Authors: John Banville
“What?” she said snappishly. “What did you say?”
I felt a piercing cold.
“I said, the place is haunted.” I was laughing now, unmanageable, feathery gasps of laughter burbling out of me.
Another silence.
“You are your own ghost,” Lydia said, with angry haste, and I heard the receiver drop with a crash into its cradle an instant before the connection broke, she too all at once become phantom, fading into air and distance.
It was not the first time I had seen a ghost in this house. One day, when I was a boy, in the dreamy boredom of a summer afternoon I climbed up the unlit steep stairs to the garret, drawn there at who knows what behest. The room was hot under the slanted, low ceiling. Someone, my mother, I suppose, in one of her periodic doomed attempts at thriftiness, had spread shallots on the bare wooden floor to preserve them for a winter that now was long past, and the air was spiced with their sweet decayed dry odour, stirring in me a tangle of indistinct rememberings. There was a single, small window here, round, like a porthole, at which I was leaning, peering out vacantly through the dusty pane into an immensity of dense blue air, when something, not a sound but a sort of tightening in the atmosphere of the room, made me turn my head. I expected it would be one of the lodgers; sometimes on my prowls I would meet one of the more peculiar among them, creeping about, looking for something to spy on or to steal, I suppose. But it was not a lodger. It was my dead father, standing in the open doorway, as real as in life, dressed in striped pyjamas and shoes without laces and an old wheat-coloured cardigan, the same attire that he had worn every day in the long last months of his dying. He held himself stooped in an attitude of indecision, not looking at me, apparently unaware of me, with his head inclined a little, listening, it might be, or trying to recollect something, to capture some stray thought. After a moment he seemed to give up the effort, whatever it was, and shrugged, letting one shoulder droop in that way that he had, and turned and ducked through the doorway out to the stairs and was gone.
I was not frightened. I would have been, I am sure, had he looked directly at me, or given some sign that he knew I was there. As it was, I was only puzzled, and curious, too, of course. Afterwards, I supposed I had been asleep somehow, in some kind of waking sleep, or trance, although there had been no moment at which I had felt myself coming to. I thought of telling my mother what I had seen, and even went down through the house in search of her, but when I found her I was overcome by a sort of shyness, and knew that I must preserve the visit, or haunting, or whatever it had been, against the contamination of a mere recounting of it. For I believed I had been privileged, a privileged witness to some bit of intimate and perhaps momentous business, as when at school one day passing by an empty classroom I had glimpsed a teacher, a youngish man with red hair—I can still see him, so clearly—standing by the blackboard with a letter in his hands, weeping lavishly, his shoulders shaking, with dark stains on his soutane where the tears were splashing.
For a long time after I saw my father everything was bathed in a faint glow of strangeness, an unearthly radiance. The world seemed tilted slightly out of true. Now, all these years later, when I saw the woman in the kitchen, I thought at once that I must have conjured up the apparition in order that it might have the same effect, that is, to make me disoriented, and alienate me from my surroundings and from myself. For I had determined, from the moment Lydia had left me on the doorstep and driven away with tears in her eyes, that I would not let myself become accustomed to the new life I had entered into on the site of the old, and had been angry to discover straight away that I was failing. To be watchful and attentive of everything, to be vigilant against complacency, to resist habituation, these were my aims in coming here. I would catch myself, red-handed, in the act of living; alone, without an audience of any kind, I would cease from performing and simply
be.
And what would be my register of being if not things, the more commonplace the better? Yet almost immediately I found myself settling down in these once familiar surroundings and letting them be so again, with all my plans and pledges forgotten. Even the first sight of my old room had affected me hardly at all; what makes for presence if not absence?—I mean the presence of oneself as a remembered other—and I might as well never have gone away, so little of me was there, to be pondered on or grasped.
Making strange,
people hereabouts say when a child wails at the sudden appearance of a visitor; how was I to make strange now, and not stop making strange? How was I to fight the deadening force of custom? In a month, in a week, I told myself, the old delusion of belonging would have re-established itself irremediably.
