A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER Read online

  So I went for a walk, admiring the scenery and the old buildings in the village in which I was staying. The church was ninth century Saxon, apparently; Joanna was getting married there tomorrow.

  While I was strolling, though, I found something else; a second-hand bookshop called Lloyd’s. The proprietor was a grandfatherly old guy with an old-fashioned waistcoat and fob chain, unruly white hair and gold spectacles. For a moment I thought I’d stepped into a time warp. When the shop door opened, a tiny bell rang. A real one, not electronic. It had been a while since I’d heard that.

  The shop had that musty smell of old books, yellowing pages. There were all shapes and sizes—from ancient family Bibles with leather bindings and brass clasps, down to glossy-covered paperbacks only a year or so old.

  There was a lot there to interest a born browser like me, and so that was it for most of the afternoon. I didn’t have much change—it was near the end of the month and I had to keep some money back for the coming booze-up with the groom and best man that evening, not to mention the one that would follow the reception tomorrow—and so I decided to limit myself to one purchase. Talk about a sweet torment. There were some beauties there. Some of my favourite writers, though they’ll like as not mean nothing to you. I had to pinch myself a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t having some sort of bibliophile’s wet dream. I resolved not to make my choice until I’d browsed the whole shop—as soon as I saw a title I’d like, two more steps along the shelves would introduce me to another, even better choice. Not easy.

  I was almost at the end, head ringing with possibilities, when I found it, or it found me, depending on your point of view. At times I wonder if it was all just chance or if, for some arcane reason, it picked me deliberately.

  It was a collection of short stories by an author called Raymond Wesley, who died a few years ago. You wouldn’t have heard of him. He was never very famous. Wrote some books for children—a dozen or so novels and three short story collections—and a couple of collections for adult readers. I’d grown up on his stuff, and read the second adult collection when it came out, just before he died. The first one, Old Bones, was about ten years older, and hadn’t sold very well. It had been out of print for years, and I hadn’t been able to find a copy for love nor money.

  Anyway, that’s my plug for Raymond Wesley. He’s got nothing to do with this anyway, but his book has. Or that copy of it.

  I snatched it up so fast that dust blew away from the shelving, and looked inside. My meagre funds were more than adequate to the task, thank God; it was an ex- library copy, and a bit worn round the edges. Not too bad, though.

  The till rang and I thought I heard a sighing sound, but it wasn’t me and it wasn’t the old man, who was humming tunelessly to himself at the time. My imagination, or the wind, although there hadn’t been so much as a breeze that warm day. I paid the old man and headed back to my hotel with my bargain. I almost felt guilty about having to pay so little. Almost.

  Now I don’t feel guilty at all. I was the one who got done over.

  II. The Scribbler

  There was still an hour or so left before I joined the others in the bar, so I brewed a coffee and settled down with my new purchase.

  Old Bones is a collection of ghost stories about an antiques dealer. An antiques dealer? Well, think about it. It’s not so surprising. They were good ’uns, too. If I’d been reading them alone at midnight in an empty house, I might have got a bit nervous. But I wasn’t. Even so . . .

  There was only one thing to mar my enjoyment, which I didn’t find out about until I started the second story. One of the book’s previous owners didn’t seem to have been as enamoured of it as I was. So much so, he’d been moved to scribble a few notes in the book to get his views across.

  There was a line to the effect that the dealer, in the course of one of the stories, had made a couple of good bargains, and had commented that most people didn’t realise the value of the things they brought to him. Scrawled at the foot of the page, in tiny, crabbed letters, were the words: And he didn’t bother to enlighten them; all dealers are crooks and scum.

  I blinked. Well, it could have been worse. Nothing too bad, the pages were readable and hadn’t been defaced, and best of all, the notes were in pencil and could easily be erased. But it broke the spell for a second, and that was a little annoying.

