My Brother's Ghost Read Free Page A

back. (I could not bear the terrible guilt-stricken look in Rufus's eyes.) She toppled sideways and brought a cut glass vase – another favourite – crashing to the floor. She screamed – swore, in fact – and turned on me. I bolted through the kitchen door and ran, Rufus ahead of me. Things were back again to normal.
    That night I lay in bed unable to sleep. Harry was sleeping. Rufus was chained up in the yard below, whining; you could just hear him. Tom was somewhere else.
    Eventually I got up and crept onto the landing. A glow of light rising from the rooms below. Voices and clinking cups. Auntie Marge was doing most of the talking. She sounded calm. Stan spoke now and then. I could not make out much of what was said, and yet I felt a sudden clutch of fear. This was the first time, I am fairly sure, that Canada was mentioned.

Ghost Talk
    T HERE IS A WAY in which with time we can take anything for granted. The strange becomes familiar, the extraordinary ordinary. As the year moved on, winter into spring, Tom's involvement with us, his presence in our lives (our presence in his death?) became what we expected, what we were used to. Normal. The mystery and the matter-of-factness were one and the same. We told no one, by the way, not a soul. The secret was ours.
    Yet periodically it would come upon me how bewildering, how unfathomably odd it all was. Here was Tom, my dear dead brother, leaning over Harry's bed perhaps, or sitting beside me on a park bench, his eternal jacket collar up, smiling, frowning. And yet if I were just to reach out (which I never did), put my hand upon his arm…
    How can I convey the strangeness of him? He was so like his previous self, but then… There was the rasp and graininess of his new voice, the almost imperceptible peculiarities in his appearance. No motion, no wind in his unruly hair, no rain on his face, only that curious shimmering, shivering at the edges of him when he ran. No actual contact either, with the tree he was supposedly leaning against; the pavement, floor, grass on which he apparently stood. He was here and with us, and elsewhere.
    Elsewhere; that was a conundrum too. I came to believe that Tom was like some kind of mobile light bulb, moving himself here and there, switching himself on and off. Except he couldn't always find the switch and had no map. Tom was bewildered too. He compared his condition once to a kind of dreaming. The logic of normal life did not apply. When he wasn't ‘somewhere’ – usually that meant with me and Harry – he had no memories at all. Then sometimes, randomly, he'd find himself stood watching a football match on Barnford Hill or boys fishing in the Tipton canal. Once he even got as far as Dudley Zoo; a keeper with his bucket, thrown fish in the air, the glazed and playful seals.
    Tom's talk: another conundrum. I wish you could have heard it; the telegram sentences, out-of-step remarks, huge silences. There was not much conversation, that was for sure. He rarely answered questions directly, though something might emerge days or even weeks later. Talking to Tom was a tennis match with few rallies. But at least in time the tension in his speech relaxed, the production of the words themselves was less of a strain. Tom would utter the most perplexing, unconnected thoughts serenely.
    Yet consider too what he achieved. Out of his ghostly maze he somehow made his way. He got to Harry when he was needed. And he got to me.

The Thief
    I T WAS MAY NOW . Tom had recently seen the seals and over a spread of three or four days told me about them. (Stan surprised me in the kitchen on one of these occasions, talking to myself apparently, and gave me a funny look.) Harry had the measles, Rosalind too incidentally. Rufus was wilder than ever and had got his ear chewed up in a fight. And I was taking sixpences from Marge's Christmas jar.
    Stealing. Yes, you would have to say it was. And yet… Marge, you see, was strict about most things. Jobs, for instance.