Broken Ghost by Niall Griffiths

Author:Niall Griffiths
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448162048
Publisher: Random House

THE EMPTINESS OF the house is immediately obvious, but still she shouts, from just inside the door:

—Mam! Dad! Tomos!

She wonders why she did that: the house’s hollowness was known to her even from the outside, and she wonders too why she stands and waits for a response because she knows one will not come.

She moves into the kitchen and drinks a glass of water – how cool it is, all pure – and even Waldo has gone; his empty bed by the stove with the blanket ruckled and his favourite toy, the red rabbit which once squeaked. There is a clicking from the boiler timer and that’s the only sound. Not unfamiliar to her, this kitchen and the things in it, just somewhat vaguer, as if they’re veiled to her, or she to them, or like they’re after-images; like they have an internal light and she’s stared at them then shut her eyes. The dresser and the crockery. The kettle and the toaster. The armchair by the window, the spider plant on the sill. The rug beneath the table on the slates and, on the table, a note – some words on paper underneath the paperweight of a cockle shell encased in perspex although where the breeze is supposed to come from with all the windows shut and locked like they are she does not know. The air in here has been baked and the roof must be buckling under the sun’s dry tonnage.

WHERE ARE YOU? the note says, like that, in capitals big and bothered. YOUR PHONE IS OFF. TAKEN T TO FOLLY FARM TO TAKE HIS MIND OFF IT ALL. WE ARE WORRIED SICK. GET IN TOUCH. The familiarity of her mam’s handwriting; known from birthday cards, Christmas cards, through decades of such stuff. Not seen for some time because of texting but as likely, still, to Emma as the blood vessels on the backs of her hands. She turns the page over and writes a reply. Makes something up; a job offer in Aberaeron. An interview to attend. Weighs it down again with the captured shell and wonders if perspex ever rots. Imagines a consciousness of sorts imprisoned like that, and the resultant insanity. Robbed of all stimulus for ever. Lunatic, lunatic. And yet there are striations in that small shell. Once it held a living thing.

Half in half out of the world. Shimmering woman she is. Upstairs, on the table in the room where she should be sleeping, with Tomos, her son, the laptop is closed clam-like. In it, she knows, and also in the phone unactivated in her handbag, she is living her real life. A duo-verse, one branch of it more real than the other, more solid, recovering its curious course in the world accessible through those things – the laptop and the phone. This is a dizzying feeling, and Emma takes her unreal half-self and positions it on the edge of the mattress. The window is open a crack for the freshness and she can hear birdsong.

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