It is evening in Wales. A pale moon is cussing silently to itself as it encounters yet another cloudy sky. Tonight was meant to be her night: she's full and flawlessly dressed in her best whites. Beneath the dense fog of dark that shrouds our endlessly sleepy village I feel like I am being tortured. It is not the current commission I am doing which is sending me over the edge: if anything working on a project for a gin distillery offers opportunity to wrangle a few bottles my way to dull down the annoyance I am feeling at my wife. My relationship with her is like any married couple bar the small detail that we both have breasts and once every month we want to kill eachother using the sharp edge of our wombs. We agree on some things and disagree on most. She likes food that she can taste without the paprika giving her ulcers in the face and I like my meals so hot that my Thai Curry could have been used on the set of Alien.
Out of all the things we could disagree on, there is one thing that we are at complete loggerheads about: her particular programme interests. No it's not Big Brother, or the dulcit tones of Call The Midwife: "Oh dear this one's got a really big head. Marge, get me husband's shoehorn out me bag would ya?" Nope. Instead, through the previous calm serenity only interrupted by my incessant quiet scribbling, there is a scream, jumbled chatter, bleeping, a confused calamity that stops me dead in my tracks. Gemma's only gone and plonked herself down to watch Most Haunted. Through it all comes that nasal tone. I grit my teeth so hard that a filling gives way.
"Have you noticed, it's gone really cold and dark?" Derek Acorah observes as he steps down a passage twenty feet beneath a sixteenth century castle. "I sense we're in a place that's really old."
"Because it's a castle." My sarcasm plays in my tones so heavily that the cat squirms on my lap and gives me a revolted look. He reasserts himself, wedging the laptop away from me and sprawling a foot out across my work and falling back to sleep with a sigh. I work his leg back beneath him as if I'm cranking the car up to change a tyre, and resume my work.
Gemma shoots me a glance. "Oh please, I'm enjoying this. I know he's probably a fraud but it's still fun to watch."
"Not to listen to." I respond. Derek Acorah's now gone off into one of his 'trances'. He's prancing about in the dark as a long dead lord or lady, miraculously not knocking himself out on a wall in the process, much to my disappointment. My wife's eyes are wide with intrigue. Yvette Fielding sounds like she's just discovered that the Earth is indeed round.
"How can you watch that?" I quiz.
"I like it. And I believe in ghosts." Gemma plugs in some headphones and goes back to watching it religiously.
The peace of my work resumes with no further interruptions for a while.
There is no doubt that Gemma believes in ghosts. She's told me about her brushes with the other side: the first time she saw a ghost as a child and ever since then she feels imbued with a purpose to uncover all ghosts in the world like some macabre pokemon hunter. I too have a fair few experiences but I remain relatively skeptical. I am a realist: I need to see and debunk a 'happening' in various ways before Casper the Friendly Neighbourhood Ghost at the bottom of my garden can be connected to the mysterious moving flowerpot on my mum's windowsill. In my mum's house, there have been a couple of interesting events that have come and gone, and some have been remembered, others drifting away into the ether alongside the paid bills, drying laundry and accomplished shopping lists.
"Wow, they caught it on camera!" Gemma says a little too loudly: her headphones cause her to lose all aspects of volume control. She's yelling across to me like an angry taximan in Picadilly Circus at rush hour. She turns the screen so I can see.
"It's a plastic bag." I observe.
Gemma looks defeated. "Well how do you explain what happened at your mum's house then?" Her tone is moderately defiant. She has worked as a professional ghost hunter and been on numerous trips to suss out the ways of the dead. She isn't prepared to believe that a Sainsburys down the road is responsible for a rogue flyaway passing the shot.
"Yeah, it was odd." I stubbornly agree. I don't want to say it's real but at the same time I can't explain it.
A few Christmases back, Gemma and I were staying at my mum's house. My mum had given up her bed for us to stay the night while she made herself a vast nest out of sofa cushions and duvets and her collection of pillows that's she had since 1966. We're drifting off, when we both hear a footstep at the foot of the bed and a breath. Gemma's upright in a second. "What was that?"
"Wasn't it you?" I ask groggily with one eye reluctantly opening to survey my surroundings.
"No. I was drifting off to sleep."
"Nextdoor?"
"Too close."
"Mhm," I'm back off to sleep dreaming about winning the lottery and buying kittens in the time it takes my wife to decide that the house is haunted and that she can't sleep in the bed without nightclothes on in case the dead person is watching her sleep naked.
"Derek Acorah leaves in a few seasons." Gemma offers me a minor reprieval fact.
"How do you know that?"
"I've watched Most Haunted a lot of times." I raise an eyebrow.
The gin distillery client is happy. I breathe a sigh of relief and put my pen down, accomplished.
Gemma's engrossed again, Derek Acorah's possessed in some abandoned bathtub in Hackney, and the cat digs a claw in to make sure I don't move.
The moon is high now, angry that nobody can see her magnificence and considering claiming sexual harrassment because the stars won't stop winking at her. At this time, I'm wishing I was there, the moon, far away and not listening to Derek Acorah and his forty-a-day voice blasting through the pointing in a French dungeon somewhere. I close my eyes and pray that the battery will soon die out.