Jeannie

by Christina Lewis

You’ve never been alone in that house. Not ever.

You just didn’t know it until now.

***

You’re pouring yourself a late glass of wine when you hear the all-too familiar creak, faltering. Then again. You make yourself still as anything, willing your body into absolute silence. Not a breath comes out of you. Nothing.

You think it’s over, then:

Mummy?

You exhale like a balloon and go with arms held out, pluck her off the stairs and onto your lap. Then you smooth her hair and tell her everything’s alright, it’s alright, before falling asleep curled up on the sofa, the TV illuminating you both.

It’s been like this for two months now – the unsettled bedtimes, the tears, the never-ending need for you to be there. You don’t mind, you tell your friends, but it’s getting wearing now. That sofa is not meant to be slept on every night, and you’re sick of waking up with an aching back. Treasure it, they reply. You’ll miss it when she’s older. So, you keep dragging your bones to work and smiling through it and dreading the newest restless night to come.

I can’t sleep

I feel funny.

I’m scared.

You’re sure this one’s down to a kid’s TV show she caught the end of when you weren’t looking, even though she says it isn’t but can’t tell you what it is. And you’ve tried everything, haven’t you? Pillow spray, stories, letting her stay up later, sleeping in your bed against all the clucking advice; you’re running out of ideas.

Your mother says you were exactly the same, running into her room every night and squeezing yourself next to her in a tight ball. Your thing was a shadow man, taller than the room in his death-black suit and top hat. You never saw his face, but he’d stand at the bottom of your bed rolling his hands over each other…slowly at first, but then faster and faster and faster until they were just a blur and you’d wake up with that heaviness in your chest, that weight.

Take her to the doctors, she ends, slopping a teacup and saucer down in front of you.

They can do marvellous things these days. It’s what you could have done with really.

***

You sit in the GP surgery, both staring at the internal map of the human body on the wall. Her little legs swing furiously until you put a gentle hand on her knee, reminding her you’re there, that this is meant to help.  

What’s a…l u n g e?

She asks, pointing to the picture. A man stands chopped in half right through the middle, his nervous system and organs all neatly labelled and explained.

The GP likes questions. Her stiff hair shakes in one great solid mass as she drops her stethoscope down and claps her hands together.

A budding doctor, she bursts. Excellent!

And she explains all about how lungs help you breathe. How they take in oxygen and push out carbon dioxide. How we’d die without them. She nods and listens and then:

Like Jeannie? She asks.

The question hangs in the air. You watch a fly boxing itself around the room in sharp, pointless squares. The GP looks at you. Your eyes itch.

Who’s Jeannie? You ask, your voice brittle and rushed.

She’s quiet then, as though she’s been slapped.

Who’s Jeannie, sweetheart? You press. Someone from school?

She shakes her head. The GP looks between you both and starts to write. Her legs start swinging again, so violently that the chair starts to move with her. Up, down, up, down, up, down…the plastic chair edges across the floor, and her breath is ragged with the effort. The GP stands up. You grab both of her legs on the upstroke, fold them up in your arms and let her rest her head on yours

Jeannie did it, she whispers, her breath gasping out in ribbons.

This is how it happened.     

The GP sits back down and starts to write again. She doesn’t look like she thinks anything’s excellent any more. There’s lots of talk about referrals and further tests, and you pull her onto your lap and feel her heart flying as the words become nothing more than a drone.

I don’t like that picture any more, she whispers. I want to go now.

So the pair of you traipse to the bus stop in the teaming October rain, her in your waterproof jacket that trails on the ground and you soaking wet, water pouring off your nose and nipping at your skin. You both decide to camp downstairs tonight, just like you did for six months after he left, hot chocolates and blankets on the sofa to warm yourselves through. You pull all the blinds, draw the curtains over them and check the front door’s locked at least every hour, next door’s dogs barking every time you touch the handle, the steady drip from the broken guttering hitting the paving slabs, the odd car going past. She grows heavy in your arms. Your head starts to roll.

