‘I’m in administration.’
‘Well.’ She looks out of the window, then says, ‘Someone has to be. I thought all the cabins were for four people? How come we’ve ended up in a two-person outfit? There must be something special about us. What do you think it is?’
At what point do you tell an acquaintance that you’re followed around by a ghost? I start to speak but she holds up a finger and says, ‘No, no, I’ll find out for myself.’
‘All right. It’s your funeral.’
I have no idea why those particular words came to mind. Those are obviously not the right words for this situation; I can tell that from the way she’s choosing to ignore them.
‘I’m not good with people,’ she says. ‘I came here to learn if I wanted to be. Good with them. If I’m missing something.’
‘What do you think you’re missing?’
‘I already suspect the answer to that question is nothing.’ She hums as she unpacks.
She probably thinks I’m an idiot. But that’s okay because I think she’s an overconfident bully who’s attempting to verbally dominate me. At least we have one thing in common: We’ll both find out what’s going on for ourselves. We are women together for a whole week.
I’ve got a feeling it’s going to pass slowly.
What makes a boy?
When I first began to understand that I was not a boy, I began to look around me and categorise others as I was being categorised in turn. I couldn’t have been more than six years old; I remember many things feeling new to me, including school. I hadn’t settled into familiarity with the routine or the others of my age who now surrounded me on a daily basis. There were so many of us, all in orbit around the larger bodies of teachers. I understood I was a kid, but not that I was a girl. That came later. I don’t really understand it now, except if I define it as not a boy.
I don’t believe girls exist, really, except as a disguise. And I’m still not certain that boys grow into men. Perhaps a man is a disguise too. An acceptance of certain rules. No different to firing a gun in the playground and demanding that the other fella lies down dead.
Having had these thoughts during a long and sleepless night, I’m in no way surprised when my ghost turns up with the first creeping rays of dawn. He sits on the end of my bed, and I wonder why I thought the rules of Skein Island might ever apply to him. If he wasn’t really a man when he was a man, then why would he be one as a spirit?
I wish I could talk to him.
I feel the pressure of him, by my legs. He’s not large. He’s creating only the smallest of dents in the mattress. He shifts his weight every now and again, and I can imagine him muttering to himself – bloody sciatic nerve, won’t leave me in peace even for a nice sit-down – but if he is talking I can’t hear it. I thought the countryside was meant to be quiet but the birds outside the thin window are rhythmically raucous. I’ve never heard these throaty calls before; I think it must be the sound of seagulls en masse. I lie there and listen.
My ghost gets up and breathes out his smoke, long and freely, into the room. I think he likes the extra space to fill. I watch the smoke stream forth from an empty space, then form a thin fog above my bed. A pause. Then he does the same over Katie’s bed, and he laughs.
She coughs. She’s awake.
We both lie there, being awake. Being breathed over.
‘Oh God,’ she says.
‘He’s just a ghost. An old man’s ghost,’ I tell her. ‘It’s really not a big deal. He visits me at dawn every day. He doesn’t mean any harm.’
He chuckles again, and is gone. The light of day is brighter, strengthening, but it cannot chase away his smoke. It’s still chewy.
I get up and pad over to the tiny bathroom. I close the door gently, then have a wee and brush my teeth. The toothpaste never quite takes all of the taste of cigars away. It has a habit of sitting right at the back of my throat.
When I emerge Katie is still in bed. ‘Come over here,’ she says. I sit beside her. She looks younger. Her eyes are very wide and her lips are pale. I keep watching them as she speaks; I find it difficult to follow what she’s saying, in a jumbled rush.
‘…understand how that could be because it’s been years and why would he be with you? Unless you’ve got some sort of other connection to him?’
‘What?’ The seagulls are raucous and it’s so early. I don’t want her to feel in control of this. Why is she talking about a connection? ‘It’s a spirit. A ghost. I know that’s a bit of a shock—’
‘It’s my grandfather,’ she says.
‘No, it’s not your grandfather—’
‘I knew him straight away. It’s him. It’s him. How do you know him? Tell me why he’s here. Is he here to speak to me? Has he told you about me? Is that why you came? You asked the staff to put us together? Did you—’
‘I think it’s time for breakfast,’ I tell her. I get up and walk to the kitchen.
‘Min,’ she calls as I hunt out a bowl for cereal, and switch on the kettle. ‘Min.’
Let her wait.
Let her fail to take him as her own.
We have a morning of activities ahead of us. Yoga and poetry and self-defence. Katie finds a space beside me for all of these classes. She seems weakened, in a way I can’t define. She overbalances while attempting Crescent Moon pose and puts out her hand, urgently, to me; I grasp it, and hold her as she rights herself.
During a group conversation about overcoming personal issues one of our number reveals that she has a degenerative disease. She doesn’t tell us what the disease is, and nobody asks. I notice nothing but a slight tremor in her voice as she talks. It could just as easily be down to nerves, if she’s not used to public speaking.
‘I wonder what bits of me will last the longest,’ she says, to our circle. ‘Not physically, so much, but mentally. No, not even that. Not my faculties but my personality. How it feels to be me. The way I pick at the sleeves of my jumpers until they start to unravel, and the way I hate the smell of salad cream, even at a distance. What if one day soon I lose the ability to smell salad cream and be repulsed by it? I won’t be me any more at that point.’
‘Your entire personality hinges on salad cream?’ says Katie, waspishly, perhaps even maliciously, and it triggers a reaction from the group that feels passionate and righteous. There’s a general condemnation of saying hurtful things for the sake of humour, and I find I want to say something too. Something loud. Shouting would suit me now, but what would I shout about? The only thing that comes to mind is an explanation of how hating salad cream might turn out to be the only element of a person that remains in their afterlife, and wouldn’t that be worse? The woman with the degenerative disease is frightened to lose herself entirely but I suspect she’d prefer that to becoming a vengeful spirit who roams around restaurants slapping sachets of salad cream out of the hands of unsuspecting diners.
They’re all shouting about the same thing, which is the need to listen to each other, and it takes them a while to realise it. I sit in my own circle of silence, and observe. The moderator restores order and the session goes on. People list what they would most hate to lose about themselves and when it comes to my turn I say, ‘My sense of humour.’ Let me remain as a long mouthless laugh that hangs in a room. I can see the appeal of that destiny, now.