My Ghosts

by Mary Swan

  They pass houses with lamp glow, but it must be late, no one else outside. The park gate is closed but not locked; it opens with a screech that follows them to the edge of the pond, where Aunt Peach used to throw crusts to the ducks and laugh at their bobbing heads. Charlie dumps the sack he’s been carrying, a jumble of skates and laces, and there is some discussion about the ice as they sort them out. Nan is worried, and Ben tries to recall exactly how many freezing days there have been. Kez says, “I don’t care,” and she’s out there first, the tails of her long red scarf working free and lifting as she goes faster and faster, until they can only hear the scrape of her blades, then Charlie’s, following after.

  It’s cold, but soon they don’t feel it, someone always holding Clare up as they follow the path of the almost-full moon, her body remembering how it’s done. The push and the glide, sleeping muscles called on to work again; that’s all she’s thinking of. But as it gets easier, other thoughts seep in. Long cold days and the glittering skiffs of snow on the bumpy ice, her mother laughing as she thumped down on her thick skirts, and her father warming her frozen toes in his hands. The cold lips of a boy Clare barely knew, who skated her off to a place where the black branches swept low.

  Out of the dark comes Ben’s voice, calling, “Crack the whip!” and they join together, only five of them but the line feels longer, as if all the others have come back. Wee Alan at the centre, grown to a man, the sum of all their imaginings. Their mother and father on either side, Ross with his big fur hood thrown back, and even Aunt Peach, her filmy eyes grown clear in the night air. A weaving, jerking line, Clare at the end, holding tight to someone’s fingers.

  And then she just lets go. The momentum carries her off in a spin, but she doesn’t fall, she holds on to her balance while the whirling inside slows down. And she tips her head back where she is, in the middle of the dark pond, far away from everyone, from the bushes and the overhanging trees. She can hear the others calling her name, and she understands then that it doesn’t really matter who they are, who she might be. With her head tipped back she watches the breath leave her mouth, heading up to the sky, black as time and stretched over everything. And the pinpoints of light that are stars, so far away they might already be gone, but still sending their light for her to see.

  SLEEPERS AWAKE

  “Hell and damn and damn it and GOD DAMN IT!” Kez kicks at the crate and sends it into the empty street, kicks the one beside it, but it’s frozen to the snowy ground, a pain in her toe that brings new tears to her eyes, and at the same time an undignified skidding and slipping. She takes deep breaths as she settles her shawl on her shoulders, tries to tamp the roaring rage, but it’s no use; she kicks out again and this time goes right down, landing with a hard thump on her behind that shocks everything out of her. She’d laugh if someone was with her. What else could she do, sitting on the hard ground in the gloom, cold seeping in through her twisted skirts.

  And there’s that boy again, standing in the shadows by the warehouse, across the narrow street. Watching her from just beyond where the street light reaches, maybe laughing at her; certainly smiling. A smirky little smile, she’s sure of it, though it’s hard to see his face properly. His hair is somehow different, and she thinks he might be a little taller, but he hasn’t changed much, he just doesn’t. He wasn’t ever a baby—well, not that she saw, but he must have been, mustn’t he. Everyone was a baby once, and then a helpless child.

  As she stands she sees the boy give a twitchy shiver; his jacket looks thin and his hands, balled up, don’t quite fit into the shallow pockets. He must be cold, but why should she care about that, even the tiniest bit. His own fault, hanging about in the almost-dark, spying on people. She won’t give him the satisfaction of looking back, no she won’t, just a quick peek before she turns the corner. Maybe he’s there, maybe he’s not; all she can see is a hazy, far-off circle of light.

  Her rage at herself keeps her warm as she walks, but the heat can’t last all the way. She turns and turns again, each street smaller and darker, until she can pick out the peaked roof of their tall, narrow house. No time now to dwell on her terrible foolishness, and she gives her head a shake, as if she can flick it away. No time now because there’s work to be done, cleaning and packing, the house where she was born become like a version of itself that might appear in a dream. Everything askew and a smell of damp, raw wood from the crates they’ve filled with bedding and carefully wrapped dishes. The idea of moving was one thing, but this is quite another. It’s terrible, that’s what it is, everything at sixes and sevens, outside and in. All mixtie-maxtie, as Aunt Peach would have said, back when she had things to say.

