No Room for Ghosts

It was a eucalyptus morning, rich with gumdrop smells as the night melted around us like a scented candle. Through the playing mist, the sun shone in subtle shades of gold that gilt every leaf hanging from the evergreen ghost gums. It slicked their curved edges like sharpened sickles, and made loose straw of the tussocks sprouting among the headstones, which stretched in unkempt rows of weathered granite and faded marble.

It gleamed off the slanting awnings of the tombs. It glistened on the still-polished face of the cemetery’s newest marker, nearest where the earth heaped, damp and pungent.

I could feel the coolness of the packed soil beneath my knees, and knew intellectually that it was the result of the vanishing frost. Beneath the shade, the ground was still thawing. That meant that it had been an icy night, and yet, I hadn’t felt the temperature at all, much as I didn’t feel tired. I supposed I never would again.

‘It must have been a beautiful ceremony,’ I said, after a long silence. That was what you were supposed to say.

Leanna crouched beside me in the dirt, her knuckles balled up to wipe away the moisture that was not dew. In her other fist, the newspaper clipping rested limply, no longer held with any urgency. As soon as we had found this plot –the tortured, rustling eucalypts seemed to back away from it like curtains– Leanna had crumpled in front of her grave, and hadn’t said another word.

Like the many marble angels who bent weeping and praying throughout the yard, we sat poised on the brink of conversation, barely registering the passing of the night. The darkness lightened into muffled grey, and then lifted like a blanket, tossed aside by a dawn that rang out like a gong.

We were motionless for so long that I wouldn’t have been surprised if the glaring sun had made gargoyles of us, so that we stayed a part of that moment forever. The very notion of other moments –future moments– now seemed highly irrelevant.

Or, perhaps, in this garden of statues and gleaming white blocks, the steaming sunlight would fade Leanna and I, bleaching us like stones until we became pearlescent, then mere outlines, and finally nothing.

‘I’m under there.’

The voice was tiny and tremulous, like the scattered, shrinking dewdrops that still waited for the day’s obliteration. I crushed a few of them as I shifted, not knowing what to say. I got the impression that Leanna hardly expected a response from me. Maybe she wasn’t even appealing to me, but to some vast, cosmic entity she suddenly found it easy to believe in.

Still muttering, she seemed to come a little closer to breaking the surface of her reverie. ‘Where are all the ghosts?’

‘There are a few more people here, now,’ I said, watching closely as the timid knots and individuals wove themselves through the sleeping garden. I was trying to discern whether any of them could see us, but they probably wouldn’t acknowledge us if they could. Knowing that, it was hard for me to apply myself to the exercise.

Leanna raised her head, curiously, like a rabbit sniffing the air. ‘They don’t look like ghosts,’ she said.

‘Neither do we.’

‘Do you think that maybe ghosts just look like people to other ghosts?’

‘Maybe. Or to… the living,’ I stumbled over the word. It was an obstacle I still wasn’t used to. ‘Who find us in the course of our haunting? I don’t know. Randolph looked human enough. Didn’t he?’

‘I think that maybe ghosts look different to different people,’ Leanna concluded diplomatically. She promptly saddened again. Her eyes fell on the flowers that had been placed in a holder, like an inkwell, beside her body’s resting place. The lilies had just begun to wilt, so that their petals were creased and leathery rather than silky. ‘I wish my family lived here. Then I might be able to haunt them, and let them know that I’m okay.’

Another moment of silence settled between us. I took my cue to banish it. ‘Hey,’ I said lamely. ‘It’ll be alright.’

Her blanched, tear-dampened face turned up towards me like the ever-questing countenance of a sunflower, fringed with tangled, blonde strands. Her hair, dyed yellow by the violent sunrise, stuck out in a rough halo, like straw leaking out of a scarecrow. There were bruise-like shadows underneath her eyes.

‘Am I okay, Harvey?’ she asked. ‘Are we okay?’

‘Sure,’ I said, unconvincingly. ‘I don’t think we have much to worry about now.’

‘Hey, what’s that?’

‘Huh?’

Leanna had turned, spying the something that fluttered feebly in the forked branches of a tree. Springing lithely to her canvas-sneakered feet, she skipped over to unhook it, and held the folded paper aloft for her examination. Condensation had soaked it thoroughly, so that the light penetrated it, illuminating printed shapes like shadows on both sides.

‘What is it? Another newspaper?’ I hesitated, trying to decipher the expression on her face, but it was too distorted from squinting at the blotted print.

‘It’s about me. Remember how Randolph said there might have been something else, but it got chucked out? Here.’

I accepted the article, and was immediately shocked. Before I had even read a word, the picture at the top seized my attention. ‘This was you?’ I asked disbelievingly, feeling my eyebrows shoot up.

Leanna shuffled. For once, it was she who wouldn’t look at me. ‘Yeah,’ she admitted, sounding if anything a little ashamed or annoyed. ‘Of course they picked a picture of me when I was fat.’ She folded her arms. ‘They liked me better that way. Read what it says, though.’

‘You weren’t fat. The opposite, really,’ I protested, but it was hopeless, and it hardly mattered now. I did as I was told.

The article was a much longer obituary than the salvaged snipped we had been given. Judging by the length of it, it had come not from a large, metropolitan paper, but from the local circulation wherever Leanna’s family were from. It described a long list of things we’d never talked about– prizes she’d won in school, and a bit about how she had left home to study. It was a glaring omission, now that I thought of it, that I had never asked her what it was she did and what her hobbies were, why it was that she waited by that bus stop every day, where she was going…

Wait.

My heart skipped a beat, and my mind skidded to a halt. Unknowingly, without even meaning to, I had knocked down one of the walls that sealed my memory of everything surrounding the incident. Recently, whenever I had tried to explore my recollection of what had happened, I encountered only a kind of sarcophagus. Not a hole, exactly, but something solid that indicated where information was lacking, or being withheld. It kept my memories from me as though they were the toxic core of a nuclear reactor– something that had broken, and needed to be shut away for my safety, lest their radioactive contents contaminate my entire consciousness.

I probed the fresh crack like a sore tooth. The revelation stung a little. I had known Leanna before, or at least, I had known of her. She waited at platform eight, every morning, at the same time that I did.

Her voice brought me back to earth, and we were sitting in the graveyard again, where the mist was fast evaporating. ‘Harvey, did you read it?’ She was impatient. ‘Did you read what it said?’

‘I, uh, yeah,’ I stammered. I was struggling to reconnect with my train of thought, as though I had just rolled out of a speeding vehicle, and had to hit the ground running.

‘I read it,’ I assured her. ‘It says here that you died of a heart attack.’