That Other Place

That Other Place by Chris Green

I am awoken by a knock on the door. The display on my smartwatch says it’s 3 a.m. Who could be calling at this hour? If Elin were here, she would insist I answer it because it must be important. But she is spending a few days at her sister Lori’s in Edinburgh. Lori is having a meltdown following her breakup with Murdo, and Elin has gone to the rescue. And as its term time, Paul is at uni in Aberystwyth, so as I am alone in the house, I elect to ignore the disturbance. I like my 3 a.m. sleep. Perhaps I imagined it, anyway. Most likely, it was a dream. I have been having some turbulent dreams lately.

The following night, at about the same time, I once again hear a knock, this time louder and more persistent than the previous night. Curiosity, or more likely paranoia, gets the better of me and I venture downstairs, take the door off the latch and look up and down the street. There is no one there. What is going on? I make a cup of chamomile tea to take upstairs and get back to the warmth of bed. But still I feel agitated. Nighttime disturbances are not something that happen in Forsythia Close. The crime rate on the estate is zero. It is so orderly, it doesn’t even need Neighbourhood Watch. Everyone here is tucked up in bed by ten, even at weekends. Not even the cats go out at night around here.

The following morning, as I am getting into the Gran Coupé to drive to the office, I catch my neighbour Halsey Adams about to load up his Lexus. He is a development engineer for a big software company. Some smart laptops he has there by the look of it, too. Perhaps I will get him to upgrade my kit sometime. The Lenovo has been playing up lately.

‘I thought I heard a knock on my door in the middle of the night, Halsey, I say. ‘You didn’t happen to see or hear anything, did you?’

‘I hardly know what the middle of the night looks like round here, Freddie,’ he says. ‘Octavia told me she heard a fox a week or two back, but other than that, it’s paradisaical. I sleep like a baby. You must have imagined it. You’re probably missing Elin, aren’t you? I’ve noticed the Clubman hasn’t been there the last week. Her sister again, is it?’

The following night, I am woken by a haunting piece of piano music playing on the Google speaker downstairs. It is gentle, hypnotic. It seems so familiar, but I can’t place it. I dig deep, trying to come up with where I know it from, but it remains to be just out of reach. In the end, I ask Google what it is. She says it is called La Petite Fille de la Mer by Vangelis on an album called L’Apocalypse des Animaux, and she has sent details about where I can purchase it to my iPhone. Why was Google playing it? Where did the instruction come from? Perhaps that doesn’t matter. The context of the music hits me. Like a train. It was on an album my ex-girlfriend, Nuala, used to play after we had made love. We would drop off listening to it. But this would have been thirty years ago. I don’t recall having heard it since. It was not well known. It was one of Nuala’s albums.

I haven’t seen or heard news of Nuala for the best part of those thirty years. My life has moved on and I have given her little more than a passing thought. She moved abroad. Somewhere hot as I recall, although I cannot remember where, but she liked hot places. Given this inexplicable reminder of Nuala, I think about her now, with an air of fondness and longing. Although we were young back then, we were in love, at least in the beginning. We both felt that way. It was full on. The sweet bird of youth. Those fleeting moments of innocence before reality kicks in.

Seeing the strange experience with the Vangelis tune as a sign, I fancy it is time I tried to find her. It feels remiss that I haven’t done so before now. But we don’t really live just one life, do we? When it comes down to it, we inhabit a series of loosely connected episodes, very much in the manner of a TV serial drama. There are threads that run through the episodes, of course, but this is about the extent of it. On practical grounds, if nothing more, we separate out everything that does not easily fit into the latest episode. It has no place there. Life is about the present and can only ever be that way.

Nuala is an unusual name, and Benz is not a common surname. Although it might be a longshot. Nuala has probably married, or she might not even do social media, it won’t take a minute to look her up on Facebook.

My search turns up just one Nuala Benz, and although she looks a little older, I recognise her right away. Blonde hair, nicely cut, and flirtatious smile, she is unmistakable. I click on her profile.

The first post on her timeline, which is dated just twenty-four hours earlier, reads, Sadly, after a brave battle with cancer, Nuala Benz passed away peacefully at 3 a.m. yesterday at home with her family. She thanks you for all your friendships and warm messages during her last days.

Nothing could have prepared me for this. Does it explain the knocks at 3a.m. and Google playing the significant music? I have never gone for all that telepathy stuff. It is well outside my comfort zone. And yet! I don’t know what it is, but something consequential seems to have been happening here.

Reading further, I find the post was written by her daughter, Megan. Still reeling from the shock, I see her bio states that Nuala lives, or perhaps that should be lived, in Summervale, not thirty miles away from me and among her check-ins is Redlands, which is just up the road. This knocks me further off balance. I may need a little time to digest this.

What should I take from the episode? There seem to be a number of big questions. Ought I to have learned something, and if so, what might that lesson be? Is it that there are communications that we simply don’t understand? Things that we have lost the ability to detect? Things that are out of reach of our five senses? Things that we don’t know we know, because in blinkered lives, we don’t take the time? Is there any message at all, or am I reading too much into something that is both unknowable and not my concern? Had Nuala tried to contact me earlier, or deliberately not done so? Should I carry on looking through her Facebook profile, and how would I feel about attending her funeral? Or is it best to stay put?

ONE MONTH LATER

Nothing further appears on Nuala’s Facebook and her profile has since disappeared. The funeral or wake will have come and gone. The mystery remains unresolved. There have been no more nighttime disturbances. Nor occult messages arriving from that other place. Elin is now back, and things at home are beginning to settle. I haven’t mentioned the spooky incidents to her, but she was curious about why I’d replaced the Google speaker with Alexa.

Copyright Chris Green, 2024: All rights reserved