Ghost
She was having the worst kind of day, the sort where her ears were fine-tuned for sharp noises, where the back of her mouth felt lined with dry starch, where her phone screen was grimy and showed no messages, and rain clouds loomed without committing, and humid air kept her brow hot and damp, and her hair sticky and unkempt, yet rigidly obeying the same unwieldy structure. It was an itchy, irritable day, and the only course was to just get through it, get home, lock the doors, hide her phone under a cushion so she could ignore the world in turn. Glass of wine, yesterday’s dahl, then put on the second half of the crime drama she hadn’t much enjoyed. Fall asleep on the sofa, wake at midnight, then have an hourlong scroll, before the tiredness would gather again as she went to YouTube to find the video of the Japanese man describing fountain pens.
It was all laid out like clockwork, but then she did it in the wrong order. Slumping on the sofa, she put on the crime drama then got antsy about not having poured the wine but felt so drawn in by the upholstery that she lacked the energy to even adjust the volume. The detective show was too quiet, and even at regular volume the lead actor spoke in a kind of hoarse whisper that suggested his heart wasn’t really in it. This soon started rubbing her the wrong way. She hadn’t noticed how jaunty the theme tune was, and how it would clang into every scene like a marching band scurrying to find it’s Drum Major. Then there was the beautiful young couple who stood accused of the crime, who could hardly act at all, but compelled anyway because their faces seemed to have received some special attention from an artistic hand. They had bone-structure and perfectly formed hair, and glorious, tender, truthful eyes. It was not fair, the way that beauty is dispersed. Such a resource should have been rationed out, but they were feasting, while she, slumped on the sofa, had been given the off cuts.
Her flat was a mess too. She had been there four months, and it still wasn’t hers. There were too many little tasks not yet completed, too many pointless things shoved to the back of drawers. The living room held the most evidence of her lack of progress. In the corner behind the TV sat a pile of carboard boxes, with trinkets and posters, and shelves she was yet to assemble. They awaited the great living room spruce that she had been saving for a spare weekend, before letting two dozen go by. The previous occupant had been a smoker, and the walls were frayed and off-white. A tab was open on her laptop explaining how best to paint over the damage, and she was certain there was an Amazon basket dormant where she had selected a primer and a topcoat. That had felt like progress enough two weeks ago, so the task of actually buying the paint had been put aside.
What was plaguing her most, however, was the box of things marked specifically for storage, which was supposed to live in the little unit in the adjacent lot beside her building, but, for some reason, she’d never found the energy to just march downstairs and put out of sight. The box just sat as an eyesore in the middle of the living room, portly in dimension, the cardboard grey and mulchy, the corners sagging open, taking refuge on a dining table that was itself gathering dust and bore too many light-yellow turmeric stains from too many late-night takeaways. Too much mess was in her eyeline. Suddenly the presence of the box became too oppressive for her to bare, it would require an immediate action, as urgently as if a pigeon had flown into the room and was now marking out the territory.
This was supposed to be her space, she told herself, her inner sanctum, it was precisely this sort of behaviour, she hissed at herself, this lethargy, that kept her life in a holding pattern, because if she couldn’t sort one measly box, no wonder she was, well, here, alone, and, Christ, three years away from being forty, and yet she wasn’t doing it, building the nest, filling the fridge, washing her towels on a regular rota, and how long, she wondered, had this slump been going for, how long, if she really thought about it, did she intend to defer the future actions that she always hoped would free her from this kind of flat, and her current line of work, and the company of the friends whom always found ways to emphasize her lack of responsibilities, even, or, maybe especially, the childless ones who sorry only could only slot in a quick drink before showing up and having a tonic water and then looking at their watch and then getting on a Lyme Bike and leaving her with far too much of an evening.
She left the crime drama rolling as she went downstairs, clutching the box to her chest, feeling the weight of it in her knees. By the time she returned, they would probably be revealing who the killer was, and she could laugh at either how ridiculously obvious the resolution was, or how pointlessly complicated it had all been if her guess was incorrect. Outside it had begun to drizzle. She trudged across the tarmac, watching the rain dribble into the box, coating the top layer of contents: birthday cards, old essays from college, a newspaper she’d kept, documenting when she and her mother had won a baking competition with a trifle shaped like a labrador. Sodden memories from an archive she was building for descendants she didn’t have.
