Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Everybody Needs Somebody to Love MARK TIMLIN

People say, that when you lose someone close, it gets better as time goes by.

People are wrong.

If anything, it gets worse.

At first, when you think about them, they might just be down the shops. Or maybe away on holiday, and due back in a week or two. Or at worst, they’ve gone to the other side of the world to live. But even if they’ve gone to the other side of the world, there’s still a chance that they’ll come back for a visit, and you’ll bump into them one day in Oxford Street, and go for a cup of coffee or a drink, and catch up on their news.

Not if they’re dead you won’t.

And sometimes that truth hits you like a length of 2x4, and you suddenly realize with a gut-wrenching force that you’re never going to see them again.

Ever.

That’s what happened to me five years ago. Five Years. Just like the old David Bowie song on Ziggy Stardust. I had that album on 8-track cartridge. Remember them?

On 8-track cartridge in a special edition Ford Capri 1600 in Dayglo orange with all the chrome sprayed black, a black spoiler, and some kind of trick Venetian blind doodad on the back window. It was impossible to see what was behind you, but it looked cool.

That was before I met Louise. In fact I can never remember exactly when we did meet. I can’t quite pin it down, though I think about it often.

It must have been ‘73. Spring. And she died in ‘89. So we were together for sixteen years. On and off.

See, we were children of the permissive society. No responsibility. No obligation. No commitment. If you weren’t off screwing the world, you weren’t living.

And Christ knows, Louise and I tried.

We were both working in the music business then. Rock and Roll. Liberation. Sex, drugs, violence, booze, freedom. A heady mix. We had it all, and we fucked it up.

I’d just got a job in the record company that Louise worked for. She was the public relations girl. We called them girls then. I went out to record shops, and tried to convince them to stock our product. I took the managers out for boozy lunches, did window displays, that sort of thing. And when a band was in town, I’d go to gigs and put up displays there as well. And I supplied the drugs. Women too. You could’ve described me as a low-life ponce. But we never thought about it like that then. Not in those days.

That was why I was given the flashy car. We reckoned that a Dayglo orange Ford Capri 1600 was the cutting edge. Then.

I didn’t meet Louise until I’d been in the job for a couple of weeks, but I’d heard all about her. She was famous. Notorious even.

Then on my third Monday morning at our weekly sales and publicity meeting, I did.

She’d broken her ankle six weeks previously, walking down the little street that connects Oxford Street and Soho Square where our offfices were located. She’d been reading Melody Maker as she went, not looking where she was going as usual, and tripped over the kerb. Silly cow. A couple of guys who were working on one of the buildings carried her back to the office where they called an ambulance. So my first sight of her was as she blew into the conference room, red hair permed and flowing, full-on make-up job, with loads of lipstick and eye liner, wearing a halter top made out of patches of ten kinds of material that she’d got from Mr Freedom, a long black skirt with buttons up the front, unbuttoned almost to her crotch, one gold, platform soled boot with a six inch heel, and one built-up plaster on the other leg. She looked great and she knew it.

‘Who the hell is that?’ I said to my boss.

‘That’s Louise Spenser,’ he replied. ‘You wanna watch her.’

And I did. Couldn’t keep my eyes off her, to be honest. And she knew it.

After the meeting we all went to the boozer. The Nellie Dean in Dean Street. I stood next to her at the bar and hummed ‘Jake The Peg’. It’s a Rolf Harris song about a bloke with an extra leg. Funny what you remember.

She gave me a cold stare, and sat with two members of our most popular band of the time.

A few months later she told me that she thought I was one of the most objectionable men she’d ever met.

We were in bed together when she told me that, which just goes to show that first impressions can be misleading.

She was always accident-prone. Whilst we were together she broke her leg once, her arm twice, and I lost count of the number of times she fell over in the street.

Even the way she died was by accident, although it took over three years for it to happen.

But we’ll get to that later.

For some reason the pair of us saw quite a lot of each other that spring, and at first I knew she wasn’t very happy about it.

We had to go to the same places, you see. I got promoted to being a record plugger along with all my other jobs, and we’d bump into each other at Radio 1, Thames TV and London Weekend, as well as at concerts and in the office.

I followed her around like a dog. She was three years younger than me. Only twenty when we met. But believe me, she was a world of experience wiser.

It seemed to me that she loved only two things. Music and alcohol. Not necessarily in that order. Of course with the music, came the guys in the bands, and with the booze came certain other substances. All of them illegal. But what did we care? Like her, ever since I’d first come across them, I’d taken to them like a duck to a duck pond.

I remember her telling me once that she liked anything that came between her and reality, and I said amen to that.

I’d led a pretty sheltered life until I got into the music business. Married at twenty to a sweet girl who didn’t understand me, and who could blame her? I didn’t understand myself. Still don’t. I knew that inside me was something wild. Something I didn’t want to acknowledge because it frightened me. I knew that deep down I wasn’t functioning right. So I asked the first woman who I knew would say yes to marry me. And she did.

