In the summer I started a compost. It stood at the back of the lot, out past the trees and the grass on the edge of the wood. It was a good spot because it was half sun, half shade, and the smell didn’t reach the house.
In the compost I put the dead grass that dried up in the sun. I put sticks and twigs and dried leaves. I put dandelions and logs and whole fallen branches, and soon I had a great heap of dead things.
Put your toothbrush in the toothbrush holder, your underwear in this left-side drawer. Slip your mud-soaked boots next to my blue Birkenstocks, right here, on the welcome mat.
Ignore my bloody mother Mary in the mirrors, her old demons, swept under Aunt Christa’s ikat rug. These ghosts — they’re scary, but they’re not trying to scare you, Bubbie. They’re mostly trying to clear their throats.
Mavis Tuddenham couldn’t remember when she first realised the world was shrinking – really realised that it was really, actually shrinking, to be precise. Mavis always liked to be accurate about things.
She couldn’t recall any indication whatsoever of a diminishment in its size during her childhood and early adulthood. The world just was, and the universe, well, that was even bigger, mind bogglingly bigger, so mind bogglingly bigger that your mind couldn’t grasp just how humungously big it actually was, however hard you tried.
I
Mildred wants to borrow a button again, she pleads with Charlotte — says come on, we haven’t played in so very long. Agatha chides them — we’re packing them away children, soon we’ll all be gone. The men with clipboards stand outside, saying this roof is crooked, something’s wrong.
This button was a porthole once, it was a Catherine wheel. These shoelaces were conger-eels, this matchbox was a bomb.
Agatha remembers this house so full of little feet and little laughs. Summer evenings yawned like dozing cats; we listened to faeries singing at the bottom of the garden, eavesdropped on wood nymphs chattering beneath the slow-crackle of bonfire leaves.
The boy calls me The Lady. Bed-ridden, surrounded by mountains of comic books and tissues of blood and snot, he looks for me in the cracks in the wall, the grotesque stains on the ceiling, smudged window glass. He should be looking outside where there is grey light upon the lake, where leaves turn yellow and red on the branches. He saw me once in the corner of a broken mirror in the old apartment in the city. He thought me very beautiful. I say this not out of vanity, but to note he saw me as the unblemished peasant girl I once was.
“Aw, c’mon, dude, let’s go look at the old cabin.” This from Mike, annoying at worst, goofy at best.
“Seriously, man, we shouldn’t go up there.” Amos, the goody two shoes of the three, always anxious not to get into trouble.
“What?” jeered Billy, “you’re scared you might pee ya pants?”
My dad told me when I was, like, seven or eight that if I dug long enough I’d eventually reach Australia. And I believed him. I mean, why wouldn’t I? He’d worked on building sites all his life, knew about that kinda stuff. Ryan, he’d say, you dig hard, son and I tell you, you’ll strike gold one day but you gotta put the effort in. He was big on effort, my old man. Work ethic, he called it. Refused to accept that jobs weren’t as easy to come by nowadays, especially for people who came from shitholes like Dilly.
Last week of the summer holidays and the sun was still splitting the sky. Amos and I didn’t know what to do with ourselves it was so damn hot. None of the girls wanted to hang out – probably worried their make-up would melt or their hair would go frizzy – so we decided to head for the beach. May as well make the most of it before the big exams. We’d soon be locked in our rooms for the best years of our lives, extracted by our parents for dentist appointments or lectures on fuckin personal hygiene.
So. This is how the story was told to me by my sister-in-law who was friends with the daughter of Mrs O. Who together with her husband ran a Turkish restaurant just off Green Lanes. Well, they were Kurdish really, which matters a lot in some contexts but not so much in this one. Anyway, Mr O was in charge of the chefs’ station, while Mrs O supervised the service and also handled the accounts. Even though Mr O was referred to by all as ‘boss’, no one wanted to look Mrs O in the eye when she passed on a customer’s complaint or, heaven forbid, returned a plate of food. Not even Mr O.
When grandma died they took her eyes, they pulled her eyes out for science.
Right out of her damn head. I wonder, if they popped or plopped or squelched or squeaked. But, in that moment, I know
three ghosts came to be.
Idle Ink 