When I was a child I saw a pair of brown trousers walking down the stairs. There’s many reasons why no one believed me, mainly the ridiculousness of it, but then again, that’s its strong point. Why would I make that up? A ghost floating would be easier, more standard, but it wasn’t a ghost. It was a pair of brown trousers. I was about five or six year’s old – I can’t be certain because most of my memories I pin to that era and they can’t all have happened then but five turning six was a coming of age for me, when the shadow man left and after that I appear to have blanked until I was eleven. So let’s say I was six, my birthday come and gone the easter before in this French house, I remember that for the card in the shape of the number that I hung on my bedroom door where it turned upside down on the handle, a six become nine, and felt immeasurably sad, my knees up, my back against the headboard of my bed. But this was summer, we were back in France, and I’d been out by the pool when I heard the telephone ring, a landline, this was the seventies, its trill reached through glass doors, across gravel and uneven stones over which I raced to the cool of the terracotta, eager to answer because what? It was exciting, useful, who knows. It stopped as I got there, the silence after noise a noise in itself, a ring ringing in my head but nowhere else and the hall felt bigger, quieter, on the edge of something as if my hurtle from water to house had hurtled me across dimensions and into a looking glass world. The rocking chair began to rock. A pair of brown trousers walked down the stairs. And when they vanished I returned to the pool with what I’d seen tucked under my arm, a vision unquestioned, I accepted it. I’m recounting this because we’ve just moved the furniture in the bedroom that used to be mine, that had a doorway to the hall which was bricked up and a new one cut so that the bathroom is now opposite but it changed the energy of the place and my son, who’s sleeping in there and hates that room couldn’t sleep. We can’t undo the bricking up but we’ve moved the looming wardrobe with the secret drawers and shifted the beds so that they’re not cut in half by a beam. And I said, I can put a sentry at the outside door if you like, this other exit that’s always been there that leads to the garden, and I imagined the being that I’d seen when I was five who reappeared the summer of the fire, who we all saw this time in brown hat and jacket, the same brown, a colour I recognised who appeared to everyone that year until we realised and shared and some of us were spooked but I wasn’t because I knew. The room is rearranged, the sentry is at the outside door, the beams no longer cut the bed, the wardrobe with the secret drawers no longer looms and six-year-old me is an echo through a door bricked up of a birthday card hung upside down on the doorhandle to the hall, don’t come in.
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