  Kez hangs her shawl on the hook, sits down and unlaces her boots, wraps her hands around her frozen toes, and all the while the old woman invades her mind. Her vacant eyes and her lost, trembling smile, but that’s not the one to be thinking about. She makes herself remember instead the earlier Peach, nasty old thing that she was. Some relation who was suddenly there, squatting in the middle of their lives.

  There must have been arrangements, but the first Kez knew of her was the morning she opened the door to the little room off the kitchen. Looking for a place to hide from her brother Ross, who’d chased her down the stairs with a shoe in his hand. Inside, the blind was pulled tight, only a little bit of light leaking around the edges, and she was blinking her eyes, catching her breath, when suddenly something squawked up out of the murk. A witch or a horrible old brownie, with its cap all crooked and showing jutting big ears, the few tufts of hair on its head. Kez gave a scream, she couldn’t help it, and the thing gave a louder one, and another and another, the sound of a rusty wheel lurching over a rutted track. And her mother rushed in and gave Kez a clout with the spoon she was holding, as if everything, everything, was her fault. The last thing she saw, as she ran from the room with her palms clapped over her own jugged ears, was an old woman huddled against the wall with her feet pulled up. Her mother kneeling, holding on to the twisted hands.

  Her thawing toes begin that tingle, and she has to tense every muscle to keep from hopping about like a fool. It must be the coldest winter ever, or maybe she just feels it more in her older bones, thirty-two already—no, thirty-three. It’s nearly impossible to believe she was once like the children she sees, running with their unbuttoned coats flapping, and it’s been years since she’s been skating on the pond. Years since she’s splintered a skin of ice with her heel to hear that satisfying crackle, since a walk through the snowy streets made every bit of her feel alive. This winter there’s a shiver deep in her bones, and the sleepless nights, when they come, are even more of a torment, too cold to get up and polish the silver or buff their shoes, with the stove banked in the barren kitchen.

  Still, as their father used to say, things could always be worse. In one of his rare letters her brother Ross wrote of the terrible storms where he was, the howling wind and snow and how he had to tie a stout rope around his waist to take the few steps to the shed where the animals were kept. Once he had to break up the kitchen chairs to feed the fire that was all that kept them from freezing. And more than once they spent a day and a night wrapped in blankets and quilts, he and his wife telling every story they knew to keep the children occupied. She’s never seen her niece, her nephews; none of them have. But when she thinks of them, she pictures the icicle children from one of Aunt Peach’s stories. Pinched blue faces, and thin voices calling out from where they hang, trapped and shivering, from the eaves.

  The kitchen is emptier than when she left; her sister Nan has been busy. As the last day looms closer they’ve packed everything they can, and the list of things they really need has grown shorter and shorter. Now down to four plates, four knives and spoons, the battered kettle, and the big cooking pot those things will be carried in when they leave. They’ve already moved some of the furniture, and Kez didn’t want to but Nan and Clare went along to see it placed. They told her that the old settee and stuffed chairs looked shrunken a
nd even embarrassed in their new surroundings. The brighter rooms revealed all the worn spots in their two carpets, while in what they already call the old house the bare floorboards echo with a desolate, alien sound. Kez knows the money she pilfered was nothing like enough for a new carpet, so she squashes that thought right down.

  It’s been going on for weeks, this move, more work than any spring cleaning, and more complicated; as they empty drawers and shift heavy furniture things keep turning up, churning up, each one a memory and a decision. After the boys dragged the brass-cornered trunk down from Clare’s attic room, Kez and Nan found an old-fashioned dress that must have been their mother’s, carefully folded beneath a tiny yellowed bonnet. Nothing to do but repack them, though they are things that have no real meaning for anyone still alive.

