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My husband mocks the ghost who hovers near me on walks. A ghost wouldn’t climb a stile or skirt cows so widely. And why would he edge round barely flooded fields? Leaky shoes?
Aren’t ghosts violent, my husband suggests. No, you need a body for that, to be as well as mean and seem, though the ghost wears blue jeans, desert boots and says
he was bullied for being beautiful as a teenager and loved a telephonist from Dollis Hill at twenty. The ghost noticed me in the doctor’s surgery. I held
a child who snuffled my hand like an animal. Dying is being born. You imprint on the person you see last. I remember his panic. Receptionists corralled the waiting room.
Calling him up now seems like human-stealing. My husband mocks: You saw a death. Why exaggerate? Maybe because, without ghosts, we are a wooden library, books about wood
bound in wood with leaves for pages, words, the seeds and nuts of ancient beech, birch, oak and rowan. Latterly I wander where box trees curl like knots of neglected hair.
They were moving about the rooms, two men. My daughter said, I don’t want to live with them. No, no, I said, they will live here alone if they buy our place. We will have gone. Do you remember that large patch of green I called the country? That’s where we will be.
I’ve been wearing this flat for far too long. It’s dark though I’ve accessorised it in turquoise. It works best when my skin is palest in winter. In summer it makes me look tacky. I am ready to invest in a house as well-fitted as a bra, none of that faux leopard skin, no balconettes.
How to explain this perfectly reasonable reason? From her Juliet balcony, she squints at the Eye, a toy Big Ben fixed, neat, inside it. She is going to have to give up her view.
Single bed. Tall brown lidded bin with a foot-press handle. White porcelain sink. Deluxe soap dispenser. Alcohol hand rub.
Orange rubber-tiled floor. Uncontrollable curtain reacting over and over to a breeze sniping in through the horizontal slit of an open window.
A high shelf on wheels covered with jugs, tiny pink square sponges on sticks, cc measures, a blank menu choice dated tomorrow, Vaseline,
Sou Son body crème, Chanel perfume spray, a stack of disposable grey papier-mâché hats to vomit into, a half-moon insert for the chin cut out.
Where are they now, the transparent walkways, office to office, tear-shaped desks, the turning necks of chairs, head rests? Sand blows through empty levels. At night, the corners are penetrated with floodlights.
Bodies move like smoke on granite mirrors. The high cheekbones of the Place de Dome, the Comfort Hotel, glint. Not my storey; that’s empty, panes broken, its eery
insides deny I ever started there, young, skipping up the runs of stair, deny I worked my whole life behind glass.
published in TLS, 23 March 2007 |
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