Ghost of a Husband by Daniel Day, whisky on the rocks

 

It wasn’t an easy decision, but it had to be done – I could see no other way in the end. I had become so sick and tired of the monotony, day after day, week after week, Sunday lunch followed by Monday evening bridge followed by Tuesday afternoon tea and so on and so on, forever and ever. 

And the effort it all took! Retirement was supposed to mean rest from work, but it had turned out to be anything but. 

‘You will get the step ladder out and dust off the curtains before this evening won’t you dear?’ she would say. Heaven forbid that our bridge club guests would look up and notice just how much dust had accumulated on the rail since last week’s visit.

‘You know I can’t do it, not with how I am with heights.’ she would always add.

Then there was the afternoon tea, always at Deborah’s Tea Rooms in town, Tuesdays at precisely two o’clock. 

They knew us by name in there. I hated the condescending tones, the cooing at us like we were infants. The way they would pull chairs out and hold doors open like we were incapable of looking after ourselves.

‘He’ll have the smoked salmon salad,’ she insisted. I hated smoked salmon; I wanted a bacon roll but apparently my cholesterol was very much her business and not my own.

In the end, I just couldn’t stand it. I announced one evening that I was going for a stroll. 

‘You’ll degrease the kitchen backsplash when you get back then?’ she said. ‘You know I can’t bend so far over the counter.’

            I didn’t reply. What would have been the point?

I stepped out into the cold night air and began my sombre march across town. Under the ghostly light of streetlamps, I arrived at the road bridge. It spanned the great river which had flowed through our town since before I was born and would not cease to flow after I was gone. 

I took in a gulp of bitter air like a shot of whisky, climbed trembling up onto the iron railing, and said farewell to the world.

I plunged into pressing darkness. An uneasy weightlessness took me then I knew no more.

That is until I found myself inexplicably standing right back in our kitchen, my soaking wet clothes seeming strangely not to drip on her porcelain floor tiles. 

My skin felt sticky and cold.

There was a newspaper sat on the table. The headline read: Body of Retired Man Found by Fisherman. I reached out to pick it up but found that my hand went straight through both it and the table. 

I quivered in the stark realisation that my plan had been successful. An unnerving dread dripped from a soaked lock of my hair and trickled down to the tip of my nose.

I heard slipper-clad footsteps on the stairs. Hide! The ridiculousness of the thought startled me and I found myself laughing. 

‘Really dear, whatever can be so funny at a time like this?’ 

I was dumbstruck. I spun towards the door to see her standing there, just as she always had been. I stumbled backwards, discovering my legs passed right through the oven door which had been left open. 

‘Do be careful.’ she said. ‘And try not to sit on any of the furniture, you’ll only get it wet.’

‘I won’t.’ I said, indignantly. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t sit on the furniture even if I wanted to.’ 

She sighed. ‘No, I suppose not.’ She looked deeply forlorn. With effort, I contorted the sickening guilt I felt to feel more like pity. 

‘So, you know I’m…’

‘Dead?’ she interrupted, and I felt a jolt in my chest at the word. ‘It would have been difficult not to notice, especially after the police came round.’

I felt sick; this wasn't what I’d wanted at all. I had wanted freedom, release from hard labour, this was so much worse.

‘But you can see me?’ I said. ‘You can hear me, we’re speaking right now aren’t we?’ 

She shuffled forwards, passing right through my body to get to the sink.

‘Yes, I can see you.’ 

‘But how?’ I said, half to myself.

‘Don’t know; suppose you must be haunting me.’ she said. ‘Unfinished business and all that.’

‘But I don’t have any further business, I have nothing more to say.’

‘No.’ she snorted. ‘You said it all when you jumped off that bridge.’ Another jolt in my chest, this time more violent. 

She looked dreadful. Not externally, she was always immaculately put together, but deep in her eyes there lay the cold, bitterness of a woman betrayed.

‘I’m sorry…’ I began, but the empty words withered and died, like the last feeble, flickers of a candle in the overwhelming dark. She finished washing the last of the dishes then passing through my body again, drew out a chair. She picked up the newspaper which covered her face as she read.

‘I suppose you’ll want to know why?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘It’s quite obvious why – you couldn’t stand to live with me any longer.’ Her bluntness was excruciating. ‘Most people would have just had an affair or something.’ she added.

‘I’d have never done anything like that!’ I defended.

‘And this is so much better is it?’ she said. ‘Why couldn’t you have simple talked to me? You never spoke! Whenever we’d go out you’d sit there, silently squirming, I knew something was wrong. I suspected you were unhappy, so I tried to arrange things for us to do, things we enjoyed!’

‘Well I didn’t enjoy them!’ I snapped. ‘I just wanted to rest for once and have a bloody bacon roll if I felt like it!’ I became suddenly aware how much my words sounded like that of a sulking child.

She tutted then turned a crinkly page, the uneasy quiet illuminating my shame.

‘Well…’ she said, crinkling the edges of the newspaper in her fingers. ‘It’s too late now, now that your'e…’ Another jolt in my chest and my entire body trembled.

‘Can you hear me?’ she said. I found that I couldn’t speak, she called my name.

‘Come back!’ she cried. Her sobs were muffled and distant.

The light in the room was suddenly unbearably bright. I raised my hands to feel tubes coming out of my naked flesh.

‘He’s regaining consciousness.’ another voice said.

‘Come back to me!’ she cried.

 

 

About the author 

 Daniel Day is a writer and musician, living with his wife and two children in West Yorkshire. He writes about ordinary things with an extraordinary twist. He has had short stories published on East of the Web and Cafe Lit. 

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