Ghosts in the Morning Read online

  GHOSTS IN THE MORNING

  A Novel

  By

  Will Thurmann

  Copyright © Will Thurmann

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  Will Thurmann is a pseudonym

  For my Dad. Don’t ever stop dreaming.

  Prologue

  I felt myself shaking, I saw blood soaking my towel, but the throbbing in my hand had disappeared, endorphins and adrenaline numbing the pain. My mind raced and blood rushed in my ears, like a brutal, incoming tide. A clock began to tick in my head.

  ‘Please press one to replay this message, two to save this message, three to delete this message...’

  I pressed three, my fingers growing steadier, as my brain tugged and pulled at strands, trying to make sense of them, to bring order...shit, there wasn’t much time.

  The door slammed. That bloody door would never be fixed now, I knew that. I put Graham’s mobile phone down and grabbed some toilet paper from the bathroom. I wound it tightly around my hand to stem the bleeding. I put my dressing gown on and scooped up the bath towel with its coppery-red stains and thrust it quickly into the washing basket.

  Graham appeared at the doorway. His face was red. ‘Alright,’ he grunted.

  My mind kept churning, knitting fronds. Tick tock tick tock.

  ‘Alright,’ I replied. I nodded towards his wind-burned cheeks and the unkempt wisps of his hair. ‘It must have been very blustery and cold up at the cemetery. You look like you’re freezing.’

  The clock was inexorably ticking, it was screaming in my head. Tick tock went the second hand, but it was getting faster. Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

  ‘Yes, I am a bit, yes, it’s a bit parky out there. I wouldn’t want to be on a boat in those gales, that’s for sure.’

  The clock was gaining more speed, its second hand was whizzing in my mind. Tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock tick tock. I tried to focus on it, to will it to stop its incessant spinning. Round and round, as my mind furiously continued to play with little cat’s cradles of feathery string, desperately trying to form a pattern. I needed clarity, tried to force it from beneath the swirls of fog around the string.

  Tick tock tick tock, the clock had got louder too, it was pounding in my head, I could feel the pendulum crashing against the inside of my forehead.

  I took a deep breath and willed my mind to calm and then slowly, gradually, I felt my heart begin to slow its hammering at my chest, and I felt the storm in the waters of my brain begin to abate. Images flitted across my inner vision, options...I could get away from here, get away from this house, this island, I could run and not stop running. Perhaps I could make a new life for myself on the mainland, I’d often thought about it. I could change my name, start afresh, I could put all the bad stuff behind me. People did that sometimes, they re-invented themselves, there was that movie once...yes, maybe that’s what I should do. A new life, a new me, I liked the sound of that.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Graham asked. ‘You look like you’re in a dream.’

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ I murmured, as the idea of running began to dissipate. I couldn’t run, I couldn’t just go, it wouldn’t work, I had the boys to think about. And I would never be able to relax, I would be looking over my shoulder every five minutes. No, I didn’t want to live like that.

  Tick tock tick tock.

  My head started to ache again, then suddenly through the chiming mist, new patterns began to emerge. A shimmering embroidery of thoughts, ideas...solutions. And the throbbing in my head subsided as the mist cleared completely.

  ‘Yes, right!’ I shouted, and I saw Graham jump.

  ‘What the –’

  ‘Sorry, Graham, sorry, I just...er...look, I was just thinking...oh nothing, nothing. Anyway, look, I’ve just had a bath, the water’s still nice and hot. Why don’t you jump in, it’ll warm you up?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, I’ll maybe have a quick shower later. I was just going to sit down, watch a film, maybe.’

  ‘Oh right.’ Think, Andrea, keep going. ‘Look, I tell you what, I’ll get you a nice big glass of cold wine, while you have a hot bath – you don’t want to catch a chill, do you? Then you can sit down in front of the TV, put your feet up. I’ve got a few bits to do in the kitchen, and the boys are out, so you can have some peace, you can watch what you want with another nice glass of wine in your hand.’

  ‘Why are you suddenly being so nice?’ Graham’s tone was sharp, tinged with curiosity and a hint of suspicion...

