Happy Death Day, Hairy Otter

“Happy death day to you,” sang the plump, rosy-cheeked ghost. “Happy death day to you. Happy death day dear…um…”

Her warbling, soprano voice came to a faltering halt.

“Sorry, what did you say your name was?” she asked in an exaggerated stage whisper.

Ernest sighed.

“It’s Professor Ellington,” Kate hissed back from the far side of a library stack, so loud that Ernest wondered why she was even bothering to hide.

“That’s rather long,” said the singer. “Can I call you Ellie?”

“I“d rather you didn’t,” said Ernest. “Ernest will do.”

She returned to her performance in a trilling, high-pitched yodel that would have shattered every glass in the library had she not been a ghost. Ernest found himself envying the still-living patrons of the university library milling about amongst the stacks, blissfully unaware of the caterwauling assault he was being forced to endure. The pink velour tracksuit the singing spirit wore did nothing to enhance the experience. People couldn’t choose what clothes they died in (if they could, Ernest would have chosen a less threadbare suit), but as far as he was concerned there was no excuse for ever having worn such a hideous item in the first place.

As the blancmange-coloured ghost belted out the final word of the song – sustaining the “Yoooooouuuuuuuuu!” through what felt like several decades – Kate emerged through the stack she’d been hiding behind. She clapped enthusiastically, a broad grin on her face, then looked to Ernest for approval.

“Well?” asked Kate.

“Um, delightful.”

“You’re sure? You really liked it?”

“It was… unique.”

The singer, thankfully no longer singing, beamed. “I was always regarded as one of the leading lights of the East Pinge Amateur Operatic Society.”

Ernest could only assume the East Pinge Amateur Operatic Society was desperate for members.  

After enduring a few more minutes of bland pleasantries, Ernest was relieved when the dreary woman finally departed, claiming she had a busy social diary. Ernest doubted this. No ghost had a busy social life. They spent most of their afterlife desperately trying to work out how to fill their extra time.

More likely she’s seen through Ernest’s fabricated enthusiasm and left from sheer embarrassment. He did try. It was part of his mid-twentieth-century, middle-England, middle-class upbringing to try to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings if at all possible. Equally, it was part of his mid-century, middle-England, middle-class upbringing not to gush excessively. He simply couldn’t fake sincerity. Even in life he“d been completely see-through.

Kate didn’t leave, though. She didn’t seem bothered by his surliness, not now, not ever. Nothing appeared to get under her skin (or whatever it was the kept her body from dissipating into thin air now).

“Happy Death Day?” spluttered Ernest. “What kind of madness is Happy Death Day?”

“It’s a thing,” Kate grinned. “A ghost thing. We all celebrate it.”

“Well, dear lady, I’ve been dead considerably longer than you, and I can assure it is not ‘a thing’.”

“Okay, it’s a Harry Potter thing.”

“A what thing?”

“Harry Potter.”

Ernest hoped his blank look would be answer enough.

Kate sighed good-naturedly, like a mother surveying the mess left after a child’s attempt to make scones. “I can’t believe you haunt a library and you haven’t heard of Harry Potter.”

Ernest snorted. “Madam, I haunt nowhere. I am condemned to live out my afterlife in this library, but I certainly don’t haunt it.”

This was true. If anything, it was the library that haunted Ernest. 

In life he’d been an academic, the kind of old-school professor far happier researching into the most cobwebby corners of scholarly knowledge rather than dealing with a revolving door of students who required tutoring. Books were his real passion. The written word was his lifeblood. While he had (or at least, would like to believe he had) an informed appreciation of all forms of classical culture and fine art – painting, opera, theatre – literature was his religion and libraries his place of worship. Foremost amongst which was this vast university library with its labyrinth of ancient, dusty, towering stacks. If only those annoying students could have been kept out, it would have been heaven on Earth.

In death, though, the library was Ernest’s hell. Or, more precisely, his purgatory. He was trapped in an afterlife surrounded by untold millions of books he couldn’t read. Couldn’t even touch. He would reach out a hand and it would pass right through their spines. A cornucopia of prose so agonisingly out of reach.

He could look over other people’s shoulders while they were reading, which was some small succour, even though it meant his reading material was no longer ever of his choice. He might fancy some Milton, but have to put up with Melville. (While Ernest admired the American author’s attempts to reveal that it was God, not the devil, in the detail, he could never raise much enthusiasm for all those chapters on the minutiae of whale anatomy.) 

“So what is this Hairy Otter?” asked Ernest. 

“Harry Potter,“ said Kate. “It’s a series of children’s books. Ghosts celebrate their death days in it.”

“Why on Earth would they want to do that?”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s morbid? I thought you said it was a childrens’ book.”

“Oh, lighten up,” Kate laughed. “There’s not much else to do in the afterlife so we may as well grab any and every opportunity to have some fun.”

