We’ve tried phone calls – but they always end up in shouting, somehow.
We’ve tried email – but he said that he’d grown so to dread the ‘cold aggression’ of my tone that he could hardly bring himself to open my messages anymore.
We’ve tried skype – but I found I couldn’t bear staring directly into his beady little eyes for so long a time.
Face to face actually works best, but only because I can usually position myself so that I don’t have to look at him, and can thus constantly retreat into other, more pleasant regions of thought.
And yet we must talk – for a while longer, at least. Family business demands it, and no further evasions can be found.
And along with that, of course, comes a raft of other family obligations: Birthday and Christmas cards: presents, even, however token in nature. All those enforced contacts which gall us most when they seem most arbitrary.
So what to get him for Christmas?
A copy of Emily Post, was my first thought (though it turned out, when I mentioned this jest to someone at work, that no-one appears to recall anymore her undisputed reign over all the intricacies of etiquette).
A film? I’ve tried that before: buying the alleged Sinophile a box-set of Chinese historical epics. But his look of complete incomprehension at the gift persuaded me that this was not an expedient worth repeating.
A book, then? The fact that the books are piled high in his house thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa [1] might suggest otherwise. Still, where best to hide a leaf? In the forest. What best to buy for a misanthrope? More of what he already has.
A book was accordingly determined on. But what book? Nothing about self-help, that’s for sure: too pointed. There’s no need to escalate the temperature when it’s already at boiling point.
I’d watched a particularly nasty ghost story sometime before: about a vengeful spirit who rejects all attempts to appease her, and instead ends up killing her would-be benefactor.
I’d seen the book it was based on some weeks before, bound up with several other stories by the same hand, in a little bookshop some half an hour away by car.
Having left it so late, the holiday frenzy was already in full spate when I decided to drive over and get it. Crowds were thronging the malls, aggressive motorists the roads. It was fearfully hot – sweatily, stickily hot – and the busdrivers were on strike.
Nevertheless, I duly set out on my fool’s errand, to buy something avowedly useless for someone I don’t like in order to try to persuade him that I do – when all the time he and I both know that all of this is just about the money, a great deal of money, which neither of us wishes to dissipate in lawyer’s fees so long as there’s any chance at all of getting our share by simply watching and waiting … Hallelujah! Deck the halls with boughs of holly, and fa la la la la la la la la (give or take a ‘la’ or two).
It used to be that the fastest way to drive across town was to avoid all the suburban capillary roads by getting straight onto the motorway. No longer, alas.
It took me so long even to get onto the motorway approach the last time I tried it that I’ve taken to putting up with all the 50k speed limits and random old ladies out in their little blue cars in the interests of simply keeping moving (and thus discouraging my sad antique of a car from overheating).
And there’s no denying that it’s more interesting inching one’s way through a built-up shopping centre than one more random stretch of soulless highway.
Which is why, I suppose, I had the leisure to see the ghost.
I say ‘ghost,’ but that is – of course – a supposition. How am I to confirm that it was a ghost, and not a hallucination, or even just a trick of the light in my eyes?
The fact remains that I saw, by the side of the road, my ex-wife standing, parcels in hand, waiting for the pedestrian crossing lights to go green.
Methought I saw my late espousèd Saint [2] … etc. etc. Not Saint, though, never that – but not a face (or a frown) I could ever grow indifferent to, either, no matter how much time had gone by.
And she was frowning, that was the thing: despite all the Christmas trappings around her, all the green trees and red hats and bundles of presents, all those things she most loved, she had that crease in her forehead which denoted distress.
There was nowhere to stop. I suppose I could have abandoned the car and leapt out and run back to accost her, but it was not – in the mundane sense, at least – a feasible manoeuvre. But I could hardly just drive on, either, so I turned down a side-street and came back, by a commodious vicus of circulation, to the same intersection.
Where she was, of course, no longer standing.
