Sitting on the bed she said a prayer to Saint Auntie. Dear Auntie, please keep Jock’s ghost away. Don’t let him come back in the night. I haven’t done anything to make him haunt me. For ever and ever, Amen. She put the light out and then she put it on again. In the darkness she saw Jock’s face in front of her and, though she knew that wasn’t his ghost but a kind of dream or vision, it gave her a fright. She couldn’t sleep very well with the light on but she wouldn’t sleep at all with it off. She buried her face in the bedclothes so that it didn’t make much difference whether it was dark or light in the room. Auntie used to hear voices-she called them “my voices”-and sometimes she saw things. Especially when she’d been in contact with one of those mediums. Minty couldn’t understand, and no one had ever explained to her, why a medium was called something that meant “halfway between” and not “best” or “worst.” Edna, who was Auntie’s sister, had been one of them, very much the worst in Minty’s opinion, and when Edna was in the house or they were in hers she was frightened all the time.
Losing Jock had been a bad shock, especially coming less than a year after she lost Auntie. She hadn’t been the same since, though she couldn’t exactly have said how she’d been different. Something inside her head seemed to have lost its balance. He’d have said, but said it in a nice way, “You never were all that balanced, Polo,” and maybe he was right.
She’d never get married now. Still, she had her house and work, and nice neighbors. Maybe she’d get over him one day the way she was getting over Auntie. She’d slept all right, the deep, dreamless sleep of someone whose dreams all come in her waking hours. The bath was filling with water as hot as she could stand it. Never leave a bath to run on its own, was Auntie’s advice. Her sister Edna, the one who saw ghosts, had done that; she’d gone down to answer the door and when she’d taken in the post and a parcel she turned round to see water dripping through the ceiling. Auntie had a lot of tales to tell of her sister Edna and her sister Kathleen, especially the things they did when they were young. Sometimes her voices were their voices and sometimes they were God and the duke of Windsor.
The water was hot and clear, unpolluted by bath essence. She lay back and dipped her head under, shampooed her hair first, soaped her body vigorously. Jock said she was too thin, needed to get some flesh on her bones, but it was natural, there was nothing to be done about it. It didn’t matter now that she wasn’t well covered. She rinsed her hair, kneeling up and putting her head under the running tap. It could dry naturally. She didn’t like hair-dryers, blowing dusty air all over your head, not even the one he’d bought her that claimed to purify the air it puffed out. Her teeth well brushed, she rinsed mouthwash over her palate, under her tongue, round the back molars. Deodorant, clean underwear, clean cotton trousers and long-sleeved T-shirt. In the local Asda they called the ones they sold antiperspirants, a name Minty didn’t like at all; it made her shudder to think of perspiration.
Breakfast was toast and Marmite, clean and dry. A cup of tea with plenty of milk and sugar. Minty put two bath towels, two hand towels, two sets of underwear, two pairs of trousers, two T-shirts, and the coat lining into the washing machine, set and started it. She’d come back at lunchtime and put it in the dryer, and maybe make time to visit Auntie’s grave. The morning was gray, misty, still. There was a queue for the 18 bus so she walked to the dry cleaners past Fifth and Sixth Avenues, stepping over the cracks. Minty had grown up with street names like that and couldn’t see anything funny about it but it had made Jock laugh. He’d only been in the area a few months and every time he saw the name he’d cast up his eyes, laugh that soundless laugh of his, and say, “Fifth Avenue! I don’t believe it.”
Admitted, it wasn’t a very nice part, but “run-down” and “a real slum,” which were what Jock called it, were going a bit far. OTT, to use his own expression. To Minty it appeared gray and dreary but familiar, the background of her life for nearly thirty-eight years, for she’d been a baby when Agnes left her with Auntie “for an hour at the maximum” and never came back. The row of shops ran from Second to First Avenue on Harrow Road. Two of them had closed and been boarded up or they’d have been vandalized. The Balti takeaway was still there, a bathroom fittings shop, a builder’s merchant, a unisex hairdresser, and, on the corner, Immacue. It was just as well Minty had brought her key, for Josephine wasn’t there yet.
She let herself in, put up the blind on the door, slid back the bars on the window. Some very strange people roamed Harrow Road by night. Nothing was safe. Minty stood still a moment, breathing in Immacue’s smell, a mixture of soap, detergent, clean linen, dry-cleaning fluids, and stain remover. She’d have liked 39 Syringa Road to smell like that, but she simply hadn’t the wherewithal. It was a scent that developed over years of cleansing within a relatively small space. And inhaling it was the reverse of what Minty sometimes experienced when it was her lot to sort through the piles of clothes customers brought in and, as they were moved and lifted and turned over, there rose from them a nasty odor of stale sweat and food stains.
Exactly nine-thirty. She turned the sign on the inside of the door to OPEN and went into the back room, where the ironing awaited her. Immacue provided a shirt service and it was her job on weekdays, and Saturdays too, to iron fifty shirts before lunchtime. It was mostly women who brought them in and collected them, and Minty sometimes wondered who wore them. Most people were poor around here, single mothers and pensioners and out-of-work boys looking for trouble. But a lot of yuppies who worked in the city had bought houses nearby; they were cheap by present-day standards and near the West End, even if they were the kind of places their parents wouldn’t have looked at twice. They must be the men who wore these snowy white and pink and blue-striped shirts to go to their jobs in offices and banks, these two hundred immaculate shirts encased in cellophane and with a neat little cardboard collar and cardboard bow tie fixed to each one.
By the time Josephine came in Minty had ironed five. Always when she arrived in the morning she went up to Minty and gave her a kiss. Minty submitted to this salutation, even lifted up her cheek for it, but she didn’t much care for being kissed by Josephine, who wore thick, waxy, dark red lipstick, some of which inevitably came off on Minty’s clean, pale skin. After she’d gone to hang up her coat Minty went to the sink and washed her cheek and then she washed her hands. Fortunately, there were always plenty of cleaning materials, cloths, sponges, and brushes at Immacue.
Customers started coming in, but Josephine attended to them. Minty wouldn’t go out there unless one of them asked for her specially or Josephine called her. There were still some who didn’t know what had happened to Jock and who asked how her fiancé was or when was she getting married, and Minty had to say, “He got killed in the Paddington train crash.” She didn’t like having sympathy; it embarrassed her, especially now she’d seen his ghost last night. Saying he was dead and accepting the kind things they said seemed like cheating somehow.
They had coffee at eleven. Minty drank hers and washed her hands. Josephine said, “How’re you feeling, love? D’you reckon you’re starting to get over it?”
Minty wondered if she should tell about the ghost but decided against it. A woman customer had once said she’d seen her mother in a dream and in the morning got a phone call to say she was dead. She’d died at the precise time of the dream. Josephine had said, quite rudely, “You can’t be serious,” and laughed a scornful laugh. So better say nothing about it.
“Life has to go on, doesn’t it?” she said.
Josephine agreed. “You’re right, it’s no good dwelling on things.” A big, full-breasted woman with long legs, she had bright blond hair as long as an eighteen-year-old girl’s, but a kind heart. Or so everyone said. Minty lived in fear that a flake of the dark red varnish she wore on her fingernails would chip off and fall in the coffee. Josephine had a Chinese boyfriend who couldn’t speak a word of English and was a cook in a restaurant in Harlesden called the Lotus Dragon. They’d both met Jock when he picked her up after work.