“Accepting the now seems like accepting a haunting to come.”
Illustration © Rachael Olga Lloyd
1.
When I started secondary school, I developed what I thought might become a keen sense for ghosts. I didn’t experience visual phenomena, only the inescapable anticipation of a ghostly presence. Perhaps influenced in part by the horror films my brother was watching, I was also coming to terms with finding my way around an all girls’ school. Map in hand, I felt the same prickling sensation along the corridors as I did upstairs alone at home: a bristle of the strange in the architecture.
In horror films, it is often this liminal space between childhood and adolescence that allows hauntings to arise: a disruption in the usual order of things, a crack in the supposed boundaries between child and adult. There was, for me, a new sense of knowing/not knowing and it rustled a disturbance: the beginnings of understanding the world as larger and more chaotic, a scope beyond family, beyond the safety of an infant school classroom. In Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts and God, Claire Cronin writes that in the ghost story, ‘the temporalities of past (the ghost) and present (the family) are always thatched together. The ghost becomes a shimmering figure for this interruption: a disjunction of our sense of time that is horrific in itself.’
My brain and body were developing rapidly and not entirely in concert: puberty like a little trauma. I was suddenly surrounded by older girls crowded round toilet mirrors, thick fogs of fruity aerosol, chemical after-scents half-covering the earthy fragrance of maturing bodies: sweat, blood, foundation. It was a heady atmosphere of all that I hadn’t experienced but knew must be coming. Once I returned home, there was menace in the murky reflections of winter windows: I might not recognise what was looking back at me. Some nights, I could not face looking at the end of my bed, for fear a young girl was sitting there, watching me.
We are told that stories must have a beginning, a middle and an ending. But in life, endings are nebulous, imprecise. Starting secondary school felt like a rupture, what Catherine Malabou calls a ‘cut in a biography,’ but my childhood still lingered, not wanting to let go. In school, I was haunted by living reminders that my innocence would not last. At home, I was haunted by the youthful essence of me.
2.
By Year 11, I avoided ghostly thoughts and feelings as much as I could, as I avoided school as much as I could. In English, however, we studied ‘The Signalman’ by Charles Dickens. On the train to my parents’ as an adult (returning), I think again about ‘The Signalman’. I have not been able to leave this story at its ending, but have returned many times, frustrated by its lack of conclusiveness.
The eponymous signalman is forewarned of his death by a spectre, but this forewarning does not succeed: the signalman is still hit by a train and is hit by a train because he is so mesmerised and distracted by the spectre. On the train, I am thinking about simultaneity. J and I rapidly text each other (a ghost in my screen), trying to decipher the nature of the signalman’s haunting. We begin to think of it as a slippage of time, rather than an explicit foreshadowing. My train slips into Birmingham without me realising.
Ghosts from other places in time feel to us dangerously intrusive, a reminder of the flimsy nature of temporality. In Spectres of Marx by Jacques Derrida (the inventor of the term “hauntology”), he writes ‘They are always there, spectres, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.’ The spectre in The Signalman acts as if to warn of the future but the future is already decided and cannot be changed, it has only not arrived yet in the way the signalman is experiencing time. Before his death, the signalman is haunted by other rail disasters which - though he receives an eerie forewarning before each one - he cannot prevent. His knowing is limited. The spectre is a reminder of his ultimate powerlessness in the face of events, their preceding, and their aftermath.
Amid the pandemic is speculation of what will happen - what it will feel like - when it’s over. There is a clamour for an ending, believing that ending to be a finality. But there is no such ending when you consider what has been before.
Accepting the now seems like accepting a haunting to come. What disturbs so much about sporadic reports of the bubonic plague reemerging on the edges of the earth, is its archaicness: a horror from the deep past that supposedly can no longer touch us.
3.
I have reached desperately for endings - especially when in pain or heartbreak. Lovesick at university, haunting New Cross, I’d listen to Arcade Fire’s It’s Never Over (Hey Orpheus), the sung repetition of the title seemingly lamenting its truth. At times I would feel angry that my heartbreak seemed relentless, cyclical, and even years after could not find a satisfying completion, becoming an invisible influence on the person I was in the now.
An over is a finality that we are not often blessed with. The events of university seem to me like they continue to live on in New Cross: zones of apparition conjured by memory, landmarks that I can never see anew. I feel my past imprint on these areas. Like a palimpsest, they overlap with a collective history: my ghost among many others.
Naomi Morris is a writer and poet from Birmingham. She was a weekly diarist for Rookie from 2011-2015. Her debut poetry pamphlet was published by Partus Press in 2019. Her next pamphlet is forthcoming from Makina Books. Some of her writing is collated on naomimorris.co.uk, and she posts about recovery narratives etc. via the Instagram @archiveofrecovery .