Charlie

Angela has a ghost.  And she calls him Charlie.  If a woman living alone has to share her home with a ghost Charlie is probably the better kind.  He was a bit of a nuisance at first.  He kept chucking books around until Angela had a word with him. “Look,” she said, “You can read any books that you want, but please don’t throw them on the floor”.  And he hasn’t since then. 

There was also the matter of the candle.  Angela put the candle in its holder on a bookcase upstairs.  And Charlie kept moving it and putting it in the windowsill.  He did this several times.  So Angela had to have another word.  “I am going to put this candle on the bookcase one more time,” she said.  “If you really want it in the windowsill, just put it there and I won’t move it again.  But, personally, I’d prefer it on the bookcase.”  It’s good to have a ghost you can reason with as he’s now agreed to leave the candle on the bookcase.

Sometimes he comes and watches television with Angela.   Television probably wasn’t around when he was doing his main thing.   She says that she knows he’s there as the sofa goes quite cold next to her.  But she welcomes him in and after a little while he goes away.

Where Charlie really comes into his own, though, is in the security line.   Mostly he sits out on Angela’s stoep.  She’s made it really beautiful with chairs and sofas and even a bookcase full of books.  Nobody steals anything, though.  They do know that Charlie is there and there’ll be trouble.  Some children were playing on the street when one of them jumped onto Angela’s stoep by mistake.  She thought it was her friend’s house.  So she jumped off quickly and said, “Sorry, Sir”.  “Who are you talking to?” said one of her friends.  “The man sitting on the stoep,” she said.  But nobody else could see him.

Charlie’s cleverest trick is to stop people coming into the house if he doesn’t trust them.  He’s never stopped Angela coming in or any friends who she has invited but when she was away she had left her keys with a builder who was doing some work for her.  And day after day the builder came and went but, on a few occasions, he tried to bring somebody else in with him to help him.  And Angela wouldn’t have minded, but he hadn’t talked about it with her first.  So Charlie didn’t like it and wouldn’t let them in.  He did this quite simply by bolting the door from inside.  The builder didn’t quite understand what was going on until he realised that when he went back on his own, there wasn’t a problem. 

So Charlie does have his uses.  But really it’s a poor lookout if an intelligent capable woman can’t choose to live on her own without some bloke, alive or dead, moving in on her uninvited.