The Poltergeist Packed Our Bags

Our flat was, for the better part of a year, what the internet would confidently call a poltergeist. Cupboards flung open. Mugs left the shelf and met the floor. Doors slammed in windless rooms; the television turned itself on to static at 3 a.m.; my partner's keys travelled nightly from the hook to increasingly baroque hiding places. It was exhausting and unnerving and it escalated, over the months, from unsettling to genuinely wearing — the sense of sharing our home with something restless and unhappy and prone to throwing things when it was upset, which seemed to be often.

We tried everything the frightened try: recording it, rationalising it, a half-embarrassed cleansing with sage that changed nothing, a serious conversation about whether we could afford to break the lease. And it was that last conversation that changed everything — because we had it quietly, in bed, in low voices, deciding privately and definitely that we would move out, that we'd had enough, that we'd start looking in the morning. We told no one. We wrote nothing down. It was a decision that existed, that night, only in two whispers in a dark bedroom.

The activity changed the next day. Not stopped — changed. The throwing stopped. The slamming stopped. And in their place came something that took us a week to understand because it was so far from what we'd braced for: it started helping us pack.

Small things at first. A box we'd flattened and left in the hall was found assembled and taped, upright, ready. Books we'd been meaning to sort were, one morning, stacked neatly by author beside the empty shelf. My partner's keys, tormentor of a hundred nights, stopped hiding and started appearing, pointedly, on top of whatever we needed to deal with next — on the lease folder, on the box of documents. Cupboards we needed to empty were found already opened, gently, their contents sometimes half-sorted onto the counter, the useful separated from the junk. Over the fortnight of our actual move, the thing that had spent a year throwing our belongings around the flat spent, instead, quietly and unmistakably assisting us in removing them — pre-packing, organising, laying things out, an eager, apologetic, tireless helper where there had been a tantrum.