I had forgotten about the beachcomber. I had forgotten about his long coat dragging through damp sand; his insolent beard, gorsey and stained as tide-abandoned foam. I had forgotten his permitted perimeter; the way he granulated then seem to wink out of existence, leaving me alone, a child at the land’s edge.

Father died not how he may have wished, with patrician dignity and surrounded by acolytes, but sat upright, propped against a folded bolster pillow – do they make those anymore? – and arguing about walnuts with my aunt Dorothy. Someone, she explained to me over the phone, someone, knowing him diabetic, the idiot, had brought him a bag of the things to nibble whilst he convalesced from a midsummer cold. Dorothy is eighty-eight and two years my father’s junior. She had assumed the role of matron, cook and chief-taster during his mild infirmity. She had been scolding him for such reckless disregard for his health when he raised a finger to reprimand her – I imagine with some erudite and withering epigram, probably in Latin – then tipped to the right, as if the raised finger had suddenly gained appallingly in weight, and stayed there, like a tree that inclines a few degrees but can fall no further. His last words were ‘these nuts are none of your concern’. As I say, not how he would have wished to go.

Dorothy, for all her querulous caretaking – she’s eighty-eight, I tell myself, give the old bird a break – is not one to ignore humour when it’s cantering around the room waiting to be acknowledged, black as a Spanish bull. She laughed when she told me down the phone of Father’s passing, laughed about his final words. And I laughed, too. Silly old goat. He’d always seemed to me as one in secret anticipation, primed for the moment when his wit would coincide with audience and circumstances to provide him with a killer put-down, the kind of thing everyone seems to think Churchill was so good at. But he always bottled it; when confronted with a gauche in-law’s Elton John-themed charcoal sketches or the egregious mispronunciation of Van Gogh, the most he would allow was a wry smile and raised eyebrow, indicating that he had thought of something dazzling but that etiquette denied him the pleasure of speaking. However, ‘these nuts are none of your concern’, it now seemed, was his actual punchline. Like the Great Gonzo raising his trumpet to give a mighty, singing blast, only for the bell to fart and bubble.

I had agreed to meet Aunt Dorothy at Father’s house the following day and begin the tedious business that comes when a relative – or anyone to whom one has become legally entangled – dies. The thought deadened me and I reached with predictable weariness for my usual anaesthetic: a green numbered bottle from the Whisky Society, Astral Weeks by Van Morrison and a big book of Rembrandts. Each of these things, in its own way, is an insufficient comfort. The whisky always reminds me of the hours I spend inspecting the catalogue, comparing years, casks, pricing and such things. I read the reviews and recommendations, even check customer reviews online. When it arrives I cut away the cardboard with a Stanley Knife, sit down with a glass and small jug of water and throw on some Thelonius Monk. I pour, mix with water then breathe deep and take a sip. It tastes like whisky. Every time, without fail. Just whisky. I tell myself it’s peaty or darker than the last, with a spicy edge or some nonsense but really I know that I’m being a pseud. On the plus side, the stuff always manages to get me drunk.

The first verse of Astral Weeks goes something like ‘If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dreams…da, da, dum, da, da, dum, dum…to lay me down, in silence easy. To be born again…’

And it’s just beautiful. You feel yourself lifted from whatever small death of the soul you’ve passed through that day, you feel understood, forgiven, washed. But after that it’s not so great. When the thing came out - when was it, sixty-nine, seventy? – I assumed it was the world’s first scratch and sniff record, so certain were its strains to reach me along with the nostril-scorching musk of joss. One is simply not allowed to dislike the record and I suppose it’s good but…but I never make it to the end without discovering that I’ve wandered off to do something else or started reading trawling the Guardian’s online commentary for idiots I can disagree with. And yet, in these vulnerable moments, I always reach for Astral Weeks. I tell myself it’s for the ‘born again’ epiphany but really it’s because I’ll be so distracted halfway in that I’ll have forgotten whatever misery drove me to play the damn thing in the first place.

The muddy reproductions in my book of Rembrandts remind me that I have spendthriftily declined to buy a new, clearer and more comprehensive volume of my favourite artist’s work in the thirty-five years since I purchased this blurred, budget edition. That night I expected to be drawn into all those self-portraits Rembrandt made of himself in later life, that deflating potato of a face, the wet eyes of a soul looking out from its softening home like a snail from which the shell has been lifted away, drying in the night. But it was a portrait of a young man, believed to be his son Titus, who appears liposuctioned of all vitality, skin streaked and stretched. The picture always shocked me. How could Rembrandt have done that, taken something as fragile as a son’s failure and transform it into his own artistic flourish. How he must have loathed him. Ha. Look what I did. Who’s he, Rembrandt or Titus? Either. Both.

After Mother died my father moved into a humble bungalow, his only luxuries being two or three spare rooms in which to store his books, photo albums and anything moveable that reminded him of Mother. I’m not sure he often looked at these objects but he liked to know they were there, padded around him like the balls of newspaper used to keep tortoises warm through their winters. The day she died, of something that the doctors had a name for but really just seemed to be a kind of swift, sweetly sad evaporation, I remember him standing outside the bedroom where he had left her. His finger kept moving to his lip and his eyes darted across the bookshelves that lined the landing, like one who’s walked into a room and forgotten what it was they had to say.

I arrived at the bungalow early, wanting to get in there before Dorothy arrived and – in her well-meaning way – claimed the territory. This meant arriving at six. I always wondered why the aged never seemed to sleep and told myself it was something about the fear of death, packing in as much tail-chasing living as possible before the scythe falls. But it isn’t; it’s because the first thing one learns, after breathing, is the first thing one forgets: how to sleep. I often lie awake thinking how did I used to do it? My soft bed, in darkness, becomes a square of ice beneath an unclouded sun. Nigglesome spectres tug at my thoughts; long-ago mistakes, embarrassing things I’ve said to women, arguments from forty years ago revive like revenants, demanding to be concluded although my opponents are old like myself, wealthy on distant shores, grudgefully retired or dead. Thoughts that were dormant during the day illume like fireflies in the night. I become a polymath. I will flit into self-awareness twenty minutes into sketching out a review of some awful street theatre I saw twenty years ago or composing a smart-arse response to some overlooked flaw in a Nabakov lecture. One night I thought in nothing but haiku…

So, six in the morning and I’m skinless and scowling from the whisky and I’ve spent the night composing a speech for Father’s funeral; actually, I spent perhaps twenty minutes on the speech then got distracted by imagining his friend Larry becoming offended by something I’d said and then mapping out the entire conversation that would undoubtedly ensue, with emphasis on my filial indignation and Larry’s eventual apology.

