Ghost streets – by Alexandra Sangster
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I have lived here long enough to know where the people who are not living anymore live.
Well not them exactly, but their ghosts.
All of the streets speak.
There is a build-up
of bones
(not the literal kind, not like in Paris with the catacombs or in Scotland with the pits of plague dead under your feet)
but bones none the less.
Most of these houses have, at some stage, held the body of someone dying or someone dead
and then many have held ashes, in boxes.
As I write this, my mother’s burnt bones sit by my bedside in a blue glass jar that once held lentils.
It’s not actually all of her. Most of the grit was put in a grave alongside her mother and father, into a discreet hole dug by a boy in a man’s overalls, leaning against his shovel in the way of men at work, awaiting instructions.
Dig it up here, up near Mum’s heart, I heard my Aunty Cheryl say, and so he did, and then we poured her in.
But earlier, secretly, I had scooped out a spoon of her and popped it in the blue jar – the first I could find. I say ‘secretly’ because, technically, this ash was not mine to subdivide, it was my sister’s too and I didn’t think she would want me messing about and so I did it, all by myself, like the younger sister that I am.
I have visited many houses in these streets because I am a minister and that is what some of us do.
I have been ‘visiting’ for over 20 years. In different ministries, different suburbs.
Early on, I used to go by bike because I didn’t have a licence.
I was a sailor, in a tiny rowboat, heaving my way through the ocean of traffic, up to old ladies’ houses, ladies who had been marooned by illness and age and who were now shipwrecked in their own homes.
I would arrive, slightly sweaty (the scent of salt), and they would welcome me with tea and tales of long-ago betrothals and soldiers and broken hearts and children lost. A wedding dress would be unfurled upon a bed. The best china from the Harlequin set, from the 1930s, would be brought out. Once a soup, cold and pale green and made of lettuce, was offered. I would drink it all down, the stories and soup and sorrow, and then would sail out, into the soft rain, again.
For the last 10 years I have been in just one place and I have got to know these particular streets and visit these particular people. And then, when they are gone, I get to walk past and stop at their gates.
Hello Pat, I might hear myself say.
Hello Pat.
Pat once lived in a house with a specially built, glassed-in verandah room. In this room, facing the street, her husband (him in the iron lung) lay for 30 years, after waking her in the night, when she was just a young bride, to say:
Pat, Pat, I can’t move my legs
(and of how only the day before, her neighbour, Dulcie, had come running through the apple orchard to tell Pat of how Dulcie’s husband, Dave, had been struck down with the Polio)
and of how Pat had to put her new husband on the back of a cart and hitch up the horses and get him to town and he had to be driven down to Melbourne, to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, and of how he taught himself to frog-breathe so that he could come home and of how they had two sons and Pat would smile a secret smile when people asked her how,
and also, when we were deep in lockdown, I went to visit – just to stand outside you know, to make sure she was okay – and of how her leg was bleeding – ripped up, paper-thin flesh – and she said:
I need help
and of how I said
No Pat, the virus, I can’t come in
but she was a little girl, all alone
and her leg was gushing
and so in I came and bowed down before her on the faded rose carpet
and bound her ancient, blood-red shin.
Goodbye Pat
I keep walking. The black cockatoos screech overhead on their way to strip the pines down by the river. Sometimes, in these streets, at night, there are mopoke owls – whose name has been changed by the International Ornithological Society to southern boobook (all lower case – which seems bit rude) and always, there are the corvids.
Hello Ian. Hello Arthur. Hello Janice.
Hello house of the boy who died of an allergy when he was old enough to stay alive, certainly when he was old enough to know about all about the things that might kill him. Ever since he was tiny. Drilled into him. Don’t eat this. Don’t touch that. Carry your epipen wherever you go.
Everyone knew.
And yet, despite the best the family could do to burn all the spinning wheels and ban all the weavers, and despite the walls they built around the kingdom, one day Sleeping Beauty sat down at a spindle which seeded itself into her skin
and
just
like
that.
And one day, the boy ate the wrong grain on the harmless cracker
and
just
like
that
the expansion
the filling up
the shutting down
the catastrophic emptying out.
Three useless days in the hospital
and then his father, a doctor himself, carried out his boy’s beautiful body,
still with the soul inside,
carried him out of the ICU and into the sunshine,
for just one
last
moment
and told his boy:
We are going to turn off all the machines, mate
We are going to let you go
and of how the boy, very faintly,
(it seemed to his father) smiled.
It’s okay, Dad
It’s okay
and of how, later, that same dad every morning would be out on his hands and knees in the driveway, cutting the grass that grew in the cracks, with nail scissors, keeping control of
just
one
thing.
This blade of grass, this next blade of grass, this next …
Outside the boy’s home there is a tree and, in the tree, there is a little box, nestling in the crook of the warm old trunk, and inside the box is a photo of the boy and a letter from his sister.
The letter says only three words:
Come home,
please.
Keep walking.
Hello strange man who I never met who died in Bali and whose widow never paid for the funeral and was one of those women who would leave laminated angry notes stapled with an upright authority to posts of carefully-cut-to-size bamboo with the words on the note printed in bold, commanding: Pick up after your dog!
Hello man with angry, grieving widow, I might say.
I can’t remember if she started putting up the notes before or after he died.
Was she this angry before? Or only afterwards?
There is a theological concept known as the eucharistic collapse of time.
The collapse of time.
In the communion liturgy we say the words:
Take, eat; this is my body. Whenever you do this, do this in remembrance of me.
The word remembrance comes from the Greek anamnesis and it’s trying to talk about the objective effectiveness and presence of one reality in another.
Or, in other words, every moment exists in every other moment.
And in every house is every ghost
and on every street there is a build-up of footprints, like settler song lines.
And I know, metaphorically at least, if not literally, where many of the bodies lie.
And so,
time
collapses.
Walks are never lonely
but are sometimes heavy.
Maybe it is time to move.
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Image: Devon Mackay - Unsplash
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