For the love of a ghost.

The day I came home from university for the holidays I discovered my mother living a very different life to the one I had known before. She didn’t remark on the sudden change, nor did she offer to explain how it had come about, and so the new set up slyly presented itself as an organic progression. The transition had been seamless. It was like a slide on a projector which bears no relation to any of the previous slides; inserted at that particular point by some authoritative figure who deemed it odd enough and beautiful enough to stand alone, captionless and proudly enigmatic. 

This small area where my mother now lived had only two buildings which sat on the gentle curve of a hillock at the end of a dirt track. A truly bizarre juxtapositioning of architectural styles, marrying elaborate, gothic grandeur with shy, poor humility, was hugged in by the muddy green landscape which stretched as far as the eye could see. To the left was nestled the perfect cottage. It looked dilapidated by somehow sturdy; safe in the arms of a mother who would surely nurture her child indefinitely, kept hot and sweetly cloaked in swathes of adoring ivy fingers who made thick love and strangled any allusion to the spurious nature of its birth. None of the lines were straight. Even the windows were tired eyes in their uneven circles and the walls formed bulging stomachs pushing outwards as though they couldn’t quite contain the weight of time and memory within. 

The fat of age had taken a rich and straight-backed form in the glorious castle which stood to the right. It must have been close in years to the cottage but had none of its decay, for time had served only to strengthen and beautify this majestic beast. Great walls hid the grounds from view, and turrets, towers and spires shot upwards to the sky.

I came to understand the rhythm of life there quickly. My mother and the other woman lived and worked together in the cottage, making things and selling them in a space built onto the back. I couldn’t be sure who this other woman was: another element of my mother’s new life which was never explained but to which I raised no objection. Their relationship was ambiguous to me. They could well have been married: as constant and comfortable as a pair of life-long lovers, they worked in a way I found beautiful, hands and minds turning over and over in companionable simultaneity. The humble thud of activity beat through their surroundings - a space in which looms whirred and spiral patterns swirled over walls and ceiling with mathematical precision. 

I just watched. There was nothing I could do to contribute to this quietly formidable environment of love-filled, devoted production. Nothing I could do which wouldn’t interrupt the flow of rhythmic movement. 

The space had more than the pretentious beauty of fabrics and cogs and patterns. The most calming subject of all my alienated gazing was the one thing that hadn’t changed at all: the making of bread. I watched her kneading dough, pushing it into tins, and then those into the big oven. The gorgeously warm smell of fresh bread laced the air with dozy food dew and drew customers from nowhere. They seemed to pop into the space, breathing deeply and murmuring approval. The till soaked up their cash, my mother and her woman their love, and the space those villagers from nowhere with each baking. Perhaps the wind outside soaked up the scent of bread which spilled from our windows and carried it as far as a town and its people.

Eventually I thought of a task I could perform. I began to wind up balls of wool and load them into baskets which I then placed evenly around the space. Round and round, up and over, over and over again. Soon there were so many baskets of multi-coloured wool sitting uselessly and forlornly that, pausing to take in the sight, I realised the ridiculousness of my new vocation. They were ornaments. They obeyed the symmetry of the decor, they spoke of an endless human rhythm echoed by every other item on display, and, equally, had the warmth of a perfectionist creator. But they never went; never sold. They were luscious bushes littering a sidewalk, padding out the flames of their floral neighbours but there to play an invisible role and considered unworthy of real attention. Bland to all onlookers. The flower lovers do not stop to appreciate the subtle charm of the bush. I too was an onlooker now. An onlooker ever watchful of her own craft being dismissed by uninterested innocents. My mother and her woman continued to make and sell; fill and refill, while I stood staring, cold as a statue, at my fruitless bubbles of s**t. 

Unable to bear the stillness in amongst so much quiet bustle, I decided to undo what I had done and uncreate to pass the time. Each ball of wool I took in my hands and carefully unravelled. And as I did so, I moved slowly around the space, winding a trail of colour between the baskets and all the piles, making each a throne. Clear passageways became a hazardous mess designed to trip up customers as I walked back and forth, eyes down, concentrating. I was undoing my work but making something else, spinning right under their feet this time so they couldn’t look away.

After a while I started to feel some new thing in the air. So much crawling around on my hands and knees had melted my body, low and heavy, into the floor. My nose drew my face into bread, piles of jumpers and scarves, blocks of cheese. The heat of the close ground, the things and me-the-cave, my underbelly, burnt fearfully now, for I felt the cold approaching from behind. 

It was a ghost-man. He was tall and dark-haired. I could see right through his wispy greyness but I don’t think anyone else saw him at all. Everything remained the same as it ever was: clicking to the whirr, whirring to the soft thud, softening the face of another in a friendly exchange. His airy presence only changed the feeling of space behind my body, in that part that no one else ever needed to occupy. Those eyes were slightly off. I stared: he tried to stare back, I think, but something was holding his gaze a tiny distance from mine. For that reason he was necessarily exempt from accusations. My initial indignation, tinged with fear, quickly lost its edge as his form and face increasingly pleased and comforted me. Since I never saw him move, I came to picture him sliding around the space as though pushed on invisible wheels by an invisible force. 

