The Spirits Inside The Walls

Like the spirit, it rises: the flesh and breath of bricks and mortar. You smell it when it rains, when the room is lit up yellow and the world outside is grey but full of bright umbrellas. Or when it lingers autumnal like logs in dampened woods speckled gold upon troweled earth. Likewise in spring when the grass is freshly mown, April-showered, refreshed. But on days like today, you smell it too. And mild as it was before the sky darkened over this Christmas, it hits you pure, crisp and clear as the season itself.

You step from your old childhood home, number ten on the door, walls roughcast in grey, and onto the pavement. No smoking allowed in the house, but that’s fair. No lighting up in front of the children, both yours and theirs. Your daughter who, along with her husband, owns the house now, doesn’t agree with it any more than your mum did – even less so, for whilst you remember Dad being sent to the garden, and later hiding out in the shed, Mum would frequently hand an ashtray to her guests.

‘Did you buy my cigarettes, Claudine?’

‘No, I couldn’t afford them. Had to send money to Patsy so you’ll just have to stop.’

‘Oh, well that’s that then, the children come first.’

And you did – you and Patsy. You knew this even then, when you were five, when Mum kept on cutting and stitching dresses and sending them to your sister, and there was no more after-tea following Dad up the path shared with Mr. Jaucis next door, or him stopping for a smoky breather to converse with his fellow Latvian in their native language.

Jaucis scared you, but you found him fascinating too. He had a big, round head full of sticky-up white hair, and he smelled like it did when Mum walked you down past the sewage works on the way to the wool shop. He had a great fleshy belly that wobbled when he laughed – ho-ho-ho – and holes in his jumper where his skin showed through. You didn’t like him speaking in English because then he would scold you… ‘I get the polis on you’ when your finger got trapped in the deckchair and you couldn’t stop screaming.

But Mum said Jaucis was good. He’d bought you a big chocolate swan one Easter when you’d never had chocolate before, and which you’d soon gobbled up, and he’d loaned her and Dad the money to buy the house back in nineteen-fifty-four - three-hundred filthy pound notes paid back in six months from her slaving away in the mill… ‘My god, the new door cost twice as much!’

You knew more however, some fifteen years later, when Dad was dying and Mum told you what his last words were, that he hated the coat that she wore - she didn’t suit poison-green - and in spite of her close-to-holy dedication and fidelity, she was always a far better mother than she ever was a wife… ‘Look after the children, dear…’ You were twenty, your sister thirty-five.

You close the white uPVC door which used to be hardwood green. ‘Olive’, your mum would tell every passer by whenever your dad repainted it, prouder still of knowing the colour’s proper name than she was of Dad never leaving a drip on the pavement, or on the red indoor step with the scuffed grey arc. There’s a mat there now, the step glossed black. No decades old marks caused by opening and shutting… Yet…

A final pull of the handle to ensure your daughter’s three cats don’t escape, and you light up to inhale.

You didn’t have cats in your day. You weren’t allowed any pets other than fish, and then only twice, although you did play with Ginger from number fourteen until his owner warned you off.

‘Jealous,’ Mum said, after Mrs. Munro had yelled at you to get your own cat. ‘Jealous like all Italian women.’ Jealous, too, that she only had sons – the ‘hoodlums’ Mum had spotted up on number fourteen’s roof in the days before the family moved in… ‘But it’s our mother’s house...’ ‘Oh well, just you carry on then …’

Your mum who came from Austria, once worked for Mrs. Munro in her chip shop. The venture didn’t end well. The ‘black rancid’ oil she insisted on using, and a heated public exchange with regard to Italian opera versus Weiner Lieder soon had your mother storming out… ‘You go sing…’ ‘No, you do, you crazy people are known for it…’ You never could work out who said what to whom...

Cigarette aglow, you walk to the end of the street, away from the music. The upbeat song plays, then fades, as a snow-globe, glitter-confetti-like scene on the wall-come-TV flickers through the window.

The Party House, you call it now, although you know it isn’t really. Your daughter and her husband may be young, but they’re sensible too. No, you’ve simply got your tongue in your cheek for that’s what you heard your mum was afraid you’d turn the place into if your inheritance wasn’t shared with your prodigal sister. Boris during Covid does cross your mind as well, still that wasn’t your number ten.

Patsy had no interest in the end - in Mum or in the property. A career girl, she’d made her own way, become successful, married well, so what did she want with her long-considered quarter share? And yet, she did accept it, and you have been keeping in touch. ‘Your mum, my dad,’ she says whenever you speak of the past.

You wanted the house far more than you did the money. However, keeping it in the family you considered the next best thing, and in hindsight it was the more sensible option. With your youngest two daughters still living at home, a two-bed plus box-room wouldn’t be nearly spacious enough. Besides, the house did require some costly renovation and you and your partner just didn’t possess the funds. Glee not greed, that’s you all over, the hedonist bent on nostalgia, but you’ve learned to be realistic, practical, pragmatic.

