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Never Stop Learning

Updated: 2 days ago

by Ash Egan



When I was four years old, my Uncle Archie was my best friend.


He lived nearby, almost within sight of our house. Each afternoon, he’d come to pick me up from school, along with my Aunt Ethel, while my parents both worked their full-time jobs.


Back then, my world was so small. School was close enough that I could see the gates from my bedroom window and Uncle Archie's place was just a little further up the road. My whole life existed within this tight triangle, condensed into an area barely the width of a street.


Uncle Archie and Aunt Ethel would wait for me outside the gates every day and then we'd walk the short distance to their house. She held my hand while Uncle Archie followed behind with his cane click-clacking along the damp pavement.


He’d ask me, “What did you learn today, Frankie?” and I'd tell him all about the letter M or the number four or what things weighed more than other things.


He'd laugh and ruffle my hair and say, “Good lad. Never stop learning.”


I loved those afternoons spent at Uncle Archie's house. The house was pristine and the walls were barely visible behind the dozens of framed photos of my parents and me. They bought me toy pots and pans and let me build dens out of blankets and dining chairs so I could hide and read my books.


In winter, we'd wrap up in blankets and watch through the window as snow fell on the driveway. In spring, we'd plant seeds in the garden, Archie sitting in his chair just inside the potting shed, out of the sun, smiling as he watched me play in the dirt.


“Do you like living so close to your Aunt and me?” he asked one warm and breezy spring afternoon as I dug around in the flower beds, looking for worms.


“I love it,” I said. “You’re my best friend, Uncle Archie.”


He laughed. “You’re my best friend too, little man. You know, sometimes I look out my window in the morning and I see you walking along to school with your mummy and daddy.”


“Really?” I said.


“Yep,” he nodded. “So next time you're walking to school, have a look behind you at my window. The one at the top of the house. Do you know which one it is?”


“Yeah, I do.”


“Of course you do, you’re a clever boy. You take a look next time you’re walking to school and you'll see me there. You can wave at me as you come past.”


“I will,” I said. “I promise. I’m gonna do it tomorrow.”


But I was four years old and I forgot my promise. The next morning, we were in a rush as usual and I was excited to learn about the planets that day. I forgot the next day too, and the day after that.


It was almost summer before the thought popped into my head again, that I should look back at the house and the top window, to see if Uncle Archie was watching.


I hadn’t seen him for a few days. Uncle Archie and Aunt Ethel were an old couple and sometimes they got sick, so I wasn’t worried that my parents had been picking me up from school all that week.


But I guess that's what made me think of him and their house that morning. I guess it’s what made me look back towards their top window as I hurried along to school.


Sure enough, there he was. A blurred outline, leaning against his cane and looking out towards the school. The room behind him was featureless and dark. 


He saw me, lifted his hand, and waved. I thought I could see him smiling too. 


I wanted to wave back but we were in a hurry as always, my mum and dad each gripping one of my hands. I could only smile back at Uncle Archie, as he stood waving from the window.


After school that day, Dad was there to pick me up again. Normally, he’d be so happy to see me that he’d hoist me up and swing me around in a big bear hug. 


Instead, he took my hand and hurried me home. His face was impassive and we moved with the same urgency as when we’d rushed to school that morning. 


I’ll always remember coming home that day because it was the first time I'd seen my mother cry. I can still see it now. You never forget the day you realise your parents are people too, who can get sad, just like you.


“We've got something to talk to you about, Frankie.” Dad sat me down on the sofa next to Mum and she instinctively pulled me into a constricting hug. Her tears dripped into my hair and ran down my cheek.


“Okay,” I said.


“It's your Uncle Archie.”


It seemed like Dad was waiting for me to say something. Of course, I know now he didn't know how to continue.


 “Can I see Uncle Archie tomorrow?” I said.


This was the first time I saw my Dad cry. 


“I'm sorry buddy. You won't be able to see Uncle Archie anymore. Uncle Archie wasn’t very well. He died last night.”


I don't know if I cried, though I suppose I did. That's as far as that memory goes, or at least the vivid parts.


I do know that I was a lot older, almost ten years old, before I realised that I couldn't have seen Uncle Archie waving at me through his window that morning. By the time I was waving back at whoever was standing in that top window, Archie had been dead for hours.


It was something else, something impossible happening again that made me realise this.


I hadn't thought of Uncle Archie much since the day of his funeral. A long, boring, and sombre day that I didn't understand then and struggle to even picture now. 


I was playing alone in my back garden, digging up the soil again. This time, I was burying army men when I heard the click-clack of a cane moving along the paving stones behind me.


I jumped and turned around, a reflex action, expecting to see Uncle Archie standing right there in front of me. I almost said his name, before I saw that the yard was empty and silent. I could feel him there though, like he was standing before me smiling and waving. I almost heard him ask, “What did you learn today, Frankie?”


