Box Set - Chapter Six

           The clothes are the same. The prim and proper jumper over the starchy shirt. The slacks rather than jeans. Overly shiny shoes. These are the clothes that Yates was wearing when he killed himself. Even in death, he can’t escape them. Them or the scar. Two eternal reminders of the memory.

            But the face is full of youth. A youth of spots and greasy hair. I know it well.

            ‘What are you looking at?’ he says. Shrinking back into the hallway. His face is in shadow with the light of the fireplace over his shoulder.

            ‘You’ve got younger.’ I state the obvious. ‘How did you do that?’

            I don’t have much experience of the dead. Are we susceptible to move like that? Can I see myself as an old man? Or regress to a baby on the ground? Benjamin died an old man and has apparently stayed that way for four hundred years. He’s so old now that he doesn’t remember where he was born. All that he is, is age. Yates is somehow different.

            ‘I slipped,’ he admits. ‘I don’t let myself fall into my memories so this is what happens. The memories become my present. Why do you think I’m here? Trapped in this horrible place. They abandoned it! They still own it. How could you let it go after…after what I did here?’

            I’m more than a little shocked. Yates looks mad. His eyes dart from side to side like someone’s coming to get him. His back hunches and hands play with the hem of his jumper.

            ‘I was sheltered in life and they continue to shelter me!’

            ‘Who does?’

            ‘My parents!’ he shouts. ‘Who do you think? They’re still out there somewhere, but could you return to the house where you found your son hanging? A grown man who couldn’t deal with how pathetic he was.’

            ‘You’re not pathetic, Yates,’ I say, stepping closer to him, over the threshold. ‘You were lonely, I know the feeling, I can still feel it now when I close my eyes. You can do that right?’

            He shakes his head. I think he’s younger than me by a couple of years. He stands a few inches shorter, but that might just be his hunch.

            ‘How could you know?’ he asks, taking an unceremonious sniff.

            ‘Because I was lonely too.’ I smile. My loneliness is a past I look back on, I can smile at it. Yates’s solitude takes hold every day. 

 He goes silent.

            ‘So you slipped into a former version of yourself?’

            ‘It happens sometimes,’ he says. ‘Come inside.’ He waves his hand. ‘You’re letting all the heat out.’

            I follow him over the threshold, closing the door behind me. The feeling of warmth makes me shiver off the cold outside that still clings to me. It’s strange. Occasionally, I see a moment of the middle-aged man in him. He’s a teenage boy and a man all at once, I guess we all are to some extent.

            ‘Now, I’ll make you a cup of tea as long as you promise it will stay in its cup this time.’

            His voice echoes through the hall and I realise he’s already in the kitchen.

            I follow him through and sit back on the stool I sat at less than an hour ago. I look through the small window above the sink and see a line of pink on the horizon.

            ‘Wait, it’s dawn already? It was day when I crashed?’ I only notice now that time has been moving at an accelerated rate ever since I found myself a ghost.

            ‘It’s the travelling,’ says Yates, pouring water into the kettle. ‘I’m reliably told that it’s something to do with the turn of the earth. You leave it and then you re-enter it elsewhere, and elsewhen.’

            I suspect that he was ‘reliably told’ by a book, not a person. But are there books that talk about ghosts? Real ghosts? Not the old horror stories my grandad used to read to me. Although I know now I hold a book about ‘real ghosts’ in my hands.

            ‘I’ve brought you something,’ I say, placing the first book down on the counter. ‘First of all I brought it to show you what you can see out there, but then I found…’

            ‘Is that a first edition?’ he says. ‘Where on earth did you find that?’

            ‘I…erm,’ I start. I realise that Yates, with his somewhat volatile personality, may not appreciate my stealing a first edition book from the museum of his hero. ‘I found it, in a bookstore I go to in London sometimes.’

            ‘I bet it cost a pretty penny.’ He snorts. ‘Liberating isn’t it, stealing books.’ He glances towards his living room which might as well be wallpapered with them. ‘I feel like the world owes me something.’
He says the words with an unexpected ferocity. Seeing Yates as a teenager, when my only knowledge of him is much older, is a little unsettling. The presence of the man is clear, but the words coming out of a teenage mouth sound arrogant. I know it’s not his fault, but I struggle to like him.

