Chapter 1

MINTY KNEW IT was a ghost sitting in the chair because she was frightened. If it were only something she’d imagined, she wouldn’t have been afraid. You couldn’t be when it was something that came out of your own mind.

It was early evening but, being wintertime, quite dark. She’d just come home from work, let herself in the front door, and put the hall light on. The front-room door was open and the ghost was sitting on an upright chair in the middle of the room with its back to her. She’d put the chair there to stand on and change a lightbulb before she went out in the morning and forgotten to put it back. Her mouth tightly covered up with both hands to keep the scream in, she took one step nearer. She thought, What will I do if it turns round? Ghosts in stories are gray like the people on black-and-white television or else see-through, but this one had short, dark brown hair and a brown neck, and wore a black leather jacket. Minty didn’t have to see its face to know it was her late fiancé, Jock.

Suppose it stayed there so that she couldn’t use the room? It wasn’t absolutely still. The head moved a bit and then the right leg. Both feet edged back as if it were going to get up. Minty squeezed her eyes tight shut. Everything was silent. A shriek out in the street from one of the kids that lived opposite made her jump and she opened her eyes. The ghost was gone. She put the light on and felt the seat of the chair. It was warm and this surprised her. You think of ghosts as cold. She moved the chair back to where it belonged under the table. If it wasn’t in the middle of the room, maybe he wouldn’t come back.

She went upstairs, half expecting to see him there. He could have got past her and come up while she had her eyes shut. Ghosts didn’t like lights, so she put them all on, all good hundred-watt bulbs, and he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. She’d loved him, thought of herself as married to him though she wasn’t, but she didn’t want his ghost about. It was upsetting.

Still, he’d gone now and it was time for a good wash. One of the things Jock had liked about her, Minty was sure, was that she was always spotlessly clean. Of course, she’d had a bath this morning before going off to Immacue and she’d washed her hair; she wouldn’t dream of leaving the house without, but that was eight hours ago, and she must have picked up all kinds of dirt from Harrow Road and the people who came into the shop, not to mention the clothes they brought that needed dry cleaning.

It was lovely having a bathroom entirely to herself. She said a little prayer of thanks to Auntie as if she were a saint (which was a way Minty had seldom thought of her when alive) every time she went in there, for making that possible. Dear Auntie, thank you for dying and leaving me a bathroom. I’m ever so grateful, it’s made a world of difference. Your loving niece for ever and ever, Araminta. She took all her clothes off and dropped them in the laundry basket with the lid. It was expensive having more than one bath a day. She’d have a shower put in when she could afford it. One day, though not as soon as she’d hoped. Meanwhile, standing at the basin on the bath mat, she used the big natural sponge Sonovia next door had given her for Christmas.

Like everything else in the bathroom, the nailbrush had been Auntie’s. It was turquoise blue with a handle, which meant you could get a good grip on it. Minty scrubbed her nails. She had brought this hygienic measure to a fine art. It was no good just rubbing the brush across your fingertips, you had to insert the bristles on the outer edge right under your nails and move them rapidly backward and forward. She washed her feet last, taking care to get plenty of soap between her toes, then using the nailbrush on her toenails. It was Auntie who had said soap was disappearing from the shops. Mark her words, the time was coming when you’d not be able to find a decent cake of soap. It was all this gel and essence in bottles these days, and powder stuff and cleansing bars, not to mention the soap that wasn’t soap at all but a cake of something stuffed full of rosebuds and seeds and bits of grass. Minty wouldn’t have given you a thank-you for any of it. She used Wright’s Coal Tar as she always had.

In the bathroom she felt safe. You couldn’t imagine a ghost in a bathroom somehow, it would be all wrong. How about her hair? Should she wash it again? It looked clean enough, the fine, flyaway fair hair behaving in its usual way and flying away at all angles. Better put it under the tap and be on the safe side. She was going out with Sonovia and Laf later and she didn’t want to give offense; there was nothing so unpleasant as greasy hair next to you. In the end she gave it a proper wash, it couldn’t do any harm.

