by Alison Moore
She fed the cat, but not The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who looked at her, and she said, ‘You’re always hungry as well, aren’t you?’
She went through the freezer, telling Robert what she had. He liked the sound of the casserole, which Jessie microwaved and brought to the table. He asked for water and she filled her favourite glass for him, but he said, as he took it from her, ‘There’s a crack in this,’ and when she looked she saw that there was, a crack so big that she wondered how she had not noticed it and how the glass was even holding together.
It was only when they were settled and beginning on their meal that it struck Jessie that no one had sat there and eaten with her since her husband had left. The casserole was Will’s favourite.
‘This isn’t bad,’ said Robert, indicating the casserole with his fork. ‘My own speciality is a curry, which you ought to try some time.’
‘I’d like that,’ said Jessie.
‘What’s your line of work?’ asked Robert. ‘What is it that you’re doing when you’re working past your bedtime?’
Jessie told him about her translation work. ‘I mostly translate fiction,’ she said. ‘I enjoy it. I like the idea that someone will then be able to read and understand something they otherwise couldn’t.’ It was a mediation between languages, she said; the word ‘translation’, from Latin, meant something like ‘bringing across’. ‘It’s not an exact science. The word you choose might have the right meaning but the wrong nuance; or it might have the wrong meaning – you do have to be careful. Words can be tricky.’
‘Who’s that?’ asked Robert, looking towards the window.
Jessie turned around in her seat to see who was there. ‘Oh,’ she said, seeing that he was looking at a photograph propped up on the windowsill. ‘That’s Will, my—’ She searched for the right term and found that she could not say ‘ex’. ‘That’s my husband,’ she said, ‘but he’s gone, he left.’
Robert nodded. Gesturing towards another photograph, he said, ‘And that’s your son?’
‘Yes,’ said Jessie. ‘Who has also gone.’ Paul’s photograph was already old when he left. ‘I have the animals to keep me company.’ Sometimes the house seemed terribly quiet.
‘You have a ghost,’ said Robert.
Jessie cocked her head to listen for some sound, and then realised that he was only bringing up what she had told him. She wondered if she was right to have mentioned it; perhaps such things should be kept to oneself, like the unsettling dream that she had told Isla about. Nonetheless, she said to him, ‘Yes, I think I do.’
‘Have you seen it?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen it.’ She recalled the night she and Brendan went looking for ghosts; she told Robert about it now. She did not remember whose idea it had been, to drive out to the countryside, to what had once been a convalescent home for war veterans, with a mental hospital wing. By the time she and Brendan went, it was abandoned and said to be haunted.
They had gone at night, with torches. They left the car on the main road and walked up a side road, away from the street lamps, climbing over a gate to get onto the driveway. At first they could not see to the end of the driveway, which disappeared into darkness, but as they walked, on and on towards their own torchlight, the old Victorian hospital became visible in front of them, a black slab against the moonless sky. When they got closer, they could see the ivy climbing the red brickwork and creeping over the windows.
The door was ajar: they were not the first trespassers. A sign in the window said ALL ITEMS OF VALUE HAVE BEEN REMOVED.
The floor was crunchy with plaster that had fallen from the ceiling, and with glass from the smashed windows, in whose frames only shards remained. Their torches flashed from the debris-strewn floor to the broken windows to the potholed ceiling to the walls scrawled with graffiti – YOU THINK I’M GONE!
Wheelchairs had been abandoned in the corridors, and there was evidence of people having slept in the side rooms, perhaps for a dare.
Brendan said they should turn off their torches, so they both turned off their torches and stood there in such darkness that there might have been nothing but the small patch of ground they were standing on, the ground they could feel beneath their feet, and beyond that an abyss.
They stood at the foot of a flight of stairs, their torchlight barely touching the gloom above. ‘Do you think there’s anything up there?’ asked Brendan.
‘Let’s go and see,’ said Jessie, beginning to climb.
