Walking with Ghosts

thumb and shakes his old-young head, his face weighted with irony.
    ‘Do you want to try again?’
    ‘No, Sam.’ You won’t sleep. Not what you regard as sleep, not the bottomless ocean which is a kind of freedom. Sleep now is like a wet bog; you lie on the surface of it, and it sucks and blows, unable to claim you.
    Sam’s eyes are tired. Has he slept? ‘I’ll get the chair ready,’ he says. He places it by the window and smothers it in blankets. Then he pushes the curtains back, draping one of them over the sideboard so you can see the entire street. He carries you across the room effortlessly. Lifts you from the bed like a small child, cradled in his arms. You were never heavy, Dora, but, dear God, look at you now.
    ‘Won’t be long,’ says Sam, taking the tray, running down the stairs. You remember Sylvia Plath, something about the street brings back a line... Poor and white, barely daring to breathe or achoo ... and you want to rush to your books and search for the memory, bring the poem back to your chair by the window and read it aloud to the empty street. You move your head slightly to watch a woman with a child locking the door of a house over the way. You have never seen her before. They have repopulated the street.
    The people who lived in that house in 1970 - what were they called? - won the neighbourhood prize for the best-kept garden. The house was made up like Noah’s Ark. You were pregnant with Diana and waddling about on the last road to motherhood. History had been put aside in the interests of biological necessity - Arthur’s phrase - and you had moved to York with his job and your widening hips. It did not seem like promotion, really, moving to York, but it made him happy, and that was important. Arthur had to be happy, he had been in a war, defending the Suez Canal. He had been in the desert, making the world safe for democracy.
    You waddle to church with him every Sunday morning. In the church they sing, ‘Eternal Father, Strong to save’, which is the only thing that keeps you going. Arthur pretends to like it all, the entire service. He falls heavily to his knees to pray, while you thank God that Diana, growing inside you, precludes you from that humiliation. If God had not already been established, Arthur would have invented Him.
    When Diana is three months old, Arthur is sitting in his nichair after church. You are cooking. Diana is crying and Arthur is reading titbits out of the newspaper aloud. The sauce is getting lumpy. You decide never to go to church again.
    ‘What?’ says Arthur, later, when Diana is quiet and the washing-up finished.
    ‘I don’t believe in it any more,’ you tell him.
    ‘But our child. Our... our civilization.’
    ‘I’m sorry. It seems ridiculous to me.’
    He looks at you as if you have shot him. His face runs to wrinkles with the effort of comprehension.
    ‘You go on your knees to pray,’ you tell him. ‘And you go on your knees for sex.’
    Arthur’s lips turn blue. He lurches to his feet and rushes over to the draining board, taking you by the shoulders. You cannot imagine what has happened for a moment. You see his arm go back and the flash of his fist and then you are on the floor and the coffee cups are breaking around you and your eye is beginning to close. The room is swimming, and you look up at Arthur who has become huge, standing astride you, looking down, his fists clenched by his side.
    ‘Don’t talk to me like that again,’ he says. He thunders out of the room, and you reach for the door of the cupboard to pull yourself up. You do not know what you have said. You had only begun your speech about knees. He should have let you get to the part about washing the floor.
    You hear her for the first time. You turn on the radio and there she is. She sings, ‘I Don’t Know If I’m Coming Or Going’. You walk out of the house with her name on your bps. That is all you have. You don’t know she is a black woman. You don’t know she is dead. You don’t know that her voice will haunt you for the rest of your life. Lady Day. You will name your son after her.
    The trouble with Arthur was his need for violence. He was the son of a miner. He had been in that war. It was not easy for him. He could never be sorry about it. There was always justification. Violence to him was a kind of love. And you were his wife. And he loved you. In his way.
    And you loved him. And you did love him, Dora, in spite of the beatings. It wasn’t as if