            ‘I thought you might want to see the annotations,’ I say.

            He lifts the book and opens it, leafing through the first few pages. He sees the opening paragraph and his face softens as he reads aloud:

            ‘There are more types of silence than there are grains of sand in the world. The streets of London after the great fire, families digging through the soot and remains of their homes. The silences of a child’s bedroom after a nightmare is one of the greatest silences of all. No greater however than the silence on the streets on Christmas day.’

            He smiles, holding the book closer to him. ‘Don’t you just love the way he captures things you never really think about?’

            I nod. It’s why I love him. Thacker saw the world in a different way. I’d had so many conversations with Penny about it. Sometimes an author speaks to you in a language only you understand; the best authors do that without even knowing they are.

            ‘Why do you stay here, Yates?’ I ask. But he’s looking closer at the page.

            ‘This…this is Thacker’s handwriting,’ he says. My stomach twists, uncomfortably. ‘I’ve read every book on him. I’ve seen his handwriting, you…you stole this from the museum didn’t you?’

            ‘I…’ I start, but he doesn’t let me finish.

            ‘Any true Thackerite wouldn’t dare do such a thing!’

            ‘Well maybe I would!’ I snap. ‘I’m trying to help you Yates, and you just push me away! Let me help.’

            ‘I don’t need help, I don’t need company.’

            ‘So turn your lights off. Live by candlelight like Cecily when she sees Roland for the first time in the attic. If you didn’t want people to come here, it wouldn’t be lit up like a Christmas tree at all hours. I’m trying to make a friend. I know it’s lonely, I’ve felt it myself.’

            ‘Oh right,’ says the teenager. ‘Your girlfriend.’

            ‘Yes, my girlfriend,’ I confirm. ‘But you can’t go around hating everyone just for having a girlfriend, I know, I’ve…’

            ‘That’s the thing with people like you! You always claim to understand when all you want to do is see how much better you have it. Don’t you think I know that!’

            ‘Oh for god’s sake,’ I say and grab his arm. This is the only way it will work, I just hope my theory is correct. I grip his skinny wrist tight and close my eyes.

It’s remarkable how easy travelling is when I’m not thinking about it. When I’m so concentrated on my target and intention that the process takes a back seat.

I don’t take Yates anywhere on earth though. I concentrate on a moment in my past, something I think he needs to see.

I feel him struggle and I fear I’ll lose him in the darkness that envelops us. It’s over in a second though so I don’t worry for long.

Our feet hit solid ground. I wish I could visit a memory that didn’t include school. For a vast amount of time I had hated the place. That’s the thing about dying at 17: there’s only one place you spend most of your time.

The passage behind the tech rooms was quiet every lunch-time. I found it after a few years at St Bartholomew’s. Years of sitting in the playground by myself, or asking teachers if I could sit in their rooms lead me to find a place to sit in the quiet.

‘Where have you taken me?’ asks Yates in a panic. ‘I’m going.’

He wrenches himself from my grip and starts running.

‘No, Yates!’ I shout after him. He can’t leave. I have to help him. Penny would have wanted me to help him.

I chase after him, down the path, towards the shouts of lunchtime in the distance.

We were on the edge of the woods. I know travelling only a few hundred metres would lead me to the smoking hut. I wonder could I visit Penny, even now in my memories.

I hear a shout from around the corner of the building. I turn myself and see why.

The darkness has found us, in a great void off the edge of a cliff. I hear a yelp and watch as Yates tumbles over, helpless to stop himself.

His scream echoes all around me like it’s my own. I reach the edge and peer over, anxiety clutching at my heart.

‘Yates!’ I call. But only silence greets me.

We couldn’t travel any further because this isn’t my memory. My memory is of the path behind the tech rooms and reading comics by myself with my packed lunch. I wanted to show him that he wasn’t alone, and now he’s plummeted. I led him over the precipice.

I know what I have to do. I can’t abandon him to this. So I have to follow. I can’t get lost in my own memories. I have to follow Yates through my mental maze. And we travel by thinking.

I take two steps back and take a run, letting the fear of falling grasp me. My stomach lurches and I plummet into the darkness.

