My Ghosts Read online

  ALSO BY MARY SWAN

  The Boys in the Trees

  The Deep

  Emma’s Hands

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 Mary Swan

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2013 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint from the following:

  “Site of Ambush,” by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin from The Second Voyage. Revised edition. Published January 1986 Wake Forest University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

  The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Block and Stephen Mitchell, © 1996 by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell. Published by the University of California Press.

  The Wild Iris, by Louise Gluck. © 1993 Louise Gluck. Published by Harper Collins.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Swan, Mary

  My ghosts / Mary Swan.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-80785-4

  I. Title.

  PS8587.W344M9 2013 C813′.6 C2013-901554-X

  Cover design by Kelly Hill

  Cover image by Adam Fuss from the series “My Ghost” 1998. © Adam Fuss. Courtesy of Cheim and Read, New York. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

  v3.1

  For George.

  Always remembered.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part I

  Absence

  Sleepers Awake

  Bella

  Part II

  Burning Boy

  The Maid on the Shore

  Aftermath

  Part III

  Wish you Were Here

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  A house can be haunted by those who were never there

  If there is where they were missed.

  —LOUIS MACNEICE

  I

  1879–1905

  ABSENCE

  September

  In her room at the top of the house, Clare is thinking about time. Thinking with her eyes closed in the poky little space up under the roof, where things scuttle and rustle. Stifling in the summer and far too cold in winter and not anything like the room that will be hers a few years from now, when they all move to the new double house on Pembroke Street. The one where the scent of lilacs drifts through all the open windows.

  But that’s in the future, and the future, like the past, is nowhere in her mind. Instead she’s thinking about time in a different way. Thinking about what it is, and why it is. Thinking about how it can be Eternal, and yet gone forever. About how it is a thing that has carried on for everyone else these past hours or days while she was lying in her narrow bed, thinking nothing at all.

  The room has two small windows, east and west, and when the word morning floats into her mind she knows that it’s there because of the faint bar of light that falls on her quilt through the panes to her right. The patchwork glows along that bar, a watery blue block at the edge of it. They each have a quilt their mother has made, sleep beneath patterns of worn-out clothing. The blue is from a shirt Wee Alan wore before he died on the crossing. Before he was sewn into a tiny shroud and tipped into the cold sea, while even Clare’s father wept. That’s a story they all know, although she doesn’t remember anyone telling it. In her bed she realizes how far one word has brought her, and she closes her eyes and falls back down into the dark.

  At some point she uses the chamber pot. When she gets up to use it again it is clean and that means someone has been there, her mother or her sisters. Maybe while she slept, if that’s what she’s been doing. Sometimes the light falls through the window to her left, sometimes to her right, and she has no idea where she’s been in between. A thing that might worry her, if she wasn’t so very tired. She wonders, idly, if this is what it is to lose your mind. Or maybe it’s her body, the thin white hands she holds before her eyes; maybe her body is the thing that’s been left behind.

  Clare thinks that thought and then it’s gone, and she finds herself in a moment when the light is neither left nor right; she is standing on legs that feel like India rubber, then walking a few paces. Sometime after that she sips broth from a white bowl, her sister’s face wavering and strange through the steam. “Eight days,” Kez says, when she asks. “You missed your birthday, we had to eat all sixteen tarts without you.” Then she says, “Are you feeling any better?”

  “I don’t know,” Clare says. “I don’t seem to know anything at all.”

  Quite suddenly she remembers that her mother is two years dead, and not emptying anyone’s chamber pot. Not sitting beside the bed before dawn, not placing a cool hand on Clare’s forehead, nor singing that quiet song. Her leaving was so easy that it’s always felt that she hasn’t really gone. That she’s somewhere just out of sight, standing by a window before the lamps are lit, or sitting on a chair in the next room. Maybe holding Wee Alan on her knee, while he pats her face with his baby hands. It’s not a thing she’s thought before, but it makes sense to Clare if that’s what Heaven is. Not a place, exactly, but something like a fold, like the part of a let-down hem that has stayed as bright and clean as it was in the beginning, while all the rest fades and fades. Maybe there is a fold like that in time, a sort of sidestep that lets you stay with the ones you loved, lets you watch them and hold them up. But no work to be done, no fretting or cares. When they opened the bedroom door that morning, only the white curtains moved in the light. Their mother’s eyes were closed, all the lines in her face smoothed away.

  At one time it could barely hold them all, this tall, narrow house where Clare lies thinking, cheek resting on her folded hands. Like a dance, the way they moved through the rooms, turning sideways, stepping forward and back to keep from crashing into each other. Her brothers’ thundering boots and the way they knocked and cuffed each other, up and down the stairs. Her sisters singing and her mother calling one name or another, and always underneath the snick of heavy scissors and the sound of the treadle from the front room where her father cut and stitched fine suits, by the only window that let in enough light.