I figured that if I took on that sort of responsibility I’d settle down.

How wrong I was. When I got married I was working for an insurance company, in a job that with my qualifications I could do on my head. I did, and hated it.

When I’d been at school I’d worked in a record shop as a Saturday boy, and loved it. One evening on the way home from work I saw an advertisement in the Evening Standard for a record shop manager. On impulse I answered the ad, got an interview, lied through my teeth, and got the job.

I was good at it too.

Then one day, a bloke who sold records off the back of a truck for a tiny company that happened to have one of the biggest bands in the world on the label was having a cup of tea in the shop, when his van got towed away by the law.

This individual was always broke and didn’t have the price of the parking ticket and tow-away fee on him, and got a bit panicky about what they would say back at his office.

I lent him the cash out of the till on the promise that if a job came up with the company I’d get first refusal.

He paid back the cash next time he called, thanked me for saving his life, and a few weeks later, gave me a bell and told me that another of the salesmen had left and I had an interview for his job the next morning.

I got it too, and quit the shop that Friday.

I thought I was the business. A white Escort van full of hot product, a desk in a room overlooking Old Compton Street, and rock stars coming and going at all hours. Bliss.

Of course I soon fell into bad habits with the bad company I was keeping. I’d only ever smoked a few joints before, and maybe had the occasional half of bitter. I told you I was innocent, and besides, my wife didn’t drink.

But this place was Cocaine Central. Smack City. Marijuana Junction. Heaven, in other words. The first joint of the day was rolled with the coffee at ten, and the pubs opened at eleven. Of course not a lot of records were sold, but with this particular band pumping out the units worldwide, it hardly seemed to matter.

After a few months, the guys who owned the label and the distribution company got a bit pissed off, and closed it down. All the other salesmen got fired, but I was kept on. General dogsbody for the record company was my game, and I loved that too.

Then I met a woman. Like no other woman I’d met before, or have since. She was pure poison wrapped in satin and lace, with shoes by Zapata, who wafted a trail of patchouli oil behind her that drove men mad.

Me included.

She was in the process of getting divorced from the bass player in an American band who were gradually winding down from being huge. She’d lived in California for a couple of years, then came back to London when her marriage broke down, got a job with the company, a flat off the King’s Road, and started hunting for prey.

She went through the guys in the office like a tornado, until eventually she got to me.

I fell like the proverbial ton of bricks, and she screwed, blued and tattooed me until I could hardly walk.

I knew I was being a mug, but I couldn’t leave her alone, and she knew it.

So did my wife.

In the end, after one of the shortest marriages in either of our families, we separated, and she divorced me.

Adultery.

As soon as the divorce proceedings began, the woman I was crazy about dumped me for a nineteen-year-old boy studying at Oxford.

For the first time in my life I was left for a younger man, and it hurt.

I left the firm shortly afterwards, and drifted round the fringes of the music business for a couple of years, until I got the job where I met Louise.

I had a load of girlfriends in the meantime, but no one permanent, and put my other bad habits on the back burner through lack of funds.

Then Louise turned up the heat.

See, I didn’t like the taste of booze much, though I’d had my share. Bitter reminded me of cold coffee, and Scotch made me puke.

Louise had the answer. She introduced me to Strawberry Hock, White Russians, Margaritas, and Harvey Wallbangers, and I was a dead gone kid.

And I found I had quite a capacity for liquor. Hard liquor, and this improbable redhead who kept flashing her knickers at me.

We got it together for the first time in the back of the Capri in an underground car park somewhere off the Euston Road. God knows why we picked that particular location. Romantic it wasn’t. Horny, it most definitely was.

I won’t go into details. Just believe me.

After that we were an item. Christ knows why. She could have had her pick of hundreds of blokes, but she chose me.

Of course we weren’t faithful to each other. That would never have done. But she moved into my flat, and we set up housekeeping together. She was a hell of a cook too. Real domestic when she wanted to be, and she got a cat.

We lived together for about eight years before things went seriously up the creek. During that time I asked her to marry me, and she refused, and just before we split up for the first time, she asked me to marry her, and I refused.

Then I met someone else and fucked off. I left Louise the flat where she continued to live with her cat. Percy was his name. A Burmese cross, and destined to live longer than his mistress. Not much, but a bit.

But somehow we couldn’t seem to manage without each other, Louise and me. Can’t live with, can’t live without. Know that one?

I think that in the first year we were apart, we talked more than in the last year we were together. And my new girlfriend wasn’t happy about it.

Too damn bad, I thought. By then I was on the road, tour-managing bands all round the world. Louise got me work in the management office where she was doing PR, after the record company we’d both worked for went belly-up, and naturally that threw us together even more.

So, in the end, I left the woman I’d left Louise for, and moved back in. It was great too, for a while. I was on tour most of the time, screwing the world, getting fucked up with drugs and booze every night, and thoroughly enjoying myself.

