The 'Sea View' is a pleasant enough pub. The staff are like friends when its a quiet evening, unashamedly getting involved in your discussions with interest in the manner publicans in London never would.
What a pleasant Sunday evening. Dad bought us all a pint, even though he's the birthday boy. The discussion was good, too. Even when the inevitable drunken commentary on recession, football and "the country going to shit" ran dry, things managed to remain interesting.
I imagine it was the romance of the misty, desolate coastal town he was still relatively new to, because in twenty-five years I maintain I've never heard Dad talk like this, but he quickly propelled the conversation toward the supernatural.
Its funny, the adamant fervour you give to a discussion when drunk, the hindsight with which you laugh at the seriousness you gave the rhetoric the night before, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.
"I shit you not," my Dad egged on, "I wouldn't make this up"
We (being myself and my friend Jake, who was visiting because his job closed down and he had shit all to do) listened intently and with wide-eyed genuity. In hindsight it would be comical to observe. Anyway.
"I used to deliver papers in Ruislip" he carried on, "one night, I was driving (I'd just passed my test, as it goes) through Denham on my way to deliver the papers, and I promise you I clenched the steering wheel like no living person ever has before or since."
I giggled with drunken sincerity. "Why?" I laughed.
"It was the middle of fucking nowhere" he maintained, waving his pint at me for emphasis, "and I promise you all" (because there was also a nice, middle aged man called Bob at our table. We sort of commandeered him from his own misanthropic loneliness, into the conversation), "I hit a woman in the road."
We all shuddered. I know.
"My heart went", Dad said. "I can see it as clear as this pint in my hand. I hit a young woman and she went tumbling over my bonnet and hit the ground beside my car."
Dad took a slight breath, and carried on.
"Then I never saw her again."
Jake and I squinted. "In what way?' asked I.
"I mean" he said, "that she was never there. My girlfriend told me I'd just met the 'Grey Lady'."
I would be lying, and I don't lie, if I neglected to mention the quiver in my skin and the hairs on the back of my neck finding a tingle, at this sentence. What is the grey lady? Well, its not that important but supposedly she's a terrible spectre that jitters across the neglected West London suburbs, rigid fingers outstretched and a horrid, upset turn across her withered white face. Apparently her eyes are so wide you can see the back of them on a clear day. Not that she'd ever materialise on a clear day. As it stands she floats along, horrified and crooked, across woodlands and flat grounds. Supposedly she's buried near Ruislip, in a mistakenly-marked tomb that was never properly sealed.
"So what!" I exclaimed. "What about here?"
Dad smiled through drunken haziness. "You know my house is 150 years old?" He asked, playfully.
"No"
"Well," he began, "I'm not confirming anything, but you know little Lyon?"
Little Lyon (real name Lyon) was the seven year old boy that lived with his parents next door to my mum and dad. Each house on that terrace, bare in mind, was a decrepit old, converted sailors lodgings from the early eighteenth century.
"Yes" I said with coast.
"Well apparently, little Lyon's mum and dad woke up one night to hear him in his room, alone, talking. They went in and asked him what was wrong, and he turned to them, smiled, and said 'nothing.'
Apparently, Lyon's dad insists, Lyon was talking to 'the lady'. His dad went pale when he said this and asked 'what lady?' Lyon simply said 'the Lady that comes here every night. She always comes. She doesn't usually talk.'
Afterwards, Lyon's dad asked Greg next door but one, about the Lady, and Greg laughed and said, 'yeah, there's a lady. She walks through these walls, through all of these houses, every single night. She doesn't do any harm, because the dead can't hurt the living, but she always comes. Every night, snake-like and cold, floating through the walls of these old houses. I don't know who she is.'
I guess I've always been interested in that sort of thing" Dad continued, "but I never took it that seriously since I've moved here" I nodded, drunk and slightly intimidated. "But I maintain that Del (his dog) has funny turns every now and again."
"What?" I asked.
