You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  This was the kind of space Alexa’s parents had bequeathed her. She tried to use it. She tried to rest there while everything else came and went. It was where she put up between episodes. It was where she tried to let go her baggage – which was always so heavy she couldn’t bring it back from the airport on her own, yet without it to anchor her she’d float away.

  Her house had a view over a park, with trees and shrubberies around some expanses of grass. After sex we would kneel on Alexa’s bed together, slide the window up, and look out over the empty street into the trees. We were looking out one night when she saw a fox cross the street. It was April. The air was still warm, smelling faintly of the river, the day’s traffic. Alexa clutched my arm urgently. ‘Look!’ The fox crossed the street with a quick, gliding gait. It was a sandy colour, greyed out by the streetlight. ‘Look! Over there!’

  I saw it too. I saw it quite plainly. But for some reason I said:

  ‘Where? I don’t see anything.’

  ‘Crossing the road. Look, there!’

  The fox paused on the opposite pavement, looked up at us for a second or two, then vanished into the park.

  ‘Gone now,’ Alexa said regretfully. She pulled the curtain across and got back under the covers. Her hands were hot. She smelled of cotton and soap. Her face took on that look of a bog-burial, serene, inturned, mummified by its own confusion. She was a survivor of human sacrifice. I sat on the edge of the bed.

  ‘It was probably a cat,’ I said. ‘It was probably one of your mother’s cats.’

  Alexa laughed. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was definitely the old fox.’

  I had a vision of her mother, tall and thin, out in the rainy garden every night after her husband left, burying yet another family pet while the traffic grumbled past two streets away on Holland Park Road. In her letters to America, it emerged later, she had accused the husband of not leaving at all. She had seen him, she claimed, or someone very like him, on the Central Line tube, every morning for weeks. ‘You refused to speak to me, John, but I knew it was you.’ Later still, she thought he had died and that she had experienced the moment of his death, suffering what she described as ‘the most overwhelming feeling of grief’ in Brompton Oratory on a wet morning in March. ‘It took me so completely by surprise. I thought straight away, Something must have happened to him.’ Alexa began to tell me the story, but I interrupted her. I had heard it before.

  ‘You know I’m involved with someone else,’ I said.

  It would soon be too late to remind her of this. She wasn’t concentrating well. She was back from Valencia or Venice or wherever, exhausted by the flight. Her luggage lay in the corner, still waiting to be unpacked. Soon we would no longer be sharing an indiscretion, we would be making a mistake. It would all have started up again.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Honestly, I do know.’

  Next morning a helicopter took off from the park and hovered there indecisively in the strong sunshine. Alexa watched it with the matter-of-fact curiosity of a toddler. Later, in a café on Old Brompton Road, she touched my arm and said, ‘When are you going away for Easter?’ Meaning, ‘When will I see you again?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said.

  ‘Sometimes I wish I could just curl up inside you and be safe.’

  What I liked most about Alexa was her determination. Her work was killing her. She was never eating enough. She was always in crisis: the pure fiction of the last thirty years, authored by circumstance; by expectation and cumulative error; by herself. You can’t not respond to determination like that, so I said:

  ‘Sometimes I wish you could too.’

  Awake Early

  Daybreak at the ship hospital, dawn along the Dock of Dreams. May’s my favourite month. It’s a hairline fracture of the heart. It’s a smear of flight across the back of an eye. I see your shadow on your wall, your small pile of objects. Those are my objects too. I’m alive to all of that. Meanwhile you whisper, ‘I feel really different to myself this morning.’ It’s all right. You can get up now, they’ll never hear us. There’s a dry wind in the corners, smelling of salt and onions. But one day we’ll feel warm again.

  Explaining the Undiscovered Continent

  All things metal tapping together in the wind. Bleached fishbones one thousand miles from the sea. Sheds where you can get directions and diving apparatus. The inevitable airstream trailer. The inevitable rusty boiler. The inevitable graffito of a coelacanth. The highline of the last tide strewn with yellowish swim bladders of unknown animals like condoms inflated then varnished into fragility. Kilometer upon kilometer of unravelled polypropylene rope. Tin signs. Tied knots. A sense of petrol. Then the cliffs! with their abandoned funicular slicing up through maroon sandstone ‘to the plateau above’. Windows of static ice cream parlours. Buildings filled to the fourth storey with the grey flock from old padded bags. ‘This is where we’ll dive.’ As far as anyone can tell, they lived in threes or fives, odd numbers anyway. Each household kept a small allosaur on a bit of coloured string. We have no idea who they were or when they were here or what they wanted out of life. That’s the attraction. (And afterwards to sit in the boat, tired, happy, washing a small blue item in the most gentle solvent: no one will ever know what it is.)

  Self-Storage

  I put most of my things into storage when I returned to London. They’ve been there ever since, in a building at the end of a cul-de-sac somewhere in Hackney where, at that time, I had friends who could find the cheapest way of doing anything. I signed for one of the smaller units, and it’s true that much of what went in there was junk. Kitchen equipment; some furniture, including the futon I had slept on for nine years, so impregnated with sweat it seemed much older; two ethnic rugs and a wicker table.

