Bella Ciao

Until I met the man with the accordion, I wasn’t the kind of person who believed in ghosts. 

*

Who am I, you might be wondering? 

Well, the name isn’t important. But some details are. Yes, it is a ‘cardinal sin’ of storytelling to dump information in the exposition, but some sins are needed to live life effectively. I’m a 29 year-old English teacher who lives in London. Where I’m from is not important - what’s really salient here is that I’m not a nut-job. I don’t buy into conspiracies, I don’t do drugs and I enjoy the odd drink, but not enough to warp any perceptions - besides, people who don’t have the occasional glass of wine should have their search history reviewed. I’ve never been one to look for answers to the mysteries of the universe. To me, the fact that we are even alive is incredible enough. 

Look, I’m trying to get away from any of those ‘unreliable narrator’ tropes you might be familiar with. Can I really trust this guy? Did he really see what he said he saw? 

The short answer is yes. And when I explain the whole story, any time you find yourself wondering if it really happened, or if I am embellishing, I want you to think about your strongest memory. What if someone were to tell you that you were making it up? How would you convince them that you did, in fact, trip on the way across the stage at your graduation and you can still remember how your face flushed with embarrassment or that eggplant parmigiana was the last meal you had with your mother before she died and that you can still taste how she used a little too much garlic in the sauce because she knew you liked it that way?

You would rely on the details. 

And hope that whoever you are trying to communicate with believes you. 

*

My story starts on a clear October afternoon on the south bank of the Thames. 

I can remember everything about that moment - the crispness in the air, the sound of chatter from tourists and school groups wandering around. 

I was standing against the railing having a smoke (nasty habit, I know, but at this point I seem to collect them like stamps) looking across the river, thinking about the juxtaposition of this place - the beauty, the grit, the history - when I first heard the song. It was distant, as sounds can be when your mind first latches onto them, but after a few seconds my inner-ear was able to sort through the ambient noise of a busy Friday afternoon to the sound of an accordion. It, in typical accordion fashion, sounded jaunty and uneven, a melody floating above sharp chords. It didn’t take long for me to identify the melody - it was an old Italian anti-facist song called Bella Ciao. I can’t tell you where I’d heard it, but I just knew it. There, on the steps going up to the Tate, was an old man. He had grey, well, everything. From where I was standing I could barely tell if he was there - as if I blinked he might disappear. 

I had a pound coin in my pocket, so I made my way over to him and saw the dark (grey) bags under his eyes and the deep furrows that sunk into his haggard face almost violently, as if clawing towards his bones. And yet, the song kept going - and it seemed to be getting faster. 

I smiled at him and went to drop the pound coin into his outspread case when it happened. 

I can still hear the sound of the coin hitting the pavement. I had turned to walk on after dropping the coin and even managed a few steps before my mind caught up - if the coin hit the ground, then… 

I turned to look for the man and he was gone. Accordion and all. 

*

After meeting the man, I went home and had a quiet night of pizza, a couple of beers and some stand-up. I could hear the faint pulse of the song the man with the accordion played even as I watched Bill Burr raving about whatever makes him angry these days. It was fainter now and resembled the sensation when you have a song with a catchy hook caught in your head. 

By the time I started to drift off, the song had faded to the background. It was in those liminal moments between sleep and wake that he came to me for the second time. 

He approached softly, with no malice, floating beside the window. When I opened my eyes, he had placed his face right against the window and I could feel a breeze that seemed to be moving through the window. The song was so loud but clear and crisp and it floated over me, making me sit up straight so I was face to face with the spectre.

I bargained with him then - I begged him to leave me alone. I didn’t hurt him and what did he want from me anyway? 

His eyes locked with mine and seemed to beckon me. They were not grey: they were a cold, cobalt blue that made me feel colder than I ever had before. 

*

The next morning and all it took was a strong cup of coffee and some toast with peanut butter to put it all behind me. In that moment of uncertainty, I did what most people do - rationalise and equivocate and obfuscate my way to a comfortable reality. It was a dream, the guy wasn’t actually there on the south bank, it was just something in the corner of my eye. 

