Ghost Story Read online

  ‘Do you think I think you’re not?’

  ‘No. I was just saying,’

  ‘I want him here more than almost anything.’ Paddy knew she meant than him himself – that she might have been content to have Max back and him not here. He didn’t want to think too much about that as a possibility. ‘In a while – he can come in a while.’

  Paddy refused to let himself ask again how long she meant by that. It disturbed him that Aggie, which was how he thought of her, could be satisfied to be separate from Max without some terrible reason. From the way they had been since, he expected this minor estrangement of theirs to last until the following morning. Once or twice in the flat, he remembered, there had been two-day silences between them. Of course, they had spoken to and through Max; he must notice as little as possible. The house, though, made their silences seem more expansive, more adult.

  Although he felt it might be seen as continuing the argument by other means, Paddy fixed a few of what Agatha might have perceived as dangers. He was wrong, however, about them not talking. In bed at the end of the day Agatha said to him, ‘I feel as if someone’s going to come along and steal the house from us.’ She spoke quite lightly, as if they hadn’t been not speaking.

  ‘You mean a burglar?’

  ‘No, I mean really steal the house – right from under us, so it’s just not there any more.’

  ‘That would be clever,’ said Paddy, for the lack of anything more penetrating.

  ‘In fact, they’re not exactly going to steal it, they’re just not going to let us have it to begin with. This is somebody else’s house – I feel it – and it’s never going to be ours; it’s always going to be somebody else’s.’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think I’ll ever find out.’

  ‘You’re being silly,’ Paddy said, before realising he should be encouraging all Agatha’s sillinesses, so as to help her ditch them.

  ‘Silly is what a house is – it’s too big. Politically, I can’t agree with it. It’s obscene.’

  ‘You should have said this before; we could have given all our money away and found a commune to join.’

  ‘What money?’ she said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh, Paddy, don’t you feel what I mean?’

  ‘I feel we don’t deserve it. I feel more middle class and excluded from everything, as if I’ve moved up a demographic – from C3 to A1.’

  ‘E1 to B2, actually. We have. We’ll get more junk mail here, more offers – though not as many as if we were living in London, Chelsea.’

  They slept.

  CHAPTER 7

  UP, coffee on, shower, shave, clothes on, coffee – and Paddy was out the door.

  Agatha said goodbye in the hall then went back to bed.

  She came down again around ten o’clock, made herself a cup of tea and then went back to bed, again.

  Alone in the house, properly, felt from the first very different to alone with Paddy around. Although Agatha had not had recourse to his comfort, the protection of its possibility had always been there – had always been present with her. She sat on the bed, cross-legged, a book in her lap. After half an hour, she put the book aside and listened to the house; she listened as hard as she was able, stilling her breathing – although this caused her blood to boom in her ears. And the house felt wonderfully alive, populated with movements and noises which Agatha could not yet identify – there were too many of them, their rhythms overlapped and syncopated. It wasn’t because the place – the building in the street – was loud; compared with London, the implied movements and the noises were for the most part microsounds (no jets overhead, or very few): tickings, creakings, crackings. The only drama came from the juddercrash of the pilot light catching, or the yawp of the central heating waking up and that was long past, now. Agatha enjoyed listening – doing nothing but listening; she took possession of the house first of all through her ears.

  In the late morning, she went with her book and sat in the front sitting room. The air there smelled empty; very old, behind-things dust had been lifted and moved around. It was extraordinarily odd to look out the window, when she saw movement, and see people. In the flat, four flights up, the things glimpsed moving had always been the branches of trees. So far, they had no curtains downstairs, and she had prevailed against nets; Paddy, disturbingly, had thought they would make a nice suburban irony. People passing along the pavement could, she was aware, look in, but surprisingly few of them did. After a while, she turned the sofa through ninety degrees: she would sit with her back to the window, not minding if what they saw of her was her hair and an ear on either side; they couldn’t see the most important thing, the page of the book she was reading.

  It started to rain around two, whilst Agatha was making lunch – she hadn’t been hungry until then. She made herself boiled eggs and toast with Marmite. This weather sounded different than in the flat. The windows there were double-glazed, but here the drops really blattered against the French doors. Agatha for a while watched the tips of the leafless branches of the appletree nodding in after-acknowledgement of being struck. The area beneath the tree was a circle of mud. Apart from this, which took up most of the space, the garden was sick-looking grass and weedy flowerbeds. She sat at the table, food finished, and considered what she could see. She had no idea about gardening, apart from that she might one day like to do some.

