Читать книгу A Test of Patients - Martin Atkinson - Страница 9

A double measure of spirits

I’d just come downstairs after refreshing myself following a busy day and was going out to the kennels to check my in-patients before retiring for the evening, when I heard the raised voices of the nurses coming from the staff room. “That’s it”, I heard Holly, the head nurse, scream from the next room, “I’m leaving. He’s done it again”. A few minutes earlier we’d finished evening surgery and I’d asked Holly if she’d like to come up to the flat for a drink after we’d tidied up. She made her excuses and said she was going out to clean the kennels and would let me know later.

As a newly qualified vet I had, shall we say, a bit of a reputation amongst the ladies. Surely, I thought, asking Holly upstairs for a drink hadn’t transgressed the boundaries of decency so much that it required such an outcry.

I could hear the other staff muttering amongst themselves about similar experiences. “He touched me on my bottom once”, squeaked Tina, the rather shapely receptionist. “And when I went up there, the door slammed and I was locked in”, added Vicky, the pretty junior nurse. So I waited a while before I dared show my face next door. Holly looked like she’d seen a ghost and was about to be revived with a cup of hot sweet tea or something stronger from the senior partner’s stash in the (not so secret) cupboard.

She was now beginning to calm down and, seeing the guilty and somewhat perplexed look on my face, started to explain, “It’s Old Tom we’re on about; he touched me on the shoulder again in the kennels”, she stuttered. I’d only been in the practice a short time and hadn’t yet heard about Tom, the kennel stalker. This was going to be the sort of story that one should ideally be listening to ensconced in a comfy armchair, armed with a glass of whisky, in front of roaring log fire, on a frosty winter’s night with a storm raging outside, but the dispensary room on a wet November evening would have to substitute for now.

It transpired that Old Tom was a practice caretaker who had lived in the surgery flat for many years. He had passed away mysteriously one night after being sacked by the senior partner. Suicide was feared; possibly more out of conscience than reality as there was no evidence to suspect this, but henceforth his ghostly presence allegedly manifested itself from time to time around the practice.

The nurses had long refused any invitation to come upstairs, but I had believed the senior partner’s assertion; that this was to do with avoiding the advances of overly amorous young male assistants.

Vain thoughts quickly flashed through my mind that, if it wasn’t just because they were trying to avoid me, then I might have a better chance with a different approach, but I was jerked back to reality as the tale unfolded. On several occasions nurses had gone up to the flat and had experienced some manifestation of this apparition. All said that they heard footsteps from time to time from upstairs, and when they went to investigate no-one was to be seen, not even the surgery cat.

Not one, however, had ever dared to go up the second flight of stairs to the loft room that Tom had actually lived and died in. It had remained empty since the day he passed away. All the nurses believed they had detected the presence of the kennel stalker and were genuinely frightened. Being a bold young man and probably hoping to increase my allure in the eyes of the female staff, I went out into the kennels to investigate but, as expected, all was normal.

I tried to talk to the partners about the spook, but the stories were summarily dismissed and there never seemed to be any time to discuss the matter. As a scientist and a sceptic, I refuse to believe in the supernatural and I adhere to the school that thinks there has to be a rational explanation for everything.

Surely the nurse’s experiences could be explained by natural phenomena and an overripe imagination. I had heard bumps in the night and found objects in places other than where I thought I had left them, but had dismissed these occurrences as the vibrations from the railway tunnel below, creaking and settling of an old building and my oversight (the Borrower’s syndrome).

A few nights later, I’d just dropped off to sleep when I was awoken by a series of bumps and crashes from outside my room. Previously I would probably have ignored these but, with the nurse’s accounts fresh in my mind, I leapt out of bed to investigate. I was not scared, I still don’t believe in ghosts, but if something was going on, or someone was playing tricks, I wanted to find out what was happening. Also, there was the vain hope that Holly had accepted my invitation after all!

I rushed out of the bedroom onto the landing and there was a picture, which had up until that point been firmly fixed to the wall, lying broken on the floor. I continued on into the living room and there, several ornaments (or what passes for such in the flat of an impoverished assistant) had once again apparently traded places. A window was open and the curtain fluttered in the draught, but one look out at the vertical drop to the street below showed no living creature had entered or left this way. The door out to the staircase remained locked from the inside and a comprehensive search of the flat revealed nothing else. Despite my scepticism, this was beginning to strain even my rational thought processes, and my resolve to believe that there must be a logical explanation was starting to weaken.

