Revenant.

Revenant.

Yesterday, I found out that Gibbs' Emporium, up on High Wynd, in the town, our only decent shop, with its beautiful curvaceous facade and art deco windows, was closing at Christmas. Not that I live there any longer. I left to spend a year in France as an au pair in my late teens, studied in Paris, and only now go back for holidays, but as soon as I read that news on Facebook, I felt something fall in me, a sudden lack, and a growing grief.

What is a ghost, I asked my mother, when I was eight. My deeply religious mother. She wasn't happy with the word ghost, but conceded that there might be spirits. Perhaps they had left something undone on this earth, and had come back, fruitlessly searching for a way of making amends for a sin of omission.

I stayed awake that night, trying to lay my own ghost, wandering the basement, and the three upper floors of Gibbs' Emporium, that hot and tumultuous summer before I left for Paris. I tried to bell book and candle myself to sleep, but nothing worked.

I imagined the glass cabinets, the stylish metal and wood display units stripped out, the mirrors smashed, the mosaics on the restaurant walls covered in canvas and polystyrene, but like a palimpsest, the former beauty resurrected in my mind, and my eighteen-year-old self tried out a lipstick at the beauty counter, sat in a deep window recess in the restaurant on a lunch break, unpacked a crate in the basement china department, sitting in the packing straw, careful not to drop a Minton plate.

My mother worked upstairs, in the office dealing with the cash.

Into the pneumatic tubes, I would screw the banknote which the customer had given me, along with a receipt naming the price of the item, and watch while it shot along wires, to the cashier upstairs. When the canister was returned, I would unscrew the metal cap, and hand the change and the receipt to the customer. By the end of the day, my hands smelt metallic and hot. 

I used to wonder if it was my mother unscrewing the canister, on high, in the office, and pretended that it was.

Watching my ghost walk, so many years later, I hear the hiss and the wail, as that steel umbilical wedded her fingers to mine.

All of my sins are sins of omission. 

Marie Hartley.