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Alison often imagined people’s deaths before they died. Not in any psychic-I-foresee-your-doom sort of way, just in a literal, I’ve-pictured-you-dying one. It wasn’t really even about the death itself, more the afterwards: receiving the news, the police at the door, a doctor on the phone, sitting by a hospital bed, walking in one morning to find someone had gone in their sleep. It was more about how she would feel in those moments, what she would do, how she would manage. It was more about the funeral, the bills, clearing the house, comforting friends and relatives. It was imagining how she would close the gaping gaps that came with loss.
She didn’t often tell people about these death-daydreams because, well, no one wants you to be pre-planning for their unexpected death, but she had mentioned it to the therapist she’d trialled in her twenties, after her mum died. The therapist, a sympathetic but serious woman, had decided that this was something they needed to work on and move away from. After six pre-paid therapy sessions, however, she’d left, unconvinced about letting the death-daydream thing go. See, it worked. It actually, really did help. You see, if you’d already prepared yourself for the worst (death), then the rest was manageable. Like, if you already knew what would happen and what you would do in the most devastating situations, then nothing else was so bad in comparison. It would all work out, or, she’d find a way to make things fit, even if it meant bending stuff out of shape or cramming it into too small spaces or snapping it in half or doing the near impossible or the ridiculous or the not quite righteous, what did it matter? She’d been prepared for death and so, whatever else life threw at her, well, it couldn’t be too much worse, could it?
The therapist hadn’t really bought it when Alison explained, claiming that imagining the deaths of her friends and family in advance was a way of avoiding, or rather, stalling, the grieving process and all-in-all, a very miserable way to live. You can’t live thinking about the end every day; you’ve got to inhabit the moment and feel both the good and the difficult things as they happen. Alison had been so tired then – tired of dealing with funerals and landlords, tired of going to therapy when it didn’t change the fact that her mum was dead. She hadn’t bothered to argue, just kept her mouth shut, still sure that the best way to live in the now was be prepared for end, because it happened. Her dad, her mum, both aunts, a cousin, her grandma. Death did seem to surround her so she may as well embrace it. Not literally, obviously. She knew she couldn’t do that now. Or rather, she could, kind of, but it was a pretty rubbish experience for the dead person.
Things had been strangely, almost pleasantly, different in regards to the ghosts and grief and losing. Yeah, Alison knew about the ‘sucking off’ – moving on – but it had always seemed like such a vague and unlikely concept. The ghosts, annoying as they could be, had become, not only a family of sorts, but a kind of permanent comfort – kind of like a particularly weighted blanket. They were there when she woke up – waiting for laptops and stop watches and music and films and books; they were there when she came home from wherever she might have been; there was at least one in the room at all times it seemed and if not, then she could hear them bickering somewhere else.
Did Alison sometimes want to scream into her pillow when they wouldn’t leave her alone? Sure. Was she seriously considering adding some of those noise cancellers Facebook kept showing to her Christmas list? Absolutely. But – it was – nice – to have a full house sometimes. It was the opposite of growing up as an only child with a single parent, who had to balance grief with paying bills with illness with mothering. It was the opposite of the university house she’d lived in briefly where she never knew who would be, when she could never predict if there would be extra faces or strangers in the kitchen or if the landlord was going to come strolling in, ‘just to check on things.’ At Button House, it was the same faces every day and yet, things could hardly be called boring.
See, one day you’d be making up dance routines with your Georgian bestie and then the next, you’d be getting critique on your art by a severed head. You’d find yourself attempting to make fennel and potato soup with a woman accused of witchcraft or singing Kylie Minogue on karaoke with a Regency poet; you’d spend more time than you liked trying to stop a dead Tory using your money to buy a whole stack of ‘vintage’ porn mags which were a good investment, Alison. One minute a caveman would be telling you about rare frog species, the next, an Edwardian lady would be helping you make sense of your monthly budgeting. An army captain would be helping you set up for your mother-in-law’s birthday party while a Scout leader would be influencing your biscuit buying every month. And that was all without dealing with building work, film crews, burglars, scammers, awful neighbours, and a pigeon problem. It was safe but not too safe.
