‘Well,’ he said, ‘very good.’
‘It is very good!’ I answered. ‘Oh, what was the point of going out? We’ve lost him somewhere.’
‘I don’t think we needed to be minding him,’ said Daniel.
‘This morning you did.’
‘Let’s watch some TV. Badr will be home soon. You’re welcome to stay for dinner.’
The offer was pleasant and full of brittleness underneath, and underneath the brittleness the strain of the day’s events and underneath that, a kind of hope that I would stay and – I think, under all that patina – a little fear too, for our new friendship, and for Tom.
‘What’re you making?’
‘Pasta and cheese,’ said Daniel.
‘So definitive.’
‘Well, that’s me,’ he said.
While the water was boiling in the kettle I opened the back door and went out. I wanted quiet – Daniel followed me.
‘You know, he’ll be back soon. Last night was—’
‘Like a dream. I know,’ Strange intimacies, and now getting dark and all too much. I hugged myself. Even with my jacket on I couldn’t keep back the creeping cold. In the bushes the dark was pooling, beginning to suck out the blue air. I turned and looked at the house. Briefly wondered if it was the house that was haunted, and not Tom. Consider: the age of this place suggests at least one person must have, at some point, died within its walls. Consider: its strange inhabitants and the kind of atmosphere that builds up over time like fat at the bottom of an oven. Old man Minto, the hermit of the downstairs room. Badr, who seemed to tend to the building like it was a kind of mistress, in his polish and adjustments a kind of devotional aspect. Daniel – for all that he swore for scepticism and against the spooky, just look at him. Clearly, a wispish, sensitive person of his type would be drawn to the ley-line feel of this place. Tom was the odd one out. He moved here because the rent was good, housemates seemed nice and they accepted his cat. Does anyone write a PhD thesis on a house? Not, just generally: specifically scale and map out a house like codicologists map the uniqueness of an old book. Does anyone truly have that kind of love in them for a house that is of neither historical or architectural significance? But a haunted house is the vessel and the text.
I wanted to ask Daniel what he thought of that, and what he felt about Tom, but I didn’t have the energy. I took some gulps of the cold air and felt my own feelings clear with it, cold clouds out through chapped lips. Daniel laughed, covered his mouth. He also did not want to hurt me.
‘Moon’s up,’ I said.
Daniel was beside me. He put his arms around me, suddenly.
We stood together in the hug. I hadn’t thought him capable, but he was assured at it. With me in the moment of it as it opened up. I did not cry, but I thought about it.
‘Forget it all,’ he said. We pulled apart, and he laughed at something. We went in and ate what is always the right amount of pasta, too much, strung with tangy cheese and glistening with butter.
Tom remained out in the night.
Minto
Daniel and I fell asleep on the sofa, him on one side, me on the other, our feet touching under a thrown coat. I was woken by sounds in the house, a key turning in the door. But it wasn’t Tom. I got up to investigate. In the hallway was a man, tall and hunched, with white hair he was sorting with one hand as with the other he rummaged in the post cubby and pulled out a stack of letters.
‘Are you Minto?’ I asked.
He turned around. A smile slowly materialised on his face.
Though it was dark I noticed yellow teeth, and blue, protruding eyes.
‘Hello! The very same,’ he said in a shoogly, theatrical whisper, before turning back around and working on his post again. He made a discard pile and a keep pile. The discard pile went straight in the bin, and the keep went in the pocket of his oversized grey coat, possibly forever. He was humming. He went into the kitchen – I couldn’t imagine him ever having been in that room somehow. I followed him in.
‘Ah, are you one of the lodgers?’ he said. He had a kind of refined, fluted voice that wavered between posh Scottish and terribly English. Sounded like a schoolmaster from a fifties film – Alistair Sim, that was it.
‘No. I just. Go out with one.’ I said.
‘Lucky them, whichever one it is,’ he said. He went to the fridge and took out a container of food and put it on the table. A sticker said ‘Badr’s turmeric chicken’ on the front, with a date.
‘Care to join me? The man’s a very fine cook.’
