by Liam Kruger

1st place

You know, in Jewish homes, there used to be a tradition of emptying out every dish, pot and basin out of the windows when somebody died.

Calm down. Try and take some deep breaths.

This was done to tell the neighbours that Uncle Abe had kicked the bucket. The spiritual explanation was that souls could be trapped by water, and keeping water under the roof prevented them from rising to heaven.

I know it feels like you can’t breathe, don’t worry about it. Push through.

You’re not going to be able to talk for a couple of minutes, but you seem to be able to hear well enough. Why, look at that, your eyes are moving?high tolerance, I see. Don’t worry about it. You’re not dying.

I used to live here too. Alone, like you. One of the biggest problems, I think, about living alone, is adapting to a world where everything is under your sole influence. Don’t you think? After a childhood?an extended childhood?of feeling other people’s warmth in the chair I just sat down in, there were few things quite as depressing as coming home after a long day of pretending to know what I was doing to find my crusty cereal bowl in the sink, exactly as I left it after breakfast.

So, naturally, I was rather pleased when I found out that my new place was haunted. Just like you.

The realisation was gradual; I blush to think of it now, but there must’ve been weeks when I meandered up and down my hallway in various states of undress, probably scratching myself, as if no one was there. Wait, that’s not quite right; no one was there. What I thought was that there wasn’t anyone there, which is different.

It was the little things that tipped me off, you know? Lights being on when I was almost certain I’d left them off, beds being made or unmade, footsteps in the room next door?which seemed reasonable at first, because the walls between these apartments are paper thin, as you know. It was worse in my time. I could sit in the middle of my living room and hear the couple in No. 15 fuck or fight while the lady in No. 11 tried to telemarket from home. The footsteps were coming from a room in the apartment, though, a fact that only bobbed to the surface of my consciousness after I’d figured it out.

Obviously, poltergeist wasn’t the first thing to jump into my head. The age we lived in, I was almost certain my flat was being broken into; I crept downstairs holding my umbrella like a baseball bat, or like I supposed a baseball bat should be held, every second or third night for about a week. Then I’d sit in the dark for ten, twenty minutes, waiting for whoever else was there?because I could tell by the tensing of my bladder that there had to be someone else there?to leap out, stabbing or shrieking or however it was the burglars operated. The lack of sleep started getting to me, though, and I realised I didn’t have anything really worth stealing, so I learned to ignore the sounds.

Please stop rolling your eyes like that, it’s distracting. I’ve told you you’re not dying.

The realisation came when I saw that my books were disordered. I was nursing a nasty burn on my forearm from when the stove had unaccountably turned itself on while I was cleaning it, and my boss had instructed me to take a few days off. Our uniforms are short-sleeved and the customers don’t like their food being handed to them by folks with nasty, seeping bandages. I said sure, and took my time looking at the books I hadn’t read. I didn’t really have time to read, back then, but I made sure the books were in sequence so that I would know where to find them, if I found the time. You’re not a very big reader, are you? You’ve got a row of empty beer cans where I kept my biographies. No matter. Anyway, it was when I found the Borges tucked in behind Grisham that I knew something was up.

I didn’t have any idea what to do about it, though. Would you? Of course you wouldn’t. You didn’t. I mean, I couldn’t exactly go around the apartment waving a birthday candle and compelling my secret roommate with the power of whomever?I don’t believe in that stuff. And I wasn’t about to go for one of those blood-and-bones sangoma exorcisms either?for one thing, I wouldn’t know where to find one. Christ, do you have any idea how awkward that conversation would have been? I bristle enough as it is every time my brother calls a car guard chief; and here I am trying to get a witch doctor to play Pagan African Superstitious Eye for the Sceptical But Attempting To Be Open-Minded Guy. Not happening. Besides, it’s not like anything had happened to warrant eviction. More on that later, mind you.

So I did nothing, for a while. The impact on my life wasn’t all that significant?I mean, I took far more care with heated appliances, certainly, but otherwise…I did entertain guests less frequently, but that wasn’t any great change. On the rare occasions that I did bring a bunk-mate home, I was so intensely aware of being watched that my performance suffered considerably, so that well sort of dried up, figuratively. Literally too, I suppose. But, really, I welcomed the company, taciturn though it was.

The solution to my problem?the ghost-in-our-house problem?came from my grandmother, which was as much of a surprise to me as anyone. She was staying in the spare bedroom for the weekend?the room you offered to that drunk friend of yours before you two inevitably ended up together in the master. One of ouma’s old friends was being buried in town, and she wanted to flaunt her continued survival where possible.

