Six visits - a ghost story

The first time I came back, there were still things that smelt of me. My shaving brush in our pristine white bathroom, my shirts in the wardrobe, a faint smell of cigarettes in my study so you can almost see me exhaling a cloud of white smoke into the easy green light of the vintage lamp-shades.

You’d noticed them too. Those stubborn smells. They ingrain into the fabrics of our suburban homes like they ingrain into our minds – one inhalation and you’re transported to another time, another time, another time…

The first time I came back I found you at the bedroom closet holding a dark green jumper that you’d bought for me. The wool itched like hell against my skin but I wore it anyway because I didn’t want to hurt you.

I never did, you know.

You were holding the coarse wool to your skin as if it were the delicate blush silk we saw in the souk on a holiday to Morocco once. You pressed the fabric to your mouth and inhaled the smell of my aftershave – cedarwood and vetiver, dark handsome smells. You could almost remember, at that moment, the sound of my laugh.

The second time I came back, my smell was less noticeable. It bothered me. You’d moved my shaving brush into the closet – not thrown away, not yet. The shirts were still in the wardrobe and the smell of cigarette smoke lingered in the study, but fainter now. The green wool jumper had echoes of cedarwood and vetiver but the depth of colour had drained out of the smell like your pale face blanching when you feel me pass through you.

That’s the funny thing – I am simply doing now, in a literal way, what I have always done metaphysically: in all our years of marriage I passed through you like water through wine, coloured and clouded your existence. Now I can actually walk through you – the old cliché about us being able to walk through walls is true. Sometimes I try and stand exactly inside you, follow each gesture of your small hands – gestures I know like the back of my hand, studied over years of watching you flick ash from a cigarette or rake hair from your eyes when you laughed. That offers me a small comfort – standing inside you, following your gestures. Your pale white hand, fingernails bitten and skin-picked at the cuticles, and the paler translucence of my own ethereal hand. Our hands together again at last in a mere shadow-dance of their old embrace.

It kills me again every time I pass through you – to see you flinch at the sudden cold you feel in your bones at my chill touch. You notice it. You notice me. But you don’t realise what you notice beyond feeling each hair on your spine stand up and a plummeting sensation in your gut - the vague bleak ache of almost encountering something long loved and hard lost.

And I was hard lost. I never realised before that I would be so missed. I never realised you would stand there with the green wool jumper and grieve my cedarwood and vetiver. I never realised you would dash hot salt from your eyes as you stood in my study forgetting already the contours of my face.

That’s one of the biggest downsides to my new condition of being dead: whereas you are cursed to forget me slowly and unstoppably, I am doomed with a clarity of memory unlike the living possess. It is my burden to carry just as it is yours to lose me piecemeal – the sound of my voice one day, the precise shade of my hair the next. I see you trying to clutch on to the memories like you clutch at the string of pearls round your neck that I gave you for your birthday. You visit the bedroom closet more and more but the smell on the green wool has shrivelled to the musty unused smell of charity shop clothes – Did somebody die in these? That was the joke you made at the Oxfam over the lousy pair of grey chinos I’d picked out. You dug me in the ribs and whispered, Who died in these? The laugh flashed across your face like fleeting sunshine in rain-shadowed cloud banks – you were stressed that day because I had taken a dark turn in the forest of my mind and you couldn’t reach me to bring me home. You paced outside the charity shop and gobbled up Marlborough Lites in a restless cloud of smoke that ravelled round your throat like a scarf.

The third time I came back, my smell was gone completely. You still took the green wool jumper out from time to time but the mean fist of disappointment always got you in the gut for that. Of course I checked the bathroom cabinet and of course you had disposed of my shaving kit – I knew it before I opened the plush white and steel door of the cabinet we’d had fitted only months before it happened. It is time, you said to yourself, as if the concept of time makes any sense to you any more. Grief blinds you to the passing of the days. You let the letters pile up on the doormat, you let regrets pile up in your mind like so many small stones until you find yourself carrying the dead weight of a skullful of rocks. Your head pounds, you reach for the aspirin, later for a malbec that slips from the bottle like a red velvet ribbon and is every bit as difficult to swallow. You gag on the crimson fabric of the wine, a sob rises from your chest, the wine only muffles it, muffles it, muffles it. I wonder, when I open the bathroom cabinet and see the empty space on the shelf where my shaving kit was, if you heard the creak of the cabinet door in your sleep, if you pulled the duvet around your ears, a feathered fortress against things that go bump in the night.

