Ghost Story

by Toby Litt

  ‘Of course,’ said Agatha, ‘take as long as you want. We’ll be fine, won’t we?’

  ‘I don’t know what you do all day. We’ll have tea when I’m back,’ said her mother, and left with a slam of the door.

  Agatha’s love for Max was atrocious: this time, seeing him in his ignorance of everything that had happened, his surface ignorance of it, she didn’t know if she was going to be able to let him go again. She would have to, however; the house, though reassuring to her, couldn’t really be said to be safe – and neither, if she were going mad, could she. Again the sense of her thought, its practicality, reassured her: Max was grabbing handfuls of grass and throwing them up in the air so that they landed on his head and went down the back of his neck. Agatha didn’t want to scare him by becoming distressingly loving, nor did she want to scare herself by giving him any chance to show he didn’t know exactly who she was. The front door opened, and it was Paddy who was coming into the kitchen. ‘Monster!’ he shouted, overjoyed to see his son playing in the garden sunshine, like a vision of how things should have gone all along. Paddy loped out through the French doors and picked Max high off the ground, interrupting the little grass-game. With his son in his arms, he felt better. Over Max’s shoulder he explained that, kindly, his colleagues had cancelled his classes for the next two days without telling him; they had assumed his father would die, although he didn’t say this out loud. After finishing his admin, which took most of the morning, he’d caught the train. ‘I’m just so tired,’ he said.

  ‘How is your father?’

  ‘Better,’ said Paddy, ‘as much as he can be. They’ll probably send him home again tomorrow. It’s ludicrous.’

  ‘Did you manage to sleep at the hotel?’ Paddy mumbled a reply that clearly meant he hadn’t. He sat on the lawn, bringing Max down with him to ground level – even seated, Paddy was a full head and a half taller than his standing son. Agatha looked at them and smiled; sad.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ asked Paddy. Agatha explained, and then they stopped talking and merely watched as Max found his own amusements, including a snail. This was as close to blissful as they’d come, since.

  Agatha’s mother returned, with two department store bags and a very large bottle of milk. She wasn’t surprised to see Paddy and asked immediately after his father.

  They had tea, and then she said she had to be getting going. ‘I can leave him, if you want,’ she said. ‘I could bring his cot round later.’

  ‘A little longer,’ said Agatha, meaning keep him, not let him stay, ‘please.’ Agatha’s mother gave a grimace and took Max from Paddy; both father and grandmother slumped – one with the burden given, one with that taken.

  After her mother went, Agatha became very practical: they needed food for the evening. She didn’t like to sound in any way shrill to herself, but Paddy had to be persuaded to go and buy something. He refused to go further than the corner shop, and returned from there ten minutes later, angry, with bread, butter, eggs, bacon, sausages and baked beans. His choice of food annoyed Agatha, as he’d definitely intended it to, but her only response was unvoiced: she knew now she wasn’t going to say anything about the house. Today, Paddy was too mule-like and not mule-like enough – if he’d refused to go out at all, she would have respected him more (so she sensed) and might have confided in him. He went to lie on the bed and fell immediately asleep. Agatha kept herself from going in to check on him. The rest of the afternoon and early evening, she sat downstairs and read; she was aware that she was half listening out, anxious, for another scrape but when eventually it came, she found she wasn’t at all scared by it. The sound was no more terrifying than the breathing, though it seemed to be coming less regularly than the day before. Paddy woke up still angry and came downstairs aware of trying to control himself and not say the things he wanted to. Agatha cooked them a dinner that was in essence breakfast: Paddy recognised the irony, for her, given the hours she’d recently kept, but did not mention it.

  ‘What does it mean,’ Agatha said after they’d finished eating, ‘that all the sentences in my head, these days, begin with the words, “Oh, God…” ’

  Paddy swerved into the safety of the philosophical (he often did that when the question was one he didn’t feel capable of anwering): ‘Do you really mean you have sentences in your head? Not just words or parts of sentences?’

