The Haunting of Ghosts - Sue

Which may or may not be true...

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"It doesn’t matter how often you tell yourself that at some point in their lives everyone is naïve, makes mistakes, gets themselves into situations that are - ill-advised. Having that knowledge (assuming it’s a truism) doesn’t lessen the pain of experience. It undoes nothing; offers no mitigation. How can it?”

Charles E. again, reminiscing. We were on deckchairs in his garden, drinking Brewdogs. This time he actually handed me a photograph. It was of a young woman sitting on a wall smiling. She is obviously happy. Given how she was sitting, the pose she’d adopted, it was difficult to assess her height, the physicality of her - except perhaps to say that she didn’t look tall and slim.

Would that be fair?

Charles nodded.

Mid-twenties perhaps, dark hair cut into a bob.

“I met her at a conference of sorts. There were a group of us - perhaps thirty or forty - who were about to embark on an overseas adventure. I can’t tell you where because it doesn’t matter; when we left London we were going to be scattered all over the globe. And I’m not sure the ‘why’ of it matters either, not in the context of this story.

“One afternoon, after the last session of the day, a group of us were lounging in one of those small urban parks North London does so well. Spirits were generally high, fuelled by youth and the immanent adventure.

“I spotted her sitting alone, crying. I’m not the Samaritan-type, but I found myself going over to talk to her, to see if I could help. Perhaps she was struggling with what was about to happen to us, to her. Perversely, in the middle of that group, in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world, I think she was feeling quite alone.

“We got to talking; she stopped crying. We left the park together. There was a connection I suppose. A couple of days later, talking turned to kissing… You know how it goes.

“I was to leave the UK in one of the first waves; her departure was scheduled for some months later. Realising that was hard.

“Impulsively, I’d signed up for the whole escapade because I had nothing keeping me at home; I had no plans, nothing to look forward to. And then, because of this girl I thought I’d rescued, suddenly I did - not that it made any difference, given I’d already ceded my liberty. In spite of my new attachment I was fixed fast to my timetable; in no time I was off, feeling as if I’d been shot from one of those circus cannons - though without a helmet nor a safety net to catch me.

“You get the picture.

“Where they sent me was remote. Think remote and then add another hundred miles. Think Heart of Darkness if you want to - though I was as far from Kurtz as you could possibly get. Soon enough I was the one sitting alone, drinking a month’s supply of beer in less than a week. I became the sad ex-pat writing long love letters and posting them whenever I could. In the space of a few weeks - four or five? - thanks to my increasing solitude I took the experiences of those few heady London days and extrapolated them into a template for the rest of my life, a future built around a girl I’d found crying in a park.

“In my new-found desperation, I felt as if by boarding the plane at Gatwick I’d snatched my own future away from me.

“So I bottled it. I bailed out. With indecent haste I ditched the adventure and returned home. It was a messy and inelegant surrender. I’d acted quickly because I wanted to get back before she left; because I needed to reestablish this future I’d dreamed of. Knowing she would still go away, I even tailored her departure to fit into my new model: I’d wait the two years; I’d plan; I’d work; I’d visit her on holiday, half-way round the world…

“But the person I came back to wasn’t the same person I’d left. Or - more likely - the person I returned as was different to the one who had walked across a London park to try and help someone out. Still naïve, just a different flavour of naïvety.

“As if it had all been some cruel magic trick, once again I had no future. Nothing had changed, other than me having a fresh scar to heal. Suddenly I was the lonely one who needed rescuing.”

And were you? I asked.

“Rescued? Eventually. But that’s another story. Or four…”

Separate Journeys

Somewhere I have a photograph of her
sitting on a low wall outside a railway station,
legs frozen in mid-kick at nothing,
and there, at her feet,
the evidence of another Oxford Street sortie.

For all her confidence and that air of stability,
she seemed always to be travelling –
from one place to another or between friends.
She was rooted of course, but elsewhere
with the omnipresent God that divided us;
of that part of her, I could grasp nothing.
So even then I could see her fading away,
unable to accept an embrace
on my terms, without qualification.
She said I made her feel free,
never knowing at what cost that came to me…

That was an age ago, and even her words
“I shall never desert you” have lost their force.

Before our separate journeys
- different discoveries for different reasons –
there was both nothing and everything between us:
perhaps that is the paradox of love.

Somewhere I have a photograph of her
sitting on a low wall outside a railway station.

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