Phantoms

by Marie O'Regan

  Soon after that Lula went into a coma.

  On Sunday, Irene signed the forms that allowed the tired young man in blue scrubs to switch off her sister’s ventilator. The machine ceased its wheezing. Irene slept in a chair by her bed while it happened. She didn’t want Lula to be alone.

  Lula died on Tuesday. For a few moments afterwards her body still seemed tenanted. Then something was gone.

  Irene went back to the home that they had shared for forty years. The bus stop was a mile away. Irene had no umbrella. She tied her plastic scarf tight, bowed her head to the cold darts of rain and began her cautious shuffle.

  Irene imagined her arthritis as a black slug that lived in the crevices of her joints. It glutted itself on cold, wet; it swelled, filled the spaces of her, slowed her to a deathly pace.

  The carcass of a shopping trolley listed on the bald verge. Torn plastic fluttered in strips, ghost fingers. Towers rose black in the night, freckled with bright pinpricks. Fairy lights cast colourful haloes on drawn curtains. It was almost Christmas. Irene tried not to flinch as she went, at the deep shadows that might conceal hostile eyes, watching her slow progress. Hands, chains, sticks, blades… Such things happened. Irene scolded herself. She could not run. Fear served no purpose. Cowardy pudding custard, Lula had sometimes called her. Fat cowardy milky pudding!

  Irene greeted their familiar yellow door with relief. Her knees were molten. She made tea with turmeric and ginger for the arthritis, took aspirin. Next to the aspirin was the unopened bottle of whiskey, given years before by a neighbour. “Alcohol is a weakness,” Lula used to say. “Those who drink it have no iron at their core.” After a moment’s thought, Irene opened the bottle. The scent sliced sharp at her nostrils. She took the whiskey tea upstairs, step by careful step.

  Lula’s room smelled of despair and eucalyptus. She was bedridden before the cancer raised its black pennant for the final assault. Irene had given Lula a little brass bell to ring when she needed something. Lula rang it day and night. “You are too fat to come up the stairs, too slow when I ring.” Irene grew to dread the pretty tinkle.

  Lula’s childhood nickname had been Lula-belle. Irene hadn’t thought of it in years; how amusing! She shook out a rubbish bag with a joyful crack. “The bin for you, Lula-bell,” she whispered, dropping it in. She laughed to herself. In went Lula’s clothes, the bright, patterned leggings she liked. The collection of teddy bears staring with beetle eyes. Irene hated teddy bears. In went the yellowed sheets, thin after many boiling washes, mounds of greying tissues, gossip magazines, pages soft with use. Irene took a long drink of turmeric whiskey tea. It really did help with pain. No wonder people said it was medicinal.

  When she had finished, the room was strange. The bedstead bare, the skeleton of an ancient beast picked clean. With the mattress gone the seeping stain on the floor was prominent, dark. Sometimes when Irene was out shopping or at the post office Lula could not wait for the bathroom. She went where she lay. Afterwards, Lula crawled out of the wet sheets, under the bed, and curled up in her urine-soaked nightdress to sleep on the boards. Irene thought that if Lula could get herself that far, she could have made it to the bathroom.

  Lula’s room was Irene’s now. She could have a lodger. She imagined a nice young man, perhaps a student of some interesting subject like archaeology. She would cook for him and he would tell her about excavations. Imagine having company that was not Lula! It would mean money. She could go on holiday. She thought of sunshine and parrots and white-capped waves, glassy deeps, coral waving in unseen currents.

  Her knees didn’t hurt at all as she dragged the black bags down the stairs, out of the back door to the bin. She poured herself more whiskey. She hummed as she drank it in bed, squinting at Nicholas Nickleby. She always read Dickens at Christmas time. Little urchins, dust piles, missing heirs, fog that stalked the world like a monster… Sleep came gently without interrupting her thought.

  * * *

  “Coming,” Irene murmured. “Hush, hush, I am coming now.” She surfaced sadly, pulled from a dream where warm arms held her and she was deeply kissed by lips that tasted of meringue. Irene loved meringue.

  She sat up. The room was as dark as it ever got. The streetlight on the far side of the close burned through the thin curtains like a vengeful moon. The whiskey had become something foul. It lined her eyes and mouth and nose; pulsing, astringent. Irene rubbed her head.

