When I opened the kitchen door Edith and Emma looked up from the meat they were dressing, their faces full; healthy, happy, ready.
‘Edith, would you and Gordon like to use my old bedroom as a sitting room?’
Edith looked at Emma, whose face exhibited the first tremors of anxiety. Fine lines, like the prints of thumbnails, appeared at either corner of her downturned mouth.
‘I imagine Emma was keeping it as it was as some sort of talisman, but now that I’m back, there’s no need,’ I said.
‘Emma?’ Edith prompted.
‘Where will you sleep?’ Emma asked me.
‘I thought I’d take mother’s room downstairs, it’s better for my purposes.’
‘If that’s what you want, Mark.’ She glanced at Edith. ‘That arrangement would mean more privacy for Edith and Gordon.’
I went back upstairs and began to sort through my books, most of which I tied into bundles and stored in the attic, gradually undoing young Mark Thornton’s craving, demanding, accusing room.
Kelfie
I was fourteen when I began to see ghosts. Telling my grandmother about this was difficult, because of our StoryGame.
The StoryGame began, spontaneously, when I was eleven. One day in my third month at Intermediate, on a dull early May afternoon, I spent my last period sitting with my classmates, facing front, our desks all separated on a grid, listening to the teacher, a thin man who smelt of tobacco. He was pacing at the head of the class, turning a stick of chalk in his fingers, telling us how he had lowered his expectations of us. He wasn’t talking to me. It was maths, my best subject.
A friend of mine, sitting at the front of the class, was flushed with anger—I could see the backs of his calves growing pink. The silence in the room was not that of attention, but of indignation and dissent.
The linoleum floor had recently been polished and was striped whitely by reflected fluorescent lights. The whole room seemed arid and inhospitable.
Outside it was going to rain. Seagulls were coming to settle on the spine of the opposite roof, squabbling and fluttering in the darkness like bright flags, calling out ‘Rain!’, their cries neatly broken in the middle.
It was cold. There was nothing near me. Nothing engaging had happened all day and there wasn’t anything I particularly felt like doing at home.
Eventually the bell rang and I caught the bus back around the harbour in the rain. I found my grandmother in the kitchen, washing dust off the infrequently used chip-cutter, which Grandad bought her one Christmas (he had a secret fascination with kitchen equipment). She hadn’t yet cut the chips so I offered to peel the potatoes.
‘Either change out of your uniform or put on an apron first, dear.’
I put on an apron—which earned me an amused sidelong look—and sat up on the bench over the sink to get to work peeling.
After a pause of scrubbing and scraping I said, ‘I’ll tell you what happened to me today.’
She made a vague, encouraging noise.
‘In the last hour we had maths with Mr Findley. Have I told you about him? He’s thin. Everything about him is a little yellow, except his teeth, which are really white.
‘He’s always impatient with us, and the only reason he likes teaching maths is, I think, because it can go below zero into negative numbers—which is like going into the underworld, he says.
‘Today he got bored and suggested we play a game, but not a maths game. He told us to clear all the desks out of the centre of the room and to stand in a circle. We all figured we were going to play “murder” like we did a couple of weeks ago in music. But then he took Terry and went with him into the middle of the circle, and stood so that Terry was facing me and Mr Findley had his back to me.
‘Findley said, “This is an imaginative exercise. I want you all to be quiet.” To Terry he said, “Look at the window behind me—or out the window—it doesn’t matter which—”
‘“For how long?” Terry asked.
‘“A few minutes.”
‘So Terry stares out over my shoulder. I know I’m not allowed to turn around. I can feel the room getting colder as it gets stormier outside, and hear the sound of gulls coming to settle on the roof of the classroom across the quad.
‘After a time Findley tells Terry to close his eyes. Terry closes his lids and I can see his eyelashes—brown with gold tips—quivering.
‘“Can you still see the window?” Findley asks.
‘“Yes, its shape, green on black,” says Terry.