  Clare is the youngest and for so long it seemed that everything happened over her head. Talking and joking and secrets passing back and forth up above her. Some laundry days the sheets were boiled then draped all over the kitchen to dry and she liked to sit under them, steamy at first but cooling fast, a muffled white world and nothing outside but empty land and sky. Her brother Ross told her once about the Eskimo who lived in the frozen North; it’s the only thing she really remembers about him. Even when she was older, and knew differently, she had the idea that was where Ross went when he left. Pictured him dressed in skins and furs, no sound but the snow squeaking under his heavy feet.

  She tries now to remember how the Eskimo tell time, and decides that she never knew. Only that their days and nights are different, long periods when the su
n never sets and others when there’s nothing but dark. The reason for that a thing she did know once, and she squeezes her eyes shut, trying to bring it back. She thinks of those problems she used to love at school, the ones that came with a story: If a man travels 150 miles in 5 days when the days are 12 hours long, in how many days of 10 hours each will he travel 500 miles? Easy enough to solve, once she’d learned to close her mind to the picture of the man and the road he walked, winding through a forest, and between bare summer hills. His jaunty pace slowing and his boots wearing thin, the sun beating down on his dusty cap. Easy enough if she stopped wondering just where the man was going, that the days were becoming shorter. Who he had left behind, and if he ever missed them.

  Ross was already gone when their father took sick, but even though the mails were slow where he was, there would have been plenty of time for him to come home. When their mother read his letter out, their father said, “He has so much to do, land to clear and a cabin to build, of course he can’t come back.” Then he coughed and coughed, his hair stuck flat to his sweating forehead.

  Kez and Nan muttered across Clare, in the bed they all shared, saying, “That Ross, he always did think only of himself.” There was a time when she thought his leaving was like one of those old songs, a great quarrel and a disowning, the details hidden somewhere in the words that bounced around above her head. But it may have been as her sisters said, that Ross just turned his back, and walked off into a life all his own. No care for their father’s long death. No thought for their mother and the way she sat down at the table when his rare letters came, her fingers tracing each word before she read them slowly out loud. How many trees cut and split, and the cow stumbling into a mire. The birth of a baby girl, named for his wife’s dead sister. And the boys who came after, that she’d never hold in her arms.

  Clare wants to keep thinking about time, but the past keeps intruding, and she wonders if that’s a clue. Like the hints her teacher used to give, trying to draw answers from their blank faces. “Think about it this way,” he would say. “Think about what you know.” The same teacher who showed them a card with a drawing of a girl, an old-fashioned cap perched on her head. Long hair flowing over her shoulders and a dark line of ribbon around her neck. “Keep looking,” Mr. Dunbar said, and suddenly it became a picture of an old crone; the same white cap, but the chin now a hooked nose, the necklace a dark slash of mouth. Once you had seen that, your eyes switched back and forth, but you could never see them both at once, could never catch whatever it was that made the picture change.

  She doesn’t know why she feels as if there’s a puzzle to solve. Steps to take, questions to ask. But remembering the magic picture makes her think of Aunt Peach, who lived with them before Clare went to school. Not really an aunt, but some kind of cousin with nowhere else to go. Always cold, her crooked hands clutching at her grey shawl, a whistle in her breathing, in her voice. She used to wander out in the street, calling the long dead in for supper. Set off for the shops in the middle of the night, her bony feet bare and bruised by the stones in the road. A sudden cry in the house—Peachey’s out, she’s out!—and everyone running to search for her.

  Even in her chair by the stove Aunt Peach didn’t know anyone’s right name. Clare’s mother said that her memories were all scrambled up, like a big mess of eggs. Now she thinks that Aunt Peach was somehow cut loose from time, the way she herself has been. “What’s my name?” Aunt Peach used to say. “What’s my name?” And when they told her, she’d repeat it again and again, like the name of a town, or a river in Africa. Something to memorize, something just as removed.

  “You had a fever, that’s all,” Kez says. Clare isn’t sure that was all, but it’s enough to know for now. Kez climbs the stairs with a bowl and spoon rattling on a tray, with the pale china jug. She helps Clare wash, waits while she spoons in soup or stew, tears off small pellets of bread. It’s not like Kez to be so patient, to speak so soothingly. Nan is the soft one, the one who will listen to anything. The one who used to whisper, “Sorry lovey, so sorry honey,” as she cleaned and bandaged a scraped shin. More motherly than their own mother if that was how you measured it, but maybe she just had more time. Clare’s mother was always in motion, and she fretted about the rent, about the accounts her father took so long to collect. The price of sugar, and how quickly the boys grew out of their boots. Always food to prepare and washing to do and mounds of mending, her needle held close to the light. A pat on the head, a quick touch on the shoulder, but no time, or not that Clare can remember, to sit quietly with her arms wrapped around a child on her lap.

