A hundred ghost stories were told amongst a gathering of people this year in Dublin. The event was part of a festival of literature being held in the city and was organised to celebrate the enduring character of the ghost story; ‘A Celebration of the Ghost Story’, it was called, a quaint affair in which bow-tied literati rubbed shoulders with eminent eccentrics from the world of paranormal speculation. The room was divided into ten ‘boundaries’. In each boundary, ten stories were told; the guests were allowed to stroll from boundary to boundary, to visit as many of the stories being told as they wished. Many tales were shared, and some affected thoughts in such a way as to be stored. The following story was not that night shared, or stored. Maybe it was too long for anybody to tell, and maybe too elaborate. You can tell a hundred ghost stories, but you won’t get them all.
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Munter experienced a ghostly tap on the chest each night at that hazy halfopeneyed juncture in the procedure of a bedtime, right before sleep becomes a fully entered thing. It went tap-tap-tap as though someone or something was trying to keep him awake a little longer. With every sleep there was this tapping until Munter became convinced that it was the work of a playful spirit who wanted fun and exuberance from him all the time of the day. The ghost was barking up the wrong tree. Although Munter was not an unpleasant man to be around, he could not be exuberant all the time of the day. He’d tried it once and it hadn’t worked. He near went insane. You can’t be exuberant all the time of the day. Munter’s day required a set calm otherwise he went insane. The tapping continued nightly. Tap-tap-tap right at halfopeneyed. What could he do about it? Surely he could do something. He had to. He decided enough was enough and resolved to find out more about this ghost and why it was being such a hindrance. Munter decided to do this as soon as he got a good sleep behind him if the ghost would just let him.
*
Munter was lying in bed. He was looking at the ceiling. It was a clean ceiling. There were no insects crawling or webs hanging or mossy bits growing. It was the cleanest ceiling he had ever known. He shut his eyes. He took to drowsiness like a shot. There was no sign of ghostly interruption. A tranquil sleep began. He stared out into the blackness of the sleep. A dream was on the horizon. What could be coming? Munter waited. He was hoping it would be a dream of intense feeling.
*
Munter got out of bed and went down the stairs. He checked to see if there was any post. With every letter came the prospect of finding out the secret of the ghost. He still received letters addressed to previous residents, one of which could have been the ghost, or could have led him towards uncovering the ghost’s identity. There were many names, many possibilities. There were no letters today. But there was a black refuse bag hanging from the letterbox. It was from a local charity that was asking for old clothes. Munter liked to contribute to the bag for charity. He thought about his wardrobe for a moment. Was there anything in there he could put in the bag for charity? He pulled the bag out of the letterbox and placed it on the windowsill as he entered the living room. He sat down. He put on the television and watched an advertisement for jam and then one for headache tablets. The tablets seemed to work okay in the ad but Munter wasn’t sure. He really got no sense of the level of pain being felt by the woman who appeared in the ad holding her head. Some headaches could be worse than others in Munter’s experience.
*
Munter yawned. He was standing in the kitchen. He’d been at the fridge for some reason. He couldn’t remember why. He opened the door of the fridge to see if a product would untie his memory. There was some raspberry jam there and he realised that that was the reason he’d gone to the fridge. He’d been interested in finding out where they made the jam he’d seen in the ad and he had gone to look at the label to see if it said where. It was nice jam. He took it out and inspected the label. County Tyrone. Ah, that’s where, Munter remarked to himself. He yawned again.
*
Munter was walking around his home when he came up with the idea for a long sleep on the dusty couch. It was the best idea he’d had all morning. Hopefully the ghost wasn’t about. Hopefully it was taking a nap too. He allowed himself to fall into the dusty couch and he could hear more springs going inside as a result of his plummeting weight. He shut his eyes.
*
November and December were far and away Munter’s favourite months. He appreciated the seasonal turn, the almost magical shift that occurred in colour and temperature and atmosphere. Munter would leave the majority of lights in his house off. Too much light spoiled the mystery and gentle warmth of autumnwinter evenings. He would have the light over the stairway on, and he would leave the door to the stairway open a little, so that some of that light got through to him as he sat in the front room doing nothing really but ruminating. And drinking hot lemon drinks, yes. They didn’t help his cold much like they did in the ads, but they sure were nice. It was November now. So he was happy about that.
