Stave 1: A Ghostly Museum Tale

I have endeavoured with this Ghostly little story, to raise the Ghost of a Museum, which shall not put curators out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me.  May it haunt their museums pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it. 

Your faithful Friend and Servant,  F.R.  December, 2014.

Chapter 1 Charley’s Ghost

Charley was dead. At least to the small local museum in the quaint town of Unreason in middle England anyway.  There was no doubt about it. She hadn’t been seen for years, the registrar had de-accessioned her and Frank had reported to the Board of Trustees that she had been ethically disposed of during the last collections review. Charley was as dead as a curator’s sex life.

Mind you, I can’t say that I know, or have studied, the sex lives of museum professionals, or whether it is any deader than that of, say, estate agents. Quite clearly she was deader than the nocturnal activities of most politicians or rock stars (Cliff Richard excepted). What I am trying to say is that we lost Charley.

Frank knew she was lost, of course he did. He had acquired her for the museum many years ago, only he would look after her, he was her sole administrator, but he did not appear cut up by her loss. Staff worried that he would mourn, but Frank was a man of the world he had moved on.

Frank had never got rid of the, ‘Temporarily removed for conservation’ sign from Charley’s display case. It had been a popular display, she had single handedly quadrupled the school visits to the museum. Her fading label still reads, ‘mummified cat found at the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut in the Valley of the Pets in Egypt in 1903’.  Frank had brought it into the museum in a Tesco’s carrier bag in the spring of 1996 having muttered something about a long-term loan from the British Museum.

Then she was gone, Frank never talked about it. It was all the same to him, he was a hard man. Frank Rason was a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, clutching, covetous, old museum manager. The cold within him froze his old features and dripped from his veined nose, the temperature seemed to lower when he walked by and it didn’t thaw one degree at Christmas.

External cold had little influence on him. If anything he preferred it as it meant less visitors to the museum, not that there had been many in recent years. His staff and volunteers had slowly deserted him over the years. Now he was almost alone. The registrar had finally walked out in the October, leaving him with only a single volunteer. Nobody ever stopped by the museum to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Frank, how are you?” Such was his countenance that not even Big Issue sellers approached him.

But what did Frank care? It was the very thing he liked. So it was on a cold Christmas Eve, old Frank sat busy in the museum’s back office. It was cold, bleak, biting weather; he could hear the people in the street outside scoffing at the £25 Museum of Unreason Xmas Special entry charge. It was three thirty, but it was dark already. The fog had come down and was so dense that the Tesco Extra over the road was a mere phantom building.

Frank’s back office door was open so that he might keep an eye on his last remaining volunteer who sat cheerfully in his elf hat behind the reception desk.

“ A merry Christmas Uncle Frank” cried a cheerful voice, startling both Frank and the volunteer out of their reveries. It was Frank’s nephew, he burst through the museum's front door full of life with sparkling eyes and an irritating youthfulness.

“Bah!” said Frank, “Litterbug!”

“Christmas litter uncle!” said Frank’s nephew as he picked up the candied ginger cubes he had dropped in his excitement.

“What reasons have you to be merry? You’re poor and you work in a museum” said Frank

“What reasons have you to be morose? You’re unfeasibly rich enough even though you work in a museum” said the nephew.

“What else can I be” returned his uncle, “when I work in a profession of such fools. What’s Christmas time but putting tinsel on the display cabinets and charging an extra £5 for entry? I’m older and a wiser. Museum Christmases are for fools. The next person who wishes me a merry Christmas will be put in the reception area pillory and pelted with turkey giblets.”

“You are wrong uncle, Christmas is a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable time: the only time of year when people think of each other and when museum shops actually turn a profit. And therefore, uncle, though I am an overqualified cultural professional working for minimum wage I believe that Christmas can do museums good, have done museums good and will continue to do museums good, and I say God bless museums.”

The volunteer in the elf hat, burst into spontaneous applause; immediately regretted it and went back to sticking glitter onto the museum’s collection of cat o’ nine tails for the annual Unreason Sado-Masochists Christmas AGM on boxing day.

“Don’t be angry uncle, come and have Christmas at our museum”

“No! and a good afternoon to you,” said Frank.

The nephew left without an angry word shouting over his shoulder,  “Merry Christmas uncle…and a Happy New Year!”

