The Holy Ryder by Chris Castle

I lived as a ghost even though I was not dead.

The council traced me to my apartment and informed me about my Ma. It turned out she was disturbing people in the apartment she was living and causing problems with her noise. I read the letter twice over, then screwed it up and pitched it in my wastebasket.

The last words my Ma said to me were, “You’re dead to me.” A familiar story, religious Ma, gay son, bridges burned and declarations made. My father was the glue out of the three. After he passed on we fell apart.

I felt like I should see her, ‘dead’ or not. I found out where she was living and managed to get a room in the same block, on the same floor. It wasn’t hard; the rent was cheap and the place was rotten. After a day or two I walked down to her room to see just how bad she had become.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

Standing outside her door, I was shaking like a leaf. Not fear, nothing as small as that, but something bigger – dread. I was scared of seeing her after all those harsh words, aware of all that time and how it had pushed us apart. But something else too; I was scared of seeing her looking fragile, of her looking … human. Even after everything, that was what gripped me; that she was going to be just like everyone else. I turned around and walked back down the hall.

I waited until she was out and then broke into her apartment.

I suppose I should be ashamed of how I acted, but when you’re already in a hole, it doesn’t really matter how deep it is. When I saw the place, my heart sank. I knew she was in trouble. My Ma had never let a speck of dust settle, not once. But her apartment was a wasteland, plates piled high and filth in the sink; it was a goddamn bombsite.

So I cleaned the hell out of the place. I found the detergents, grabbed some cloths and went about it. It took me the better part of the day and by the time I was done the place damn near sparkled. I was feeling so good I didn’t even hear the key turn in the lock until it was too late.

The door opened and I ran into the nearest closet. I jammed myself in, counting the seconds until she would open the door and find me. My breathing was high and my heart was loose.

But she just went right along like nothing had happened.

I saw her in snapshots, my view being obscured by the slats in the doorframe. She didn’t register surprise, didn’t call out. Instead, she sat down and rested her elbows on the newly polished table and sighed. She spoke low, and at first I thought she was talking to herself. Then I realised she was praying. It went on for a good ten or fifteen minutes and then she walked off without a second glance. I heard the soft wheeze of the bed as she lay down, and then silence. I opened the cupboard door, dusted myself down and walked away. As I gripped the door handle I froze. Her voice was low but clear; a voice that was awake and alert and nothing like sleep-drowsy. “Thank you,” she said. That was all.

I turned the knob and went outside to the corridor, wondering who was crazier: her or me? I walked down the hall to my room and thought about what had happened. The image of my Ma – worn, true, but not defeated – was clear in my head. I made my decision.

I didn’t break in every day. I made my way in a few times a week. I lived my life according to when her front door opened and promptly slammed shut. Each time I picked a room and went about it with a fervour I had rarely known; I was a regular housewife; I even went out and bought decent quality gloves and industrial scour pads. I filled the fridge, paid the bills and answered the angry letters that funnelled into the place on a seemingly regular basis; all of it.

And every time she caught me.

I wanted to be caught, sure, but each time I ended up half trapped and almost free. I would contrive to duck into rooms or under the bed. And every time she would wander around, linger a little, pray and then head off to her bed. It was only then that she started to talk to me. It became our ritual.

She never said anything that needed an answer and for that I was grateful. Instead, she would talk about one thing and then another, always in that same soft, alert voice – a voice I had never heard growing up – as if she was reading out a letter. She’d finish with a little sigh replacing the full stop. I listened to her talk about ordinary things; things that were small but seemed vital by the way she spoke.

Rapture. That was the feeling I got when listening to her; talking like a woman with her whole life ahead of her instead of behind her. It was something like rapture running through my skin and all over my heart. She would talk and I would listen and then that sigh would pop up, almost out of nowhere, and break my heart, and it would be all over.

She started calling me “Holy Ryder.” She never explained herself, not once. Instead she called me by that crazy name, just when one of her talks was drawing to a close. She said it as a matter of fact; Ryder with a ‘y.’ I have no idea what it meant; all I knew was that it felt good when she started calling me that. It made me feel like nothing else on earth.

Then it ended. At first I hardly noticed. One moment she was talking and then she stopped, as if drawing breath. The silence went on and on. Even then, it didn’t quite get to me. It took a few more seconds and then I called out, “Ma”. I clamped my hand over my mouth as soon as I did.

I knew what had happened but I still walked slowly into that room. No drawn out confession, no grand last words. My Ma was on the bed and she was still. I reached down and took her hand; it was still warm, the way I remembered it when I was a kid. I knew there were things I had to do next, call an ambulance and arrange all the things that followed, but for that moment I just held her hand tight.

That’s it. If she became a ghost she did not come back and haunt me. I still hear her voice sometimes, when I’m sleeping mostly; I wake up and there’s such a familiar feeling it can only be her. Sometimes her words come into my head; words that I’ll only ever associate with her voice now. There’s power in that, I think, to make a word your own. It’s a gift that came late, but it’s something I’ll always treasure.

“The Holy Ryder.”