  I forced a soft calmness into my voice. ‘Oh, it’s um, well, it’s Christmas, I’m trying to show a bit of Christmas spirit. Look, it’s been really rough lately - for both of us – I just thought we could try and take a step back for a bit. Get on an even keel. So, let’s just try and have a relaxing day, we both need it, don’t you think?’

  Graham sighed and his shoulders dropped, sloughing off some of the weary tension he was holding there. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll have a bath, and a drop of wine. And maybe, as you say, in the spirit of things, after that we can try and find a film that we both want to watch.’

  ‘Okay, yes, good, good, I’d like that,’ I said. Graham began to undress for the bath as the clock continued its circuits.

  The police would be here soon.

  Tick tock tick tock tick tock.

  Chapter 1

  I killed a man tonight. Not intentionally. Well...I’m fairly sure I didn’t mean to, but then I haven’t really been feeling quite right lately. Been a little bit out of sorts. But anyway I think it was an accident...yes, it’s true, it was an accident. One thing is for sure, though, he’s definitely dead. Brown bread, that’s what we used to say at the Garter Home when someone had died. We thought it sounded cool, I guess, as if death was something we should be cool and nonchalant about. We probably thought it made us sound tough.

  Recently I have come to realise that I am invisible. It’s been like this for a while, I think, but it’s only recently that I’ve become fully aware of it. Invisibility, it’s a strange thing. The man at the petrol station who takes my credit card without raising his head and waits for me to enter my PIN doesn’t see me. The supermarket cashier who swipes my shopping with a series of monotonous beeps doesn’t see me. The shopkeepers, the cashiers at the bank, the people who push past me in the street, the retired grey people who smash their trollies through mine in the supermarket, the man who fills the heating oil tank, the man who reads the electric meter, my husband, my children; none of them see me. The man I killed tonight certainly didn’t see me. Because I am invisible.

  Okay, okay, I don’t have an invisibility cloak, I know that I’m not truly invisible. I do still have my marbles, I’m not some crazy fruit loop, I’m not some delusional Harry Potter fan. Though I have read some of the books.

  My name is Andrea Halston. I am forty-four years old, but I feel older. I am a...well...I’m not sure what the modern term for it is, but I am what used to be called a housewife. I don’t go to work, I haven’t had a job for quite some time. I had a part-time job for a few years, when Simon, my youngest child, was at secondary school – I was a book-keeper at a building firm, but the firm went bust. Not surprising really, the boss spent more time on holiday than at work, and not with his wife. When she divorced him, he drank too much and worked too little, so the building firm went belly-up. I saw him in town once, a few years later, he looked like a shell that had been hollowed out, like a walking skin.

  I don’t need to work, we don’t need the money, Graham’s salary is more than enough. Graham, my
husband, is five years older than me and he is having an affair with his secretary. Or Personal Assistant, as she likes to call herself. It’s a cliché, I know, for someone in his position – Graham is an audit partner – to be sleeping with his secretary, but I suppose she’s attracted to what she sees as his power. Or his Porsche. I very much doubt that she is attracted to him on a physical level; his ever-expanding pot belly makes him look a little like a bowling ball with legs, rather than cuddly, and he is balding in a bad way. She- the PA - is twenty-something, and I think she is quite pretty, although it is difficult to tell under all the makeup.

  He doesn’t know that I know about the affair. I also know that it is hurting him more than it’s hurting me. I can see it on his wretched face every evening, when he drinks a bottle of wine, or more, in an attempt to drown out his pitiful guilt. He won’t tell me about the affair, of course. And he won’t leave me, or ask for a divorce. I’m sure he’s considered it, desired it probably, but even though he’s caught in some sort of mid-life crisis that only appears to afflict men, he’s not that daft. It would cost him too much, he knows that. He would be too scared that I would take him to the cleaners. I’m sure he’s worried that the affair with Nikki the secretary won’t last too, and deep down he’s probably terrified of ending up on his own in some crummy bedsit, cuddling a bottle of vodka. Rightly so...the affair will fizzle out when she gets bored and he gets too needy, or when she meets a younger, more powerful man.