You dream of something you can’t quite grab hold of, and when your brain tries to make sense of it, it slips and shifts and changes, dancing away. You wake suddenly, sweating. She’s bolt upright and staring.

Go to sleep, you say, coming out of it like a fish after food. Go to sleep!

Jeannie, she whispers.

Her eyes dart behind you, almost sliding out of her head. You feel your shoulder blades creep and flex, your skin goose-bumping. You don’t look.

Sssssh! Sssssssh, now.

You bring her into you heavier than you intended, bury yourselves under the duvet and wait for the shaking to stop, Whether it’s you or her, you’re not sure.

You still keep coming back to what the walls gave you.

***

It’s May, and the heat’s stifling. You’ve got the wallpaper stripper on full blast and the house is like a bloody sauna, shards of volcanic paper piled in huge, sticky piles. You’re nearly finished for the night, just finishing the back wall of the bedroom, when your scraper hits something and flicks it up in a clean arc, flapping on the gloss-stained floor boards.

A blank envelope.

So the stripper goes off then, packed into an unwieldy pile in the middle of the floor, and you sit cross-legged and turn it over and over between your fingers. You’ve heard of this, people putting coins or talismans or letters in the wallpaper to bring luck to the house - this is a good sign, a sign this house has had people who cared.

You ease out a sheet of soft, tissue-like paper that looks like it’s been open and closed a thousand times them pause, a cough from the next room signalling the fine line between sleep and wakefulness. You wait for her to turn over and fall back into that deep sleep. A cat screams somewhere outside in the blackness. A car illuminates the room, then dies. It feels like everything’s pausing, just for you.

Silence.

I cannot keep her still, though help me God, I have tried. The devil is in her now and there’s nothing else to do but pray.

You read it twice, put it down, pick it back up. Read it again. There’s no name at the bottom, and the final line looks like it’s been written in haste, the lettering smudged and sloping down to the bottom corner of the page. And while you don’t believe in anything other-worldly, in any of those superstitions your mother used to drum into you, you can’t deny that tingle, the coldness in your bones. You send screenshots to the WhatsApp group as soon as you’re cleaned up and in bed, the duvet pulled right up to your chin like a child waiting for the bogeyman to come knocking.

Total hoax. At least we know the Victorians has a sense of humour after all.

WTF? OMG, burn it.

And that’s what happens when you start stripping wallpaper J J J

Then they’re onto other conversations and you laugh, but you just can’t shake the sense that something’s watching you from the dark of the open landing. You sleep with the light on that night, and for every night after until her terrors come.

***

Things carry on.

She sleeps on the sofa every night now. No matter how many lamps you leave on or stories you read, you’re so weighed down with tiredness it’s just not worth the struggle. And how can you admit that you actually feel safer with her there, bundled up against you? You’re not sure who needs who more.

You should ask at the library you know, says Diane out of the blue, chewing at her nails as she waits for the staff room kettle to boil.

You’ll probably find out all sorts about those old houses. That’s why we went for a new build, ‘cos you know all the history, don’t you?

Not a lot that Diane says makes sense, but this, while stirring her coffee exactly five times clockwise and five times anticlockwise, actually does.

****

It’s a thundery Tuesday afternoon, the type that makes the skies apocalyptic, when you give up your lunch break to listen to instructions on how to use the records computer, the librarian talking you through each button and search window like it holds the power to turn off the world.

Maybe it does, she says archly when you make the joke

You’re quiet then, watching the birds flit past and the rain starting again as she finishes off her speech, deliberately slower for you having mentioned it.

Alone, you start with the obvious.

Princes Ave.

Land disputes, a building accident, planning permission, a couple who won the lottery in 1977 but never moved, a car crash, a fight over boundaries, a battle to save an oak tree.

Nothing.

No 37, Princes Avenue.

