Ghost Story

by Toby Litt

  Once up and out of bed, she was hardly less pleased with the state of things. The house during the day was exquisite pleasure – she drank in the undisturbed-but-by-herself air: to be able to choose which room to spend time in, not constantly to be called, required, needed. If the sun was out, she sat with a coffee and looked out through the French doors. This, for reasons of her own, reasons secret even from herself, was as near as she was prepared to go. She looked into the appletree and watched the smoke from her imaginary cigarette blow through it, emphasizing the spaces between its green leaves. All that she worried about, at such moments, in that spot, was being spied upon by one of the three house-windows with a view down into the garden. The reason this occurred to her was that she had herself started to become a little obsessed with watching the houses – the ones on the other side of the road. During the day, with most adults at work and most children at nursery or school, the houses opposite did almost nothing – which was one of the main reasons she watched; of course, and this was another big reason for her fascination, whatever did happen was completely spontaneous and unpredictable, unlike television: curtains could be drawn at any moment across an ambiguous encounter. Agatha, though, could see only a short distance into the rooms – those with windows clear of curtains, blinds or nets. The rest of her penetrations were made up. One house, the most fascinating to her, had a window with a model sailing ship in it – a clipper. There was often movement behind the ship, movement she suspected was male, old. Agatha had yet to see anyone leaving or entering the ship house. Mostly, she stood back and watched, stepping side to side, through a small gap calculatedly left between the main bedroom curtains. So far, she had learnt very little about the lives of the people across the street. But her observations of them made her suspect that, quite probably, one of their windows was hiding behind it a watcher-back – although as the newcomer to the street, and the beginning spy, it was Agatha, strictly, who should have been regarding herself as secondary.

  When she was not watching, or drifting, she cleaned – dusted, vacuumed, polished, ironed, read recipes, made shopping lists for Paddy, made to-do lists for herself. Most of all, though, she read books. She was, she realised, quite consciously, almost systematically, living out her own mother-with-toddler fantasies of uninterrupted time. If only – she had thought, in the months after Max was born, in the months during which he wailed into life – if only he – taking instants to dream long days – if only he wasn’t; but this had been another guilt, one which she tricked, for her own self-facing, into if only he wasn’t so. The so was false, she knew now; how could she not? She had wished him away, and he had gone – and if only he wasn’t had become and now that he isn’t. One new-mother fantasy had been of reading a whodunnit cover-to-cover in a morning, and this she had done – twice; another, achieved only the once, had been a mid-afternoon bath, long enough to read a couple of chapters. But she did not particularly like to be alone with her unclothed body, and soaping between her legs brought the sorbet texture of remorse into her mouth.

  Agatha’s body had gone wild: her legs were as hairy as they could get – as hairy as Paddy’s: black hairs, animal; she hadn’t shaved under her arms or waxed her lip since; her hair was a shapeless, more-than-shoulder-length thing which she often put up with a couple of pencils. The fingernails were bitten away, although she could never remember biting them (she did it when she watched television). She had a small cyst in her vagina, about which she hadn’t told Paddy – he might make a fuss and start insisting she went to the hospital. She had had enough of hospitals, she felt, for the rest of her life: if it was a choice between dying and going to hospital again, dying looked – she flippantly thought – the more attractive option. Most of the time, she didn’t put in contact lenses and forgot or couldn’t be bothered to wear her glasses. She turned the world deliberately into a blur, so that whatever came out of it to hurt her would be softer and she wouldn’t see it until it was already upon her. Television was better, she found, indistinct; the objects that appeared on it were far more intriguing when improperly seen, and the people more mysterious and charismatic. What were they doing? The music usually explained, narrating and moralizing the action. Why were they bothering doing what they were doing, with the world as terrible as it was? Cooking? Gardening? Decorating? Perhaps, she thought, they did these things because the world was as it was. Agatha at least in the first few days regularly watched advertisements she had helped devise; she recognised her own slogans, though not the intonation with which the actors mispronounced them. She felt sorry for the actors in advertisements; they were so obviously dying, on screen – their souls desiccating from having to do something so unShakespeare. They didn’t deserve it. She wore her glasses only for looking at the appletree in the garden; cooking she made more interesting, and a little more dangerous, by doing it short-sightedly.

  When the house was very quiet, she closed her eyes and listened to the waves. It had been one of her great discoveries about the house – that they were audible all the way up here. The house was four streets away from the beach – opening the windows in the bedroom did not seem to make the sound any louder, or bring the beach any closer; the smell did that, the wet-sweater smell of seaweed. Standing in the front porch, something she had never yet done, might have given her a better idea of how loud the waves really were. Other sounds interrupted: cars drove past, seagulls made their uncanny noises – as if they had a baby stuck in their throats. Her dislike of seagulls had become a major part of their deliberations as to whether to move to the seaside; just as her fear of heights affected their choice of holiday destinations – no clifftop drives for her, no thank you. Now she heard the gulls every day, she did not hate them any the less. Once, she had surprised one on the ledge of the bedroom window, and the bang of its taking-off wings against the glass had made her squeal and then giggle with fear.

