You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  When I claim some people are too easy to find, what do I mean?

  Poll tax gave rise to a generation which lived in other people’s houses. They formed strong personal ties yet remained evasive, incurious about one another. As a result, never fully sited, they suffered mild depressions and moved on. I’m not looking for them.

  A train ride with someone you met yesterday. The smell of diesel fuel in carriage air. You look sideways at her face, you’re not even sure you like her. The plain fact is she looks more grown up than you. Her house is cold and needs work. She has a kid. She says things like, ‘I’ve always got by on my wits.’ That’s exciting but eventually you interpret it as a judgement. Later you see that’s how she lives her life, as a judgement, as an ideological act. It’s too forceful. It’s too blunt. Worse, it doesn’t work. She’s just as compromised and vulnerable as you. Later still the pathos of that hits you, but by then she’s long gone and you are too.

  I’m not looking for her.

  Afternoon, Old Compton Street. Rain makes it like an older version of itself. I’m doing the bars with a photograph. ‘Can I just show you this? This is a sixteen year old boy who’s gone missing. You haven’t seen him round here have you? No? Can I just leave this with you?’ Meanwhile in some other street – Ghost Town, Croydon, UK – the boy’s parents have consulted a clairvoyant. She has a vision of him washed up in the waiting room at St Thomas’ Hospital, Waterloo. Easy enough to check. I find he called there using a false name, but ‘became frightened’ and left without treatment. Treatment for what? They can’t say. That’s a bit more interesting to me, especially the clairvoyant, but it’s still not quite what I mean.

  Facts are the easiest things to come by. From age fourteen upwards, girls run away more often than boys. Yet twice as many adult men go missing as adult women. Men aged twenty four to thirty are likelier to disappear than any other group. More people go missing from the South East than any other region in the UK. What did they leave? Well, they left home. Why did they go? They can’t tell you. People run away. They relocate, they go missing, as we’ve said. That’s a geographical statement as much as a social one. It’s what makes them easy to find.

  The challenge is in the ones who go missing in their own lives. There’s less to know about those people. They live inside us. They have very simple ideas. We rarely hear their voices before it’s too late.

  What does he want, this man from Barnes, whatever his name is? His intention is still unclear. Is he a traveller or only a tourist? Worse, is he a psychogeographer? To start with, he brings it all back. He comes home, seven every evening, just as if he’s been to work. He’s diligent. He keys his notes into the laptop; he downloads his pictures. It’s an act of capture. For now, at least, his is the narrative of a man who begins to write a book about the immediate area he lives in – a radius of a few ordinary London streets – with every oriel window and garden ornament, every spalled brick wall, described as a feature. Then one day, from a narrow corner in ‘Little Chelsea’, East Sheen, he hears the following dialogue:

  ‘Now she’s begun to claim it’s boring here.’

  ‘Well of course, it is.’

  He stands up close, but he can’t see in. He imagines a room smelling of death, with two old people talking their dreary talk beneath the crosses, pietas, and old photographs on the walls.

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I only know her as Elaine.’

  A long pause, and then:

  ‘We wanted that war. All of us wanted that war. World War Three was the great imaginative act of its day.’

  ‘Children are better in pairs.’

  After that there’s only a sound like someone doing the washing up. A cough. Later, at home, he realises he hasn’t written any of it down. The next morning he takes the camera but forgets the notebook. Soon he’s leaving them both behind. He feels relieved. A little guilty. He feels naked. Two years later his wife finds out he doesn’t work in communications any more. That’s when she calls me.

  I listen to the family’s ideas. It helps them. I appear receptive but that’s a pretence. All I need is the facts. Who’s missing. When it happened, or when the relatives first noticed it had happened. I don’t want their theories. They come to my office and sit uncomfortably looking at the desk and the dusty filing cabinet, wishing they had gone somewhere else.

  Whatever I say they always ask themselves:

  ‘Why did he do this?’

