Ghost Virus

David unlocked the front door of the bungalow and stepped inside. The hallway smelled airless and damp. He was about to call out, as he always used to, ‘Hallo! It’s all right! It’s only me!’ but of course he didn’t need to – not now, nor ever again.

All the same, under his breath, he whispered, ‘Hallo! It’s all right! It’s only me!’

He went into the living-room. The curtains were half-drawn, so that it was gloomy in there. His mother’s knitting was still lying on the seat of her armchair, a half-finished sleeve in pond-green wool. She had promised him a new sweater for his birthday, as she always did every year, but this year, thank God, he wouldn’t have to pretend he liked it.

This was the first time he had visited the bungalow since the funeral last week. He had been making excuses to himself why he couldn’t have come earlier, but the reality was that he had been dreading it. The smell of urine-soaked seat cushions. The chipped china ornaments and the murky reproduction landscape paintings. The kitchen with its blocked sink and its tannin-stained teacups and its dinner-plates that hadn’t been washed properly, so that they still carried a crust of month-old gravy round the rim.

Worst of all were his memories of growing up here. David was an only child, and his father had died of a stroke when he was eight, so he had spent all his adolescent years here alone with his mother. Netty, her name was – a selfish, bitter, domineering woman who never had a good word for anybody.

Strangely, she had been almost beautiful when she was young, in a sharp-jawed way, and she had kept her looks into her old age. But dementia had taken hold. Up until her late sixties she used to pin up her hair into an immaculate French pleat, but gradually she had allowed it to grow tangled and filthy. Her clothes became spattered with the food that she had dropped, and by the age of seventy-eight she was incontinent.

A carer from social services had visited her every day, but she had spent only about twenty minutes tidying up and changing the bed and microwaving her lunch for her. It wasn’t surprising that she hadn’t stayed longer. Netty had done nothing but insult her and complain that she was ugly and useless and a fat black cow.

David had been appalled by her racism. When he was seventeen he had a black girlfriend, Millie, from Streatham, but he hadn’t dared to bring her home.

He went through to his mother’s bedroom. In here, too, the curtains were half-drawn, so he pulled them open. The small garden outside was overgrown with weeds and heaped with sodden leaves. A concrete gnome was surrounded by dead bracken, so that only his faded blue hat was visible.

David looked over at the bed with its thick brown- and mustard-coloured cover. The pillow was still indented from his mother’s head, and the sheets were still stained and wrinkled, untouched since her body had been lifted out of it. In the corner, her dressing-table was crowded with jars of foundation and crumpled tubes of anti-wrinkle cream. The mirror was so dusty that the bedroom appeared as if it were filled with fog.

He had come to the bungalow with the intention of clearing up everything in it – emptying drawers and taking down curtains – so that it was ready to be put on the market. But now that he was actually standing here, all of that brisk efficiency had drained out of him. He felt as helpless as he had when he was a boy, overpowered by his mother’s relentless malevolence.

Don’t you dare touch anything – this is my house, not yours!

He went across to the fitted wardrobes and opened one of the sliding doors. All of his mother’s dresses and skirts were hanging in there, some of them filthy. Her lilac tweed suit he remembered from when he was a teenager, as well as the long green dress with the cowl-neck collar which she had always worn to what she considered were ‘special occasions’, like his school concerts and midnight Mass on Christmas Eve.

On the right-hand side, every shelf was untidily stuffed with her sweaters and cardigans, which she had once folded with almost obsessive neatness, and with her underwear, her withered roll-ons and her laddered tights. He was about to slide the wardrobe door shut when he noticed the black fisherman’s sweater which his mother had knitted for his father, for his birthday, the year before he had died.

David had always thought it was the best sweater that she had ever made – mainly because his father had insisted on it being black, and not custard yellow or pond green or salmon pink like most of her knitwear. All the same, his father and mother had argued ferociously about something on his birthday – David couldn’t remember what it was – but after that argument his father had refused to wear the sweater.

His mother had kept it, though, and on wintry days she had worn it herself, even though it was much too big for her.

David tugged it out from under the other sweaters. It was untouched by clothes moths, and it was clean, so his mother probably hadn’t worn it for years. He had been thinking of buying himself two or three new sweaters for the winter, and if he kept this one, it would save him a bit of money. His solicitors’ partnership hadn’t been doing too well lately, and he was in arrears with his mortgage, although he hadn’t told his wife Evie that he was almost broke.

