Walking with Ghosts

with a song.
    In another second-hand shop he’d found the picture of the sailing ship. And the pens and the penholder almost completed the room. There were some books missing, books, the titles of which had gone from his memory. His father had had some large books, some of them so big that Billy, the child, had been unable to lift them.
    For the carpet he had again had to use a dealer. It was Polish, with bold arabesques and long curved serrated leaves in reds and blues. Called Polish, but probably made, the dealer had told him, in Istanbul, back when it was Constantinople. An original would have been impossible to find, and would have cost more than a small country. But the dealer knew a woman who could make up a passable copy for three hundred pounds.
    Black woman. She spoke with a Leeds accent but lived out at Escrick with her three children. She’d trained as an interior designer, but had turned to working with her hands. William couldn’t remember her name now, but he could remember her face, and that she was thirty-five years old. He’d remember her name later.
    He got a headache after he’d met her. An early indication that she was like Dora.
    The same woman had decorated the room for him. The wallpaper that his father had used was no longer available. It was lemon coloured, with tiny blue florets, and the woman had mixed pigment and painted directly on to the wall. For a while William had not been happy with it, because he knew it wasn’t wallpaper. But eventually he forgot about it, and now it felt exactly as he remembered the room when his father was still alive.
    And there were times, more and more recently, when his father was there in the room. It was a ghostly presence, but none the less real for that. He couldn’t see his father when he was in the room. But he could feel him. ‘It makes me feel cold,’ he told himself, trying to analyse it. ‘Yet sustains me.’
    That room and the attic room were the only furnished rooms in the house. William lived in the attic. The remainder of the house was a wasteland. There was a kitchen downstairs, somewhere to heat water or fry sausages, but it was not a pleasant place to be.
    William sat in the room he had furnished like his father’s study when he was depressed, or when he wanted to feel close to his father, or when he needed to think. Today he needed to think over what Sam Turner had said to him. And he needed to think about his mother.
    She was going to die at last. It was a flaw in the universe that she had managed to live so long after she had caused his father to die. Now, if he could believe what Sam Turner had told him, Dora was going to die soon. It would be good when she died. The world would be a better place. When he was still a child, living at home with Dora and his sister, Billy was the smallest. He was the smallest in the house, and he was the smallest at school. The smallness made him angry. And when he felt his anger it made him physically bigger and powerful. When that happened he could make Dora disappear, and Daddy come to life.
    Now, if she died soon, that would become a reality. She would disappear from life. And if she disappeared from life his father would find it possible to live. Because they were opposites, those two. They had always been opposites. She was stupid, aggressive and intrusive. Billy, as a child, after the death of his father, had hated her, and now William, the man, hated her. His father had been loving, gentle, intelligent, and interesting. She should have died, and his father should have been the survivor. That would have made sense, had meaning. Now, after all these years, meaning was coming back?
    William had told Sam Turner about the funeral. He’d wanted to show Turner what kind of woman Dora was, that was one thing. But he’d also felt able to talk to the man. He’d never see Dora again, but it was useful to have a go-between, then at least she’d know that William hadn’t forgiven her.
    Funeral? Fiasco, more like.
    Dora was not going to take Billy with her. She and Diana were going to go to the burial alone, and leave Billy at home with a neighbour. But Billy wouldn’t hear of it. He was going to be there, to listen to the service, to sing the hymns. To watch his father being sent up to heaven, to be there with the angels.
    ‘Billy, there won’t be any hymns,’ Dora had told him.
    ‘I don’t care. I want to go.’
    The three of them left the house at ten o’clock that morning. There was a