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The Higher Realm

Originally published in Boomerang, edited by the poet, Neil Rollinson, to whom continued thanks, this story was the basis for my most recent novel of the same. Even now, I remain happy - or as happy as any writer ever is - with the story, but there were questions and lacunae in it that, less and less gently, nagged at me to pursue the situation further. I also believe it's possible to read the story before the novel without stumbling upon the novel's many secrets.

Neil Rollinson's site seems to have disappeared for the moment, and I give the address here in the hope that one day it will re-appear enlarged and transformed as this story eventually came to be.

I'd never have gone across that day only Valerie insisted. Valerie's a single mum with two kiddies and a collie dog. She lived next door to the Gilhooley sisters. She said their house was awful quiet - it was always awful quiet - but for the past week, whenever she let the dog out, it ran right round to the Gilhooleys' door to whine and scratch at it and wouldn't easily come away. Valerie said that couldn't be normal and I agreed because the dog, unlike her kiddies, was always biddable.
         I knew at the gate the Gilhooleys were dead. I sensed it like a hum in the air. What I hadn't expected was how warm the door would be, the glass front on it hot as flesh.
         I knocked. I called. I knocked again. I felt a fool. What if they were fine and came to the door and I'd have to say, 'I'm sorry, ladies. I thought you were dead'?
         I'd have turned back - I'm not a nosy man - only Valerie was at the end of the path, the two kiddies clutching her bare legs and the dog straining at its leash.
         She said, "Go on, Mr Wilkinson. I've got my mobile and an ambulance on speed-dial.'
         Odd thing was how the door wasn't locked. Only they'd pushed this big fridge-freezer up against the door and it was hard work for a man my age to budge it. I shifted it no more than an inch and there came this waft of terrible heat and this evil smell of what I know now was bodies rotting. That was enough for me to tell Valerie to go speed-dial that ambulance.
         The Gilhooley house is the spit of mine, the spit of all the ones on Mackintosh Close. There's no hallway. The front door opens straight onto the living room. I opened it wide enough to see one of the Gilhooley sisters in a blue nightie huddled face down on the rug, the gas fire full on. I saw no more. I didn't vomit. I wasn't sick until dawn next day. Instead I told Valerie to take the kiddies and the dog back home and I went to stand on the kerb and waited for the ambulance and the police and not long after reporters and cameras from the local news.
         I lived across from the Gilhooley sisters seven and a half years and I knew them only to say hello in the streets and sometimes after Mass. They'd once been regular attenders. I thought them pious women, skinny, odd but proud. The four of them would sit at the back in matching boleros and purple bobble hats and even in prayer they never took off their mittens. They'd trill all the hymns in this lovely descant but they never went up for Communion or parted with so much as a penny when I came round with the plate. They'd slip out the second the priest said Amen and afterwards I'd see them hurry up the hill back home walking in single file. With their purple bobble hats they had a look of thistles on the move.
         A year in they gave up Mass, no reason given. I'd push the parish bulletin through the letterbox until Eileen told me to desist. Eileen Gilhooley, all neck and throat and no shoulders to speak of, she was the eldest sister - or so I thought. I didn't know her name was Eileen then. I didn't know they weren't really four sisters but three sisters and an aunt. I didn't know what they did for money, where they'd come from or how they spent their time for they seldom left the house but for the shops and whenever they went they used a taxi so there must have been a phone and money from somewhere I suppose.
         That's how things are on the Mount Munroe estate, the way things have become. We were the first house up and ready forty years ago. Me and Fran had the wallpaper done and the curtains up when most of the road was mud. It's all changed now, two cars in most drives, patios at the back, porches at the front, satellite dishes and dormer windows on every other roof. Folk move on, move up. It's mostly young couples now, Valerie's age. They go out to work and seldom mix. There's joyriding and gangs over on Westmoreland Road, but this close is quiet enough. You can be dead in your home six whole weeks before they think to find you. The Gilhooleys are proof of that.
