You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  Could you explain one thing in your mail?

  It’s where you say, ‘You had a shoulderbag with something in it, something with an odd shape.’ Well the person you claim is me in the video isn’t carrying anything. He’s a man in what looks like a corduroy suit, reading The Guardian. And anyway, can you tell me when I ever owned a shoulderbag? Can you tell me that? I hate men who carry shoulderbags. You know I do. That’s just another reason it couldn’t have been me. ‘A shoulderbag from some shop in Camden,’ you say, ‘a bit knocked about and dirty, with something in it.’ I can’t think of anything that sounds less like me. I wouldn’t be seen dead in a corduroy suit for that matter either. You must know that.

  If you were going to palm this off on me, you might have made a video that matched the description in your mail.

  ‘Something in it,’ you say, ‘a shoulderbag with something in it.’ What do you mean by that? And what music was I listening to? Was it John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins? Because if I wasn’t, I don’t think it was me, do you? I mean, with what you and everyone else in the world knows about me?

  You say that after I wouldn’t say hello, I got off the train at King’s Cross. That’s another mistake, because why would I get off there? I never worked there. It’s just such a big hole in your story. I can’t think of any reason to get off the tube at Kings Cross at ten o’clock in the morning when I work in NoHo. You say I got off the train and you followed me out of the station and down to the canal. I went to the Regents Canal at eleven o’clock in the morning? I don’t think so. I think Get.This.com would have something to say about that, don’t you? If I hadn’t turned up for work by eleven o’clock in the morning?

  Then there’s all this stuff about the empty building. That’s sick, Fareda says, and I can understand why. She says I should get an injunction.

  If you want to know how I met Fareda, I put an ad in Time Out.

  ‘Man 35 seeks interesting woman 25-40. Must have broad but individual taste in books, music, films and be able to tolerate a high degree of individuality in other people’s taste. Must like men but not football. Nobody who thinks of the South Bank, the Arts Council or the ICA as repositories of culture. Nobody who thinks a good haircut is important. Nobody trying to make a career in TV, journalism, or TV journalism. Nobody who wants it all. Nobody trying to fit a man into the vestigial and precisely-shaped space left by a tightly woven support structure of family, friends and work.’

  Recognise anyone in that paragraph, Julie? Well it’s you.

  That’s how hurt I felt. You say Fareda broke us up. You say I was fucking her. Well, that would have been something. I wasn’t fucking anyone, Julie, not even you, because you were always too bloody busy. How do you think I felt about that? How good did that make me feel? Now you say that I won’t speak to you on the tube. Well maybe if I saw you I wouldn’t. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. But I never see you on the tube!

  You know, sometimes I just play the files you send and I laugh. These people are not only not me, they’re all different. You’ve followed a lot of different people to this building with the broken windows you claim is by the canal in King’s Cross. You’ve taken some blurry DV stuff of them standing there looking at the walls and corners. It’s filthy in there. Dirty people, looking up at the walls like that without moving. I don’t know how you got that, but it isn’t very nice, and I don’t want you to send any more of it. None of them look like me. They’re older, they’re younger, some of them are obviously women. You should get help if this is what you’re going to spend your time doing. I mean, are you paying them to stand there like that? Or what?

  It isn’t any good, all this. I’m with Fareda now and we’re happy. I wish I could have been happy with you but I wasn’t. You weren’t happy either, you said as much. You should stop this and give yourself a new start, you owe yourself that. You owe it to me, too. It would be easy for you to meet someone, easier than it was for me. Another thing you say is that you regret what happened between us. You say, ‘Every night I wish things could be the way they were.’ You say you cry every night. But you never cried then, and now it’s too late.

  I left you, Julie. I changed offices and I never use the Central Line for work any more. I don’t know how you found that awful building. You should get some help, because these people you see aren’t me.

  Dog People

  I met Myra at the Arts Club. It was lunchtime on the sort of summer day which makes you want to eat outside, off a table with a luminous white cloth. The girls touch the statue of Aphrodite for luck, imagining her to have blonde hair and bare arms like their own. They look down admiringly at the healthy balding suntanned heads of the men who have signed them in. My own date had failed to appear.

