A House in Dunedin

When Martin and Carolina Pereira told their families in Montevideo that they had bought a hundred-and-twenty-year-old wooden house on a hill in Dunedin, at the bottom of the world, the reaction was mixed. Carolina's mother said they had lost their marbles. Martin's father said that wooden houses were a recipe for disaster. Martin's grandmother, who was ninety-one, said, "Good. Old houses have more stories," and went back to her crossword.

The house was called Kowhai Villa, although the kowhai tree after which it had been named had died decades earlier. It had high ceilings, a veranda that leaned slightly to the left and a view of the harbor so beautiful that it made up for almost everything else. The previous owner, a Mrs. Isobel Kerr, had lived there for sixty years before moving into a retirement home in Christchurch. The real estate agent handed them the keys and a thick blue folder. "She asked me to give you this," he said. "I think she was rather fond of the place."

The folder turned out to be a hand-written manual, divided into three sections: The Garden, The Stove and Gerald. The first two were self-explanatory. The third, as far as they could tell, was about the ghost.

The garden section was a masterpiece of firm instructions. The roses by the gate are the apple of my eye. Do not let them go to rack and ruin. The lemon tree will sulk in winter: ignore it, it is putting it on. Under no circumstances plant mint in the ground, unless you want a garden made entirely of mint by Christmas. Carolina, who had never kept a plant alive for longer than a month, read it with growing alarm. "We've bitten off more than we can chew," she said. Martin told her to keep her hair on. It was a garden, not rocket science.

The stove section was harder going. The kitchen was dominated by an enormous cast-iron coal range, black as night and roughly the size of a small car. According to Mrs. Kerr, it was temperamental but loyal, and it had a mind of its own. Light it from the left, never from the right. If it smokes, open the back door and apologize to it. If it still smokes, it is Tuesday; it always smokes on Tuesdays. Martin laughed until, the following Tuesday, the kitchen filled with smoke and stayed that way until lunchtime.

Which brought them, inevitably, to Gerald. Gerald, Mrs. Kerr wrote, has lived upstairs for as long as I have and possibly longer. He walks about at night, mostly between midnight and two. He is harmless, though he does like to make his presence felt in the hallway. Do not try to get rid of him. He was here first. If you are kind to him, he will keep the house good company when you are out.

Carolina refused to take it seriously. "It's a joke," she said firmly. "A sense of humor from another century. Take it with a pinch of salt." Martin agreed, at least during daylight. But on their third night, at ten past midnight, they both woke to the sound of slow, heavy footsteps crossing the ceiling above their bedroom. Thump. Pause. Thump. Then a scratching noise, a long silence, and a sound that could only be described as a cough.

For a week they slept badly. Martin got cold feet about the whole adventure and started looking at apartments near the university. Carolina, who refused to be beaten by an invisible lodger, borrowed a ladder and a flashlight and, one Saturday morning, climbed into the roof space. Martin waited at the bottom, his heart in his mouth. After a long minute, she began to laugh.

Gerald was not a ghost. Gerald was a brushtail possum, large, gray and deeply unimpressed, sitting on a nest of old newspapers with an expression that suggested the house belonged to him and they were the intruders. Behind him, carefully placed in a cookie tin, was a note in Mrs. Kerr's familiar handwriting. So now you know, it said. I could hardly tell the agent that the house came with a possum. Possums are pests in this country, but this one is family. Please let him stay. And put the kettle on; he likes the warmth from the stove.

They let him stay. A man from the council came, sighed, and fitted a little door that let Gerald come and go without wandering into the bedrooms. The roses survived. The lemon tree sulked and then, in spring, produced forty-three lemons out of pure spite. The stove still smokes on Tuesdays. And when Carolina's mother finally came to visit and woke at midnight to the sound of footsteps overhead, Carolina simply turned over and murmured, "Don't worry, Mama. It's only Gerald." Then she fell asleep again.