  I was annoyed at first. In twenty-four years of marriage, I haven’t cheated on him once. Unless you count a drunken half-snog with a gorgeous surfer when I was on one of Anita’s hen do. And I don’t. Twenty-four years. The old joke says you get less for murder, which seems pretty ironic considering I killed a man tonight. In twenty four years I have given birth and reared three children, I have cleaned the house, made the lunches, cooked the dinners, washed the clothes, ironed the shirts and generally sacrificed most of my life, and then Graham goes and shags his secretary. So it’s only natural for me to be annoyed.

  I wasn’t angry for long though. I understand why he’s doing it. He wants to feel young again, to feel that youthful exuberation that gets harder to come by as life enters the final straight. He is suffering the effects of that pendulum of mortality that swings inexorably over a middle-aged man’s head, driving them to irrational impulses. Maybe it’s about the sex too. They say it’s different for men, it’s more of a need. And, for sure, I know I’m not that much to look at these days. My once cheeky little muffin-tops have morphed into full-blown fat love handles. The baby pounds that sat too long on my hips and thighs have got too comfortable. I gave up trying to shift them a few years ago.

  I wasn’t always like this. In days gone by I could turn a few heads, used to get the odd wolf whistle too. Bit of a looker in my late twenties, some would say. I think Graham used to think of me as a trophy wife, a pretty bit of eye candy to hold onto his arm at the corporate functions he had to attend. Not now, though, no. Now, it’s all Graham can do to stand next to me at the rare functions we attend together. Most times now, Graham goes alone to the corporate functions. I guess it makes it easier if Nikki’s there, too. No chance of my female intuition picking up on the ‘thing’ between them.

  I don’t think Graham enjoys making love to me, we don’t do it very often these days. When we do it’s automatic. Perfunctory. A few minutes of him wheezing away on top of me, whilst I lay back and decide whether to have fish for tea tomorrow, or fret about whether Simon is coping at university, and if I should ring him again on Friday, or would that make me an over-protective mother? I don’t really know why we bother at all, although I think we’re practically at that stage. To be honest, I’ve never really liked sex that much. It was okay with Graham when we were first going out – Graham used to believe he was ‘good in the sack’, he actually said that to me once -though I never really believed in all of that. I mean, what would make someone good in the sack, surely not the speed that they thrust themselves into you, like the women in porn films would have you believe? None of it really made sense to me, most of the expectations surrounding sex were completely unrealistic. T o me, it was all about degrees of tolerance.

  Most nights, though, I’m asleep when Graham comes to bed. It’s easier for both of us that way. It means that Graham doesn’t have to feel obliged to talk to me, or wish me goodnight with an accompanying fake goodnight kiss, and also it means I can try and get to sleep before he starts snoring.

  I sip my wine and think about the man I killed, and I am invisible. The television is on, but the sound is on mute. I like the silence. Graham is out, it’s his weekly badminton club night. I run my top lip along the glass and exhale gently, making the glass sing. I lick my lips, enjoying the sharp, citrussy tang of the Chardonnay. It’s a good one, a very expensive wine, in more ways than one. After all, it cost a man his life.

  I stare down at my hands. They’re admirably still. No trembling, no aftershock. I am surprised, I would have expected more fear...panic, perhaps. I mean, after all, it’s not every day you take the life of another. But something has changed in me tonight. I would have expected that I would feel nervous, scared, guilty even. Instead, I feel excited. Alive. Powerful even. I don’t recall feeling like this before. I’ve always felt small, insignificant, so this surge, this quickening that the man’s death has triggered is unfamiliar, alien. This must be the rush a drug user feels, and I don’t want it to stop.

  I hadn’t meant to kill him, no way, it wasn’t like it was planned. I had only gone out for a pint of milk. For my coffee in the morning. Well, that and a bottle of wine. Okay, primarily a bottle of wine. I had driven further than I needed to, there was a shop closer, but the wine selection at that shop was limited to cheap and nasty over-sugared Australian fizz, so I had carried on driving, enjoying the soporific numbness of driving on dark, quiet roads. I did that sometimes.

