Image credit: Eugenio Marongui

Well, there you go, bloody man with the ideas, eh? And the problem with ideas is they come before you even realize you’ve had them, and if you’re keyed up – like talking to a very pretty girl who is crying in front of you – you just blurt them right out as though they are writ in stone, eminently realizable, the logical conclusion to everything.

It’s got me into trouble before, my tendency to speak before I think, and my lack of regard for follow through and consequences. But now, how was I to do what I suggested? Whatever possessed me to think that this strange, otherworldly phenomenon, which no-one had ever seen or spoken of in anyone else (to my knowledge anyway) could not only be replicated in another person – and not just one other person on this planet – but another person in George’s pissy little club?

I’m a moron. It’s true. The evidence is in. And a moron now faced with a big problem, because I desperately didn’t want to disappoint Natalie. I’d thought discovering her was fascinating, rather delightful really. It wasn’t until she’d laid her secrets bare to me that I began to really think how terrible it would be to be like that. I’d had vague thoughts about it, but nothing concrete enough to think and take care. Take care. My mother used to tell me to do that all the time, because she knew I never did.

I have an eye for things – a very perceptive eye – it’s just that it doesn’t connect often enough to my brain. Maybe that was why I was still lurking around the edges of the film world at almost thirty with the most impressive entry on my resume being working for that halfwit Roger. Who was I to think that I’d not only make the discovery of the century for film, but also be able to make something of it?

Or help a lonely, frightened girl find someone else who really knew what she was going through?

Still, I’d made my bed – another of my mother’s favorite sayings. The odds were against me, that was true, but I had to at least try. I made a list of the possible reasons I might just be successful, because I thought it would cheer me up:

1. Maybe like draws to like, others of her kind would come to the club because she was there
2. Maybe it was something in the drinking water in this city – a kind of mutation – and so there would have to be others
3. Maybe she was the next evolutionary step up, and that evolutionary improvement liked dance-clubs
4. Maybe I was destined for greatness so I’d just be lucky this time

Yes, you can see the problem. Except for the very slight hope around number one, the others became increasingly absurd. And even that one seemed unlikely too, because she didn’t even know exactly what she was. Why would anyone else so blessed and afflicted have any idea either, or have progressed to actually seeking out others? Unless they had someone who noticed too? Or unless some difference in personality made the experience different for them and so they were confident or brave or inquisitive. Or at the very least less timid.

I could, of course, extend the experiment outside the club, but the logistics were extraordinarily difficult to manage. If I roamed around, vox pop like, filming in the streets it probably wouldn’t work because I would be there, looking through the camera eye in situ, an ‘intelligent’ presence that would see any possible other ‘ghosts’ and so the film would film them, just as Natalie appeared on film whenever anyone was looking at her. And while theoretically other security camera systems might have captured – or only partially captured which is more to the point – such creatures from time to time, where would you start going through them even if you had access to them? Which I didn’t have, of course. So, I would be limited to other places where I could set up cameras to film by themselves, and that meant getting the agreement of other club owners, café operators, restaurant managers, librarians. Well, you see the difficulty. There aren’t that many George’s around, and if there are, I don’t know them.

So, it was the club or nothing. Well, I’d try at least, and I’d also try to put some intelligence into the operation. Hard for me, you might say!

(c) Helen M Valentina 2015, All Rights Reserved