Nonsense, of course. Larry would no more criticise me on the day of my father’s funeral than he would urinate into Father’s ashes. He’s a decent man, full of humour. But that’s what long nights do to you; that’s what too much thinking does. Takes everyone you know and turns them into a mouthpiece for your own self-piercing thoughts.  

I unlocked the front door and was hit by the shock of nothing being different. A cool spring light sloped into the hallway through the open kitchen door. The pictures on the wall, two small oil paintings of relatives no one would ever now know the names of. I’m sure Father had told me  - I’m sure I’d asked – but we’d never written it down and now they were simply portrait of a bonneted woman c1780, and family group, c1850. It occurred to me that, with Father dying, not only had his light snuffed but a beacon that could have scoured the brambled past for me, picked out threads of eccentricity, delusion, weird joys, perhaps helped me find an analogue, some cause of myself.

The kitchen was inorganically tidy and gave me my first little shock. It appeared as the kitchen of a house one has just moved into, where the kettle and a few essential have been unpacked; tea, sugar, sliced bread, but the detritus of ownership is unspread. Father never used the kitchen much, except for tea. If it transpires that there is no inheritance left for me, I’ll know where it went. Bengal Star; one street away and the only phone number he knew by heart.

I made myself a cup of tea and experienced the first of many truisms that one hears about the recently bereaved. Let this serve as ensign to the rest and we’ll speak no more of them; I kept imagining that I would hear him call my name from the other room. It would have a precise tone, muffled by the adjoining doors and his position, facing away, sat at his desk, looking out over the garden. There would be an edge of impatience, as if I had failed to heed him – although it was the first time he had had called. When the kettle clicked itself off, I jumped.

I wandered into his study, sat down at his large desk and began to leaf through the various documents and letters that covered its surface, as if I’d find his will just lying there on top, his instructions written out in simple language and big letters. That would have been the finest bequest I could receive, I realised. Never mind the money, just leave me nothing to think about. No such luck. There was evidence of some correspondence he’d been carrying out with a medieval historian based in Liverpool; they were debating the veracity of medieval reports of the dead coming back to life, each of them making scrupulous use of textual quotes and academic citations. Typical of Father; find something as intricate as it is pointless, identify a fine point of possible disagreement, and let him go. Never could be bothered with it myself. I sometimes think I took up drums just to convince him I was too thick for him to bother trying to improve me. Snob that I am.

I hovered around a couple of pictures on the wall; I thought that if I took them down then I would at least have made a start. They were easy, nothing to fold or alphabetise or read. Just lift it off the hook. I removed one picture from the wall, a watercolour of some pale shore sentried by rushes. I moved to put it on the desk, realised I’d need to tidy the desk first, stepped over to a table at the side of the room but, narrowed by an accumulation of books, this was too small for the picture; then I thought about putting it on the floor propped against the wall but feared that I, or Dorothy, would kick it over and anyway what difference was it if it was on the wall or the floor, really? Then I laughed at myself for taking five minutes to conclude that the best place for a picture is on the wall but my laugh filled the room with a cold, slap-back echo and it suddenly felt very indecent to be doing anything at all to Father’s things. I put the picture back and returned to the hallway, unable to choose which door to pass through next.

His bedroom was impossible to enter.

I returned to the kitchen and fumbled with the key in the back door, stepping out and walking around into the back garden. It was too early for flowers; most of the beds were empty or poking up the kind of twig-fingered bones that are creepy as hell to look at most of the year but which please everyone inordinately when they manage to squeeze out a rose or two for a few weeks each summer. Father had not been a gardener for a long time; Dorothy was the driving force, bringing her various sons in law over in what seemed a well-sustained and rigorous rota of weekend days. She had them turning soil, pruning and scraping mossy strips from between the redbrick paving stones. She never once asked me; at the time I took this with affection and a little pride. She hadn’t wanted to bother me with such menial, distracting chores. I was wrong, of course, as I figured out one sleep-free morning. She didn’t ask because she didn’t trust me to turn up or do a good job without complaining. Ouch.

I edged around the lawn, pretending to examine the unweeded beds should a neighbour be peering out at me from one of the back windows of the terrace opposite. The air was crisp as a school morning and I could smell, just as a dog barks at what isn’t there, floor polish and cubed bleach, chlorine, the chemicals of education. And I was a boy again, momentarily.

Back in the house, I roamed for something to busy myself with. The hall snaked away, leading to the library, a room no bigger than the rest, low ceiling, a small window with a table under it. There were bookshelves on each wall and, on top of these, in the small gap between the shelves and the ceiling, boxes had been squeezed, no doubt containing his large and entirely unfocussed collection of knick-knacks, gnomic machine parts to be identified at a later date and anything relating to Mother that wasn’t book-shaped.

It seemed safe, here. There was no room to move anything anywhere else; the books would have to be looked at by someone else; I couldn’t have guessed the value of a single one of them. There were feather-edged volumes bound in a leather that looked warped and black enough to have been stripped from the back of some unlucky, trepanned, stone-age marsh dweller; there were rows of those series, Georgian or Victorian, that seemed to run to thirty volumes on subjects guaranteed to never be read by anyone once the first print run was finished: A thorough and true account of the actions pertaining to the division of the westerly territories by his grace sir so-and-so-and-whatever. Yeah, I’d let an expert wade through those.

The bottom shelves were reserved for more personal items. I found our family photograph albums arranged in chronological order, the pictures phasing from fading monochrome to the garish blur of Polaroid and early colour. I opened one at random but put it back immediately. The colours hurt.

There were visitors’ books from the days when mother had ensured the old house had operated a revolving-door policy on hospitality. Many of the signatures were illegible and comments that would have been witty and personal in, say 1948, were to me as oblique and unintelligible as a satirical aside from a Commedia clown.

I found a shelf that seemed designated to my life. There were children’s annuals; Victor and Hotspur- which I never really liked but wanted on my shelf at school to look tough – also earlier books; a Jeremy Fisher that had been crayoned through by an infant that could have been me or even one of my parents. Its cloth binding was near-perished. The illustrations in children’s books are strange, both remembered and not remembered, intimately felt yet alien. As if someone of great skill had attempted to sketch another’s memory of a childhood dream and, whilst coming close, not quite succeeded.