  I know I should feel some sympathy at least. I know I should, but I don’t. I didn’t know the man, I had no empathetic connection to him, was it unnatural to feel nothing? Yes, sure, I killed him, but if he had died tonight at the hands of another, or indeed of natural causes, how would I have known about it then? If that had been the case, I would have known nothing, felt nothing. As I do now. Well...not necessarily nothing. That sparkling frisson of elation is still with me.

  I think that it is extremely unlikely that I will be caught. The damage to my car appears to be minimal and I’m almost positive that nobody saw what happened. The road was very quiet.

  And, after all, I am invisible.

  Chapter 2

  ‘How was badminton?’

  ‘It was alright. A bit quiet,’ Graham grunted.

  Graham wasn’t a morning person. Before ten o’clock in the morning, he was grumpy. It couldn’t be much fun for his staff, though maybe he was different at work. Maybe he put on a facade, I’m sure he would for Nikki, at least.

  He chomped his cereal as he flicked the pages of yesterday’s local newspaper. I could see moon-like flecks of milk on his chin, nestling amongst a few straggles of wiry hair that he had evidently missed on his morning shave. The slurp and chew of over-sugared flakes of corn echoed in my head, and I clenched my fingers, digging my bitten nails into my palms. I wanted to pick the bowl up and smash it in his face.

  ‘Can I have another coffee?’

  I stared at him, my eyes boring into his bald head. He obviously felt it unnecessary to say ‘please’. His manners had deteriorated in recent years – perhaps he felt that I was just his wife, undeserving of common courtesy. I sighed, and took his cup. I could have refused, could have said ‘piss off and make your own’, but It was easier to make it myself. The coffee machine was my pride and joy – Italian, expensive – and I didn’t like Graham touching it. His fingers were too fat, too impatient, and I didn’t want him to break the machine. Like he had the last one.

  ‘Daniel still in bed, is he? Shouldn’t he be up by now, he’ll be late for work.’ Graham s
aid, without looking up from the paper.

  ‘No, he hasn’t got to go in today. His boss is a bit quiet at the moment, I don’t think that he’s got much work on at the moment,’ I replied, but Graham wasn’t listening, he’d switched off after the word ‘no’. I may as well have been a wall. I spoke to the wall sometimes – during one-sided conversations with Graham I would say ‘yes, that’s a great idea, thank you wall’ or ‘no wall, that’s fine, no thanks’ – but my mocking sarcasm usually went unheard. It made me feel better, though.

  ‘Bloody hell, can you believe the brass neck of these bloody Ministers. We’re in the middle of a bloody recession – and it is a recession, no matter what they call it – and they go swanning off a business trip to Singapore. Like that’s going to help. Bloody idiots.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Singapore. I remember reading once that you get fined for eating chewing gum there, is that right?’

  ‘Eh, what?’ Graham snapped, without looking up.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  Graham tossed the paper onto the kitchen table and went into the hall to pick up his briefcase. ‘Bye then’, he called, then he was gone, the door slamming. The hinges needed looking at, I had told Graham, but that was months ago. I would do it myself, but he never let me touch his tools. He even pathetically had a combination lock on the tool cupboard in the garage. I wondered if he kept a stash of girlie magazines in there.

  Years ago, Graham used to kiss me on the lips before he went to work. A proper smooch, lips moist and a hint of passion. Love, even. As time passed, this changed to a dry kiss on the cheek. Now, this too had changed. Now, it was a shouted goodbye, or sometimes nothing at all, just the slam of a door that needed fixing. Did all marriages get to this point eventually? Honeymoon love morphing into the sort of care felt for a sibling, then a gradual, inexorable fading away, leaving a mild tolerance that bordered on the fringes of outright dislike. Maybe we were too scared, too set in our ways, to change things, so we accepted the way of things, we accepted a life we would have dreaded when we were young and idealistic. If familiarity breeds contempt, were all marriages destined for that contempt?