The Universe of Things

by Gwyneth Jones

  It was necessary, for these tasks of mindless drudgery, to develop a special state of mind. I had trained myself to toil away thinking of practically nothing, in a positive trance of stripper fumes and burning muscles. In such a state hallucinations are not unlikely… I decided to give the power drill a rest, and put out my hand for the wire wool; I found myself tugging at a hank of human hair. I dropped it in instant revulsion, but not quickly enough. My hand was stinging. The wool was impregnated with stripper, and I’d forgotten that I’d taken my gloves off. I saw that my fingers and palm were stippled with drops of blood. I knelt staring at my hand, prickles of unease at the back of my neck.

  The house seemed quiet now I’d switched the drill off, the light looked extra artificial, as it always does in an empty room at night. I put on my gloves and went on, plodding patiently at the weary task until my wad had become clogged and useless. I reached for a new hank of wire again: it was hair. I felt someone resist and flinch away as I tugged. In an instant my mind was flooded by another consciousness. I felt the indignity of senile helplessness, when you can’t look after yourself and have to bear the brusque attentions of a careless nurse or a resentful daughter. The feelings of this old woman under my hands washed through me: arousing no sympathy, no pity; only fear and disgust.

  Then the experience was gone, and I was left shuddering: freed from the possession. Far away I could hear the radio, playing quietly where Don was at work papering walls on the floor above. I went and called up the stairwell. “Can we change over? The stripper fumes are getting to me.”

  Anatomy of a staircase: This old house of ours is tall and wide. One of its main beauties is the stairway. It sweeps down from the sunny eyrie where my workstation, the latest script, waits for stolen moments: down and around into the generous hallway with its black and white checkered tiles. It was those elegant tiles, I think, and the graceful curve of the stairs, that decided us to buy this place. I knew that the stairwell was going to be perfect. I saw the banisters stripped and lightly varnished, the walls painted in washes of delicate sea-color, pale turquoise and lilac and azure, rippling into each other. But what a job it was!

  At least there were no chemicals involved in the preparation, so I could get a little done during the day. At home, at our flat, I used to play with Suzy all the time; when she wasn’t with the childminder. Housework, Don and I would share at evenings and weekends. In this house I’d become the “working mother” of my nightmares — and Suzy had become almost my enemy. I kept promising myself I’d make it up to her, when the needs of the house had been satisfied…

  I was working on the top floor, sanding down an excrement-colored dado. (Who was it who chose to have walls the color of shit?) Suzy left whatever destruction she’d been wreaking in my neglected office and took the sanding block from my hand. Stop, she said (in that proto-English only Don and I can actually understand).

  “Please get out of my way, Sue.”

  “Please stop.”

  I’ve told her that that word “please” is like a little kiss, so she kissed me as she tugged, with those determined, imperious small hands.

  “I’m sorry honey, but I must get on.”

  I’m becoming a real, old fashioned traditional mother, I thought in despair. I’ve no time for my darling, she’s part of the drudgery. And I had sworn to myself that my baby would never be “work.” But I was hypnotized by the task; it seemed the only way back to Suzy was to get through this. I shook her off and went on scrubbing, and found I was scrubbing flesh. The wall was soft flesh; it smelt of talcum powder and sour age; it shrank away from me as I scoured. I kept on, fighting the illusion of an overtired brain.

  “Please stop! Please stop!”

  Insensate cruelty to the helpless flesh. I was kneeling astride the old spine, flaccid skin falling in loose folds… Get out of my way, you old brute… I dropped the block and ran for the bathroom. I was actually, physically sick then: vomited and lay on the floor at the foot of the toilet.

  I stared up at the crazed plasterwork of the ceiling, veined like the rich and ugly marble of a Victorian public building. But that was decay up there, rags not riches: bare boards under my head, gritty and paint-smeared and varnish tins heaped in the corners. Our chaste Victorian Reproduction bathroom suite seemed to float above its surroundings, like a family of swans strayed into a scummy old canal. Slaving against the encroaching tide of filthy chaos, all day and every day, like a Third World housewife… This can’t be my life. I was near to despair. I heard Suzy come trotting into the room, rolled over and saw her standing there in her little green dungarees, holding the sanding block: her red gold curly hair a glowing aureole. She laughed, uncertainly: I was playing a game that she didn’t understand.

