The metro route I’ve plotted takes me through all the stations Let’s Go warns one to avoid at night – Anvers, Gare du Nord, Barbes-Rochefoucault. In the darkness of the tunnels, I notice some amazing graffiti speeding by and wonder about people who have the time and audacity to insinuate themselves into that forbidden gloom during the hours the trains don’t run. Bright whorls and garish lines scroll their way up the curved walls and I think of Lascaux. How did these modern artists see their way to paint in the dark? What strange contortions did they perform with their spray cans? And what makes their cryptic message seem as alive as the flickering horses of that cave in the Dordogne?
We emerge into diluted sunlight, straining to sift its way through a gauzy film of cloud, and a wind that tears at whatever pieces of the city it can catch. We’re high above a neighbourhood where railway lines run like zippers and tenements march into the mist, covered in the extravagant splashes of more living graffiti.
Suddenly a little girl, nine or ten perhaps, slips into the car. Dark, pony-tailed, wearing non-descript clothing that has the limp look of many days’ wear, she peers around timidly. With a catch in her throat – a delicate vein in her neck pulsing – a frightened bird – she launches into a beggar’s patter, tells us her father is dead, her mother ill, and all she asks is a bit of bread.
Rather stupidly, I wonder why she isn’t at school and studiously ignore her, as do the other passengers. No one moves a muscle or acknowledges her in any way. No one tosses so much as a centime. Why? Does her quavering neediness embarrass them? Strip illusions and self-satisfaction away too brutally? She is the only beggar – among gypsies with their wild violins, chomeurs, the obviously homeless – I’ve seen on the metro who’s been given nothing, who’s been so utterly ignored. It’s as if she doesn’t exist.
I don’t give her anything either. I’m going home next week and my funds are low and this is a side of Paris I refuse to involve myself in. Yet I feel oddly ashamed and her voice haunts me. I could go back down into the tunnels and ride the trains for hours, looking for her. I try writing a poem and it’s boneless, flat.
Years later in China, over an oily pancake and egg plant lunch, I sat discussing the world and all its kingdoms with Jonathan from New Zealand.
“I saw a ghost once,” he said out of the blue. “I was on a bus with some friends and a strange lady got on, a sort of bag lady. She seemed really ill and I worried she wouldn’t make it to a seat, then I was afraid she’d pass out. She tried to make eye contact with me, as if there was something I could do to help. When we got off, I asked my friends what they thought I should have done.
‘‘What lady? What are you talking about?’ they asked. Not one of them had seen her and she was right in front of us. I realized she was a ghost, the only ghost I’ve ever seen, and not at all what I thought a ghost would be. Sometimes I wonder if I dreamed the whole thing or had a brief hallucination.”
An cold chill juddered up my spine and the hair on my arms stood on end. I experienced that click, that flash of certainty that resolves an issue that’s gnawed forever at the back of your mind. Of course! The girl on the metro was a ghost – and that’s why everyone acted as if she wasn’t there.
The question that remains, of course, is why. Was there a purpose in my seeing the girl on the metro? I don’t know, just that in an odd way she haunts me still.
In talking to Tickles over the weekend, he mentioned that he, too, has been twice wakened from a deep sleep recently by a male voice speaking his name, calmly but forcefully. His description matched – perfectly – my experience back in January.
What is the real purpose of these awakenings? Who is it? I believe it’s Piglet but I can’t prove it. If forced to be truthful – in the way the everyday world defines truth – I’d have to say I don’t know.
...I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
Sylvia Plath
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