  Agatha had not wanted to talk about it either, really; she had said it in the hope that Paddy would ignore it, or rationalize it out of existence, or do what he was doing now – intellectualize, safetyize it. ‘I don’t think I can really say what the inside of my head is like – it moves too fast, it’s too complicated. I’d like to be able to transcribe it, but I can’t; I don’t think anyone can, no-one has.’

  ‘There is a problem between language, I think, and speed. Faster than the speed of thought is a cliché, but most philosophy crawls – most philosophy is in slow motion.’

  ‘It has to be; it has to pretend it’s stupid.’

  ‘No…’ said Paddy, hoping to be interrupted – he didn’t know exactly what he was going to say if he wasn’t.

  Agatha, for once, obliged. ‘Not stupid, then – it has to pretend it’s speaking to someone stupid.’

  ‘Again, no. Are you trying to annoy me? Is this one of those arguments where you start saying things that I know there’s no way you believe?’

  ‘Oh, God…’ said Agatha, to make Paddy laugh, and she succeeded, but felt defeated.

  ‘I see,’ said Paddy, and stood up. He was carrying his plate to the sink, but not hers. Agatha didn’t know what it was that he could see; she supposed that he’d just said something deliberately opaque in order formally to conclude a subject that couldn’t actually, honestly, logically be concluded. She was curious to see where this impossible conversation would go, so she pursued it, and Paddy, towards the other side of the kitchen. ‘What?’ she said, ‘What exactly do you see?’

  Paddy answered immediately, as if he had been expecting this particular question: ‘I see that you are angry.’

  ‘You know I’m angry – that’s not an insight, it’s a starting point.’

  ‘I know that you are specifically angry.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘That’s your question. Why “Oh God”? Why can’t you be sure about what you – and I think, really, about what we should direct our anger towards?’

  Agatha said, ‘Is that it? – do you really think.’

  Paddy was resting his bottom on one of the work surfaces – he was tall enough to be able to do that.

  ‘I think that you’re asking my permission for you to be angry at a God you stopped believing in a long time ago – before you left school – or maybe you’re worried that you didn’t stop, and you’re looking to me for some reassurance that you did.’

  ‘That could be right,’ said Agatha, genuinely startling Paddy; he had been interpreting this all, he realised, as an argument – a willed, created argument. But her question and the curiosity behind it were genuine, or at least she had chosen to present them to him as such, and as such, he now saw, he should have taken them. ‘Are you serious?’ he said. ‘You would like me to dispose of God for you.’

  ‘Well…’ Agatha said.

  ‘While I make some peppermint tea, I’ll just go over a few of the better known arguments.’ Which meant that he had to swerve again, swerve into serious-taking-talking. ‘You’re doubting your doubt,’ he said.

  ‘I’m doubting everything,’ replied Agatha. ‘I want something solid – as a place to start.’ She thought of the breathing, dismissed the thought, then thought of the scrape.

  Immediately, she expected to hear it but of course didn’t.

  ‘You could start with death,’ said Paddy, ‘with the fact of death.’

  Agatha found she could flow: ‘I don’t find that solid at all. It’s an easy humanist religion-in-disguise, death is. But only because you can’t say anything of it, just this and that about it and before it
– just because it’s definitely there in some form doesn’t make it anything; it certainly doesn’t make it a full stop.’ Agatha was glad Paddy had been a little cruel, mentioning death; she remembered student conversations like this, in the first few weeks of the first year, when she had found a few people to share her idealism of argument: they could say something about the world worth saying; by speech – impassioned speech – discoveries might be forced. It was not the fault of students that their early earnestness was used as an easy way, later on in life, of discrediting any genuinely searching talk. They might, despite their own awareness of it as student cliché, get somewhere during the intensity of those early nights – somewhere other than in one another’s pants.

  ‘I think I agree with you,’ said Paddy, cautious as always. ‘I was probably wrong, and a bit trivial, to bring death up so quickly and easily. You make me feel like a charlatan. But it is the issue, isn’t it? It’s what we’re really talking about.’

  ‘I’m talking about life,’ said Agatha, hating how merely paradoxical it made her sound. ‘I’m talking about the difficulty of living – of continuing to live – without knowing,’ she hesitated, ‘without knowing which of the many many pricks to kick against.’

