Nadine Dognahnyi sat in a deck-chair early one Autumn Sunday morning (early, for a Sunday), the sun shining low in the sky as if in league with the chill of the air. She was determined to lay claim to her ration of the sun before Winter set in and she pulled the fur of her coat collar tight round her scrawny neck.

The rustle of burnt leaves, as they fell through the branches of the nearby tree, was hardly more than the sporadic breeze that caused it. On either side of her (though not directly above) were the clothes she’d just hung on the line, moving flaccidly in the selfsame breeze. Their lives were lazy, those anorexic ghosts who inbabited the sleeves and leggings. Too early for them, also.

Nadine wondered why she’d plumped herself down in the unseasonable deck-chair at all. As the odd squawk of wintering birds mingled with the other more intangible sounds she’d first half-noticed, Nadine closed her eyelids, as if better to find her bearings.

The world inside her head was far more understandable, and it mattered not that the extraneous world of reality surrounding her infiltrated the daydreams like guest goldfish in the aquarium of her skull. Another bird (massive by the sound of it) squawked from somebody else’s roof. Unaccountably, it caused Nadine to think of her age and, in consequence, of her past. She’d been, what people call, flighty. A will o’ the wisp, with the emphasis on “will”. She’d married to suit herself, not others. How could she have helped falling in love with a foreigner? It was in fact his thick accent that had originally attracted her. She could not be expected to have dunked her then young and pretty head in a basinful of cold water to clear her mind. Love is not like that. She didn’t care that “friends” at the Ladies Group would snub her for the natural leanings of her emotions. If it weren’t one thing, it would have been another. The way the other members of the Group walked, noses held aloft, should have warned her that they would be only too easily insulted, put out of joint. They’d been born with solid silver dummies in their mouths. Others who actually earned their fortune (or even obtained it through a freak of fortune itself), were inevitably side-lined, humoured and merely tolerated. Nadine must have known that wedding an East European would result in worse than just rustication.

She opened her eyes again to the garden. The sun was now higher, the washing even less energetic. The shadows of the trees threw mottled patches of sunlight across the lawn and, actually, there was now some noticeable heat from the irititic eye in the sky. Dognahnyi, her one time beau and name-giver, had been dead now almost a year. In fact, tomorrow would be the anniversary, the Death Day, when it would be more appropriate to think of her widower. Incredibly (though she believed it), his face had dispersed into the past (like faces of old school friends never seen again since childhood). Surely one year could not efface the memory of a loved one.

A voice erupted from the house at the other end of the garden. It was her daughter arguing, shouting, making a nuisance of herself. Nadine was often the butt of such traumas, but today she’d consigned Berry to the care of the ghosts. That reminded her of why indeed refuge in the garden this early Sunday morning had been so urgent. The ghosts once arrived in the house had tried to appear playful, fatter than their cousins on the washing line, more jolly and rubicund, ready to lend comfort. . . Nadine had relished their coming, apt as it had been on the tail of her late husband’s departure. She needed company (and with Berry to rear), as many hands as possible were welcome at the pumps. They moved about the large house, gathering the dust to give them shape, shaking the mops out of the windows like heads, chatting of this and that much like unto the socialese of the Ladies Group. Then, things turned sour. Nadine blamed Berry, the teenage wildfire, for taunting them with her tantrums trawled from childhood. The ghosts should hvae been humoured, not blooded with petty squabbles; given a basis for existence out of the pride granted by gentle communion with real pepple, not foisted off with the frailties and fragilities of human misunderstandings. But how could you really blame Berry? She missed a father far more than Nadine missed a husband.

The last straw was snatched from the pigpen of the previous week. All had gone wrong. Nadine had lost all contact with her own daydreams. The Ladies Group had disbanded, she’d heard, just on the strength of a whim. (She’d known the whole affair was as capricious as Christmas snow but, nevertheless, the shock of never now being accepted back into the flock [at least she’d treasured a crumb of hope by the mere continuance of its existence] was a blow that made sitting in the garden at all hours of the day or night no eccentricity, compared to those that now faced her during the rest of her body’s old age.) Berry had lost her best friend at school, either by death or argument Nadine was unsure, for the tale was garbled, but the tears real. Berry even went so far as to turn on the ghosts and accuse them of being mere figments of her mother’s imagination. Nadine watched them slouch off like sagging barrage balloons into their respective corners of the back parlour, knowing that they were slowly filling with water, dragging them down towards the floor where the carpet did not reach the skirting-board. Berry sulked off, too, skulked off, with them, and as if by being their enemy, she’d grown more like them.

Since then, the ghosts had adopted the more traditional role of the prankster poltergeist, with seasonings of evil to soup them up.

The sun had by now crystallised out, the bird squawks more insistent, the washing-line ghosts dead in their own clothes. Nadine wondered if Berry was safe alone with the house ghosts. She did not really care. One them might be Dognahnyi himself, returned to claim his birthright within his daughter’s memories. Surely, if so, he would not allow her to be harmed nor even tranced. Or perhaps he wanted her to die away from Nadine to bring her closer to him?

Eventually, the strange, mysterious sounds that had opened the curtains upon Nadine’s revery did become nothing but the noise they had always threatened to become from the outset. All turned ordinary again. The house, at the far end of the garden, had by now gradually grown quiet again. At least, temporarily. None of it mattered, she realised. Being woken from her daydreams by the renewed ordinariness of everything around her, Nadine remembered that Berry had been slaughtered in the same road accident as her father (but in different cars). Berry could never die again, for she was already one of the ghosts. So, Nadine sighed with relief. The police suspected sabotage on one of the cars, but nothing was ever proved.

Nadine ambled into the house to see how the roast was getting on in the oven. With her bird’s appetite, there’d be plenty left over as tomorrow’s cold meat for Death Day.

(published 'Nutshell' 1989)