Scrapbook Page 10

  I decided not to move home. I keep the house exactly as it was the day that they went out to shop and never came back. My dead wife’s clothes are in the wardrobe. Amber’s dolls are still on her bed. I did this initially because I could not bear to so much as look at them, but now I do it because I cannot bear to move them. I wonder sometimes if they will stay that way forever - until I either give up or life gives up on me. I’m not sure which will come first.

  So I stay frozen in time, neither moving forward nor moving on. I cope. Working for yourself has its advantages of course. You can throw yourself into your job and because you are your own boss you have nobody to nag or ask awkward questions. It can isolate you of course, but that is what I want really and so it works for me.

  The neighbour’s tend to be a nuisance as I am sure you would suspect. Lorraine next door is always bringing around food, and although I am rather grateful for it I always return the plate by more or less leaving it on her doorstep, ringing the bell and running away. She is a nice woman and her intentions are good but I don’t want to talk to Lorraine or in fact any people at all. Full stop.

  I have clients, yes. I maintain my flow of work and my reputation as an architect is sufficient for me to be able to maintain a healthy business without having to tout myself out to gain employment. So i remain insular; alone, and that is just the way that I want it. No complications.

  My dead wife whispers in my ear of course.

  “You need to move on. You cannot live this way forever. Nobody can. You are making a shrine of Amber and I. By putting us up high on a plinth you make us more than we were; you forget our flaws, the things we did that annoyed you.”

  “You did not do anything to annoy me.” I say aloud as I indulge in this imaginary conversation and in my mind my wife screws up her face in annoyance just as she did when she was alive.

  “There!” she more or less squeals in anger, “You are doing it already!” and with a loud nonexistent tut she leaves again, just as silently as she arrived. Not that she was ever there in the first place of course. It still unsettles me for the rest of the evening but I am used to it by now. It doesn’t happen all of the time but when it does it can mar the rest of the day for me, or even sometimes brighten it if she says something nice or reminds me of better times...

  I have an office girl who comes in three days a week to keep up with all of the admin and process the invoices. Sheila is at university as a mature student and I think the hours suit. I pay her a little more than the usual rate I imagine, though I do this as I don’t want the hassle of having to replace her and also because she is very efficient. That I could do this myself is without doubt but really I just do not have the time to do so, or indeed the interest.

  Sarah, my now dead wife, used to do this job for me but after the funeral it quickly became obvious to me that I needed help with the side of the business that I just had no experience with. The accounts, for example. I had placed an advertisement in the local paper and Sheila had been the first to reply. I liked her from the off. She was efficient and did not require much supervision after the first few days. She was also painfully shy and so all conversation was work based and brief, which suited me just fine.

  I sat her down on her second day and told her about my wife and daughter. I thought it was only fair really, and I did not want her finding out by accident or from the neighbours.

  “So the man driving the bus died too?” she had asked and I nodded. “Awful.” she said, shaking her head.

  “It was nobody’s fault.” I had said. “The poor man driving the bus I am sure would be appalled to find his death resulted in two more. The bus was in perfect working order. Sarah and Amber were not in the road at all.”

  “How sad.” she had said, staring down for a moment at her tea cup. Sheila seemed to be able to know exactly when it was I was thirsty and would appear with a brew. Having handed it to me she would disappear just as quickly as when she had first arrived. “How very sad.” she repeated, and then she stood up. “By the way the invoice for the work on the town hall has been paid. I will take the cheque with me and pay it into the bank on the way home.”

  “Typical council paying by old fashioned cheques.” I had smiled and so Sheila got back to work. From that day to this she never mentioned my wife again. I would say that it was refreshing but I do not think that is the correct term. It would be far more accurate to suggest that I found that she never pried, never asked and never hassled me which was really the main reason that I liked her. Certainly the accounts had never been in better order.

  “I tried to keep up with the accounts. I really did.” said my dead wife. “But we did have Amber you know. It wasn’t quite as simple as the setup you have now.”

  “I know honey.” I had said and she had slipped from my mind the way that she always did, only to return at random points later on. It was rarely long but as time stretched out and the accident became further and further away the gaps lengthened. I felt guilty of course, as if I was losing her again somehow, but everyone who accosted me always insisted that time was a great healer and I just smiled and carried on. I was good at it after all.

  “Are you sad daddy?” Amber asked me one day.

  Did I mention that Amber, my dead daughter talked to me as well? Perhaps I should have said. Sarah did not have the monopoly on that by any means.

  “Not sad as such.” I smiled, remembering how I used to brush her long hair out of her eyes and the look of irritation - remarkable for a five-year-old that her face showed almost everything that she was thinking - that she gave me when I did so. “Not sad. just missing you really. Like my life is frozen in ice without you.”

  Her face had crinkled up as I had imagined telling her that as if I had confused her, so I tried to explain.

  “It feels like I cannot think of anything else. How things could have been different if the bus driver had not been at work, or you had not gone to the shops that day. I feel as if I cannot move forwards because I do not want to, because if I do I will lose you all over again.”

