Harbinger

Death is absence, drowning in black. Clinging to the memories of people you love as they dissolve into nothingness.

When I wake my throat is aching and my cheeks are wet with tears.

“Oh,” I say out loud to my husband. “I do miss you.”

Reaching out I am surprised to find he is lying next to me. He gives a grunt of a snore, unaware of the relief I feel.

I am not dead. Just dreaming.

The cat lying at the end of the bed lets out a cat snarl because my dead brother stands at the end of the bed, smiling.

“I miss you too,” he says.

I’m stuck between two worlds. I’m not sure where I belong. The dead intersect with the living around me. They have been with me so long I have never learned to… live? Like Prufrock, I’m a patient anaesthetised, blindly sleepwalking through life. I never really learned how to engage with the living world.

The dead tend to get my sense of humor. So, there’s that, I suppose. I prefer the world of the living by a small margin. Although nobody laughs at my jokes.

“I am still reeling from the fact that you invited me to your funeral a week before you died,” I tell him.

“I went out on my own terms,” he says defensively although he doesn’t need to be on the defensive. His family have been celebrating his willingness to die quickly so as not to burden them as an act of ultimate heroism. “And you still didn’t show. Even with the advance notice.”

When our Aunt died after a long and humiliating illness, he hiked into the hills hoping to avoid the carnival of death our mother was co-ordinating. But Mother would not let him escape his stage cue that easily. She called Search and Rescue, and he was marched back down to town to bear the coffin.

He was vastly resentful at the lengths she went to ensure he did attend, so I doubt he really holds a grudge against me for skipping his funeral.

“You might have waited just a little longer to end it,” I say petulantly.

Or he might have hoped a little more.

Although there was no hope because the medical board wouldn’t have allowed him the choice to die so easily.

My brain tingles and a ringing starts in my ears. I can smell something I almost recognise. Is it burning? No nothing like burning. For some reason I associate it with anxiety. It is familiar but I can’t say what it is.

“You should get that checked out,” my dead brother tells me.

My brother says this. 

My brother who waited a year, writhing in back pain, believing it was back strain before finally seeking a second opinion. An MRI that showed he had kidney cancer. His spine had cracked as the cancer spread to his bones. He was told he only had a short time left to live.

When told that the end was near, only then did he move with haste and lodged a request for legal demise. He was gone in a few weeks. Slipped away after sipping on a death cocktail,

How dare he tell me to prioritise my health when he paid so little attention to his. He carelessly ignored all signs of his own illness and then left so suddenly...

My brain sizzles. I am transported to a forest, pushing back branches and vines.

I’ve had that memory before. Although it is not really a memory. I live in a city. Pushing through this dream forest, I’m trapped forever, facing infinite obstacles.

“No,” he says, “It’s not a dream. This is not some artistic reverie. Your brain is trying to warn you. Something is wrong and you know it. Same as me. And you are ignoring it. Just like…”

The cat hisses at him, he hisses back but she is unperturbed. When I open my eyes my ghost brother is gone, and I can sleep. The cat turns around three times and nests herself between my snoring husband and me. She purrs with contentment.

#

The number 13 bus route always has a few dead souls taking the scenic route around the bay. I know which passengers are ghosts because their bus pass is never charged. A mechanical voice tells them: “Please pay the driver.”

But the bus driver waves them on anyway because bus drivers are trained not to pick a fight with the undead.

My brother pats the seat next to him. One of my ex-boyfriends is seated towards the back of the bus. He is nervously drumming the back of the seat in front of him. That was his habit when he was alive too. No drum kit. No sticks. He drummed his fingers as if Brian Jones lived in his head.

Is he dead? Or just visiting.

“He’s dead too,” says my brother so I opt to sit next to him instead.

“That’s sad,” I say.

“Not really,” says my brother. “He lived in Dannevirke. One might even go so far as to say it was a blessed release from this earthly plane.”

Dannevirke. And he always claimed dating me was hitting rock bottom. I guess he still had a way to go.

“There’s something in your head,” my brother says. “It will eat away at you, press against your brain. You feel it now. In fact, isn’t it a little odd that you see dead people?”

“The dead have always been around,” I tell him. “It’s not a recent thing for me.”

“Our mother has the gift. Perhaps if you went to see her…” starts my brother.

“No!” I say. “Absolutely not. She was a fake.”

“Mostly,” he says.

“She exploited me. And the drama! The woman should have been locked up as a confidence trickster. And, and, if she has the sight, how come she didn’t tell you to get to a doctor earlier?”

