You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts

by M. John Harrison

  ‘The fact is,’ he emailed Julia Vicente, ‘I can recover so little of that time. The shoreline cliffs crumble into side-streets of tall pastel-coloured apartments. The old dockyard, with its rusty machinery revisioned as art, is an endlessly fragmenting dream, endlessly reconstructing itself. As for you and me, we seem like characters in a film. You never stopped smoking cigarettes; I bought a yellow notebook which I never wrote in. For years I’ve kept these fragments floating around one another – it’s such an effort – attracted into patterns less by the order in which they occurred or by any ‘story’ I can make about them than by gravity or animal magnetism. But I have no memory at all of the experience as it fell out. Perhaps if I could see you more often, I’d remember more.’

  It was hard to know what she made of that.

  ‘I’ve grown used to you being here just the once or twice a year,’ she replied. ‘Don’t come again too soon, I wouldn’t know what to think.’ In an effort to lessen the impact of this, he saw, she had struck through the word ‘think’ and replaced it with ‘cook’.

  He was grateful for the joke. But that night he dreamed he was back in the cloister. This dream was to recur for the rest of his life, presenting as many outcomes as iterations; from it, he would always wake to an emotion he couldn’t account for: not quite anxiety, not quite despair. He dreamed the white blur of Julia Vicente’s face watching from the shadows, immobile and fascinated until the procession of search-and-rescue teams found her and bore her triumphantly home on a stretcher in the bald light and shimmering air of the plateau. The fountain seemed to roar silently. The cloister cobbles softened and parted in the heat, encouraging Cave to slip easily between them into the vast system of varnished-looking natural tubes and slots which, he now saw, underlay everything. It was cold down there; damp, but not fully dark. He could not describe himself as lost, because he had never known where he was. He heard water gushing over faults and lips in tunnels a hundred miles away. Full of terror, he began counting his arms and legs; before he could finish, woke alone. A feeling of bleakness and approaching disaster came out of the dream with him. His room was full of cold grey light. 5am, and traffic was already grinding along Caledonian Road into Kings Cross. He made some coffee, took it back to bed, opened his laptop. Although he knew it would mean nothing, he emailed her:

  ‘What can any of us do but move on? How?’ And then: ‘Did I ever have the slightest idea of your motives?’, to which she could only reply puzzledly:

  ‘Of course you did. Of course you did.’

  Work remained central in Julia’s life. She continued to write and publish, though none of her books had the same impact on our side of things as her first. Still pursued, though now by cultural historians rather than cultural journalists, she made hasty public statements about herself which she came to regret. She and Cave exchanged emails, argued, fell out, made friends again. In her fifties she entered a fourth marriage, which lasted as long as any of the others. (At around that time, Cave wrote in his journal, ‘She arrives at the airport either an hour early or an hour late but in any case attractively deranged. She has no money and her car won’t start. She greets you by saying in a loud voice, ‘Oh god, things have been horrible,’ and doesn’t stop talking for some hours. She will insist on driving you somewhere and then forget how to get there and phone husband #4 – who is at that time in another town – for directions.’) She dyed the grey out of her hair but rejected all forms of cosmetic surgery; experienced some symptoms of mild arthritis in the fingers of her right hand.

  ‘It’s sad to think,’ she wrote, ‘that people long ago stopped making full use of you as a human being. You feel as if you have let them down by somehow not being persuasive enough.’

  The daughter, meanwhile, grew up, evolving from a curious olive-skinned scrap with very black hair into a tall, graceful adolescent obsessed with dogs. This surprised Julia as much as it did Cave. ‘One moment she was five, the next she was fifteen. I was a little upset at first, but now I’m delighted. Luckily she’s very self-absorbed.’ And then, out of nowhere, a year or two later: ‘She wants to be an archeologist. I think I might come to London now. There’s nothing to keep me here.’ Cave looked forward to a new beginning, but it was more as if something had ended. The closer they came geographically, the further they drew apart. Sometimes it was as if they had simply changed places: Cave buried himself in his Autotelian journals and memories, revisiting a relationship that had changed so much it was to all intents and purposes over; while Julia Vicente, camped less than two miles away from him in a rather nice house on the banks of the Regents Canal, waited impatiently for his return.

