The Migration of Ghosts

by Pauline Melville

  By the time Gita and the others had clambered over the field to join them, the table stood slightly unevenly in front of the coconut trees, covered by the tablecloth. The small group of new arrivals stood chatting for a while in the tattered shadows of the stunted palms. The shining coconut leaves moved in the breeze like green plastic flails. Dried grass and clay-soil stuck to Adriana’s shoes. She stood and watched, mystified, as the others continued with the business in hand.

  Under the open sky, they struggled to set ten chairs in place, four on each side of the table and one at each end. Baskets of food were unpacked. Gita laid out the silverware that glinted in the sunshine. Pride of place in the centre of the table was given to a rich dark plum fruit-cake with plenty of whisky in it, resplendent on its tall, silver-plated cake-stand. Gita carefully placed Auntie May’s silver candelabras on either side of it. Gradually, the long table was laid as if for a Victorian high tea. Plates of hard biscuits, every sort of sandwich, cucumber and tomato salads, dishes of preserves, relish, plums, prunes, stewed apricots, silver teapots, decorated plates of Staffordshire china, Royal Doulton china, silver milk-jugs, silver tankards, all crowded on to the table. The wealth of the display was in the greatest possible contrast to the appearance of the people who carried out the tasks, each one of whom was poorly dressed in faded, skimpy, stained and ill-fitting clothes and cheap shoes. Everyone worked quickly because flies and marabunta hornets were already inviting themselves to the feast.

  When it was finished and the table, aslant under the afternoon sun, was heaped with food, the group stood back to admire their handiwork. Then they each selected a chair and stood behind it and Adriana heard the words of what sounded like a hymn being sung, accompanied by a drum. The voices, some shrill and some deep, were raised together in an unpractised chorus which petered out towards the end.

  ‘That will make the ones that does bury round here feel nice,’ said Gita, mopping her brow and re-tying her headscarf as she came back to where Adriana waited.

  ‘I hope it does keep the Scottish doctor happy,’ added one of the other women doubtfully. ‘His jumbie supposed to rise up from the burial ground and inject passers-by. If you see him you must cut a hank of ’e hair and tie it to a cabbage palm.’ She frowned blindly into the sun.

  The group looked back with pride at the fine display. There was a palpable feeling of satisfaction amongst them as they abandoned the laden table to its fate and made their way back to the road across the lumpen field, fixing the arrangements as to who would collect up the dishes and silverware next day. Then they said their goodbyes and made their way down the still muddy road.

  As the rest of the group dispersed, Gita and Adriana waited at the roadside, hoping to hitch a lift back to where they could catch a mini-bus. Black clouds fringed with opal light threatened rain again. After a while, the sun set behind the trees, making the whole coconut grove look as if it were suddenly engulfed in a fiery orange blaze. The table stood on its own beneath the lengthening shadows of the trees. A pyramid of mosquitoes danced over the cake. Gradually, the uproar of sunset subsided and slid below the horizon leaving only the white tablecloth to glimmer in the darkness.

  Gita finally explained.

  ‘Every year we does conduct a ceremony in order to appease the spirits of the English dead who bury across de road right here. We does leave de table piled with food for dem jus’ so. Whoever arrive first in the morning gathers together de crockery and silverware. It is always de same story. Nothing ever stolen. Silverware, dishes and tablecloth always remain intact, jus’ how we leave dem. But de food has always been attacked, gnawed and scattered, whether by animals or ravenous English spirits we ain’ too sure. Abdul will bring back your aunt’s property early tomorrow. It will be safe. That is de English Table Wuk. You see it now?’

  Adriana absorbed the information in silence. Bats began to flit overhead. The two of them waited by the unkempt burial ground, the remnants of old tombstones sticking up like broken teeth planted in the ground. Adriana leaned over to try and decipher the names on one or two of the stones. She made out some English names and one Dutch family grave.

  After about a quarter of an hour, the headlights of a car approached them slowly along the rutted road in the dusk. The driver stopped to pick them up.

  As they climbed into the vehicle, Adriana enquired curiously, ‘But what about the Dutch people buried nearby? I saw a Dutch grave. Is nothing ever done for them?’

  Gita looked at Adriana in amazement and laughed a scornful laugh as she folded the empty bags on her lap, holding on to the open window as the car set off again down the uneven road.

  ‘You head ain’ good or what? Everybody knows that the spirits of the Dutch are unappeasable.’ The car took off, leaving behind the table, a faint glimmer in the night.

  A Note on the Author

  Pauline Melville’s first book, Shape-shifter, a collection of short stories, won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best first book. Her novel, The Ventriloquist’s Tale, won the Whitbread First Novel Award.

  By the Same Author

  SHAPE-SHIFTER

  THE VENTRILOQUIST’S TALE

  PRAISE FOR THE MIGRATION OF GHOSTS

  ‘The most startling aspect of Melville’s short stories is their fierce, almost daring topicality. It was only a matter of time before Diana’s death found its way into art and literature, but Gordon Brown? I was alternately surprised and amused by this unique storymaker’

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Ghosts, spirits, premonitions and dreams are the imaginative backdrop for Pauline Melville’s extraordinary new collection of short stories. Like her first two award-winning books, these stories may leave the conventions of literary realism such as fixed place and time behind, but they offer a different kind of truth … Melville writes about the surreal otherness, of our daily lives … A dazzling original use of language … Sharp wit and many comically bizarre moments … Melville’s stories are like a benign duende: irrepressibly sprited stories reminding us how much we miss by ignoring the ghosts, shadows and magic all around us’

  Scotsman

  ‘Captivating . . Truly memorable’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Steaming between the jungles of Guyana and the heady, sweaty atmosphere of the Notting Hill Carnival via Andalucia, Soho, Nigeria and Paris, The Migration of Ghosts sizzles with vibrant life … Restrained, yet with a tamult of ideas pulsing just beneath the surface … Joy and wonder in life commingle with the undercurrent flowing through all Melville’s stories here, of death, of ghosts moving through the temporal and spiritual world: universal stories retold by a consummate story-teller. Read it – this book is hot, hot, hot’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘Melville pinpoints her characters at moments of self-discovery and revelation. She is adept at giving voice to the silent observers of life, the dispossessed, the nameless oppressed … This is Melville writing at the top of her form, with characterisations that dance off the page … Prize adjudicators for 1998 should start here’

  Sunday Times

  ‘She has the rare ability to make deeply foreign experiences, such as self-starvation or life in a Guyanan women’s gaol, both intriguingly exotic and intelligibly familiar’

  TLS

  ‘Melville’s cool and mischievous eye, and her relish for language and ideas, are manifest across the dazzling span of these stories … Melville’s stories triumphantly fix such ghostly epiphanies, with a wit and a prose to savour’

  Guardian

  ‘Melville is as happy in the world of spirits as she is in the world of the living’

  The Times

  ‘A fascinating collection’

  Time Out

  ‘Pauline Melville’s Anglo-Caribbean background gives her work a rare cultural diversity … Wonderful’

  Independent

  ‘Her rich repertoire of voices is drawn from her own experience in cros
sing cultures and frontiers’

  Literary Review

  ‘Magical’

  She

  First published 1998

  This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 1998 by Pauline Melville

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ‘The President’s Exile’ first appeared in New Writing 6, Eds. A.S. Byatt and Peter Porter (Vintage in association with the British Council, 1997)

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  eISBN: 978-1-4088-4776-3

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