Robert Stone

useless

The strangest thing about this man, and there were several very odd things from which one might choose, was that I couldn’t shake the conviction that I had seen him before. I was saying to myself, Oh, look. It’s him again, but I couldn’t remember where I had seen him nor really believe, given what he was like, that I had seen him and forgotten about it.

I take the trouble to make a short train journey to Woodbridge because of the river. It’s a popular place for just walking and exercising dogs and you don’t have to go far before you come to the next bench. I expect it’s true to say that a lot of the town’s visitors are long in the tooth. Still, I walk quite a long way to a favourite bench very close to the water’s edge and where the river bends so that you have the sense of water being almost all around you. I sit there and read, watch the birds, eat my sandwiches. There are times when all you can hear is the movement of the air and the water and the chink-chink of the rigging of the many little boats.

The man I am talking about though was sitting as near to the town as possible. There’s a concrete shelter there, painted blue and white and fitted with benches, a couple of which point back towards the town or at the tide mill. My man was sitting on the bench that overlooked the river. He was about my age and he was engaged in bouncing a green rubber ball, attached to his hand by a length of elastic, against the kerb of the path. He caught it every time it came back to him. How could he not? He hadn’t shaved for several days, he was conspicuously overweight and he was wearing a hat with Super Mario printed on it. The hat had two life-size hands on the top of it, the chubby fingers reaching for the sky, and I bet he could have made those hands clap if he had wanted to.

I watched him for a long time, from the safe distance of my favourite seat. He interrupted my reading. The fellow never once stopped bouncing his ball, which was lime-green, and he was still there when I decided to go home hours later. He was the first of them.

The second one I met, although you could hardly really call it a meeting, was also at Woodbridge but on a different day. I think this was after Super Mario but I’m not sure of that because I only started to think about them as a series after I had met the third one. I had been given a lift to the town but had to return by train and it was only when I arrived at the station that I found that engineering works were taking place and that I had an hour’s wait for a replacement bus service. Annoying, but I was in no danger of being marooned, left without resource, at a loss, and I wasn’t in a hurry, not really, so, what to do for an hour?

I walked to the main road outside the station concourse and considered my limited options. I was thirsty and I thought I might cross the road and visit the Victoria, a pub I didn’t know at all, and have a pint. That would cost £5 for which I had not budgeted. Or, I could turn back to the ice cream kiosk and buy a bottle of water for £2, about 100 yards from a billion gallons of free water.

I was standing in this wide driveway, which is never used except by pedestrians, quite to the side of it, thinking of these things, when I heard a voice behind me, clearly very irritated by my presence,

— Excuse moi.

Not loud, but, as I say, obviously vexed. An unnatural emphasis on the French monosyllable. An old woman, approximately half my height and with short grey hair, definitely not French. She instantly circumnavigated me and walked off down the road.

I was taken aback. I had to look around me and make doubly sure that it really was possible to drive a small truck past me without needing to ask that I move out of the way. I hadn’t got out of the way in any case, I hadn’t moved and this woman couldn’t have been right behind me when I stopped because I’d been standing undecided for a minute before she expressed her indignation. Exasperation personified.

—Idiot,

I called after her, as she scuttled on her way, but she was certainly out of hearing. She had put me out, that old woman, the injustice of it. They are suffocating, insults you can’t refute. If you can’t be insulted you don’t care for what anyone thinks. That’s not me. I was the idiot. I have been told that I was born with a skin too few.

Now there was another one that I am not so sure about who also said, Excuse me.

I have a booklet containing eleven maps and some instructions for circular walks in the Needham Market area. I have been ticking them off, one by one. The latest, the fifth, had directed me along a very under-walked route that had had me crouching through the hawthorn and battling among the brambles. I got back to town and I was standing at the pelican crossing when a young man also waiting to cross, very long curly hair and a band t-shirt, said to me,

— Excuse me, you’ve got a sort of twig thing on your head.

He was right, I did. A substantial twig thing had crowned me like a pagan king, evidently for the last hour or so, including the time I had stood on a crowded railway platform and on the train journey home. I removed the foliage and smiled shamefacedly at the curly youth. I could have left it on my head and simply said, I know, but I didn’t think of that until later. He was probably alright, that young man, although it was embarrassing to walk beside him as we carried on along the same long road from the station.

