The real ghost of Terror Bay

There were three people who could have been the ghost of Terror Bay, and none of them truly fully exist.

The first candidate is the dying British sailor, who is offered help by an Inuk but offers a tragic refusal in response. He’s almost a zombie when we meet him – fighting for the last sparks of sense out of his broken mind, closer to death than life – and he winds up haunting the Inuk. But he’s not the ghost.

The second candidate is the narrator, who extends the offer of help and somehow comes to understand the sailor’s sad tale. When Chrissy Mostyn did me the great honour of voicing the character*, she transformed it; not just in gender (I’d actually tried to keep it gender neutral so that more readers might find themselves imagining the story happening to them) but in scale. My Inuk was a worldly-wise and weather-beaten tribal leader, sharing his story as a warning. Chrissy gave the world a strong but burdened young girl in the face of a fearsome world. That was fascinating; we actually took opposing views of the storyteller, but it all stitched together wonderfully because Jacob Holm-Lupo’s music blended both painfully lonely and globally epic vibes. And although I love the idea that, if you visit Terror Bay on a harsh stormy night you might hear her whispering her sorry tale in the wind, she’s not the ghost.

(I did actually think she was when I first wrote the poem, and so it originally ended with the line “And, pleading like a child would, ‘Don't save me,’ he said.” I didn’t want to spell out the idea of who was haunting who; then when I worked out that she wasn’t the ghost either, it was more fun to LOOK like it was being spelled out, when it’s not.)

The third candidate is me, and I am the ghost. Of course, we all put some of ourselves into everything we create, because that’s part of the reason for doing it. But this is slightly more literal. You see, I’m one of those people who struggles with severe depressive issues. Severe. Dark, dark, dark deadening. Over the years I’ve developed a toolbox for managing the situation, although the first challenge is to identify when I’m in a depressive episode, and that’s not as easy as it might sound. (Imagine you’re in a room with no windows, and over a period of time the lighting changes from cold white to warm white to a subtle orange colour. You probably won’t notice until something forces a change and you go, “Oh, I’m seeing everything differently!” It can be like that.) The second challenge is being patient about how long the tools take to operate (before I can make the leap to the light switch and reset the colour).

The ghost was the first character to step cautiously out from my story engine (subconscious) just as I recovered from probably the worst depressive attack I’ve ever had. It had taken several weeks to fight off and in the end I’d had no option but to just hide for about a week until it was over. Subsisting patiently until the opportunity to escape that nastily-lit room presented itself. When it did, it was a bright crisp winter day, snow and frost everywhere, the sun low in the sky and not doing much against the bitter north wind. Well, I love days like that and I needed to physically change as well as mentally, so I went out and enjoyed the weather. Inspiration very quickly struck in my mood of elation, relief and sensory joy (it was really cold which emphasised I was really alive). As I wandered down a road near a churchyard, the depression made one final bid to take me back to hell, but I wasn’t having it. The moment passed but it reminded me that, under the elation, relief and joy, there was exhaustion and sadness to follow as I returned to normal. I was, in fact, the sole survivor of a war I hadn’t won, cast in sorry shadow by a cold and distant sun. And that’s who I told myself i was, and it sat on my phone like that until it merged with the Franklin Expedition tragedy and became a personal allegory for my own troubled expeditions.

Yeah, those attacks can be harsh… but I can and do live with them because they make me who I am, andI think I’m kinda good at who I am. Then, when you get to drag a piece as powerful as The Ghost of Terror Bay out of hell with you, it offers hope for the next time hell feels like it’s winning.

(*I would dearly love to be certain that Chrissy agreed to perform the poem because she was blown away by the story. I’m sure she didn’t hate it, but I fear it was more to shut me the fuck up since I’d been trying to find a way to work with her for several years. That may have backfired since I now want to do it again…)