Ghosts

By Maxim Griffin.

You reach for the next box – no indication of the contents – you place the box on the table – rain – the search for the missing birth certificate continues – there’s been a house move since you last had it – this must be the box – the lid lifts – a breath of dust – you dive in.

A street map of Nenagh – annotated in biro with names and addresses – you don’t recognise the handwriting – 42 St Conlan’s Road – you’ve never been.

Wedding photos of people you don’t recall – mid 60s – a fiercely pink dress on a grey day – the groom has Michael Caine’s glasses – smiles, overcoat, bouquet – they’ve both been gone a while now.

School pictures – pudding bowl haircuts, missing teeth, woolly jumpers – you weren’t born yet – there are no details to pinpoint a specific date – mid to late 70s, early 80s at a push – he was born in 1968 – you haven’t seen her since they moved away.

Holiday snaps – Minnard, 1988 – you remember, just – it rained, there was a castle, it rained, there were midges and jellyfish – a photograph of Derek leaning on a prehistoric monument, sleeves rolled up, pipe in hand, behind him is a black mountain.

Angela on the beach – very stark black and white – a wide hat casts a shadow over a beaming face – Mykonos, August 1967 – a faded colour picture of a blonde toddler who is sitting amid cabbages – newspaper cuttings, obituaries, names you know but never had the pleasure.

Nostalgic photographs
The brown envelope could be promising – the contents spill out – tiny photographs from another world – three children in a little boat, early summer – there’s cow parsley – the boy has a stick and one of the girls holds a terrier – documents – good – photocopies – nope, not here – a hall full of happy, drunk people in evening dress – blurred faces, arms around shoulders, New Year seems likely – you think of that last shot in The Shining – someone has written on the back – 1933 Martin Flanagan + Cmdr Esmonde VC died 1942 BS Scharnhorst – you make a note to look it up – everyone in the photograph is smiling, in their prime – you can hear that song, ‘Midnight, the Stars and You’ – this box is a deep vein of ghosts.

It continues – a cat you’d forgotten about, an auntie you met once, a double exposure taken at some faraway castle, still no sign of that birth certificate – what’s this? Who is this nun? Someone has written on the back – a hand you’ve not seen for nearly 20 years – the inscription reads SISTER AGATHA WILL NOT BE READING THE TEA LEAVES – a little boy, 1950s, stands next to a piper who is sticking his tongue out, on the back it says TONY.

You staring back at yourself now – how old? three, maybe four? A bottle of juice tucked under one arm, a T-shirt with Muppets, on the lawn of some National Trust property – good days out meant a castle, bad days out meant a stately home – a Shell guide on the dashboard and a Thermos of coffee – and there’s one of Paddy, aged 12, peeing in a layby on a wet day, Lake District 1991 – before he got called to the ghosts – a big grin as he aims for a barbed wire fence.

Next – pupils of the Wesleyan School, Louth – a little girl holds a chalkboard – 1909 – the house behind them is the one you grew up in – the headteacher lived there and the front garden was the playground – the faces are familiar, local – two boys lean in on each other on the brink of giggles – they’d have been old enough for the war – next – the same house, another time – masked children ready for Halloween, Pam is there, dressed as a clown – she had Down’s Syndrome and would come to play every so often – what happened to her, where did she go?

Reliving memories
This box is a strange geography – distant cousins, lost holidays, echoes – it’s good to hear them – a list of places you can’t return, will never visit – Mum’s shop, she sold big knickers to old ladies during the 1990s – there she is again, the big table in the Mason’s supping halves on a Friday teatime with Ann – 2005 maybe – pre-cancer – maybe it was already there – Ann’s gone now too – she was good – and the Mason’s – changed hands, gentrified – the bars ripped out, the day drinkers moved along to the Pack Horse or the cemetery.

It’s not all so doom-laden – here, look – the only record of an enormous (and terrible) painting executed after being challenged by a notorious German artist – those were daft days – look, the first proper girlfriend from way back when, somewhere in the west country at the turn of the century on the brink of midsummer – have you got it yet?

A voice from the other room – got sidetracked – look – photos of Skibbereen post office where Martin was boss – a portrait of Norah, all glamour and fierceness – a posing child with a stick for a sword – Christmas dinner 1990, party hats and a novelty moustache – another envelope – ration card, documents of National Service, a random school report for a child, excelling at English – an Irish wedding certificate, 1943 – closer – a final envelope – must be in here – nope – strips of exposed film, you hold them up one by one – figures, faces, overexposures – a tower of a church you know is somewhere around here – you can make out bare trees and the backs of headstones – two figures, pale against an overdeveloped sky – one has their hand raised, waving goodbye – huh – thanks ghosts.

The rain is easing up – the sun might even come out – a voice from the other room – “Hear it is, found it!” – ah, typical – we’ll get it sent off in the morning – you stack the pictures back in the box – Norah, Martin, Tony, Angela, Mum, Dad, Paddy and all are put away again and you replace the lid and it sighs as it settles.

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