Ghost Girl, Banana by Wiz Wharton EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Wiz Wharton
- Language: English
- Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
London 1997
12th Day of Mourning
By the time I was twenty-five, there were only two things I remembered
about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons; the second
was that we were happy.
We’d taken our father’s name, of course, but a name is only half a story.
The other half existed in that strange hinterland: hushed questions, Chinese
whispers, that had faded over the years to silence. And that was the
problem. Like a dripping tap or an unpaid bill, Mumma was the squatter at
the back of my brain forever waiting for the moment to surprise me.
The beginning of my ending is easy to mark. I was standing at the living
room window, watching my neighbor’s funeral procession make its third
lap around the estate. Brixton rain. The sort that gets nothing clean, only
picks up the grime and the stink and drops it somewhere else.
A small crowd had gathered in the car park, pretending not to get wet
beneath their Tesco shopping bag rain hats and broken-winged umbrellas,
but it seemed dishonest of me to join them. I didn’t even know the dead
man’s name although we’d looked at each other often. Our flats faced onto
each other, separated by the scrubby excuse for a square, and sometimes—
when I’d wake up in the night—I’d see him propped against the mirror of
his glass. Ferret, I used to think: the way his hands were always in motion,
his bony fingers plowing troughs through his hair, or stroking gray skin
through the fabric of his vest. One day I’ll go over there, I told myself. He
might have a story, too. We could become friends. But I never did.
The too-long rattle of the letter-box drew me away from the window,
accompanied by the postman’s tuneless whistle. I waited for him to retreat,
listening for the tight wet loop of his footsteps fading across the landing
before I wandered into the hallway.
On the mat was a single envelope. I’d never been a person who got
excited by the mail; someone who expected flowers or cards from
boyfriends, or round robins from girls I’d been at school with. Mostly it
was menus or my appointments, perhaps one of those anonymous
invitations for self-defense or the local jamboree at which no one awaited
my attendance. I kept them all, nonetheless. Positioned right at the entrance
to the flat, it demonstrated to the people who came by—my landlord, the
pizza delivery boy sopping wet from his piddling little moped—that mine
was a busy life, populated with busy people.
I threw the letter on top of the pile and went back to spying on the car
park. The funeral procession had moved on but the crowd hung around in
their clusters, chatty and reluctant to disperse. Maybe they were waiting for
an encore, a second chance to reflect on their mortality. But he looked so
well when I saw him. One minute he was here and then . . .
Gone.
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