As the nephew left, he let two women of a certain age into the museum. One was dressed as a Christmas Fairy and another as a Christmas tree. They bowed and began a slightly slurred version of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman’. Frank put his head in his hands and wondered where the key to the pillory was.

After a wait that seemed interminable, the singing stopped and the fairy stepped forward.

“At this festive season, it is desirable that we think of the poor and destitute museums and their volunteers, who suffer greatly at this present time.”

“Are there no prisons?” asked Frank.

“There are many prison museums; what shall I put you down for?”

“Nothing!” Frank cried. “Leave me alone, we are not merry in this museum and I can’t be responsible for making museum volunteers happy. Please leave.”

Seeing Frank eye up the pillory in the corner of reception, the ladies withdrew.

As the fog outside grew thicker, the time came to close the museum.  Frank opened the door, and grudgingly let the volunteer out.

“I suppose you are not coming in tomorrow.” growled Frank

“If that’s OK?” the volunteer smiled faintly as he took off his elf hat.

“It is not convenient and it’s not fair, if I was paying you wages, I would dock you a day’s pay. See you on Boxing Day.”

The volunteer scuttled out the door, Frank locked up and trudged out into the foggy Unreason evening.

He lived in his long deceased mother’s flat above the chip shop on the High Street. After popping in for an unwrapped cone of chips for his tea, Frank shuffled down the side alley towards the gate that lead to his front door. The back yard was so dark that Frank actually had to grope his way down the passage. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the flat, that it seemed as if the weather sat in mournful meditation on the future of the heritage sector in the UK.

Now, it is a fact that there was nothing at all particular about the flat’s doorknob except that it was very large. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Frank having put his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knob, not a knob, but Charley’s face.

Charley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the rest of the yard, but had a dismal light about it, like a rotting lobster in a museum store. Frank stared again at the knob and it was simply a knob again.

Frank quickly put the key in the door, turned the knob and marched resolutely into the flat and closed the door with a bang. The sound resounded through the flat like an enormous fart. Quite satisfied he double-locked himself in, which was not his custom.  Thus secure against unwanted visitors, he took off his cravat; put on his pyjamas, dressing gown, slippers, and a nightcap he’d found lying around in the museum costume store in a box labeled ‘do not open under any circumstances’.

Frank sat alone with his usual late night tipple, a half of Theakston’s Old Peculier with a Ryvita Crispbread for dipping. As he sat in front of the single bar electric fire, the memory of Charley came flooding back and the night he took her from the display case and met a Russian of uncertain morality in the Leicester Forest East Services and swapped her for a paper bag full of unmarked Euros. Did he regret his actions? He just shrugged his shoulders.

“Bah! Unplug!” said Frank as he turned off the electric fire. He made his way out of the room and into the bathroom.

The front door flew open with the unmistakable sound of plywood banging on chipboard. Then he heard a shuffling noise, it was getting louder and coming towards the bathroom door. Cockroaches?

“Bah! Must debug!” said Frank.

His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through the bathroom door and passed into the bathroom. Frank remained seated on the toilet and contemplated pulling his pyjama bottoms up.

“Charley’s ghost!”

The same bandages, the same whiskers, the same foul smell without doubt it was Charley.

“What do you want with me?”

“Much” the mummified cat purred back. “Ask me what I was.”

Frank asked the question while the ghost perched herself in cardboard box at the side of the bath.

“I was your premier object in the museum, I filled your museum with life, and the day you got rid of me you murdered your ethics and your museum.” sighed Charley

Frank sensed something malevolent, but Charley remained motionless.

“Mercy, dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?” whimpered Frank.

“Hear me!” Charley suddenly cried. “You will be haunted by three curators. Without their visits,” said the ghost,  “you cannot hope to continue to preserve the material culture of this fair land. Expect the first tomorrow, when the bell tolls one.”

When it said these words the spectre wrapped its loose bandages back around its body and walked backward and with every inch the bathroom door began to swing open and suddenly she was gone.

Frank closed the door and reached for the toilet roll, after a brief hiatus he went down stairs to see that the front door was still double locked. He stumbled to his bed feeling uncomfortable, as if there was something there in the bed with him.

“Bah! Bedbug!” yawned Frank and fell asleep in an instant.

Next: the first of the museum professionals visit Frank