The feeling of falling and spinning into nothing isn’t so scary when I have a purpose. I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to think like that. I have to think like Yates and he is scared of this place.

                I sense the lurch in my stomach, the feeling of being upside down on a rollercoaster and concentrate on it. I try to convince myself that it will never end. He might be lost on here forever. I hope that it’s my memories, and my memories won’t let that happen to a person.

                ‘Help!’

                A muffled voice in the darkness. Like it’s speaking through a thin wall. I recognize the voice and my heart leaps in my chest. Almost immediately, the voice dies away with the excitement. Excitement is not where Yates will have landed. Where would excitement take us? The first time Dad took me to a comic book shop, my first real date with Penny, the first time I splashed in the sea. 

                Part of me doesn’t want to know where Yates is. There are some memories that none of us want to see again. I concentrate on the fear again. Now fear that I won’t be able to find Yates. That I’ve condemned him to this.

                ‘Let me out!’

                The voice is clearer this time, as though we’re in a crowd and he’s a few people away.

                Fear, fear, falling, fear. I am never getting out of here.

                ‘Easton?’

                I realise that I’ve been squeezing my eyes shut. I don’t know for how long, it’s hard to know when it’s dark already.

                My head throbs slightly with the effort.

                ‘Yates!’ I say, relieved to hear his voice.

                I look down slightly. He wasn’t that short before.

                ‘Please let me out.’ His voice cracks. A higher pitch than before. The same voice but ever so slightly different.

                I stare at him. The fuzz on his lip has gone, and several inches hang loose on his clothes. He looks like a boy who’s tried on his father’s clothes. His eyes are puffy and wet and a trail of snot drips from one nostril.

                ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘Whatever I did, I’m sorry, just don’t punish me anymore.’

                He sniffs again and I don’t know what to do. He’s slipped again, slipped into a much younger self. He much be nine or ten.

                ‘I were going to help me,’ he says. ‘And I don’t know where I am.’

                I look around, quite worried, because neither do I.

 The space is huge, and definitely not a place I’ve been before.

I see it’s a train station before anything else. To our left there are boards showing places like New Haven, Poughkeepsie, Harlem. Places I recognize from a life of watching American sitcoms. I’m in New York, Grand Central Station. I have been here before, but I was very young at the time. The place is alive with New Yorkers bustling back and forth, on phones that look old to my modern eyes.

            I have always wanted to go back. My parents were wealthy enough to cart me on their travels with them. I don’t have a memory of this place but there are countless pictures of me in a photo album with a picture of the Statue of Liberty on the front that my parents like to get out every now and again. I remember them getting it out the first time Penny came round. I resented them for it a little, they knew Penny’s parents weren’t able to go on such extravagant adventures.

            ‘Where are we?’ asks Yates sniffing, trying to hide his face. I can only guess that the younger Yates gets, the more he revisits traits of his youth. His teenage self had been moody. Now though, he hides like he’s just old to not cry so much anymore and he knows it.

            ‘Grand Central Station. New York City,’ I add when I receive a blank look.

            ‘Oh, the Fly protects New York City, and the Iron Captain.’

            ‘You read comics?’ I ask, more than a little surprised.

            ‘Yeah!’ he says excited. ‘Not any more though.’ His face loses all emotion, adopting the snootiness I’ve come to associate with Yates. The change is sudden, but momentary. Instantly he reverts to his childlike self, wiping his nose on his sleeve so he turns it up, like a pig.

            I shake off the peculiar sight of a child visiting his adult self and look around. If this is my memory then my parents are here somewhere with me. Curiosity grips me and I start searching for them, I’ve always wanted to know what they were like as young parents, not influenced by the good behaviour world of home videos.

            ‘What are they?’ Yates points up at the ceiling with his cuffs hanging over his hands.

            I look up and see something I’ve always wanted to see with my own eyes, the constellations carved in gold in the station’s duck egg blue ceiling.

            ‘They’re the stars,’ I say, my voice lighting up as I try to keep the boy interested. ‘But they’re backwards. In the sky, the minotaur over there is on the other side of the room. Some people say that’s how God looks down on us from above.’

            ‘I don’t believe in God,’ says the nine-year-old boy, stopping me in my tracks.