Then I met someone else. I needed to right then. I was a mess. Semi-alcoholic. Semi-addicted to uppers and downers, and as a lot of my friends told me, on a one-way roller-coaster ride to Hell.

Mind you, it felt all right to me. But I’m always the last to know.

So when Ms Straight came along, determined to save me from myself, I clung on to her like the last survivor of a shipwreck clinging on to a lifebelt.

By then I was beginning to realize that if I didn’t get cleaned up I was in serious trouble. I was taking more than the fatal dose of Valium every day, and getting through a bottle of spirits or more between noon and bedtime.

Ms Straight worked in publishing, had a nice, and I mean nice, bijou house in Clapham, and needed a project. Moi.

So I packed my bags and left Louise again. She cried and so did I.

I lasted a couple of years with Ms Straight, cleaned up my act and got a job in publishing too. I made a few good contacts through her, had a fair degree in English, loved reading, and somehow knew what looked right on the page. It wasn’t the biggest or most prestigious publishing house in London, but it suited me. I still had the job until. Well, like I said before, we’ll come to that.

Of course I kept in touch with Louise. I knew by then that I had an addictive personality, and I was addicted to her. We’d been together for years, and had become, to our mutual surprise, good friends. No more sex. That had gone out of the window long before. No. Friends. Friends with mutual interests, private jokes, and memories that no one else shared.

Of course Ms Straight hated it. She thought that when I was with Louise I was off the straight and narrow. And she was right. But not as badly as before. Never as bad as that, ever again.

Then we split up too, and I was left with my clothes, some books, some records, and a Ford Sierra. Not a lot to show for a life, but we all have different goals.

Louise took me back, of course. She’d got a new place to live by then. She was on her own, apart from Percy, and I moved into the spare room.

It was that summer that Louise had the accident that in time was going to kill her. And if I’d been around it would probably never have happened.

She was doing freelance PR by then. Still in the music business, but video and travel too.

One of her clients was a travel agent who, by way of a bonus, offered her a week in Spain for two. It was at short notice, and I couldn’t go. I was working a deadline on a book edit, with a particularly obnoxious and pernickity author, and there was no way I could get time off.

None of her other friends could make it either. It was literally go the next morning or not at all. So she went. On her own.

Hey, this was the eighties. What could happen?

Shit happened. Like it often does.

She had a great time. Fell in with the hotel owner and his family, and got real friendly.

Then on the last morning of her stay, with her bags packed, and whilst she was waiting for the coach to pick her up for the trip to the airport, she went for one last stroll along the beach she’d come to love.

And Nemesis, in the shape of a big, black dog came loping along the beach towards her.

At first she thought he was just being playful, and as an animal lover, she joined in. Maybe he was, but he got too excited and bit her. Twice. Once on the face and once on the foot.

Louise was terrified and ran into the water to escape. The dog didn’t follow her. He ran up and down on the seashore for a minute, then split. Louise came out of the water, went back to the hotel, dried herself off, changed, put plasters on her bites and came home.

No anti-tetanus. No antibiotics. Nothing.

She was okay for a couple of weeks, then started to go strange. Now you’ve got to remember that Louise was always strange. Eccentric. And the older she got, the more eccentric she became. I didn’t mind. I’m eccentric myself, and I was used to her.

Then one night, after a particularly early start, I came home to find her lying nude on her bed. She hadn’t touched the breakfast dishes, and Percy was screaming to be fed.

I moaned like hell as I fed him, and she came into the kitchen, still naked, and collapsed.

I wasn’t very sympathetic. After a hard day at the office, all I was ready for was to crash out in front of the TV with an Indian take-away.

‘Are you pissed?’ I said unkindly after I’d picked her up and put her in a chair.

‘No.’

‘What then? Why aren’t you dressed?’

She suddenly looked scared. ‘Don’t know. I’m fine.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘I am.’

And suddenly, with the sure and certain knowledge obtained from all the years I’d known her, I realized that something was seriously wrong.

‘Louise,’ I said. ‘What day is it?’

It was a Thursday. A day of infamy.

‘Monday,’ she said.

‘And you haven’t been on the booze, or anything else?’

‘No. I told you.’

‘Lou,’ I said. ‘Get some clothes on. I’m going to take you to the hospital.’

‘No,’ she screamed, and ran and locked herself in her bedroom. This wasn’t the Louise I knew, so when she refused to answer my knocks, I called her doctor. I apologized, told him what had happened, and that she wouldn’t unlock her door.

He wasn’t a bad bloke, and came straight round. Louise had always been fond of him, and after a few minutes’ conversation through the locked door, she opened it. By then she’d pulled on a dress, and put on some lipstick. But most of it was on her chin, and the dress was on back to front. When I saw that, I knew that something bad, something well beyond my ken, was happening.

And I was right.

The doctor called an ambulance, then left. That was all he could do.

I went to the hospital with Louise. The paramedic asked her for her name, address and date of birth. She didn’t have a clue. She was getting worse. I gave him the information, and stayed at the hospital all night. No one could or would tell me what was wrong. Eventually I cornered a consultant in one of the corridors, and he told me. Meningitis. Another day and she would have been dead.