Upstairs, they found more corridors and side rooms, more abandoned equipment, more graffiti – We R not Alone. ‘I think we’ve seen everything,’ said Brendan. ‘Let’s go.’
When they were outside again, about to begin their walk back down the long driveway, Jessie glanced back at the building.
‘I think,’ she said to Robert, drawing his empty plate across the table and stacking it on top of hers, ‘I was still hoping to see a ghost, to see one at the window, watching us go. There was nothing there, nothing to see, but you just got this feeling . . . And it’s the same here. The spare room door won’t stay shut. And I hear things. Mostly I just get this feeling . . .’ She took their plates to the sink. ‘Come and see for yourself.’
She led him up to the landing, where they found the spare room door standing open. ‘You see?’ said Jessie, eyeing the crack that sat in the angle between the hallway wall and the ceiling and stretched towards the bedroom.
‘So this is the ghost’s room,’ said Robert, walking in.
Jessie was aware that the room appeared quite ordinary. She stood in the doorway while Robert looked at the door and the frame and the hinges.
‘What makes you suspect,’ he said, ‘that your ghost is a little girl?’
Jessie told him about Eleanor, about losing her at the museum.
‘You want it to be her,’ he said. ‘You want her to be here.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jessie.
‘Do you think she’s here to punish you?’ asked Robert, coming out onto the landing again.
‘I don’t know,’ said Jessie, but she thought about the fissures that had appeared in the house, as if it were succumbing to some pressure or force. She thought about her favourite glass, cracked, and her special mug, broken. She felt watched, and she did not feel forgiven.
‘Perhaps it’s not the house that’s haunted,’ said Robert.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Jessie.
‘There’s no getting over something like that,’ he said.
‘Of course not,’ said Jessie, closing the door behind them.
They were only a few steps from her bedroom, and the possibility of turning in that direction, of inviting Robert into her room, crossed her mind. She imagined Will coming home, and having to say to him, ‘There’s someone else.’ She imagined Will standing in the doorway, on the doormat. ‘I’m sorry,’ she would say.
They walked to the stairs and went down to the hallway, where Robert put his shoes on, putting away his holey sock, his naked big toe. He thanked Jessie for the lunch, and left.
In what was left of the afternoon, Jessie did her household chores. After putting fresh covers on the bed, she sat down with some mending, listening to The Proclaimers – ‘I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)’ and ‘I’m On My Way’ – while she put a neat row of stitches in the hem of her wedding dress, her translation conference dress. She repaired some favourite underwear, which had been waiting on her mending pile for months. She turned up ‘Sunshine On Leith’ before threading a darning needle and bowing her head over the hole in the toe of Will’s sock. According to the census records that Jessie had seen, her great-great-grandmother had worked weaving woollen hosiery, and Jessie liked the feeling of sitting in Lenore’s house darning a sock, the activity connecting her, she felt, to Lenore, the past alive somehow in the present. But while she was fixing the hole in Wi
ll’s sock, she found herself thinking about the hole in Robert’s.
During the week, Jessie found herself looking for Robert, looking twice at men who had his colouring, his stature, his gait, seeing doppelgängers everywhere.
She worked late into the night. She had begun the translation of the new book. There were words, phrases, images about which she would very much have liked to ask the author, but the author was long dead. Although, she considered, it was not really necessary to say long dead, to stress that as if it were pertinent, as if a long-dead author were somehow further away than one who was only recently dead, as if Jessie might still stand a chance of putting her questions to a newly dead author, as if it would just be a matter of finding the means of communication, perhaps just asking loudly enough, listening hard enough, and doing it quickly, before too much time went by.
On Friday, she went to The Bourtree, where she talked to a neighbour and another dog-walker she recognised. She saw Kirstin, though not to speak to. She stayed later than usual, drinking more than she meant to, but she did not see Robert.
