My Ghosts (30 page)

The women were talking and laughing and eating in the space they’d claimed, but a few shifted and beckoned to her, making shooing motions at a younger woman who had Lizzie’s sulky look. One nodded and patted the cleared spot at the edge and Clare climbed up, curled up, her head on the pillow of her canvas purse, turning her back on the train-crash seats, on their bags and the neatly printed labels. She closed her eyes and listened to the rustling and chewing, the women’s circling voices, and thought that if she’d taken a different degree she might know things about them. If she even knew what the language was she would be able to imagine exactly where they had been and where they were going, who was waiting to hear the stories they were bringing back.

The engines rumbled and the voices webbed around her and she had a sudden crazy thought that she’d been waiting
for these women, and that she was meant to go with them. They would welcome her as they had when they made her this space, right on the edge, and maybe wherever they were going was a place she was meant to be. Somewhere away from all this
better than
and
worse than
; she saw herself moving with them through a timeless landscape. Long skirts rippling as they made their way along a winding track, a faint sound of music leading them on through a hole in a deep green hill.

Something touched her shoulder and she came back to herself with a start. She turned her head to see John standing beside her and though it took a moment, in the dim light, she saw him clearly and completely, saw him just as he was. A kind and serious man, her daughter’s father in every way that mattered. Whatever had blown through their life would have rocked him just as violently; she realized that now, just as she knew that nothing he ever did or decided was done lightly. And she saw that he was so much braver than she was, though it seemed such a simple thing. Putting one foot carefully in front of the other, and carrying on.

She noticed that the women’s voices had stopped just as John said, “Can you shift a bit?” His face close to hers, and one knee already on the platform. There was a sudden hissing, a rasping cackle, and they seemed to rise together like a great black wave, the hissing louder and louder. “It’s all right,” John said, in his calm and reasonable voice. “It’s all right,” he said, straightening up, his palms facing out. But it made no difference; the sound rolled on and a bit of thrown food hit him on the cheek, leaving an oily streak that glowed dully in the murky light, just beneath one startled eye.

The noise subsided as he backed away, as he said her name,
wiping at his tired face, and Clare wondered if there would be even a trace left of this long, still moment, should she live to be very old. And she knew that she was clinging to the shreds of something, that whichever way it went, any minute now she would have to open her hands.

When the rains came
, we moved on, skipping from island to island like smooth stones over water, following the sun. A time of rusting ferries and sunburned shoulders, matches flaring and frayed bell-bottoms and always someone, somewhere, strumming a guitar. Everything fluid, people came and people left and some we minded losing more than others, but it was fleeting. This was 1974 and we had no idea how young we were. Still trusted anyone with long hair and a bouncing walk.

In Athens we stayed in
hostels in crumbling buildings and places that were even cheaper, rooftops where we spread out sleeping bags and the night sky was the only thing hanging over us. We made connections everywhere, on those rooftops or waiting at bus stops, in the American Express office or among the expensive rows of tables in Syntagma where waiters in white shirts popped out of dark doorways and wove their way through traffic, balancing plates on heavy round trays. Have you got a light, have you got a good place to stay, where have you come from, where are you going; in those days we were always moving and always talking, choosing the details to share from our ordinary lives and leaving out what didn’t matter, shaking off what didn’t fit and thinking we could really
do that, draw a line before and after and have nothing trailing along behind.

We were looking for the sun
but not the city sun, nothing like tourists, we thought, and some of us didn’t bother to make the steep climb to the Acropolis. What felt right was watching grey Piraeus fall away from the deck of a boat and then turning to face the open water. One boat, one place, and then another and another and we began to recognize each other on beaches or in ferry lines, outside cafés, we began to move along together, sharing cigarettes and bits of food, cheap Valium to help us sleep on those long and noisy voyages. People came and people went and we knew them for a while, knew the stories they brought with them and the ones that happened when we were together. Sometimes they left bits of clothing behind and that kept them as close as skin, at first, but mostly it was just those stories left and as time passed they thinned out, didn’t mean the same to someone new who hadn’t been there and anyway had their own stories, patches to add to a pattern that was always changing. We sailed from one place to another, sometimes separating at the dock where women held up signs and plucked at our sleeves but always finding each other again, and the days and nights slid into their rhythm, the beach, the square, the bar.

Sometimes a tiny moment is all that it takes, and braided time begins to unravel. It was Halloween and the streets were filled with wet brown leaves, with ghouls and tiny angels, and on her front porch three children stood in a pool of light. Tangled
long wigs held on with flowered headbands, tie-dyed shirts and strings of bright beads, medallions around their necks.
Peace, man
, one said, making the sign someone had shown him, guaranteed to get a laugh and an extra handful of candy.

