The use of an elbow’s backward hinge to wipe yourself properly…
…and he asked you to stand … just there. So as to demonstrate what must have been meant. He claimed that was just where … well, just where a ghost had stood earlier just as he had been looking through his bedroom window straight into the blinding sun of freak weather conditions, a time of day when he often expected you to arrive, but today you had been late, and instead of you, he had witnessed just there, yes, just there, the appearance, apparition or actualisation of approach by what he could only call a ghost … the ghost. Yes, just there. Peter waved and pointed as he stage-managed you into position beside the bullace tree, just in front of the grinding, creaking wooden-gate, a step poised upon taking another step up the stone steps towards his mansion’s front-door that you always rang with a happy flourish. As you know, Peter and you were in love. And on that day of the ghost, you had been late.
Peter actually noticed that sunshine lit things in a weird way that night – for day had indeed soon turned into night uncharacteristically without any intervening twilight or dusk, a fact that he blamed on freak weather conditions. The sun still seemed to shine, however, despite the coming of night; the sun was a dark blob on the horizon which shook him to his roots. He feared that he might not survive the implications of global warming that had been described by scaremongers day in and day out throughout the pages of his consciousness. It was almost a relief to worry about something as old-fashioned or as traditional as a ghost. The ghost of someone he once knew who must now be dead. But that person was not dead. One cannot be a ghost if one were not dead, could one? He squinted at your shape masquerading in the guise of the same earlier ghost in the garden, simply so that he could rationalise, reconcile something he knew in his heart of hearts to be essentially irrational, irreconcilable. You would do anything for him; you would even play silly goose or ghost games or games with the light and with the imagination. But it had not been imagination about the ghost, he assured you. What about a quirk of the light, then, you asked?
Putting aside nasty thoughts, stuffing the head of his necktie tight within the white starched collar (as meticulously laundered), Peter suddenly decided to answer the door – it having now been rung by yourself following your masquerade as a ghost in the garden – he himself now intent upon disappearing off with you to the pictures. In those old-fashioned, traditional days in England, the only way courting couples could snatch a kiss was upon the back row of a cinema as the film played itself out upon a loop of customers coming in and going out to the continuous performance rhythm of seeing through a film up to the point when they had started watching it … at the same time as kissing and cuddling amid the luminously smouldering cigarettes. One of his favourite sayings was about people ‘who reached the end of the long road by kneeling along it’: a religious conviction that could not be expressed in any other way. He made sure he wore clean underpants when he went out with you, not that you would ever likely see them.
Pathé News today, somehow with an anachronistic monochrome of stilted cinematic commentary, predicted that modern weather patterns would become even more memorable – almost like science fiction in reverse … but did future problems infect their own past with renewed dangers? … unless all of us, in those days, were too busy watching the passing of reality itself in the same way as we watched films, from the middle to the beginning, and then back again. And you both tentatively stared up towards the flat moving faces on a huge white screen that was like a vertical ceiling, your own kisses forgotten when contemplating the future’s ghosts passing in silhouette or in shadow across the same wide white screen … while a giant usherette’s torch shone out beam-like, disguised as a projector populating the darkness with shapes thus summoned to give credibility to these same shapes as a reality. He whispered sweet nothings in your ear as both of you returned to canoodling … oblivious of someone he once knew watching them from the upper circle, where their last short breaths were intensifying amid the billowing tobacco-stained air.
Prayers and nuances tremble, shadowily kneeling knee by knee onward to the gate you hoped to enter without a creak or grind. Silence is a language with too many words, so many words indeed that one cannot even begin to choose which words to speak at all. You both continue to tease sweet dark kisses from each other just as an approaching dawn stains the now whitening sky with browny yellow skidmarks from the pre-emergent sun … just along and above the horizon … just there, where someone he once knew stood with knees as elbows and elbows as knees.
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