Ghosts in the Morning

Chapter 1



I killed a man tonight. Not intentionally. Well...I’m fairly sure I didn’t mean to, but then I haven’t really been feeling quite right lately. Been a little bit out of sorts. But anyway I think it was an accident...yes, it’s true, it was an accident. One thing is for sure, though, he’s definitely dead. Brown bread, that’s what we used to say at the Garter Home when someone had died. We thought it sounded cool, I guess, as if death was something we should be cool and nonchalant about. We probably thought it made us sound tough.

Recently I have come to realise that I am invisible. It’s been like this for a while, I think, but it’s only recently that I’ve become fully aware of it. Invisibility, it’s a strange thing. The man at the petrol station who takes my credit card without raising his head and waits for me to enter my PIN doesn’t see me. The supermarket cashier who swipes my shopping with a series of monotonous beeps doesn’t see me. The shopkeepers, the cashiers at the bank, the people who push past me in the street, the retired grey people who smash their trollies through mine in the supermarket, the man who fills the heating oil tank, the man who reads the electric meter, my husband, my children; none of them see me. The man I killed tonight certainly didn’t see me. Because I am invisible.

Okay, okay, I don’t have an invisibility cloak, I know that I’m not truly invisible. I do still have my marbles, I’m not some crazy fruit loop, I’m not some delusional Harry Potter fan. Though I have read some of the books.

My name is Andrea Halston. I am forty-four years old, but I feel older. I am a...well...I’m not sure what the modern term for it is, but I am what used to be called a housewife. I don’t go to work, I haven’t had a job for quite some time. I had a part-time job for a few years, when Simon, my youngest child, was at secondary school – I was a book-keeper at a building firm, but the firm went bust. Not surprising really, the boss spent more time on holiday than at work, and not with his wife. When she divorced him, he drank too much and worked too little, so the building firm went belly-up. I saw him in town once, a few years later, he looked like a shell that had been hollowed out, like a walking skin.

I don’t need to work, we don’t need the money, Graham’s salary is more than enough. Graham, my husband, is five years older than me and he is having an affair with his secretary. Or Personal Assistant, as she likes to call herself. It’s a cliché, I know, for someone in his position – Graham is an audit partner – to be sleeping with his secretary, but I suppose she’s attracted to what she sees as his power. Or his Porsche. I very much doubt that she is attracted to him on a physical level; his ever-expanding pot belly makes him look a little like a bowling ball with legs, rather than cuddly, and he is balding in a bad way. She- the PA - is twenty-something, and I think she is quite pretty, although it is difficult to tell under all the makeup.

He doesn’t know that I know about the affair. I also know that it is hurting him more than it’s hurting me. I can see it on his wretched face every evening, when he drinks a bottle of wine, or more, in an attempt to drown out his pitiful guilt. He won’t tell me about the affair, of course. And he won’t leave me, or ask for a divorce. I’m sure he’s considered it, desired it probably, but even though he’s caught in some sort of mid-life crisis that only appears to afflict men, he’s not that daft. It would cost him too much, he knows that. He would be too scared that I would take him to the cleaners. I’m sure he’s worried that the affair with Nikki the secretary won’t last too, and deep down he’s probably terrified of ending up on his own in some crummy bedsit, cuddling a bottle of vodka. Rightly so...the affair will fizzle out when she gets bored and he gets too needy, or when she meets a younger, more powerful man.

I was annoyed at first. In twenty-four years of marriage, I haven’t cheated on him once. Unless you count a drunken half-snog with a gorgeous surfer when I was on one of Anita’s hen do. And I don’t. Twenty-four years. The old joke says you get less for murder, which seems pretty ironic considering I killed a man tonight. In twenty four years I have given birth and reared three children, I have cleaned the house, made the lunches, cooked the dinners, washed the clothes, ironed the shirts and generally sacrificed most of my life, and then Graham goes and shags his secretary. So it’s only natural for me to be annoyed.