So if the purpose of the appearance of this ghost is to dislocate me and keep me thrown off balance, am I indeed projecting it out of my own fancy, or does it come from some outside source? Both, somehow, it seems, although I do not understand how that can be. That glimpse through the kitchen doorway was the first of many such sightings, brief, diaphanous, gleamingly translucent, like a series of photographs blown up to life-size and for a moment made wanly animate. What happens in them continues to be remarkable only in its being unremarkable, the woman going about what seem to be commonplace tasks—nothing is definite in the dimension in which she exists—or just standing, silent, lost in reverie. It is not possible to make out her features properly. That is, I see the scenes in photographic sharpness, but the figures themselves are not finally realised, their features not fully developed, as if they had moved a fraction while the plate was still being exposed. The child in particular is unfixed; I do not know why I even call it a child, so vague and amorphous is its form; it is the mere idea of a child, no more. They are still growing into existence, these shadows made of light, or perhaps they existed once and are fading now. Whatever they are engaged in, whatever attitude they strike, they seem always somehow guardedly at attention. Have they, I wonder, on their side, an intimation of my presence? Am I to them what they are to me, a fleeting brightness glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, through a doorway, or pausing for a second on the stairs and then vanishing with a noiseless sigh? And it is not just these two—that is, they are the ones I see, if see is the word, but there is the sense of others, too, a world of unseen others, through which this woman and her formless child move, and in which they have their life, if life is the word.
I am not afraid of them, just as I was not afraid when my father appeared to me that day in the garret. There is too much the sense of striving, of large and melancholy effort on their part, for them to be truly frightening. Some intricate system, elaborate yet mundane, an unknown unity, some little lost and desolated order, is trying to put itself into place here, to assemble itself within the illfitting frame of the house and its contents. I am convinced they are making the effort not only out of an unavoidable compulsion— these creatures are struggling somehow to
come to being
—but that it is for my benefit, too. I believe these phenomena are in some way concentrated on me and my state, intricately involved in the problem of whatever it is that has gone wrong with me. There is pathos in the notion of this poor half-developed world struggling blindly, in bafflement, perhaps in pain, to come fully to life, so that I might . . . what? Have something demonstrated to me? Be a witness? Be instructed? Or is it, I ask myself, is it that something is trying to exist
through me,
to find some form of being,
in me
? For although I speak of them appearing outside of me, a moving spectacle, like figures on a stage, in fact—in fact!—I am amongst them, I am of them, and they are of me, my familiars.
Familiars, yes—that is what is strangest, that I find it all not strange at all. Everything here is twilight and half dream, yet the appearance of these phantoms is naggingly insinuative, as if I should, or would, know them. There is something in them of those ancestral resemblances that will spring unnervingly up at one from the cradle or the deathbed. They hover maddeningly at the tip of my mind, as a sought-for word will hover on the tip of the tongue. They have that air of inscrutable significance that will surround people encountered the morning after a troubling dream in which they have figured. And indeed, the visions themselves work a similar effect, lending to this or that piece of the humble appurtenances of my new life a passing spectral significance. When I speak of them being at the table, or the range, or standing on the stairs, it is not the actual stairs or range or table that I mean. They have their own furniture, in their own world. It looks like the solid stuff among which I move, but it is not the same, or is the same at another stage of existence. Both sets of things, the phantom and the real, strike up a resonance together, a chiming. If the ghostly scene has a chair in it, say, that the woman is sitting on, and that occupies the same space as a real chair in the real kitchen, and is superimposed on it, however ill the fit, the result will be that when the scene vanishes the real chair will retain a sort of aura, will blush, almost, in the surprise of being singled out and fixed upon, of being lighted upon, in this fashion. The effect soon fades, however, and then the chair, the real chair, will step back, as it were, out of the spotlight, and take its accustomed place in dim anonymity, and I will cease to notice it, try as I might to go on paying deference to this plain thing that has known its numinous moment.