         The police said they were in a state of advanced decay and the papers gave their names and ages: Moira Gilhooley, 62, twins Eileen and Deirdre, 51 and Brenda, 45. They all lay down and died. They starved themselves to death. The aunt, Moira, went first and a fortnight later Deirdre and soon after Eileen followed. Brenda was last by a week. Brenda was my favourite. It was her in the blue nightie.
         They'd turned their living room into a makeshift bedroom when they became too weak for the stairs. There was no television, no radio but perhaps an old gramophone. They spent their time writing letters to each other so they couldn't have spoke much even to each other. I suppose if you live oddly you get to die odd too.
         Much of what I know is from the papers and from the inquest at which I was called as a witness although they didn't keep me long and the police were always very chatty to me throughout. They took me for a sociable sort, a good neighbour type. I'm not.
         I've lived quietly since my wife died. I lived quietly with her too. Somedays I think the reason Fran and I fell in together was because we were alike in being solitary. When you're a couple the world thinks you're solved. It leaves you be. "Look at us,' Fran would say at the end of an evening, 'alone as a stone, the pair of us, alone as a stone and on us own.' She liked to rhyme.
         When she upped died, no warning, cancer, I was bad with grief, right lost, and then I had this severe concussion the result of a run-in with a shopping trolley and a pyramid of butter beans. That was my fault, not Asda's. One of the cans landed on the soft part of my head. I was dumb for a fortnight and confused a long while after. I've not worked since and now I'm past retirement age. I'm well enough. I stutter when I talk too long. My tongue gets tired. My pool of words drains away. If I'm shy and keep to myself I've a doctor's note explains it. Worse thing is how I sometimes feel as if the world's no longer at arm's length but of a sudden rushes up at me close as breathing. It's why I like the chat-lines late at night, all them women on the phone, just ordinary women calling in, no bodies only names and saucy invitations, their voices cooing at you and saying filthy things.
         They hold inquests at the county court. The building's brand new, red plastic chairs and a drinks machine. You sit about with people being done for driving without a licence and young thugs caught on the rob. It doesn't seem respectful. There ought to be another better place to discuss the dead.
         The last to see the Gilhooley women alive was a taxi-driver called Sayed. He was at the inquest in a mucky turban, a Paisley shirt, sandals and no socks. We didn't speak. He picked two of them up at the shopping complex in Little Atherton with more than the usual number of shopping bags, mostly bottles of mineral water, the non-fizzy stuff. He described both of them wearing boleros and one as having lovely skin and silver hair and I thought that must have been Brenda without the bobble hat. That was in March. June, I found her face down on the rug and dead, a crucifix about her neck apparently.
         The sisters had grown up by Radcliffe Park on the other side of town. It's very bay window is Radcliffe Park so there must have been money once. They must have known a better life. According to the papers - it was in all of them, even the posh ones on a Sunday - they kept themselves quiet even then except they weren't called Gilhooley. Gilhooley was the aunty's name and they changed by deed poll when they came to live on Mount Munroe. The aunty had come from Sligo when the girls' mother had died giving birth to the last and she'd never gone back. No, their true name was Callick and the father had died when the last was in her late teens. He ran a hardware shop on Brackley Street. It's gone now. I took a bus and had a look. It's a car park for Toys-R-Us. Anyway when it was there and the father living, the sisters served in the shop. I imagine them young in sober clothes, pinafores and headsquares not boleros and bobble hats, not speaking much but genteel and subdued and the shop would be old-fashioned with pulleys and cash registers that went ping. One of the sisters would know all about screws and nails, another would know about plumb rules, gauges and pliers. Each would have had a speciality. They'd sell Reckitts Blue for a Whiter Wash and firelighters white as Kendal’s Mint Cake and lovingly arrange the soap powder boxes on the shelf so they'd go Oxydol-dol-dol. They'd be this smell of paraffin and Cleveland Biscol and they'd wrap everything in stiff brown paper and bow and curtsey with every purchase. They might have been known as the Gilhooley girls and been considered beautiful and more like nuns if nuns ever worked in hardware shops.
