Walking with Ghosts

Mister Normal, Sam thought. No distinguishing marks or tics. Little body language. In a line-up you’d walk right past him. Everybody’s brother and son.
    I want to keep him alive. Sam remembered saying exactly that about Donna after she was mown down by the drunk driver. ‘I want to keep her alive,’ he’d say, and people would think he meant he wanted to keep her alive in his mind, not let the image of her slip away. But he didn’t mean that at all. He meant something much more literal, something that slipped away between the words. It was during that period, when he wanted to keep Donna alive, that he began the serious drinking.
    ‘I think I know what you mean,’ he said.
    Billy, William was going to laugh. He’d heard it before and he knew it to be hollow. But something of the truth or the reality of Sam’s words got to him. He suppressed the laugh. He looked straight ahead of him for several seconds, not moving, apart from a slight flexing in his hands. Then he said, ‘If I could I would like to rewrite my life story.’
    ‘That’s not possible,’ Sam said. ‘But it might be possible to interpret it a different way.’
    ‘I’ll talk to you,’ William said. ‘I won’t see Dora, but I’ll talk to you. So long as you realize that no voice can reach me.’
     

32
     
    A call from Celia. ‘Dora, are you still living in that enormous house by yourself? Sam Turner’s looking for somewhere to stay temporarily. Why don’t you offer him a room?’ Remember, Dora? Celia needs her spare room for her niece.
    And two days later a lost white man in a white suit on your doorstep. ‘Hello, Dora. Celia said—’
    ‘Yes, come in. You can have Billy’s old room.’
    ‘I hope it’s all right,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to crash in if it’s not convenient.’
    You don’t want a permanent lodger. You make that clear from the beginning. A few weeks will be OK. Until he can find something.
    He brings a quietness into the house. For some weeks now you have been tired. All the time you are tired. In the morning it is an effort to get out of bed. You trudge through the days. At night you lie awake, staring at the ceiling.
    Three days after Sam comes to live in your house you find the first egg on the underside of your left breast. You are lying in bed in the morning. You listen to Sam leaving his room and going downstairs to make coffee. The egg slips to one side as your fingers travel up towards the nipple. It is not a sparrow’s egg, not the smallest possible egg; it is a blackbird’s egg, embedded in the fat of your breast, close to the surface. Your skin begins to crawl, and a dank coldness grips you from inside. The egg is not perfect; it is almost Perfect, but there is a ridge towards the narrow end. A mother blackbird sat on this egg would be worried.
    You sit up and dress. You decide to ignore it. You go downstairs and drink coffee with Sam.
    He prepares a meal for himself in the evening, and offers to make it for you as well. Why not, you think, he does not pay that much rent.
    The house slowly grows brighter. Sam has a meal ready when you finish teaching. During the day he takes over the running of the house, does the washing, tidies up the garden. He spends two days repairing the cupboard doors in the kitchen. The hinges have been hanging off for years. He suggests repainting the hallway, brings home colour cards for you to look at. After the meal you spend two hours together pondering the relative merits of Coral Pink and Astley Hue.
    Despite yourself you find yourself watching the clock during the day, waiting for the time you will return home. And it is not the house that calls you, Dora. It is definitely not the house. Through that autumn, after the hall is repainted, you walk together in the park. He tells you of his time in London and California, about his first wife, Donna, and his daughter, Bronte. You tell him about your job, about the intrigues of the department.
    He plays you his Dylan songs and you listen to them, hear what he hears. You play him Lady Day, and he ends up playing her himself. Especially the Gershwin, ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me’. He plays it over and over again because he’s a sensualist.
    The egg in your breast does not go away. You ignore it for a while, but you cannot forget it. You decide to tell Sam, work yourself into a state, and are then struck dumb in the breakfast room. It is impossible to look him in the eye. He places his hand on your