Hauntings

 

There is a babble of sound in the Year 5 area. Some children are sitting in groups with their classroom assistants. And I am sat at another table, in the far corner, waiting for a child.

His teacher has told me that she’s forgotten that I would be there. She wants him to finish watching a DVD of Hercules. He’s watching the cartoon. Can I wait?

So here I am, sitting, waiting.

It is impossible to hear what is being said around me within the babble of sound from the chattering children. It’s a comforting sound, like gentle waves breaking against a ship’s prow.

But there is something new.

A word.

A phrase.

And then like turning a radio dial through white noise to a faint and distant signal, eventually I do catch something.

Indistinct.

An echo.

It is a barely audible sound, like the wind blowing through sea spray.

But then I catch one word, and then another, as the dull chanting acts like a charm and quells the chatter of nearby groups.

I hear a phrase.

The larger group just around the corner with their teacher are reciting a poem. She is reading it slowly. She has nearly finished. She has a strange voice. It is low and heavy: gravelly, with elements like grating glass. She reads it flatly, her class reciting it along with her like a heavily drugged congregation saying a reluctant prayer.

A curséd poem.

It was one that I once liked. One that I too, as a child, also learnt by heart. I remember reciting it to my brother. Entertaining him with it. Putting it to song. Using different voices. Bringing it alive. Making him laugh.

He was married just a few weeks ago.

We, his sister and nephew, were not invited, though we would have loved to have been there.

Instead he sent us a web cam link.

If we typed in the code, then we too could watch, like looking at a distant isle through a telescope.

And it was there at this wedding that the poem, “The Owl and the Pussycat” was read out.

The reader of the poem, his bride’s grownup daughter, unable not to giggle as she’d read the lines, “Oh lovely Pussy, Oh Pussy my love.”

All innocence lost.

This was the poem my brother and his bride had chosen to speak of their love to each other on their wedding day, before their three invited guests in a northern registry office.

We watched the archived recording on my computer, too sad and unhappy to watch the event live; and then too upset to smile when afterwards we stared into a void.

The babble of sound returns, in a rush of air, to fill the vacuum.

I can hear nothing more of the poem.

And thankfully, it is after I’ve wiped the tears from my eyes, that the boy finally does turn up for his hour-long lesson.

He’s only fifty-six minutes late.

Too late to do anything.

It means I have lost an hour’s pay.

I put the readied materials away, as he skips away for his lunch.

Oblivious.