The human brain will go to amazing lengths to protect itself from something harmful, even when that thing is the brain itself. But I had no choice at that point. I had to meet a friend for coffee. 

*

You may wonder why this is significant enough to mention in a ghost story; to that I reply, like a meteorologist, I don’t make the weather, I just report it. I was meeting a friend from work who was having girl problems. He was a bit sulky and needed someone to sulk to and me, being the local sulking-bag, seemed the appropriate choice. 

So I got there and we found a seat by the window. Minutes later and we were in front of overpriced and redundantly named caffeinated beverages. I was doing my best at pretending to actively listen but I couldn’t help my eyes wandering to the pavement outside when I saw him. He walked slowly with his accordion and his grey, sloping gait and his face was a tight scowl.

I won’t lie to you, this one shook me a little. It was the way he moved that seemed… malicious. I’m all for a friendly ghost - shit, I was raised on Casper. But a ghost that wants to hurt you is no bueno. 

The song was loud now in the ears inside of my head and he got up close to the window. If I believed in God I would swear to him (or her) that this man’s breath fogged up the damn mirror. This time, he mouthed a word to me: Listen. 

That was all. He stared at me again, of course, to drive the point home. But by that point I had already spilled my mocha-frappe-whatever all over myself and my friend was clued in to the fact there was something else going on outside of his girl problems - he might have even felt a chill as well. 

*

He came to me again on the tube home. As I approached Wapping, I started to feel cold. Above me, the lights flickered and for half a second there was darkness. When the lights came back on he was in front of me; it was like standing in a freezer. The song played in my head quietly and somehow this was even more disconcerting. The closer he got to me, the colder I felt until his grey hand moved towards me and into me. It was as if my insides had been replaced with ice. So when the train stopped at Wapping, which was still seven stops away from where I wanted to go, I ran off, rubbing my arms to get some feeling back in them.

Once I got off the train, he started walking in front of me. Of course, I didn’t follow him right away but after a moment, he turned around and fixed his glacier eyes to me and I felt the cold descend on me through his eyes and I followed him. He, or I guess we, now had somewhere to be.  

I didn’t think I had any other choice. 

*

Off we went through East London. It was kind of cool walking behind the spectre as anytime someone was near him he would just go right through them. Through twists and turns, cobblestones and alleys, I followed him and the song from his spectral accordion that was always playing for me started to get louder. When we got to Cable Street he started to slow down; Bella Ciao was nearly deafening now. He cut through a few more alleyways and we ended up in front of a derelict old building. It had evidently been a small home at some point but was nearly falling apart. 

The grey man turned to me and pointed. To say I shuddered would be the understatement of the century - of course he wanted me to go into an abandoned building. But it wasn’t like I had a choice. In fact, I have my doubts about choice; I think it’s actually an illusion. But I digress. 

He walked in through the wall (of course) and left me to use a door that was rotten and falling apart. I pushed it open and ended up in a foyer that was full of dust, spiderwebs and in that moment, in my mind, my impending doom. For the first time in a long time, the music stopped. The grey man stood in front of a peeling door and I approached it. He pointed toward the door and mouthed the word see. In the silence of the tomb, I made my way forward, clasped the door handle that was inexplicably cold and turned it. 

*

Walking into the room, everything got really blurry as if I had just taken an elbow to the head. I rubbed my eyes and as my vision came back, let out an audible gasp. 

It wasn’t just that the room was newer - it seemed brilliant, rendered in high definition, sparkling. It was all so different from the foyer that I didn’t notice the girl sitting in the corner. She was not grey but very much alive, with dark brown hair and inquisitive, intelligent eyes; she wore a blue dress that shimmered with an electric intensity. She was tuning the reeds of an accordion and those eyes were alternating between her work and a clock in the corner of the room.  

Inferring that I had entered into a sort of Christmas Carol situation, I figured that she couldn’t see me so I stood and watched her nimble fingers on the reeds.

It had only been a few minutes when there was commotion outside the room and the door burst open. 

What happened next, in that moment, happened incredibly quickly. Thanks to memory and dreams that will likely plague me until my dying day, I can relay each moment to you with exceptional clarity. 