She was off her head for more than a week. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know her family. She didn’t know her friends. Then, just as the fever broke, complications set in.

The meningitis had weakened a valve in her heart, and she needed immediate surgery. They operated right away, and put in a new valve.

I went to visit the same night and I could hear her screaming as I got out of the lift. I didn’t know how I knew that it was her, but I did. I’d never heard a sound like it before or since. Primeval. Animal. My blood temperature fell like a stone.

I was sure she was going to die that night. But she was made of sterner stuff. I’d always known that Louise was tough, but I had no conception exactly how tough that was.

She pulled through, and left hospital a month later. I was down as next-of-kin and the consultant called me into his office the day she was discharged.

‘Does she smoke?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘Not any more. Does she drink?’

I nodded again.

‘Keep it moderate.’

There was about as much chance of that as flying down to Rio without a plane, but I didn’t say so.

Louise had to keep going back to the hospital as an outpatient. Three times a week to have her blood checked, and she had so many needle holes in her arms that she looked like a junkie.

They hurt her a lot there. It wasn’t their fault, but each time she came back I could see the pain in her eyes like a shadow on the sun.

Then the doctors decided she needed a heart transplant. And all because the Spanish authorities pumped untreated sewage into the sea, and that damned dog had chewed on her.

So the waiting began for a suitable donor. A wait that was going to take three long years, and every day her condition deteriorated.

And looking back, the worst thing is that when you’re with someone who is seriously ill, terminally ill in fact, you get used to it. Get to take it for granted, and in the end you treat it as normal.

At least until the worst happens.

And the worst happened just after Easter in 1991. Louise was bad. And then the call came that a suitable donor heart had turned up. It belonged to a twenty-one-year-old man who had died in a car crash.

Of course I wasn’t there when she got bleeped. I was working, and got the message later. After the operation had been done in fact. I was in London looking after the apartment and Percy, and flat out against a deadline again.

The operation took place on a Tuesday evening, and when I called the hospital that night, they told me everything was fine. I phoned again on Wednesday, and the prognosis was excellent. She phoned me herself on Thursday morning and sounded great. I know I should have visited her, but I was busy. You see, she was in Bedfordshire, and I wasn’t.

If everyone hadn’t been telling me how successful the op had been, I’d have gone up. But they kept saying that she was doing well, so I didn’t arrange to visit until Sunday morning.

By then I’d sold my car, and another friend of Lou’s was driving up, and had offered me a lift.

Listen. I’ve thought about it a million times since. I should have gone before, but I never thought that anything really bad was going to happen.

She was Louise, see. And Louise always survived.

Wrong.

I was boiling an egg for breakfast and waiting for the guy to arrive that Sunday morning when the call from the hospital came.

She was starting to reject they said, and I should prepare for the worst. I turned off the gas under the saucepan as soon as I put down the receiver, and the egg was still there when I left the place finally, weeks later. It was kind of like a reminder of what I’d done. Or hadn’t done, as the case may be.

But the worst was still to come.

When the guy with the car arrived I told him what was happening, and we drove up in silence.

He didn’t come into the hospital with me. Just sat in the car outside and I went in alone.

She was bad. Dying. I took one look at her, and I knew. Then to my eternal shame, I left.

But eternity is a long time, and I was going to learn that the worst way.

I went back to her friend in the car and we went. We stopped at the first boozer that was open and I had several large ones.

She died at half past nine that night, and I wasn’t with her. Just call me bastard. I do it all the time.

I should have gone to see her before. I should have stayed with her when she was dying. But I didn’t have the bottle.

So I never had a proper, last conversation with her. And when I think of all the times we’d talked in the past, that’s one of the things I regret most. That we didn’t talk after the operation. And after she died, I’d have given my right arm to talk to her for just a few minutes.

Stick around.

That was five years ago, and like I say, it gets worse.

The day she died, part of me died too, and try as I might, I can’t resurrect that part, and as the fifth anniversary of her death got closer, more and more I found myself at three or four in the morning, sitting dead drunk in my living room, crying my eyes out, playing her favourite records and contemplating doing my wrists with a razor blade.

I’d moved, of course. I could have stayed at Louise’s place, but couldn’t handle it. So I’d found a place of my own. I was alone by then. Even poor old Percy had died. He’d lasted a year or two, but no cat can live for ever, and in the end the vet said that it would be kinder to have him put down. I cried then too. Like I say, I’ve cried a lot over those five years, but who are the tears for? Me or Louise?

Shit, but I hated being on my own. And I’d been involved in some disastrous relationships since she died.

Relationships? That’s not exactly the word I’d use to describe them. More like disgusting little detours into my worst nightmares. But after a while, any comfort seemed better than none, even if, as certainly as night follows day, they ended in disaster.

And then, shortly after the fifth anniversary of Louise’s death, I met Julia.

