The Ghost That Closed Down The Town: A Literary overview

Doomed lovers, goëlery and headless horsemen...

Gareth Pike goes behind the cover of Arthur Goldstuck’s “The Ghost That Closed Down the Town”
with a torch and some trepidation.

May 10, 1986
David De Wet was driving towards Bloemfontein late on a stormy night. Suddenly, he was startled to see a bedraggled, rain-soaked teenage girl loom up in his headlights. Naturally he screeched to a halt and offered her a lift. They carried on towards town. The girl did not speak much and had obviously been out in the elements for a while, judging by her shivering, paleness and rain-soaked clothes. He asked her where she wanted to be dropped off, but as they neared the quiet suburban address she had given him, a strange thing happened. She was no longer in the passenger seat of his Corolla; instead there was only a puddle of water on the seat. Arriving at the house in question, a shaken De Wet described the girl to a weary-looking man at the door, who told him that the girl was in fact his daughter - who had died in a road accident two years previously. Every night since then, she had been trying to get a lift back home…
Or something like that, anyway. That was just poetic license,
although it does mimic the story of the Uniondale ghost, a tale retold
many times over in various places by different people.
The names of the driver or the town might change –
but it’s the same enduring urban legend of South Africa’s ghostly hitcher.


But if you even felt the slightest shiver just now, it demonstrates our collective penchant for believing, or almost believing, the ghostly stories that travel our country by night.

What’s more, the above example demonstrates an archetype – the ghostly hitcher – which has popped up in various countries in more than 100 forms. What Arthur Goldstuck, journalist, IT expert and urban legend connoisseur, has discovered in his research, is that people love to tell each other ghost stories, often different versions of the same basic story – lost children; the escaped murderer on the loose; the headless horseman; the man with the hook for a hand... Whether any of these spine-tingling tales have an original grain of truth is of course a subjective matter. But if the stories themselves were ghosts, South Africa would be overrun.

Goldstuck’s latest foray into urban legend, The Ghost that Closed Down the Town, takes the reader on a tour of some of South Africa’s most haunted locations, where things have been going bump in the night (or even the day) for years.
There’s the Nottingham Road Hotel, where fussy ghost Charlotte puts the scares into any unruly resident of room number ten (she likes it to be just so). There are the battlefields of the Anglo-Boer war, practically awash with long-dead soldiers thundering about. In various school toilets lurks a repulsive little Tokoloshe called Pinky-Pinky, which had Gauteng schools in a frenzy in the early 90’s. In fact, walk into any well-established school, heritage sight or hotel, and you’re likely to bump into a ghost – or rather, a ghost story. Goldstuck’s decades of research on the topic involved in-depth discussions with innumerable witnesses of local ghostly phenomena, but sadly for ghostphiles, there appears to be little verification for most of the stories we love to tell.

As the author puts it, “I do believe that most - but not all - claims of the supernatural can be attributed to two sources: the mind, or the milieu. The milieu makes the expectation possible, and the expectation makes the belief possible!” In other words, we are inclined to believe what we are ready to believe.
There’s also a correlation between the state of society and the prevalence of ghosts; a country wracked by violence or war is more likely to have more ghosts than say, New Zealand. South Africa has its share of violence, notes Goldstuck, and “locations of violent death, including battle fields, murder scenes or notorious accident black spots, are more likely to be associated with ghost sightings than those that have no history of violent death.” South Africa, with its turbulent history and mix of cultural superstitions, is ripe for the haunting. Goldstuck stresses, though, that he is not a ‘ghost buster’:

“ I go looking for ghost stories, as well as the stories behind the stories. I wouldn't object to the term myth buster, but even that is giving me too much credit. At best, I get rid of ghosts by explaining them away. Ghosts hate that.”
The Ghost That Closed Down the Town will expose the roots of many of the stories you’ve heard – and a few you didn’t even know were lurking nearby. You might even be inspired to set off and explore our most haunted areas, including battlefields. “These are the most haunted areas in general”, says Goldstuck, “particularly the farm region and battlefields of the Western Cape, Mpumalanga and the KZN Midlands. Cape Town the most haunted city in SA. All schools, and especially school hostels, are haunted - at least by vivid imaginations.”

Of course, even healthy skepticism can sometimes be shaken, and some of the stories Goldstuck revisits are perhaps less easily discarded than others.

