Vanishings by the Mersey
Some typos just wilt away unnoticed, and some are funny, or crude, or both; but some will accidentally jolt your sentence to the most unexpected places. In a moment of enthusiastic nostalgia for where I was in 2009, I accidentally described Liverpool’s architecture as “constantly starling”, and have been transported in my head to a city of grand sandstone edifices which suddenly and without warning scatter into a hundred thousand black-feathered flecks, all streaming and undulating in lightning murmuration through busy streets of cowering people, only to reassemble just as immediately as a muscular carved statue adorning a fountain, or as a red-bricked single-storey almshouse set back from the street behind a garden of roses and buddleia, obviously still nodding in the air after the flurry of birds, a few petals falling to the ground.
Back when I lived in Liverpool, and this may still be the case, there was a man with a name like Terry Bright or Harry Mowbray or something like that, who had a GHOSTS column in one of the local papers. It had been going for something like 15 years, perhaps longer, new stories of historical hauntings every week; and as a writing project, it gave you the sense that this beautiful city must just be limitlessly haunted, ghost activity beyond anything any resident was actually aware of — the way Colin Dexter’s more well-known literary endeavour had every Oxford resident thinking: there’s a lot more murder here than we ever hear about. (That pun, believe it or not, wasn’t intentional, but it arrived like a poorly old cat, so I will allow it to stay.)
My then boyfriend and I got increasingly fascinated by the fragile and scrupulously non-repetitious imaginary of these ghost-story columns, especially the place of them: the fact that they seemed to warp the city of Liverpool — not unrecognizably, not like when you see a TV programme set in the place you’re familiar with, and the locations they had available to them mean that someone who’s living by the Royal Sussex County Hospital nips out for breakfast in Hove, or walks from Hampstead to Streatham in fifteen minutes — but in more subtle ways.
We first noticed a glitch with a column of Bright-or-Mowbray-or-something-like-that’s which told the story that if you stood in a particular place — on Huskisson Street, I think it was — you could, so it was said, sometimes see a frightful apparition in one window of a particular building, somewhere else. I’m going to say Percy Street, but I don’t remember. The Georgian quarter, anyway.
Wherever it was, this haunted vantage happened to be just minutes from where we lived; so one evening, on the way back from the Peter Kavanagh — the best pub ever, and definitely itself haunted: the arms of the wooden pew-like seats carved with the faces of punters in times past, and the walls painted in murals of them, a decorating job done over a hundred years ago by someone who couldn’t pay his tab — we wended home, tipsy, and as we wended we started peering around, so as to look for the correct angles for discovering this phantom. We stood by the left gatepost, or whatever it was, of the particular place on Huskisson Street, and looked where we were told to look.
There was no line of sight from the one place to the other. It was absolutely impossible. Such a view wasn’t possible now, and it couldn’t have been in 1960, no more than it could have been possible in 1860 either. The skeptics among you may think that this just reveals the ghost column as a sustained creative writing project, frequent productions of a man who was perhaps getting lazy, or perhaps forgetting the shape of the city, and after 15 years of regular submissions to the editor no longer bothered to check the geography of his stories.
However. Is it not more likely, that Terry Bright, or Harry Mowbray, or whatever his name was, could actually see through walls. Is it not more likely that he had already been dead for years, and was still somehow sending in his regular columns to the paper, while, to his changed eyes, the walls of sandstone brick, which had grandly defined the streets around him while he lived, were gradually fading, week by week and month by month — until he saw nothing but the ghosts they concealed, thousands of them, and no living people, no cars, no buses, and not a speck of sandstone except the ridge on which Liverpool was built, revealed eighteen thousand years ago by the movement of the very glacier he was, very gradually, returning to.
With thirteen years of hindsight, and feeling increasingly ghostly myself these days, this is the story I prefer.