The fourth time I came back, you were not there. I took the opportunity to leaf through the papers on my desk. You haven’t had the heart to touch them yet. It is the last room you’ve left, the study, because it was my room and life must go on in bedrooms and kitchens and sitting rooms. The shirts and green wool jumper had also vanished now as if they too were ghosts – ghost-garments that would haunt the same charity shop we’d laughed in, limp and unfilled on their hangers. You’d always teased me for wearing too much ‘drab’ – you were the colour to my beige, you were the sun to my moon, the light to my darkness. When we’d married, there were whispers in the family: What business does she have to be walking up the aisle with a manic depressive? I suppose in my final frenzy that was both a farewell and a fuck you to the world I proved them all right.

I’m sorry, I whisper, but the words are ghosts of themselves, pale imitations of apology.

In the papers in the study, there is nothing to see. An unpaid bill that will never be paid, a picture drawn by our granddaughter, half of the invites to your birthday party that I was writing when it happened. The only note I really want to see is noteworthy by it’s absence. I feel the lack of the last letter I left on the desk, neatly folded and addressed to you in my spidery black hand that was only a little more shaky than usual, like I feel your absence from me. I remember exactly where I left it, tucked under the snow-globe you gave me one Christmas with its cutesy little world of teddy bears in red and white Santa suits that’s only a little shake away from being a blind flurry of blizzard. That’s how my world always felt, you know: one little shake and a blizzard of unease would sting my eyes and howl my ears to deafness.

The fifth time I came back, the study door was shut. I noticed you’d moved the tiny urn from the mantle-piece too – you had scattered my ashes weeks ago at the park where we had courted, as dizzy with grief as we were then with lovers’ impatience to fall headlong into each other. You picked up conkers and pocketed them like small talismans the day of the memorial. It felt good to have something very hard and very smooth between the pocketed fingers of one hand as the other threw my ashes to blind the wind’s eyes. The priest also throws his words to the wind, humble comforts that you half-hear above the yowling of a November north-westerly. You stamp your feet and dig for warmth in your pockets. On the way home, you laugh with the others about my old quirks and catchphrases and your laughter has the airy sunshine of a Spring day echoing with light after storms. I follow you at what I have judged a seemly distance (I did not wish you to feel the cold ghost-touch on your arm today at the memorial) and now I, too, smile as you recount the story of how we met.

It was a blind date to the botanic gardens arranged by mutual friends. The hothouses were stifling and sweat beaded on my forehead and I regretted wearing the heavy flannel shirt. I was anxious – you were beautiful. We talked of our dreams to travel, touring the world in our minds as we read the exotic placenames on the labels of the plants – Jaipur, Malaysia, Nicaragua, their names read like spells. By the end of the date we were holding hands and you were impressing me with your knowledge of the tiny curl-backed ferns and plump squat cacti. Your eyes were dashed with diamonds as you spoke, the scintillation of a fresh young mind at work. I kissed you beneath the Indian vines and the smell of your vanilla chap-stick mixed with the smell of the desert rose whose flowers bloomed like the first recognition of a kindred soul.

The sixth time I came back, I knew instantly that I would not return. I do not want your dreams haunted by the memory of my suicide forever and I may be a ghost but the living have a habit of noticing our shyly-left clues – the pile of papers in the study moved and no through-draft to have shuffled its ghostly fingers through them, a bathroom cabinet door left ajar, a wool jumper refolded out of habit when you’d left it scrunched up in a fit of weeping. We must keep the secrets of the dead. These half-snatched glimpses of us that the living may glean at midnight in the wicked dry laughter of a door-hinge or creak of an untrustworthy floorboard are the only clues we may leave. You will shiver and turn on the light and reach for the water on the bedside table to ease the sudden dryness in your mouth. You will sleep a little uneasily that night but you are not a believer in the supernatural. You do not believe in me, just like I did not believe in myself. I want life to go on for you, I want laughter to go on for you. I want you to heal from the loss of me, and lead, with my blessing, a life less haunted than mine.

And so I will not come back again, but pray only that we may meet again one day, when you too will be no more than a breath down someone’s neck in the night and a wandering stranger in the darkness, to touch hands once more, spirit to spirit, like we always did...