When I told my mother, she was angry. She said I shouldn't play games like that, that I could really hurt people's feelings and I should absolutely not mention a word of this to my Aunt Ethel. 


Not that I would've got a chance. We rarely saw Aunt Ethel anymore. The times we did were weddings, christenings, and funerals and even then, she would be sat at a distant table, with distant relatives.


I couldn’t understand what made Mum so angry. The feeling that Uncle Archie might still be around was a comfort to me. It brought back so many memories I'd long forgotten, stuff obscured by the onslaught of childhood. I felt special, thinking that he'd come to visit me, to let me know that he was still my friend.


I asked Dad why Mum got so mad and he gave me a stony look. I think he too was trying to decide if I was playing some kind of bad joke. But I told him about seeing Uncle Archie waving from the window and he believed I wasn't making it up, at least not consciously anyway.


“Try not to mention Uncle Archie around your Mum, okay buddy? It upsets her a lot. It's tough for her to think about him. If you need to, you can talk to me about him, okay?”


“Why?” I asked, “I miss him too.”


“I know buddy, but the thing is, your Uncle Archie was ill for a while, a long time. He wasn’t ill like Grandma, not like when she died. I mean he was ill in his mind.” He paused and I felt a precipice open before us and saw him considering whether or not he should send us tumbling over the edge.


“Archie’s illness made him sad and it caused him to make strange choices. Like deciding the only way to stop the sadness was to stop living altogether. He decided to cause his own death. It's called suicide and it really hurts those around you when it happens, but Archie didn’t know what else to do. That’s why Mum got so upset. Maybe, if you feel like you want to talk about Archie and how you miss him again, you can talk to me about it, okay?”


It was a long time before I brought Uncle Archie up again but it wasn't the end of his visits.


At first, I was angry. Those visits began to feel like a taunt. Every time I'd hear the click-clack of the cane behind me and turn to find no one there, it made me want to scream. Every time it was like he was making the decision all over again. Deciding to die, deciding to leave me. 


It wasn’t every day or even every week, but the visits didn't stop. Every so often, the click-clack would come again. When I was alone, watching TV, or reading comics in bed at night or fetching something from a stationary cupboard at school. 


The anger faded eventually. As I got older and realised his choice had nothing to do with me, I was happy to think of him again. I was comforted to know my friend was still checking in, and that he still watched out for me.


By the time I was 22 and getting ready to graduate from university, I’d gotten used to those visits. Used to the sound every now and then of the cane click-clacking up behind me as I worked on my dissertation or stood at the bus stop. 


He was there the first time I got drunk, watching me sway against a lamppost and trying not to be sick. He was there when I met Alice, the girl I was going to marry, as we both tried to borrow the same book from the library. He was there when we had our first kiss, sitting on the roof of the old convenience store around the corner from my halls.


Even when I didn’t hear him walking behind me, I felt his presence often. I felt his smile, and almost heard him asking, “What did you learn today, Frankie?”


It wasn't until graduation that I saw him again. I walked up on stage in cap and gown to collect my diploma, bathed in the exhausted applause of a thousand parents waiting for their turn to click their cameras and shed their tears. I looked up toward the balcony for Mum and Dad and found them clapping and crying tears of joy. I looked for Alice and found her next to them, blowing a kiss from her soft red lips. 


I wasn’t looking for him, but there he was anyway. Uncle Archie, standing at the back of the hall, by the fire exit, in the shadows. Leaning on his cane, smiling and waving.


We had dinner to celebrate afterwards, in the same tacky Italian restaurant our family visited every month. When dinner was over, they cajoled me into making a speech by rattling their spoons against their glasses.


I thanked everyone. Mum, Dad, Alice. My tutors, my teachers, my cousins. I was half drunk and didn't know what I was doing. I rambled on like I was accepting an Oscar as my closest family and friends smothered their laughter. 


Until I mentioned Uncle Archie. Until I talked about how he'd always encouraged me to learn, and always tried to grow my mind. How I missed him and his enthusiasm and his nurturing ways but I had felt him there with me that day, as I picked up my diploma. 


I didn't say that I'd seen him or that I sometimes felt like he visited me, even though the red wine had almost tumbled those words out of my mouth before I could stop them.


Still, the atmosphere changed. Only Alice was clapping now. Dad's face dropped for a split second until he noticed me looking at him and he hid it with a phoney smile. 


Mum turned away completely until I brought my rambling speech to a close. Then she rose from the table and walked away in silence, closely followed by Dad. They were gone for a long time and when they came back, Mum’s make-up had been hastily reapplied.


I was ashamed of myself for hurting her feelings like that again. I had only thought of myself and how my thoughts of Uncle Archie affected me. 


It took me a full two weeks to get up the courage to apologise. Long after Mum had pretended to forget about it.


