The Life and Afterlife of Charlie Brackwood (The Brackwood Series Book 1) (9 page)

Chapter Nine

In the days that followed I kept my promise to myself to explore the forest I had seen from my vantage point on the peak of the mountain.  I had been staying with Gran and Gramps while I decided where I wanted my own house to be and in what style.

While walking through the quiet, peaceful wooded area I felt a strong sense of home that was completely unexpected. I immediately felt at peace.  I realised that I was craving the calm and tranquillity that came with being in the presence of nature once again.  No noise.  No crowds.  Just blue sky and greenery.  My mind was made up. No huge house was going to be built on the long street for me.  I was going to live in this forest amongst the things I’d loved most about Earth.  My plan was to change my surroundings so that they resembled what I’d had there.  A piece of my history. A reminder of my past.

The search was over.  It was not a house I was about to build but something else, something familiar from my past.  Some might call it a childhood notion but for me it was a lot more than that.  It was a connection to my former life.  I was going to recreate memories of my time on Earth by building something that had become second nature to me over the years.   A treehouse.

After walking around the vast wilderness for what felt like days I finally settled on the perfect tree for my future home.  Just the thought of the impending project was enough to improve my state of mind.  I was a hard worker and enjoyed keeping busy.  I was only ever happy when in the midst of a project or two.  Lucy would often tease me about it but sometimes I’d catch her watching me in my workshop.  She’d giggle as she told me how absorbed I had become in my work.  So absorbed that I hadn’t noticed her watching me for over an hour.

The treehouse was built by hand and was the largest I had ever created.  During its construction I began slowly to regain pieces of my identity.  The familiar process of constructing something that had become so important to me on Earth soothed my soul and I never wanted the construction process to end.  I found myself dragging it out  to prolong the pleasant feeling of nostalgia.  Over the years I would add to its design, giving myself further projects that would, in their turn, satisfy my craving for the familiar. 

Naturally, the house was made of wood, which allowed it to blend in nicely with its surroundings as well as giving me some privacy.  The treehouse eventually became so big that it encompassed a number of trees and had various rope bridges that led to look-out points and zip lines.     

The child in me felt the desire to build a home that injected a sense of fun into any soul passing through its doors.  Which is also why I decided against the idea of a traditional staircase.  Instead I installed a wooden helter-skelter-style slide that was hidden in the fat trunk of an old tree in the main body of the treehouse.     

Throughout the trunk round holes were punched into the wood and acted like windows.  On particularly sunny days the sunlight bounced off the highly varnished wood of the slide, giving it a fantastical, fairy-tale quality.  The main house had many windows and was round in outline. I designed it this way so that I could see all around the forest and marvel at the beauty that surrounded me.  Even the roof had small windows that acted like spy holes and granted me access to the stars that shone in the night sky, so similar to the ones I had gazed at in the Earth's atmosphere.  It almost made me feel as though Lucy and I were sleeping under the same sky rather than accepting the grim reality that we resided in two completely different worlds.

My home was bizarre, to say the least, but it was unique and radiated a sense of adventure that would later save my sanity.

The house was designed to be at one with nature and to offer shelter to wildlife if need be. After all, I had imposed on their world to make my own home, and felt better for knowing that my home could accommodate them in turn. 

Therefore bat boxes and bird boxes hung in disorderly fashion on the outside of the main house as well as around the various lookouts.  Bird feeders and bird baths were also dotted around so that I could admire the colourful plumage of the vast array of feathered species that inhabited the woodland.  Watching the birds gather around the outside of my home would remind me of my father.  He was a bird lover and would often leave the house before sunrise to meet up with a group of local bird watchers in the hope of spotting a rare specimen.

I left food out for foxes and created safe havens for hedgehogs.  Colourful, handmade butterfly and beetle boxes were placed sporadically around the pretty wilderness, just waiting to be colonised.  Before long various species of different shapes, sizes and colours turned up in hordes.  I would often wonder why the animals here still felt a strong urge to eat but not the humans. All I knew was that I liked to watch them.

This was my tribute to Lucy, who had insisted that our garden should be a safe haven for every creature and had stocked it full of all sorts of microhabitats.

When drawing up plans in my imagination for my new home many ideas had presented themselves.  I had even mused over the idea of building the exact replica of the house I‘d shared with Lucy.  A house which I knew as accurately as I knew the Lord’s Prayer.  So accurately, in fact, that it was as though it had been burned on to my retinas as my last conscious image.

In the end I dismissed this desire as a romantic notion that would most likely only bring pain and loneliness.  The memories I had of that house were plentiful, some good and some bad, but all were cherished. 

I remembered arguments about finances, working long hours and household chores.  Cold winter nights sitting by the roaring fire playing card games.  Happy memories of me and Lucy bringing in our annual evergreen spruce and dressing it in tinsel and expensive glass baubles while drinking mulled wine and arguing over who got to put the star at the top.  Glorious rainy days spent making love in every room of the house. 

Overall I felt I couldn't bear to live in a place that encompassed so many happy memories of the past without the people who had featured so prominently in it.

So what do you do when you're without the ones you hold most dear?  You think of something else that has brought you comfort in the past.  Something that isn't as hard to conjure up as flesh and blood.  You build something completely new but something that also has familiarity and represents joy and freedom in your past life.  You build a treehouse.

My life in the forest might have brought solitude but it also provided stability.  I didn’t feel obliged to make small talk with the other over-friendly residents and I could grieve for my lost future in peace.  The grieving process was hard.  I was not only grieving for the people I’d left behind but also for a promising life that I would now never experience.  I withdrew from my loving grandparents, only coming to realise later that they too had been through the same thing I was experiencing. 

