Ghosts and Stories

Dad tells me he was twenty, and a keyboard player in a band in Trelawny, Jamaica, where he’d grown up. The local girls went nuts for musicians, even mum, he claims. If you could afford a keyboard, you must be rich. Their usual haunt was the Marley Hut, an unoriginal name, but alive with fresh sounds. Reggae was growing passé. His crew used their musical skills to fuse it with touches of soul and jazz, and the crowd believed they were the new Toots and the Maytalls.

The set went well, even though the bass guitarist got drunk. He liked a rum before show time, though it was usually more than the one. They ended with a cover of Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Cryin’, one of dad’s faves, even now, after mum and him are done.

We’re sitting in the front room by the windows facing the empty, quiet street. I watch him pull the lever on the side of his chair, and slide down and backwards, as if he’s about to take off into space. The sun bleeds over everything, dries in the rug (from Habitat, may it rest in peace) and creates a chillout CD cover effect.

Dad sips at his rum, then chucks it all back.
“You see that Ghosthunter series they have on Sky, now?”
I tell him I haven’t, but I’d snuck a peak. I’d waited all of five minutes to be scared.
Dad chuckles at a private joke. “Yeah. A load of rubbish.”
He refills his glass, and mine, leans back in his chair and sighs.
“Your mother believed in ghosts. Does she still?”
I say I don't know and vaguely recall a Halloween in which I’d snuck into their room and crawled into their bed whilst they'd slept.
“Dupees. Not those pansy ones with white sheets and holes for eyes. Fiery, evil, blacker than the night ghosts.” He points two fingers at his own eyes.
Despite myself, the image runs down my spine. I think about turning on the lights.
“Remind me to give you a book about them.” A sip, then a slurp. “Your mum might be missing it.”

At the end of the set, they’d been swarmed. The small shack for a bar was in danger of overheating. Dad did his public duty, chatted to a few girls who insisted they walk home together (no texts in those days) and a couple of older men with a rum in one hand and a notebook in the other, claiming to be music agents. He mostly ignored them, dad laughs, regretfully, I think.

He bid the other band members goodnight and headed off on the thirty or so minute walk to the edges of St Mary’s parish where he lived in a bedsit with his folks. He remembered that the night was a little cooler than usual, cooler for the West Indies. His eyes soon grew accustomed to the dark, though the dirt paths leading to the bridge were almost as clear as the brook he heard flowing off the Black River.

He came to the bridge and prayed to the Almightiest Lord on high. The thing with the bridge was this: it could support one car, or one or two persons, but not at the same time. A wooden cliché, it was sturdier than most and only fifteen or so foot long, traversing a whisper of water and leg breaking rocks. He looked ahead for any headlights, and seeing none, moved forward.

It’s hard imagining my dad as a young man. I’ve seen the pictures, and heard the tales, but that doesn’t help with the before picture, the one before you’re born. You wonder, sometimes, if the paunch of a belly, or the permanently creased brow was the result of twenty-two years of childcare. I saw him now, a flicker of a young man successful in music and womanizing, walking home without a care in the world. In one way it was creepy. In another, it felt like looking through a photo album of some long dead musician published by Sony.

Halfway across, he spied two headlights. They were a dull yellow, he remembers, the battery probably in need of changing. He recalled cussing and turning to back up.
The lights disappeared.

His face has gone back in time, to that exact moment. His mouth hangs open, a little loosely, his eyes question marks.
“I mean, it couldn't have reversed so quickly. I would have heard it.” Another sip. “Your mother still driving?”
I confirm that she is.
“Cars scare her terribly,” he muses.

He continued walking ahead, thinking maybe the headlights had shorted out, somehow. He said he knew that this was unlikely, but there was nothing else he could think of that made sense, if there was any sense to make. The wind had picked up, and then stopped. The bridge creaked, but it couldn't be because of his weight.
He was almost at the other side when he decided to turn around.

My heart’s pounding, and I’m not sure why.
Dad drains his glass.

The back taillights of a car, glowing red, moved away from him, and stopped in the middle of the bridge where he’d been standing seconds before.

My stomach performs a somersault.

They stayed that way for a long, long time. If he’d seen something appear, dad says, like a person getting out of a car, something like that, he would have run as if he was still in his track days at school, rum or no rum.
I’m not sure if he’s talking about now or then.

The taillights faded, bit by bit, slow, reluctantly. Soon there was nothing left but the trickle of tired water, the growing wind, and his pounding but sceptical heart; pud-dum. Dum. Pud-dum.

Dad starts to smile, casually dabs a little sweat from his creased brow.

At the edges of his township, there was another tiny shack, strictly for the hardcore. He decided he needed another drink. It was in there he met my mother, and told her what had happened. Later, he says, she told me that she hadn’t believed me, but that I’d looked a little shook up. She distracted me, he says, by indulging me.

Dad starts the car, reassuring me he is able to drive. He parks outside the flat I share with mum. I wonder if she’s OK, feeling bad for leaving her all alone on a Sunday evening. Again.
Dad gently pokes my hand.
“Don't be a stranger,” he says.
I say I won't and open the passenger door.
“Mum thinks our flat has a ghost.” I’ve just remembered this.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. It only bothers her, though, after we have a glass of wine and she’s told me about her work day in encyclopaedic form.”
Dad chuckles. I like to hear him chuckle. “Next time I’ll get you a bottle of rum to give her.”

As he drives away, I wave until my hand feels like it’s going to fall off. The roads are dead quiet. I do my best not to look for any red lights and look up to our flat where our kitchen light is a dull yellow.