The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  Suddenly, she had an excruciating pain in her lower back. She became a whirwind of destruction and hurled the paper plates at the fence.

  ‘I want you to care for me,’ she yelled at Douglas, ‘provide for me, give me security, not sit in front of the television with a bottle of wine every night. Is this it?’ She stood by the table, shouting. ‘Is this all there is?’

  They had been together since she was twenty. Now she was forty.

  ‘I want out. I want my freedom.’ Her face looked pinched. ‘Is this all there is?’ she screamed.

  She phoned and wanted to come up. It was nine o’clock at night. She looked summery in a blue frock printed with sprigs of tiny white flowers, but also tired and a little drawn, having been back at work full-time since the beginning of term:

  ‘I didn’t sleep last night,’ she said as we sat on the floor. ‘My head was going round and round. I went to a meeting at the school about the government education cuts and I was so angry I couldn’t sleep. I got up at the meeting and laid into the man, the apologist from the council. We had been sent a very clear leaflet spelling out what the cuts would mean. No music teacher. Can you imagine? No playground helpers – the ones that the timid kids always like to hang around.

  ‘It was a brilliant meeting. The union guy said it was one of the best he’s ever been to, even though he’s an old hack. Anyway, I was so angry that I found myself shouting the council guy down. Up until then it had been polite questions and answers. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up and said, it’s a disgrace. I came here because of a very good leaflet. I didn’t come here to hear you apologising and defeatist. I thought you would have suggestions, plans. That’s why I’m here. I know about the cuts. I thought you would tell us what to do about them.

  ‘I just let rip. You know, when I was about twenty I had an ambition to make a political speech and get a round of applause. Well, it took twenty years, but I got my round of applause. Then others joined in, enraged, confronting him. Teachers mainly. It was dynamite. I was waving my finger at him. I have to find something outside the home. I felt politically active. I felt that this was where I should be. I felt completely alive again.’

  I nodded. From the start I had prepared myself for her death.

  She came and sat on her usual side of the table in the kitchen. I made apricot tea, that delicious tea from the Algerian coffee shop in Soho. Again it was night, about nine o’clock after a cloudy summer’s day. She had put on a little weight. Her features had rounded out. She looked rested, but the weight had swelled her remaining breast and she now suffered anguish at seeing the false breast in the mirror because it was too small and no longer a perfect match.

  She had needed to buy a swimming costume for the holidays. She tried on some with padded cups. The cups were too pointed. The black woman assistant was so kind and soothing that she had nearly reduced Ellie to tears. Whichever costume she tried on, the scar showed and she wanted to retract herself from view. It made her want to cringe as if there was a hole in one side of her through which the wind might blow and set the exposed nerves aching. She felt vulnerable.

  She stepped out of the shop into Oxford Street. There was nothing special about the day. It was a day much like any other except that she battled all the way home on the bus experiencing the misery of an irreversible deformity.

  She had endured the same trauma whilst undergoing the radiotherapy treatment. An enormous lift took her down into the intestines of the hospital and the doors opened straight into the treatment room. There was no escape. She had to lie on the trolley bed while the ominous equipment was manoeuvred over her. Her arm was raised and with each treatment she felt the same agonising vulnerability. Her breast was gone and she shook with horror at the exposure of this voided torso to the machine.

  ‘You know what I wanted to ask you,’ she said, suddenly brushing the topic of illness aside. ‘What do you think about this politician who’s been having an affair with that actress? I was surprised last night, talking to a man who used to be an MP, that he seemed to think there should be legislation to protect privacy. But then, they tend to close ranks. But MPs are fair game. They choose public office. Anyway, these days it doesn’t seem to make any difference. They’re so corrupt they never resign anyway. Just carry on as though nothing had happened. But I don’t think there should be laws to help them cover up what they do. They go on about family life and values and then create laws themselves that destroy poorer families.’

  I agreed. She went on to talk about the way education was being undermined.

  ‘Soon all the schools will have opted out from local authority government. They’ll be managing themselves. And apparently, if they don’t do well they’ll be shut down. But what will happen to the children? I expect they’ll do the same with the legal system soon. Value for money will be the criterion. Justice bounded by economics. Education and justice. Two things that seemed so absolute. Sold.’

  Flitting through my mind as she spoke were thoughts about all the meetings she had attended: meetings with staff; meetings with students; meetings with her women’s group to discuss issues or read poetry or study paintings or photographs; meetings to arrange a rota of help for a sick friend; meetings on local issues such as the noise made by the re-building of Arsenal football stadium; helping with school events; taking poor city kids for weekends in the country.

  The tea became lukewarm in its dark-blue enamel teapot. We embraced and she left. She would be on holiday for a month in France.

  At the end of that month, a friend from South America arrived to study in England. Ellie had been one of several people who had paid something towards his fare. She opened the door of her house and greeted him with such warmth that he stood transfixed on the doorstep and nearly melted.

  That evening she sat at the table laden with the meal’s debris, the remnants of Douglas’s cooking, joints of pork, chicken, green salads gleaming with oil and garlic dressing, half-empty bottles of wine, and she listened with delight to stories of life in the bush. He, in turn, was mesmerised by her radiant attention. But at about ten o’clock she began to flag and eventually excused herself because she was feeling suddenly exhausted even though the cancer had gone and she was in full remission.

