AN AUSTRALIAN GHOST

HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD

“Once a jolly swagman/camped by a billagong….” WALTZING MATILDA.

Australia has almost no tradition of ghosts – although patriots are quick to point out one prime example in our most famous ballad, Waltzing Matilda.  The Jolly Swagman drowns himself rather than pay for his crime.

And his ghost may be heard as you pass by the billabong

“Who’ll come a-waltzing matilda with me?”

But this spectral sheep-shagger has the Aussie afterworld pretty much to himself. Though Europeans see a revenant in every crumbling rectory or overgrown mausoleum, phantoms don’t thrive in sunlight – or so I believed, until I encountered my own Christmas ghost.

It began with a piece of music – a scrap of an orchestral classic that had troubled me for as long as I could remember. Even as a teenager, I’d switch it off if I heard it on the radio, or leave the room.

I knew it was Tchaikovsky, and when I was about fourteen I identified it as a passage from his ballet Romeo and Juliet. Sorting through my parents’ 78s under the big record player in the living room, I found the 12-inch black HMV 78 rpm disc: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture. Every impulse urged me to smash it. Instead, I placed it on the bottom of the heap, face down, in the hope it would stay there, forgotten.

           What was my problem with this music? I could never quite explain it, except to associate my antipathy with a childhood Christmas Eve.

In my memory, I was about seven, and lying in bed in the room I shared with my younger brother. Our parents had gone out, leaving an aunt to baby-sit. Light from the hall spilled through the half-open door and with it the stately but impassioned music of Tchaikovsky. And after that….? As far as I could remember, nothing.

           If one had to feel bad about a building, the house in which we then lived was perfect. A single-storey cream-painted Victorian villa, it stood behind a fence of spear-shaped iron railings on a hillside street of identical houses in the inner Sydney suburb of Leichardt. It had been the home of my father’s parents, after whose death he and his brother inherited it jointly. Since housing was scarce, they decided to move both families into it.

           From the start, the house depressed me. The smell of old people hovered in the lofty rooms, along with the bits of medical equipment – chipped enamel, crumbling red rubber - that furnish props for the last years of the aged. Dry rot was everywhere. Once, my foot broke through the rotten boards, engulfing my leg to the thigh. The instant during which it dangled there, in what spider-infested dark I could only imagine, became a special horror I never forgot.

All this and more came back literally to haunt me decades later in Los Angeles. I’d agreed to participate in a project that involved being hypnotised by a psychologist named Joe Steiner.

“So where are you now?” Joe asked me from outside my hypnotic trance.

“In the house where I lived as a child.”

In one sense, I knew I was lying on his worn corduroy couch in his little apartment in City of Commerce. I knew too that it was 1989 – more than forty years since I’d left that house. Yet the memory felt disturbingly real.

“So you’re….how old?”

“About nine.”

I was back there and back then, in Leichardt, with the mustiness, the smell of the old and worn, the sense of the dead and gone.

And I even stood in the old parlour, with the big fireplace, and the twin beds in which my brother and I had slept. The room where I’d heard  Romeo and Juliet.

But now it was day, not night. And I was no longer in bed, but standing by the door, looking into the room as if I had just entered from the hall.

“What do you see?”

I wasn’t alone.

Across the room, beyond the two beds, leaning on the mantel piece above the fireplace, was a woman – a stranger.

She could have been fifteen or forty. Black hair, unwashed, hung limp and greasy almost to her shoulders. Her face was thin, pale, unhealthy, her narrow feet bare. A flowered house dress came halfway down her thin calves. Repeated laundering with harsh soap had leached all substance from the cloth. It looked as tired and pale as the woman herself.

Expressionless, she straightened up and walked towards me, bare feet soundless on the lino floor. As she came close, she raised her arms as if to embrace me….

And walked right through me.

A wave of icy dread travelled from my head to my feet. Even now, the memory brings back a shiver of that chill.

“But…she just walked right….,” I stammered. “What was it?”

Joe was unperturbed. “Sounds like a psychic manifestation.”

I lay trembling, as wet with sweat as if I’d been doused with water. I wanted to say But I don’t believe in ghosts.

Joe said, “It could explain your bad feeling about the room, and that piece of music, couldn’t it?”

“How?”

“You displaced the memory of this….whatever it was. Transferred it to another occasion, in the same room.”

“You think so?”

“What do you think?”

I didn’t know what I thought. Nor do I now. But my sweat and fear were real.

The story has a postscript.

I seldom read my old fiction, but recently I had to look at a science fiction story called Beach, written in 1967, before I ever left Australia.

The action takes place  in some indeterminate future, in a  Sydney devastated by an unidentified disaster. A few survivors linger on the beach, fearful of revisiting the empty streets, though one is courageous – or foolish – enough to leave the shoreline and explore.

 I realised I’d used Leichardt as a location, exploiting the sense of isolation and confinement it induced.  “Houses closed in, fences enclosed, overgrown gardens thrust up ragged patches of vegetation. Concrete footpaths, cracked and overgrown, grass and weeds probing up between the squares…”

I’d also co-opted our old house, again not favourably. All my detestation seemed condensed into one single image, of Victorian photographs hung on a parlour wall:

“....ancient portraits and prints from an era before any he could name. Crazy faces, bearded and opaque; faded ladies in lace collars, haloed in a milky oval or framed by a collar of gilt cardboard and an even more ornate plaster moulding; overdressed children staring with blind savagery at the camera;  the inhabitants of a dead age, their faces as rigid as icons, stared down in implacable disdain and rage at the one living person in the room, a pale girl in a blue dress…”

           I shivered again as I read the passage that followed. For an instant, I was back on the couch in Los Angeles.

“He saw her face for the first time, a pale oval in which in which eyes as luminous as those of a lemur provided the single evidence of life. Her mouth was pale, thin, bloodless, fixed with a terrible smile. She stood up, and came towards the window….”

           I recognised her at once.

Almost twenty years after our first encounter but twenty years before I’d confront her face-to-face, she’d glided through my fantasy in disguise - my Christmas ghost.