The two ghosts, Ian and Curt, are sitting in the back seat of Gillian and Ali’s car. They are pretending to be strapped in, as if safety is a concern. Ali is driving. They are listening to R.E.M. on CD. Out of Time. Losing My Religion.
It has been a productive trip, for G&A at least. She had a number of errands in Aviemore. He had kept driving to Granton-on-Spey for a meeting with his lawyer. On the way back they had stopped off for a meal at the Duke of Gordon before stocking up on some frozen items at the Coop, to add to her earlier grocery shop. They drive up to the croft just after night falls. The ghosts can tell from the heat emanating from the tyre tracks that somebody has been here recently. That someone being Bronwyn Gosling. She must have left only a few minutes ago. Gillian and Ali are oblivious.
G&A go inside, unloading the car in a couple of trips crunching over the gravel. Then they close the front door, draw the curtains, and peace descends. The two ghosts sit in the car, taking in some of the details. It is not a new car, but it is comfortable. Ian dismisses the vanity mirror on the passenger side, while secretly desperate to have a look. He wants to keep busy. He is aware of “an atmosphere”. Curt has been unusually quiet. Ian thinks that he knows why.
Inside, she is in the utility room, shifting things around in the chest freezer to make space. “What does GLT mean?”, she calls through to the lounge, where he is stretched out watching trick pool shots on Instagram.
“No idea”, he shouts back.
“It’s your handwriting. Looks like a pasta sauce or something. Dated 14 February 2024”.
“Sorry. Must have been in a rush”. Another three letter acronym that he had coined and then forgotten.
“We’ll try it tomorrow night. Maybe that’ll jog your memory”.
The following morning she hits the road early, heading to Inverness to do some staff training. She has had a recent promotion. Her prior experience has attracted the attention of the spreadsheets in America. Ian and Curt are with her. They have not left the car all night. Ian is pretending to be clipped in at the back and Curt is sitting with her in the front, still brooding. At Newtonmore, just past the shinty pitch and the grill, at the Ralia turn, she turns left onto the new A9. Without a sound Ian slips out of the car. He is not allowed on the new A9. It was not built until decades after he was alive. Curt is quite relieved, glad to have her to himself. He is going to try some “techniques” and influence her thoughts. He starts humming. He cannot understand why she has not as much as looked at the materials that Bronwyn dropped off recently. The “BCG” box. His box really, if memory serves him correctly. There must be something of interest in there. Instead, Gillian has been chasing around sourcing new chapters for a fictional Bill Drummond. Why can she not recognise a bird in the hand.
Ghosts do not use the types of networks that we rely on. They are more tuned into bosons, leptons, quarks and muons. This has some advantages. Tapping into the wider cosmos he becomes aware of a strong and rather unexpected signal. Somewhere in the vicinity of the East Anglian fens, Grayling Muir is making a rare visit. Curt whips off to check out the small number of locations they shared in life. The community hall, Bronwyn’s house, Curt’s cottage, the birdwatching hide and surrounding environs.
Grayling is hovering around Bronwyn’s garden just outside King’s Lynn, leaning on a bird table. Just as in life he continues to look suave and has a full head of hair. Rather like an American Peter Egan, Curt thinks. He hasn’t seen Grayling for decades. His previous jet-setting ways, following the exciting life of an academic, mean that he has a much wider territory to explore, if you like airports and conference venues, and the exotic holiday destinations that follow to offset the time in the library. As usual, Curt is left feeling very parochial in his presence. He accepts Grayling’s warm welcome with a degree of steeliness.
“Still the same old Curt then”, laughs the professor.
Curt attempts a smile and then gets down to business.
“Funny you should turn up”, he gabbles. “I was just thinking about my American trip”. He shivers at the memory. He hasn’t been inclined to return. Until now.
November 1994. Curt is sitting on a plane, fretting about the future. He is having a rather late midlife crisis. Questioning his faith has been a career long issue. Norah has given him a book for the trip, and he is not sure that it is helping. The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?* by Leon Lederman (1993). He is finding it difficult to concentrate, after too much brandy on the flight and the announcements about the descent to Dulles Airport, Washington DC. He is back in the 1960s and Peter Higgs has proposed a boson, which is a wave in a field which gives mass to all elementary particles. It is just a theory. There is not definitive proof. But it has to exist, to explain the way that atoms and the universe behave, or everything will topple over. It must be there, but it cannot be seen or measured. His thoughts loop around, trying to replace the God particle in the theory with God himself. Something apparently so important and fundamental and powerful, but invisible and unquantifiable and unknowable. He looks down over the ocean, imaging the waves that you cannot see from this altitude. And the forces that must be keeping this aircraft up in the air. He wants to be down on solid ground. He cannot believe any of it.
