Ghosts and Other Lovers Read online

  It would have been a normal response, not even heroic, to have grabbed the child, to have scooped him into her arms and pulled him back to safety and to the gratitude of his mother. It would have been the act of a moment, the obvious thing to do, to have thrown herself at the child. But she had not.

  Instead, against all reason, Alida had flung herself at the man in black, had thrown herself into his waiting, outstretched arms, and taken the embrace that was meant for the child.

  The next thing she knew was pain. A blinding agony that lanced all through her, stretched her joints out of socket and broke every bone, took even her scream and shattered it inside her agonized eardrums. She was ripped apart and thrown back together into a shuddering, wracked heap that knew not even its own name.

  “Are you all right, love?”

  Opening her eyes was like ripping skin off a barely healed wound; her throat was too raw for a moan. Alida realized that she was alive. She was standing on Newington Church Street, her back against a wall, and before her was a little white-haired lady — hair-net protecting her fresh perm, blue dress buttoned up to the neck, handbag square and glossy as the Queen’s — gazing at her with concern.

  Alida looked down at herself and saw that she was whole, with no signs of blood or bruising, even her clothes — flowered print skirt and sleeveless pullover — undisturbed.

  “What happened?” she asked, and clenched her teeth and rocked against the wall as an aftershock of pain ripped through her.

  “I don’t know my love, I’m sure. I happened to notice you, and you were backing up to the wall as if you couldn’t stand properly on your own, and you had a look on your face … it was the look that worried me… .”

  “Not … a car didn’t hit me?” Alida looked out at the road, past the woman’s emphatic negative, to where the multi-colored traffic glittered in the sun and surged ceaselessly past.

  She saw the yellow dog panting in the sunlight, still blocking the door to the tobacconist’s shop, although the two young men and the woman with the pushchair had moved on out of sight. She forced herself away from the wall, far enough to look around the bend, and was rewarded by the sight of Gavin’s red curls. The little boy’s hand was firmly in his mother’s grip as they walked away.

  As for the man in black —

  The pain that was her memory of him was so sudden and sharp that she bit her tongue, finding the taste of blood a relief.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said to the woman who was still worrying about her. “It’s over now.”

  “Maybe it was the heat,” said the old woman. “I’d see a doctor, though, just to make sure. It might be your heart, and you can’t be too careful.”

  But Alida knew it wasn’t the heat, and it wasn’t her heart. It was death, and she had survived it.

  She walked on, moving slowly, for the intensity of the experience had left her feeling almost boneless. As she came to the old churchyard she went in and sank onto a low stone bench to rest. She couldn’t face her friends just yet: they would know by looking at her that something had happened, and she didn’t know how she could explain it to them. She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell anyone, for she expected disbelief, and she did not want to be made to doubt her own experience.

  She had seen Death. She had felt it, gone through, and survived.

  Despite the warmth of the day, Alida shivered. The agony was still there, on the edge of her consciousness, dangerous even to think about. And yet — she had come through. Death, like pain, was comprehensible; it had a place in the world like that other mystery, sex. And, like sex, it was both simpler and more momentous than she had imagined in her innocence.

  She felt almost pleased with herself, with her new maturity. After a few more moments of reflection she was able to stand up, smooth down her skirt, and go to see her friends as if she was the same person they had always known.

  She thought that was the end of it. She had satisfied her curiosity and cured her obsession; she had come to terms with her own mortality and that of others and need no longer dream of death.

  But Death had not finished with her. On the bus that evening, going home, she saw the man in black perched on a seat beside a frail old woman. His face was turned away to the window, as if he was watching the passing scene. Later, she saw him huddled in a doorway between two shabby tramps with a bottle of wine, and another day he leaned solicitously over a baby in a pram, and dogged the footsteps of a heavy-set young man. Death was everywhere, and no matter how she tried, Alida could not blind herself to his dark presence. Even when she did not see the man in black she sensed him near.

  She was sitting at her father’s bedside, knitting a sweater while he slept fitfully, when a chill premonition of pain made her look up.

  Death came in sideways, his face turned away from her. He crept in like a crab, presenting the smooth black cloth on his back, his face against the pale green wallpaper as if he expected to merge with it unnoticed.

  The tenor of her father’s breathing changed, becoming rasping and shallow, and Alida opened her mouth to call her mother, but no sound emerged. The ball of wool rolled under the bed as she lurched to her feet, and she found her legs too weak to carry her to safety, weak with that remembered, crippling pain. She stared at the intruder as he sidled along the wall, aware that in another moment he would reach the headboard, and then he would be able to lean down to touch her father.

  There was no conscious decision. She was thinking of escape, of the pain she could not bear to experience again, and not of self-sacrifice. But she could not stand by and watch her father suffer. It was almost an instinctive, physical response, to push Death away —

  So she flung herself across the bed, threw herself for the second time into Death’s outstretched arms, taking the embrace meant for someone else. And embrace him she did, rather than push him away; clutched him tight as if he were a long-lost lover.