  The phone rang. It sounded like someone with a bad cold. It was not a cold. It was the result of crying. Ellie was ringing from the hospital. The cancer had come back. It was in the hip, leg and the throat. Ellie was distraught, sobbing.

  ‘I want to see my children grow up.’

  A short while later she rang me again, sounding in control of herself.

  ‘We’ll just have to do it all over again,’ meaning, I presumed, the chemotherapy, and the fight in general.

  I went round to her house. Ellie arrived about a quarter of an hour later and we both behaved too normally – as if what had been discovered was nothing more than a blasted nuisance, an inconvenience like a car breakdown. The children watched television in the front room.

  Douglas came home. She sat at the kitchen table with him and told him.

  ‘Oh Ellie,’ he said sympathetically, ‘you shouldn’t have to go to those places on your own.’ He looked down. He could rarely bear to go with her. They talked sensibly, hands touching firmly and gently.

  That night we went up to her room, Ellie and I. The children were in bed. Douglas was watching television.

  Ellie had always wanted a deep, rose-pink carpet. Now it was a bit worn but still retained a soft glow in the lamplight. The bed was half made, books and papers scattered on it. The bedside lamp shone on another pile of books on the chest of drawers beside the bed.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ she said, ‘just last night I started looking at Dante’s Inferno again. Do you remember how I used to read it and get such a lot from it?’ She picked up a paperback of The Divine Comedy. ‘I was reading the part where they are climbing down Lucifer’s shank.’

  She lowered herself gingerly on to the bed with the book in her hand and s
tarted to search for the passage. ‘There are two versions. One has them climbing down Lucifer’s shaggy body, reaching the thigh and turning themselves upside-down so that they start to climb up his legs. In the other version, a different translation, Lucifer himself turns upside-down.’

  She handed me the book and levered herself awkwardly off the bed again to find the second version. My heart sank as I looked through the canto. Why had she chosen that image? Lucifer, a thousand feet tall, his body piercing the centre of the earth, winged with featherless wings like those of a bat. I read the first section she had pointed out:

  And thus from shag to shag descended down

  Twixt matted hair and crusts of frozen rime.

  And when we came to where the huge thigh-bone

  Rides in the socket at the haunches’ swell,

  My guide, with labour and great exertion

  Turned head to where his feet had been and fell

  To hoisting himself up upon the hair.

  How would we ever overcome such images? She stood by the bed puzzling over the two texts. It seemed that there was a way out, that by climbing Lucifer’s shank they reached the River Lethe as a small stream and by following it upwards they could gaze towards an opening where the stars appeared, and so they journeyed, against the flow of the stream, against oblivion and towards recollection. It was this path she was looking for and she was using Dante’s Divine Comedy as her street guide.

  I shuddered. The giant shaggy thigh of Lucifer with its hanks of frozen goat hair. It was too powerful.

  With some difficulty, she struggled into a nightie and lay down on top of the duvet with its gay pattern of geometrical shapes in bright colours. I looked down at her long limbs, beautifully arranged on the bed. There was no sign of anything wrong. Despite the pain in her right hip and leg, when she managed to lie down on the bed the limbs looked strong and well-proportioned with no sign of the ravages taking place inside.

  The next day she was washing dishes in the kitchen when the pain exploded with threefold ferocity. A young, pony-tailed nurse from the pain team arrived and prescribed morphine. The pain was in the socket of her right thigh-bone and hip. Exactly where the turning point of Dante’s journey took place. She could hobble with a stick but if anything jarred the leg she suffered agonies that left her white-faced and immobile. Her eyes seemed so enormous and blue in that ashen face. Later they found that her hip-bone had fractured in its socket and they gave her an operation to replace it immediately. The cancer was in the bones.

  Cancer always seemed to me to have something to do with the sea, not just because of the name, cancer the crab, a creature whose direction is unpredictable, which comes at you sideways and unexpectedly. There are other connections with water. I have an image of swimming in a blue sea and catching sight of the undulating shadows of black rocks beneath the surface, menacing, ominous. After I swim away, the shapes disappear. The sea is brilliantly clear, the sky wide, the coast distant. And then, suddenly, there they are again, the shapes.

  Gradually, Ellie struggled to walk again with the hip replacement. She walked the length of a shopping centre and triumphantly bought a scarlet cotton dress with a low neck and tiny black pattern. Back in her house, she tried it on while I sprawled on the bed. She stood in front of the full-length mirror and adjusted the sleeves.

  ‘Yes. I like it,’ she said approvingly. And the vibrant colour did suit her as she turned this way and that, studying the mirror’s image.

  The next day, we visited the consultant. Often, on those visits, I felt less like a friend than a grim guard, escorting someone relentlessly to their execution. Using a stick, she gripped my arm. I had to hold up the traffic with one hand because she took such a long time to cross the road. Despite the pain-relief team, she was in constant agony.

