Walking with Ghosts (26 page)

‘By chance,’ Sam said. ‘It wasn’t easy. You live like a recluse, like someone who doesn’t want to be found. But at the same time you live in York, fairly close to your mother and sister. That smacks of ambiguity to me, on the one hand you don’t want to be found, but on the other you don’t want to get totally lost.’

‘What are you? A psychologist?’

‘No. I’m a messenger. I came to deliver a message from Dora.’

‘Tell her I’m not coming.’

‘Why?’

The smile again. ‘So many reasons. She’ll know why.’

‘Maybe she will,’ said Sam. ‘But you could forgive her, whatever it is you’re punishing her for. Just come and sit with her for a few minutes. That’s all it’d take.’

‘Is that part of the message?’

‘No. I added that to the message. I’d like you to come as well. I’d like to get to know you.’

‘Know me?’ Billy shook his head. ‘Nobody can know anyone else. You can only know what I want you to know. Same with Dora, you only know what she wants you to know. I know other things. A different Dora to yours. I could tell you about her.’ His words were certain, but underneath he had all the foundation of a house boat.

‘And if I listened,’ said Sam. ‘If I let you tell me about the different Dora, will you then come and see the Dora I know? Soon. Before she dies?’

‘No. I don’t want to see her. She’s no good.’

‘It can’t be that simple, Billy.’

‘People don’t call me Billy. Nothing’s simple. I don’t want to open the floodgates.’

‘What shall I call you?’

‘William, that’s my name. After my father. Arthur William Greenhills.’

‘OK, William. What do you mean, “Open the floodgates”?’

‘Let it all come out. What she did. How she planned it. The destruction. It’s all contained. If we let it out where will we be then?’

‘I give in,’ said Sam. ‘Where will we be?’

‘Lost,’ said William. ‘I want to keep him alive.’

There was a deadness in the tone of his voice, and there was that vulnerability around his eyes that Diana had mentioned. But apart from those two things you wouldn’t have picked him out in a crowd. Mister Normal, Sam thought. No distinguishing marks or tics. Little body language. In a line-up you’d walk right past him. Everybody’s brother and son.

I want to keep him alive.
Sam remembered saying exactly that about Donna after she was mown down by the drunk driver. ‘I want to keep her alive,’ he’d say, and people would think he meant he wanted to keep her alive in his mind, not let the
image
of her slip away. But he didn’t mean that at all. He meant something much more literal, something that slipped away between the words. It was during that period, when he wanted to keep Donna alive, that he began the serious drinking.

‘I think I know what you mean,’ he said.

Billy, William was going to laugh. He’d heard it before and he knew it to be hollow. But something of the truth or the reality of Sam’s words got to him. He suppressed the laugh. He looked straight ahead of him for several seconds, not moving, apart from a slight flexing in his hands. Then he said, ‘If I could I would like to rewrite my life story.’

‘That’s not possible,’ Sam said. ‘But it might be possible to interpret it a different way.’

‘I’ll talk to you,’ William said. ‘I won’t see Dora, but I’ll talk to you. So long as you realize that no voice can reach me.’

32

A call from Celia. ‘Dora, are you still living in that enormous house by yourself? Sam Turner’s looking for somewhere to stay temporarily. Why don’t you offer him a room?’ Remember, Dora? Celia needs
her
spare room for her niece.

And two days later a lost white man in a white suit on your doorstep. ‘Hello, Dora. Celia said—’

‘Yes, come in. You can have Billy’s old room.’

‘I hope it’s all right,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to crash in if it’s not convenient.’

You don’t want a permanent lodger. You make that clear from the beginning. A few weeks will be OK. Until he can find something.

He brings a quietness into the house. For some weeks now you have been tired. All the time you are tired. In the morning it is an effort to get out of bed. You trudge through the days. At night you lie awake, staring at the ceiling.

Three days after Sam comes to live in your house you find the first egg on the underside of your left breast. You are lying in bed in the morning. You listen to Sam leaving his room and going downstairs to make coffee. The egg slips to one side as your fingers travel up towards the nipple. It is not a sparrow’s egg, not the smallest possible egg; it is a blackbird’s egg, embedded in the fat of your breast, close to the surface. Your skin begins to crawl, and a dank coldness grips you from inside. The egg is not perfect; it is almost Perfect, but there is a ridge towards the narrow end. A mother blackbird sat on this egg would be worried.

You sit up and dress. You decide to ignore it. You go downstairs and drink coffee with Sam.

He prepares a meal for himself in the evening, and offers to make it for you as well. Why not, you think, he does not pay that much rent.

The house slowly grows brighter. Sam has a meal ready when you finish teaching. During the day he takes over the running of the house, does the washing, tidies up the garden. He spends two days repairing the cupboard doors in the kitchen. The hinges have been hanging off for years. He suggests repainting the hallway, brings home colour cards for you to look at. After the meal you spend two hours together pondering the relative merits of Coral Pink and Astley Hue.

Despite yourself you find yourself watching the clock during the day, waiting for the time you will return home. And it is not the house that calls you, Dora. It is definitely not the house. Through that autumn, after the hall is repainted, you walk together in the park. He tells you of his time in London and California, about his first wife, Donna, and his daughter, Bronte. You tell him about your job, about the intrigues of the department.

He plays you his Dylan songs and you listen to them, hear what he hears. You play him Lady Day, and he ends up playing her himself. Especially the Gershwin, ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’. He plays it over and over again because he’s a sensualist.

The egg in your breast does not go away. You ignore it for a while, but you cannot forget it. You decide to tell Sam, work yourself into a state, and are then struck dumb in the breakfast room. It is impossible to look him in the eye. He places his hand on your shoulder. ‘Something wrong, Dora?’

