15 March 2005
ghosts
I am nine years old now and the ticking of the wall clock in the hall is preventing me from closing my eyes. My eyes are shut, but not really shut. My eyes could be shut for ten hours, yet I would not be able to sleep. Tick. I’m waiting for the electricity to return, or for sleep to release me from the darkness.
I am two years old, and I am put, grudgingly obedient, to bed – but in their bed. I am on my father’s side. I close my eyes for a second and when I open them it is light again, and I feel rested although I know that I didn’t sleep, and that daytime snuck around while my eyes were shut.
Sleep. The more I crave sleep, the more it eludes me – a waning moon that slices my palm as I try to grasp it.
The sickle in the sky dimply lights up, with the help of the streetlamps, my shutters, from the outside. I can sense them conspiring. I am fourteen years old. I have been living alone for two months now. I am a child, scared, woken in the middle of the night by the peeking moonlight. I am fully awake, but I can’t open my eyes. I can sense, but I cannot move my toes in the darkness. I can feel the tips of my fingers that have slipped out of the protection of my sheets as a cold winder draft curls around them. The wall clock ticks… ticks… ticks.
I spring from my bed, gasping for breath as I hurl myself towards the light switch on the other end of the dark room, tripping as my ears and eyes struggle to follow my racing body and heart. My mind. My mind worked from the moment I was awake, and yet had been unable to will any other part of my body into motion.
I am nine again. In five years I shall move away from home. My mother walks into my room and tosses a book onto my bed, then leaves, silently. I voraciously read through all I can lay my hands on. In this case, a book on the reproduction of living things, beginning with flowers, passing through bees, and ending in a pair of human beings. Later that evening, she collects it from my room as I sit listening to my brother tell stories of ghosts, paying special attention to the ways in which I could best escape them. “If you hear a strange sound – one you know should not be heard, or if you catch something from the corner of your eye – a sight that probably wasn’t natural – NEVER turn your head. Ignore it. Don’t let the ghosts know that you’ve acknowledged them. That’s how you’ll draw them to you.”
I’m two again. I’ll leave home in just 12 years. I howl and scream in front of the bathroom door, scared. So terrified. I stare, my eyes fixed on a door, visible from where I have my back pressed against the bathroom door. I’m begging my mother to let me into the safety of the bathroom, the safety of her company. She’s very practical about these things. I need to learn to be alone. But soon I won’t be alone. I know. And that’s why I howl and scream. I’m scared of that door and what it contains.
I’m 21. I’m at home. I put my parents to sleep. The familiar stairwell is dwarfed by time as I turn the brass doorknob to my room. My room. I haven’t seen it for fifteen years. We had moved away when I was six. To a land where I learned that black men do not live in trees, and where ghosts ceased to haunt me. The house – my room – doesn’t smell the way it did, of chilli, soy sauce, and musty pine when I was two. After 15 years of western tenants, the house smells of potatoes, dill, and raw salmon. It used to smell of my pet husky, too, if I sniffed around at corners carefully, where her hairs used to wander.
The little room without a door doesn’t smell of safety and incense under a serene statue of the lord Buddha anymore.
To the left, the door I once stood staring at is not there. It never was. It was a figment of my imagination. Although my mother remembers the night I howled outside the door of the bathroom well. There was never a trapdoor to the attic, either. Nor an attic for that matter, even though I had such distinct memories of seeing a man climb there once. I remember telling everyone we live in a four-storey house when I was young, because I counted the attic as one floor. I once even dreamed that I was that man in the attic, and I was with a woman there. We weren’t wearing any clothes.
I was found fast asleep on top of the washing machine in the basement-floor of the old house once, again, when I was about two. It was the last place they thought of looking, because the first closet I came across upon right at the foot of the stairs to the basement would send me hurtling back upstairs. That closet is there. But I still don’t know what is really in it. Back then, what was really in it was a dead body, to me, anyways. How I’d gotten past the closet in the middle of the dark night alone, when I never dared to even in the daytime chaperoned, was as large a mystery as how I had managed to open the forbidding metal door into the laundry room and still climb on to the top of the machine.