  She felt lonely, on her own, and doubly childless, but, if asked, would have denied feeling lonely – would have said, instead, she felt ‘lonesome’ or ‘just alone’. The quiet of the house, its small noises, microsounds, were something that gave her extraordinary pleasure; she listened to them actively and intensely, just as she would have listened to a song recital by someone she loved. She was not a long listener, she gave it three or four total minutes, standing on the spot or looking up from a book, but they stood in for the hours of Max’s wail, whimper, burble and prattle – which was what she missed about him most of all; his needs, his need, she could do without, but the reminders of his continued life – they, she felt, were her need.

  Always around teatime she called her mother and got her to hold the phone up to Max’s mouth; she had to hear his breathing – after that, she could try to appreciate his efforts with two or three sentence-making words. He probably knew who he was speaking to, just about. She had reconciled herself to missing out on some of the more important (and memorable) stages of his linguistic development. At least she would be seeing him on Saturday – this she and her mother had confirmed towards the end of the week.

  When Paddy returned, around seven usually, she had dinner ready. They sat down together at the kitchen table, and ate with great care. He tried to tell her about his day; she tried to listen. On the one evening Paddy was late, Agatha had begun to fantasize he was dead. She made guilty plans for herself, Max and the house: they would stay inside, ordering food deliveries from the local supermarket, and clothes and everything else from catalogues; or they would go to a Scottish island and work towards being accepted in their tenth year there by the locals; or they would disappear hand-in-hand into the great and easy mall of America, become thoughtless. This kind of morbidity had become common with Agatha, since. She had become used to staying at home in the company of her death-fantasies. Her assumption was always that when Paddy was late he was dead. In some ways, he was dead for her all day long – dead, routinely, from the moment he left in the morning: killed by a pavement-climbing car or a brain haemorrhage or a fallen piece of s
pace-debris. If she spoke to him during the morning or afternoon, she was convinced he’d be killed the second he put the phone down – by a freak electrocution, by another brain haemorrhage, by the murderer looming up behind him with a knife even as they’d been talking to one another for the last time, again, final, repeatedly. Unexpected callers during the day – meter-readers and evangelists – were always, though she never answered the door, sombre policemen with their hats tucked under their arms. ‘Mrs –?’ ‘Yes. It’s Paddy, isn’t it?’ ‘I’m very sorry to have to inform you –’ Eventually, she had begun to acknowledge the comedy aspect of the morbidity. ‘Don’t cross any roads,’ she’d said, as he left for work. (This had started, she remembered, about a month ago.) ‘I won’t,’ he would say – before he caught on to her anxiety-expressed-as-mock-anxiety, and started to reply, ‘Nor you neither.’ Then she would close the door on his back, certainly for the last and final time: never that smile, never those eyes again. Much had changed since they moved into the house, not least that his death seemed to have its liberating aspects, too. She did not see him off at the door; she stayed in bed.

  CHAPTER 10

  IT was clear the moment Max came carried through the door that he was delighted with the house, and that getting him to leave would be difficult – almost as difficult as separating him from Agatha. Some form of trick would in all probability have to be used. They might have to wait until he was asleep, then carry him out stealthily to the car. For now, though, Agatha took him from her mother’s arms and carried him into the kitchen. She and Paddy had decided not to take him upstairs: the kitten, in its travel basket, in the attic, was still clearly audible from the upstairs landing – a ludicrous but still affecting helium meow: aeiou! They didn’t want to risk Max hearing this; both remembered meow, learnt from picture books, had been one of his earliest words: after moo and woof but before no and dad. As she set him down on the kitchen floor, Agatha tried not to let her tearfulness show. Agatha’s mother was glad to see this, the mothering, the tears and the attempt to hide them; she believed that guilt had a necessary part to play in bringing her daughter back to her senses. (This alone shows how unaware Agatha’s mother was of the extent of Agatha’s already existing guilt.) ‘I’m exhausted,’ she said, after Paddy had offered her a cup of tea. Paddy took this to mean yes, and filled the kettle. He, too, was aware of Agatha’s emotion. Max was only interested in the garden. He kept crawling towards the French doors and leaving smears of fascination on their bottom halves. After a couple of minutes, Agatha said, ‘I’ll make the tea – why don’t you take him outside?’ Paddy knew immediately that this meant Agatha wasn’t allowing herself the garden, either. He became very angry but mutated this into swift action: the doors were opened, Max was lifted shoulder-high and held up to touch the small new leaves of the appletree. Agatha’s mother followed them out, as if she too wanted to embarrass her daughter, eventually, into crossing this threshold. ‘It’ll be lovely when you’ve done it, won’t it?’ she said, to Paddy but loud enough for Agatha to know she wasn’t excluded.