Minty dried herself and dropped the used towel into the basket. She never used a towel more than once and she never used body lotion or perfume. Deodorant, yes, and on the soles of her feet and palms of her hands as well as her underarms. Body lotion only dirtied clean skin as makeup did. Besides, she couldn’t afford all that rubbish. She was quite proud of the fact that no lipstick had ever soiled her mouth nor mascara her pale eyelashes. Normally, since Auntie passed away, Minty would have walked naked across the narrow expanse of landing into her bedroom, as she might have if only the living Jock had been in the house. It was different altogether with a ghost who was dead and shouldn’t want to look at a nude woman from beyond the grave. She took a clean towel from the cupboard, wrapped it round her and opened the door cautiously. There was no one and nothing there. No ghost could have survived in that bright light.

Minty put on clean underwear, a clean pair of cotton trousers, and a clean sweater. No accessories, no jewelry. You never knew what germs were harbored by things like that. She was due to give them a knock next door at seven-thirty. The cinema they were going to was the Odeon at Marble Arch, and the film started at eight-fifteen. Something to eat first and maybe a cup of tea.

Why had he come back like that? They said ghosts returned when they had unfinished business to attend to. Well, he had. An engagement isn’t finished till it ends in marriage. She hadn’t even seen his body or been asked to the funeral or had a pot of ashes like they gave her when Auntie was cremated. All she’d had was that letter telling her he’d been in the train that crashed and been burnt to a cinder. The fact was that she’d started to get over it—she’d stopped crying and got on with her life, the way they said you had to—and now his ghost appearing like that had brought it all back. Perhaps he’d only come to say a final good-bye. She hoped so.

The kitchen was spotless. It smelled powerfully of bleach, a scent Minty liked. If she’d ever worn perfume it would have smelled like bleach. Although she’d just had her big wash she washed her hands again. She was very particular about what she ate. Food could be messy and make you dirty. Soup, for instance, or pasta or anything with gravy. She ate a lot of cold chicken and ham and salad and bread, the white kind, not the brown, which might have any filthy substance in it to make it that color, and eggs and fresh, unsalted butter. Her weekly expenditure on tissues and paper napkins and kitchen roll was ruinous but it couldn’t be helped. As it was, she used the washing machine to capacity every day without adding linen napkins to the load. When she’d eaten she washed up everything she’d used and put it away, and washed her hands under the running tap.

Was she going to leave all these lights on when she went out? Auntie would have called it a wicked waste. The upstairs ones would have to stay on. She wasn’t going to go up there and turn the lights off and have to come down the stairs with all that darkness behind her. Out in the hall she took her coat off the peg and put it on. There was always a problem with coats because you couldn’t really keep them clean. Minty had done the best she could by running up a couple of cotton linings on the Immacue machine. She could wash them and slip a clean one into the coat each time she wore it. The best thing, if she was to have any peace of mind, was not to think about the dirt on the outside of the coat, but it was a struggle not to do this and she didn’t always succeed.

The light was blazing in the front room. Minty went a little way in there, retreated, and, standing in the hall, put her hand round the door jamb and snapped off the light switch. Her eyes had closed of their own volition while she performed this action. Now she was afraid to open them in case Jock’s ghost had taken advantage of her temporary blindness to seat himself in the chair once more. With the chair pushed up against the table, perhaps he wouldn’t be able to. She opened her eyes. No ghost. Should she tell Sonovia about it? Minty couldn’t make up her mind.

The street doors in Syringa Road opened on to tiny rectangular front gardens. Minty’s garden was paved all over, Auntie had seen to that, but next door’s had earth and flowers growing out of it, masses of them in summer. Sonovia saw Minty coming and waved from the window. She was wearing her new red trouser suit and a long scarf thing in powder blue that she called a pashmina. Her lipstick matched her suit, and her hair, newly done, was just like the shiny hat on the toby jug Auntie had brought back from a trip to Southend.

“We thought we’d go on the bus,” Sonovia said. “Laf says there’s no way he’s parking the car down there and maybe getting it clamped. He has to watch his step, being in the force.”

Sonovia always said “being in the force,” never “being a policeman.” Minty was disappointed about the car but didn’t say so. She missed being taken about in Jock’s car, though it was old and what he called a “boneshaker.” Laf came out from the front room and gave her a kiss. His name was Lafcadio but that was a bit much of a name to go to bed with, as Sonovia put it, and everyone called him Laf. He and Sonovia were still only in their late forties but had been married since they were eighteen and had four grown-up children, who’d all left home now and either had their own places or were still at university. Auntie used to say you’d think no one else had ever had a son a doctor and a daughter a lawyer, another daughter at university, and the youngest at the Guildhall School of something or other, the way Sonovia went on about it. Minty thought it was something to be proud of but at the same time couldn’t really comprehend it; she couldn’t imagine all the work and study and time that had gone into getting where they had.

