Ghost Census

An Ordinary Job Peter was washing a teaspoon at her kitchen sink. He had always washed teaspoons separately, holding each beneath the tap and rubbing it between his finger and thumb as though it had been involved in something unsavoury. June could remember asking him, more than once, whether a dishwasher wasn't supposed to make that sort of thing unnecessary. The dishwasher had been bought after his death. She had also replaced the sink, the taps, the kitchen doors and most of the plates, but apparently none of this was enough to distract him from a teaspoon. He was wearing the blue checked shirt she had given to the charity shop in 2020, or thought she had. His sleeves were turned twice above his wrists. There was a patch of pale skin on his forearm where he'd caught himself on the metal edge of the coal bunker when he was young, a scar he had disliked because it looked, he said, like somebody had drawn a badly shaped fish. June remained in the doorway with her shopping bag hanging from one hand. Inside it a cucumber rolled against a tin of chopped tomatoes. She had meant to put the bag down and have a cup of tea before sorting the laundry. Instead she watched Peter turn off the tap, set the spoon on the draining board and inspect the cupboard above his head. 'Where are the mugs?' His voice was unchanged. She had imagined it changing in her memory over the years; sometimes she heard him speaking too slowly, or in a manner more stern than he had really possessed. This was the voice that used to call from the garden when he couldn't find his secateurs. 'Peter,' she said. He looked round. His expression was one of mild relief, as though she'd only been upstairs. 'I thought you'd gone out.' June let go of the bag. It struck the floor and the tin rolled out. Peter's eyes followed it. He stooped, picked it up and put it on the counter with the label facing her. There was dirt under one of his fingernails, the kind of black crescent he used to acquire after an hour among his runner beans. 'You're going to hurt your back doing that,' she heard herself say. 'I haven't done anything to it.' She could have told him that a man who had been dead for eleven years ought to know very little about what his back might do. Instead she looked past him to the back door. Locked. The bolt was where she'd left it. A folded supermarket receipt sat beneath the fruit bowl; her glasses were beside it. The ordinary contents of the room hadn't moved to accommodate the impossible thing in it. Peter came towards her and stopped when he saw her face. 'June?' She went to the kitchen chair and sat down because the distance between standing and falling had become worryingly small. He pulled out the opposite chair but didn't sit. The motion was familiar too: he used to put a hand on the backrest before deciding whether he had time for a proper conversation. 'What year do you think it is?' she asked. She had been about to ask where he'd come from, but the year was the one fact they ought both to be able to agree upon. Peter shifted his hand on the chair back. 'What year?' 'The year, Peter. Please.' He considered that for longer than any sensible question deserved, with the stubborn concentration he used to bring to a crossword clue he disliked. 'Twenty twenty,' he said eventually. 'Has something happened?' She tried to say yes, but the sound caught in her throat. She reached across the table and took his hand. It was warm. There was the usual roughened patch along his thumb, a small ridge of old damaged skin she could have found with her eyes closed. He bent his fingers around hers, unsure whether she wanted comfort or help getting up. 'You died,' she said. He kept hold of her hand, though his fingers loosened. 'Died?' He glanced at the kitchen door and then back at her. 'June, what are you talking about?' 'In November. Eleven years ago, nearly. Peter, I was there.' She felt foolish supplying the date as if he might look it up in a diary, but once she had begun she could hardly leave him with an allegation and nothing to support it. He sat then, heavily enough to make the chair give its old complaint. It had belonged to them both, one of the few things she hadn't replaced. June watched him rub a water droplet from the table with his sleeve. Her mind kept arranging evidence she didn't want: the ambulance, the green curtains in the hospital bay, the plastic bag of possessions given to her by a nurse who was embarrassed to be so young. She had identified him. She had signed the form. Her cousin had driven her home because she wouldn't let herself be driven by anybody else. Peter said, 'I remember the shed.' She frowned. 'What about it?' 'I'd been putting that shelf up. The one you said would come down as soon as I set anything heavy on it.' 'It did, eventually.' She hadn't planned to say it. The shelf had fallen the following spring and broken two plant pots, which had seemed a thoroughly unreasonable thing for Peter to have arranged from beyond the grave. He looked oddly pleased to have remembered a practical detail. 'I'd come in for my lunch.' 'You said your chest was tight.' 'Yes.' His eyes moved towards the little radio on the windowsill. It was a different one, a compact black model with a cracked volume dial. 'I was going to take a tablet. Then I was on the floor, I think. I don't remember getting up.' June remembered much too well the weight of him as she'd tried to turn him onto his side. She pulled her hand free, partly because she wanted to cover her mouth, partly because she needed to see what would happen when she let go. His hand rested on the table. It didn't fade. He didn't ask her to hold it again. 'I buried you,' she said. It was the first part of the story she had told him that sounded, even to her, like an accusation. 