  Still, I had the book, the stories were good, and in the way it was a little amusing, to think of some acerbic sod—doubtless gypped in the past out of a decent Welsh dresser for what he later learned to be a comparative pittance—venting some of his wrath like that. As I read on, I found a couple more of his little observations, and even chuckled at one or two of them (a reference to Mars Bars in the text was annotated: Ugh, horrid, rubbish, poison!—the previous owner hadn’t had much of a sweet tooth either), although I couldn’t help but think something along the lines of Didn’t he (somehow I was sure it was a man) have anything better to do? Couldn’t have had much of a life.

  I remembered that all too well later.

  Anyway, I finished the story, which was quite a long piece, and then checked the time to find it was about time for the aforementioned booze-up to begin. I closed the book with a snap, and went downstairs to join the others. Between that, the wedding, and reception the next day, and the subsequent second booze-up, I had neither the time nor inclination—nor, on both mornings after, I suspected, the ability—to read so much as my own name.

  III. Venom

  I’ve never learned to drive, for various reasons—maybe there’s a gene and I just don’t have it—and so I’d come up by coach. I preferred train travel, for all you hear about the state of British railways, but, as previously mentioned, I wasn’t exactly rolling in cash at this point. Still, coach journeys have their good points, especially if you can get a window seat. And it’s much nicer to be driven than to drive, I find. Though admittedly my experience of the latter is a bit limited.

  I watched the Lake District countryside pass me by, and soon enough we were on the motorway and heading back into the industrial North. I dug around in my overnight bag, found Old Bones, and got stuck into the third story.

  My pen-friend (as I’d begun to think of him) was getting into his stride now; there were jottings on every page, which began to amuse me less, although one or two still raised a smile. I began wondering about him; who he was, what he did. Definitely a man, I decided, after finding a sentence about one of the characters having a mistress half his age with Lucky bastard scribbled beside it. There was no exclamation mark, which for some reason niggled at me; most men would write that as a joke, but in this case I had the feeling he meant every word.

  More annoying was the note, squashed into the margin at the side of the text during a tense moment: You cannot build tension in a first person narrative; we know that he survives otherwise he wouldn’t be able to tell us the story. Okay, so there’s an element of truth in that, but then again, in a ghost story, maybe that rule isn’t so hard and fast. Even so, it was just plain unnecessary; pedantic, triumphantly picky. My image of the ‘pen-friend’ sharpened; I thought of a crabby old teacher or lecturer, perhaps a failed writer himself, unable to read a book for the pleasure of it, without treating it like somebody’s homework, going after every grammatical error. Here and there, he’d underlined other bits of text and scrawled his corrections beside them, ignoring the fact that, apart from anything else, the stories were written in dialect.

  The humour went clean out of the situation in the fourth story. The narrator, it emerged, was a jazz fan, and liked nothing better than to come home, stick an Ella Fitzgerald record on the turntable, and put his feet up with a snifter of brandy. The reference to Ella was underlined twice, and connected by a sharp arrowed line to the words, at the top of the page, in that crabbed, spidery hand: ugh horrid nigger squawks!

  Some people think I’m a bit humourless and over-PC. Maybe I am, but I have no sense of humour about remarks like that. I stared at the words fo
r a few seconds and tried to keep reading, but even when I’d turned the page, that venomous little phrase kept coming back to me. I marked my place halfway through the fourth story and admired the view from the window—such as it was—the rest of the way home.

  On my return, I searched round the house until I found an eraser in one of the drawers, and set about scrubbing out the offending remark. After a moment’s hesitation, I left it like that and went on with the rest of the fourth story.

  But there were more comments to come. Describing a character’s cheating on his wife, the pen-friend had appended GOOD FOR HIM! in double-underlined block capitals, stabbing the pencil down so hard on the exclamation mark’s point he’d punctured the paper. Later on, when it emerged the wife had returned the favour, the capitals were jagged with fury, snarling FILTHY DIRTY SLAG. The S in SLAG resembled a picture of fork lightning, like one of the runes on an SS uniform, and had left a quarter-inch rip in the page. Later on, when the two characters were reconciled, it got worse; IDIOT! he’d written, and RADDLED BITCH—I HOPE SHE GIVES HIM AIDS! The last word had been underlined three times. There were several other references to disease, stuck like leeches to every physical description of the woman that hinted at her age.