Party house! Mum was nearly a hundred when she died and you were fifty-seven. One year older now. You wonder if you might live a whole century too, then you squint at your lit cigarette, give a shrug and puff away.

Seven grown-up children (you never did do things by half), three grandkids, one deceased. A cot death. You believe that’s what finished Mum off – or began to. But even though you knew what was coming, and had been long-prepared for her death, it’s strange not having her here this Christmas. Strange, too, how everything in the house has been stripped out and turned around in a matter of months. Nice though. They’re decorators by trade, your daughter and hubby, so they know what they’re doing, and you’re sure that Dad, a plain and simple man, would have approved. No more mismatch floral colour-clash, all made safe and practically updated.

Tinkle, tinkle across the way, a windchime in the grounds of the church. Sold and converted some years ago, the building is now a split-level, open-plan dwelling, windows lit up in neon; hot pink and yellow, electric-blue, neo-classical arch. The sound is silver, bells on a sleigh – could be driven by Old Father Time, you think now your mood has turned poetically prophetic…

Sleigh. Or would that be slay? And how would you interpret the latter? More positive when young, that’s for sure…

Old Father Time, dressed up like Santa, whooshing his way through an air that’s surprisingly still…

You always did feel a draft on this corner, Mum told you this every time you set foot in the street, ‘so mind and keep your hood up, cover your mouth and nose with your scarf, and, for heaven’s sake, put something decent on before you catch pneumonia…’

‘Okay, Mum, I’ve buttoned my old faux fur, and I might even have a clean hankie in my pocket, but can’t promise it’s been ironed…’

You look to the sky, see only your clouds of smoke, retrace your steps, and walk on.

Victorian midnight, that’s how you see the homes either side of number ten. The street deserted, old people and death. Blacked-out windows despite all the cars parked up.

‘We were the young ones then,’ Mum told you. ‘In fifty-four. Still younger than most when you came along…’

Chitter-chatter over the garden fence between trays taken in and out of the oven, the condensation on the windows caused by the bursts of steam, the wipe-down cloths and those used for the dishes, you jumping down from the steps beside the old laurel.

‘Oh, Mrs Laurie, poor dear, you must come in for a sherry, you can’t be on your own on Christmas Day… My, my, you eat like a sparrow and your tiny hands are frozen…’

Dad preferred it to be just the three of you, four if Patsy showed face, but he only ever whispered his objections – and mainly after the event. Like when Mum bought her ‘height of fashion’ wine-coloured plastic three-piece-suite then complained Dad’s ‘fat' (Brylcreemed) head left marks on the back. Or when she insisted on apricot paint then decided it didn’t suit your living room anywhere near as well as it did her friend’s…

‘And you never, ever, thought to buy me a present, not so much as a card after all I’ve done for you…’

‘But, Claudine, you get all my wages…’

‘Oh, but Dad, you could keep something back…’

Mum never called Dad by his first name. This embarrasses you still… Your dad... And then there were his and Mum's silly arguments. Words exchanged over words.

 ‘It’s yow…’

‘It’s ewe...'

‘It’s yow. I learned it from a shepherd…’

The steps and the laurel are gone now, Mum had a porch built after Dad lost his leg. Your daughter intends to turn it into a catio…

Fun and games. That was yours and Dad’s thing. Draughts, Chess, Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, Three-Card Brag, Darts too for a while – those holes on the door of the shed, board hanging like a teardrop in the end.

Mum wasn’t a player… ‘Always me doing all the work…’ Her shouting through from the kitchen, the extra-loud clatter of pots and pans and crockery, it made your butt-cheeks clench and put you off your next move. But the year you got Monopoly the three of you played for so long that Mum forgot all about making Christmas dinner.

Yes, all fun and games, it surely was, like the candles lit during the powercuts, the fancy ones (because they were spirals) saved for Advent. One the first week, then two, then three, then the angel chimes would appear from their evermore battered box – a nightmare to assemble, till finally, ting, ting, ting, tin trumpets and wings flying in circles over the four Sunday flames.

The candles are scented now. You gift them to your children, burn them on a daily basis, just like the windchimes in the street might be still heard in the coming months. No occasion, just celebration. Or should that be the other way round? You’ve had ‘Joyfully Remembered’ inscribed on your parents' gravestone for you don’t agree with ‘Sadly Missed’ for those who have lived a full life. You know you can’t miss what you carry inside, what you smell in the air and walls which surround you, what you see as still being alive when you look at and speak with your children and their children too. When you look forward to what may be – another child perhaps, growing up in the same house, sleeping in the same bedroom as you did. What goes around, what proves immortal…

Bungalows surrounded your two-floor semi-detached, your garden path (and washhouse in the early days) shared with Jaucis. He died with a thump about a year after your dad but wasn’t found till some weeks later after the body turned putrid and the policeman on duty vomited in the street. You were married by then and had been up for a visit and thought you’d heard something, but no. The old man hadn’t spoken to Mum in years, not since she and a friend had cleaned his place up. His hospital-stay mid-seventies, his furniture bonfire, and no more chocolate swans for you, no more ho-ho-ho, and no more Latvian or broken English.

