HIS glasses are halfway down his nose and he has the old tartan dressing gown hitched over his stomach tied up with a tassel cord. At any minute he’s going to shout up the stairs that breakfast is ready. You could have stood the spoon up in his porridge.
My own porridge tends to the watery. "It’s a little watery," said my other half very gently once. "I wouldn’t say that, dad," said our son. "Not even when it’s like dipping your spoon into a swamp. Personally, I always just dip and shut up."
He’s a wise son, our son.
"About time you showed up," I tell the ghost of my father. A lot has happened in the 32 years since he had the bad taste to die suddenly. My mother has weathered storms since then. She has also travelled to America, taken the TGV through France and posed with her head stuck through a hole in a fake portrait of the Mona Lisa in Paris, for the laugh. But in her old age, she has become incorrigible. Let’s say she can shake a stick with the best of 'em.
I have plenty to tell the ghost of my father. It includes her recent cracked rib and how a body can, nevertheless, haul the furniture about with impunity. I’m sorry for all you missed, I tell him. He looks at me. There are no words.
My ghosts hover on street corners, just out of reach, and when I have finally decided, that’s him, off there in that old brown coat, and I run to catch up, a stranger turns round in my father’s coat.
Friends’ ghosts show up in places where they were most at home. The ghost of my uni friend walks into the kitchen. Chocolate biscuit cake was her speciality. It was never a party without it. She’d sweep into the student house where we sat huddled in our coats about the coal fire – no central heating then – and produce a big box of the stuff.
Mary Berry eat your heart out.
There was also the ginger biscuit and cream cake where you drowned the biscuits in sherry, slathered them in cream and left the cake overnight in the fridge.
You could overlook her devotion to Cliff Richard because of that cake.
Frankie may very well have been going to Hollywood back then, but she went soppy over Cliff crooning Christmastime, Mistletoe and Wine.
Thirty-two years ago, when my father died – just an hour after leaving hospital and minutes after pointing out the spot on the ceiling that my brother had missed with the paint brush – she came with my other close friends to the wake, we sat around on the floor and she whisked out her chocolate biscuit cake.
Back then, none of us could have dreamed that her life would last two more short years.
You were robbed, I tell her ghost. I’m sorry you missed the weddings and the babies, the first days at school and any excuse for a party. I’m sorry you never got to sit with us in Eileen’s beautiful garden on a summer’s evening.
I’m sorry too for my friend who never did make 40. She was my first ever friend. "Do you think I’ll make 40?" she asked me once as we motored down a road somewhere when it was clear her life was on countdown.
She had clawed back years then, fought hard to watch her children grow a little.
She always had plans. She had her own compost heap and a beautiful pink and white clematis sprang up the red brick wall. She wanted to talk politics and news – to argue and debate and forget the damn disease that was eating at her.
I talk to her ghost in the garden. She’s at home sitting in the sunshine. We talk about books we loved, stupid dares that involved her walking out her bedroom window and along the sill and the time she broke her arm.
Our homes almost backed on to each other. We’d go up to our bedrooms on winter’s evenings at a specified time and flash the bedroom lights at each other.
"I’m so so sorry that you didn’t get those years," I say. "Don’t waste a single precious moment," she whispers back.
I take her at her word.