He shifts away from me. “She did,” he says. 

Do the dead feel it when you smack them? Perhaps. He certainly flinched.

“Then she has a small gift that she exploits for personal gain,” I conclude. “They should burn her at the stake.”

“You should visit her. She’s mellowed.”

Mellowed but not completely dried out would be my guess. I shake my head.

“It wasn’t all showmanship you know,” he says as if the dead really do come to know secrets in their afterlife. He’s bluffing. The dead have no more inkling than we do as to the meaning of this comedic farce we call life. “She has some abilities. She’ll know there’s something wrong with you. Listen to her. I didn’t. She was right. She knew me better than any medical expert. Please see her… see a doctor… listen to me…”

This is my stop. I push through him on my way to the door. When I glance back, he’s gone.

“You should visit your mother today,” says the bus driver. “He’s right.”

“Thank you, driver,” I say as I climb off the bus. I find it hard to judge the step from the bus to the ground. That’s new. I walk more stiffly, and I am so, so tired.

The winters are cold in this town. The cold locks up your joints. Not to mention the hills straining your tendons. It’s nothing.

#

My mother is dead. I received a call. Short, sharp to the point. 

“Why aren’t you here now?” I ask my brother. “Why are you never around when I need you?”

Silence wraps around his absence, and this time it’s worse than when he died.

My childhood family are all gone.

Except for my father but he hardly counts.

Grudgingly I drive to my mother’s last known address. I never had the mental energy to define where home is for me, but this is not it. I lived like a pirate after I ran away from her. Rootless. I didn’t pay taxes until I was thirty because I had no country of residence.

I was persuaded to anchor myself by my husband. I have created home for him and our twin babies, a new family that I do my best to belong to. But I distrust the comfort that comes with the notion of “home”. If I hadn’t let my past infiltrate my present I wouldn’t have found my brother again. Then I got to know the man he’d grown into - and immediately lost him again.

I couldn’t bear it if that were to happen to my children. My husband.

My brother’s wife and children consider me a distant relative, a stranger. If they understood the strange childhood we’d endured, they might understand why he haunts me while they became accustomed to his absence. Ours was a different type of kinship and we are unvarnished, too rough to fit into what most people consider family.

#

My mother’s house is painted turquoise blue. The shutters are purple. The window ledges are painted bright gold. As I make my way towards the door, I cross the moss green floorboards of her porch. They match the dense foliage surrounding the house. Vines wrap around the pillars supporting a porch roof and tubs of pot plants spill across the porch on to the driveway. A bed is installed on the porch under a banana tree, so I suppose she is still in the habit of sleeping outside.

Was. Was in the habit.

The door matches the shutters royal purple with azure trim. Before I can knock it opens.

“I made a pot of tea,” she says. “I felt someone was coming to visit. I wasn’t expecting you but come on in anyway.”

It’s not quite a decade since I last saw her.

“Mama,” I clear my throat. “Mother, you’re dead. Move on. Please.”

She shrieks with laughter from the kitchen and enters the room carrying a tea tray. Her tea pot has an image of 1980s icon Mr T painted on it. When she sits, a cat leaps into her lap. A parrot flaps across the room, seizes a biscuit and perches on a lamp.

“You’re not dead.” That cat would not be sitting in her lap if that were the case. Cats can’t abide the dead. I understand why they feel that way. I really do.

My brother materialises behind her and mouths, “Sorry” at me.

“Not dead yet,” says my mother. “In fact, looking at your aura-“ Jesus Christ “– I am probably the healthier of the two of us.” I open my mouth to argue, but she heaves a sob. “Oh. There is no greater tragedy for a mother than to have her children die before her.”

“I’m not going to die,” I tell her as she clasps her hand to her brow.

“We’ll see,” she says and that is in no way comforting. She makes a grab for my hand peering at my palm tsk, tsking. I stop drinking my tea because I know I’ll regret letting her loose on the leaves.

She mutters her generic predictions forgetting I know her act as well as she does. She would invite grief into her house and then lied to people left behind knowing they would pay any price for comfort. I watched their faded loved ones plead with them to apply good sense. But her palm was crossed with silver over and over.

Loss takes away logic. She manipulated that. She made my brother and me her unwilling assistants.

It is just as well she is not dead. I would guess there are many beyond the veil waiting for her to pass over to extract their revenge.