  There were things that were less mysterious too, like Charlie’s slingshot, discovered on top of the tall corner cupboard. Dust-covered but still working, as he proved with a wadded-up dishcloth. “Right there, all these years,” Charlie said, turning it this way and that in his bigger hands. Still where their mother must have hidden it, after he startled the carter’s horse; she told him she’d burned it in the stove. And then they had to picture her, tucking in her skirts and climbing up on the stool to push it out of sight. And they had to think again about her hard hand and her punishments, think about what she must have understood about being a boy, and how she maybe planned to give the slingshot back as a reward for some run of good behaviour that he never achieved.

  “Where have you been?” Nan says from the doorway, and suddenly Kez feels so frail she almost tells her. Everyone thinks they’re as close as two peas and they are, but once they were closer. They still never run out of things to say to each other, but there are also things they keep to themselves. And there are things they let go, as Nan does now, saying only, “I need your long arms. The good thimble’s rolled under the bed and I can’t reach.”

  “It’s not your arms, it’s your fat behind that’s the problem,” Kez says as she stands, and Nan blows out her round cheeks, and does a little shimmy with her hips.

  Up in their room, their mother’s sewing box is mounded with spools of thread that must have clattered and unrolled all across the boards. Nan tries to arrange them while Kez lies down on the floor and elbows her way into the farthest corner, thinking how dark it is here, how quiet. A good place to hide, though that’s not a thing she’s ever done. Her fingers close around the thimble and something else that is hard and round, wedged into a crack. When she wriggles out, her opening hand echoes a long-ago day and there it is, a tiny china teapot, painted with delicate blue flowers that are little more than dots.

  “What was her name?” Kez says, though they both remember it. Lisbet, of course, the daughter of a man their father got talking to, likely in Armstrong’s tavern. A man who had recently arrived to take over the running of a factory, with a girl just their age who was so mopey just now, and missing her friends back in Cobourg. A visit was arranged, a thing that only two fathers could have thought was a good idea. Kez and Nan knocked on the glossy door, their hair plaited so tightly their faces felt pulled and changed. Dressed in their best, and marking the twitch of scorn on the little girl’s face before she said, in a syrupy voice, “Do come in.”

  There was tea and conversation in the parlour, questions about their school, although of course, as her mother said, Lisbet would be going back to Miss Simpson’s. When the cakes were gone they were sent to the playroom, climbing the carpeted stairs behind Lisbet’s flounces and frills. “You may sit there,” she said, pointing to two low, painted chairs, and then she showed them all her toys and games and told them what fine quality they were, as if they wouldn’t have the wit to know. She had a lot to say about the grand house she’d left behind, and its long green lawns. The white pony that was all her own, and how her father would buy her another as soon as he found one good enough. Kez crossed her fingers and said they’d also had ponies, called Star and Midnight, but of course they were too old for ponies now. “Actually,” Lisbet said, “my father is going to buy me a real horse. Maybe two.”

  When she tired of talking Lisbet took down her china-faced dolls, one by one, from the shelf where they sat in a swirl of skirts, and told them their fancy names before she put each one back. Wilhelmina and Jocasta and Evangeline, Felicity and Charlotte. Over by the window there was a dollhouse, sitting on a table that made it taller than they were. Three floors of rooms all papered and furnished, and smaller dolls that lived in them. They played with it for a long time; Kez and Nan were the servant dolls and when Lisbet shook a little bell they had to clump up the staircase with a miniature tea service on a miniature silver tray, and pour for the Lisbet doll, who reclined on a velvet sofa. “You may curtsey and go,” the Lisbet doll said, but each time they arrived back down in the kitchen, with its heavy black stove and hanging pots, the bell would ting and she would say, “More tea—I’m parched.” Until the Kez doll knocked over the table as she passed it with her rocking walk, sending everything flying and making the real Lisbet stamp her foot and tell her she was horrid. Then they had to sit down on the hard, low chairs and watch as she brushed and dressed Jocasta’s hair, until it was time for them to leave.