Maybe the best of it though was the no dying. No worries about late night phone calls about car crashes, no doctors giving terminal diagnoses, no coming in one morning to find them gone in their sleep, no freak accidents, no murders, no requests to come-up-to-the-hospital-now-she-doesn’t-have-long. The whole world might be turning to shit, her shift at the farm shop might have been awful, the boiler might be bust, but she’d come home and Robin and Julian would be playing chess, Fanny would be pretending not to read Kitty’s romance novels and the plague ghosts would be exactly where she’d left them in the basement. Might it have been wiser, more financially smart, potentially better for her sanity to have sold the house once the loan had been paid back after the first year of wedding events? Possibly, but, by then, it had become home.
It was home and it was stable and safe – well, not quite constructionally or financially – but it was home and it was familiar and the fundamentals didn’t completely fall away – and then – and then Mary. No warnings, no sense of something terrible about to happen. Alison hadn’t even been there – hadn’t even got to say goodbye. Worse still, the night before, they’d all gone to bed early on account of the bird club and the party and so there was no last film night, no proper goodnights and Alison couldn’t even remember what the last thing she said to Mary was. It had just hurt. It was the façade falling off the front of the house or the crack in the ceiling spreading; it was the jigsaw puzzle you’d finally completed getting smashed to pieces before you’d got a chance to show anyone that you’d done it. There was something painful too, about trying to organise a children’s party and a kind of funeral at the same time and she’d never felt more understood and yet so separate from Mike as in that moment where he’d gone off to deal with the living and she’d gone to deal with the dead-dead.
It took a while for things to fall back into a normal rhythm after Mary. Not because the things they did radically changed, but rather, because they didn’t and that meant it took forever for the normal tune of their life to stop sounding as if notes had been dropped, as if one instrument had stopped playing. Clubs finished too early: something would happen or be said and they’d all turn, expecting Mary to speak up and the she didn’t; Film Club rolled around and it was supposed to be Mary’s turn to pick but no one wanted to take her go and so they’d spent a solid hour arguing over what compromise film they should watch, before concluding it was best to just skip Film Club that week.
But it had got easier, a difficult thing in itself, but it had happened. Fire jokes were slipping back into conversations without any guilt. Pat was able to dictate the new club schedules to Alison and it no longer felt monumental not to include Mary’s name anywhere. Alison had started writing present lists and it felt almost like a relief rather than a punch of sadness to have one less gift to think of and pay for. Still, what’s left now is an itch, like the new skin round a healing scar and Alison can’t help but scratch it. As a kid, her mum had made her go to bed with socks on her hands to stop her picking at her chicken pox scabs in the night, but the metaphorical socks of distraction and just don’t think about it had never worked. Nor had the socks, come to think about it. She’d just pulled them off as soon as her mum had left the room.
She’d spent time imagining each of the ghosts moving on, carefully compiling lists in her head of what might trigger it, what might allow it and all the ways in which she ought to avoid those things. No more playing therapist. No more carefully chosen films with very particular messages. No more seeking buried secrets. Maybe it was selfish; maybe it was keeping a life support machine on when any hope of even the slightest recovery was impossible. Maybe none of them would go in her lifetime anyway and it would be them mourning her. Maybe it would happen rapidly and then Alison would have a quieter, emptier, easier to manage house, except it was be too quiet, too empty and she would be mourning ghosts forever and no one would get it. She wouldn’t be able to bat away questions with, there’s been a death close to me. What would she do without someone always there to hang out with or to impart wisdom on life and family, tent pegs and tie knots, oysters, cheese, planning regulations and different words for love? What would she do without the excuse of ghostly encouragement to do possibly weird and unhinged things when Mike had his sensible head on?
Alison sighed and poured the milk into the tea. That was that. She’d had her seventeen minutes of doom-thinking for the day. Now, it was time for biscuits. She carried the tin into the common room where Pat was teaching Kitty and Thomas the moves to the Y.M.C.A, where Julian and Robin were crowded over Mike’s old phone, grinning too much to be doing anything innocent, where Mike was sat on the sofa, Humphrey’s head on the cushion besides him and Fanny and the Captain looking over his shoulder, all three ghosts casting judgements on the shirt options he was considering for Leila’s upcoming birthday party.
For now, things were fine. She’d imagined the ways that they might one day not be, how one day, this room might be empty, but for now, it wasn’t. For now, she was about to turn the room into a warzone by opening the biscuit tin, and opening a fraught debate over what should go best with tea. She smiled, more than ready for the kind of chaos that they all created best together.