There were my schoolbooks; screeds of rote-learning, handwriting exercises and scientific diagrams that were the scope and limit of my formal education. I could tell, from one tiny scribble in the margin of a Physics exercise book, when my real life had begun: ‘So what?’ I’d written. That was the summer I first heard Miles Davis. The snake’s hiss of the ride cymbal, like a curtain being drawn back on the future. Not Philly Joe. Who was it? Jesus, that I can’t remember the drummer on Kind of Blue. I bothered myself with that as I picked through the final pieces on the shelf. There were sketch books I’d taken on holiday with me, when I’d decided to be an artist, and a notepad from when I’d decided to be a novelist. I tried to look at the pictures and read the words but I kept thinking of that stupid drummer and that soon Dorothy would be here and I would have to make decisions about all of these things, all of these objects that had suddenly attached themselves to my otherwise featherweight life. I picked another notebook from the row and opened it.

It wasn’t another schoolbook. At least, it had not been used for that purpose. The pages were filled with my tight, intense, child’s prose. It seemed to be a diary of some holiday we’d had by the sea – that would have made it Suffolk, probably Winterscoe – I would have been twelve or thirteen. I wasn’t reading closely, only enough to brush against images of lone treks along dunes, a game involving lead soldiers and complaints about the food and early bedtimes. A child’s holiday thoughts. Bubbles of emotion rose in me and I cursed Dorothy aloud for leaving me here alone for so long. Just then, as if summoned like a good fairy, I heard the key turn in the front door and felt an enormous wash of gratitude. I looked down at the exercise book to close it. But a sentence, around a quarter of the pages in, snared me and forced a re-read.

I did not notice Dorothy as she entered the room. I had quite forgotten about her. I had tried to read on but could get no further than the first sentence:

I saw a ghost today, it looked like an old man walking around the beach looking for something he’d lost, I wasn’t scared.

"There you are. I wondered where you were hiding yourself.” Aunt Dorothy entered the room, face glowing; she shrinks every year and reminds me of the Muppet versions of old women; hair in a bun, soft face but jaw working fast, operated from within by someone young and vital. I snapped the book shut as if I was doing something wrong and stood up.
            “Hello, Dorothy,” I said. She clucked and scooted up to me, grabbing my hand, which she palmed and caressed.
            “You poor thing,” she said, as if I was young man – which I’m certainly not – who has just been orphaned – which I suppose I had been. She was dressed splendidly, like the best old ladies: A brooch, a butterfly marked out in costly gems, and one of those stiff, navy-blue jacket-blouse things that I’ve never needed to know the name of until now. I gave a bland smile and patted the back of her hand. “He didn’t suffer,” she said. As if I’d asked. “It was just as I told you. He just tipped a bit, then he was gone.”
            “Perhaps it was the nuts,” I said, smiling. Dorothy shook her head, as if embarrassed. It was strange.
            “It wasn’t the nuts, dear. It wasn’t. It was his own bloody pig-headedness if it was anything.” I laughed at this sudden outburst. Dorothy covered her mouth. “I mustn’t swear,” she said, looking up at me with a coy smile that had initiated the creation of at least one child with an American passport and a Norfolk accent, “I’m a granny.”
            “I’ve been trying to make a start,” I began.
            “We’re not going to worry about that, yet,” Dorothy said. “I’ve put the kettle on. Your father gave me his lawyer’s details a long time ago. We’re to meet them this afternoon. This morning there’s nothing for us to do but make sure everyone’s doing as well as they can.” By us, she meant herself, of course, and by everyone, she meant me. I must have looked a sight to her. I was still wearing my coat; a long, black, dragging thing with holes in the lining, one deep pocket filled with sediments of sweet wrappers, chewed snack-remnants and bottle caps. My paisley shirt was untucked from my jeans and the band around my hat, bought in a moment when I’d fancied styling myself as a latter-day Muddy Waters, was peeling away. The glue was unstuck. Dorothy smiled at me.
            “You don’t change,” she said. There was an unexpected inflection in her voice that seemed to take her by surprise; accusative. She looked around. “So many books. Do you think he read all of them?”
            “I’m positive he didn’t, aunt,” I replied.
            “You mustn’t be sorry that you weren’t there,” she said, suddenly, frighteningly serious and adult. “You mustn’t be sorry.”
            “I’m not sorry,” I frowned. But it struck me that she might not have meant what I thought; that I wasn’t there for Father’s death, but more that I hadn’t been there on Sundays when the grand-nephews and nieces came to scatter the floor with toys or on nights when his video recorder – latterly DVD player – wouldn’t record Simon Schama. Or on the evening when he moved into the house for the first time and, having positioned the furniture to his contentment and eaten the inaugural Bengal Star meal, I chirped, ‘so, I’d best let you get to know the new place, Dad. Don’t want to cramp your style’ and, telling myself I was doing something innocent, left the old widower alone whilst I drove off to see a friend’s Dixieland group. Maybe, I thought, she’s telling me not to be sorry for all those things. I turned and ran a finger along the spines of a few books.
            “Well,” Dorothy said, “I’ll leave you to have a look through here. There’ll be tea when you want it.” And she left, with great tact and taste.

Still standing at the bookshelf, I lifted the exercise book and opened it again:

I saw a ghost today…   

I read on.

…it looked like an old man walking around the beach looking for something he’d lost, I wasn’t scared.

It was past the Devil’s Footprint and where the dunes stop and all the gorse bushes start. It wasn’t even nearly dark but it was by the time I got home and mama was terribly cross.

Terribly cross. Thank Christ for the sixties, I thought. Blasted all that Narnia guff away with one spin of Little Red Rooster. Of course, most of us were hot for Von Daniken by the end of the decade so not much had changed, I suppose. Allegorical lions coming back to life to defeat evil aren’t so different from the Chariots of the Gods. Dear me. We thought we were so very original.

The Devil’s Footprint was a huge dip in the sand in the middle of a dune, quite a way from the cottage where I would stay with my parents. The cottage stood close to the edge of one of the cliffs. Too close, as it turned out. I heard it fell into the sea a few years back. If you walked north from the cottage the cliffs very gradually softened and loosened into gentle dunes which, in their turn, levelled into maze-like salt marshes. From the look of this diary I must have been out near the final few dunes. No wonder it was dark when I got back. No wonder mama was terribly cross.