Jules, she called herself. Which was fair enough. She could’ve called herself exactly what she wanted as far as I was concerned.

I met Jules at a publishing party. I was pissed as usual. I usually was in those days.

She was standing at the drinks table and I wandered over to get a refill.

‘Hello,’ she said.

“Lo,’ I said back. She was blonde, with long, thick hair, a little black dress and high heels. She looked all right. Better than all right as a matter of fact. But the state I was in, Alsatians looked attractive.

‘My name’s Jules,’ she said, and stuck out her mitten.

I had a cigarette in one hand, and a glass of appalling red wine in the other, so none to spare. ‘Paul,’ I replied, and spilled my drink down her front.

‘Clumsy,’ she said, but didn’t appear to take umbrage. That was certainly a point in her favour.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m pissed.’

‘So I noticed.’

‘I’ll pay to have your dress cleaned.’

‘Don’t worry about it. It’ll go through the wash.’

‘Good attitude. Fancy a drink?’

‘I’ve got one.’

‘No. Not here. Somewhere else.’

‘Are you trying to pick me up?’

‘Not if you don’t want me to.’

‘I might be here with someone.’

Same old same-old. ‘Well if you are,’ I said. ‘Just say so.’

‘Well I’m not.’

‘Right. That’s got that sorted. Do you want a drink then?’

‘Are you always so aggressive?’

‘Yes. No. Dunno.’

‘Where would we go?’

‘There’s a club I know around the corner. Gerry’s. It’s all right.’

‘All right then.’

So that was that. On the way to the club and over a few drinks, until we got slung out at closing time which was about 2 a.m., I told her what I did, and she told me that she worked for an agency which handled film and TV writers. So we were brother and sister under the media skin. What larks!

When we finally left the place, I was totally gone, and she wasn’t far behind. We stood together in Dean Street and a decision that was to shape the rest of our lives was made.

‘Wanna come back to my place?’ I mumbled.

‘Where’s that?’

‘Stockwell.’ She’d already intimated that she lived somewhere west of Shepherd’s Bush.

She hesitated. She knew what it meant if she came. And so did I.

A cab turned out of Old Compton Street, heading our way, with its amber ‘For Hire’ light burning.

‘Okay,’ she said, and the die was cast.

I hailed the taxi, gave him my address and we both tumbled in.

We got back to my place, went in, I made coffee in a sort of embarrassed silence, we drank it, and went to bed.

Now normally, these sort of late, one-night-stands with strangers end up in total grief. But this one was different. In bed we fitted together well, and we both enjoyed it.

The last thing I remember before falling asleep was Jules kissing me and saying, ‘That was great. I haven’t had so much fun in years.’

And truth to tell, nor had I.

When I woke up it was light. The rising sun slanted through the gaps in the curtains and lay brightly on the duvet. Jules was fast asleep next to me, curled up like a kitten, and Louise was standing at the foot of the bed.

I mean she was there. Really there. Three dimensional and displacing the air. You see, however much you love someone, and however well you know them, when they’ve gone, sometimes it’s hard to remember what they looked like.

Thousands of times I’ve tried to place her in my new flat, but I only have four images of her that remain with me always. And none of them are particularly pleasant.

The first two are from the place we shared, and both are after she got sick.

The first memory comes from a morning. She was standing, brushing her hair in the mirror, silhouetted against the sun shining through one window. Her hair, that she’d once been so proud of, was coming out in clumps, and I realized how close to death she was.

The second is from the evening. Late evening in the summer before she died. Once again the sun caught her. This time as we were sitting together and watching TV. And for a brief instant I saw her as she would be if she lived to be very old. But by then, her body was old, and within a few months it would close down completely.

The third memory is how she was that Sunday morning when I went to see her for the last time in hospital. Her skin was tight over her skull, there was a white crust around her mouth, and when she saw me, and reached out to touch me, her fingers were like claws.

And finally. The last memory is from when I went back the next day. When I plucked up courage to go. I remember how she was lying in her coffin. She should have looked peaceful then. The battle over. But she didn’t. She looked totally pissed off that she was dead. And I could only bring myself to touch her face for a moment. It was cold, and hard like wax. And I hated it. And hated myself for feeling like that, and not being there when she died.

As I left the room where she was lying, the old man who dealt with the bodies gave me the ring she was wearing when she died. It was a sapphire and diamonds set in platinum. I went home and put it on a chain around my neck so I wouldn’t forget her.

I still have it.

‘Hello Paul,’ she said from where she was standing. ‘Long time.’

‘Louise,’ I said, confused. ‘Is that you?’

“Course it is.’

‘But you’re…’

‘Dead, is the word,’ she said, and came around and sat on the bed next to me.

I looked at Jules lying there, beside me, and wondered why, of all the hundreds and hundreds of mornings I’d woken up alone since Louise died, she’d decided to pop round on this one.

I said as much. I wasn’t frightened or anything. Just curious.

‘Because of her,’ replied Louise, poking Jules. ‘You two are going to make a go of it.’ And she poked her again. Harder.

