Walking with Ghosts

window. He has left the door open so you can hear Lady Day singing, ‘I’ll Get By As Long As I Have You’. Johnny Hodges’ alto saxophone oozing a warm, refined balm. When the song is finished Sam looks up into your eyes. ‘It isn’t worth worrying about, Dora,’ he says. ‘It’s all in the past.’
    You stick a smile on your face and ruffle his hair. The past, the present, it is all the same to you. The future, too. Your life is not going to continue for long. The past and the present, they are the only realities, and they are impossible to separate.
    ‘Are you here?’ he asks.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘With me?’
    ‘Yes, Sam. I’m here with you.’ The past is not a forbidden country. It is familiar territory. It is not a landscape you love, Dora, but it is a landscape you know. The present is unknown. It is the land in which Sam is king, and in which you feel yourself a guest. He loves you, this Sam. You have no doubt about that, and you are happy to be his guest. Only, only... you cannot help feeling that happiness has come too late. If he had arrived ten years earlier you would not have been a guest, you would have been a queen.
    He twists the ring on your finger. ‘You remember Diana’s coming today?’ he says.
    ‘Oh.’ You don’t remember, Dora. You don’t know what day it is. You who knew everything. Now you think about it, there is a vague memory. Sam will be going to work; and Diana will come to make sure you don’t fall out of bed.
    ‘It’s Geordie’s birthday.’ You bite your tongue as the words leave your lips. It is not Geordie’s birthday.
    Sam smiles and shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ll be seeing Geordie, but it’s not his birthday.’
    ‘Yes, of course.’ You remember now. Geordie’s birthday was a long time ago. It was in the spring. You went for a walk with him and Janet and Sam in the park. Now it is autumn, soon to be winter. Saturday. Something always happens on Saturday.
    You close your eyes and put one foot into the world of sleep. This is as close as you get these days. In the real world (if it is real) Sam releases your hand and gets to his feet. You are aware of him standing over you, and though your eyes are closed you can see the expression on his face. It is an expression of tenderness. It is an expression that streams out of him and into you, that settles on the surfaces of your body and seeps through the pores and into the bloodstream, your bones, into every crevice of your body, and warms you.
    He stands still while part of you drinks in his life forces, and the other half of you walks in dreams. Large limpets cling to your body, beneath the skin. As you take strength from Sam, they appropriate it, using it for themselves. They suck you dry, becoming fatter and firmer while you become thinner, frailer; they light up like beacons, illuminating the desert of your body. They have no purpose, Dora. They are insane.
    Sam moves towards the door. He stands for a few minutes, looking back at you before going downstairs. You can read his mind. He is happy that you sleep. He hopes you will gain strength and live for ever. But that is not how it will be.
    You slip into darkness and the events of your life unfold themselves in reverse order. As time regresses you become lighter and younger. Everything is reversed. You are hanging m the pear tree while Arthur brushes the flies from your eaten eyes. You are a girl in the countryside leaping a stile; you leave the ground and fly, you do not come down on the other side, your movement is arrested in the air. You leap the stile for ever and ever. You never come down. You hover in a rush of leaping skirts and legs, your head thrown back and the wind in your hair, completely free of the earth. And down below there is everyone you ever knew, alive or dead, and they look up with amazement, waiting. Waiting.
    This is your private land, Dora. Yours alone. A land you share with no one. Not even Sam. Because you have beaten the limpets and the eggs. They might eat you alive now, they might suck the life out of you, but it will do them no good, because they cannot live without you. When they take the last ounce of strength, you will be released. Then there will be Arthur again, quiet and repentant; your mother writing the history of the stars, your father with his yellow skin, and Dylan Thomas, too, sucking figs. You will be separated no longer, not even from Sam. He will remain behind, but you will wait for him beyond