Walking with Ghosts

faithless. Your self-respect, your dignity, they ebbed away like the murky waters of the Ouse. You submitted to Arthur’s beatings with something approaching the joy of a penitent. When his white and hairy forearms took you from behind, cutting your lungs off from the world, and the fist of his free hand pummelled your kidneys, then, and for a time afterwards, you were released from guilt. You were a Catholic during those years, Dora. You were a Catholic and Arthur was your priest.
    But your will was not broken. Every week something went into the tin. You changed your coins to notes, and the notes into higher denominations, until finally you had enough to buy a broken-down house on the banks of the River Foss. A house surrounded by factories and shaken by lorries, a house with no garden and only poky, grimed windows. A house of your own. Paradise.
    The switchboard operator put you through. Arthur had that note of impatience, something approaching anger in his voice. He didn’t like you to ring him at work.
    ‘Dora? What is it? I’m busy at the moment.’
    ‘I’ve left you.’ The line buzzed into silence.
    ‘What are you talking about, Dora? Can’t we speak about this later?’
    ‘No, Arthur. I mean it. I’ve left the house. It’s no good trying to find me. I’ve only taken what’s mine, or what the children will need. Goodbye.’
    ‘Dora—’
    You have taken little. Your small collection of records by Lady Day. ‘Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off’.
    ‘Dora-’
    You put the telephone down. Guilt is tangled with relief and another, wilder, emotion. Irresponsibility? You do not stop to analyse your feelings. You are liberated. Free. You have released yourself. You walk along the narrow, grey streets of your new neighbourhood, Diana and Billy at your side. There is a smell of cement and foam rubber in the air. Diana has something in her eye and wants to go home, but to her proper home, where she lives with Daddy. Billy wants to look at the boats on the river. You take in great gulps of air and sand, and you swallow them down.
     

8
     
    William wondered if he was going off. A large black bruise had formed itself on his inner right thigh and it was the middle of the night and he was in the street where Dora lived. It was dry but there was the ghost of a storm lingering in the air.
    Going off. It was a phrase he’d come across in a magazine called Harpers & Queen, which he’d found abandoned in the launderette. An article about serial killers. They killed to a pattern, but all the time there was a psychosis growing inside their minds, and eventually the psychosis took over the pattern and they lost it. They went off. Killed randomly, indiscriminately.
    William had read the magazine from cover to cover. He’d started with the article about serial killers, then he’d read an article about the best schools for posh people’s children. There were so many articles he couldn’t remember them all. One about Rolex watches, how the cases were made out of a single piece of metal. Another about how at Christmas a bottle of Chanel No. 5 is sold every five seconds. He’d read all the adverts for skin clinics and cosmetic surgery, for introduction agencies and body-management clinics, home gyms and health farms. In this magazine you could find everything you’d never need, from clowns to stretch limousines.
    But he’d come back to the article on serial killers and read it again. He’d torn those pages out of the magazine and taken them home with him. The other articles held you for a moment, but this one was compulsive.
    Going off.
    A strange expression. Not like going off on holiday. Not like that at all.
    William only came here in the middle of the night. For the last weeks - was it months? - there had been a light in her room. It was as if she didn’t sleep. As if she sat up all night waiting for someone to release her.
    He went around the back of the house and climbed over the wall into the garden. The shed was still there, on his right. The fruit bushes in the centre of the garden, and the climbing rose on the trellis. Up near the house was the pear tree, and William walked underneath it and leaned against its sturdy trunk.
    He was shaking, but soon regained control of his body, forced it to become still. His will-power dominated flesh and blood, extinguished emotion. An owl began to hoot but shut down in mid call. William ruled the night. The natural world quivered.
    He stood in silence. Thoughts of