You recall his grey woolen socks, more darn than material, dripping, beans eaten straight from the can, grubby nets where he stood by the washhouse window, creepily watching (or possibly not) as you played beneath the clothes-line, paper boats capsized, felt-tipped passengers bleeding a rainbow of ink in the soap-sudded lake, then later when you sunbathed as a teen, and probably in the very same sticky-finger-torturing deckchair you’d been trapped by when he freaked you out in a different way.

The washhouse went some years before your parents’ and Jaucis’ friendship wound up in ashes; they bought his half out and extended the kitchen. Modernized then and untouched till this year when your daughter and hubby pulled back the oranges and lemons’ lino and discovered the ants. Mum had sworn they were real when she'd said she’d felt them crawling and the carer hadn’t believed her…

‘I’ll take you upstairs to bed now, Claudine, if that’s alright…?’

‘Yes, that’s fine. But you know I’ll just come down again…’

Narrow stairs. Had to have a handrail fitted. That’s gone now too, like the laurel and the steps and everything else except the key in your old bedroom door which has been stuck there forever, since well before nineteen-fifty-four…

They had to take the rail away. Couldn’t get the king-size bed in otherwise. The old (much smaller) one had to be lowered out through the window as was.

A glance down the close and you stub out your cigarette. Can’t see the garden, can’t see anything, but it’s there in your mind, and you know your mind’s eye sees best. Dad’s structured beds and lawn, his fruit trees… and the wilderness after he died and Mum took to manic planting. They’ve dug it all up now, didn’t take long, and they’ve bought a hot tub. A gazebo with fairy lights… Party House!

You’d call them Dinkies, your daughter and her man, except he’s six-foot seven, so ‘Double Income No Kids Yet’ does seem more apt. Like ‘no arguing with you, mate,’ when he takes the cats out on a leash.

He’s a bit like your old electrician who had to lower his head when he came in through the living room door, and Mum would call out ‘mind the step!’ Fell over it herself in the end. Had to remove all Dad’s hand-woven rugs. No carpet now either, they’ve opted for laminate. Good choice, easy clean, you’ve invested in it as well. A blessing when it comes to your grandkids, the youngest, a boy, the typical wrecking-ball... He reminds you of your five-year-old self….

‘Can’t take that wee one anywhere, breaks everything she touches… Don’t you dare press those buttons on the new TV, don’t pull at the decorations, you’ll have the tree down…’

They’ve changed the place where it sits, and its bigger and more becoming than the tree you remember; all bushy and tastefully decorated, white, silver and gold. No more the swinging gnome with his blank tin-foil book of carols, no more drunken crepe-paper angel with the pink-purple wings, no more ‘red light on top’. Your mum would insist on this every year. You never knew why, but you guess it was for much the same reason that she thought the red bulb in the hall would add a certain warmth until she realized one day, with a squeal of shock-horror, how its presence when viewed through the top-light, could possibly be misconstrued.

Unlike your mum, who lived to see her great-grandchildren born, your dad never knew your kids as he died too young, but the house is full now, a dozen today including partners and little ones, only three absentees – living ones. Your family take up the two luxurious sofas and a covered bench besides.

When you were a child, just the three of you was usual, barring Patsy now and then and the occasional neighbour, and you always had a sit-down dinner, not a buffet like today, hot-plates replacing the wide and bulky heaters which might have contained asbestos and cost a fortune to run and even more to remove… ‘You’ll get chilblains if you sit on that. You’ll burn it out…’ The warning on the back that read ‘Do Not Cover’ constantly pointed out.

There’s a different song playing when you step back inside. Fairytale of New York, but not the version you know – a new one - and they’re sitting around laughing and drinking, your second youngest on her boyfriend’s knee in a sequined Santa hat and dress which has risen up past her waist.

The table’s been cleared and folded away to be replaced by a lengthy electric keyboard, kids plink-plonking away and squabbling over whose turn it is, till someone pulls the plug out and the little boy’s older sister stands hands-on-hips giving cheek to her mum, to be quickly told off by Dad to ‘stop with the attitude’. The boy’s pulling crackers, ‘Chill’ on the front of his Christmas jumper, less of a whirlwind today. ‘Grandma, do you want to pull one too?’ Hehe, he wins again….

‘It’s funny without Great-Granny,’ his elder cousin says.

But there she is, smiling down from the wall by the door. A photo of her holding this girl as a baby, her first great-grandchild. There was a hole behind that picture once, a small one made by a nail, and you’d pushed one of Mum’s most-used needles inside it. Like for a game of Hunt the Thimble that she didn’t know she was playing. Heaven knows why...