Walking with Ghosts

wonder what it would be like to walk in a storm. To have that hard rain in your face; to watch the drops bouncing off the pavement; and return home dripping, your hair in rat’s tails, your neck and back sodden. You could ask Sam or Diana to open the window, but it would be a waste of breath. ‘Shall I lift you?’ Sam asks. He places his hand beneath your head. ‘Lean on my shoulder.’
    You shake your head. You do not want to disturb the iron bar. To lean on Sam’s shoulder would be good, but time is running out. You do not want more pain. He holds the glass to your lips and the liquid trickles into your mouth. ‘Not long, now,’ he says. ‘The doctor will be here soon.’
    The doctor. That’s what happens next. You are still here in the physical world. You lose track of time and space. Only one thing you know. As you get older less and less happens more and more often.
    Sam holds the glass to your lips, but this time the liquid trickles from your mouth. You hear yourself making a sucking sound, but this simple act, drinking, is beyond you. You catch concern in Sam’s eyes as he watches the droplets clinging to your chin.
    You’re dribbling, Dora.
    And Sam’s watching.
    Dribbling.
    Like Billy did after Arthur died.
    He began bed-wetting. He’d sit and look at you while he soiled his pants. Loss offers opportunities of maturity or regression. For you and for Diana the loss of Arthur meant a kind of maturity. But for Billy it was different. The death of his father revealed an unequivocal opportunity for regression. Because Billy didn’t grieve, Dora. You knew he should grieve, and you tried to make him.
    But he wanted to suffer. His father’s life had gone. Now Billy seemed to want a living death.
    ‘I want to give Daddy his eyes back.’ This child, this tiny son of yours looks at you from his bed, and he says that. I want to give Daddy his eyes back. You go to him. You enfold him in your arms, crush him to your breast. Because he is taking on more than his scrap of a soul will ever manage to carry. He has too much knowledge, Dora. The weight of it will swamp him.
    You watch anger, hostility, and guilt growing in the child. You explain over and over again that it is not his fault, that Arthur loved him, but that Arthur’s pain was too much to bear.
    Billy’s eyes glaze over.
    From time to time the child’s anger is directed against his dead father. He cries out in his sleep: ‘Daddy, don’t leave me.’ But when he wakes he is ambivalent about Arthur and Arthur’s death. He wants to carry the weight. And he wants to put it down.
    Ambivalence is guilt.
    As he grows, the guilt grows along with him, sometimes disproportionately. It is always there, in his eyes. He looks at the floor. He doesn’t engage your eyes or the eyes of his sister. In an end-of-term report his Geography teacher mentions this strange phenomenon. Throughout the length of the period I have had to teach this child, he has never looked me in the eye. It is as if the only eyes he engages are the eyes of Arthur, the eyes that have been eaten by the birds. He thinks about his father. He thinks about what was said, and what was not said. And he feels, increasingly, that he can only achieve relief for his guilt by paying restitution for the rest of his life. That’s what he means when he says: ‘I want to give Daddy his eyes back.’
    He has lost his father, and nothing will ever replace that loss.
    The best he can do is idealize the man. Idealize him and identify with him. And as Billy grows, you watch him become more and more like Arthur. Every day there is another facet of his father’s character being reborn in Billy.
    The child grows, and as he grows a kind of sickness grows with him.
    The only person in the world who could have stopped that happening, Dora, is you. And you failed.
    You failed because, as he got older, Billy wanted you to be clean, good, and hardworking, like the idealized version of his father, and he told you so. And you, Dora. God forgive you, but you didn’t want those things. You wanted to live. That placed you at a distance from your son. He couldn’t hear what you had to say. You weren’t a proper mother; you were greedy, bad, and sexual.
    You wished on the moon.
     
    What happened there?
    ‘You were sick,’ Sam tells you.
    There is that stench of vomit. You can taste it on your lips. Sam and Diana have changed the pillow and the sheet.
    Weary.
    You want to talk to Sam but you are too weary.