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confectionary in the shadow-striped quiet as we journeyed
under the city, that I became aware of faint movement around me in the
carriage. It was as if the other passengers began to twitch when I wasn’t
looking, and whenever I turned to see they stopped moving.
    I stared at my hands, counting the
crumbs on my fingers as I chewed the last of the food. And saw it at the edges
of my vision: fast, blurred movement, like something that shifted quicker than
the eye darting only partially into view.
    Faces. Hands. Open mouths. The
glimmering shapes of unusually supple bodies as they disturbed the still, stale
air. Each passenger had a sketchy double, a barely-glimpsed twin, and these
others were hanging from them like unruly children, grasping, silently
pleading.
    I kept staring at my hands, the big,
scarred knuckles, wondering if I was going insane.
    There was one sitting on The Spiker’s
knee, holding his head in its hands and silently screaming into his face. But
he was completely unaware, blind to its presence.
    When I looked directly at him, it
was gone.
    Then the train pulled squealing into
a station, and I hobbled out onto the crowded platform, pushing my way through
weekend shoppers and dazed tourists. I could hear the Spiker calling my name,
but I ignored him, not wanting to see that thing on him ever again.
    I’m not sure how long I kept running
(or limping), only that it didn’t seem to be an escape from what I’d seen. They
were everywhere, those things: holding people’s hands as they strolled beneath
a weak and heartless sun, sitting across from lovers in bars and cafes,
squatting morosely in the back seats of cars. Some of them were quite well
defined, and the same size as the people they were dogging; but others were
small and withered, emaciated effigies that looked like something out of old
WWII photographs taken at Belsen or Auschwitz.
    And all of them were vying for the
attention of those they resembled. It seemed to me that all these faint
doppelgangers wanted was some kind of confirmation of their own existence, a
word, a glance, a gesture…
    But what where they? Ghosts? If so,
why did they look like mutated versions of the people they were stalking? And
what the hell did they want anyway?
    It didn’t take long for me to
construct a plausible theory.
    Night fell, and I found myself
walking down by the river. The moon smeared the water with a silverish glaze,
and I could hear little waves breaking on the litter-lined shore. I looked up
at the underside of the High Level Bridge, the rusty steel beams, the weird
tatty pieces of rope that were tied to stanchions like so many unused methods
of suicide. My thoughts wandered through that barren landscape, looking for
clues.
    What if they were the ghosts of our selves,
haunting their corporeal vessels? The sides of us that we neglect in the blind
headlong rush into modernity and empty consumerism – the creative side, the
caring side, the untended part of us that isn’t so hard-bitten and jaded.
    And what if they are fading as our
society becomes harder, harsher, more insular? As we lose our empathy for
others, our sense of being more than just another rat in the race, what if
these other, softer selves are gradually being reduced to nothing; mere
suggestions of shadows on the wall, hushed noises in the night?
    When we see a ghost, we are actually
seeing ourselves, a forgotten part of our humanity left to rot, to grow stale
and listless. That is why phantoms are always so familiar; and instead of
realising the truth, we assume that we have seen the spirits of long-dead
friends and relatives, when in reality we are catching a glimpse of ourselves.
Each of us is haunted, but few of us ever stand still long enough to ask why,
or by whom.
    It takes too great a paradigm shift,
far too much of a sideways step outside a lifetime of human conditioning, to
allow us to see the truth.
    I went back to High Bridge Street
every weekend for the next month, hoping to catch