“I“d rather not, if it’s all the same,“ said Ernest. “And where did you find that dreadful woman?”

“Oh, you know, out and about,” said Kate, evasively.

Kate never liked rubbing it in that, unlike Ernest, she did get to leave the library.

Because although Ernest and Kate were both tethered ghosts (as opposed to free spirits, who could wander where they wanted) the Professor was tethered to a place, this library, while Kate was tethered to a person, her former husband, Donald. Not that he knew anything about it.

Donald Lamond was also a professor at the university (of some sub-section of science or other, Ernest could never be bothered to remember), and a frequent visitor to the library. This meant that Donald’s deceased wife was often in the library too, indelibly attached to Donald in incorporeal form. 

So while Ernest was stuck in the library, Kate was constantly out and about since Donald appeared to have plenty of social engagements. Kate would often complain to Ernest about what an absolute bind it was to have to follow Donald everywhere (Ernest had studiously avoided the subject of bathroom breaks) but he would certainly have preferred her kind of post-life existence, which at least offered a degree of variety. It had also allowed Kate Lamond, a gregarious woman by nature, to develop a network of ghost friends and acquaintances; a network that was growing ever larger as contacts made contacts made contacts.

Ernest liked to affect an air of gruff indifference about Kate’s irregular visits (determined by her husband’s whims and academic needs). In life she was exactly the sort of forthright, overfamiliar member of the opposite sex he would have avoided like the plague. But death can change a man. Kate was right – ghosts embraced anything that broke the tedium and so – dammit – he’d actually grown to quite like the woman. Not that he would ever admit that to her. And, given the chance, he’d still prefer to be able to read Cicero, Shakespeare and Byron once more. Probably.

“You know it’s not actually my death day,” said Ernest. 

“No, that’s Friday,“ replied Kate.

Ernest was always impressed how she retained so much trivial information in her head; she wasn’t an academic but her ability for recall was capacious. He must have let slip the date of his death at some point in the past; he wasn’t sure when, but Kate Lamond had clearly filed it away.

“But I can’t rely on him…” Kate nodded towards a reading desk where her husband was hunched over a dry-looking tome, “coming on the exact day, can I?”

Donald, unaware eyes were upon him, erupted into a rattling cough that shook his whole body.

“Aside from anything else,“ Kate continued, “He might not make it to Friday.”

She laughed and Ernest joined in politely, but he knew she worried about her husband’s health, and what might happen to her should he die. The rules governing such events in the afterlife were notoriously fluid. Would she become a free spirit? Would she fade out of existence? Would he become a ghost or skip this step as most of the dead did, and head straight for heaven, hell or oblivion?

“You know what?” said Kate. “I’m going to make your death day a new tradition.”

“Oh, please don’t,” groaned Ernest. “I may be dead but I still have some pride.”

“Nonsense. I’ve already got some great ideas for next year. Don’t worry. I know you like all that classy, highbrow stuff. Like Andrew Lloyd Webber.”

“Andrew who?”

“When did you die again?”

“1958, as I’m sure you know.”

“Ah, yes. Before Cats, then.”

He was pretty sure cats had been around long before he’d died but he decided not to pursue that line of thought.

“But why celebrate my death day? Why not my birthday? That would be considerably less ghoulish.”

“I don’t know your birthday.”

He’d clearly never let slip that bit of information.

“If you let me know,” she carried on, “we could celebrate that as well.”

“In that case,” said Ernest. “I’ll make sure I never let you know. I don’t believe I could endure your special surprises twice a year.”

Twelve months almost to the day later, Ernest recalled those words as a gangly, stubble-chinned actor of meagre talent stood before him, fumbling his way through a half-remembered version of Hamlet’s most famous speech (ghosts being unable to refer to the original text). After a few minutes, Ernest could stand no more.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!” he exploded.

“I… I’m sorry?” stammered the actor, his mouth agape.

“You’re getting it all wrong!” Ernest sighed. “It’s not ‘From where no one comes back from’ – it’s ‘from whose bourn no traveller returns’. I don’t think you’ve got a line right since ‘to be or not to be,’ and you gave every impression that you thought that was a question about what type of pencil you should be using.”

“Now, hang on mate…“ spluttered the actor. It was no use. Ernest was in full flow, and spent the next ten minutes laying into the guy’s lazy delivery, poor acting ability, slovenly stance and inappropriate use of the glottal stop, a linguistic abomination that had absolutely no place in Shakespeare, not even a – shudder – modernised version.

Ernest was still listing the guy’s crimes against theatre when the ghost stomped out of the library.

“Not a fan, then?” Kate emerged through the stacks. “Apparently the kids all loved him on YouTube.”

“You what.”

“A thing you wouldn’t like, Professor,“ said Kate. “Too many glottal stops, probably.”

