Ghosts come to roost in our new home. Aunts and uncles, yiyis and kaufus, a medley of half-remembered faces and ancestors I’ve never seen. They flock on the balcony and screech against the glass doors. They crawl through the floorboards like cockroaches and root through the trash, looking for things to eat.

“Your home is filthy,” a ghost aunt hisses, nibbling at a chicken bone.

What is there to do but run? My feet take me down the hallway and into the solace of the only room that locks. I lean over the bathroom sink, but then my reflection in the mirror grows wrinkles, leans forward and says, “You need to clean the spiderwebs on your ceilings.” Pohpoh floats out of the mirror.

All I can do is tremble. She flicks knife eyes over the stained grout, the black spots in the shower, and the pads stuffed haphazardly under the sink. “What a mess!” she sniffs. “And it’s so mouldy.”

I drink in the timbre of her quavering voice. It has been years since our final dispute, and months since her passing. Until the end, she did not want me at her bedside. I have learned the shape of that grief, swallowed it and let it make a space for itself within me. Who knew that I would see her again — that beloved lined face looming out from my looking glass, pinched into a familiar glare?

“Look at you! Your eczema is worse and your hair needs a wash,” she says. “And you’ve barely cleaned this place. Did you forget how? Did you forget me?”

“Of course not.” My voice is somehow steady. “I’m glad you made the time to visit. All of you.”

I know my duty. They made me, so of course I must house them. “Welcome, everyone!” I say to the congregation of ghosts as I emerge into the living room. I urge them to keep their shoes on, sit down and make themselves comfortable. We don’t have much furniture yet, but the ghosts pile up on the couch and find spots on the floor. I boil the kettle and brew pu’erh tea. I slice triangles of watermelon and cut up two oranges.

The ghosts descend greedily upon my offerings. They scoff up all the fruit in a blink, skins and all.

“How long are you staying for?” I ask.

“Until you get the filth out of your home,” says Pohpoh.

*

My girlfriend Liv gets home from work at seven. She steps through the door in her Rebel Sport uniform to find my entire ghost family crammed in our apartment, their many eyes lit up like cats’ in the dark. She screams and I scream and all the ghosts scream, and Liv scurries into our bedroom and slams the door. I call to her through the wood, explaining that I didn’t invite them but they found me anyway, that they’re boisterous and don’t respect personal space, but I won’t let them hurt her.

“I thought we were gonna gouache together tonight,” is her muffled reply. Her voice is reproachful.

“I’m sorry. Next time?”

“Fine.” She pauses. “Is there dinner for me?”

I search the fridge. I decorated its door with Liv’s gouache prints and she added polaroids of us. There we are, looping arms on a Shinjuku side street. Posing in slutty outfits at a Mardi Gras event. Kissing at her manager’s wedding.

Liv and I spent months applying to apartments. I was sick of my five-person sharehouse and the seventeen-minute walk to Campsie station. Liv was ready to leave her bô´s place in Canley Heights and do her own laundry at last. We battled the Sydney rental market for months until we finally got an offer on this Berala unit — one bedroom, fourth floor, street-facing balcony. Creaky windows, sticking doors, mould in the bathroom. But still, a space for us. The movers came and went, our friends sent a monstera, I fed my parents a pack of lies.

And then we wandered the rooms of our new life, filling them with our things. My warm lamps, her favourite books. We stocked our pantry with vermicelli and filled the freezer with zongzi. Liv vacuumed the floors with the fancy Dyson her bô´ gifted her, while I scrubbed the benchtops until they gleamed. We argued about the position of the couch and the best internet company. But at night we stumbled into the shower together, bumping elbows and feet, sudsing our bodies in the newness of the space. I got to my knees on the hard wet tiles, and kissed and kissed her until she gasped.

Tonight, Liv finishes her leftover salmon rice in our room alone. We take separate showers. As we lie in bed, she traces her fingers lightly down the length of my arm. I do not respond. The ghosts are gossiping in the other rooms, and I know what they think of us.

In the morning, I pull up the livingroom blinds and Liv creeps into the kitchen to pack her lunch. “Her hair is so short,” I hear Pohpoh bark in Hoklo, a language I can understand but do not speak.

“Doesn’t she look like a boy?” comes an aunt’s voice. “Does she want to be one?”

The ghosts quarrel in hushed tones. Liv keeps her head down as she exits.

For breakfast, the ghosts scull Liv’s soy milk and peck at a heap of defrosted zongzi. I hunch over our secondhand desk and spend the next few hours culling the emails in my workplace’s events inbox. As I work, uncles smoke behind me on the balcony. They urge me to find a good husband and make a nice home for myself. “Won’t you give us a nephew?” one asks, blowing smoke in my face.

On my lunch break, I duck out to the supermarket near Berala station and do a new round of groceries. The ghosts are outraged when I suggest making Japanese curry, so I pour a whole packet of frozen wontons into a pot of water. I return to my emails as they boil.

