Ghost

by Louise Welsh

  Thanks, Pauline said.

  It took three months for Pauline’s referral. By the time she was sitting in one of the plush armchairs on the other side of the desk from the counsellor she had lost a substantial amount of weight, there were black circles round her eyes, and her hair had outgrown the style it was supposed to have.

  It’s a woman, she whispered, a woman or a girl, I can’t tell which. I can only just catch her, and only sometimes, in the corner of my eye. I’m pretty sure she’s here now. I don’t really like talking about her in the third person. It seems rude.

  Behind the counsellor’s head there was a poster of the Munch painting of the screaming person on the bridge. Above the face was the word DEPRESSION and a question mark, in shimmery out-of-focus letters.

  The piece of plastic on her desk said that the counsellor’s name was Mrs Jane Figgis. Mrs Figgis looked tired. She wrote down Pauline’s name. Now then, she said. Pauline. We’ve got a six-week block of meetings, Pauline, and I’m hoping you will be able to make it here to the office at this time every week for the next five weeks not including today.

  I will, Pauline said.

  Including this week, that makes six weeks in all, Mrs Figgis said. Now. If you feel like you’re going to be unable to keep to this arrangement, for any reason at all, for instance if you’re ill, or you have another appointment somewhere else, or you just don’t feel like coming, if you could telephone reception and explain that you can’t comply with our schedule on that particular week.

  Yes of course, Pauline said, but I’m always available on Thursday mornings, Thursday’s fine for me.

  Because if you cancel, Pauline, you see, you must understand. Whether you choose to or you have to forego one of our scheduled meetings, regardless of reasons I’m afraid, you’ll lose that meeting altogether. I just have to make that clear, and I hope it isn’t a problem for you, Mrs Figgis said.

  No, no problem at all, I understand, Pauline said. She signalled with her eyes to the armchair on the left of her. She’s here now, she said. I think she’s in that chair there.

  Yes, the counsellor said. She wrote something down and looked at her watch. Tell me about yourself, she said. Let’s start with your childhood.

  *

  It’s nothing to do with my childhood. When I try to picture it, the entity called childhood, it repeats on me, rich and well-meaning as a glass of milk and I know that it was a time of effortless seasons, fanning down one after the other like the pages of a book slow-riffled by the thumb of some blithe, indolent hand.

  My name is Pauline Gaitskill. I was born in July 1966. I work for Hummings Mints; I design the combinations of sugar, flavouring and chemicals to make the insides of the Hummings range chewy and harmless. I’ve been doing this for the six years since I left college. I’m solely responsible for several things: Hummings Chewy Spearmints, Hummings Chewy Peppermints and Hummings Chewy Strongmints. At the moment I am working on a potential new project, Hummings Chewy Traditional Olde English Mints.

  Recently something has changed for me. It is possible, I suppose, that it’s been changed for longer, that I just didn’t notice, but I’ve been aware of it since the first week of November last year.

  I remember because that night we had friends over; we had stripped our front and back rooms and we were celebrating our new polished wood floor. Our friends brought some dope, which made us hilarious and we were lolling and giggling round the aftermath of supper. The table was strewn with our leftovers. Someone had left the television on in the adjoining room, a programme where some elderly people were talking about their lives, and every so often, I remember, there would be film of mounds of dead bodies from all over the world over the century, over the lifetimes of the old people. The thing I remember is that every time any one of us caught sight of these dead bodies in the other room we would all end up destroyed, in helpless laughter.