Grandmother was terrified of the big city and all of the crime in it; I was almost certain she would be woken up by the scraping of chairs going on in the empty dining room, and start asking unfortunate questions. Luckily, any sounds getting into her room were drowned out by her snoring and, later, her alarm clock, which also failed to wake her. Still, my grandmother?like many other grandmothers, I suspect?claimed to have some sort of second sight. Apparently grandfather swings by for a chat every few weeks, and my parents’ old house is haunted by a little Spanish girl.

Naturally I wanted to know if she was picking up on any sort of presence over here. I didn’t want the question to be too transparent, though, or else she’d just have said yes to maintain her image. We were sitting in the lounge?my furniture wasn’t as nice as yours but I think the couch was a little more comfortable.

“I’m curious about who lived here before me,” I hazarded, because my conversations with grandmother were awkward enough to sustain statements like that.

“Yes,” she replied. “I wonder how much their rent was, when the neighbourhood was better.”

“Well that’s true.” I watched the light fixture in the kitchen swing back and forth behind her. “But I was thinking more about their identity. Like how I could get to know about a person who was previously living. Here.”

She looked at me, a little startled, and stared for some seconds, eyebrows arched and lip pressed together. She looked around the room, carefully, as if on the verge of some great veil-breaching revelation, and said, “I don’t know, check the Googles or something.”

She shrugged and picked up a copy of People, to start on the crossword.

So I checked “the Googles” I wasn’t the online savant that you are, but it didn’t take much more than “death” and the name of the neighbourhood to bring up a series of obituaries from the local paper. About half of these were families reporting the tragic death of their pets, a disproportionate amount of which were beagles named Snoopy. The human deaths were about as clichéd?KS, female, eighteen, died in a car crash on the way home from a matric farewell; GD, male, twenty-three, took own life; EW, female, sixty-one, passed quietly in her sleep after a long battle with cancer; and JT, male, forty-three, died of injuries sustained during armed robbery en route to hospital. It was all so unbelievably typical, I was convinced that I was going to be stuck with some dull working-class ghost…and then her entry caught my eye. I can see you know which one I’m talking about.

CA, female, twenty-four, overdosed on painkillers and wine. It was a little contrived, yes, but there was something romantic about the wine. Oh, I willed my ghost to be her. A little bit of digging got you further here than I did?you found the coroner’s report, clever duck, so you heard about the cigarette burns all up and down her arm, and the tattoos. I only heard about that later?from the horse’s mouth, so to speak?but she seemed interesting, to be sure. A quick trawl through Facebook later, I had her name and her face. Are you on Facebook? I shall have to find out.

Her online profile had become a little shrine, after she died. Friends who obviously knew nothing about the circumstances of her death were throwing condolences and eulogies at her unmanned profile now, numerous and sentimental as graveyard flowers. Like you, I ignored these at first, scrambling first through her photo albums, madly seeking some sort of tangible proof; here a generic beachside landscape, there a black-and-white deck chair, a pile of bottles next to a familiar corner, and?ah. A photograph she had taken herself, standing in this very bathroom, of her reflection in that mirror. She’d cropped her hair short and had the camera placed in front of her protectively, like a talisman.

It was her. It had to be her who was haunting me. And now I had found her.

I found out more, over time; her Facebook profile, revealing even at a cursory glance, became like an encyclopaedia under my scrutiny. I know which books she’d read, which music she’d liked, where she’d worked, who her co-workers had been. I bought the books, played the music and visited the mediocre restaurant with the remarkable mojitos. Is this not sounding familiar? The ghost girl’s reconstructed life? Of course it is. I think you might’ve been more desperate than I was, to convince yourself that the girl had lived here.

Don’t worry. She really did.

I have to hand it to you; you really dived head-first into the project. There were some aspects to the arrangement that I put off, even as I teased out the barest details of her life. I didn’t want to be seen buying an Ouija board, I told myself. I think I was reluctant to try to communicate. Nerves, you know. Not you, of course; you went right out and got everything you might need to talk, didn’t you? Not that you ever talked to her. I am sorry about that.

When I got desperate enough to think it might work, we used the mirror to communicate. It seemed appropriate.

I remember the routine well. I’d turn on the shower, not even touching the cold faucet, just letting it get as hot as it could?waiting for the surface to steam up. It wouldn’t happen every time, but it’s a small apartment?there are only so many places for a ghost to be. I’d feel that tingle in the back of your mind that we both know so well by now, and I’d say “Hello”. Fingers that weren’t fingers would press themselves to the glass and write in a fluid, almost curling style?Hello yourself.

She was blithe, even as a ghost. Especially as a ghost.

