The Juggler's Children by Carolyn Abraham

Author:Carolyn Abraham [Abraham, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37215-4
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

In the days that followed the arrival of Dennis’s DNA results, memories of my grandmother haunted me. I had the strange sensation that she was listening to the internal dialogue running through my head.

I had not envisioned hauling this kind of skeleton out of the genetic closet. I imagined the waves of posthumous judgement that would attach to her memory, accusations she could never counter. And what right would anyone have to judge? My grandmother was just seventeen when she married my grandfather. He was twenty-four, a railway guard, introduced to her by an older sister. She called him Mr. Crooks all the while he courted her, even on their wedding night. Who knew the circumstances at play in the most private relationships of her life? At the same time I felt guilty for thinking her capable of it. She was my grandmother, the one who smothered me in her roundness and slept beside me in her bed, even when I was covered with measles.

One afternoon I was typing at the computer, trying to capture this swell of emotions, and the letter O suddenly went berserk. On its own, as though it were being depressed by a stubborn accusatory finger, row upon row of Os appeared on my screen—hundreds of them, filling the page. I changed the battery in the keyboard. Stephen changed the keyboard. Nothing helped. I called my sister, a purveyor of custom software and the family’s twenty-four-hour technical assistance provider, and asked if she’d ever heard of this kind of glitch—rampant wilful O syndrome. She hadn’t ever. The letter O behaved when I wrote emails, I told her, but each time I returned to this chapter, ruminating on Nana’s possible tryst with Earnest Meek, oooooooooooooooooooooooooff it would go again.

Science reporters are not supposed to believe in ghosts. Faith in anything that can’t be measured or weighed or poured into a test tube, grown in a petri dish or swished about in a centrifuge is generally considered to fall on the pseudo side of science. But having grown up in the deep woods of superstition, I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about their existence. Of course the brain is a powerful machine, full of quirks that can fool you and make you feel things that aren’t there, a dazzling CPU that can draw rapid-fire connections between a smell and a memory—or a computer malfunction and the supernatural. So maybe it was inevitable that as I meddled in the affairs of the dead I would collide with one phantom of the mind or another. Even my pragmatic father had his own eerie confrontation, when his camera jammed as he tried to photograph his grandfather’s records in Coonoor.

But my grandmother had been a true believer. Bridget Meek’s spirit-stalking used to upset Nana Gladys, not because she thought it was nonsense but because she was worried her mother-in-law’s next-world communing would invite some long-lost soul to take up residence in their house. After my grandfather died, Nana Gladys was so convinced

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