  The consultant’s clinic was crowded and noisy. She pointed out a hand-written notice that said ‘200 more managers – 200 less beds!!!’ and pulled a face. When her name was called we went into a small room that barely kept out the sounds of the busy clinic outside. She was no longer seeing Dr Mackintosh. It was not even the same hospital. This consultant was dark, charming, suave, informal and vague. As we entered, he complained wearily that the increase in bureaucratic paperwork made him spend less time with his patients.

  Ellie pulled out another list of questions. He listened and answered sympathetically. The disease was unpredictable. ‘The aim is to control the tempo of it. The hope is that it will be containable. Sometimes it goes haywire and then we can’t contain it.’

  ‘What … what … what sort of … How …’ Nearly in tears, she looked over to me for help.

  ‘She wants to know how long she has got to live,’ I said, feeling strangely brutal and recognising the uncomfortable pleasure of knowing that the question did not refer to me.

  ‘Do I have six months?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s the most difficult question we’re always asked.’ He looked out of the window for a moment, then raised his shoulders, swivelled round in his chair to face us and opened his arms.

  ‘I’d stick my neck out and say yes. I will give you Oromorph to control the pain. You can take as much as you need.’

  She found some hope for recovery in his words. I did not. He gave himself away in those few seconds when he looked out of the window.

  On the way back, she sat in front with the Greek mini-cab driver, a man in his fifties whom she could not resist lecturing on the iniquities of the Conservative government and their policies on public transport and the health service while she took the occasional swig of liquid morphine.

  It was in the early hours of the morning. The telephone by my bed rang. I lifted it up and an extraordinarily deep, masculine voice growled, ‘It’s me.’

  The voice was an octave lower than most human voices. It sounded like a voice from one of those old-fashioned, turn-handle gramophones when the record is slurring and getting slower and deeper as it winds down.

  ‘I don’t know what … I can’t … I don’t …’

  ‘Is that you, Ellie?’

  ‘Yes.’ Then came the sound of teeth chattering at an abominable volume, like the clattering of dishes.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m fr … I’m frightened.’

  ‘Is Douglas there?’

  ‘I c … can’t speak to him,’ came the reply, riddled with hiccups. ‘Y … you s … said I could phone y … you any time.’

  The slow voice roller-coasted up and down. I sat up sleepily in bed and felt myself recoiling in horror from her fear. I wanted to hang up. Instead, I started to talk chattily about what I had been doing that day. All the time, I was desperate for the conversation to end. She replied occasionally, sounding as if she were speaking from the bottom of some cavernous pit. I began to talk her up as if she were a climber who had fallen to a ledge halfway down the cliff face with no safety net.

  Then I had a bright idea.

  ‘You know what has happened, Ellie? You know why you’re feeling like this?’ I was determined to make this the truth.

  ‘Whaat?’ The voice was sounding more normal.

  ‘It’s the drugs. The drugs are making you feel so strange. You’re full of morphine. That’s why you’re feeling weird. That’s the only reason. You’re perfectly all right. The drugs are making you feel like that.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘I’m sure. I’m positive.’ I was willing it to be the truth.

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t take so much.’ The voice was sounding up to speed. The tone had risen to a more normal pitch.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to sleep now?’

  ‘Yes. I’m feeling better. Thanks.’

  We talked on for a little until I could feel sleep settling on her. We said goodbye and I hung up. I felt sick.

  * * *

  Some hours later, when it was still dark, I woke to find a tall dark woman, full of sorrow, standing at the bottom right-hand corner of the bed. The hair was in a
straight bob. She looked familiar. She wore dark cothes and was drowned in sadness. I struggled to wake up properly and swung my feet out of the bed to put them on the floor. I looked up and there was nobody there. When I thought about the figure later, I sensed that the woman had been some sort of combination of Ellie and myself. I suppose it must have been a dream but it felt real.

  That summer, Ellie held a birthday party in her garden. She held court from an elongated garden chair like a chaise-longue, wearing a straw hat with flowers round the brim. The garden was crammed with friends, children and food. Ellie looked well and happy, opening presents and talking to the children. But all of us felt that the future had been foreshortened in some way.

  I drove at furious speed towards the hospital, maddened by the dawdling of the other traffic which did not even attempt to jump the lights. I had received a call from Douglas telling me to get there fast. There was no parking space in the underground hospital car-park. I drove round and round the gloomy, subterranean area with its hollow sounds, agonising over the waste of time until someone pulled out and I shot into their place.

  The day before, Ellie had gone into a hospice for a week’s respite care, to relax and have some tests. The next morning she had got out of bed and fallen. The other leg had snapped and broken.

  An ambulance had brought her to this hospital. I ran through the dark corridors looking for the fracture clinic. To my relief I came across two of Ellie’s friends, sitting on a bench outside the swing doors of the operating theatre. A nurse came out and to our surprise we were allowed into the white, arctic waste of dazzling walls and lights where Ellie lay having her leg bound from thigh to ankle in wet plaster of paris. A nurse from the hospice stroked her forehead.

  ‘Oh Ellie, you poor thing,’ I commiserated. ‘At least it’s not the same leg as before.’

  She opened her eyes and rolled them with that familiar look of weary exasperation.