Mrs Appleby

It was the last house you'd have expected to find a ghost in. Not
old or picturesque. Built in the early 1900s and now pebble-dashed,
with a neat front garden and a paved back yard. Two storeys plus a
cellar, three bedrooms. Like the other houses in Aurelia Terrace.

It was the first place Gillian had ever bought. She was struck by how
different her furniture looked in it - more solid, more sure of itself,
to the point of smugness. She wandered from room to room; even lay down
underneath the stairwell - her stairwell. Why, she wondered, had Mrs
Winscomb been in such a rush to sell?

Gillian was 'settling down' rather late in life at the age of 43, in a
small grey town beyond the London commuter belt. She had never made
much money, eking out the occasional low-paid acting job with slightly
better-paid secretarial work.

However, recently a friend who did voice-overs for TV ads had gone down
with 'flu and Gillian had been asked to promote Happy Sunshine orange
juice. The producer was delighted with her talking fruit voice: she had
sounded, he remarked, quite incredibly like an orange. It was quite
uncanny. The large cheque covered her deposit on the house and all her
moving-in expenses.

On her first night alone in the house, she woke at 2am on a damp
pillow. Oh not this again, she thought. The sadness she kept so well
under control and hidden from other people's eyes, she was hardly
conscious of it being there. She switched on the light, located a
tissue, wiped her eyes and blew her nose thoroughly. Then she turned
the pillow over, thumped it and lay down again. But sleep would not
come to her.

I'm a failure. I missed all my chances - or really, they never gave me
any. And now it's too late, I'm too old. She thought of all those
nerve-wracking auditions and the bored dismissiveness or patronising
kindness of the casting directors. With always the same result - no
thank you.

While other actresses dreamed of playing Rosalind, Juliet, Ophelia or
Desdemona, Gillian had always particularly fancied the role of Lady
Macbeth. The woman's naked ambition fascinated her - and then the
sleepwalking scene, what a gift for a great actress! And Lady Macbeth
need not be very young, in Gillian's opinion... but still the casting
directors invariably picked a blonde bimbo. Visualising her, no doubt,
in a transparent nightie.

On that first night, Gillian heard the scratching. A faint sound, which
could be either inside the house or outside. Maybe leaves rustling? Oh
well, she thought, you always hear strange sounds in a new
place...

Hearing it again on the third night, she padded downstairs to
investigate. She waited in the downstairs hallway. After a few minutes
the scratching came again. From behind the cellar door.

"Rats!" Gillian thought. She was not frightened of the creatures, nor
of mice, but for some reason she felt very unwilling to open the
door.

Next morning, she rang the council and arranged to be visited by the
pest control officer.

"I'd have been scared to death! You're so brave!" her friends cried - a
few months later at a dinner party in west London.

"Well, I didn't know it was a ghost" Gillian pointed out. "The idea
hadn't even occurred to me.

"So when did you realise?"

"When it spoke."

"Aaagh!"

"That was after I got the Applebys' letter."

Gillian was wrestling with the central heating system when the letter
to Mr and Mrs Appleby arrived. She was also expecting a small cheque
covering the deposit on her former rented flat. Who were these
Applebys, anyway? She found seven in the local telephone directory. But
Mrs Winscomb had only lived here a year, so they'd be easy to track
down. She popped the letter into her bag.

Later that morning, Gillian had a terrible shock. The local supermarket
appeared not to stock fresh ginger or chillis, or even wholemeal bread
or whole black peppercorns! Gillian had been prepared to forgo Kohl
Rabi and sweet potatoes, but had not expected to be reduced to eating
white flannel and sprinkling her food with dust. How truly grim, she
thought, staring at the dirty mirrored shelves of the produce section,
which today featured only Golden Delicious apples and a
diseased-looking cauliflower.

At that moment the cashier said "Thank you, Mrs Appleby". Mrs Appleby!
Gillian spun round eagerly, to see a thin blonde carrying a lidded
wicker basket. Crying "Excuse me!" and brandishing the letter, Gillian
caught her attention just as she was about to waft through the exit
doors.

"This came to my house. Did you ever live here?"

The woman glanced at the address. After an unwilling pause she said "My
husband did". Her voice was refined but flat, as if trapping another
accent beneath. And she looked dreadfully pale - dead pale, with bluish
lips. That shade of lipstick does nothing for her, Gillian thought. She
should wear cherry red. Or if she doesn't want to look tarty, bright
pink.