  The Arts Club isn’t a good place to be blown off in, especially at lunchtime. People who have also been blown off, or are about to be blown off, or are about to admit to being blown off, eye you with hatred as you walk past. They want no reminders. Among them that day was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. Her head had the qualities of an ethnic bronze, massive and massively-proportioned, all the features of which overstate some powerful but recently obsolete cultural dictum. She swung it slowly left and right. She stared at her watch, ordered a glass of house red.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ I heard her tell the barman, ‘for this wretched person I wouldn’t even recognise.’

  I asked him if I could have a club sandwich. Recently he had stopped cautioning me, ‘And you are a member, aren’t you sir?’ every time I ordered a drink. I told him I would have the sandwich outside. ‘The table nearest Cupid,’ I said. Cupid, a rational little deity, perches out there in the Arts Club garden, on a mossy clam shell between two terracotta urns, shooting his arrow of water into the air above a black pond decorated with green weed. He presides over affairs, one night stands, change. He serves the club members with the endless debacles they mistake for an emotional life. I was ignoring him when the woman with the massive head came and stood by my table.

  ‘You don’t mind,’ she told me, ‘if I sit here.’

  In a way she was right.

  ‘These bloody people who say they’ll meet you,’ she complained. She pulled my Telegraph apart and began to read the food page. ‘I can’t stand octopus,’ she said, as if she had caught me eating one. Then: ‘You don’t say much, do you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I can’t stand fish of any kind. I suppose you’re doing something this evening?’

  We went to my flat. ‘Flat’ is perhaps the wrong word. I was renting a room from some friends of mine who lived in a maisonette on a council estate in Bow. The estate was constructed like an open box, so that it captured every passing sound. Even the silence was full of ghost aircraft descending far away, a shim or resonance of cries and traffic. At night you could hear young Asian men having their heads kicked in outside Mile End tube station by cheerful BNP members over from Leytonstone for the dog fights. I was as far east as the Arts Club is west, but I could come and go as I liked, and I was never uncomfortable there until Myra said:

  ‘They’re very tidy, aren’t they? Your friends?’

  Then she said:

  ‘My god, is this actually a futon?’

  She was wearing a white linen suit, the skirt of which she soon pulled up round her waist to show me the sandy coloured fur between her thighs.

  ‘What do you think of that, then?’ she said.

  As soon as I got close enough to have an opinion, she turned away from me and lifted her great haunches in the air, laughing.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Can’t we talk first?’ I said.

  When we had finished – or rather, when Myra had come, with a sudden series of barks and groans, shaking her head from side to side and looking back at me over her shoulder – she seemed to expect something else. There wasn’t anything else I could think of. That was the first and last time Myra ever came to Bow. If I suggested it thereafter she made excuses, and we
always went to Chiswick, where she owned a garden flat thirty seconds away from the Thames. There she had, as she put it, La Trompette for evenings, Richmond for Sundays, and the kind of neighbours who can easily afford an Audi cabriolet. In Chiswick, sex was noisier. I wondered what people made of us. ‘So long as you can avoid Hammersmith,’ Myra said, ‘Chiswick is heaven.’ To her, Hammersmith was less a place than a condition.

  She was already anxious when we were apart.

  Is ‘anxious’ the right word? It was an anxiety which revealed itself, like most of Myra’s emotions, as irritation. Where it proceeded from, I don’t know. ‘You’ll go to seed in that place,’ she would warn me, if I spent a day working at home. ‘I’m your last chance at a normal life.’

