Don’t Come Crying To Me

By: Barrie Darke
September 11, 2008

MELISSA HAD A friend, Nadine, who roused herself to anger at the smallest things. Melissa knew it was her on the other end of the phone simply by the pause – it was the pause while the gun turrets turned.

‘You wake up extra special this morning, did you?’ Nadine asked.

The main thing about Nadine’s anger was that it was never to be taken too seriously. ‘I wasn’t special or unspecial,’ Melissa said. ‘Just normal.’ She hadn’t been in long from work, and had sat down for a few minutes before seeing to her tea.

‘Did you go home in a shining carriage?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘It better be something like that.’

Nadine could keep this sort of thing going for an hour, and while it could be enjoyable, Melissa was hungry. ‘Whatever I did,’ she said, ‘I did it to annoy you. I had it planned. All day, I’ve been looking forward to it, and now it’s worked I’m ecstatic.’ She worked in an architect’s office, and the truth was that this conversation was easily the most interesting part of her day.

‘I could just about believe that.’

‘You should.’

‘Stick two fingers up next time. It’s more of an insult.’

‘All right. Now’d be a good time to explain in a bit more detail.’

Nadine had driven past a bus stop on her way home from work, and Melissa had been there. She had slowed down, but Melissa had only acknowledged her by slowly turning her head away. She left another pause.

Melissa wondered aloud why she would be at that bus stop, when it was halfway across the city centre and for buses heading away from her street; and why she would’ve been there at that time, when she got out of work half an hour earlier. Nadine’s anger cooled quickly, though the humour that replaced it usually still had a few hot threads. ‘Well you’ve got a double, and I pity the poor twat.’

They ended the conversation with everyday talk, then Melissa made her tea, not thinking about it beyond the idle dreaming of what her double’s life would be like – if someone had done a study of it, the way they did with identical twins who’d led separate lives. Probably the results wouldn’t be so interesting. She also spent a while rummaging in her brain for that German sounding word for a double, and it popped into her mind when she was watching the telly before going to bed: doppelganger.

At work the next day, and on the way home, she considered she’d forgotten about it, but when the phone rang at about the same time as it had the day before, she knew it would be Nadine with an update: she had confidence in this outcome the way a master craftsman knew his joints would stay firm for a century.

‘It’s quite something,’ Nadine said. ‘Quite amazing, really. I think she’s even got some clothes the same as you.’

Melissa laughed down the phone. ‘That’s taking it too far, that.’

Nadine rose to the challenge and described what her doppelganger had been wearing: a pink t-shirt with a faked capture from a speed camera on it. Melissa had such a top, bought from a charity shop in a straitened time some years before; she hadn’t worn it in a while, but she was sure she hadn’t redonated it or thrown it out.

‘Hang around a bit tomorrow and I’ll pick you up, we’ll go past her,’ Nadine said.

Melissa was going to decline, since it was a ridiculous exercise, but instead she said, ‘All right then.’

After putting the phone down she went through her wardrobe and checked for the pink top. It was still there. Feeling more than a little stupid, she slipped it off its hanger and pressed it to her nose. It didn’t particularly smell of anything or anyone.

That night, and through the next day, it was hard to convince herself that this was just an interesting coincidence, a small anecdote in the making. There was even a small chance that it was something better left alone – sometimes, when she thought about it again after thinking about something else for a while, her heart gave out a ripple. Which isn’t to say that she rang Nadine to tell her she would give it a miss. People in the office commented on how quiet she was, but she was quiet most of the time anyway.

She had half an hour to kill at the end of the working day, which she spent drifting round the shops, a habit she had recently fallen out of. It was a bright, cool day, and she walked round without any purpose, choosing the shops to step into at random, in a daze, slightly disassociated, though she thought she had willed this on herself. Still, she also knew that part of her was looking out for the doppelganger with every step she took, though she considered she saw absolutely no one who looked like her in any particular, infact it was probably below the national average. After a while, she wanted her brain to shake like it was a wet dog.

