Echoes

Introduction

Why do we humans cling to the hope of the paranormal? Is it so painful for us that our loved ones should be gone that we create echoes, ghosts, of them still on this planet?

My mother did that when my father died. She used to tell my grandma stories of how he left her car keys out in the bowl in the porch like he always used to. How he stroked her hair the night he died as she tried to fall asleep. She used to tell me of how he was still in the house, and would often set a place for him at the dinner table. I was young at the time, only eight years old, but I still remember what she used to do. But, it’s all in the past now. It doesn’t matter what she used to do, or how people thought she was crazy, how I thought she was crazy. I stopped thinking she was insane by the time I was 16, because I could see all the things she saw too.

My father died in a construction accident, where the plank holding up off the ground snapped, and he fell to his death. It was a warm summer’s evening when his friend Brian came round to our house. He gave me a sad smile as I played with whatever toy I was obsessed with that week, and took my mother into the kitchen for “a chat”. Afterwards, he took me aside, while my mum was sobbing on the kitchen floor, and told me to be brave and strong and smart just like he knew I was and would be. I smiled at him, and looked around him to get a glance of my mother. He ruffled my hair and left, and it was my task to do the impossible. Comforting someone in the middle of needing comforted yourself.

The days went by, adding up to 2925. Eight years. And every one of them started with me waking up thinking of my dad and me falling asleep thinking of my dad. I found it hard to grasp it all. It’s a hard thing to grasp though. How someone can suddenly go from being present tense, to past tense. Used to and was and did instead of does. I think the fact that my mother used to claim he was still here also made the transition harder. It wasn’t fair to anyone around her, but no one had the heart to tell her so. Sometimes, on a good night, she would tell me stories of the people she saw during the day. Magnificently strange people, with wild eyes and uncombed hair. I always went looking for those people, but never could find them. It seemed my mother was in a world of her own. 

We didn’t have a television, computer or radio. But we had thousands of books, littering the house. Piles of books in each room. I was raised reading stories, having stories read to me, making up stories in my head.

On the night before my 16th birthday, at half past eleven at night, my mother came into my room, a crazed look in her eye. She raved to me about getting out and running away before it was too late, before “it” drove me mad. She scared me, and I cried a lot that night. I debated whether or not I should run away. What had I got here? No friends, a shitty school, a dead father and a probably insane mother. It was raining, and I didn’t take anything with me when I climbed out of the window, and never looked back.