  During the afternoon, Agatha was distracted from her book. Another noise, or set of noises, had added themselves to those of the front room. They were sometimes like paper being scrunched and sometimes like fingernails being tapped on wood. After a couple of occurrences, she set out to find where they were coming from. She didn’t feel scared; from the sounds, she could tell that whatever was making them wasn’t dangerous. They seemed to be coming from the back room – the wall there to the right of the fireplace. She stepped through the new wide doorway from one room to the other, through the wall that was no longer there. Perhaps it was the neighbours. She assumed they had neighbours, though she hadn’t seen any yet. With her ear against the wall for a couple of minutes, aware that she could probably still be seen from the street, of course the noises stopped. And when she went back to her book, a page and a half in, just getting absorbed, they started again. She put her foot on the boards and walked across, aware the scrunching which was perhaps more a scrabbling had already ceased. This time, she stood still – any shift of balance caused a slight high groaning in the floor; she breathed herself towards stillness. The scrabbling definitely scrabbling took a minute to start up again. It was over by the wall, where it met the floor. Agatha looked, and noticed for the first time a long triangular gap between one floorboard and the broken-off end of another. She stepped towards it, the quiet coming immediately; the noise-maker was alive, definitely. A couple of steps away, at the thought of a rat, Agatha stopped; it could be a rat; there was no reason it wasn’t a rat. They didn’t know this house at all well. Agatha’s small terror felt exactly like Max’s hand reaching up and grabbing her windpipe; she could even feel his elbow nudging her breastbone. If it was a rat, she might have to go out for the afternoon and wait for Paddy that evening on the doorstep. This thought, she realised, scared her almost as much as that of a rat. And because it was raining, she would be wet as well as ridiculous in his eyes. Another brave step towards the hole, as she tried to convince herself that a rat was quite a big animal and would make bigger, deeper scrabbles. Another step, and she was almost there. She leaned forward, a loud creak coming from the board beneath her heel; the hole was too dark, nothing could be seen in it but black. What if the cellar light still didn’t work? Agatha thought of the torch, then where Paddy had told her he’d put it: the shelf at the top of the cellar stairs. What a stupid place, Agatha now said to herself. Why not the miscellaneous drawer in the kitchen, along with the back-door keys and the clothespegs? She walked stealthily out of the back sitting room and into the hall. It was best if she didn’t paus
e before opening the cellar door. The dark in the triangular hole was merely the little brother of the dark down at the bottom of these stairs. She tried the lightswitch; it gave a loud click and nothing happened. Up and down she flicked it, but the cellar light stayed off. A pause for thought and breath and a little fear – this was not good. Agatha reached for the torch on the shelf and clumsily knocked it with her fingertips. It rebounded from the wood behind it, fell over and rolled towards the edge of the shelf. Agatha reached to save it but succeeded only in touching one end and making it spin off into the air. The torch descended the stairs, loudly, end over end. Agatha could just about see it, the light catching its black rubber ridging. Bump on one step, bump on the next – and then it seemed to catch. There was a moment’s pause and then bump-bump-bump-tink-clunk. The torch had reached the bottom, and it sounded as if the bulb might have shattered. Damn. Agatha moved to go and fetch a candle from the kitchen but then remembered with a sniff they still hadn’t bought any, though intending to for months. She considered giving the whole expedition up, but didn’t want to think of herself as silly – or approach the word ‘cowardly’. Immediately, she set off down the steps – not hurried, she didn’t want to fall; she held on to the bannister and was aware how tightly she did this. With every step, it got darker. Agatha reminded herself not to think of rats, and the fact that if there were rats under the floorboards there would certainly be rats down here. She stopped, listened; she could hear a slight whining, which was the gas in the pipes beside the meter. She tried sniffing the air; dusty, not damp – and not putrid or urine-smelling. She sniffed again, more deeply now she knew it wouldn’t be horrible; a cool, long, chalky, plastery smell, but nothing to hint at animal occupation. She continued down, her pupils having dilated, the dark not seeming so dark. Perhaps, she thought, she should leave this for now – wait for Paddy to get back and tell him what had happened. But she hated to think of his gained superiority. The torch at the bottom of the cellar stairs would be taken, by him, as yet another minor proof that she couldn’t do things any more – that she botched them. It seemed, to her, as if by giving this up she would be passing over a proportion of the house to him. Two more steps down, the air was cooler but not in any way unpleasant. She waited for her eyes to do their work of adjusting; they did, but she still couldn’t see the bottom step. Looking behind her, she guessed it would be the next or the next but one. She listened again and realised that the main sound was the blood in her ears – a waterfall in a forest, heard but not seen. Her right foot reached down and patted the next, wooden step; she shifted her weight and followed it. Her left foot wouldn’t move, so she used her right again – it made a harder sound: the bottom. She could smell dust, thought about getting dirt under her nails. The dirt frightened her almost as much as the dark. But she had to do it – bend down and start feeling about with her hands. What if one of them touched hair? Not even a living rat with teeth but a dead one with scrapy clawed feet. Her hands moved in small arcs, Agatha following them forwards as little as she could. If the doorbell rang, she thought, she might pee herself; if Paddy decided to phone. One of the fingernails of her left hand touched something, something which seemed soft. She pulled back, not sure if she was judging herself correctly – whether she was really the kind of woman who could do this. Run! Both hands out, to refute this thought, and they closed around the shaft of the torch. Slowly, Agatha stood up. She didn’t want to switch the torch on. Not seeing was bad but seeing might be a lot worse. She turned and now ran, almost tripping, up the stairs and out into the light-filled kitchen. The torch was dusty, and a long blond hair was caught between it and her fingers. Agatha pulled this off, though it seemed determined to cling to her, and let it fall into the bin.