‘“Now, Terry, watch the empty shape of the window on the inside of your eyelids,” says Findley, “then imagine you see a figure silhouetted against the green light. The figure climbs through the empty frame, then steps to one side of the windows, out of sight.”
‘Terry starts shivering. Findley steps away from him saying, “You are alone in the room with it—it is crossing the dark room to you.”
‘Terry’s pretty nervous now. “Where are you going?” he asks.
‘“I’m not here.” Mr Findley takes another step backward, saying, “It’ll go away when you open your eyes, but if you open them before it touches you, then you’ll find you’re still in the dark room.”
‘Terry is obviously feeling really freaked out. He says, “I’m going to open my eyes.”
‘“You don’t need my permission,” says Findley, really angry.
‘So Terry opens his eyes, looks at Findley and says, “So what?” Then suddenly grabs his own arm and jumps sideways looking shit-scared! And Findley shouts, “It touched you! You’re in the dark room, you will always be there now!”
‘Then Terry just ran, pushing through us. But he didn’t seem to be able to see where he was going and he crashed into a desk and cut open his head. I went to tell the ladies in the office to ring an ambulance.’
My grandmother had stopped wiping the chipper and was frowning at me in concern and confusion.
‘When I was halfway down the stairs Findley leaned over the banister and called, “Kelsey!”
‘So I stopped.
‘“Kelsey,” he threatens me, “don’t you dare tell.”
‘I yell, “I’m going to tell, because you’re a witch or something!”
‘Then I know I’ve done the wrong thing, because his face goes tight and his eyes bulge. I notice that the top steps on the stairs are going all blurry. Then they slowly begin disappearing, step by step, like they’re being painted out by a brush dipped in invisible paint. I look down, but the bottom of the stairwell is full of rippling black water.
‘Gradually the disappearing steps force me to go towards the water, and Mr Findley is leaning over the banister with his face bright and hazy, like the sun through a cloud.
‘The steps go on vanishing, on a slow, soundless drumbeat. Till finally I’m on the last step, beside the black water.
‘Then the step disappeared and I fell in—’
My grandmother waited.
‘And that,’ I concluded, ‘is why I didn’t come home today.’
Several days later Grandma told me a story in return, and we began a regular exchange of tales, staged usually in the kitchen, sometimes to the detriment of Grandma’s cooking—particularly when it was her turn to tell the tale. Sometimes we were the stories’ protagonists, sometimes it was our friends, or imaginary friends, or invented people we didn’t even pretend to know. Occasionally we would, for weeks, in alternate sessions, pursue the fortunes of a group of characters—until, either bored or striving for effect, I killed them off.
When my grandfather was away, which he often was, working on the collections at the Museum in Wellington, Grandma and I would tell each other stories over dinner, and even late into the night on Fridays and Saturdays. And when Grandad was at home he would emerge from his study and come looking for us in the kitchen, to find us apparently standing watching the pot lids jump, turning to him as he intruded: dumb, disorientated and—in my case—resentful.
For Grandma and me the StoryGame was a
project, entertainment, a private world (a world in which we were rulers). It changed me, made me comfortable with shadows, reflections, distortions, inversions, half-truths, with timelessness and contracted time, with dramatic postures and extreme emotions. It gave me a certain skill in the effective use of language, and a fearlessness about suspending my ego—because at will all my being could be called on for the performance of a story, the creation of lives that had nothing to do with the life of Keith Kelsey.
It was this last effect of the StoryGame that contributed most to my ‘seeing ghosts’, because I was in the habit of relinquishing myself to muse, mindless and quiet like a radio receiver open for signals. And eventually the signals came.
My first three ghosts happened under similar circumstances.
First.
It was night. I was in bed and near sleep. I turned away from the wall towards the room and, for some reason, opened my eyes and caught sight of something that it took me several minutes to make any sense of: a human silhouette right beside my bed and next to my face. It was a form more dense than a shadow, darker than a shape cut from black velvet, as airy and deep as a mirror in a dark empty room.