I have come to distrust even the solidest objects, uncertain if they are not merely representations of themselves that might in a moment flicker and fade. The actual has taken on a tense, trembling quality. Everything is poised for dissolution. Yet never in my life, so it seems, have I been so close up to the very stuff of the world, even as the world itself shimmers and turns transparent before my eyes. There are dreams in which one seems to live more vividly than in life. I have my moments of impatient incredulity when, a troubled sleeper, I will seem to struggle out of this dream-world into the sweaty bewilderment of waking. But then one of those translucent images will flash along the edges of my vision and I will realise that I am not awake, or that I am awake and all this that had seemed a dream is no dream at all. The line between delusion and whatever is its opposite has for me grown faint to the point of vanishing. I am neither sleeping nor awake, but in some fuddled middle state between the two; it is like being half tight all the time, a transcendent tipsiness.
The suggestion of the familial the phantoms bring with them makes me wonder if they might be the form of a rejected life coming back to claim me. After all, here I am, living in the house of the dead. It is such a strange sensation, being once more among the surroundings of my growing up. I was never fully at home here. If the lodgers led unreal lives, so too did we, the permanent inhabitants, so called. Doubtless this is a reason why the apparitions do not frighten me, that the place was always haunted. I spent my childhood among alien presences, ghostly figures. How meek they were, our lodgers, how self-effacing, blurring themselves to a sort of murmur in the house. I would meet them on the stairs, squirming sideways as they edged past me and smiling their fixed smiles of pained politeness. In what was called the dining room they would sit stooped over their plates of rashers or meat and mash in the watchful, downcast attitude of children being punished. At night I would seem to hear their presence all around me, a tossing, a shifting, a low, restless sighing. Now here I am, a lodger myself, no more real than the phantoms that appear to me, a shadow among insubstantial shadows.
What is it about the past that makes the present by comparison seem so pallid and weightless? My father, for instance, is more alive to me now than he was when he was living. Even my mother was not wholly there for me until she had safely become a memory. I see them as a sort of archaic double-act, a Baucis and Philemon, bound together here, tending to the needs of others, both of them slowly turning to grey stone as the days rose and fell, each new day indistinguishable from the one that had gone before, slow grains accumulating, becoming the years. As a child I took it that when the time came for me to leave they would stand back, two humble caryatids holding up the portal to my future, watching patiently, in uncomplaining puzzlement, as I strode away from them with hardly a backward glance, each league that I covered making me not smaller but steadily more vast, their overgrown, incomprehensible son. When they died I did not grieve for them. And so I ask myself, are these hauntings now their revenge, a forcing on me of some part of a lost life I did not attend to properly when I had the chance? Are they demanding the due of mourning that I did not pay? For there is a sense of sorrow here, and of regret; of promises unkept, of promise unfulfilled.
In those first days alone here I saw no one, or not in the flesh, at least. After the call from Lydia I would not answer the telephone, and grew so to fear its abrupt harsh summonings that in the end I disconnected it. Such silence after that! I let myself sink down into it as into some motionless warm sustaining stuff. But I did not bask, no, I did not. In the beginning I was all energy, up and doing every day at dawn’s first light. I tackled the overgrown garden, ripping up armfuls of scutch grass and hacking at the brambles until my hands bled and sweat ran into my eyes. My mother’s rose bushes are still here, all gone wild. The spade turned up ancient potatoes, hollowed-out carcasses that burst under my heel with a plop and oozed a whitish fluid. Spiders scuttled, grubs writhed. I was in my element. Labouring there in the midsummer heat I experienced a demented euphoria. I would find myself muttering snatches of wild talk, or singing, or laughing, and sometimes even weeping, not in sorrow but a kind of awful glee. I had no aim in view, I was not going to plant anything; I was just working for the sake of work, and presently I gave it up, and left the briars and the mounds of uprooted grass to swelter and rot in the sun until new growth covered them over.