The ghosts where I live

Margot and the plastic bag man

Audio by Jules Keohane

Across the road from the house I lived in during my (previous) married years, a Belgian woman stayed alone in the three-bedroomed house she’d inherited from her parents. Except for her early years in the Belgian Congo, she’d lived there most of her life. She spoke English with a French accent. She often leaned on her forearms on her front gate. She waved when she saw us and chatted to all passersby.

On some Fridays, a little white van would stop there and deliver bottles of beer in a crate. She had several cats and, in her backyard, a vicious little tortoise that defied the slow-poke image of tortoises everywhere to hare (yes, hare) across the grass to nip at naked ankles and toes.

She had no car. She rented her garage out to people wanting to store things.

One of the people who wanted to store things there was a man I often saw walk down to the shops from the old-age home higher up in our suburb.

He always wore trousers, a white button-down shirt and a jacket or a cardigan over that. The jacket or cardigan was stuffed with plastic bags. You knew this, because he would pause in his walking to pat himself down, pull bags out of pockets like a practising illusionist, turn back, walk a few paces as though he’d forgotten something, stuff the bags back into his pockets and then turn again in the direction he’d been heading, apparently appeased by something. His jackets and cardigans bulged wherever there was a pocket.

On a day in March 2011, I sat down to work at my desk and saw through the window that the man who distractedly pulled plastic bags from his pockets was also the person who had rented Margot’s garage.

I had not seen the arrival of his goods; didn’t know what was behind the dark and dirty garage windows. But on this day, the doors were ajar and I could see inside.

Large woven polypropylene storage bags and plastic grocery bags, all seeming to contain books and papers, had been thrown into garage in a heap. At times during a mysterious three-day mission, the owner of the stuff took a nap on his bags. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

The man stood mostly on the threshold sifting through his bags, taking something out, putting it back, or tossing it over the swollen stomach of his storage pile into the dark depths of the garage.

He came every day for three days. He didn’t bring water or food. His mission seemed vague and inconclusive. He never left with piles of finds.

At some point when it was dark, long after his headlamp had failed him and my children were in bed, he would push everything back inside, bolt the lock, and leave.

Impossible task PICTURE: Karin Schimke

The long mission never repeated itself, that I saw.

Now and again, he would arrive at Margot’s driveway gate with a supermarket trolley designed to hold two baskets. Inside them would be shopping bags knotted at the tops. They were squared off like bags containing books. He would open the gates, open the garage doors, toss the books inside, lock up, leave.

Pockets overflowing. PICTURE: Karin Schimke

I moved away from the house that overlooked the garage six months later. I avoid the street entirely because leaving there was a wrench.

I don’t know whether Margot is still alive.

I never see the man anymore, walking with purpose down the road towards the shops, then patting himself down, turning back, then back again, while pulling reams of plastic from his pockets.

‘If you live in a place long enough it becomes peopled with ghosts,’ writes Ivan Valdislavić in The Near North.

One remembers some ghosts fondly.

With love,

K.