It was the last meeting of my creative writing group before Christmas, and we went for a meal in town. I suggested that maybe this time of year was the right time to retell ghost stories… thinking of course of those ghosts in A Christmas Carol!
I don’t usually write anything myself because I feel that the group is about the writers I’m leading, rather than about me and my work, but on this occasion I thought I would take up the same challenge as I had given them.
I used to write short stories, but I haven’t done for many, many years so it was really quite difficult for me. I have to confess that I think the group did far better than I, one was a bout a child misunderstanding the word ‘poltergeist’, another about a young woman finding out about her grandfather who had died in the first World War, very poignant at this centenary of the start of those dreadful events.
I set my story in my own past, in a house I lived in when I was a student, many years ago… Here is the first part of it:
I moved away from home when I was eighteen and went to Manchester to do my degree; there was no student accommodation at the time and for the first week or so I lived with friends of my parents before getting a room in a house on Palatine road in Withington in the South of the city.
Number 44 Palatine Road was an old red-brick Edwardian villa and I had a room on the ground floor, a shared bathroom, kitchen and sitting room. I got it through an agency and the woman I dealt with was more interested in chatting on the phone to her friend while smoking one cigarette after the other as she pushed forms across her desk for me to sign.
She broke off her conversation to tell me something about there only being one other tenant at the moment, but then her friend on the other end of the line obviously had some more exciting piece of gossip and she turned away from me.
The only other person in the office was a young girl, pounding away on a typewriter, a harassed and anxious look on her face. I tried to ask her more details about the room, but she just shrugged, so I put my new key in my pocket, stuffed the contract into my old school satchel, hitched it onto my shoulder and with my suitcase went out to find my new home.
The other tenant I met a couple of days later. I was bent over peering under the grill to make sure I didn’t burn my toast for my baked beans when there was a chill as the door opened behind me and I glanced over my shoulder to see a thin girl about my own age standing there.
I stood up and introduced myself and she mumbled her name, Mara, Marie, some name beginning with M. I held out my hand but she just waved a pale hand at me. I was never very good with fashion and I couldn’t help but think how great she looked, the dark clothes, the long dark hair, the pale make-up.. I felt very gauche in my kilt and jumper and tan stockings. I had begun to grow my hair while I was in the sixth form, but it didn’t look as interesting and hippyish as hers.
There was a smell of burning and I rescued my toast; I offered some to Mara as I called her, hoping it was right, but she said she wasn’t hungry. She drifted over to look out of the window into the Manchester fog and I asked how long she had been here as I spread marg on my toast. We only ever had butter at home, but Blue Band margarine was all I could afford on my grant.
She told me she had been here a while. I asked if there had been any other tenants, wondering if there were rooms to spare for people I was beginning to get to know at college. She wasn’t very friendly and I felt a little shy and nervous so I retreated to my room with my burnt toast and baked beans.
I didn’t see Mara very often but began to realise that her miserable appearance didn’t necessarily mean anything; she seemed friendly enough in her gloomy way. I had thought she must live upstairs because I occasionally heard noises up there, but no, she lived in the other room in this downstairs flat.
I must have been quite resilient then, because I wasn’t phased by the occasional mouse creeping across the lino, I put up with the freezing flat, just wearing more jumpers; I had a two bar electric fire in my room but I didn’t want to have it on more than necessary, it was so expensive, and the little wheel whizzed round and gobbled up the shillings I fed it.
We were in the kitchen… which is where we seemed to meet most often, when there was the sound of footsteps upstairs, definite footsteps.
“New tenant?” I asked I was actually a little lonely to be truthful; none of the friends I had made lived near me and most nights I was here in the chilly ‘flat’.
“A ghost…” Mara replied.
Lois Elsden 