At the weekend, she made another casserole, and froze it. She did her laundry and was hanging her underwear on the line to dry in the winter daylight when Isla’s back door opened and Alasdair came out. They made small talk while Jessie pegged up her pillowcases and Alasdair got to work mending a puncture on his bicycle. The bicycle was leaning against the low wall that separated their two yards, and Alasdair was crouching over a washing-up bowl, inching the inner tube around in the water, looking for the leak. When Jessie had hung up the last of her washing and had picked up her empty basket, she paused by the wall and watched him patch the hole. She was complimenting him on his hands – ‘. . . lovely long fingers,’ she was saying, ‘like a pianist; do you play?’ – when she saw Isla standing at the door, watching the two of them.
Jessie smiled at her and said, ‘Hello, Isla.’
‘Hello, Jessie,’ said Isla, but she was not smiling. ‘Alasdair, come inside, please.’
‘I’m mending my puncture, Mum,’ said Alasdair.
‘I said, come inside, please,’ said Isla.
Alasdair mumbled something under his breath, but he stood up, leaving his bike and his tools where they were, and went inside with Isla, who closed the door.
Jessie took her empty basket inside and set about putting fresh linens on her bed.
On Monday morning, Jessie found another postcard on her doormat. She looked at the back, at the handful of words in Will’s cramped handwriting, and at the photograph on the front, and at the postmark. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re not coming very quickly, are you?’ Perhaps he was not coming after all; perhaps, in between the sending and the receiving, he had changed his mind.
She put the postcard on the kitchen windowsill with the first one, and waited to see if there would be another.
She had begun the nightly process of filling her ear canal with oil, which sometimes seemed to ease the pressure and improve her hearing and sometimes seemed to make it worse, and which always caused a mess.
Trying to lie very still in bed, on her right side, she continued to read the D. H. Lawrence biography. Just now, he was in his prophet phase, claiming that we had lost touch with the cosmos, that we no longer knew how to communicate with it. Well, thought Jessie, perhaps that was so.
She woke on her back in the night. She could hear a wet sort of noise. It made her think of the Frogman, the damp slap of its feet against linoleum . . . She listened for a while before switching on the bedside lamp and looking towards the door, where the dog was lying across the threshold, licking itself. The dog looked back at her. ‘It’s just you, is it?’ said Jessie. She switched off the lamp and after a moment the sound began again, and Jessie tried to imagine it being a Frogman after all, its wet feet slapping towards her, but now she knew it was only the dog, licking itself in the dark.
In the middle of the week, Jessie saw Robert in the frozen food aisle of Morrisons. Jessie had been looking for peas, and was just fetching a bag out of the chest freezer when she realised that the person reaching into a nearby freezer cabinet was Robert.
‘Hello,’ she said.
Robert looked up. He had a bag of frozen roast potatoes in his hand. ‘Hello, Jessie,’ he said.
‘I haven’t seen you all week,’ said Jessie.
‘I’ve been at St. Abbs,’ he said. ‘I’ve been diving.’
‘In the sea?’ said Jessie. ‘In this weather? Isn’t it cold?’
‘Oh, it’s very cold,’ said Robert. ‘It’s worth it though. It’s a different world below the surface.’
‘How deep do you dive?’ asked Jessie.
‘I can’t get down very deep at all,’ said Robert. ‘I have problems with my sinuses.’
‘Do you go often?’
‘I go when I can.’
‘I think I can smell the salt on you,’ said Jessie. Looking at what he was holding, she said, ‘Please don’t buy frozen roast potatoes.’
‘I promised to make you my curry,’ said Robert.
‘I don’t think you promised,’ said Jessie, ‘but if you’re offering . . .’
‘I am offering,’ said Robert. He put the roast potatoes back into the freezer. ‘Are you done?’ he said to Jessie as she put the peas into her basket.
‘I think I am,’ said Jessie.