  They were drinking red wine in Islington one afternoon when part of the sky went dark. Eddies of wind bullied the street trees around. A single feather floated into view, made its way across Cave’s lawn and out over the garden wall, its weird calm transit defining a layer of privileged air at about twice the height of a person. ‘People don’t give in to age now the way they used to,’ said Julia. The windows behind her blurred with rain, rattled a little in their frames. A summer squall always made her excited. ‘Age has to find its expression in new ways.’ It was her topic of the moment. ‘I don’t know anyone, for instance – not anyone who really accepts and understands what age means to them – who hasn’t experienced the urge to act out the coming journey.’

  ‘Which journey is that?’ he teased her.

  ‘You know exactly what I mean!’ And then: ‘Some kind of walkabout: as soon as you get the idea, you feel relief. Here’s a way of recognising and accepting that urge to leave everything behind. A way of being thrown by it.’ Cave considered these rationalisations with as much dignity as he could, then poured her another half glass of red and wondered out loud what would happen to the feather. The rain stopped. ‘Seriously,’ she said: ‘What kind of a map would you use for a journey like that? A final journey?’

  Then she laughed and added: ‘You don’t have to answer.’

  When he first met her, Cave had sometimes glimpsed for an instant the older, tireder woman she would become; now that she was tired all the time, there were brief instants in which the younger woman showed through. Seeing what he thought might be his last chance, he offered:

  ‘I’ll answer if you answer.’

  She stared at him intently. ‘Answer what?’ she said.

  ‘Tell me what you expected to happen in the cloister.’

  She seemed to relax, as if she had been afraid he might ask something else. ‘To you? The same as him, perhaps. To me?’ She shrugged. ‘Who knows. Something new.’

  A child, playing in a garden several houses away, began shouting, ‘I said I can’t do it! I said I can’t do it! I said I can’t do it!’ over and over again. At first it was part of a game with friends or siblings, with a pause for laughter between each iteration. Then the other children dropped out and the chant took on values and momentum of its own, on and on, real meaning, real confusion, real rage. After two or three minutes Cave realised it wasn’t even the child’s own rage, any more than the sentence itself was the child’s sentence. It was the rage of some significant adult, overheard in god knew what circumstances.

  Alternate World

  Long horizons, rising downs. West Sussex pub, full of the ghouls of money. 1947 Concours d’Elegance Bentley in the car park. Light aircraft float to and fro across the ghouls’ own sky won in single combat from the Nazis all those years ago. The weather is fine, blowy mid-May, but when we say we’ll sit outside, the barman responds with a kind of knowing servility, ‘You’re going to brave it, then?’ Yes, we’re going to brave it. We’re going to meet today’s minor but satisfying challenge, we’re going to brave the May weather and have our lunch outside, the way the ghouls braved the Nazis in the blue enduring sky to protect their power and money all those years ago. You can’t be the rulers if you have no country to rule.

  A Bad Dream

  I woke up from a dream about losing my identity and not being able to
find anything that would confirm it. It wasn’t a dream about the problem of losing your identity; neither was it a dream about, say, the horror of not having a financial identity. In the dream, loss of identity was not a condition that required explanation or a way of escape in either of those senses or in any other sense: it was just a condition. I was in the town of my birth. I hadn’t been there for decades. I was at the station, at a sort of advice counter. The man behind the counter was amused. It was as if he didn’t understand the extent of the problem. It was as if he couldn’t believe anyone could lose their identity. I was trying to appear cheerful about the situation. I had a tarpaulin travel bag containing a few clothes and other personal items. It was also full of bits of waste paper and receipts. Each time I went through this litter in the hope that a credit card or phone or other identifier would turn up, it seemed to be more useless. Who would help me? Though I couldn’t remember any addresses I knew I could physically make my way to one person’s house. But I had long ago fallen out with them.