The children clumped back down the steps, their wigs askew and their fluorescent peace signs bouncing. All of it as remote, as dated for them as those movies that pop up on television in the middle of the night. The ones with cardboard scenery and improbable dialogue, a conniving woman with sharply drawn eyebrows and an innocent one in soft focus. She thinks now about how time does that, by moving on; you glance back and so many things seem as ridiculous as the ancient belief that the sun was a fiery chariot, dragging the night across the sky. That a person could sail to the edge of the flat world, and just disappear.

She still has her own, real beads and they’re very different; they made a delicate rattle in the bottom of a box when she lifted it down from the closet shelf. It’s not very big, that box, but it holds a lot. Those tiny black and blue beads and the frayed string that once held them, a hard-covered notebook and a sifting of flimsy tickets from buses and boats, sugar cubes crumbling in their wrappers. There are several matchboxes, one filled with soft sand, and a dried-out leather bracelet. A handful of washed-out photographs, the harsh wake of a boat and rough hills set against a clean sky, the blue shutters that frame a window with a long view to the sand and the sea. Things the girl she was had thought were important to capture, and she tries to imagine herself looking through the lens of her cheap camera. The sun hot on the top of her head and a slow clatter of goat bells the only sound.

There aren’t many interiors or night shots, because of the expensive square flash cubes. There’s a peeling, whitewashed room with a fluttering curtain, and a picture of a group of long-haired people in a bar, flashed bright and clear and smiles on all their faces. Behind them a tray seems to float in the air, the person who holds it lost in the shadowy background. For a long time her memories were tied to these frozen photographs and she would have thought, if she’d thought, that the rest had faded to nothing. Then a boy flashed a cheeky peace sign under her yellow porch light and they began to stir. Rousing like a ragged ghost army and falling into place, the whisper of shuffling feet taking on a marching rhythm.

The last place
was a small white village on a small island, twisting narrow lanes that all somehow ended at the tiny square where the old men sat, saying things in a grumbling tone. Some of us had rooms in Adelpha’s house at the edge of that village, the main floor a long corridor with doors opening off, rusting metal bed frames where we were always stubbing our toes and a tiny room somewhere in the middle with a toilet and a shower, a drain in the floor. The water a thin spray that was never more than warm and with our long, salt-crusted hair, everything in the room dripped wet by the time we were done, and when we wiped the crooked mirror our sun-browned faces startled us, made our eyes seem so much brighter, looking out, looking in.

Adelpha knew some German
but most of us didn’t; she carried paper and a fat green pencil in her apron pocket and wrote
down numbers, sometimes drew stick figures to explain that we should never take our clothes off on the main beach or that the taverna by the port was not a good place. Every
Freitag
we climbed the outside stone steps to the rooftop, through the hot buzz of wasps that hovered over a spread of drying figs, and Adelpha smoothed out our crumpled drachmas and made checkmarks in a little book. She lived up there in summer, behind a curtained doorway, with a family we could only guess at by the things they left behind, a school book splayed open or an abandoned glass of coffee, part of a small footprint in a mess of squashed fruit. Sometimes we saw her in the village with other women dressed in black, crusty bread or paper-wrapped packets in the string bags that dangled from their hands.
Kalimera
, we said, or
kalispera
, and sometimes they nodded, but there was a way they turned their heads, just the tiniest bit; we noticed that but didn’t think it was anything that really mattered.

The place she’s rented in this little beach town is more like a cabin than a house, tucked in behind cedars and facing a quiet street. Out the back door there’s a clump of tall bushes, their leaves already fallen and blown away. There’s a tangle of garden and scruffy grass, and a short flight of steps that leads down to the beach where she walks, in all kinds of weather. She’s been told that the town is bustling in summer, but it’s hard to imagine that now. Hard to picture bright towels spread out on the sand, and women bending to squeeze water from their hair. Children squealing and jumping in the waves, slapping at the surface with the flats of their hands.

She came here on a whim, that’s what she said. A name that popped into her head when there were complications, a gap between closing dates and a burst pipe in her new place, all the damage the previous owners left behind. It made sense to have the repairs done before she moved in, and though she agreed with her friends that it was so
frustrating
, in a way she’d been quite relieved. Glad of an in-between time when she could finally deal with things and work out how to go on, but that hasn’t happened yet. Instead she’s surrendered to the place and the season, to the thoughts that float through as she walks the long shore, or looks out at the changing lake. They’re not the thoughts she expected to be having, and she doesn’t know where they’ll take her. All these stirred-up memories of what it was like, to be young, with a brimming heart.