In Kwandebele in the early 90’s, a young girl called Bathabile was beset by a malevolent force which hurled stones over her shoulders at anyone nearby. As Major Aaron Mahlangu told People magazine at the time, “There were several police officers…all of us witnessed the same phenomenon. What I saw convinced me that this is a genuine supernatural occurrence.”
In 1986, musician Paul Ndlovu was killed in a car crash. Yet for months afterwards, people kept claiming they had seen him in various parts of the (then) Transvaal. The rumour went around: Paul had been kidnapped by an inyanga and was now a zombie; the walking dead. Truth or fiction? Ask the journalists who were allegedly taken to a kraal to see Paul in person...
Near Lydenburg, Martiens Joubert alleges he was attacked and bitten by a man who had been living, invisibly, in the roof of a farmhouse and using goëlery (witchcraft) against the farmer. After being bitten, Martiens said, “my arm was pitch black.” He related this and many other stories to the author “matter of factly, as if it were a perfectly normal occurrence.”
And so much more lurks in our nocturnal landscape. You need only talk to the person next to you, and they or someone they know will have a story to tell. Here’s one from an old friend of mine, who swears it wasn’t a dream: “Some of us rented a dilapidated cottage down the South Coast a few years ago; the elderly owner had recently passed away. In the early hours, maybe 2am or so, I suddenly awoke to see an old lady with a furious expression, looming over me and sucking in her breath like a vacuum cleaner on high, as if she was trying to suck out my soul, or my life force.

I felt very cold and panicky because this was clearly a malevolent presence. Then I managed to struggle into a sitting position and she disappeared.” After all his research, Goldstuck writes, his conclusion is that “there is enough to convince me that ghosts can exist. Yet, there is too little to persuade me that they do exist.”
What you believe probably depends on what prevails next time you’re woken by mysterious sounds in the middle of the night; your faith that the unknown always has a logical explanation – or the tingling hairs on the back of your neck.

The Ghost That Closed Down The Town
by Arthur Goldstuck

Published by Penguin Books.

'STRANGE NERVOUS LAUGHTER': A literary overview

Strange Nervous Laughter is both the definitive Durban love story
and Bridget McNulty’s fond farewell to her hometown.


It’s funny when someone you know becomes a published author. I remember talking to Bridget McNulty at a messy picnic one Saturday afternoon, back when we were both bouncing around Durban’s eclectic, leafy Berea and hanging out with mutual friends. She already had a title for her book- Strange Nervous Laughter – and two publishers were vying for it. Bridget was breathless and fizzing with excitement as she exclaimed, “Once this gets published, I’ll be the luckiest girl in the world!”
A year or two later and we’ve both ended up living in Cape Town. Bridget’s book shines down from the shelves all over town and things, for this ebullient young talent, are falling into place. But then, people who say, “For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be an author” and possess the same “dream it; do it” passion as Bridget unashamedly does, deserve their nook at Exclusive Books. It’s early summer when I finally manage to reconnect with her in Gardens for a coffeethon - several book launches, readings and radio interviews after the book’s release. She’s tired after the recent ‘whirlwind’ but also as infectiously lively as ever; vivid green eyes and all.

Strange Nervous Laughter literally sparkles on the table between us. It is, to nutshell, the story of three passionate, interweaving relationships, set during ‘the hottest summer Durban’s ever experienced’. Bridget grew up in Durban and has the life of the city ‘permeated into my skin’. The story unravels authentically in the locales all long-time Durbanites know, from the markets of Grey Street to the seedy but elegant Golden Mile.

Yet it’s the characters in the settings that bring this book alive. They are fully fleshed out and feel like people you could easily know. Before sitting down to write, Bridget spent years simply taking notes and observing people - “I stole blatantly from everyone I know, comments and words and little personal quirks” (It’s true – she carries a notebook everywhere and is likely to stare at your fridge magnets when over for tea).

The result: six fully formed characters that reflect contradictory parts of Bridget herself. “No favourites!” she swears. SNL has a refreshing openness. It wears its emotions on the cover and feels all the more real for it. Anyone adrift in the heady early days of a new relationship – or trying to stitch together the abrasive tatters of a doomed one – will find a friend to relate to in Strange Nervous Laughter – and there are six to meet.