Her hair is still henna red, her clothing is just as flamboyant. The seventies never ended for this woman. How she loves her bell bottoms. She peers at me with her oddly coloured eyes. Light blue, the colour of weathered sea glass. They are her best feature and their uniqueness convince the gullible she sees in a way that is different from the rest of us.

“I didn’t have the same gift as you and your grandmother,” she says. “But darling you are not well. I don’t know why you thought I was dead, but something has brought you here.”

I look to my ghost brother who is gazing up at the ceiling and while I am distracted glaring at him, Mother places her hands on my cheeks and her eyes lock my gaze. For an instant I am sure they change colour to gold, then her eyes are pale, pale blue again. The scent of sandalwood fills my nostrils and I realise that this is the phantom smell that has haunted me the past twelve months. This time it is real, and it’s her signature perfume.

“Please,” she says. This is the first time I have heard her utter this word.

“Please,” says my brother but only I hear him.

“Please see a doctor,” she says. She closes her eyes and breathes deeply. “I feel something dark inside you.”

My brother sits in the passenger seat next to me. I ignore him. Usually if you ignore the dead, they fade away. I hum along with Neil Young on the car radio. My my, hey hey… My brother changes the channel on my radio station to a heavy metal rock station.

“I ignored all the signs that I was ill too,” he says. “Learn from my mistakes.”

“Was it a mistake?” I pull off the road. “You were never that invested in life to begin with. It is my belief you faced death and regarded it an opportunity.”

He shakes his head.

“You didn’t have to go so quickly,” I shout at him.

“It’s not true that the dead don’t feel. We grieve for the pain we cause the living,” he starts.

“My ass you do,” I mutter.

“You know our mother,” he says. “She won’t let you off the hook until she knows you’ve done as you’re told.”

“I’m not sick,” I want to sob. I can’t be sick. I have nothing left to get through this.

Spirits usually return to complete unfinished business or take revenge. A few appear to protect the people they left behind.

Sometimes car keys mysteriously vanish so you delay a journey and discover the bridge washed out around the time you would have crossed that river.

You have compulsion to take a different route. When you arrive home you learn the streets were closed because a rogue gun man was firing randomly at cars. Your car could have been one of them.

This is how the dead are supposed to work. Silently, invisibly. A slight nudge towards a better choice whenever a fork of fate appears.

“You never play by the rules,” I say wearily but I am alone in the car.

He’s tired too. I am keeping him from his rest. He was in such pain and so tired when I last saw him alive, I can’t keep him from peace now.

Dammit. I make the call to my doctor.

#

The neurosurgeon is certain the ghosts that haunted me all my life were due to the large brain tumour he has removed. Hospitals are generally besieged by the dead, but when I rise back into consciousness. there are no ghosts. I only see the insane.  

“I told you so,” says my mother almost at the point of dancing a jig, ignoring a nurse who is imploring her to wear a mask. “I knew there was something dark inside you.”

Given the choice of being with me when I wake or leaving our children in our mother’s care, my husband has accepted the lesser of two evils and sent her along to the hospital to be at my side.

I try to tell someone to remove her, but there is still a breathing tube down my throat, and I can’t speak. My mother smiles and I know she is thinking, “Good that’s an improvement.”

“Oh dear,” says my mother. “Your aura can do with some cleansing.”

She holds up a medallion. One of her plastic toys that she uses to trick the gullible.

I’m speechless and incensed. I wave my hands trying to sign that I am conscious, I am lucid, and I want this woman removed.

“I would take that tube out now before she rips it out herself.”

I try to turn my head, that’s my brother’s voice. He is speaking into a nurse’s ear and immediately they comply.

The nurse asks me to turn my head towards her, but I don’t want to because I know if I look away, he will be gone for good.

The tube is removed and someone hands me water to cool me down. I am afraid to turn back.

“I didn’t want the time he was owed,” I say finally. My mother’s claw grips my hand as she knows who I’m talking about. The ICU nurses bustle around us, moving the bed up and down. Tears stream down my face. “He left too soon and I inherited the time he had left but he would have made better use of it. He should have -.”

Found a cure. Prolonged it just a little longer. Say a proper goodbye. Not organise his damn funeral and send me an invitation.

I turn my head and he’s still there. “I don’t want you to go.”

He fades anyway. Job done. Goodbye…

“I didn’t want his time,” I say.

“Death likes a balanced ledger,” Mother says with a heartless shrug. “Death owes someone more time because of his decision to go more quickly. It might as well be you.” She beams happily. “More time for us to spend together.”

I hear my brother laughing.

“Thank you,” I tell him.

ENDS