  A few nights after that I heard the breathing again. It might have been going on for a long time; I was putting up shelves and only heard the other noise when I stopped to rest. The sick person went on gasping, gasping, gasping until the spasm reached some kind of climax, and then ceased. Whoever it was, they’d been moved up from the basement to the first floor (I couldn’t imagine someone who breathed like that would be able to climb stairs).

  It was only later, when I was putting my tools away and the stertorous breathing began again, that I noticed the sound had also changed sides. It was coming through the uphill wall of the terrace now. It had been downhill before.

  I went up to London for a script meeting, feeling resentful because I wanted to spend all Suzy’s childminder days on the house — anything to get the awful task over with. Zak Morgan, the animator, came out to the pub with me afterwards and actually bought me a drink. I knew I must be looking terrible if even Zak took pity on me.

  We were not fond of each other. He smirked at me over the little table, chin on hand as if he was posing for an old fashioned photo (Zak is always posing for something). “You know, you’ve really mellowed over the past six months, Rosie. We’ve all noticed. No more of those porcupine prickles everyone used to dread.”

  No friend of mine calls me Rosie. Patronizing bastard. But he was right. I used to fight guerilla campaigns at these meetings. It was only a kiddies’ cartoon, but as far as I could make it so, it was going to be on the side of the world I wanted for my Suzy. There was the time when they thought I was giving the female toon characters too many strong lines. There was the Rainforest story, when they were worried that my “ecological” bias might offend some people (for heaven’s sake!). My strength was that everyone knew that I wanted as much as anybody for our product to be a success. I didn’t always get my way, but I often did, just by being humorous and reasonable and yet standing my ground.

  But that was before the house. I wasn’t fighting for anything at present. I had no aim in view — except to keep on turning in stuff that was good enough so they’d go on paying me. I watched Zak watching me as I digested his compliment, and the worst thing he’d told me was that a half year had gone by. Half a year of Suzy’s precious life had dropped into that abyss of a house and vanished without a trace. He smiled as if he could see right into me: the springs of grief and loss that welled up inside. Loss irremediable, grief unassuagable…

  “Well,” I said seriously. “That’s because I’m preoccupied at the moment. I’m being haunted. I have become the victim of psychical possession.”

  Just as he was getting ready to restrain me in some humane but painful fashion until the men in white coats could get here, I laughed.

  “I mean the new house, Zak! I’m being haunted by dry rot. It’s terrible stuff, you know. You can be riddled with it before you even suspect there’s anything wrong. Maybe I should tell you about cuboidal cracking, so you can check your place over before it’s too late.”

  But on the train journey back home my joke began to take on an unintended meaning. Or to take the shape of a truth I’d been avoiding.

  Donald was home and had fetched Suzy from the childminder’s. I left them playing together in her room, and went downstairs.

&nbs
p; The dry rot was supposedly totally eradicated, we had guarantees to prove it. But the idea of that creeping cancer of bricks and timber unnerved me, and I’d developed a slight phobia about the basement — where rot had been so rampant. I didn’t want to move in down there.

  Down, past the room where the sick person gasped on the other side of the wall, past the other room where I had tugged on an old woman’s matted grey hair… Through the front hall, where my beautiful dream was beginning to be realized. Takeaway cartons littered the basement stairway. The walls were still bare, the air still smelled of empty house, junk mail decaying in a damp hallway. In the depths, in the place Mr. Hann had elected to call “the family room,” there was a wet, acrid smell of new plaster. A mountain of crated furniture stood in the middle of the new pine floor.