Zoopla prices, old photos from past sales.

Nothing.

Haunting???

A phoney ghost hunt in the old part of town, a couple who say they saw two chairs move across their front room with a thousand comments from people accusing them of attention seeking. A well-loved medium found dead at home.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

You drum your fingers on the desk, squash your knuckles in your eye and watch the fireworks inside your head.

Then.

Jeannie.

An artist shortlisted for a prestigious prize two streets away. A bank manager. A lollipop lady retiring after thirty years of service. A woman who shaved her head for her best friend. A woman accused of murder.

You read.

Saturday the 31st of January, 1880

A most terrible crime was committed on Saturday the 31stoff January on Princes Avenue, the newest of the streets to be built on the east side of the city.

Miss Jeannie Enid McDonald, a mute since birth, ran through the streets in her nightwear at approximately 1am, banging on the door of Briar Street police station in a state of apparent distress. When the policemen on duty enquired of her behaviour, she was said to have written:

She shook and shook, and her spirit has left her now. Pray for both of us, I beg you all!

On investigating her place of abode at 37 Princes Avenue, the body of her thirteen-year-old daughter Iris Charlotte Cooper was discovered lying in the bedroom, ‘all twisted up and stiff, the face demonstrable of great pain before death eventually claimed her’. A bottle of arsenic was discovered in the kitchen which McDonald wrote was for rats, but ‘not with any great vehemence that made the officer believe it was truly the case’.

McDonald will appear in the court on Thursday the 12th of February accused of death by arsenic poisoning, whereupon her fate will be determined by the judge.

And then:

Friday the 13th of February, 1880

The much-anticipated case of Miss Jeannie Enid McDonald was heard at the court yesterday, whereupon the Judge did sentence her to death by hanging from the neck after four hours’ deliberation.

The policeman on duty the evening Miss Iris Charlotte Cooper - daughter of the condemned - was discovered at 37 Princes Avenue stated that the rigours of death were most compatible with arsenic poisoning, likely administered in tea over a period of months. Neighbours on both side of the property stated they frequently bore witness to strange bangs and screaming, and that the two were rarely seen out in public during decent hours. Indeed, Mr Taylor of the Aberdeen House Chemists stated that McDonald had approached him on two occasions with a barely legible letter seeking advice on how to exorcise what she described as ‘the demons, the violent shaking’ plaguing her daughter. He advised her to consult a physician, whereupon she communicated that if she did so, she would almost certainly be admitted to an asylum.

It is the opinion of the Judge that McDonald wished to be free of her daughter and found a most contemptuous way to be disposed of her, but could not live with her actions almost immediately after they had the desired effect. McDonald denied this, but could not give proper reasons that accounted for the demise of her daughter other than ‘the devil made her shake’.

When the death sentence was passed, she wrote for the benefit of the Judge and court:

Let it be known I am glad to join her, but not in this world.

 Her execution is henceforth set for Wednesday the 24th of March at the city gaol.

You sit for a while, listening to the hot rain thrumming against the wall. Then you turn the computer off and leave.

***

The next day, you’re ill. You can’t possibly be at work feeling like this you tell them, and they agree and tell you to sleep and drink sweet tea. This weather’s playing havoc, isn’t it?

You put your things – her toys, the clothes that still fit, the ring your father always wore, your wedding pictures - in three big boxes in the front room, then you sit cross-legged on the floor and write your reply for the house, for Jeannie, for whoever comes to read it:

It wasn’t your fault. It never was. 

slipped though the slit lining paper and sealed with a thick line of glue.

The warm storm air tears around you, rattling and upsetting as the taxi beeps a steady rhythm of impatience. You stretch as far out of your bedroom window as you can, dangerously far, and let Jeannie’s letter rip from your fingertips, dancing over the rooftops. You watch until it’s a black dot and then nothing but grey-pink sky.

 You swear you hear a sigh at the nape of your neck.

You don’t look back.