The unit was just about wide enough to be called a garage. It was a maze of cobwebs and smelt vaguely of urine. Like many dark spaces, there was the lingering sound of something dripping. She peered in with a flashlight. Setting the box down, she saw again the rusty old bicycle that the previous occupant had left behind which, somehow, was now her responsibility to dispose of. Then she heard a flutter in the corner of the room. There came a strange hacking sound, the kind that perforates the ambience of an otherwise calm forest. A creature was purring, or barking, or coughing, weakly, clearly in distress; a stray dog or some other blighted thing, unless, heavens, a bat had gotten inside. She fumbled for the torch. Her mind was already quite prepared for a bat to launch an extended claw attack on her face.
The torch light travelled to the corner of the room, and illuminated the originator of the strange noise, which came not from a bat, but from something far more extraordinary. It was coming from a pile of clothes, which themselves shrouded over a sort of sunken mannequin, a bizarre object that seemed to be in the act of deflating, as it made a persistent whistling sound. Hollow eyes blinked back at her. Yes, it was moving, sighing, breathing. She was looking at a man, that was undeniable now, as the sunken ragdoll found his feet, and swayed apologetically, trying to balance himself against the wall. His face was all wrong, though. It had the quality of an empty milk bottle, sat too long on the kitchen side, the contents now curdled, the container meek and shrivelled. The man smiled at her, and she backed away, her right arm feeling for the exit.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t sure you could see me!’
She found the garage door and was finally able to set the flashlight down, sprinting out of the room and letting the blue wooden entry slam behind her.
‘Did I give you a fright?’ she heard him ask, through the crack under the door. Yes, she couldn’t reply, she was very afraid, pulsing with the white-knuckle fear that erodes all other senses. She was sprinting at an untold pace, back into her building, up the three flights of stairs, up and away from danger as a primate vanishes up a tree. Cowering behind her locked door, she crawled into her living room, the energy now wiped from her completely. The crime drama blared at her in an unfamiliar language. She lay on the floor, holding herself, trying to remember to breathe.
Even in that moment, she didn’t believe herself to be in danger. Or, rather, she understood that her entire knowledge of physics, and indeed, of the whole the world might be in danger, but her corporeal body wouldn’t come to harm. She stayed prone on the living room carpet until the image of the man’s face had finally shifted away. Then she sat up and wiped her brow. Anyone else, she reasoned, in this instance, would call someone, whether it be the police, or, at the very least, a burly relative, someone who could boulder into the garage and give the ragdoll a good scare. But, aside from the small problem of her cousin Keith now living in Weymouth, she did not feel she could consult the authorities on a metaphysical crisis. For she was certain she knew the man’s face. There was something in his smile, how small and timid and toothy it was, that she had recognised at once. It was the face of a man she knew to be dead, the one who used to occupy the very rooms she called her own.
His name was emblazoned on a stack of envelopes she kept on a bookshelf. Five months after his death, he still received more mail than her. Les Jersey – one of those British names which, in aspiring for drabness, arrived instead at flamboyant kitsch – had become a figure of latent curiosity. The estate agent couched it all in vague terms, that there was a sad story of the man before, that the building was still adapting; it was the first tour she’d ever seen delivered in a sombre whisper, even as he was showing her the induction hob. She was not usually morbid in her curiosities, but naturally she Googled details of the deceased just to ensure his end wasn’t too grisly. Only an idiot would occupy the site of an axe murder. But it was nothing like that; it was just another middle-management hiccup, another grey soul leaving before the end of his contract, crumbling in the sniper’s alley of middle-age, alone in his tiny lot, found by a stranger, mourned by a half-dozen. The fate of his and her type. She learned his portrait as a small measure of respect, from one foot-soldier to another, in the hope that, in a Karmic cycle, a younger body might eventually do the same for her.
Google could not dispel her terror. His face was there, smiling the same grimacing smile, adjoining two paragraphs on his company’s website, detailing their good friend Les and his now permanent absence. She’d felt an instant kinship when she’d seen his smile. People who don’t know how to smile seem to get the expression wrong in every way possible way; suddenly one’s nostrils, eyebrows or, even, the lines of one’s forehead, all take on their own agency and contort the face into the complete antithesis of contentment. Then it was the trite obituary of his lifetime employer. A kind man, always happy to help. Spare words to fill the gaps in a person. Such was the peril of being unknown.
It was quite the predicament for her, being, as she was, the opposite of superstitious, knowing that a dead man was waiting politely in her garage. She could leave the impossibility where she found it. Maybe she could take a leaf out of previous generations, and solve trauma with a heavy drink, and a week of mumbling through work. The mind is bound to flood itself with other thoughts, after a while. She might catch herself worrying about the water bill and smile to know the initial torment was over.