I blinked, stared, struggled to focus—but it was no trick of the light.
I panicked and struck out. It was no hallucination, no ‘air drawn dagger’—I struck out and my blow was resisted, with a firm pressure, like that felt when two magnets repel each other. My hands, feeling no substance, only force, slid off the shape. And then it vanished.
My second ghost, several weeks later, was less alarming. Again I was in bed and near sleep. There was nothing in my mind. I found myself lying on my back with my eyes open, looking at a figure at the end of my bed. It was not actually standing at the end of my bed—my sense of perspective told me it was further away than the end wall of my room, in ‘long shot’, standing as if on a rise in some space beyond the room.
It was thin and elongated, like an El Greco figure. Its skin was apparently made of dead leaves, rough, patchy and grey-brown. Though it was night and the objects in my room were barely visible in black and dark grey tones, the ghost was standing in dull daylight—a coloured figure in a black and white picture.
We stared at each other. I wasn’t afraid, or moved, or even interested—the responsive faculty of my mind was in suspension. I just watched, not analysing, or speculating, or even reacting, till it disappeared.
I saw my third apparition at night also, and at the edge of sleep. It was a small volume of radiant blackness, about half a metre long and thirty centimetres across. It was the same ridged, lumpy shape as a yam, and had two ‘eyes’, blurry grey patches, one in its middle and the other near its base. It occurred to me that this thing was a baby. It seemed to tell me, ‘I’m a baby.’ This idea amazed and delighted me, and, as soon as I registered these feelings, the apparition disappeared.
After this I told my grandmother. ‘I see ghosts,’ I said. Then miserably, ‘This isn’t a story, it’s true—I’ve started to see ghosts.’
She looked expectantly at me.
‘I won’t say anything more about it, because you’ll think I’m telling a tale.’
I said no more then, and she didn’t ask any questions. But several months later she asked me whether I still saw ghosts.
‘Yes—the other day, when you were sewing up that split in my jeans—’
‘Yes?’
‘And I was in my room, combing my hair, and I suddenly said, “What are you doing there?”—I wasn’t talking to the cat.’
‘I thought you must be. You sounded amused.’
‘I was pleased. This lovely wheel of light had just rolled up behind my shoulder and was taking a look at me in the mirror. When I asked it what it was doing it rolled away through the wall.’ I looked at her in challenge, and, when she didn’t say anything, told her, ‘They come and rubberneck at me now, it’s like the word has got round I can see them. A few weeks ago I saw one which was really surprised that I could see it—’
‘How did you know it was surprised?’
‘I felt what it felt—I felt its surprise—it was like it had seen a ghost, sort of.’ I frowned at her severely and, when she still didn’t respond, burst out, ‘All right! I’m going crazy then, but I’m not lying!’
‘I know you’re not, dear.’
Relieved, I was only able to stare at her sulkily and suspiciously.
She sighed and shrugged, her brows tilting upward above the bridge of her nose, her face at once pained and resigned. ‘I used to see what I called “ghosts” once too, when I was young. I suppose you could say you’d got it off me, but don’t blame me.’
‘I wouldn’t. I don’t mind—except it’s crazy and useless and—I mean, I saw a floating black yam with eyes and it was a baby! It’s all so immensely weird that I can’t hope to understand it.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s why I didn’t say anything when you first mentioned it—because I was having a hard time believing that I once saw “ghosts”. It is hard to remember and believe it when it stops happening, because there is no way of anchoring the experiences in ordinary life.’ She mused, ‘It is almost like it wasn’t something that happened to me. It was so irrelevant, and impersonal.’
‘You mean you were in a selfless mood when you saw them. I’ve thought about this. Ghost-seeing seems to happen during a sort of mindless state. It’s natural for me to see ghosts and know nothing about what they mean, since I’m not able to think about it when it’s happening, because if I did think about it, it wouldn’t be happening.’
