Bull Running For Girlsl (9 page)

The librarian came in to put a few books away and the girls jumped out at her, waving their arms in front of her face, trying to attract her attention—but to no avail. She did not see them. They laughed at Alice and pinched one another, generating more screams that would wake the dead.

Perhaps they are the dead
, Alice thought.

The librarian did not see them but Alice did. Was she going mad? She hadn’t slept for two nights, but, surely sleep deprivation couldn’t produce this.

“You see them too, don’t you?” A man had entered the room and stood by her side. He was around fifty, with a beard and moustache, looking like some English professor with his notebook and pen. Next to him was a man wearing a baseball cap, who peered over the older man’s shoulder trying to see what he was writing.

The man in the cap became irritated and distracted. “I said my name was David Dobson not Hodgson.”

“Quite,” said the professor, crossing out Hodgson and writing Dobson. He then wrote
young woman and fledgling eye
, on his pad.

Alice was speechless. There was a sickly-sweet smell of burnt brown sugar in the air. The girls were pulling out books and stacking them behind the librarian, giggling and waiting for her to turn around and fall over them. The professor continued to write in his notebook and then paused—

“You will soon get used to it. I see them all the time.”

“So do I,” said David Dobson.

The librarian turned around, but by this time the books were back on the shelves and the girls were seated again on the table, swinging their legs and singing a song that Alice faintly recognised as a childhood nursery rhyme.

Alice fled from the building and into what she thought was the comparative safety of the shopping mall. She had the sudden desire to buy something in green, but had no idea why or what? She made for the first shop selling women’s clothes and wandered along the rows, pausing to choose a green skirt and a pair of bottle-green army trousers. Then, she paid for both and left the shop to go…but where? She didn’t know.

It was then that she saw them

 At every one of the half-dozen shops along each side of the mall she saw a man standing by the doorway, like some bouncer at the entrance to a nightclub. But there was something strange about them. All the men were Caucasian and dressed in black. Dark men outside dark doorways, and suddenly the entrance to each shop had turned into some black abyss through which she was sure one could vanish forever.

“Is there nowhere safe?” Alice whimpered.

She made for home. Seeing her dead grandmother on TV was nothing compared to the kids in the library and the men at the mall. She could go to her sister’s. No. Her sister was looking after Ellis and Ben that night, as Alice had told her she would be working late at the library. Besides, Alice didn’t want them involved in this, whatever
this
was. The world seemed stable before she began the affair and now her life seemed to be in pieces. She was falling apart; Alice could barely count out the money when she bought a bottle of wine at the liqueur store.

Once outside her home she nervously glanced up at the bedroom curtains, unlocked the door and sat on her stairs clutching the shopping bags and the wine. Her head was exploding with images of people and things that should not be there. What was happening to her? Was Maitland behind it all? Or was she going mad? Seated on the stairs she started a steady rocking motion to comfort herself. Then she pulled the skirt and the trousers out of the bag, wondering which to wear for protection—green is good isn’t it—the colour of life. That might help—will it?

Alice burst into tears. Was the whole of the ghost world trying to get her attention? She was terrified. She dared not look over her shoulder and that rotten smell was still there.

She went through the house, too terrified to sit still for long. Alice felt compelled to throw some of her most-valued possessions out in the trash can: the radio her mother had bought her; the porcelain figure of the little child she had treasured; the wedding cards that she said she would never throw away, until now.

“They all have to go,” she said sadly. Was this a precursor to her departure, and if so to where?

She almost threw out the manuscript that she had written, based on the Lancashire Witch Trials in seventeenth century England, but in the end some stronger impulse saved that.

Once done with the cleansing she felt exhausted. She heard the phone ring—that would be her husband—but she ignored it. She would sort this out herself. Alice opened the wine, poured a large glass, took it upstairs with her and sat down upon the bed. She briefly closed her eyes and sensed the great rushing of Maitland’s face coming towards hers at break-neck speed.

“Boo!”

With that simple, childish word coming out of nowhere Alice held her breath as she looked into the dressing table mirror. The weak sunlight of a February afternoon lit the room and in the mirror, for a brief second, she could see the form of a man dressed in black.

Once more she fled her house, leaving the door open behind her. She had no fear of the living, just of the dead—or her own madness. She tried to cross Delaware Road but found it difficult to do so, on account of a man in a dark overcoat standing so close to her, whose proximity scared her half to death.

Halfway there,
Alice thought; but to where?

She backed away from the edge of the road and jumped instinctively as someone tugged at her arm.

“Are you all right, Miss? You don’t seem okay to me.” A cop was staring hard at her. She could see in his eyes that he was wondering if she were in trouble or if she were simply unwell and needed help in crossing the road.

“Can’t you see him, can’t you see the man?” she started.

“What man, Miss?”

“The man standing right next to you.”

The cop looked around behind him. “There’s only you and me here.”

Alice didn’t say anything as the tears once more streamed down her face. She had done a lot of crying that day. The cop helped her to cross the road and she wandered aimlessly into the park, and sat down on a bench. As the snow gathered and settled on her green coat she shivered until her lips turned blue with the cold. Far across the park, children were coming out of school, and Alice thought she saw her sister pick up Ellis and Ben. They never came across the park and so they would not see her. She closed her eyes and whispered a silent prayer.

She saw Walter Maitland just one more time.

Ellis and Ben never saw their mother again.

A body was found just north of town—or what was left of it after the dogs had been at it.

