The VW Golf was the first car they bought together, but it was always hers, really. She’d longed for it, chosen it, made them save up for it. As soon as she’d driven it off the dealer’s forecourt she’d grabbed Steve’s thigh with her left hand and screamed with excitement.
…..‘Get the music on, quick,’ she’d said, and Steve had loaded the cassette of favourite songs they’d brought with them to make the moment perfect. The first track was The Closest Thing to Heaven by the Kane Gang, which was her favourite song in that summer of 1984, and for a year afterwards, until the day she died. 

They had met in Fuengirola three years earlier, each on package holidays with different groups of friends. There had been a sudden fall of rain one hot afternoon as he lay by the pool, and he had watched with amusement as holidaymakers ran for cover. In the midst of the panic, he saw her walking calmly around the pool to the bar, her back straight, her perfect ponytail falling between her tanned shoulder blades, and he had loved her from that moment to this and every second between. Even now. He felt hollow as an Easter egg, but he was still in love with her. At night he lay on the sofa with her cat, which stared at him with mystified, where-is-she eyes. He pictured Sophie’s face, her eyes shining as brightly as they had done that first rainy afternoon in Spain. Sometimes the flat seemed to hum with her presence. He felt as if she was with him somehow, just out of sight, as if death had failed to tear her completely from the physical world. He had never imagined that you could love a dead person with the same passion you could love the living; it wasn’t something you planned for when you were only twenty-five.  

In the midnight of his grief, he placed the car for sale in the classified advertisements of the Derby Evening Telegraph. VW Golf GTi, 1984, as new, he dictated over the ‘phone. Tornado red, sports seats, alloy wheels, tinted glass. Only 2,000 miles. One lady owner. 
…..Next day, the first of the potential buyers arrived, a boy racer from Burton-on-Trent in a rusty Escort. He kicked the tyres and tugged knowledgeably at wires and pipes beneath the bonnet. He was only a few years younger than Steve, but Steve thought of him as a boy; bereavement had an ageing effect, he realised, cutting an invisible ravine between him and the young. 
…..‘Why are you selling it?’ the boy asked, settling into the driver’s seat. 
…..‘It was my girlfriend’s.’ 
…..‘Oh.’ One corner of the boy’s mouth smiled knowingly. 
…..‘No, no, it wasn’t that,’ protested Steve. ‘She – she.’ His eyes were suddenly moist, and the boy stopped smiling.  
…..‘Oh, shit. Sorry, mate.’
…..After a brief silent moment of respect, the boy turned the ignition key. The car responded with an intransigent click. He tried again, and again, but the engine would not start.  
…..‘That’s odd,’ Steve said, relieved at the distraction. ‘It’s always started first time. Mind you, I haven’t driven it for a while. Not since… Since.’ 
…..They each turned the key several times, pumped the accelerator and fiddled with the choke, all without success. 
…..‘I’m really sorry,’ said Steve. ‘It’s never done this before. I’ve wasted your time.’ 
…..The boy stepped out of the car and stood again on the autumn-leaf pavement. He looked at the car, then at Steve, and back at the car, as if trying to solve some three-dimensional puzzle.
…..‘If you sort it out, give me a call,’ he said, and backed away, shrugging, moving one hand towards Steve in a futile gesture of commiseration, as if to a distant drowning man. 
…..Steve watched the boy drive away, then turned his attention to the recalcitrant Golf. He breathed deeply and tried the ignition again, and the engine purred immediately into life. The cassette player, too, clicked and whirred into action and resumed playing the Kane Gang’s soulful tune at the point she had last left it. The melody stabbed at Steve’s ragged heart. He ejected the cassette, slotted it into its Perspex box and put it in his pocket. He went back to the flat and placed the cassette on a high bookshelf where it would not trouble him with its painful reminders. 
…..Two hours later, another potential buyer was trying in vain to start the engine. 
…..‘I’m sorry,’ Steve said in surrender. ‘It’s usually fine. I turned it over half an hour ago.’ 

‘I don’t want to go, Steve,’ she had said, on her hospital bed, clutching his hand with both of hers. ‘I’m too young for this shit. I just want to be with you, you wally.’ 
…..When she’d slept, trapped in the net of wires and tubes which were battling to keep her alive, he had buried his face into the blackness of her blankets and sobbed a wall of tears until the sheets were wet. 
…..‘Don’t you dare sell my car,’ she said to him one night near the end, laughing through her tears and wagging a thin finger at him.  
…..‘I won’t,’ he said, discovering that it was possible to laugh, cry and love simultaneously. 
…..‘If you try,’ she chided, ‘I’ll come back to haunt you. I’ll scare the fucking pants off you.’ 

