A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String Read online

  Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

  I look, but there’s nothing out there. Just a great sweeping blue-black sky with no stars. All around me, houses are beginning to light up. The Bradshaws’ children, five and seven, have been up for hours. I’ve seen the movement at their bedroom window, their smudgy faces peering out at the dancing penguins on my roof.

  Those bloody penguins. Singing ‘Winter Wonderland’ night and day. How can I stand it? Mr Bradshaw was right, they were a mistake – and in a swift movement I get up, though I still have a good two hours before dawn, and switch off the Wall of Lights.

  The sudden darkness is quite a shock; usually, with the curtains open, there’s enough light from outside to illuminate my entire living room. Now there’s nothing but the glow from the small artificial tree by the TV, and the fairy lights on the mantelpiece. Just out of curiosity, I switch those off too. The darkness is soothing. I imagine just not doing Christmas this year: no pudding; no pies, no Queen’s Speech, Wonderful Life, creamed potatoes and Bisto gravy. No turkey sandwiches and video-ed Morecambe and Wise; no presents; no tinsel; just peace and goodwill.

  For a moment the thought holds me, magical. To give in; to be free; to read – a thriller, perhaps, or a historical romance – over a simple lunch of cheese and crackers. Perhaps I could even call on Phyllis. She doesn’t live far – just a bus ride away, down the Meadowbank Road – and for a second I see myself actually doing it, buying the ticket, walking down the gravel drive, knocking on the door (perhaps there will be a garland of holly pinned to the knocker), saying, ‘Good morning, Phyllis’ (though perhaps not ‘Merry Christmas’), seeing her smile, smelling her scent of rose and laundry. Just that. No lights, no miracles. No angel to point the way. No Bedford Falls.

  You could do it, you know. It’s easily done. The voice sounds a little like that of Alastair Sim in the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol. A clipped, authoritative voice, not easily dismissed. You could just stop. Today. This minute. Now.

  Could I? The thought brings me indescribable relief. Relief, and with it, a terrible, inarticulate fear. Stop? Just stop? But what would I do?

  Once more, I see myself walking down the gravel drive to Phyl’s house. I imagine the sound the gravel makes, that frosty crunch. There will be a pot of lavender by the door, and a row of winter pansies lining the path. She has a smile of exceptional sweetness, especially when taken by surprise, and a habit of tucking her unruly hair behind her ears. Perhaps there will be a pot of tea on the hob, and a box of biscuits by her chair. She enjoys looking at travel brochures; perhaps this time I will join her, and we can spend Christmas in Portugal, or Italy, or Spain. It’s really much too cold for us in England at this time of year. We could do with a change.

  I can almost see it; almost hear it now, like music in my mind. A new life; a new hope; a place beyond Bedford Falls and its eternal, ersatz snow. For a second, delirious, I am out of my chair; my hand on the door; my coat and hat left hanging on the hook, as if the moment of turning to pick them up might be the final, fatal moment in which Bedford Falls drags me back—

  And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, the doorbell rings.

  Today? At six? Unheard of. It’s not the postman (no post on Christmas Day). And it’s surely not the Bradshaws complaining about the lights. Who then? A visitor? A joker? In haste, I yank the door open. An icy breeze drifts into the room, scented like Christmas – cloves, apple, pine and brandy – but there’s no one at the door. The gate is closed; the street deserted. And yet the bell rang.

  Every time you hear a bell ring—

  I know that voice. It’s the voice of Henry Travers in Wonderful Life: kind, warm and impossible to resist. And yet it sounds like my voice too; so close that an observer might struggle to tell us apart. How can I think my work is done? How can I even consider abandoning my post on this, of all days? There are presents to be wrapped, the voice protests. Sprouts to be cleaned, carols to be sung, potatoes to be roasted, stuffing to be rolled into walnut-sized balls and laid in a baking tray with sausages and bacon strips; giblets to be removed from the defrosted turkey; the pudding to be placed in a ceramic basin and steamed. If these duties are not performed, what terrible floodgates might then be opened? What stars might go out, what gospels founder, what salvation be squandered?

