The year has turned, the days growing shorter, a fact I seem almost entirely to have missed. I take Leah’s arm and she doesn’t resist me, allows me to tow her up the hill toward a place we used to walk. There is a wide stretch of common land between the circle of flats and houses that border ours, grass uninterrupted by the canals that ring so much of the city. We used to walk here a lot when we first moved, Leah desperate for some space and some air between trips while I was simply happy to accompany her. Look at that, she would say, pointing at nothing—a child flying a kite in the shape of a kestrel, a woman loudly breaking up with a man on a bench by the road. Today, she is quiet, goes where I lead her until suddenly seeming to become unable, dragging downward on my arm in a slow-motion movement that it takes me too long to realize is a fall. She goes down where she is on the grass and I don’t know what to do or how to get her back to the flat again. A woman, passing by with a dachshund wrapped up in a fuchsia jacket, pauses to ask if my friend is all right and I tell her yes without knowing what I’m saying, let her go without knowing how to ask for her help. Leah lies on the grass where she has fallen, curved into herself like a conch, like something from which a creature might emerge.
I get her home again; I couldn’t say how, it just happens. As I said before, things go on. I get her into the bath and keep her there until, by degrees, she seems to feel better, and eventually I manhandle the television into the bathroom, balance it on the toilet seat and plug it into a long extension cord I have rolled in from the bedroom. I put on Jaws and ask her to watch it with me, sit on the mat beside the bath and keep one hand on the side of the tub so she can touch me, if she wants to. I think about the first time we watched this movie together, the way she cut herself off in the middle of talking about sharks and told me she didn’t want to be boring. She says nothing now, though she seems to follow the movie, flicks water at the back of my head the first time the shark appears. I feel exhausted, a feeling of catching up, a feeling of something finding me. My heart is a thin thing, these days—shred of paper blown between the spaces in my ribs.
LEAH
Jelka on the floor with her ear against the escape hatch, saying something I could not hear. When I asked her what she was doing, she looked up at me, her expression dim in the hard fluorescent light.
“Ghosts don’t speak,” she said to me. “People misunderstand this. They think that when you’re haunted you hear someone speaking but you don’t. Or not usually. Most of the time, if you hear something speaking, it’s not a ghost—it’s something worse.”
Her face was not its normal color; it had the look of something sunk in milk. She lowered her ear to the escape hatch again, closed her eyes as if in concentration. “My priest used to say that,” she continued, though I hadn’t asked for an explanation, “my last priest, before I stopped going. When I was eighteen, I thought I saw a ghost in my mother’s house. It was just under the stairs—the place we used to keep shoes—not someone I knew, just someone. It was the middle of the night and it told me it needed help, that it wanted to speak to me. But when I told my priest, he said that it couldn’t have been a ghost because a ghost wouldn’t have spoken. He said that demons masquerade as ghosts to try to tempt us, to drag us into sinning. You’re not supposed to speak to the dead,” she added, “it’s somewhere in Deuteronomy. There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. It means you’ve stopped trusting in God, that you’re trying to bypass Him, to bypass His plan. A ghost that speaks is just a demon, trying to tempt you into making that mistake.”
I said nothing, only sitting down beside her by the hatch and touching her arm very gently. She hadn’t eaten, it occurred to me, in however long. Matteo was somewhere else, presumably on the main deck, though I wasn’t aware of this as fact, just as something that had to be. I had woken this way, to Jelka talking in a way I couldn’t understand, to the press of electric light and the certainty of darkness without. Jelka didn’t respond to my touch, only pressed her ear closer to the hatch. “So what is that,” she said, “if it isn’t a ghost—what is it?”
I looked at her, took my hand away from her arm and looked down at the hatch. I could hear nothing, not even the sound that so frequently ringed itself around us, not even the sound of the ocean, not even Matteo, wherever he might be. There was no sound at all, in fact, except for Jelka talking, asking aloud what it was, what I thought was talking to her through the hatch.