We were in the garden, just a week away from the start of my and Alice's plan to spend our gap year travelling the world on a shoestring.


“I'm sorry Mum,” I said. “For bringing him up that night. I didn't mean to upset you. I didn't mean to ruin it.”


She looked at me, her eyes shining with love and pity and said to me, “Oh Frankie. No, you didn't ruin anything. Please don't think that. I just find it hard to think about him. It wasn’t your fault.”


She hugged me tight and it felt like a weight lifted from us. Like something was at peace. It felt like maybe that would be the end of my visits from Uncle Archie. He'd made sure I’d grown into a man. He'd made sure I’d never stopped learning. Maybe now he could rest.


And how I wish that could have been the end of it. 


I was thirty when my mother died. The cancer took her slowly enough for us to make our preparations, to say our goodbyes, but quickly enough for it to be a shock.


Alice and I stayed at the house I grew up in for a week or two, to go through Mum’s stuff and decide what to do with it. Dad had long since lost the mobility and the mental capacity to deal with such things. He’d been on a downward spiral anyway, one that Mum’s illness had only accelerated. 


Despite the circumstances, it was nice to be home again. Nice to be able to show my son, Ben, the house where his daddy spent his childhood.


I was sorting through boxes in the attic when I found it, buried under a mountain of mortgage and bank paperwork. A crumpled and faded document sticking out of a ripped binder that once had a small padlock on it. 


The first police report was a cold, clinical description of the circumstances in which Uncle Archie had been found. How the dumbbell he’d suspended on a rope above his head had dropped and cast blood and brain matter across a wide area of the garage. How it had made facial recognition impossible. How DNA and dental records had been used to identify the body, to spare his wife and sister. How due to the nature of his death, the funeral would have to be delayed so that a post-mortem could be carried out.


If you can imagine finding something like this, reading this about a man you loved and idolised, a man you missed all your life, then what you probably can't imagine is how much worse it felt to read the second police report.


This one was from two weeks before his death. From the last day I'd seen him, the last day I'd been in his house. It detailed how, that night, he'd been arrested. It indicated, if not in any great detail, what they'd found on his computer in the days that followed.


I can't explain the sickness that I felt. In my stomach, in my soul. I can't explain the days and nights I spent trying to convince myself it was some kind of bad joke. Or why my father, now almost too far gone to remember my name, let alone his own, could only wave his hand when I tried to ask him about Archie. To ask him if it was true even though I knew in my heart that it was.


I can't explain why I found it so hard to forgive them for not telling me, even though I knew they were trying to protect me. I can't explain the guilt I felt, knowing that all the effort my mother went to, all that suffering in silence as I invoked his name in love whenever I experienced the smallest success, amounted to nothing when she couldn't be around to protect me any longer.


All I know is that there was one thing I was thankful for. That day in that auditorium, when I'd seen him smiling and waving from the darkness by the door, my diploma in hand and a bright life ahead of me, was the last time I had seen him. The last time I had felt his presence.


I took my wife and son, and that small comfort, home with me. Home to our house where we'd grown a new family and started to make new memories. I took it home and tried to lay Uncle Archie to rest forever.


Ben grew taller, smarter and more beautiful with each day. Every day finding a new way to make me and Alice laugh or surprise us with his curiosity and intelligence. 


The summer of his fourth birthday was idyllic, A summer of long, hot days spent picnicking in the park and collecting shells at the beach.


On the night before he was due to start school, as I towelled his hair after his bath and with his nerves beginning to grow, he asked me, “Daddy, did you like school?”


“I loved it,” I said. “I always loved to learn new things.”


“When do you stop learning?” he asked me.


“Never,” I said. “You never stop learning.”


My heart jumped as the words slipped out, unthinking, and a shudder ran up my spine. 


Ben gave me a searching look and I plastered a wide, reassuring smile across my face, hoping he wouldn’t notice I was trembling, or that my face had drained of colour.


I tucked him in and read to him quietly by his bedside, the words tumbling out of my mouth without meaning.


When I was finished, and I was sure he was asleep, I snuck out of his room without waking him.


I turned as I did so, standing in the doorway for a moment, to look one last time at his peaceful, sleeping face. The same way I had every single night since he'd been born. Ten thousand nights of trying to reassure myself that he was still there, still breathing. Trying to make myself believe that I could make him happy, keep him healthy, keep him safe. That I could protect him from all the horrible things in the world, the way my parents protected me. 


After all this time, I almost believed it. And that's when I heard the slow click-clack of a cane along the floorboards behind me.


THE END



 


Ash Egan is a writer of horror stories. His work has been shortlisted for the Leicester Writes Short Story Prize 2024 and the 2k Terrors Short Story Competition 2023.


He lives in Bury, Greater Manchester with his wife and son.


Ash can be found on Instagram: @hyeana.legs.

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