A Ghost in the House

It was the cat that first noticed that we had some sort of ghost in the house. He would be sitting on your lap quite happily then suddenly his ears would go up and he would stare with wide eyes at, nothing, before he jumped down and streaked off, the hairs on his back standing up. We used to laugh and shout after him, ‘Hey, Simon, seen a ghost.’ We don’t say that anymore.

The other members of our household talk openly about my being “on the scale,” the autism scale that is, I respond by saying that we are all on the scale, just some of us are a little higher. The ‘scale’ thing is a leg-pull that refers to some of my habits, not exactly habits more odd little quirks that I don’t see as odd at all. Sensible yes, practical yes, but not really odd. My wife works full time and I have the luxury that my work is more or less part-time which means I get to do much of the housework, which is fine. I get to do the washing and ironing and the kitchen cleaning up. So first, I have a ‘thing’ about the way sheets and towels should look in the airing cupboard. I like to fold them so that you don’t see the ends, just the roll over. You can see all of the towels, and it looks neat, what’s wrong with that? The others, the boys and my wife don’t get it. They pull out a towel from the pile, disturb the rest and then it’s a mess. The “scale” conversation also includes how I like to load up the dishwasher, you know, in a practical way, starting at the back and working forwards, loading the same items together. Then there’s the socks. I wouldn’t dream of leaving the house with odd socks on, the boys don’t care. When I try to pair up the socks from the wash, they never do, pair that is. The world record is fourteen odd socks in one wash. To ease my pain and frustration in the utility room at the pairing sessions I bought a second linen basket just for socks and pants. That’s a lot better, but I still get a high proportion of odd ones. Further investigation under beds usually brings out a few culprits and then those still on their own go into the plastic tub. This is not marked ‘Odd socks’ I’m not that far up the scale.

The doubts started to creep in when my socks came out of the wash on their own. Categorically there are no socks under my bed or lost during PE lessons or left on the floor on a sleep over. No, my socks go into the washing bin without fail, as a pair. So when I had three of my odd socks over I went on a hunt. I checked the main washing basket, behind the freezer, under the bed – although there isn’t really a space under our bed, plus every other place I could think of that might store a sock. Nothing. The odd sock bin grew to overflowing. I had to try to forget it - it was taking over my life.

Next, there was the ‘orange affair’. The four of us were sitting around the tea table, which was a bit cramped because we were moving furniture around and so had pushed the table into a tight corner temporarily. One of the boys took a large Jaffa orange from the bowl and it dropped off the table and rolled away somewhere under our feet. He was told to leave it there until we’d finished as, because it was so tight, it was difficult to get down under the table. We finished eating and cleared away and I got under the table to reclaim the orange, but I couldn’t find it. Twenty minutes later I had pulled the table, chairs and everything else out of the space. No orange. It just wasn’t there. No explanation whatsoever. We all looked, everyone swore that they hadn’t picked it up. From then on in the household whenever anything went missing, you know Biros, keys and odd things. it was called an ‘orange moment’ and I would constantly repeat the old joke about ball point pens turning into odd socks, but the more time went on – especially with the socks – I began to believe it.

So life continued, constantly finding odd socks with no mate, constantly losing pens and other little things, normal stuff in a house, yes? Then one Saturday I needed to get up into the loft, not a nice place, not in cob-webby way, but in a jammed-packed-goodness-knows-what all-this stuff is kind of a way. My place on the ‘scale’ does at least mean that the boxes are laid out well and labelled. I was looking for a photo album, and pulled out a large box marked “Photo Albums”. Good start. Behind the big box was another, with no label. ‘Not one of mine I thought’. It had been there a while shown by the amount of spider pooh and dust plus the brown parcel tape had dried out and was peeling off. I had to sit down after I had opened it. Inside the box sitting on top of a pile of socks was an orange, a large orange, fresh as the day it was picked. The socks were all odd ones. I recognised many from having raged around in the utility room trying to find their other halves. I pulled them all out and counted them (OK?). There were 57. In the bottom of the box were seventeen Biros, three earrings, two cuff links and finally the missing radiator key.

Over the next few days I matched up about half of the socks from the ‘Odd sock box’ and discarded the rest, their friends having long been binned. Some of the earrings and cuff links were returned to their mates and the orange sat on the counter uneaten for three days until it grew a blue fur.

We don’t talk about ghosts in our house anymore but we do still refer to ‘Orange moments’ and every year we have a family trip to the loft to recover all the missing items.