I was firing the bow out along the dunes, away from the water. Papa told me not to because I might hit someone in the dunes but because we’re the only people dull enough to stay somewhere like this there wasn’t any chance at all of that.

Right on, son. Stupid papa. I could hear the conversation. I could see myself, urgent and sombre, missioning to the door of the cottage, satchel over my shoulder, bow and real metal-tipped arrows gripped in my fist.
            “I assume you’ve found a target to aim that thing at, Monsieur Loxley,” my father smiles. “I mean, I assume your schedule of entertainment will not include launching arrows into the blue unknown then rushing off to find where they may have landed; in sand, bush or unfortunate holiday-maker’s sternum.”

I pause in the doorway. There’s no target.        
“I’ll only shoot on the beach, where I can see people coming.” Father gives an acquiescent nod and returns to whatever he was doing; making fishing lures perhaps, reading – almost certainly.
            “Wouldn’t it be more fun, darling, if you were to find something to aim at?” My mother, voice lifting from behind the fanning back of an armchair, facing the fire.
            “I just like firing the arrows,” I snort, with the grandeur of the perennially misunderstood. I’ve no intention of aiming at anything except the next spot to run to. Not then, not now.

So there I am, I suppose, weaving through the dunes. Alone, alone. My parents were always searching for the next project, the next literary obsession or community cause; it was never about solving or mastering or even pleasure but, looking back, understanding and logging the experience seemed to be enough for them. I’m convinced this is the reason I’m an only child.

It would have been warm but not hot due to the wind skimming and lifting off the sea like a swarm of invisible, migrating birds ever-arriving from the North Pole. There would have been fast-ruddered banks of clouds over the grey sea; I’m sure of that. They grazed as they moved, white bulls shouldering the upper air, solid-seeming.

I fired my arrows all along the dunes and then I reached the gorse bushes where the dunes run out. I had to go into the bushes to get an arrow out. They were prickly so I didn’t want to go back the way I had come. I went ahead and then I had to walk all the way around a shallow mud pool with crabs in it.

Yes, yes, there would have been baby crabs skittering through the dull bronze water, their white shell castings drying all around like papier-mache ghosts. What a wonderful thing it is that crabs can do. Oh my, the things I’d slough.

I was almost on the beach when I saw a man walking near the water. He had a long coat on and I could see his beard moving in the wind. He was picking things up from the sand but sometimes he would put them down again, or throw them towards the sea. I didn’t want him to see me but I don’t know why.

Too many spy novels, that’s why. I felt a little deflated. Like most boys’ stories, this started with the promise of ghosts but seemed now that it would consist of little more than projecting the desire for some adventure onto this dopey old codger. I laughed, recognising my own predisposition to be amazed; I was moved by it and also mildly disgusted.

I watched him for a while and I could hear him talking to himself although because of the wind I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I didn’t want to go back through the bushes but in my head I thought that if he saw me he would be angry although I don’t know why. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to be there. Although I hadn’t seen any keep out signs or climbed over any fences. He just kept moving around the beach but not going too far one way or the other like he had to stay inside a circle drawn in the sand. I waited for him to go further up the beach like beachcombers usually do but he stayed there. Then I thought maybe he was looking for something. Then I got a bit scared but I don’t know why. Then I heard a dog barking.

I looked up from the book for a moment. The air around me had shifted whilst I was reading, some little change that I could not place, something I’d missed. There was a cup of tea steaming on the table next to me. Dorothy. She must have come it whilst I was reading. Was I that enwrapped, that numb to the world? Perhaps I’d dozed off. That’s what old men do, isn’t it. They doze, snooze, have a quick bit of shut-eye. We soften and become cosy, our needs twee. It’s monstrous. I won’t have it, I thought. I’ll get home and listen to the Stooges and get angried up and then find a pub with a band playing.

The dog was a Labrador and it came running along the beach, barking at the old man. He stopped what he was doing and stared at it as if he’d never seen a dog before. Then I heard a man shouting. He got closer and I could see him. He was calling the dog. It was called Tench. Tench was just standing in front of the old man barking and barking. He had his arms by his side and didn’t say shoo or go away or anything. I thought Tench’s owner might apologise to the old man but I just heard him say ‘what are you barking at you mad thing’ and then he grabbed Tench by the scruff of the neck and pulled him away although he was still barking and looking behind him. Then I realised it was a ghost and ran back through the bushes even though I got scratched.

Mild surprise tangled with new, begrudged admiration. Then I realised it was a ghost. Well, maybe not the conclusion I, or another adult, would have reached but given the evidence it wasn’t entirely absurd. I had been expecting a hope of the supernatural superimposed over some prosaic anomaly, or perhaps a good tale mutating into garish fibs; the old man sprouting devil horns and lunging after the boy across the dunes, perhaps. But this felt inconclusive. As is the way with a child’s thoughts, the diary veered off into domestic complaint and plans to save for an oil paint set upon returning to the city. The final sentence of that day, however, read:

Tomorrow I’ll go back and see if the ghost is there again. I will take papa’s camera although I’ll have to pinch it and put it back in secret and work out how to get the picture processed without him knowing.

Oh, don’t worry, son, I thought. Just tell him you want to take his prided camera out into the sand dunes to snap a ghost you just saw a dog barking at. He won’t mind a bit. I made myself laugh. Dorothy must have been hiding behind the door, waiting for signs that I had returned to the realm of the sentient, because no sooner had I made a sound than the door slid open and she was standing there, cautious smile and – sweet lord – a glass of ice and liquid in her hand.

Saints, does my family know how to drink.

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” she said.