Nadine was usually late for things, but this time she made a superhuman effort. She was trying not to show any excitement, though it was difficult for her to hide any emotion, so her smile was fat and her laugh bubbling. There was no way Melissa could reach that pitch, which Nadine picked up on straight away, taking the piss mercilessly. She said she was going to push Melissa out at the bus stop, take her double in; she couldn’t make a worse mess of her life than Melissa had.

The traffic was as thick as a dinosaur tail, but they still reached the bus stop quicker than Melissa would’ve liked. She needed more preparation time, though how she would’ve filled it remained obscure. Nadine kept saying, ‘She won’t be there, that’s how these things always work,’ and this gave Melissa the idea that, if they saw her, she would pretend she hadn’t. This was a product of Nadine’s disordered, obsessive mind.

But she was there, and they both quietened down and stared at her as the traffic glided them past. She didn’t appear to be aware of them, but there was maybe something too conspicuous in the way she wasn’t. Melissa was hoping to find points of dissimilarity, no matter how tiny, but she had to concur that even the hairstyle and waiting posture matched her own, and she was wearing clothes that Melissa recognised: a top she still wore, a skirt she didn’t, and shoes she’d had a few years before then thrown out when the heel broke.

‘Shout something,’ Nadine urged her, but she wouldn’t, and Nadine didn’t either. She laughed and went so far as to slap the steering wheel, and then they were out of sight. ‘You should’ve got out and stood next to her,’ Nadine said. ‘She would’ve shit herself.’

Melissa wasn’t so sure about that.

*

Nadine dropped her off, didn’t have the time to come in. Melissa cooked some tea, more than half of which ended up scraped into the bin, then she sat blindly in front of the telly for a while. The news passed. She waited till after the rush hour would’ve finished, then got ready to go out. On her way, as an afterthought, she slipped a photo of her parents, who lived a few hundred miles away, into her handbag.

The bus stop was awkward to get to, requiring two buses, but both of them came on time and the roads were virtually empty; they hardly even stopped to pick people up. She tried to look out of the window, but the sky was just beginning to darken, and all she could see was her own faint reflection in shadowy golds. She looked down at her fingers as they rolled and folded her bus ticket. They’d had superstitions as a child, she remembered vaguely, some arrangement of numbers relating to the day you’d get married, or something more morbid on Halloween.

She got off, fiddling with her bag, her jacket. The other stop was across the road and up a little way. Melissa’s eyes weren’t great, but as she neared and it became clear, there was no surprise but still a jolt. She crossed the road with more distraction than was wise.

This time her doppelganger was looking at her. She was smiling, though not one of their welcoming smiles. The jaw was set too hard, the chin jutting a little too brusquely. It was the smile Melissa adopted in the office when one of them seemed about to sidle up to a dirty joke.

Melissa nodded at her and got an identical nod back.

‘Let’s not do it like that,’ Melissa said.

‘You’re right,’ she said. The voice was hers, as far as Melissa could tell, a slightly mimsier version of how it sounded in her own head.

‘What’s your name?’ Melissa asked, not knowing how else to start.

‘You hardly need to ask that,’ she said. ‘Call me Anne, if you like.’ Anne was her middle name, which she never used, never told anyone.

Melissa took out the picture of her parents. ‘Do you know their names?’ she asked.

‘Pauline, Mark,’ she said, eyes bright, ready for more. ‘They live in Scotland now.’

Melissa sat next to her. There was another dim reflection, this time in the shelter, shot through with rare headlights. Anyone passing would think them worth a double-take, maybe a lecherous thought, nothing more than that.

‘Should I be more or less scared than I am?’ Melissa asked after a while.

‘That’s a good question.’ She nodded slowly. ‘I would say, less scared, in most ways. Most, but not all.’

‘All right,’ Melissa said. ‘That’ll do.’

‘It’ll be fine, though.’