  After a glass of water, she walked silently as she could into the back sitting room. She had confidence: this little hole couldn’t be as bad as the dark cellar; she had been braver than the cellar. She turned the torch on – it worked! – the bulb hadn’t smashed – and pointed it down at the tip of a tail disappearing. The shriek she gave surprised and then embarrassed her. Her hands jumped to her face and the torch was now shining in a pale circle on the ceiling, but in the instant before this she had seen something other than the tail. She wasn’t sure she could bear to look into the hole again, although she was almost certain she wouldn’t see eyes looking back. It had been little black dots, probably droppings. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, and was glad to hear herself speak. She let her hands cascade down her sides, flop. The torch shone into the hole, and there the droppings were. They looked small – too small to be ratshit. And the tail, she talked convincingly to herself, the tail had been too thin for a rat.

  When she took a step backwards, she could feel blood sloshing around in her feet, like water in Wellington boots. A bit dizzy, she helped herself over to the sofa – touching one of the cardboard boxes they were using until they bought a coffee table. Once she had sat down, Agatha realised she was immensely happy; she had been, for a little while, so completely, fantastically distracted. She hadn’t thought about, and here she started to cry; she hadn’t thought about it at all.

  When she had recovered, she made a conscious decision to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed. It wasn’t that she was scared of hearing the scrabbling again; she just didn’t particularly want to.

  When Paddy got home, she hugged him harder than she had been planning to. ‘Come here,’ she said, taking his non-umbrella-holding hand. A definite march across to the hole in the floor, picking up the torch from the arm of the sofa. Click and shining it down into. ‘What are those?’

  ‘Those things –’

  ‘I saw it.’

  ‘Hang on. I think they’re droppings.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a mouse?’

  ‘You saw what?’

  ‘I think it’s a mouse. I think we’ve got mice.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I saw its tail.’

  ‘They look like mice droppings to me, yes.’

  ‘Mice, that means we’ve probably got rats too, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘It means we’ve got an infestation – a nest.’

  ‘Calm down. We’ll just have to buy some traps, or borrow Henry and May’s cat for a few days. They’re easily got rid of – no problem at all.’

  ‘It was a bit of a shock.’

  ‘I’ll buy a trap or two tomorrow,’ said Paddy, amused at the idea, ‘easy – we’ll put some cheese in it, or whatever fashionable mice are eating these days: bang, problem solved.’

  ‘I don’t like to think of them being in the house, not when Max is back.’

  ‘I promise we’ll get rid of them by then.’ Paddy was glad this little crisis had brought the subject up easily. He wanted to ask when that was likely to be – the weekend? Surely Aggie had missed Max terribly today, and wouldn’t want to be without him much longer. He looked at her in the hope that he would be able to see this in her.

  ‘Tomorrow – you’ll do something tomorrow.’

  ‘As soon as I can. Don’t worry about it. Were you scared?’

  ‘No,’ said Agatha. ‘But the bulb in the cellar has gone.’

  ‘You went down there?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I just know the bulb has gone.’

  CHAPTER 8

  PADDY brought home a trap the following evening; an old-fashioned one of the sort that Agatha, when he presented it to her, remembered from childhood – a balsa-wood base with a spike for the temptation, a spring-loaded bar coming straight down on the mouse’s spine. ‘I’ll set it before I leave tomorrow,’ said Paddy.

  ‘I didn’t see the mouse today,’ said Agatha, who had spent most of her time reading in the bedroom. ‘I think perhaps it might have left. Perhaps I scared it off.’

  ‘I bought some cheese, too,’ said Paddy, producing a comically large slice of Gouda.