“I suppose so, but I’m sure there’s a rational explanation,” I replied. Dorothy frowned. I frowned back.
            “Are you feeling poorly, dear?” she asked. I shook the thought from my head. I had been back on the beach, looking over that boy’s shoulder, squinting at the ringed-in old man.
            “No,” I replied. Then, “yes, perhaps a little.” It occurred to me that Dorothy’s tipple might be medicinal, even at this hour. And I was keen to imply that I, too, might require medicating.
            “Well, I’ve just poured myself a large one,” she grinned. “Doctors be damned. I watched my own brother die before my eyes last night. God knows I can’t have long to go.”
            “Dorothy, that’s not true, you…”
            “Hush, dear. I’m eighty-eight. When death comes for me I want something in my hand to toast her with.”
            “How do you know it’s a she?” Dorothy laughed. She was transformed. There had been wicked flashes, now and then, but she was showing me something new. As if I’d passed or failed a crucial initiation.
            “I know death’s a she,” Dorothy smiled, “because no man can ever bring himself to throw things out, no matter how old or useless they’ve become. Men are sentimental.” She looked around the room, at my father’s shelves and crunched boxes of dry, unlabelled memories. She seemed to be rebuking him for something and, by extension, me.
            “Very cheerful, I must say.” I tried to smile but she had spooked me. The shelves full of things seemed to lean in on me. As if, by dying, Father had slipped some burdensome yoke from his shoulders and I had stepped into it. I had inherited his mortality.
            “He gave me a fright,” Dorothy said. “It wasn’t the dying. I’d always expected him to give me a warning first. He was thoughtful like that. Such a fright. It was like when someone jumps out at you and says boo and there’s this moment of fright but then relief and maybe one even laughs. It was like that, you see? Him frozen saying boo but without the afterwards when one realises everything’s all right.” She took a swift, bird-like sip of her drink. I could smell it. Brandy; a syrup on the air. I had forgotten that this old lady had a big brother who had died only the previous night. Neither of us had known life without him.
            “I suppose you’ll miss him terribly,” I said. I wanted to reach out and place a hand on her upper arm but I didn’t.
            “Not for long,” she smiled. “He was a terrible bully, you know. When I was little. He’d order me around like a little dictator. I used to hate him sometimes.” She flinched, as if she’d snagged herself on a thorn.
            “You mustn’t feel guilty,” I said, then regretted it.
            “Of course I don’t,” she said. Then, “You don’t.” That tone again.

What is her problem? Fuck this, I thought. I’m getting a drink.  

I stood up rather rudely, said ‘refil?’ in clipped tones and then walked out without taking her glass. The afterglow of a life illuminates many petty moments. It’s how we grieve; not the big set-pieces, the gnashing and howling ‘why oh why’ it’s the sharp tone over the washing up, the unexpected swear word, the little barbs shooting out at random like a mis-sprung porcupine.

I took the exercise book with me and, in the kitchen, peeled back the pages, searching for my place. There was a diagram for some kind of kite and a not-very-good drawing of a Lancaster bomber. I found the spot and, having fetched a glass, I read as I strolled through to the sitting room in search of the drinks cabinet.
I did get the snap of the ghost. But he broke the camera. I don’t know how he did it. I think he did it just by looking at me. Papa’s going to assassinate me. I don’t know what to do.

Dorothy must have wondered where I’d got to. I know I did. I pictured her wandering through to the kitchen and finding me gone, the back door hanging open.

Someone has spilt some thick, streaked and off-white emulsion over the stretch of my memory that leads between reading those words in the diary and pulling in a layby somewhere outside the city. I was breathing so hard I could have run there; my lungs seemed squeezed in fists and I could see in the rear-view mirror that my face had a slick greyness to it that was not healthy. I was driving under the influence. I half-fell out of the car and stumbled to the edge of a field. There was nothing growing in it, just the black ridges of ploughed earth, a spinney at each corner. As a child I had always imagined those little, tight gatherings of trees to hold insoluble mystery. A pheasant picked and stalked up from a ditch at the northern side of the field. I lost myself for a few moments, shrunk so small by the inflated East Anglian sky that I was infinitesimal even to myself; what a gift.

But the thoughts returned. The exercise book on the passenger seat began to reassert its gravity. And I, passing out of whatever had so spooked me, began to wonder what the matter was. I was sure I had not seen a ghost; so that couldn’t be it. It was simple: as a child I had invented a ghost for myself, pursued it, broken my father’s camera and, as I would no doubt soon learn, been punished and forgotten all about it.

Forgotten all.

I’ve always had a kind of pride in my forgetfulness. It suggested, to me at least, a sense of mission, of higher business that those around me proved they did not share with their capacity to stop and notice and remember the calculation of tax returns, when so-and-so was elected or the name and birthday of some obscure and Gilray-like aunt. I felt myself streaking through it all (in both senses of the word), eyes on the prize, cosmic, destined, fleet-footed…

But to forget a ghost, even an imagined one? It was inordinate, out of proportion. Like the way I twitched at the thought that I had no recall of these events, the feeling of arriving at a party and realising you’ve forgotten to buy a present just as you step into the throng of smug-arsed guests all clutching theirs. Or when you wake into the joyful flotation that comes before the hangover swipes and you remember what you said and did the night before and feel the silence from the neighbouring pillow. Uncalled-for.

My mobile phone chimed from the car. It was Dorothy. I read her name but didn’t answer. Come on love, I thought, what did you expect? That I’d arrive all bustle and noble grief, ready to lift the cheiftan’s shield, the weight of his robes. You knew I’d do a bunk.

I picked up the exercise book from the passenger seat. Turning the flimsy, filmy pages was like opening a series of iron doors. I walked to where the verge slipped down to the field, pulled my coat around my legs against the breeze and sat upon the ditch-edge.

I had to wait in the house all morning. It drove me barmy because mama would keep telling me to get outside and play and not waste the holiday moping indoors. I had to invent excuses but she just got impatient with me. Eventually they both decided that they wanted to go for a walk. They tried to make me come with them but I said I didn’t want to and although mama tutted and papa rolled his eyes they went anyway and left me in the house. Then I could take the camera. There was already film in it.  

I followed the dunes the way I went yesterday. There were more people about at first and I was cross that they might scare the ghost away but the further I went there were less and less people. I think they like to drive to the car park by the café and walk for ten minutes up the beach then go back. Most of them don’t walk as far as where the old man was. Perhaps that’s why he’s there. I had the camera in my satchel because I didn’t want anyone asking questions.

As I got closer to the place I saw him it seemed to get colder. I wasn’t scared but it was queer as the sun hadn’t gone behind clouds and there was no more wind than before. Everything was the same but colder although I wasn’t scared.

As soon as I got close to the spot of beach I took the camera out of my satchel. In between gaps in the gorse I could see the space but not the old man. The sand seemed deeper than yesterday. It was hard to walk fast. But when I got to the place I’d been yesterday I saw him as if he’d appeared from nowhere. If he’s a ghost then I suppose he did. I had a sick feeling but I told myself not to funk it.