         There is another sister living yet, Beryl. She runs a wool shop in Hyde. I saw her at the inquest. Hard-faced and hair piled up, she wore a mohair jumper and slacks and mostly stood about outside smoking menthol cigarettes and humming Edelweiss. She didn't seem that bothered but she cried before the Coroner so I'm no judge.
         She married at eighteen and had lived in Kenya a good while and when she came back a widow her shop in Hyde took all her time. She had a son doing a degree in Leisure and a daughter a nurse at nights.
         'We were never close,' she told the Coroner. 'Aunty Moira and the other three were always tight together.'
         She had an idea she wasn't altogether related. She was auburn and all of them were fair and thinly-made. She didn't know for certain but maybe she had a different father and that would explain why and with no hard feelings there was this rift.
         'They embarrassed me as a girl. They'd not talk - even to each other - but send each other little notes. They went about in single file, heads down. Even young I knew that wasn't normal. And there's no photographs of any of us growing up and I don't think that's very normal either.'
         After the father died the shop failed and money was always scarce. They sold up and moved to Mount Munroe Plains.
         'I offered to help out,' she said, 'but I've only the bungalow and they were always proud. I'd visit whenever. They pushed up stuff against the door because they were afraid of getting robbed. They'd always done that. They used masking tape on the windows to seal up the drafts. They'd always done that too. Even before they took it into their heads to starve themselves, this is how they were. They lived on air and prayers to Jesus and they weren't that fond of washing. I knew it was odd but it was normal enough for them.'
         She'd dropped by that Christmas but they were out or not answering and I do have this memory of a BMW parked outside and a woman with a holly wreath and a tinsel Christmas tree standing about the Gilhooley house a good twenty minutes or so. I could have invited her in.
         She phoned them on New Year's Day and said hello to them all but that was the last contact she had with them until June and the police came and asked her to identify the bodies. It was then she broke down and cried. It must have been very upsetting. I just had a glimpse of Brenda. I didn't see her face and the nightie covered most of her but I'd seen an arm flung out all streaked and mouldy like bacon only green. She must have had to see all four. She must have had to look each of them in the face and two months dead they must have looked a sight.
         I think I've heard Beryl's voice before. I can't be sure. It's low and deep and sure. It's not like her sisters, not that I know for sure but I remember how they sang at mass, that trill and catch they had and how they knew every word and seemed to savour it.
         I'm thinking music mattered to them and then I recalled how sometimes there'd be music coming from the Gilhooley house. It'd be the only peep you ever heard out of them. It didn't happen often. Spirituals. Paul Robeson was it? Hymns too if it was a Sunday. Organ music. Blasts of it. Whatever it was it'd be played so loud you could hear it in your own home. Five minutes, sometimes half an hour and, once or twice, only a couple of seconds, so quick you disbelieved your ears although it would come at you like a yell, a screech. It was like the house was suddenly tired of standing silent and it just let rip and made a noise to let the world know it was still there. It could happen day or night and late into the evening. A couple of times it was so loud I had to hang up the phone.
         I'm only on the chat-line an hour a day, longer at weekends. I can't afford it else. I set the alarm to go after sixty minutes and I nearly always hang up no matter the state of play. There's a male voice welcomes you: 'Press One to hear the other callers on the line.' You press One and it will be Merry Widow, North West and she'll say a little something and then its 'Press Two to move onto the next caller; press Three to leave a message for that caller' And it goes on: Trudy, Vixen, up for it in Humsey; Shirley V., hot and horny; Randy Renee for chat or meet; City centre Sylvia up for laughs and maybe more. There's Janes and Sylvias and Delias and Rhonas. Round and round the names go and they say all sorts of things to get your attention. Some say nothing at all and there's just this space where you can hear them breathe. I always leave a cheery message.