*
Munter was getting sick and tired of ghosts. It appeared there had been eerie goings-on in every house he’d lived in since the beginning of his located life.
Ghost 1, 20 Cuchullain Terrace, 6 years old: an old chef who criticised family meals daily and sabotaged Sunday dinners in fits of jealousy.
Ghost 2, 7 Legion Avenue, 10 years old: a shy young woman. Munter only saw her once in all the time he lived with her and that time she disappeared in an instant because she was too shy.
Ghost 3, 35 Belvedere Road, 15 years old: who was apparently once a famous traditional folk musician. When he was told the name of the musician, Munter couldn’t place it. The name disappeared from memory as the ghosts piled up in his life.
Ghost 4, 10 Martin Street, 23 years old: an old lady with frazzled grey hair who stood on the stairs each morning with a smile. She sometimes wept, but mostly just smiled.
Ghost 5, 29 Portsmouth Road, 26 years old: his sister Rachel. She’d been dead two months, then she came to him one night, said, Stop drinking, you fucking idiot, and stole a bottle of Jameson from him.
Ghost 6, 7 Cornwell Terrace, 29 years old: this one, that taps, that is very hungry.
&
Aside from tapping him on the chest when he was trying to go to sleep, Ghost 6 was also prone to eating all of Munter’s food. It was by far the hungriest ghost he had ever known. His fridge was raided every night and cupboards ransacked. Munter wondered how it was possible. He didn’t think ghosts had anywhere to put solid materials since they were not themselves material. But this ghost had a great big stomach and could retire an entire kitchen within a few hours. One night, at the click of about two thirty-five, Munter came downstairs from his bed and went into the kitchen to find a half-eaten pizza resting on the table. He hadn’t eaten any pizza in the last few days. He looked and noticed that the cooker had been left on and not only that there were some crispy pancakes baking under the grill. He realised that the ghost had cooked itself a pizza and was now in the middle of preparing a follow-up snack. It was an ailing ghost too. Munter would hear a chesty cough scratching the night air – the rattle of a poorly ghost, he surmised. He decided to leave a bottle of Benylin out one night. He left it sitting on the hearth in the sitting room. When he woke up the next morning, the bottle was empty. He felt good that he had helped out in some way like a doting mother. But the coughing got worse every night. The ghost wanted more Benylin. When it could muster a truly dreadful cough no longer, the ghost took to wheezing horribly and loudly. Munter had to leave a bottle of Benylin on the hearth each and every night to keep the sick and hungry spirit happy.
*
Munter looked at the letters on the mantelpiece. He reckoned one of these letters contained the mystery of his ghost. The letters had been sitting there for ages. He hadn’t done anything with them yet. He got up and looked to see if any of them had been opened. He got the idea in his head that maybe the ghost had taken the natural measure of reading its own post. None of the letters had been opened. Either the letters had absolutely nothing to do with this supernatural presence, or what letters were addressed to the ghost were merely bills or junk mail that just were not relevant in the afterlife. Something had happened recently with the letters. There may have been some form of meaning attached to the happening. One of the names on the envelopes had presented itself to Munter on a lazy afternoon in the living room. He had been halfasleep one day on the dusty couch. He had just eaten a big meal of lasagne. His eyes were closed and he was sitting dead still waiting for slumber to slip over him. There was the usual tap-tap-tap on his chest. He opened his eyes to discover that one of the letters had been placed on his lap. It was a very mysterious incident which had a dreamlike potency to it.
