Walking with Ghosts

sat there and they waited. They lived in their houses, little boxes, side by side, stretching like ribbons along drab or twee roads. Even their clothes were the same, their crimplenes and their nylons and mixed fibres. How could you pick one of them out and say you found him or her attractive?
    They weren’t attractive. Not at all. They were ugly.
    Ugly and pointless.
    Getting born, eating, fucking, and dying.
    Physical actions taking place in a vacuum, an impenetrable silence.
    She rang the doorbell a couple of times, then she stood back and looked up at the house. After a few minutes she went around the back. William’s first thought was to follow her. He could stride over the road and down by the side of the house. Charles Hopper wasn’t at home, he knew that, because Charles Hopper was in a chest back at William’s house. So the woman, the private detective, would be alone now around the back of Charles’ house. No one at home. The house deserted, quiet. He could come up behind her, take her by the throat, shake the life out of her. Punish her.
    But for what?
    William didn’t move. Why should he punish this woman? She wasn’t Dora. She was no one. Nothing.
    And yet, there was a reason. Otherwise William would not have followed her. Now it was like being in a dream. The day had set itself up around him, it had placed him at the centre of the scene, painted in Charles Hopper’s house provided the private detective. Somehow the opportunity had arisen to get rid of this woman detective, and deep within William there was a voice nudging him towards the conflict. Take her. Take the woman. Do it.
    And he would do it, too. If he could remember why.
    If she was Dora he wouldn’t hesitate. But something was wrong. Dora was a mother, and this woman wasn’t. Even that wasn’t clear in William’s mind. He didn’t know if this woman was a mother or not. And it was important to know that. If she wasn’t a mother there would be no point in taking out her eyes.
    The woman called Marie Dickens left Charles Hopper’s house. Suddenly she was back on the street and walking towards the town. William followed.
    He followed her home. He watched her take a key from her pocket and put it into the lock of the door of her house by the river. He sat on the grass verge about eighty metres away and waited, watching her house. After an hour a man arrived. A man with a raggedy beard. The man tried the door, but it was locked. The man knocked on the door lightly, twice, and Marie Dickens opened the door and let the man with the beard in.
    The wind came back again. Gusting along the river and the bank so that birds wheeled in huge arcs to maintain their positions. For a few moments William thought it was out of control, a tempest, a hurricane, he narrowed his eyes and grabbed hold of the sods of grass. But it blew itself out as quickly as it had arrived. There was a puff and a sniffle and a catching of the breath and the earth returned to its previous calm.
    William went home to his house in St Mary’s. While he’d been sitting on the grass verge by the river he’d managed to clear his head. Now he was tired, weary, and felt that if he got on to his bed he’d fall asleep. But he didn’t want to do that. He wanted to sort out what had happened to him this morning.
    There were two things he had to do. The first thing was to kill Dora. William smiled. Not literally, of course. If he killed his mother he would be arrested by the police and locked away. Everyone would know, the whole world would know that he had done it, and if there was a court case they would all know why he had done it. For his father. Revenge for his father. But then they would all forget. Within weeks, days even, the world would forget. William would be locked away, Dora and his father would be dead, and there would be no one to remember. The newspapers, the television, all the reporters would find another story. Reality would be swamped by illusion.
    So that was clear, then. That’s what he had to do. Kill Dora, over and over again. He had to find a suitable stand-in. She had to be similar to Dora, that’s all. Not identical. William was a make-up artist. He could take any woman and transform her into Dora. Provided she was around the right age, and that she had the right kind of experience. She had to be a mother.
    Theatre.
    All the world’s a stage.
    The play’s the thing. The play allows the artist to subjugate his desires. It is a safety valve. Dora