  I see now that there can be no leaving. I am a broken clock, frozen forever at an impossible hour. Let others move on, if they must, if they can. For myself, I have duties to carry out. Sacrifices to make. Stockings to fill. Warnings to deliver. Lives to touch. Like it or not, I am the Ghost of Christmas Present, and I have a job to do.

  Very slowly I turn away from the door. A flick of the switch, and the Wall of Lights shines forth again. On the mantelpiece, fairy lights twinkle. That scent of pine, strangely nostalgic, that must have wafted in through a crack in the door. And now, looking up, from a violet sky slowly brightening towards dawn, I think I can just see the first small flakes of snow.

  Would You Like to Reconnect?

  To me, the internet seems the natural place for a certain kind of ghost story. The late-night glow of the laptop screen; voices from another world. Writing Blueeyedboy – which, arguably, is in itself a kind of ghost story – I found myself becoming increasingly fascinated by our growing dependence on the virtual world; the relationships we build there; the communities we create; the connections we make with people we may never meet in real life. This world can be a feast of friends, or the loneliest place on the planet. It’s all a matter of perspective.

  NO ONE REALLY dies online. It’s a truth I’m only just starting to learn. What seems wholly ephemeral is stored away forever here, hidden perhaps, but recoverable for those who really want to find these little slices of the past, these flashes from the archives of oblivion.

  I first joined Twitter two years ago as a means of keeping in touch with my son. That was Charlie; nineteen years old; away at university. We’d always been close, and I’d always known his absence would leave a hole, but not the size or depth of it; the hours spent waiting for him to call, that perpetual sense of anxiety. Not that there was anything to fear; but to be without him, alone in this house, was worse than I’d expected.

  It’s a big house; perhaps too big for just a mother and her son. Four acres of garden; a paddock; a wood; a river running through it. But Charlie managed to fill it somehow; to make it come alive, to explode, to buzz with restless energy. Now it was almost unbearable. Not empty, no; but peopled with ghosts: Charlie, at five, in his treehouse; with a jar of tadpoles; Charlie, playing his guitar; or staging performances of We Will Rock You using an old wooden puppet theatre and a CD copy of Queen’s Greatest Hits. I hadn’t realized until then how much space a boy could occupy, or how much silence his absence would bring; a silence that presses on the house like a sudden increase in gravity.

  But then my son introduced me to the world of social media: Facebook, YouTube, and most importantly, Twitter, which I had at first dismissed as the most trivial of all, but which, I now realized, was to become a lifeline. To have my son at my fingertips; to know what was happening in his world; to connect whenever I wanted – these things were far from trivial, and in spite of my technophobia, I embraced it for his sake.

  My online name was @MTnestgirl, a play on his love of musical theatre as well as my maternal role. Charlie’s name was @Llamadude, a name I found ridiculous, but somehow oddly like him.

  ‘I’ll always stay in touch,’ he said. ‘Wherever I am, I promise I will.’

  And he did: from university; from internet cafés around the world; from his phone; his BlackBerry; from concerts and campsites and festivals. It isn’t always easy to find a good wireless connection, but Charlie kept his promise, and always tweeted every day. A moment is all it takes; a hundred and forty characters, or the time that it takes to click on a link or send a picture from your phone—

  And suddenly, I was not alone; I was there, with Charlie and his friends. I went to their lectures, watche
d their films, listened to their music. Charlie used Twitter to connect with a wide variety of people: some friends of his in real life; some stage performers he’d never met; actors; singers; writers; technicians. These virtual friends became mine as well. I visited their websites and blogs; watched clips of their concerts; shared in their lives. Through a glass, darkly, I watched my son and all his interactions. I couldn’t be with him in the flesh, but I was in everything he did; a loving presence; a watchful eye; a ghost in the machine.

