If you listen carefully, you can hear the guy who inscribes the headstones—what do you call that guy? A mason? A tomb engraver?—sharpening his chisel and preparing the stone that will mark your grave. Such work must require a steady hand. If you keep listening, you might even hear him tapping away, chiseling your name slowly, so he doesn’t have to hurry, to make sure your headstone is ready on time and the letters are shaped beautifully and your name is spelled correctly.
I come from a long line of ghosts.
By the time I was born, my mother’s father had been dead ten years. Ten years, in the grave. Is it safe to say I did not know him?
In photos, with his white hair, in his elegant three-piece suits, the chain of his fob watch suspended between the lower button of his waistcoat and its left pocket, William Wildy looked like a ghost, or a funeral director: someone from another era. After all, he was born in the nineteenth century, 1892 or thereabouts.
Curious about this dignified man whom I was allegedly descended from, I would tug at the hem of my mother’s skirt and ask her questions.
She wouldn’t say much. He drove an old-fashioned car, a real tin lizzie. He invariably wore a suit, even when he wasn’t working. He was the head of customs, oversaw all of Australia’s imports and exports.
“I took you to see him once, his grave at Fremantle cemetery,” she would tell me. “You were young, so you probably don’t remember.”
“Yes, I do,” I would tell her. “We left some flowers. You showed me his name on the headstone; that’s how I learned to read.”
“That’s right,” she would say. “Now you run off, I’ve got things to do.”
W-i-l-l-i-a-m. W-i-l-d-y.
This was everything I knew about my granddad. A name, an anecdote, a few facts. But not so long ago, my mom talked about her father on the phone. I forget how he came up. She told me about the last time she saw him.
That was in 1960. My mother had left Australia to marry her Scottish husband. They lived in Scotland for a while, in Motherwell, with my gran, then moved to London. My grandfather and his wife, Hilda, hadn’t seen their daughter for a few years; they had never met her husband or their two grandchildren, Rory and Fiona. They wanted to check up on her.
So they traveled by ship from Australia to England. At the time, the voyage from the port of Fremantle to Portsmouth, where the ship docked, took six weeks.
By the way, did I mention I haven’t seen my mother in thirteen years? None of my family. I can’t quite explain why I haven’t made the trip home. But I can tell you that during this period, my mother’s voice has taken on its own identity.
William and Hilda Wildy arrived early in the morning, when it was still dark.
They took a train to the tiny basement flat—small as a postage stamp—that my mom and dad rented in Cricklewood in North West London.
Initially, my father was shy around his in-laws. This shyness never fully dissolved.
“But it was a wonderful reunion,” Mom said, “everyone so excited to see everybody, even with the cold and the cramped conditions.”
They did a lot of catching up, a lot of cooing over the babies, discussing who resembled whom. There was a fine layer of salt on my grandparents’ belongings, their suitcases and my grandma’s hat box. Rory (or was it Fiona?) started licking the salt off my granddad’s face as he held his grandchild in his arms.
When my mother asked her parents how the voyage was, they said it was fine. The food was tolerable. Her dad told her they had seen a burial at sea.
“It was an impressive sight,” he said. “As the coffin slipped from its black canvas bag, it made quite a splash.”
It was slightly disconcerting to hear my mother enunciate the words of her father, as if his voice were haunting her voice, like a so-called voice from the grave. I could almost, but not quite, hear his formal manner of speaking, his diction, his intonations.
My grandparents intended to stay for six weeks: six weeks to get there, six weeks in London, six weeks to get back.
“Your granddad liked order,” my mom said. “And symmetry. He liked numbers to match up and things to be in their place. It was a habit he picked up from his work.”
They did a spot of sightseeing, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey. They went to the Tower of London and saw the jewels in the Jewel House and the cell in the White Tower where Edward IV’s long-haired boys were imprisoned before they disappeared, only to turn up two centuries later as an incomplete, inconclusive set of bones. After morning tea, they viewed the gibbet where countless men were hanged for treason until they were all but dead, as a preface to being disemboweled and drawn and quartered, and paused briefly at the exact place where Anne Boleyn’s head left her body for good.