  ‘There isn’t a possibility of trying to kick against all of them, collectively,’ said Paddy, ‘under one name – evil or bad luck.’

  ‘No,’ Agatha said, ‘you want to see that your kicks are doing some damage.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Paddy, hands comically covering his groin, ‘for that image.’ Even as he made the gesture, he knew how annoying Agatha would find it.

  ‘It’s been a long time since I felt so angry, with anything,’ said Agatha. ‘I feel like painting my room black and listening to the angstiest music I can find – whatever they’re listening to these days; God, I’m so old. Has anyone ever written in defence of the moody adolescent world-view, anyone respectable?’

  ‘Not intentionally,’ said Paddy, ‘and if they were respectable before, they weren’t for very long afterwards. Don’t go all Goth on me, please.’

  ‘There’s still something stopping me – I don’t think a full reversion to adolescence is possible. I have too much money and too many things and too much space –’

  ‘And a child,’ said Paddy, again in an attempt, this time deliberate, to anger Agatha into ending the conversation.

  ‘Max is what we’ve been talking about,’ said Agatha, ‘don’t you see that? When I talk about the world I mean the world-for-Max, the world that is going to fall down on his little head as soon as he takes any notice of it.’

  ‘It’s fallen already,’ said Paddy, ‘and I’m fairly sure he’s noticed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘How could he not? His world has changed – he’s living with your mother: that’s fairly earth-shattering in anyone’s book.’

  ‘What else can we do? He can’t be here.’

  ‘You say that.’ (And at last they were down to it.)

  ‘No,’ said Agatha, ‘I know that – I know it completely.’

  ‘Then there’s your starting fact, your main prick-to-kick: you can’t live with your son, at the moment.’

  ‘Our son can’t live with us.’

  ‘Or your son can’t live with you, one of the two.’ They were talking over one another now, not listening before responding.

  ‘I want him here, do you think I don’t? – but I’m afraid of destroying him.’ At this Paddy went quiet. ‘Some accident might happen, when I was distracted.’ She remembered how terrified hearing the scrape had made her. How would she have been able to cope with that and Max? And perhaps there were other discoveries, even more disconcerting, to be made about the house. ‘I can’t cope. Every time he cries, I start crying – and I can’t stop. He sees that. He must be trying to find some sort of meaning for it. He must feel how unnatural it is. How different it is from before.’

  ‘He has no idea at all what’s natural or not, only what we give him.’

  ‘I don’t want him growing up with the insecurity of a mother who can’t cope with – who can’t even bear it when he winces.’

  ‘Surely it’s better to get over this with him around, the routine of it will help.’

  ‘You’re not here,’ said Agatha. ‘It’s the routine I’m finding impossible, because nothing’s just automatic; I pause before everything; there’s a barrier of thought to go through before I can do it – anything.’

  ‘Do you want me to give up work? Do you want to go back to work?’ Agatha didn’t immediately reply. ‘You said that this was the way you wanted it – last time we talked you did, anyway.’

  ‘I do. I need to sort it out with myself,’ said Agatha, defeated by Paddy’s challenge. She left, to be on her own for a while; upstairs she went, all the way to the attic, where she sat down in the darkness on the bare boards. Recently, since becoming aware of the breathing, she had found herself behaving in a way that was both private (it was important that her actions went unobserved) and demonstrative (her actions must be unmistakable in meaning, had anyone been there to see them). This odd mixture, as much as anything, came closest to being what she could call her mood – a series of almost artful gestures; bad art; they embarrassed her, how could they not? At moments, she realised she needed to do something, and she also realised that what she was about to do (not necessarily what she was thinking about doing) wasn’t the best thing or the right thing, the most sensible or the most productive; (she didn’t let the scrape interrupt her, this time) it was just the thing thing – not unavoidable, because many times before it happened she managed to stop herself, and do something else; but if she were not to do the thing – which presented itself as doable (the thing thing), she was aware then that she was acting in denial of her mood and deliberately avoiding what she would otherwise rightly have done. The relative complexity of this often paralysed her; and again and again she found herself standing after half an hour still on the upstairs landing, still in the middle of a room. It was easier for her to be in a room in which there were fewer not-doable things: an empty room still presented itself as decorated with possibilities; a dark, empty room, slightly less so. She closed her eyes and concentrated herself on the practicality (which was also the unpracticality) of her grief. Paddy, on past form, she knew, would allow her a certain amount of time, about half an hour, before coming to check she was okay – okay, which these days probably just meant that she hadn’t attempted suicide.