Jules didn’t wake, just sighed in her sleep and rolled over.

‘She won’t wake up,’ said Louise. ‘You did a good job on her last night.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Am I imagining this?’ What else could I say under the circumstances?

‘Feel me,’ she said, and held out her hand. The hand I’d touched a million times before.

I took her hand in mine. It felt like solid flesh. But cool. Not cold. Not warm. Cool.

‘So where have you been?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know. Somewhere.’

‘Why haven’t you come back before?’

‘It’s difficult.’

‘Are there other people there?’

‘Yes. But we never meet.’

‘So you’re alone.’

‘Not entirely. Percy’s with me. Look.’

She pointed towards the door, and there, with a look on his face as supercilious as the one he’d worn when he’d been alive, was her cat.

‘He just turned up one day,’ she said.

‘So what is this place?’

‘It’s like a beach. Hard sand. Red. And sometimes I can hear the sea, but I can never find it. It never gets dark, but the sun never shines. You never sleep or get hungry, or go to the loo. You don’t sweat or get dirty. You salivate a little. Just enough to talk, and your eyes are wet, but you never cry. Sometimes I find footprints, but I’ve never seen another soul except Percy.

‘I had to have him put down,’ I explained. ‘It was a kindness.’

‘I know. I’m not cross. I like his company.’

‘And you can see what’s going on here?’

‘I can see what’s going on everywhere.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Look up at the stars, Paul. And you’ll know what I mean.’

‘You can see what happens on other worlds?’

‘Sssh, Paul. I shouldn’t be telling you all this. I shouldn’t be here at all.’

‘Who told you that? Who told you everything?’

‘No one. I just knew. When I got there I just knew the rules. The same as I knew what would happen if I disobeyed them.’

‘And what would happen?’

‘Well, if I get found out. Poof!’ she said. ‘I’ll go to another place.’

‘What kind of place?’

‘I don’t want to think about it. There, there be dragons.’

‘And you just look, and you can see what’s going on here?’ I was beginning to repeat myself.

‘I’ve never missed an episode of EastEnders.’ That had always been her favourite programme.

‘And now you’ve decided to pay me a visit. Just like that.’

She got my drift. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to suddenly turn into a flesh-eating zombie like in the films. And Percy won’t change into the rabid cat from Hell with six-inch fangs. It doesn’t work like that. I just know that now you’ve met her,’ she looked disgustedly at Jules’ still form, ‘you’re going to forget all about me, and I’ll just fade away.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re wrong. I’d never forget about you in a million years. She’s nothing to me. An easy lay. It’s you I love, and always will.’

Louise smiled, got up from the bed and stood beside me. ‘We’ll see,’ she said, bent down, picked up Percy, who put his paws on her shoulder like he always did, and she walked out of the room.

I lay in bed for a minute at least before I followed her. The flat was empty, and I knew it. But even so, I looked in every cupboard and behind every chair.

I went back to bed, and although I didn’t think I would, I fell asleep again, and when Jules gave me a shake at eight-thirty, I was sure I’d dreamt it all.

‘I had a hell of a dream,’ I said.

‘Me too. I dreamt that you were going to fuck me again.’

So I did.

Dream or not, Louise had been right. Jules and I did make a go of it.

We saw each other constantly that summer, although I must confess I tried to spend as much time as possible at her place, a pied-à-terre down the Goldhawk Road. It wasn’t bad. Just twenty minutes’ drive away, or a few stops on the Victoria line, then change, and a few more stops heading west.

But Louise didn’t come back to visit, and eventually I forgot all about it.

Then, one evening that September, I came in from work to get changed for a publisher’s dinner, and she was sitting at the kitchen table holding Percy on her lap. He was looking longingly at the fridge, and it struck me that whatever Louise had said, some dead creatures still remembered about being hungry.

‘Hello,’ she said when I walked in. ‘Fancy a cup of tea?’

It was the same thing she’d said to me myriad times before. And I answered like I’d always answered. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Put the kettle on.’

She dropped the cat on to the floor and did just that. ‘I told you that you two would get on, didn’t I?’

I nodded and lit a cigarette.

She made the tea. Just one cup, and said, ‘Party tonight?’

‘You obviously know,’ I replied. ‘Been using your crystal ball again?’

‘That’s right. Taking Jules?’

I nodded.

‘You could always take me.’

‘Can anyone else see you?’ I hadn’t asked that question before.

She shook her head.

‘It’d be a bit weird then, wouldn’t it? Me sitting next to an empty chair having a conversation with an untouched plate of chicken Kiev.’

‘I suppose you’re right. But I might come anyway. The Savoy, isn’t it?’

‘Is there anything you don’t know?’

‘No.’

‘Then why this visit? Not that you’re not welcome.’

‘You’re forgetting me. I can tell. I’m fading away.’

‘Does that happen?’

‘Only to people that no one cares about.’

‘But I do care.’

‘Not as much. Not since Jules came along.’

