I
The first time I saw a ghost was when I was nine or ten.Although if I were to be perfectly honest, I'm not altogether sure. I could have been a couple of years younger than that or a couple of years older. My memory is vague. It's not as it was.
Nothing is as it was.
Then again, you know that.
It's your fault in a way, but I'll tell you what you want to know. I'll tell you everything and then you can judge me for yourself. I know that's why you are reading, and I hope that your preconceptions have not already formed from what you've read about me in the brown manilla file that is no doubt resting on the desk at which you sit. Just beyond the reach of your right hand. Beside your mug of coffee (or tea – but I like to think that you have a mug of coffee, for I think you are going to need it). On that manilla envelope are four words, and I know what they are. I saw who wrote them and I know why they were written. Those words probably didn't – and still don't – mean anything to you just now. They will be meaningless for quite some time, but by the end you'll know what they mean and, like me, you'll know why they were written.
That will come in time. I don't know about you, but I have all the time there is. All the time in the world. In fact, thinking about it, I do know about you. I know that you don't have as much time as you would like. I can emphasise. But things are different for me now. Have altered quite dramatically since I've been in here.
Funny really. For most of my life I never felt that there was enough time. Minutes, hours and days seemed to escape my grasp like I was clutching at smoke. As soon as I thought I was in control, I was out of time. Never enough. So much still awaiting my attention as darkness fell and my eyes grew heavy with sand. I would cast a resigned glance at the piles of work left unattended, cursing my lack willpower as my body grew increasingly leaden. It would be with a sigh that I would lift myself from my chair and tread wearily to bed, resenting every forthcoming hour I would spend chasing the shadows of my dreams. The next day, I would not awaken refreshed and relishing the hours ahead.
I would wake suddenly. Fearfully.
I would immediate try and grasp hold of the unobtainable. Time itself. Willing it to bend to me, so I may master it. Even for that one day alone. To be in control.
I was never in control. I would begin the day behind, struggling to keep my head above water. Aware of each passing second as my hair grew grey by degrees, my skin sagging with each passing hour. I was so afraid.
This fear, you see, is because I knew my best days were behind me. Ambition had been replaced with resentment. Passion with dust. Lust with sand.
So much sand.
I could practically hear it behind the walls. The soft cascade. Soon the walls would bow and bend, the wallpaper splitting, the plaster cracking. The room I was sitting – be it my classroom; the staff quarters; any room in my own house; my parents house – would be consumed by sand, marking the end of my days, entombing me and all I possessed in it's suffocating embrace.
My mind wanders. You want to me to tell you everything and my attention has saw fit to journey towards my own selfish converse. I began to think on time you see, and how I feared it, yet no longer do. I was remarking how much time I now had. How little you have. I am being selfish. I am goading you into perhaps skimming much of what I now say. But you daren't. You see, you want to know what I know. You want to know all that I can tell you and because of that, you dare not skip one word of this account.
Funny. I feared time, my lack of control over it and now things are very different indeed. I control the flow of this narrative. I control the pace at which the information is imparted. I control your attention.
Take a drink of your coffee. I think it is getting cold.
You're still thinking about the ghost. The first one, and how it all ties in. You're thinking about the words on that envelope and now, despite yourself, your thinking on time, and how little you have left. You don't drink your coffee because you don't want me to be right, that it is beginning to cool, that it will soon be lukewarm and not to your tastes. You resent me and the time I am taking to begin my story.
That's fine. I can live with that. Or rather, have lived with that.
When I was young, my parents took me to the beach. Nothing unusual there, Except it was a cold day, late October or early November, and I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I was so cold my flesh goose-pimpled in huge aenemic boils, my teeth chattering so loudly that I couldn't hear the voices in my own head. My father drove, my mother beside him reading the road atlas and giving him directions on where to go, for we had never been to this particular beach you see, thirty or so miles from the cottage that my parents were renting for the two weeks that my father had got off work.
I am unsure why they elected to take their summer holiday at that time of year, as I am unsure about their insistence to visit the beach that day, but being young and well-mannered, I didn't think it my place to question either of them and in fact was rather excited at the prospect of missing two weeks of school, being as it was outwith the official school holidays. Thinking about it now, it was obviously the only time my father could get the time off work, although he had never taken any time off before, and in fact took very little since.
But there we were, the three of us and our luggage crammed into the white Vauxhall Astra that my father was still paying off to the finance company more than five years after first collecting the vehicle (I knew this due to overhearing many a heated argument rising through the vents to my bedroom from the living room, although I did not know at the time what they were arguing about, being too young to understand the concept of money and the word finance being as alien to me as the prospect of my own adulthood). The drive was long and I was quite bored, having read all my Commando comics more than once, and drawn beards on every single character in my Dandy annual that I received on my birthday a short while before. I had drawn an especially large and full beard on the version of Desperate Dan that adorned the cover (his smile huge yet not reaching his dead eyes, I long thought of Desperate Dan to be quite an enigma, and in fact favoured the Beano more than the Dandy), enough to cover most of his face and trail down into the large steaming cow pie that he had rested on his immense thighs.
My parents talked little, preferring instead to argue over directions, or listen to the tennis commentary - occasionally cloaked in static – emerging from the car radio. I soon resigned myself to looking forlornly out of the window, wondering when we would ever arrive at our destination.
We didn't go straight to the house that we were renting for the fortnight. No. My mother became quite emotional upon catching sight of the beach she had not visited since she were a child (and if she had said that once, she had said that a thousand times) and insisted that we park up behind the dunes and walk through the network of paths and detritus from the previous summer's campfires and spend some time on the sand. I had become quite hot in the car and so had discarded my long sleeved top and jumper, also requesting in my own unique way (I whined excessively) that I would like to wear my shorts when we stopped at the services a couple of hours earlier. Punishment perhaps for my earlier crying, my parents locked the car before I could notice that I was not wearing adequate clothing for the season. They were already arm in arm almost out of sight in the dunes before I realised that I was too cold.
I began to speak, to decry my goose-pimpled flesh once we reached the open sand and caustic wind, before a glance from my father put pay to my intentions. So I remained standing there, shivering on the sand, watching a storm roll in over the horizon, dark clouds meeting the slate grey of the sea and enveloping more and more of the sky in a dark wash.
I walked behind them for quite some time, unable to catch most of what they said to one another but hearing the inflection in their voices, hearing it even now. They were happy then. That place. The disparate combination of poor weather, a complacent son and a childhood memory somehow causing my mother to draw herself close to my father, closer than I had ever seen them before.
Or ever saw them since.
It's important you know that. That my parents loved each other. Although that was the first time I ever truly noticed how much.
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