The ghost of Christmas past

23Feb08

At half past eleven, jarring a tableaux of uncommonly peaceful people placed close, food-and-wine malleable around a table dripping with one large wax white candle, comes a knock on the door.

It is The Ghost of bloody Christmas Past.

Remnants of himself smeared over Chrisie’s wall in blood red paint. The anti-christ and his balls.

(BRITAIN’S
BURNING
DIAL
999)

The violent slash of black against the red of the front door. The belt buckle scratches in the paint of my father’s car. His mohawk haunts me. It is funny but also not how when this Ghost of Christmas Past

lifted the knocker and dropped it lifted and dropped lifted and dropped
three iron echoes

his name fell onto the tip of my tongue and lay there scratching and biting before I swallowed it. Despite it having been a year and a half or so.

The Ghost of Christmas Past parading his new car. I wonder if he compiled a mental checklist of Chicks To Resurrect.

Wanna come out, he says, and it is not a question. The rest of us previously peaceful people hear only his dull, stale-gum obstructed monotones, the table being hidden from view of the front door with its black jagged smear of paint. If I could see this six-foot-one ghost I would want to kill him. I want to kill him anyway.

Come out, he tells Chrisie with a nod in the direction of his white Punto. In the passenger seat lurks a second ghost, slouched and greasy and good for not much else other than posing slumped and greasy in the passenger seats of new cars.

I don’t hear what she says to him. She stands resting her weight on one hip in her Ramones T-shirt with her hair scraped back and her bangles which clink when she moves, arms folded, and probably says something ballsy when he lies and tells her it’s not even ten yet, why would she want to sit with her family when right here at her doorstep is a white Punto with a slouched and greasy second ghost thrown in completely free-of-charge?

An uneasy coincidence or the sixth sense of a ghost, that he turns up minutes after she’s talking about some new guy without the paint buckets and satan style, and I’m thinking of an alternative strand of a larger story, of accidental babies and ohmygod the screaming the bottles the nappies at 3AM the fat bauble wrists and the baby milk smell?

You can’t kill a ghost, I remind myself.

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