Beth is a cashier who levitates when she’s happy (just a foot or so); Mdu can communicate with whales, and rescues the lost, amnesiac Aisha from the sea. There’s, Pravesh, a hearse driver who, disturbingly, knows when someone’s going to die, and always passes Beth at the supermarket. Meanwhile Meryl, a conflicted lesbian, is getting to know a waste handler called Harry, who’s trying to set the world record for most green food consumed. Eclectic, quirky characters to say the least; all with some ‘magical realism’ tendencies. It’s like a gentler Heroes.

Still, they are very much rooted in real life. The book kicks off with a jarring event straight out of tonight’s e News, that sets in place a kind of destiny, which will ultimately draw all six characters in, with some very surprising outcomes. It’s a book about love – but real love: often as unpredictable as a schizophrenic racehorse. Happy endings are not a given – but then this isn’t Mills & Boon. “I wanted to write in a distinctive voice” says Bridget, “and I wanted to write accessible fiction with a true, deeper meaning. I think it’s criminal that people who ‘don’t like reading’ only ever read trashy romance books.”

For Bridget, “any relationship makes perfect sense in retrospect; but we’re not living in retrospect. We’re all trying to muddle our way through every day, without hurting too many people. And we screw it up! All the time. But it’s not malicious and that’s what I tried to convey with the relationships in SNL.”

By late afternoon, we’re both a little wired. Partly the coffee and partly the change we’re both still in the throes of, just a few months into Cape Town life. This brings me around to the obvious question of when Bridget’s going to write her “Cape Town book”.

“Not until next year!” she chuckles. “I need to get under the skin of this city, the way I have with Durban. Right now it’s too new and fresh for me. I don’t want to write about a city the way people see it. I want to find the real heart of it, and the heart is often messy and unpredictable and seedy. As with human hearts, that’s going to take time to discover.” We say cheers on the sidewalk and I wonder where this young writer, who has already achieved much, will be in another year’s time. Bridget hops onto her scooter and weaves her way up Kloof Street,to blend into her new home; observing, learning and loving as she goes.

‘Strange Nervous Laughter’ is out now from South Africa's Oshun Books (a division of Struik).

Find out about upcoming tea parties with Bridget McNulty in Durban, Joburg and Cape Town on www.bridgetmcnulty.com
and follow her writing on www.blog.bridgetmcnulty.com or www.thoughtleader.co.za/bridgetmcnulty.

2107 AD?

2107 AD?, originally uploaded by gareth6pike.

IMAGINARICA

Travels through an America of the mind

As published on www.gocray.com a long time ago.


The other night I got to thinking, as I gazed out of my window
into the dusk, over the neon lights of Durban, across the dark Bluff
with its mysterious military base, and up to the sky where another
plane lifted away with a load of London-bound visa applicants.

I got to thinking, here I am living in Africa, but have I ever travelled the Great Rift Valley,
or boated down the Congo, or seen the storms over Virunga?
For my shame, I’ve never even been to the Bluff, two miles away from home.
Instead I have spent much of my life watching Hollywood films,
reading American novels, and listening to ‘The Boss’ tell tales of blue-collar disappointments,
or the Jayhawks evoke golden dusk over telephone wires and corn.
Though I love Africa, most of my memory is replete not with crickets, lions,
black taxis and Kwaito, but with the gangsters, skyscrapers and Thanksgiving holidays
of the distant USA.

In my mind, if not in reality, I know the desert of Nevada and the streets of New York
more intimately than my own nearby Umhlanga, or the informal settlement over the hill from Durban city.

It seems pointless to feel an affinity for places one has never, ever set foot in,
while the sights and sounds of your immediate surroundings seem as
ephemeral as the television that built your (fake) memories.


How is it that I can almost smell the mist over Golden Gate bridge, can almost feel the blistering sun of Death Valley? How can I rememberAmerican places and smells and sights, if I have never been there?I have become a willing victim of American cultural imperialism…and it’s too late to go back. Thanks primarily to Hollywood, I have cobbled together a vast geography in my brain, that all in all, almost adds up to the actual experience of a week in Georgia. If I close my eyes, I can travel for miles, from coast to coast.

My mental America has very little to do with the contrary tableaux that is the actual reality of the place today. I know that the USA is in a flux of change right now, with George Bush at one end, Michael Moore at the other, and a confused, questioning population in between. My mental America is the ideal - as all daydreams must be.