I fetched cutlery.
‘No plates,’ he said, holding up a hand.
We sat and picked through the sticky, spicy chicken with our forks, saying nothing. Minto continued to hum as he chomped. Distracted or wishing to appear distracted. After a while he stopped, fork mid-air.
‘Do you know what’s happening with the blond one?’
‘Tom?’
‘Yes, the blond one. I have noticed he is a little odd. Now, if it’s habitual oddness or sudden onset queerness, I cannot quite say. Just that to me he seems a little . . . lost in the fog.’ Before I could answer, he forged on.
‘Now, we’re all a little foggy now and then. God knows I’ve forgotten to eat for days at a time, or I’ve not paid a bill – somehow it always gets done, very good they are here about that. But when someone is so off that it starts to unbalance the house, that’s when I. Well. I go out on a walk and try to think of a solution.’
‘That’s what you were doing? You were on a walk.’
‘Midnight stroll. I went to the Pentland hills.’
‘That’s quite far for a walk on one night.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, ‘it depends how time works for you. For some, like me in my old age, it is slower than for others. And you find you can get a lot more done when it is slow, though it can irk those who are fast fast fast.’
I went to the sink and washed my fork.
‘Do sit, girl. Sit sit. Have more of that. There, good. Sometimes, my days last for weeks at a time. I only must remember to keep some supplies to hand, or risk getting fatigued as the day stretches on ahead of me.’
‘I like that,’ I said, ‘though I don’t quite believe you’re entirely serious.’
‘Oh? Well—’ Minto paused. ‘If I had to take an educated guess at what has happened to your gentleman friend,’ he said, ‘I’d say he is suffering from a kind of disruption.’
‘Disruption of time?’
‘Ah you’re a quick one,’ he said. He ambled to the sink and washed his own fork under the cold tap and poured himself a glass of water.
‘Where do you think Tom is now, in his disrupted time?’
Minto stopped and stared in thought. His eyes were a paler blue than I’d thought, the colour of scintillations of light on water.
‘Oh, I haven’t shaved in too long,’ he said, rubbing his grizzled jowls. ‘Now, Tom, I’d say he’s probably lost in another century entirely.’
‘You’ve seen him with the book then?’
Minto looked at me. Man did not blink much. Owl head and a slight smile, ‘Ah, what book?’ he said.
‘The diary. He’s been reading the diary of an nineteenth-century man.’
‘Well, that’ll be it then,’ Minto said. ‘Look for him there.’
And with shuffling steps he left the room. And there came shortly after the sound of his door closing shut.
The Revenant
I lay dozing in Tom’s bed, and it was Tom that woke me, flushing the toilet and coming in at seven in the morning. I checked my phone for the time.
‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked in a carefully groggy voice.
‘Out,’ he said with a sheen of sweat on his face. It was too little to go on.
‘Okay. Oh, cold feet.’ I said, and shifted to make room. He set down his jeans and tee-shirt, smelling of raw earth and of himself. It smelled like he had been lying on the ground. He had pieces of leaf in his hair. Many of them. I didn’t dare
to try and remove them.
At ten I woke up and got out of bed. The party was that night. Hallowe’en. I opened the curtains on the crisp-looking day, and looked back at the room. Mrs Boobs was awake and staring at me. We sat in vigil over Tom. His face soft with sleep. People can look so perfect while they sleep, I thought, so tender and wonderful. All that life held in safe hands. No worry or pain. Unless they are dreaming. But Tom’s eyes were still. And was he the only occupant of that body, and had he been all the time he was away in this world of ours, or some other?
Around ten minutes later he got up swiftly and walked shirtless into the living room, and I followed behind like I was a wife, or a cat.
‘Where is it?’ he said.
Daniel was still on the sofa, with a mug in his hand and the TV on. ‘Hmm?’ he said, ‘Oh, Tom. Hi. The diary’s in my room.’ Tom stalked out. I looked at Daniel. He mouthed humour him at me. I picked up a pad of paper from the floor and scrawled in biro, some kind of episode? And underlined this.