  I could tell them. From age forty he had the feeling of being spread very thin on the world, like a specialised coating. If people weren’t careful with him, he felt, if he wasn’t careful with himself, he’d crack or peel or flake away. Then one day he was trying to understand the instructions for some household appliance, and where it said, ‘How to set up the timer,’ he read instead: ‘How to let things slip.’ In the end, even the correct reading began to seem odd to him.

  ‘Timer?’ he thought.

  That would have been the way it was.

  For the sake of the family I ask all the usual questions. Did he seem to be getting thinner? Did he have – some evenings and in dim light – a kind of transparency, an abraded look which you could detect one minute but not the next? For the sake of the family I look through the stuff he left behind: it’s a collection of professional qualifications, Barbour jackets and Australian stable boots. It’s a shelf of music CDs, English light classical, 80s pop. I find his laptop: it’s a Sony. I find the travel notes and picture files, stored under Personal, passworded with the name of the family labrador, and it’s all much as you’d expect – that naive, eviscerating attempt they always make to express their inner life as a record of the outer. I find the garage he sold the Audi to: it was a TT, very nice condition. I get positive responses at the White Hart, the Bull, and the Sun – he was seen in all three, last Boat Race day. But what did those locations mean to him?

  Nothing, compared to the wall he puts his back against now, as, quaking with Thames fever, he rests after the long slog through the woods from the railway, past Marc Bolan’s memorial and on to the Roehampton Gate. He’s emaciated, stripped down. He’s so far ahead of me! What began as observation became an adventure then a trajectory of relapse, a going-native. The long slow slide into the heartland of his imagination.

  Eventually I’m on some windy hill, Richmond Park, early morning. I know he was here before me, quivering like an animal that’s got the scent of distance in its nose, turning his head slowly so he can discover everything with those new eyes of his. But that was two years ago, and even if he was here yesterday I won’t catch him. He’s got his second or third wind by now. He’s used to it. In his mind he’s pushing an old bicycle loaded with his things, first towards Wimbledon then down the endless heartbreaking sweep of the A3 to the sea. It’s his space now.

  I call the wife.

  I say, ‘He’s in your house but he’s not there anymore.’

  I say: ‘You knew that already.’

  I advise her: ‘If you find the husk, leave it where it is. They’re often in the garden somewhere; or the attic.’

  Some of them you track down. Others you don’t, and often that’s the best thing. Because what are you going to do? Corner them in the loading bay behind a supermarket in Dalston? Chase them down a muddy path in Stoke Newington cemetery, calling out in a language they can’t remember? Back them up against themselves until there’s nowhere left to run and whatever dissatisfaction drove them inwards, whatever fire they’re full of, bursts out of the neck and sleeves of their crap old raincoat and they go up in front of you like a bundle of dry sticks? I’ve seen that happen, believe me it’s not worth it.

  Another afternoon, another bar. I’m always on the lookout for the boy who called in at St Thomas’ Hospital then, unable to control his anxieties, left before he could be treated.

  ‘You can’t keep them away,’ the barman says. ‘They’re so bloody anxious to start their lives.’ He treats the photo to his oblique, dismissing glance.
‘They think of this as life,’ it makes him say. He laughs. ‘You should be here in the evenings.’ Whatever he’s seeing is so ordinary it’s beyond his power to describe. ‘Life!’ he repeats.

  ‘You run the place,’ I remind him.

  ‘Too true,’ he admits, turning back to the spirit optic.

  A missing person inside your own life. OK, I’m not sure what I mean by that. But the good detective shares some of those qualities of absence. Qualities of self-disenfranchisement, for instance. He’s a torn place in the web which would otherwise detain him – home, family, profession, culture. I went missing from my own life years ago, but you don’t need me to tell you that.

  And what if, in the end, I’m wrong? What if Missing of Barnes only ran away, the way the majority of them do?

  Well then I’ll know.

  One day I’ll stand in an upper room in Harringay, looking out. The rain will be falling almost invisibly on the shiny black branches of the trees, dripping off again in big soft quick drops. At the bottom of the garden next door I’ll see a man working in a shed. It’ll be him.