Of course it was true.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘Don’t mention it. Some people only last a few weeks.’

‘How do you know that, if you’ve never seen anyone else?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘I just do.’

‘So what can we do about it?’

‘Lots of things,’ said Louise. ‘But I’d better let you get changed. You don’t want to keep Jules waiting.’ And she hauled Percy up, and walked out of the kitchen, closing the door behind her. I only waited a split second before I followed, but when I searched, the flat was empty again.

After that, things started getting really weird. Louise and Percy were hanging out a lot at my flat, and I wouldn’t let Jules anywhere near the place. Not that Louise didn’t make the odd appearance at Jules’ place. She did. And often I’d know she’d been there when we weren’t. Things were moved or vanished, and Jules started talking poltergeists. Hey, I knew better. And then she started showing up at work, and in pubs, bars and restaurants. I was losing weight and smoking too much, and people started commenting on it.

It got so that I dreaded spotting a redhead anywhere. A redhead in a black sweater, black short skirt, black tights, and scuffed black shoes. A redhead who didn’t look a minute older than the day I met her all those years ago.

Then, just before Christmas, I made the biggest mistake of my life. On the twenty-first of December I asked Jules to marry me.

And on the same day, she made the biggest mistake of her life.

She accepted.

She was going up north for Christmas to visit her family who had moved there.

She wanted me to go with her, but I had family commitments of my own. And besides, I wanted her to break the happy news to her folks whilst I was a couple of hundred miles away. I spent Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day in the bosom of my family. I told them the glad tidings just before I left, and split to leave them to mull it over in their own time.

I got back to my flat at lunchtime on the 27th, and Louise was waiting for me.

Talk about ‘Hell hath no fury’.

She was well pissed off, and even old Percy spat at me. And I’d fed the little bugger for years.

‘I knew it,’ she screamed. ‘I knew you’d do something stupid.’

‘Hey, listen,’ I said back. ‘You’re dead. I don’t even know if you’re a figment of my imagination. So don’t get all aerated with me.’

‘Try this for a figment,’ she said, and cleaned my clock with a right hander. It hurt too. ‘If you marry that bitch, I’ll be gone. I know it. She’ll want babies and shit like that, and you’ll forget me, and I’ll be gone.’

‘I told you, Louise,’ I said as calmly as possible under the circumstances, holding a cold flannel to my throbbing nose, I’ll never forget you.’

‘And you want me to stay?’

What could I say, after all we’d been through? It was time to shit or get off the pot. Cast the die, and to hell with the consequences.

‘Yes,’ I said. And with that single word I invoked the chaos theory. A butterfly spread its wings in Venezuela, and it rained in Somaliland.

Louise calmed down then, and Percy rubbed his fat, furry self against my leg. She even cooked me dinner. A most acceptable lamb chop, mashed potatoes and peas.

Later on, when I was smashed on a bottle of port that one of my authors had sent me for Christmas, I broached the subject of sex.

We were watching the late-night movie. A stalk, strip and slash exploiter from the late seventies.

‘Do you still fancy it?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘That’s all over. Just as well really.’

I had to agree, but didn’t vocalize the thought. Necrophilia had never been a fantasy of mine.

Louise stayed until the end of the film, then she blew me a kiss, collected Percy and left.

She stopped in the doorway as she was going, and asked, ‘Did you really mean what you said?’

‘What?’ I’d said an awful lot that night.

‘About me staying.’

‘Of course.’

She smiled a brilliant smile. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘See you around.’

But after she went, I remembered the story about the man who wished for something, and got exactly what he’d wished for.

Jules came back for New Year, we went out and celebrated, and surprise, surprise, Louise didn’t show.

I was amazed. At the very least I’d expected her to pop in and wish me the compliments of the season.

In fact I didn’t see her for months. And as the wedding plans advanced, Jules and I visited both sets of parents, God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world. At least our little piece of it. I even cut down on cigarettes, and started to put on weight.

Then, on the sixth anniversary exactly of Louise’s death, I got home from work to Jules’ place where she’d promised to cook me dinner, and it had all come on top.

Of course I had a key to the flat, and the first thing I saw when I’d let myself in through the front door was Percy giving himself a quick wash and brush-up by the foot of the stairs.

I looked at him, he looked at me, and I knew that this was a bad news day. I’d known it since I’d woken up, and his being there confirmed it.

I walked down the hall to the kitchen. The door was ajar, and there was a light on inside the room.

I pushed the door all the way open, and for a moment I thought that Jules had redecorated the white walls.

In red.

But it wasn’t Dulux vermilion gloss that coated every surface.

It was blood. Hot, scarlet blood. Already turning brown in the air. Jules’ blood. My wife-to-be. And she was lying on the black and white checked vinyl floor in a pool of the stuff, with more gushing from the multiple wounds that Louise had stabbed in her body.

Louise was still bending over her, and when she saw me, she stood up, wiped the blade of the kitchen knife she was holding on her skirt, and stuck the point of it into the butcher’s block that rested on one of the work surfaces.

