My Ghosts (33 page)

But lately
, Iz said, she’d been thinking that she’d made a mistake, that she’d messed with the order and wasn’t the person she was meant to be. One who wasn’t so sad, one no one would want to walk away from. She knew Douglas would say that was nonsense, it was up to everyone to decide their own life, but Iz told Clare she kept thinking about her grandmother’s stories. The one about the tailor’s vain daughter who stole a jewelled cloak, and paid such a terrible price. Forever after invisible and condemned to float at the edges, watching others live out their happy lives.

Clare told Iz once
that she envied the crowded rooms and the noisy family; she said her own father could go days without speaking, her mother too, and in her memory she grew up in a house that was silent, except for the clock in the hall. “Ticking away,” she said, “like the song.” Clare’s mother liked things ordered, lists everywhere and always the same meals on the same nights, and if Clare looked for one word to describe her it was
sharp
, like the knitting needles that clacked together in her busy hands. She said her father was softer and his cheeks were always smooth, gleaming from his electric razor. He was an optometrist with his own office and every morning he buffed his shoes, took his lunch bag from the counter where it sat beside Clare’s and put it into his black briefcase, snapped the locks. Her mother opened that briefcase after he died, nothing
inside but a newspaper folded to the crossword and a salami sandwich with two bites gone, and Clare thought that must have marked the exact moment he had made up his mind.

Once a year
, near her birthday, Clare’s father said, “Welcome to my kingdom,” and he checked her eyes and showed her how everything worked, the charts and the clicking lenses and the bright circle of light. “Perfect vision,” he said once a year, and one of those times he told her a secret, said that he had perfect vision too. Nothing but plain glass in the frames he changed every year, but it was what people expected; after he died Clare’s mother said of course she’d known, and it had been her idea in the first place. She didn’t like to talk about him but Clare thought she had to be sad, and she tried to keep her company, sitting up late and watching old movies on TV, even though they were so boring she could have screamed. Her lunch already made, she could see it from the couch, the folded bag sitting by itself on the counter.

At the round table
in the sunlit square Clare told Iz that it was terrible how quickly he had vanished, and how she’d let it happen. How soon she got used to waking up without the sound of his razor, the staccato slaps of Old Spice. She said her feelings were so jumbled that she tried very hard to feel nothing, though she took his striped scarf from the closet and wore it around for a while. She lost track of it, but when she asked all her mother said was, “That old thing? That’s no loss at all.”

Usually she has the beach to herself when she walks, but occasionally there’s a figure in the distance. Sometimes coming toward her, and maybe also working out how to manage the
approaching interaction. How long to appear lost in thought, how soon to look up and the proper distance to begin to acknowledge each other. Either way they risk looking like fools; too far apart and they’re smiling at nothing, but wait too long and it’s ridiculous to pretend not to notice when it’s just the two of them on the empty sand. It feels like a small victory, the way they manage the calculation and the connection, before moving on in their different directions. Two people in exactly the same place, for an instant, but with completely different thoughts, and for different reasons.

If it’s a day when she’s feeling particularly untethered she does an exercise, once they’ve passed each other, and tries to remember each detail. Gloves or no gloves and the colour of the jacket, buttons or zipper. Height, weight and age, size of nose. It was one of her favourite lectures, the one on eyewitness testimony, on
attention
, and she always started with that short video, young people in some kind of hallway who are passing a ball back and forth. “Count the white-shirted passes,” she told her students, “count carefully,” and when it was done she had them call out their answers. There were always a few who suspected a trick, a few clever ones who had counted black passes too, and how many girls, how many boys, how many with long hair tied back. But they gaped just like the others when she said, “Yes, that’s fine, but did anyone notice the gorilla?”

It can only work once, that video, but it works astonishingly well, the gorilla so obvious, when the students watch it again, they can hardly believe it. Year after year they still talk about it as they gather their books, as they zip up their backpacks. Still shaking their heads at how much you can miss, paying attention to what you thought was the important thing.

We knew every crooked lane
in the small village on the small island and our days and nights had a lazy rhythm. But content as we were they sometimes caught up with us, those empty moments where there was nothing new to say. Then we played a game of questions and answers,
yes
or no, a game that always started with someone saying,
A detective walks into a room …
There was always a dead body in the room, no obvious cause or weapon, a few strange clues. There might be a man with a damp shirt front, or a woman on a cot, a thin broken stick on the floor. An open window and a few shards of glass, a suffocated couple. The detective says,
I know what happened here
, and the point is to arrive at the bizarre solution he has instantly understood. A man who has stabbed his own heart with a dagger of ice, two goldfish and a broken bowl.