  It came again, the sound that had woken her. She stilled, hand on her aching brow. It could not be. Cold fingers walked up and down her spine. Once more from the empty room next door it sounded: the imperious tinkle of a little bell.

  Irene’s lips parted. Her heart was a warm plum in her mouth. The bell rang. “Coming,” Irene breathed before she could stop herself. Years of habit.

  She stood before Lula’s door. Inside, it went on. Tinkle, tinkle. She promised herself that she would not scream.

  “Lula?” Irene whispered. “Sister?” The knob was slippery in her palm. The door yielded with a creak, swung wide.

  Bare of curtains, Lula’s room was flooded with ashy yellow streetlight. All seemed as usual. The bedframe, white and spectral in the corner. Beneath it, the dark stain. The scuffed walls, the slight catch of eucalyptus lingering in the air. Irene stood, fists clenched white. She waited. Her knees ached, trembled. Nothing. No sound but the wet shush, shush of her heart. At last Irene gave a little whoofing sigh. Shame flooded her. She should not have drunk that whiskey. She was not used to it. Exhaustion, the grief of the day. She was confused. It was natural. A waking dream.

  She turned to go back to bed. A shrill tinkle rang out behind. She turned, flesh thrilling. Beneath the bed, the stain was moving. It shifted in patterns of dark on dark. Two eyes, the plane of a cheek, the curve of a chin... It was a face made of shadow, and Irene knew whose it was.

  Lula’s voice was that of creaking timber, wildfire. She said her sister’s name the old way. In Lula’s dark eye sockets were tiny pupils of flame.

  Irene’s slippered feet moved without her will, towards the smoky outline of her sister’s face. It was a natural thing, both right and true, to go to Lula and be a part of her… Lula’s mouth opened slowly, impossibly wide to receive Irene, a snake dislocating its jaw. From the yawning depths of her throat there came a brassy tinkling. A long black tongue flickered about her lips. The world began to tear in half.

  Something shrill and terrible rang out, ululating, drowning the bell. Irene had broken her promise to herself, for she was screaming. She ran from the disembodied head of her sister, which formed and scattered on the bedroom floor, calling with her bell voice for Irene to come, come down into the dark.

  * * *

  Irene sucked a boiled sweet. That helped. Her head ached all the time now since the ringing had begun three weeks earlier. It went on day and night. She drank a little more whiskey. That helped too. She was stiff from sitting on the floor, back against the door. Her swollen knees burned. She imagined the slug within, fat and preening. The bell rang on. Each peal a dent in her skull. She slept lightly in the odd intervals when the bell stopped. She went to the shops every few days but she was jumpy, irrational. She thought she saw a man and woman following her. Faces slid as if melting. Everywhere she went, she heard the bell ringing.

  “Okhti al-koubra, I don’t understand!” Irene said tearfully to the thing behind the door. Arabic and English had begun to slide into one another. “You don’t like me! Or this house or anything in this life! Why don’t you go?” Inside the room, the bell rang on, whether in answer or indifference, she could not say. Irene knew better than to open the door. It was not safe. The sucking mouth, the hungry dark, the sound of the world, tearing… Instead, she beat the wood with her fist. “Why are you here?” she shrieked. “Atrukini lewahidi. Leave me alone!” The little bell rang on and on.

  Irene blew her nose on her skirt. She wondered how long she would last without going mad. Perhaps it had already happened.

  * * *

&n
bsp; She sat upright. She must have slept. Night had come. The dark, silken. The streetlamp was out. Silence. No bell. What woke her?

  Irene heard it then. The crunch and tinkle of glass. A panel in the yellow front door giving to a fist. She could picture it. The gloved hand reaching carefully through. Sure enough, in a moment it came: the sound of the key turning slowly in the lock.

  The door swung open. A quiet male voice said, “All right?” Another answered, unintelligible.