To delve briefly into my box (a U.S. Air Force provisions drop crate, circa 1941) of Imaginarica: *


1981, Cape Town. A little boy is hunched in front of a snowy black and white TV, thrilling to the thunder of hooves, as the Lone Ranger flies across a landscape of dust and cacti, bandits hot on his dust trail.Every week I would ride alongside the masked hero who waved his popping silver gun around with total nonchalance - and never seemed to hit anything.

Back then there was ‘Gunsmoke’. ‘The Big Valley’. ‘Silverado’. I imagined all of these exhilarating adventures unfolding across the plains of a giant, dusty America, maybe in a time before they had greened the land. I actually thought that all of America was a desert. Having seen mainly Westerns, how was I to know otherwise?

'Gunsmoke' seemed to be set in about the middle ages, certainly some long-distant mythical age, rather than the 1800's, as my mother said it was. Or perhaps the west even existed in an age after some cataclysm in the far-flung future (I had read ‘Warday‘ and watched too many episodes of ‘The Ark’...).

I became confused sometimes, as I pored over Louis Lamoure novels I was still too young to read. Did Westerns take place in America or in Mexico - and then what was ‘New’ Mexico? What had happened to the old one? Why were there 'Indians', or redskins, as the cowboys called them, in the desert, but also in the forests and mountains of 'Hiawatha'? Were they the same people as the Indians in India?
Were the mayors of towns still called sheriffs nowadays? I had too many questions.
I couldn't decide whether TV programs were telling me the truth or not.

As I've grown up, some scattered historical foundations have fleshed out my western imagery.



I know that there are large deserts in the regions of Arizona and parts of California (as I saw in ‘Chinatown’ and ‘The Mexican’), deserts which extend right down across the border into Mexico. I know that New Mexico is a U.S. state, and that Mexico is independent of the USA.
I know all about the Alamo. The old west had existed all right, though perhaps not quite as I had imagined it.My mental picture of the USA has been growing all my life, but unlike an atlas, it is filled with inaccuracies, thanks to fanciful scriptwriting and Batman comics.



Then there's New York...modern Rome.

Yellow taxicabs. Steam rising from vents in the road. Rollerbladers
with headphones in Central Park. Loonies proclaiming the end of the world.
Newspaper stands. Buildings that scrape the sky. Ice rinks. City
Hall. Madison and 5th. Macy's.
Italians and Greeks, Chinese and Hispanics. Bridges, lots of bridges.
These are the properties I now know to be true of New York.
But the New York of my imagination is another story altogether.
I vividly remember Godzilla plummeting into a dark river (the Hudson?)
like a falling mountain. I remember climbing into a cab at the height of 1984's ghost infestation (if America had a queen, my vote would be for Sigourney Weaver) and having a zombie leer vacuously at me from the driver’s seat.
I saw crack troops jog ominously over the river into midtown during
‘The Siege’ that nearly toppled the status quo.
I even know names like ‘Midtown' or 'Staten Island' -
whereas the average New Yorker probably wouldn't know South Africa's Wilderness, Hogsback or Riviersonderend.
But then, South African movies don't screen around the world.

The New York of my mind is as unreal as it is inspirational, as free of
scars and corruption as a child’s first view of the sea.
It is as inaccurate as some Americans’ view of the Namib desert, yet full of names and places and icons that all add up to a gigantic cultural stew. I remember the gremlins, and a giant gorilla in monotone, and Spider-man swinging through rain-slicked concrete canyons.
For me, though, the memory of this great city that most stands out would have to be a simple one:

Autumn leaves falling like rain onto an avenue in Central Park where Tom and Penelope laughed under a vanilla sky, themselves living in a dream that felt all too real.

Talking of dreams, I had this one last week... I was walking down a two-lane blacktop in a gentle drizzle, through a haven of tranquillity. Some tiny town in...New England? White picket fences, huge front yards, rusty Ford trucks in the 'yard', and little mailboxes with red flags on them. The road was ‘Sorority Avenue.' What a place. So alien to an African. I vowed, when I awoke, that one day I would simply have to find and walk down that road, in the rain.
Just be there, for a moment. If, that is, it actually existed. It had felt real to me.