The brass doorknob turns gently, and I feel compelled to tiptoe into my old room, afraid to disturb the lingering memories. I leave my clothes in a pile on the ground and I watch a few slits of moonlight wrap my skin like silken bandages, falling across my eyes as a blindfold. I slip into the now dwarfed bed that had once threatened to engulf me.
Sleep creeps slowly up my nostrils from the closet-smelling sheets and fills my head, and it’s heavier and heavier. Then. Tick.
I am nine again. Being inside this house in my largest fear. This house has many ghosts. They didn’t follow me when I was two, or three. Or four, five or six. I always knew they were there. I never went anywhere in the house alone, even though they didn’t mind me. My nanny took me everywhere. I think she saw them, too. I am in my room alone, and the walk-in closet at the corner a moment ago, seemed innocuous – a small blue door with a handle of sticky metal. Now, it reached for me solemnly in the darkness. It was waiting for the moment to bend that protruding elbow of a doorknob and display to me all the concrete horrors of the past stored inside – unordered heaps accumulating grime.
I am two. I walk to the room of my sleeping mother and father, seeking to crawl between the sheets and find comfort in their gentle breathing. But I stop at the door. I am not looking up at the handle. I’m looking down.
This is ridiculous. I’m not nine. I’m not two. I’m twenty-one. My eyes are accustomed to the moonlight, and apprehensively, yet pretending to be angry with myself, I stumble my way to through the dark back into my room, feeling the blood rush to my head as the pace of my heart quickens and I open the closet door. The light switch is inside the door on the left, just as I remembered. Boxes. And a gorilla mask I was always more scared to wear than to see lay on top. Curious now, I opened a box, running my sharp fingernails down the aged plastic tape, which easily gave way. Dolls inside. I picked one up. A golden-curled baby with head, arm and legs attached to a cloth body. Her blue eyes always closed when she lay down. The doll stared back at me with her wide-open eyes. Then her head rolled off.
I’m fourteen again. I’ve never noticed my nanny was insane before. I was told that she became schizophrenic after we left the country. She got married when I was nine. We were gone most of the time, but came back for a month every year. She always seemed to know when we were back, and would call us before we called her.
I got lonely staying in my apartment alone, with my parents on the other side of the world. I sleep over at my former nanny’s place once. Just once. Her sons are big now – they are already 4 and 5. I sleep on the living room couch, quite soundly. In the middle of the night, a frantic muttering coming from the bent figure of P’Nim, huddled over the cassette deck, the digital numbers sending her into a frenzy, wakes me up. I sit on the ground next to her and she explains, “Khun Noo – this number – this is Jani’s birthday, and this – when it flashes - this is Janne’s. What are they trying to tell me? What are they trying to take now?” I try to tell her it’s ok – I try to say that she probably just needs a little sleep. But she refuses, saying she doesn’t sleep any more. “The voices keep my awake. I don’t sleep. Except when it gets bad and they send me to the hospital. When I come home, I sleep well for a few days. I don’t like being far from my family.” She looks at me.
Neither of us were born in this cold country. Neither of us like it here. She was only 19 when she became my nanny in Thailand. She was 21 when she came to Finland to continue her duties. We left the country – the government of Ethiopia would not allow for her to come with us, where the Finnish government had allowed her to enter as our employee. Why hadn’t we sent her back to Thailand?
I stand there with the doll in my hands, and before I can react, I hear the scream in my head. It’s so loud I can hear nothing else for it’s duration, and the scream ends in a sound like laughter, very faint.
I turn on all the lights on the way to my parent’s room. The closet is there again. The trapdoor had never been gone. For the first time in 15 years, I crawl between my parents and they are pleased and shocked to find me there in the morning.
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