  “Where’s Nan?” she thinks to ask. “She’s not caught my fever, has she?” Kez tells her that Nan hurt her knee, that it’s swollen up like anything and she can’t do the stairs. She says it happened when they were dancing in the kitchen, that Ben was there, that Charlie had stopped by and was showing them some steps he said were all the rage. “I’m surprised you didn’t hear us all the way up here,” Kez says, “we were laughing so hard.”

  It might be true. Their brother Charlie usually brings some wildness with him and he always has the latest knot in his tie, the most fashionable collar. She can picture her brothers and sisters dancing all over the kitchen, the table and chairs moved aside and steam hitting the dark windows, running down in streams. It might have happened, and Nan might have twisted her knee, but she thinks it more likely that Kez is making it up, a cruel reminder that all kinds of things are going on without her.

  Her sleep is still sudden and deep; days pass, and when she’s awake her floating mind snags on thoughts that she tries to examine. Something has happened to her body, she knows that. A walk across the room wears her out, her limbs at the same time so heavy and so weak. She’s not sure why, but she senses that it’s important to keep her mind tethered to this notion of time, to rein it in when it scatters and wanders too far. Another kind of exercise, like the way Kez makes her shuffle from her bed to the doorway, so her feet don’t forget what it’s like.

  Clare doesn’t think there’s anything in her books that will help, and besides, someone has taken them away. The little wall shelf empty, except for the doll her father made from bits of wood and knotted string, a faceless circle for its head, topped with a mess of fine woollen hair. She’s puzzled by the doll, doesn’t think that it has always been there, but that’s not what she wants to be thinking about, so she closes her eyes and tries to remember, instead, all the things she knows about time.

  People used to believe that the sun rode the sky like a fiery horse and chariot, dragging the night behind; she remembers learning that. An answer to a question that was satisfying enough, that let them live their lives by the broad rhythm of light and dark, free to eat when they were hungry, rest when they were tired. Now she asks herself why that wasn’t the end of it, why someone felt a need for more order, and then more. For sundials and church bells, for school bells and ticking clocks and watches. For the time-ball that dropped like a slow stone, her father lifting her onto his shoulders to see over the tall people in front of them. All of it marked out, ticking away, days and hours and minutes, the present divided into smaller and smaller pieces, as if that could keep you from looking into the great black expanse of the future. Darkness on the other side as well, years and years, thousands of them, millions, it’s said, since the world began. Time that existed so long before there were men to think of it.

  Clare imagines that kind of time as the inky black cloth her father rippled out onto his long table. A dark, flowing mass that he measured and cut, tamed to take on the shape of a man. She used to hide under that table, too, listening to the stories he told himself as he worked, the songs he sang so softly. Not even thinking until much later that he had known she was there, of course he had, and the stories were for her. Tamlane with the Elfin Queen, and Thomas the Rhymer. The long song about the cold blowing wind. “Little pitchers,” she remembers him saying sometimes, when her mother stood, cross, in the doorway.

&nbs
p; She can’t picture her father’s face, except at the end. Those last days at his bedside, when the time between his eyes flickering open grew longer and longer, as if he was getting used to how it would be. But she remembers how strong his arms once were, lifting her through the air. And she remembers his foot tapping when he played his old fiddle, and how she loved the times when the neighbours came with more fiddles and drums, when the music was loud in the crowded kitchen, everything a swirl of colour and sound. Hands clapping and her father’s eyes closed, his knee bent and lifting and his boot crashing down.

  After he died they had to sell the long table and the sewing machine, the box of chalk his fingers had held. Their mother wrapped his fiddle in a baby-sized quilt and sent it to Ross, even though Charlie was the one who made music from everything he touched. A pair of spoons or sticks of kindling, the battered squeezebox he spent hours cleaning and patching, and working the stuck buttons free. He must have minded about the fiddle, but that’s just how it was, everyone in their place and things decided. Ross the eldest, if you didn’t count Wee Alan, and entitled to certain things, even though he’d walked away. Ben, the next son, stepping into Ross’s place, handing his pay envelope to their mother and later to Kez and Nan, who cooked and cleaned, who walked together to the shops every day and always came home with something they’d found, even if it was only a story to tell. No question but that Charlie would apprentice to the jeweller on King Street, a man from the same church, who dressed in plain suits their father had made. Or that Clare would become a teacher; what better way to earn her living, to make use of all she’d learned. A girl always top of her class. A girl who loved everything about going to school, loved even the smell of the classroom. The sleepy, chalk-dust light that fell through the tall windows.