You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  ‘I heard it was their dog,’ Myra said.

  Talk to someone in a coma and you are talking to yourself. When it’s your mother there are further complications. What do you say to her? I really liked your meringues? That time when I was eleven and threw up on the tea table from eating Heinz spaghetti on toast – Do you remember? – sorry about that! The things you expect to say, you don’t. The things you want to say don’t seem quite right. Eventually I began to talk about myself. I gave her progress reports dating back as much as twenty years, from the parts of my life she had missed. I listed my divorces. ‘It took a long time to learn to like myself,’ I concluded, ‘but I’m doing quite well now. I don’t think I’m as angry as I was, not as angry or as scared.’ It brought her up to date and it was therapeutic for us both. I used all my charm on her, son to mother, and she used all hers on me, mother to son, staring coyly up at the ceiling of Bramley Ward, bursting with the secret no one wants to hear.

  My sister left a message for me with the nursing staff.

  ‘She does seem rather anxious to get in touch with you,’ they said, handing over the damp, heavily folded piece of coloured paper on which was written, ‘You’ll have to talk to me in the end.’

  I stared at these words, then out of the window of the 1.50pm to Euston. Now, I don’t know. Or do I? What I would say now is that until the thing with Myra happened I didn’t feel enough terror. I would say that like everyone else I ate too much; looked forward too often to the evening bottle of Chilean red. That’s what I would say now. But that afternoon all I could do was smooth out the paper until you could barely tell it had been folded, and leave it behind me on the table when the train got in.

  Back in Chiswick, someone was in Myra’s house. The truth of this visited me not experientially – as a smell or faint sound, a sense of occupation, of usedness, in the air – but as a kind of prior knowledge validated by my sister’s note, the moment I opened the door. I stood just inside the hall, the way we all have done at one time or another, and called:

  ‘Hello? Myra?’

  They were in the bedroom. She was on her hands and knees and he had got up on her from behind in the gloom. They were panting harshly, and their faces had a stunned look as if something was happening they didn’t understand. He had a thick ginger beard. She seemed to have one, too, but I suppose that must have been an effect of the shadows in the room, the few thin slats of river light angling in through the blind. As I watched, he began to turn round so that he faced in the opposite direction to her. It was a slow, awkard procedure if he was to keep his cock inside her. But he did it eventually, and they remained like that, motionless and uncomfortable-looking, until I closed the door on them. They hadn’t seemed to notice me.

  That had to be the end of it.

  ‘I hate dogs,’ was my parting shot to Myra. ‘I hate their shit. The smell of it makes you heave.’

  When I’m in Chelsea I still look for her, listen for her voice, watch for the swing of the head slowed by its counterweight of vanished meanings. I see her there sometimes with other men. They’re over-attentive, but then this is the Arts Club. Myra’s sitting at the same table she sat at with me, staring at the Cupid fountain. ‘You’ve got to understand,’ she’s telling someone, ‘that other people are as confused as you. Just not so self-involved.’

  My mother clung on for a while then died. The funeral went well, in that none of the relatives fought; although one or two refused to attend. Perhaps to help make up the numbers, my sister brought her dog, an English bull terrier with a big white blind-looking face. Two months later she was telephoning me every other day to ask for money; once a week she would write a letter summing up the injustices done to her by the remains of the family.

  She lived with the dog, on one of those estates financed by the optimism of the late 1940s, a hundred and ten company houses in light-coloured brick set down around bleak flat squares and triangles of grass. She made some sort of life for herself there. Eventually I drove up to visit her, and we leafed through the family albums. There was my father, Guy Fawkes night 1968, thirty three years old but laughing as fatuously as a boy, in a boy’s red-and-white football scarf, with the bonfire lighting up one lens of his spectacles. I never liked him. He died not long after the photo was taken, and that only made things worse. It reduced the chances of settling anything between us.