  I see him like this. He’s wearing a blue plaid shirt and safety glasses. His dog sniffs round his feet. Every so often he stops what he’s doing and comes to the door of the shed and looks out into his garden, or across it towards his house. The dog stands by his leg, its head just touching his knee. It’s an old dog with a grey muzzle. After a moment they go back into the shed. He moves the wood from one place to another inside. He puts it up on the workbench. He takes it off again. Everything happens very quietly and comfortingly under the yellow light above the bench, and the afternoon slowly gets dark around him. A growing pile of offcuts appears by the shed door and, absorbing the rain, turns from white to sandy brown.

  Babies From Sand

  (1) THE WATER HOUSE

  A permanent exhibition of water paintings at the Holst House Gallery features Crossing the River Styx by Joachim Patinir, as well as some small canvases by John Atkinson Grimshaw, including In Peril, in the foreground of which several figures are seen running towards the sea at night across a vast, sloping, otherwise deserted quay. ‘Though he is not known for his seascapes,’ the catalogue remarks, ‘when we re-examine Grimshaw, everything he painted seems to be located near water – wet estuarine streets in Leeds; Hampstead depicted on bluffs above a shallow sea at night.’ Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa can be found in a side-room, along with a Philip James de Loutherbourg, The Flood – sometimes known as The Deluge – the composition of which eerily resembles that of Sea Idyll by Arnold Böcklin (1887). Loutherbourg died in Chiswick in 1812, having all his life ‘pursued interests in alchemy, faith healing and the supernatural’. He was a follower of Cagliostro.

  (2) THE DOGS OF ST MARGARETS

  The twenty sixth of June: Cultural Day of Bad Luck all along the river as far as Windsor, but especially in the small enclave of St Margarets. A hot breeze moves the baskets of trailing flowers on the lamp posts. Faded looking men in red T shirts, a little bald, a little grey at the edges, gather outside Edward Fail Solicitors, across the road from the bowel cancer charity. Later they will go down to the water, where every high tide briefly strands three lumps of wood known as ‘the Three Marys’. These – large, black, asymmetrical, sodden as much with age as with water – are celebrated as the estuary’s gift to the land, in a traditional call-and-response. (The dogs of the enclave howl: not just today, but on the anniversary of every one of the borough’s many more private, more primitive tragedies. Each year when the light is right these animals remember events of five, ten, fifty years before. They remember not to the day but to the season. Things spread out. Whole months fill up with overlapping disasters.) Among the amusements on offer to visitors are: dream incubation, ritual bathing, and divination by the Lots of Mary.

  (3) THE REVEREND HARRY PRICE

  During the late 1990s, especially at high tide, the familiar figure of Harry Price could often be seen ascending the water stair at Hammersmith Bridge, dressed in dirty cotton chinos and an old-fashioned Belstaff waxed jacket, and carrying on a plastic strap round his neck the twenty year old Polaroid Sun 600 camera with which he recorded much of his data. Nightly excursions to the astral plane had emaciated the ageing psychogeographer, and his incomplete masterpiece The Potassium Channel – written in two hundred black Moleskine notebooks as he pursued, yard by yard, dérive by dérive, his minute investigations of the Brent River and its surrounds, from the boatyards at its confluence with the Thames, past Wharncliffe Viaduct and the zoo, towards the A40 at Greenford – lay abandoned. ‘If the disaster can be said to be unevenly distributed,’ he wrote to his wife, Fanny, by then a permanent resident in the old Barnes Fever Hospital, ‘Brentford is one of the places it has been distributed to. Boatyards and their horrible refuse. High water one minute, the next only mud. Sudden drops bulwarked with rusty metal.’

  (4) TRANSFORMATION REACH

  ‘Oliver’s Island’, open six to seven most evenings, May to October: a small wood, frequented by foxes and wildfowl driven upriver by population pressures in the Barnes wetlands, has grown up on a late-Victorian dreadnought abandoned in midstream. Its iron plates have turned to stone. All down this stretch of the Thames, islands are becoming boats, boats are on their way to being islands. The boats fix themselves in the mud. They settle in the mud. Over the years they become mud. In the final stages of transformation, they support a thicket of buddleia often too dense to navigate. Between the bushes the old decks can sometimes be glimpsed, covered in rabbit-cropped turf and little winding trodden-down paths. Suddenly a passer-by makes out a new shape – planks! The curve of the bow!