“I’ve seen a ghost,” she said. “When I got in from work. In the front room, sitting in a chair. It was Jock.”

They had never met Jock but knew whom she meant. “Now, Minty, don’t be so daft,” said Laf.

“There’s no such things as ghosts, my deah.” Sonovia always said “my deah” like that when she wanted to show she was older and wiser than you. “Absolutely not.”

Minty had known Laf and Sonovia since they came to live next door when she was ten. Later on, when she was a bit older, she’d babysat for them. “It was Jock’s ghost,” she said. “And when he’d gone I felt the seat of the chair and it was warm. It was him all right.”

“I’m not hearing this,” said Sonovia.

Laf gave Minty a pat on the shoulder. “You were hallucinating, right? On account of you being a bit under the weather of late.”

“Heed the wise words of Sergeant Lafcadio Wilson, my deah.” Sonovia glanced in the mirror, patted her hair, and went on, “Let’s go. I don’t want to miss the start of the picture.”

They walked along to the bus stop opposite the high wall of the cemetery. When she had anything worrying her Minty never trod on the cracks in the pavement but stepped over them. “Like a little kid,” said Sonovia. “My Corinne used to do that.”

Minty didn’t reply. She went on stepping over the cracks; nothing would have induced her to tread on them. On the other side of the wall were tombs and gravestones, big dark trees, the gasometer, the canal. She’d wanted Auntie buried in there but they wouldn’t have it, there was no more room, and Auntie was cremated. The undertakers had written to her and said the ashes were ready for her to collect. No one asked what she was going to do with them. She’d taken the little box of ashes into the cemetery and found the most beautiful grave, the one she liked best with an angel on it holding a broken violin kind of thing and covering up her eyes with her other hand. Using an old tablespoon, she’d dug a hole in the earth and put the ashes in. Afterward she’d felt better about Auntie, but she hadn’t been able to do the same for Jock. His ex-wife or his old mother would have had Jock’s ashes.

Sonovia was talking about her Corinne, the one who was a barrister, about what someone called for some reason the head of chambers had said to her. All compliments and praise, of course. No one ever said unpleasant things to Sonovia’s children, just as unpleasant things never happened to them. Minty thought of Jock dying in that train, in the fire, a violent death which was a cause of a return from beyond the grave.

“You’re very silent,” said Laf.

“I’m thinking about Jock’s ghost.”

The 18 bus came.

“That was an unfortunate choice of film,” said Sonovia, “under the circumstances.”

Minty thought so too. It was called The Sixth Sense and it was about a poor little mad boy who saw the ghosts of murdered people after they were murdered. Sonovia said that good it might be, but she worried about the effect on the boy actor playing the part. It couldn’t be right for a child to see all that, even if it was only acting. They went into a pub in Harrow Road and Laf bought Minty a glass of white wine. If it had been the pub where she’d first met Jock she couldn’t have stayed, it would have been too much for her. She didn’t know anyone in here.

“Now are you going to be okay going into the house on your own?”

“You go with her, Sonny. Put all the lights on.”

Minty was grateful. She wouldn’t much care to have gone in there by herself. Of course, she’d have to tomorrow and the next day and the next. She’d have to live there. The house once more ablaze with light, Sonovia gave her a kiss, which she didn’t often do, and left her to the bright emptiness. The trouble was she’d have to turn the lights out behind her before she went to bed. She went into the kitchen, washed her hands and Sonovia’s lipstick off her face. The kitchen light out behind her, she walked down the passage, expecting to feel Jock’s hand on her neck. He’d been in the habit of placing his hand on her neck and holding her head up to his before giving her one of his deep kisses. She shivered but there was nothing. Bravely, she switched off the front-room light, turned, walked to the stairs, the darkness very deep behind her. She ran up the stairs as fast as she could and into the bathroom, not closing the door, because she knew that if she did she wouldn’t dare open it again.

