Not a Ghost Story Read online

  ***

  I was lucky with my builders; a conscientious man with a droopy moustache who seemed to have stepped out of the 1940s, and his young nephew, a slightly camp boy in a Lou Reed t-shirt. I wondered if he had ten of the same t-shirt; or whether he never changed it. They took charge of everything, charged exactly what they'd said they would, and left the flat white and empty and smelling of paint.

  They were tidy workers, but they must have made a fair amount of dust and noise; I asked them whether the old guy on the ground floor had been any trouble. They'd never seen him, they said; so he can't have minded too much.

  Life there felt somehow provisional. A bed, a desk, a chair, a microwave. I never really had time to cook; I bought salad and sliced salami at the Italian deli, or heated up a ready meal from the supermarket, or ordered pizza or Chinese.

  It was always strange coming home; like coming into a haunted house in Dickens, the ancient front door, an archaeology of paint layers that had partly rubbed through around the handle and the letterbox, and the lino passageway and bare stairs, wood bleached whitish grey with age, and then stepping into the bright cold whiteness of my own flat.

  I looked into the ground floor windows once or twice. They were slightly above where they should have been, as if the street level had been changed after the house had been built, so I had to stand on tiptoe; I felt vaguely embarrassed, as if I'd been caught riffling through someone else's mail. There were books piled high on the windowsill, and half-drawn curtains in dirty white; the room was too dark to see into. Sometimes I imagined it to myself; it would be full of books and old newspapers, and cuttings taken from old newspapers that hadn't been filed, and bits of string and old perished rubber bands kept 'just in case'. I thought of stories I'd read in which old blokes in sheds collected cuttings about serial killers, and became slowly stranger and madder till they confessed to crimes they not only hadn't committed but couldn't ever have committed. And then I thought; things like that don't happen in the real world.

  I remember when I first moved to London there was a factory on the bus route from Hackney into the City, somewhere in that ever changing vortex of traffic lanes around Old Street, where stacks of paper blocked every window. They never moved, till one day I was passing and noticed the whole factory had been torn down. Further on the same bus route was the Mole Man's house, a villa of peeling stucco behind screens of corrugated iron; they said there were tunnels underneath it stretching as far as Kingsland Road, and the roof of one had opened and swallowed a bus, and still he kept digging. But the council evicted him eventually. I suppose they've built another block of flats on it now.

  That's the trouble with London; you never get to the bottom of a story. You see things, you move, you never find out what happened.

  About a week after I moved in, there was a strange smell on the staircase, sweet and stomach-turning at the same time. I thought at first the man downstairs must have left some rubbish out, a bit of past-its-sell-by-date meat perhaps that had started to fester, but there was nothing there. It might have been a poisoned mouse (or this being London, more likely a rat; they say there's always a rat within six feet of you, wherever you are in the city) that had creapt here to die; I thought back to when we'd had mice in the back kitchen, when I was a child and lived in the country, and we'd put out poisoned bait, and they'd died in the crawlspaces of the tiled roof and stunk the place out, but I couldn't remember the smell. Only the sharp wet stink of mouse piss.

  Anyway, the strange smell disappeared after a couple of days, so it was nothing to worry about.