It was a game
that could go on for hours, stopping and starting and carrying on in the bar in the evening, while Pink Floyd played and Gerard’s little girls sang along and we thought how lucky they were, growing up free with no rules about homework or bedtimes and the whole island their playground.
Us and them, us and them
; the little girls sang and sometimes they danced until their mother brushed the tangled hair from their eyes and led them off to wherever they slept. Some nights she came back but mostly she didn’t, and then Gerard pulled a chair up to our table and Hans said, “Here’s
Romeo
, here he is.” And Gerard smiled as he set down his bottle, and gave Clare his sleepy-eyed look.

For a while
Clare stayed on after he’d turned out the lights, and in the dead afternoons they met in all the secret places he knew; she told Iz everything and said she hadn’t known she
could be so happy. Other times Iz listened while she fretted because he hadn’t appeared. Had something happened or was it her fault, it must be, she must have mixed up the time or the place. Until one night she watched Gerard watching Jen as she raised her tall glass. Her bracelets jangled as she swept back her shining hair and Clare felt such a fool, the last to see it, the last one to know. “How could you not
tell
me?” she said to Iz as they walked through the empty square, and Iz said, “How
could
I—put yourself in my place.” The next days weren’t easy but then Clare caught her balance, steadied by the sun and the beach, by that rhythm, and she told Iz, “I think it’s working, what you said.” Carry on and pretend it doesn’t matter, and one day you’ll open your eyes and find that it’s the tiniest thing.

Someone had heard
something about a secret path to a secret bay and we tried to ask Adelpha about it; she said, “
Schmugglerin
,” and mimed an eye patch, and that made it even better. We imagined a flag in the wind, a white-sailed ship and a wooden chest spilling treasure, and set off the next day with the rough map she had drawn, an X near the graveyard marking the start. A narrow track that wound through dust and scrub, that circled small groves of twisted trees and sometimes climbed steeply and we wiped our faces with shirttails, with the ends of patterned scarves, stumbling and tripping and Iz banged her knee hard, and had to limp the rest of the way. Adelpha had drawn the wandering path and a few scattered squares that maybe matched the lone huts we passed so she must have known it well, this baking centre where people lived differently, out of sight of the circling sea.

We were talking
about turning back but then like a puff of magic the beach was there below us, a rush of sand flowing
out to meet the waves as they crashed in, rolling white and much bigger than anything we’d seen in the place we’d come from. There was a building of some kind and we thought of water running down the sides of cold bottles, platters of olives and oil-soaked bread, and it seemed like a cruel joke as we got closer, and then a marvel. A puzzle without an answer, a room for the detective to walk into, except that it wasn’t a room, that structure, nothing more than the
idea
of a room. No roof, just a concrete floor marked in large squares and one white wall with a wide window set in, blue-painted shutters that could fold closed but now were open, framing the long run to the sea. On one side there was a line strung between poles, draped and sagging with small, dried octopus, and there was no way to know, in the bright sun, if they’d been there for hours or months. No way to tell if the place itself was the beginning or the end of something, the real window in the imaginary room. We held on in a ragged line and felt the pull as we waded through the waves, rode them back to the rippled shore until it was enough. The white wall cast a narrow shadow and we closed the blue shutters and stretched out, our heads and shoulders cooler in the shade; Hans said that if there was music it would be perfect but we told him it already was, and that was exactly how it felt.

The way back should
have been easier with the heat of the day past, even for Iz who was still limping. But the path twisted and things looked different in the fading light, and suddenly we weren’t sure of anything, not which rocky hill, not which far-off hut, which stunted tree was the landmark. Then the night fell down, only a paring of moon, and we stumbled and cursed and felt the chill. It wasn’t far, we knew that, but the ground was tricky underfoot and we had to pay attention, stop talking,
and that silence left space for other thoughts to slither in, with the dark hills looming all around. Until we saw the first warm lights, more and more of them, and the smaller shadows of the place we’d started from. We moved faster then, almost running as we pushed our way through the narrow streets, and our feet were so light on the solid ground, heading for the music, the bar and the long table where we would sit and laugh, turn it into a story and share all our crazy fears. That out there in the dark we’d really thought we might be wandering forever, and how we’d remembered every campfire and every old tale we’d ever been told. The way we’d realized how close they really were, those things that roamed through the night, and the ones that swooped in with a terrible cackle.

She’s read books, she’s seen movies and plays, the medallions, the rings and the bells. The music and dancing, psychedelic swirls and free love, the communes and Turkish prisons and blown minds. It’s always more comic or more dire than anything she remembers, more
authentic
, somehow, and the stories are often said to be true ones. But she knows how that works, those true stories and how we all tell them. In even the simplest recounting, a conversation in a shop, or a walk through the park in the evening, you alter a phrase, or give yourself words you should have said. You make the dog growl louder, you make it a Rottweiler, though really you have no idea what it was. Little tweaks in the details that surely don’t matter, until you think of how many there are, in a lifetime.