‘Yes. That’s what it was like.’
‘And I got it from you.’
‘It’s not a hereditary disease, Keith, so don’t sound so accusing.’
‘But it is hereditary.’
She smiled. ‘Maybe. I’ve told you about my father, how he was an ardent, born-again atheist, not raised as an atheist, like you or me or your father. Well, he didn’t believe in God, gods, spirits, life after death. You name it, he denounced it. But once, when he was a little tipsy, when I was having a conversation with him, testing the water, so to speak, wondering whether I could confess to him that I “saw ghosts”, he said to me, “I don’t believe in ghosts—even if I do see them.”’ She laughed.
‘You didn’t tell him then?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Did you grow out of seeing them?’
She became solemn and shook her head. ‘No. I had a bad experience—I never saw them after that. I never wanted to. Later I suppose I got out of whatever habit of mind it was that allowed me to see them.’
‘What was the bad experience?’
‘I won’t tell you. I don’t want to frighten you.’ She took my arm. ‘Don’t ever get frightened, Keith. If you are picked on by things worldly or otherworldly, just resist—’
‘But it isn’t an “other world”, or the “other side”. I think “ghosts” are people in another time, asleep or daydreaming. Often, just as I think, “It’s a ghost!” I know they are thinking the same thing. Somewhere, sometime, I am an apparition—and God knows how I appear to people in that time. What kind of vegetable I resemble.’
‘Yes—but that’s not all, there are other things that happen which don’t fit your theory.’
‘Great. I can hardly wait,’ I said, apprehensive.
A few weeks later, on a very windy night during one of Grandfather’s visits to the capital, I woke my grandmother. I went into her bedroom and sat on the bed, tense, staring at the shapes that, with increasing noise, bustle and clarity, were flowing through the room.
‘I know they are there,’ she prompted, watching me, propped up on several pillows, her arms folded across her breasts, her eyes large and alight. ‘What do you see?’
Shivering, I told her: ‘They are semi-transparent, greyish and bony. They aren’t walking, they are being, kind of, washed through the room. At first I only heard them—like a sound-mirage from some faraway crowd. I can’t hear what they’re saying. T
hey’re getting easier to see. It is like they are the shadows of people cast sometimes on a close-by surface and sometimes on something further away. They keep swelling and shrinking, and at the same time they are all running that way—’ I gestured across the room from left to right. ‘This room is full of people.’ I was trembling. ‘I’m so tired,’ I said, becoming, in a short space of time, so exhausted I was close to hysterical collapse.
My grandmother turned on the light and folded her bedspread over me. She picked up a book from her nightstand and began reading to me in a loud, cheerful voice. I recall jumping when she began, as if at an abrupt sound, then falling quickly and deeply asleep.
A week after this incident—the night of the ‘spirit migration’—Grandma brought me a print of the Australian painter Pro Hart’s The Release of Souls from Trafalgar. She gave it to me saying, ‘That’s what you saw the other night, isn’t it?’ In the picture a swarm of spectral shapes rose like smoke from the listing ships.
‘Yes, it was a lot like this.’
‘Do you still think it was “another time”?’
‘Perhaps. A terrible other time.’
Mark
On the same day that I was visited at Oatlands by Captain Green, I finally tried to write to Emma about Bellevue Spur. The newspapers at home had judged the assault a costly but brave failure. Like the abandoned Peninsula campaign, our people were told, Bellevue was not for nothing. Our mettle had been once again tested by stress.
Emma wanted to know what I thought. She wrote, ‘—the tally of dead and wounded was so high, surely it was an ill-advised attack?’
My attempts to explain Bellevue to my sister set in motion the process of remembering. When I began the letter I believed I could give a clear account of my experience of the attack, but I myself censored out the nightmare, dread and delirium; writing and remembering, and withholding memories.
After Z-Hour Page 18