Melissa gave her a good look, though it was hard to do, could perhaps have taken years off her life. The resemblance was absolute exact, though she thought her doppelganger looked like she did when she was tired, strained. Whatever else she was at that moment, Melissa herself wasn’t tired.

‘What are you then?’ she asked, turning away again.

‘What would you say I am?’

‘Don’t play … I have to be up for work in the morning.’ She was unsure why she added that.

‘Sorry.’

Melissa reached out to touch her, and wasn’t surprised when her hand passed through her. Her hand was cold, enough on its own to make her shiver.

‘You know it anyway, don’t you? I’m your ghost. I’m sorry to say it so bluntly.’

‘Oh … don’t be sorry,’ Melissa said. It was easy to say things, harder to inject some sense into them.

‘Your ghost-to-be, if you want accuracy.’

‘We might as well have accuracy.’

She chuckled. ‘Will I just talk, you just listen?’

‘Yes,’ Melissa said.

‘I’m going to have to be brusque,’ she said, using a word Melissa knew but didn’t think she’d ever used. ‘I haven’t got much … vibrancy. Because, for obvious reasons, I’m not the full idea of a ghost while … you’re …’

‘I’m still …’

‘Mmm. And I don’t want to be. This is why I’ve managed to get here now, to see you.’

‘Why did you appear to Nadine first? Why not straight to me?’

‘It’d be harder for you to dismiss me as a figment of two people’s imaginations, wouldn’t it?’

‘It would, yes, you’re right.’

‘If you’d seen me coming towards you – under the bedclothes with you.’

‘That’s right as well.’

‘So. What I’ve got to say ...’

‘Go on, sorry, I’m listening.’

‘You’re on a bad path. Right? It’s heading towards … me being full. Right?’

‘All right.’

‘Do you know why?’

Melissa shook her head, an exaggerated gesture that made her think of being a child at school not knowing the answer to a long division question.

‘It’s loneliness. Sorry, I have to be quick – feeling emotion usually would be good for me, but not in these circumstances. The laws are all about-face.’

‘Go on then. Loneliness, you’re saying.’

‘Loneliness. It might be all right for now, but it won’t for much longer. It’ll come over you all at once. It only takes a few bad nights to … you wouldn’t get through them.’

A car went by, an old man in it, concentrating hard on his driving. ‘I didn’t think you’d be good news.’

‘I am, in a way.’

‘When am I due to die then?’

‘I don’t know exactly. And I probably wouldn’t tell you if I did. I’m here to stop you, anyway.’ She laughed. ‘Stop being lonely. There you are, that’s my advice, now goodbye, good luck.’ She laughed for a while, not a healthy sound, then closed her eyes for a few seconds to bolster her energy. ‘That’s it though. Don’t be lonely. Fall in love with someone. That’s the best way of avoiding it. Even just being with someone, having some laughs, would be enough. Be open to that sort of thing.’ She laughed again. ‘I’m not saying become a slag or anything, but …’

‘If that’s what it takes …’

‘Bite the bullet.’

They shared a laugh, one that rose and fell at the same time, and therefore drew another in its wake.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got to fade away now.’

‘Can I just ask …?’

‘Quickly then.’

‘Are you in Heaven?’

‘It’s not like that. It’s just a realm with good and bad.’

‘Is it preferable to here …?’

She had to give that some consideration. ‘Not always.’

‘Are you just saying that to keep me here?’

She smiled. ‘Not wholeheartedly.’

‘Is our grandmother there?’

‘She is. Though family doesn’t mean anything up there. You have new connections. Sorry, but I’m going to have to …’

Melissa nodded. She stood up, had another long look. ‘Will I see you again?’

‘Only if things go wrong. I’ll come and collect you.’

‘Well. That’d be nice.’

They laughed in the same way again, then she said, ‘Go on. Don’t see me fade. It’s embarrassing. Good night.’

‘Night,’ Melissa said. She crossed the road for the bus home, but couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder halfway. She saw the fade, and it wasn’t so embarrassing.