  ‘It’s the time,’ said Paddy, then saw his mistake, and tried to cover it. ‘I think I’m much more into gardening than Agatha.’ Max was grabbing his ear with both hands; it felt wonderful. He realised he’d failed – had only emphasized who wasn’t gardening, who had all the time.

  ‘Tea,’ said Agatha, laying the things on the table. With an instinct for the difficult, her mother said, ‘Why don’t we sit out here?’ The day was sunny if not comfortably warm.

  ‘It’s still a bit muddy,’ Paddy said. ‘Let’s try and keep Max fairly clean.’ He carried his son back inside. Agatha’s mother followed and closed the doors, for the time being, behind them.

  This visit of Max’s was fast becoming atrocious for Paddy. He had to restrain himself from thinking and doing so many things. His instinct was to encourage Max’s desire to be here; he wanted his son to associate the spaces of the new rooms, from the first, with happiness, fun, security. But he could do none of this, not without the certainty that any attachment of love towards the house that he caused Max to feel would be wrenched when, after tea, after more treacherous talk, his grandmother tore him away. Paddy thought of divorce – how divorce wasn’t a singular event; divorce was perpetual, for its children. They were regularly wrenched, to a legally established timetable. He hoped he was underestimating the damage done to Max – if he had it right, they were in for a lifetime of behavioural problems. Paddy had, already, many times, lived through Max’s first fight at school, his first caution by the police, his first overdose. He wished, as a father, that he had lost his capacity for imagination, since it did nothing but present him with horror after horror of dramatized guilt. While Aggie was pregnant for the second time, they had been smug – that was what Paddy now believed; they had reached a high-point of conceit. Two children, they would have – two not perfect but intelligent, happy, growing children. And now, he hoped for one young man who wouldn’t, whilst his mother was still alive, jump under a train. Max, pressed up against the exciting doors to outside, must sense this change – he had become a surlier child, quicker to anger and slower to calm. His grandmother, Paddy knew, used sweet things all the time as a control device. Aggie had told him about her own confectionary childhood. It had always been her mother’s way. When Max arrived, Paddy had noticed, he was already half-frantic from the sugary treats that had kept him quiet during the drive over. He was not hungry now, and Paddy was concerned about the bad habits and tastes he was developing. A grandparent, particularly one on their own, could be expected to spoil their grandchild – but that was meant to be during, at most, weekly visits; Max was in danger of being spoiled full stop. And of course there was nothing Paddy could say about this, for Agatha’s mother would quite happily have removed Max’s seat from her car, brought it inside and driven off without him. Perhaps, he thought, this was something – not knowing her daughter as well as he did – something she genuinely expected. But it wasn’t to happen. Agatha did not ask whether her mother was happy taking Max back for another week, and so made it clear that she didn’t consider it in question. This angered Agatha’s mother. She had a life of her own, too, didn’t they know that? There were things she was missing out on, important occasions the like of which would not come again. This she would say on the phone, that evening, after Max had been successfully (for the moment) put to bed. She promised herself the pleasure of the unadulterated truth, and the longer satisfaction of knowing Agatha would have to ask then.

  Agatha felt her mother’s growing annoyance and, to some extent, went along with it. The presence of Max made her feel her own almost-evil. She, too, wanted to do something against herself – but what was there? To take Max back, for a night or two, then force him out again, would be worse even than this few hours’ visit (which, anyway, she’d arranged).

  A certain exhaustion had overtaken Agatha, a certain apathy creeping up from the ground, through the soles of her feet (bare) – she could no longer impose her will upon any part of the world. By refusing to leave the house, she called many many things down upon herself: her mother was not the least of them. There was no emotional logic to this visit, it could only do Max harm – the idea that anyone else, that Paddy, was looking at Max as she looked and mentally calculating how much harm, every day, every hour, he could safely be expected to take – that notion was unbearable to her. Yet she, guilty herself, could find no argument against it: you mustn’t because I do did not work; nor no-one should; nor this is unbearable. She bore it, she did it, she had given them their example.

  Max and Agatha’s mother stayed another couple of hours. She went out, at one point, to do a little shopping by herself. Paddy took Max out into the garden again, and Agatha – full of self-hate and tenderness – watched the normality of this. As they had anticipated, it was easier to smuggle Max out of the house whilst asleep. Goodbye, like this, wasn’t really goodbye, but at least it avoided being the end of the world.

  Aft
er Max had gone, they didn’t talk about him – not more than to say he had looked well and hadn’t seemed unhappy. They didn’t speak again, really, until they were in bed, when the conversation was on another subject. Agatha was calmer, seeming to want to be in contact with Paddy about what they were experiencing together; he improvised as best a reaction as he could.