She poured herself a brandy and gulped it down. A few drinks later and she could feel the edges of her mind start to soften. Some part of her was quite amused by all this. What a waste of a good haunting, she thought, dolling it on someone who kept her own birthday a secret. She glanced at the stack of envelopes baring the dead man’s name. Rarely burdened by impulse, she suddenly felt a twinge that she had to go back down to the unit and give the apparition his undelivered mail. If she did return, there would be no great philosophical inquiry about the afterlife, nor any attempt at an amateur exorcism. It would be more akin to how one checks in on a spider trapped beneath a boiler glass. She would acknowledge its presence, then leave it behind.
Thus, she returned to him and, in almost matronly tones, addressed him as Mr Jersey, and informed him that several subscription services were unaware of his change in condition. Out of a mixture of fear and gallantry, she refused to acknowledge what his new condition was, in fact the only question she posed was whether he intended to remain in the storage unit. He had barely spoken as she had guided him through the various correspondence. The dead man just nodded excitedly until he was finally invited to speak.
‘If it’s alright, I think I’ll stay here.’
‘Quite alright,’ she said, and turned to exit, having successfully shepherded the supernatural back amongst the mundane.
‘It’s oddly difficult,’ he added quietly, ‘to move… when you’re, when you’re as I am.’
It was a week before she saw him again, a week in which she’d kept plotting how she might return and probe him more deeply about the situation at hand, her curiosity finally worming its way through. Too much superstition, of too many different forms, kept her from going. There was the most basic kind, that this was her own madness that she must keep at the door, lest she suddenly see dead people everywhere and be found talking to empty chairs on commuter trains. Then there was the more intellectual fear, the one that she kept shopfront in her mind, that the situation was entirely real, but that she might gain a knowledge of the world which she wasn’t entitled too. The mystery of death is the engine for mortality. This was her preferred reason for keeping away; that it took a greater courage to leave some things in the great unknown. Present, too, was the rationale of her mother, oddly transposed from fruits to fatalities, that the ripe should never mingle with the decomposed, as the one would always hasten the decline of the other.
But she did return, popping her head into the little unit to ask if he wanted anything from the outside world. He was happy to see her. Wary of establishing any proper connection, she stated firmly that she couldn’t stay long. People needed her, she insisted, and he was so understanding that it broke her heart.
‘I’m quite alright,’ he said, ‘I just sit here, really.’
Indeed, he hadn’t moved from when she saw him last. Still crouched in the corner, arms clutching his knees, sighing to himself, like a schoolboy waiting for his guardian to appear. She asked him if she might fetch him some books.
‘Oh, I think that’s all gone, I’m afraid,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘Reading. I tried, with the letters you brought me, but they all just look like hieroglyphics now.’
He could no longer read, but he did remember her name. He said it with such calm fondness, like he was her favourite uncle, like it was the only name his mind had ever really tried to keep. Rachel. Thank you, Rachel. He took joy in knowing that she was taking the flat, and that she was getting on alright with the neighbours. He was in sincere agreement that she should repaint the yellow walls and apologised for his nasty smoking habit.
‘My one sin,’ he said, ‘If you can forgive me, Rachel?’
He was too kind, it meant too much to him, she felt beholden by something outside of her remit. It was the same dilemma as when she would help out a rough sleeper, never by giving them change, mind, but with the offer of a hot drink or a sandwich, and the way in which they would keep thanking her afterwards and want to tell her how the generosity might spur them on to making a change. Yes, she would always think, very good, now let me on my way. Perhaps her kindness was a finite resource, or perhaps she just liked being alone. It was her natural state, and though it rarely brought joy, she knew it at least provided self-preservation.
So, she parsed out her visits to him, marking each with a gap somewhere short or wide of fourteen days, in case he might spot a pattern or realise she were rationing her returns. Mr Jersey, as he remained, would ask the same few questions, often about a favoured resident on the building’s first floor, or about her own progress repainting the living room, or, occasionally, the busyness of the main roads in the area now that there were traffic controlling measures in a borough nearby. There was never anything she could bring him, no help she could provide beyond light conversation. In turn they had an unspoken pact about the elephant in the room. He was not a ghost; he was just Mr Jersey. She had no clairvoyant gift for seeing dead people, there just happened to be a dead man before her.