He was doing the same as yesterday. Looking around the beach but only within a circle that I could almost draw in the sand because he walked the  

Here, the word perimeter was attempted and abandoned several times

…he walked the outside of the circle like it was a circus ring. I wonder what he’s looking for. When he looked up I saw his face seemed made of pale dough. I tried to take a picture but the camera was very shaky. When I have my own I shall buy a tripod. He couldn’t have heard the button click over the wind and the waves but he looked right at me and I heard something go crack inside the camera. He stared at me and I have to say that I was very scared. He had a look in his face that I think I shall be able to describe only when I am very old and many sad things have happened and I’ve learned the words for them.

I thought of my own face, that albino owl in the rear-view mirror. The little bugger was wrong, of course. You never learn those words. There are none. Perhaps it’s in music, that feeling, or in some painting I’ve yet to see. But words? Sorry, Sunny Jim. No chance. You’re mute. You just don’t know it, yet.

When I got home the elders made jokes about how I’d gone out once there was no one telling me to go out. I tried to laugh but all I could think about was the broken camera. I went to my room and tried to fix it but I think I’ve made it worse. I’m more scared of papa than the ghost. It definitely is a ghost. I don’t know what time it’s from, though. If papa finds out about the camera I think I’ll have to run away. I don’t know how much it cost but I know it was a lot of money. More money that I could ever pay back.

What a prophetic statement. I had one link to the great old bluesmen, one thing Blind Willie McTell and I could have talked over on Decatur; we both got ripped off by the record people, signed the wrong damn piece of paper and signed it with a dozy, grateful, shit-eating grin. Of course, Willie had the entire structure of racist America on his shoulders, keeping him uninformed, poor, easy to exploit. I had private schooling, a childhood full of books and relatives in the professions and I still managed to sign away my share of Look Out, the Future’s Behind You as well as a couple of EPs and a live LP. You see it in the news occasionally that some poor stooge (not Iggy, although it’s the sort of thing he gets caught up in) from back then has taken an old band-mate to court over the rights to the keyboard run to this or that million-seller. And he may lose or he may win but it’s all so dreary. Because he thought it was for keeps, that those arpeggios and slap-it-with-a-boxing-glove basslines would keep you in birds and mandrax forever. More money than I could ever pay back. Good God, y’all.

There was a picnic area close to where I’d parked. At least, two picnic tables that the council had deigned to drop at the roadside. I heard sounds behind me and, turning, saw a people-carrier had parked and was disgorging a family party of at least three generations, each vying with the next to be the most obnoxiously, honkingly attention-seeking and vulgar. I’ve lived my life trying to step out of the protective aura of snobbery my parents conjured around me as a child; I’ve squatted, lived on council estates where the only operable vehicles were stock cars and my neighbours kept goats and pigeons. I don’t think I’m a snob but – Christ alive – some people have you reaching for an imagined posey like a Regency fop. I’m not even going to describe them. It’s not about class, it’s not about income. It’s about self-respect and wilful, red-top scoffing ignorance. The way people fatten their children.

 I stood up, pointedly, to leave the raucous scene behind but, with what was – I’m sure – a minor stumble, I became aware of how much I’d had to drink. Did I mention Father’s Laphroig, quarter-empty on the back seat? I caught one of the family group looking at me with silverback suspicion. It seemed wholly reckless, then, to climb into the car and keep driving. The small annex of my brain that attends to my safety flashed up images of standing at a roadside, dumb before police, child corpses, vague and red, littering the public highway. I gripped the exercise book and, turning on my heel as if it had been my plan all along, stepped down the side of the ditch, hopped across the dank water at the bottom and set out across the field towards one of the copses.

Thick mud, rich with incipient life, feet sinking in like roots into clay…wood pigeon’s muted call…lambent flicker through canopy of trees etc. You know what it’s like in the woods and you know how people like to write about them. And it is like that. It’s also wet, the kind of wetness that smells green. And the ground is spongy with all the stuff that’s died. And the trees have fungi growing from them and it’s hard to find a place to sit because these little ecosystems keep all the dew and rain in for days. In the centre there was a stagnant pond. I’m sure it was stagnant although just then it seemed pure, drinkable, baptismal. I sat down on a kind of fistula bulging from the base of a tree. I knew that lime-green algae would be smearing my arse and coat but I didn’t care. There was a drumming in my ears. Not in my ears. Why do people say that? It was in the bone and gristle. Like a thought beating on a door. I opened the exercise book again.

I know the ghost can only walk inside his circle but it also occurred to me just now that he might be able to go where he wants at night and that now he’s seen me we have made a connection and he will be able to smell me and follow me here. It’s very windy tonight and the window is rattling.

I just fixed the window in place with some paper folded and jammed into the space. I had to do it with my eyes closed as it isn’t sensible to stand next to a window at night when there’s you’ve just taken a ghost’s photograph. If I saw something, even if it was just a cat or something I think I’d make enough noise to bring father in here and with the camera out on the bed the game would be up. Hold on, the window seems to have come loose again. It’s rattling…

The next few pages were blank, creased and stuck together as if something had been poured on them. Forgetting a ghost was like forgetting first love. What extraordinary, rich and abundant distractions had life brought me that I should not have had the room for this, my own little adventure. Perhaps 1972 pushed it all out of my ears. 1972 was good. There was a US tour. Met the Plaster Casters. Just this overwhelming feeling that a whole city could be pleased you arrived, that a city could throw you a party and come to hear your six-piece conceptual suite about a mechanised future ruled by druids. Absolutely lunatic, the whole thing. The lie of welcome. And the itch, that tip-of-the-tongue tingle that something wasn’t quite right. Like a window rattling when it should be safe tight.  

When the writing started up again it was on water-wrinkled pages and suggested cramped conditions or a lack of light. It was double spaced.

Papa found out about the broken camera. When I went to fix the window I saw a face. It was just someone from one of the other cottages but I screamed. It was a stupid thing to do. Papa came running in and saw the camera in all its pieces on the bed. I was still frightened by what I’d seen. He just looked at the mess on the bed, looked at me and took a deep breath. He said ‘why don’t you pull yourself together and I’ll see you in the sitting room in ten minutes’. Then he walked out.

I don’t know what happened next. But I was out in the dunes with my satchel in the dark and I was running fast. I must have climbed out of the window.

