Michele Forbes - Ghost Moth

“Wil-ly,” Stephen says with a huge smile, and immediately he wants to see what Willy Miller tastes like.

“No — don’t eat him! Bring him to Mummy!” Elizabeth laughs.

A humpback bridge suddenly appears on the road as Katherine shifts her position a little on the sofa.

“Let’s put a barricade on the bridge and a burning bus,” says Elsa. She lifts Micky Muffin’s bread van and turns it on its side. “That’ll have to do for the bus.”

“What are you doing, Elsa?” asks Elizabeth.

Elsa continues. “Now”—she stops Farmer Meadows with her finger—“do you have any identification, Farmer Meadows, in order to pass the barricade?”

“Don’t be stupid, Elsa,” says Maureen. “Why would you need to ask Farmer Meadows for identification if you know it’s Farmer Meadows.”

Elsa looks blankly at Maureen. Maureen promptly removes Micky Muffin’s bread van from the bridge and allows Farmer Meadows to continue. Farmer Meadows weathers the humpback bridge nicely.

Then Willy Miller arrives beside Katherine wet with saliva, as though he has just been caught in a shower of rain.

“For Mummy,” Stephen says, and smiles at her.

“Thank you, my love,” Katherine says. George comes over to the sofa and sits on its edge. Katherine looks at George. She looks at her children. To have all this.

Only once since that night on their honeymoon in the blue-stoned courtyard had they mentioned Tom. The day George was helping Katherine move out of her mother’s flat into their new home together, George had spotted Katherine packing a small statuette and had asked her where it had come from. When she told him, he had exploded in anger. “A fucking shrine — that’s what you’ve made for him, is it?” Startled, she had let the statuette slip from her hands. It had fallen onto the parquet floor and had broken into two pieces, the smooth bald head rolling off under the table as though the statuette had been guillotined. Outraged at the viciousness of George’s attack, Katherine had screamed back at him, “His name is Tom, for Christ sake! His name is Tom!” The sound of the name pitched in the air like that, so much in the present tense, shocked them both. His name, that name, transforming right in front of them into something rich and strange and terrifying.

On their honeymoon, she had offered George a confession, in the hope that it would set her free, and he had, in turn, handed a confession back to her. Their wedding gift to each other. A gift they had rewrapped and then carried silently throughout their married life. They had both been frightened that talking through their feelings about what had happened would have unraveled the hurt caused, would have demanded something of them that would have been too much for them to bear. Would have demanded that they look together at the frayed threads of their lives spreading out in front of them like an ancient tapestry. Each of them then having to discern exactly which one was the thread of guilt and where precisely it had twisted around the fibers of their love. Each of them asking how easy would it be to find the thread of infidelity? Its silken weave so difficult to trace and capture. And which the illusive thread of betrayal? Where did it follow the warp and where the weft? Which the thread of culpability? And where the threads that had unraveled from doing nothing until it was too late? But in the state of forever searching for the other’s forgiveness and never asking, they had both kept Tom alive. The way we continually keep the dead alive in an attempt to repair the past. The way we carry the dead through life and so forget to live.

However, losing each other they had never wanted. She sees this now.

Something within Katherine is softening — whether of her own volition or not is hard to tell — as though a veil or a skin is falling from her. And it seems perfectly obvious to her now, only she just hadn’t been able to see it. That holding on to her memories of Tom, burying them deep within her, detail after detail, in a vain effort to protect herself and George, had in itself been an endless infidelity. An infidelity to the here and now. Even though she had not been able to admit it to herself, she had held on to it all in her attempt to make sense of Tom’s death. Perhaps make sense of the loss of a baby, too — if there ever had been one. Most of all, to try to make sense of what George had done — or not done — out of love for her.

Then, since her cold encounter in the sea with the seal, since she had faced a kind of drowning of her own, all those memories of Tom had risen to the surface, risen in a bid to be released, risen in a bid to release her.

George had been tortured by his own ghosts, too, she had no doubt, interminably tortured, had turned pieces of memory over and over again in his mind, wondering how he could have made things different, or possibly, even secretly, grateful that he hadn’t. The pain of that keeping, she feels it now. Such a weight for him to carry. George waiting in the dusk of his life, like a child waiting for the big snow, so that it may ease the world with its white promise. Wasting himself with an ill-defined hope. Wondering how, in the eyes of the world, he could possibly justify his actions on the night of Tom’s death. Wondering how, in the eyes of his wife, he could possibly compete with the perfect dead.

After their play, George makes something to eat for the children, then goes upstairs to prepare Katherine’s bed. Katherine gathers up Applewood Green and all its inhabitants in the gray woolen throw to keep them safe, leaving them on the sofa, and then touching each child tenderly on the head as they sit at the kitchen table, she moves to the hallway and begins to climb the stairs. George comes down the stairs and meets her halfway. She looks up at him.

“It’s bad luck to cross on the stairs,” she hears herself say to George.

“Is it, now?” George replies with a smile. “I never knew that.”

Then he bends down and lifts her in his arms. “I’ll have to carry you, then,” he says.

He lifts her up and cradles her against his breast. Her frame is as light as a child’s. Her hair is soft against his cheek. He rubs his cheek against her hair. He breathes her in. He carries her up the stairs, still the groom he once was, still the man who loves her, the man who has always loved her more than anything in the world. This big, generous man, showing pride in his carrying, as though he has just discovered his talent to win her back. She takes to him, allows herself to yield to his carrying, though she laughs and tells him she does not need to be carried, that she is strong enough. This is sweet, sweetness itself. This acceptance. She had imagined it as a melting, but instead it feels like a falling, a cascading. Now that it has all begun to surface, it is, ironically, an easy spilling, a welcome release. This acceptance of what they were together and what they are. He carries her into the bedroom and sits, still holding her, on the end of the bed, as though he sits on a large rock staring out to sea, her head still resting on his breast. Picture them together. She is a limpet on his body. He will not let her go. His arms encircle her. She has found strength she did not know she had. The arc of her bent body keeps them both weighted to the rocks.

It is not forgiveness. Forgiveness seems irrelevant now, too haughty a thing, too opinionated, too sure of its own step. Too dependent on negotiation. This is something other. This is a recognition, a reclaiming. A much more delicate thing. It has the kind of cleansing purity that weeping can sometimes bring, although they are not weeping. They are sitting together on the end of the bed. In each other’s arms. Trembling with tenderness.