  After his death my mother couldn’t stand mess. She decorated often, bought new furniture and carpets; cleaned and cleaned. I can’t stand mess, she would tell us, meaning, I can’t stand the mess you’ve made of my life. I don’t think there was any doubt she loved him, and adored him, and depended on him. She grew roses in the garden he had measured out so exactly with pegs and twine. She grew them in the way he would have approved, pruned to stumps in severely rectangular beds, surrounded by grey, cloddy, heavily weeded earth. Even at that age I could feel her looking around in a numb way and wondering how she would make sense of it all, which I don’t think she ever did. It all fell apart when he went. Things were too much for her. That was the feeling I had from my mother around then, that her hold on things was marginal, that we were a difficulty hard to contend with: things were difficult enough without the demands we might make.

  ‘Our mother always preferred you,’ my sister said. ‘We need to talk that out. We need to talk about it.’

  I asked if I could go to the toilet.

  She looked puzzled. ‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘Of course you can go to the toilet.’

  It was another greenhouse Sunday, high humidity and temperatures in the 30s. Every so often she coaxed the bull terrier on to the steps outside the kitchen door and poured a two-litre bottle of Evian water over its head. For the next few minutes it sat in an evaporating puddle with its tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth and an expression of bliss on its face, while its pinkish eyes remained as hard as marbles. The back yard was full of dogshit, and stacked up on the hard earth was all my mother’s furniture – two double mattresses, a thirty-year-old Creda gas cooker, armchairs and sofas the vinyl of which had already faded and split in the sun and rain. My sister was in dispute with the council over this. She was in dispute with her neighbours over it. ‘But be honest with me,’ she said, ‘where else could I put it all? I ask them that and they can’t answer.’ She was in dispute with almost everyone about almost everything, and in addition genuinely disabled by asthma. The house smelled of the dog, which rarely took its eyes off me.

  Driving back down the M1 an hour or two later, I spotted a couple and a child in a splash of sunlight, waiting by their car for the breakdown service. The woman and her little boy smiled at every passing vehicle; the man only seemed embarrassed. You often see families like this, poised on the hard shoulder of the motorway where woods and wildflowers spill down a shallow bank to the edge of the tarmac. Their afternoon is already ruined. The AA has been called, the outing postponed. It’s a cracked radiator, it’s electrical, it’s something none of us, any more, can fix. There’s nothing left to do but wait. At first they stand awkwardly in their careful high street clothes, unable to find a body language for the situation. Then, after five minutes, something happens. They move away from the vehicle, shade their eyes, peer at one another or back at the motorway, torsos moving one way, legs another, in the long grass. From the nearby woods a bird sings, there is a flicker of movement. The child tilts its head alertly to listen; the parents look at the child. Suddenly they hang between choices, up to their calves in moon daisies and cornflowers, surrounded by a froth of elder blossom and pink dog roses. Possibilities stretch away in the form of field and hedge. Scents, sounds. For a moment it’s likely they will abandon the car and disappear, having mistaken this strip of woods between the motorway and the low-lying pasture for something they can run off into for good.

  Jackdaw Bingo

  Aliens arrive on Earth after a long journey, only to find that humanity has died out. The aliens have never used writing or paper, so they don’t understan
d books; they’ve never stored data digitally, so they don’t understand computers. They recycle the books for fuel and the internet servers for chemicals. But their own typical data storage system looks and acts very much like a jackdaw, so they value the jackdaws and put them in beautiful jackdaw-friendly environments and spend the next five hundred years reverently trying to decode the messages of hope they’re sure humanity left encoded in jackdaw behaviour. Jackdaws can’t believe their luck.