Another time, I dreamed I was standing outside a roadside diner
somewhere in Ohio. Just standing there, thinking ‘wow, I’m actually in America.
I’m really here. I made it.’
I was looking at faded poster advertising a Johnny Cash gig in Cincinnati. When I awoke, it was with a sense of loss. I had been there, dammit. Funnily enough, I noticed later that my bed was smattered with soil, the kind you might find on the fringes of a small town in Ohio. Or maybe I had walked it into the house before bedtime.

These travel dreams are so vivid, I can't tell you. I think if I ever did land in America, I'd experience profound disorientation; the feeling that I am dreaming and need to wake up.
It's as if I never actually need to fly there, since, in my head, I have already seen about twenty states. In one long dream I had, I spent two weeks in a condo just off Venice Beach, crashing house parties with Jim Morrisson.

I'm fascinated by America's wide-open spaces, as well as the cities.
There must be vast tracts of unexplored wilderness in that huge puzzle
map of the States that hangs lopsidedly off my mental wall. I’d like to see the Grand Canyon. Montana.
The Great Lakes. Alaskan wolves in the wild.

I often think, what does it really look like as you drive North out of Seattle?
What is the quality of the air in Chicago? In Maine, how does it feel to sit with your legs dangling off one of
those flaking white wooden jetties, gazing out over the fishing boats that have carried fathers and sons? If you were in Maine, could you locate a small twilight town called Derry, where the mayor (sheriff, what have you) sported a badge saying S.King?
Of course I'm being flippant; I'm making believe.

The America my mind wanders through is inaccurate in so many ways.
I have probably put all the state lines in the wrong place. My New York
is way too big and I just know that I forgot to include a whole bunch of one-horse towns in Texas.

What astounds me about Imaginarica is that I must share it with millions of Laps, Nepalese, Swedes and Kenyans. There is no other country in the world that has been so over-exposed in popular media. Hollywood truly is the dream works.
I imagine that, in my sleep, all the people I come across in my America are others from far away, who have watched so many American movies that, like me, they now have a huge country growing in their heads, one they can visit almost at will.

Think how different everything would be if "Gone with the wind" had been set during the Russian Revolution. Or if Superman was an Australian superhero, famed since 1939 as the guardian of …Perth?? What I mean is, imagine the world, if America was simply a small country south of Canada, Russia ruled the globe culturally, and Hollywood was instead Moscowland.

Imagine if Brad Pitt was a Bollywood screen idol, or everyone on earth watched Chinese movies. Think how different the world might be if so many of us foreigners were not, of our own free will, Americanised?
In the last decades of the 20th Century and the early years of this one, America has colonized the world from within its own borders.
The knowledge is quite jarring, because unless American cultural dominance is eternal (and what is?) then one day, in a few centuries, we might well be speaking Mandarin Chinese - should China be a world power at that time. Would Thai Bo be the new baseball? Will millions glorify Shanghai streets and Beijing girls and live the Asian dream?

Right now, at this moment in history, America is the fantasy to millions, and myself merely a dreamer, deluded into travelling without moving the bizzaro world of Imaginarica. I know the real America is up there somewhere on the top of the globe, a gigantic, all-powerful, imperfect land in motion. But sometimes I think about flying up, over the Atlantic, west from Ireland, cruising for miles and finding...nothing. Perhaps discovering that America was after all nothing but a mental construct, and that the Atlantic simply met the Pacific in a swirl of deep-ocean currents.

I continue to mull over mythical America just as perhaps, thousands of years ago, a beet farmer in the North of Europe might have pondered on mighty far-off Rome.

Maybe I’ll never actually go to the States, you know. After all, the actual reality of it might be too much to assimilate. If America wasn't like the land I had visited in thousands of movies, I might have some sort of fit, or cognitive dissonance, and be found one day by the LAPD, drooling and wandering the back lot of a K-mart in Philly.

No, it's safer to keep cruising alongside ‘Frisco bay in a blue Pontiac, a young Brooke Shields at my side, with The Boss singing about glory days. Yeah, I know. That's just make believe.

But you know, isn't that what the American dream is all about? To many like me, around the planet, America is a dream.


* Imaginarica:
Seemingly authentic memories of geographic locations, which one has not visited in reality.

Just good friends

Because my wife and I are such ardent animal lovers and because we rent a small one bedroom apartment in a trendy block, where you can’t fit so much as a Basil plant on the balcony – let alone a pet – we often venture out to meet and interact with animals wherever we can. In our time we’ve tried to tame seagulls, starlings, hornbills and doves. During the recent Hermanus Whale Festival, I briefly befriended a dassie mother and child on the rocks. We’ve visited The World of Birds an abnormally high number of times and (here comes our dirty little secret)
we have a habit of coveting other people’s pets.