tap-tap-tap
(cough, cough, splutter, wheeze)
Munter’s blissfully drawn eyelids were once more forced to roll up and make do with the reality consciousness afforded him. He'd missed another opportunity to experience a cleansing nightmare. He wasn’t having intense psychological dreams anymore. He used to have reflective dreams, disturbing dreams even. He liked these dreams better. They always made waking up such a pleasant thing. When he woke from them, he felt cleansed of bad feeling, but harnessed no desire to investigate the possible meaning of the dream. He felt the disturbing aspect of it had no place in his real life, especially if it had been born from an event and people in his real life. The dream was a way of addressing something, but going no further than addressing it; the dream was merely a way of washing such things from his consciousness and the sub division of it. These dreams more often than not involved his family. They were no longer part of his life. He had been in touch with a cousin in recent times, but that was it. His immediate family were all gone. He had left them back in Belfast a few years ago and didn’t even leave a note; when he looked back now, he wished he’d left them a note. It was just after his sister’s funeral. After the funeral, he went home and planned his escape. He didn’t want to be anywhere near his family in the time following his sister’s death. Munter had known them to get drunk. He had known himself to get drunk too. He had been drunk at Rachel’s funeral. So had his brother. Being a drunk had allowed him do things like that. Sometimes he dreamed of being drunk again, not feeling the petrifying blue of heavy consumption in the dream, but experiencing the unique strain of fun that drinking inspired in him and being bouncy and rambunctious with the people he met in the bars. It made him experience exuberance all the time of the day. Munter liked to dream about his family even when the dreams were bad. His memories were bad, so the dreams were frequently soured by iniquity. But it was good to keep in touch with them even if contact was confined to his unconscious existence. He loved them very much even though they were drunkards. He was sure they loved him when he was a drunkard.
*
Munter chose to use the word drunkard to describe this former guise, and avoided alcoholic. There was a weightlessness in using the word drunkard. Saying drunkard was easier for him to agree to in light of his family’s continued quandary. There was still some denial within him about the whole issue; he couldn’t enumerate drunkenness in his life. At least he had detached the being constantly drunk part. He said no to being a drunkard when he moved to Dublin. It took him a while to do so, but eventually he gave it up. His last drink was a pint of Guinness in Grogan’s pub on Clarendon Street. It tasted good. He had been drinking with a man who sold little jokebooks for any occasion who informed him that if he ever required a little jokebook for any occasion he now knew where to go.
&
Munter never had a problem with drinking until the day he drank too much-too much. He'd always been drunk too much, but never too much-too much. Drinking too much had previously not affected him badly. It had only made him experience the sunshine of being with other people. Eventually he found he could experience the sunshine of being alone also. He would buy some beers and lay around in his home drinking them by himself. Most people drank too much. Everyone drank too much. He was aware of other people who drank for the sunshine of being alone. They weren’t drunkards, were they? Being a drunkard meant existing under monopoly of drinking, not drinking too much and then going about daily business of life until the next session. One day, in a flash moment of inebriated lucidity (all drunkards have these spells, but subsequently forget them until they reappear as ugly creatures of bitter significance in their subconscious), Munter took account of the fact that the session had overwhelmed his daily business of life, had become his daily business of life; he was drinking too much-too much. His life was a pint glass being filled, but the glass had reached the extent of its capacity, and the tap kept running.
*
He looked at himself in the sitting room mirror. He had a puffy mushroom of tough black hair. He’d worn this puffy mushroom since his teens. It made him look younger than he was. Munter was a man in his late-twenties, but he could have passed for twenty-one. Whenever people met him, that’s what they told him. You could pass for twenty-one, you know. I took you for round about that age. Or twenty-two, even. He was lucky he stopped the drink when he did, otherwise he may have looked three times that presently. For all the comments about how young he looked, there was still the little matter of how old he appeared to himself. He had a young-looking face, but he didn’t really like it. Young it may have seemed to be, but he had a second chin growing. It sat underneath his original chin like the bomb. And the puffy hair was receding now. A tributary of baldness ran awkwardly through the bundle of puff. He hadn’t counted on that happening. He had considered many things in relation to his life, but never hair loss. He took his face away from the mirror and sneezed. It was a bad cold he had. But staying cooped up inside wasn’t helping at all. He could feel misery edging into his life. He could feel it creeping through the cracks in the floorboards and through the keyholes in the doors. Misery made a bad cold much harder to deal with. He decided to go out. He went up to the bathroom and washed his face, his ears, cleaned his teeth, his hands, cut his fingernails, his toenails, had a shave, a bath, had a shower, and sprayed and dried himself. All that cleaning made him very hungry indeed. He decided he would get a breakfast made for him in Marlon’s Café which was his favourite place for having breakfast made for him. Not only did Marlon’s Café provide hot food and drinks and a warm place to sit and relax, they also cut your keys for you if you needed that along with hot food and drinks or a warm place to sit and relax. There was a key-cutting stall at the back. Who’d have thought of it, eh? The proprietor of the café, that’s who.
*