  I literally had not been down here alone since the last site meeting before we moved in. There had been plenty to do elsewhere: I hadn’t had to explain my reluctance. But I had been nervous enough to tell myself I had a phobia about dry rot, the white cobwebs that crawl over bare brick —

  She — it — was still there. It sat exactly as I had seen it before, placidly in possession. Its hands moved constantly, hooking and twiddling away; its soft face was blankly complacent.

  You Can’t Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow’s Ear

  I decided not to tell Don. I knew what was happening, I could translate the language of this haunting; but I was afraid of my reputation. Don believed in my “feelings” about places and people. I had to keep quiet and get through this crisis alone, or the house would be poisoned for both of us; I’d have to tolerate the slight damage to our relationship meanwhile.

  Once I came back from another business day to find Don rooting through my desk. There were voices downstairs. We were in for an impromptu social evening, and I was having to brace myself. I was more anxious than ever to get the decorating and fixing up done, to bury her — but I’d sound crazy if I said I’d rather scrape paint than relax. Don was throwing up flurries of paper, like a dog digging for a buried bone.

  “What are you doing?” I shouted.

  “Oh, Rose. I was just looking for that photograph? The one of the old Polish lady?”

  We’d found this photograph at the back of one of the fitted cupboards that we took out of Suzy’s room. It was an old, sepia print, nothing to do with my ghostly, tv cookery, grandmother. But I had burned it anyway.

  “Why are you making such a mess?” I yelled. “It isn’t in there. I don’t know where it is!”

  I chased him off my territory. He left, rolling his eyes, with that naughty-boy expression he puts on when he thinks he’s run up against the incomprehensible feminine in me: Rose seen as a faulty appliance.

  This house… It had its own smell now, no longer masked by damp or tar, raw plaster and wet paint. Whenever I opened the front door the stale perfume enveloped me: lily-of-the-valley, or maybe lavender, with a vaguely antiseptic afternote. It smelled a little of hospitals. Or the powder-room of an old-fashioned department store, where beneath the effortful sweetness of old ladies who like to look nice, lies just a whiff of sour, unclean decay.

  I dreamed about the first time we came to see the empty house. But it wasn’t empty. We were met, in the big gloomy cluttered hall, by the old lady from the photograph: a bundle of dark blouse and skirt, like a bag tied in the middle. Her face was yellow as beeswax, her hair, pulled back into a hard bun, still quite black. We looked around. The house was full of furniture and ornaments and curtains. At the back of the big hall, its black and white tiles almost obscured by grime, an old gas chandelier dangled, crusted with cobwebs, as if — impossibly — the house had never been wired for electric power. Under it three doors in frames of carved wood stood in a line. The wood, varnished treacle thick, was richly freighted with dust. Each door opened onto an awkward angular slip of a room, such a perverse arrangement it was hard to guess at the original use. It was the kind of error that worked like a drug on us, making us desperate to strip out, knock through, open up — as if we were the only ones who could discover the true house, the one the original architect had failed to realize.

  Everywhere there was the gloom that starts with blinds pulled down to preserve the carpets (for whom?) and becomes the murky cave where an old lady hides the fact that she has become unable to cope. It was obvious that she’d just given up on most of the rooms. Velvet curtains hung in rags, preserving in the folds odd streaks of vivid purple: the lurid taste of a long-dead age. An upright piano stood rotting on its feet, shards of its back board scattered on the floor; inside, the dusty hammers had fallen and twisted with rust. In one bedroom we lifted a mattress and uncovered a layer of wriggling white larvae. Don kept looking at me hopefully: Yes? (the silent communication system of the house hunters); and I was signaling no, no, no…

  In the middle of our viewing the men in white coats came and took the old lady away. It was someone else who let us out, and Don — that is, a part of me — was very relieved. She was gone and we were safe. The Don part of me thought everything would be all right now. But I said no, no, no…

  The incident with the larvae never happened. The old Polish lady had died in a nursing home, before the house went on the market: the house was stripped to its rotten walls before we ever saw it. We never saw a piano in here, or a gas chandelier; or those three strange doors. But some dreams become true. They taint your remembered experience.