  Knowledge of danger flooded Irene like dye. She tried to stand. Her joints blazed. She mouthed silent curses. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Downstairs, footsteps. Irene pulled herself across the hallway floor into her bedroom. She slid over to the window. Her fingers shuddered and slipped, useless on the latch. But then she had it and the window swung open, letting in the good night. The yard looked very concrete, far away. How long was the drop? Eighteen feet perhaps. Irene grasped the windowsill and strained to haul herself upright. As she did, gloved hands took her shoulders. They pulled her gently away from the window. Irene fell to the floor with a painful thump.

  Two shapes bent over her, giant against the dark. They wore ski masks. Irene considered screaming. She looked at the hunting knife, shining in a fist. She did not scream.

  “What do you want?” Her voice was not her own, but that of a frightened old woman.

  “Tie her up,” the large man said.

  When the second figure came close Irene saw that it was a woman. She lifted Irene onto the bed with little trouble. She taped her wrists to the bedposts. Irene started at each crack of the tape. “Please don’t hurt me,” she said.

  The woman hit her on the temple and everything trailed fiery stars. “This isn’t for pleasure,” the woman said. “We need to make an example or we’ll have more and more of your sort coming over here.”

  Irene was flooded with relief. There has been a misunderstanding, she said to the woman. I was born here. That was what she meant to say. What came out was a wet moan.

  “This isn’t personal,” the woman said again.

  The man stood over Irene. “You don’t have to watch this part,” he said to the woman. She nodded and turned away.

  He lit a candle stub and put it on top of Irene’s copy of A Christmas Carol. He stuffed handfuls of gauze into her mouth. He pulled down the neck of her blouse and rested the point of his knife below her collarbone. The knife was sharp, and when he began to cut her flesh parted like butter. Irene was glad of the gag because the pain was bad, and she was ashamed to cry out in front of them.

  At last, it was finished. “Show her,” said the woman. She had watched, after all.

  The man brought Irene the little hand mirror that she kept on the chest of drawers. It had pink roses on the back and around the rim. He held it up so she could see. Irene blinked away tears. She stared. He had carved the symbol into her breast. It was an old sign. Irene knew what it meant. Everyone knew. The intersecting arms, the cross.

  Softly, from the neighbouring room, a little bell began to ring. The man paused with Irene’s rose pattern mirror in his gloved fist.

  “She’s alone,” the woman said. “We watched all week.”

  The man put down the mirror and gathered Irene’s throat gently in his hand. “Who’s here?” he said. He took the gag off so she could answer.

  “My sister,” said Irene, mouth strange and numb. “Please, don’t hurt her, she is ill… She has no money, nothing valuable – leave her alone!” Irene made her eyes flicker quickly, like the actors on EastEnders did when their character was lying. “She has nothing,” she said again. The bell tinkled, insistent.

  The man put the gag back into her mouth. “You watch her,” he said to the woman. “I’ll go.”

  “We don’t know who’s in there.” She took his arm. “Together, remember?”

  He touched her face gently through the balaclava. They went.

  Irene heard Lula’s door open. The tinkling rose. The door closed. The world tore. Irene felt it in her body. A hole opened in the fabric of things: a terrible passage. Wrongness enveloped her. Black covered the world. She gasped, cried out and fainted to the sound of the ringing bell.

  Irene woke in silence, in the guttering candlelight. The only sound was of wax dripping onto A Christmas Carol. The book would be quite ruined.

  She knew that she was alone in the house. Irene began to work her wrists patiently against the tape.

  * * *

  Irene stands in the doorway of her dead sister’s bedroom. The black stain under the bed is gone. There is no sign of the man or the woman. Irene is the only living thing here. Outside, the wind moves in the close.

  “Shukraan, habibti,” she says. “Thank you, Lula-belle.”

  Irene remembers a day when she and Lula were just little girls, holding hands by the banks of a stream which ran brown in the morning sun, each curve and wavelet limned with light, when their father put one hand on each of their heads, and they knew that they were loved. Irene knows the bell will not ring again, except perhaps once, years from now. Until then, she must learn to live alone.

  FRONT ROW RIDER

  Muriel Gray

  She’s not a morning person. Never has been. But lately, mornings have become harder than usual. Blinking in the putty-hued square of light from her window she accepts that she has become a cliché, and she can’t bear clichés any more than she can bear the assault of the work-day alarm clock. Yet here she is, lying in a corner of her double bed, bought in a moment of optimism never fulfilled, clutching a damp, compressed pillow. What can be more clichéd than the sleeplessness of the haunted?

