I AM ON the haunted road and then I am inside a memory and the memory is of all those cold mornings. In the memory, I am remembering: the gnarled hand flicking forward, baronial, holding mine in front of my face, mimicking the angle of his wrist. The memory inside the memory is distilled to the word fingertips. That is all I have to remember, I tell myself as I walk towards the stadium, fingertips, fingertips, fingertips, and a cocked wrist. It is his voice speaking through me. I listen. I am an adult and I harbour the child. She always listened. The stadium is empty except for the cleaner. I wave to him. He unlocks the automatic doors for me with a smile. Out on the court, the leather scales of the basketball are soft. I grip them tautly with the fingers of my right hand. I dip. I flick and snap my wrist. The ball moves: fleeing, falling. It drips like water through the net. I breathe. Fingertips, fingertips, the voice whispers. Finger, it screams, tips. There is still an hour before anyone else from the national league squad arrives for our team training. I walk to the bathroom. I can no longer breathe. I am sobbing, breathless, for no reason. My reflection surveys my wet face in the mirror. I tell her to breathe. She smiles through the tears catching on her eyelashes. 

I SLITHER OUT of this memory. I am on the road again. Looking back, I can see all the little shreds of bleeding skin I have left behind. I look at my bruised forearms and the scabs turned scars on my legs. The marks are now tiny memorials to forgotten moments. I glance backwards again. The start of the road leads to him: a man only of my memories, but still I can hear his voice. It is a voice that carries and deepens and booms as it enters me. He is a mentor, the skills specialist, my shaper. He is his own contradiction: calm and briskly furious and gentle and brutal and cold and humorous. If I cast my eyes far enough down the long road, I can see him – Graeme – as I first saw him, but only because he has never changed appearance. The ghost that stands watching on the yellow lane line thirty metres in front of me still looks like him.