His mother’s death had actually come as a relief, not just because he would no longer have to visit her two or three times a month and listen to her demented insults, but because she had left him nearly £17,000 in savings and shares and the bungalow would fetch at least £475,000, if not more. Her jewellery would be worth a couple of thousand, too.

He took off his brown corduroy jacket and tugged the sweater over his head. It smelled faintly of the perfume his mother used to wear, but he found that nostalgic rather than off-putting. Perhaps she hadn’t been as hard on him as he remembered. She had been left to fend for herself with an eight-year-old boy to take care of, after all, and with only her child support to feed and clothe him.

He looked at himself in the foggy dressing-table mirror. The sweater fitted him so well it could have been made for him. It was warm, and it relaxed him, so that he no longer felt so hostile towards his mother, and the bungalow seemed less depressing, and more homely.

Now you understand what I went through, putting up with that ungrateful father of yours, and bringing you up, you obnoxious boy. I never even wanted you in the first place. You were an accident, and a tragic accident, as far as I was concerned.

‘I was an accident?’ said David, out loud. ‘You didn’t want me?’

What am I doing, he thought, talking to myself? But perhaps he had been selfish, when he was a boy. Because the two of them had always argued so much, he had blamed his mother for his father’s death, without once thinking what pain and loneliness she must have suffered. No wonder her tongue had seemed so sharp at times.

He shrugged on his jacket again, but he kept the black sweater underneath. He didn’t know why, but it gave him confidence, and certainty, and a feeling that he was in charge of his life again – and that was a feeling that he had been losing lately, with his partnership doing so badly. Nelson & White had lost several crucial actions in court, and because of that their reputation had suffered and business had dried up.

He left his mother’s bedroom and went into the bedroom that had once been his. His mother had been using it to store suitcases and deckchairs, as well as her ironing board and vacuum cleaner and cardboard boxes filled with all kinds of junk, from burned-out lightbulbs to ten-year-old women’s magazines. His single bed was still there, with its shiny blue quilt, and his poster of David Bowie was still stuck on the wall beside it, although the bottom half of it had been ripped off.

This was where you hid yourself and never thought about how lonely I was. This is where you listened to your cacophonous music and masturbated every night. Oh, don’t think I didn’t know! I found all your Mayfair magazines! And you thought that I was being hard on you?

David stood in the doorway with his mind in a turmoil. He felt as if he was seeing this room through his mother’s eyes now, and remembering what it was like when he came home from school and closed the door and stayed there all evening, only emerging to eat his supper in the kitchen and never say a word to her, except to grunt.

You know what I should have done? I should have come into your room one night when you were sleeping, and suffocated you. Why didn’t I?

David found that his eyes were filling with tears. He blinked, and they blurred his vision, so that all the junk in the bedroom seemed to dance.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise. I really didn’t know.’

He was still standing there wiping his eyes when his iPhone warbled. He sniffed and took it out of his pocket. It was Evie calling him. There was a picture of her on his screen – dark-haired and petite and smiling, with red and yellow balloons in the background.

‘How’s it going?’ she asked him.

‘Why?’

‘What do you mean, “why”? I just want to know how it’s going, that’s all. Do you want me to come around and help you? I’ve finished all my shopping now.’

‘Why should I need any help?’

‘Well – there’s an awful lot of rubbish in that house to clear out, isn’t there?’

‘What do you mean, “rubbish”?’

‘All that old furniture, of course, and bedding, and curtains, and your mother’s clothes.’

‘They’re not rubbish! How dare you call them rubbish?’

‘David – what’s the matter with you?’

‘Nothing’s the matter with me. Why?’

‘You don’t sound like yourself at all. And why are you being so aggressive?’

‘You’d be aggressive if you’d had to put up with all the bad feeling that I’ve had to put up with.’

‘Honestly, David, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Has it upset you, clearing out your mother’s stuff? I know she was a horrible old bag but you shouldn’t let her get to you. Not now – now that she’s dead. Why don’t you call it a day and come home? We can both of us go back there on Saturday and clear it out together. Or I’ll do it by myself, if it throws you off so much.’

‘Oh, you think I’d let you do that?’

‘David – please, come home. You’re sounding so weird.’

David stood silent for a few moments.

‘David?’ said Evie, but then he ended the call without answering her.

Yes, I’ll come and see you, Evie. And I’ll show you what I do to anybody who insults me. I’ve done it before and by God I’ll do it again.