The woman lowered her hands from her mouth. “No, no…its fine, Mr Davies. To tell the truth…” her pale face flushed once more, “I have been having a bit of trouble in that department lately. I was hoping it would just sort itself out…but if my Charlie says I must go to the doctor - then I will.” Fresh tears started to fall from her eyes and she stepped into the small kitchen to grab a piece of tissue. “Look at me starting again with the waterworks…you must think I’m a silly old bird.”
“Not at all, Mrs Jessop.” Roger followed her through to the kitchen. “Not at all.”
She sniffed and finished wiping her tears, plopping the damp tissue into a bin. “Well, I’ve kept you long enough, Mr Davies. You’ll be wanting to get home to your family.”
Roger frowned and shook his head.
“No family? No wife?”
“Afraid not.” A rueful smile, a hint of sadness in his eyes. At thirty-five, he still considered himself a decent looking man. A few wrinkles were beginning to form around his eyes, sure, his hairline was receding, but only slowly. He kept himself in reasonable shape, although, if he was being honest, too much time spent propping up bars was taking its toll a little. Women showed an interest often enough to stroke his ego but Roger kept his distance. He wasn’t gay – he just knew that the relationship he wanted, he couldn’t have. It was destined never to be.
“A good looking young man like you?” She touched his arm, “If I was ten years younger I’d marry you myself!” She suddenly looked taken aback. “I shouldn’t say things like that, should I? Not with my Charlie watching…”
Roger shuddered a little at the thought and hoped his face had not betrayed him.
“I’m only teasing.” She chuckled and took a white envelope from the kitchen counter, handing it to him. “It’s all there Mr Davies. And worth every penny. Thank you.”
3
The nearside front tyre of the Ford Transit clipped the roadside verge, the van banging and knocking as the wheel crunched over frozen mud and stones before swerving back onto the tarmac. A blonde haired woman in the passenger seat snatched a cigarette from between her glossy red lips.
“For Christ’s sake, Dan! I’ve told you once already – slow down!”
“Jesus, woman. Will you shut up!”
Her husband turned to face her, “Whose driving – me or you?”
“Well that’s exactly the bloody point -” the woman almost choked on her cigarette smoke, “You’re driving! Driving like a bloody idiot as per bloody usual.”
“Say ‘bloody’ some more, mum, why don’t you?”
The sarcasm came from the back of the van and the woman turned to her ten-year-old daughter, Sam. “Shut it, or you’ll get a bloody slap.”
She turned back to her husband. “It’s minus six out there tonight, there could be black ice. If you can’t drive slower, stop the van, get out and I’ll bloody well drive!”
*
Roger Davies looked right, left and then right again.
All clear.
He pulled out of the junction, gradually accelerating up through the gears. It was just past ten o’clock so he pushed the button to turn on the radio in the hope of catching the news bulletin. As sound filled his speakers, he swore under his breath: he had clearly just missed the news and his ears were now being assaulted by an annoying ad for some carpet warehouse. By the time he had finished cursing the irritating jingle had faded away and the DJ of the hour launched into the first track of his ‘Artist of the Day’ back catalogue. Roger gave the music a chance but decided it wasn’t for him, turning the volume down low, the song playing quietly in the background, providing some small degree of company as he drove the few miles to his home.
He drove steadily, aware of the freezing temperature and the danger of hidden ice. As his eyes scanned from side to side, he admired the ethereal beauty of the frost-coated grass banks, glinting like diamonds in the beam of his car’s headlights. The muted melodies from the stereo soothed his tired mind and he felt his memory drifting back to the expression on Mrs Jessop’s face when he told her that her long-dead husband was still with her, still watching over her. She’d looked as if all her past sorrow and grief had been sucked out through the pores of her age-withered flesh, leaving her in a present bathed with warmth and a future she no longer feared.
*
Roger’s ‘gift’ had first breathed life when he was a boy of fifteen.
It had been no earth-shattering experience at first - no all-singing-all-dancing pictures flickering across the retina of his mind’s eye with his heart hammering at his ribs and his breath rasping, hot and dry, in his throat. His gift had begun life as nothing more than a smell: the sooty odour of an open fire, fuelled by lumps of damp coal and wood, carried on a cool draft from a frosted window. The scent plucked at strands of memories, fingering and twisting them in his consciousness. These threads of reminiscence soon developed into something not unlike Deja vu – a feeling akin to a memory that dangled just beyond the stretch of his mental grasp. Muddy sediments were stirred up in his brain, settling all too soon, before he had a chance to swim amongst these re-lived experiences. But he instinctively knew that these memories were not his. These moments, long since deceased, were not memories from his short, centrally-heated and double-glazed past, but images from his late grandmother’s life. Seconds later, when the experience had all but faded, he realised he had been holding his grandmother’s wedding ring that she had bequeathed to his mother just