  “Frozen like a snowman?” Amber had smiled, and I had returned her grin and then she was gone again, and the point I was trying to make would be unresolved somehow; still between us.

  Sheila continued to be an absolute star. She organised me when I was having black days and helped me when I was having good days to be more organised. Her single most redeeming feature to me was that she continued on a daily basis to never mention my wife or daughter at all. This helped in all kinds of ways, although the internal dialogue I seemed to be having with both them continued unabated.

  Which was why I found it so strange when one day whilst handing me a cup of tea Sheila had sat down in my studio where I was finishing up my latest drawings and looked at me oddly.

  “You may want to consider closing down Sarah’s Facebook account.” she said, and smiled.

  My instant reaction was anger. Sheila never mentioned my wife. My next reaction was disbelief. I did not even know that my now dead wife had had a Facebook account.

  “I didn’t know she had one.” I said.

  “Well she did.” said Sheila. “Pictures of Amber mostly. Greetings from friends and so on.” she looked at me strangely then as if she had over-stepped the mark somewhat. “Nothing sinister.” she almost giggled as I swigged at my tea. I wasn’t quite sure what to say.

  “Surely there is nothing new on there. She is dead after all.” I said.

  “Well there will be.” said Sheila. “I was looking at it the other night. If friends post things, then it appears on her Facebook. It’s just that obviously she does not post anything herself.”

  “With her being dead and all.” I said, a little too harshly. Sheila winced.

  “Yes.” she said, “A bit like a runaway train with no driver and an unlimited amount of track.” I screwed my face up at Sheila’s odd choice of words and she smiled back at me.

  “I will think about it.” I said, and returned to work, though for the
rest of the day and until Sheila left I found it hard to concentrate, waiting for Sheila to leave so I could log onto Sarah’s computer and have a look.

  When she left I started up Sarah’s neglected old laptop and found Facebook in her bookmarks and when I opened it up it logged her on automatically.

  The next few hours are I am afraid missing. I poured over her comments on other people's events and pictures, saw her likes and the things she looked at, the simple trivial little things that she did not bother me with. I approached it logically, in chronological order until I came to the day of her death. August 14th 2014. The day before it was a few pictures of Amber I had never seen before and I stared at them for how long I am not sure. She looked so full of life in them, but as I caught up with the time of the accident the posts changed and after that it was all posts of candles and silence and conversations that were there to read but she had never seen and never would.

  “It’s all such bullshit really.” said Sarah. “It all seems so unimportant now.”

  “You never told me you used Facebook.” I laughed.

  “Ah it was a love / hate relationship at best.” she said. “Nothing important.”

  “It all seems so fresh to me because I haven’t seen it before.”

  “Just close it down.” she said. “It will just run and run until nobody knows who this person is in their friends list and slowly it will all dwindle and fade like a candle going out.”

  “I don’t want the candle to go out.” I said quietly.

  “You must let it.” she said simply and she was gone again.

  I could not bring myself to close the account but from that day to this I never looked at it again. There was no point really. She wasn’t there. Yet at the same time I could not snuff out that candle either, to use her euphemism.

  “I looked at Sarah’s account.” I said to Sheila the next day. She looked back blankly at me. “Facebook.” I said.

  “Ah. Well. “she looked vaguely guilty almost. “That must have been quite sad.”

  “A little.” I smiled. “But I could not bring myself to close it.” Sheila looked at me carefully before sitting down.

  “I can understand that.” she said. “It does make you think though. If you die your digital footprints are still there. If you did not know Sarah, you would think she was still alive.”

  “Oh I don’t know.” I said. “There are lots of condolences at the time of the accident.”

  “I suppose so.” she said, “Though if you missed those - say for example you looked back just a month then it would be easy to miss.”

  “Footprints in the sand.” I said, “All those things remain online and yet the person who wrote them is gone.”

  “I often wonder how a television or movie star’s family feel if the channel is showing a repeat or an old film and their loved one is there on the screen in front of them and yet they have passed.”

  “Never thought of it really.” I said, starting to think about it now. “It must be horrible.”

  “Was looking at Sarah’s Facebook horrible?” asked Sheila and I shook my head.

  “Well there you are then.” she said and rising returned back to her chores. After that it was back to being a normal day. Just how I like it.

  The Facebook idea sort of lodged in my mind though. I wondered how many people on that site are dead? How many people's blogs are read and the reader wonders why they have not posted anything recently, which could be explained by them not being with us anymore? It is a unique problem of the twenty first century I suppose. I found it disturbing and perhaps a little morbid but equally very odd. Very odd indeed.

  “Daddy does it make you sad that I am never any taller?” Amber said and I smiled. I knew that these conversations with my dead wife and with my equally dead daughter Amber were a complete fabrication. They were not ghosts or anything like that. It was I knew all in my head, but it comforted me. Or at least I think it did, for sometimes I imagined them asking me some very awkward questions that I wasn’t sure of the answers to. I think a psychologist would have the makings of a fine case study of me, but given what had happened it was hardly surprising now was it?

