8. THE LONG FAREWELL

Albert finds that he can communicate with his host...

Hilary Entwhistle felt her heart lurch as the thirteen year-old schoolgirl spoke of her love for the dead boy whose voice she had just heard screaming in her head.

She’d known Albert Tench quite well. He always sat on the front row and was always attentive. He hadn’t even earned a single detention whilst he’d been in her class, though his quiet pursuit of everything she taught him ought to have earned him an anti-detention if there was any such thing, which there wasn’t.

“I understand completely, Miranda,” she said quietly, much to the surprise of the rest of the class. “Maybe you’ll describe how golden the pound coin is? Maybe you’ll remember seeing someone drop it? Maybe you’ll …. you know the sort of thing I mean. And then, maybe, you’ll explain how you feel as you spend it … give it … you know.”

“Yes miss,” the girl said, and there was something about that simple exchange that made even the boy Masters careful not to say anything out of turn.

The lesson eventually came to an end and the bell rang for home time.

Miss Entwhistle, sat at her desk when the room was empty and then did the most surprising thing imaginable. She took a mirror out of her handbag, the large brown handbag she kept next to her desk, and looked at herself. Then she spoke to her own reflection.

“Well, Albert,” she murmured quietly, “I don’t know how you did it but you’re in there somewhere.”

“I’m sorry,” he tried to say, and he did say, the words did come out of Miss Entwhistle’s mouth, quietly, in her voice yet obviously directed at her.

“I know what it’s like to lose someone, Albert,” she said, still using his Christian name though in class, when addressing the pupils, she usually called them by their surnames. It was easier. There might be several Susans but only one Petrie. That was the way she looked at it anyway.

“I had a husband until he passed away,” she continued, very quietly, little more than whispering. “I understand heartbreak, so I understand Miranda Tinkle.”

“Yes, Miss Entwhistle,” he managed to force between her lips.

“Mrs,” she corrected him, “I was married to Bert Entwhistle, and he was a good man. Now stay where you are. I’m taking you for a little drive.”

Albert knew that the conversation was two things simultaneously. He knew that it was sorrowful and he knew that it was grotesque. And then he knew a third thing, that it was honest. Above all things, honest.

Mrs Entwhistle made her way to the staffroom and her coat. It was a cold January day and she didn’t want to risk life and health by freezing to death.

Her car was small and blue and suited her. That’s what Albert thought anyway.

“Where are you going?” he managed to ask.

“You’ll see,” she replied.

It was quite a short journey, and in only about ten minutes they arrived at the cemetery that surrounded a small Victorian church on the edge of town.

“This is where I left Bert,” she whispered, suspecting that he could hear her even if she merely thought the words. But there is something reassuring about the things you want to say to a person coming out of the mouth, fully formed, as words. The volume didn’t matter, just that they were there, whispered but loud to her uninvited personal passenger.

She parked the car in the small parking area next to the church and made her way down several rows of stones marking several years of death until she came to one, black marble with a photograph of her late husband etched onto it, looking like he had in life with light in his eyes and a smile on his lips.

“Let me introduce you to Bert,” she whispered, “he was my life, my everything, but the cancer got him. It took his before his time, and I was with him when he gasped his last breath. I told him of my love for him at the very moment that he winged his way to wherever it is the dead go. Maybe there’s a heaven, maybe there isn’t: I don’t know but I doubt it. What is left of us, Albert, is the shadow of us that lives on in the hearts of the people we touch with the magic of our being. What is left of my Bert is inside my head and I love him still even though the cold Earth has held him in its bosom for the past ten years...”

“I’m sorry, Miss … Mrs,” he managed to say.

“There’s the girl, Mildred Tinkle. That’s where you should be, a memory inside her head of a boy she loved, not here with me, in the craggy brain of an old woman who’s not got so long on the Earth herself. So, young man, I would advise you to vacate these premises before dear old Bert thinks I’m two-timing him!”

“I would … how do I?” he asked.

“How did you get here, young man? Just do the reverse of that and you’ll be all right!”

“I was riding my bicycle on Christmas day,” he began, and he wanted to tell her everything, how he’d suddenly been Miranda’s mother actually giving birth to her, and that had been hard to accept, him being only thirteen, then how he’d been a coach driver, crashing his coach and saving the lives of his thirty-odd passengers on a motorway in France, how he’d found himself out of the blue cleaning her windows, and how, now, he was part of her life at school, living uninvited in her teacher's body, not knowing how he got there or how to get out. But as the words formed inside whatever he had as a mind she knew, she imagined the things he wanted to tell her before he could shape them into sounds.

“You poor boy,” she breathed, “but you do know you’ve got to go, don’t you? You do understand that there’s only room in my heart for one dead person, don’t you, and that one person is my darling Bert? And I hope you appreciate that I have no intention of dying in order for you to have to fly the nest and go to pastures new? For a start it could be that Miss Miranda Tinkle needs someone who understands her sorrow.”

“I do know!” he thought, not quite aloud, “but I don’t know what to do!”

“Then just a moment, and I’ll help you, Albert,” she whispered, and she moved her head so that she was staring directly at the face on the gravestone in front of her.

“I’ll help the boy and then I’ll be back, my love,” she breathed, and she smiled a warm, loving smile as a tear found its way out of one eye and ran down her cheek. Albert could feel it as if it was his own tear but had the sense and decency to realise that the grief was hers and hers alone.

“You must go now,” she told him.

He formed the words that meant goodbye, but kept them to himself because in less than a fractured moment he found himself forcing a set of handcuffs on the wrists of a violent man and saying, in a voice unrecognisably different from his own, “you’re nicked, my son, you’re nicked!”

© Peter Rogerson 08.05.19