The Darkness

Ghosts, the gothic, and the wrongs they right

The light is hot and bright and everywhere is too warm, and it makes me think of cold nights and heavy covers, of owls outside the window and a blanket on the bed, of candles and of ghost stories, the delicious shiver of fear felt in a warm safe place. Today, the heat here has broken. Today, the sky is grey and the overgrown garden is waving in the wind.

Last night it rained. I went out, onto the streets after it was over and the sky was pink in streaks. I crossed the street to avoid a weaving drunk man, watched him drop rubbish all along the street and I felt despairing, felt angry, felt tired of it all. I thought of the football the man was probably stumbling home to watch, thought of the depressing, terrifying spike in domestic violence that’s reported with every huge sports tournament. I had spent the evening watching She’s Gotta Have It, the original Spike Lee film, not the box set. I can’t stop thinking about the unexpected rape scene - more, I can’t stop thinking about the way it was glossed over, justified. I read that Spike Lee has since apologised for including this scene. This does not make me feel better.

This darkness - these hundred tiny cuts of hurt - this is not the darkness I long for on stifling heatwave days. The darkness I crave has a cosiness to it, a sense of the past echoing, of wrongs being righted. This darkness takes the shape of a ghost story.

C.J. Cooke has an excellent piece on the Gothic and the women who won’t stay dead - and how the genre gives these women the chance to be heard, to strike out against the wrong that’s been done to them in the past. A ghost story, a gothic story - these are a reckoning. I had not articulated to myself, not consciously, that this is what draws me to this genre. Hauntings must have a reason. The reason is an injustice, a broken system, odds stacked against you, small wounds accumulating one after the other, time after time, a longing - no, a need. I have been spending all my time with my own ghost story, which is finally edited and done, and this story of mine is no different. It is filled with darkness but the driving motor of it is a need to stand against injustice, to bear witness to what’s gone wrong in our society and think about how we change that. Because however we go about it, change it we must. There is hope in that.

The darkness I found last night, that left me tired and wounded for a while, was not the darkness I was looking for. It was not cozy. This morning, I read a beautiful, beautiful piece by rebecca hooper, about being a magpie and collecting the details of life around you - of collecting the dark along with the light and sifting through them when you’ve carried them home. This is what it means, I think, to be a writer and to be engaged in the world. We sit with the darkness as well as the light. In reading it, I felt less alone. There are others, out there, carrying the same weights, telling their own stories that steadily leach out the poison, that spin webs of hope and joy despite - perhaps because - of the dark.

So that darkness I found last night was not the kind I have been craving - but it was, perhaps, the type that keeps me writing stories that seek to fight the darkness. Stories where revenge is had and scores are settled and where hauntings - however they manifest - are echoes of the past that will not be left to lie.

Last week, on the longest day of the year, I swam in the light at half ten at night. The sky was purple one way and peach the other. The water rippled with it, pink and yellow and orange shifting with every incoming wave. I dipped my face, felt the sparkle of light departing. Back on the shore, my friend changed and a man with a metal detector insisted on following his straight path right along beside the small wall where she was changing. From the water, I shouted, ‘Really?’ He did not hear. There was a whole beach. He could have simply taken a few steps away. I doubt, if it was a man changing, he would have so casually asserted his dominance. It is small, easily brushed off, so common we almost don’t notice it. In fact, we laugh at it, roll our eyes and laugh. But it is these thousands of tiny cuts, being disregarded, squashed, ignored, abused, that build up into a world where millions of women will be afraid, simply at the outcome of a football game.

Still, my friend and I swim together in the sea, idiot metal detectorist forgotten. The tidal island of St Michael’s Mount is outlined against the purpling sky. The other way, where the sun has so recently fallen, the clouds are dotted like puffs of flame, glowing embers, shifting with every moment. The water is alight and we are surrounded by it, striking through it, bubbles washing against our skin, bodies strong and alive despite the cold. This is what we think of as we drive home, racing the sunset across the moors, warmed by the world and the rush of the water. Not the idiocy of a man with a metal detector, not actions that tell us we are less, but the glow of finding the brightness anyway. The strength of withstanding the cold, the glitter of sun on water surrounding us, that great big flaring sky.

Sign Women’s Aid’s petition to end domestic violence here, or donate to them if you can.