  Mike is my partner. He makes toothpaste dispensers; we’re perfectly suited. That night he was telling Roger and Liz about something he’d read in the Sunday paper, where the last words of pilots in planes about to crash were recorded, and were usually oh fuck or oh shit or oh Christ. Then we all joined in making up people’s famous last words. Marc Bolan: at least I went out on a smash hit. Marie-Antoinette: did you have to take so much off? I only wanted a trim. (I thought that one up.) Liz had one about Princess Diana, I don’t remember. I remember we had a long and detailed argument about whether famous last words were valid after or before the death, and we eventually decided that they’d have to be said before to count, since you couldn’t really say anything after you were dead, and then we went round the table and each of us had to think of one. Look how close I can get to the edge of this cli-i-i-i–. Do you think we should be driving quite so fa–. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly sa–. Liz had one which was the same each time with different endings. Why are you coming towards me in that threatening way with such a big sharp kitchen kni–, that tennis ra–, hypodermic syri–, sawn-off sho–. There were people lining up in black and white on television, about to be shot or hung. I pretended to be one of them. I said: I really wish this was just a game of famous last wo–. I got the biggest laugh. We were laughing our heads off.

  The next day my head felt all light. The next day was the first day I had an inkling that something might actually be wrong.

  *

  The waiting room was full of people waiting to talk to counsellors. Pauline stood at the receptionist’s desk until the receptionist looked up from her screen.

  I won’t be coming to my appointment next week, Pauline said. Or the week after that, or, I’m afraid, the week after that. And I won’t be able to come next month at all. I’m very busy next month.

  The receptionist clicked up the first of Pauline’s appointments and began deleting the letters of her name. Pauline pushed through the heavy swing doors. She paused to hold the door open. She didn’t want it to swing back and hit whoever was at her heels.

  Pretty blonde Pauline turning heads in the sun of a June afternoon. Blonde and wide-eyed like a girl from an old-fashioned hairspray commercial, frowning slightly, quite attractively, as if concentrating; looking all the better for being a little too gaunt; her long hair shimmering and the sight of her sending a pleasant shiver over the surfaces of the hearts of passers-by as she walked down the street.

  Pauline stopped suddenly, very suddenly turned round.

  Nearly, she said in a whisper. Nearly caught you.

  Pauline talking to the ghost as she walked, but quietly so nobody would think her deranged, humming what she said into a singsong so anybody would think her just strolling along, singing a song. Me and my sha-dow, strolling down the a-ven-ue, me and my sha-dow. I know you’re there. What do you want. I know you want something. What do you want from me. She smiled back at a man who was smiling at her from behind his fruit stall.

  Daydreaming, darling?

  Yes, I suppose I am, she said.

  Can I do you anything today, love?

  Not today, thanks.

  Pauline went into an empty church, sat down at the back.

  Is this right? she said under her breath. Is this any good?

  The church was shockingly cold. Pauline sat in a pew then lay down on her back. She looked up at the rafters. A medieval-looking man hung carved into the wall. He had his arm round the shoulder of another man most of whose face had been chiselled off, and he was holding open the wound in his own side so the man with no face could put his fingers into it. The face that remained was patient, indifferent. Pauline sneezed, and heard the sneeze repeat itself in the church a fraction of a second after it had left her nose.

  Bless me, she said.

  Less me, the echo said.

  She lay as flat as she could. She crushed out the space between her back and the wood she was lying on.

  Nothing there, she said.

  Air, the echo said.

  I give up. I’m going mad. I am, Pauline said.

  Vup. Ad. Am
, the echo said.

  Out on the street heat haze or car haze hung at the traffic lights. Pauline crossed the road to the fruit stall and bought eight oranges from the man.

  Got a cold? the man said.

  Vitamins, Pauline said.

  At the newsagent’s she bought a newspaper and a bottle of water. When she came out she saw the girl hanging from a lamppost. She watched her, cut down, fall through the air and crumple on to the ground.

  The bottle smashed open on the pavement. The oranges rolled into the road. A boy stopped his bike and picked up what he could as the cars roared past. He held out his arms full of oranges to the woman standing with her mouth open, broken glass round her feet and water seeping into the cracks in the concrete. A mother tugged on a small child’s hand, told her to come away.

  Are you in pain? Pauline said.

  Eh? the boy holding the oranges said. You all right? All right then?

  The women watching from the pelican crossing decided between them that she was drunk.

  Your poor head. Is it heavy? Pauline said.