  I rubbed the first couple of bits out, but after a while I was barely reading the story at all, just turning the pages in a sort of morbid fascination to see what he’d written next. It was almost as if he was trying to rewrite the entire book, imbue it with a fresh perspective—his own—which I had no desire to share.

  In the end, I had to give up, shutting Old Bones and slamming it angrily into a gap on the bookcase in my spare room. I was genuinely angry; the book felt, for want of a better word, defiled. I would have given a lot to get my hands on the ‘pen-friend’ and ask him what right he thought he had to inflict his prejudices on me.

  Stupid, I know, really. There was surely no way of tracking him down now. Besides, the library would have fined or otherwise penalised him for defacing it, unless of course he’d bought the book once it was withdrawn. I found that more likely; I couldn’t imagine a private owner putting up with those scrawled notes. At the time, it had been his book; presumably he’d thought it his to do with as he saw fit. The notes were in pencil. I could erase them easily enough, had already done so.

  All the same, it put me off reading the rest of the collection for some time. Later that evening, after a couple of pints down the Bull’s Head, with friends, I felt a little mellower, even sorry for the old guy, whoever he’d been. I was pretty sure he was old, or had been—maybe he was even dead, now I thought of it. He’d obviously been bitter and twisted about something that had happened to him. I wondered what. In the end, I shrugged it off. It was all second-guessing by now, and while it didn’t excuse his prejudices, the most lasting feeling his jottings left me with were bitterness, failure, disappointment. Someone who’d set off with a whole raft of hopes and watched them fall loose and drift away down the river before his helpless eyes, leaving him, in the end, alone with nothing.

  I actually found that more frightening than anything in the Raymond Wesley book; the prospect of looking back in thirty or forty years’ time at all my dreams and aspirations and knowing that not one of them had ever come to fruition. No great loves, no great successes, just mediocrity and compromises. I’ve never read the book Papillon, funnily enough—it was on the kind of list every bookworm has, of books they must get round to reading someday (and usually never do) but I did see the Steve McQueen film. And I always remember the dream sequence where he stands before a faceless judge and jury who tell him that the crime he stands accused of is not theft or murder, but a wasted life. To which he can only shrug and plead guilty, and nod resignedly when they remind him—for he has always known—that the sentence for that is death.

  I didn’t sleep well that night; perhaps all that brooding on my fear of failure had seeped into my subconscious. I couldn’t really remember the dream that had disturbed me, except for a voice humming a tune I recognised: ‘Paint it Black’ by the Rolling Stones. It must have been what had woken me up, that humming, my brain somehow weaving it into the fabric of the already fading dream’s last moments. My bedroom window was open—it was a hot night—but as I scrambled out of bed and staggered to it, glaring out and determined to give whichever drunken prat was responsible a tongue-lashing, the humming stopped. When I pulled back the curtains, the street outside was empty and the night was hushed as death.

  IV. Happy Snaps

  The next day, a Sunday, it rained. I only had one other book in the house that I hadn’t previously read, so by the early afternoon had exhausted all my reading supplies other than Old Bones. So, reluctantly, I got it out again to brave the pen-friend’s addenda, eraser in hand.

  The notes got worse and worse as I went on, a near hysterical tirade of misogyny and racism. Not to mention homophobia—if there’d been fireworks on the page before, it morphed into a full scale artillery bombardment when a slightly stereotypical gay hairdresser cropped up in the sixth story. And, of course, anything else the scribbler could use as an excuse to bang on about, he took advantage of, filling every available space with his ‘observations’. Whoever the pen-friend had been, he’d hated, as far as I could tell, just about everything and everyone. In the end, I hardly read a word of the stories, just went through the book cleaning up after my unwanted correspondent. The eraser set to work, scrubbing at the scrawls, leaving only vague grey smudges and grains of rubber.