They went together to the checkouts, and then carried their bags through the town centre. Nearing the bottom of her street, Jessie said, ‘I’ve got these peas that I ought to put in the freezer.’
‘Put them in mine for now,’ said Robert.
They walked on, until Robert turned down a dim alleyway, and Jessie hesitated for a moment. Do I really know this man at all? she thought. And then, even though she did not, she followed him into the alleyway, her shopping bags awkward at her sides in the narrow space. Robert unlocked a door and Jessie saw the hallway beyond: tidy, tiled, scrubbed clean.
The kitchen, too, was spick and span, with everything in its proper place and all the surfaces kept clear. ‘You’re very tidy,’ said Jessie.
‘I try to keep things in order,’ said Robert, unpacking and putting away the contents of his shopping bags.
His kitchen windowsill was bare while her own was always cluttered: apart from the postcards and photographs, she had pot plants – herbs – and various odds and ends. Robert’s windowsill would not get much sun, but still she said to him, ‘I can give you some herbs – some coriander and some basil.’
‘I don’t want plants,’ he said, washing his hands at the sink. He took an apron down from a hook and put it on; it was stripy, dark blue and white, like a butcher’s. ‘They always die.’
‘Do you go away a lot?’ asked Jessie.
‘I like to get away,’ he said. He picked up an onion and reached for a knife. Chopping the onion made him cry, and he lifted his free hand towards his face as if to rub his eyes but his fingers were oniony so instead he pressed the back of his wrist to his eyes. He looked as if he were acting in a tragedy.
‘Can I do anything to help?’ asked Jessie.
‘You can keep me company,’ said Robert, slicing into a green chilli. He cut quickly, with what seemed like no distance at all between the knife blade and his fingers. Jessie was wary of distracting him and after a minute of silence he said, ‘You could put on some music.’ There was an iPod, on which Jessie found the Manic Street Preachers. As the first track began, she said, ‘I haven’t heard this for years. This came out when my son was little.’ The Manics had been Paul’s favourite band. They had listened to the music together in the living room, then later he listened to it alone, in his bedroom, turning it up louder and louder, his bedroom door vibrating, until all of a sudden he was gone and his room was silent.
Robert was pouring oil into a pan, heating it up. Jessie watched as he slid the onion and the chillies from the chopping board
into the pan, and added powders and pastes, a pinch of this and a spoonful of that. Already it was smelling very good and she told him so and he smiled. ‘Are you sure I can’t do anything to help?’ she asked.
Robert nodded. ‘Wash your hands then,’ he said.
He gave her a tomato to chop. She began to slice and dice it and Robert said, ‘Look at your hands.’ Jessie paused, mid-cut, and looked at her hands.
‘I did wash them,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I mean they’re so white. Look at mine.’ He held out his own hands, showing her their redness. He was still holding the wooden spoon with which he had been stirring the curry, and a drip fell onto the floor tiles. He cursed, and there was tension in his movements as he put the wooden spoon back into the pan, tore a sheet from the kitchen roll he kept to hand, and bent to wipe up the stray spot of sauce. When he had binned the stained sheet of kitchen roll, washed his hands again and returned to the chopping board, he said, ‘You’re bloodless.’
‘I’m not,’ said Jessie, though the word had many meanings. She had once been called ‘cold blooded’ as she stood shivering at a bus stop, wishing that she had worn a coat or at least a cardigan. She had objected to that as well; she had not liked the sound of it. She had tried to stop shivering as if to prove it, but she had been unable to.
As her knife slid through the tomato flesh, she thought of the man on the train with the plaster on his finger. She tried to be careful.
‘Can you take a bit of heat?’ asked Robert.
‘A little bit,’ said Jessie. Something she had not thought of for years came into her head and she said to Robert, ‘I once set fire to the fence around our house. We had an incinerator and I lit the contents. It got out of hand and the fence burnt down. And then while the fence was missing, the tortoise escaped. We never saw it again.’