Held Hands, Stabbed Backs

When I was eight years old, I believed in ghosts.

I believed in ghosts because we all believed in ghosts; how couldn't we, when they were a regular occurance in our daily lives? We all knew about the Moaning Myrtle-like ghost girl who stalked about in the school toilets, because we maybe hadn't seen her ourselves but people in the class who told us about it certainly had. Some of the braver children had tried the "Candy Man" trick, calling out an incantation three times into a bathroom mirror to see if faces appeared. It was Year 4 and my whole class were obsessed.

Then, one night my friend called me and she told me that there was a ghost in her house she'd met. Her name was Stephanie, a little girl who had died when she was pushed down the stairs. Her and another of her ghost friends protected the two of us; they had to because for some reason or other, a man called Bob who was also dead wanted us to die, he had been the one that killed Stephanie. I remember Molly telling me that Jane, who correalating with my weird eight year old obsession with the Tudors at that time I imagined looked like Jane Seymour, would hold my hand and protect me when I stuck out my own arm. They obviously never appeared but once in the classroom my friend told me that man was there, that he was touching my back and I could feel it, I could feel this pressure and this pain, it was so real that I didn't want to look behind me because I really felt his nails digging into my shoulders and I felt that I would see them. Similarly, Jane held my hand when I was scared. I feared her at first but not after a while. Her hand was cold and soft, her fingers very thin.

We were so young that it's hard to work out how long this odd little playground game went on for. Maybe a month. Maybe six. Maybe a year. But one day Molly told me she'd made it all up, made up Stephanie and Jane and the killer because she'd just wanted something to go on in our lives. At first I wanted to smile at her and shake my head because didn't she understand, it was real. I knew these imaginary friends so well. Then she told me she felt the same, that they'd become real, that we'd felt and heard and maybe even seen them and it was so strange because it was the strength of both our imaginations, childish faith and belief, things we'd told each other and most of all a need for comfort from monsters that had really made them real, our Ghosts.

A few years back I went to a Mind, Body, Spirit fair as a kind of experiment with my mother. I was too young to see a medium but she did. He'd known so many things. He'd known the name of her baby sister who died, he knew about a cupboard in our house that things had been moved in. He said that she had a daughter who got a funny feeling in her left leg, and that it was "the big orange cat" - our family cat Ginger died about a year previous to this - rubbing himself against her leg like he always used to. And that was true, I did used to get a tingling feeling in my leg. At the time we all cried and hugged. I felt so happy.

But since then I've started to doubt it, and a lot of this is down to me discovering Derren Brown. In a documentary he gave readings like this, claiming to be contacting the dead and using names, dates and things from people's personal history, that he always declared was using trickery. He did this to make people aware of false "mediums" but I have no idea how, if it was a trick it is still somewhat incredible.

I think I still believe in the big orange cat against my leg. I know that sometimes when I think about it I feel it, but am I conjouring it up myself? Because I've tried to work it out and there's really no way to know.

One last thing; I was in an exam recently I just knew I'd done awfully in. I did what I could and finished forty minutes early and that's always horrible because all there is to do is sit, stare at the clock, think about how much you fucked up. It sends you into crazy ways of finding entertainment, because of how lonely it is being in a room full of people where everyone else is silent and concentrating.

I wanted comfort and I was imagining holding a hand. Nobody's hand in particular, just a hand. I shut my eyes. And after a while, it was there. I moved my fingers around, feeling mine tangle in their's, feeling the softness of their skin. We played with each other's fingers. I squeezed and they squeezed back.

I have different amounts of belief in all of the above, different kinds of seemingly physical contact with an imaginary force. The hand today was not real, I know that, and neither were the ghosts in the school bathroom and the girl that died on the stairs. I'm still not sure about Ginger the cat. I know it's something I'd really like to believe in.

***

There were some stories in that I wanted to go back and change to third person because I'm so distanced from them it was weird to say "I".

In other news, this song has my heart at the moment;



I'll be back soon.

- Lizzie x