  I could have left it all behind. I brought it home out of what I now understand to have been contradictory impulses. The smaller items were packed into cardboard boxes unwrapped and undusted, as if I didn’t want to acknowledge them; as if their fragility might solve some problem for me. Personal electronics. Ornaments, including a china elephant. A thin gold wristwatch which had stopped working long before I set out in 1986. Why did I take it over there, let alone bring it back? There were a lot of books. There were a lot of cardboard files full of contracts, stuffed in among which I found three short, unpublished accounts of my stay.

  Instead of boxing these, I kept them back to read on the flight home. Even now, after a decade back in London, they appear to me to have been written by someone else. They don’t seem to belong to me, or to my present way of looking at things, or to any way of looking at things I might once have had. They contradict one another. All three have been generated on a typewriter rather than by computer. I don’t recognise the typeface; and the pages, though roughly foolscap, are of uneven length, single-spaced, hastily written-over in red ink, cut up, pasted back together with a kind of patient hysteria.

  ‘I lived the whole of that year,’ the first begins, ‘in a long house with a single corridor running past every room –’

  While the corridor had no windows, the rooms looked out on to a harbour lively with heat and warships. Some rooms were dilapidated, with holes in the floors, collapsed ceilings, home to colonies of lizards and palm squirrels. Others were occupied by people like me who had never stayed in one place or situation long enough to learn to look after themselves. Yet others were really good rooms, cool, intact, full of contemporary sound equipment, interesting steamed plywood furniture and themes from Western lifestyle magazines. Tired of my original quarters, I was looking for somewhere quiet and without distractions. I had work that needed to be done: even more, perhaps, it needed to be organised.

  It was impossible to calculate how many rooms there were in the long house. This information was known only to the figures of authority who often squatted in a line along one side of the corridor eating fish curry with rice. I soon found an unoccupied room, characterised by a large table full of neglected plants in pots and some veinous diagrams at d
ifferent heights on the walls. Someone had built a shelter out of flattened cardboard boxes in one corner. The floor was littered with dirty flex, yellow cardboard boxes of nails, bags of chemicals that had burst in the heat, and the plastic toys you buy for hamsters. There was some sense that this was the detritus of not one but several previous attempts to inhabit the room.

  I had to pick up that mess before I could start. But this is how puzzling the whole experience became: as I got rid of things, new things would appear. Someone’s laundry, rammed into three or four binbags. Personal objects, such as: a broken Breitling chronometer, a framed photograph of the breakfast room at the Colonial Hotel. Confectionary. I would pack this stuff into other binbags and throw them into the corridor, then go back along the corridor for some things of my own. Each time I returned, there was more stuff. It was always different.

  At lunchtime I hadn’t done any work. I hadn’t even taken my Mac out of its bag, that’s how bad things were. I ate lunch with an old friend, who was anxious to be certain nothing of hers was among the belongings I had moved out of my original room. She was leaving later that day by air.

  ‘These people,’ she said, ‘don’t want help. They’re cocking a snook at everything we think worthwhile.’

  ‘“Cocking a snook”,’ I repeated. ‘You don’t often hear that.’

  ‘It was what my father used to to say.’

  We smiled at one another.

  Then she took my wrist in one of her hands in a way she had and said, ‘I want to be sure you’ll be all right.’

  I would be fine I said, I would be all right. But when I got back from lunch I surprised another man in the room. He was a local, younger than me, a bit scruffy, a bit ordinary. He wore cheap, ordinary clothes and even his stubble was worn-looking, as if he worked hard at some ordinary job. He had a radio playing the local music. He was stuffing my things into carrier bags and stacking them in the corridor. He thought the room was his.

  ‘It has always been mine,’ he said. ‘It was always my room from when I came here.’

  At first, I felt aggrieved. My work needed to be done. It needed, more than anything else, organising. Yet I was quickly convinced by the sincerity of this man’s belief that it had been his room before I tried to occupy it. It had never been ‘spare’, or mine to organise. I went round picking up my remaining things, while he sat on the windowsill and watched me with a calm expression. Behind him the warships flickered in the heat haze in the harbour.

  ‘If you had nowhere else to go,’ he said, ‘you could use this room. But you would have to share it with me.’

  ‘No, no,’ I said.

  I was anxious to explain. I could easily go somewhere else, I was just looking for somewhere quiet to work. I was a writer. I was writing about the big changes that were going to happen here.

  ‘They are bigger changes than you think,’ he said.

  I left him there, his head turned so that he could look out of the window while the radio filled the air with music, and went back down the long corridor, peeping into all the really good rooms, full of expensive old furniture or looking like the lobbies of comfortable hotels, thinking that I would never have a room like that, and rather dreading going back to the quarters I had come from, which would be unwelcoming, disordered, full of flies.

  But when I got there I found that the figures of authority had inspected it while I was away. It was now the gateway to a rolling endless landscape of tall grass, under a lighting effect from the cover of a commercial fantasy novel. In the foreground, lying on the grass in front of a bench, was something which looked partly like a woman and partly like an oriental cat a kind of ivory white colour, which though it first seemed immobile, was slowly writhing and moving, struggling not to become one thing or the other but to remain both things at the same time. Something else was happening, too, maybe some people grouped in the foreground, I can’t remember. I was struck by the potential of this landscape, rolling away under its alien light. I heard a voice say, ‘You need never leave here.’ A beautiful tranquility came over me, along with a sense of my own possibilities.

