Ghost Story

by Toby Litt

  Next, she thought, God. Church was one of the places, in imagination, she most often visited outside the house. Once there, she didn’t wish to take part in a service, she wished to leave immediately – but to do so knowing she at least had been there, that was what was important; something to do with showing spiritually willing, as if on the church door (it didn’t matter which; any denomination, however loopy, would have done – any dusty cavern) God had someone taking names. Agatha’s God rated curiosity as a form of worship and physical presence as a participation of the soul. She wasn’t able to make Him believe a walk around some cloisters equal to taking communion, but even though He seemed to be blind to some of the things that went on outside His place of worship – since, she hadn’t any credence left to give to His supposed omniscience (when Rose died before being born, God was only forgivable, only conceivable, if He’d been elsewhere and otherwise engaged) – even though Aggie’s God was obviously a bit of a dunderhead where the rest of the world was concerned, inside his little grey boxes of cold, he was attentive to the tiniest of spiritual minutiae. And today Agatha had something, a parcel, she longed to take and deposit – wrapped in the brown paper of anonymity and tied with the white string of convention – beside the for-kneeling-on cushions, between the pews. This she had done before, many times. She never wanted to be around when God, sucker, untied the string and lifted the box free of the paper; and when God opened the box, Agatha always wanted the blastzone to be, somehow, contained entirely within God, within heaven, within where the shrapnel, the shockwaves, wouldn’t rip her to splatter. That was for her the purpose of God: to dispose of highly explosive materials by being periodically blown up and seemingly destroyed by them. After the parcel-dumping, Agatha knew she wouldn’t think of God and the extraordinary service He offered for several months – but, one day, she would realise that she’d for a while been gathering materials together for her next bomb-box. That, in the past, in the years during and since university, had been Agatha’s method of God-dealing – it wasn’t worship, although there was always a certain amount of awe as she approached the church, the horrendous parcel in her mental hands, and always a deep gratitude, as she walked away disburdened of it. God had served His purpose and had accepted – for her – His containment, His obliteration. She didn’t want more than that; forgiveness, blessing, benediction – the bestowal of grace, if it came from anywhere, came out of Agatha and flowed backwards towards the place of her relief, the site she had created, or adapted, for that purpose. Agatha also forgave, which should really have come first but with her came last of all – she forgave God for allowing Himself to be circumscribed and herself for circumscribing Him. And then, like so many others who shared her occult terroristic religion of brown paper packages tied up with string, she went on with her life – lighter, freer, and with a growing sense of doubt that might be debt. Whatever she might persuade herself, it was something external – external to herself, and to the bad cold stone buildings she visited – which had successfully taken away her troubles, Lord. Agatha’s box, since, was huge; she had wrapped, unwrapped, repacked and re-wrapped it more times than she could have counted – in an instant of regret or annoyance, she had done it twice again; it required immediate delivery, if not it might start to leak, it was leaking, it was leaking faster, it might go off in the house – killing everything. Perhaps she should use God’s courier service – perhaps a vicar could be persuaded to carry it away? But she’d never thought of using any other method than a personal delivery service. The great utility of it, the greatest, was that she didn’t, at any point, have to speak – not even to herself. There were emotional chemicals and compounds she had put in there which she had never explicitly formulated; all the most explosive things it contained were unworded, inchoate, chaotic.

  By the end of the day, Agatha for the first time since they moved in was looking forward to Paddy’s return – she wanted to see if she was capable of letting him know what she had been thinking. It wasn’t likely, she felt, that she could do more than try to let him in, to know that the effort of forwards-movement was one she was making.

  CHAPTER 16

  PADDY phoned around eight, already late back, to say he wasn’t coming home that evening: his father was ill, had pneumonia (again), and had been taken into hospital. Agatha asked if Paddy wanted her to do anything – she meant, was he going to try and use this as a way of forcing her out of the house? She wasn’t at all sure how she would react to this, whether she was able to go outside, and was very much hoping Paddy wouldn’t force that crisis upon her; he didn’t, for which she regained just a little love for him. ‘Thank you,’ said Paddy, allowing Agatha to retain the dignity of the appearance of having meant what she said.