         It's just ordinary women. Their husbands are away or they've left, died or disappeared or were never there. They're women you might sit next to on a bus or who might serve you in a shop or live two streets away. They're lonely women feeling horny - horny's the word most used. Sometimes we arrange what's called a meet. They give me their address, bold as you like. I have my coat on ready to go but I'm no sooner by the door and I desist. What would happen if I really went? They'd find out I'm not 42, six foot and hung like a bull. I'd find out they were lying too, that even the address they gave was false.
         Once though I was well up for it and I was halfway down the street and raring and this blast of music came from inside the Gilhooley house. Ave Maria it was. I turned around right there and then. I went back home. I saw their curtains that were always pulled twitch a bit, I'm sure. It was as if they knew and they were my guardian angels asking me to refrain and so I did. And so I do. I'm a widower but I'm still married in my head.
         The pathologist at the inquest was a woman, a Doctor Russo, nice, petite, blonde, a bit heavy on the make-up, more like someone you'd see behind the counter at a chemist. She said the aunt was the first to die, of bronchial pneumonia brought on by starvation. She was found propped up on the sofa bed, grossly emaciated but otherwise quite neat, arms crossed and hair combed. There was evidence of cancer that had gone untreated.
         It worries me that I don't know which of them was the aunt. I suppose living together they all grew alike but the aunty must have been strong to come over from Sligo and much loved for the sisters to take up her name and ditch their father's the way they did. They couldn't have liked him much.
         The next to die was one of the twins, Deirdre, and if I could give you one feature that distinguished her from the others I'd be lying. All I know is she was found at the back of the sofa, curled up in the corner of the room. She'd not been washed or moved because by then the remaining two were probably too weak to do anything but concentrate on their own dying.
         Eileen did struggle as far as the kitchen. She was found sitting on top of a pile of binbags. Flies had made a home in her. Brenda had stayed in the living room. She died last. Her end came painful and slow. Buckets of urine lay about. The central heating was set on high. The letterbox was sealed with gaffer tape. There were tables and chairs piled up against the back door. There'd been no attempt to move them. None of them had attempted to escape and here and there in drifts were the letters they had written to each other their whole lives long as well as in those desperate weeks.
         The letters explained as much as could be explained about why they'd hid themselves away and starved themselves to death so they could die and meet again and live thereafter in what they called the Higher Realm.
         When the Higher Realm first got mentioned at the inquest - by a woman police officer reading from her notes - I gave out this cry, this tiny yelp. It was most embarrassing. People looked at me and I wished I could have disappeared. I even thought the Coroner would call me out to explain myself but they moved on as if I'd made no sound at all.
         I'd heard that phrase before, the Higher Realm. I'd heard it used by Brenda Gilhooley, the only sister I'd known by name, the only one of them I'd had a talk with, the one I'd seen post-mortem, as it were, face down on the rug, in a blue nightie, arm flung out, a stick of bone and rancid flesh. She'd spoken to me of the Higher Realm that time I helped her with the wheelie bin.
         We used to all have metal dustbins for all our household trash and other rubbish. Fran would scour ours out with bleach and once a week men from the council would come round in a dustcart to empty them. For years that would be sound of a Thursday morning, the noisy dustcart chewing up the trash, the clunk and scrape of them metal bins and the fellas calling out to each other in that matey way they had. Then they took away the metal bins for good and left us with the wheelie bins, big plastic containers on wheels as tall as me they only empty once a month and even then you have to wheel it onto the street yourself. Ugly orange things they are, bright orange, not nice. You walk along the street these days and its not doors you notice, not windows or folks' gardens but these big orange wheelie bins parked at the side of every house. I've never liked them. Even now I wheel mine out with a very bad grace but it was over the wheelie bins that Brenda Gilhooley and me shared our moments.
