Walking with Ghosts

your mouth. The cold water is like light, it sends messages of hope to every nerve in your body. You do not tell him when you have had enough, you do not flicker your eyes or alter the tempo of your breath. He takes the sponge away. He knows.
    You can feel Geordie’s dog, Barney, settled at the end of the bed, by your feet. And you wonder about Geordie. Where he is, what he’s doing.
    Your fingers move on the quilt and Sam takes your hand in his own and you hope he can see the smile that is like a song in your blood, and any doubts you might have sink away, down through the mattress, down further through the floor, as his chuckle unfolds itself into the room.
    ‘It’s past, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘You’re feeling better.’
    You move your lips and he gives you the sponge again, and finally you can speak: ‘What time is it?’
    ‘Four o’clock. The night is young.’ He chuckles again. ‘Can you sleep now?’
    ‘Where’s Geordie?’ you ask.
    ‘At home in bed. It’s late.’
    You close your eyes. Yes, you can sleep. You let yourself slip away. Sam is holding your hand. He has a grip of you. It is four o’clock in the morning. You are no longer confused. You are grateful.
     
    As a part of history, you are connected with events and people of the past. On the day you were born Rudolf Hess invaded Scotland by parachute; clothes rationing was already in force. The previous year the British army was evacuated from Dunkirk, three hundred and thirty-five thousand, four hundred and ninety men huddled on the beach under constant attack; and the following year the siege of Leningrad was lifted. Lady Day had her first taste of hard drugs. You were destined for history.
    Your mother was a historian, a secret historian. Her account of the Great War is still among your papers in the bureau. You have failed to edit it for more than thirty years. The truth is, you never wanted to edit it because it was hers. You were jealous of her, as she was jealous of you. Her only achievement, as far as you are concerned, is that she was a cousin of Dylan Thomas (and your earliest memory is of being kissed by him).
    ‘I was kissed by Dylan Thomas,’ you have told almost everyone you ever met. ‘He went down on one knee and kissed me on the cheek. I remember being tickled by a day’s growth of beard, and the smell of figs on his breath. He was a relative on my mother’s side, somewhat removed, but he visited us when he was in the neighbourhood.’ You have been a snob about that.
    In truth, you don’t know if you remember it or not. You don’t know if you remember Dylan Thomas, or if what you remember is your mother’s memory. Because she told everyone the same story: ‘Dylan Thomas kissed Dora, you know. She was small at the time, but she still remembers, don’t you, Dora? His bristles and a figgy smell, typical childhood observations. He was my cousin, you know, a regular visitor whenever he was in Wales.’ You are like your mother. You have become more like your mother as you have grown older. The last ten years have been a nightmare in that respect. You would not have believed it possible. You feel like her. You turn your head when someone speaks and in a flash you recognize the gesture. It is your mother turning her head. She lives in the tone of your voice. Your characteristics, gestures, inflections of speech, they are all inherited. You are reverting to form. Everything you rejected, burned, left behind; it is all reconstituting itself. You have not escaped. You have run away, but you have not escaped.
    You laugh because you can see now what you were running from. It is life’s oldest comedy. Your mother was not so bad. She was like you. A Swansea girl, born and bred. When you laugh at her you are laughing at yourself.
    You were special. You were a special child born into a special family. A respectable family. A middle-class family. You had advantages. The house had more rooms than people. A mile away the working classes lived in black shams lit by candles. Further away still lived the miners who communicated in grunts. The miners who lived on roots, and who made Mother tug you into her skirts when they passed in the street.
    Already when Dylan Thomas published Deaths and Entrances you could read and write and converse about the world, you were more knowledgeable and wise than any miner or any miner’s son or daughter. You told all Mother’s visitors about the Sydney Harbour Bridge. ‘A triumph of