No one would ever hear about the meetings either. She was careful, at the rare times she was out with friends, not to drink too much, having read about a young man who committed a notorious crime in his childhood, being given a new identity and a fresh start in his adult years, yet still prone to revealing his true identity to friends and colleagues after getting five pints deep at a pub. This would have to remain her little secret. How could she possibly discuss it elsewhere, anyway? Once every fortnight, for twenty minutes, I talk to my deceased neighbour about our local council. That would be the end of her, surely, she would be trussed up, taken to a white-walled room, and fed liquid cosh until she could only see the world as a blurred outline.
The arrangement remained, between the living and the dead, before another development emerged in her life, and she began to be pulled away from the strange situation in her garage; stranger still, she began to forget Mr Jersey was there at all. Carefully, quietly, she had started to fall in love, with a man who was very much alive, who’d she met at a house party, who, at first, she thought she actually despised, but later realised had just brushed up against his sullen outer shell. He was in no way glamorous, but he made her laugh. They went at a casual pace until half his things were at hers, and every night they would be at the hob together, or snuggled on the sofa, and there was no space for her to sneak away and greet Mr Jersey. Not that the dead man seemed to mind. Mr Jersey’s face never changed when he saw her appear. It was always the same fond smile.
She kept the new man secret from Mr Jersey. She felt compelled to keep those elements in her life separate. Then the man, at that time, through slightly forceful negotiation, officially her boyfriend, though she found the term adolescent so instead called him her male friend, with just the right kind of emphasis, bought her flights for a trip away to the Canary Islands. They would be gone for a few weeks, then her mother was demanding they visit her in Cornwall, then a few friends had poked back into her contact book, demanding to meet the new man. Suddenly her calendar was filled with scribbles and crosses, things to be arranged, nice ideas that she’d need to make work. She had far less room, suddenly, to be attending to a poltergeist.
Visiting the unit for what she hoped wouldn’t be the final time, she explained gently to Mr Jersey that a friend had invited her away, and that it may not be convenient for her to come as regularly.
‘I remember a holiday in Grand Canaria,’ he said, happily, ‘I was ten or eleven. Not too old to play toy soldiers. My first time trying foreign food.’ He tailed off, looking briefly rather mournful. Mastication was the only subject to provoke any melancholy in him. She had noticed this first when, a few months ago, she’d idly mentioned her office kitchen finally stocking custard creams.
‘Well, I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time.’
‘Thank you, Mr Jersey, I hope so.’
They shrugged at each other; in the way people do when they’re out of conversation. Only ten minutes had passed between them this time. She was even more reticent with him than usual, frightened of letting slip that the arrangement might soon be over. There had to be more to say to him, but her mind was blank.
‘So,’ she began, raising her eyebrows and jutting her hands into her pockets.
‘Don’t let me keep you, Rachel.’
She looked at the man, at his poor, punctured face, looking half-formed, almost a shadow. She wondered if he might be in that unit forever, or whether he might slowly fade into the structure of the place, lingering like damp, like a thousand lives linger in abandoned buildings, their names and faces forgotten, their purpose unknown. It was then, finally, that the dam broke. She had to know what was waiting for her.
‘What was it like?’
‘Hmm?’
‘I’m sorry. I just need to know.’
‘Oh, you mean-?’
She nodded.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I thought you might ask. Eventually.’
He frowned.
‘It is a bit frightening. For a second. I was just, you know, going along. And then I was coughing, and then… and then, I was aware… it became less pleasant, I’ll say that much. It was like the sudden drop you feel crossing a tow bridge, or, or when you noticed too late you’ve knocked a mug off it’s perch. The controls go. And then, then it’s a bit frightening. But then, I saw my mum. And that was nice.’
Mr Jersey smiled and laid out his hands. She thanked him, then apologised repeatedly for having asked. It was all very polite, as they said their goodbyes. Then as she lifted the blue door, she heard him call her name.
‘One last thing,’ he said quickly, ‘Just… I think I did it wrong, after I came out of it. There was a man, there, when I woke up, and I’m now quite sure that he was sent to help, you see, and tell me… help me find the, you now, the way out. But I was a bit scared, so I ran away. I hid down here. And he didn’t find me again.’
Rachel tried to find something useful to respond with, but, as she had always feared, her mind just wasn’t built for these matters. She wanted to direct Mr Jersey to some advisory panel, comfort him with the knowledge that there would be bureaucratic measures in place, but, in truth, she had always considered death as, at the very least, the end of bureaucracy.
‘So, just, if you don’t mind,’ Mr Jersey said, ‘I was wondering if, if you ever meet the man yourself, would you be willing to give him a message, and tell him that I’m still here?’