Ghost in the noonday sun

 

I woke up in a bad mood. For no reason, I was tetchy and irritable, with gluey eyes and my skin too tight. TV annoyed me. The light through the curtains got in my eyes. E-mails, which should have been replied to, had not been replied to. My girlfriend’s story about her work was ill-timed, and every time I asked her a question, she took a spoonful of muesli, necessitating a full minute’s worth of chewing before she could answer. I hid in the bathroom, my head out the window, breathing in the cool air and silence.

I decided to go for a walk. Like a dog, I need to be walked. If I’m in the house too long without exercise I become anxious, and today I was wound up and over-heated. Susan was getting ready for an afternoon shift. Normally, I kiss her goodbye at the door, but today she was glad for me to leave the house first. Kissing her, I grabbed my keys and shut the door behind me.

I had nowhere to go. During the pandemic I walked around my neighborhood hundreds of times and I covered it all for two or three miles in every direction. It was boring, but there was a graveyard half a mile from my house, and I decided to go there as there was never anybody about and I still felt jangled and odd. The graveyard was built on a hill, so the tree-lined circle of gravestones at the summit was exposed and often windy. I felt the need for clean air, somewhere the traffic was a murmur.

As I was walking down the street – one of the arterial roads bleeding into the city centre, and always busy – I chanced to look to my right. There was a large, freestanding house, set well back from the road. It had been empty for many years, the entire time I’d been living in the area, but that had clearly changed. Where it had been the speckled grey of nuthatch eggshell, now it was gleaming white, only the mottled roof betraying its age. It was larger than any other house in the area, and set in its own grounds, suggesting it had always been there. The other houses on the street were parvenus.

I stopped for a moment to look at it. It was a handsome square building, nicely symmetrical: two black windows, upstairs and downstairs, either side of a black door, slightly ajar, revealing another black door within. A white curtain was visible in the top left window, half draped, the bottom more so than the top, forming a pale crescent against the darkness. In the opposite bedroom window, the curtain was pulled across and a square, black object tilted against the glass. I took it to be a Wi-Fi hub.

There were three cars parked outside the house, but there was nobody to be seen. Some lawn furniture was visible from the side of the house, against the furthest corner of the garden. The driveway curved smoothly to the road, though the gravel surface was potholed. The front garden fell, with a bank sharp as the side of a bath, down to a wide featureless lawn, beyond it two heavy headed, mournful trees cast a pall of gloom over the brilliant green of the grass. Twin bonsai shrubs squatted in pots either side of the open door. The scene was very still, and the day was very hot, though rain was promised for the afternoon.

There was a cage of scaffolding pressed against the right-hand side of the house, two wooden planks placed at the summit. Behind that, on the edge of the garden, was what looked like a gutted shed: four frayed chipboard walls, no roof, though it might have been being built, rather than falling apart. Propped up against it was an old green door. It looked out of place next to the cheap and cheerful impermanence of the chipboard, and the pristine solidity of the house. The green paint had faded in yellow stripes down the length of the door. It was like viewing it through long summer grass. It was bleached and blistered. The day was very hot.

Then I saw her.

I saw her.

She was tall and pale and quite, quite solid, even fleshy; her skin lustrous in the sunlight. Long, black hair hung in two bunches over her shoulders. She wore a short A-line dress in green and white checked cotton. It was old fashioned and too short. She stood next to the green door, her head bowed, hands resting flat on her thighs, pressing the cotton dress against them.

 The sun shone on her black hair, and glared white on the scaffolding between us, and on the cherry-wet clumps of broken gravel on the driveway.  It was all so ordinary; except she didn’t move. She didn’t move at all. Her stillness was unnatural. Head bowed, hands flat to her thighs. I reeled, my hackles up. She was wrong. Her surroundings seemed to shimmer, while she was anchored and heavy, a dead centre. I felt insubstantial. Next to the certainty of her, I felt doubtful.

I want to try and communicate the oddness of the experience. It was like a category error: a banal scene punctured by the inexplicable. Once, I was looking through my living room window, out into the front garden, and suddenly caught the yellow and black eyes of a sparrowhawk, staring straight me. It was like discovering a tiger on the lawn. The bird flew off, leaving the corpse of a wood pigeon behind – a couple of tufty white feathers on the grass, two tear-shaped spots of blood on its breast. It shook me to see those predator eyes staring into me. They shouldn’t have been there. And that was the sensation I felt here but amplified. She shouldn’t have been there. My senses were screaming that she shouldn’t have been there.

I wasn’t scared. It was, after all midday, and besides I hadn’t expected to see anything unusual. I was far too wrapped up in my own frustrations to think about anything but myself. I might never have looked up at all. But I did. And I saw her.

She was pinned against the mundanity of the chipboard, the tired green door, the distant lawn. I wasn’t scared, but I felt something, something older and colder. Was it dread? She was a shiver on a sunny day.

I realised I’d been staring at her for a full minute. If she was just a tall, pale girl in old fashioned clothes, it could have been a police matter. But her clothes were strange. Could she have been an actress? Could they have been filming at the old house? But film-sets are loud, shouty, shooty places, with clanging and hammering, and spilling with drifting, surplus people. There was no evidence of any of that. The house was quiet. There was no movement at the windows, in the garden, anywhere.

I walked the length of the house and then returned to the same spot. If she was still there, I reasoned, everything would be fine. I have no idea why I thought this. If she was still there, there was still the possibility that she might break from her peculiar stasis. A normal movement, a stretch or scratch, would have punctured the illusion. She would have been an ordinary human being, just somebody standing in the wrong garden, in the wrong clothes.

Of course, she was gone.

I walked the length of the house again, to where some portion of the back garden was visible to see if I could see her walking about, or lounging on the lawn furniture, so the spell would be broken. But there was nothing.

I walked around the block, a journey of approximately ten minutes, and then back to the old house. There was no sign of the girl, or anyone. There was some rubble, a giant bag of cement. Something black under plastic, fat grey stripes of gaffa tape holding it in place. Ordinary things. Dull things, under the hot sun. The house was still, the black door still ajar, the gardens silent, eaten up by the long shadows of the trees.

Did I see a ghost?

I went back the next day. The house was still quiet but there was some evidence of activity. The green door was gone. The scaffolding had shifted slightly. It looked more of a work in progress, the rubble shoveled, the cement bag depleted. It looked normal. There was no ghost girl, and she seemed to unravel in my head, like a decaying dream.

She had been too cinematic, anyway. A creepy girl with long dark hair, refusing to look up, head bowed, and pale as death? That’s exactly the sort of ghost I’d like to see. It’s Sadako in “Ringu”. It’s the former governess from “The Innocents”, weeping in the reeds. I know too many ghost stories to see a ghost like that. Besides, I don’t believe in ghosts. And if I did, there were plenty of people I would have preferred to see. People I’ve loved. 

But I did see her. In the noonday sun, pale and solid and still. I know what I saw, and I know how it made me feel.

And she shouldn’t have been there.