Pohpoh hovers over me as I type an email to my manager. She mutters about the eczema on my face and the oiliness of my hair. After all these years, she still picks on the same flaws.

Eventually, she asks, “where you work?”

I do communications for a writers centre. “I do admin for a company,” I say, keeping my eyes on the screen. The click rate on our latest newsletter was 17.2%.

Pohpoh sniffs. “Just working at home?”

“Most days.” Our sponsored book giveaway was our most-clicked link.

“What you do?”

I don’t know how to explain electronic direct mail. “I put events up on the internet. Stuff like that.”

“What about her?” Pohpoh’s voice quivers. “Does she work?”

It’s too difficult to explain the zines and art prints. “Yeah, at a sport shop.”

The wontons float. I drain the water and offer the whole pot to the ghosts, flinching as they feast with rabid delight.

I look up at the ceiling. The spiderwebs have been cleaned away.

*

Days pass. The ghosts grow larger and rowdier. The aunts go through my wardrobe and spill shaoxing wine on my low-cut tops. “Accidents happen,” I sigh, and throw the clothes into the laundry basket. As I sit on the toilet, ghosts bang on the door and demand I help them with the television. While I design a newsletter for work, they eat sunflower seeds and toss the shells all over the floor.

“You’re practising good skills with us,” an aunt says. She spits cherry pits onto the walls, leaving red kiss stains on the plaster. “This is training. You want to learn how to run a nice clean household, don’t you? Be a ma one day?”

I say nothing.

Time flows on, and Liv and I tiptoe through our lives. We’re accustoming, I hope, to the new topography of our home life. I keep up with my share of the chores, while still fulfilling my duty to feed the spirits. This involves almost daily grocery runs for dumplings, spring onion pancakes, peaches and pastries from the Vietnamese bakery. Liv helps by vacuuming and wiping down surfaces in the evenings, even as the ghosts hiss and gnaw at her ankles. “Don’t touch her,” I snap, and they shrink away. But still, they watch her, and me, and the careful space we keep between us.

The bedroom is the only place they do not tread. I declared its doorway a boundary, and the ghosts have yet to trespass. Liv spends most of her time in there now, taking shelter from my ancestors. Often, I crack open the door to find her curled up with her sketchbook, or tapping on her Nintendo Switch.

Tonight, she is in bed early, watching Parks and Rec on her phone. As I slide under the duvet, music rattles the walls of the apartment. It’s karaoke night for the ghosts. Liv locks her phone and sighs. “Moving in together has been … a lot.”

There is an edge to her voice that I choose to ignore. “They’ll leave, I promise.”

“There’s always so much drama with you,” she mumbles.

The ghosts are chanting a Teresa Teng number I vaguely recognise. Pohpoh used to sing it in the car as she took me to school. I hum a few notes of the melody.

Liv chews her lip and turns her body away. She pulls her knees up to her chest, making herself small.

*

The ghosts settle like dust over our furniture. They spread their restless bodies across every space and surface. In the dryer, a grand-aunt naps amid my warm socks. In the fridge, an uncle nestles between the peaches.

“Do you remember the twenty-four stories of filial piety?” Pohpoh asks as I work. “The child who sold himself to bury his father? The boy who let mosquitoes drink his blood, so his parents would be safe?”

The others drink baijiu on the couch, talking about the war and revolution. Toasts are made to the valiant ancestors who now walk among them, while the grand-uncle who fled communism is rebuked. Yipohs cast Qing dynasty dramas to the television via my YouTube account. Aunts queue up videos extolling the virtues of filial piety, waving me over to the couch to watch. Pohpoh watches me eat shin ramyun for lunch and mutters about the weight I’ve gained.

There are more ghosts now than ever. New faces keep popping up from the toilet bowl and climbing out of the sink. They eat and gossip and grow, swelling up and floating like balloons along the ceiling.

And the mess. Oh, the mess. One evening, Liv gets home and stops. Her eyes scan the sea of empty bottles and filthy plates. My work day has kept me too busy to clean. I brace for snapped words, but she only sighs. Wordlessly, she takes the basket of dirty clothes and switches on the washing machine.

Something clinks behind me. Pohpoh crouches in a corner, shoving peach pits into a trash bag.

*

I do not see it happen, but it happens. My ghost aunts swoop Liv. She is hanging up our shirts on the balcony and they come at her like magpies, claws out and screeching. Afterwards, I try to hold Liv as she cries on the phone to her bô´. She packs three tote bags of clothes, as well as her sketchbook, gouache set and Nintendo Switch.

“Text me if you need me,” Liv says, opening the front door.

I’ll die if you leave me here, I want to scream. But I know what Liv would say. You’re being dramatic. You know that isn’t true.

She moves to kiss me goodbye but the ghosts are watching us, their whispers a flurry in my ears. Too many eyes and poisonous mouths. A buried instinct has me turning my face at the last moment, so her mouth catches my cheek.