Had she ever been there at all? Well, I suppose that it depends in what sense you mean the question. Would she have been visible to anyone else seated beside me? Possibly not. But that doesn’t mean that she hadn’t been clearly apparent to me, despite the fact that I wasn’t thinking about her, and hadn’t – in fact – spent a moment on her for what seemed like years.
I ranged around the shopping centre for a while (having finally found a park in the nearby mall), but with little result, and nothing to show for it besides perplexity.
Could it have been her? There was no real reason why not. Despite the fact that she lived on the other side of the world, in the approximate zone of the white Christmas, she could have made a sudden decision to revisit old haunts at the season of goodwill. Why not, in fact?
I hadn’t heard anything from her, was one reason why not, but then she did have some (fairly distant) relatives here. Perhaps she was visiting them? There was certainly nothing unbelievable in the idea that she wouldn’t trouble herself to make contact with one whom she had somewhat unceremoniously dumped so many years before.
Who knows? The heart – any faint vestiges of heart – had gone out of my errand, but that didn’t seem a strong enough reason to give up on it entirely. In the absence of alternate directions, let inertia carry you in the same trajectory, is the usual rule in these matters. And so I went on.
Backing and filling my way out of the parking building was quite adventurous enough, but given that all that had to be done anyway whether I turned left (towards the bookshop) or right (towards home), I let the ease of the leftward drift carry me on.
Till I saw her dog.
It was a big Briard sheepdog, black as night, called Ajax. I’d never exactly got on with the dog, but we’d maintained mutually respectful relations during most of the time I’d been married. With her, on the other hand (and the rest of the extended family) he’d been on the most rapturously loving terms.
There he was, standing by the side of the road, staring fixedly into space, as if at some imaginary point in the distance (I remembered his uncanny skill at detecting where a car was going whilst still some minutes or miles away from the destination: with intense excitement if it was to see one of his loved ones, dejection if it was merely to the vet or the grooming clinic).
He certainly wasn’t looking at me, and – so far as I could ascertain in the brief glimpse I got of the other side of the road whilst driving by – nor was his mistress anywhere in sight.
I’ve read Phantasms of the Living [3]. I know that most sightings of people who couldn’t possibly be there in the flesh are not at the point of their death, or at the moment they’re on the operating table, or in the grip of some extreme emotion. It can correspond with nothing significant at all – for either the perceiver or the thing perceived.
I also know about fetches: those strange visitations of totem animals or uncanny sights which betoken some ill luck to the beholder. Gunnar’s vision of a hillside covered with blood at the climax of Njal’s Saga, for instance.
What, then, was this? An omen or a happenstance? A meaningful intervention from the paranormal realm – or a mere coincidence?
On I drove, towards the bookshop, towards Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Other Ghost Stories, towards my destiny, towards the distinct possibility that my brother would get his way, and all those weighty wads of dosh, to keep as company for himself alone as the night falls and the darkness comes wherein all the beasts of the forest do move [4].
Notes:
[1] John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1l.302-3. Quoted from Paradise Lost. Ed. Alastair Fowler. 1968. Longman Annotated English Poets (London: Longman Group Limited, 1974), 62.
[2] John Milton, Sonnet XIX. Quoted from Complete Shorter Poems. Ed. John Carey. Longman Annotated English Poets. 1st ed. 1968 (London: Longman Group Limited, 1971), 413.
[3] Edmund Gurney, Frederick W. H. Myers & Frank Podmore, Phantasms of the Living. 2 vols (London: Rooms of the Society for Psychical Research / Trübner & Co., 1886).
[4] Psalms 104: v. 20 (Anglican Prayerbook version): quoted in ‘Mr. Humphrey and His Inheritance.’ The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James. 1st ed. 1931. Pocket Edition (London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1964), 340.
Olivia Macassey, ed.: brief 54 (2016)[20-23/12/2015]
[1512 words]
[Published in brief 54 (2016): 99-104;
Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 79-82.]
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