  Whilst he waited out the time before he could safely go up and talk to Aggie, about half an hour, he thought, Paddy did the washing-up. He remembered how, in the hospital, eating crisps, chocolate bars and burgers dispensed from vending machines, he had felt something like nostalgia for the kitchen – he had even anticipated what a pleasure washing-up would be, how normal and reassuring and not to do with grief. The side window of the kitchen, above the sink, looked across towards a dull wooden fence too high for even tall-Paddy to see over. He was glad, particularly now, there would be no inadvertent eye-contact with the next-door neighbours, whom he had no wish at this time to get to know – let them think them strange and stand-offish; as long as they didn’t start to come round with offers of sugar, cake, biscuits and friendship. The idea of that was sickening; it felt like a lurch, side to side. With his hands in the hottest water he could bear, Paddy thought long slow thoughts – about the course of his own and Max’s and Agatha’s lives. He tried to avoid the practicalities of inference and decision; instead, he was looking for a more trancelike state. In this, he would feel able to divine whether there were still possibilities of distant happiness for all three of them – and, even further off, whether these possibilities could be achieved with them all still together. He became, though shamefaced even in front of himself, visionary; and he did believe, in a semi-mystical way, in them as a family, and by extrapolation, in the family as an abstract. But he knew, equally, that a divorce between Agatha and him would see him intellectually convinced of the ignominy of
all families. He was ashamed of his own anticipated inability to maintain a consistency and logic of thought. He wished it weren’t so – and so kept himself, as much as possible, on specifics: which hurt, for he couldn’t but be aware that his image of Max was wrong, outdated; today’s visit had forced that upon him. He was coming not to know his own son and worse, his own son must surely be growing in ignorance of him. If forced to choose between the two states, being known or unknown, he would of course have taken a life gazing at Max, safe, autonomous, through a one-way mirror. There was less of the show-off egotism in Paddy than he sometimes felt was necessary; a more theatrical father would probably have created scenes of separation and recapture. (This was the gaudy of fatherhood, something Paddy had never managed to fit to himself; motley had always been the best he could do.) He put a plate on the draining board and reached for another, and as he did so he thought he heard Aggie shifting and scraping about upstairs. There was no second sound, though. He went back to his thoughts, slightly more annoyed with himself. If he had gone over to Agatha’s mother’s in the car, she wouldn’t have been able to keep Max from him: a polite request, polite but definite even without a lie, would have had Max in the back seat within twenty minutes. Paddy, scrubbing congealed egg-yolk off a plate, felt that he would perhaps have been a better father if he’d been a worse father, or rather one less concerned with immediate cause-and-effect distress. He was proud of his gentleness, but also perceived it, from his own father’s point-of-view (projected) as weak. He never made demands; perhaps, he worried, he should make demands – he should demand more of himself, and of the world; he should demand that he stop worrying so much. It wasn’t possible: change; personality revision. He thought about deliberately smashing a plate, but then felt shamefacedly emasculated – why not smash up the whole kitchen, if that were sincerely what he felt? Why, he wondered, had he never, not even as a child, destroyed anything of size? Was this simply to do with class – that those who have less are far more likely to deprive themselves of it? Perhaps it was because he had always been so large, and felt so clumsy, that it was the world which needed protection from him and not the other way round. He knocked the plate gently against the side of the plastic bowl, in order to microdramatize (for himself) his humiliation. Did Agatha approach understanding? Did she find herself annoyed by his underdeveloped capacity for rage or for expressions of it? He didn’t think so: he was a modern man, and his masculinity was – to the modern woman she was – hopeless, hapless and comic; comedic, rather. The thought of this sickened him, made him feel unsteady on his feet. He had to put on an act: although he had anticipated enjoying the washing-up and how good doing it would feel, right now (in the middle of this train) it started to feel effeminate and he resented having to do it. They had a dishwasher and he decided then to make more use of it – but he realised immediately the only time