I wasn’t angry for long though. I understand why he’s doing it. He wants to feel young again, to feel that youthful exuberation that gets harder to come by as life enters the final straight. He is suffering the effects of that pendulum of mortality that swings inexorably over a middle-aged man’s head, driving them to irrational impulses. Maybe it’s about the sex too. They say it’s different for men, it’s more of a need. And, for sure, I know I’m not that much to look at these days. My once cheeky little muffin-tops have morphed into full-blown fat love handles. The baby pounds that sat too long on my hips and thighs have got too comfortable. I gave up trying to shift them a few years ago.

I wasn’t always like this. In days gone by I could turn a few heads, used to get the odd wolf whistle too. Bit of a looker in my late twenties, some would say. I think Graham used to think of me as a trophy wife, a pretty bit of eye candy to hold onto his arm at the corporate functions he had to attend. Not now, though, no. Now, it’s all Graham can do to stand next to me at the rare functions we attend together. Most times now, Graham goes alone to the corporate functions. I guess it makes it easier if Nikki’s there, too. No chance of my female intuition picking up on the ‘thing’ between them.

I don’t think Graham enjoys making love to me, we don’t do it very often these days. When we do it’s automatic. Perfunctory. A few minutes of him wheezing away on top of me, whilst I lay back and decide whether to have fish for tea tomorrow, or fret about whether Simon is coping at university, and if I should ring him again on Friday, or would that make me an over-protective mother? I don’t really know why we bother at all, although I think we’re practically at that stage. To be honest, I’ve never really liked sex that much. It was okay with Graham when we were first going out – Graham used to believe he was ‘good in the sack’, he actually said that to me once -though I never really believed in all of that. I mean, what would make someone good in the sack, surely not the speed that they thrust themselves into you, like the women in porn films would have you believe? None of it really made sense to me, most of the expectations surrounding sex were completely unrealistic. T o me, it was all about degrees of tolerance.

Most nights, though, I’m asleep when Graham comes to bed. It’s easier for both of us that way. It means that Graham doesn’t have to feel obliged to talk to me, or wish me goodnight with an accompanying fake goodnight kiss, and also it means I can try and get to sleep before he starts snoring.

I sip my wine and think about the man I killed, and I am invisible. The television is on, but the sound is on mute. I like the silence. Graham is out, it’s his weekly badminton club night. I run my top lip along the glass and exhale gently, making the glass sing. I lick my lips, enjoying the sharp, citrussy tang of the Chardonnay. It’s a good one, a very expensive wine, in more ways than one. After all, it cost a man his life.

I stare down at my hands. They’re admirably still. No trembling, no aftershock. I am surprised, I would have expected more fear...panic, perhaps. I mean, after all, it’s not every day you take the life of another. But something has changed in me tonight. I would have expected that I would feel nervous, scared, guilty even. Instead, I feel excited. Alive. Powerful even. I don’t recall feeling like this before. I’ve always felt small, insignificant, so this surge, this quickening that the man’s death has triggered is unfamiliar, alien. This must be the rush a drug user feels, and I don’t want it to stop.

I hadn’t meant to kill him, no way, it wasn’t like it was planned. I had only gone out for a pint of milk. For my coffee in the morning. Well, that and a bottle of wine. Okay, primarily a bottle of wine. I had driven further than I needed to, there was a shop closer, but the wine selection at that shop was limited to cheap and nasty over-sugared Australian fizz, so I had carried on driving, enjoying the soporific numbness of driving on dark, quiet roads. I did that sometimes.

I know I should feel some sympathy at least. I know I should, but I don’t. I didn’t know the man, I had no empathetic connection to him, was it unnatural to feel nothing? Yes, sure, I killed him, but if he had died tonight at the hands of another, or indeed of natural causes, how would I have known about it then? If that had been the case, I would have known nothing, felt nothing. As I do now. Well...not necessarily nothing. That sparkling frisson of elation is still with me.

I think that it is extremely unlikely that I will be caught. The damage to my car appears to be minimal and I’m almost positive that nobody saw what happened. The road was very quiet.

And, after all, I am invisible.