THREE GHOSTS
When you've been here long enough, the question isn't if you believe in ghosts but whether you can escape from them. And old houses with things – corners, pictures, the simplest and ugliest bits of furniture – where are they all now?
She was a constant presence on the loneliest of roads. A middle-aged anorexic, running along Wiltshire's paths, through the sporadic villages, over the wind-blasted plain or under the July sun. Before work, during morning coffee, at lunchtime, after work.
My father pulled out as she toiled through the heat and told me she copied down their canteen menus. A child would have asked 'what's she running from?', but I'd just finished my first year at college.
She must have lived somewhere – we drove past a bungalow in Winsterslow.
Perhaps someone reading this has an eating disorder? One of my cousins did and hanged herself in Istanbul airport. Her father was an alcoholic, but she went to an expensive school.
Such callousness shocks me; where are my feelings?
I once taught a girl with newly braided hair. Both parents junkies; the mother splashed across the local rag 'banned from every shop in Bicester for shoplifting.'
I told her it was lovely: 'My mum spent hours on it.'
Who can forget that baby elephant, his mother in a cage, reaching her trunk out to cradle him?
I can't think of it without an ache.
She worked hard but doodled a lot: attendance perfect – then gone.
A crack-house in Banbury her new home.
No more suns drawn over cartoon newbuilds in her English book.