Liv only smiles. “Breathe, okay?” is all she says, and then she pulls the door shut.

The ghosts explode in celebration. They clap me on the back with a hundred hands, careening around the hallway like confetti. “No more stain on this family!” cheers Pohpoh. “We’ve cleaned it away!”

“Time to find a husband!” chimes an uncle.

The aunts grin from ear to ear. “We can ask our friends about their sons. I think there are a few engineers É”

The ghosts invite themselves into the bedroom, insisting on keeping me company that night. They settle into the room’s nooks and crannies, making pillows out of Liv’s remaining clothes. Sleep is difficult with the thunderous snoring. Too many bodies breathe in one enclosed space. I cry quietly in the dark and think of Liv. She never invited herself into anything. We were friends for years, then she gave the gentlest knock, and my architecture cracked right open.

In the morning, my ancestors clamour to be fed. I pan-fry dumplings for breakfast and break all the skins. For lunch, I overboil a vat of gloopy congee with basa fillets. For dinner, I stir-fry prawns and bokchoy in hoisin sauce. The ghosts lick the plates clean then beat their fists on the ground. More, more, more.

“We’ll make this home lucky and lovely,” says Pohpoh. Her eyes are shining as she follows me around the kitchen. “I’ll live here and take care of you and we’ll find you a good husband.”

The walls of the apartment are stained with cherry and laoganma. Every flat surface is heaped with dirty plates and paper towels. The only thing left in my fridge is a rotting eggplant. The polaroids of Liv and I are no longer on the door. The ghosts have replaced them with pictures of themselves. In each white-rimmed oblong, my ancestors flash peace signs and make faces at the camera.

“Do you like them?” Pohpoh asks. “We’re helping you redecorate.”

My toes brush against something pointy, and I lean down to feel under the fridge. I fish out one of Liv’s art prints, now splashed with fish sauce.

I look up and meet Pohpoh’s gaze. Her narrowed eyes glare sharp as cleavers. Growing up, I was always told that my face was an echo of hers. We have the same dimples, the same creases to our frowns. The same itching skin, the same greasy hair. I am her reverberation. She read me riddles as a child, and listened as I recounted the full plots of my favourite movies. So the baba fish swam to Sydney? Your gonggong swam to Hong Kong, you know, nine hours across the bay. There were sharks there, too!

Around us, my aunts cluck and cackle and thrash their wings. My uncles smoke and swell with laughter, their chests expanding with their guffaws. The noise in the apartment rises like a wave, filling the room, submerging it. I speak to Pohpoh, tell her that I will always love her, but I cannot hear my own words. My lungs constrict. I am running out of air.

I push through the sea of bodies and prise open the cupboard. I find Liv’s Dyson vacuum cleaner.

I vacuum the ghosts up — every fucking one. They scream and writhe and try to fly away, but I snag them by the tails and feed them into the mouth of the machine. I stalk from room to room and round up the haunters hiding in every corner. I scour the cupboards, the pantry, the wardrobe. I find them all.

When I am done, the dust compartment rattles dangerously. I carry the machine out onto the balcony and shut the glass doors behind me.

I empty the vacuum into the wind. The ghosts wheel about in the night sky, their bodies losing air like balloons. Yipohs scream you can’t treat us like this before the breeze snatches them away, and uncles curse me as they fade out into the darkness. The aunts whirl and shriek like birds of prey, talons out and slashing at me. They grab at my hair, pull at my shirt, scratch at my elbows. I shake them off and they swirl into the sky.

Pohpoh is the last ghost left. She snatches my wrists but I tear myself away, and she grabs the balcony railing. “Boubui!” she calls, legs billowing out behind her. I step forward and pry her fingers off the metal, one by one. The wind plucks her into the air. “No!” she screams. “I’m not leaving you! I need to take care of you! I’m your family! I’m your home!”

“Goodbye!” I wave and wave, grinning through my tears. “I’ll remember you!” I hope that will be enough.

Pohpoh shouts something else. Perhaps she is chastising me for treating my own family so rudely. Perhaps she is cursing me and my love and the home we have made, with its mouldy bathroom and cobwebbed ceilings. Perhaps she is asking me not to forget about her. Perhaps she is begging to stay — in the apartment, for just a little longer — in my life, she’ll take just a corner of it —

All the same, her words are swallowed away by the wind. She shrinks into the bruised distance and I watch until she is smaller than a star.

My home is quiet without the gossip of ghosts. I gather the filthy plates and throw out the bitten fruit. The polaroids gleam on the fridge and I kiss their smiling faces. I hope they are wishing me peace from the dark place they’ve returned to. All I wish is the same for them. I press my fingers to the walls and walk slowly through my emptied rooms.

Winner of the 2023 Neilma Sidney Fiction Prize, supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation