Walking with Ghosts

without a poet or a philosopher. Does anybody know what we are living for?
    Sam struggled through another orange juice before Billy left the pub. Counted to twenty-five and hit the pavement behind him. There were still several people about, flitting among the Pubs and restaurants, gazing in the lighted windows of the shops. Billy took a slow, sauntering walk towards Stonegate, where he mingled with groups of tourists, and parties of drinkers outside Ye Olde Starre Inn and the Punch Bowl. A busker playing a battered guitar was insistent that he was the piano man, and, sure, he could be a movie star if he once got away from this place. Sam watched him for a full minute, then dropped a coin into his cup. The guy was really shook.
    A saxophone some place far off played.
    A table was overturned and a couple erupted into a spitting, scratching battle on the pavement. The chaos came out of nowhere. Suddenly they faced each other, talons drawn. She went for his eyes, and he brushed her aside and pushed with both hands on her chest. She staggered back, her arms flailing to maintain balance, but she was always going down. A couple of latter day knights decided to bruise her assailant’s kidneys, and a running fight developed.
    ‘A pretty piece of business,’ someone said. The crowd quickly divided into those who wanted to stay, perhaps join in the fun, and others who favoured a change of scenery. The girl who had gone down was back on her feet. She screamed something unintelligible at her boyfriend and stalked off towards Coney Street.
    Billy followed.
    Sam was not far behind.
    Maybe he wasn’t following her, just travelling in the same direction. Except he was close to her, dogging her footsteps. Not so close that she felt threatened, though she’d obviously drunk a lot, and might not have noticed him. Billy kept ten metres behind, and followed her on the same side of the street. After Coney Street she went past the fire station and eventually stood with her finger on a bell of a flat in Fishergate. Billy crossed over the road then, and stood inside a bus shelter, watching until a man answered the door and pulled her inside.
    Sam watched the watcher.
    Billy stayed inside the bus shelter for a further ten minutes. Then he made his way back across town to St Mary’s. Sam followed. They passed hopeful whores and despairing ones. Billy let himself into the house and Sam heard him locking out the world, a mortise lock, and a couple of bolts at top and bottom.
     
    Later, at home, Sam looked at a couple of photographs. Both black and white. The first showed Billy as a boy, fifteen years old. Dark eyes staring out of a white face. There was a trace of Dora there, around the mouth, but the broad forehead and the setting for those eyes were a direct gift from Arthur, the subject of the second photograph.
    Arthur was not posing. He appeared to be staring into space, unconscious, and the photographer, probably Dora, had caught him in profile. Someone else might have made something of the photograph, taken hints from the way Arthur was holding his body, diagnosed character and personality. Sam couldn’t do that. He saw a guy who’d been dead for seventeen years. Someone who’d made a final decision, decided not to pass on any more replicas of his forehead and his eyes.
    He let both photographs lie where they fell on the desk. He felt in his inside pocket for another one, and looked at that for several minutes. It was a copy of a photograph Marie had given him of India Blake. She was a truly beautiful woman. A stylish coat over a black lace blouse and a knee-length skirt. She was gazing past the photographer, at the future, wondering what it might hold, and not guessing the truth. His eyes were always drawn back to her face. The symmetry of her features. Flawless. Completely beautiful and completely dead.
     

21
     
    William threw off the covers and stretched himself out on the bed. He slept with the window open and the morning air was sharp. Glancing down along his pale body he watched the goose pimples raising themselves up to defend his borders. Mindless, the struggle for survival, cellular, molecular.
    As the dawn took its course and light slowly filtered through the curtains he felt his body temperature dropping. He didn’t move, that would be cheating. If he moved his heart would respond and send a warm rush of blood to all those peripheral regions. What William wanted was the opposite; he wanted his heart to slow down,