Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 39

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.