  “You must come again,” her mother said, already closing the door, while behind her Lisbet crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. When they were out of sight, around the corner, Nan opened her fist, her fingers spreading out like petals to reveal the little painted teapot, and two cups with the tiniest of handles. They ran the rest of the way home, cheeks flushed with the thrill of their wickedness, and for a long time after they took turns pouring, behind the closed door of their room.

  “Will you have a cup of tea, Miss Moon?”

  “Oh yes, Miss Jug, I’m terribly parched.”

  Kez drops the little teapot into the sewing box, just as Nan says, “Will you tell me now where you were all that time?”

  “Keep your nose to yourself,” she says, blinking away the picture that rises in her mind. The warm glow of the fringed lamps and the fire behind its screen, the doctor’s kind face and her soft voice, so much worse than if she’d laughed aloud when she spoke of unreasonable expectations. There was a time Nan would have been in on everything from the start, but that’s long past and how dare she ask her questions, as if she doesn’t know it.

  Downstairs the last of the soup is warming in the big pot, and if Clare remembers to pick up a loaf on her way home that will do them, with some left over for their breakfast. She’ll be lugging her satchel of books, and her head will be spinning with ideas from the lectures she’s been to, but she’s more likely to remember than Charlie, who is reliable only in his unreliability, as their brother Ben likes to say.

  He’s still a bit of a worry, is Charlie, with his carelessness, and staying out all hours. Their mother always said he had too much charm for his own good, and said it to him every time he made her smile in spite of herself. If she was still alive she’d be fretting about his tired-looking eyes, the way money slips through his fingers. Still, he manages to pay his share, and the house is certainly more lively since he moved back. It’s often wild around the supper table, all five of them, until Ben married, slipping into the jokes and silliness of their childish selves, those bits of their characters that don’t mean much, show much, until they spark off each other.

  Charlie never said why Mr. Howell dismissed him from the jewellery shop, but he stepped right into a job in the new department store that suits him well, his dapper style and easy manner soon making him the top salesman of scarves and overcoats, of calfskin gloves and fine bristle brushes. He’d learned more than he thought from their tailor father, about fabrics and quality details, and he had a knack for convincing a man that those details mattered and would be noted. That this jacket might cost a little more but it was cut to the latest style in London, and sent an important message about his taste, his status.

  It was even easier, Charlie said, if the man
’s wife came with him. The lightest of touches on her back as he guided her into a chair. The twitch of an eyebrow, from behind her husband, that told her they were in this together, that they both knew she would do the persuading, her opinion the one that mattered. Better still was when the wives came on their own, to pick up new handkerchiefs, or a gift for some occasion. Tricks of the trade, he called it, the way he flattered and listened. The accidental brushing of fingers as he showed the fine stitching inside a slim wallet, or the way he demonstrated how an expensive tie would look, the four-in-hand knot neat around his own smooth neck.

  Just tricks of the trade, nothing wrong in it, and perhaps only natural that he would also become a trusted companion. He was out most evenings, escorting someone to the theatre, someone else to a concert, or a lecture. The tickets paid for, gladly, by husbands too busy or uninterested to do it themselves. Such manners he had, he imagined the ladies saying to each other. And a way of settling a woman’s cloak on her shoulders. A wooden box under his bed was slowly filling with collar studs, jewelled cufflinks and other unasked-for gifts he sometimes pawned when his wage wasn’t enough to keep him.

  These were things he told Kez, the night she heard crashing in the kitchen. When she crept down with the heavy doorstop in her hand, and found him there, with his shirt mis-buttoned and a sheepish, tipsy look that reminded her of their father. He was trying to make a cup of tea in the moonlight that flooded through the bare window and she did it for him, and sat with him while he drank it, and talked and mumbled. “Ah, the wives,” Charlie said, a slow droop to his eye that was trying to be a wink. Kez said that she didn’t want to hear any more; it wasn’t true, but it didn’t matter. He folded his arms on the table and was instantly asleep, the moonlight hollowing his upturned cheek and giving it a skull-like look that made her shiver.