We listened to Tom ascending the stairs, footsteps up to Daniel’s room. His tread made it half-way back down the stairs, where he sat, and I looked at him, again dumbly like a wife, or a cat. I felt oddly like he had come down with another person. I couldn’t see from where I stood if he had the book or not – I thought not since he would have had to have kept it down the front of his pyjamas. Nowhere else for it to go.
‘Am I overthinking it?’ I whispered to Daniel, who only shrugged. I wondered how Badr was doing. He was the only one of us at work today. Though Tom should have been. I got up and made more food. So it always goes. Breakfast, tea. In the midst of some kind of internal or external strife. Coffee, instant soup, checking your emails on your phone, chaos in the world, biscuits, the economy destroyed, a stadium.
The next thing I knew, Tom was in the kitchen with me, bustling about.
‘Can I get some of that hot water,’ he said. And he made himself a soup from one of my packets and sat drinking it while leaning on the counter as if nothing whatsoever had happened.
I let him drink for a while. Then, nearly bursting: ‘Where were you yesterday?’ I said, in as close to a correct, coolish, non-enraged, still meaningful tone as I could manage.
‘Oh shit, I didn’t tell you, did I? Company away day,’ he said. Then he finished up and went off for a shower.
I took my soup to the doorway of the living room. I could have stood in the entrance to a shelled stadium. That would have done.
‘He’s cheating on me,’ I said to Daniel, ‘d’you think?’
‘Hmm, maybe,’ he said, bending his head to sip more from his mug, the sensualist. ‘But it’s the better option than what you were thinking before.’
‘Fuck you,’ I said, with affection.
I walked through the house, past Minto’s door, into the kitchen, into Tom’s room, back into the kitchen, and then to the back door, opening it but not stepping through as if I could be both standing in the warmth and out in the cold air standing in the garden. I snuffed that air. Mrs Boobs came and snuffed it too. I was upright on my place, I was disgustingly subservient to this man’s actions, and needing, needing to know. The wife faces the sea her husband is sailing on, and does not know what is his fate, and it’s the nineteenth century, and even now, some of us find ourselves so. What’s he doing if he’s not cheating on me, I thought. Daniel came up to me, with the coat on his shoulders. I wanted to laugh at him there. The world’s least imposing gangster.
‘Do you still think there’s something supernatural, cold bitch?’ he said.
‘So I’m the cold bitch now? Me, the spooky one?’
‘It’s a beautiful day,’ he answered, closing his eyes and raising his head up in the brightening light from the window. Dark eyebrows, darting eyes. Soft lips. Nobbly nose. Such surprisingly beautiful detail and I suddenly thought, with morning clarity, that we were forming a tiny cult between us.
‘Something is happening with him,’ I said.
‘If he’s cheating on you with somebody,’ Daniel said, ‘you don’t have to overthink it. The strangeness is guilt, or something. Or perhaps he has secret business all of his own that relates to none of this.’
‘I met Minto last night,’ I said.
‘Oh really? What – what did he say?’
I explained.
‘Do you feel vindicated in some way, that old Minto senses something in the way you have?’
‘Are you a therapist? Because that’s how a therapist sounds, I think. At least, in shows.’
I opened the back door at last and went out. Bare feet on painfully cold concrete slabs. A snail there going about its business I stepped around him. Let myself enjoy the plumes of my breath. It was Hallowe’en, and the invisible was all around me, pressing on my legs like a cat. I didn’t really feel that uncanny. Tom was a dilemma and a sliding desperation to which I felt sharply alert. And rightly so.
Plumping
Some days it takes four hours to get ready for an event because you have to pull your soul up from a deep well and shake it out, let it dry in the sun a little bit. You know what I mean? I walked home the forty minutes to my flat and climbed the three flights of stairs. Everyone was out somewhere. With slow movements I entered the shower, wet and conditioned my hair. Vee had some fine potions on her part of the shelf. I clapped and smeared cold white slime on my face. I think I was crying but the shock against my skin drew me out of it.