December 1994. He is standing in a heavy tweed jacket and tie, making his way across a huge car park to a hospital block on the Parkland Memorial Hospital campus, Dallas. He is a few weeks into his “exchange”. Grayling has pulled some strings to arrange a hospital chaplaincy attachment for his English friend.
Curt feels as far removed from his normal life as it is possible to be. He is used to flat terrain. He is from East Anglia after all. But the skies here, and the sunsets, viewed from the considerable elevation of his dormitory room balcony, across oceans of cars, highways, skyscrapers and strips of shops, are overwhelming. His wife, family and friends, feel a million miles away. An expensive call required to even just hear their voice.
He supposes that this is part of the plan. Ministers are hard to fire. He has been shunted around for months by church bureaucracy back home. From a steady congregation, to a short spell in a hospital job in the closest District General, and now this. His usual job, back in the parish, awaits on his return, but for now it is all about time away from the ordinary, learning new tricks at his rapidly advancing age. He imagines his congregation back home anticipating his reinvention, imagining a bold, upright, confident Curt striding up to the altar, booming out his welcomes, ad libbing succinct passages, introducing new rousing hymns learnt from the Dallas plains. He wishes he were back in the vicarage, with Norah, rather than his whitewashed room in the Texas Woman’s University Dormitory. Either that, or they are trying to break him. Hasten his retirement. He wonders what his exchange partner is doing in King’s Lynn. He will be getting to know the congregation, filling his shoes for a few weeks, sleeping in his spare room, enjoying a boiled egg and soldiers with Norah. They themselves may never meet, though their paths may have crossed in jet streams.
He climbs into the elevator and presses the button for the chaplaincy offices. He pats his pocket to check that he has a book with him. Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947 in French, 1948 in English). Something absurdist and metaphysical, inspired by a cholera outbreak. If he has some time during the day he will be able to dip into it. He hopes it will help him understand disease and our response to death. He finds the patients he meets on the wards too far removed, behind bed rails, drip machines, charts and monitors.
He drops his carrier bag beside his desk and sidles across to speak to Chris, a student chaplain who seems to know everything. Curt is piggybacking onto his email address and is about to send his first message to his son Ali. Chris is typing for him, because they only have a few minutes before the team’s morning huddle. R.E.M. is playing on the local radio station – The Edge, KDGE – same song.
| Monday 28 November 1994 Dear Alistair, Eventually I have managed to work out how to use E-mail. It was a long pain-staking process wasn’t it! Chris and I managed to get to Mexico and back in one piece, walking through what we have since been told is one of the dodgier parts of Juarez – certainly we were accosted by many cab drivers offering us girls and other such pleasures. We escaped and stayed at Hotel Cockroach and then travelled up to New Mexico in a huge automatic Buick. 70mph felt like 20. It was incredible. We spent a couple of hours in the huge caves at Carlsbad, and returned just in time to catch out flight (after I had managed to lock the keys in the car with the engine, 200 miles away from the airport). How are things in Edinburgh? Dallas is a weird sprawling metropolis which has shops in the most inaccessible places. I went to visit a record shop on the outskirts of town yesterday and managed to get lost, walk for about 4 miles to discover that I would have another 8 miles round trip if I was actually to reach the shop, and had to head back. By the time I caught a bus back (a whole hour wait) it was half past nine. I haven’t bought anything other than food for the last 3 weeks. I’m looking forward to your tape of British music – it’ll be a refreshing change. Send my regards to everyone back home and tell your Mum I was only joking. Yours sincerely, Your Dad |
They watch the message sending, and Curt shouts in disbelief when Chris explains that it has gone and will be in Ali’s inbox already, available to read when he next logs in. The team is gathering around the table in the corner and asks what they have been up to. Curt starts to explain but is quickly interrupted. They need to start the day’s work. But he is not worried. He does not hear the team update. He is imagining himself in the New College library, Edinburgh – a space he knows very well. He wonders where their computer is housed. He wants to know if his son has replied to his message.
The Two Ghosts
#GANTOB2024 Pamphlet 32
To be continued…
* Which takes us part of the way to answering question 11
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