  ‘But shouldn’t I come?’ Agatha asked – she needed to be absolutely sure he wouldn’t attack her for this later.

  ‘I don’t think he’s in danger,’ said Paddy, ‘not right now – and he doesn’t want a fuss made.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ said Agatha.

  ‘There’s a hotel near the hospital. I can go and see him in the morning.’ Agatha asked about Paddy’s father’s lungs – they were not in a good state, said Paddy. This, Agatha knew, this or something very like it, was in the end going to kill Paddy’s father. If it wasn’t this time, this stay in hospital, it would be the next one, or the one after that. His father had said, often, he wanted to be over and done with the whole business as soon as bloody possible. Life in a wheelchair, Agatha knew, hadn’t for Paddy’s father really been life at all; when younger, he’d been a club-level rugby player and a decent amateur mountain-climber – then, when he could no longer do either of those, a hill-walker – and, finally, a fairly apathetic nine-hole golfer.

  Agatha was momentarily distracted by a sound somewhere in the house. Paddy didn’t want his father to die, she knew, but also he didn’t want his father to live in such a hateful way that he ceased to be recognisably his father. ‘I’m going to bring Max to see him, tomorrow,’ he said. ‘He hasn’t asked, but I think he’d like that.’ Agatha was immediately worried about the distress this might cause her son; she said nothing. ‘The ward isn’t too bad,’ said Paddy, relaxing into sadness. ‘It’s just a load of old men coughing all the time. Occasionally they put the curtains around one of them, they cough more and more, then less and less, and then they don’t cough at all. Next time you look, it’s a different old man – but he’s still coughing. My father’s just one of the different old men.’ Agatha said she was sorry, and Paddy said he was okay. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow from work, in the morning – let you know how he’s getting on.’

  ‘Don’t cross any roads,’ said Agatha; ‘Nor you neither,’ said Paddy.

  As she put the phone down, it was as if all the rooms were darkening – thunderclouds on the staircase, thunderclouds beneath the ceiling rose. This, Agatha realised, would be her first night alone here. It would be silly to be frightened, what was there to be frightened of? A Victorian house on a Victorian street, people only two or three feet away on either side – a scream would bring them running; streetlights shining in through the front windows; it was hardly the Gothic castle in the Black Forest. And yet – and yet, she knew that she was only reassuring herself because she was in need of reassurance. And that, really, she could these days find the opportunity for terror in the most infinitesimal things. Soon, she thought, I’ll be frightened by a speck of dust – just like a kitten might be, that had never known such a thing before.