Maybe I’d forgotten that I’d opened the window and had left it ajar and maybe vibrations from a particularly rickety train had dislodged the bric-a-brac. Still full of bravado, I decided to overcome any previous reticence and to pay a visit to Old Tom’s room to see if I could find anything that would throw more light on the story of the ghost. I unlocked the door to my flat, but as I began to climb the stairs, something very odd started to happen to me. Like in a dream – where your body just won’t move when you want to run – my legs refused to obey my commands to walk forwards.

The harder I tried, the more some invisible force seemed to be holding me back, but slowly I inched upward until I stood outside the loft room door. I reached out to touch the handle, but my arms would not function. I became aware of a sudden icy chill and all at once my courage and rational thought abandoned me. I turned tail and half ran, half stumbled downstairs back into the (relative) safety of my flat.

My refusal to believe that there was any supernatural force at work was being stretched to the limit and I was struggling to think of any rational explanation for what I had just experienced. Sure, the cold air could have channelled up the staircase from the still-open window or the chill was a physiological response to fear, but what force was acting to incapacitate my limbs?

If you’re expecting there to be spectacular finale to this story, where the ghost of Old Tom finally revealed itself, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I never plucked up the courage to visit Tom’s room again and, in future, ignored the tendencies for my objects d’art to have a mind of their own. I did finally manage an all too brief encounter with Holly at the Christmas party, but it was soon time to move on to another practice. I later heard that the senior partner had died somewhat prematurely, but I suspect that it had more to do with over-indulgence with the spirits in his secret cupboard rather than anything to do with the spirit of Old Tom. However, this was not the end of my unworldly experience. I just moved on to another.

My next practice was a branch surgery, run with super efficiency by an argumentative and formidable receptionist/nurse who had been there since the dark ages and who ruled ‘her’ vets with an iron fist. I suspect that she not been invited up to the assistant’s quarters too frequently!

One day, while we sat arguing about some inconsequential matter in the waiting room during a quiet afternoon surgery, I thought I saw someone the height of a small child walk past the window. Expecting the door to open and the child to come in bearing an abandoned fledgling or similar and, half anticipating having to issue the eulogy on leaving wildlife to fend for itself, I was surprised when no-one entered. I rose to my feet to look outside but there was nobody about. “You’re wasting your time looking”, muttered the ogre, “that’s just Millie”. “But there’s no-one there”, I interjected. “Well of course not”, came the reply, “Millie died several years ago, but her ghost still comes to visit us”.

Apparently, Millie was the daughter of a previous assistant and had frequently visited the surgery as she loved to see the animals. Unfortunately, Millie had developed a particularly aggressive form of leukaemia and had died at a tragically tender age. According to the ogre, Millie’s spirit was often spotted around the surgery. Even now, after the practice has been modernised since I bought it and the ogre has long been replaced with more modern generations of veterinary nurses, the legend of the ghost has been passed on, so whenever anyone sees something out of the corner of their eye, or we think someone has come into the waiting room but it is empty, we will still joke, “it’s only Millie”.

Nurses have come and gone and I remain as sceptical as ever, being dismissive of the imagined shapes that pass by the window or the shadows I see in the waiting room, as tricks of the wind or the light. But those staff members who claim to be more receptive about these things believe they have really seen the fleeting form of a little girl. The trouble is that the sceptic will always look for a logical explanation for why things happen, but the believer sees them as reinforcement of their beliefs (a bit like religion and homeopathy in a way).

Time passed and we had a new telephone system fitted, but as with most new electronic devices there were some teething problems. However, one bug the engineers just can’t seem to iron out is the persistent paging of the clinic from the surgery flat. The adjoining house is not occupied now apart from the downstairs office and kitchen during the day, but upstairs, the flat is still used for storage and by locums and by me or a nurse for an occasional stopover to check hospitalised patients.

I’d like to embellish the story by telling you that when we pick up the receiver we can hear the disembodied voice of a small girl, but although the first rule of writing is to never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I cannot lie and I have to confess that the line is always silent. Each time I’ve investigated the phenomenon of the mystery pager, of course, there’s been no-one there. With all this, along with the movement sensor in the flat which sets off the alarm periodically for no apparent reason, the nurses are now too spooked to go upstairs alone or to stay in the flat overnight if they’re on call. But it can’t be to avoid my amorous advances any more – I’m far too old for that!