We’re not proud of it, but there it is. On three occasions, we’ve befriended neighbours’ cats to such an extent that they actually ended up spending more time with us than at home. Of course, the velvet cushion, cat nip and little tuna biscuit treats probably didn’t hurt. Various owners would appear at our door during the 8 ‘o clock news and ask pointedly if we might have seen their cat.

One set of neighbours even moved away suddenly, forlorn tabby cat meowing farewell to us from a cardboard box. I’m not saying we were the cause of their move, but they certainly didn’t leave a forwarding address. I bet the cat would have, if it could.

Recently though, we’ve stumbled on the most golden opportunity yet, for those suffering from pet envy. While following an irritated dove down Cape Town’s Hof Street, we ended up in De Waal Park; a verdant, well-kept giant green square where dogs of all breeds bring their owners on a Sunday afternoon, to frolic, mingle and wee on the numerous handy trees (the dogs that is – not the owners). Here, loosely congregating around a large central fountain, were all the dogs we had made wish lists about owning. Here was a staffie, who threw himself at us with characteristic abandon and bit my wrist in a friendly manner. There, a small black fur ball that looked like a shrunken, dyed Ewok. Best of all were the two golden retrievers who came and leaned against our legs in a nonchalant fashion. Big, ambling, shaggy, licky dogs. This was happiness.

Still, we needed to be careful. I could already see one or two of the dogs’ owners eyeing us every now and then – us with no apparent dog in tow. We retreated behind a fir tree and decided to move to a different part of the park – you couldn’t linger too long in one place, for fear of arousing suspicion. During our meander,
we came across a little Alsatian cross Jack Russell – some 50 metres from his likely owners. I made dog-calling noises (how do you write those?) and opened my arms in a friendly manner. He stared. He goggled. He barked. Then he ran as fast as his little legs could carry him, clearly wise to our interloper status.

Next time, we agreed, we’d bring a fake wooden dog, on wheels, and pull it around with us on a leash. And a tennis ball; we needed a ball. All dog people had balls. Soon, we’d be ‘in the mix’, chatting with other dog people, and getting to know their pets every Sunday afternoon. I got the idea from the wooden horse of Troy…but then, we too were deceivers of a sort, admittedly. Not that we’d ever, ever steal anyone’s best friend, of course – we were harmless, really. Hearts in the right places etc. etc. We only wanted other peoples’ best friends to be our best friends too. Unfortunately, owners who were amenable to ‘sharing’ their pets were rather slim on the ground. We decided to make good our exit, before the alert went out that there were two non-dog owners in De Waal Park, lurking on the fringes of the obedience training session.

On the way home we stopped only to speak to a dusty black and white tomcat on a street corner in Gardens, while his owners peered at us through the front windows. Happily, when we got home to our designery block, inhabited largely by the latte set, we found two more cats – resident cats, even. Someone must have just moved in with them. Unfortunately, they appeared to be Siamese – a rather wiggy breed,
in my experience. I approached one on my haunches, as it sat munching quietly on some grass. I reached out a hand to ruffle its ears – and it turned into a hissing, hovering ball with four beclawed legs glinting like razor blades in the sunlight, before shooting off into the flower beds.

A setback, then. Most likely an alert had gone out on www.fbi.cat, the international website dedicated to keeping tabs on what the media were now dubbing pet whisperers. Pet whisperers, like us, apparently already numbered in the thousands (and growing). Young, otherwise normal couples who worked in the rat race, they usually lived in compact urban clusters sans garden access, and simply had a deep yearning for the halcyon days of childhood, when they used to roll around with the muddy dogs in mom’s herb garden, long after being summoned to bath. Anyway, it was clear that for now, we’d have to lie low. We tramped up to our flat and plonked ourselves in front of the TV. Maybe there was a Lassie movie SABC2; that always raised our spirits. Then I noticed two little brown geckos, ‘parking off’ in the corner of the lounge ceiling. Geckos, I thought. They were new. I looked at my wife.
We both looked up at the ceiling. Our own little, resident (possibly mating) pair of geckos. Could they…could they be tamed?