Ghost Story

Ghost Story

By John Grant

It’s not till we’re back on dry land that I think of phoning home. I glance at my watch and find it’s just a few minutes before six. Dverna probably won’t be home yet – most days she stays on late at the school, marking papers or supervising clubs, ans it’s especially likely tonight that she’ll stay on, knowing I won’t be home for hours. She doesn’t carry a mobile, so the only number I have to phone is the landline Even so, I give it a try.

No answer.

I’m tempted to stay overnight in London. I feel I should face Connor and Elsa, try to explain to them that really I’m not the cad they must thing I am – even though Lindsay has told me they don’t think about it like that. Because, you see, they too don’t know I’m married. So far as they’re concerned it’s just fine their darling daughter is getting it together with someone they’ve know all his life. Of course, perhaps said daughter shouldn’t have got herself knocked up by him in the interim, but modern days modern ways… So Lindsay says. How they’re going to feel about me when she tells them the new Lindsay is the craziest fool in the world for believing my obisous lies. What whoppers I’ve been telling. Land her in the pudding club, then pretend it was my mysterious Evil Twin…

I should be with her, so we face the music together. But I also need to be with Dverna. If I could speak to her on the phone, maybe it’d be different, but she has to have the option of deciding whether or not I go home to bristol tonight.

Ghost Story, Photo by Elena

I explain something of this to Lindsay. As we stand there, the light beginning to fade from the sky, I see a young guy who’s passing helping himself to an eyeful of her. It’s far from the first time it’s happened today. She is exquisite, a jewel cut by a master craftsman, just as she was when she was five. And I think to myself yet again how very easy it would be, if things were different… But things aren’t different. I’ve never felt that each of us has only one soulmate out there in the world. If anything were ever to happen to Dverna, I wouldn’t resign myself to never finding someone else to whom I’d feel equally close. But I cannont figure Lindsay as a soulmate. I love her in that almost-family way. I think she is beautiful, and wonderful, and amazing, and I’m fascinated by her presence the way I’d be fascinated by the over-brightness of a jewel automation, and the streak of lust I have for her right now is like a guitar string being tightened too far, but she’s not the person I’m meant to spend the rest of my life with.

None of this do I say. Instead I say, “What are you going to tell your parents this evening?”

“Nothing.”

“They’ll be wanting to know, won’t they?”

“They respect my privacy, I respect theirs.”

“Like I can believe that.”

She gives my hand a squeeze. We’re approaching the bright lights and the noise of Marble Arch. “Do believe me,” she says.

Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton, Prime Books, 2015.