Walking with Ghosts

her shaking hands. ‘Dora. What is it?’
    ‘Aghhhhh.’ The bar is cold and hot, with all the compassion of the industrial revolution. It drags your eyes from their sockets; sends a line of spittle dribbling along your jaw. It sticks, lodges in a thick crevice of muscle and nerve from the pit of your left arm to the dead inside of your right hip. It is an old axle, rusted and heavy, as taut as Arthur’s rope.
    ‘Hang on, Dora. I’ll get Sam.’
    ‘Dear God.’ Outside, a squall of wind whips the leaves along the avenue. A car speeds past, too fast. Ignore the pain. Try to ignore it. Short breaths. That’s better. Short, fast, tiny breaths. In out, in out, in out. There are still leaves on the tree.
    Sam crosses the room in two strides, wiping his hands on the front of his T-shirt. His face is drawn. Your eyes leap towards him. ‘I’m going to carry you over to the bed,’ he
    says.
    In out, in out, in out. ‘No. Don’t touch me.’ Keep the breathing going. ‘It’s an iron bar, Sam. Right through me.’
    He puts his arms under you. ‘You’ll rest better in the bed,’ he says. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle.’
    You are flying, Dora. Flying through the air. You look back at the window, the leaves in the street, the solitary trees. A quick, last glimpse before you are lowered to the bed. The bar shifts inside you, settles, pushes your jaw and neck to the left, hard against the pillow.
    ‘How’s that?’
    ‘No.’ You shake your head.
    Sam moves you over on your side and the bar passes out of focus. The bar does not go away, it lies with a degree of acceptable discomfort inside you.
    In out, in out, in out. ‘OK.’ It’s OK if you don’t move. Keep up the breathing. ‘Get her out of here.’ Diana is hovering in the doorway. She shouldn’t see this. Sam should get her out of here.
    ‘No, Dora. I’m staying.’ She comes forward, places a hand on the quilt. ‘I’m not a baby. I want to be here.’
    You try a deeper breath and let it whistle out through your teeth. There’s no point arguing with Diana. She’s going to stay.
    Dear God, Dora. You have no strength now. Your eyes close. The room is silent. Sam and Diana recede. Smiling Smiley scowls down at you from the past. He has found another woman.
    A woman? He has found a girl, one of his students, twenty years old. You are forty-one. No contest. Experience counts for nothing. Smiley is on a quest for innocence. He discards his cravats; buys a pair of suede shoes, slip-ons, without laces.
    His girl is called Sally Bowles. She has never heard of Isherwood. She is a kid. She watches you with sharpened teeth. She smiles every minute of the day, maliciously. She has caught a big fat Smiley fly in her silken web. She is the happiest, the hungriest, the most popular girl on campus. A witch-woman, sick with her own power. Smiley tells you she carries contraceptives in her saddle bag. And you, Dora? You don’t even have a bike.
    Smiley lasted for ever. He was always there. Part of the fixtures, until he was gone. And then there was you, Dora. You and Diana and Billy. And no one else.
    Diana rampaged through the house like a wild thing. It was your fault, Dora. It was all your fault. You had lost him- Lost him for yourself, and lost him for Diana. It was the Arthur story all over again. You were not grasping enough. You should have pinned him down when you had the chance. Now it is too late. He has gone to Sally Bowles.
    He has gone to Sally Bowles and you indulge yourself in a year or more of enforced domesticity. You spend time with your children, you take them out at the weekends, you read to them, you buy them new clothes and alter the old ones. You make dresses for Diana, sprawling over the carpet with paper patterns, cutting, sewing, rainbow silks and satins. The three of you toddle off down the avenue to the theatre, a box of Cadbury’s Bourneville Selection passing to and fro in the dark. You try everything to make it feel like an ordinary family, a normal family. But there is no man there, only the ghost of one. The father of your children strung himself from the pear tree. You cannot alter it, Dora. You are different. Billy and Diana are different. They know what people say. They take the jibes from the other kids at school. Billy screams out in his sleep. Diana never speaks about it in words of more than one syllable.
    You were all born a generation too early. What was acceptable in 1990, and what will be commonplace at the turn