  The water was evaporating already on the pavement. The boy put the oranges down, stepped back.

  She draped the hanged girl’s arms round her shoulders, hoisted her on to her back. The girl’s head swung down, loose, hung round Pauline’s neck. Pauline held it in her bare hands.

  *

  I think we are friends now. She is much less shy than she was to start with, and I have invited her to stay for as long as she wants. She is staying in the guest room. I have been trying to explain to Mike, but he just refuses to see it.

  She has an endless appetite for television. She lies on the couch with her head propped on the arm of it and watches tv like a sick child. (Actually I think she only is about twelve, or thirteen at the most.) She loves quizzes, game shows, shows where people sing. She particularly seems to love old musicals. She watched the whole of Oliver! and I could tell, she was moved, especially when Nancy gets killed.

  She becomes quite agitated if anything serious is on. Mike gets very angry and we have had several arguments, the last and most furious so far over a documentary film of some Canadian loggers taking chainsaws to trees. But she didn’t want to see it and I will not have her suffer. Anyway Mike didn’t really want to watch it; he’s never wanted to watch such things before. He was just trying to prove a point.

  For someone with such bad co-ordination she gets around pretty well. She likes to hang herself from things all over the house. She’s tried out all the light fittings in all the rooms. She likes the upstairs banister rail; she enjoys the drop in the landing. Last night she hung on the wall like a picture. I think she was trying to make me laugh.

  It is exciting having a friend again. Mike is a little resentful, which is unreasonable. It’s not as if we skulk in corners and discuss him or anything. It’s not as if we talk at all. I don’t believe she understands English, even if she could talk. I sing to her sometimes; it’s a universal language. I show her words in the paper and try to explain them until she looks bored. We have a book of photographs of wild flowers. She is always signalling to me to find the pictures of the small pink ones, field bindweed, and the small blue ones, forget-me-not.

  The way her eyes are set up beneath the lids makes her look cynical, and once you get to know her she’s not like that at all. She hangs off the tree at the bottom of the lawn and birds swoop round her, rest on her shoulders or the side of her head. One day I lay on the grass and she lay beside me; we stayed there all afternoon and all evening, until it got dark. She wanted to watch the things coming out of the ground.

  I would like to remove what’s left of the rope. It looks heavy and uncomfortable; it must rub. But when I showed her the knife – it’s too thick for scissors – she flew off up the stairs in a panic and hung from the light in the back bedroom and wouldn’t come down. I heard her thump back on to the carpet well after I went to bed.

  I wonder what her name is. I have no idea how to find out. I tell her, to comfort her, because she must need comfort, that there’s nothing so strange or different about it, that she’s missing nothing, that it’s the same for everyone; every one of us falling through air with one end of the rope attached to our birthdates till the rope pulls tight. Some people just have less far to fall, I say.

  But she looks at me with her white eyes, her head hanging like an empty ventriloquist’s dummy, and I know what the look means. Some people are pushed. Some people aren’t given enough rope. You can’t know what it was like.

  True. I don’t know. I have no idea what it was like.

  I can make a good guess as to where she is now. In her favourite place, doing her favourite thing, swinging beneath my kitchen clock pretending to be the pendulum.

  *

  Pauline stopped going in to work. Mike found out when Pauline’s boss called his office to ask if she was any better. He drove home in the middle of the day and found her lying on her back on the lawn, staring at the sky with her hair in the soil beneath the rose bush.

  That night in bed he put his head on her arm.

  Love, he said. Baffling, all this. Really it is.

  No, Pauline said. Baffling is where they hang you by the foot; they used to do it in parts of Europe and in Scotland, it’s a symbolic sacrifice, like putting you in the stocks. They did it to people who owed money or to perpetrators of mild forms of treason. It’s not the same thing at all.

  Mike sat up, took Pauline by an earnest hand, made his face earnest. Tell me it again, he said. I’m trying to understand. In your dreams, and in your head –

  – uh huh, in my dreams, if you like, Pauline said

  – you’ve got this pretty girl always going to her death, Mike said.