for trance this would gain him was the loading and unloading; not enough. He would continue to do the washing-up, gladly, mildly. At this point, he wondered whether he had just genuinely given something up, been humbled in argument with himself, or whether it had just been a camp internal dramatization (apart from the little knock) of a humiliation that had long ago occurred but – what? – he hadn’t noticed, been meant to notice? The last mug now on the draining board, he pulled the plug and waited to scoop the pieces of food from the plughole. After all that happened, Paddy had expected Agatha to become depressed – had expected much the same for himself, too. It would be the worst time they had endured, even including the deaths of his mother and her father. He had known this even as it was beginning, in the hospital, after the final scan: it had been a phrase in his head – The Worst. What was beyond his expectation was that some lapse would occur, that Aggie indeed would fail to cope, that she would start to go mad; and that he, though as intimately involved as he had to be, wouldn’t at all know what to do. Her noncommunication had worried him to begin with; she had never before been a brooder-upon-things – her decisions had always been immediate and instinctive; he had admired this birdlike capacity of hers for changing direction whilst in flight. But he feared she was changed: often her decisions didn’t hatch for days and days, and – was that her moving about again? – when they did they were fully formed, with wings, but flightless; dodo-dos. She had become emotionally mute: he knew there were decisions she was making, inside herself, to which he was no longer privy – decisions which intimately concerned him and Max, but that he no longer had any idea of how they were being taken. Agatha, as each day passed during which they hardly coincided and each night she spent awake and alone, was becoming more and more terrifying to him. He expected her to make an announcement, soon – every day, he thought, might bring it out of her. It’s over: he was anxious this would be it, and that he would have no chance to argue against or to persuade. It’s dead. He could feel her points of conclusion, when she reached them, but was kept, still, from knowing what they were. It frightened him to see how disconnected from him Aggie could be, whilst in the room with him; her attention seemed all to be elsewhere, as if, in fact, she were in a completely different room. This was no longer a marriage. He remembered points at which they had, despite their intellectual doubts about Nature, felt it Natural to know one another’s passing thoughts even when separated the whole day; it had sometimes taken an hour or two in the evening just to talk them through. This, of course, had been before Max. The feeling of separation – he used the word ‘divorce’ in thinking of it – was nauseating; they might as well have been living at different historical periods, so little communication was passing between them: if this were so, Agatha was the earlier of the two – she left possibilities for emotional palaeology, for excavations; the skeletons of flightless decision-birds; Paddy, for her, could only be some vague idea of the future, what might be. He became more and more upset. What if she were really going mad? Fuck. The floor seemed to lurch like the deck of a ship. What if she were capable of going mad? It might need the live presence of Max to prevent that, but Paddy was afraid he would be abducted into Agatha’s abnormal world. Imagine if Agatha were to make or perhaps allow him to keep the same hours as her! A night-two-year-old! He tried to distract himself from this by imagining something worse. Paddy hated to think of Agatha as dead, but at the moment she was undoubtedly and completely dead to him; he had resolved, many times, on confronting her – and had given hours of thought to the most life-penetrating thought-penetrating death-penetrating words he could say. In all of them, he detected the bleat of a husband-about-to-be-left: Tell me what’s going on or Let me help you – I love you, you know or What’s happened to you? or I’m scared – scared of losing you – scared I’ve already lost you. He had to deal with the possibility that Agatha might already be beyond the point of becoming unbalanced. He felt incredibly lonely in this, as lonely as he could remember; he wanted to call someone, but not a doctor. He did want a second opinion, and the only people he could think of from whom a visit wouldn’t be suspicious were Henry and May. He decided to phone Henry from work and to arrange bumping into one another at the railway station. Pretending normality, Paddy would tell Agatha he had invited Henry round for a coffee – Henry would see what he saw, he would leave, and the following day they could talk it through again on the phone.