  By the time I was done, I’d lost all appetite for reading and felt badly in need of a shower. I shoved the book back into the case and went downstairs.

  About an hour later, my doorbell rang. I opened the door to a willowy girl about my age. She was holding a small wallet under one arm, and an old newspaper over her head to keep the rain off.

  ‘John?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Hi. Alison Davis. I’m a friend of Joanna’s.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Come in.’

  She grinned. ‘Thought you’d never ask.’

  I stood aside to let her through. In the kitchen I brewed some coffee, watching from the corner of my eye as she sat down and ran her fingers through her black hair to smooth it out.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ I asked her, passing a chipped mug.

  ‘Thanks. Oh, Jo asked me to come round. I live near here.’

  I vaguely remembered seeing her; a face glimpsed in the crowds at the wedding. Now I thought of it, I’d wanted very badly to go over and talk to her, but my skills with women are only marginally better than my skills with cars. Not quite as bad, thankfully—a twenty-seven-year-old virgin in Manchester is a sorry sight—but bad enough. For several hours I’d kept promising myself I’d go over to her after just one more drink; by which time I’d lost the ability to walk. The ability to talk coherently had likewise deserted me, though, so it had probably been for the best. I made up my mind to ask her for a drink or meal at some stage before she went.

  ‘We got some photos back from the wedding; Jo thought you might want to see them.’

  ‘Oh. Thanks.’

  She passed me the wallet and I flicked through it. I made the appropriate noises over the pictures of the happy couple, and the amusing ones of various relatives. The egomaniac in me kept wondering when I’d be cropping up. At length, I did; it was a picture from the wedding reception’s early stages, on the lawn outside the hotel, just before the meal. I had to smile at the picture of me squeezed into an expensive suit, trying to look suitably serious as I shook hands with the best man. Then I frowned and pointed. ‘What’s that?’

  Alison leant forward. She smelt of sandalwood. I found the fragrance intoxicating. ‘Don’t know. They couldn’t do anything about it. Flaw in the emulsion, I think they said.’

  There was a mark on the film all right, a sort of brownish discoloration, a shadow. In the picture, it was behind me. It didn’t cover any part of me, though it stained the face of a woman standing in
the background. It bore a more than faint resemblance to a head and shoulders, and I said as much to Alison.

  ‘Yeah, I thought that as well.’ She grinned. She had strong, bright teeth. Her eyes were green in colour and very long-lashed; an age seemed to pass as I stared into them, before coughing and glancing back down at the odd mark. I glanced up to see her grinning still, rather mischievously now. ‘Maybe you’ve got a ghost following you.’

  I laughed. Alison didn’t. She picked some of the other photos out of the sheaf and spread them out in front of me like a Tarot deck.

  There were about half a dozen of them, all of me. At the reception, waving to the camera, on the dance floor, disco lights behind me and—on the morning after—hunched over breakfast with a crippling hangover and outside saying some rather queasy goodbyes.

  In all of them, that shadow was there. Behind me or beside me. In one it was directly behind me, a head-shaped splodge above the crown of my own. In another, the mark tainted my flesh; it spread over my shoulder. For some reason, it looked very like a hand. I was smiling, but the smile looked slightly off. I thought I remembered the moment; I’d felt a touch of something—a shiver, a chill, a twinge of nausea. It had been the morning after, so the latter was quite feasible. But my eyes kept going to that mark on my shoulder.

  ‘Weird, isn’t it?’ Alison said. She had her neat chin propped on one slim hand. Her face was not far from mine. It would have been very easy to have kissed her. I didn’t, of course, but wanted to.

  ‘Weird,’ I agreed.

  She showed me the rest of the photographs and finished her coffee. ‘I’d better get off,’ she said finally. ‘Things to do. You know how it is.’