Walking with Ghosts

shoulder. ‘Something wrong, Dora?’
    ‘No.’ You have not yet fully recognized this egg in your breast. You have not yet accepted it yourself. It is too early to tell the world.
    ‘Sure?’ He lifts your chin towards him, forcing you to engage his eyes.
    ‘It’s nothing. I feel queasy.’
    ‘Might be the beginning of a cold,’ he says. ‘Have a day in bed.’
    But you get up, Dora. Go about the day as normal. Try to ignore it. If you ignore it it might go away.
    The next day it has grown again. It grows every day. It is still an egg, but larger, larger than a blackbird could lay. You have to tell Sam now; the egg is too large for you to cope with alone. He explores it with gentle fingers, and it slips away from him as it slipped away from you. A cloud envelops his features as he tries to locate it again. You hold your breath, waiting for his verdict, hoping he will explain it away.
    ‘It might not be serious,’ he says. ‘You’d better let the doctor see it.’ You two are alone together under heaven. There is no explaining an almost perfect egg in your breast. Sam knows what it is. You know what it is, but even after breathing the word to yourself, after naming it, it is still not explained. It is not enough to know what it is, you need to know why.
    But no one will tell you why, Dora. You join the unconscious merry-go-round of doctors, specialists, X-ray technicians. ‘Don’t worry.’ That is the advice they have. ‘Don’t worry, these breast lumps are often non-malignant.’
    They cut it out.
    Sam takes you to the Radium Hospital and the two of you are lost in a maze of wards and corridors. Everyone is dying, the walls are porous, impregnated with hopelessness. The eyes of the patients no longer see. You are one of them, Dora. You will be welcomed here. Sam will go home, and you will remain. Sam will come for an hour every day while you grow weaker. You will take the treatment and vomit, the foundations of your face will crumble away and Sam will pretend not to notice. Nuclear science will gain an infinitesimal gram of understanding. And then you will die.
    As you walk the corridors with Sam looking for the Reception Ward, he grips your hand tighter. You feel his nails digging into the heel of your hand.
    You imagine what it would be like if the tables were reversed. If you were going back home without Sam. If y0ll were, a few minutes from now, going to leave him here and return to your life in the avenue alone.
    ‘Excuse me,’ Sam asks a man with a concentration camp in his eyes. ‘The Reception Ward?’
    Your legs stiffen, Dora. You lead Sam to a side door, through it, and out into the gardens. You walk away from the building, and Sam follows, still hanging on to your hand. He does not ask what is happening. The buildings and the garden fan out behind you, and you train your eyes on the horizon, walking towards it, a thin line dividing earth and sky.
    After some time Sam begins to laugh. You have climbed another fence and are struggling across a ploughed field on a hillside. Sam trips over a furrow and rolls about laughing. ‘Do you think this is the right way?’ he asks.
    You sit on a ridge of earth and look down at him. It is as if your whole body is smiling. The right way? It is the only way, Dora. It is the way you have sought all your life. The way you never expected to tread. You brush earth from Sam’s face and pull him to his feet. The light is beginning to fail, and the thin red line of the horizon has moved away from you. You still have a long way to go.
     
    The park blazes with colour. The trees riot through browns, and yellows, and golds. Squirrels take on the rush of the approaching winter, seemingly working through the nights. You wonder that with their sense of urgency they have not yet invented arc lights.
    Sam tells you about his marriage to Brenda. He does not blame the other man for the break-up. ‘It was already doomed,’ he says. ‘He just happened along at the right moment. if it hadn’t been him it would have been somebody else.’
    You do not speak about Arthur for a long time. When you finally do tell him he stops on the grass. He stands under a beech tree, fallen nuts around his feet. He watches you for a while, then he takes your hand and begins to walk again. The following weekend he brings Geordie, his young friend, and the three of you eat together. Geordie is shy, withdrawn, and dressed ridiculously in leather trousers, plastic shoes. They are running