LAUGHTER IN THE DISTANCE (previously published ‘Lost Pages’ 2005)
The room was unaccountably quiet – in a way that made it seem more spooky than it was. Charlie sensed that there should be more noise, as he watched the people in it miming conversations. They were trying – very successfully as it happened – to keep quiet for someone who was ill upstairs. Charlie knew this fact because Susie – he thinks her name was Susie – told him that this was indeed the case.
“Who’s ill?” Charlie had asked. He asked it again because he was now talking – whispering under his breath – to someone else. This time he didn’t even guess her name.
“I thought Susie already told you,” this new girl answered – so quietly that Charlie had to read her lips.
There were at least twenty people in the room. Some were still coming in, others leaving, a few neither. A ghostly gathering – and growing ghostlier by the minute, Charlie thought. He laughed to himself. It was hard to explain the purpose of the room, let alone of the meeting itself. The room was a cross between a lounge (or what they used to call front room, sitting-room, drawing-room or parlour) and a neutral waiting-room at a doctor’s or dentist’s surgery. The electric fire with too few bars actually seemed to make the room feel colder than if it weren’t there at all. Psychological, Charlie assumed.
He felt as if he were the only person of substance in the whole place. The others acted so low-key, he wondered if they existed at all, barely negotiating the bad reception on a TV screen as they came and went.
Charlie recalled he had earlier met a lady called Isabel Barnett – a name that sounded slightly familiar to him but he wasn’t old enough to check out a sufficient length of past time to judge whether it were a name that prefigured his own tenuous existence.
This Isabel Barnett was in fact the hostess who had greeted Charlie at the front door – a heavily made-up face with billowing gold-trimmed drapes below. A mouth like a brightly pursed rose-bud rather than one that was defiantly clamped shut behind lip-stick.
“Come in, Charlie,” she had said.
He remembered her welcome like the back of his hand…
***
“I thought Susie already told you,” the girl repeated, bringing Charlie back to the present moment.
“Told me what?” he had forgotten.
“Who’s ill upstairs.” This time her voice was not even silent miming. Pursed lips had become gritted teeth, merely with the implication of articulated words.
***
Charlie was in the kitchen. He was used to spending most of the time at parties in the kitchen talking to those who happened to be passing through to get a drink or some more food. Charlie found the kitchen the best place at any party. A sort of Way Station.
This was not one of those parties, however. It was a gathering of hushed whispers, some bordering on a silence beyond silence itself. Even the silence of the grave was subsumed by shifting earth or the conversation of worms. There was no music coming from the waiting-room or lounge. And there was no booze, only cups of tea that clinked on their saucers like percussion instruments in a fastidious invisible prelude. A delicate intaglio of glances and tunes underhummed from some memory of a signature tune in ancient wireless days.
Charlie soon returned to where most people found themselves. As soon as he realised this wasn’t a party as such, the kitchen and its passing inhabitants lost all their fascination. Mutual, he thought.
Isabel Barnett smiled at him from where she was standing alone. Susie had vanished, probably to the kitchen, now that Charlie had left it. What was the point, he asked, in holding a party where someone was ill upstairs?
Suddenly, as if in some oblique reply to his question, he heard laughter in the distance. The distance was vertical … which was strange as, more often than not, distance tended to be horizontal. Vertical in this case was, however, unclear whether it arrived from above or below – but it certainly was laughter. Unmistakeable as it cut through the studied silence, despite its own tones of snigger and ponderous giggle. So ponderous, perhaps, it was beneath the threshold of most normal hearing.
Charlie guessed this was the ill person laughing upstairs. Laughter is a much better deal with death than groans of pain. He laughed at his own thoughts and found himself suddenly in the company of Susie again. Every girl here was called Susie, or was that just his imagination? But imagination more customarily multiplied than reduced. Isabel Barnett was more a single lady than a girl – yet still a mother figure – and Charlie could often see her fading into the background whenever she was caught watching him … watching him watching her.
“Who’s ill upstairs?” This time it was a question, rather than Susie telling him he’d already been told who exactly was ill upstairs … or downstairs, depending on the floor where the questioned was asked.
“How should I know?” said Charlie. This was obviously not the same girl as he was talking to earlier … or even the nameless girl before Susie who had, reportedly, told him who was ill upstairs.Susie offered a kiss. At first, Charlie assumed it was destined to be a mere peck. But it was more than this – and indeed at-close-quarters was where one was supposed to be at parties, Charlie knew. Yet he was shy. Nevertheless, he allowed her to press her breasts into his chest – and both of them snogged and petted with barely perceptible gulps and gurgles and intermittent excuses of breath-taking or coughs on bodygas or embarrassed laughter.
Isabel Barnett stared at them. Charlie knew this fact instinctively and he remembered, with a shiver, who exactly was ill upstairs or even near to death, in fact – as he continued to hear laughter in the distance. It amused him, placated his worries. He had to grasp the nettle, take life in both hands, as he led the girl called Susie upstairs – away from Isabel’s increasingly distant clucking. Not even in two minds about it, he wanted to hear Susie’s laughter louder still.
No point in being in a Whodunnit if you knew who was about to do it, thought Charlie. Stifled laughter as the mystified ghosts dispersed from around both culprit and victim.