  A pretty girl going to her death, Pauline said. Does the prettiness make a difference?

  Of course, Mike said. He smiled. I’d think it’d be much harder to watch a pretty girl having to die, he said.

  Pretty, Pauline said. Well, it’s hard to tell. She’s beautiful, of course. But it’s not what you’d call a pretty sight. But yes, I suppose she was once pretty. Or she might have been, if she’d had the chance. Anyway, she’s a friend. Friends are always pretty, even if they’re not.

  Pauline stared at the wall. Mike lay back and watched her stare into space. He thought about the three thin pretty girls from the American sitcom about friends, and then he imagined them on their way to die. He made up various possible deaths for them. Then he replaced them with some of the prettier girls from work.

  Christ, he said.

  He turned over so Pauline wouldn’t sense his erection, closed his eyes and shook his head sharply, pictured himself instead, driving along the motorway under turn-off signs and signs flashing warnings about fog, driving fast along boring country lanes and slowing as he came into a village, past a sign about old people crossing, a sign about a hump-backed bridge, a narrowing of the road, a sharp bend, a sign saying keep your distance.

  I don’t know what to do, Mike told Roger at lunch. I’m at the end of my tether. She won’t go to work. She won’t answer the phone. She won’t come out, not even down to the pub for a quick drink. She sits in the house all day in a room with the curtains closed, or on the kitchen floor with her legs crossed leaning against the fridge, or she shuts herself in the bathroom and talks to herself. She won’t talk to me. She watches rubbish all the time on tv. Her work phoned me; they can’t sign her off sick without a sick note and she won’t go to the doctor, she keeps saying she’s better. But she lies in bed all day and won’t get up. She’s hardly eating. I’ve bought her presents. They make no difference.

  Yeah, Roger said. Liz says she can’t get her to speak to her. She says it’s as if she’s a different person. She thinks she needs therapy.

  She’s been, Mike said. She won’t go back. The therapist told her it was displaced guilt.

  What’s this? Maggie said across the table. What’s this about guilt? Somebody’s guilty of something around here and I don’t kn
ow about it?

  Mike bristled. He didn’t want anyone else listening in.

  Pauline says it’s a load of rot, he said to Roger. She says there’s nothing displaced about it and the sooner we all realize it, the better.

  Yeah, right, Roger said. He frowned. Guilty of what? he said. He hadn’t really been listening, and didn’t want Mike to realize. He began wondering whether Pauline was having an affair after all, like Liz thought. (He and Liz had been discussing it. In fact they had had rather a nice time discussing it, and had gone out for a meal specifically to do so, and had spent more time talking to each other because of it than they had for quite a long time, and afterwards they had been exceptionally close and had had some very good sex.)

  Well, you know, Mike said. Like when. Like this thing that happened about a month ago, I was reading this piece out of the paper about soldiers taking an amateur video of each other pretending to be shooting people in the mouth and raping people, and the paper had got hold of the videotape and now the soldiers were in trouble. I mean, it isn’t even a real bad thing, but she went running crying out of the room. I mean, it was only them having a laugh. I told her. Terrible things happen all the time. You can’t be this sensitive, you just can’t.

  No, Maggie said, you can’t, can you? When Dave and I were in Washington we went to the museum they’ve got about the holocaust, you know? It’s an amazing building. But it’s so depressing, and it’s really tiring.

  Liz’s father, Roger said, used to do this thing. He used to take pictures of gravestones all the time. Liz has all these photos of her and her mother and sisters on days out in cemeteries. Her father used to make them go because it was easy to park and you could always find somewhere to sit. Weird. I mean, sick.

  Spooky, Maggie said looking at Mike.

  Right, Mike said. He was sweating. He held his arms close in to his sides, in case there were patches showing under them. He looked at his plate, at what looked like gristle on his fork. Last night he had woken in the middle of the night from the same dream, the recurring dream, where his parents appeared to him smiling, vibrantly alive.