Young writers often receive well-intentioned advice from their teachers and mentors: Don’t begin a story with your character waking up from a dream. Don’t begin a story with a paragraph about the weather. One paragraph into Sarah Hall’s short story “Later, His Ghost”, and I was pleasantly aware that she was breaking all the rules:
The wind was coming from the east when he woke. The windows on that side of the house boxed and clattered in their frames, even behind the stormboards, and the corrugated-iron sheet over the coop in the garden was hawing and creaking, as though it might rip out of its rivets and fly off. The bellowing had come into his sleep, like a man’s voice. December 23rd.
The date, two days before Christmas, seemed significant, but I was curious how she was going to get beyond the weather and into the real story. The second paragraph delivers the kicker – for the man in question, the one fumbling to wake up, it’s life or death. These two lines: “People who stayed inside got in trouble. No one helped them,” introduce us to the fact that this is an apocalyptic story, and the wind is actually one of the primary characters, an antagonist of extreme proportions. The verbs and adjectives begin to pile up in great onomatopoeic proportions: clattered, scuttled, ooming, oceanic, topple, splintering etc. We begin to feel the force of the wind that is relentless, understand the contours of his uncertain world.
Hall is dropping crumbs: Someone else named Craig, offstage – dead or alive? A pregnant woman and English teacher named Helene who is sharing his house, but inhabits another room, one which it appears she doesn’t leave – is the child his? A line here, a paragraph there of some ancient text, a play that the main character is trying to recover for Helene, for Christmas.
I’ll admit that Helene was the real hook for me. Although I don’t typically like having so many questions floating around to start a story, with so little solid footing to be found underneath, Helene appeared like an unusual pearl; a deep mystery to be solved. Like the main character (he remains unnamed) she had my focus and attention – if not her and the baby’s survival (it seemed unlikely), then her happiness – on Christmas; as reader I was complicit in this goal.
The delicious details – he’d been saving a tin of smoked pheasant pate, a jar of red currant and boiled potatoes, a tin of actual Christmas pudding…even a miniature whiskey, with which to set fire to the pudding. I’m not British, but the details of such a feast was not lost on me after a paragraph that begins by describing the ulcers starring his tongue, and the small, strict feedings he had to allow himself so he would not become sick.
Hall has created a voluptuous scene of the wished for holiday scene, and the recovered play is the one missing piece. The weather is not good, but he must go out, for he has only two days to go. His “storm-diver” outfit is a cross between a stunt pilot and a clown. The description of each careful piece of adapted clothing lets us understand how long he has been at this – perhaps one of the last living in this terrible windswept part of the country. His mantra is the Buffalo – an image he recovered and keeps in a drawer – a relic of something that existed long ago, a mythical beast. Hall returns to this and it becomes an odd, but useful symbol that grounds us in the character; his eccentricities are endearing. He is humble about his fate as one of the survivors.
The tension of his journey outside is terrifically taught with the onslaught of objects – rubble heaps, avalanche of walls, clods of earth tumbling past him… Stripped down it is a simple story of survival, man vs. wind, but in the midst of this she has given him an impossible desire it seems: recover the play from a fancy home, an untouched library, perhaps filled with webs, corpses, or?
Fifteen pages in, hall finally provides us with the facts of something we’d been holding as a half-truth all along – that this character had certainly seen a number of deaths and very awful ones at that. “Craig’s broken skull the soft, foul matter inside. Who you became afterwards was who you told yourself you were.” The delicate egg is cracked open and spilling on the page – you still aren’t sure what Craig meant to this guy, but it’s clear that he witnessed Craig’s life end suddenly and tragically.
It is this information that propels the journey of the last 4 ½ pages of the story. His sheer determination to go on, despite fading light, increasing danger, the question of whether he will be able to make the return trip. The fact that he is going to find what he needs in this house is stated right at the start of the second to last paragraph. Joy, terror. The play survives next to the corpse of a dead man who likely killed himself before the wind could get him.
The man says that he will come back after Christmas to recover more of the treasures and books in the house for the English teacher. The final vision is of his outfit in the house’s cracked hall mirror. “His coat hood was drawn tightly around his head; he was earless and bug-eyed, and one eye lens was shattered. The metallic tape around his neck shone like scales. He looked like some kind of demon. Maybe that’s what he was, maybe that’s what he had become. But he felt human…his ankle hurt, which was good. He could use a can opener. And he liked Christmas.”
This simple scaling of things, abilities, desires, pain. When he turned to the mirror I felt I was going to be very upset if it was revealed that he was dead, so I was reassured by this assessment and his confidence that he owed it to this other human to get home for Christmas. A hugely sentimental ending that is not sentimental at all because it ends before we know that he gets back – snow has started falling in the wind, so we know it will that much harder for him on the return journey, but we are rooting for him, for Helene and the slim details we are given about her life.
Hall taps into some of our most basic joys and fears with “Later, His Ghost”. The title itself projects the only certainty in the uncertain, wind-filled world she has created. By sticking to the elements and showing us just the very tip of the iceberg (no backstory on how this weather arrived) we are gripping to the only moment he/we have – sentence by sentence.
Madame Zero is an excellent collection of nine tightly woven stories by UK-based author Sarah Hall. I became a big fan of Hall’s ability to drop the extreme, the absurd, the no, it couldn’t be, into the everyday. She didn’t shy away from sensual details and zany, eccentric behavior. These details gave her characters dimension, bold intention, and strong desire. At the end many of these stories I had to stop and pause to collect myself back into the world, to look up and see my own hands in front of me.