I found that I was gripping my forehead. The poor scamp had done a runner, just as I had this morning. We hadn’t, it was clear, run as far as we’d hoped. I looked around. It’s a cliché, I know, but there really could have been nothing in the world but this little copse and me. I imagined the world beyond the luminous green fringe as a ploughed waste, one tractor churning up the dirt and not due back this way for ten thousand years. And nothing growing. Did I really see a ghost? Did I believe in ghosts, then or now? Avoiding the metaphysics, I wondered what the baleful old soul had lost, what he’d done to be marooned like that. Perhaps it was indifference, or rather a kind of lackadaisical disregard for the rituals of dying that had washed him up; he’d missed that tarred boat, assumed there’d be another one. Or perhaps he been there, eager on the phantom jetty, only to reach into his pocket and find his ticket gone. Perhaps that’s what he was looking for.

I didn’t get lost in the dunes because the moon is over the sea. I wanted to head away from where I saw the ghost but there are more cottages that way and no dunes and it ends in a river that flows into the sea and there’s no bridge.

I was afraid of the ghost although I told myself not to be stupid. I knew papa would be waiting in the sitting room for me, probably with mama. He would wait ten minutes then probably a bit more before coming to get me. I don’t know how he’d punish me but it’s more about what he’d say. He’d be sarcastic and serious at the same time. I didn’t want to go where I saw the ghost so I kept off the beach but the gorse got very thick and tore my coat. It scratched up my arms and legs and I started to worry about tettanus.

I’m in a pill-box. I found it by accident. I scraped my knee on the wall because it’s almost buried in the sand. It smells as if the soldier inside died and is still here. I didn’t want to go in. What if this is where the ghost comes from, I thought. But the ghost is too old a man to have been in the army in the War. And he doesn’t look like a soldier and I think ghosts always wear the clothes they were known by or the clothes of their job. He looks more like a tramp. I’m writing by torchlight. I filled my satchel with all the things I could but not with food because there wasn’t any in my room. It’s very cold. I think I hear papa calling me. He might be worried but if I go back he’ll soon forget about that and it’ll be back to talking about the camera. I can’t face him. It’s too embarrassing. I’ve bloody messed things up. I’ve messed them up.

I had to stop reading. I can’t face him. It was that, not the ghost or the camera. It kicked. It kept kicking. I’ve messed things up. Those words could have been written in 1973, when I found I had no money to buy a house and finally showed my record contract to a lawyer. Or when Jackie buckled under five years of my unstinting dedication through word and deed to demonstrating that I was not good enough for her. Or when I walked out of that PGSE a month before the end spouting some bullshit about not becoming an instrument of the state but really knowing that I just wouldn’t handle the early mornings or those insolent, expectant faces every day; or when I couldn’t fix my own damn broadband, or when I told Jackie that I thought children would hold back her painting but really knew that I just didn’t want the hassle and the expression on her face, abandoned and just mortified that I couldn’t even be bothered to lie well to her anymore, and when mother died and I got drunk at the wake and ensured that everyone would remember me, not her, that day. I could have turned to my father on any given day and said I’ve bloody messed things up and, yes, the diary had it, it was the embarrassment that kept me away. I broke his camera trying to snap a ghost. I lay down on my side, shoulder rolling a dip into the soft ground. My sight went milky and it was a good thing.

I couldn’t imagine a way back. I wondered if there was a staircase at the bottom of the pond, silted with blackened leaves at first but then widening and free of mud. A staircase I could walk alone, unobstructed, with no path to choose but down. I wouldn’t care what was at the bottom, if the way was clear. I turned a page.

It’s morning. I’m still in the pill box. But I can see the ghost outside.

I don’t think I’ve had much sleep. It’s too cold and there were always noises. I might have pneumonia. I had a dream about a railway running through the desert. I knew that a bomb was going to go off but there was nowhere to hide. I expect it’s because Father was in North Africa in the war. The ghost isn’t doing much. Just walking in its circle picking at things on the floor. When the clouds go over the sun it goes greyer and less visible.

‘That’s the bloody problem,” I thudded a fist into the spongy floor. “North Africa.” Father got to go to war. Everything he did in his life after that was justified by his time served as a warrior. I think he was decorated. Isn’t it terrible that I don’t know for sure; isn’t that just awful. He heeded the call and, for those few glorious, unimaginably harrowing years he was justified each day. Never waking up wondering as to his purpose. Never drifting. Why couldn’t I go to North Africa? There were no good wars in my time, no way to be proven.

I sat up again, the better to read.

I’m so hungry. I have to just tell myself there’s no such thing as ghosts and make a dash for it. I’ll close my eyes and run.

There was a gap in the page, like a minute’s silence.

I can’t explain what just happened. Even when I’m old and rich and I’ve read all the books in father’s library I won’t be able to explain it.

I packed my bag up and ran up out of the pill box. The sand was deep and slippy so I couldn’t get a good speed going. It was like running in a bad dream. I closed my eyes and hurtled between the gorse bushes out into the space where the ghost was. I had my head down and tried to aim for the right-hand edge, so I could carry on along the beach and find somewhere to decide what to do next. Then I hit something like running into a brick wall. Which I’ve done once and so I know it felt the same. I fell on the sand and thought I’d broken my nose. I opened my eyes to see if there was blood and the ghost was right in front of me. I think I ran into him. He was looking at me with those sad eyes but he looked so much like a person I was almost relived. I felt like I recognised him. Was it my grandpa? He died when I was very little. I couldn’t breathe or move, like when you’ve winded yourself. I wanted a passerby to come along. Even Father. The ghost held out his hands to me. He kept opening them and closing them, as if they were hungry baby birds. Then he carried on searching on the ground, picking up shells and pebbles and mermaids’ purses, looking at them then throwing them down again. Sometimes he’d glance at me as if I could help. I can’t explain how he told me but he told me he would be there forever if I didn’t help him. It sounds loopy. I got on my hands and knees and started crawling across the sand looking for anything that looked like it might have been lost, a key, a coin, some glasses, a photograph. Sometimes he spoke but even up close his voice was blurred as if it came from a long way away across the wind and I couldn’t hear the words.

Sometimes I’d find something that had been washed up, like a bottle, and hold it up to him, but he’d just look away and keep searching. I think people may have walked past but I didn’t really notice them. I can’t understand it, now. Why didn’t I run away? I forgot about being hungry.

