The Last Room in the House

By Andrea Martin-Banks | January 15, 2023 | Comments 0 Comment

Haunted memories of the day the ghosts of my family came to take me from this world…

Old writers rarely go in a blaze of glory, we tend to just fizzle out like a firework on a damp night. And that’s exactly what happened to my old friend Gordon Pugh, finally.

He’d always been as noisy as a newsroom filled with ancient typewriters, but when he met his final deadline he fizzled a little then died. Sadly, his demise caused hardly a ripple in the pool of Manchester’s Fleet Street.

But death held no fear for him, he’d died once before you see and, as it was no longer a new experience, he didn’t want to make a fuss. When you are an old writer, once you’ve experienced something it becomes old news and it’s time to move on to pastures new.

Gordon’s family home was in the hills outside Mold, North Wales, but he lived, four nights a week, in a dingy bed-sit in the toxic back streets of Cheetham Hill. “A pit in Coffin City,” he would say with a woefully Welsh smile: “Cheap you see, twenty five pounds a week, cockroaches thrown in.”

Cockroaches, a shaving mirror, a bedside table, a Westclock alarm with matching bells, a three-bar electric fire and that was it … apart from this photograph he bequeathed me. There was a handwritten note with it saying that he believed this picture had led him in to his first death and then out again. It’s actually a picture of his Uncle Harry.

The note finished: “I was going to take my uncle to the grave with me, I thought perhaps he might lead me back to life again, but then I realised I can’t be really bothered… so, I thought maybe my Uncle Harry could actually help you in your quest to find the truth about life after death …actually, by the time you read this note and receive my picture I will have scooped you, just like in the old days,

“Good Luck and all the best,

“Your very good friend Gordon.”

I guess, Gordon’s life had never been complete in the way a writer wants it to be complete. We all want our work to live on after us, but Gordon’s legacy to the world, a short tome on the world’s first test tube baby, is sadly now out of print.

It was on that particular story though that our paths first crossed, we were both staking out the family from the bar of the George and Dragon near their home in Stockport. Back then Gordon was bright and funny, unbowed by a life of too much booze and too many cigarettes. And I have to hold my hands up, that time he did ‘scoop’ me. He got to the family two minutes before me, claimed an exclusive and wrote his book.

Last time I saw him we were in the murky world of the Crusader Club at the back of the Express building in Ancoats, Manchester. I remember it so well, stairs as black as ink, rubbery swing doors, beer-stained tables, you could hear the first edition park and then watch the mass exodus of van men up the stairs.

Down here in The Crusader it was our world beneath the gutter, a funny world where we’d stay ’til three, four, in the morning, every morning.

And there’s Gordon hilariously retelling the story of his own death and wafting the picture of his Uncle Harry proudly as if it represented proof of his experience.

As I look at the picture today in my study, it goes back to the Thirties and I must admit I get a strange feeling from it, something about the eyes, the way they look into me. It’s an eerie photograph.

Anyway, here’s what Gordon told me that last time in the Crusader Club, only an old journalist has such an eye for detail: “I had no idea why Harry was waiting for me when I came up for air from the club, he was puffing contentedly on his briar pipe. It confused me; he’d died from lack of breath nearly 30 years ago.

“I have to admit that his death had no more affect on me than his life had. He never bothered to leave me a penny in his will – and he was rich in his own right, an insurance salesman of all things, first car in Mael Famau and the first divorce too…

“Now I was 52 and there he was, in front of me larger than life and twice as ugly. A hideous ghoul in fact, if I might be so purple. He was drunk too, a family trait,” he laughed.

“He was wearing a shabby business suit and a dark tie as tight as a noose. A grin stretched across his tombstone teeth, making his paper-thin cheeks look like they were about to split. I could feel the emphasymic rumble of his chest through my boots.

“Harry seemed genuinely pleased to see me, I suppose we were waving about in the same wind, bit of a drunkard’s gig really.

“He didn’t speak. And neither did I. Too much unchartered water under both our bridges. I smiled at him nervously and in return he faked a very unmilitary two-step and a stumble that became a foppish bow.

“Unfortunately that dislodged his jaw and it was left hanging unnaturally loose – then I noticed his skull was beginning to show through his threadbare flesh.

“I shivered and he shrugged, sighed and blew all the air out of the street. I was concerned of course when Harry held out his hand to me as if to a child but I took it anyway. His grip felt cold, a part of the bleakness.

“Now, it has to be said that the spectral visitation of a dead uncle is unnerving enough, but the fact that last orders was fast approaching and there wasn’t a pub in sight was enough to strike terror into the dying heart of any lad from the hills …

“But there was something in my Uncle Harry’s grip that made me realise I had nothing to fear. He already had last orders waiting for me as he led me down a long and dark alley.

“I felt like we had entered the final pub at the end of the world. Inside an old cigarette-chewing journalist tuned in a Roberts radio on the bar, keeping up with the news, needle going back and forth, sounds from across the world, little snippets, glitches, bleeps.

“My granddad inexplicably was there at the end of the bar, in his boots and his baggy black serge pants, vest and braces, belly as big as a maternity ward. He raised his beer to me and smiled. I smiled back as Harry handed me a beer.

“I could still hear what was going on outside, the gurgling of the gutters, a drunkard caterwauling under a melting streetlight, a fat old policeman whistling as he goes by.

“A cloud of smoke belched from Harry’s pipe engulfing me, when it cleared he was looking down at the floor.

“You’re dead,” he whispered like smoke sliding from a gun.

And that’s when it happened to me. It was like smoke was drifting across the universe. I was bouncing amongst the stars. I managed to retain a sense of my body but it was a vague misty shape, an echo. I turned turtle – swooped – and pulled stunts, I could see ashes of my life leaving a trail.

“I soon realised there was no oxygen up here, no thermals, no wind, not like we know it anyway. This was the wind between galaxies, this was the gas that kept the universe alive but we can’t breath it and yet you don’t choke, you simply can’t breath anymore.

“Then I landed and I found myself at the bottom of a set of stairs … all nine hundred of them in a tight spiral, a deep red corset of a stairwell, like the stairway to the womb.

“I began to climb step by step. By the third floor I was going up those stairs like each one was a mountain. Strange though, I didn’t feel tired … just weary. I plodded on. Nothing happening. Nothing to report. Step by step. Stair by stair.

“But I kept on going up, pushing down on my knees with my hands. I could hear a dog panting in my ears, maybe it was a door-dog chomping at my heels. I knew I couldn’t look behind me. No point, there’d be nothing there. Nothing. A big black zilch.

“I looked up and the stairs had become stone, each one a thousand miles high. I looked up at the first thousand miles and started fumbling around for a handhold. Then a foothold. I knew I was heading for the highest room in the house, the last room you reach in your mind, the attic, the room of memories and dust and decay. I’d got to keep climbing.

“The building began to collapse around me, room after room fell past me – the closing down of the mind I suppose – rubble and bricks, icons and stairways, trials and noises, fell away below me. But I kept on climbing. Then I reached out, like an amoeba, into the sky, and hung there, waving into the universe. The stairs were falling away but from where I was waving, I could see the lights of my grandfather’s house, a safe haven as it had always been, and there he was, my Uncle Harry, he was walking away.

“It was a strange thing, but I came back to life when I heard the twin bells of the Westclock in my dingy little flat in Cheetham Hill, this picture of Harry was leaning up against it, as if he was looking at me.”

***

As I sit at my desk in my haunted house at the heart of the Village of the Damned my attention keeps being called back to this photograph on my desk. It’s the eyes isn’t it, they seem to know something. I wonder what it is?