Haunted Tales

The Wrong Teletubby

Richard's son stopped speaking to him a week after he died.

He had got into the habit of logging in to Facebook first thing every morning, when the weight of what had happened made it difficult to do anything, just to see once more the last thing his son would ever say to him.

Luke Davies cant wait to hit the surf this w/e!!!!!

23 October 2010 at 23:08

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And then, on the day of Luke's funeral, after Richard stood and watched his child disappear impossibly into the ground, he got home and fired up the computer only to find he had taken his final message with him. Luke's face was still there, grinning out of some overcrowded freshers' week bar crawl, complete with the remnants of his gap-year tan and the wispy beginnings of a goatee beard Richard had never got to see in real life. And his name was still there, and the photos he was tagged in that had become so familiar, and the news that he had changed his location to Loughborough and become a member of Loughborough University and the Department of Modern Languages and the Athletics Soc and the Indie Soc and the Windsurfing Soc, and he was attending Fresh 'n' Wild at the Union and the Poly Bop in the Cellar Bar and was now friends with dozens of people Richard had never heard of. And there was even a message from the very same day from someone called Hal Barnett asking if NE1 got spare car space down to Plym on sat??????, but his status update was gone. Kaput. Disappeared. His son had gone silent.

Richard supposed they just cleared themselves after a while. Now he thought about it, he had put one up when he first joined - Richard Davies is not sure about this newfangled technology! or some such - and that wasn't there any more, even though he didn't remember deleting it. He only had a handful of friends - he'd only really joined the thing because Luke had said it would be a good way for them to keep in touch after he went to uni - and most of them never bothered to update their status things either, apart from Bob at work who seemed to put some rubbish about what he was eating or doing or watching on telly every couple of hours, till Richard had even thought about deleting him as a friend except he knew he would notice.

He sat staring at the computer screen for so long that the white light that bleached his face dropped to a dull grey and then switched itself off completely, and he became aware of the shadows and the cold around him and the fact that he hadn't switched on a single light in the house, let alone the central heating. He twitched the mouse to bring the computer back to life, and accidentally managed to click on one of the links in front of him on Luke's page: the Windsurfing Soc.

And he was so glad he had. The first thing he saw beneath the logo was a message from someone called Alistair Thorne. He remembered an Alistair from the funeral: a nice lad, he had come over to talk to him and Luke's mother specially.

As many of you know, the society suffered a terrible loss last weekend when Luke Davies, one of our newest members, drowned in a freak accident at the BUCS event in Plymouth. I know all members will join me in passing on the society's deepest condolences to his friends and family.

A party from the university will be attending his funeral in Guildford this Saturday at 3pm; I will be going on behalf of the society. There are still places in the minibus for any of Luke's friends who would like to attend - contact Dr Buckland for details.

I've also started this tribute page for those who will not be able to attend so they can leave their memories of Luke.

Richard clicked on the link and let out a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a sob: here was his son again, in a photo he had not seen before, in his wetsuit, grinning and waving at the camera on a shingle beach with sails in the background. The beard was a lot more impressive. This must have been taken on the day the accident happened. It was like he had been given another chance to see him.

He scrolled down, his eyes misting as he read through the messages beneath. There were dozens of them.

I only knew Luke a few weeks but he was one of the nicest people to me in the first week, showing me how to work the cooker in our kitchen and rescuing me in the bar more than once like a true gentleman! I can't believe he is gone and I will miss him so much

I was at school with Luke for five years and was lookin forward to seeing him at xmas. Can't believe I will never see him again. He was such a great bloke, neva had a bad word for anyone and was a real team player - we played rugby together in the First XV that took the Charter cup for the first time in four years. But more than that he was a great laugh and a superb guy. RIP buddy

RIP Big Man. Never see his like again

Just heard the news I am so gutted. Raced against Luke many times but only managed to beat him once - and that was because he was having treatment on his ankle at the time! He was a true sportsman - one in a million.

He recognised some of the names; one or two of the pictures looked familiar. But there were so many people here he had never heard of, people from around the country, around the world, even - there was a chap here writing from Malaysia - and his son had touched every one of their lives enough that they had come here to pay their respects to him.

Richard left the computer to blow his nose, splash water on his face and get himself a whisky. He wasn't certain he actually liked whisky, but he generally had a bottle in for occasions that demanded it, and this was surely one of them.

Once he had located the bit where you could leave a message - he knew it was right because a little picture of himself came up beside it - he took a good twenty minutes or more to compose it properly, half worrying that there would be a deadline on these too and it would go out there half-finished, making him look demented. In the end he kept it simple:

Hello everyone, this is Luke's dad. Just wanted to say how much these messages mean to me and our family. Luke was so loved and touched so many people wherever he went. I will miss my son so much but it is a great comfort to me to come to this page and read all your memories of him. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

He took out the bit about 'our family' before he pressed Comment. Denise had always hated him speaking for her. He sent her the link to the tribute page instead. She was on Facebook - though she kept some of her pages protected - but he wasn't sure to send links that way, so he ended up emailing it to her instead.

After that he sat up looking through Luke's photo albums for a few more hours until he'd finished the whisky and he suddenly realised it was three in the morning and he still hadn't switched the central heating on.

When he checked the page the next evening three of Luke's friends had added messages after his one. He didn't recognise any of the names, but it was very nice of them all to send their condolences.

He went on checking the page every morning before he went into work. It did him good to see Luke's grinning face first thing, gave him something to get out of bed for, and he could hardly look at it in the office after what he'd said to the youngsters about not using Facebook or Twitter or any of the other ones during working hours. Besides, if he started looking at it at work he wasn't sure he'd ever be able to do anything else.

On the Tuesday there was a short message from Denise at the bottom of the page - As Luke's mother it gives me great strength to read the messages here thank you all god bless xx - so he knew she'd got the email. She hadn't written anything back to him, but the counsellor had said there would probably be elements of blaming the other, and it wasn't exactly as if they'd been having many civil conversations before the accident. Although he had to admit she'd been a tower of strength at the funeral.

Towards the end of the week he got a private message. He knew because a little icon he'd never noticed at the top of the page lit up red and when he clicked on it, it said he had a message from someone called Sadie. She was a friend of Luke's from university - the girl he had helped with the cooker - and she said how sorry she was not just about his death but not to have had a chance to talk to Richard at the funeral as well. She told him a bit more about what Luke had been like at university. Apparently a whole bunch of them had gone back to his room on the first night after the bar had closed and he had cooked everyone cheese toasties and made so much tea that she had felt guilty and taken him round some of her spare teabags the next day and they had been good friends from then on. She wasn't on the same course as him but they'd hung out, as she put it, lots ever since, and she'd seen him just the night before he went off on the windsurfing trip and how excited he was about it and how he'd shown her his new wetsuit and his equipment all laid out and ready to be packed.

It wasn't clear from the message whether they'd been boyfriend and girlfriend, but Richard got the impression she might have liked to have been. Whichever way, it wasn't for him to ask, so when he wrote back he tried to keep it quite chatty and said how nice it was of her to get in touch and how much he appreciated it, and how it helped to hear about how happy Luke had been in the weeks before he had died and...