"Well," said Dad, "God bless your mother for steadfastly ignoring this, but I fucking promise you that one night, we were sat around the telly, I notice Del's eyes darting left and right, like he was following something. (They say animals can sense things), it startled me a bit, but I brushed it off.... until Del started barking, furiously, at the wall. Del stared intently at nothing at all and barked, his eyes transfixed.... I don't know, just a wierd moment."
We sipped our beers in silence. I stared at our new friend, Bob, and snickered silently. Although if I'm being truthful to myself I will admit that the back of my neck tingled slightly at that story.
We drank in silence for an interval, and I sat back in my chair. I then stared into an in particular corner of the pub. My relaxedness withered. I suddenly felt edgy and irritable. The particular corner consisted of a slightly narrowed section, leading to the toilets. It wasn't that anything specifically changed, but there was a certain desolation coming from that section. It was well-lit, but there was a darkness, somewhere. And it came creeping, no, scrawling, out from a forbidden corner and slowly infected the light, seeping rigidly and horribly into everything else like a malevolent spider, until it was black with shadow. I stared, tears may have welled behind my eyes and my hair may have tingled and moved as this happened. That visible corner screwed and shrank into darkness and I do believe, drunken hindsight permitting, that a set of animated, black, crooked fingers poked bleakly out of the shadow and gyrated horribly back into it.
THE BELL rang. Time at the bar, they say. We started up into reality.
Me, Dad, Jake and Bob slowly and awkwardly gathered our things. We bade a mumbled, grim farewell to the barmaid and started for the door.
It was so beautifully silent in the Kentish coastal village at night. Nothing like London. You can see stars and "hear angels fart", if they will. Bob was funny, all through the night he sneered at Dad's adamant ghost stories, being the staunch atheist he is. We strolled through the brisk, biting cold and Dad INSISTED on carrying on the ghost stories;
"she looks at you through the conservatory window"
"I couldn't sleep, yet I saw the grim, black shadow crawl across my bedroom"
"there's something in that alley just before my house"
They were all his. We were liberal in our listening, but in all seriousness we just wanted to get home.
The roads were silent. Old, detached houses and little else lined the way. The stars were so visible it was absurd. Jake had already gone home a separate way.
We came to a bridge. It passed above us, pure concrete and starkly rigid, almost accidentally art deco. It was largely in shadow and it protruded and jolted out in all sorts of bizarre places. The dim, yellow-lit road passed under it.
Bob went crooked and let out a low, ugly squeal of discomfort. "I don't want to" he groaned.
"What?" I asked in disbelief.
"I can't go under it" he cried, staring ominously at the jagged concrete of the overhanging bridge.
Dad laughed, for some reason. Bob hesitated as we each looked on in slight disbelief, and he eventually passed under.
"Do you mind me asking what that was about?" I blurted out, with regards to the bridge.
Bob said nothing. He simply looked up to the starry sky and sighed.
"Look." he said. "You can see all of the bright universe in the sky at night."
I think me and Dad both smiled amicably at this.
Then Bob slowly, eerily arched his head toward the ground. His expression blinked abruptly to a blank, unhappy one as he stared at the concrete.
"And you can see the grimness of hell beneath us, all the same", Bob hissed. He didn't sound himself, at all.
Dad was undeniably drunk, but all the same he turned bravely to Bob and said "Go home, mate." We all three of us stood awkwardly on the spot for a moment. Bob stared into nothing beyond us, looking like he was dead. Nothing my Dad had just said even registered, although he quickly turned and left all the same.
Dad and I staggered home. The evening was indeed weird, and obviously my first instinct was to take to the home computer and type it all up, before I forgot any detail.
Ghost stories are always creepy when you combine them with intoxication and mistaken interest in such an environment, and I know that human beings are eternally susceptible to unexplainable things when its interesting.
I'm not saying I believe any of those silly stories, or take Bob's odd actions very seriously, although, if I'm honest, when I sit here at this desk late at night, in this long, cold living room, and think of that dark thing that just drifted by me in the distant shadow (knowing that everyone in the house is upstairs, asleep) not a minute ago, and slithered shakily into the darkness, the hair on my head tingles and a slight tear forms behind the eye. I've always been a bit rational, but I can't ignore that.
I dread the trip upstairs to bed.