In the darkness before dawn Steve awoke to a rattling in the bedroom. The cat—her cat, he still thought—was on the windowsill, pawing insistently at the horizontal blinds, trying to see out onto the street. Steve slipped out of bed and stroked its arched black back, trying to flatten the spiked fur. 
…..‘What’s up, cat?’ 
…..The cat ignored him, absorbed by something neither of them could see or hear. Steve raised the blinds and together they stared out at the silent, icy neighbourhood. A dozen cars were parked along the far side of the road and the Golf was among them, glowing under a yellow streetlight. There was something odd about the cars, and it took Steve, in his drowsiness, a few moments to work it out: each of the cars was shrouded in a layer of frost, but not the Golf.  
…..Steve shuddered involuntarily, looked away and looked back. Then he dressed quickly, his curiosity just outweighing his fear. He donned his winter coat and a woollen hat, took the car keys from their hook by the door, and stepped outside. All was quiet; his neighbours slept on in a hundred darkened bedrooms, mining their subconscious minds for the stuff of dreams. Steve wondered if he was dreaming too, but the chill night air felt real enough as he crossed the road to the car, crouching down and sideways, making a smaller target of himself with the primeval instinct of an animal approaching danger. He opened the driver’s door and lowered himself into the seat. 
…..The interior was warm. Steve slid the key into the ignition, his hand shaking, and turned the key clockwise one click. The cassette player whirred into life and began, impossibly, to play her favourite song again. Yesterday he had taken the cassette out of the car and left it in the flat. Or had he? He doubted himself. Perhaps he was going mad, he thought; maybe his mind was disintegrating under the weight of his sadness. He let the song play on. 
…..In the centre console sat a paper coffee cup with a trace of her lipstick on the rim, a holy relic in the religion of his love for her. She had been the last person to touch the cup. She had held it in her delicate fingers, caressed it with her soft mouth, and to throw it away would be a desecration. Steve peered inside it and saw the remains of a Marlboro Light, a trace of her lipstick on the filter. The cup had been empty yesterday, he was sure.  
…..Three weeks earlier he had shaken her ashes into the source of the River Dove, alone, high in the Derbyshire Peaks, just as she had wanted. He had watched her ashes float quickly on the crystal water towards the distant sea, but now he was learning that those physical remains were only a part of her; perhaps the least important part. 
…..He switched off the cassette player and said into the silence:
…..‘I know you’re here, Sophie.’ His voice was hoarse. In the window of his flat the silhouetted cat was pacing back and forth like a sentry. Steve watched and waited. 
…..‘I want to be with you,’ he said, through the lump in his throat, ‘you wally.’ 
…..Then a sudden movement in the rear-view mirror caught his eye—a flick of blonde hair, a flash of red lipstick—and her voice said, in a whisper:
…..‘Drive, Steve.’
…..Adrenaline surged in his veins. He had the sensation of falling helplessly into some vast abyss, a crack in reality. He could no longer trust his senses, but he didn’t care. Her voice drained him of all his anguished longing. She was with him now, either inside his head or out there in the material world; it didn’t matter which. 
…..He started the engine, checked the rear-view mirror and eased the car slowly out onto the streets of the ephemeral city. 

The following afternoon, the telephone rang at the home of Roy Baxter. Roy wriggled his feet into his slippers, hauled himself out of his armchair and padded into the hallway, tightening his dressing gown against the chill. 
…..‘Hello.’ 
…..‘Mr Baxter?’ 
…..‘Yes, speaking.’ 
…..‘This is PC Williams over at Derby Police Station. We met yesterday. How are you?’ 
…..‘Oh aye, hello. I’m still in shock, to be fair. The doc’s signed me off for a week an’ given us some pills.’ 
…..‘That’s good. Listen, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to check something in your witness statement quite urgently.’ 
…..‘Anythin’ to ‘elp.’ 
…..‘You said that after your lorry jack-knifed, you climbed out of the cab and walked back along the road.’ 
…..‘Aye, that’s right. Toward the bend. Ah were thinkin’, I need to warn folks comin’ round. An’ find a phone box.’ 
…..‘And you got to the bend, and that’s when you saw the car approaching?’ 
…..‘Aye.’ 
…..‘Can you talk me through that part again?’ 
…..‘Yep. It were dead quiet, there wunna any traffic. Well, there wunt be, at that time, an’ not in that weather. It were freezin’. Ah got to the bend, an’ then the car came whizzin’ round, on the inside lane.’ 
…..‘This was the Golf?’ 
…..‘Aye, the red GTi. The sun were just up an’ there were enough light to see. Ah flapped me arms to tell ‘em to slow down, but ah don’t think they saw me.’ 
…..‘They?’ 
…..‘Aye, they. Driver and passenger. It looked like they were having fun, both laughin’ their ‘eads off. Terrible, what happened to ‘em.’ 
…..‘You’re absolutely sure, there were two people in the car?’ 
…..‘Oh aye. They were in the inside lane, and I were walkin’ on the verge, so ah got a good look at ‘em. Ah could see the girl on the passenger side ‘specially. Then they skidded and rammed into me truck. Ah ran back to try an’ ‘elp but the fire were too ‘ot, ah cunna get near ‘em. Poor buggers. Ah’m sorry.’ 
…..‘Nobody’s blaming you, Mr Baxter. It was an accident. Your truck malfunctioned and you did what you could.’  
…..PC Williams paused. ‘The thing is this,’ he continued, ‘we only found one person’s remains in the car. A male. In the driver’s seat. No-one else.’ 

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Feedback on “The Closet Thing to Heaven”

I submitted this story to the Hastings Writers Group Ghost Story competition in September 2023. I didn’t get in the top 4 (of 16 entries), but here’s the feedback from the external judge, Tina Brown, creator of the Hastings Ghost Walk and author of several books:

“I absolutely loved this story, it left me smiling and I found heart warming of love of reunion.  Loved that a cat was included. Could feel the sadness which Steve felt after losing his partner. I love how its written “he had never imagined that you could love a dead person with the same passion you could love the living”. Sad tale with a heart-warming twist in the end.”

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