  Eventually I gave in. After Myra’s remarks, Bow had lost its gloss anyway, though I still quite liked the strange shop signs along Roman Road – Spoilt Bitch, Blisters, Shuz-A-Go-Go. (For a while there had been a lingerie shop called Bare Essensuals. It didn’t prosper, and though the sign remained the shop began to sell mirrors instead, as if its owner had decided to cook the impurities out of the narcissistic act and leave only the really good stuff.) Myra hardly seemed to notice when I moved in with her, except to warn me, ‘Don’t get in my way in the mornings.’ The only other thing she said was, ‘Don’t offer to do my washing and I won’t offer to do yours.’ She could see I had been tempted by that. The bedroom smelled of overused bath towels, Myra and Nonoxynol-9. On the bed, the sheets were always pulled about untidily into heaps. Perhaps that was because we were always having sex there.

  Myra hated it if we didn’t have sex, or if I seemed to lose interest in her for a moment. I could see there might be problems with that. Around then my mother, who was seventy three and lived with mixed success in the Midlands, had a small stroke. Unlike Myra’s, my mother’s anxieties had always revealed themselves as anxiety: when she saw the ambulancemen in her front room, she fought. Just as she feared, worse was to come. Her struggles brought on a further stroke, and a coma, and then, for a month or two, Bramley Ward in the local hospital, which she shared with a transient population of equally unconscious but always slightly younger women.

  Most of that time, my sister watched over her. My sister, like many relatives of stroke victims, had convinced herself my mother was still somehow there. The nursing staff explained to her that passing expressions don’t signify awareness, but she couldn’t accept it. My mother wasn’t helping with this. She was smiling as happily as a girl. Some of those smiles were surprising to me, they were surprisingly sexy. It was as if she wanted to share something with us. Sometimes she wanted to share it so much that she was practically winking at us. I didn’t want to know what it was. These were the opposite of a baby’s practice smiles, they were what you got when there was nothing left to practise for. But my sister kept saying, ‘We can’t give up, we mustn’t give up.’

  I didn’t know what to feel about it. I had my own difficulties, sitting by the bed on a plastic chair for an hour in Bramley Ward trying not to interpret that smile, so all I felt was my sister’s need. It pressed me into the walls. She had me cornered there twice a week in the hospital smell and the light of an internal window with a kiddie’s picture taped to it, entitled, probably, ‘My Gran doesn’t say anything any more.’ There were other issues. I had been looking for a better family than ours, my sister said, since I was thirteen.

  ‘Something’s the matter with you,’ she said.

  There was some justice in that: as soon as she spoke, the world had tilted to one side and started to rotate slowly.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘she’s not going to wake up.’

  The vertigo wore off in the cab on the way to the railway station, but though I felt fine by the time I got back to London, I’m not sure I was ever fine again.

  The hospital gave fruit and flower names to all its wards. Bramley Ward. Daffodil Ward. Cherry Ward. Wards were grouped into wings which had the names of famous local people. Despite that, it had no integrity, it wasn’t even itself, and was run as a satellite from some other hospital in the nearest big city. My sister explained to me they were always threatening to close it down; it was probably another thing we shouldn’t give up on.

  So that was the way things worked out. I went up and down to the Midlands, sometimes by car, more often by rail. Each visit, I tried to avoid my sister and catch the early train back to London. At night I lay in the dark imitating my mother’s depthless, lively, transient expressions, thinking we were more alike than I preferred: both of us were afraid of death. As a result my dreams were full of the surprised humiliation I used to feel as an adolescent when forced to see things from someone else’s point of view. I would wake up to find the room rolling slowly to the left and Myra staring intently down at me as if she knew something I was keeping from myself. Whatever it was, it still didn’t enable her to understand me.

  ‘Can we not fuck?’ I would hear myself beg.

  It was another climate-change summer. The light, like seaside light, seemed to make the streets wider and more spacious. Even London streets had a promise about them in that light. They became esplanades luring me upriver towards Richmond, or, less advisedly, north through Turnham Green until I lost myself in the tissue of residential streets which had worked its way into the fabric of Acton then died; a place neither clean nor dirty, new nor old, inhabited by mid-day joggers and almost defunct pigeons, organisms like me. One afternoon I got back early and sat out under the cherry tree in Myra’s garden. Chiswick Eyot smelled of exposed mud. A dog barked, an engine fired two streets away. A man was saying ‘Yes,’ and ‘Hm,’ into a cellphone, his voice close and slightly hollow, as if he were talking from an empty bath. It was another afternoon of hyperaesthesia. A breeze started up and though the sun was still beating down, the rustling cherry leaves made it sound like rain. Lulled by this, I fell asleep.