  His whole body was charged. As she embraced him, she felt her flesh sear wherever his touched it. It was as if a powerful electric current ran from him to her, melding their two beings into one. She felt him imprinted upon her surface, and then etching deeper. She felt the flesh melting from her bones, dripping off like hot fat, sizzling. She felt his arms binding her like chains heated white-hot, searing through her arms, her ribs, reaching her interior where her heart burst into flame.

  Yet she was still alive. Alida realized she had emerged from the other side of pain, and did not understand how, when her flesh had been melted away and her bones gone to ash, mere consciousness could have survived. She became aware of her aching body, which lay across the foot of her father’s bed. She felt it begin to heal, felt her blood cool and flow again, felt her bones reconstitute themselves, felt her raw, liquid flesh solidify, and at last she raised herself up, looking timidly around the room.

  There was no sign of the man in black. As for her father, he was sleeping peacefully, breathing regularly, and looked better than he had for days. The terrifying translucent quality she had noticed about his face was gone, leaving him her familiar, living father. She had taken his death, she thought, and they had both survived. She closed her eyes on tears of joy.

  As the days passed, Alida’s father grew stronger. He began to eat more, and no longer complained of pain. The doctors were wary of offering hope, and seemed to view the idea of total remission as skeptically as they would the miracle Alida knew had occurred. But she knew the truth. She had won him back from death. The immediate danger had passed, and now he would live to be an old man.

  Alida’s pleasure in this was complicated by what it told her about herself, and she withdrew from family and friends to brood on it.

  She had saved her father, as well as a stranger’s child, from death, and she did not doubt that she had the power to do the same thing for others. It was an awesome responsibility, a godlike role she had not asked for and did not want. Was she meant to be a new savior, meant to suffer and die a thousand times to redeem the lives of others?
Was she to give up any life of her own and travel around the country foiling Death on highways and in hospitals? Yet even if she had wanted that, Alida knew she could not conquer Death. She could only save a few out of the millions he marked each year for his own, and that was as it should be. She would gladly suffer again if need be to save her mother, or a friend, or some innocent child, but why should she help the very old, or the wicked, to evade their rightful deaths?

  Alida decided to trust to chance and her own instincts. She would not go in search of Death, but she would use her ability when she felt she must.

  In the days and the weeks that followed this decision, Alida continued to catch glimpses of the man in black, but never more than that: a sighting across a crowded street or in a passing car, or a premonitory shudder as a stranger brushed past. She thought she should have been happy in her freedom: she wasn’t being forced to make a decision; she didn’t have to die again. But she was restless and on edge, sleeping badly, skipping meals, always waiting for and wondering about the next death.

  She began dreaming of death again, but this time it was not the loss or recovery of loved ones that she lived through in her sleep; now she dreamed of the man in black. Now when she slept she found herself pushing impatiently through the darkness, pulling at his arm, pressing herself against him, struggling to see his face. In her dreams pain was transformed to pleasure, and instead of fearing the agony, she longed for his embrace. Gradually this longing crept into her waking hours and she had to recognize that the lives she might save did not matter to her. All she wanted was Death.

  But Death, it seemed, did not want her. Although she had felt earlier that it was her obsession with death which had drawn the man in black to her, and made it possible for her to see him when others did not, her desire no longer worked such magic. She thought perhaps it was having the opposite effect, that her very eagerness might be foiling her: death might see her not as a lover but as a threat, a dangerous rival who stole his chosen victims.

  She began to haunt the casualty wards of hospitals, but although she often sensed the presence of Death, she was never able to draw close enough to touch. She stopped going to work, preferring to roam the streets at all hours of the day and night, yet no matter how often she saw that familiar black suit, it would vanish as soon as she attempted to follow. She read about deaths in the papers and heard of them on the news: starvation in Africa, a car bomb in Ireland, a machine-gun maniac in Los Angeles, and all the obituaries, all the private little deaths which took place out of her presence, beyond her reach. So many died, so many who did not have to. Why wasn’t she allowed to intervene? Why couldn’t she find someone who was about to die? Only her dreams gave her any relief, and they were few and far between as she found it harder and harder to sleep.

  Alida did not realize quite how desperate her mood had become until one morning in the bathroom she found herself staring at the blood welling from a cut on her finger — a cut she’d made in a futile, half-conscious attempt to extract the blade from a disposable plastic razor.

  The pain scarcely registered, but the sight of the bright red blood recalled her to herself, and she stared at the mirror, seeing for the first time how pale and haggard and thin she had become. How near death she looked.

  And her eyes shifted from her own face to look beyond. She couldn’t even hold her own gaze; she was always looking for the man in black, always trying to see that still unseen, unknown face. Everything she did was an attempt to call him back to here but she knew she must not take her own life unless she really was giving up. Because she didn’t want to die — she wanted Death, and to survive death, again and again.