It was the man who really came third who clinched it for me. I have been working from home for more than three years now and I work at night as I always have. I sit in my armchair with my back to the front window staring at two computer screens. I have my music on and as a rule the music is all that I can hear at this time. I have a reading lamp and I also light a candle, for company, and because I sometimes like to pause and watch the flame dance. The world seems very still and I am conscious of sitting in a pool of yellow light. On this night I was also conscious of a man standing at my front door, which I can see out of the corner of my eye. I felt as if I had summoned him. I don’t know if he rang the bell because that doesn’t work, never has, and I couldn’t see him clearly as the honeysuckle has overgrown a lot of the window and some part of the door too. The house might look unlived-in, an impression I don’t choose to dissipate. It was so late by now, something short of midnight, that I didn’t think he could have been knocking on doors. He had been looking for a light, evidence of someone still up. I really had summoned him. I thought I’d better answer the door.

This fellow was stocky with cropped hair, bullet head and glasses. He wore a t-shirt with a Union Jack on it. He had been drinking, I could smell his breath, and he had no teeth. He called me boss. That was a mistake. Sometimes they call you sir. Both dead giveaways. No one calls their actual boss boss. That is the opposite of what is really meant. I knew straightaway that he was too stupid to be sarcastic. His face looked rather wet, his skin glistened, for which I had no explanation. Another person might have found him menacing but I couldn’t take seriously this soppy-looking man with no teeth.

He told me he was my neighbour. He lived just up the road. I suspected this wasn’t entirely true but I also felt I might know the house he was referring to. He said that he had locked himself out of his flat and wanted to know if I had a ladder I could lend him. This was another mistake, asking a direct question to which it was much too easy to say no. He should have uttered a plea along the lines of,

— I am locked out of my house and I don’t know what to do.

If he had said something like that it would have been as if the quandary were as much mine as his.

I told him that I didn’t have a ladder, which was true. I could have told him that my next-door neighbour Richard, doubtless now asleep, did have a ladder, he had it roped to the side of his house, but I chose to protect Richard rather than rescue this toothless stranger, if that is what he was. The idea that I would lend a ladder to a drunken skinhead in the middle of the night and then help him to climb through a first storey window was a scenario from silent cinema that I had no intention of recreating.

He seemed to find it amazing, unbelievable literally, that a man should not have a ladder, although, all too obviously, he did not have one himself. His accusation, that I was lying, was unspoken, implied by his tone merely, so I couldn’t come back with that retort.

He said, already walking away, immediately defeated,

— So, you can’t help me then.

I wasn’t sure if that was a question or not. He meant that I didn’t want to as well as that I couldn’t and he was more or less right in both cases.

Failure and obscurity were his proper condition. Even before he had disappeared I had known he was a ghost, like the others.

The distinguishing feature of ghosts is that they are trying to behave normally, to fit in with the living, but they are hopeless at it. They want to be accepted and at the same time to pass unnoticed. Ghosts sometimes resemble rowdy or unruly people because they no longer know how to behave. They are useless because they can think of nothing to do. There is nothing for them to do. No matter how eccentric their behaviour, they think they are acting like the living, doing nothing exceptional, unless they do have an inkling.

Nightworkers are bedevilled by hideous noises; the endless wail of the unanswered burglar alarms, the furious gabble of the one-sided mobile phone conversations when no one visible is passing, even the shriek of braking locomotives from the nearby railway line. These are the, often derisive, cries of ghosts, I’m sure, not least when they appear to be quite dissociated from that possibility.

A few nights later, my attention was drawn by the bleating of a car horn as it passed the window, the driver inevitably angry because a young man was riding his bicycle in the middle of the road and wouldn’t let the car pass. I had never seen him before. He was yelping and waving his cap in the air like he was riding a bucking bronco.

Harmless enough, in truth. I turn contentedly back to my work, which never diminishes for all my endeavours, sneezing discreetly on occasion in this dusty house and warming my hands at the candle, now and then, like a man on the edge of the world.

Robert Stone was born in Wolverhampton in the UK. He works in a press cuttings agency in London. Before that he was a teacher and then foreman of a London Underground station. He has two children and lives with his partner in Ipswich. He has had stories published in numerous British, American, Asian and Canadian magazines, including Stand, 3:AM, The Write Launch, Confingo, The Decadent Review, The Westchester Review and Lunate. More details can be found on his website. He has had two stories published in Nicholas Royle’s Nightjar chapbook series. A story appeared in Salt’s Best British Stories 2020 .

Robert wrote the following about ‘Useless’:

‘Useless’ is a true story, more or less. The man with the Super Mario hat, the slightly drunken man who knocked on my door in the middle of the night asking me to help him break into his own house. Real enough. Of course, I don’t know that they were ghosts. How could I know? I am only guessing that. And the young man riding his bicycle in the middle of the road? I am not sure now whether or not I imagined him, but, after all, it is the sort of thing that happens.