  When I woke up ten minutes later, a rhythmic sound was coming from the garden next door. It had a shuffling, plodding quality, like the sound of someone exercising on a treadmill. The rhythm of it was metronomic. Then a voice said: ‘Venice is nothing but souvenir shops. You wonder how they make any money, with such a high ratio of shop to customer?’

  It was Myra.

  Instead of calling over the hedge, I went upstairs to look out of the bedroom window. Two people were down there, but I couldn’t get enough of an angle between the hedge and the wall to see what they were doing. ‘Mind you,’ Myra said, ‘I did hear of a blind man who, whenever he was abroad, went into souvenir shops to touch the goods. He would run his fingers over a Tower Bridge or an Eiffel Tower, whatever, to get some idea of the shapes of the city he was in.’ There was a pause. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose there are enough blind people to keep Venice above water.’

  Later, when I asked her, ‘How was work today?’ she answered, ‘Oh, the usual bloody grind.’ Then she added, in a voice not quite like her own, because sympathy was a difficult thing for Myra, a response drawn forth only with the aid of deep resources of patience and stamina:

  ‘And how do you feel?’

  I wasn’t sure. In one way at least, I said, I actually felt relieved. Once my mother had suffered this disaster I could embrace it as a possible fate of my own. In a sense I could even look forward to it, because prior to that I had only my father’s death as a template. For years I’d expected to die suddenly and be removed without warning from other people’s lives, the way he had been when I was thirteen. ‘I’m not sure you’ll understand this,’ I told Myra, ‘but now I can imagine something different for myself.’ I had something new to look forward to.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said. She said that if I needed to see someone, she could get me a recommendation. She said, ‘Look, do you want the rest of that?’

  We were at Le Vacherin in Acton Green. It was late. Our waitress had an inturned look. Outside, Acton Green Common lay in a moonlike trance all the way to the tube line. Apart from ours only a single table remained
occupied, by a young couple who had brought their very small, quiet baby with them. It didn’t look more than a day or two old, and they were obviously delighted by it. Every ten minutes they lifted it out of its carrycot as if they had just been given it, passed it to and fro across the table, then settled it back again. Myra had lost patience with this pantomime early on, but seemed undecided how to respond. Now she put down her spoon in the remains of my prune and Armagnac tart and said in a loud voice:

  ‘Did they order that? Only I can’t find it on the menu.’

  They stared at us in surprise. Didn’t we like their baby? No one disliked their baby.

  Myra shivered.

  ‘They hate me,’ she said. ‘I’ll see a cat when we leave here. There’ll be a cat out there now.’

  Myra hated cats. She claimed they were sly and untrustworthy; their love was cupboard love and without looking hard you could find something flat in their eyes. A dog’s eyes, on the other hand, had depth. A black cat crossing their path, some people think, brings luck. Myra wouldn’t walk down a street if any kind of cat had crossed it that morning. She said they smelled.

  ‘I don’t know how you can bear the touch of them,’ she said with a shudder.

  At a loss, I could only tell her the following story –

  ‘Things were chaotic and miserable during Adam and Eve’s retreat from Paradise. The children squalled endlessly. There hadn’t been time to pack. Adam, who regretted the whole episode, blamed Eve; Eve realised for the first time that Adam was a wimp. Jacob, the third son, was particularly upset. With the whole tribe cowed and disoriented, less by God than the weather outside, only the family cat Mau had the presence of mind to memorise the route. A few years later, driven by her love for Jacob, who had allergies and never came to terms with the world, the cat led him back. Impressed by the boy’s obsessiveness, the angel on the gate that day offered Jacob a piece of the maternal fruit. But as a reward for Mau’s loyalty, he franked the route permanently into the blank back pages of her DNA. From that time on, there has always been a cat who remembers the way back to the Garden of Eden.’