  Agatha felt distressed, and all the following morning sat in the armchair opposite the ho
le, waiting and watching and wondering. Her answer came when the pinky brown nose of the mouse shivered its way, tentative-tentative, out of the floorhole. Mice, she knew, usually move very fast – she had seen them on the tracks of the underground, zooming out from under rapidly bearing down trains. They were escapologists extraordinaire, but this little one, with its forward-asking nose, was heading trapwards. She could see it dying and see it dead. With this knowledge, she watched herself, unsure what her reaction was going to be. The mouse was out on the floor now, moving in zigzags, faster and more definite than before. It stayed within a foot of the skirting board, which was where Paddy – advisedly, after phone consultation with his farmer uncle – had placed the trap. On getting off the phone he had mentioned that mice have no bladder control, leaving a slight smear of urine behind them wherever they go. Agatha remembered girls at school in black acrylic uniforms with pink tails twitching delicately in-out of their top pockets. Mice had been a craze, shortly before and for some girls overlapping with and facilitating introduction to boys; some rebels dyed their mice pink or orange, or even stripy, if they could be bothered. The nose of the mouse, which Agatha was now feeling through as if it were one of her own fingertips, touched the cheap balsa wood of the trap’s base. ‘No!’ Agatha screamed. ‘Don’t!’ The mouse zapped down the hole, unharmed, quicker almost than she could see. She lurched out of the armchair and towards the trap – off-balancedly reaching her hand down to pick it up; she misjudged, put her fingers wrong, and snap was in bad and immediate pain. Laughter was her first reaction, then the thought that if the trap left any mark on her fingers she would have to tell Paddy what had happened – and Paddy would mock her for being soft, and she would have to say, ‘But I couldn’t just sit there and watch it be killed,’ and Paddy would say something like, ‘You didn’t have to just sit there and do anything at all.’ He would put her down, again, for a sentimentalist – all this she thought, whilst in pain. Then, left-handed, she forced back the jaws of the trap and was able to slide out her fingers – one of which was bleeding, having been punctured by the little spike-of-a-nail Paddy had pushed the cheese down onto; the cheese that had now fallen onto the floor and which, with the last of her laughter, Agatha pushed with a bare foot into the mouse hole. ‘You deserve it,’ she said, ‘after that shock I gave you.’ The fingers of her right hand, when she came to look at them, were pale with a pink line diagonally across the knuckles – there was a spit of red where her blood had seeped into the balsa wood. ‘I saved the mouse,’ she thought, ‘I saved the mouse’s life.’ She started to weep, aware that she could be seen through the front window – about to put her bleeding finger in her mouth, she thought better of it. Crying harder, she took herself through into the kitchen where she turned on the cold tap and put the hurt hand into the flow. Agatha was by now quite used to rationing and delimiting her crying; this time, she thought, I’ll cry until I’ve finished washing my hand. She was still sobbing, however, when she reached for the kitchen roll and wrapped her finger in a temporary bandage of softish, roughish paper. ‘I’m a fool,’ she said, out loud, ‘a bit of a bloody loon.’ Paddy will laugh at me, she thought, hearing his expostulations – perhaps she could delay it until he’d been in the house an hour, or until after they’d eaten. But he was observant, he would soon notice. And what had happened with the mousetrap was their little cliffhanger, their tiny narrative hook of the day; it gave them both a way of avoiding, ‘Did you go out?’ ‘No.’ This already was becoming a question between them. If Paddy got bored enough at work, it was possible that he might even call during lunchtime to ask if anything had happened, mousewise. Agatha unpeeled the paper, which had formed itself around the ridgy contours of her finger. The bleeding had stopped; there was a little v-shaped flap of skin, stuck down by a sliver of congealed blood. She had, she realised, stopped crying; the best way out of the evening’s awkwardness, at her expense, was to kill a mouse – or to let Paddy know, the moment he came through the door, that joking would be absolutely the wrong tone. But, she thought, she had discovered something about herself: she couldn’t bear the idea of being a deathbringer, not to anything. She kissed the finger better – those maternal reflexes, she thought – then opened the fridge door to find the cheese. I must learn, she thought, I must remember what I was before; we can’t have Max with mice running up his trouser-legs and biting him, or trailing pee across his plate before dinner. She pulled the metal spring back and pressed a crumb of cheese down onto the spike. I am brutal, Agatha thought as she carried the trap through into the sitting room and replaced it exactly where it had been before. Back to the armchair she went, a self-conscious warrior-woman, tasting the soap on her finger. She sat there another hour, and the mouse did not return; from the kitchen, that afternoon, through the smell of coffee, she heard a sound she had forgotten the meaning of – and it was Paddy, not having phoned during the day, who found the brokeback mouse that evening, pink nose a dead millimetre from the cheese. He didn’t notice the finger, but Agatha told him everything anyway, with a laugh and a wail he was quite used to, even in this odd combination. They hugged, briefly. ‘Perhaps it was a different mouse,’ he said down her back. No, she had looked, as Paddy dropped it into the bin; she had seen the mouse she had seen before – and had saved. ‘Why did I do it?’ she said, and Paddy didn’t feel like asking what she meant.