She thought it would take on the aspects of a dream, become hazy and dismissible, but it didn’t. The next day it still felt vital and crucial, like the big moments of childhood and adolescence: certain Christmas mornings, first kiss, first rush of love, first heartbreak, first orgasm. She wondered if this happened to lots of people, but was one of those things that no one dared mention. As a teenager, she’d thought adult life would be full of such things.

There’d been flurries of sociability in Melissa’s life – University years being a drunken high point – but nights out with raucous company were something she needed less of now she was in her late twenties. She didn’t miss it, whatever that might have said about the passing of youth.

And it was two years since her last relationship had ended in a terminal drift. He had worked in a different office in their block, and he’d been very nice, though no ball of fire in any department, and she expected he would say much the same about her. They’d lived together for a while, but seemed even more apart when they did so.

There’d been gaps between relationships of a similar length before then, but they’d never been much longer, and she’d never been closing in on thirty. She supposed it was worrying, if she sat and thought hard about it. She supposed she could be called lonely, but surely you could only be called that if it bothered you. She supposed, as had been said, the collapse could come over her at any time, that something she wasn’t even aware she was kidding herself about could reveal itself as monstrous – but she felt no wind from its wings just yet.

She rang Nadine anyway. Nadine was part of a gang of girls who liked their binge drinking throughout the weekend, and Melissa invited herself along that Friday. She had been out with them a handful of times before, the last being Nadine’s birthday, and she had a so-so time, being able to melt into the background while some of the bigger personalities related their latest emotional disasters. She didn’t offer much herself, which would be resented if she saw them regularly, she knew. She wondered if her ghost knew about loneliness-in-crowds

Every couple of days there was something new to fill Nadine’s mind – she was now involved in a hilarious office feud – so the woman at the bus stop wasn’t mentioned, not even as ‘one of those things.’ It was likely she’d forgotten all about it. Even if she hadn’t, Melissa didn’t think she’d connect it with her coming out for a drink.

That first Friday, the first time in a while Melissa had had a drink, she found herself buckled into a taxi at nine o’ clock, and only just managed to get out of it at her house before she vomited onto a lamp-post. She spent Saturday in bed, and Sunday feeling sorry for herself.

The second Friday she paced herself a little better, and lasted the whole seven or so hours. That night there were fights, stolen handbags, and one of their number being struck a glancing blow by a bus. Someone recommended having a pint of water before going to bed, which would cut her hangover by four fifths, and to her amazement it worked.

Most of the girls who weren’t in relationships, which was most of the girls, had one night stands. Melissa didn’t think this would do her much good, so avoided it, though it was obvious Nadine knew she was on the lookout for a man. She had no faith in Melissa’s outgoing nature, so on the third Friday she arranged for them to meet a group of men she knew. One of these in particular was angled towards Melissa, a pretty, sandy-blonde called Gerry.

She didn’t think it would come to anything, not the first time it was tried, and she hardly believed it when it seemed to be working out. Gerry had a line in self-deprecating humour, which was a rarity in the testosterone-clamp of most of the bars they visited. He ran his own computer repair service, which was expanding nicely, though he was aware not to spend too much time talking about it. He’d been married in his early twenties, though it hadn’t lasted more than a couple of years, and there weren’t any kids around; he was gracious about his ex-wife, saying they’d been too young, but Melissa got the impression she’d been a bit of a nutcase. He liked the kind of films she wanted to see, and he’d been known to pick up the odd book now and again. His waist size was much as it would have been when he was a teenager, and someone had obviously told him to pay complete attention to a woman when she was talking, even when a frenetic story was being relayed loudly nearby. He looked as mildly uncomfortable as she did about still being in these places at their age.

He rang through the week, and they met for a meal. It was fine. He told some funny stories about being in people’s houses to fix their computers, none of which she could remember the next day. It rained, and he held his jacket over her head. He made no effort to kiss her, and saw her home all the same. All of this would do.