In the spring Maitland found a new ‘Alice’, for he had become nostalgic and realised that he missed the old one. Her name was Anne and she was an assistant in a drug store. She invited him over for dinner and whilst he sipped his red wine he thought about the new games he would devise for her. Maitland heard the rattle of knives in a kitchen drawer, just before he fell into unconsciousness.

In the kitchen, Anne made cinnamon coffee and nodded in agreement with the other woman, who spoke to her earnestly and then faded away into the shadows.

“
She thought of Jeanie in her grave,

Who should have been a bride;

But who for joys brides hope to have,

Fell sick and died, In her gay prime,

In earliest winter-time,

With the first glazing rime,

With the first snow-fall of crisp winter-time.
”

“
Goblin Market
” by Christina Rossetti.

The British rarely go into detail about death and it came as a shock to Christy when she went to Blackstock’s funeral parlour to pick up her mother’s ashes, that they weren’t ashes at all, just small bits of ground up bone
—
a light colour of brown
—
all that was left of the small, fragile old woman.

In her grief Christy couldn’t make her mind up where to put her mother’s bits of bone, until they were to be interred at St. Mary’s Church in Prestwich, Manchester. The remains came in a brown plastic container with a screw-on lid. The container was larger than she thought it would be, half the size of an upended bread bin. Christy would unscrew it every day to look at her mother, being very careful not to spill any of her out on the kitchen floor. There was no smell of death; just her mother’s leftover life.

Christy felt old at forty. Those two hours that she had stayed with her mother after she died had aged Christy, without doubt. As her mother took her last breath Christy was horrified to see the years rush into her mother’s lovely face and her tongue start to turn black around the edge. Christy had felt Death brush by her cheek, making her feel defenseless and afraid.

For a time she kept the brown container on the bookshelf in the living room…then in the garage. But it was chilling and impersonal in there, and at one point she even had it in the car, until the day she had to say farewell forever. Christy had heard of relatives who never gave up their dead, who could not stand for them to be mixed up with everyone else in the garden of remembrance. Her mother would have her own special place in St. Mary’s graveyard, under the oldest of oak trees which was bent and weather worn, its lower branches spread wide over its charges, as if gathering them together for safe keeping.

Macabre books and films had engrossed Christy after her mother’s death. She had never actually been to see The Sedlec Ossuary, a Roman Catholic chapel, which was underneath the cemetery in the Czech Republic, but she had seen a programme about it on TV, and the memories had stayed with her.

In the nineteenth century an artist had been commissioned by the Schwarzenberg noble family to sort the bones out. He placed thousands of human bones in four neat mounds in each corner of the chapel, made a coat of arms for the family and hung in the centre of the nave a chandelier that contained every bone in the human skeleton.

After the programme that night Christy had the nightmare

She felt a heavy, shifting weight pressing her down. She could just about push her hand up between skulls and bones; the hideous mass of bones moved with a gravel sound when she did so. Once at the top she could see by the light of the grim, bone chandelier the avalanche of grisly remains that she had managed to free herself from. Christy struggled to hold back the bile in her throat. The compulsion to be sick was strong but her reverence for the dead was even stronger. She would not further defile the bones.

That nightmare was two years ago now.

Christy had since taken on the job of a Duty Manager at the Mortimer Hotel in Manchester, where a number of waitresses came and went from the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, all working for minimum wage. Not all Eastern European women were sold into sex slavery it seemed, though Christy had read on the net about the impromptu slave market raided outside the coffee shop in Heathrow. Money had changed hands before the police had broken it up and they had taken the young girl away into protective custody. It seemed that the going rate was four thousand pounds per girl and the girls fell into it because of threats to their families. Passports were taken off some girls and given to others from non-EU countries like the Ukraine and Moldova.

Christy shivered and was relieved to think that her girls (the waitresses Janina, Marija, Ona, Gabriele, Evelina, and Auguste) were at least safe for the time being from prostitution. Others were not so lucky, and recently Kamile had left abruptly. Christy liked to believe that they went home
—
as some did
—
when they were homesick. Some girls left without giving notice but whilst they were there, they worked hard and complained little.

The Mortimer Hotel, with its sixty basic bedrooms, was mostly for businessmen and overnight visitors to Manchester
—
but not the sort of place to stay in for more than one night. For thirty quid one couldn’t expect much. Apparently the hotel had been renovated recently and Christy had taken the job a week or so after. She wasn’t crazy about the work but her husband, Paul, was pulling his weight and she wanted to get the credit cards down to a manageable level.

Occasionally the hotel was open to anyone off the street for
Soul Night,
or other such lacklustre event. Up until now Christy had only been working the day shift, where she’d heard some complaints about noise in the early hours on a Saturday morning. But her shift didn’t start until Monday, and the people who complained at the weekend had usually left by then. Betty, one of the old cleaners, had said something about complaints concerning unusual noises, and recently some
fi
lthy, bloody bandages had been left in the sink of room thirty-two. It
was
a cheap hotel after all.

On Monday morning Gabriele, one of the more able girls, had cooked limp bacon and underdone eggs again.

“Gabriele, you need to leave it in the pan longer, get it crispy, and cook it longer
—
do you know what I mean?”

The pretty Lithuanian girl smiled her most
You-have-to-
forgive-me-because-I’m-still-new-and-foreign
sort of smile and Christy left it at that for the time being. The minimum wage wasn’t much to survive on, although the girls did live very cheaply up in the old attic bedrooms of the hotel. Unless Gabriele actually did cause an outbreak of food poisoning, Christy wasn’t going to get too arsey about it.