Ghosteria Volume 2: The Novel: Zircons May Be Mistaken, Tanith Lee [classic fiction txt] 📗

– can ghosts cry? This onecan. It just seemed so mean, somehow. Mean of something. A stupid way tothink.

Anyway, I was thirty-seven when Imet Steven. He was thirty-six, tall and strong, with a lion’s mane of thick,pale brown hair down to his shapely bum. I used to love that, you know. Notbums, necessarily. The way the men had been enabled to grow their hair long,and wear lace shirts and stuff like that. It seemed an age of grace but itdidn’t last. Not much does.

Steven and I got together atonce. As I said I’d had plenty of lovers by then, no strings, a terrific timehad by all, and very few harsh partings. But with Steven it was different. Hemoved in with me at my little pad at Blackheath.

One wonderful summer. I won’tdescribe it. If you’ve ever had a summer like that, you’ll know. And if youhaven’t, well that’s a shame, and I’m not going to upset you. Don’t be jealous.After summer the gold leaves fell and the nights drew in like vultures, and mylatest exhibition was cancelled due to ‘Lack of Interest’. And Steven, who hadcharmingly and appreciatively and extravagantly lived off me, turned sullen andunpleasant and next met somebody else. He and the autumn left Blackheathtogether. I think he and his new lover went to live in Paris. I hope thefucking Eiffel Tower fell on the pair of them. (Though it probably didn’t. Evendead, I’d maybe have heard.)

Oh, you say, so you went into a Gothicdecline over lost love and pined away for three or four years and then ended itall. It wasn’t that straightforward. It wasn’t just love and summer that ended.The exhibition was the first, and then the book illustration contract, that wasalso cancelled, and the burglar broke in and wrecked the place, and the mess-upwith my allowance ‘happened’, so I ceased to get it, and my mother wasshrieking down the phone from her house in Spain that I was a parasite and shecouldn’t afford to keep me any more. And the money Steven had stolen out of myaccount, that too, around seven thousand pounds. And the leak in the kitchenroof I couldn’t afford to fix. And breaking two of my fingers, (index, middle),on my right hand when a piece of metal resisted the electric tool I was usingand erupted, crushing them, and they didn’t mend straight, and it wasn’t theawful way they looked, I didn’t care too much about that – just that I couldn’twork properly any more. Not that, by then, anybody seemed to want my work.

My fortieth birthday arrived, andit was just as if those three bridging years had all been one. One long winterof short hopeless days and frozen nights. My ‘friends’ had all gone too, flownoff like migrating birds who avoid the initial contaminating touch of frost.No friends. No lovers. No family. There were four or five bad paintings I did,that looked as if a demented and talentless child had made them. I’d left myflat by then. Had to. Just a room. That sort of thing. Over a main road thatroared and screamed and provided violent accidents – as my neighbours said,from four a.m. until four the next morning.

On my birthday I took myself, allalone – I couldn’t budget for anyone else, nor was there anyone, to a beautifulrestaurant I’d sometimes formerly gone to in Putney. The meal was delicious,wine fine. Everyone was happy. Everyone else. Those strangers at other tables.But I did my best, and then went home quite early, on the racketing trainsmelling of other people’s inebriation, excited hope, and utter exhaustion.

I got another job that year. Iworked in a big store that sold everything and nothing, in the novelties department.No, I’m not even going to talk about it.

You do what you can, if you can,when and how you can. Somewhere, as forty ticked away towards forty-one, a manpicked me up in a cafe, and when I realised I really was expected to sleep withhim, couldn’t, and wouldn’t, I escaped in a cab. The driver was mad and kept ontelling me the world was going to end soon, and I said, “Good”. But that meantnothing to him, and his prophecy nothing to me. (It was almost fifty yearsahead of its time any way.)

I didn’t celebrate my forty-firstbirthday.

But I dreamed about my father asby then I hadn’t for years. He looked old and frail and unhappy. He said I hadbetrayed him, I was a bitch, a monster. I had caused his heart attack by myunspeakable (and unspecified) crimes and nastinesses.

This dream was so unjust, sohideous, I couldn’t shake it. I was forty-one, and he had beenforty-one. Had anything about his death been my fault? What? How? When?Perhaps he had mistaken me for my mother, who had changed so much she hadbecome unknown to me, and with whom, since the ‘parasite’ business, I had hadno contact. But I wasn’t like her. I was like Dad. My dad. My dad.

I don’t know how long it went on.I’ve heard about it since, that sort of weakening and inertia. Decline andfall. I killed myself with sleeping tablets and gin in the spring of1970-something. Can’t remember quite the year – ‘73? ‘4? ‘5? But I wasforty-one. Was I? Yes, I was forty-one.

It didn’t hurt. I wasn’t afraid.I thought I’d sleep forever. But I woke up here.

And why here, this placepart castle, part old mansion, part past and part present? Like a glowing sunnyyellow submarine floating in a murky subterranean sea, far down below themargins of life and the world.

Itwas when I was about fifteen, (thirteen?), around then. My mother had readabout the house and semi-attached ruined fort in some book, and said we mightgo and see it. My father liked old houses too, and so we went. That is, we camehere, and saw.

I can remember it in thesunshine, a spring afternoon. There had been rain, but that stopped. Now raindrops only sparkled in the trees and on the grass and shrubs as we approached, uphill,and the sun was fully out. Frankly, easy-going and pleased teenager that I