
prodding in our relationship, and gave more winks and nudges than
my folks did. Her dad on the other hand, he never seemed to really
like me. He was never overt in his dislike, but I could tell he
wasn’t so keen on me. Especially as I got older. I suppose any
father with a daughter is bound to be the same.

That was the last summer of my
childhood. The next year, well… everything had changed. Although I
suppose I hadn’t changed that much, she had. She entered her
terrible teens and suddenly she wasn’t the Lily I knew. I came up
for the summer expecting it to be just like it was before. But she
was so suddenly different. Suddenly she’d gone all punk.

No wait, grunge – the early
nineties… Suddenly she was fashionable, and I was… I was still a
kid. Some dorky, geeky pre-teen who wasn’t part of the incrowd.

Suddenly school yard politics
were here in Morecambe too. She wasn’t there on the wall looking to
the sea that year when I went looking for her; she was off with her
friends. It wasn’t like she hadn’t had friends in all those years
I’d known her, but for those two weeks she spent most of her time
with me; we hardly ever had others join us.

Now she had a gang, three or
four girls and a few guys. When she was nowhere to be found that
first day, her gran directed me to where I could find her. She’d
reached that age of growing up where you find yourself hanging
around shops. She was by a late-night Spar with her new friends,
pooling money together to try and buy cigarettes and then moving on
to the next shop when they were turned away.

I was a nervous weirdo to them.
I looked so square in my old jacket and jumper compared to their
torn jeans and band T-shirts. She talked to me a little, but it was
clear that I was now an embarrassment. She was desperate to fit in
and in particular wanted the attention of this tall guy with a long
face and spiky hair.

I sort of hung around with them,
not saying much. They were too busy talking school gossip and
listening to tapes on their Walkmans, pushing their heads together
to hear the music on shared head phones. I didn’t really know any
of the bands; I never really paid much attention to music back
then, at home all I had was cassette tapes of old Dad’s Army
episodes my dad had given me.

I would’ve thought she was an
imposter, a completely different girl if it wasn’t for the walk
home. I went with her back to the hotel and for a brief while she
was that same girl with her head in the clouds I used to know,
humming along to a tune only she knew. In the past I’d found it
endearing, but now it seemed like a barrier. I was dejected and
disappointed; the girl I thought I loved was someone else now.

For the rest of that holiday I
hardly saw her. She actively avoided me. I was embarrassing to her;
I used to think of us both as outsiders together, but she was on
the inside now. It was just me still looking in. I was so upset I
moped that fortnight away. I spent virtually the whole time stuck
with my parents, and they got pretty sick of my whining and
complaining. But honestly, after six years what were we exactly
going to discover in Morecambe that was new? All the same places,
all the same attractions. I was getting pretty sick of it. The only
thing I wanted was no longer within reach.