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Love is what brings about a ghost—isn’t it? The unfinished business of love.
The thought of taking on a whole other person is like homesickness.
They’ve both reached for something beyond them and in order to keep up the pretence they have to be different people, so that when truth comes looking it won’t recognise them.
He didn’t understand it at first, he asked, “Why are you pretending to be stupid?” and he saw the look on her face and knew what it meant, and he didn’t bring it up again. She is hiding herself for safety.
He cannot do what Kerry has done, make a space for cotton wool under the skin, bolster the past with a new version of himself. Perhaps he doesn’t have the imagination. How did his mum do it, in the naked knowledge she was one of the bad guys? The shiny patch of skin on his wrist that never goes, the way his fingers ache in cold weather, become numb and creaky. The slip of the blood through the veins of his wrists. He’s only understood recently why they never asked for help from a neighbour or a teacher—the shame, but worse than that for him. The love for his mother.
When you thought about it, everything that happened in the world was just the natural way of things—you didn’t look at a termite mound and think how the termites had ruined the earth with termite-made structures. They did what they did. We’re just doing what we do.
“I’ve just been thinking about all these buildings that get left behind. And then someone else moves in, and it’s like having people put their own skin on your skeleton and expecting you to be fine with it.” She picks up the coffee cups and comes into the front room, hands one to Janey. “I felt like, really, I should be allowed to go in and touch all her stuff.” “Hmm,” says Janey, accepting the cup. “I don’t like that.” She looks around the room. “I guess that’s how ghosts must feel.”
“I just know that I wasn’t supposed to be a mother, I can’t do it, I don’t know how to not be afraid all the time.”
I have swallowed a cold long splinter. It’s not dread, or even sadness exactly. Homesick, I feel homesick for somewhere that doesn’t exist.
They are not a family given to displays of emotion, they like to laugh at sad things, keep them safely at a distance. Distance. The great reliever and creator of pain.
