Walking with Ghosts

involved himself, Geordie and Marie could handle it easily enough.
    Two weeks, maybe two and a half. He’d be able to spend more time with Dora.
     
    It would have been too complicated to go into with Jill Sheridan, but Dora, Sam’s wife, had known the murdered woman. They hadn’t been close, but Dora had been upset when India Blake had disappeared, and shocked when the dead body was discovered. Dora had followed the case closely, sometimes reading extracts from the newspapers to Sam when he got home in the evenings.
    He stopped in at Betty’s for coffee instead of going straight to the office. Sam was still surprised that he was married at all. He’d watched himself getting closer to Dora, talked himself out of it a dozen times, then watched himself making up his mind to go through with it. He and she had recognized the lawlessness in each other. That’s what they called it. Whatever it was, they shared a bond.
    And now she was falling apart.
     
    He had watched his wife at night rowing out into a fjord. Before the disease took her strength, they had stayed in a wooden cabin near Tromsø, courtesy of a satisfied client. He remembered her strength. The water was slate grey, with a faint touch of blue. There was a line of silhouetted trees on the opposite bank, edged with scarlet, but fading out into pink and blue. No sound. Total silence. She’d pulled away from the shore with strong, rhythmical strokes. Sculling across the glassy surface of the water. She was a silhouette. In the distance an oyster catcher had called out in the wilderness.
     

2
     
    You were a child then. You were a girl in pigtails, thin, your ribs and collar bones sticking out of you like primitive scaffolding. You did not fit. And they told you over and over that you did not fit. And you believed them, because they had all the answers, and even if they had not told you you would still have known that you did not fit, because they all did fit, and you were different. Not fit to ... Not fit for...
    What was it all about? That time? Your childhood? You should be able to make sense of it. You feel a deep need to look there for the meaning which has reverberated throughout your life. The meaning, or the lack of meaning.
    You knew he was dying. He had been dying for as long as you could remember. They took you into a curtained room and pushed you towards his bed, and he was your father, your dying father, and he was thinner than you. Badly shaved, prickly and yellow, with hollow jaws, and stinking breath and long gnarled fingers with calloused nails that should have been shorter, and you had to let him hold your hand and go so close that it looked as though you kissed his cheek. Though you never kissed him. Never once; only brushed your lips so close to his face that your heart thumped against your flimsy ribcage. My God, Father, you think now. If you’d known, if it had been possible for you to know then what you know now, then you would have kissed his lips. His dry, flaking lips. And he would not have died so soon, for your lips then were like a knot of juicy grapes, the spittle of the vine. And your lips now are like his were then, and you are kept alive by love.
    You are confused. You are grateful, but you are confused. The world has gone through so many contortions. And it is not because you are so old. It is rather because everyone else is so young. It is because the thing that crouches inside you is so elemental, so mindless, so ageless beyond age, so weighty and cud-chewing, so liable to charge an imaginary rag. You have to keep it at peace. You have to dominate it. You are a matador. You have to pray.
    You have the facility of perfect recall. You are a daughter of the earth. You can remember the details of your mother’s womb, your reluctance to leave its warm-sea-saltiness, your horror at that first tug-of-war. Since then you have become a virtuoso of birth. Now, for as far as your eyes can see, there stretches an infinity of sand.
    Sam’s hand smoothes your brow. His two eyes are twinkling in the darkness above you, slightly out of horizontal, like Aries. It is night and you are coming back. The pains are dulled again. You have come through another tug-of-war. The desert is still there, waiting, but here in the oasis the night is cool.
    ‘There,’ he says. ‘It’s better now.’
    And you feel your head nod assent, and your lips rustle as you try to speak. Sam moves above you and you feel his fingers pressing the sponge to