*

She’d been trying to work out if she felt less lonely, but since she hadn’t felt especially lonely to begin with, it was difficult to say. She enjoyed their time together, and it was better, she could see, to have someone than not have someone, though she wondered if losing Gerry, some years down the line, would be the event to steer her towards the pills and the rope; damned if she didn’t and damned if she did. It was hard to say if this was meeting with her ghost’s approval: there was no sign of her, not even the faintest presence when the lights went off and sleep was a while in coming.

Then she met Gerry on a Friday a couple of weeks later. That was the night Melissa had decided she would probably sleep with him, if he didn’t do anything of-putting. It was a shame, then, that he looked a little sweaty when she met him. He kept playing with his hair, and not improving it.

They went for a meal first, and while he sat back and let her speak, he marred the effort by clearly tuning her out now and again. He periodically apologised, blaming pressures of work (the drawbacks of a ‘no fix, no fee’ policy), and waving away her suggestion that they leave it for now, meet up on a better night.

A few more drinks didn’t settle him down as far as she could tell, and she had to admit that a shag probably wouldn’t either, so the chances of him getting one were growing ever more slim. She agreed to go on to a club, though she was in two minds about it. She’d always liked dancing, and that would get her through. She liked the absorption of it, letting her mind loose in the music and the spaceship lights. Gerry leant over and shouted something in her ear now and again, though she couldn’t make out what he was saying. Probably apologies, or pledges to make it up to her the next time.

Afterwards, there was a fast food place, and they managed to get a seat there, cooling down, ears thrumming. She didn’t want anything, but he bought a burger which he couldn’t finish and gave away to a wide-eyed student. Melissa relished some of the sights in the way of someone who knew she wouldn’t be doing this too many more times. They got drawn into far-roaming conversations with others, and soothed some tensions. They exchanged glances between themselves, but she wasn’t sure what was in them.

At close to four in the morning he asked her to join him at the bus stop. He said this was something he often did: he liked to go home on the first bus of the morning, and they could talk in the shelter, let the night slip away. Some of his favourite moments, he said, were watching the sun come up.

She thought it would be good to see the sun come up. She’d done similar things as a student. If it was nice, and if he calmed down as he seemed to think he would, then maybe she would go back with him, though she was tired by now.

When she saw which bus stop he was heading for, she sobered up quickly. She stopped walking. He was a little ahead before he realised, giving her time to take off her shoes. When he turned round, his eyes were half pleading, half blazing. She ran back the way they’d come. She thought he followed for a while, but soon gave up.



She stayed in bed that day, though sleep was impossible. She put some music on, to cover any creaks the house might be making, but then worried that creaks were happening without her knowing it. She got up, busied herself. One job was sorting out some old clothes to take to charity shops, including the pink top. She forced herself to eat, but it was a chore. Gerry didn’t ring.

That evening she went back to the bus stop. It was the time after the shopping had been done, but before the serious drinking started, so the area was clear. Melissa crossed the road, trying to be languid, careless, superior, but most of what she felt was sadness.

Her ghost was weaker still, but anger was compensating for that. She was standing unsteadily in the entrance to the shelter, pointing, trying to spit the words out. That they came in gasps made them worse.

‘You’ll regret it,’ she said. ‘You should’ve let him do it. You’ll see. You’d’ve been better off.’

‘What did his ghost tell him?’ Melissa asked.

‘That’s between them. None of our concern. You just worry about your own life.’

‘I can last awhile longer yet,’ Melissa said.

‘That’s the problem. There’ll be no joy for you.’

‘How can you be like this to me?’

Her ghost faltered a little at that, but managed a recovery. ‘Don’t come crying to me when your life is miserable,’ she said.

‘I can hardly hear you,’ Melissa said.

‘You can hear me say this, at least. You’ll die in a worse way. It’s true.’ Her face was wrenched into ugliness the way Melissa’s never was, unless that was how she looked during nightmares in which she came close to dying.

This time she stayed to watch the fade away. It made her heart sore in unique ways, but then her bus was coming. She ran across the road, and just caught it.