Growing up with the Other People
I wrote this piece for Dear Damsels — but didn’t, as is classic me, meet the deadline for their ‘Together’ theme. So here it is anyway: about growing up with Other People. It is a true story.
I grew up in a haunted house. I don’t mean some sort of fairground ghoul ride where skeletons pop out of every cupboard door, I mean it was quietly and largely unconflictedly inhabited by people who weren’t my family.
I want you to understand that my family do not believe in ghosts. My parents are scientists, my dad a staunch atheist and my mother a firm christian — neither believes in spooky things coming back from the dead to haunt you. I did not watch Ghostbusters as a child, I never — despite looking extremely like Wednesday Addams until I was old enough to transition into Morticia — had a lot of interest in the creepy, preferring books about anthropomorphised mouse wars.
My little brother is even less inclined to the supernatural than I am, having never even gone through an epic fantasy obsession stage. We never did Hallowe’en, we didn’t watch Goosebumps, this isn’t the product of an overactive enthusiasm to convince ourselves the house was spookier than it was.
It is a slightly spooky house. Or rather, I thought so when we first moved in — because I was little and didn’t understand that sometimes buildings can just seem neglected without being sinister, a lonely Groke of an unloved place. It had been empty for a little while and had a large, overgrown garden with a mouldering greenhouse that splintered glass into the deep grass of the lawn, in between fruit trees from the orchard that had once been on the land.
But those are obvious remains. As an adult, I fully understand the bluntness of a decade of disrepair and its action on rotting wooden frames; the day my dad pulled the greenhouse down seemed dramatic only because it slightly increased the number of shards of glass you’d find when rooting through the borders and under thick privet hedges my mum desperately tried to dissuade me from eating.
Falling down, overgrown things are just that, though. Even if there’s no simple way of clearing them. The garden was an endless source of curious objects, when I was very young — toy soldiers and cars appeared out of soil and a sandpit filled with builders’ grit from when the house had been slated for demolition.
As for the walls — we knew there was nothing in there. When we moved into the house a structural survey had proudly declared that all new sockets had been fitted throughout the property, which was true. It did not mention that all the wiring behind them had been ripped out, repurposed by enterprising electricians before the council’s planning department gave the place a stay of execution, refusing to let it be fragmented into a terrace. It took a lithe man with an admirable will to crawl into small, dark places weeks to reconnect it all.
When we finally moved in we had to rip the stairs out. They weren’t the house’s stairs — which must have been a more staid escalation belonging to a 1960s rural build — but some from an office or warehouse maybe, full of gaps and bothersome given the incredible height of the downstairs, an impressive fifteen feet between floors that had drawn my parents to the place.
I think that’s why the stairs have always felt strange. You shouldn’t, maybe, install the wrong hardware on something like that — a connective rail, a liminal space that should be transitory, disrupted and congested.
Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it’s always been this way. But I am technically minded and the stairs have always seemed like a good place to start a rationalisation of the irrational.
As I said, we don’t believe in ghosts. I’m not sure the Other People are ghosts, in the classic sense of spirits returned from the brink of death to linger in the world of the living. But whatever they are, they are there. Sometimes more than others. The purest definition of a haunting.
If I’m making them sound like Borrowers, I shouldn’t. They’re just people we hear and sometimes see in the house. If you’re not concentrating you can find yourself talking to them, hearing someone come into the kitchen and open the fridge behind you before you remember you’re the only person in the house. Well, only explicable person in the house.
Sometimes you’d see them in the garden, a gaze-slide where your brain noted the presence of someone who you might or might not recognise without alarm until you processed it a few moments later and by then they’d not be visible. Their cars would drive in and out of the drive, sometimes agitatedly and repeatedly — I used to lie awake, as a young child, listening to them late at night and quietly imagining that my dad’s car was being stolen, rather than that what I was hearing wasn’t exactly there.
I used to explain it as the house having bad RAM. A few broken pixels. Sometimes it got a little out of step with itself and entered a loop and showed the wrong thing or played the wrong audio for a little while. But that’s reductive of the Other People, who have a presence beyond sensory misalignment.