Then I found something that was different and held it up. It was just a lump, covered in sand and grit, but too light for a stone. It was hollowed out like half an Easter egg.  This time he came over. I was shaking and trying to understand what I was doing. He held out his hand and the air seemed to be crying and I was breathing it. That sounds silly but it’s how it was. It was the kind of crying you have when it’s sad but also a relief. That’s the only way I can think to say it. The air was sad It was crying. And the sand, and the sea. Just like there’s electricity in everything, there was sadness in the whole world. The ghost took the thing and, as if it was very precious, began to brush the sand away with his thumbs. 

I read the next few words and something, some perished fan-belt within my pre-digital, imitation-teak casing, snapped.

The mother from the picnicking family at the roadside told me later, when she brought flowers to my hospital bedside, that they were first alerted to my plight by a sound that their youngest daughter, Britney, assumed to be a ‘grumpy elephant’. Apparently their none-too-peaceful pastoral was interrupted by a drunken old man charging from the bushes at the far end of the field, clutching his chest and howling. I vaguely remember the pain, like a molten cannonball being dropped into my lungs. But I better remember the cause of the pain. Cameron, for such was the husband’s name, dashed out into the field to either assist me or defend his children against me, he wasn’t yet sure which. I made it half way before hitting the churn like a collapsible scarecrow.

It was a very, very mild heart attack. The doctors said I was lucky and I must assume that they’re right and be accordingly grateful to the universe. You know what hospitals are like, or you’re lucky and you don’t and you’d rather not thank you very much so either way I’ll not tell you about my stay. I did a lot of thinking, though, which I will get to in a moment. I was busy remembering things and trying to stay alive whilst knowing them. It’s like adjusting to a new disease, a prosthetic limb (I imagine), or a new home that is so much smaller and more disappointing than the last. But it’s also knowing that the disease, now diagnosed, can be treated, that the limb, awkward as it is, will allow one to walk and the home, poky as it might be, is one’s own and can never be repossessed.

By the time Aunt Dorothy found out what had happened to me I had already checked myself out.

When I finally returned to Father’s house, nothing had moved or changed since my previous, pinballing visit. I passed through the coolness of each room, floating, not settling. I think I was looking for some kind of locus of spirit, a place where Father could be found, something I could address words to. But he wasn’t there, of course. He wasn’t there in the packed rows of books that no one would read again. He wasn’t in the paintings, which I cleared space for and stacked on top of one another because I was going to sell the house as soon as I could. The tops were rich with dust and I wondered how much they’d meant to Father. Had he even known who they were? I had assumed so but I assumed a lot of things. Had he once lifted them from the wall, following his own parents’ death, wondering at the faces, hankering after genealogical definition, precedence for his own, weird interior pools. He also wasn’t in the bedroom, although that’s where I stopped looking. The bed was made, single, empty. I sat down on the corner and tried to say the word ‘sorry’ but it wouldn’t come. Instead there was a sort of caving in, a gentle subsidence in the air and I remembered the exercise book, how it said the air was sad. Quite true, of course.

“You mustn’t blame yourself,” Dorothy appeared in the doorway.
“Is there a secret entrance to this place, or something?” I half-snapped. She smiled and stayed where she was, half-in, half-out of the door. Oh, but she’s so old. I really saw it, then. There was reedy sunlight coming in over the top of the curtains and it hit her just so, highlighting every soft crease.
            “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t have talked to you the way I did.”
            “I’d forgotten,” I said, looking up, suddenly glad that – as is increasingly infrequent these days – there was someone older in the room. “I’d forgotten all about them.” Dorothy shrugged and sat down next to me. The mattress hardly moved, as if she had accumulated there in weightless moments, like snow. I sagged, instead of the mattress.
            “I can take care of everything, if you want,” she said. I shook my head.
            “You’re a very old lady, Dorothy.” It came out a little harsh, like a terminal diagnosis. “It would be awful of me, I mean irresponsible and very selfish, to ask that. He was my father. I’ll bury him. And do all the bloody paperwork.” I was dreading every living-hell, brain-crippling minute of it. She seemed to falter, as if I’d drifted into speaking Mandarin. She gave a little frown and fretted her hands together.
            “He was proud of you, you know. In his way,” then gave me a sly, shy glance, to see if I’d bought it. I gave her a kiss on the cheek.
            “Even if he wasn’t…” I said, then couldn’t finish the sentence; although it was unclear even to me whether this was due to a dearth or a surfeit of ways to end. 

After leaving hospital I had driven straight out to find the field with the copse of trees. There had been rain and the exercise book was gone, blown into the dank pond at the centre or carried off by a bird to line a nest. I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t need to read it again.

Standing there, close to the water, still wearing the clothes in which I’d nearly died, I reached back into my pocket to see if what I’d experienced was true. It was. I didn’t need the exercise book to remember the last few lines of my story.

. He took the thing and, as if it was very precious, began to brush the sand away with his thumbs. Then he held it up and showed me. I didn’t understand but he seemed satisfied and put it in his pocket. I know it was a ghost and not my imagination because once he’d done that there was a feeling like the whole beach was lifted a little way then fell again. He went all grainy and seemed to camouflage with the sky and beach and then he wasn’t there. I don’t know who he was and I certainly don’t know what was so important about half a walnut shell that he had to spend all that time looking for it.

As I’d sat in the soggy mud, reading the exercise book, those words had sent a freezing shock through me. They’d nearly killed me. I was answerable, but this time I would answer. I reached into my jacket pocket, the pocket without holes. My fingers prodded and probed for a moment before locating and identifying a simple, broken, brittle thing. But I had known it would be there, as soon as the old ghost had squirreled it away. 

And I remembered again the last time I’d visited father. He was having his summer cold and I was to keep him company but I’d forgotten the appointment until the last minute. I leapt up from reading some book, realised I’d not left time for supper and grabbed the nearest packaged snack I could find from the kitchen on my way out. I munched as I drove, shoving the detritus into my pocket. I had been wearing the same coat I wore the day after Father died, the day of the ghost story and the heart attack. The Eventful Day, I think I shall call it. I realise that I always wore that coat when I visited him, the long coat with the ripped lining. I barrelled through his front door, offered him a share of what I was eating. We talked and he suggested a trip to the Bengal Star. We walked to the front door, put on our coats, enjoying a conversation I will never remember. But it was gentle, and familiar, and we were kind to one another. Of course, I forgot about the snack I’d brought and left with father; the half-full bag of walnuts.