It wasn’t long before my new lifestyle began to attract attention from others and it seemed that my living quarters were massively exciting to children.  They turned up in their droves, all with hope in their eyes and the energetic and enlivened atmosphere that always seems to follow children around.

Before long the place had become a haven for the little squirts and was continuously buzzing with hysteria and a sense of adventure.  It had become the beating heart of their imagination. 

Most days I could be seen sporting a rather fetching feathered cap while swishing a wooden sword threateningly in thin air and making booming pirate noises that caused the children to squeal in delight.     

In their teeming imaginations the treehouse, with its lookout points and rope bridges, had become a gigantic ship and the children delighted in becoming my fellow pirates. 

There was a lot of fun to be had in that treehouse and I thoroughly enjoyed being in the thick of it. I even made a skull and crossbones flag for the children to hang on a pole to display their infiltration of my kingdom.

The invaders who filled my days with adventure and gaiety were of every age, both boys and girls, and all with their own sparkling personality.  They gave me a reason to laugh on a daily basis, which lifted my spirits considerably, and before long I realised that I drew comfort from these small beings, all so hyper and filled with heart-warming innocence.  The parents or guardians of the children trusted me completely. After all, if there’d been anything sinister in my intentions I would not belong in Heaven.

There was one child in particular to whom I had grown close. He was the smallest and most malnourished-looking in the group.  His name was Timmy and he looked to be around four years old.  He would never say much and had a shy demeanour that I put down to his age.  He would stay close to me, watching me with his big blue eyes, and became a sort of mini shadow that I couldn't shift.  He would rarely interact with the other children but appeared to crave the attention of adults.

I would often find myself wondering about him and his preference for adult company and came to the conclusion that I must offer him some form of comfort.  I wondered how he had found himself here, just as I wondered the same thing about the other children.  But Timmy was different. Timmy coaxed the caring and nurturing side out of everyone, both adults and children alike.

Though the children who visited brought me joy and solace, there was still one thing missing, the one thing I could not have.  I would often look in on the lives of the ones left behind, which would ease the symptoms of my grieving heart. I sought comfort from seeing familiar faces, observing familiar surroundings, but I was also desperate to be remembered for as long as possible, even though I often had to endure very painful scenes among those I’d left behind.

Not long after I'd moved into the treehouse I saw what no man should have to see, but curiosity got the better of me as did my ego.  Suddenly, I was an unwanted guest without an invitation.  An unexpected visitor nobody would see.  A gatecrasher at my own funeral in a room full of heartbreak.

The church was heaving and my heart warmed to see the large turn out.  I felt pride that so many had turned up to pay their respects to me. Unknown to them, it made me feel less alone.  They hadn’t forgotten.  They still cared.  I let that thought linger in my mind as I stared at the face of everyone who had had enough compassion to show up today.

The vicar’s booming voice echoed off the stone walls and high ceiling of the church.  The gentle sound of fluttering feathers caused me to look up at the exposed beams of the church roof where I spotted a family of barn owls all huddled together, oblivious to the melancholy atmosphere that surrounded them.

Everywhere I looked yellow peonies could be seen, such a cheerful flower for such a dark and gloomy occasion.  The flowers did not fit the mood of the occasion, which was sombre.  I saw the highly polished coffin that contained my body.  I found it hard to accept that my own flesh and blood lay there while I, a soul without a body, still felt as real as I had when I was alive.

I scoured the room for Lucy, part of me not wanting to see the pain I had caused her.  She sat on the front row, crying softly and holding a tissue to her face.  Her cheeks were flushed and she wore no makeup yet still managed to look fresh- faced and beautiful.  Her hair was scraped off her face and twisted into a messy bun at the base of her neck.  Wispy ringlets framed her heart-shaped face. She tried in vain to scrape them back off her face only for them to fall into position once more.  Pinned on to her coat was a butterfly brooch that I had returned to her during a traumatic time in her life, in an attempt to lift her spirits.

The fact that she found it hard to look at the coffin was obvious.  She kept her gaze fixed steadily at her feet.  Just like an eighteen-year-old boy matches the colour of his tie to his date's dress for the high school prom, the weather was wet and gloomy and matched the sombre mood inside the church.  Rain poured down in a thick sheet and black clouds looked threatening in the increasingly dark sky.  Outside the church the mourners sheltered under a sea of umbrellas, a dark canopy of misery.  I listened as Amy's father droned on in his monotonous voice.

The sombre mood conjured up a memory of a day very similar to this one.  The sound of roaring thunder could be heard outside whilst the low sound of women sobbing bounced off the thick stone walls of the church.  I remembered the day clearly.  Gilly’s funeral ceremony was beautiful.  Her school friends had drawn pictures of her, each one depicting her in a unique and distinctive way.  Poems were read and favourite songs were sung.  Stories were told in a caring and fond manner.  After a while the sobbing stopped.  Her funeral was truly a celebration of her young life. 

My funeral, however, was nowhere near as uplifting.  Gilly had died an innocent, taken too soon from the life she’d loved too by a wretched disease. Whereas I’d been a drunken fool, too intoxicated to listen to my own better judgement.  My death was a mistake that could have been avoided, and I couldn’t help but sense that the majority of the guests at my funeral blamed me for my own fate.

As the service ended my heartbroken parents must have heard the words 'sorry' and 'loss' a million times but both maintained a brave face.  No doubt some part of them was relieved that the worst was over now.  Out of the corner of my eye I spotted Russ. I must have missed him during the service. He was up on tiptoes trying to see over the mass of black umbrellas.  I could tell by his body language that he was searching for someone.  His eyes suddenly widened with recognition and his facial expression swiftly changed to one of keen pursuit.