Would it be wrong of me to say I coveted her then? It wasn’t like your relationship?and your relationship was sweet enough, with the awkward entreaties to undying love and all that. I loved her, of course, but I loved what she had managed to make herself into?mourned by people who hadn’t spoken to her in months even before she died, beloved by people who had not been as fond of her in life. She’d tethered all these hearts to her grave, with some pills and a bottle of wine. I was awed. It’s no big deal, she’d written, and through the steam I was sure I saw a shrug of those angular shoulders. I don’t mean to belittle what you felt, dear; I’m sure you thought you loved her very much. She’d have appreciated the sentiment.

From here, I think, the story should become very familiar. I didn’t leave the house very much, after first contact. I had money enough to last a while, so I stocked up on wine and candles, and that was that, for a time. I sang praises to the ghost girl, constantly in her company, talking and laughing at the gross world of the living.

I don’t think I ate for a week.

Later, she told me that she’d come to regret the suicide attempt. She still called it an attempt because, well, I’m still here, aren’t I? She said that she’d had time to think things over and, once she’d done all the things ghosts can do?the big ones like flying, and the little ones like reading every book in the house without blinking?she began to miss the stuff of life. That spoiled her for me, a little, but it didn’t really matter by then. I had become transfixed, wrapped around her gossamer fingers. Having felt the power she wielded, I can’t bring myself to get angry at her anymore. You’ll understand.

We made love, eventually. I had gotten very drunk and the last threads of daylight were creeping out under the curtains. Without apparent thought, I found my hand sliding down past my navel. It struck me that I wasn’t entirely in control of my hand stirring; that the nerves were jerking a little, like a frog with a current through it. You are, of course, familiar with the sensation; when your hand becomes someone else’s glove, and when your eyes are seeing for someone else. There’s that vague sense of panic, and the rush that comes with it. I’m afraid I didn’t have the same rush of virginal shame that you wallowed in, but there’s nothing especially wrong with that. You came around. It felt good; when it was dark enough, the tongue in my mouth might not have belonged to me, for a few minutes at a time.

Test-driving, it’s called. She didn’t tell me that through the mirror, though.

Like you, I said that I loved her. And, like you, I was eventually asked to prove it.

I think it was easier to make you do it. I hadn’t been struck by any thoughts about the immortality of love?more by the spectacle, the ruined car-crash lives she’d left behind, making a clean exit. It took convincing; she told me that we could escape the confines of the apartment, that we could be united in spirit; that I would never be out of shape.

If the last one didn’t convince me, it did make a difference.

I think I should’ve grown suspicious around the time that she started making very specific instructions about how to go about killing myself. I’d wanted to go with hanging; that rafter in the dining room would have been excellent for it. Pills and wine in the bathtub, she’d said, like me. Like you.

So I’d sat there, feeling my body grow numb and weak, as my muscles stopped listening to my screaming, panicked brain, and felt myself stepping out for a moment.

“Calm down,” said a voice that didn’t disturb a single atom, but which I could still hear. “Try to take some deep breaths.” My rolling, thrashing ghost eyes stopped for long enough to see her, perfectly composed down to the cigarette burns on her arm, floating a few feet above me and my body, which was twitching.

“I know it feels like you can’t breathe. Push through it.”

She smiled at me and sank into my body. I can only imagine what the look on my face must’ve been like. It’s probably a little like the look on your face. Except it’s my face, now, isn’t it?

The first thing she did when she had control of my body was throw up. It seemed the dosage of pills and wine she’d prescribed?which, incidentally, is the dosage of pills and wine I advised you to take?would be enough to push me to the edge, without quite killing me, providing ample opportunity for a somewhat more experienced ghost to step in, and take control, which she knew she was capable of, after those late-night test-drives.

You mustn’t be mad at me. It’s not like you ever checked to ask your ghost’s name.

She told me about the Jewish tradition as she was washing her face?my face?in the mirror. About the friends that had decided they loved her after she died. About how it was time to re-connect, even if it meant using my body.

I hadn’t wanted it anyway.

I do feel a little guilty, obviously. She had stolen my grand gesture from me; no online shrine, no mourning relatives. I suppose I’ve stolen something from you.

I didn’t mean to deceive you, duck, but would you have fallen in love with me if I hadn’t pretended to be her? Would you have given up this lovely body?well, nothing a diet won’t make lovely?like I gave up mine?

Don’t moan like that, little ghost. There’ll be someone else coming along soon. It’s a nice apartment. I won’t tell the new tenant about the scraping chairs, or the dripping faucets. You’ll have a chance, like me.

Then you can tell me how wrong I am.

Copyright © 2010 by Liam Kruger
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