The first thing I noticed was actually a person - the grey man, looking alive and very much not grey, was pushed into the room by three other men. Now, while he was not grey, he was gaunt, lean and haggard. I studied his face and noticed that underneath the weariness and fear he wore was a burning flame of passion and anger. 

The girl who must have been his daughter was standing and shouting but this realm of the past I had entered had taken her voice. I studied the men who now held this once grey man and noticed how they all looked the same: they were tall and wiry, unmistakably British and unmistakably angry. They held their knives low, up against the man’s back and appeared to be growling threats to him. They were conferring amongst themselves and in the silence of the past all it took was one of them to point at the girl for me to know what was about to happen. 

He would have figured it out in the moment, too, and it is when he does that he acts, channelling all of the hatred back at these men who hate him not for who he is but how he was born, the stories they had heard about his ancestors, the inferiority, the lies and the bile spewed for thousands of years. He kicked at one of them and managed to send the knife clattering across the floor. The other two were on him before he could get to it; the killing blow was swift and delivered just under the rib cage. 

He crumpled to the floor. 

The girl moved across the room in a blur and retrieved the knife. By this point, I had tears streaming from my eyes and I was screaming but in the silence of history I could make no sound. 

Her father reached his hand out as blood started to pour out of his mouth. The men turned towards the girl and their eyes narrowed and their faces grew reptilian with hunger as they realised they had waded deep enough in blood that they must continue on and they shuffled towards her with deathly certainty.

The girl held the knife out at them but they did not stop; she raised it to her throat and as she locked eyes with her father (there was love in her eyes, not fear but love, even at the end she died with love in her eyes) and drew the knife across her throat. 

*

I became dizzy again after that and when I could see, I realised the room had returned to what it would have looked like in modern times, which was dark and dusty and grey. I half expected to find bones or a blood stain but that only happens in the movies; all there was was dust and dirt. The grey man stood in the corner of the room but he did not face me.

I don’t know why I spoke to him then; perhaps it was the shock of what I had just seen or the pain of what he had endured. 

“If-if that was you… I’m so sorry. For what they did to you. To your…” 

I couldn’t bring myself to say the word. He didn’t turn to me until a few moments later. 

“What can I do? How can I help? Is she… with you? Wherever you are.” 

He shook his head. His eyes focused on the ceiling and then he turned back to the wall. 

I looked around the room for something, anything that might act as a clue. In the corner, against the wall, was a battered case. I went to it, blew the dust off and opened it: inside was an accordion that clearly hadn’t been played (or tuned) for a very long time. 

I closed the case, picked it up and carried it towards the door. Removing or even rescuing the accordion seemed like a good place to start. When I got to the door it was still cold and still locked. 

“Sir, I don’t know what to do. And I’m sorry. But please let me go. I-I just don’t know what to do.”

He turned to me for the last time and somehow, through the grey and the realms between us, his eyes found mine and there was real longing, real despair in them. He mouthed one final word to me: free. 

It hit me then, like all ideas do, with the subtlety of a brick through a window. It was this house that was holding them, this house that was chaining them down. It was this house that was their curse. I knew what I needed to do and reached into my pocket for my lighter. 

Of course, the rational part of my brain was firing distress signals at an alarming rate, thinking that I may be starting a fire in a room that I was locked into. But after what I had seen, after how his eyes had found mine that last time, I knew. I lit the curtains across from the door and ran away from them, hoping I would find my own freedom and not a fiery death. The door didn’t open at first until it did and I ran out. I only looked back once but the grey man wasn’t there. 

When I got back outside, I grabbed my phone and punched in the three digits required in these situations. 

“Hi, I’d like to report a fire. Yea, uh, 38 Cable Street.” 

I hung up and kept walking as I could hear the flames growing hungrier inside the house. The smoke was already pouring out of the windows and the heat was getting unbearable. I was safely across the street when I stopped to look once more - the flames had made their way to the roof. There, in the smoke - though I will never be sure if what I saw at the end was real or not, because some things like ash and smoke and dust and bone and life and death and ghosts and angels are just so much alike that you can’t tell the difference - I thought I saw two grey figures floating towards the sky, away from the dust and away from the grey, and wherever they might go, it didn’t matter as long as they were together.