Алия Уайтли - Skein Island

Nobody wanted to live there because of the smell. It was pervasive and greasy at night, after a day’s frying, and in the early morning I’d wake to a deep, woody fug hanging over the bed, blue against the light through the thin curtains. I didn’t identify that smell as cigar smoke for the first year that I lived there. I didn’t think the laugh I kept hearing could be a laugh. A ghost? Surely not. That would be scary and would necessitate action on my part. I would have to find another place to live, or reason with an unknown entity. The experience would have to be chalked up as frightening and not… soothing. Yes. It was soothing to breathe in that smoke and feel the presence of amused old eyes upon me when I woke, but only if it was not real and not exactly in my head either. Not scary. Not pathological. Not examined .

I lived there for two years. When I left the smoke and the presence came with me, and I was glad .

I look over what I’ve written and realise that these aren’t words for Dave at all. They are true statements I’ve made for myself. I don’t want to stop, and I also don’t want to go on. Writing down true things sounds dangerously like creating signposts in a wilderness. Once a place has been pointed out, sooner or later somebody will end up travelling to it.

A few months ago Susan, a work colleague, went to Skein Island. We all laughed at her. She smiled patiently at the jokes about getting in touch with her feelings and wearing a pair of dungarees; what kind of people were we? We were a pack looking for the lowest member to pick on. It wasn’t new behaviour. We do it most days, using cruelty to avert boredom, and she left for the island to the sound of our derisive comments.

When she returned she seemed the same at first, but it dawned on us all at one point or another that something had changed. We stopped making jokes at her expense. One morning I found myself alone with her in the ladies’ toilets on the fifth floor, and we looked at each other’s reflections in the mirror above the row of sinks.

‘What was it like?’ I asked her. I got the feeling from her instant response that she had been replying to that question a lot. Perhaps we’d all been sidling up to her one at a time, picking our moments.

‘It was unique,’ she said.

She stepped back from the sink and moved to the drier, and I found myself saying over the din of hot air, ‘No, really. I really want to know.’

She finished drying her hands and walked to the door. Then she said, without looking back at me, ‘No distractions. Nobody else I knew, or who thought they knew me. When there was nothing else there to keep me from seeing it, I turned out to not be what I thought I was. There was… more of me.’

A few days later Susan gave in her notice. I haven’t seen her since.

And now I’m standing in front of the mirror in the ladies’ toilets on the fifth floor. Far too often recently I’ve been daydreaming about where Susan is now, and those dreams are ridiculous and romantic. She’s parasailing or dancing the Argentine tango. She’s eating oysters or driving a Ferrari, and she’s doing all of these things with some faceless lover.

If that lover doesn’t have a face, how can I be so certain that they’re beautiful?

There are things that none of us are seeing. There are so many things that we’re not seeing.

The queue for the number 37 is longer than usual, and I find myself thinking of the unfamiliar faces, none of them beautiful, as interlopers. What’s so interesting about my route home today? Don’t these people have other places to be?

A man who looks about my age – maybe out of education for a few years but no wiser about what being an adult actually means – is handing out leaflets. He works his way down the queue and when he reaches me I take a leaflet automatically to avoid a conversation. Perhaps it’ll contain wisdom that I need. Wisdom hidden as an advertisement. I’d like to believe in serendipity, and I’m already starting to believe in the importance of words on paper.

If there’s wisdom in there I can’t see it.

The usual double-decker arrives and I manage to get a seat on the top deck. An older woman takes the seat next to mine and we sit with our knees touching because it can’t be helped. She puts her large patent leather handbag on her lap and hunches over it, opening and closing the silver clasp.

I pull myself into that inner space I’ve perfected specifically for journeys on public transport. The town centre slowly rolls past, punctuated by the stops and starts of arrivals and departures. I have a long way to go yet.

‘Here,’ says the woman sitting next to me. She’s holding out a pen.

‘Pardon?’

She points at my hands. I’m still holding the leaflet, but I’ve folded it once, down the centre, to reveal its clean white reverse. It looks like it’s waiting to be written on.

‘Did you need this?’ she says. Then she looks past me, out of the window, and jumps up to push the stop button on the vertical bar. She leaves the pen – a cheap biro – on the seat, and walks away. I watch her descend the stairs and emerge on the pavement. The bus jerks, and moves on.

So there are signs, when it comes to writing. I’m not strong enough to resist them.

My ghost is an old man .

He’s not a kind old grandfather type. He’s annoyed and bitter and he sees the funny side of being stuck in those emotions forever when he thought they would switch off. The cigar habit probably killed him – that rasping edge to the laugh gives it away – so now he smokes them ironically, no longer needing the nicotine but wanting to make a point of not giving up because it keeps him human, even in death .

I bet he got offered the chance to go to the afterlife. I bet there was a long tunnel, white and swirling, and he felt the pull of it at the moment of surrendering his corporeal form. It opened up above the armchair in which he was slumped (in a cheap-end-of-the-market nursing home, with the skeleton of a half-formed jigsaw puzzle on a small wobbly table beside him) and he looked up at the afterlife to see relatives waving at him, beckoning him in. Then he thought: No thanks very much, I’ll hang about at the fish and chip shop and scare generations of bloody students instead.

Who knows how long he’d been doing exactly that before I came along? Perhaps I was the first one who didn’t shiver or scream at the whiff of tobacco and the throaty laugh. I’d imagine my lack of interest in his tricks piqued his interest. It touched him in a way he hadn’t been touched in a long time, metaphorically speaking, because he obviously hadn’t been touched at all. I stayed with him and he got to know me, and when I moved out he decided to follow. He thought: I’ll stick with you, girl. You’re all right.

We’re happy together. Sort of. He hates my boyfriends because not one of them has been worthy of me yet. He chases them away and he will continue to do so until Mr Right comes along and then he’ll disappear up to heaven, job done, and this is turning into a ridiculous fairy tale and I have no idea who my ghost is or what he wants or even what I’m writing about and now I’m at the bottom of this piece of

I look up. The road is unfamiliar. I’ve gone past my stop and run out of paper. We pass a road sign: Uneven Road Surface Ahead.

I’m sick of signs.

When you visit Skein Island you write a declaration. It is the story of your life. You give up your declaration to be stored in the library along with the stories of the thousands of other women who have visited. This isn’t about your story being read, or appreciated, or turned into a thrilling adventure for all the family. It’s how it has to be enough to know your story exists because that’s all there is.