  At last the whole place was ours. I heated up some coffee in the microwave and stared into the sunny garden, but I wouldn’t let the wilderness out there tempt me. This was going to be a Suzy-free day spent entirely at my desk. I sipped the coffee, which tasted like hot rainwater, and headed for my office. We’d just finished decorating the big room in the front of the basement — which we were helplessly calling “the family room” although we hated the description. The walls were a clear, opaline yellow, with a geometric frieze in black and umber over which I had taken enormous pains. The windows that we’d had enlarged carried great swathes of sunlight up and down, echoing my yellow. Curtains of heavy linen in a deeper shade still had to be hung. I’d insisted on indirect lighting. No overhead lamps to cast gloomy shadows: this basement must never be gloomy. Our old living room furniture — some of it looking pretty shabby — stood about a little awkwardly in its big new home. The art nouveau fireplace, this one scraped by Don, not by me, gleamed darkly in its restored beauty, its glossy iron lilies to be echoed by the baroque yellow lilies on my new curtains. No trace of the decay that had conjured up my vision remained, but I still had to come to grips with my bad feeling about this room. I averted my eyes from the hearth. If I don’t look, then there’s nothing there…

  I opened the door to the rest of the house. There was someone climbing ahead of me, up the basement stairs. My hand had reached automatically for the switch on the wall, and it was in artificial light that I saw her. She — it — was wearing a lilac colored dress, knee length, and a white cardigan. She — it — leaned heavily on the banister with one hand, the other hand pressed to the wall, and looked at me over its shoulder.

  I shut the door. There were boxes of our possessions waiting to be arranged on polished shelves and hung on the pale walls. I sat on a box of books, my back to the hearth. I was sweating. Ridiculous thoughts raced through my mind, ridiculous expedients. I would leave a note for Don, leave now by the basement door, fetch Suzy from the childminder’s, and we would run for it. We would never come back here. We would take to the roads, become nomads. There was no other hope of escape.

  I fought with myself, and conquered. I heated up my stale coffee over again, and went up to my office. The figure was no longer visible; if it was still there I walked through it. I did a day’s work at my desk: not good work, but good enough so I’d get paid for it.

  One of my grandmothers had died before I was born. The other, a self-sufficient old lady, lived in Canada; I hadn’t seen her since I was a child. Don had no grandparents living. Both of us had middle-
aged parents as yet untouched by age… And yet I was left with the faint certainty that I’d seen the woman on the stairs before. I knew her. I dug out photograph albums, buried for months in the turmoil of moving and hunted furtively for that soft old face. I couldn’t find her. Where had she sprung from?

  From deep inside myself, of course — familiar as a bad dream.

  What harm can a ghost do? Fiction apart, there never seems to be any purpose in these things, if they exist. They just happen, they just are. What is there to be afraid of? The fear is of the contagion of death. In Chinatown once, in an exotic city far away, I had seen a death house: a place to which the dying were hurried, still breathing, in a ruthless attempt to quarantine them — exactly as if death were an infection that could be avoided. I was sick with death. Something old that should be dead had used the house as a way into my mind… Working on this house had reduced me to flesh-and-blood machinery: bludgeoned me into the housewife role I’d always fiercely rejected. Some part of me must have been afraid of this, all along.

  I knew that my fear was taking this hallucinatory form because I was so tired. I would be better soon, soon as I could throw away my work gloves and become Rose again. I knew all this, but I could not stop myself from thinking about that figure on the stairs. Sometimes I saw it when I opened that door, sometimes I didn’t. It was always with me.

  One day I was at my desk, dashing off a quick email or two while Suzy played in her room. The baby listener was at my side, I could hear her talking. Baby talk always sounds conversational, they always leave pauses for an invisible listener’s replies…but suddenly I knew that she was not alone. I jumped up and ran down the stairs. There was nobody there, of course. She was surrounded by a strew of colored bricks, piled two and three and four high.

  “Who were you talking to, Suzy?”