'I know what you said.' Peter traced a damp line left by his sleeve on the table. When she added that she had seen him dead, he gave no further answer. He had once corrected June on every minor matter, from the direction of a road to where the passports were kept, despite being reliably wrong about the passports. Now he listened without attempting to put her right. Peter glanced at the wall clock, which read ten past eleven. 'Perhaps we should ring someone,' he suggested, and when she asked whom he had in mind, he offered the doctor. 'The doctor who signed your death certificate retired six years ago,' June said. She pushed herself upright, dislodging the chair slightly from the table. 'We could try someone else. I don't know who yet.' She filled the kettle without checking how much water was in it. Peter went to the cupboard where the tea had always been, found her stock of spare batteries and birthday candles instead, and asked what she'd done with it. She pointed to a tin beside the microwave. He remembered that tin as the place she kept biscuits. 'I've made some changes,' she said, and heard how little the sentence covered. He looked round properly for the first time. The old pine cupboard had gone; there were shallow grey drawers, a microwave in a recess, photographs on the windowsill. His attention snagged on a framed photograph of her standing beside a woman in a bright yellow coat. Both were wearing medals on blue ribbons and holding paper cups. It had been taken at the finish of a charity walk four years earlier, in rain heavy enough to leave her hair plastered to her forehead. 'Is that you?' June followed his gaze. 'Of course it's me.' 'You're older.' He seemed appalled by his own choice of words. 'I only mean—' 'Eleven years older. That part's quite straightforward.' She was wearing thick socks and an old cardigan with a hole forming beneath one arm. When she'd come into the kitchen she'd been thinking about what to eat for lunch and whether the guttering man would come on Friday. Being examined by her husband at a distance of eleven years was something for which she had not dressed. She became suddenly aware of the creases on either side of her mouth, and then angry at herself for caring. He looked no older than when he'd died. The back of his hair had the same uneven place where he used to trim it himself. She'd expected, if she ever saw him again in a dream, that he would be younger. Instead he was the exact wrong age for the room he was standing in. 'How did you get here?' she asked, once he had stopped examining the kitchen photograph. 'I'm here, aren't I?' His irritation came more from helplessness than disagreement, or so she hoped. He had been able to explain most things in the house once, even when the explanation turned out to be wrong. 'I mean, did you walk in? Was the door open? Did you see anyone?' June waited while he turned towards the spot beside the counter where she'd found him. He said he remembered the garden, or thought he did, followed by the unfamiliar cupboard and the teaspoon. Of the ambulance and the kitchen floor before his death he had only untidy scraps. 'You didn't come in through the door, then?' 'I don't remember any door,' he said. 'I can't tell you what you want to know.' She didn't know whether he meant he couldn't remember or knew he hadn't. She could tell he wanted to be useful, which was almost worse than if he'd been confused. June had spent eleven years managing plumbers, arranging insurance renewals and finding someone prepared to repair the roof without walking on the conservatory. She did not need a man who had died to start worrying about the kettle. June offered him something to eat. Peter seemed surprised, then admitted he was hungry. At least she knew what to do about that. 'Well, that's a start,' she said, and took bread from the cupboard. The first two slices caught because she'd put the toaster on its highest setting by mistake. Peter scraped them with a knife over the sink while she buttered another. He worked steadily, spreading the butter right to the corners, which she had never managed to persuade him was a waste on bread cut into triangles. He ate most of what she gave him and drank the tea she'd set before him. At one point he caught her watching and asked whether he had something on his face. 'I don't know what I'm watching for.' She took the heel of the loaf when he suggested she ought to eat as well. Outside, a delivery driver reversed along the road, the warning tone sounding three times before it cut off. Their neighbour's terrier barked from behind the fence. Somebody was running a washing machine next door, and the low vibration came through the shared wall as it always had. On the fridge was a weekly calendar, held up by a magnet advertising a glazing company that had closed years earlier. June had written THURSDAY — LUNCH KITCHEN — 10 in thick blue pen, then beneath it: ask Eileen re oven trays. She'd been helping prepare the weekly community lunch at the hall for nearly eight years. It was work, sometimes tiring work, and she liked it. Peter studied the list without asking a question. She turned the calendar slightly towards the wall. 'Who have you told?' Peter asked. He had been silent while she turned the calendar towards the wall, and June realised he might have been waiting for an explanation. 'Nobody. I've only just found you.' 