  So it was a bit of a surprise to me to find myself back on Sarah’s Facebook a few weeks later after Sheila had gone home and the day's work was done. Nothing was new of course. A few friends had posted this and that and by default it appeared on Sarah’s account, but nothing major. After a while I got bored and began surfing.

  I have never been a great one for the internet in general, though I use it for my work when I have to of course. In the end I found myself looking at my own website, more out of boredom really. I looked at my portfolio, my strap lines and so on. It was, and is, I have to say, a very good website. It should be - the company who designed it for me charged me a small fortune to create it. Still, it looked great. Idly I clicked on the Google maps location of my office at the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and then more out of lack of any ideas of what to do next than anything I plucked the little orange man off the Google maps legend and moved to street view, and there I was looking at my office as if I was standing on the street outside.

  I moved the mouse and the view switched, and I clicked ahead on the road and the view zoomed forward just as if I was moving along my road, heading out into the main road and down the hill to the main street. Everyone does it of course. Looks at their own house. Goes on virtual tours. I once started out on a street view mission to travel along the full length of route 66 in America, but after ten minutes I was bored and so gave up in probably the very first mile.

  This time however I moved further along the street, clicking forward and forward, and as I did so I noticed the date that the van from Google had last scanned this street. This was a new thing I thought. I had certainly never seen it before, but there it was at the top of the street view, the date that the footage had been captured by the Google van. As I did so my blood ran suddenly cold, for at the top of the screen I saw the date at almost exactly the same time I saw on the screen the bus looming up on the map ahead, frozen in time.

  August 14th 2014 it read. The same day my wife and daughter died, and as I clicked once more on the map to move it forward the bus was now gone, behind me. I spun the mouse around and yes, there it was, further back in the traffic, the number seventy-seven on the front of it like a scream of danger, calling to me. I spun the mouse around and then forward a little more, down into the high street, just before the scene of the accident, and as I did so I saw on the pavement who I knew I would see the moment I saw the date, saw the bus.

  Their faces were all blurred out of course as they were facing the camera but as I saw the two figures on the pavement I knew straight away who they were. The low slung bag on the woman’s shoulder. The small bobble hat on the child holding onto the woman’s hand, her pigtails tucked under the hat so that from behind she looked like a boy. Again, the little girl had her facial features blurred but I knew the clothes. I knew the poise. There could be no doubt about it. It was my wife and daughter. It was Sarah and Amber, and judging by where the bus that had killed them was placed on the street that I had just passed, then the Google maps van had taken this picture within a very brief time period before the accident. I looked at my wife and child on the Google Maps street map and I knew then that they had only minutes left to live, for already the bus driver was no doubt feeling unwell; a clammy cold feeling yet he was drenched in sweat and his chest was crippled with what he thought was indigestion. Within minutes - or less - he would be dead too.

  It was like they were frozen in time, their fate a minute or less away, and yet never changing, always expectant of the death that was yet to come but was so close I could almost do what I had not done when it had actually taken place. I could almost watch it happen.

  “It didn’t hurt daddy.” said Amber and I sobbed out loud.

  “It’s not the point, Amber.” I said. “It’s not the point at all.”

  I put the computer
down and went to get a drink. It was going to be a long night, for I doubted that I would sleep now.

  The next day found me tired and worse for wear with a vicious hangover. I had fallen asleep, bottle of Scotch on my knee at some point after three in the morning and when Sheila arrived at nine in the morning she took one look at me and visibly paled. So I showed her what I had found on the Google street map.

  “Oh God.” she said as she saw the date and I explained the significance of that day to her, for I was not sure if she knew or not. Then the bus. Then my wife and daughter.

  “You are sure it is them?” she asked.

  “Positive.”

  “Then you must write to Google. Get them taken off. They will need to re-take their pictures. I am sure that they will do it if you ask them to. They surely have a procedure for this sort of thing. They must have.”

  “Yes.” I said meekly, but I did nothing about it. Not that day. Not the day after.

  “Don’t you want us taken off the map view?” asked Sarah, whispering in my ear one cold grey afternoon a week or so later.

  “It would be another little bit more of you gone.” I explained. “They re-do the map every few years anyway. You will be gone then.”

  “Okay.” she had said; nothing more.

  The truth of the matter is Sheila was giving me serious grief about getting the pictures removed. She had found an email address for Google and they had asked her to respond in a letter stating the location, reason for the query and so on. I knew this as she had shown me the letter. In fact, she passed it to me now.

  “All you have to do is post the letter.” she said, looking at me closely for any hint of a reaction. “Their website says that they can have the images replaced within three months if you let them know.” I looked at the envelope, all sealed and ready to post anger rising in me. I had not even read the damned thing! “Get them taken off and you can move on.” she added. “No need to wait until some random point in the future when one day you get to look at the street view and you will see a new date and the picture will be slightly different and they won’t be there any more. Do it now and you can forget about it.”