My mum texts me sometimes now, well over a decade after I moved out, asking if I am alright because “the other people are very loud” that night. It usually heralds something bad. A foreboding. If the ghosts in Haunting on Hill House are a blunt metaphor then the Other People are perhaps an even closer one. Every household has those things unspoken and unacknowledged, after all — maybe all families have Other People. But I know none of my friends ever had them quite like ours.
My dad, a fierce rationalist, refused to truck any talk about the Other People for a really long time. Especially the idea there was Another Dog that we could hear walking around. Our own dog was a grumpy, blind Yorkshire Terrier with very little propensity for the supernatural but would occasionally seem to walk round things that weren’t there — or, like all dogs, growl at things in corners or stare at something you couldn’t see. But that’s dogs, of course and there’s nothing to be read into the fact he did it slightly more after he lost his sight.
After the dog died, though, my dad started standing out of the way for him absentmindedly. Even though, of course, the dog was not there — we were hearing the Other People’s dog. Or maybe an echo of our dog. Either way, it wasn’t a dog who was there. My parents, at some point after I moved out, started leaving radios on very loud in almost every room.
Which was probably because my granny had been moved in and there was more chaos than the Other People could intrude on. In fact they seemed to recede for a few years beneath the very present drama of the living. But there are a few old faithfuls — the cars in the drive, a menacing older man in the garden, the dog that isn’t there and women sitting on chairs that don’t exist, in rooms that are a little out-of-line.
I don’t know if we confuse them, if the echo is mutual. Do 1990s children in with bumbags and neon shorts race through 1970s living rooms? Or confuse people fruit-picking in the orchard? I dread to think. But in the same way I grew up aware you had to be careful of digging for glass in the garden, potatoes coming out of the vegetable patch pre-sliced sometimes, I grew up around the Other People.
I’ve never had a conversation with one. I don’t think it’s possible — whatever breach taking place is mutely meaningful, the confusing visitor who has no intention of leaving. Or maybe thinks that we should.
Sometimes, going up the stairs, there was a point around the landing where something chill would slip through the air. Surely air currents around the house; I know about the architecture school test to make a bell ring in a basement and am confident the students could have had a helping hand in our place, the bell ringing in the bedrooms no matter where you put it.
When that chill fell over me, in this gateway space between the upstairs and downstairs that surely couldn’t be a threshold for anything more, I’d be gripped with fear. Temporarily frozen, not sure whether up or down was safest or what exactly I was scared of. Perhaps finding out what it was was the actual fear.
I’m not a scaredy-cat, I used to live on a boat I had to crawl round a small ledge in the dark to get to, take a leap of faith across a metre of mud and rubble to reach the back deck of. But thinking about the sudden sense of liminality, of a crossover decision, of some thing or place that might be there or here or gone, makes the hairs on my arms prickle.
I wouldn’t call it an easy cohabitation. Like flatsharing thirty-something millennials, the Other People were at best a distraction and at worst outright annoying. Not in the way that a poltergeist would capriciously rearrange your bath towels and throw the loo roll in the toilet but like the housemate who insists on working on an essay in the living room when you’re trying to watch TV, a persistent presence that makes you feel like you can’t quite relax in private.
Not that it seems to have stopped my parents living there, of course. I went to look after their (new, although he’s old as well now) dog while they went to a wedding a few months ago and the house is as it ever was, despite a major reconstruction half a decade ago.
Standing in the kitchen, I was trying — in the way adult children returning to their parents’ house do — to find my Mr Scruff mug in the cupboard, back to the door of the kitchen while I rummaged at the back of the shelves. I was frustrated by WiFi and trying to work, grouchily seeking caffeine under the pressure of a Grand Prix weekend and not having thought about the Other People for the best part of ten years.
“You haven’t got rid of my fucking mug, have you?” I asked thin air, because it had just padded across the lino and opened a fridge that isn’t there.