         I was coming out one morning and I saw her struggling with her wheelie bin. Their path had a bit of a slope to it and she didn't seem to have the strength to push it or any knack for steering it. The wheels on them are always wonky.
         I went across. I didn't think. I was very bold. I am a good neighbour, I suppose. I just went across. I said, 'Give it here. You can't get a proper grip on it with them mittens.'
         I wasn't abrupt or rude. I just took charge and steered the wheelie bin up the path with her following me and mumbling at me to desist, not proper words but like she was some length of string held so tight it hums from its own tension.
         'Ugly things, these wheelie bins,' I said as I parked it by the gate. I had my cap on, my good cardigan and my dentures in. I think I looked presentable. 'I much prefer the old bins, the metal ones, you know. I think they should bring them back, don't you?''
         She was looking down, to the sides, away into the air, pawing the path with a slippered foot as if she were writing out the alphabet, but she looked up at me when I said that about the metal bins. She looked at me full in the face, no shame, and I thought what lovely skin she had like top-of-the-bottle-milk and she had these pale blue eyes and no eyelashes, no eyelashes at all so that when she looked you got the full effect.
         'Oh no,' she said in this tiny voice as if it had shrunk to almost nothing from seldom being used, 'we must move on, move up. We must. How else are we to get to Higher Realm?'
         I was beggared at what to say to that. What was the Higher Realm and where and how was it to be reached via an orange wheelie bin?
         A clever man, a charmer, a nosy one would have found the means to bring her out and have her say but she just turned about and scarpered back to the house, the front door closing behind her with a click.
         I went on up to the shops and came back without bread or milk I was that confused, but I had a plan by then.
         I figured how if she'd had trouble wheeling out the bin out she'd have trouble wheeling it back in. I sat by the window and waited.
         I worried some other sister would do the deed but it was Brenda came out the next morning after the dustcart had gone and I was across the road in a flash.
         'I'll give you a hand with that,' I said and I steered it down the path.
         She wasn't in a bolero. She didn't have her mittens on or her purple bobble hat. Her hair was silver and hung new-combed and straight and she had on this blouse, a sunflower print, brand new it was, the price tag, unbeknownst to her, dangling down the back.
         I said, 'I'm taking your advice. I'm moving on. I'm moving up. I've decided to love the wheelie bin. It's the modern world.'
         I didn't mean it. I said it for a laugh. I'd practised saying it and I said it well, all smiles.
         She didn't smile back. She was much too concerned. 'Oh, you mustn't love it. You mustn't love one thing in this world. Things are glue. You get stuck fast and you'll never know release.'
         She held me with those bald blue eyes. I didn't know what to say. People don't say such things to me. People don't stay silent year on year and in a second blurt out stuff like that - or perhaps they do. Perhaps there are people who say only what they mean and nothing else.
         'Glue?' I said. 'I don't follow you.'
         'But you should,' she said. 'Follow is exactly what you should do.'
         I'm a polite man, courteous. I tried to understand. 'I don't know what you mean,' I said.
         Perhaps she would have gone on, said more, explained, only the front door behind her was ajar. I heard something or someone shift inside the house and even deeper within a voice call out, 'Brenda?'
         I don't know which one it was behind the door or which one called out her name but that's how I came to know it. The sound of it was enough to make her turn, go back inside as if she were remote-controlled or a dog that came when it was bidden. The last thing I saw was the big sunflowers on her blouse and the price tag on her back and then the door closed with this soft reluctant click.
         The wheelie bin never moved again. They stopped using it at all. It turns out they let stuff pile up in binbags in the kitchen and then take it some place in a taxi.
         All the women wrote notes and letters to each other but Brenda wrote the most. They read out quite a few them at the inquest. Eileen's were the ones most about the Higher Realm. She wrote of wavelengths and veils of illusions, of bodies being merely overcoats.