  Earth Advengers

  As soon as we get the alien starship I will be known as Ms Jet, or Lady Jet. You will be Lemmy. Other members of the crew will be Spike, Smork, Cookie & The Crow. & we will have jokes, for instance in any bad situations – like we are running out of ammunition & surrounded by enemies – I will always say, ‘Cookie, this is the worst porridge you ever cooked up!’ & we will all have a favourite weapon. Spike’s favourite weapon will be his rusty Earth .40 snub. & I will say, ‘Seriously Spike you expect to hit anything with that, anyone is always better with the four inch barrel & the adjustable backsight.’ & Spike will always say, ‘Captain Jet, a four inch barrel is for vermin control.’ & I will say, ‘That’s what we do here in space, Spike.’ Then I will give him a significant look & add: ‘We control vermin.’ & everyone will laugh and Spike will admit ruefully, ‘Guess you got me there, Ms Lady!’ Spike makes his own bullets & has Outworld hair. Cookie is always ‘Fat Cookie’. My special weapon will be a fifteen petawatt proton gun which only I can lift, aimed telepathically through advanced radio telescopes distributed in the Cat’s Eye Nebula & accurate to less than one Planck length. Our main enemies will be: Bizarro Nazis & The Junk. Our signature will be: Earth Advengers!

  Keep Smiling

  (with Great Minutes)

  Volsie came out of me in a room at the Les Halles Citadines, from somewhere near the top of my left leg. It was hot and soft, a lot of discrete masses like grapes, or the inflationary universes of the new cosmology. I got hold of it in my hands and struggled with it and pushed most of it back in. I had just that moment arrived – it was my first time in Paris – so I let the rest sink into the carpet and went straight out. I didn’t think much of it. That was my mistake.

  Pere Lachaise cemetery, the Metro gate: a lunatic, bearded and dreadlocked, spun round and round at the top of the steps, raising his arms to bless us as we entered, while he recited an endless list of the fallen.

  ‘All those who failed to find the ashes of Max Ernst,’ I heard him say, ‘in the columbarium in the year 2006. All those who failed to kiss the tomb of Oscar Wilde. All those who wandered about looking for Colette but found only Jim Morrison. All those who went to the wrong place.’ It was hardcore rant, rich with the sheer physical sweat of a world being held together for the benefit of the tourists, with their unknowing souls and dormant sense of the relations between the spiritual and the spatial. ‘All those,’ he concluded, as if only now testing the pivot of his argument, ‘who gave up, but later found a monument to the death commando at Buna Monowitz work camp, and couldn’t for once think of anything cheap to say (being instead silent).

  ‘This song,’ he told me, ‘is respectfully dedicated to all those who refused to sign the truce because it was written in the wrong colour ink.’

  Too late I understood that he was Volsie too, and so we wandered together in and out of the little unkempt tollbooths and wrought iron urinals of the many dead, up and down between the cobbled levels, dirt paths and exposed tree roots in the sunshine.

  ‘What are you on?’ I said.

  ‘You’ll find out,’  Volsie said. ‘See that man there?’

  I said I saw him.

  ‘Stepped on a grave this morning. Dead within the year.’

  He looked ordinary enough to me. He looked like an American.

  ‘Which grave was it?’ I said. ‘Out of interest.’

  ‘Someone called Darjou, 1757 to 1843. But see the expression on his face? Dead before August.’

  I was puzzled by that: by what it meant for me. I went back to my Citadines apartment with its chic, nervous little kitchen and the special bed from under which a second bed slides suddenly and bangs your ankle. I listened all evening to the quiet yelps of laughter from down in the central courtyard.

  You ask how it is that Volsie manifests as an episode of psychic piles one moment, a madman in a famous cemetery the next. You ask what its voice sounds like. Volsie will come out of you soon. It might be in the form of the oyster, it might be in the form of the pearl; it might come out of your mouth in the form of the Teratoma of Entitlement, a ball of dry Victorian-looking gristle, horsehair and compacted papier-mâché complete with a single eye from a species on the extinction list. You won’t ask questions after that. Answers will be the last thing you want. If you didn’t have bad teeth before, you will now. That cough of yours will soon appear to be the worst thing that ever happened to you; the glaze of the eye – the passive eye of a dead seal, the button eye from a French teddy bear bought years ago by some old friend of the family – will encode all the information you need.

