THE AUTHOR JEANETTEWINTERSON ON SUPERNATURAL SIGHTINGS AND THE GHOSTLY LATE-NIGHT WAKE-UPCALLTHATREMADEHER
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GHOSTS? ME NEITHER, but explain this.
It’s late at night and I am asleep in the basement of my little Georgian house in Spitalfields, east London, right opposite the old fruit-and-veg market. That site was once a leper hospital – you can hear it in the name Spitalfields. From the late 1600s, it became the hub of London’s grocer trade – every cabbage from Essex, every apple from Kent made its way here – and, later, the entire understorey was turned into vast vaults to ripen bananas, where unseen King Kongs swung silently through the subterranean city.
Yes, I made up the gorilla part, but not the rest, because stories have a way of retelling themselves and that’s what this story is about.
My house was derelict. When I bought it, in the early 1990s, it had been on sale for 15 years. Nobody wanted to live in Spitalfields in those days – just a few crazy artists like Gilbert and George.
The deal was cash-only. No survey. Sold as seen. Nothing had been removed from its long and cluttered past. The fireplaces were boarded up – but all there. The panelling on the walls was covered over in Dulux. The floorboards were as wide as hope and as worn as many lifetimes. There was no running water. No electricity.
The upper floors had been the offices of an oranges importer. I have a trunk stuffed with the notepaper and envelopes, the address books and telephone numbers in London and Seville.
On the ground floor, a shop had opened in 1805 as a general grocer. We were selling onions the size of cannonballs during the Napoleonic wars.
An old house, a house built in the 1780s, a house with a past. They say walls have ears, but what if walls can speak? What if our buildings are trying to talk to us?
It’s late at night. I am asleep. It has taken me two years to make the house habitable again and, for now, friends of mine are living in the upper floors. I am fine in my basement flat, the life of the city present but muffled through the ironbarred grating that sits at street level, while I am what lies beneath; unseen, unsuspected, solitary as an oyster.
Soon after midnight, I am awakened by the quick clatter of footsteps down the straight stairs leading to the basement. No carpet. I am aware that my right arm is hanging out of the bedclothes – and it is this wrist that is suddenly and lightly held by four cold fingers and a thumb.
I can hear breathing but it isn’t mine. I realise that I am having my pulse taken. I say out loud – why do I say this? – ‘I am alive…’
Immediately, the hand drops my wrist and I hear footsteps moving swiftly up the stairs. All I know is I am intensely cold. When I turn on the bedside light, I am alone.
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