  News breaks fastest on Twitter. Hearts can be broken as quickly. A winter’s morning, an icy road, an oncoming truck, and my son on his bike, the bike I’d bought him a year ago, for his eighteenth birthday—

  A hundred and forty characters is more than enough to end the world. First came the scatter of messages all across my timeline and his – OMG, it is true about @Llamadude? What’s the news? Does anyone know? Has anyone heard from @MTnestgirl?

  And then, almost instantaneously, repeated over and over: Oh, fuck.

  Death should be silent, I told myself. Death should be a black hole. But the news of Charlie’s death was propelled by Twitter’s morphic resonance, that mystic and mysterious force that holds flocks of birds together, shaping them into a widening gyre of screeching semi-consciousness—

  They say that birds are messengers between the waking world and the next. That morning they were out in force, those virtual harbingers of death, tweeting madly and helplessly, the sound of their wings like a wall of white noise.

  Before Charlie’s death I’d had only about a dozen followers. Now, total strangers were following me. Hundreds of them. What did they want? To offer sympathy, to gloat, to share in a real-life tragedy?

  I told myself I should go offline. My timeline was almost unbearable. The terrible news of Charlie’s death had taken only minutes to spread. Thousands of Twitter users reached out. Strangers sent their condolences; singers and actors my son had followed posted words of sympathy. It was more than I could bear, and yet I couldn’t turn away.

  I remember Charlie once telling me about Schrödinger’s Cat, a creature both alive and dead; poised between realities. On Twitter, Charlie was alive; I could still read his status and know that barely an hour ago he’d been excited about a performance of Les Misérables he’d been planning to see in London; that he’d had a bacon sandwich for breakfast, that he’d changed his current avatar to a picture I’d taken years ago – Charlie at twelve, by the seaside, standing triumphantly astride a monumental sandcastle, while the incoming tide hurled white-topped waves at the parapet and the seagulls swooped—

  Meanwhile, in that other world, I went through the motions of being alive. But everything now seemed to me like a series of sepia photographs. Making arrangements; the funeral; Magritte men and women, like black birds flocking around a hole in the ground. I flew back to Twitter with a sense of mingled anguish and relief – relief at leaving that dead world, anguish at having to watch Charlie’s status receding from 24 hours ago to a series of ever more distant dates.

  I considered deleting his account. But I would have needed his password for that. It was equally true of all his accounts; his Facebook page was still open, his wall covered in messages. His YouTube channel was still alive with videos of Charlie; and when I logged into Twitter again, the first thing I saw was a recommendation, listing @Llamadude among the people I might like to follow.

  Even worse were the e-mails. Automatically generated, they arrived in my inbox at intervals: An account you have been following (@Llamadude) has not posted in 14 days. Would you like to reconnect?

  At first, I deleted the e-mails. I tried to disable the messages. But Charlie had set up my account, and I didn’t know how to alter it.

  Would you like to reconnect?

  I thought about closing my account. But Twitter, for me, had become much more than just a means of staying in touch. It was here I felt closest to Charlie. Here, among his virtual friends. People here still mentioned him; when they did, his name would appear on my timeline. Sometimes, whole conversations would be tagged with Charlie’s name; and it was easy to picture him there, listening, taking part. It was their way of keeping him alive, I suppose; of making sure we remembered him.

  ‘You ought to go out more,’ my mother said. ‘It isn’t healthy, moping around the way you do. And spending hours on that Twitter isn’t going to bring our Charlie back—’

  Well, of course it wasn’t, Ma. But—

  The Egyptians had their pyramids. The Victorians, their marble. And Charlie had Twitter; unhealthy, perhaps, but here was where my son lived on; cached, encrypted, stored away. I found myself including him in everything I tweeted. My comments filled up his timeline. The day of his last post receded. Some people talk to their loved ones standing by the graveside; I talked to Charlie from my room, with a cup of tea and a biscuit. I told him how I spent my days; I talked about the garden. I quoted lyrics from musicals. I re-tweeted posts I knew he would like. Steadily, my followers increased. I now had over two thousand.