  There is little originality, she thinks, in the troubled creature that nightly thrashes the duvet to the edge of the bed, and hers hangs tantalisingly this morning, as it has on others, waiting to slither from the edge like a linen coin push as she shifts and squirms. Her waking is not gentle, following another night of sweats and nightmares, of falling and screaming and bright lights and hard surfaces, the knowledge presenting itself in the daylight that she won’t be able to bear much more of it.

  She coughs, out of habit rather than necessity, tugging back the escapee duvet, trying to find solace in its softness, its familiar insulation. Feeling nothing, she huddles and crouches, making a ball of her body like an armadillo expecting trouble.

  No part of her even wonders anymore. She simply accepts it will happen. Time ticking, days counting, something inevitable approaching. On a good day, she asks herself if it might be the same for everyone. Death approaching. The sands running down. Then her heart tells her it’s not the same. She won’t die an ordinary death in a hospital bed; fixed-smile, grown children at her side, framed by wilting petrol station-bought chrysanthemums. She writhes at the vision she has just conjured. Is that ordinary? Is that desirable? She coughs again, turns, and questions for a moment why she forged an image so dismal.

  No matter. She feels certain she will never die a picturesque death. Her future is a blur and not a Norman Rockwell tableau. She has no children, no lover, no life that can be filed under satisfactory. She blinks at the ceiling. Recently painted, it offers little Rorschach relief, mocking her with its absence of distraction in peeling patches or dampening blooms. A bland, plain, desert of magnolia, leaving her alone with reality.

  She closes her eyes, sighs deeply and gives herself over to the day’s simmering fear. She frames the thought by saying the words. Says them in her head and faces the day.

  Is he here?

  If he isn’t here already, then when will he be here? It’s the same thought. Every day. On waking. Sometimes the dread cools as the day wears on and she dares to hope. Maybe he isn’t here at all. Maybe he’s busy somewhere else. Where would that be? Is her haunting unique, personalised, bespoke? Why should it be? What’s so special about her? Maybe it’s a chain store haunting. Why shouldn’t it be happening at the same time to an Amazonian monkey hunter, a Korean care worker, or an Icelandic property developer? Are they afraid to look people in
the eye? Fearful of reflections and shadows? Terrified they will see the face in the crowd, that person who shouldn’t be there, who has no right to be there, but who is always, unfailingly, reliably there? What vanity says a ghost is for you alone?

  But such musings bring little comfort. The hope of a day without him is always dashed. He will come. Early, late. Day or night. Sooner or later. He will come. She realises her breath is coming fast, her heart beating too hard. She closes her eyes and composes herself. She can do this. It’s a new day, and she reminds herself that in this indifferent, enigmatic, ineffable universe, she is lucky to be here.

  Without knowing how, she is already at the breakfast table. She stirs her tasteless, colourless cereal mechanically, without joy.

  She is at work, staring into the deep of a computer screen, her colleagues moving around her like choreographed dancers.

  She is in a café, the fat proprietor watching the evening news on the wall-mounted TV, arms crossed over his ample belly. Summer bluebottles drone and bump against the glass. Her coffee and half-eaten plate of food sit cold in front of her.

  The temperature drops. She bows her head in despair. Here it comes. As always, she feels him approaching before she sees him. Many times she’s tried not to look. Tried closing her eyes, or reading a book. But like floating gutter leaves sucked down a drain, her gaze is helplessly pulled towards the point of his appearance. So now, against her will, she looks up, a fearful glance from half-closed lids, her breath blowing vapour into cold air that has no right to exist in this summer heat. The café owner shudders and rubs his arm against the sudden icy chill. She waits, heart thumping, but doesn’t have to wait long. This time it’s fast. He walks swiftly past the grimy café window, left to right, adjusting a jumper knotted round his neck, a bundle of newspapers held beneath his bare arm. That’s all. It’s over. The room regains its steamy warmth. That brief, tiny glimpse, she knows, was all there would be for the day. Just once. Just enough to drain her, tire her, chill her. Defeated, she heads home.