So, what I knew: Tom had vanished all day and into the night. He said a work thing. There had been the weirdness with the book. The book’s sense of inauthenticity. Now a totem he could not live without to the point that even when he had it he thought he didn’t. I hadn’t slept. I was becoming entangled and with what, given he didn’t give much away. I started shaving my legs. Slops of white dripped on my belly and went down the drain. Wine, I thought. I wrapped a towel around me and got the wine from the cupboard. I’d brush after. My teeth were foul anyway with the late night chicken even after a brush. In between the kitchen and the shower I decided I did not think in the marrow of me he was cheating. Stupid, I thought. What else? A bender wouldn’t explain the oddness. A ghost then, or something inhabiting him, some obsession relating to the book, fuck anyone else’s opinion.
But Daniel had been so reasonable that my lifelong belief in the – yes, I know, implausible – world of spirits visible and invisible was shaken. If I wasn’t much for belief in anything else, why should I believe in them? I decided I had two options: 1. Call my parents and ask them again about the cold bitch incident, get something concrete on that or: 2. Mull it over some more before venturing to make any decisions. I decided on the latter. My parents would be unkeen to hear from me outside our allotted phone call day, and the worse for having the old bruise prodded. I rinsed off the conditioner and shampooed. I let the gunk that was left on my face stay on a bit longer. Cold steam about me. I leaned in to the narrow strip of heat. Ghosts though. The rattling window. The vacant stare and the yelling about stabbing. It wasn’t much evidence. Tom’s leaves on the pillow. Could be just a deep involvement with the text and its delusions, with the physical object which contained the text. His sweat-dirt smell. I liked this explanation. It played to my own obsessions. It allowed me some dignity. And hinted that whatever was off would be easily solved by waiting out til the book lessened its grip on him.
I got out and dried and put my loungewear on, black and loose. I had to pick up my party clothes from the tailor soon but too much thinking assailed me. Swirls of the nights past, the hill, the book and its weirdness and whatever it might be hiding. I padded into my room and lay myself down operatically on the bed, thinking of my haunted man, pushing back the idea of myself as a dull, everyday, cheated-on woman, then pulling that image to me again and hugging it tight with all its thorns. My little throw pillow said ‘be well’ on it, a relic from another relationship that had sickened and faded from this world. But I kept it because I wanted what it wished. He might be fucking someone else. Th
at would be easier. Snap off ties. I looked up at the picture I had stuck to the ceiling: a forest in the mist from on high. What did it matter? We hadn’t been going out long enough for it to matter. Get on with life then Órla. You’ve done it so many times, or someone else has done it to you – left, with little notice. Why this little game with yourself that it has to hurt? Revelling in being pained when really you are bringing that pain into being on yourself like it’s a kind of obligation. I regret myself greatly, as an academically-minded woman, reduced to the cyclical obsessive.
Better minds than mine have worked this game out and kicked it. Stop then. Stop thinking. But better minds than mine have also burned in anguish for days. I yelled out an obscenity, at Tom, myself, the immortal fraughtness of relationships between people.
I determined as the only option that I would be in this haunted theory and keep Tom in my life for now, and allow myself to obsess in this one respect. It was so capacious an escapade; the diary entries had carried him out into the streets, all night, and had removed him some place I could not get to which I told myself I was interested in reaching for out of curiosity. He had seen some ghost of something, that much was convincing to me. Ghost of self-reproach, ghost of a conspiracy-hunter. I let myself dream myself then into all roles, turning them about to understand. I was Tom – his strangely vacant look and absent hours. I’d see him tonight, unless he wandered off again. I was James Lennoxlove, riding his foaming horse back from the ball, blood in his mind, then nothing, nothing, then dates of entry that seemed innocuous but were not. I wondered what the party would have in store for me, me as Tom, me as myself. And then, an inevitability, I could not fend off picturing him kissing some other girl, hand on her curves. It excited and appalled me. I thought of myself rushing in and catching him at it. Over and over on my little track, occasionally sighing to the naked room.
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