But my grandfather’s constitution was delicate, and a week into the trip, he had a brain hemorrhage.
My mother is into her crossword puzzles; she does one every morning without fail and is knowledgeable about the root meaning of words.
“That’s when a blood vessel bursts and floods the brain,” she explained. “Hemorrhage comes from the Greek and means blood bursting forth. But it can also mean a damaging loss of something valuable.”
Near death, Granddad had to be rushed to the hospital.
His wife and my mother and the little ones visited him every day. Luckily the hospital was nearby and they could walk through the park and admire the roses.
What you could see of them. Mom told me that although London had outlawed coal burning—after the great smog of the 1950s that killed thousands of people in a matter of days—citizens were flouting the law and burning coal, despite a potential fine of hundreds of pounds. Just as they had disobeyed the law back in the thirteenth century, when King Edward I decreed that anyone caught burning coal would be put to death.
“If torture and death wasn’t enough to deter someone,” she said with a laugh, “why would a measly fine work?”
Consequently, the air was grimy. The petals of the roses were gray and blackened, but if you put your face close enough, you could breathe in the perfume of the rose. Whenever they got home, the white wicker of the prams and the babies’ clothes were filthy.
I can almost hear the sound of my mother’s voice telling me all this as I tell you: her diction, her manner of speech, her formal intonations. Like her voice is haunting my voice. Can you hear it too?
My grandfather nearly died. He recovered, but he was not himself. When he was conscious and able to speak, my mother inquired as to how he felt.
“Do you want to know how it feels to have a brain hemorrhage?” he told her from his hospital bed. “It’s as if there is an avalanche in your brain and that avalanche buries all your memories and thoughts. Or the avalanche is comprised of your thoughts and memories and they bury one another until there’s nothing.”
“He certainly had a way with words,” my mom said. “I think I picked that up from him. That must be where you get your leanings.”
I come from a long line of ghosts who are interested in words.
My grandfather was never himself again. He kept on talking about their outing to the Tower of London. He was an excessively rational man, but he now claimed to have beheld the ghost of Anne Boleyn, carrying her own head; “I could discern the thin red line where her neck was severed,” he said.
My mother was ready to tolerate one ghost sighting, but her father also maintained he had clapped eyes on the ghosts of the two dead blond Princes in the Tower, Edward and Richard. Mom decided to play along and asked him if he was scared.
“Not at all,” he said. “I just wanted to cut their hair.”
By the time he was well enough to be discharged from the hospital, over four weeks had passed. It was near the end of the trip. My mom attempted to persuade her father that they should change their tickets and extend their stay until he was strong enough to travel. But that would have meant losing their return tickets and having to pay for a new one-way, ten pounds each, a total of twenty pounds. What a waste that would be. My granddad had spent his whole life tallying numbers, determining tariffs. He was simply not prepared to do this.
Before my mother knew it, it was time to put her parents back on the ship and to say good-bye. Dad borrowed a car from a mate and they all drove down to the docks, early in the morning.
My grandparents stood on the deck, waving damp handkerchiefs.
“I can still see them up there,” my mom said, “even though it was so dark, all I could make out were their silhouettes.”
When my grandparents arrived home, they called their daughter. My mother asked about the passage, and her father referred to the burial from their first voyage, the splash it made, as if the two voyages had blurred into one.
“He sounded very frail,” my mom said, “kept mumbling about bad omens, and his voice was just a wisp of what it used to be.
“This might sound peculiar,” she told me, “but by then it was not so much his voice as the ghost of his voice.”
Granddad did say he had read an Agatha Christie novel, a murder mystery set on an ocean liner, which he enjoyed. The rest of my grandfather’s thoughts were lost at sea.
Two months after they returned, William Wildy died, not at sea but in his bed. It was a new bed he had recently purchased, as if he had specifically gone shopping for a deathbed.
My mother was unable to attend his funeral. The corpse would not wait that long. Her father would spoil. But when he died, she felt it.