‘Hello Paul,’ she said. ‘Supper’s nearly ready.’

I went straight to Jules, but it was too late. She was dead. I knelt in her blood and tried to revive her, but all I managed to do was to cover myself in the stuff. Big mistake number one. Too much blood, I thought. Too much blood for her to have in such a small body.

When I realized it was useless, I stood and tore the knife from where Louise had stuck it, and went looking for her. Oh yeah, I can hear you say it. A stupid thing to do. But I did it anyway. Maybe you would’ve done the same thing under the circumstances. Big mistake, number two, you might say.

Of course she was gone. Percy too. So I did what any good citizen would do at a time like that.

I called the emergency services.

You see I’ve always prided myself on being a good citizen. Big mistake number three.

So naturally the coppers arrived with the ambulance. They took one look at me and hustled me into the living room to wait for the CID.

Ten minutes later, a pair of plainclothes police got to the house, and the fun really began.

Have you ever tried to explain to the law that your ex-girlfriend, dead exactly six years to the day, had turned your current fiancé into steak Diane on the kitchen floor? Or steak Julia in this case.

Don’t bother.

It doesn’t wash.

They cautioned and charged me when I’d told them my full name, and they drove me to the station, where, after being processed through, I was taken to an interview room. One of them, the youngest, put on a tape recorder, and they started.

What made it worse was that just then, Louise walked into the room, carrying Percy like a baby, sat down in an empty chair in the corner, crossed her legs and joined in.

So the conversation went something like this:

‘Well, Paul,’ said the oldest of the two coppers. ‘No “Mr”. Just “Paul”, all the time. ‘This is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

I agreed that it was.

‘So what happened?’

I told him. From the moment I walked through the front door and saw Percy until the two policemen arrived.

He seemed quite amused by the notion. I’m sure he was the life and soul of the police social club.

‘They’re never going to believe you,’ said Louise.

I didn’t answer. I figured I was in enough trouble as it was.

‘Come on, Paul,’ said the young one. ‘You don’t really expect us to believe all that.’

‘See,’ said Louise.

‘It’s the truth,’ I said.

‘Why did you kill her?’ said the older copper.

‘I didn’t.’

‘Was it a lover’s spat that went too far? Or was she playing away? Or you?’

‘It was nothing like that,’ I replied. ‘I’ve told you what happened. And that’s all there is to it.’

‘Right,’ said the young one. ‘Let’s run this by one more time. You’re telling me that last year, your girlfriend Louise Spenser, who at this time had been dead for five years, came to visit you.’

I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said for the benefit of the tape.

‘With her cat? Who is also dead.’

I nodded again. ‘Yes.’

‘And since then, although you had since become engaged to the deceased, she’s been visiting you on a regular basis.’

Nod three. ‘That’s correct,’ I added for something different to say.

‘With her cat,’ said the older guy.

‘We mustn’t forget the cat,’ said the young one.

‘I know it sounds ridiculous,’ I said.

‘No,’ said the young cop. ‘We get this sort of thing all the time.’

‘Told you,’ said Louise.

‘Will you be quiet?’ I blurted.

‘Who me?’ said the young one.

‘No,’ I replied.

The older guy, who was a bit more suss, said, ‘She’s here now, isn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Where?’

‘Sitting in that chair.’

He sighed, got up and walked towards it. But Louise was too quick for him, and got up. He sat down on the seat she’d vacated, and said smugly. ‘Still here, is she?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I think it’s time for a refreshment break,’ said the young one, and the interview was suspended.

That went on for the next twenty-four hours.

I got a lawyer who advised me that I make no further comment on the charges. But the evidence was overwhelming.

I was found covered in Jules’ blood, the knife had my fingerprints all over it. I was famous for going off the rails with drink and drags, and to put the tin lid on it, I was telling a preposterous story about the ghost of my dead girlfriend.

My brief advised me to go for a plea of temporary insanity.

I stuck to my story.

I was banged up in the remand wing at Brixton, but kept separate from the other prisoners.

Louise and Percy came and went like they owned the place. It was okay. They were a bit of company for me.

Of course no one else could see them, so I made a bit of a name for myself as being totally mad.

Radio Rental, the screws called me — mental.

The case went to trial at the Old Bailey. I pleaded not guilty, but as I had no defence, the case only lasted for a day. Every paper in the land covered it fully, and Louise and Percy sat with the defence counsel throughout.

The jury convened for less than half an hour, and when they came back, they brought in a guilty verdict.

So that’s my story. Not the happiest one, I agree.

But things have worked out okay. I’ve got a nice room. No sharp corners, and lots of cartoons on cable.

Louise and Percy never go away now, and that’s how it was always meant to be.

The three of us together. No worries about the mortgage, or where the next meal is coming from.

Daffy Duck is on now, which is kind of ironic. And there’s liver and bacon for supper.

I’m not mad, you know, whatever they say. Louise will tell you that, won’t you Louise?

Well, she would if she was in the mood.