She’d never really got rid of Auntie’s stuff, apart from a few clothes she’d taken to the Geranium blind shop. They weren’t as clean as they might have been, and carrying them, even in a plastic sack, made her feel dirty all over. The rest she’d shut up in a cupboard and never opened again. She opened it now. It smelled awful. Just her luck when she was off to work; she’d have to have another bath before she went. The purse on a belt some people called a fanny pack or a bum bag but Auntie wouldn’t, it was too crude, hung by its strap over a hanger on which was a coat that smelled of mothballs. Minty resolved to have a real clean-up and clear-out that evening, take the stuff to Brent Council’s old clothes bank, and wash out the cupboard. The bum bag she brought delicately to her nose. One sniff was enough. She washed it in the bathroom basin, laid it to dry on the edge of the bath, then washed herself all over. When it was dry, it would make a convenient holder for the knife.
As a result of all this, she was a bit late for work, very unusual for her. Josephine, all smiles, said nothing about her lateness but announced that she and Ken were getting married. He’d asked her over the wontons and shrimp toast they’d had last night. Minty wondered what form the proposal had taken since Ken didn’t speak any English.
“I’m starting my Cantonese conversation class next week,” said Josephine.
Minty accepted an invitation to the wedding. As she began the ironing, she asked herself if she would ever meet another man who would want her as Jock had done. If it happened, it mustn’t be while Jock continued to haunt her. It wouldn’t do to be out with a man in the pub or at the pictures and have Jock appear between them, or watching them. Besides, she’d promised him there would never be anyone else. She was his for ever, and ever might be another fifty years. What did he want? Why had he returned? Because he was afraid she’d met a new man?
The shirts smelled of that indefinable clean scent she liked so much, newly washed linen. She savored each one, bringing it to within an inch of her nose when she lifted it from the pile. Minty ironed the shirts not just as they happened to come-picking up the top one first, then the next one and so on-but choosing them according to color. There were always more white ones than colored, about twice as many, so she would do two white, then a pink, two more white, then a blue stripe. It upset her if the sequence went wrong and she found she had four or five white ones left at the end. This morning there were fewer whites than usual and she could see as she progressed that she was going to have the luck to make the ironing of a pink-and-yellow-striped shirt her final task.
It was more than a week since she’d seen Jock and then, just when she thought he’d satisfied himself, found what he was looking for, or simply got tired of the search, he’d appeared again. She’d gone to the pictures with Sonovia and Laf, one of the cinemas in Whiteley’s, and seen Sleepy Hollow, a film people found frightening about a headless horseman-a ghost of course-that kept appearing in this town in America and chopping people’s heads off.
“Never seen anything so ridiculous in all my life,” Sonovia said scornfully, passing her the popcorn. Laf had fallen asleep, snoring softly.
“It’s scary,” Minty whispered, but more out of politeness than truth. Films weren’t real.
But just as the tree split open again and the phantom horseman and his horse leaped out from its roots, Jock’s ghost came into the cinema and sat down in the end seat of their row on the other side of the aisle. The way they were sitting, she three seats in from the end, Sonovia next to her and Laf next to Sonovia, meant she had an uninterrupted view of him. He’d sat down without looking at her, but now, no doubt because he felt her eyes on him, he turned his head and fixed on her a dull, expressionless gaze. She was wearing Auntie’s silver cross on a ribbon round her neck and she put her hand up to it, clasping it tightly. This action, supposed to be a sure specific against visitants from another world, or so Auntie had said, had no effect on Jock. He stared at the screen. Minty touched Sonovia on the arm.
“D’you see that man at the end of the row?”
“What man?”
“On the other side, sitting at the end.”
“There’s no one there, my deah. You’re dreaming.”
It didn’t altogether surprise her that he was invisible to others. Josephine hadn’t been able to see him that time in the shop. What was he made of? Flesh and blood or shadows? She’d promised him that once she’d been with him she’d never go with anyone else. Was it possible he wanted to keep her to her vow and he’d come back to take her away with him? Minty began to tremble.
“Not cold, are you?” Sonovia whispered.
Minty shook her head.
“Must have been a cat walking over your grave.”
“Don’t say that!” Minty spoke so loudly that a woman behind tapped her on the shoulder and told her to be quiet.
She was silent, shivering. Somewhere in this world was the place where her bones or her ashes would be buried. A cat, going about its nocturnal business, had trodden on that ground and passed on. Jock wanted to take her there, to that grave, and have her ghost with him, wherever that was. She couldn’t watch the film. Reality was more frightening. Jock had only been there ten minutes, but he got up to leave. As he passed her he whispered, “Polo,” and touched her on the shoulder.
She shrank back in her seat. His touch wasn’t like a shadow or a breeze but real, a warm hand with a natural hand’s pressure, heavy, possessive. “Go away,” she said. “Leave me alone.”
Sonovia turned and glared at her. Minty looked round, toward the exit, but Jock had gone.
After the film was over, Laf and Sonovia took her for a drink in the Redan.
“What were you muttering about in the cinema?” Laf asked, grinning. “Sitting there with your eyes shut, nattering away to yourself and making faces.”
“I was not.”
“Yes, you were, my deah. What’s the point of going to the pictures if you keep your eyes shut?”
“I was scared. Everyone was scared.”
They denied it. But she couldn’t talk about the film, neither able to agree with Laf, who pretended to have enjoyed it, nor with Sonovia, who couldn’t stop laughing over the frequency of the horseman’s decapitations. Jock’s ghost had distracted her entirely. It seemed that he had been threatening. She could still feel the pressure of his hand. He shouldn’t take her with him; she didn’t want to die, to be taken to some awful scary place inhabited by ghosts. She’d take steps to defend herself.
When she first saw him, she wouldn’t have believed a weapon would be effective against him, but the hard and heavy feel of his hand had convinced her that, ghost though he was, he was solid and unyielding. So she needed the knife and needed to carry it with her at all times. For who knew where he’d next turn up?
She finished the last shirt and slipped it into its cellophane bag, inserting a cardboard bow tie, spotted blue-and-white, under the collar. Josephine had popped down to the car hire place to make transport arrangements for her wedding, and when the doorbell rang, Minty thought it was Jock. It would be just like him to come today, the last time she’d ever be out without the knife. She picked up a pair of scissors from the shelf where they kept the stain remover and the spray starch. But it was only Ken, who pretended to be scared of the blades pointing at him and began clowning about with his hands up.
Josephine came back and the two of them started canoodling, kissing with their mouths open and all that. Funny, because Josephine had told her before she met Ken that the Chinese never kissed, they didn’t know how to. Maybe she’d taught him. Minty quite liked them, but their going on like that made her want to stab them with the scissors. She felt left out, isolated, shut into a world of her own, inhabited only by herself and Jock’s ghost. Like someone sleepwalking, she trailed into the back room and sat down on a stool, staring at the wall and turning the scissors over and over in her hands.