'But you went out.' He sounded bewildered. June said she'd been buying tomatoes and hadn't known she was supposed to leave a message. He tried a smile, gave up halfway and apologised. She wished he'd said something irritating instead. There were plenty of things he'd once said that had been easier to deal with. June felt tears behind her eyes and disliked them for arriving so late. She hadn't cried when she picked up the tin, or when he first said her name. After the funeral there had been periods when she'd cried over quite small things, usually because somebody had asked her for the account number on a bill he used to pay. She had learned that grief could wait until an inconvenient moment and then present itself with considerable confidence. Peter reached across to put the butter knife in the sink. 'I don't want to frighten you.' 'You might have thought of that before.' June heard the unfairness of it, and Peter, after a moment, said he hadn't planned anything. She found a clean tea towel and folded it, although it was already folded. 'Nina saw you on your last birthday. She was at the funeral. She lives three doors away. She can come round.' Peter looked towards the photograph on the windowsill. 'Does everyone know, June? About me being dead?' June considered the question. The council had issued its letters; the bank had closed his account; his name was on a small stone in the churchyard, and the allotment committee had appointed another treasurer. She had not liked the word widow when it first appeared on a form and liked it no more now, though she had grown used to it. 'Yes,' she said. 'Everyone knows.' He contemplated that with the expression he had once reserved for unexpectedly expensive car repairs. June said he ought to stay in the house until they'd found someone who could explain what was happening, and he bristled. He wasn't a child, he reminded her; she told him that was not what she was suggesting. There were people who might recognise him on the pavement, people whose reactions neither of them could predict. 'You don't know what they'll do if they come in here either,' he said. 'No. I don't.' She looked at the phone on the table and wondered when she'd last been so grateful to have somebody nearby who might be prepared to come at short notice. She found Nina's number on her phone. Her hands were sufficiently unsteady that she pressed the wrong contact, heard the brief opening of an answering machine, and hung up before leaving a message for the guttering man. She got through on the next attempt. 'Everything all right?' Nina asked when she answered, her voice slightly out of breath. June could hear a door somewhere and assumed she'd been in the garden. 'No, not especially. Would you come over?' 'Are you hurt? Has somebody broken in?' Nina asked. June told her she wasn't hurt, although there was somebody in the house. That answer was enough to make Nina stop questioning her. She said she was coming and rang off before June found a way of explaining. Nina had always been useful in an emergency. June suspected, however, that her friend would have preferred one involving water from a burst pipe. Peter pushed his plate away. He'd eaten nearly everything, leaving the small hard edge of the toast that had caught in the toaster. 'Are you going to tell her?' 'I think she'll notice.' He got up and carried the plates to the sink. June wanted to ask him to sit down, to put both hands where she could see them, to stop carrying on with the morning. Instead she told him the top drawer was where the clean cutlery belonged. He opened the drawer and looked at it, and she saw his fingers tighten around the teaspoon. By the time Nina knocked, June had put the shopping away and made three cups of tea. One had gone cold. The kettle clicked off as June opened the front door. Nina came in wearing gardening gloves with the fingertips cut off. She had a narrow face and a practical way of standing, feet apart as though prepared for the floor to give trouble. 'You look awful,' she told June, dropping the gloves on the hall table. 'Sorry. You do. Do you want me to call somebody?' 'I need you to look at something,' June said. She held the kitchen door half closed while Nina stripped off her gloves, and couldn't think how to ask her to be prepared for what was inside. 'What sort of something?' Nina asked. June found that opening the kitchen door was easier than explaining. June led her into the kitchen. Peter was trying to work the latch of the new recycling bin. It swung open under his hand just as Nina crossed the threshold. 'I've worked it out,' he said, pleased with himself. Nina stopped so sharply that June almost walked into her. The two women stood shoulder to shoulder while Peter straightened. He saw Nina, and his face brightened with recognition. 'Hello, Neens.' Nina made a noise June had never heard from her before, a short breath followed by what might have been the beginning of a laugh. She caught the edge of the counter. 'It can't be,' Nina said. She had one hand on the counter. For a moment June thought her friend was going to take a step backwards, but Nina walked towards Peter instead. 'I know,' June said. 'That's what I've been telling him.' Nina looked from his face to the photograph on the sideboard, taken at his fiftieth birthday in the village hall, and held out a hand. Peter took it, and she turned his palm over slowly as though checking for a cut. 'I've seen his coffin,' Nina said, her voice much lower than before. June reminded her that she'd been at the funeral. Nina let his hand go only when he tried to draw it away to give her room to sit. Nina brought her other hand up to her mouth and kept it there. The kitchen clock advanced another minute. June sat down before her legs could make the decision for her. She knew they would have to telephone someone again, someone who could record what the two of them had just seen. She wasn't sure who that should be, and for the present Nina seemed unable to remember either. 'You can have that tea,' June said after a while, pointing towards the cold cup. 'Or I'll make another.' Nina pulled out the chair beside her. Peter went to fill the kettle.