  Twice before she had managed it — how hard could it be to find someone else who was about to die? Alida did not realize she’d made up her mind to attempt murder until she actually had her victim in range, directly in front of her and too close to the edge of the station platform, a hot wind presaging the arrival of a train. Alida had taken one step forward, and brought her hands up to push, when from the corner of one eye, amid the crowds, she saw the unmistakable black suit drawing near.

  Horror froze her, as she understood what she had meant to do. Death vanished. She could not act. Around her, people pushed and shoved and clambered into the train, leaving her behind, alone with herself and her desire.

  No, not desire: she had to recognize now that it had taken on the force of an addiction. It was a need which had set her at odds with herself, which had taken over her life, her mind, and her will.

  But not entirely. She could still think, and she could refuse to give in. She would change. She had to.

  Trembling but determined, Alida rose out of the underground onto the gray city street, thinking of how she would forget her two deaths and concentrate on living. She was too much alone, she decided; she needed to spend more time with her friends, and to find a lover.

  She imagined a man in her arms again, in the warm privacy of her bed, wrapping her legs around him and pressing her mouth to his, holding him close, forcing him to be still, feeling his poor, feeble attempts to get away, feeling the power tear through him, ripping him out of life —

  It took an act of considerable will to stop that chain of thoughts, and Alida could do nothing about the fact that her heart was pounding and her breath coming in short gasps of excitement — or was it fear? Alida didn’t know what to think. She had become a stranger to herself. She didn’t dare to think about what she wanted. It was as if she contained two people, and the desires of each one were incomprehensible, and dangerous, to the other.

  She went on walking because it was the easiest thing to do, and because it seemed safe. It might even do some good, she thought, to walk until her mind was emptied by exhaustion. She was scarcely aware of where she went, or of the passage of time. She crossed the Thames and continued traveling southward, moving at a steady pace, untiring. She had no destination in mind, but gradually she realized that she would soon be in her parents’ neighborhood. The light was failing — it would be dinnertime, and her mother always made more than enough. She was not hungry, but Alida snatched at the idea of a meal with her parents as at an anchor to normality. They would be pleased to see her, and for a little while she might seem to be her old self again.

  Her parents lived on a quiet side-road, in one of a row of large but slightly shabby terraced houses. Turning the corner, Alida at once made out the familiar figure of her father. No longer restricted to his bed, he was standing now and very slowly, carefully sweeping the dead leaves from the crazy-paving which he had laid down in place of the front garden the summer that Alida was fourteen.

  She felt an overpowering rush of love at the sight of him. It seemed that in that one moment, as she saw him moving slowly in the twilight, that she recalled all that he had been to her through thirty years, the whole sound and sight and feel and smell and meaning of him in her life. She began to walk more quickly, wondering if the sound of her heels clicking against the pavement would make him turn, anticipating the slow, pleased smile that would spread across his worn face at the sight of her, savoring his surprise.

  Then something other than daughterly affection made her heart beat faster as she glimpsed something — someone — beyond her father, behind him, half-hidden by the shadow of the arched entrance to the front door. The man in the black suit.

  There could be no doubt. His utter stillness sent a chill through her. And then, almost as if he were signaling his contempt for her, a black-suited, pale-fingered arm was outstretched. It fell just short of her father’s stooping shoulders, but if he moved so much as a step back those fingers would touch him. And there was nothing Alida could do about it. She could not reach Death first, as she had done before. This time, her father stood between her and Death.

  Her only hope was to make her father come forward, out of Death’s reach, toward her. If she could warn him in time, call him to her —

  She screamed, calling him by the infantile name she’d ceased using years b
efore, two syllables he had not heard for fifteen years. Perhaps he didn’t understand; perhaps he only recognized the terror and the longing in a woman’s scream.

  The sound made him turn to look, and Alida came running, moving toward him faster than she had ever moved in her life. She saw the expression on his face change, and with part of her mind she wondered what he saw to make him look so terrified. Whatever it was, it made him step backward, almost stumbling away from her.

  Backward, within easy reach — and yet the man in black did not take him. As she knocked open the little iron gate and flung herself forward, Alida did not even wonder why.

  Then her arms were around her father and she was holding him tight, feeling him die.

  This death was not like the other two, the ones she had received second-hand, charged and painful from the hands of the man in black. For this death was hers, and she gave it.

  She felt his bones shatter like glass beneath the pressure of her arms, and when she put her lips to his it was to suck out his last, shuddering breath. She lanced his soul and let out the life, and pumped his body full of death, and then she let it fall.

  No pain, this time, but only an exquisite relief, a rich, heady pleasure. She stood, breathing hard, watching the shadowed entranceway, waiting for the man in black to come out.

  When he did, when he stepped into the failing light and showed himself to her, she saw that he had the ordinary face of a stranger. He was a mortal man once again, having passed the burden, or the gift, of death to Alida.

  She reached out with long, cool fingers to caress the human face before her. She closed his eyes and gave him the rest he had been longing for. Letting his body fall beside that of the man who had once been Alida’s father, Death vanished about her business.

  The Walled Garden

  When I was five years old I saw the future. My future. After that, I was unable just to wait and let it happen. I had to go looking for it.