“You know how they say you can sense when someone dies, someone very dear to you?” my mom said, a quaver in her voice. “I was home by myself, well the kiddies were there, and I had just put them down for their naps. So I made myself a cup of tea and began doing a crossword puzzle. I don’t remember the first clue, but it had seven letters, I remember that. And as I tried to figure the word out, I got the most uncanny feeling, I can’t quite describe it, like something . . . well, like something floating through the air and into me and for no reason I burst out crying. What a ninny, I thought, crying over a crossword puzzle! Wouldn’t you know, my mother calls a half hour later, telling me Dad had died. Isn’t that remarkable, how I could sense this, across the ocean, thousands and thousands of miles away?”
W-i-l-l-i-a-m.
After receiving this news, my mother stared at the black telephone in their landlady’s hallway; it had always struck her as a miraculous technology, but suddenly it looked ominous, black as a hearse. She realized she would never get to speak to her father again. Her father’s voice had . . . fled the earth.
Distraught, she sat down and went back to her crossword puzzle; its blank white boxes demarcated by fine black lines had also taken on a menacing value. She completed it, except for that one word.
W-i-l-d-y. Pronounced not wild-e, but will-d, d like the letter, will like the legal document in which a person expresses how their possessions are to be disposed of and distributed after their death, when they have no need for possessions because they are . . . indisposed.
The one object William Wildy took with him, one he thought might come in handy, was his fob watch, hidden in the waistcoat of the black three-piece suit he was buried in, a suit he had made to measure on Saville Row in his last week in London. In his will he insisted the watch be wound by the mortician right before the coffin lid was closed.
And in all these years,” Mom told me, “I’ve only dreamt of him once. I didn’t know it was Dad at first. He was in the kitchen, dressed rather casually, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and some pants a laborer might wear, spattered with paint. He wasn’t dressed like himself or behaving at all like he did when he was alive. He was being very untidy, opening cupboard doors and not closing them, spilling milk and jam on the floor, and cursing!
“Even so, you would think I would have been pleased to see him, but I was petrified. A bit like Mary and Martha when Jesus raises Lazarus. It was a good reminder that resurrection is nice to think about but would be terrifying if you were faced with it. In truth, the only thing more disturbing than someone you love dying is the same individual coming back from the dead.”
When my mother came to the end of her story, which, I suspected, she was telling for the first and only time, I reminded her of the day she took me to the cemetery to visit Granddad’s grave and taught me to read her father’s name etched into the stone.
Mom was silent and then laughed.
“I’ve never told you this, dear,” she said, “but we never went to his grave. I did take you to the cemetery, but I couldn’t find his plot. I looked for a while, but it was so hot and my shoes were pinching my feet, so I gave up and left the flowers on someone else’s tombstone. I’m not sure how you got that idea into your head; I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have humored you, I think you just learned to read the usual way.”
She laughed again, I laughed as well, and beneath our laughter, within it, there was a puzzle, a clue, a question.
Yes, I think it’s safe to say I did not know my grandfather. The fob watch must have stopped keeping time long before I was born. Yet from my mother’s story and our mutual fabrications, I feel I have a better sense of him than many people I know who are supposedly living.
Like my granddad, I’m a rational man. I like order, symmetry. From where I stand, here in this other cemetery, Life and Death can be viewed as a system of imports and exports. I picture William Wildy in the afterlife, head of customs, supervising the incoming and outgoing flow of goods, ensuring the duties are collected and there are no discrepancies, no entry of items into the realm of Life or Death that are restricted or forbidden.
Now I remember how the subject of Granddad came up. My mom was wondering if I was planning a trip home. Before she got off the phone, she asked again.
“Any thoughts on when you might visit?”
I gave her my usual line: work was busy, it was hard to get time off, they were so inflexible, I would put in another request, I’m sure they would agree soon . . .
“Well,” my mom said, “that will give me something to look forward to.”
I watched her voice waft out of the receiver, a separate entity, a disembodied spirit. My mother is frail and getting on in years; a feeling floated in the air, in the thousands of miles between us, a sadness I cannot talk about: not with her, not with you, not with anyone.
I come from a long line of ghosts intent on self-deception.
I still can’t believe he made the trip,” Mom said, drifting back to talk of her father. “It went so quick. It was like your grandparents disembarked and I saw them for a second and then they got back on the ship. But I’m so glad I had the chance to see him that one last time, and he had the chance to see me.”