The Second Death of Mr Arlington-Locke

Olive Arlington-Locke was four years old when her father died for the first time. Her family lived in Edinburgh at the top of a Victorian townhouse, in an apartment tastefully decorated by her psychologist mother. It had been a straightforward accident: a shifting of space, a window mistaken for a mirror, and a fall. After the funeral, the neighbours across the hall had gifted them a vegan casserole. It had sat, stubbornly, on the kitchen counter for ten days before its own burial in the food waste bin. Olive remembers watching the progression of decay on its mealy surface and imagining her father succumbing to the same process.

Twenty years later, her father died a second time. He was hit by a bus while walking home from the corner shop, having just won a sizeable sum of money on a scratch-card. Witnesses at the scene told Olive how he had absentmindedly walked into the road; the paramedics told her that he had died instantly. They gave her a bundle of things that had been retrieved from her father’s pockets: his worn brown leather wallet, his awkwardly large bunch of keys, and the small black notebook he always carried. She felt sorry for the driver of the bus, who almost certainly had not been expecting to peel a middle-aged man off his double-decker on such a nice spring day. Nobody told Olive about the scratch-card – why would they? Sure, people had seen him scratching, but he had such a non-reaction it must have been a losing card.

Dear reader, I know you must be thinking: what kind of father dares to die twice? Olive would not have a response for you. Her father had been a rather average man, bumbling-but-loveable, and certainly not brave. The first death of her father had devastated Olive’s mother; her usually fastidious and conservative moods replaced with dramatic outbursts of wailing, fits of rage, and catatonic introversion, all interspersed with episodes of Spanish telenovelas and tuna melt sandwiches. Then, at some point in Olive’s childhood, her father was back. She was not sure when this happened, or how it happened, or why nobody else remembered her father’s first death. She was happy to have him around again and didn’t press further. There are many things we do not understand as children, and the mystery of her father’s death was not her top priority. Besides, asking too many questions would always activate her mother’s psychologist brain, and Olive didn’t like to be interrogated.

A robin was singing unguardedly from a nearby tree as Olive retreated from the accident scene, finding a bench nearby and thumbing the yellowed pages of her father’s notebook. When one’s father dies a second time, the overwhelming feeling is curiosity rather than grief. The notebook was mostly filled with random biro scribbles, shopping lists, observations, transcribed poems and quotes, and reminders, all scrawled in her father’s recognisable tiny script. Nothing particularly unexpected. Suddenly something stood out to her – an office address and a contact number for a certain Professor Hinchliffe in Virginia, USA. The address was written in ink pen, the handwriting a bigger and more beautiful cursive. A biro asterisk adorned the space next to the address: “See notes”. Olive hurriedly flipped through the remaining notebook pages to find the matching note, skimming over a comparison between two types of Toyota Prius, a three-berry trifle recipe, a list of school friends accompanied by their current addresses, and other artefacts of her father’s existence. Unsuccessful, she eventually reached the document pocket folded into the back cover. Here she found the winning scratch-card, though what shocked Olive more than the jackpot was the post-it note stuck to it with the same phone number repeated, this time in her father’s handwriting. An internet search was Olive’s back-up plan, again to no avail: Professor Hinchliffe of Virginia, USA did not exist on any search engine, social media platform, or university directory. Even searching for the phone number alone didn’t yield any results. Olive's only remaining option was to actually call the contact number, an understandably terrifying prospect for any tech-dependent millennial, with the hope that Professor Hinchliffe themself could explain why her father had their address.

Olive hesitantly entered the number, her phone screen blankly shining it back at her. She pressed the green call button and listened to the ring tone. Once. Twice. On the third ring, someone picked up.

“Good morning, this is the office of Professor Hinchliffe at the Arlington-Locke Department of Near-Death Experience Research. How can I help you?”