Ruth Rendell - Adam And Eve And Pinch Me

She shrank back in her seat. His touch wasn’t like a shadow or a breeze but real, a warm hand with a natural hand’s pressure, heavy, possessive. “Go away,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

Sonovia turned and glared at her. Minty looked round, toward the exit, but Jock had gone.

After the film was over, Laf and Sonovia took her for a drink in the Redan.

“What were you muttering about in the cinema?” Laf asked, grinning. “Sitting there with your eyes shut, nattering away to yourself and making faces.”

“I was not.”

“Yes, you were, my deah. What’s the point of going to the pictures if you keep your eyes shut?”

“I was scared. Everyone was scared.”

They denied it. But she couldn’t talk about the film, neither able to agree with Laf, who pretended to have enjoyed it, nor with Sonovia, who couldn’t stop laughing over the frequency of the horseman’s decapitations. Jock’s ghost had distracted her entirely. It seemed that he had been threatening. She could still feel the pressure of his hand. He shouldn’t take her with him; she didn’t want to die, to be taken to some awful scary place inhabited by ghosts. She’d take steps to defend herself.

When she first saw him, she wouldn’t have believed a weapon would be effective against him, but the hard and heavy feel of his hand had convinced her that, ghost though he was, he was solid and unyielding. So she needed the knife and needed to carry it with her at all times. For who knew where he’d next turn up?

She finished the last shirt and slipped it into its cellophane bag, inserting a cardboard bow tie, spotted blue-and-white, under the collar. Josephine had popped down to the car hire place to make transport arrangements for her wedding, and when the doorbell rang, Minty thought it was Jock. It would be just like him to come today, the last time she’d ever be out without the knife. She picked up a pair of scissors from the shelf where they kept the stain remover and the spray starch. But it was only Ken, who pretended to be scared of the blades pointing at him and began clowning about with his hands up.

Josephine came back and the two of them started canoodling, kissing with their mouths open and all that. Funny, because Josephine had told her before she met Ken that the Chinese never kissed, they didn’t know how to. Maybe she’d taught him. Minty quite liked them, but their going on like that made her want to stab them with the scissors. She felt left out, isolated, shut into a world of her own, inhabited only by herself and Jock’s ghost. Like someone sleepwalking, she trailed into the back room and sat down on a stool, staring at the wall and turning the scissors over and over in her hands.

Jock had always had a pack of Polo mints in his pocket. That was why he’d called her Polo, she thought. He’d passed them to her when they were at the cinema and she’d liked them, they were a clean sort of sweet, they didn’t come off on your hands. Pinch, punch, first of the month , she remembered, no returns. Just walk on by, wait on the corner…

She’d brought her lunch with her, sandwiches of grated cheese and lettuce, a small plain yogurt. You never knew what went into the flavored kind. When she’d eaten it, she wrapped the remains in newspaper, then a plastic carrier, and put the lot in Josephine’s rubbish bin in the backyard. Even touching it made a more than usually thorough wash necessary. She scrubbed her nails with a brush, left her hands soaking in clean, soapless water for five minutes afterward. When they came out and were dried, the fingers were pallid and wrinkled, which Auntie had used to call washerwoman’s hands. Minty rather liked them that way, it meant they were really clean.

It was one of those afternoons that passed uneventfully. A man came in with his seven shirts. He always did, once a week. Josephine asked him once if he hadn’t a wife or a girlfriend to bring them in for him, not to mention wash or iron them. Josephine hadn’t put it that way, but she did mention it and the man hadn’t liked it one bit. Minty thought he might not come back but take his shirts to the place down Western Avenue. As it was, he took a fortnight before reappearing and Josephine was especially nice to him, remembering how tactless she’d been.

After that there was no one until a teenager came just as they were closing and wanted to know if she could pay by installment for having her dress cleaned. It was a short red dress with bootlace shoulder straps and hardly any skirt, and Minty thought it would have washed. She’d have washed it. Josephine said, “Certainly not,” and the poor kid had to take the dress away again.

Minty walked home. She had an uneasy feeling Jock would be on the bus. He’d never yet appeared in the open air. Old Mr. Kroot was in his front garden, sweeping the path. He pretended not to see her. Maybe he hadn’t been the one who had sent that condolence card, but the home help had without him knowing. She could tell he knew she was there. Something in the way he stiffened told her that, and the way his wrinkled old hands with tree-root veins tightened on the broom handle. When she was a child he’d been quite friendly and then, one day, while his sister was staying with him, his sister and Auntie had had a row. It was about the washing line or the fence between the gardens or maybe Mr. Kroot’s cat peeing up against the bushes, something like that, but Minty couldn’t remember what. Mr. Kroot’s sister and Mr. Kroot had never spoken to Auntie again and Auntie had never spoken to them. So they’d never spoken to Minty again either.

The sister wasn’t there at the moment. She lived somewhere else, a long way from London. Mr. Kroot was all alone with his cat, which didn’t have a name. He just called it Cat. He turned and looked through her as if she were a ghost like Jock. Then he went into the house with his broom, shutting the door much harder than he normally would have. The cat came up to the door just as he’d closed it. It was so old that Minty could hardly remember a time when it wasn’t there; it must be at least twenty by now, and if you multiplied that by seven, which was what Auntie said you had to do if you wanted to work out a cat’s real age, it must be a hundred and forty.

As Minty unlocked her front door and went into the house, the cat began a deep-throated senile yowling to be let in. She half thought Jock might be in the hall, waiting for her, but there was no one and nothing there.

Would a knife have any effect on a ghost? What were ghosts made of? Minty devoted quite a lot of thought to this. Before she saw one, before one touched her, she believed them composed of shadows and smoke, vapor and some cloudlike intangible substance. Jock’s hand had been firm, exerting a strong pressure, and the seat of the chair he sat on had been warm to her touch. Was he the same person he’d been when he was on the earth? A thing of flesh and blood, not like a black-and-white photograph, a grayish moving image, but brown-haired, pink-skinned, his eyes that same dark blue? Blood-would he bleed?

She would try it. If it failed to work she’d have lost nothing. She’d just have to try some other way. Imagining it as she ran her second bath of the day, she saw the knife go into the ghost body and the ghost dissolve, disappear in a wisp of smoke or melt into a clear pool like water. There would be no sound, no cry or gasp, only a vanishing, an acknowledgment of being beaten, of her victory.

Thinking of it like this almost made her want to see him. She had her bath, using the big golden sponge that had once had a life of its own, attached to some rock in the sea. When she was done, she washed it out in hot water, then cold. One day Jock had asked if they could have a bath together, the two of them get into the water at the same time. She’d said no, she’d been shocked at the suggestion. It wasn’t what grown-up people did; it was for little kids. Besides, if she’d shared a bathful of water with him she’d only have had to take another bath on her own afterward. He never seemed to think of that.