She scrubbed her teeth, washed her face and neck and her hands again, her underarms, her feet, and the bit between her legs that was sacred to Jock. No other man would ever touch or enter it, that was a promise. Before she left the bathroom she touched every wooden surface, choosing three different colored woods, the white of the panels that boxed in the bath, the pink picture rail, the pale yellow handle of the back brush. She wasn’t sure if something portable would do, perhaps it ought to be part of the fixtures. It had to be three surfaces or better still seven, but there weren’t seven different colors in the bathroom. No one, no ghost, was outside the door. She’d forgotten her glass of water but never mind, it couldn’t be helped, she’d have to do without. It wasn’t as if she ever drank much of it.

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.

“He was a lovely chap,” said Josephine. “Life’s a bitch, when you come to think of it.”

Minty would rather not have talked about it, especially now. She finished the fiftieth shirt at ten to one and went home for an hour. Lunch was free-range eggs scrambled on white toast. She washed her hands before eating and again afterward, and her face as well, and put the washing in the dryer. The flower-selling man had set up his stall outside the cemetery gates. It wasn’t really spring yet, it was still February, but he’d got daffodils and tulips as well as the chrysanthemums and carnations that had been around all winter. Minty had filled an empty bleach bottle with water and brought it with her. She bought six pink tulips and six white narcissi with orange centers.

“In remembrance of your auntie, is it, love?”

Minty said it was and it was nice to see the spring flowers.

“You’re right there,” said the flower-selling man, “and what I say is, it does your heart good to see a bit of a kid like yourself remembering the old folks. There’s too much indifference in the world these days.”

Thirty-seven isn’t a “bit of a kid” but a lot of people thought Minty much younger than she was. They didn’t look closely enough to see the lines coming out from the corners of her eyes and the little puckers round her mouth. There was that barman in the Queen’s Head who wouldn’t believe she was a day over seventeen. It was her white skin, shiny about the nose, and her wispy fair hair and being as thin as one of those models that did it. Minty paid the man and smiled at him because he’d called her a kid, and then she went into the cemetery, carrying her flowers.

If it weren’t for the graves it would have been like the country in there, all trees and bushes and grass. But it was no good saying that, Jock said. The graves were the reason for the trees. A lot of famous people were buried here but she didn’t know their names; she wasn’t interested. Over there was the canal and beyond it the gasworks. The gasometer loomed over the cemetery like some huge old temple, commemorating the dead. Ivy was the plant that grew most plentifully in here, creeping over the stones and slabs, up the columns, twining round the statues and pushing its tendrils through the splits and cracks in tombs. Some of the trees had black, shiny, pointed leaves, like leather cutouts, but most were leafless in winter, their bare branches sighing and shivering when the wind blew but hanging now limp in stillness. It was always quiet, as if there were an invisible barrier above the wall that kept out even the traffic noise.

Auntie’s grave was at the end of the next path, on the corner where it met one of the main aisles. Of course, it wasn’t really her grave, it was just the place where Minty had buried her ashes. The grave belonged to Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, who departed this life 15 December 1897, aged fifty-three, asleep in the arms of Jesus. When she’d brought Jock here she’d told him this was Auntie’s grandmother and he’d been impressed. For all she knew, it might be true. Auntie must have had two grandmothers like everyone else, just as she must have. She was going to have Auntie’s name put on the stone, she’d said. Jock said the grave was beautiful and moving, and the stone angel must have cost a fortune, even in those days.

Minty took the dead stalks out of the stone pot and wrapped them in the paper that had been round the tulips and narcissi. She poured the water out of the bleach bottle into the vase. When she turned round for the flowers, she saw Jock’s ghost coming down the main aisle toward her. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweater and his leather jacket, but he wasn’t solid like he’d been last night. She could see through him.

She said bravely, though she could hardly get the words out, “What d’you want, Jock? What have you come back for?”

He didn’t speak. When he was about two yards from her he faded away. Just vanished like a shadow does when the sun goes in. Minty would have liked some wood to touch or maybe to have crossed herself, but she didn’t know which side to start from. She was shaking all over. She knelt on Auntie’s grave and prayed. Dear Auntie, keep him away. If you see him where you are tell him I don’t want him coming here. Always and forever your loving niece Araminta.

Two people came along the path, the woman carrying a little bunch of carnations. They said, “Good afternoon,” the way no one ever would if you met them outside in the street. Minty got up off her knees and returned the greeting. She took her parcel of stalks and her empty bleach bottle, and dropped them in one of the litter bins. It had begun to rain. Jock used to say, Don’t worry about it, it’s only water. But was it? You didn’t know what dirt it picked up on its way down out of the sky.