         'There is no happiness on earth. Every soul has a karmic debt to pay, a cross to carry. Everything is transient, unlike the Higher Realm.'
         All the letters were like that, cheerleading each other onto a better place, all but one and that one came from Brenda.
         They had not eaten for forty five days and she wrote to Eileen.
         'Please listen. Our deaths are slow and we did not envisage such pain as this. The idea of ascending into Heaven is a good one but our stomachs are devouring themselves and our eyes are failing too. None of us foresaw this agony. It will get worse. Is there no better way than this?'
         Imagine in what a state she wrote this. Two of them were already dead, the aunt propped up on the sofa bed, Deirdre curled up in the corner, the house stinking and alive with flies. Who knows if they repented? There's no further evidence that they did. There was no other letter of complaint from Brenda. She never moved the fridge from the door or unpicked the gaffer tape from the windows. She never picked up the phone.
         'It was a sad and tragic end,' the Coroner said, 'and we can only hope they are at peace. It was something nobody could have helped.'
         I don't believe in God. This is my confession. I never did. It was Fran who went to church and I went with her. When she died, I stayed to the same routine. Things are like glue. You stick to them. I go to mass of a morning and Benediction on a Sunday afternoon. I help out with the plate. It passes the days. It fills a life. Maybe there's a reward. I don't go to Confession. I've no sins I'm happy speaking of. I don't see how the chatlines are a sin. I don't see why you can't sin in your head if it does no harm. The Gilhooleys lived life as if it were a penance, as if living itself was the sin. It's not. We're not stuck fast, not fast at all. Nothing truly glues you to this world except living in it. I wonder if I'm not that far myself from reaching the Higher Realm.
         I told Valerie about Brenda Gilhooley and the wheelie bin. She was out clipping her privet, her two kiddies washing the dog with the garden hose. She has new neighbours now, Lance and Graham. They work at Ikea and drive a Beetle. She hears them arguing through the walls and doesn't think they'll last.
         'Do you think she wore it special, Mr Wilkinson?'
         'How do you mean?'
         'The blouse. They were never out of them boleros and bobble hats and one chat with you and there she is in a brand new blouse.'
         'I don't follow.'
         'You never know, Mr Wilkinson, you never know. You might have been her chance to escape. She might have taken you for a merry widower.'
         Merry Widower is what I call myself on the chatline but how would Valerie know that? Maybe she uses the chatline too. A single mum, she gets lonely. I'd not recognise her voice, not really, not for sure unless she said something I'd heard her say already like 'I've got an ambulance on speed-dial.'
         I do listen out as the names go by for a familiar voice. Angie. Simone. Lynette. Occasionally there's a Brenda, an Eileen, a Moira, a Deirdre. Sometimes there's even a Fran.
         You live with a wife four decades and almost nothing sticks. You see another woman once with a price tag on her blouse and you can hardly bear the weight of remembering her.
         There's a woman comes on the line called Susie. That's all she says. Susie. She says it like a song or as if it were made of sherbet and it's fizzing sweetly in her mouth. I send her messages, courtly ones, saucy ones, pleading ones or just plain rude. She never replies. Perhaps it's Beryl née Gilhooley. Perhaps it's Valerie, laughing at me. Whoever it is, I'd have a meet with her, I would.
         In the meantime I listen on. Ida. Christine. Dorothy. Fay. Come and get me, boys, it's Judy. Rose from Prestwich on line for love. Gill in Pudsey for Horny Chat. Muriel. Louise. Leanne, the Leather Queen. I don't even set the alarm no more. I sit in the dark, cup of cocoa going cold and growing a skin and the names click by, round and round like a wheel it is, a big Ferris wheel, all lights and flashing invitations, going faster and faster, spinning, whirling. Giddy with it I am. I can scarcely hold on sometimes. I come unglued. I just let go. I am released and floating. I am driving across the night, joyriding through the dark, the voices no longer names but stars and I'm almost there. I almost reach the Higher Realm.