  Agatha followed or tried to follow her usual routine, but she soon realised that it was entirely dependent upon Paddy’s being there and her behaving as if he weren’t. And so, she let the night start early, pretending that Paddy had just gone to bed and that she wasn’t going to join him for three or four hours. She went with her book and sat in the back-to-front room. Her concentration was appalling. She knew enough about reading to know that the eyes don’t simply travel along the lines, like cars down a motorway, they cheat – skip ahe
ad to anticipate coming events, double-back to check whether that word really had been that word and not another word. Still, she felt like she was failing the writer; she should have been more disciplined, not so concerned with merely turning pages. It was more important to read the book well than to congratulate oneself for having read it. She was a bad reader, she felt, too scatty, not worth writing for. After half an hour, she put the book aside and listened hard to the breathing; she had been scared of doing this, scared that the unexplained sound of it would begin to scare her. If that were the case, she didn’t know what she’d have done – perhaps call Henry and May to see if one of them could come over to stay the night; they’d understand. She wanted to be calmed, to be allowed to return to herself as a better, clearer-headed person. The house had never seemed so quiet nor its breathing so clear and steady. Agatha breathed with it for a couple of long minutes, thinking about Paddy in his hotel room – assuming he too wouldn’t be able to sleep. He should have given her the number there, but she always had his mobile if she needed it. She thought for a while about his body, the length of it and the weight of it and the presence of it – all of the qualities that would be absent from their bed that night. Which was when, halfway through this thought, she heard it: a long scraping sound – it wasn’t particularly quiet, no quieter than the breathing, perhaps even a little louder; she knew immediately that she’d heard it before, but she couldn’t remember when. It was probably, she thought, just one of the accustomed noises of the house. If Paddy had been upstairs, she most likely wouldn’t have noticed it: her safety would have deafened her. For five minutes, she listened out for the scrape to come again – but she didn’t hear a thing, except the normal nightsounds of outside and inside, and the breathing. Aggie went into the kitchen and made herself one of her midnight expressos, then decided that, as Paddy wasn’t there, she didn’t necessarily want or need it: she could go to bed at any time. This thought made her guilty, and she had to deal – sitting silently – with the thoughts that followed of why she had been avoiding her husband’s bed. It was easier, without him physically around or imminent (all day he was imminent, right from the moment he left – perhaps never more so than in the minutes after he closed the door behind him), to think of him without the sensation of disloyalty, which tended to end thought. Was it really that she no longer loved him? Quickly she dismissed that, then realised this haste was probably the most indicative hint she had. She forced herself back to the question, forced the question back upon herself, talking it through out loud – unafraid of seeming mad; it was worth seeming mad for a marriage, even if marriage to begin with was madness. Agatha knew she wasn’t dismissing the idea of not loving Paddy so quickly because she was totally certain she did love him. Haste betrayed doubt betrayed her betrayed him. Her first insight, repeating, ‘Do I still love Paddy?’, and rocking backwards and forwards on the kitchen chair feeling an inner lurch, was that she had been deferring a deep look at this question for so long that her suppression of it had become a quick reflex. If she let it start now, it would burgeon, ramify, unravel – yes, coil out endless (seemingly endless) spools of speculation; the complexity of which suggested not love, no longer love. Love, for her, was rarely baroque like this. She felt she could spend all day exploring with her inner eye the curves and folds, the ivory and gilding, of her love for Max. But Paddy had always been more monolithic: rough, landscape-dominating, weatherworn; profound and profoundly incomprehensible. She had been going out with him for so long that he really did seem, in himself, in his physical presence, the remnant of some long-forgotten religion. This old worship must have been, she now assumed, her first passion for him; and it worried her she could re-create no clear sensation of what and how this had been. Paddy as fresh Paddy: she thought of cowpats, and laughed. Paddy as something that didn’t feel exhausted. Not known – he wasn’t boring to her in that way; it was her incomprehension of him that she had become overfamiliar with, and begun to hate. His work was something she had once wished to understand, and also, she came to realise, compete with him in. When they talked about it, she had often hoped some polished insight of hers, presented casually, almost not mentioned, would be what set him off towards greatness. This, though, wasn’t how greatness worked – it probably wasn’t how Paddy worked either, great or not. Probably, she thought, not; almost certainly. Which could serve to make him more loveable but also more hateable. Early on, Paddy had been an ideal to her – particularly for keeping on with academia when she had pursued income and other, faster rewards. She had respected him almost to the point of agony – and then, again, she heard the scrape-sound. It was louder in the kitchen than it had been in the back-to-front room – no, she couldn’t be sure of that. It wasn’t quieter, though, and she hadn’t been listening with her entire body tensed to receive it. The only thing she could think was that the scrape was coming from somewhere inside the house; that was how it felt: very close, almost upon her. Agatha looked towards the hall, the cellar door, all thought of Paddy and love gone – or maybe transformed into something else. She knew, or felt she knew, that the scrape hadn’t simply been a chair being pulled back in either of the next-door houses. That might have been the case for the one she heard in the back-to-front room, but the one in the kitchen just now couldn’t have come through an adjoining wall: there wasn’t an adjoining wall. She looked again at the cellar door; going down there was of all things the one she least wanted to do, which made her realise it was probably her inevitable task. Deferring the moment of decision, she took herself through the house, every cupboard, every corner, from top to almost-bottom – as she went, she listened, and as she listened, she felt it less and less likely that the scrape would have its source anywhere other than in the cellar. Remembering what it had sounded like, she convinced herself that the sound was surrounded by a slight halo of echo, of room-emptiness. By the time she got down to the hall again, she felt she was ready to put herself to the test: mouse or rat or man or hairy-slimy non-living cellar creature, she knew that now was the time to confront it.