  Next morning proceeded with fine rain. Paris rain, not enough to stop anyone going out but enough to soak them piss wet through in half an hour. I walked around. I began by crossing the river a few times, going the same way each time, over by the Pont des Arts and back across the Ile de la Cite, looking down at the tents of the homeless pitched along the bank. I took to the Seine on a sightseeing boat and watched the rain run down the curved viewing glass. I saw Concorde Square, I saw the Alexander III bridge, ‘the most luxurious bridge in Paris’; I saw the Eiffel Tower lurch abruptly out of its own fog. Arches of blue and yellow plastic flowers ran the whole length of the boat inside; also lines of fake lamp posts with dim lights behind bright orange glass. Right down the middle of the boat. What do you say about something like that? I didn’t get it. I debarked cold, and had to have a calvados in a café near the Musee D’Orsay.

  Volsie came out of me while I was there.

  This time it came out from a bit higher, somewhere around the upper bowel, and slithered into my lap.

  ‘I know how you feel,’ it said. ‘You feel like an outsider, as if you ought to be living in a tent near the Pont-neuf.’ I felt soaked. I felt odd to be sitting with all those purple grapelike universes inflated over my thighs as warm as a pet dog. ‘Not one of your contemporary lifestyle-choice outsiders either,’ Volsie said. ‘Just some old bloke who can’t fit in. Maybe you’re allergic to the pace of the modern world. I know I am.’ There are those who believe Volsie is synonymous with death. Others associate him with any journey by train. He was with me in Paris and he was with me on the return journey, where he gurned up and down the aisles of the Eurostar in the guise of a food steward.

  ‘All those,’ he said, ‘who ate Ghent ham and Westland salad, all those who ate ‘macaroon au chocolat noir.’ You never look me in the eye, but I piss in your mouth while you sleep and you taste it when you wake. Oh, don’t thank me, it’s what I do.’ He pushed his face into the face of the woman sitting next to me across the aisle. She was reading the Sunday Times. ‘Watch this,’ he said to me over his shoulder, before slipping his face right through the paper and into hers: ‘They fall asleep like children, clutching their smartphones.’ The Sunday Times, he said, was a red-top for people who thought they were special. He said, as if it was connected, ‘All that counts is the individual moment of suffering.’ He said that everything else was ideology, hypocrisy, lies, claim and counter-claim, bullying and self-serving and pretending to be the victim: everything else was the financial news. ‘The only time people are human any more,’ he said, ‘is in the moment of having their humanity taken away from them by other human beings. Being killed revalues your life, it’s a way of choosing dignity. Another thing,’ he said, ‘I never saw a nuclear explosion I didn’t enjoy. You think that’s all over? Think again.’

  He showed me his own phone, black, rubber-coated, the size of a fox. By then we were in Waterloo.

  ‘This is
my stop,’ I said.

  Volsie walked me as far as the Dali statue. Then he got smaller and smaller across the polished concourse floor and went spinning into the crowd – like a dropped coin of small denomination no one bothers to pick up any more – towards the Embankment. He was going to the Tate Modern. After that he was off to Clapham to undermine a reading group. I thought I’d got rid of him but I hadn’t. The next time I saw him it was three weeks later, in the Pret A Manger on Cranbourne Street W1. He was a thin man about sixty years old with cheeks hollowed by a fanaticism like the desert wind etc., etc., and he was eating the All Day Breakfast with Free Range Mayo. He watched the women going to and fro along the pavement outside, up and down the kerbs, waiting at the junctions. It was Thursday lunchtime. After a while he put the All Day Breakfast down with an impatient sigh.

  ‘You think you see the real world,’ he said to me.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘You heard. You think you see the real world. But you don’t.’

  I had a bite of my sandwich. He watched me with satisfaction, as if he was eating it himself. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good!’

  ‘There’s a world, then?’ I said. ‘Somewhere round here?’

  ‘A world, but not the real one. The real one would –’ he shrugged. ‘I don’t say what the real one would do to you,’ he concluded.

  ‘How could I see the real one?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s easier than you’d think,’ he said. His watery blue eyes measured me. ‘In your case,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t recommend it.’