  Only those automated e-mails reminded me of that other world: An account you have been following (@Llamadude) has not posted in 40 days. Would you like to reconnect?

  This time, I clicked the option: Yes.

  And then, one day, in my mailbox, there came a notification:

  @Llamadude has replied to your tweet.

  Of course, it was impossible. It must be a mistake, I thought. No one else used Charlie’s account. My son had been meticulous about online security; his passwords carefully chosen to defy any attempt at hacking. I logged on to my Twitter account and rapidly scrolled down my Mentions page.

  There! There it was. From @Llamadude. That little trigram of symbols – semi-colon, dash, closing bracket – one of the many devices known to the online community as emoticons. In this case, a wink, with a little smile, beside my dead son’s avatar.

  ;-)

  For a long time I just stared at it. That cluster of punctuation points. Of course, I knew it wasn’t my son; but part of me didn’t believe it. Tests on Twitter users have proved that we experience the same surge of endorphins when looking at a friend’s avatar as when we see them in the flesh – and this was Charlie, smiling at me, somehow, from beyond the grave—

  Someone must have hacked the account. Either that, or one of Charlie’s friends had somehow got hold of his password. Anxiously I awaited the inevitable wave of junk mail that would follow if his Twitter account had been hacked; or worse, the drunken ramblings of some flatmate assuming his identity. But nothing happened. Just that smile—

  ;-)

  No one else seemed to have noticed. Most of Charlie’s friends had moved on. My followers, too, were drifting away, their attention claimed by riots and wars. I told my mother, who urged me to seek some kind of bereavement therapy.

  But something had changed inside me. My mother would never have understood. The message from my son’s account had changed the texture of my grief. Something I’d believed was lost had slowly emerged from the darkness—

  It’s not always easy to stay in touch. The internet, for all its complexity, is still a work-in-progress. In the remotest parts of the world, you can still wait for minutes – even hours – to make that vital connection.

  The thought was almost too absurd for me to put it into words. And yet, as I sat at my desk at night staring at the computer screen, there was something compelling about the idea. Charlie had promised to stay in touch. He’d just taken longer to get online.

  An account you have been following (@Llamadude) has not posted in 90 days. Would you like to reconnect?

  I waited for confirmation. It came at last, in the form of a link, a complicated chain of code that had been abbreviated to fit Twitter’s 140-character requirement.

  @Llamadude has sent you a link.

  I clicked on the link. The screen went blank. For a moment I thought: it’s a virus. Then an hourglass icon appeared, and I realized that I was waiting for a picture to load. It took a
few minutes; then, reading the script at the top of the screen, I saw that the link had taken me to a page from GoogleEarth. Taken from the air, I could see a house; some trees; a little stream—

  That’s my house, I realized.

  My house, captured on a day when the trees were beginning to turn; my car parked outside; and there, on the ground at the edge of the lawn, something bright that caught the sun—

  It was Charlie’s bike, I knew. The one he’d been riding the day he died. And now I also knew exactly when this picture had been taken: September 2009, just before he’d started college. A helicopter had flown overhead – you could just see part of its shadow in the photograph as they’d taken the picture, and Charlie and I had been sitting there in the shade of the big trees. If you could look through the canopy, you’d even be able to see us there, tiny, hopeful figures, frozen in eternity.

  I found myself beginning to shake. Why had he sent me this picture? No message had come with the link, not even an emoticon. What was he trying to tell me? That nothing need be lost for good? That somehow, I could reach him?

  I stayed at my computer all night. I was afraid that if I logged off, or navigated away from the page, I would never find it again. I slept a little in my chair, ate a sandwich, checked my mail, opened a window to Twitter. I found that I could do this without losing my link to Charlie. I stayed at my desk all day, all night, waiting for instructions. Outside, the days and nights flashed by like windows on a passing train.

  My mother called a few days ago. I heard her knocking at the door. I didn’t answer; I don’t like to leave my computer unattended. Eventually, she went away. She still sometimes tries to phone me, but I never answer.