  Getting Out of There

  Hampson came back after some years, to the seaside in the rain, to this town built around a small estuary where a river broke through the chalk downs. Everything – everything people knew about, anyway – came in through that gap, by road or rail; and that’s the way Hampson came too, down from London, midweek, in a rental van, unsure of what he would find for himself after so long. He had options, but since he wasn’t sure about them either, he rented a single room on one of the quiet wide roads that run down from the old town.

  The day he moved in, he realised that not all the things he had brought back with him – bits of furniture, endless half-filled cardboard boxes sealed with gaffa tape – would fit in there, so he drove the van to a self-storage under some railway arches where the London Road left the centre of town. It was a bit back from the seafront, the usual kind of place, not very modern, with untreated breeze-block cubicles of different sizes, behind doors that were little more than plywood. He spent a morning carrying things around in there, then looked into the office on his way out. Behind the desk he found a woman he recognised.

  ‘My god,’ she said.

  At the same time Hampson said: ‘I knew you when we were kids!’

  ‘You wouldn’t leave me alone,’ she said.

  ‘I was quite stricken.’

  ‘I know you were,’ the woman said.

  Hampson paid the bill. ‘I was seven years old,’ he said, ‘and you were, what? Thirteen?’

  She laughed. ‘I bet you can’t remember my name either.’

  Hampson had a couple of tries but she was right. As he was leaving, she called after him, ‘It’s Beatrice.’ And then: ‘Are you going to be stricken again?’

  Hampson said he didn’t know how to answer that one.

  ‘You haven’t changed,’ she said, as if he’d already done something which demonstrated it.

  The house – it was called ‘Pendene’, everything had to be called ‘dene’ round there – was large, square, detached, surrounded on three sides with empty parking space and, at the back, a long, overgrown garden. It wasn’t much. Hampson’s room wasn’t much either. It lay at the end of a long, badly-lit second-floor landing, which still smelt of food cooked there in the 1960s: a section of a room – perhaps twelve feet by ten, painted white, accessed from a fire-door with the remains of broken bolts laced down the inside – so literalistically partitioned out of the original Victorian space that the light filtered in from about two-thirds of a bay window. The day he moved in, before he went down to the storage with his things and met Beatrice again, he had looked out of the window and watched a woman, thirtyish, long hair and nice legs in skinny jeans, walking diagonally across the road towards him from a house twenty yards down.

  The garden wall, so overgrown with ivy it was bowing into the street, cut off his view of her. Shortly afterwards she was followed by a man in a pale blue shirt, who vanished in the same way. The next time Hampson looked up she was walking towards him again. The wall obscured her. The man followed about a minute later, and the wall obscured him. This happened three times, in bright sunshine. Hampson never saw either of them walk back towards their house. They didn’t speak to one another. Up the street – towards the square where the buildings began to look a little less bleak, more as if they housed families of human beings – the gardens were full of camelias and early-flowering clematis.

  For the first three or four days he didn’t do much. He had a job to go to, pushing software in a local design firm, but it wouldn’t start for a week. He pottered around, refamiliarising himself, feeling his way across the joins between the old town – with its herringbone brick and lapboard architecture, its carefully cultivated links to notable soldiers and writers of the Edwardian afternoon, and its quiet graveyard backwatered behind yews – and the new, which wasn’t much more than a housing estate, some car parks, and a loop or two of bleak, dusty pubs and charity shops tucked between the chalk cliffs and brutalist sea defences known for lost geographical reasons as Shining Dene. There wasn’t a lot to it, but Hampson already knew that. The promenade. The beach with its reclaimed Victorian railway track. A couple of Regency crescents on a hill which attracted a dry cold wind.

  If you were bored – and Hampson soon was – you could go up on to West Hill and stare out towards France. One lunchtime he went into the English Channel, a pub about a hundred yards back from the clifftop, and Beatrice was sitting there at the back. He got a drink and went over to her. He asked if she minded him joining her, she asked him why she should mind. Unable to disentangle anything from that, he said:

  ‘This is a weird place.’