  (5) THE HUMAN FOOTPRINT

  ‘Squalls of rain pursue each other southeast, the latest accompanied by a lurch of pressure and humidity that encourages waves of scent from the narcissi in the vase on my desk. Between squalls, light strikes half-opened petals, which, though individually white, wrap themselves round a smoky yellow tinge. It races in like the epilleptic aura, at a surprising angle from the broken edge of the cloud cover, leaving the air quick and transparent against a dark sky. Ideally one should experience this kind of light on the riverbank near Putney, four o’clock in the afternoon; and perhaps remember later that the person who walked towards you was gone too quickly when you turned to get another look. Look for what rises to the surface in light like that! Not so much ghosts as visitors from the future, the past, or somewhere that is, simply, never quite there. People from under the water, who lose something of themselves on the shore. Babies from sand, at a loss beneath water. To us they seem robust, but their hold on reality is tenuous.’ – from The Seizure Journals of Fanny Price.

  (6) THE POTASSIUM CHANNEL

  Notes for the incomplete final chapters of this work present as a sheaf of media reports and scientific abstracts. A seminar on ancient human migration (tracked via mitochondrial haplogroup); the Gnostic foundations of 20th Century Russian science; computer software designed to identify unknown locations by matching them with ‘a library of sixty million landscape images’: Harry Price’s obsessions run together, hardening into unconformable layers of time and data. From a study of studies, robust evidence surfaces of a preCambrian micro continent along the Laccadive-Chagos Ridge; paragraphs from Wikipedia shed new light on metabolic byproducts found deep in the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. Body parts wash up on a beach east of Southampton; while (‘almost simultaneously’ Price notes) in the Borough of Brent, a man of about forty, naked and with an inexplicable greenish tinge, is observed by passers-by to drag himself out of the Grand Union Canal near Gallows Bridge then run straight into heavy traffic on the nearby dual carriageway of the M4, where he is struck and killed by a black BMW Alpina with Swiss registration plates before being dragged for some distance underneath an unmarked Volvo FMX D13 truck painted Mediterranean blue.

  (7) ARNOLD BÖCKLIN, ‘SEA IDYLL’

  Perhaps the best but least-known picture in the Holst House collection. The Swiss symbol
ist, known for his dream paintings of the English Cemetery in Florence, produced this item quite late in his career. In it, three figures – a woman and two children – are depicted sprawled on a lumpen, almost-submerged rock barely large enough to accomodate them; while a fourth – perhaps a man, perhaps some more powerfully ambivalent creature of myth – emerges waist-high from the water nearby. Their tenure on the rock seems anxious and marginal, their poses are awkward and strained. The woman, in yearning towards the man, is carelessly allowing her baby to fall into the sea; while the dwarfish older child, its enlarged buttocks stuck up into the air as a result of some deformity of the spine, appears to be trying to mount her from behind. The painting is too fraught to be any kind of idyll. A sense of confusion – of failed allegory – infuses the drab palette, the deformed anatomy.

  (8) THE SEIZURE GENE

  Somewhere along the Brent between the Thames confluence and the Fox Inn, for reasons unexamined or perhaps even unadmitted, the Prices became, in the days leading up to Fanny’s illness, obsessed with the meaning of human gene Kv12.2. This gene originated ‘more than 500 million years ago in the genomes of sea-dwelling species’ and has a decisive role in spatial memory. A final note for The Potassium Channel, written some time in the early 2000s: ‘Yesterday I watched a heron eating a live eel in bright sunshine on the South Pier mudbank. Today it was foggy: the mud was almost awash: the heron still waited there. I fear the hidden channels of the confluence and hate low tide as much as I hate the partly-foundered lighters.’ And later: ‘Kv12.2 is a very old gene. Even the fish have it.’