The exit doors opened and closed, then opened and closed again, as
though invisible beings were passing through the electronic eye.
Distracted by all this activity, Gillian continued trying to offload
the letter, with eventual success - the woman took hold of it by one
corner. Then a Morris Minor parked outside tooted its horn. A paunchy
man was in the driver's seat "That's my husband. Thank you.
Goodbye."

"Give me your address, just in case any more post arrives for you... "
Gillian rummaged in her bag for a pen. But when she looked up, the
woman was gone.

"They're not married... " the cashier mentioned, as Gillian was going
back past the check-out. She halted, scenting gossip.

"Oh really?"

"They ought to be. And they pretend to be. But he couldn't get a
divorce from his first. She left him - just disappeared one day - " The
arrival of several more customers made further conversation
impossible.

On her return, Gillian found a little man in a shabby black suit
shining a torch behind her dustbin, which stood in a concrete enclosure
outside the front door. It was the pest control officer, or ratcatcher,
looking remarkably like a rat himself with his sharp-featured, whiskery
face. Gillian invited him indoors and he examined the cellar, which was
empty, dry and had been painted in the not-too-distant past. It
reminded Gillian of the white-washed houses on Greek islands. An Ideal
Home-type cellar.

"No rats here" the ratcatcher confirmed, shining his torch up and down.
"They called me in before, a year back - thought the address sounded
familiar. No rats then, no rats now."

"Oh really? Was that Mrs Winscomb - or Mr and Mrs Appleby?"

"No, it was the police. Thought there'd been a murder. No murder. No
body, anyways. Wanted me to check for suspicious substances. None I
could find. Treacle tin full of treacle and a whisky bottle with,
surprise surprise, whisky in it. No rat poison. No rats, no poison, no
body, no proof of murder" the ratcatcher summed up.

"Course, that doesn't mean he didn't murder her. Just, they couldn't
catch him. Too slippery. Like some rats - 'cept I always catches the
rats, in the end."

" A murder - in this house?" Gillian said faintly.

"Don't let it worry you, miss. No body, no proof, no need for getting
all het up." The ratcatcher then tactfully changed the subject by
remarking that it was time for elevenses, and while taking refreshment,
regaled Gillian with stories of his life and career. He even showed her
a photograph of his father's tombstone, carved with a rat above the
inscription R.I.P. His father, also a ratcatcher, had died aged 50,
"from the effects of all the toxic chemicals. Most pop off early in our
profession, miss. Whether employed in the public service or working
private". The stone rat, by contrast, looked sleek and lively.

Gillian listed with wide-eyed interest, storing up details for her
ratcatcher impression, which subsequently proved a great success at
dinner parties. However, she continued to feel annoyed about the
murder. "Mrs Winscomb really should have told me" she thought. "It's
the sort of thing I'd have expected her to mention."

The scratching sound had now become much louder and more urgent. "If
it's not rats, then what is it?" Gillian wondered, as she lay awake at
the usual time, waiting for the noise to stop, as it would within 20
minutes.

And not only louder - it seemed, as she listened, to have taken on a
new timbre, an extra layer or dimension of sound. Behind and between
the harsh scratching, she could hear a hissing, like the wind caught in
dry leaves. And within that, a repeated "on - un - on - un".

"How very strange" Gillian thought dreamily. "It's almost like a voice;
like someone trying to talk without lips, and not much of a palate, for
that matter. I wonder what the words could be - let's see, now...
"

At that moment the voice became clear in Gillian's head, as if her
thoughts had helped it to form. But it was also distinct from her and
separate, another being, whispering through the house.

"Jonathan! Jonathan! I'm alive!" Gillian sat bolt upright in the
darkness.

"But weren't you scared?" cried her dinner party friends a week
later.

"I was bloody terrified. But five minutes afterwards, I couldn't be
certain how much of what I remembered was true - or whether I was
making it up, or dreaming. So the next night I set a tape machine to
record in front of the cellar door. But when I played it back -
nothing. Blank tape."

After a short silence, one of the dinner party guests said pensively
"I'm so glad we don't have a ghost. It would make it so awfully
difficult to sell the house."

"You could make a feature of it" her husband suggested.

"Don't be silly, Michael. What sort of weirdos would buy a house with a
ghost in it?"

