3. Trouser Buttons

A QUESTION OF TIME Part 3

Eleanor Crinkworthy looked around to see who was talking but there was nobody there. She even looked under her pillow, but all she could see was a packet of mints for when she wanted something to suck on in the night.

“If that’s you, Colin Wharton,” she said, “you’re not here. You can’t be because you’re dead. I went to your funeral and shed a little tear in memory of what you used to keep in your shorts.”

“You actually cried?” he asked, touched to his none-existent core by the notion that there was somebody on the planet who found his demise worthy of tears.

“There you go again! It sounds like Colin Wharton but it can’t be! Becuse I do know that he’s dead. I was there when they buried him! I even saw gooey drops of him dripping onto the grass when they carried his coffin!”

“Something happened,” he groaned, “something weird when my skull was smashed in by the headlight of that Land Rover. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now, but I’m here.”

“Show me yourself, then,” demanded Eleanor, who, being a girl, always needed precise proof if she was going to believe anything, and then even that was rarely enough.

“I can’t help it if you’re blind to other dimensions!” he almost shouted, “and what was that crack about what I keep in my shorts? I’m the same old Colin Wharton, a bit confused maybe but I’m beginning to sort things out. When we get married you’ll…”

“You think I’m going to marry a ghost!” squawked Eleanor, “there’s no way I’d ever do anything as daft as that!”

“But I’m not a ghost,” protested Colin, suddenly aware that the decomposing him in its coffin deep down in the church yard wanted to start crying, “I’m me! And when we get married…”

“There you go again! Then tell me, if you’re not a ghost, what are you? I can’t see you, but I can hear you and it’s your voice. I recognise it from when you begged me for a kiss the day before you decided to play hopscotch on the main road!”

“That was the first kiss I ever had from a girl,” he sighed, “and you poked your tongue into my mouth, which I thought was disgusting until I realised you’d been sucking on a mint!”

“And then you liked it. It’s how my folks kiss, though maybe not with mints. And, believe you me, if you were to see them getting all lovey-dovey you’d probably be disgusted!”

“We’ll always be kissing like that when we’re married,” he sighed, “all our long lives together. People will say they’ve never seen such a loving couple, even when we’re old and grey and past it.”

“There you go again! I’m not marrying you no matter how many times you say it!” she shouted.

“What’s wrong dear?” came her mother’s voice from down stairs, “what’s all the shouting about?”

“It’s Colin Wharton!” she called back.

“I know, dear, it’s ever so sad, but it’s a year since that dreadful accident and you really will have to get over it!”

A year!

“Yes, mum,” she replied in a voice so contrite she may have been back in her pram and gurgling in that way that made the grown-ups go coochy-coo and tickle her under the chin with scratchy fingers.

“So go to sleep,” said mother, and Eleanor heard the door to the lounge downstairs click shut.

“A whole year and I still miss you, Colin,” she whispered.

“And I’m still wearing those shorts you were on about,” he teased, “I don’t know how to change them.”

“So what are you if you’re not a ghost?” she demanded.

That was one hell of a question and he thought he knew the answer to it until he realised that he didn’t.

“I don’t know,” he moaned. “I’m me. Colin Wharton, Husband to Eleanor Wharton, nee Crinkworthy…”

“I’m fourteen and they don’t let fourteen year olds get married!” she told him, hoping to put an end to that strand of the conversation before she began to think being married to a disembodied voice might be a good idea after all.

“I’m thirteen,” he said, “I’ll always be thirteen. It says so on my gravestone.”

“So you are dead. You have to be dead in order to have a gravestone with your name on it,” she said, convinced. “There isn’t a gravestone with my name on it, so I’m alive.”

“But there is! I’ve seen it!” he told her, “I stood by it not ten minutes ago and shed a tear or two. I was there when you died. I held your hand as your life ebbed away. It was most touching.”

“Now you’re talking rubbish!” she said, making sure she didn’t shout because the last thing she wanted was for her mother to investigate the nature of the conversation she was having with a dead person.

“Not at all! 1943 �" 2021, it says. Rest in peace, beloved mother and grandmother. Eleanor Wharton…”

“Now just you stop it!”

“I was there when we got engaged,” he told her, slowly and thoughtfully, “it was the first time we ever made love, you and I, and you were seventeen going on eighteen and positively rampant!. So was I! It was our life as if could have been but for that darned Land Rover! And it was as real as you kissing me last year, before I died.”

“That was real,” she sighed.

“Then I was there at our wedding… wait! I’ll be back!”

The vicar smiled benevolently at him. “Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife?” he asked, winking hugely because he knew he did. There never had been such a loving couple, and he thought them blessed by the very reality of their love.

“I do,” he replied, aware that a certain amount of excitement in his nether regions might manifest itself at any moment of he didn’t manage to mask it.

The service became the mask until it came to the bit about him kissing his bride, and then, in one glorious explosion of power the middle two buttons of his trouser fly flew off. One of them hit the vicar straight on his nose.

Thankfully, nobody noticed and with a bit awkward crouching and bending he managed to conceal his embarrassment from everyone in the church.

“Well done!” grinned the vicar, rubbing his nose, “well done indeed! The best wedding ever!”

© Peter Rogerson 02.06,21

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