Time and Time Again

Chapter 3

The room was empty apart from the jagged pale mist sitting on the hazy outline of a bed with its back to the wall. Simon was looking at himself as he'd done years ago, frozen and vacant. Emotions welled and subsided, his heart thumping against his chest, in his head and stiff fingers. He watched it - him - reading a book. Ghostly music was playing; faintly, enough to recognise. After a few minutes, Simon started to form thoughts through the grip of what he assumed was a full-body anxiety attack. He regained control of his hands. He could curl the fingers into fists and straight again. He became aware of his breathing which had become shallow and measured.

The book his ghost was reading looked like a text book. Simon focussed his eyes to read the title, Poincaré's Maps. Simon brought the music into focus and recognised the song. It was a song he'd heard on the radio that morning in the bathroom. Simon had regained control over his mind sufficiently to focus on the manifestation on the bed; the face in particular. It was him, but twenty years old. As a child, the ghost he saw was a child, the same age as him. The misty form reading the book on the bed was now an adult, Simon's mirror.

'Everything alright?', the estate agent had been waiting patiently at the top of the stairs, awaiting Simon's approval or otherwise of the room she was trying to let.

'Fine,' Simon called back without shifting his stare from the ghostly doppelganger, 'I'll take it'.

The three weeks that followed turned Simon from a man who travelled to and from his place of work between watching television and spending time with family to one who still travelled to and from his place of work but dedicated the rest of his time to following the pale misty version of himself. He'd followed it to the local university, the local pub, library and leisure centre. It interacted with hazy apparitions of people he didn't recognise. He could sometimes hear its conversation when the ambient noise in the room was sufficiently low. Tuesday, 6th April, Simon sat in his rented room; the one he'd used as a bedroom as a child when his family owned the house, watching his ghost as it took a book from a misty desk, placed it down on the table top and opened it. Simon gazed down over his ghost's shoulder to read whatever he could make out. Though the writing on the hazy book was quite fuzzy, he could read what the ghost was writing by following the shapes the pen made as it scratched over the page.

'It's thirteen years later and I still miss him. It's like the time between never happened. It could be yesterday. He asked me if I wanted to go round after school. If I'd said yes, he'd be here. I'd be there. He'd be with me at university. The days and nights. He'd have loved this. I could have done something. Why didn't I see him that night? I only remember being here in my room. Why didn't I want to see him? I remember him chasing Tony in the playground the day before. Laughing. I was sitting on the ground in the hot sun, watching, like they wouldn't let me join in. Why didn't I join in? Alan was running and laughing...'

Simon was frozen with almost every emotion he felt capable of feeling. The misty figure had stopped writing, the pen dropped on the table. Only a moment passed until it picked up the pen once more and wrote once more.

'I'd give anything to be able to take those things for granted again. I guess I never pass on anything these days. Everything I'm offered, I do. I work and I learn and – I work harder than I think I ever would have if Alan was here. I've learned things, done things, written things – but I'd give it all for another time around and I'd stop it all happening. I'd have my friend and he'd see all that I've seen.'

The spectral figure closed the book and moved over to the hazy outline of its bed. Simon had placed his actual bed on the opposite side of the room to the one which was only there sometimes; only when his ghost was in the room. Though he felt nothing when he touched anything ethereal, he thought it best not to sleep in the exact place this misted form existed every night. The figure lay face down and remained motionless. Though Simon couldn't work out what his brain was telling him, he knew where he had to go and what he had to do. He grabbed his coat and made his way out into the spring air. The smells, the warmth from the sun on his face and the sounds of traffic triggered something positive in him. Not memories as such, just a sense brought on by the atmosphere of the day. Walking by the Churchyard with the cherry blossom in full bloom, the old school master's house set back from the road surrounded by a yellow-green stone wall and the old monument that stood in the centre of the green, all garnered positive sentiments as he made his way towards his old Primary School at the end of the main road.