  ‘It’s a town of the dead,’ she said.

  ‘I meant the pub,’ Hampson said.

  At the back it was hollow with plastic beams and tobacco-stained artex; a whitish sea-light crept in among the tables nearest the window, overexposing the floorboards, the sleeping dogs, the customers’ feet. Every support pillar was papered with posters – ‘Club Chat Noir’, ‘Maximum Rock & Roll’ – and a sign behind the bar advised, ‘No bloody swearing.’ For a moment Hampson and Beatrice stared companionably around, then she said:

  ‘So. London.’

  ‘London,’ he agreed.

  ‘I’d kill to be in London,’ she said. ‘Why’d you leave?’

  He couldn’t answer that. He hadn’t answered it for himself.

  ‘I suppose you get sick of it,’ he said. ‘You get sick of pretending it’s not crap.’ But it had been less about London and more about not fitting into your own life, not being described by the place you live in. Not being seen into life, by others or yourself. He had been lonely there even though he knew people: but Hampson told her a different story. ‘Vomit’s the London keynote,’ he said. ‘If you like to stand in a puddle of someone else’s in a tube train on a Friday night, London’s the place to be.’

  ‘But why come here?’ she said. ‘Nothing happens here.’

  ‘Nothing happens there, either.’

  She laughed at that. ‘Except the vomit,’ she said.

  ‘The vomit’s world class. Good solid stuff. We can be proud of that.’

  She made a face.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll have another drink.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ Hampson said.

  After that, he often popped into the storage at lunchtime. He took a couple of things out then put them back. She teased him about that. Hampson was a small man, perhaps five foot six. He couldn’t see anything wrong with that. In her high heeled shoes Beatrice sometimes had an inch or two on him. He was excited by her and didn’t see why he shouldn’t show it. They chatted. They shared this funny small-town teenage history. It was all very pleasant and explicable but it wasn’t going any further. Then, after a fortnight or so, Hampson was dawdling through the centre of town on his way to the cinema to see a film called Shame. It was a warm evening, just after dark, with a light rain and static patches of mist out to sea. As he crossed one of the Hi
gh Street junctions Beatrice walked straight out of a house about a hundred yards in front of him. In the moment the door slammed, she was just a figure to him, in a pencil skirt and some sort of jacket with a pinched-in waist; then he recognised her from her walk, short tapping steps echoing back to him. He followed her without a thought. They were soon out of the centre, heading up the Bourne past the Ship Museum into the Old Town, where she knocked on a door; waited for a moment or two; called, ‘Emily? Can I leave them with you tomorrow? Emily?’ and receiving no answer went up a steep, narrow little passage and out into one of the Regency enclaves that faced the sea. It wasn’t an area Hampson remembered. She was too far ahead to call her name; anyway shyness kept him from calling out to anyone in public. He thought he would make himself known when he caught up with her, but he never did. Instead he hung back, listening to the sound of her heels on the pavement. He never saw where she went. The cloud broke: moonlight gave the deserted streets a flattened perspective, as if the two of them were in a picture: suddenly Hampson became anxious and turned off.

  Next day he went to the storage at lunchtime and asked her out.

  ‘You took your time,’ she said. ‘What about Sunday afternoon?’

  They rode the West Hill funicular railway to the park at the top of the cliffs. She stretched her arms and looked out to sea. ‘It’s great,’ she said, ‘that you can get so high above it all.’ A moment later she was gone. Hampson sat on a bench looking out to sea, waiting for her to come back. There was a strong smell of cut grass, then fried food from the café at the top of the funicular. If he looked off to his left he could see her sitting on a bench about a hundred yards away. Behind her the town fell away towards the sea. Was she looking back towards him? He couldn’t be sure. Suddenly a great flock of gulls poured down the Bourne and circled over the shops and houses, screaming and calling; then spread out along the esplanade and diffused like fog.