“That person was utterly ghastly. Is that really the best you could come up with? I think we’ll skip death day next year, in that case.”

“But it looked to me like you were having a whale of a time.”

“You are deluded, madam. I loathed every second.”

“Of his performance, yes,” said Kate, a glint in her eye. “But you were loving giving him a dressing down.”

“I was…” Ernest began protesting. Then he stopped. And pondered. And wondered if Kate was right. Having a good old venting session had been… fun. 

“Go on, admit it,” said Kate. “You enjoyed that.”

Ernest, of course, would admit nothing of the sort. But they both knew she was right.

“Happy death day, hairy otter,” teased Kate.

Ernest, against his better judgement, began to look forward to his annual death days after that. Most of Kate’s surprises were just as delightfully awful. There was the alleged “leading“ art critic who purported to deliver an appreciation of the library’s various paintings but who hardly knew his Pre-Raphaelites from his paint by numbers. Another year there was the rag-tag a capella group who sang Gregorian chants in such a discordant dirge that Ernest couldn’t decide what they were less familiar with: each other, or the concept of Gregorian chants. A former pianist turned up for another death day and performed the finger movements for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5. – forty minutes of him waggling his digits in mid-air while Ernest and Kate tried not to look at each other for fear of bursting into laughter. The less said about the mime artist the year after the better.

Ernest thoroughly enjoyed hating them all.

Then one year, after a particularly excruciating Rabbie Burns tribute act had shuffled out of the library, Kate turned to Ernest and said, “A little bird tells me that next year’s death day is a very special one.”

Ernest didn’t understand. “I“m sorry?”

“It’s your seventieth death day.”

“Is it? I don’t keep count.” This was true.

“It is indeed. And you must know why that’s special.”

“Um….”

“You were seventy when you died.”

“Was I really? It’s so long ago…”

“So that means, this time next year you will have been dead as long as you were alive.”

Ernest thought about this state of affairs briefly and wondered if Kate thought he should be having some post-existential crisis, but decided he didn’t really care.

“That,“ continued Kate, “makes it a very unique death day.”

“Something can’t be very unique. It’s either unique or it isn’t.”

“And so, I’m going to arrange something very unique to celebrate it. Next year I’ll make it something I know you’re going to adore. Not something so bad you’ll enjoy moaning about it. Something that’ll really, truly blow you away, Professor.”

“You already know what it is, don’t you?”

“I’ve been planning it for years.”

Kate didn’t mention her special seventieth death day surprise again for quite a few months, but as the date drew near, she was clearly growing excited.

“I want this one to go perfectly,” she told Ernest. “The biggest stumbling block will be when his nibs over there…”

She nodded towards her husband, who was browsing in the cryptozoology section and coughing so loudly she had to raise her voice…

“…decides he wants to come to the library. It would be fantastic if he comes in on the actual day, but it’s not likely. I couldn’t be that lucky. Sorry, I mean, you couldn’t be that lucky. If not, would you prefer the surprise before or after the actual day? Of course, you could have it on the actual day if you don’t mind me not being there. I don’t have to be there. That can be easily arranged. But I…”

“Mrs Lamond.”

“Yes.”

“You’re babbling.”

Indeed, she was. And Ernest thought it was very sweet. This surprise clearly meant a lot to her.

“Of course, you must be there,” said Ernest. “If your husband doesn’t come in on my death day I would very much like my surprise to be on the next visit after my death day.”

Kate beamed like the Sun had taken up residence inside her skull.

Ernest didn’t see Kate again before his death day. This wasn’t unusual. Douglas Lamond was well advanced in years now and not as mobile as he once was and Kate’s visits had been growing less frequent for the last couple of years.

When she didn’t turn up on teh actual day either Ernest remained upbeat. It would have been nice, but he’d never really expected the stars to align so perfectly. Besides, having to wait, not knowing when his surprise would finally come, simply increased his sense of anticipation.

He was still anticipating a week later.

And the week after that.

By the week after that, he was seriously concerned.

“Have you heard anything about Ka… about Mrs Lamond?” he finally asked another of the library’s regular ghost patrons, a skinny guy in motorcycle leathers who skulked around the archive newspaper section and rarely said much. He didn’t say anything at all that day. He just shrugged, then went back to reading an ancient copy of the Telegraph over somebody’s shoulder.

Ernest didn’t know if he wanted a definitive answer, anyway. He feared he knew what it would be. So, he told himself that Douglas was likely either ill and bedridden, possibly in hospital, with Kate forced to remain by his side.

No, no, no, Ernest decided. Douglas had simply decided to take an extended holiday. Didn’t Kate once say they had relations in New Zealand? Or was it Newcastle? It began with New. Damn, he wished he had her total recall.

But after another agonising month dragged by, Ernest reluctantly conceded that another explanation was far more likely. Douglas had passed away, and Kate’s afterlife had come to an end.