  After a moment or two, the young man whose room I had tried to occupy came up behind me. He touched my shoulder.

  ‘This room also belongs to me,’ he said.

  What surprises me most about this account is how much has been left out – the print media headlines, the troop movements, the international paralysis, the corporate betrayals. There is no question of me being as naive as I have presented myself here. Everything was a public psychodrama. Everyone knew full well they were behaving badly, whichever side they claimed to be on. There was nothing real left, nothing to be observed or reported-on except in terms of its reportedness. Any sense of what was actually happening had slipped away the previous winter; and the political windows were closing one by one, not just on the more exotic possibilities, but on any possibility at all.

  Once I had decided to fly back to Europe, I knew I would have to see S again to say goodbye. We arranged to meet in the arts quarter, where the river swung inland and we could stroll between the playfully rusty sculptures, stainless-steel galleries and postmodern restaurants which had replaced the original shipyard furniture. It was a warm evening, with a slanting light the colour of egg yolk. The quays were crowded with people arguing pleasurably about where they would go to eat or have sex; I felt the same sense of pleasure at being with S.

  ‘But this evening I hate you,’ he said, when I told him.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because by being with you I lose the certainty of who I am; then, when you leave, I lose it further.’

  Before S could explain what he meant, a young local man rushed past us and threw himself into the river, windmilling his arms and calling out something like, ‘This is the way to do it!’ The water cleared quickly where he had broken the surface, and he could be seen perhaps twenty feet below, not far out from the bank, trying to hold himself down in a foetal position, until several of his friends jumped in after him and pulled him out. They went away shouting and laughing, shaking themselves and wringing out their clothes.

  ‘I think so many things about you,’ S said.

  Later I took him back to the long house, found my room, and encouraged him to have sex.

  Afterwards I dreamed about the boy who had jumped into the water. In the dream I jumped in after him and found him floating upright just above the bottom, anchored in an envelope of air. He couldn’t live and he couldn’t die. I could hear him urging me to help, but when I tried to speak, a strong current pulled me away from the bank and the clear, shallow water, and into the cold, muddy, turbulent currents on the other side of the river. I soon realised that I was being carried away, among large boats and ships, towards something like a narrow, high-sided weir, on the other side of which, I knew, was a steep drop. In terror and confusion, I was swept away and died.

  ‘You see!’ I shouted at S, who was still on the bank. ‘I went in there, and I’m dead! I’m dead!’

  As I woke I was still dead but I was calming down.

  In the morning I described the dream to S. ‘What do you think about me now?’ I asked him.

  Instead of answering he said, ‘Before you came here, I used to know exactly who I was. I used to be so certain who I was that I could reject anything – even something I liked and wanted – for the next thing that came along. There was a core of identity so hard it didn’t need any form to make it visible and available to me. I knew who I was. I didn’t care whether the stuff I owned – the things I did, the clothes I wore, the music I listened to, the people I knew – represented me or not.’

  ‘I’m sick of being one of the things that doesn’t have to represent you,’ I said.

  Years after the fact, with memory fading and in circumstances changed to the point of incongruity, I take out the second account of my time over there, leaf through its pages, and remember S’s expression when I told him that.

  ‘One evening a week,’ the accoun
t begins, ‘I have supper in their garden with my friend Bernard and his family, who live on the hill above the port –’

  The history of that quarter is of a fall from grace. It begins with some medieval prince covering the hill with flowers and ends with a fashionable suburb where the prices now reach European levels. Everyone who’s anyone lives there, diplomat or businessman, or in the case of Bernard, ‘cultural ambassador’. The flowers have long gone. The cheaper streets at the base of the hill, drenched in a rich sunset light, are lined with wrecked cars.

  ‘Not that we mind,’ Bernard’s wife told me, with not a hint of irony, the first time I arrived for supper, ‘because they’re really rather lively and attractive, almost art. All the different colours! And people use them as storage, their houses are so small.’

  The end wall of Bernard’s garden is rough-plastered a shade of terra cotta. On to the plaster a previous owner has painted a trompe l’oeil gateway a little less than life size, opening on to a trodden-earth path through a wooded landscape. The path leads away in its flat sine curve into distant hills planted with olives. Secondary growth is applied as a mist of green, while the trunks of a hundred trees, very slim and straight, stand away from the path like spectators.

  On that side of things, it’s morning perhaps. At this distance it’s really quite hard to tell. You’re too aware of the brushstrokes, the stipple. The effect is best gained not from the garden itself but from Bernard’s kitchen, sixty feet away. From there the faded quality of the paint blurs everything together, turning the garden into an extension of that mysteriously inviting path, a merging effect heightened by the ivies which spill thick and glossy over the wicker fences on either side. Plantings of arum lily, fuchsia and false orange lead your eye to the small acacia tree artfully overhanging the gate itself.