‘No.’ You have not yet fully recognized this egg in your breast. You have not yet accepted it yourself. It is too early to tell the world.

‘Sure?’ He lifts your chin towards him, forcing you to engage his eyes.

‘It’s nothing. I feel queasy.’

‘Might be the beginning of a cold,’ he says. ‘Have a day in bed.’

But you get up, Dora. Go about the day as normal. Try to ignore it. If you ignore it it might go away.

The next day it has grown again. It grows every day. It is still an egg, but larger, larger than a blackbird could lay. You have to tell Sam now; the egg is too large for you to cope with alone. He explores it with gentle fingers, and it slips away from him as it slipped away from you. A cloud envelops his features as he tries to locate it again. You hold your breath, waiting for his verdict, hoping he will explain it away.

‘It might not be serious,’ he says. ‘You’d better let the doctor see it.’ You two are alone together under heaven. There is no explaining an almost perfect egg in your breast. Sam knows what it is. You know what it is, but even after breathing the word to yourself, after naming it, it is still not explained. It is not enough to know
what
it is, you need to know
why.

But no one will tell you why, Dora. You join the unconscious merry-go-round of doctors, specialists, X-ray technicians. ‘Don’t worry.’ That is the advice they have. ‘Don’t worry, these breast lumps are often non-malignant.’

They cut it out.

Sam takes you to the Radium Hospital and the two of you are lost in a maze of wards and corridors. Everyone is dying, the walls are porous, impregnated with hopelessness. The eyes of the patients no longer see. You are one of them, Dora. You will be welcomed here. Sam will go home, and you will remain. Sam will come for an hour every day while you grow weaker. You will take the treatment and vomit, the foundations of your face will crumble away and Sam will pretend not to notice. Nuclear science will gain an infinitesimal gram of understanding. And then you will die.

As you walk the corridors with Sam looking for the Reception Ward, he grips your hand tighter. You feel his nails digging into the heel of your hand.

You imagine what it would be like if the tables were reversed. If you were going back home without Sam. If y0ll were, a few minutes from now, going to leave him here and return to your life in the avenue alone.

‘Excuse me,’ Sam asks a man with a concentration camp in his eyes. ‘The Reception Ward?’

Your legs stiffen, Dora. You lead Sam to a side door, through it, and out into the gardens. You walk away from the building, and Sam follows, still hanging on to your hand. He does not ask what is happening. The buildings and the garden fan out behind you, and you train your eyes on the horizon, walking towards it, a thin line dividing earth and sky.

After some time Sam begins to laugh. You have climbed another fence and are struggling across a ploughed field on a hillside. Sam trips over a furrow and rolls about laughing. ‘Do you think this is the right way?’ he asks.

You sit on a ridge of earth and look down at him. It is as if your whole body is smiling. The right way? It is the only way, Dora. It is the way you have sought all your life. The way you never expected to tread. You brush earth from Sam’s face and pull him to his feet. The light is beginning to fail, and the thin red line of the horizon has moved away from you. You still have a long way to go.

The park blazes with colour. The trees riot through browns, and yellows, and golds. Squirrels take on the rush of the approaching winter, seemingly working through the nights. You wonder that with their sense of urgency they have not yet invented arc lights.

Sam tells you about his marriage to Brenda. He does not blame the other man for the break-up. ‘It was already doomed,’ he says. ‘He just happened along at the right moment. if it hadn’t been him it would have been somebody else.’

You do not speak about Arthur for a long time. When you finally do tell him he stops on the grass. He stands under a beech tree, fallen nuts around his feet. He watches you for a while, then he takes your hand and begins to walk again. The following weekend he brings Geordie, his young friend, and the three of you eat together. Geordie is shy, withdrawn, and dressed ridiculously in leather trousers, plastic shoes. They are running a private detective agency. You look at them and you don’t believe they are private detectives. Then you look again, and it’s obvious that they couldn’t be anything else. Their last house was blown up by a psychopath. That’s why Sam was living with Celia. But he’s living with you now. Sam touches Geordie all the time. He cannot keep his hands off him. Eventually Geordie relaxes, chatters constantly about his friend called Janet. Janet is a cousin of Philip. Small world. Whatever happened to Philip? Some people are like that, insubstantial. They disappear.

When Geordie has gone you sit together with Sam in silence. He has something on his mind, but you do not prompt him. When he is ready he will speak. ‘Have you ever thought of marrying again?’ he asks.

You laugh. Of course you have thought of it. You thought of nothing else for years. But not now. It was something to think about, to dream about ten years ago, even five. But not now. Men are not interested in old women.

‘I’m not interested in old women,’ he says. ‘But I’m interested in you, Dora.’

Your heart sits up inside your chest. It pumps blood at a breakneck speed into your head. You see Sam for the first time. You see him in a flash of light, and then he has gone. He is younger than you, but he has migrated across generations. In the space it takes to blink an eye you lose sight of him and something inside and outside of you pulls you to your feet. You are running from the room, as if pursued by a demon. You run over the garden, beneath the starving pear tree and out of the back gate. You are in the alley lined with garages. It is night, pitch black apart from the stars. He has proposed marriage to you, Dora. This man; this young man.

You stop to catch your breath, pressing your back against the rotting wood of a garage door. The stars, which meant everything to the ancients, mean nothing to you. You try to put them in place, casting around for the Plough, but they will not take form. They strew the sky like spilled silver, and they remind you of people, of humanity itself, of the millions of isolated human beings sprawling over the planet, never touching, never coming within range of each other: your father in his perpetual sick bed, your cold mother, your dead husband, and your absentee children. They remind you of everyone you ever knew. Smiley and Philip, as far apart as the sky can reach, sailors and cowboys, Dylan Thomas and Sam Turner, your first and last lovers.