"I'm surprised your hair didn't turn pure white overnight" another
guest said archly to Gillian.

"Perhaps it did. In that case, I'll leave off the henna rinses."

"Darling, I didn't know you dyed! How clever you are!"

The ghost went on performing night after night, saying the same thing
in the same kind of voice, with few dramatic variations. Gillian began
to think of it as a sort of actor and of herself as the necessary
audience. "It's not really speaking to me, poor ghost" she thought.
"Still, it needs someone to listen, otherwise what would be the point?
And maybe, just to show I am paying attention, I should say something
back."

"Sitting up in bed, she announced loudly "Jonathan's not here!" The
whisperings immediately ceased and the house was silent.

"I wonder if ghosts ever get stage-fright?" Gillian mused at breakfast
the next morning. "Of course it never actually appears - it speaks
'off'. Like a prompt.

"I've got a ghost living in my cellar. Ho ho ho" she thought - adding
the ho hos in defiance of this not-very-amusing situation. "A ghost, ho
ho." Still holding a piece of toast, she went to the cellar door and
opened it. Nothing there. "Where's my ghost gone? Is it hiding, or
'resting'? Has it been reabsorbed back into the fabric of the
building?"

Gillian perched herself on the cellar steps. "It's the ghost" she
thought "of a person who used to live here and who was perhaps -
probably - murdered. At an informed guess, I'd say it's the first Mrs
Appleby."

Goosebumps rose on Gillian's arms. Feeling very cold, rather as if her
body heat were being tapped, she went to the kitchen and filled a hot
water bottle. Clutching which, she returned to sit on the cellar steps
again, this time half-way down.

"You've got to help me, lady, if you want me to help you" she told the
ghost. "We're in this together now, girl."

Then she seemed to enter a kind of trance. After what seeemed a long
while she heard, as if from far away, the doorbell ringing, and went to
answer it.

She recognised him immediately, as if they had been long acquainted; as
though he were family, not a stranger glimpsed once through a car's
side window. His plump cheeks and hazel eyes which, though bright and
clear, had no depth and gave nothing away. He wore suit of fine wool
and a clean white shirt.

"Oh, it's you!" she said brightly.

"Er - Miss Walker? We haven't met before, I think?"

Gillian made an effort to shake off the dreamy remains of her trance
state, which felt like fingers trailing in her head. "No we haven't -
of course not. But you're Mr Appleby, aren't you? Won't you come
inside?"

"Thank you, no. I've just called to collect any post you may be holding
for me, in addition to the letter you gave my wife. I had a forwarding
arrangement with the post office, which ran out recently, owing to
inefficiency and lack of communication on their part."

"Is your first name Jonathan?" Gillian enquired.

"It is!" He looked expectant.

After a long considering pause, Gillian said "No. It was only that one
letter. But why not give me your new address, just in case anything
else does come through?"

Frowning perplexedly, he took a card from his breast pocket and handed
it to Gillian, who scrutinised it. "My goodness, you have risen in the
world!" she rudely exclaimed - having intended to make some neutral
remark. And her voice sounded odd, with a faint Yorkshire or Cumbrian
intonation. And whose was this harsh laughter? Not hers.

He turned abruptly on his heel and strode off down the path. Really,
Gillian could hardly blame him for going. She seemed to have lost the
art of appearing sane and normal.

As she passed the cellar door, she flicked back the latch, threw the
card inside and slammed the door shut again. Like a zoo-keeper tossing
a hunk of bloody meat into a cage.

The Idea came to her that very evening. She could visit his house, now
she had the address. And confront him, since the ghost could not;
seeing as the first Mrs Appleby, poor thing, was tied to this place.
She would try to surprise him into a confession.

The ghost wants either revenge or recognition, for the crime of her
murder. And I want - to lay her unquiet spirit to rest. We both want
peace, Gillian thought. R.I.P.

Other people chain-smoked before auditions, or knitted; Gillian hummed.
It often got on her friends' nerves. She was humming now as she walked
up Tudor Drive. A sign enclosed in clear plastic and sellotaped to one
of the street trees said 'Please do not allow your dog to foul this
footway. Any dog found doing so will be reported to the local council
and prosecuted'. Another sign on the frosted glass porch by the
letterbox said 'No free newspapers, leaflets or circulars'.