The first time I saw him he was way over the other side. This quiescent state of glassiness might have served to render him one more of the numerous objects littering our spatial separation if I hadn’t been so deeply ridden with disease. The disease caused by unexpected newness which often clings to the mind in spite of official rejection. I recognised him as a statue of unquestionable beauty, an ideal made as real as cold stones can make it - for the sake of centralising human adoration. The statue of physical perfection shall scoop out and squeeze your human heart, and give the pulp of weeping veins to the wind, for they cannot be kept or known to have existed. The removal of some indefinite yet essential inner part of me, then, is what may be said to characterise our first meeting, and for this reason you will understand why real feeling, the sort which returns to swill and sway on waves of thought, cannot be described here. Someone took it from me and my awareness of its absence was all that remained - though that too is a feeling, albeit in the shape of clouds or a little like the sound of noise. My body, somehow emptied, was now liable to sudden shocks, which are also composed of empty pieces. One of these shocks crashed over me the time I turned around and found myself nose to nose with the ghost-man. How close could he come? Would we merge together?

Moving slowly and awkwardly over the floor spinning my colourful web was now a mere waiting game. The longer I concentrated upon my task, face diligently pressing downwards into grainy textures, the closer he might be when I stood to turn. And then the heady rush of rising suddenly, a full ball undone and resown into the ground. My spin was eager; so eager that it fell through me like some drunken horror, demanding genuflection before that ghostly, silent charm. 

I never left that place in all of this. Night did not fall: I had no need to leave or sleep because time did not exist. We all played a game of purpose and balance. Adding layer upon layer to my carpet allowed me the pleasure of attentive company between each ball of wool. The ghost-man had come and he had made complete our space of colours which heretofore had been lacking in red. The jumper he wore was of wonderful bright red wool. It helped me grow to love the sight of him more than any other colour could have done. So alert was I to its call, so hungry for its bloody distinctiveness daggered straight and true through blurry bundles that love seemed to quiver at my mouth. A delicious food that my tongue could not taste; that my teeth could not grip properly. 

I could feel my head soft and hot from this distant yet powerful creeping of emotion. Dizzy and prickling in his presence, at times the thought of it made me still, stopped my turning and reined me in. I forced myself to curb the constant desire to spin and check and feel relief. I held fast in my position, ball of wool frozen in my hands as I stared decidedly ahead at things and colours which now meant nothing. I cut a breath so I could hear more clearly, arriving at the tip of my lung’s heave in the creation of new pressure, anticipation filling up my body. And then came cold lips on the nape of my neck. A kiss of air and tingling outrage spun me round quick as a flame’s lick. Nervous, red pleasure burned me up; made me unsure of all things real now intangible lips had met with human skin. I pushed my horribly solid flesh through thick, scented air to wave and grope at him, but couldn’t. The eyes were way off now, devoid of any will to focus or catch on me. I could only turn my back again and continue facing outwards.

There came several more kisses after that. But I could never turn and face him however fast I moved. By then he would be standing far away, on the other side of the space. Perhaps they were not real and only in my mind. His whole body denied them, still and indifferent, and his eyes were filled with a dreadful absence which took him elsewhere; carried him into a landscape I would never see but knew was there because it hung in his line of vision and haunted him. 

More alone now than ever, I left the cottage and walked towards the fairytale castle. The squeals of young children at play seeped through enormous stone walls to reach my ears, diluted and merged in a joyous rumble. The wind and all the sounds it brought soothed me. This magnificent place is a primary school. I could hear the energy of the playground at break time.

I’m there. Listening to the freedom of children and closing my eyes before glowing sunlight. I’m sitting on a low-down wall within the great walls which cut off the outside world. I am between that world and the children. I cannot see them because this place is a maze, a garden of walls which twists and turns and multiplies. They’re in their somewhere, behind a million surfaces, in their own fairytale world. 

I open my eyes to find the ghost-man has followed me here and is sitting beside me. The wind blows his hair and makes it look real. Closing my eyes again I listen to the children. They’re in my little black cave now, closer than ever because walls no longer separate us, echoing instead against the walls of my mind. Pulled in so close to me; the only thing that dances on in an empty world, and yet their noise seems a vivid memory of another time, sparkling outwards from some anonymous point in dark and secret spaces. As long as I have my eyes shut tight I can only doubt that they exist. Seeing black conjures walls of another substance: a barrier calmly lowered without a word. It is the passage of time.

I am thinking this when I remember the ghost-man sat beside me. I open my eyes. He’s there, but now he starts to shrink, solidify, transform himself. A tiny girl, real and laughing, looks right at me. And so she gets up and runs off, back to the playground behind the great walls.