Walking with Ghosts

his blood to run cold.
    There were people in the world who could slow their heart rate to a fraction of its normal activity. Some of the Brahmin holy men could wind it right down to a few beats a minute. William’s heart, at rest, was normally sixty-four beats a minute, but in his morning sessions he could get it down to under forty. He could control it.
    He could begin to feel how his father had felt.
    William had first experienced the cold, real cold, when he had touched his father that day they took him down from the tree. His mother had taken them upstairs, William and his big sister, left them in the large front bedroom while she went to a neighbour’s house for help. His sister had said they must stay there, but William wanted to be with his father. ‘You can’t make me stay,’ he’d told her. ‘You’re only ten, and you’re a girl.’
    ‘Daddy’s dead,’ his sister had said. ‘We’ll never see him again.’
    William shook her off and went down to the garden Daddy was there, swinging on the tree, gently, back and forth, swaying. He didn’t answer when William spoke to him. Daddy didn’t say anything, but he knew William was there, and he was glad they’d come back. He was much fatter than William remembered. It was as if he was full of air, like a huge tyre that had been blown up too much. He was still William’s father, but a person with all that air inside them might burst.
    What it was, he was stuck up there in the tree. The rope around his neck was keeping him from speaking. A person with a rope around their neck, they wouldn’t be able to speak, even if they wanted to. And the rope was what was keeping all the air inside. Like with a balloon, you tied string around it to keep the air in, didn’t you? Yes, or you tied a knot in it.
    And if the rope was very tight, then a person wouldn’t be able to undo it all by themself. Of course they wouldn’t. They’d need help.
    William knew if it was him up in the tree, William up there with a rope around his neck so tight he couldn’t speak, then Daddy would get a ladder or a chair or something and climb up and help him get the rope off his neck. There was a chair on the grass. One of the new chairs out of the kitchen, which wasn’t supposed to be outside. And it certainly wasn’t supposed to be kicked over in the grass. William righted it and climbed up on to the seat, but even when he stood on tiptoe he couldn’t reach higher than his father’s knees.
    He ran down to the garden shed and pushed at the door. Locked. He went back to the house and got his mother’s stepladder from the laundry, set it up under the swaying feet of his father. The stepladder wasn’t firm on the lawn under the pear tree, it wobbled as he got higher. The top step of the ladder brought William’s head level with his father’s waist. Even if he stretched to his full height he couldn’t reach the rope. He would have to climb the tree itself, crawl out on the branch above his father’s head. Or, and a new bought came into his mind, he could climb up his father’s body. Sit on his shoulders like he used to before they went away- That was one of the things he missed when his mother took them away. Sitting on his daddy’s shoulders while his daddy pranced around on the grass. It felt like you could fall off any minute and really hurt yourself, but you knew that Daddy would never let you fall. So it was dangerous and safe all at the same time, made you squeal and laugh at the top of your voice.
    William grasped hold of Daddy’s belt and kicked off. The stepladder clattered over on to the grass. The two of them swung from side to side together, and William wrapped his legs around Daddy’s waist. He pulled himself higher by grasping his father’s lapel, and eventually he got his foot onto the buckle of Daddy’s belt, and from there it was easy enough to get up to his shoulders. And easy to sit there as well, because he could hold the rope as well as his father’s head.
    But he couldn’t loosen the rope. He couldn’t unpick the knots. Once William had managed to unpick a knot in his shoelaces, and that had been difficult, had taken him nearly an hour. But the knots on the rope around Daddy’s neck were much tighter than shoelace knots. It was going to be terribly difficult to untie knots like these. If shoelace knots took a whole hour, then knots like the ones around Daddy’s neck might take years and years and years.
    It was then that he felt the cold.