Behind a small forest of assorted conifers was the porch, its tiled
roof supported by classical white pillars; and this framed the massive
front door, of dark wood studded with dull metal. As Gillian
approached, the door creaked open. Alarmed, she stepped off the path
and hid behind a false cypress. "Come on, Gillian" she told herself.
"Already you're acting like someone with a guilty conscience. He's the
murderer, remember."

The second so-called Mrs Appleby emerged, tennis racquet in hand,
passed Gillian without seeing her and de-central-locked a red Fiesta,
which she then drove off in. Good - she's out of the way.

Gillian pressed the bell and while she was waiting, ran nervously
through her prepared lines. This whole project was crazy and would
probably get her banged up in the loony-bin. Ho ho ho.

He answered the door. "Can I have a word with you in private, Mr
Appleby?"

"I've booked to play a round of golf. This is highly
inconvenient."

He wore a royal blue V-necked pullover embroidered with a small white
crest of a lion rampant and the word 'Pringles'. Gillian fixed her eyes
stubbornly on the lion.

"Oh, very well. But I can't spare more than a few minutes."

The hall was faux-18th century, with a grand staircase of imperial
design sweeping up to a galleried landing. Gillian followed him into
the living-room, which also had a hollow feeling about it, like a stage
set or a show house. It contained an excessive amount of dead vegetable
matter - bowls of pot-pourri and arrangements of dried flowers, dyed
leaves and desiccated fruit.

Gillian sat down on one of the two sofas, crossed her legs, uncrossed
them again and began: "I can't find the key to the cellar in my house
and so I wondered... did you take it with you, by any chance?"

"Certainly not!"

"Were you trying to hide something?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Like a corpse, for instance?" Gillian laughed in a strangled way. This
was turning out all wrong. She had imagined him being guiltily evasive
- instead he just stared at her.

"I'd better go now." Gillian stood up.

"Yes, I think you had better."

At that moment, without warning, the ghost came into her - or rather,
dislodged itself from her guts and surged up through her solar plexus,
in a rush of unstoppable energy.

"Jonathan! Jonathan! It's me, Charmian! I'm alive!"

That did take him by surprise. He lost colour.

"You thought you could escape from me, didn't you?" Gillian/Mrs Appleby
cried, advancing towards him. "You thought you'd got away with it. Let
me tell you, Jonathan, let me remind you of what you did to me. In case
you might have forgotten! First, you put that pillow over my face to
stifle me and then, thinking I was dead, you dumped my body in the
cellar. I dragged myself up the cellar steps and scratched at the door.
I called out for you - 'Jonathan! Jonathan!' Remember how I begged you
to help me, to have mercy - you, my murderer? And then you dealt me the
killing blow and thought you'd silenced me forever. You wrapped my
corpse in dustbin bags and weighted me with stones. Then you sank me
deep in a lake, near our favourite holiday cottage - where we went on
our honeymoon! Oh, Jonathan! How could you forget our love?"

As the word 'love' was pronounced, Gillian bared her teeth in a snarl,
pushing her face into Mr Appleby's. He staggered and fell, bringing
down a crystal decanter and a tray of sherry glasses.

Oh. Oh dear. He's had a heart attack.

Gillian 'phoned 999, for an ambulance and the police.

"What were you and Mr Appleby talking about?" the police inspector
asked her.

Leaving out the ghost, Gillian told him as truthfully as possible. "I
suggested to Mr Appleby that he might have murdered his first wife."
The police inspector wrote it down, without comment.

In the hallway she passed the second Mrs Appleby, still dressed to play
tennis and now chatting on the phone with her solicitor. "What's the
situation with the house? I mean legally, is this my house now?" She
wriggled her fingers in friendly goodbye at Gillian.

I never planned to say any of that, Gillian thought at the bus-stop.
She felt the familiar uncertainty - did it all really happen? Am I
remembering it right? Was it true, or did I make it up? I didn't know
half of what I was saying - it just came out of my mouth. I wasn't
working to a script.

One thing for certain - she had just given her greatest performance
ever. And in the process gained an insight into the nature of acting;
for now she understood what it meant to be 'possessed' by a part.

At home again, she slept for hours, waking when it was dark. The house
was quiet, with no scratchings or whisperings. Gillian stared at
herself in the bathroom mirror, thinking that she looked different from
usual - her eyes bright, her cheeks rosy.

"We've got our own back on him" she told her reflection. "He's dead;
we're alive. It's our house now."