            I see him looking up at the ceiling, looking towards me every now and again to see if I’m watching.

            ‘Did your parents not believe in God?’ I ask.

            ‘I only have my dad,’ he says. ‘And he goes church every week. I just don’t believe in him.’

            He’s being standoffish again. Yates in childhood doesn’t seem to be a lot different to the man’s later-life self.

            I look around the station again. I must be here somewhere, or else we wouldn’t have come here at all. After a while, I lose hope, not seeing anyone I recognize in the throngs of busy travellers.

            ‘Do you want to go home?’ I say the words, and Yates’s head snaps around like an antelope sensing danger.

            ‘No.’ He raises his voice to a level that would have drawn glances if we’d existed in the station. ‘I want to stay here.’

            ‘Come on, Yates,’ I say. ‘I know you’re in there somewhere. We have to get you out of here.’

            ‘No, you’re just like him!’ he shouts and starts running, through some people staring at the boards. I’ve not seen anyone pass through anything yet. It’s quite an unsettling experience, especially here in a memory. There are no shudders, we’re not really here. It’s quite comforting in a way, to know how much influence we have in the real world. Here, we’re all ghosts.

            Yates doesn’t take too kindly to stumbling through people.

            ‘What’s going on?’ he says, his eyes going puffy again with tears. ‘I want Mummy.’

            I go after him, but he keeps backing away. ‘I’ll take you to her, I promise.’

            ‘No, you’re lying,’ he says. ‘He always says he’ll take me to Mummy but then he…’

            He starts to cry again, not backing away anymore. He starts drawing on the floor with his finger. X’s, over and over, on top of one another.

            ‘Just leave me alone.’

            I sit down beside him. ‘What did he do, Yates?’ I speak slowly, careful with my words. I’m dreading the reply.

            Yates shrugs, tugging on the cuffs over his hands. ‘He says I deserve it. I’m worthless. I deserve to be alone.’

            Which Yates was that? It’s hard to tell sometimes.

            ‘You’re not worthless, Yates, and you’re not alone are you. I’m here.’

            He looks up at me, I try to make my face as friendly as possible, to let him know I mean the words.

            ‘I think you have the best house on earth. It’s amazing what you’ve done after everything. You don’t have to tell me what your dad did, I can guess.’

He looks down at the tiles on the ground still, but nods.

            Then he looks up, as though a sound in the unending ruckus of Grand Central have caught his ears.

            I follow his eyes and am a little taken aback. I’d been looking for it, but I don’t think it’s a sensation I’ll ever be used to.

            I’m walking, well, toddling around the station concourse. I’m wearing the I heart NY T-Shirt my parents still kept upstairs.

            I’m lost. The way I look around, up at the ceiling, at any couple who passes me, tells me that somehow, my parents have let me get away from them.

            I don’t remember the incident at all, but the look on my face tells it all. Confused, beginning to get upset. I can see in my face that I think they’ve left me here.

            Yates sees me too. ‘Someone’s lost that boy. Can we help him?’

            I shake my head. I don’t know how much Yates understands in this state. Telling him the little boy is me in my memories might only scare him.

            ‘His mum and dad will find him in a minute,’ I reassure. ‘Just watch.’

            It’s hard to watch myself so scared. I want to help myself but I know it’s impossible.

            ‘Every one feels alone sometimes you see,’ I say. I see my mum and dad in the distance, worried sick. They’re coming this way. It’s only a matter of time. The tears are coming. My lips are quivering, a sure sign of waterworks.

            ‘Not all the time though,’ replies Yates. I burst into tears, a child’s desperate cry filling the hall. My mum breaks into a run, leaving my dad with the pram. ‘See his mum’s found him now. And I bet his dad doesn’t get his belt and…’

            Tears fall down his red cheeks again. I reach out and put my arm around his shoulders. He moves a little closer to me.

            ‘No,’ I say. ‘Some people are the worst people imaginable, but sometimes they leave us behind and we can move on with our lives. We don’t stay stuck in the same place forever, because that’s how the bad people find us again. Even if we never see them.’

            He looks up at me. ‘Can we go home?’ he asks.

            ‘Yes,’ I say, smiling. ‘Take my hand.'

            Before a second travels by, I’m sitting in Yates’s kitchen again.