There’s a poltergeist in the narrator’s house but she doesn’t tell anyone, since its activities are low-key. It also seems a bit like a TV itself: “Something has definitely moved in, some kind of living emptiness, small of stature but energetic and pushy” (we’re in the cathode ray tube era, before the plasma screen took over).
For distraction, the narrator “immerses herself” in the “bluish rays” of the television, and thereby “floats off to foreign worlds, becomes frightened, intrigued, heartbroken – in short, she lives.” Naturally, the poltergeist wants attention, and attacks the sound-machines: it trashes a shelf of records so it falls onto a piano the narrator used to practise on as a girl. She then transforms into a being called “the mother-daughter”. To outwit the poltergeist, she destroys half of her possessions. “The television is the worst. She has to wait for dark and then throw it out the window with all her might, [then] carry the remains to the trash in her little grocery cart”. She’s left with her books and records, and a sewing machine. I like how this story explores the weird presences of audiovisual devices – how they change the emotional gravity of a house. I’ve used the same hi-fi for 24 years but still await my own poltergeist.
Collected in There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill her Neighbour’s Baby, Penguin, 2011
A Personal Anthology 