That was the usual fate for ghosts like Kate. While ghosts tethered to places and free spirits simply faded over time, ghosts tethered to people tended simply to vanish when the person anchoring them died.

A few tethered ghosts did go on to become free spirits, but the percentage was tiny. And if Kate had become a free spirit, Ernest was sure she would have paid him a visit by now. “So, no,” he told himself with his signature mid-century, middle-England, middle-class stoicism. “That’s the last I’ve seen of Mrs Lamond.”

While Ernest tried to maintain a pragmatic acceptance of Kate’s fate, as the months wore on, he felt her absence ever more keenly – an aching slab of absence in the shifting mists of the afterlife. She may have been infuriating at times, but the library was a drab and soulless place without her visits to look forward to. It was not as if he was going to get a decent conversation out of motorcycle leathers guy.

But death goes on, and Ernest settled back into his pre-Kate existence, reading over other people’s shoulders, mentally correcting the grammar in the poorly-written newspaper journalism (“Fewer, not less, for heaven’s sake!”) and being blandly cordial but prudently indifferent towards any new ghost visitors to the library, in the hope they wouldn’t decide to regale him with their life – and/or death – stories. 

He never did ask Kate how she died. Neither did she force the story on him. Ah, he missed her. 

Shortly before his seventy-first death day, Ernest was on the hunt for a library patron reading something interesting he could sneak a peek at. Taking his usual short cut through a stack of books on the etymology of economics, he emerged into the aisle beyond, and came to a sudden, skidding halt. 

Before him stood an imposing ghost, with undeniable presence. Which was especially impressive considering that he was dressed in a long, white night shirt and a pillbox nightcap perched atop his wild, curly black hair. 

“Good day, sir,” said the ghost, giving a languid bow. Rising again he took a couple of steps towards Ernest, who noticed that he had a pronounced limp.

Ernest thought he could have stepped straight out of A Christmas Carol except there was a mischievous glint in his eyes and bonhomie to his smile that the Professor rarely associated with Dickens’s dour characters. From his attire he’d clearly been dead a very long time, and yet there was no sign of him fading. Somebody who’s still famous among the living, then, thought Ernest.

The ghost continued, “Would I be correct to assume that I have the pleasure of addressing the most enlightened Professor Ernest Ellington?”

“Well, I don’t know about enlightened, but yes, I am Professor Ellington. And you are?”

“Someone with a message for you from New Hampshire.”

“New Hampshire? I don’t know anybody in New Ha… oh, hang on.” A wild thought struck Ernest. No, surely not? 

“She says, ‘Happy death day, hairy otter’.”

Ernest’s jaw dropped. The library seemed to fade around him and he felt an odd sense of vertigo, as if somebody were stirring his ashes with a pencil.

Not New Zealand. Not Newcastle. New Hampshire. Douglas had relations in New Hampshire!

“You… you’re my death day surprise?”

“I am indeed.”

“So, Kate’s still in the afterlife? She hasn’t moved on?”

“She was still lingering but a few weeks ago, before I returned to Europe. She bade me to look in on you as she said you were a ‘fan’.”

Ernest snorted with good-humoured derision. “Fan”, indeed. That was definitely the kind of ghastly term Kate would use.

“I wouldn’t refer to myself as a ‘fan’ of anything,“ retorted Ernest. “But now I am curious. Who exactly are you, sir?”

If Kate’s previous form was anything to go by, the fellow was probably a professional village idiot, a former morris dancer or an actor who’d once been an understudy in a Kazakh production of Les Misérables.

“My given name is George, but nobody calls me that,” said the ghost before leaving a dramatic pause, during which he straightened, as if to deliver a Shakespearean monologue. Ernest braced himself for the worst. “I’m universally known as Byron.”

Ernest laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Lord Byron?”

“The very one.”

“You’re serious?”

“Rarely. But in this case, most assuredly.”

Surely this had to be be another of Kate’s little jokes – some ghost she’d met who just happened to look a bit like the dying Byron depicted in paintings, and who would soon launch into an excruciating recital of Don Juan.

And yet…

“‘The great object of life is sensation…’” Ernest quoted.

“‘…to feel that we exist, even though in death’,” the ghost misquoted. “Are you testing me, sir? I am hurt.”

The ghost had replaced “pain” with “death” in the quote. Earnest was certain that hadn’t been a mistake.

This was Byron, he was sure of it now. History’s most famous free spirit, now literally a free spirit. And if anyone could charm one of England’s greatest poets into serving as a messenger boy, then it was Kate

And so Ernest found himself mere inches away from one of his greatest literary heroes, in an exclusive audience with a man whose work he’d studied and admired and theorised about. There should have been a million questions he needed to ask him about his life and his writing. Instead, there was only one thing Ernest wanted know.

“So is Kate ever coming home?”

© Dave Golder 2020

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